Prairie Weather

Allies in arrogance and brutality

It staggers me to read defenses of what the Israelis have done. They attacked a civilian flotilla in international waters breaking no law. When they met fierce if asymmetric resistance, they opened fire. And we are now being asked to regard the Israelis as the victims.

Seriously.

This is like a mini-Gaza all over again. The Israelis don't seem to grasp that Western militaries don't get to murder large numbers of civilians because they don't like them, or because they could, on a far tinier scale, hurt Israelis....Andrew Sullivan

What the Israeli navy has done -- wait a minute:  what the nation of Israel has done in its response to civilian protesters boarding the ship -- is abhorrent.  There's no more to say about it, only that we owe it to our own deeply flawed nation to detach ourselves from "allies" who expect us to help them get away with such brutality.  Yes, we've shown ourselves to be just as brutal, but we need to begin somewhere to get our souls back.

Just do it

So now what? 

What preparations should be made for the next hellacious oil "spill"?

A New York Times editorial has this to say:

One outside-the-box question that looms large is whether the federal government should now develop its own capacity to deal with a huge blowout. As things stand now, industry has all the equipment and experience. In an interim report to the president on Thursday, Mr. Salazar suggested the creation of a kind of parallel technological universe in which government would have the robots, the coffer dams and the other tools necessary to help control a big blowout.

That could be expensive, but Mr. Obama indicated on Friday that he had been thinking along the same lines. As well he should be. The images from the last month — Washington essentially powerless, BP flailing away — have been deeply disheartening.

Here's another possible solution. Make sure the government has all the technical expertise readily available to be "deputized" as blowout management.  Leave the experience and equipment to the drillers.  Make that their responsibility. 

Have a government agency which makes sure no well gets drilled unless the drillers have both the proven experience and the equipment to deal with a spill, including the robots and cofferdams.  Make drilling in the Gulf or anywhere within US jurisdiction allowable only to those who can prove they meet the standards and who will pay an up-front contingency fund to cover blowout management costs.  No more MMS.

Make the corporation/s who own the drill fully liable for both the short and long-term costs of the blowout -- signed, sealed, delivered.

Why not?

The mating of Sarah Palin with former communist European emigres

Think about it.  Modern American conservatism appears to consist of a gradual drift away from (hysterical rejection of?) the very social theories and cultures of which  the guardians of conservatism were once a part.  As so often happens with extremists, they tend to blame their opposition for the very extremes they were once associated with.  The left in America (hardly left by most developed nations' measure) are therefore condemned as "socialists" and "communists, " the very "evils" these conservatives embraced before pivoting 180 and calling themselves conservatives.  Makes a kind of nutty sense, doesn't it! 

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Allen Guelzo, seen as tilting somewhat to the right himself, teaches history at Gettysburg College.  He also teaches a course for the Teaching Company about "The American Mind."  In the full description of the course (available on CD, DVD, etc.) is a neat, compact description of the arc of modern American conservatism from the 1930's onward.

Conservatism: The origin of a distinctively American brand of conservatism is linked to the arrival of émigré European intellectuals after World War II. These thinkers found allies among former American communists, who had turned away from socialism; traditionalist Roman Catholics; and Southern agrarians.

Here are the horrors they've left behind, neatly packaged in the summary: emigres, Europeans, intellectuals, communists, socialism.

Here are their latest friends:  former communists, traditionalist Roman Catholics, and (bless their hearts!) Southern agrarians.

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What an awful mix of resentment, defensiveness, and muddled thinking these conservatives have embraced.  It's a mating of two utterly distinct cultures -- one educated, somewhat isolated, and sodden with an intellectuality born of self-justification, and the other under-educated, isolated, and feeling left out.  

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The engagement party probably took place almost exactly three years ago in June 2007 when a boat pulled into the harbor of Juneau, Alaska and Sarah Palin was the new, eye-catching governor.

... Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.

On June 18, 2007, the first group disembarked in Juneau from the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam, and went to the governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns, for lunch. The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.

By all accounts, the luncheon was a high-spirited, informal occasion. ...Jane Mayer, New Yorker

Bill Kristol is not only known for his outrageous and doomed prognostications but for his ties to the family that just about epitomizes "emigre European intellectuals."  His father was famously the "godfather of neo-conservatism." 

Just a reminder.

Later we might take up the issue of "evil spawn," okay?  (And you thought those plumes of oil in the Gulf are just about our worst problems!)

What's preventing faster economic recovery?

Who's keeping you from getting a job?

In a word, a group of elected representatives in Congress who believe that if you direct money to the stinkin' rich and starve the needy, everything will get better. 

I'm not kidding.  Paul Krugman is sensibly worried about this prevailing Congressional "wisdom."  Others among us are also very worried that so many nutcases hold so much power.

Here’s where we are: growing GDP, but mass unemployment still the law of the land, with only tiny progress so far. What can be done? Well, we could have more fiscal stimulus — but Congress is balking even at the idea of extending aid for the ever-growing ranks of the long-term unemployed. Fiscal responsibility, you see — hey, and let’s make sure estate taxes stay low! ...

...Shibboleths and conventional wisdom are blocking all routes out of this slump. And I worry that policy makers will just sit there, for years and years, all the while congratulating themselves on the soundness of their policies. ...Krugman blog

More to the point:

What’s the greatest threat to our still-fragile economic recovery? Dangers abound, of course. But what I currently find most ominous is the spread of a destructive idea: the view that now, less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, is the time for policy makers to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain....Krugman column

You'd think they enjoy inflicting pain on the most afflicted.  Well, okay, I do think  that.  Yessir, I think they enjoy inflicting pain on the most afflicted.  Wouldn't it be crazy to draw any other conclusion?

Stimulus making things better?  Quick!  Cut off the stimulus! 

Take that, you pathetic, jobless jerk.

Oil spreads, kills

A litany of half-truths, withholding crucial video, blocking media access to the site and a failure to share timely and complete information about efforts to contain the largest oil spill in U.S. history have created the widespread impression that BP is withholding information about the April 20 oilrig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, if not misleading the public and the government.

The government has been little better, for weeks blindly accepting BP's estimates of the size of the spill, all but powerless to force the company to curb its use of toxic chemical dispersants and ignoring warnings from its own officials about possible worker safety violations.

Most damning, say members of Congress, was BP's failure to release video that would help measure how much oil is being released from the broken well — a number that will be key evidence when federal investigators and perhaps juries consider what damages BP should pay. ....McClatchy

According to one Louisiana State biologist, two newly discovered species of fish have most likely been killed off by the oil.  That's whole species, not just a few fish.

...Independent scientists and government officials say another disaster is playing out in slow motion -- and out of public view -- in the mysterious depths between the gusher and the coast, a world inhabited by sperm whales, gigantic jellyfish and diminutive plankton. 

More than a month after the BP PLC spill began, the disaster's dimensions have come into sharper focus with government estimates that more than 18 million gallons of oil -- and possibly 39 million gallons -- has already poured from the leaking well, eclipsing the 11 million gallons released during the Exxon Valdez spill.

''Every fish and invertebrate contacting the oil is probably dying. I have no doubt about that,'' said Prosanta Chakrabarty, a Louisiana State University fish biologist.

The deep Gulf is an area where light can't penetrate and researchers rarely venture.Yet what happens there can ripple across the food chain. ...NYT

NPR's science reporter says this morning that getting hard information from BP is ... hard.

Why do we continue to use the word "spill"?  That word minimalizes and trivializes a gigantic, pervasive, and long-term disaster.   Oh, I guess that's why...

Dispersants are bound to prolong the gradual death of much life in the Gulf. An estimated 910,000 gallons of dispersants -- enough to fill more than 100 tanker trucks -- are contributing a new toxin to the mix. Containing petroleum distillates and propylene glycol, the dispersants' effects on marine life are still unknown. 

What is known is that by breaking down oil into smaller droplets, dispersants reduce the oil's buoyancy, slowing or stalling the crude's rise to the surface and making it harder to track the spill. 

Dispersing the oil lower into the water column protects beaches, but also keeps it in cooler waters where oil does not break down as fast. That could prolong the oil's potential to poison fish, said Larry McKinney, director of the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. ...NYT

Meanwhile, the White House has moved into the next stage of grief and frustration:  self-flagellation.

...Administration officials acknowledged the possibility that tens of thousands of gallons of oil might continue pouring out until August, when two relief wells are scheduled to be completed.

“We are prepared for the worst,” said Carol M. Browner, President Obama’s climate change and energy policy adviser. “We have been prepared from the beginning.” ...NYT

It looks as though pressure from the administration was responsible for BP's discontinuing the "top kill."

Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they worried it was putting too much pressure on it. BP announced Saturday evening that it was ending that effort. ...NYT

It's also looking as though BP doesn't know much more about how to cope with the problem than the government.  And hurricanes -- common in the Gulf during the summer months -- could make things a lot worse.

If the leak is not contained or slowed and continues at the higher estimated flow rate of 19,000 barrels a day until Aug. 20 — four months after the accident — it could amount to close to 2.3 million barrels spilled into the gulf. 

After more than a month of diagnostic tests and the pumping of tens of thousands of barrels of drilling fluids — and everything from golf balls to shards of rubber — into the broken blowout preventer, engineers are still debating about what they think may be the inner contours of the five-story stack of pipes and how to best contain its leaking gashes.

In the end, all the mysteries of what went wrong and caused one of the greatest environmental calamities of history may not be known until the well is finally killed and the ill-fated blowout preventer is brought up from the bottom of the sea. 

The final plugging of the well will have to wait until August, when the two relief wells are scheduled be completed. Those wells are being drilled diagonally to intersect with the runaway well and inject it with heavy liquids and cement. Work could be slowed by storms in what is expected to be an active summer hurricane season. ...NYT

Getting worse before getting better -- or maybe even worse

The "American people need to know that it is possible we will have oil leaking from this well until August when the relief wells will be finished," presidential adviser Carol Browner said on the CBS show Face the Nation.

Browner also warned that the spill could get worse for several days as BP attempts to put in place another containment structure. That effort will involve cutting a pipe that rises from the seabed, and because a kink in the riser may be limiting the flow, cutting it could release as much as 20 percent more oil over a period of four to seven days, Browner said. ...WaPo