As Albert Einstein famously said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. He truly was brilliant. It’s a tragedy that policymakers have learned so very little from the genius he shared with us.

Forget all the other drivel in the above announcement for just a moment, and focus on the Department of the Interior’s comments about Shell Oil’s intent to drill in the Arctic.

Either they honestly believe that not a one of us has any type of working memory, or that we are too stupid to be able to Google what they are referring to, or, hey, maybe THEY have been lobotomized over at the Department of the Interior, or the folks at BSEE & BOEM are all being held hostage by Shell and forced to type this. Hell, I don’t know. But this is the reality of what they are asking us to collectively forget.

This video was taken by the US Coast Guard in 2012 while they were rescuing Shell Oil’s rig workers after the Kulluk RAN AGROUND in Alaska simply because Shell was trying to dodge some tax liability deadline. Yes. That’s actually what happened.

The Coast Guard was SO pissed off that they had to go into such a dangerous and entirely avoidable situation to rescue these guys that they wrote this report which, by all accounts, should have finished off Shell’s chances to screw up again in the Arctic. Clearly, no one in the US government had a chance to read it.

In the spirit of Albert Einstein, whose sayings inspire me every day, I will not even suggest that anyone waste their time writing to the Department of the Interior because, after all, they haven’t paid the least bit of attention to any of us in the past.

I think Einstein would approve.