Massive Oil Spill

[_huckelberry]

kevin, bombs?
My understanding is that if you have a fire at a petroleam pump a bomb is used to blow oxygen away from the fire and disperse the superheated oil.The explosion puts the fire out as a result. The present problem is entirely different. The fire is out. The leak is not one the surface where is it is reasonable easty to cap. I do not see how a bomb would help. It in fact could open the leak up further to allow it to leak faster.

I suspect droopy has a point that the experts are like to be in the petroleum business. I do not agree with droopy that industry is the only sourse of expertise. I am a bit shocked all around that all possible sources of expertise seem ignorant of good effective proceedures to take care of the situation.

There should be more foresight on both ends, corporate planing and government oversight. Easy to say now that the barn with the open door is already empty.

[_Kevin Graham]

I agree Huck, and I misunderstood the nature of the leak. I assumed it was coming straight from the ground, but it isn't. At least not according to a diagram I just saw at WSJ.

It seems their plan now is to pump mud into the pipes to clog it up, and if that doesn't work, they said they'd throw pieces of tires and golf balls in there to see if that does it. But scientists in Louisiana said that this could very well cause more problems, as in another leak.

It just seems like a gigantic cluster-f***

[_msnobody]

I grew up going to the gulf beaches. As a youngster, I was shocked the first time I went to an other than gulf beach that the sand wasn't brilliantly white like at the gulf beaches.

This is certainly a disaster. I would think the oil spill could probaby be seen from space by now. This is going to be disasterous for our states economy.

[_Darth J]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_CbuQKT8SU

[_JohnStuartMill]

Clearly, when you left the Church, you didn't abandon theism altogether, as your god at present is clearly the state.

Droopy, I love that you can't decide if you're Jerry Falwell or Mikhail Bakunin. You're a rare breed: very few God-freaks are also anarchist idiots.

[_Polygamy-Porter]

Great story on 60 Minutes about this.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id= ... contentAux

[_Brackite]

Governor Jindal not waiting for President Obama: http://forums.hannity.com/showthread.php?t=1956861

[_Droopy]

You're reduced to regurgitating Rush Limbaugh Talking points that reflect your poor understanding of the industry and why it is what it is. Contrary to myth, we have the technology and the means to provide people with efficient transportation without fossil fuels, but the Auto and Oil corporations control everything and refuse to give up their current monopoly.

Standard. You accuse me of "regurgitating" Rush Limbaugh talking points, and then what do you do? Retreat in the first instance to Noam Chomkiesque, pop Frankfurt School conspiracy theories about "repressed technologies" held at bay by greedy corporations with fantastic powers of coercion and subversion. Well, thanks yet again for avoiding an intellectually substantive answer and hiding under an Oliver Stone screenplay.

You regurgitate talking points from Friends of the Earth funding letters, and then accuse me of regurgitation? Perhaps your just a little too close regurgitation as an intellectual habit to know the difference between regurgitation and digestion.

Any attempt by environmentally minded politicians to change our current course, is met with fierce lobbying efforts by these corporations along with aggressive propaganda campaigns by their henchmen over in the Right Wing media. Their end product is a mass of duped fools like yourself.

If there was profit to be made in these "green" technologies, and a viable market for their products, the oil companies would be crawling over each other to be the first to hit the market with them. But the fact of the matter is that each and every one of them is being subsidized by taxpayers because they are not economically viable. You don't understand economics, you have no understanding of the free market or how it works, and appear to have no conception of the economic and engineering problems facing "green" technology that are well known and documented, preferring leftist psychofantasies about "corporate capitalism" to sound reasoning and clear, methodical thought.

Who the hell said anything about bureaucrats? The government hires engineers, but you knew that right? And American engineers with more at stake just might have better luck.

I'm sorry, fill me in here: what stake would government engineers have in stopping the leak that the company itself, watching millions of dollars of crude oil disperse into the sea and facing bad PR from a media and government totally hostile to its business and the product it produces, would not?

Only a moron would think BP "knows what they are doing" when it has been a month gone b and so far their attempts to stop the leak look more like exercises in tom-foolery than expert-based engineering.

Hmmmm. Could just be a very difficult problem to solve, a problem that takes careful planning, execution and perhaps highly original thinking, to accomplish. But you have an ideological ax to grind, don't you? Do you really think I believe that you care if that leak goes on from now until next Christmas or not? No, I don't, and neither does Obama, or most of the leftists in Congress who see this as yet another juicy "crisis" to exploit for political gain. The longer it goes on, the better for the Left it becomes.

The environmental damage is going to be, at best, trivial. The real point of all this is eco-hysteria and anti-capitalist animus, for which you are playing your role well.

But hey, your right wing religion says that since they are a privatized organization, nothing can do it any better! So it must be true. Even if that means 12 months later our tourism and fishing industry is utterly destroyed thanks to the new Gulf of Texaco.

Anti-intellectual hystrionics. Why don't you, just for once, try serious, calm, rational argumentation?

You'll find a way to blame the Left.

The Left has nothing to do with the accident. Nor does the Right. It was an accident, pure and simple, either of honest human error or a defect in the materials used. There is no one to blame here, as far as we know, for the leak itself. The problem are those on the Left, like you, who see this not as an engineering problem to be solved but a front in an ideological war against enemies of mythological proportions.

The economic crisis was cooked up by Bush's pride and need to go murder a few hundred thousand Muslims, just to gratify the rednecks down south.

You know, you are degenerating, both intellectually and psychologically, by the day.

I'm actually a little concerned about you, at this point.

And Phil Gramm, who is rightly called the "father of the financial crisis," by creating legislation such as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 -- that ushered in the malfeasance that almost toppled the world economy.

In reality, of course, the economic meltdown was created and brought to a crisis point by a combination of decades of fiat money creation, artificial easy money and exaggerated low interest rates, an economy based on consumer and business debt, the disastrous (and politically motivated) Community Reinvestment Act, and the malfeasance of Fannie and Freddie (Which, given what we know of the manner in which they cooked their books and handled their finances, had they been private financial institutions would have been shut down many years ago and their officers (Rains, Gorlick etc.) imprisoned) in buying up countless billions in toxic assets and bundling them together into mortgage backed securities and spreading them as mortgage backed securities throughout the economy like a virus, which was the precipitating straw the broke the camel's back.

What makes people like you so intolerable is your black and white mentality. For you there are only two sides. One is the "government" which represents every aspect of evil imaginable, and then the other is the "private" which represents all that is good and righteous. No amount of education could sway you unless maybe, a Mormon is elected President.

Since you're not capable of thinking beyond the intellectual level ofJaneane Garofalo here, I think I'm just about ready to call it a thread.

Or like in Brazil, where oil is so plentiful that it is exported and the price is always stable?

It was once that way here too, but we stopped drilling and processing and selling our own resources because politicians who think exactly as you do came to power and made critical decisions. None of that was inevitable.

There is no reason that prices should be "stable" in a free market, and there is no reason to assume they should. They may stay within a certain range over a certain time frame, but change is the core attribute of a free market. The nice thing about a truly free, competitive market is the consistent downward, deflationary trend that in many cases, and depending upon other economic variables, accompanies a low tax, dynamic, competitive, innovative market for a commodity or product, as well as the continual improvements in quality and variety.

Another trait of black and white thinking, is the appeal to extremes. You see no grey. You see no middle-ground. And who the hell said we should nationalize anything? This spill is causing an economic catastrophe within our worst economic downturn since the depression, and you want our government to do nothing and just allow a corporation from a foreign country to take control.

Our government is the primary and pivotal cause of the present economic mess, and I see no rational reason or logical argument that would demonstrate a reason to entrust to those who caused the destruction of so much wealth and so many eocnomic lives with fixing any of it, from the "stimulus" to the bailouts to taking over major auto makers to capping deep sea wells. They have shown precious little competence in the vast majority of what they control and regulate, so I see no reason to assume such here.

When we're dealing with a group of so-called "experts" who aren't getting the job done, then what do we have to lose? More oil? Your hatred of government is so engrained that you can't even accept the fact that BP has screwed the pooch and is making a joke out of the famous Right Wing talking point about how private corporations do everything better.

I do not hate government. That would be an anarchist, and I am no anarchist. I do fear, despise and oppose government beyond the limited, strictly controlled, bridled and constrained government as created by the Founders, and, from a historical perspective, see no reason to entrust it with anything beyond those clearly limited and enumerated powers and prerogatives.

Uh, I'm crtiticizing Obama now you assclown. Just because I didn't jump on the racist bandwagon of the Tea Parties...

Have you hit bottom in your credibility yet? In some sense, I have my doubts.

and criticize him during the first few months he was in office, didn't make me a "Staunch Conservative." Unlike you, I've always tried to keep my mind open,

That's like Godzilla telling Rodan, "Can't you be a little more careful around those buildings? Unlike you, I keep my hands to myself."

and I criticize where I see its needed. I dropped criticism of Obama the moment he became our President, and that is documented on this forum.

I didn't. I continued in the same vein I had been criticizing him throughout his campaign, as soon as it became clear who and what he really was.

That's the kind of rhetoric that give you and your ilk a hard-on, but you're an idiot if you think I'm attacking the "institutions, principles and liberties" of America. A talking point straight from Beck. Learn to think for yourself Dafty.

Kevin Graham, was a friend of mine.
Kevin Graham was a friend of mine.
He drink Kool-Aid, Droopy drink the wine...

[_Brackite]

Gulf Oil Spill is Obama's Hurricane Katrina:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/mary-kate-c ... trina.html

[_cinepro]

Gulf Oil Spill is Obama's Hurricane Katrina:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/mary-kate-c ... trina.html

I'm not an Obama fan, and I despair at the effects of the spill (having lived on the gulf coast in the past). But I think it is reaching to equate it to Bush and Katrina.