Posts from — May 2010

Actually, we don’t know who the ultimate winner is. The Conservatives took 306 seats, Labour won 258, and the Liberal Democrats held on to 57 seats. The problem is that you need 326 seats to win, so the result is called a “hung Parliament”.

The Conservatives are in talks with the Liberal Democrats to form a ruling coalition, but nothing is certain. Gordon Brown is still the prime minister until a viable ruling bloc is formed.

All this election has guaranteed is that another election will probable take place in two years or less, as Jams O’Donnell predicted in comments.

Last week one motel on our barrier island had 160 rooms reserved for this weekend. As of Thursday 100 people have canceled their reservations.

It is sunny and in the low 80s. The Gulf is turquoise and the sand is sugar white. Oh, yes, there are millions of gallons of oil in the Gulf that could wash ashore at any time.

Every time the GOP starts this debate, they claim that oil drilling won’t affect tourism because the wells will be invisible from the beach. The ‘well from hell’ is over 200 miles and two states away, but a lot of people who would have had work this weekend in that motel don’t now.

Look, if there was some wonderful stuff that you could spray on your water front that would repel oil, or make it a snap to clean up, BP would have already bought up the world’s supply, just like they bought up the world’s supply of industrial oil dispersants. BP has done everything but send minions to supermarkets to clear the shelves of Dawn when it comes to dealing with this spill.

No one with a real product is going to be calling you to sell you some miracle product, when BP will buy it by the barrel at a price you can’t match. It is a con, a fraud, a rip-off. The state and local government will do the clean-up and bill BP for the cost.

Your county emergency management agency provides free training if you want to volunteer for clean-up duties. The animal rescue groups will provide training on dealing with oily wildlife. There is no valid, for-profit, oil clean-up training. If you apply for one of the paid positions with the BP effort, they will provide any necessary training.

If anyone offers these type of things to you, record their phone number if possible, take their picture if they show up at your door, call the sheriff or state fraud unit. These are just another form of looter.

Rookies

Do you smell gas?

[Editor: These weeners (they are out to be weaned) just showed up. They are both grey/blue and white, with the one on the bottom a KT pattern, and the one on alert the Tonto pattern (white chin, chest, and paws).]

Friday Ark

At this point in the process the exit polling would seem to indicate a hung Parliament, with no party winning a majority. The Labour Party has lost seats, primarily to the Conservatives, but it will still be a while before anything is certain.

The BBC news main page is being constantly updated with the latest results.

Update: It looks like the Conservatives will be asked to form the government, but will not win a majority. This probably means there will be another election in the not too distant future,

The LibDems weren’t the force that polling was indicating they would be, and may even lose seats.

The BBC reports that the Air France crash ‘black box site found in Atlantic’

French government and military officials have urged caution, saying there is no guarantee the flight recorders will be found.

“It’s like trying to find a shoe box in an area the size of Paris, at a depth of 3,000m (9,800ft) and in a terrain as rugged as the Alps,” French navy spokesman Hugues du Plessis d’Argentre told AFP.
…

Air France flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared on 1 June 2009 in stormy weather, killing all those on board.

What they have done is reduced the probable location of the data recorders down to a 5 kilometer search area. This was possible by reviewing all of the data from the various search vessels that scanned the bottom while the transmitter beacons on the recorders were still working.

Now they will be deploying submersibles to search this much smaller zone.

McClatchy is reporting that there wasn’t total confidence in the system: Report adds to doubts about key oil rig safety equipment. This covers two presentations, one in 2003 and a second in 2008 by officials with Transocean, [and BP America in the second report], that question the ability of the current blow-out preventers [BOPs] to actually work.

Senator Maria Cantwell [D-Washington] chairs the Senate Commerce Committee’s oceans, atmosphere, fisheries and Coast Guard subcommittee, and she wants to know what’s going on. The industry keeps telling the world that there’s no problem while insiders are writing reports saying the system may not work.

A problem that was highlighted in the 2008 paper was that the stronger pipes being introduced for deep water drilling might make it impossible for the BOPs to work as designed. A further complication is that the plans submitted to companies like Cameron and Hydril who manufacture the BOPs may not match what is actually built. Factory testing is worthless if the materials involved in the installation are different.

I located a picture of the BOP on the well. The discussion on the page includes several people with deep water drilling experience who speculate on what went wrong.

Update: From Kryten in comments: Deepwater Horizon: A Firsthand Account.

My Mother has television and has it on when she is crocheting, knitting, etc. Lately when I have been at her house there have been political ads on for the Republican primary for governor of Alabama. They are torture.

There is a guy named Bradley Byrne who is being attacked for voting for strong consumer protection laws, believing in evolution, and not accepting that every word in the Bible is true.

For his part, Byrne claims to have cleaned up Alabama’s two year college system, when the system was cleaned up by a Federal investigation and prosecution while he headed it. I admit that it was remarkable that he hadn’t done anything worthy of an indictment.

Then you have Tim James claiming that “we speak English in Alabama” which is probably a mostly true statement these days, although Alabama was originally a French colony. At least he didn’t claim that Alabamans can read English, which would be a bit more of a problem.

And lets not forget “Judge” Roy Moore and his magic rocks. He is the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who installed the granite Ten Commandments monument in Alabama’s supreme court building, and refused to comply with a court order to remove it. He and they were removed from the building.

Ol’ Roy is running for governor seemingly claiming he is to the right and more righteous than Moses, but I’m waiting for him to part the waters of Mobile Bay.

The National Association of Letter Carriers’ annual food drive, Stamp Out Hunger, takes place in most areas this Saturday, May 8^th. This is a major source for the nation’s food pantries who are having a hard time keeping up with demand.

Fill a bag with non-perishables and leave it by your mail box if you can. If you don’t have a mail box, most post offices will have a collection point.

While the USPS provides some support, this effort is driven by the carriers themselves.

Oh, yeah, having Dick Cheney, the recent CEO of Halliburton, in charge of US energy policy, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, taking their lead from the White House, the Minerals Management Service “streamlined” the permitting process for drilling, according to this Washington Post report via CBS: BP Gulf Drilling Got “Rubber Stamp”

(Washingtonpost.com) The Interior Department exempted BP’s calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.

The decision by the department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 — and BP’s lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions — show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.
…

While the MMS assessed the environmental impact of drilling in the central and western Gulf of Mexico on three occasions in 2007 — including a specific evaluation of BP’s Lease 206 at Deepwater Horizon — in each case it played down the prospect of a major blowout.

In one assessment, the agency estimated that “a large oil spill” from a platform would not exceed a total of 1,500 barrels and that a “deepwater spill,” occurring “offshore of the inner Continental shelf,” would not reach the coast. In another assessment, it defined the most likely large spill as totaling 4,600 barrels and forecast that it would largely dissipate within 10 days and would be unlikely to make landfall.

“They never did an analysis that took into account what turns out to be the very real possibility of a serious spill,” said Holly Doremus, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has reviewed the documents.

According to the Hedgemony’s MMS appointees, there was no point in doing an environmental impact study, because a blowout wasn’t possible. The gusher has been spewing 5,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf every day. The only reason it isn’t worse is because the pipe was crimped when the drilling platform sank.

Wikipedia usually has to “lock” its Cinco de Mayo page. I suspect it may be related to the sudden appearance of sites opposing the celebration of this semi-holiday and others who have a hissy fit about any Mexican holiday being celebrated in the US.

In Mexico Cinco de Mayo or Batalla de Puebla, is only a really big celebration in the state of Puebla, where the battle took place.

The Mexican army won the Batalla de Puebla on May the 5^th, 1862, but the French went on to Mexico City in 1863 after receiving reinforcements and installed Emperor Maximilian.

It has the status of St. Patrick’s Day in the US, an excuse to eat different food, and drink different booze, and be obnoxious show an interest in other cultures.

Margaritas, tacos, and the destruction of piñatas, that’s what it is really about, although some people have other interpretations.

While there are tarry blobs of oil coming out of that well, the leading edge of the leak is going to be a iridescent sheen on the water. Some of the oil is red, as is seen in aerial photos of the slick, but the mass of it is milky colored because it has emulsified, like a well-shaken bottle of oil-vinegar salad dressing. The emulsified oil may not look as bad as the black sludge, but it will kill fish by coating their gills and kill you if you drink it, just like the sludge.

Who you gonna call?

• To report oil on shoreline or request volunteer information: Call (866) 448-5816 or e-mail deepwaterhorizonresponse@hotmail.com.
• To report oiled wildlife, please call (866) 557-1401 and leave a message. Messages will be checked hourly. Individuals are urged not to attempt to help injured or oiled animals, but to report any sightings to the toll free number.
• BP has established a claim system that will allow people to begin the process to recover lost income or recoup damage-related expense at (800) 440-0858.

This is like Hurricane Elena in 1985 that cruised parallel to the coast going East, and then reversed course and made another pass towards the West. The waiting was almost as bad as the resulting landfall.

What is there to say about the Times Square incident? As Fallenmonk points out it was not too bright. Even Newsbiscuit has satirized it.

To be accurate, there were no explosives involved in the attempt. Gunpowder, gasoline, and propane are all flammables, and the fertilizers you buy in Lowes or Home Depot are neither flammable, nor explosive. There are compounds that can be used both as fertilizer and a low-grade explosive, but they aren’t stocked by “home improvement” stores.

Obviously if this guy had gone to gun shows or hung around with survivalists, like Timothy McVeigh, he might have learned how to do it properly. [It is more likely that he would have disappeared if he had attempted it.] It would appear that the “al Qaeda” terrorist camp was just a rip-off, like a lot of trade schools that advertise in the back of magazines or on dubious web sites. It wouldn’t have been quite as bad if it hadn’t paralleled the Glasgow Airport attack, which was slightly more successful, in that there was a large fire at the airport. It’s probably a chain of bad terrorist training camps for gullible Muslims living in the West, similar to dude ranches.

The Pensacola News Journal reports on three Senators and a Representative in Mobile at a news conference:

“We have some good news: The leak is being restrained,” said U.S. Senator George Lemieux, R. Fla. “BP thinks they are reducing the flow, so we very hopeful about that. But I can’t say enough about what a huge threat this is to our way of life in Florida.”

But late Monday BP issued a news release contradicting Lemieux’s assertion.
…

Lemieux joined Alabama senators Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions and U.S. Representative Jeff Miller at a 2 p.m. press conference at Mobile Regional Airport.
…

Sessions was asked about the extent of BP’s liability and their promise to pay for all economic and environmental damages. The Alabama senator said the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990 provides claims for environmental damages, real and personal property damages, loss of profit, loss of government revenue and cancellation of hotel and rentals. Sessions said there is a strict liability for BP to pay for all clean-up costs. In addition, they are subject to fines of up to $75 million.

[FYI: all Southern Republican politician who use “Jeff” are actually “Jefferson Beauregard” on their birth certificates, as in Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions, and Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Miller.]

Obviously someone attempted to explain to Senator Lemieux [R-Kelly Services] how the blow out preventer worked, and he assumed that BP had used it to crimp the pipe and slow the flow, not understanding that, in fact, the BOP hadn’t worked. [You just can’t get good temps anymore.]

No, Senator Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions, there is no $75 million fine in that law, that is the limit on BP’s liability for anything other than the actual clean-up. I realize that you might think that making a corporation pay anything for the damage they cause is a fine, but that isn’t the way it works.