A Quarter of a Million Gallons a Day

Offshore drilling, a safe way to get the oil and gas we need, or so said the Oil Slut, until they yanked the commercials.

In a closed-door briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the current flow.

There are allegations out there that BP drilled several thousands of feet deeper than their drilling permit allowed. The BP Oil Spill is damaging the shit out of the states around the Gulf of Mexico and, if the wind shifts, the oil will enter the Gulf Stream and Florida's new motto will be "Come to Florida and Smell Our Oily Beaches".

In the meantime, the people who are promoting the fictional idea of "clean coal" are running their ads, ignoring the long-established truth that when it comes to despoiling the air and water, nothing beats coal.

One thing is clear, though, and that is that there is no cheap, easy and environmentally friendly way to get electrical power. You can cover the Southwest with solar plants and build a larger nationwide grid. You can dam the rivers, which pretty much wipes out ocean species that spawn in fresh water and which can, in some circumstances, cause earthquakes. Wind turbines chop up birds like massive blenders. Current designs of nuclear plants generate very radioactive waste and an accident would be devastating. Fusion power "will be practicable in four decades," as the backers of fusion have promised for the last 30 years.

Another Change to the Way Blogger Works.

For a long time, the posting time of a piece was the time when it was first auto-saved.  So if you were working on a blog post for awhile, be it hours or even days, when you finally hit "publish post" the time and date stamp tracked back to that first save (unless you changed it).

It doesn't seem to be working that way anymore. Now the time and date stamp seems to be when it was published.

Snookered By a Front Group

The New York Times got conned by a self-styled conservation group that is a front for the offshore oil drilling industry. 

(H/T)

May is "Zombie Awareness Month"

I didn't know that May is now Zombie Awareness Month.

And there is even a book on zombie forensics.

Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead

Silly me, I didn't know that there was much to research, for if they come, the idea is to escape, evade, and kill any in your path.

This Could Get Interesting, and Not in a Good Way

The South Koreans are openly talking about retaliating against North Korea for the sinking of the RKS Cheonan.

Defense Minister Kim Tae-yung on Sunday threatened North Korea with retaliation if it is found to have been behind the sinking of the Navy corvette Cheonan on March 26. "Retaliation -- whatever form it takes -- must be done," Kim said on KBS TV. The possibility of a vicious cycle of retaliation "must clearly be considered," he said.

It is not too off the mark to state that the North Koreans are batshit crazy. I also suspect that in any sort of military exchange, North Korea has less to lose. A conflict won't do any good to the South's economy, while the North is about as poor as they can get. The North Korean Army could fire off a bunch of shells from their emplaced artillery and wreak havoc in Seoul, which is within artillery range.

Or the North could just rip open the border fence and do a Mariel Boatlift type of influx into the South. It could get very interesting.

(H/T)

40 Years Ago: Four Dead in Ohio

Four students were shot to death in Ohio at 12:24PM, May 4th, 1970, in what became known as the Kent State Massacre.

Soldiers in the Ohio National Guard leveled their M-1 rifles and poured rifle fire across the commons at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding another nine.





Many of those people were not involved in the demonstration. William Schroeder, an ROTC student, age 19, was shot in the back as he was walking to class; he was over 125 yards away. Sandra Scheuer, 20, was also on her way to class, was over 100 yards away, and was shot through the throat. Jeffrey Miller, 20, was shot through the mouth and died instantly; he was standing in a parking lot over 80 yards away. Allison Krause, 19, was shot through the chest from over 100 yards.

No investigation has ever shown any provocation worthy of mass gunfire as a response. Nobody was ever successfully prosecuted for the shootings.

There was a nationwide student strike in the aftermath. My high school was open on May 5th, but probably 90% of the students refused to go to class. After the second period, the administration gave up and canceled school for that day.

Ten days later, in a similarly unprovoked shooting, the cops at Jackson State University (Mississippi) shot and killed two students, wounding 12. As in Kent State and at Orangeburg South Carolina two years before (4 dead, 31 wounded), none of the shooters spent a day behind bars.



You can easily find folks on the Right who maintain, to this day, that the mass shooting of unarmed demonstrators was justified. Keep that in mind when you read stuff about how the Teabaggers are so, so outraged because there are riot cops on the periphery of their protests.

UPDATE:  A column by Elaine Holstein, the mother of Jeff Miller, one of the four students who were shot to death by the Ohio National Guard.

The Republican Party = the Confederate Party?

Folks in the GOP, at least in Virginia, are adopting Civil War symbology.

Next step will probably be the adoption of party uniforms. I have a modest suggestion, of course:

Gray uniforms for daytime wear:



White for night-time and for formal occasions:

Evolution at Work

One thing about humans as a species seems to be that we often cannot learn a damned thing:

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

There is nothing about this story that was not foreseeable by anyone with a basic education in science.

But every industry assumes that they are different and that they can ignore science. The farmers were no different.

Farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.

Part of this may be due to the fierce dedication to scientific illiteracy of a certain number of the religious and political interests in this country, for if you and your neighbors think that evolution is a fraud, then the point that, if you apply the same pesticide or herbicide over and over again, that the pests and weeds will develop a tolerance for the stuff will escape you. You won't be able to see past the marketing hype of Monsanto. You'll think that if a little application of a weed-killer is good, a heavy application is better.

But sooner or later, a weed (or pest) develops a tolerance for the chemicals used to kill it. And then there is that huge ecological niche for weeds that is now empty and the poison-tolerant weed fills it, as rapidly as propagation allows.

Monsanto and their ilk, of course, have a vested interest in ignoring the way evolution works. They'll eventually develop another weed-killer that works as well as Roundup. And the cycle will repeat itself.

Because we will have learned nothing from this.

Incompetence and Ineptitude

Really, jerkoff? You tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square and it took you two freaking days to figure out that you should get out of the damn country?

The guy who sold the car advertised it over the Internet, which likely means that the clown who bought the car sent an e-mail. Once the cops had talked to the seller of the car, they probably had a good idea who the perpetrator was.

Concur Ref A

Craigslist ad.

BT,DT.