Florida is now fully benefitting from BP's free oil initiative

Fucking communists, just taking and taking:

Driftwood and seashells glazed with rust-colored tar lined the surf along the Gulf Coast's once-pristine white sand beaches Saturday, the crude from a busted oil well deep underwater showing up in greater quantities and farther east.

A cap placed over the gusher was collecting only a fraction of the oil, which had stained beaches with a waxy mess of tar balls and created an unusual orange foam in the surf.

In Gulf Shores, Ala., wooden boardwalks leading to beachfront hotels were spotted with oil from beachgoers' feet, and some condominiums were providing solvents for guests smeared with the brown goo. At Pensacola Beach, the retreating high tide left an orange stain in its wake.

Erin Tamber moved to the beach area after surviving Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where she had lived for 30 years.

"I feel like I've gone from owning a piece of paradise to owning a toxic waste dump," she said as she inspected the beach Saturday morning.

I wish I could have the slightest feeling that this is going to be a turning point, where people really push back in a sustained way against destructive capitalism and the government that loves it, but I don't. People don't care. Now that Lost and American Idol and whatever else are going to repeats, I guess people have to find some other distraction. Baseball? I don't know. I'm fairly confident that people's attention, in significant amounts, will not turn to BP and the federal government. I would love for it to, but it's not realistic. Katrina didn't do it; why should this? I guess it's a bit more spread out, but it hasn't killed anyone aside from Deepwater Horizon workers. People just don't care. Too fucking busy with hating immigrants or Muslims or whatever the political distraction issue of the day is.

Anyway, Florida's western beaches are getting fucked and people can't go in the water anymore:

Swimmers at Pensacola Beach rushed out of the water after wading into the mess, while other beachgoers inspected the clumps with fascination, some taking pictures.

Health officials said that people should stay away from the mess but that swallowing a little oil-tainted water or getting slimed by a tar ball is no reason for alarm.

On Saturday morning at a public beach in Gulf Shores, a long line of brown globs marked the high water line from overnight at the public beach.

Finally, somehow, real thought worked its way into a news story, if ever so slightly:

"This is disgusting," said Macon Srygley, of McCalla, Ala. "I hate it for BP, but this has to be a lesson for anyone drilling in the ocean. We've got all this technology, but are we not smart enough to realize we can end ourselves with it?"

Right on. We aren't, and we will.

BP's oil spreads to Alabama and Mississippi

Of course, it will only get worse. There is lots and lots more where that came from, seeing as the hole will probably be spewing oil and gas for at least two more months. Nice.

And if it took that long for oil to reach those places, think of how much is behind it and for how long it will keep washing up, long, long after the hole is plugged or runs out.

Rust-colored oil washed ashore on barrier islands off Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday, while more patches of crude offshore appeared to be moving toward those states' coasts, authorities reported.

Researchers scrambled to clean up tar balls and puddles of oil from the beaches of Alabama's Dauphin Island, while a strip of oil about two miles long and three feet wide stretched along Petit Bois Island, about five miles away off Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour's office reported.

It marked the first time oil has hit Mississippi's shores since the largest oil spill in U.S. history erupted in late April. And while tar balls associated with the Gulf spill had hit Dauphin Island, about 35 miles south of Mobile, in early May, residents said that Tuesday was the first time they had seen oil hitting the beach.

Only part of the island's beaches have been lined with protective booms, with much of those barriers lined up near a protected wildlife area on the west end of the island.

These places are fucked. And BP doesn't care any more than it is legally compelled to.

BP's"top kill" procedure to plug the hole did not work

At all. In the least. Still blowing thick, deep black oil. Not surprising, given the track of failures behind them:

The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill.

And you know what? They aren't going to stop it until they drill a new well, which will take until August:

BP has started work on two relief wells, but officials have said that they will not be completed until August...

That's at least another 180 million gallons of oil that will blow out, making it top out at easily over 300 million gallons. But remember, as Tony Hayward said, the Gulf of Mexico is real big, so it doesn't matter much.

In the meantime, don't expect too much, as they are basically throwing things at it and seeing what sticks:

A technician who has been working on the project to stem the oil leak said Saturday that neither the top kill nor the “junk shot” came close to succeeding because the pressure of oil and gas escaping from the well was simply too powerful to overcome. He added that engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work.

“Simply too much of what we pumped in was escaping,” said the technician, who spoke on condition of remaining unnamed because he is not authorized to speak publicly for the company.

Once again - "engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work." Wow. They don't understand the equipment they are using. Good idea, especially when working with such a volatile and destructive material as petroleum.

Also, the New York Times is still lying about how much oil is coming out of there:

He said it would capture most but not all of the oil leaking from the well, which is believed to be gushing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

We know it is much more than that. Much, much more.

Oil industry threatens the president and you

They are relentless as well as remorseless. Such is the march of capital.

"An extended moratorium on safely producing our oil and natural gas resources from the Gulf of Mexico would create a moratorium on economic growth and job creation," said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, the main U.S. trade association for the oil and natural gas industry...

The ban, Gerard said, will hurt growth "by undercutting our nation's access to affordable, reliable, domestic sources of oil and natural gas..."

Gerard said he understands the frustration many feel toward the industry, but he said lawmakers should reconsider any decisions that would limit access to domestic sources of oil.

"This issue is much larger than the oil industry since access to affordable energy impacts every sector of our economy, every state in our nation and every American family," he said...

The ban could also mean layoffs in the energy industry, particularly in the Gulf Coast region, according to API. The group said 150,000 jobs are at risk if deep water production is significantly reduced over a period of five years.

"Deepwater is where the new action is in the Gulf," said API spokesman Bill Bush. "If that's shut down, there could be serious jobs impacts."

First, the US imports around 70% of its oil. So it only produces about 30% domestically. And of that, 30% it is only 30% that comes from offshore drilling. So the US only gets 10% of its oil from domestic offshore drilling. Not very much. At all. Fuck it.

Capitalists throw around the word "jobs" like Zionists with "anti-Semite." As soon as you make a point with them, they threaten and smear you so that you fuck off real quick.

Really though, if jobs are truly lost from stopping offshore oil production, too bad. Has to happen sooner or later - that oil ain't gonna be there forever. And that's what oil companies are ultimately in the business of - running themselves out of business, although they don't tell anyone that. Or themselves, really. But anyway, sometimes you just have to find something else to do, especially when you are a cog in the most profoundly destructive industry/line of work/business the world has ever known. Slave traders had to do it, much of the German military had to do it after World War II, even people selling Yugos had to do it. It sucks for the politically-celebrated "little guy," but such is life. Hopefully, one day, slaughterhouse workers will have to do the same.

BP's hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico is now blowing muddy oil

Congratulations. You're doing a fine job.

Don't forget to check BP's disastervision for the latest on their struggle to address a problem for which there are really no short-range solutions, as no one bothered to think that far ahead (there was too much money to be made too quickly to wait on the technology to address a "what if" situation). And that is 100% their fucking fault.

Watch James Carville get really mad at BP

This is fun. Sure, he's way too sympathetic to Obama (Carville is a professional Democrat), but it's nice to see someone get really pissed at BP on television. I think at least 70% of it is genuine. Which is high, especially for a political strategist/politician maker. Mary Matalin seems to be even more legitimately disturbed, maybe 85%. You never know though; I tend to view electoral politics in much the same light as professional wrestling.

Thanks to BP for helping us to get there faster

So much life on earth (still, despite our best efforts) to wipe out before we win the war.

Here is a big shout out to BP, Halliburton, Transocean, the federal government, the president and the Coast Guard for doing a whole lot of nothing while the Gulf of Mexico is silenced. I would like to give a less immediate, but perhaps more broad mountain of gratitude to the oil industry the world over, automobile manufacturers, industrialists, capitalists and state capitalists of all stripes, the airline industry, purveyors of all things plastic, and once again, the federal government, for ensuring that all this continues unabated and that all the appropriate pieces of shit get the subsidies and infrastructure they need to keep fucking the planet. Great teamwork!

Ruined.

Once again, I would like to reiterate that I hate us.

Oilvision

Watch it spew. Watch as we kill the earth a little bit more.

"I was born on planet earth
at a drastic time full of plastic mirth
and everyday I've seen increasing signs
and you would too if you'd opened your eyes
you had a chance you did not try
so now it's time to watch it die"

The oil hemorrhage is never going to end

It's been well over a month now, and don't you know that hole in the ocean floor is still blowing over a million gallons a day into the Gulf of Mexico with no end in sight. Actually, you know what, never mind that. It does not matter how much oil is coming out of the hole:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

Whatever the case, for the last week, BP has been sucking out 126,000 gallons a day, at most, which I'm sure will find its way into cars very soon. Amazing that they are still making money off of this thing. Fucking company needs to be shut down, deploying any and all means available.

To stop oil from coming to the surface (addressing the aesthetics of the matter), they're using dispersants underwater, which are known to be toxic. Aside from their intensely poisonous nature, BP is making a new problem - vast underwater oil clouds, "including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots." Great news.

While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology.

This is already the worst single-event environmental disaster this country has ever seen. It will go down as one of the worst in the world. And no one seems to be able to do anything about it.

Tradeoffs

All the "benefits" that people got from the oil that was pulled out of that hole in the ocean and refined, like driving to the mall, watching television, having plastic bags and making pointless shit at work, could never justify snuffing the life of even one bird.

Oil clumps seabirds' feathers, leaving them without insulation — and when they preen, they swallow it. Prolonged contact with the skin can cause burns, said Nils Warnock, a spill recovery supervisor with the California Oiled Wildlife Care Network at the University of California-Davis. Oil swallowed by animals can cause anemia, hemorrhaging and other problems, said Jay Holcomb, executive director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center in California.

The bird has no idea what's going on. It's trying to clean itself because it knows it's dirty, but it's killing itself through that cleaning.

This suffering is the saddest thing in the world to me right now.

We did that. We will keep doing it. It will happen again and again, until we have used all of the oil, we no longer have the means by which to extract it, or we are dead. Which will come first?

The good old days

Back when the oil catastrophe was only half the size of Rhode Island and the media told us it was blowing out 42,000 gallons of oil per day, as per the instruction of British Petroleum. Things are better when we don't question. The Coast Guard had to step in and point out that it's actually 210,000 gallons per day, and then the media had to say, "Well, yeah." Cause BP did. So you know, BP jumps, the corporate media jumps twice.

This was also back before BP basically jumped out of the way and let other people take care of it, like they are doing now:

BP - which is responsible under federal law for the clean-up - said it was using four submersible vehicles, equipped with cameras and remote-controlled arms, to try to activate a blow-out preventer - a series of pipes and valves that could stop the leak.

However, this was a "highly complex task" and "it may not be successful", said chief operating officer of BP's exploration and production unit, Doug Suttles.

If the blow-out preventer does not seal off the well, the company intends to place a large dome directly over the leaks to catch the oil and send it up to the surface, where it could be collected by ships.

A dome. That's their answer. Good one.

Also, in this case, the title of "expert" been conferred upon anyone who has access to basic thought processes:

Conservation experts say the oil has the potential to damage beaches, barrier islands, wetlands and wildlife reserves along hundreds of miles of coastline in four US states.

Fuck.

Fucking oil drilling disaster

What to say, huh? It's obviously a huge disaster, decidedly of the human variety. Nothing natural going on here. I'm sure it's already snuffed out many lives of the non-human variety, lives that had absolutely no chance. It will get worse, and it will stay bad. This is going to last for a long fucking time. British Petroleum (BP) this time.

Of course there is a whole lot of lying going on; it's quite morbidly entertaining to read early accounts of the catastrophe against those popping up today. Estimates as to how much oil is blowing out of that hole they made in the ocean floor keep going up and up. The rising estimates are tempered with that absolute bullshit that keeps people confused and doubtful, saying that you can't measure what's coming out of the hole. NO FUCKING SHIT. The Coast Guard is estimating five thousand barrels a day, which equates to two hundred and ten thousand gallons. Yes, 210,000 gallons. Per day. Since last Tuesday, April 20th. Nice. We're closing in on two million gallons. If only we could get some of that and do a nice uncontrolled burn on these fuckers' houses.

And they're doing all this crap to get rid of the mess they've made, from setting the ocean on fire (literally) and spraying dispersant on it to hoping that it will hit cold water that will cause the oil to harden and sink to the ocean floor. Not kidding. Great answers. Sink to the ocean floor. Yeah boy.

There seems to be some confusion as to the cause of this mess. I can clear it up - people drilled a hole in the floor of the ocean in order to extract crude oil.

Here is the highlight of the article:

Amid several of the thicker streaks, four gray whales could be seen swimming in the oil. It was not clear if the whales were in danger.

Not clear. Again, I can clear this up: yes. Yes, they are in grave danger. They are swimming in oil. Eating in oil. Breathing in oil. Would you feel that you were in danger if you were in similar circumstances?

It's fine though, we can just have a contest where Japan, Norway and Iceland race to come kill those four whales. You know, for humane purposes.

Some more good news:

BP says work will begin as early as Thursday to drill a relief well to relieve pressure at the blowout site, but that could take months.

Here is a scalable solution:

Another option is a dome-like device to cover oil rising to the surface and pump it to container vessels, but that will take two weeks to put in place, BP said.

I hate us. When will we die?

How to avoid getting redeployed to combat

This is fucking awesome:

[Army Spc. Marc A.] Hall has been jailed since Dec. 11, two days before his brigade with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division out of Ft. Stewart, Georgia, was scheduled to leave for Iraq. He was charged with the military offense of communicating a threat after telling his battalion commander that he might shoot or otherwise attack a fellow U.S. soldier, according to Army lawyers. He previously served in Iraq in 2007-08.

But it was a CD recording of a rap song that Hall wrote and sent to the Army's personnel office in July 2009 that gained notoriety for the case.

At that point, Army lawyers said, Hall knew his unit was scheduled to deploy — just two months before he was to finish his four-year enlistment contract. An unpopular Army policy known as "stop loss" requires that soldiers who are assigned to a unit at the time it deploys will be kept in the ranks for as long as the duration of the yearlong tour.

On the recording, Hall denounced the Army for the policy and rapped about opening fire with his military-issue M-4 rifle.

"I got a (expletive) magazine with 30 rounds, on a three-round burst, ready to fire down," Hall rapped. "Still against the wall, I grab my M-4, spray and watch all the bodies hit the floor. ... I bet you never stop-loss nobody no more, in your next lifetime of course. No remorse."

Pretty great. This guy seriously did not want to go back to war, and was willing to do just about anything. He fucking mailed a CD of the song to the Army! Man, that's gutsy. Good for him. It should really say something to people that he'd rather spend an indefinite period in jail that go back to combat. It probably won't though.

Fuck military service, at least in this country. You're just a tool of imperialism, suppression and oppression.

New plans for offshore oil drilling

Ok. So there's quite a bit to say about this. Here is a brief summation of what the president has handed down:

The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

Concerns abound from virtually every conceivable method of analysis - environmental, political, social, financial. Mine are chiefly about the environmental impact of this and people's perceived right to do as they wish with land simply because they can, but I am not going to go into that. Instead, I will offer a bit of unsolicited advice on how to achieve one of the goals that this new petroleum extraction is supposed to secure.

Mr. Obama said several times during his presidential campaign that he supported expanded offshore drilling. He noted in his State of the Union address in January that weaning the country from imported oil would require “tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.”

Mind you, I have no belief in the sustainability of industry, nor do I wish for it to be so, but if one were of that mindset (and all capitalists are), there is a crucial first step that they must take and push for:

Get off the oil industry's dick.