"Chicken Little of the Week (Year?)" Award

BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years. The oil giant drilled down miles into a geologically unstable region and may have set the stage for the eventual premature release of a methane mega-bubble. (...) "The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region "boils over," ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide..." The warning signs of an impending planetary catastrophe—of such great magnitude that the human mind has difficulty grasping it-would be the appearance of large fissures or rifts splitting open the ocean floor, a rise in the elevation of the seabed, and the massive venting of methane and other gases into the surrounding water.(...) The people and property located on the greater expanse of the Gulf Coast are sitting at Ground Zero. They will be the first exposed to poisonous, cancer causing chemical gases. They will be the ones that initially experience the full fury of a methane bubble exploding from the ruptured seabed. The media has been kept away from the emergency salvage measures being taken to forestall the biggest catastrophe in human history. The federal government has warned them away from the epicenter of operations with the threat of a $40,000 fine for each infraction and the possibility of felony arrests. Why is the press being kept away? Word is that the disaster is escalating. Methane is now streaming through the porous, rocky seabed at an accelerated rate and gushing from the borehole of the first relief well. The EPA is on record that Rig #1 is releasing methane, benzene, hydrogen sulfide and other toxic gases. Workers there now wear advanced protection including state-of-the-art, military-issued gas masks. Reports, filtering through from oceanologists and salvage workers in the region, state that the upper level strata of the ocean floor is succumbing to greater and greater pressure. That pressure is causing a huge expanse of the seabed-estimated by some as spreading over thousands of square miles surrounding the BP wellhead-to bulge. Some claim the seabed in the region has risen an astounding 30 feet. The fractured BP wellhead, site of the former Deepwater Horizon, has become the epicenter of frenetic attempts to quell the monstrous flow of methane.(...) A huge gash on the ocean floor—like a ragged wound hundreds of feet long—has been reported by the NOAA research ship, Thomas Jefferson. Before the curtain of the government enforced news blackout again descended abruptly, scientists aboard the ship voiced their concerns that the widening rift may go down miles into the earth. That gash too is hemorrhaging oil and methane. It’s 10 miles away from the BP epicenter. Other, new fissures, have been spotted as far as 30 miles distant. (...) Methane levels in the water are now calculated as being almost one million times higher than normal. If the methane bubble—a bubble that could be as big as 20 miles wide—erupts with titanic force from the seabed into the Gulf, every ship, drilling rig and structure within the region of the bubble will immediately sink. All the workers, engineers, Coast Guard personnel and marine biologists participating in the salvage operation will die instantly. Next, the ocean bottom will collapse, instantaneously displacing up to a trillion cubic feet of water or more and creating a towering supersonic tsunami annihilating everything along the coast and well inland. Like a thermonuclear blast, a high pressure atmospheric wave could precede the tidal wave flattening everything in its path before the water arrives. When the roaring tsunami does arrive it will scrub away all that is left.  Helium.com

"Cor, 'at's better out than in, innit?" (British expression celebrating flatulence)

David Seaton's News Links

All I can say is that the world better end soon or I am going to become a total skeptic.

I mean, I believed in the great Swine Flu epidemic and spent most of last winter frantically washing my hands and sneezing into my elbow while I waited for the economy to collapse and the euro to disappear, but the idea of the world ending in a huge, cosmic fart off New Orleans really takes the cake.

Where does this appetite for immanent catastrophe come from?

I live among some of the world's most skeptical people, the Spanish, and they have a saying when somebody comes up with a story like the one above, "ya será menos", which translates more or less as, "by now it's probably less". Most Spanish people believed that the whole swine flu thing was a conspiracy of Donald Rumsfeld's to sell Tamiflu, while I was washing my hand twenty times a day... "ya será menos" they said and it turns out they were probably right.

Being American, I naturally love this catastrophe stuff and lap it up, but this methane-end of civilization story is really jumping the shark and if the Gulf of Mexico doesn't crack a rat, and soon, my reactions to such future chickenlittleishness will be... Ya será menos. DS

Oil, Obama and tea... tea everywhere and not a drop to drink

Ruccola

As one should expect from a natural phenomenon, failure is fractal—observable at every scale. The same pattern of maladaptive strategy leading to untimely demise constantly replays itself at the level of viruses and bacteria, and all the way to individual plants and animals, populations, societies, countries and civilizations. Dimitri Orlov

Bogus and misdirected as the Tea Party movement is, in one respect it has an authenticity that the left lacks: it is angry and it's prepared to translate that anger into action. It is marching, recruiting, unseating, replacing. We talk, they act.  George Monbiot - Guardian

David Seaton's News Links

Globalization allows or forces all people to ask themselves, "what benefit do I derive from the state I pay taxes to?"

When we see that the only real power in the world belongs to the "markets", we all wonder what need our particular nation state fulfills that wouldn't be better served by a soccer team.

I repeat, that this is a question that stares everyone in the face today, both left and right, but only the far right seems to be addressing it, all backwards, but addressing it.

As Monbiot says, the Tea Party

(...) voices the resentments of those who sense that they have been shut out of American life. Yet it campaigns for policies that threaten to exclude them further. The Contract from America for which Tea Party members voted demands that the US adopt a single-rate tax system, repeal Obama's healthcare legislation and sustain George Bush's reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax. The beneficiaries of these policies are corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Those who will be hurt by them are angrily converging on state capitals to demand that they are implemented.

So obviously they are thick as a brick, but they are a living example of people who are on their feet, getting well organized around what they believe in and taking it to the streets and the political campaigns.

This a movement. Misguided, manipulated, wrong headed, whatever, but as Woody Allen said, 90 percent of success is just showing up.

So the only ones showing up are the ultra-right.

Let's not put too fine a point on the word ultra-right, let's just loosely define it as some sort of ad-hoc mix of xenophobic, chauvinistic, populist-militaristic idiocy whereby globalization's walking wounded blame their troubles on a variable geometry combination of Islam, homosexuality, abortion, elitism and ruccola, instead of the financial industry (for example).

But funny enough though,  for incipient fascistoids they don't seem to be yearning for some Duce, Caudillo, Fuhrer or The One to lead them passively to the promised land. They are not cutting anybody any slack: pragmatism, charisma and "stories" don't seem to make much of a dent in them, its all program, program and God help the politician that deviates from their orthodoxy.

Why can't the left seem to show such initiative?

George Monbiot has put his finger right on a major problem for the American left or for the left in most developed countries for that matter: the left has become the default wimp option.

This certainly is not a law of nature, they hardly ever came more alpha than Joe Hill,  Che Guevara or Lenin, but in the USA, and most of the rest of the developed world, the left has somehow come to be vaguely represented by ruccola, white wine and librarians. Who knows, perhaps it's something they put in the water or feed to the beef cattle.

But maybe, just maybe the worm is turning, Katrina vanden Heuvel the editor and publisher of the Nation, one of America's leading progressive voices, wrote the following in the Washington Post:

Now, with resistance imperiling the Obama's change agenda, there is an understanding that it is time for progressives to mobilize independently once more. It doesn't matter whether you think Obama has done the best that he can or that he has compromised too easily. What's important is to alter the balance of power. And that means recruiting and mobilizing to unleash new energy into the debate. (...) The tension between Obama and the progressive movement isn't a threat to the president. Rather, it may be needed to save him.

Well, I'm of the opinion that if it will have to threaten him, and threaten him much more than the corporate "constituencies" do in order to "save" him.

Because this is really more about saving his proposed or implied agenda than it is about saving him.

It's about wanting to save what people were wanting to want before they got what they got. DS

Down by Gulf, oil my blues

"A man's true homeland is his childhood" Rainer Maria Rilke

"Oil-covered birds on fire. Another name for dinner."  Rush Limbaugh

David Seaton's News Links

The Gulf of Mexico is in the news again and just like in Katrina days I feel all messed up by what I'm hearing and seeing.

A while back I wrote here about Biloxi Mississippi, down near where all the oil is spilling. Feeling lazy, I'll just plagiarize myself and fill it out a bit.

Although I come from the Middle West, in a very special way the Gulf of Mexico is the only place I ever felt at home

When I was just learning to talk my parent's marriage was breaking up. This was in the days before "no fault" divorce, so to get a divorce my mom had to "abandon" the home. She took me with her and we lived for a couple of years in the old Tivoli hotel in Biloxi Mississippi, long since closed, whose ruins are still some sort of "historical" landmark down there.

This all happened at the end of the 1940s and Biloxi Mississippi at that time was a charming place, in its final days as the "American Riviera" and not the tacky nightmare it has long since become. All of that schlock was blown away by Katrina, I understand, but I'm sure it will be even worse when reconstructed.

Anyway, neighboring Keesler air force base was a tiny thing then and there were no casinos and all that goes with them either, just warm breezes off the Gulf of Mexico, Forrest Gumpy shrimp and oyster boats and soft-voiced people, young and old, white and black, who loved small children and sweetly and patiently took endless pains with them... nothing like Chicago.

My late mother in those days was  a young divorcee and a drop-dead redhead, so I didn't see much of her  either by day or by night and I spent most of my time in the ample laps of the African-American ladies who actually ran the hotel. They made a huge fuss over me, in a way that nobody up north, even my own family, ever would again, and I still remember the warm sound of their laughter and the high pitched, slow cadence of their speech and the smooth, warm touch of their skin. Looking back, I have often thought that those were by far the happiest days of my childhood.

Unlike Chicago, older children in Mississippi, like the adults, were also kind and patient with small children and let them tag along. I had one friend, who must have been eight or nine years old, a veritable ancient for a toddler like me, whose daddy owned a couple of oyster boats and  we had the run of the boats when they were tied up at the wharf. On discovering that I liked oysters, he would sit me down next to a barrel full of them  freshly caught and with a special knife, skillfully shuck oysters for me and feed them to me on the half shell. I could easily eat what today would be about a hundred euros worth at a sitting and to this day I have found it hard to ever pay for them.

I'm sure that, if my friend is still alive, he has been retired for several years by now and I wonder if he has sons who are oyster men too and is wondering how they are going to feed their families with the oil spill having shut all the fishing down.  DS