Thursday, May 6, 2010
Slick Operator: The BP I've Known Too Well
by Greg Palast
That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.
Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen, but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.
What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.
That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.
To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called a "boom." Quickly surround a spill, leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers, or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.
But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of them at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department, even when all is operating A-O.K. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.
Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time, oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.
But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.
As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.
And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.
http://www.truthout.org/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well59178
Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth
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Whether it took the Earth 4.5 billion years to get to where it is today (or a mere seven days), destroying it might take a lot less time. Sam Hughes presents a host of methods for ending the planet -- and life -- as we know it. Enjoy!
- By Sam Hughes
10. Total existence failure
You will need: nothing
Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist. Note: the odds against this actually ever occurring are considerably greater than a googolplex to one. Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.
Utter, utter rubbish.
9. Gobbled up by strangelets
You will need: a stable strangelet
Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create and maintain a stable strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of strange quarks. Keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed the stabilizing machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.
A while back, there was some media hoo-hah about the possibility of this actually happening at the RHIC, but in actuality the chances of a stable strangelet forming are pretty much zero.
Earth's final resting place: a huge glob of strange matter.
8. Sucked into a microscopic black hole
You will need: a microscopic black hole. Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.
Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the center of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.
Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
Source: "The Dark Side Of The Sun," by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time, he was my original source for the idea, so that's what I'm putting.
http://www.livescience.com/technology/destroy_earth_mp.html
Supreme Court Upholds Freedom Of Speech In Obscenity-Filled Ruling
Justice Ginsburg wrote that those who dispute her interpretation of the Constitution can "shove a fat one so far up their ass they choke."
WASHINGTON—In a decisive and vulgar 7-2 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court once again upheld the constitution's First Amendment this week, calling the freedom of expression among the most "inalienable and important rights that a motherfucker can have."
"It is the opinion of this court that the right to speak without censorship or fear of intimidation is fundamental to a healthy democracy," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority. "Furthermore, the court finds that the right to say whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, is not only a founding tenet, but remains essential to the continued success of this nation."
Added Ginsburg, "In short, freedom of speech means the freedom of fucking speech, you ignorant cocksuckers."
The decision came Monday in response to the case of a Charleston, WV theater troupe that had been sued by city officials for staging a sexually explicit play with public funds. Reversing the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the theater, an outcome free-speech advocates are calling a victory and Justice Ginsburg called "a bitch-slap in the face of all those uptight limp-dicks."
The ruling in City of Charleston v. The Kanawha Players marks the first time in 220 years that the nation's highest court has taken such a fiercely profane stance.
During oral arguments, Charleston's chief counsel Dan Roy said his clients could restrict any public speech they deemed offensive, an argument quickly dismissed by Justice John Paul Stevens, 90, who turned to his colleagues and made a repeated up-and-down hand motion intended to simulate masturbation.
"I'm beginning to wonder if you really understand what 'abridging the freedom of speech' means at all," said Stevens, a 34-year veteran of the court known for his often-nuanced interpretations of the First Amendment. "I'm also wondering whether you and your fat-faced plaintiffs over there need to have some respect for constitutionally protected expression fucked into your empty hick skulls."
Justice Clarence Thomas, who voted with the majority, wrote a concurring opinion in which he made little mention of established court precedents but emphasized that he himself had viewed materials "way, way nastier than this stupid play."
"I don't know what kind of bullshit passes for jurisprudence down in the 4th Circuit these days," Thomas wrote. "But those pricks can take their arguments about speech that 'appeals only to prurient interests' and go suck a dog's asshole."
http://www.theonion.com/articles/supreme-court-upholds-freedom-of-speech-in-obsceni%2C17372/
Hey Arizona, Don't Fuck With This Mexican... MACHETE has some Cinco De Mayo words for you!!!
| Hey folks, Harry here and earlier today Robert Rodriguez and Danny Trejo dropped by my house with a package. Rodriguez is calling this his "Illegal" trailer. You see, Robert talked Fox into letting him put together a Cinco De Mayo message for ARIZONA - given. Well, the way things are in Arizona at this moment - it is kinda insane that there is a movie that was shot over a year ago waiting to be released that is about - THIS EXACT ISSUE... but if, Danny Trejo and buddies went Revolution Wacko as a result. Make no bones about it, this is a pure Mexploitation film, but like real exploitation at its height, that shit was pulled straight out of the headlines, even sometimes slightly before the headlines were the headlines. Frankly - that's just kinda cool. We've all known about this silly fun project of Robert's for a while, but then... an entire fucking state just goes fucking nuts... And us being Texans - we're usually quite aware of the lunacy of our surroundings here. But really, ARIZONA... what the hell? For your pure enjoyment here you go my friends, Happy CINCO DE MAYO! Spread this Everywhere!!!
If you can't see it above, go to... http://www.aintitcool.com/node/44943 |
Senator Robert Byrd Threatens West Virginia Coal Companies
by Daniel Kessler
Writes Byrd:
First and foremost, the coal industry must respect the miner and his family. A single miner's life is certainly worth the expense and effort required to enhance safety. West Virginia has some of the highest quality coal in the world, and mining it should be considered a privilege, not a right. Any company that establishes a pattern of negligence resulting in injuries and death should be replaced by a company that conducts business more responsibly. No doubt many energy companies are keen for a chance to produce West Virginia coal.
...
Time will tell just how far Byrd is willing to go. If he really wants to hold coal's feet to the fire, he can support the comprehensive climate soon to be introduced in the Senate, a body he has called home for decades.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/byrd-smacks-coal.php
Burr ‘Couldn’t Imagine’ Supporting A Bill To Prevent Mass Teacher Layoffs
By
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has crafted a $23 billion bill meant to help states avoid making mass teacher layoffs, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has promised will reach the floor sometime. "We will be pushing hard for this in the Senate," Harkin said.
Thus far, Harkin has received no Republican support for his effort. When National Journal asked Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) if he would back the bill, he scoffed that he "couldn't imagine" a situation in which he would give a bill preventing teacher layoffs his blessing:
Another GOP member, Richard Burr of North Carolina, said he hadn't seen the bill but "couldn't imagine" he would support it, positing that it's not the role of the federal government to hire teachers.
Burr might want to spend some time imagining what teacher layoffs in his own state would look like. There are currently 3,700 fewer teachers working in North Carolina than there were last year, and cuts for the next school year "will be even worse."
Dream Ball Project
To the children in The Third World; Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Congo and etc, who can't enjoy football freely because of poverty, war and natural disaster, having a football means a lot and can be a dream and hope to escape from their poor life.
However, the children are so poor that they can not buy a football. So, they play football with the ball made of plastic bag or a coconut palm leaves Therefore, giving them their own footballs which can give them hope, is our aim of this project.
We suggest this Dream Ball made of relief boxes delivered to those poor children by recycling.
A. Create patterns that can help making a ball on the surface of an aid box.
B. Activities of giving aid boxes to children in The Third World.
C. The used aid boxes will be recycled as a football by children with the patterns on boxes.
D. By making Dream Ball with the children together, the aid organizations will get the chance to be friendly with them.
Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with "rent boy"
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