A very dramatic article from the WSJ that tells the story of panic on the oil rig before sinking

Wall Street Journal

I am beyond shock and awe on BP's actions. Their bribes right after the fact said a lot about how really bad this event was.

Aside from all else, the indirect evidence from the article that I linked to makes it clear that it would be difficult for anyone to actually shut down the well in an emergency... apparently the system is set up with a bias to insure that there will never be a case where the well is shutdown in any situation that might later be found unnecessary.... apparently attempting to exclude potential financial loss from over cautious safety related shutdowns.

Los Angeles Times

...seems the 'multi-tasked one' benefited from BPs contributions to beat Hillary and John.

The 60 Minutes story from a few weeks ago showed that a rubber gasket was the first to fail a full month before the accident. Transocean told its crew to ignore the problem and to keep working under pressure from BP to get that oil out of the ground because BP had already lost $200m plus when the Deep Horizon drilled into sand and had to be repositioned.

One of the things I remember reading in some article was that the rig had regular emergency drills where they practiced assembling at the lifeboats to board and lower them. Problem was that they always practiced at exactly the same time.. Sunday AM. Never in the middle of a stormy night.

Random practice drills are necessary to train automatic responses into people in the event of a real emergency. Obviously, they never reached that sort of discipline. No doubt the "drills" were carried out in such a way as to check a box on some OSHA chart.

Rick, almost all corporations spray contributions across the political spectrum but concentrate on whomever they expect to win a particular contest.

Not to deny that BP's contributions had an effect on the issues. Just some perspective.

Yeah, no matter who was elected, I am sure there would have been a money trail leading back to BP.


And when you think about it, it makes sense. The corporate strategy really does not care which politicians (or political party) may win a specific election; they are all about exerting their influence no matter who wins.

Absolutely!

Yup. They didn't "mix-up" the drills. I guess someone in charge was unclear on the concept of what "random drills" meant.

Oh, no. They knew exactly what "random drills" meant: expense. Disruption in production. The necessity to provide solutions to identified problems which did no have to be solved if they were never formally recognized.

Is anyone concerned about the fact that media access is being controlled by BP via the Coast Guard in a "chain of command that runs all the way to the White House"?

Checker, I have been concerned for years now. The problem is that my concerns continue to be validated.

I was concerned when former President George W. Bush's Administration used the American media as part of its weapons grade psyops program. I knew the administration following would find it too tempting to ignore. I'm no genius, I'd been well informed by authorities on the subject such as Col. Sam Gardner and others. It is still there for people who care to read about it. That's the beauty of the weapons grade psyops used on Americans. It is hidden in plain view. Few Americans care enough to investigate it. The government has done an awesome job in that regard.

Every single day, it seems, I shake my head in amazement at the masses who continue to pay attention to the MSM. Honest to God. I totally ignore it. Most Americans don't.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that the MSM fairly well lays down for Washington. They have, they do and they will.

The BP disaster is much worse than the MSM has reported. It will be much worse than they report until they have little alternative other than to admit the obvious way, way after the fact.

The BP disaster isn't over by a long shot. All of us will suffer as a result of it. And, no, Obama and company aren't going to tell us until they must - and even then - only as much as they must at the time.

Perhaps people ignore the big picture because it is so bleak that it hurts to think about it. Maybe people ignore the big picture because the social pressure to believe that America is too bright, too moral, too righteous to experience horrific events on a massive scale. That's understandable as it has been drilled into our heads since birth by people who believed it.

For whatever reason, I believe the government and the MSM - call it "Infogov" - is going to do what they fecking well please in attempt to keep the lid on situations that they created and made worse.

We can look at the BP incident 6 ways from Sunday, and that is perhaps is in fact how bad it is. The MSM and nightly news in particular aren't, however, going to tackle the subject. The environmental impact could be absolutely staggering. The impact on the American economy alone will likely be devastating. The BP disaster will no doubt hasten Peak Oil, a situation that America and the world continues to choose to ignore.

It's a battle of the corporations against the people.
We Lost.

I agree about the open ended negatives and looking ahead, can see more problems than those cited by today's doomsayers. Taking a look at the ocean currents, it's possible to see point at which tourism and the fishing industry for the entire east coast could be destroyed. If the reports of health problems from oil are true, we may have a new crisis that has not yet been researched in depth.

The collateral damage will grow by quantum leaps, as we imagine the tumbledown throughout the economy.

I cannot recall anything that has been suggested to happen, that doesn't (or didn't) have a solution... suggested by the scientific community. That includes nuclear disasters. So far, there doesn't seem to be anyone who will project an absolute solution.

I think that the public is gradually catching on to the fact that all of the ameliorating efforts have come to naught. Can anyone really believe that floating oil can be coralled with "booms"? On the fourth day of the "spill", with only a mild chop on the water, 80% of the booms that were in place, failed.

There seems to be no agreement among the world's scientists, as to just what happens to oil... sinking, breaking up, solidifying, vaporizing, returning to the carbon state, mixing with shoreline sand...

As yet, despite having read dozens and dozens of articles about the disaster, there seem to be as many theories as there are authors.

What happens if we lose "X"% of our food supply? How may species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms may be irretrieveably lost? How far could the damages reach? Mexico? South America? what happens to the migration of acquatic species? Does anyone know how far inland the damage to lowlands will extend? Bays, Rivers...

Making a wild guess, I'm thinking that there will be support for "bombing" the spill... appealing to the logical thought process of many.

The final "fail safe" answer seems to be the relief wells. Think that one through, and try to imagine how that will happen. It pushes the resolution date to August, at the earliest, and about trying to join one 18 inch hole with another 18 inch hole after three or four miles of drilling... well, hate to be a cynic, but...

So back to golfballs, rope, and mud, and manufacturing and deploying hundreds of miles of floating tubes. Back to looking for huge blobs of oil, 20 miles long and five miles wide floating beneath the surface of the ocean, 500 feet down.

we seem to be down to trusting BP..., and it's obvious they don't know much more than anyone else.

Just think... The President of the United States... the most powerful nation in the world... asking anyone has a good idea about how to fix the problem, to give him a call.

Dunno about you,but this makes me a trifle uneasy.

It is and we did, my friend.

Shucks, corporations are people too... just folks don't you know

And, as it turns out, there are a lot of us ordinary people fighting lower taxes on ALL people (including corporate people) less regulation on all people (including corporate people) ... all we really want is a level playing field... where ALL people have an equal chance... it is mere coincidence that corporate persons seem to have a bit of a leg up on that level playing field.... go figure

Its pretty obvious that BP is the monster here. They are greedy, they cut corners, they even ignore industry safety standards. They are bad guys.

Keep in mind, however, that MMS, OUR regulator, was known to be corrupt as long as four years ago as per congressional hearings. On top of that, our regulations were much more liberal than those of, for instance, the UK and Norway. That, of course, makes no difference as our entire government kinda stopped regulating ANYTHING about 8 years ago (financials, the food supply, oil production, you name it). So, OUR government was well aware that BP (and the rest of the producers) were greedy, self serving, monsters. Given that one would have thought that OUR government would have done something! Nope, instead we were consistently told that they were all growed up and would act in their own best interest which were also ours!

So, we kinda gave the bad guys the right to do any damned thing they wanted and, when they did, we were terribly surprised. My own thought is that much of this outrage towards BP may be slightly misplaced and we just may have our own set of greedy, self serving, monsters (OUR government?)

My question is for the actuaries, statisticians and mathematicians.
How big does a lie have to get before it becomes impossible, in a practical sense, to prove it's a lie?

There HAS to be a unit of measurement for lying, and if there isn't then it's the job of our nation's mathematicians to come up with one.

But since they should have done so ALREADY and haven't...HELLLLLO, like maybe twenty years ago? I guess it's MY job to get them started.

So in honor of the BP oil disaster I hereby propose that the unit of measurement be known as the Pinocchio, and the abbreviation should be either ".pin" or "nose".
I will leave it up to you, my esteemed colleagues, to come up with a way to determine the unit of measurement but since we need to keep it simple to start off, just pick the abbreviation we should use for the pinocchio.

We could start off with a proven lie of antiquity like the famous and now debunked "George Washington and the Cherry Tree" lie.
If that innocuous piece of patriotic fluff qualifies as "1" on the Pinocchio scale, and Blumenthal's "I served in Vietnam is a "5" then what's the upper end?

100?

1000?

Come on, we can do this...

Excellent post. I'm not a statistician or mathematician, but speaking pragmatically: I believe one film clip showing people dropping to the ground and unable to breath or move will disprove even the biggest and best lie, especially if you're one of those on the ground. I suspect that BP has already broken through 1000 on the .pin scale.

And there you have it, ladies and gents I give you "the pin scale".
Now we have to populate it with the varying conditions that are marked off in "degrees" so that we can delineate the scale from top to bottom.

Off to another thread to see if this really does have legs of its own. I don't want to harm the legs of the original aim of this thread any further!