Monthly Archives: April 2010

Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill: Bureaucratic Boondoggle?

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Approximate oil locations from April 25, 2010 to April 28, 2010, including forecast for April 29 * NOAA

The Star | U.S. may send in troops as Gulf oil spill worsens

A massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is even worse than believed and as the government grows concerned that the rig’s operator is ill-equipped to contain it, officials are offering a military response to try to avert a massive environmental disaster along the ecologically fragile U.S. coastline.

… But time may be running out. Not only was a third leak discovered — which government officials said is spewing five times as much oil into the water than originally estimated — but it might be closer to shore than previously known, and could have oil washing up on shore by Friday.

At the same time, there appeared to be a rift developing between BP and the Coast Guard, which is overseeing the increasingly desperate operation to contain the spill and clean it up.

Note the very troubling confluence of existing conditions, incompetence, bureaucratic bickering and environmental disaster as emphasized by me.

Seriously, people, Grow Up. Where have I heard of a horrible situation made worse when local “authorities,” late-arriving military and other responders fought like a bunch of little lipgloss-smacking schoolgirls over damage assessment and the right way to fix things? Oh yeah, Katrina and The Flood! You guys have obviously learned nothing about incident response logistics. Louisiana, why you, honey? Why is it always you?

Here’s a nice New York Times infographic that shows the movement of the oil spill and wildlife at risk.

Responsible, environmentally-sensitive hydrocarbon extraction is also something for which I moved to America. Visit a Kuwaiti beach and stick your hand into the earth of the shallows; it returns with sand and black, gooey stuff. I used to swim in those beaches a lot when I was a kid. Which explains the painful blisters that developed all over my body and the amount of heavy-duty, prescription hydrocortisone cream and antibiotics bought to treat them. Is it surprising then that you can discover the same at the beaches of Louisiana?

Update: Just in case you still don’t comprehend the impact of this oil spill or think it’s necessary collateral damage or some such garbage, Cousin Pat frames the whole disaster very eloquently, “One mechanical failure andthe entire Gulf Coast is at risk? … These aren’t the granola-crunching, tree-hugging, hippie concerns the right-wing likes to make believe. These are real, WTF happens when your drilling platform explodes and we can’t turn off the Fing pipes with existing technology.”

Thought I Moved To America To Get AWAY From This Ish

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The Daily Beast | Say “Hell No” To Arizona “Research has also shown—are you listening, Glenn Beck?—that illegal immigrants commit much less crime than homegrown Americans.”

Reason | Immigration & Crime: There’s Nothing To Fear From Illegal Immigrants “Today, as ever, most foreigners who make the sacrifice of leaving home and starting over in a strange land do so not to mug grandmothers or molest children, but to find work that will give them a better life. Coming here illegally does not alter that basic motivation. In other words, they want to become full-fledged Americans, and they’re succeeding. Is there something scary about that?”

YRHT | Your Brown Skin Is Now Probable Cause Update: It sure as hell is when an American citizen produces a driver’s license and social security number, but is still detained until someone can produce his birth certificate.

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NPR | Court: Wal-Mart Must Face Suit Over Women’s Pay How do you think Smiley Face rolls back those prices? D once worked IT for Wal-Mart and told me that women suffered humiliating working conditions there. They were routinely paid less, passed over on promotions and screwed on health benefits.

Watch the spread of WalMart from 1962 to the present.

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The “Islam is an evil and wicked religion” brouhaha versus Comedy Central’s cowardly censorship of the latest South Park episode on Mohammed AND Kyle’s speech on intimidation, fear and tolerance. Franklin Graham is an evangelical idiot who is encouraged to spread falsehoods, hatred and fear. Comedy Central is a bunch of idiots who dissuade themselves from airing a show that calls evangelical Muslims on the carpet and attempts to dissipate fear. I say we throw all the world’s fundamentalist “leaders” onto an island and they take care of one another.

Veggie/Vegan Restaurants In NOLA?

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The Chaister will be visiting New Orleans two times in the next six weeks. Yes, I am so incredibly jealous!

As a very strict vegan, she wants to know where to eat. Omnivore here doesn’t have this problem, but I do recall it was very hard to find restaurants in NOLA for my fanatically vegetarian mother, brother and sister-in-law. At least back in 2004.

Any NOLA dining recommendations for vegetarians and vegans?

nullVegan Donuts by VeganWarrior CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I Will Always ♥ Books

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Critical Mass’s Mark Athitakis interviews Andrew Altschul of The Rumpus.

This is what’s so frustrating when you talk to people in the mainstream publishing industry. They’re so sure no one loves books anymore–because the corporate accountants are telling them they can’t hit a 15% profit margin. And so they’re bending over backwards to find the magic bullet: Is it e-books? Can the iPad save us? What if we get Sarah Palin to write a vampire novel? But people still love books. Period. And they want to talk about them. They want to be a part of that conversation. And it’s a much more important, healthier conversation for us to be having as a society than talking about stock options or Grand Theft Auto or America’s Next Top Model all the time.

What happens when you throw the baby of meaningful and affordable content out with the bathwater in a changing technological market. Someone alert the newspaper publishing industry about this, too. While you’re at it, check the Amazon.com landing page. How long has it been since it featured an actual book?

(via The Rumpus | We ♥ Books)

Earth Day: Rigs, Mines, Volcanoes & Earthquakes

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I’d say Happy Earth Day, but man is she pissed.

My thoughts today are with GulfSails and his family. His uncle is one of the 11 missing and presumed dead since Tuesday’s explosion of the Transocean semi-submersible drilling off the coast of Louisiana.Transocean and others suspect a blowout, usually associated with shallow gas pockets. To which NolaDishu and I immediately asked, “What was up with the preventers?” The rig sank today, but not before a NASA satellite captured an image of the explosion’s smoke plume.

GulfSails comments, “Coal mine losses are big news. Eleven men who fought to save a rig and 116 other lives – well, guess that’s crap.” Even so, the world knows little of the working conditions of our coal miners. A Massey Energy miner, who was recently interviewed under the pledge of anonymity said, “Production was the name of the game … At all costs we’ve got to get X amount of footage outside at the end of every shift … For me, I felt like that lump of coal was important than a human being’s life.”  Massey, as you know, owns Performance Coal Co., now sadly famous for the Upper Big Branch mine explosion. Read Jeff Biggers for more.

As a customer of and former worker for the energy industry, I’m not so hypocritical as to call for the wholesale cessation of oil, gas and coal production, although I do question current expansion plans. All I ask is that we keep in mind exactly what and whom we are willing to sacrifice to extract it. “Drill, baby, drill” and “It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it” are shitty, self-centered things to say when you don’t have to do the dirty work and in your backyard. Have some awareness and respect.

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Will the airline industry please quit being WATBs about the EU closing airspace in the wake of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption? Maybe you guys and your insurers should pay attention to most-assured future eruptions and work around it, not it around you. How many times do we geologists have to tell you that the earth doesn’t work at your bidding? The Eruptions blog nails it:

A lot of what I read has an attitude of “How dare you inconvenience me and hurt the airlines with this foolish ban!”

… Close the airspace: too cautious. Don’t close the airspace: too reckless. This is a classic “no win” situation for the EU, meteorologists and anyone involved in the (in my opinion) right decision to play it safe – the trap of disaster mitigation is that if you get it right, and no one is hurt, then people fall into a sense of complacency. Suddenly, the loss of money has become as big a problem as the loss of life.

Well, since the eruption is an Act Of God in the parlance of the insurance industry, I humbly suggest that we sacrifice a few airline industry officials to appease The Big Woo. Let’s also push in all the reporters who can’t get the name of the volcano down, never mind that IT’S THEIR JOB.

Still, I found these links funny: How To Name A Volcano and the Volcano Airlines game (Use mouse to fly. Avoid the dark ash clouds.)

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Bringing a whole new meaning to “Love A Geologist And Feel The Bedrock,” an Iranian ayatollah suggests that feminine immodesty in dress is the cause of earthquakes. To be totally fair to right-wing cleric Sedighi, what he actually said was that “women and girls who don’t dress appropriately spread promiscuity in society” and THEN “when promiscuity spreads, earthquakes increase.” Never mind the second leap of logic, the first one is troubling in itself because that’s what many pillars of polite society elsewhere in the world, including in America, choose to believe.

In full (frontal) scientific response, Jen McCreight aka the Blag Hag wishes to test Sedighi’s claim with a Boobquake.

On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake. If not, I’m sure Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn’t rumble. And if we really get through to him, maybe it’ll be one involving plate tectonics.

Jen invites you to join the Facebook event and use the hashtag #boobquake when tweeting about it.

While rummaging in your closet for that perfect ho-ter top, don’t forget about our very own American ayatollahs. We do crazy quite well right here. I mean, Jesus Monkey Lords, do we ever.

Volcanic Behavior

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@vicchi says AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl. I say AY-yuh-fyalla-YO-kel. Let’s call the whole thing off. Then again, I call this a row-ter, while he refers to it as a roo-ter. Hmph.

The media and public are all OMG ICELAND VOLCANO ASH CLOUD MEESA SAY PEOPLE GONNA DIE, like it’s never happened before. We geologists were introduced to the term jökulhlaup (yokel-laup) early in our undergraduate days because it has, just not in the Modern Attention Span era. By the way, jökul is Icelandic for any mountain covered by ice and snow, so you can drop it and refer to our currently erupting wonder simply as Eyjafjalla. Phew.

I’ve been asked why Eyjafjalla isn’t playing nice like Hawaiian volcanoes that just ooze all over the place and don’t ground flights (unless your runway is burned off the face of the earth).  One of the reasons is the presence of rhyolite in the magma. In other words, Hawaii’s volcanoes produce basalt, which has an extremely low silica (SiO2) content in comparison with Icelandic volcanoes, which extrude rhyolite with 70+% silica content and water. The presence of silica increases the viscosity of the melt, hence generating explosions and ash. Those of you in the Basin & Range of the United States, take note.

There are other contributors such as where Iceland is located, i.e. on the mid-Atlantic ridge (and apparently a mantle hotspot) and under a giant pile of snow and ice. Ars Technica’s Understanding The Split Personality Of Iceland’s Volcanoes offers a simple and short geologic roundup of all the factors in play here.

Check out the awesome pictures of volcano and ash action at Boston.com’s Big Picture.

NYTimes | A Tale Of Two Volcanoes: Simon Winchester compares and contrasts Krakatoa and Eyjafjalla. In Krakatoa, Winchester explains the geologic and socio-political story surrounding that famous Indonesian volcano and argues that that volcanic activity (along with something about being under the thumbs of imperialist bastards) contributed to the region’s eventual and fierce Islamic revolution.

All of this is to say that active geology can have very sudden, profound and long-lasting effects on human behavior. Just something to keep in mind as volcanologists warn that “ Iceland is entering its next active phase and estimate it will last for 60 years or so, peaking between 2030 and 2040,” hence disrupting North Atlantic air travel.

Four Dead In Ohio

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Flipped through radio stations yesterday and stopped at a DJ announcing the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Kent State University shootings. “Kent State University will be holding a multi-day event to mark the happenings of May 4th, 1970,” she said. “A celebration of what happened on that campus.”

Celebration?

“I guess the word isn’t celebration, but but, more like commemoration,” she then stammered.

How about just anniversary or remembrance, lady?

Thankfully, she quickly segued into Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young before the foot-in-mouth disease got worse.

Winning Elections Is Not Enough

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“In a campaign, you need help from your friends;
in Washington you need it from your enemies.”

– Hunter S. Thompson, 1994

A recent study indicates that “Lobbyists with past working experience in the office of a US Senator su ffer an average 21% drop in generated revenue when that Senator leaves office. The eff ect is immediate, it is discontinuous around the exit period and it persists in the long-term.”

Treme

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The creators of Homicide, The Corner, and The Wire are at it again, this time in a city not wholly unfamiliar to readers of this blog: New Orleans.  Treme premieres on HBO this Sunday at 10PM Eastern. David Simon fans everywhere are working themselves into a tizzy, but keep in mind this isn’t The Wire: New Orleans edition. Simon and co-producer Eric Overmyer explain:

Unlike The Wire, Treme is not about drugs or rampant corruption among city officials. Instead, the series follows ordinary New Orleans citizens as they attempt to rebuild their lives following Hurricane Katrina … the decision to leave the grittiness behind in Baltimore was a conscious choice.

Is the show too much too late?

Almost five years have passed since Katrina and the Flood, we’ve proven in the last year that our government and economy are broken and Americans don’t give two shits about one another and, especially with the Superbowl win and Mayor Ray Nagin out the door, it seems that New Orleanians want to move past living in post-K PTSD. Kinda odd timing to bring back Late 2005 and to apply again the floodlines that had just faded away from walls and hearts, isn’t it?

Here’s the dirty secret: No one learned a damned thing from what happened. Up here in Ohio, I am sometimes asked, “Well, what did you expect would happen when a Category 5 hurricane hit a city 20 feet below sea level?” (To which all I want to do is torch my computer and blog and walk into the forest, away from the willfully, yet-underinformed troglodytes.) Down in New Orleans, many are not back in their homes FIVE YEARS LATER exactly because of rampant government corruption, the state government goes through great lengths to reduce much-needed physical and mental health and educational services and a second failure of the federally-built levees is still a very distinct possibility. Comprehensive flood protection a la the Dutch is only a dream. Outside, it’s America. Back in May of 2007, at a horrifyingly low point in the city’s recovery, my buddy Dambala presciently observed: “It’s not just New Orleans that is dying … I think it’s America in general. We are just the cynosure of the descent … the most photogenic example.” Enter the recession and the latest Grand Circus Of Democracy.

It’s not too much and never too late.

But, here’s the real secret: New Orleans is more than a warning, a cautionary tale. It just is, with a tale that can be told 50 or 500 years from now. The matter of how much and when thus becomes irrelevant. All the citizens of New Orleans have ever wanted since August 29th, 2005 is reoccupy their homes, their neighborhoods, their lives and to let the world know that what happened in New Orleans was not the result of a hurricane but flooding caused by the breakdown of levee protection and federal, state and local government. They don’t want your respect or sympathy on account of being mostly black citizens of an irreplaceable city chock full of historic architecture, rich food, tasty drinks and grand merriment. They want your acknowledgment that they, too, are people who have a certain way of going about their lives and that’s that. Treme tells us this story.

So, I will watch the show out of curiosity and expatriate pride … and cojones, an anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach and hope that they get it mostly right.

And blog about it. In anticipation of the show, I founded the Back Of Town blog and invited writer friends from the NOLA Bloggers/First Draft/New Package krewe to hold forth on the show there. And, gods love the internet, have they already brought it pre-premiere: Go check out the news and opinion posts and, starting Sunday, episode reviews. And please feel free to join the conversation or just bring the popcorn and enjoy the discussion and dissection. But come:

America needs to understand New Orleans, whether it wants to or not, whether it believes it needs to or not.  Whether Treme will help make that happen is anyone’s guess, but even without having seen it, I don’t think this story of New Orleans, of its value, is to be told as a request, with an open hand, with an aspiration, or a goal, other than that of verity.  It’s a story to stand on its own merits, for its own sake. It has value because it is. Some know that, others seeking to know will come to bear their own witness.

Our Apathy Hits Harder Than The Wrongs

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Iraq massacre leaked. ”Why did the Pentagon stonewall FOIA requests? Shit happens during war. We understand. But covering up fatal mistakes only compounds the injustice. Whether or not what happened that day was criminal, what followed leaves no doubt.” When moral rectitude outweighs moral character and secrecy surpasses coming clean with the truth, we have lost.

FCC loses Net Neutrality case. Welcome to New Communist America, where the largest internet provider kills competition and development and decides what data you have access to. An NPR commenter cries, “A win for the consumer!” Some libertarians call for the abolition of the FCC. Pssst, when Customers become Consumers whose purchasing choices are greatly diminished, it’s no longer capitalism but legislation-mandated robbery.

Meanwhile, everyone from the national media  to the local news “is hard on the case of iPad sales and Tiger Woods’ f***crimes.” While the White House entertains the latest teen douche-sation and throws pitches to the nation’s collective catcher.

“In politics nothing is accidental. If something happens, be assured it was planned this way.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

“If you’re not a part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.” – Despair, Inc.