I Hope You're Happy

First off, I am accepting no money from BP to write this, have not been offered any, and I’m sure I will go completely unnoticed by BP anyway. Second, I think the oil spill is a horrible tragic ecological and financial disaster. But I’m not so pissed at BP that I’m going to boycott.

I don’t think BP is an evil company, and this comes from a very liberal and ecologically minded person, and in defending them, I feel at odds with myself in a way, but here I am. BP is just any company doing their business as best they can. They didn’t want this disaster to happen, they didn’t plan it by any means. They are going to suffer tremendously during and after all of this, both in their earnings and their share prices, and for as big as they are, we will suffer as well.

All of the consumers out there screaming at BP don’t know the scope of this thing in terms of the technology involved, the scale of the operation. Think about this—the hole is a mile underwater. 5,280 feet between the surface and the floor, and who knows how deep under the floor from there. Everybody involved knew it was pushing the limits of our oil technology, and stopping the flow is doing the same.

The reaction to scorn and boycott a company caught in a predicament is in this case kneejerk at best. We didn’t catch them purposely spilling pollutants into the gulf and then lying about it and trying to cover it up and denying it. They are actively pursuing containment, cleanup, resolution and restitution in action and public statements. They seem to be far more open about what has happened and what they are doing than any other company I’ve ever seen in this situation. I read an article yesterday about (http://io9.com/5543260/supertankers-could-be-super-easy-solution-to-gulf-coast-oil-disaster) a cleanup strategy that mentioned a spill by a Saudi company:

“He says he first developed the method while working for the Saudi company Aramco to control a massive 800 million gallon oil spill in 1993 and 1994. (The spill, which at roughly twenty million barrels is about twice as bad as any other oil spill in history, was not reported at the time, likely due to the secrecy of the Saudi government and its state-owned oil company.)”

Yes, a spill twice as bad as any other in history which wasn’t reported at the time. That puts BP on the path to sainthood by comparison. Let’s look at some of the thoughts that might be floating around in your head about this.

The 5,000 barrel a day figure. I won’t defend BP’s use of it, but let’s look at how it came about and is being used. First, it was an early Coast Guard estimate, not a BP estimate. It was an estimate based on oil reaching the surface, the only meric we had available to us at the time. When it came out, I don’t think there was any video of the oil leak itself, at the very least not released. Now we have the video, and we have better estimates, not because we see more oil at the surface, but we have a better source to analyze.

The big issue on this front, which makes the public not trust BP is how they clung to the estimate after the video was released. This was probably their PR people pushing them, after all, the Coast Guard is a pretty reputable source to exploit, but they began to back off that figure surprisingly quickly for a company in their position. In other oil spills, they’d be holding that number until their grandkids were through college. I mean, their coming off of that number in this instance is practically unheard of for a company, especially for an “evil” oil company.

The efforts to stop the leak. Being a mile down, not only are we pushing the limits of our drilling technology, but we’re pushing the limits of our emergency contingency technology, too. BP is already spending $6-$7 million dollars a day trying to stop this, the first attempt, a giant 100 ton box with a hose attached essentially, failed because of a design flaw. In a quickly designed and built completely from scratch in a few days of that size which was going to push technology past where we had been, I don’t blame them for the failure. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never tried to drop a 100 ton box to the sea floor a mile down. I’m not sure I ever saw a cost to hastily making this box, but even though it failed, I’m satisfied with the attempt.

Point is, they’re trying. They’re saying they will pay for every claim and all of the cleanup. Once this is stopped, as eventually it will be, it will be interesting to see how well they stick to that promise. And I’ll pay close attention to what they do compared to the Exxon Valdez. By comparison, Exxon denied, avoided and has wormed its way out of most of the fines the government levied on it. So far BP is putting on the responsible hat, and time will tell if it stays that way.

But the next biggest question in the debacle is who messed up? I so want to place the blame on Halliburton, and most experts say when the oil has floated to the surface as it were, Halliburton will get a large part of the blame. For right now, I can’t say it matters. Setting these CEO’s in front of Congress was a silly exercise in cart before the horse. We don’t even know what went wrong, and Congress wants a body to hang. I do, too, but that buoywon’t get the spill cleaned up any faster. Whether the concrete seal blew out, or the emergency cut off systems which failed were properly designed, maintained, or executed is unimportant if the leak never stops leaking.

And as for the boycott, all we’re doing is depriving a company that is behaving with shocking responsibility of funds which might be useful should it actually need to pay off all the fines and legal judgments against them.

I’m not saying that we should feel bad for BP, either. We should feel bad for the people the spill has affected, for the animals caught in our mess. We all drive cars, we all rely on these fuels while we haven’t pushed for replacement technologies. It is time we recognized some complicity while we make sure we hold BP accountable for the accident when all is said and done.

I would like to take a moment to inform you of an experiment many of us can and should participate in which has to potential to greatly enhance our lives and aid in our prediction of earthquakes. The experiment will take place on Monday, April 26th, and carries the official title of “Boobquake.” The recent spate of earthquakes around the world is what prompted the study, that and an Islamic Cleric from Iran, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi  who blamed these recent earthquakes on exposed flesh of the human female. To the experiment’s lead investigator, Jennifer McCreight, this sounded like a testable hypothesis. Participation is simple. If earthquakes are caused by cleavage, providing an abundance of cleavage should produce an abundance of earthquakes, and the date to test this is Monday, the 26th. You can see the facebook event listing at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=116336578385346.

Now you might be thinking this particular cleric is off his rocker, that linking singular seemingly natural events in random parts of the world to certain ongoing and omnipresent morally questionable to some behaviors seems daft, but this sort of accusation is often offered by leaders of several faiths, well, usually just very conservative and vocal parts of faiths, but what’s wrong with a little generalization here, right?

There is a colorful history to such divinations, from Fred Phelps displacing his hate of homosexuality to his deity and blaming everything from natural disasters and wars to the wrath of the good and peaceful god, to Pat Robertson (who was feeling quite aware of having faded from the public spotlight) blaming Haiti’s earthquake on the deal Haitians supposedly cut with the devil in their revolution. In this case, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “It never ceases to amaze, that in times of amazing human suffering, somebody says something that could be so utterly stupid. But it, like clockwork, happens with some regularity.” Now the White House is bound by certain rules of etiquette, and so if they call you stupid, you know you’re far from rational discourse. Since then, earthquakes have struck Chile, Baja California, China, Indonesia, and hell, even very near me in Illinois. Yes, a better study might be put on attention seekers getting headlines in the wake of a natural disaster, but I’m not sure that would be science as much as statistics. I prefer science, particular the science of boobs.

There are some significant instances of this we might study in preparation for Monday’s experiment.  My favorite, I think is Hurricane Katrina for it’s butterfly effect through history. Hurricane Katrina hit  the week after the gay pride parade in New Orleans, and therefore, it was a wicked weekend in a wicked city. The accusations began even before the storm hit, before the levees broke. Fred Phelps, from his church in Kansas (which for some reason never gets a hurricane, and he never seems to blame tornadoes on gays) blamed the storm on the parade. So did Pastor John Hagee from San Antonio, Texas. Their predictions seemed focused on God  wiping out the French Quarter, for its sinful ways. Of course, some people rode it out in the bars in the French Quarter, and it being high ground, and even as close to the river and coast as it is, it hardly received any damage. On the other hand, the low lying areas were, as we know, destroyed, areas full of churches and faithful. Hm, something wasn’t adding up, no matter how much the conservative preachers proclaimed God’s victory over sin.

Within weeks, hurricane Rita was bearing on New Orleans, a lesser storm, but anything at that point would have been a second major disaster, and the preachers were back at it, proclaiming God was finishing off his work in New Orleans, which apparently an All Mighty God couldn’t wipe out a city in one try, but that’s beside the point. Funny thing, though, the storm turned away from New Orleans and moved on to Houston. It was as if some Storm creating deity was angered by the things somebody nearby was proclaiming in His name.

But Katrina’s influence wasn’t over yet. If one hurricane is God’s hand at work on earth, then all surely must be. As an aside, isn’t it funny how hurricanes only hit the same areas of the world, despite them being in the bible belt while the rest of the world goes on sinning? Anyway, as that hatefest we know as the Republican 2008 Presidential Campaign was having it’s crowning event, on the opening night of the Republican National Convention, Hurricane Gustav was coming ashore near New Orleans, as if to remind us all how horribly the relief was handled by the Conservative Religious President of the party in power. It was as if a deity were up there going, “Stop putting words in my mouth, you don’t know what I have to say.”
Which makes me wonder what Iceland did to deserve the volcano eruption of the past week. It’s too cold most of the time to show boobs, and aside from inflicting Bjork on the rest of us and being not particularly good at banking of late, Icelanders seem a pretty innocuous bunch.

So, boobs. Monday. Though, it occurs to me that Monday might not be enough evidence to reach a conclusive result. We should maybe make this experiment happen at least once a year, just so that we have a sufficient data set, or maybe quarterly. Can I get a grant to pursue this?

Occasionally, I’ll find an article about some paranormal event that I can use for reference here. I read a lot of paranormal weird news because it serves as inspiration for some of my scifi-fantasy-horror writing. I think it’s a good subject for comparison. We have a subject that only a handful of people really know about, and a divided knowledge base that feels passionately about their issue. This one is about bigfoot bones.

Scientists feel they have a pretty good grasp on the fauna of North America, and the ecology. They feel if a large hominid were wandering the wilderness, well, they’d have found it by now. They also feel that there’s no ecological niche open that could support a population of such large creatures, largely a matter of math in studying available food supplies. They also feel there’s a lack of evidence, no carcasses, feces or tissues, no bones.

And that’s where cryptozoologists come in. They come up with ways of studying the animals, and theories based on whatever science they think they can come up with. Sometimes its the crankiest of the cranks, and sometimes its really quite valid at least in procedure. Loren Coleman is one of the more prominent cryptozoologists which does not mean he’s the best scientifically, but he has a new theory about where the bones are. I’ll keep you in suspense until a bit later.

Now let’s imagine the issue is health care, and specifically, the cost of a version of the bill. The way it is working right now, the Democrats come up with a bill and they have an estimated price tag. The bill is sent to the General Accounting Office and while they crunch their numbers, the Republicans come up with another number, usually twice as expensive as, or three times as expensive as, or something along those lines, whatever doesn’t seem too far out of line but at the same time with a sufficiently scary number of zeroes. Then the GAO eventually comes up with a price tag that is between the two. This goes on with many bills on many issues, and the party roles can be reversed depending on the issue and who is in teh majority and which way the wind is blowing.

The dollar values are sometimes wildly off base, and we let everyone else, i.e. the media to fact check everyone else, and then the talking heads get involved, and a teaparty or two happens, and nobody knows what is true anymore.

And think about the birth certificate issue, or Obama’s religion, or any other of these iffy issues. How likely is it Obama was born in Africa? The simplest facts say his birth certificate, regardless of folds, or certification, is from Hawaii. The conspiracy theories rely on shaky evidence to make their case, and the math of the opposition should always be suspect.

What it comes down to is porcupine dens. Yes, that’s where the bones are. All of them. You can read it for yourself. He says porcupines like to hoard bones in Africa, and by extension America.  Sounds good, right? Well, until you think for a minute about how many bigfoot (bigfeet?) there must be out there, compared to porcupines, and I’ve never even seen porcupines in the wild and I’ve been to some areas where Bigfoot is known to be sighted on camping trips and the like. Those must be some busy porcupines, and they must be sitting on a veritable elephant’s graveyard of bigfoot bones. And how are they so good at collecting ALL of the bones? I thought beavers were busy, but porcupines, must be a full time job collecting all of those bones. Do they have swap meets or conventions for bones collectors? Doesn’t sound likely to me.

That’s why I try to look at all of these accusations skeptically. I don’t take either side at their word. They have reasons to skew their numbers, ad they have errors in their calculations. The GAO is theoretically impartial, and probably the best official source for the figures. But in the end, I try my best to find out what each side says and get some sense of reality from all of them. I don’t believe in porcupine dens without having a good reason to do so, and neither should you.

So Chris Dodd is only mostly bad

Chris Dodd introduces bill to limit bank overdraft fees and change regulations heavily in consumers favor. Let’s face it, this sounds like a good cause-effect relationship. You can imagine nefarious bankers saying, “First, we create a huge economic crisis, then when people are most prone to stretch their bank book to overdraft, we’ll make millions off of fees.” You’re still a jerk for evading taxes and all that, but you have one redeeming point in the ledger.

Bill Maher, usually a skeptic, called out by Michael Shermer over vaccinations

Bill Maher is suspicious of government sanctioned H1N1 vaccinations. Shermer is calling him out. Let’s see what his reaction is.

Shepard Fairey legal case takes a strange turn

Unfortunately Shepard tainted his own defense by destroying incriminating evidence and misrepresenting himself. What should have been a simple fair use open and shut case that established precedent and forced a big company to accept normal legal use of images, we now have a case that will probably seriously hurt the artist, bit Shepard and the little guy. Also see this

The Secret Service is overwhelmed with threats on the President

Ironically, all those people protesting for smaller government are going to wind up costing the government a fortune.

GOP politician (in a snazzy bowtie) apologizes for ethnic slur

What is it with Republicans that they can’t go a week without a racial or ethnic slur?

GOP survey, find out how they mislead their voter base in a poll to validate their own existence?

Let’s see:

Do you oppose the Obama-Pelosi health care takeover plan that would bring Washington bureaucrats between doctors and patients, ration medical treatment and deny critical care while skyrocketing the national debt?

Should Republicans fight against judicial nominees who bring a personal, left-wing  agenda on social issues to their jobs as judges?

If Barack Obama tries to gut the USA PATRIOT Act and other important laws that promote the safety and security of all Americans, should Republicans in Congress fight back?

Hate to burst your bubble, but Energy Star is bullshit

Apparently, many products are not tested, they run on the honor system, and we all know how honorable our giant companies are.

The Daily Show explores the controversy. It’s a shame John Oliver has to be so confrontational with the scientist in the beginning because it would have been stronger if he just let the absurdity of the high school teacher speak for itself.