Various rants

1. Airline travel. Volcanic ash...this is a natural event/"disaster" and one can't fault the governments and airlines for worrying about it. But how about if they quit assuming I'm a terrorist (late middle age American female, Ph.D., Caucasian, slightly disabled, usually carrying a computer, hard-to-remove shoes with custom-made industrial-strength inserts so I can actually walk without much difficulty, never, NEVER have set off an alarm, no arrests, much less criminal record, although a few tickets for speeding and failure-to-obey-stop-signs over 45 years of driving)? I ALWAYS get searched. My luggage ALWAYS gets searched. I am always thirsty, and now I can't carry anything liquid onto a plane. The latest insult is that on international flights I can no longer have my glass of Scotch before dinner without shelling out real money for it.

This summer I plan to take onto the plane, if, IF they will let me, a couple of those little bottles of Scotch you can purchase for an outrageous price (albeit less than they will charge me if I buy it from Delta) onto the plane is a Ziploc bag. Stay tuned.

2. The oil spill in the Gulf. Evidently BP is claiming today that they are not "responsible" for the spill, because the company (whoever it is) they outsourced something or other to is actually responsible for the failure of whatever it is that caused the explosion/blowout/whatever that resulted in the spill.

Give me a break. BP is the company that drilled/owned/whatever the well, and has been making buckets of money of late from this offshore drilling. As far as I'm concerned, BP is responsible for whoever or whatever company they outsource whatever to, and also for whatever results from same. The oil companies have gotten a free pass for far too long for whatever they did so we can have cheap oil/fuel here in the US. They can sue the company that screwed up if they want, but I'll bet they gave the contract to the company, whoever it is, who made the lowest bit, which they were able (probably/possibly) to do because they cut corners on safety issues. BP is ultimately responsible, as far as I'm concerned. And BP should be held responsible not only (NOT ONLY) for the damage done or inflicted, and clean-up of same, but also for lost wages and income of all those people put out of work by the damage from the spill. And they should be responsible not JUST for the cleanup, but also for whatever expense is incurred in restoring the marshes and wetlands that appear to be likely to be destroyed to viability.

Katrina was a natural disaster. All or most of the destruction in New Orleans was directly traceable to the Army Corps of Engineers. But problems in the delta and marshlands, etc., was NOT caused by the Corps of Engineers. This oil spill, however, and all the damage it will cause, is caused by negligence on the part of BP, and BP should be held accountable.

So there.

Cheers, Lillie