Born To Believe

Razib over at Gene Expression has an interesting interview with Heather McDonald on faith and conservatism, and her disillusionment with much of what conservatism seems to have become. I disagree with her that George Bush hasn’t damaged the cause of conservatism. While I agree that he’s not a conservative, and that his policies shouldn’t do so, the popular mythology is that he is a conservative, and so they will.

But more interesting to me is this tangent, brought up by the Derb:

I don’t want to rain on Heather Mac Donald’s parade, especially after the sweet compliment she paid me in that Q&A Ramesh linked to, but consider the following:

Amazing

This is one of the dumbest things I’ve read in a long time:

The investigation determined that Hill and Duque had not been drinking before their fatal dive. One of their untrained tenders reported having one beer, while another reported drinking three beforehand.

“The problem here was that the recreational activity was taking place at the same time as an operational activity that involves risk and specialized training,” Wurster said.

“It was the combination of the two things that lends an air to the whole accident event,” he said.

The Healy was sailing through the Arctic with about 35 scientists to collect data that would help them map the ocean floor. Hill was the ship’s dive officer, as well as the liaison between the scientists and the crew.

As is generally the case in these things, everything went wrong, and just one thing going right would have saved them. How could a ship’s dive officer be so stupid as to overload with unjettisonable weights? At least, unless they were on a mix, they probably narced out pretty quickly at that depth and temperature, at which point they were feeling no pain.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!