Category Archives: Transhuman News

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) -- State Senator Stacey Campfield has posted a response to his Holocaust reference made in a blog post earlier Monday. His response reads:

I regret that some people miss the point of my post. It was not to offend. It was to warn. To draw attention to Obamacare and the slippery slope that I see occurring in the lives of myself, my constituents, and the rest of the country with the continued taking of freedom by the federal government.

In no way was my post meant to diminish or detract from the pain, suffering and loss of human life that occurred during this dark time in human history. Instead the post was meant to draw attention to the loss of freedom that we are currently experiencing. I stand by my steadfast opposition to Obamacare.

My position and record on the sacredness of human life and protecting that life speaks for itself. 300 million Americans are at risk from government bureaucrats deciding who should be given life saving medications and who should be denied. Every citizen now faces the possibility of their tax dollars going to pay for a government funded abortion. At no point in our history have we ever faced a federal government and administration with a lower regard for human life, and that is something that I cannot and will not allow to go unchallenged.

I will continue to stand up against the government takeover of the nations healthcare. I will continue to support freedom and life.

This morning, Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield posted a "Thought of the Day" to his blog that read,

"Democrats bragging about the number of mandatory sign ups for Obamacare is like Germans bragging about the number of manditory [sic] sign ups for "train rides" for Jews in the 40s."

Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Chris Devaney released a public statement on the blog post this morning:

"While Stacey Campfield routinely makes remarks that are over the top, today's comments are ignorant and repugnant. No political or policy disagreement should ever be compared to the suffering endured by an entire generation of people. Those comments have no place in our public discourse. He should offer an apology to members of the Jewish faith immediately."

Tennessee Democratic Party Chair Roy Herron also issued a statement on the post:

Excerpt from:
Campfield says he regrets readers missed the point on his blog post

During his first two years working at a large oil field in Kazakhstan in the early 1990s, Joel Haight saw eight people die on the job.

It was a vast operation run by Chevron Corp. in partnership with the government, and Mr. Haight was the projects safety director. The oil wells and processing plants were run by Kazakh workers, Russian supervisors and Turkish maintenance crews.

Some of the technology and job requirements were unfamiliar, and cultural tensions wedged themselves into work. The first time there was an accident, workers rounded up the culprit and prepared to beat him up as punishment.

Mr. Haight had long had an interest in human factors engineering which includes designing machines and processes to match the humans who would be carrying them out. This assignment gave him a perfect chance to mind the humans involved in designing a safety program.

"Safety is very much a human-centered process," he said. "Human factors engineering seeks to optimize and match up attributes of humans with the expectations of a job. When those are not properly matched up, people are more likely to get injured."

Human factors research dates backto the early 1900s but only recently has become a trending topic in safety.

"Designers, engineers, researchers and practitioners need to understand the human as a component in the system and as one that is interactive, variable and adaptable," Mr. Haight wrote in an article pushed in Professional Safety, a journal of the American Society of Safety Engineers,in 2007.

The discipline will be a central component of a new safety engineering certificate program at the University of Pittsburgh, where Mr. Haight now teaches.

The program is expected to launch in the fall and will be available to Pitt graduate students, as well as industry professionals. Mr. Haight and the university are hopingthe latter group will show up en masse. The programs advisory committee is stacked with heavy hitters from the oil and gas industry, including Chevron, BP and several large insurance companies.

Human factors engineering isnt necessarily intuitive to oil and gas companies, which use success metrics that tend to focus on production, productivity and growth.

More:
Human factors engineering picks up steam in energy industries