Archives for posts with tag: gulfspill

This’ll Go Down About As Smooth As An Ipecac-Alka Seltzer Long Island Ice Tea

By Devin
July 5, 2010 //
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Remember how Republicans were so happy to use that Dubai Ports thing a few years ago to make themselves look meaningfully different from the Bush administration line? From yesterday’s newspaper:

Institutions in Abu Dhabi and Qatar are understood to have been sounded out about the prospect of taking a strategic shareholding (of BP) to support the ailing share price and deter potential bidders.

BP being bought, mid-cleanup, by a Middle Eastern company? Tell the Tea Partiers that and you could almost just as soon tell them that, week after that, you’ll be issued your Subdermal Identity eXchange 66 Model Federal RFID chip week after that.

Poor Obama. I read another editorial today about liberal fantasy projections onto him versus the reality of him running as a centrist. I wouldn’t blame him if he wishes he wasn’t the president for this particular stretch of American history but, well, “so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” So chin up— and hope the Republicans continue their unrelenting war on the Middle Class.

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King of Snakes

By Devin
June 20, 2010 //
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From CNN.com this evening:

According to an internal BP document released Sunday by Rep. Edward Markey, D-Massachusetts, BP believed that the worst-case scenario could be as high as 100,000 barrels, or 4.2 million gallons of oil per day.

The figure is the highest yet to surface regarding the leaking oil well.

Hmm. “Highest yet to surface” and “higher worst-case scenario than previously reported” in the paragraph above that. Yet— I could swear I’ve seen that number somewhere before…

I’ve never been too worried about being a Cassandra— but getting Laocoön-ed sticks in my head as a threat. When I was in middle and high school, I had a recurring elaborate dream about surviving a nuclear apocalypse by convincing a cadre of followers to retreat into underground Seattle. In thanks for having convinced them to hunker down before the war, the CHUDs elect me mayor of Sewertown— a position I reluctantly accept on the condition they promise to stay deep enough in our new subterranean home to avoid the surface radiation.

Flash forward several years. Two young postbellum sewer tots wander into the hot zone and die horrible prolonged deaths. Enraged, Sewertown blames, turns on and ultimately lynches their previously Honorable Mayor, yours truly.

It was, uh, not a pleasant dream.

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Categories life, news

Intelligence Failures

By Devin
May 20, 2010 //
1

CNN says Dennis Blair is resigning; BBC says he is being “replace(d).” Interesting disconnect in terminology there! I also think it’s interesting that, among the BBC’s laundry list of recent spy snafus, they didn’t include this doozy.

Meanwhile in intelligence failures,

(BP) spokesman Mark Proegler said Thursday that the siphon is now drawing about 5,000 barrels a day up to a ship on the surface. That’s as much as government and company officials had estimated the spill was pouring into the Gulf every day for a month. Proegler declined to estimate how much more oil was escaping.

…yeah, I bet he did. I’ve been pretty disgusted with the government’s complacency in regards to BP’s stranglehold on information. I understand that a lot of that complacency was built into the system— this  is, after all, the same regulatory regime that capped potential monetary damages, ostensibly to ensure “Mom and Pop,” smaller oil company firms could still compete in the offshore environment. Any system stupid enough to have ever bought that logic probably has a lot of stupid built into its peripheries.

But seriously— CBS had Coast Guard officials blocking camera crews from filming polluted beaches, with the officials insisting “(these are) BP’s rules, (they’re) not ours.” Whose damn Coast are you Guarding? The insinuation clearly seems to be its not “ours” either.

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Mammoth

By Devin
May 2, 2010 //
3

A team of researchers sequenced the gene to produce wooly mammoth hemoglobin.

Then they inserted the gene into bacteria which grew it— and it has anti-freeze properties. Let’s hope dinosaur urine cures cancer and that can be the science story of 2010 instead of ongoing ecological devastation.

(By the way— regarding the Gulf disaster— I really hope it stops increasing exponentially soon. 5k a day— 20k— 200k gallons a day according to this article! I think that’s about 3/10ths of an Olympic size swimming pool. But I also noticed the estimate of total discharge in that article was 1.6 million— almost an order of magnitude less than the estimate I read in another article today.

That’s about 4.2 million gallons then— six Olympic size swimming pools. See if you can find Sam and I getting married for scale.)

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Categories sciencenews

A Brief, Profane Post

By Devin
May 2, 2010 //
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That “worst case” is the increasingly likely, Ian MacDonald derived leak estimate. So, uh, well… fuck.

An Obama joke from the stupid Press Club dinner to make up for that profanity (I learned it from Dick Cheney, after all):

Unfortunately, John McCain couldn’t make it. Recently he claimed that he had never identified himself as a maverick. And we all know what happens in Arizona when you don’t have ID. Adios, amigo.

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