Twin Pipes In The BOP

A crazy well indeed,

Reporting from Washington —
The gushing BP oil well is a mystery still unfolding, and late last month, a team of scientists from the Energy Department discovered a new twist: Their sophisticated imaging equipment detected not one but two drill pipes, side by side, inside the wreckage of the well’s blowout preventer on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

BP officials said it was impossible. The Deepwater Horizon rig, which drilled the well, used a single pipe, connected in segments, to bore 13,000 feet below the ocean floor. But when workers cut into the wreckage to install a containment cap this month, sure enough, they found two pipes.

Basically the well hole is a mess, and may explain the Top kills failure, and why the government is making contingency plans in case the bottom kill fails.

I got this from here. That lead me here, which blog has a post on the whale sharks,

This week’s report: Three whale sharks swimming in heavy oil four miles from the gushing Deepwater Horizon wellhead. “Our worst fears are realized. They are not avoiding the spill area,” said Eric Hoffmayer, the University of Southern Mississippi scientist who found the large aggregation last week. “Those animals are going to succumb. Taking mouthfuls of oil is not good. It is not the toxicity that will kill them. It’s that oil is going to be sticking to their gills and everything else.”

and this post

Hell, anyone following the gusher knows why BP has used well over one millions gallons of Corexit: to hide the oil. This is spite of an EPA request to restrict the use of this highly toxic dispersant. And we all know Thad Allen is BP’s pathetic straw man in uniform. Only those who live for Nascar and Xanax believe Obama’s in charge.

And the link

Testimony before a Senate investigative panel this week is expected to reveal what many have suspected about BP all along; they don’t care about the environment, the animals that are dying, and the lives that are being destroyed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

In a shocking interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on June 29th, Allegiance Capitol Corporation V.P. Fred McCallister said that BP is deliberately sinking oil with the toxic chemical disbursant Corexit, to hide the size of the oil spill. By sinking the oil before it can be collected, BP won’t have to pay fines on it.

I’m not sure that any of this is really new, but putting all together for you so you know how the blogosphere works in conjunction with the traditional media, and some of the love/hate relationships that go into the dynamic. Most of you know that too, but some of you may be politicians and don’t know a damned thing about any of this.

That sort of ties in with the dKos/2KR polling problem that TPM has covered fairly extensively, and leads into my education on one factor that makes it difficult rely too heavily on polls, Rasmussen has been accused of polling irregularities as well as Gallup, that I’m aware of, and so the education part is the extra degree of difficulty that the traditional media has that I hadn’t really given them credit for.

There is a lot of media criticism that I think is valid, a lot of it, but to be fair I wanted to at least acknowledge this point.

Small And Medium Business Security Tech Center

Lest I be remiss in keeping you guys informed of useful stuff, from the blog,

Today Dark Reading launches a new feature: the SMB Security Tech Center, a subsite of Dark Reading devoted to bringing you news, insight, and in-depth reporting on the topic of data security in small and midsize businesses.

Just don’t accuse me of being useful, we’ll get along fine.

Obscene Language Is Bad

Obscene behavior is normative.

So the NYT went from calling waterboarding torture 81.5 percent of the time to calling it such 1.4 percent of the time. Had the technique changed? No. Only the government implementing torture and committing war crimes changed. If the US does it, it’s not torture.

The Google doc he links has more details, but I wished it included rags like the Washington Post as well as some other high profile operations with hypocritical standards of behaviors for themselves and others. I would imagine the same applies to the visual media outfits as well as to those mentioned in the Google doc.

Yes, But Of Course

Apologies to you dear readers, exclusive of those proceeding dear readers, who were offended by the language of the previous posts.

I will work on that, if you will endeavor to persevere.

The Rest Of Us Call Them A ClusterF*&k

No wonder they were shocked by war priapism. The only problem I really have with these “elites” is their inability to use their minds to think independently of the circle or circles they travel in. Everything they write about deals with people in the abstract, as though they are standing athwart history and no one is noticing them whizzing on the book.

Sounds About Right

Just to recap

Let Them Eat Crabs

Those dispersants are doing the job, yessiree Bob,

The tiny droplets are visible under the transparent shells of the 2-millimeter-sized crabs collected in Davis Bayou, said Harriet Perry, director for the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Laboratorys Center for Fisheries Research and Development.

No one could’ve predicted,

Typically, dispersant is sprayed on the surface of the water, where the oil naturally comes to rest, and works a bit like a dishwashing detergent on grease. It breaks down the slick into millions of tiny oil droplets that then become suspended below the surface, normally in the top 30 to 50 feet of the ocean. There, over the course of weeks and months, oil-eating bacteria, sunlight and wave action help break the oil downinto its chemical components, which are then diluted throughout the water.

None of which stops big apples,

Update: Alex has been upgraded to a hurricane and continues on course, veering away from any direct contact with the Gulf oil spill area, but still disrupting containment and cleanup efforts. Tar balls “big as apples” have been pushed deep into wetlands by the storm, reports AP.

Just think, BP was capping the well as a strategic move, waiting for oil prices to rise before putting it into production, ( the better to gouge you, you see,) and we have all these drill. baby, drill advocates telling us that we need to do so to cut back on the import of fungible oil from nations that don’t like us. None of them see the disconnect just presented because someone made them mad by pointing out just how wrong they can be.

ht eschaton

There Is Some Good Economic News

A five dollar bill I left on the kitchen table has made its’ way to the grandson’s piggy bank, having been released to him by his Grandma, who thinks I have held it for way too long and he should have it.

I am of the opinion the delayed multiplier effect will emerge around Christmas time, provided no ice cream trucks pass by the house before the end of summer, forcing me to revise my economic forecast.

Feds Evans: Jobless Recovery A-OK With Us

No job growth in the economy, 19% U-6 is all we can do.

This is the recovery, lean back and enjoy it.

Encourages smaller families to slow labor market growth.

Yes, I have quit live blogging the interview since it makes it awkward for the uninitiated.

Update: I have taken some liberty with what was said to make it sound like what I heard. This is a habit I acquired from the cable news outlets.

According To My Marketing Research Company

I should not be telling my readership to blow it out there asses.

I have told them to blow it out their asses.

Democrats Remain Optimistic Through It All

Who would’ve thought?

Overall, Democrats are now much more optimistic than Republicans about the economy, even though they have lower incomes and less wealth and have suffered more job losses during the recession. For most of the time that President George W. Bush was in office, Republicans were more upbeat than Democrats about the economy.

Well I can see where that got them.

No Air Time For You!

Scott Brown’s World

We don’t need no stinkin’ regulation…

Unknown outside of a few Wall Street legal departments, the A.I.G. waiver was released last month by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform amid 250,000 pages of largely undisclosed documents. The documents, reviewed by The New York Times, provide the most comprehensive public record of how the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Treasury Department orchestrated one of the biggest corporate bailouts in history.

The peoples House?

Is anyone in DC on the peoples side?

An Incoherent State of Mind

The Iraq War Inquiry, something the don’t ask don’t tell, US government and media don’t wish the public to know,

10.53am: Sir Martin Gilbert is asking about aftermath planning. Could Britain have exerted more influence over post-conflict planning?

“I don’t think so,” says Jay. He asks himself this question a lot. There were two issues. There was a “pretty incoherent state of mind” in the US administration at that point. Britain has good relations with the state department. There was “a rather incoherent state” in Washington at the time.

He says there were concerns about “planning too obviously for an aftermath” at the time because that would imply conflict was inevitable.

It is better not to plan at all, after all winging it isn’t just for non expert bloggers.

As Goes Britannia

So goes America,

George Osborne’s austerity budget will result in the loss of up to 1.3m jobs across the economy over the next five years according to a private Treasury assessment of the planned spending cuts, the Guardian has learned.

Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015.

The just say NO! Republican/Tea Party fiscal responsibility in action.

Now that’s independent thinking they can count on!