Last post on the BP Macondo oil spill/blowout, for now

...though the fallout will undoubtedly continue for decades to come.

BP's atrocity is now officially estimated at having reached 16 times worse than the Exxon Valdez, by as early as the end of June 2010...(and certainly much worse, for being so deep underwater), Dan Froomkin absolutely gets the final word in my book. Read the whole thing.

"Social Contract"

...Been enjoying catching up on This American Life.

Also watched "The Cove". Very moving, all (review here). Meanwhile the more publicized "Whale Wars" has been growing less sappy/sentimental and more effective of late, thankfully. One wonders how the September slaughter season in Taiji is shaping up this year. I'm not sure I'll ever eat sushi again (there was never any danger of going to Sea World).



Update: According to the mini-series now airing, Blood Dolphins, the Taiji slaughter is still in operation (only now monitored by police cameras, covered with razor wire and carried out even more covertly behind tarps)...much more here.

The vast majority of Japanese people do not knowingly eat dolphin meat (it is often packaged and sold, deliberately mislabeled as something more desirable, much like Pollock in America), which contains scandalously high levels of mercury poison (cf. Robert F. Kennedy, mercury and autism). Nor do they know about the illegal, misguided and completely unnecessary dolphin slaughter taking place in Taiji and elsewhere on their shores.

BP Gulf Oil Blowout Update

Update: And more and more (and worth repeating once again).

And more, and more, and more.

Republican Bigots

Update: Real Americans, Please Stand Up.

Via here.

What a bunch of lowest-common-denominator-cable media-milking knee-jerk racist bigots have tried their shameless ignorance-exploiting best to dominate the last few weeks whatever lingers of a "public discourse" in this already intellectually-deprived country, or: In the absence of anything positive to offer, Republicans try to find a wedge issue and milk it, as usual. No surprise, Newt Gingrich is apparently one of those "intellectual" bigots. Sara Palin is quite obviously a bigot. Between the two of them, not a shred of self-earned moral conscience hinders their shameless, opportunist, unintending self-parody/hoof-in-mouth routine. Despicable behavior from pathetic human beings, deserving of far more serious condemnation than the advertising pimp-owned pussy media is currently much capable.

...for the last nine years, at least, people have been trying to block the construction of mosques all over the country.

Now, let's be clear, the subject of the highest profile Muslim structure, 51 Park in New York City, will have a basketball court and a culinary school. Two floors will have a prayer room. The other eleven will host movie nights, performances, group dinners, etc -- it's basically a Muslim YMCA, open to everyone. These moderate Muslims are doing everything we could ask of them. They're trying to build a bridge in the communities they live in, trying to show the world that Muslims are cool and interesting and diverse, and proving that being a Muslim does not equal being a terrorist.

But they're being thrown under the bus by our elected leaders, egged on by some of the ugliest elements of the right-wing. Well-intentioned leaders of the Democratic Party are getting caught up in the fray as well, some of them seeking to find common ground with an implacable opposition. It's not helping.

This isn't just a Manhattan problem. Right now, there is opposition to mosques in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Southern California, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Illinois, and dozens of other locations across our nation. Where would they move? If public pressure can be brought to bear to take down the most high-profile Muslim community center in liberal NYC, then these other places don't even have a chance, Ground Zero connection or not.

Frankly, this isn't about Ground Zero. This is about America. This is about freedom. This is about people and there seems to be no place that Muslim people can go without being harassed.

The harassment has to stop, and that starts with you and me.

I think most people agree that Muslims have the right to worship. But these efforts to harass Muslims are based in fear, prejudice, and ignorance. Removing a community center doesn't solve these problems. But talking about religious freedom -- really engaging people -- can open people's minds, and blunt the prejudice.

I pledge to do it myself.

-excerpted from a letter by Arshad Hasan

NB. And Howard Dean, while not necessarily always a bad thing in the world, remains (I say as a fellow Vermonter) just another opportunist, politically-ambitious coward. In other words, he read a poll, smelled an opportunity, tried to be make a savvy move and appear "centrist" and ended up back-peddling frantically from the position of bigot. Too late trying to be Bill Clinton, bub. As he peddles, he makes some otherwise valid-sounding points. Points Keith in particular would do well to mind, needless to say. Or not.

Konturen–Volume 2

Looks interesting...(via)

Anis Shivani

Billy Colllins: Ouch:

Pioneered the poet as the stand-up comedian...the clown and the "nature-lover"...Part of his carefully nurtured persona is not to take himself too seriously...Has perfected, over twenty years, a brand of poetry candy--take a few variables about known facts, alter one of them, and see where that takes you. A one-trick pony who acts in every poem as if he's discovering the trick for the very first time. His never-discarded mask of humility is how he shows off in his poetry--and outside it. Imagines he is a container for childlike wonder, but actually exemplifies childish incomprehension. Like the others, escapist denial of death is pervasive.

Not that I agree with him about Jorie Graham, nts.

Oil spill update

All you need to know is here, not that anybody cares.

The War Logs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/2010/jul/25/wikileaks-afghanistan-data

Hardly "news" to anyone with half an eye open, but the existence of actual real journalism is certainly a novelty worth celebrating.

I hear it's all good reading, but recommend starting here.

custom floating walnut mantel shelf

Naomi Klein

• On the BP Macondo Blowout atrocity.

• And a giant TOLD YOU SO. Turns out BP's own internal documents estimated the blowout spill rate at 100,000 barrels/day. I believe there are a bunch of arrogant, corporate-grovelling tools on The Oil Drum who owe some independent experts an apology.

Final week to buy something from my shop

...before we leave the country for a spell. Help fund our trip, and give yourself or someone you know a profoundly utilitarian work of art they will use every day and appreciate for generations to come:




GreenRiverWoods.Etsy.Com (more listings to be posted this evening)

Thanks to everyone who helped make Art in the Park a terrific success, once again!

Oil Spil/Political Notes: Thomas Friedman still preaches the happy slave gospel from his mansion, UK pensioners versus American workers

• Update 6/15: Mixed metaphor king's idiot Thomas Friedman jumps on TOD blame-fallacy bandwagon, as predictable as it is pathetic. In John Emerson's apt appraisal:

"This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s fault. It’s not the government’s fault. It’s my fault."

This kind of bullshit comes up every time a large corporation does harm "Don't ask who killed the Kennedys, when after all, it was you and me." In the same way, how could anyone blame Enron or anyone in finance for the destruction ...of the global economy, since some of us have been known to steal pencils from work?

When it's you or me or a schoolteacher, it's "accountability". But when it's a large corporation, it's "the blame game".

It's not just that corporations are persons, with the same rights that the rest of us have. Corporations are immaculate persons and can never be blamed for anything.

Sort of like Jesus and the Virgin Mary....

If you want to say that we should all look at our oil consumption and way of life, that's a good point, but on the other hand, some of us already have, and have changed our way of life. A lot of us strongly opposed offshore drilling, but the DrillBabyDrill people won the political argument. Others live the way they do because there's not much choice (for example, living in a town without a decent bus system).

BP was guilty for cutting corners on safety, which they're on record as doing as a matter of policy. The US government is guilty of lax regulation, which they did as a matter of policy, and of approving offshore drilling in the first place. A lot of politicians and voters (but not all) are guilty of supporting offshore drilling and the weakening of safety regulations. These are the people who actually caused the problem.

If you want to go beyond that to say that we have to reduce oil consumption, fine. I agree. But saying that it's everyone's fault is just bullshit, and it's the most recent lie that the defenders of BP, the bush administration, and the Obama administration have picked up in order to absolves themselves of the actual responsibility they have for the actual things they did.

Indeed. As I may have mentioned in a comment at TOD, any analysis that fails to account for the functioning of power is pretty well just pulling the blanket over the collective citizenry's head (and in the process rendering our just and righteous fury at those precise targets which might actually be vulnerable to such pressures and compelled to change, dangerously impotent). Of course expecting literary hacks like ex-billionaire, now multi-millionaire Thomas Friedman to do anything except buttress and slather the status quo in poshlost', with superficially "clever" and "profound" analysis, would probably be about as productive as polishing a turd. I was saddened to see The Oil Drum take this line. It's probably one reason the site remains so ineffective, and frankly, self-congratulatory, and insular.

• Update 6/14: OK so I've skimmed The Oil Drum, and this comment is essential reading.


(image of one-ton tar ball via)

• A message about Obama's new position on BP, and what to watch for to determine who's in charge.

• Robert Reich: still pushing temporary receivership, and rather convincingly.

More on Helen Thomas (via):

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Press You're Stuck
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

To be honest I haven't read TOD since they started (thankfully, finally) discussing the various Corexits, as I had been prodding them to do (whether any professional consensus was reached, I have no idea...) As soon as I have a spare six hours, I may check it out.

Come drink beer with me

If you're in the Asheville area, come say hello. I will be under my tent all day missing soccer, along with a hundred or so other local artists, Pack Square downtown all day long for Art in the Park. Gazing at that strange war trophy, the Vance Monument.

If you're not in the area, but would still like a custom table top, chopping block or something wood-related (for the same price as something mass-produced), there's still just barely time to have it shipped before we leave for France for four weeks: http://greenriverwoods.etsy.com

Someone should just publish comments from TOD

...Comments that deserve to be read by people not obsessed enough (yet) to spend hours wading 300-400 comments in. Posted with the strong caveat, of course, that these are taken out of context!

Here:

Interested_public on June 9, 2010 - 11:32am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Parent subthread | Comments top

This is the problem with trying to do science in a crisis - really an impossible task. A responsible study will take time (6 months to a year) and quite a bit of sampling as the gulf is a big place. A fundamental problem will be the lack of pre-spill baseline data for comparison. We don't know how the oil might change in composition and character over time as it interacts with seawater and the gulf biota. We don't know that much about underwater currents in the gulf, although there is some data on this and I expect more will be forthcoming now that there is a perceived need for it. This is also one of the reasons that knowing the leak rate is very important - there needs to be some reasonable estimate of the proportion of oil that is not reaching the surface.

As with the lack of pre-accident technical means to deal with a deepwater blowout - despite ample fore knowledge that such a problem might arise and documentation of specific problems that should be addressed - there is a similar lack of baseline data with which to evaluate the current problem, despite the extensive underwater development of oil resources in the Gulf and the likelihood of a major leak occurring at some point.

Trying to play catch-up over a few weeks or a month or two will not produce satisfactory answers to many rather important questions - we will end up realizing how much we really don't know about the Gulf ecosystems and watching the experiment play out as we work to understand what we are seeing. People with agendas will take preliminary results to say "See, no problem, why all the hand-wringing?" or "The Gulf will become a dead zone!" when the reality is "Wow, we really don't know that much about the consequences of our actions and their effects on the environment because we really never bothered to look or try and understand any of this stuff ahead of time. Only the most grossly obvious effects like oily birds or soiled beaches will be immediately apparent.

Hopefully the end result, in a few years, will be a more mature understanding of this bit of the world and a more responsible approach to extracting the resources we find useful for our needs. One can hope anyway.

Here:

[new] Paleocon on June 9, 2010 - 11:16am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Parent subthread | Comments top

Obama is the Mediocrat president.

Anger here isn't from a media-driven frenzy, but from a growing, 6-week debacle that aptly illustrates BP's approach to situations and people. Americans are reacting to disdain, sloth, and weaseling -- attitudes which are worse than negligence. Obama said the gov't was in control, and that's his 'style', so now the gov't will earn just ire as well. Obama will join the "make it up as we go" perception if he's not careful. He will increasingly struggle to blame BP while saying the gov't is doing all they can -- it's a tricky corner he chose to paint himself into.

Why I've moved from "BP is handling things" to "BP should be skewered":

1) By intentionally not measuring flow, and then acting solely on low estimates, they have assets in place that are inadequate for the situation now at hand. They have had 6 weeks to marshall resources, and yet are now leaking oil solely due to inadequate top-side resources. There is zero reason not to already have resources to deal with max flow of an unconstrained BOP already on-site. Who cares if an FPSO is already working elsewhere? Shut the site down and worry about that production later.

2) After the fact, the history of BP as a corner-cutting, law-flaunting, risk-taking company is now becoming obvious. This points blame at MMS as much as BP, as this was permitted to continue. Blame also goes to the administration -- anytime you have an obvious rogue outlier it is up to those with oversight to reign them in.

3) General defensive posture, and "wait and see" approach. While engineering work seems to be properly parallel, BP drags their feet on everything else. They are slow to provide video, capture details, date estimates, spill resources, response coordination, and a general tone of "it's not that bad" while each aspect continually gets worse. The only logical reason for a CEO to make stupid statements on air is that the company doesn't think it's important not to.

Helen Thomas "never has been/never will be a racist"

A fitting tribute. Make no mistake: Helen Thomas' retirement is our loss. Fuck Ari Fleischer, vengeful lying prick.

Gulf of America Update ("we broke it, we own it" -Colbert)

• As fellow blogger John Emerson pedantically, and correctly notes: "'Awed' is the wrong word" here. (It only took the feds two months to catch on; surely companies like Exxon bound to be responsible for future atrocities will take note.)

• This comment about what caused the BP Macando blowout deserves widespread recognition.

• Also, read the articles in the left-hand column at McClatchy, one of the most reliable and reputable investigative journals out there. Particularly this one, this one, this one and last but certainly not least, this one (cf. last week).

• And, the plot thickens.

Meanwhile every day that passes BP fails to make meaningfully better what they gambled to make significantly worse last Thursday morning, or even to make it back to just as bad as it was the for the first 48 goddamn days....they aren't even going to try another approach, for another month. This would appear to be an acceptable state of affairs for BP, nearly two months on:



Can't help but notice BP is spraying carcinogenic dispersants like never before at the immediate opening (you can actually see the oil exploding into droplets on impact), most conveniently on the side being monitored by the most highly-publicized and most easily accessible feed (that is, the side most people are watching):


Once again, for all twelve BP Macondo blowout oil spill feeds, see this page for listed links: http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=9033572&contentId=7062605


•

• I seem to have begun the occasional habit of leaving comments at TheOilDrum, sometimes with what I determine to be necessary and useful provocation partly in mind, I admit.

New Heidegger

Here (via).

Election Rigging in Arkansas

Update: It worked. Thanks in part to the DINO-loving White House. Props to the AFL/CIO though. Rahm Emmanuel is only the most obvious symptom of a disease the Democratic party needs to cure.

Charles Tapp is a total fucking asshole:

Remember how rural voters broke so heavily for Halter in the primary? Well now those same rural voters have to travel miles across a mountain range to get to town on a weekday to cast their vote, and Tapp ran away when he was asked about what this would do to disenfranchise minorities. How painfully obvious can this get?

One voter told a local TV station, "I don't know if I'm gonna vote or not now... I'm going have to get time off work, and I don't know I can leave Monday or Tuesday."

WE'VE COME TOO FAR TO LET ONE LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIAL MESS THINGS UP. We need to redouble our efforts to "get out the vote" for Halter.

In case you hadn't heard:

A new Research 2000 poll shows Bill Halter [progressive] leading Blanche Lincoln [Blue Dog DINO sellout hypocrite douchebag] 49% to 45%.

But now, a major local election official, Charles Tapp, is making it harder for Bill Halter's supporters to vote.

Garland County is the most populous county Bill Halter won 3 weeks ago, and could be key to his run-off victory this Tuesday. But election commissioner Charles Tapp reduced the number of polling places from 42 to 2.

Also, after personally promising Bill Halter there would be early voting this weekend, Tapp reversed course. Hundreds of voters showed up to vote yesterday but were denied.

Can you help fight back? We're working with Halter's campaign to call thousands of Garland County voters to tell them when/where they can vote -- and we're pumping up turnout in other parts of the state to make up for any lost votes.

Sign up to call Halter supporters to ensure they vote. Click here. Or if you don't like making calls, donate $4 toward Halter's "get out the vote" effort in the final hours.

So what actually is the law, five days or ten days? Perhaps someone could sue his lying ass.

Some interesting links

• This feed right now is a pretty clear indication of just how well British Petroleum's mostly cosmetic "top hat" is not functioning (braced on top of a gusher BP deliberately made worse–nearly five days ago–worse by a degree of magnitude which remains undisclosed and certainly appears to be significant) (best live 24-7 discussion at TOD, as usual):

eho on June 6, 2010 - 3:14pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

My first post ... there is good exchange here at TOD... better than I have seen anywhere else. Unfortunately there is a lot of conjecture but this seems to be the result in the large part on a lack of transparency on BP's part (if we don't have the facts to discuss, we'll d - well make them up!)... unless they are operating in the dark ... which could be very well true.
I worked 15+yrs in offshore oil starting in the late 70's. A good joke then was Q - Ya'know the two things that f -d up the oilfield? A - engineers and o-rings. ... so it appears things haven't changed much. By my recollection most 'company' engineers with any authority were cost oriented, risk management (avoidance) guys. Innovation on the operational side was left to contractors. I think there are structural reasons (mainly liability) for this. The blame game. The highly skilled work for the majors where they hope to keep their butts well covered for a fruitful and uneventful 35 yr career.
So everything in this heroic response so far looks to me like a delaying game, a some what pathetic dog and pony show ... letting the clock run out until the Relief (with a capital 'R') Well is completed.
End of Rant ... Sorry ...

And here is some of that purely "anecdotal evidence," according to BP (as they continue to deny the very existence of vast underwater plumes despite more and more scientific evidence):

• http://gulfblog.uga.edu/

I give this current hat another 24 hours, before they pull it off because it has been corroded useless, and replace it with another, equally ineffective "fix."

Bleg

Sincere thanks to the many people who've commented and emailed over the course of the past week. Unfortunately though, and despite receiving more traffic than ever before in this humble blog's rather prolonged life, unless someone out there wants to drop $160 in my account via the "donate" paypal button on the sidebar there, I cannot afford to continue doing this. (I do have lots more video from live feeds saved, should anyone have any specific requests.)

(I am a woodworker by trade. In between and after crew time building cabinets or installing finish trimwork, I work overtime on my own little business (+ our old house, animals and extensive locust raised-bed gardens/greenhouses). Please feel free to visit my online shop, if interested.)
Thanks again.

Update June 5: No further "progress" to report. The blowout remains substantially worse than it was nearly two months ago, essentially the same since BP ripped it wide open and pinned a floating flower to its side/polished the turd, Thursday morning. It seems likely BP has just given up. Certainly most experts in the field were never very optimistic about any "solution" not involving relief wells, months hence, from the beginning.

Some light reading...

June 6: Honestly, the only serious effort BP appears to be making anymore is buying up search engine terms like "oil spill" and lying to the press. Their numbers don't exactly add up, either.