it's a wonderfull weather, weeks on end. to dry. the whole world is heating up, saw pictures of noctilucent clouds that scared me to death, oil spill came to a grinding halt.
we saw some great sunsets (not many) motley clouds (the gulf oil?) and wednesday a once in 3 years complete (double) rainbow. however the cops stole my acculoader last year, so no pics.
since i spend every day since my friends X. birthday browsing an oilcatastrophe and have become rather vocal at points i should condense some of my findings here.
the first, most eyespringing, detail is the extent to what media and (corporate) policy makers converge in projecting myths, exquisite naivety, straight nonsense and limited knowledge.
so about from the very start of the reporting, a rather to huge flow of myths but also of facts obscured after having (accidently) become public started. it enticed several campaign items like for example when day in day out associated press in the united states started publishing articles that said: you are dependend on oil! thou ar'st depenedth on oil! without oil no jobs! etc.
just like it is mindless that aljazeera or bbc repeat that 20 ppl (1) have died when the well blew up in every article. (rather a waste of bandwith , and thus energy/oil) it is mindless to think that even people that eat gentech food have forgotten these are packed in plastic. or that cars drive on oil. or jobs thrive on oil. that we wouldn't understand that is quite the "projection".
do you remember bp locked the survivors in for 24 hours? even wounded ones? guarded them, i think with assault rifles, and forced them to sign waivers? forgot it? didn't need to be repeated 3 times a day? in each paper?
that the only guys that were launched with a lifeboat were the fatheads that had been 'celebrating the safety record', (it hadn't nearly sunk for a whole year).
to be honest i payed little attention when it was burning,
all the sensation, as if i can't guess that a burning rig looks like a dirty mess. i kinda assumed the problem would be over once the thing had sunk. but not so, so the next subject became the blowout prevention stack.
i think it is due that i describe what i read about the bop. it was reportedly broken, so broken some even spend most of the day before to try and improvisedly fix it.
i don't want to say it must have been sabotaged, or that they coud have properly maintained or improvisedly fixed it, but how should i be sure it was not?
that trail had the usian media 'stumble' upon 'the ideal spill's'(2) bop maintainance records.
that hellburnedon and transocean appeared complicit but outside the stockexchange also was an early impression, the lousy cementing, the use of the wrong kinds of drilling fluids, but also the catatrophic and econ0omical potential of the spill wouldn't have went unnoticed to them.
however the maintainance reports implicated bp as much as any. the whole bop, was shipped in a testing configuration. even if it hadn't been broke chances it would have functioned 'well' would not have been great , let alone perfect.
i think with half of the 'shears' in a testing configuration the other half would not really be the most set to blow. all of that is besides the point, since the thing plainly was not checked for integrity by the responsible party for the drilling operation. bp.
you could think transocean was at that point complicit by letting the bop go like that. but the exact details of corporate and subsidiary ties are complex and plenty. not sure if it was here that by then i had for me decided the others (cheney, hellburnedon, transocean) were not free of blame. (3)
by then it also became clear tony hayward (..) and others had sold shares in the days and sometimes weeks ahead. again a subject that investigating it soon gets me sleepy, so that i have to take reports to that mostly on facevalue. on facevalue it is scary. democrat and republican, corporate and governmental have all been implicated. i have to assume information like this will be subject to the same mechanisms of censoring as other informations in the media, so the real scale and to some extend who actually knew about it (m pretty sure tony did) when their shares were sold by financial investors i am not very sure. transparance is a nice ideal, but for now something applied on the poor and privvy to the rich.
in some points i strayed into informations beyond that, but we are now once week into the gusher. i payed attention to the wildlife and saw some reports of massmortality in fish.
i had great hopes the 'containment dome' could be a help. but it had no pump, scrapers anything more versatile or anchors so the ill understood(?) mechanism of icing had it's hayday.
tony whined about his. my hay ! he must have thought. people kept collecting hair and throwing oil and straw in water. black people appeared in the clean up pictures, it takes about a dozen black people about a day to collect an immense pile of plastic bags full of oilwaste.
solidarity is everywhere, it takes 30-50 white people about a day to collect 150 ( it would weigh aprox a fourth plastic bag) turttle eggs to an incubator. guess who is better?
the first time i saw a really mixed crew on the beach was when obama visited it first. in the upperclass case at least he was a minority. 't was still the black people to get the physical contact with the oil ofcourse.
for some reason for a while hands with oil had appeared in the papers, i had been wondering why, (2nd and 3rd week into the disaster) only now i understand. not that i want to say you can't clean oil with your hands, far from that, there must be ways to do that in a safety kind of way.
k those were publicitary hands. the odd thing is maybe so much doesn't go for obama's well groomed beach, i think he was curious to have a look when they pointed him where to look at the right look of tarballs. i would be, what would the quasidispersed gulf oiltarball on a recreational facility look like?
by now he felt the need to play his own game of gulf btw. both literally (like tigerwoods) and as commander in chief. mh, he did better then mcchrystal, perhaps he should give it a try in afghanistan himself;) where the times bomber had just celebrated the 999th casualty in the afghanistan war today was celebrated the 1000th. i warned them to stop feeding a daily dose of dead soldier meat. helped a bit. detractors became hard to find, north korea for example didn't really hit the mark yesterday. that stupid cold usian war ...
was also a bit quick after pakistan that had complained all the promises of billions were nice but they'd rather get a couple of millions really. that was the day before that.
perhaps i have to say what i think about the 'incident'. to my knowledge recent deaths had been among the northkoreans in recent months. i wasn't shocked nor certain of northkorean involvment. there will be a probably more reliable russian investigation into the subject.
the investigation into the gaza boat incident was another one of wich i severely doubted it's impartiality. otoh, awaiting russian confirmation it did much to highlight a possible exterior cause, suggesting a rather modern means. they said it exploded at 150 mtrs under it. there is a marked possibillity old mines would do that, and without being convinced of impartiality the remains of the torpedo tell me nothing at all, and even appear notably suspect for looking like they have been outside for years (not under the sea for weeks). also ofcourse the claim for their genuine northkorean origin (that goes metalurgically unchecked), is a very onesided one. that is a claim from the northkorean branchvariety of the cia , the military information service.
with a great history of cia provocations in the far-east , the general trending with japan and last but not least the recent agressions towards northkorea, i don't have radical opinion on the matter. so after having been distracted, and a small break, on with the catastrophe.
(1) i know, i know it was 9-11;)
(2) bp in the media day 3 or 4.
(3) i am not so sure about anadarko, but i think these bore little or no executional responsibility.
thats only my impression and one that could or could not be correct as a result of getting it from (after all corporate) journalism.
