Real men who pack up corporate headquarters and move offshore don’t do safety tests. Safety is only for lilly-livered liberals who bother to care about human life and the environment. Safety is simply not macho enough for Halliburton.

Halliburton Co. acknowledged late Thursday that it skipped doing a critical test on the final formulation of cement used to seal the BP oil well that blew out in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company, which was BP’s cementing contractor, said that BP at the last-minute increased the amount of a critical ingredient in the cement mix. While an earlier test showed the cement was stable, the company never performed a stability test on the new blend.

The cement’s failure to prevent oil and gas from entering the well has been identified as one of the causes of the April 20 disaster.