Monkeyfister

"The ultimate philosophical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating an entirely new entity other than the entities previously existing in disjunction..."

Labels: Collapse, Finite Resources, MetaMetatude, Oil-Dependent Paradigm, Peak Ouil, REOEI

*** 1st Pacific Bank of California
*** The Bank of Bonifay
*** Towne Bank of Arizona
*** Access Bank

Labels: Bank Failure Friday, Bank Failures, Collapse

The Louisiana Department of Social Services on Friday submitted a request to the U.S. Department of Agriculture requesting immediate food assistance for individuals and families in 14 coastal parishes impacted by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Those parishes are: Cameron, Iberia, Jefferson, Lafourche, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John, St. Mary, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Terrebonne and Vermilion.

"Estimates indicate that approximately 47,000 households may experience a need for food assistance due to these events," said DSS Secretary Kristy Nichols. "Replenishing food bank inventories with an infusion of commodities is essential to preventing low-income families and elderly citizens from going hungry as resources are directed towards the coastal parishes due to the oil spill."

The USDA Commodity Program provides basic food items for household consumption, including items like canned goods, cereal bars, rice, water, juice and toiletries. The goods are given to food banks in affected areas for distribution.

Labels: BP, Li'l Bobby Jindahl, Oil Disaster

BP lowered a 100-ton concrete-and-steel vault onto a ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, an important step in a delicate and unprecedented attempt to stop most of the gushing crude fouling the sea.

Underwater robots guided the 40-foot tall box into place. Now that the contraption is on the seafloor, workers will need at least 12 hours to let it settle and make sure it's stable before the robots can hook up a pipe and hose that will funnel the oil up to a tanker.

"It appears to be going exactly as we hoped," BP spokesman Bill Salvin said Friday afternoon, shortly after the four-story device hit the sea floor. "Still lots of challenges ahead, but this is very good progress."

By Sunday, the box the size of a house could be capturing up to 85 percent of the oil.

Labels: BP, Oil Disaster

Denying firearms purchases to people on the no-fly list is a terrible idea, because two wrongs do not make a right, and the "No Fly" list is, to my lights, an offesnsive and unconstitutional apostasy.

I am more than the resident gun nut around here, which is defined as a person who owns way more guns than they need, but not nearly as many as they want. I was also one of the civil libertarians yelling the loudest whe the "No Fly' list was rolled out, and I have not budged off that position.

It is, by most estimates, over a million names long, and there is no way in hell that there are that many terrorists in the entire freakin' world. I would doubt that there are even a tenth that many real terrorists in the entire world, if you added up all the nutcases from every fundamentalist freakshow on the planet, who are willing to die and kill innocents for an ideology.

Not only that, once your name is on their unconsgtitutional enemies list, there is no getting off of it. Remember all the trouble Senator Kennedy used to have at the airport after we trashed our first amendment right to freely associate? Or how about eight-year-old Mikey Hicks? He is no-fly listed, can't get off of it and isn't even old enough to exercise his Second Amendment right to purchase a firearm. Maybe he will never want one, but maybe he will. Adopting Lautenberg's ridiculous rule now would deny him his right to own a firearm for hunting, forevermore.

When they start picking away at the amendments that comprise our Bill of Rights, I get my hackles up right quick and get real fucking protective - mama bear protective - of that Second one.

An abrogation of the Constitution is still an abrogation of the Constitution, even when it achieves an end that one finds desireable; 'tis a fair-weather civil libertarian indeed who will take such an offense in stride just because they don't like the thing the abrogation is aimed at.

Instead of trashing the Constitution twice, hows about we do some common sense things that will actually make us safer, instead of more posturing and hyperbole that does nothing to make us safer, but merely sounds good in theory.

Instead of sound-bite posturing, how about some of our elected officials start showing some political courage and taking on the NRA and proposing some common-sense gun laws?

Yes, you read that right. I am an admitted firearms fanatic and I am also in favor of regulating guns.

Labels: Bad Legislation, Liberals With Guns, No-Fly Lists, War On Terror n'Shit

Oil gushing from a blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico could force closure of the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port next week, authorities said Friday.

The port, known as LOOP, is a platform off the Louisiana coast about 80 miles southwest of New Orleans. It is one of the leading facilities for imported oil, handling up to 1.2 million barrels a day and feeding half the nation's refinery capacity.

Tankers that are too large to enter the Mississippi River pull up to the facility and hook into a pipeline system that sends their oil to onshore refineries, including those lining the Mississippi north of New Orleans.

Current projections show the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon disaster could reach the port next week, said Sale Sittig, director of the Louisiana Oil Terminal Authority, an oversight body for LOOP.

"It definitely could be shut down if the heavy oil gets in the vicinity of the platform," Sittig said.

The Coast Guard would determine whether LOOP would be shut down. The port has never closed for an extended period since its inception in the 1970s, though it has closed briefly for hurricanes.

A long closure almost certainly would send gasoline prices higher, Sittig said.

Labels: Collapse, Oil Disaster, Oil Prices

The drawing of parallels between industrial accidents is a dubious armchair sport, but here the parallels are just piling up and are becoming too hard to ignore:

* An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 spewed radioactive waste across Europe

* A recent explosion and sinking of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform is spewing heavy oil into the Gulf of Mexico

These accidents were both quite spectacular. At Chernobyl, the force of the explosion, caused by superheated steam inside the reactor, tossed the 2500-tonne reactor lid 10-14 meters into the air where it twirled like a tossed penny and came to rest back on the wrecked reactor. The cloud of superheated vapor then separated into a large volume of hydrogen gas, which detonated, demolishing the reactor building and adjoining structures. At Deepwater Horizon, a blowout of a recently completed oil well sent an uncontrolled burst of oil and gas, pressurized to over 10,000 psi by the 25000-foot depth of the well, up to the drilling platform, where it detonated, causing a fire. The rig then sank, and came to rest in a heap of wreckage on top of the oil well, which continues to spew at least 200,000 gallons of oil a day. Left unchecked, this would amount to 1.7 million barrels of oil per year, for an indefinite duration. This amount of oil may be enough to kill off or contaminate all marine life within the Gulf of Mexico, to foul the coastline throughout the Gulf and, thanks to the Gulf Stream, through much of the Eastern Seaboard, at least to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and possibly beyond. A few tarballs will probably wash up as far north as Greenland.

The Chernobyl disaster was caused more or less directly by political appointeesm: the people in charge of the reactor control room had no background in nuclear reactor operations or nuclear chemistry, having got their jobs through the Communist Party. They attempted a dangerous experiment, executed it incompetently, and the result was an explosion and a meltdown. The Deepwater Horizon disaster will perhaps be found to have similar causes. BP, the owner of Deepwater Horizon, is chaired by one Carl-Henric Svanberg—a man with no experience in the oil industry. The people who serve on the boards of directors of large companies tend to see management as a sort of free-floating skill, unrelated to any specific field or industry, rather similarly to how the Soviet Communist party thought of and tried to use the talents of its cadres. Allegations are already circulating that BP drilled to a depth of 25000 feet while being licensed to drill up to 18000 feet, that safety reviews of technical documents had been bypassed, and that key pieces of safety equipment were not installed in order to contain costs. It will be interesting to see whether the Deepwater Horizon disaster, like the Chernobyl disaster before it, turns out to be the direct result of management decisions made by technical incompetents.

More importantly, the two disasters are analogous in the unprecedented technical, administrative, and political challenges posed by their remediation. In the case of Chernobyl, the technical difficulty stemmed from the need to handle high level radioactive waste. Chunks of nuclear reactor fuel lay scattered around the ruin of the reactor building, and workers who picked them up using shovels and placed them in barrels received a lethal radiation dose in just minutes. To douse the fire still burning within the molten reactor core, bags of sand and boron were dropped into it from helicopters, with lethal consequences for the crews. Eventually, a concrete sarcophagus was constructed around the demolished reactor, sealing it off from the environment. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, the technical difficulty lies with stemming a high-pressure flow of oil, most likely mixed with natural gas, gushing from within the burned, tangled wreck of the drilling platform at a depth of 5000 feet. An effort is currently underway to seal the leak by lowering a 100-ton concrete-and-steel "contraption" onto it from a floating crane and using it to capture and pump out the oil as it leaks out. I think "sarcophagus" sounds better.

---

Translate "industrial accident" into Russian and back into English, and what you get is "technogenic catastrophe". This term got a lot of use after the Chernobyl disaster. It is rather more descriptive than the rather flaccid English phrase, and it puts the blame where it ultimately comes to rest in any case: with the technology, and the technologists and politicians who push it. Technology that can and sometimes does fail catastrophically, causing unacceptable levels of environmental devastation, is no good, regardless of how economically necessary it happens to be. It must be shut down.

Labels: Collapse, Off-Shore Drilling, Oil, Oil Disaster, Peak Oil

S&P 500| 1,110.88| -17.27
NASDAQ| 2,265.64| -54.00

Labels: Collapse, Wall Street Ponzi

Labels: Collapse, Fucking Greenspan, Greedheads, PIIIGS

May 5 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate today approved a change to financial-overhaul legislation banning taxpayer-funded bailouts of Wall Street firms as Democrats aim to attract Republican support for the broader bill.

Lawmakers voted 96-1 for an amendment offered by Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, to bar use of government funds to rescue failing financial companies. The move revises a provision that Republicans said would perpetuate bailouts.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who drafted the overhaul legislation, said today he wants to satisfy those who doubt “the too-big-to-fail proposition is no longer a question.”

Labels: 2010 Finance Reform Bill, Collapse, Too Big To Fail, US Senate

SAN ANTONIO — Firefighters are trying to control a two-alarm blaze raging at a fuel refinery on the city’s South Side where a tanker truck exploded at a loading dock, injuring at least two workers and forcing widespread evacuations.

A black plume of smoke was visible 40 miles away as firefighters went going door-to-door urging residents to stay at least one mile from the fire, which threatens to ignite nearby fuel supplies.

“We’re trying to pull everything back until we have a better idea what’s going on,” Fire Chief Charles Hood said Monday afternoon.

“Our main concern is not the fire but the materials of combustion. It’s a very dynamic situation and we’re still trying to get our arms around it,” the chief said.

He added: “A larger explosion could basically kill a bunch of people that are close by.”

Firefighters were weighing options on how to control the blaze, which was still raging two hours later. Hood said the 100 firefighters at the scene mainly were trying to keep nearby combustible materials from igniting.

Cindy Campbell, the controller at AGE Refining Inc., said a truck started on fire while at a loading dock at their plant at Southeast Military Drive and South Presa Street.

Labels: Collapse, Oil Disaster, Oil Distillates, Oil Prices

Labels: Collapse

Labels: Mid-South Flooding, Mid-South Storms

Labels: Mid-South Flooding, Mid-South Storms, My Life As It Is

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.

A global review of honeybee deaths by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) reported last week that there was no one single cause, but pointed the finger at the "irresponsible use" of pesticides that may damage bee health and make them more susceptible to diseases. Bernard Vallat, the OIE's director-general, warned: "Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster."

Dave Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries, the Pennsylvania-based commercial beekeeper who first raised the alarm about CCD, said that last year had been the worst yet for bee losses, with 62% of his 2,600 hives dying between May 2009 and April 2010. "It's getting worse," he said. "The AIA survey doesn't give you the full picture because it is only measuring losses through the winter. In the summer the bees are exposed to lots of pesticides. Farmers mix them together and no one has any idea what the effects might be."

Labels: Extreme Weather, Mid-South Storms, My Life... With Cats, Tornadoes

A tiny nonprofit group — one paid staffer working in a one-room office in a small town in West Virginia — has been causing U.S. officials and one of the world largest oil companies to regularly backtrack and revise their estimates of the size and flow of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

SkyTruth first analyzed satellite and radar data on the spill and challenged the initial estimates that 1,000 barrels of oil were flowing daily from the broken wellhead about 130 miles southeast of New Orleans. The figure was quickly changed to 5,000.

Saturday, the group updated its analysis to estimate that more than 11.1 million gallons of oil is contained in the slick, which would make it the largest oil spill in American history. John Amos, the group’s president, also revised the estimate of the rate of oil leaking to 25,000 barrels a day, saying it was a "rock bottom" figure. There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil.

The group’s findings have been a thorn in the side of industry and federal officials in a number of previous oil spills, and its aerial mapping and analysis of the extractive industry’s environmental footprint had drawn the wrath of mining and onshore oil companies.

“We are the eyes for the environmental community and for people who care about the environment,” Amos said.

Federal officials questioned the accuracy of the group's estimates. “Any exact estimate is probably impossible at this time,” Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Saturday.
Unlike other rapid-response groups that flood the scene with staff, Amos and SkyTruth volunteers work from computers, downloading digital imagery from orbiting satellites operated by NASA as well as private companies.

“Anybody can browse the web and see the pictures; we want to get the underlying satellite image and bring it into our system at SkyTruth. We map-rectify it so it can be used to accurately measure and locate things, like the location of fisheries, wildlife refuges or other sensitive areas that could be impacted by this event.”

In the case of estimating the amount of oil in the gulf’s slick, Amos said it’s a simple matter to use the sophisticated maps to calculate the depth of oil and its spread: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has standard methods to extrapolate oil volume in oil spills.

Labels: BP, Corporate Values, Corporatocracy, Oil Disaster