Sabotage comes from wooden shoes, but not the way you’ve heard

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I was delighted when Star Trek informed me that French workers once threw their wooden shows, called sabos, into new machinery to stop mechanization – hence the word sabotage.

But is the tale a language myth?

Grammarphobia says the word “didn’t originate in the practice of workers tossing their sabots into machinery to botch up the works. In fact, there’s no evidence that any sabots were ever tossed into any machinery.” The word first appeared in an anarchist report sent to the 1897 congress of the Confédération Générale du Travail in Toulouse. The report advocated work slowdowns and used the word because “it has long been the custom to liken the slow and clumsy worker to one wearing wooden shoes, called ‘sabots.’ ”

Word Detective agrees.

Star Trek! How could you let me down?

Climate Change Profits

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We’ve discussed climate change/global warming quit a bit on this blog and I’m still learning about the topic. I ran into an interesting element on Straight Dope that complicates the issue for many people: who profits? As Cecil says, the distinction between profiting and profiteering is eroding.

In the spirit of Old Testament-style judgment, I thought I’d arrange various ways one might cash in on climate change from least to most evil.

He goes on to list ways to profit, from Renewable Energy, an industry in the right place at the right time, to Arctic Drilling, which gets an evil nod because of the ” circularity at work here: by burning enough fossil fuels to warm the earth sufficiently to melt the polar ice caps, we’ve now gained access to yet more fossil fuels buried under those ice caps.”

You might want to invest in companies that sell storm surge gates to coastal cities or snowmaking machines to Alpine ski resorts.

Cecil doesn’t mention the possibility that evil scientists profit by faking studies to extract more grant money – a terribly serious charge that shouldn’t be thrown around without proof (of which I’ve never seen any.) I can be cynical myself, and that goes too far for me. But I’d like to know how every person who testifies before Congress makes their living.

Whether the topic is health, housing, gun safety, education… or anything – there will always be someone whose job depends on the status quo or on change. There will be winners and losers for every action taken by government, the marketplace, or individuals.

I take my philosophical stand from Star Trek.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few – or the one.
Sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.

In Star Trek’s universe, you can base a movie on both lines. It depends. No really important choices fit on a bumper sticker. I’m still convinced by the (vast) scientific agreement that human activity is the main force behind our current rise in average global temperature, and that rise will yield more losers than winners. It’s already baked into the cake, if you’ll forgive the heat-related pun. But we can change course, and good people can make good decisions despite the current insanely partisan politics. I’m not ready to believe everyone around me is evil.

FBI Ruling on Hillary Clinton

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The determination that no charges will be brought against Hillary Clinton for using a private email server that could have (and probably did) result in compromising highly classified material bothers me on several levels. I and others at the Rocky Flats Plant were required to carefully protect classified information. It was made abundantly clear that carelessness with classified reports could have dire consequences, to include loss of your clearance (and therefore your job) and possible criminal charges. I’ve never believed Ms Clinton’s assertion that she had never sent classified information on her private server and that nothing ever sent was marked classified. We were briefed on what would be classified, and we treated incomplete reports as classified from the moment we began drafting a report. It was deemed “born classified.” I’m confident Ms. Clinton didn’t need a secret or top secret stamp on much of the information to know it was classified and should be treated as such.

On another level, it is easy compare this situation to the FBI raid on Rocky Flats that found nothing alleged in the search warrant. The Justice Department persisted in continuing the investigation with a Grand Jury in a desperate search for why they conducted the raid. They refused to give up and admit they were wrong. They eventually forced Rockwell to plead guilty to crimes that would not have been crimes anywhere else. Almost all of the items in the plea bargain referred to environmental issues that had been reported in detail by the plant well before the raid and, in the words of the plea bargain, had no negative offsite effects. All the raid accomplished was frightening local citizens, but the Justice Department persisted in forcing a guilty plea that helped save their reputations. Apparently Clinton’s reputation was judged to be more important than the reputation of the FBI.

Why did the FBI not find a “Martha Stewart” type of violation in Hillary’s case? Stewart had been accused of insider trading, no evidence was found to support the claim, but she was convicted of lying to federal investigators (or at least giving them conflicting information). Why was Hillary given a pass despite the fact she repeatedly lied? The only logical answer is that Hillary was treated differently because of her political position.

This makes me very sad for the country. The laws are apparently really only for the “Little People.” To paraphrase Orwell’s Animal Farm, we “Little People” have naively believed all people are equal. We now know that some people are more equal than others.

Splitting Hairs

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The expression originated in the 17th Century, or perhaps earlier, based on the thought that a human hair was so thin that it would be a waste of time to try to split it. Some developed the art of winning arguments based on small differences or trivial points to divert from the main argument, which is how the expression is used today.

Rocky Flats Museum Meeting

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There was a commentary last week discussing the most recent Rocky Flats Museum Newsletter and how that newsletter rekindled my interest in the museum. I sent some emails and was invited to a lunch meeting with “Murph” Widdowfield, President of the museum. He bought my lunch at Nancy’s on 7120 Federal Blvd. He brought me a packet of information that I intend to very briefly summarize. The first thing that was obvious was the list of the Board of Directors has a heavy influence by Rocky Flats alums and is missing the people who once served on the board to make certain the anti-Rocky Flats perspective had a heavy influence on anything the museum did. I had ended my volunteering at the museum because I became tired of getting openly frustrated that I believed the desire was to present a negative desription of the plant. One article in the packet describes how “Rocky Flats spawned many rumors and misconceptions over the years. These misconceptions have grown in some people’s minds into reality.” I believed the anti-Rocky Flats group working on the museum was working to encourage those kinds of misconceptions, and I ended my participation when I failed to convince them they would kill the museum with that approach. Listening to Murph and his interesting presentation about what is happening now makes me want to get back involved.

The packet of information included a history of the finances of the museum and how the rental fees and other operating costs effectively ate up the initial “seed” money from a Kaiser-Hill LLC grant and congressional appropriation arranged with the help of then Senator Wayne Allard. A problem surfaced when DOE directed that none of that appropriation could be used for fund raising, which resulted in the money being drawn down without mechanisms being developed to replace it. To get to the point, funding of a permanent museum is the overreaching problem. There are large amounts of artifacts that could be used to build something that would be worthy of the value the plant had in helping defend the nation during the Cold War while also helping to build the communities in the Front Range that would not be as vibrant if there had never been a plant.

Murph gave a passionate description of the governmental agencies and people he has contacted to help with development of a viable museum. He convinced me I should participate in some form. My initial reaction is to offer research support that will be useful to understanding why the country decided the Rocky Flats Plant was needed to develop a nuclear deterrence to the risk of Soviet aggression. I intend to offer to provide segments of the book I’m drafting about the history of nuclear weapons and why the country decided Rocky Flats was needed for the monthly newsletters. I’ll be interested in what happens next.

Wet Blanket

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I liked the analysis from Disappearing Idioms. It described a “wet blanket as “…a person, although sometimes it can be a thing…that be counted on to spoil the fun or dampen the enjoyment of others.” What really attracted me was the “Three Famous Wet Blankets.” The first was the Eeyore donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh, Sad Sack from Yank Magazine, and my favorite, Joe Btfsplk of Lil’ Abner who “…travelled with his own black cloud overhead.” The explanation of the origin is that it refers to 1660 references to keeping a thoroughly wetted blanket handy to smother a flare-up in confined spaces.