Cut The Body Loose!

A collection of facts about the BP oil geyser from today, the day the geyser quit finally.

• Scientists now estimate that 35,000 to 60,000 barrels (1.4 million to 2.5 million gallons) of oil have spewed daily from the breach. The high end of that range would mean that about 215 million gallons have leaked out since the disaster started.
• By comparison, the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound amounted to 11 million gallons, and the 1991 Persian Gulf oil disaster intentionally caused by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein spilled 240 million gallons.
• Oil, in forms ranging from a light surface sheen to tar balls to thick red-brown sludge, has washed ashore along the Gulf Coast from marshes in western Louisiana and Mississippi to beaches in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. Tar balls were found July 7 in Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, Louisiana.
• More than 3.15 million feet (almost 600 miles) of boom has been placed in the water to serve as a physical barrier. In Louisiana, temporary sand berms are being built to protect barrier islands.  Skimmers aboard boats and ships are trying to capture floating oil.  Absorbent booms and pads are being used to soak up oil floating on the surface or clinging to plants, boats and structures.  Commercial fishing and shrimp boats are being used in many of these operations, providing a source of income for some idled workers.  About 1 million gallons of chemical dispersants have been sprayed on surface oil in hopes of speeding its breakdown and evaporation.  Pools of floating oil are set on fire in controlled burns.  The massive converted cargo ship A Whale is being tested for its ability to separate oil from seawater. Its operators say it can skim 21 million gallons of water a day.  The federal government sent a bill this week for $99.7 million to BP and other responsible parties. BP and other parties have already paid three bills totaling $122.3 million. In addition, BP has placed $20 billion into an escrow fund to pay damage claims.
• Birds: 1,866 collected dead; 1,120 collected alive; 505 released.  Sea turtles: 463 collected dead; 197 collected alive; 9 nests transported; 56 hatchlings released.  Mammals (including dolphins): 59 collected dead; 5 collected alive; one released.  The number of fish, shrimp, oysters and other sea creatures killed or harmed is unknown.  Commercial fishing in the Gulf of Mexico earned $659 million in total landings revenue in 2008, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. The region accounts for 73 percent of the nation’s shrimp harvest and 59 percent of its oysters.
• Deepwater drilling in the Gulf employs more than 10,000 workers directly and 25,000 indirectly in support businesses. The overall oil industry employs 55,000 people in the region, according to government statistics.  Less one on Dec 31, 2010 – me. Tourism brings $20 billion to the five-state Gulf region, the government says.  Countless stores, gas stations, restaurants, hairdressers and other enterprises rely on money from those industries flowing their way.
• The government has suspended deepwater drilling and closed 35 percent of the Gulf to commercial fishing. Oysterman Vlaho Mjehovich found “95 percent casualties” in his oyster beds this week. “Everything’s dying,” he said. “There’s no oysters out here. … It’s dying now; it’s going to keep dying. I’ve seen areas [go] 10 years … without oysters coming back.
• “This is not something that’s going to be done and fixed overnight. People have to understand: This is going to take years to come back. And it’s like, what do you do? I had a business. My business was taken away from me overnight.”
• Drilling of two relief wells began within days of the Deepwater Horizon accident; officials have said the wells should be completed by mid-August, but some have expressed optimism the job could be done sooner.  Now It seem the new cap just may be able to keep the well plugged, David comments.
• The federal government is issuing a new moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico effective until as late as November 30.  Obama administration officials  indicated their intention to reinstate the moratorium since the initial ruling. Thousands of people and businesses depend on income from deepwater drilling operations. The Gulf offshore operations produce one-eighth of U.S. domestic oil and a quarter of its natural gas.

Extracts from – CNN July 15, 2010 modified to shorten as much as possible, David Wadleigh

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Before you blame poor Veronica White, pause a moment to see this situation is not as Black and White as it first seems.  It seems fairly obvious to this writer that a communications breakdown  caused White, who just happens to be Black, to make the apparently Black Racist release of White City Council members’ emails.  I can easily imagine the outside agitator asking for “copies of White’s Emails” and Miss Veronica thinking she was giving out only copies of her own emails, the Veronica White Emails.  Little would she know if some Black Hearted IT geek, the same one who deleted all of Mayor Nagin’s emails, deliberately included all the emails from all the White members of City Council, not just Veronica White’s email.  I think Miss Veronica is just an innocent bystander, as usual, and neither a part of the problem nor its solution.  My impression that this was the work of a Black Racist outside agitator is because there was no similar Black Mail attempt made by the outsider.

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It seems to me with growing frequency that much of what some people call religion is indistinguishable (in this life) with superstition.  Neither superstition nor religious belief is provable by measurement or statistics.

I think superstition whenever some belief only works if the believer “has faith”.  Nothing wrong with an informed and examined faith, but frankly some of the things many religions would have us believe on blind faith alone are really quite preposterous and unlikely.  Creationism in the strict seven days work done 6000 years ago variety of the religious far right seems to me to be such a superstition, certainly not a science at all.

Here we have come to Darwins’ 200th birthday this month, and don’t you know it but that Mr. Jindal’s solidarity with the religious right caused him not to veto the Science Education Act last year.  Now that act is causing loss of revenues in Louisiana and also impeding Science in Louisiana.  One national group of biological scientists, The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology,  has canceled their significant convention here, and other groups of scientists are speaking out as well on web sites and blogs.

Geez Louise, evolution has evidence to support its theory all around us.  It is a theory, but a well suppported scientific theory of the type science treats as true until or if later proven false.  A theory that has withstood years of research and questioning by the same biologists who cancelled their conference here in New Orleans.

Creationism or Intelligent Design has zero science involved, there is no growing body of evidence to support it.  In fact evidence says it cannot be as the Earth is more than 6000 years old for a start.  It points to the Bible for proof, which one must then first try to translate in the correct context and then also must believe on faith alone (blind faith I think) in the Bible as the inherrent word of God.  This is just as silly as the flat earth thing folks, although the flat earth theory had no big religious meaning behind it.

Now, if somebody wants to believe that God created everything in seven days is a metaphor for God or a Higher Power or Nature guiding evolution or setting it in motion, no problem.  To stand in the way of Science though, to harm Science and attempt to change its results to fit a superstition, those who do this should be ashamed of themselves.  Talk about sore losers.  But, you see, if Creationism isn’t “literal” about the seven days and the 6000 years ago, then all kinds of other things in the Bible likely aren’t literal either, it all falls more suspect and needs close inpection.

Mr. Jindal is an educated man and knows better, he should have vetoed the bill last year and needs to see it gets rescinded.

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I had cause to sit for hours in a no cell phone, no laptop, no drink, no food, no television government waiting room yesterday all through the inauguration.  That was after dumping of pockets and being scanned.  Bathrooms needed persmission and a key.  No reading material other than a few government pamphets provided.

I’m not expecting luxurious waiting rooms, but in the name of security this is just not justified.  Airport flight gates are secure, and people there are allowed cell phones, computers, a cup of coffee or drink of water or a snack and unimpeded access to a restroom.  Thank goodness I quit smoking, other captives in the room were jonesing for a smoke bad.

This government waiting room was federal, and was serving citizens who had paid taxes supporting this office all their lives, had committed no crime or wrong doing.  Now we were also having to pay an expensive lawyer to do our business, in effect it was us in the waiting room that were having to pay for both sides of this process.  Why does the government have to go and lock us down like we are criminals or hostages, cut us off from the outside world, deny us a simple cup of coffee or soda?  The government employees at least got breaks and maybe even a glimpse of outside news, but the citizen clients did not.  In fact, I found myself making change so that civil servants could pay for the delivered lunch they took behind closed doors and ate at lunchtime.  All of us in the waiting room just had to forget about getting any lunch at all.

There were two classes of people in the room, lawyers and the rest of us.  The paperwork process had been made so confusing that even college graduates needed a lawyer to figure it out.  You could tell the lawyers from the rest of us right away as the lawyers all wore expensive looking shoes and clothing and sort of herded the rest of us through the system like cattle.  It felt like unless you were a lawyer or worked for the government, you were just a sack of meat being punished by the exceedingly long wait in a holding area devoid of any way to spend your time productivity while waiting for other people to reach some result.

So for the entire inauguration I had to sit and twiddle my thumbs while studying the photos of Bush and Cheney still up on the wall while the rest of the country gathered at computers,  televisions and radios even in many workplaces.

I remembered Reagan saying “Take down that wall!” and I wanted to shout “Take down those photos!” because after eight years it feels like we are toppling a wall.  The iron curtain has moved, no longer running through the middle of Germany.  Now days the iron curtain is in front of the entrances to federal government holding cells, err, waiting rooms for ordinary citizens.  When you cross that threshhold you are no longer an adult, a citizen, a person of free will.  Now you can’t even make a phone call or have a drink of water.

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A member of our family totaled his car by driving down a New Orleans street and hooking the undercarriage of the violently bouncing car on a protruding man hole, bending the frame.

Myself, I had $500 damage to my Grand Marquis just by dropping a wheel in a deep pothole on Fleur de Lis Drive in Lakeview – who knew it would be so deep.  I was going slow, trying to get to my Church, it slammed the car into the ground so hard it broke the bumper and tore the shroud off the radiator fan.  There are NO PLANS to fix that road, although it is major enough to have a neutral ground and streetcar tracks on it.

The same car had the entire exhaust system torn off it by simply backing out of my Algiers driveway and catching the tailpipe in dirt where a street used to be.

The City has a lot of Grand Marquis and Crown Victoria cars which must be meeting the same fate on a regular basis at tax payer expense.  These cars are unsuitable to drive in New Orleans period, never mind taking them home.  If a City employee needs a take home vehicle, it would be best to give them a take home dump truck that is built for driving here.

I think given the condition of New Orleans streets, there should be a bylaw preventing New Orleans City owned cars from being driven on New Orleans streets.  Its just plain destructive of public property to drive a government car in New Orleans, during working hours or not.  The city owned cars need to be kept in adjacent parishes where they have actual roads to drive on.

We should NOT make exception for the city politicians and bureaucrats who have had the roads leading to their houses repaired, even though those roads are now reasonable to drive on without wrecking the car.  I guess thats why the politicians here can’t get the roads fixed, or let the roads get this way in the first place.  The roads they live on are in good shape, and since they don’t have to pay when their government vehicle is wrecked by driving in Lakeview or Algiers then its really no skin off their nose if the rest of us are wrecking our vehicles to get home.

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