We have yet another cheery report on BP’s incompetence and impotence nearly buried (page 8a) in today’s Key West Citizen (keysnews.com). On page 5a is an equally cheery report of what hurricanes might do with the oil spill this year. On the front page, well, it’s as if life as people in the Keys have known it does not face extinction.
As for what perhaps is really going on at BP’s Deepwater Horizons blowout oil well, here’s a reply from the fellow whose invective comments centerpieced yesterday’s “Homeland Security – Oil” post. I met “Solar Richard” in Key West last year, when he came through the Keys trying to interest our local governments in solar energy farms. Maybe they will be more interested in his ideas if he comes to the Keys again. Maybe.
Thanks, somebody has to wake people up to the game Big Oil is playing. The leak(s) are in three different points on the riser, one just above the BOP where they are going to cut the pipe clean, two where the broken pipe lays on the sea floor and finally three where the camera is set up. Number three is leaking the least oil/gas. Your Governor is going to have his hands full of oil on both sides of Florida. Your microbes are going to need some Gas-X after this feeding.
Renewably Yours,
__o
`\ <, _
...... ( • ) / ( • )...... SolaRichard, Seattle/Tacoma's Solar Abecedarian
1-253-572-9220
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen. -Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963) Except You & Me.....SR
I told some friends when BP’s oil spill hit the news that there could be no good outcome. BP represents something much bigger and far more horrible than most Americans are even able to conceive, much less accept. Take this email from a staunch Republican friend, who spends the cooler half of the year in the Keys.
I am willing to cut BP a lot more slack than you are. I also don’t believe everything I read. Maybe your marine biologist doesn’t like corporate America and that could influence his thinking. The problem will eventually be fixed and BP will pay a bundle. Beyond that, I only hope we don’t do with oil drilling what 3 mile island and Jane Fonda did for nuclear.
Even after all that has happened since BP’s well exploded, even after all that’s been reported about it, I bet half of America still is willing to cut BP more slack, just as they are still backing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which always were about oil. Iraq, for its oil and refineries; Afghanistan for the pipeline that could be built through it to the Asian oil fields below Russia.
Solar Richard said in his email included in yesterday’s “Homeland Security – Oil” post that we should have listened to Jimmy Carter about seeking new ways to produce energy. I wrote back to him, in early January 2004 (after I had sniffed out Vietnam war protestor Senator John Kerry as trying to out-hawk George W. Bush in that bizarre greater of evils presidential race), I was told in my sleep, “God wants Jimmy Carter to be the next president.”
I told a number of people about that dream and not a one of them seemed swayed. Carter could have run again, as he had only served one term. Carter was involved in the Navy nuclear submarine program and knew a bit more about nuclear power than anyone I have known except perhaps a nuclear submarine commander I knew in high school before he went to Annapolis.
I keep laughing my ass off at the look on my Republican friend’s face when I told him maybe four months ago that Republicans are going to have to deal with Sarah Palin in the next presidential race. Drill, Baby, Drill is going to really screw up the Republican Party. The elephants can’t have it both ways. Palin is their party’s dream come true.
She is so far right of George W. Bush that she is out trying to convert wolves to Jesus, so she won’t have to kill them with her sniper rifle. She makes the National Rifle Association blush when she talks about the right to bear arms and Homeland Security. Hell, she scares Osama bin Laden out of his wits. Every night he dreams Sarah Palin is stalking him down and putting a bullet between his eyes.
You can’t wage war without oil, lots of oil. You can’t have massive numbers of disabled veterans without oil, lots of oil. You can’t have massive numbers of cases of battle shock (post traumatic stress) without oil, lots of oil.
Back to the oil spill, I watched a heart-wrenching news report in a Louisiana costal/fishing village last night. I saw grown men crying. One said, “Without fishing, we are dead.” I wept with them. I’m tearing up as I write this.
If BP pays for all of the emotional and physical damage it has done to Americans and this planet in this oil spill alone, BP will not have any money left to pay for the letter notifying its stockholders that it went out of business. No way in hell are American courts and politicians, Republican or Democrat, going to let BP be gutted like that, because Exxon or Chevron, or some other Big Oil Brother will go next to the gas chamber.
Are Americans going to give up their cars and trucks? Are they are going to go back to riding horses and burning candles at night? Are they going to put the U.S. Military on oil rationing?
Do Americans really think God wants human beings to use fossil fuel and nuclear power? If so, they should be deported back to the Klingon planet. If they don’t know what that means, they really ought to watch more Star Trek replays.
All is not well this Memorial Day. Americans who believe all is well, or who believe BP has told even 1/10 of the truth in this holocaust, ought to be banned from ever voting again.
As for our armed forces, no American military non-com or officer should ever again go to war over oil. An order from the President, the Commander-in-Chief, to go to war over oil should be respectfully disobeyed. Such patriots should be held in the highest esteem by all Americans.
Sloan Bashinsky
On a personal Memorial Day note, yesterday brought yet another challenge from Birmingham, Alabama, my hometown, to the coroner and police’s determination that my brother, Major, killed himself and tried to make it look like someone else did it. I told the writer I would publish it, if my Board of Directors agreed with her challenge. My Board of Directors, Jesus, Michael, Melchizedek, Magdalene, the Holy Spirit, the Father, do not agree with her challenge. Nor, therefore, do I.