Later On

Ramit Plushnick-Masti and Noaki Schwartz for Associated Press:

The company whose drilling triggered the Gulf of Mexico oil spill also owns a rig that operated with incomplete and inaccurate engineering documents, which one official warned could "lead to catastrophic operator error," records and interviews show.

In February, two months before the Deepwater Horizon spill, 19 members of Congress called on the agency that oversees offshore oil drilling to investigate a whistle-blower’s complaints about the BP-owned Atlantis, which is stationed in 7,070 feet of water more than 150 miles south of New Orleans.

The Associated Press has learned that an independent firm hired by BP substantiated the complaints in 2009 and found that the giant petroleum company was violating its own policies by not having completed engineering documents on board the Atlantis when it began operating in 2007.

Stanley Sporkin, a former federal judge whose firm served as BP’s ombudsman, said that the allegation "was substantiated, and that’s it." The firm was hired by BP in 2006 to act as an independent office to receive and investigate employee complaints.

Engineering documents — covering everything from safety shutdown systems to blowout preventers — are meant to be roadmaps for safely starting and halting production on the huge offshore platform.

Running an oil rig with flawed and missing documentation is like cooking a dinner without a complete recipe, said University of California, Berkeley engineering professor Robert Bea, an oil pipeline expert who has been reviewing the whistle-blower allegations and studied the Gulf blowout.

"This is symptomatic of a sick system. This kind of sloppiness is what leads to disasters," he said. "The sloppiness on the industry side and on the government side. It’s a shared problem."

Read the rest of this entry »

I guess the Catholic church still has a thing for people who use children as sexual prey: it is fighting to give those people more legal protection. I guess they believe this is the answer to "What would Jesus do?" and I’m sure that in their view Jesus (God) wants them to go to great lengths to protect the wealth of the church, because we know that He valued wealth above all things.

An editorial in the NY Times:

The Catholic Church is working against the interests of child abuse victims in state legislatures around the country. In recent weeks, lobbying by the church has blocked measures in Wisconsin, Arizona and Connecticut intended to widen the legal window for victims to file lawsuits against hidden predators.

We urge the New York State Legislature to rise above intense lobbying by the New York State Catholic Conference and Orthodox Jewish officials and pass the overdue Child Victims Act. Like a similar measure enacted in 2003 by California, it would create a one-time, one-year suspension of the statute of limitations for bringing civil lawsuits over the sexual abuse of children.

Once that window closes, people alleging abuse would have until age 28 to bring a claim. Current law sets the limit at 23 in most circumstances.

The measure recognizes that it typically takes many years before victims are ready to come forward. The measure also recognizes the Catholic Church’s history of intimidating victims and burying abuses in church files, creating a shroud of secrecy that extended in many cases until victims were in their 30s or older, well beyond existing time limits for prosecutions or civil lawsuits.

An earlier version of the bill passed the Assembly in 2006, 2007 and 2008, but the Senate, then under Republican control, refused to consider it. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver expresses strong support for the latest bill, amended to cover abuses by both religious and non- religious entities. But he is insistent that the Senate act first before requiring his members to cast another politically sensitive vote on the issue.

The Senate Codes Committee is set to consider the measure by mid-June. The committee’s chairman, Eric Schneiderman, Democrat of Manhattan, should work to ensure passage of the bill, which has safeguards against the filing of bogus claims.

The Catholic Church fears a wave of costly settlements and damage awards like those that followed California’s temporary lifting of the statute of limitations several years ago. Those concerns, and the difficulty of trying to judge decades-old accusations, are outweighed by the need to afford victims a measure of justice, the demands of public safety, and the injustice of rewarding any group for covering up sexual abuse of children.

The Catholic church has strayed far, far away from the teachings of Jesus, hasn’t it?

Take a look.

OMG. You must look at these!

Inspired by Wired’s back-page future-product page.

… Presidents following Barak Obama found his innovation useful in a variety of situations. President Walter Halley said of Obama, "You have to admire his prescience and courage in giving future presidents a freedom that previous presidents had never enjoyed: a perfectly legal way of removing even American citizens, based on secret evidence and a streamlined process that eliminates the delay of defense and trial, which has the additional advantage of keeping the proceedings small and secret." It was Halley, in fact, who insisted that executions under the Obama Assassination Doctrine Augmented be simulated accidents, with an "accidental death" finding enforced as needed, to avoid revealing such executions to enemies of the US. This step was taken following some enemy citizens surfacing following previous uses of the OAD on citizens resident in the US—the "Trial Taliban" (as they were known for their fanatical insistence on public trials) were finally put down following the fortuitous accidental deaths of their leadership as they gathered to foment their rebellion.

The first, relatively minor extension to the OAD occurred in the following administration, when President Hardwicke pointed out that, since an American citizen could legally be assassinated on the President’s order, then certainly anyone not an American citizen was a fortiori a potential target as circumstances dictated. This Universal Assassination Doctrine (UAD) became the rule, and was invoked as needed when a negotiated agreement seemed uncertain or tedious, and more recently, according to some reports, to remove unqualified candidates from election races well in advance of voting, so as to ensure the best possible candidates are elected.

Indeed, this single original innovation, the Obama Assassination Doctrine, is probably that president’s most enduring legacy, one that did more to change American life and culture than even the Affordable Care Act…

Scott Horton:

Libertarians argue that the criminalization of recreational drugs like marijuana cannot be justified in a society that legalizes alcohol and tobacco and relies extravagantly on commercial pharmaceuticals. They also argue that enforcing this prohibition has a net negative impact on society. They have built a formidable case and appear to be steadily winning support—current polling data suggests that a majority of those under 49 favor decriminalization, and an overall majority will emerge in favor in the near future.

No writer has made stronger contributions to this debate than Radley Balko, who has paid special attention to police violence in the war on drugs. Balko has recently posted a must-see video of a raid by a drug enforcement unit in Columbia, Missouri (posted below for ease of access). Here’s Balko’s description of what happened:

On February 11, the Columbia, Missouri, police department’s SWAT team served a drug warrant at the home of Jonathan Whitworth and Brittany Montgomery. Police say that eight days earlier they had received a tip from a confidential informant that Whitworth had a large supply of marijuana in his home. They say they first conducted a trash pull, and found marijuana residue in the family’s garbage. During the raid, police shot and killed the family’s pit bull. At least one bullet ricocheted, injuring the family’s pet corgi. Whitworth, Montgomery, and their 7-year-old son were at home at the time. The incident was written up in the Columbia Daily Tribune, noted on a few blogs that cover drug policy (including a post I put up here at Reason), and then largely forgotten for several weeks.

On April 28, I received an email from Montgomery. She had seen my post at Reason and read an account of some of my reporting on SWAT teams published in Reader’s Digest. She said she was reading to her son in his bedroom at the time of the raid. Her husband had just returned home from work. Police fired on their pets within seconds of entering the home. “I’ve never felt so violated or more victimized in my life,” Montgomery wrote. “It’s absolutely the most helpless and hopeless feeling I could ever imagine. I can’t sleep right … and I am constantly paranoid. It’s a horrible feeling… to lose the safety and security I thought I was entitled to in my own home. Nobody protected us that night, my son and I were locked in the back of a police car for nearly four hours on a school night while they destroyed my home.”

Raids like this one have occurred thousands of times across the country. Indeed, the only thing that’s unusual about this raid, as Balko notes, is the fact that every embarrassing minute of it was captured on video that the police themselves took. Balko’s superb book Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America systematically documents and catalogues the cases.

Another work that makes the case effectively is Bill Haney’s film American Violet,which was released one year ago but lamentably drew little attention. It tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old African-American mother of four whose life is turned on its head when she is caught up in a similarly absurd drug raid. The film offers an inside look at the American criminal justice system and shows how the tremendous power it vests in prosecutors can be horribly abused. It is based on events that actually occurred in Hearne, Texas, in the fall of 2000—one of a great number of “anti-drug” campaigns in Texas that were used as cover for racist harassment. While these campaigns were raging, George W. Bush was governor of Texas and John Cornyn was the state’s attorney general. Both distinguished themselves by their abject indifference to the abuse.

Law-enforcement officers visit high-school civics classes around the country giving anti-drug talks and describing the campaign they wage in the war on drugs. It would be appropriate to show all those graduating high-school seniors the tape of the raid in Columbia, Missouri, or ask them to watch and give their reactions to American Violet, because the issues raised are far more complex than that typical police lecture supposes. Moreover, as Gideon Lewis-Kraus noted in the October issue, many of the factual premises advanced in support of the war on drugs simply don’t stand up to scrutiny. Balko and his allies have won this battle, largely by demonstrating how this prohibition has been abused and corrupted by law enforcement. America’s ready for a second end to prohibition.

I’ve been expecting it any day now since around 2005. Climate Progress has an interesting post on it, from which this graph comes (click to enlarge):

Here’s the post:

The BP oil disaster reminds us once again of the many large costs of oil use not included in its price.  But because conservatives have blocked or rolled back all serious efforts to move us off of oil in the last three decades, peak oil will soon change that (see Deutsche Bank: Oil to hit $175 a barrel by 2016 and World’s top energy economist warns peak oil threatens recovery: “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us”).

Energy economics expert and long-time guest blogger Craig Severance, has a review of recent research in this important area, which is largely ignored by the status quo media.

Craig Severance is co-author of “The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power” (Praeger 1976) and a former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission.  This piece, “It’s the End of the World (As We Know It),” is reposted from his blog.  Bonus R.E.M. video at the end.

A storm is quickly approaching, and the world is not ready for it.

The permanent end of the era of cheap oil is coming as soon as next year, according to a raft of official reports that have made their way into energy media over the last few months.  Governments are now beginning to acknowledge the looming crisis. Yet, perhaps because they waited too long to prevent it, leaders are not yet alerting the public.

The entire world economy is built on cheap oil,  A permanent oil production shortage will thus lead to The End of The World (As We Know It).  What will come on the other side of this — will it be good or bad?

Public Unaware. Except for a few stories in financial pages such as London’s Financial Times, this earth-shaking news has yet to reach the Mainstream Media.  While “Peak Oil” researchers have long warned of approaching oil shortages, the difference now is these dire warnings are being validated by the highest government and oil company officials.  Yet, no political leader has had the courage to make a major announcement to prepare the public for what lies ahead.

This public blindness is tantamount to the isolationism that gripped the U.S. in the years preceding WWII.  While the highest government leaders did their best to prepare for inevitable war, they were hamstrung by the resistance of a public unable to accept what really lay ahead.  Similar to today, some politicians advanced their own careers by feeding on the public’s desire to believe no coming storm could ever reach them.  Yet, the storm came anyway.

The Limits of Oil. The looming crisis we now face is often referred to as “Peak Oil” — a status where global oil production will reach a plateau, then begin its irreversible decline…

Continue reading.

Take a look at the recipe. I’m definitely making.

Schneier on Security:

At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with a physical attack.

I didn’t get to give my answer until the afternoon, which was: "My nightmare scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios."

There’s a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism.

Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it’s only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes.

Second, it’s based on flawed logic. It begs the question by assuming that a proponent of an action must prove that the nightmare scenario is impossible.

Third, it can be used to support any position or its opposite. If we build a nuclear power plant, it could melt down. If we don’t build it, we will run short of power and society will collapse into anarchy. If we allow flights near Iceland’s volcanic ash, planes will crash and people will die. If we don’t, organs won’t arrive in time for transplant operations and people will die. If we don’t invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein might use the nuclear weapons he might have. If we do, we might destabilize the Middle East, leading to widespread violence and death.

Of course, not all fears are equal. Those that we tend to exaggerate are more easily justified by worst-case thinking. So terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and almost everything else; technology is hard to understand and therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional weapons; our children need to be protected at all costs; and annihilating the planet is bad. Basically, any fear that would make a good movie plot is amenable to worst-case thinking.

Fourth and finally, worst-case thinking validates ignorance. Instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses on what we don’t know — and what we can imagine.

Remember Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s quote? "Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know." And this: "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Ignorance isn’t a cause for doubt; when you can fill that ignorance with imagination, it can be a call to action.

Even worse, it can lead to hasty and dangerous acts. You can’t wait for a smoking gun, so you act as if the gun is about to go off. Rather than making us safer, worst-case thinking has the potential to cause dangerous escalation.

The new undercurrent in this is that our society no longer has the ability to calculate probabilities. Risk assessment is devalued. Probabilistic thinking is repudiated in favor of "possibilistic thinking": Since we can’t know what’s likely to go wrong, let’s speculate about what can possibly go wrong.

Worst-case thinking leads to bad decisions, bad systems design, and bad security. And we all have direct experience with its effects: airline security and the TSA, which we make fun of when we’re not appalled that they’re harassing 93-year-old women or keeping first graders off airplanes. You can’t be too careful!

Actually, you can. You can refuse to fly because of the possibility of plane crashes. You can lock your children in the house because of the possibility of child predators. You can eschew all contact with people because of the possibility of hurt. Steven Hawking wants to avoid trying to communicate with aliens because they might be hostile; does he want to turn off all the planet’s television broadcasts because they’re radiating into space? It isn’t hard to parody worst-case thinking, and at its extreme it’s a psychological condition.

Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at the University of Kent, writes: "Worst-case thinking encourages society to adopt fear as one of the dominant principles around which the public, the government and institutions should organize their life. It institutionalizes insecurity and fosters a mood of confusion and powerlessness. Through popularizing the belief that worst cases are normal, it incites people to feel defenseless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats."

Even worse, it plays directly into the hands of terrorists, creating a population that is easily terrorized — even by failed terrorist attacks like the Christmas Day underwear bomber and the Times Square SUV bomber.

When someone is proposing a change, the onus should be on them to justify it over the status quo. But worst-case thinking is a way of looking at the world that exaggerates the rare and unusual and gives the rare much more credence than it deserves.

It isn’t really a principle; it’s a cheap trick to justify what you already believe. It lets lazy or biased people make what seem to be cogent arguments without understanding the whole issue. And when people don’t need to refute counterarguments, there’s no point in listening to them.

Rebecca Frankel at Best Defense blog for Foreign Policy:

Stubby’s story begins much the same as so many other war dogs — as an orphaned puppy taken in by a young soldier. This abandoned bull terrier was  found by a private by the name of J. Robert Conroy, who discovered him wandering the streets of Hartford in 1917. And, after winning the affection of the rest of the soldiers in the 102nd Infantry, 26th Yankee Division during training at Camp Yale, Conroy sneaked the little dog onto the ship and went with the troops to France.

The canine stowaway was eventually discovered by Conroy’s superiors, but Stubby managed to charm his way into becoming an official military dog. According to the Smithsonian, by that point Stubby had "learned the bugle calls, the drills, and even a modified dog salute as he put his right paw on his right eyebrow when a salute was executed by his fellow soldiers." As legend has it twas the salute that won over Conroy’s supervising officer.

The scrappy stray — named for the look of his wee tail — first became famous after saving his troops on the front line from being gassed, having survived an gas attack once himself, the war dog was highly attuned to the pernicious odor and able to alert the soldiers before any real harm was done. Stubby also "had a talent for locating wounded men between the trenches of the opposing armies; he would listen for the sound of English and then go to the location, barking until paramedics arrived or leading the lost soldiers back to the safety of the trenches."

Not only did he survive a bombing and shrapnel wounds — spending weeks recovering in the hospital — he even captured a German spy — singlehanded. Upon discovering the intruder he barked and kept the man from running by "seizing his prisoner by the breeches, Stubby held on until help arrived."

Sgt. Stubby is perhaps the single most decorated war dog in U.S. history. He was the first dog ever to receive the rank of Sergeant and over the course of WWI he saw 17 battles, was awarded a slew of badges and medals, and eventually met three American Presidents — Harding, Wilson, and Coolidge (Coolidge hosted Stubby and Conroy at the White House in 1925). Stubby was a lifetime member of the American Red Cross, the American Legion, and the YMCA who pledged to Stubby "three bones a day and place to sleep for the rest of his life."

Stubby never needed to take up the YMCA on its offer. As an old dog, he finally succumbed to illness and died in Conroy’s arms in 1926. His obituary not only graced the pages of the New York Times on April 4, 1926, but took up three large columns and featured his photo.

Stubby’s remains were preserved, and you can actually visit him at the Smithsonian museum still wearing all his medals, just as he used to wear them — pinned to the blanket made for him by the ladies of France who adored him so, that would become his life-long uniform.

In other war dog news: Kuwaiti "refugee" dogs looking for adoption in the States

Actually, businesses are always about to go bad—the drive for profit forces bad decisions on them. But that’s why we have the government, laws, regulations, and regulators and inspectors. Michael Shear and Peter Whoriskey in the Washington Post:

Toyota officials sought to develop a public relations campaign to attack the credibility of key witnesses who have testified before Congress about acceleration problems with the company’s cars, according to documents provided to the House committee investigating the automaker.

The effort was based in part on polling conducted for Toyota by Joel Benenson, President Obama‘s chief pollster. His poll questioned the integrity of the witnesses: Sean Kane, a Massachusetts safety consultant, and David Gilbert, an auto technology professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Congressional investigators have demanded to know from company officials whether a campaign to debunk or discredit their witnesses was put into action.

The company says it never produced advertisements based on the polling. Still, plans for the campaign have drawn the ire of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which, upon learning of them, told the automaker to hand over all related documents.

Lawmakers "would take very seriously any effort to malign or intimidate witnesses who cooperate with our investigations," a committee spokesman said in a statement Friday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Benen:

The Maine Republican Party raised a few eyebrows this week when it endorsed a right-wing party platform combining "fringe policies, libertarian buzzwords and outright conspiracy theories." Almost as interesting was the Maine GOP’s behavior at the meeting where the platform was adopted.

Republican activists held their annual gathering at the Portland Exposition Building, near a local middle school. GOP members used an eighth-grade classroom for a caucus meeting, and took it upon themselves to start making some changes. (thanks to several alert readers for the tip)

"We allowed them to use the space and I’m appalled that they would go through a teacher’s things, let alone remove something from a classroom," [School Committee member Sarah Thompson] said Wednesday. "We want the public to use school spaces, but they need to respect that it’s a school and understand that they should leave it the way they find it." [...]

When [studies teacher Paul Clifford] returned to school on Monday, he found that a favorite poster about the U.S. labor movement had been taken and replaced with a bumper sticker that read, "Working People Vote Republican."

Later, Clifford learned that his classroom had been searched. Republicans who had attended the convention called Principal Mike McCarthy to complain about "anti-American" things they saw there, including a closed box containing copies of the U.S. Constitution that were published by the American Civil Liberties Union.

There’s just something oddly spectacular about Republican activists describing a copy of the U.S. Constitution as "anti-American" because they didn’t approve of the group that distributed the copy.

Party officials later apologized for the members’ misconduct.

Kevin Drum:

If drilling for oil has the potential to cause vast damage, then the drillers of oil need to have the financial wherewithal to repair that damage when it occurs. That’s the kind of personal responsibility the Republican Party stands for. So Republicans certainly wouldn’t object to raising the liability cap for offshore drilling accidents so that taxpayers aren’t the hook for the costs. Right?

You underestimate the Republican party. None other than Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski stood up to object. Yes, the senator from the state that got hammered by the Exxon Valdez spill objected to raising the liability cap.

And what was her argument? If the liability cap is raised, that might exclude small oil companies from being able to get the insurance and financing necessary to drill offshore. After all, only the oil giants could afford $10 billion. That is to say: only the oil giants can afford to clean up after themselves.

You’re not dreaming. That’s really the argument. Murkowski wants small, independent oil companies to be able to privatize the profits of offshore drilling but offload the financial risks to the public. And she frames it as avoiding a "Big Oil monopoly" on drilling. She’s just defending mom-and-pop oil shops! The gall is breathtaking.

That’s David Roberts. On a historical note, this is pretty much how the nuclear power industry is treated too. Back in 1957, when no one knew just how dangerous nuclear plants were, insurance companies were unwilling to write open-ended policies for them. Congress, however, didn’t want that to get in the way of nuclear development (too cheap to meter, after all!). So they required plant operators to buy the biggest policies they could, and then put taxpayers on the hook for any damages above that.

Oh wait. No they didn’t. Actually, they set up a $10 billion insurance pool funded by the industry. Taxpayers were on the hook for anything above that, but at least the industry as a whole was responsible for the first $10 billion. If Murkowski is so worried about all those small oil companies, maybe she should support the same kind of fund for offshore drilling. But I guess that would be socialism. Or something.

Steve Benen:

It’s peculiar to me that Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) would invest so much time and energy in repealing the estate tax. With an enormous budget deficit, and a budget in which scarce resources are needed for a variety of policy goals, pushing tax cuts that exclusively benefit millionaires and billionaires seems to reflect misguided priorities.

But Lincoln has worked on this issue for years, and whether it makes sense or not, she’s not giving up the fight.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) on Thursday told The Hill that a fix for the estate tax should be aimed at helping small businesses, and not wealthier taxpayers since they have the resources to weather whatever tax rate Congress throws at them. [...]

"I don’t think there’s any American out there who believes you should work all of your life to find that when you die, 55 percent of [your estate] has got to go to the government," the senator said. "Coming up with more balanced exemptions and rates is critical."

That may sound reasonable at first blush, but Pat Garofalo explains that Lincoln’s description of the policy is simply wrong.

[T]he estate tax — like the personal income tax — is calculated on marginal income, the particular percentage is only levied on amounts above the exemption. So if the exemption is $3.5 million, the first $3.5 million of the estate is passed on entirely tax free. Tax is only paid on the first dollar in excess of that. So an estate worth $3,500,001 would have a tax bill of .45 cents under 2009 law.

The effective tax rate — the amount paid as a percentage of the entire estate — owed by people who actually had to pay any estate tax at all in 2009 was about 14 percent. There were no grieving widows who have to hand over half of everything they own to the government.

As for Lincoln’s concerns for small businesses, her argument is, again, unsupported by reality.

It’s bad enough for the conservative Democrat’s concerns for the Walton family have compelled her to push this bad idea, but the least she could do, after years of effort, is get the details right.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress:

Some people weren’t sure about my earlier metaphor, “Time to stop calling the BP-Halliburton oil disaster a ‘leak’ or a ’spill’ — Try ‘an undersea volcano of oil’.”  But now it seems clear that even my May 1 post questioning the official “leak” rate —Oilpocalypse Now: WSJ reports BP oil disaster may be leaking at rate of 1 million gallons a day — was an underestimate.

And it’s now as clear as unpolluted water exactly why BP suppressed for weeks the release of their video of the gusher:

BP knew that experts could roughly calculate the flow rate just from that image — although they can’t easily distinguish oil from gas and other things in the volcano.  That said, it appears most of this is oil, as reported in the story from NPR science correspondent Richard Harris.

Brad Johnson at TP summarizes the story and has followup:

Based on “sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday,” Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, told NPR the actual spill rate of the BP oil disaster is about 3 million gallons a day — 15 times the official guess of BP and the federal government. Another scientific expert, Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated the rate of flow to be between 840,000 and four million gallons a day. These estimates mean that the Deepwater Horizon wreckage could have spilled about five times as much oil as the 12-million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster….

In an email to ThinkProgress, Dr. Wereley clarifies: “My analysis is based strictly on what is seen in the video, so only one pipe and only for that brief period of time. I’m making no claims about what happened earlier or what may happen in the future.”

BP’s hubris and arrogance remain unchanged (see Is BP the Goldman Sachs of Big Oil? CEO Hayward says to fellow executives: “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”). TP notes:

On Tuesday, BP America president Lamar McKay testified under oath before the Senate that “you can’t measure what’s coming out at the seabed.”

But it is CEO Tony Hayward’s comments that boggle the mind.  The Guardian reports today:

In an bullish interview with the Guardian at BP’s crisis centre in Houston, Hayward insisted that the leaked oil and the estimated 400,000 gallons of dispersant that BP has pumped into the sea to try to tackle the slick should be put in context.

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume,” he said.

Yes, apparently even if it spewed all of the oil in the world into the ocean it still wouldn’t be a big deal to BP because the entire ocean is so vast.  Seriously.

For the record, BP’s dispersants are toxic — but not as toxic as dispersed oil.

The interview ends with yet more hubris:

Hayward said it was “unwise” to speculate about the direct causes of the accident before investigations had been completed. “There is a lot of speculation, red herrings and hearsay.” He also admitted that BP had made mistakes in its early response to the crisis. It initially refused to compensate fishermen who were unable to produce written proof of their normal earnings. Most keep no such records.

He also said BP had made a mistake when fishermen signing up to help with the relief effort were required to sign agreements limiting their receipt of any future damages from BP.

“It was a bit bumpy to get it going. We made a few little mistakes early on.”

Yeah, BP made a few little mistakes:

• The three causes of BP’s Titanic oil disaster: Recklessness, Arrogance, and Hubris:  Salazar says drilling companies made “some very major mistakes”; Expert reviewer finds well’s cement seal “was probably faulty” and inadequately tested (to save money); Explosion occurred while BP executives were on board “celebrating the rig’s safety record”!
• How about a spotty safety record, insistence on voluntary ‘trust me’ self-regulation, a drilling plan that ignored key risks, and failure to use best shut-off technology to save a few bucks?
• Stupak stunner: Oil well’s blowout preventer had leaks, dead battery, design flaws, “How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?”
• Shocking allegations against BP

Andrew Sullivan gets more mail from his readers:

The campaign isn’t confined to France. In Australia, an armed robber who used a burqa as a disguise has kicked up a political storm. In Belgium, the lower house of parliament recently voted 136-0 to outlaw veiled garments. In Italy, where face-covering has been illegal but unenforced since the ’70s, a woman was just fined for the very first time. Alex Wilhelm wades through the debate:

For the Italian woman mentioned above, the fine for her attire (a steep 500 Euro) is the least of her concerns. Her husband has decided that if she cannot wear the burqa outside, then she cannot go outside. The woman is now effectively under house arrest for committing no crime. She will not be able to go outside to take a morning walk or an evening stroll. Her sentence is life in prison. [...B]anning the burqa as an ancient hulking relic of sexism can backfire and take away what modicum of freedom that these women had enjoyed previously.

Below is more commentary and firsthand experiences from readers. One writes:

I am a modern, liberal, Muslim woman who has never worn a scarf on my head, let alone burqa. There is nothing Islamic or religious about it.

There may be some idiotic women who choose to wear it because they don’t want others to look at them but please, they need to grow up and be a part of western society if they want to live here. Men in Pakistan (where I am from) are crazy and often sex-deprived and I can understand why some women would want themselves covered and not get stared down by scary men in public places. My understanding is that Islam says don’t attract undue attention toward yourself and dress modestly. But in western society, they are attracting undue attention to themselves by wearing this burqa. I just don’t get why these people are incapable of thinking and take the Quran so literally.

Another:

One of your readers said that the burqa communicates and reinforces the idea that “women are dangerous and that they belong to men.  It says ‘you are allowed out of the house only if no one can see you.  Only if you are invisible.’” But this is only part of what it communicates. It is not only a religious symbol, but a traditional one as well. Its traditional importance is to communicate and reinforce the idea that men are uncontrollable sexual beasts who must be kept from seeing the female form in too much detail lest he, understandably, lose control over himself and act out his desires. It’s something of a preventative measure for the sake of the young woman’s honor and, often times more importantly, the honor of the family.

I’m an American living in a Muslim country for over two years now and have had this explained to me by both men and women again and again, and it never makes any more sense. Otherwise respectable men will go on about how they just doesn’t know what they would do if they saw an overly exposed woman, and how this is just part of our nature. My response of “You’re a man, be one, control yourself,” is shrugged off as naive.

As it has been explained to me in the past, feminism is not only for the improvement of the status and understanding of women, it is also for the improvement of the status and understanding of men. Men are hardly the victims in this situation, but views on masculinity are definitely linked to this issue and need to be brought up.

Another:

I live in Minneapolis and spent a lot of time during the last few years volunteering in adult basic education classrooms, where our students are primarily learning English, and many of the attending are Somali women, all wearing a burqa or hijab.  The women I’ve worked with are smart, passionate, engaged with learning about their new country and home.  Usually I’m a very cynical – came of age during the Bush years and all – but these women absolutely inspire me with their firm belief that America is about freedom of expression and opportunity.  It’s incredible.  They don’t fit the stereotype of a Muslim woman who has no identity and is indoctrinated to believe in her own subjugation.  I never saw one of them shirk from a man during an argument in class.  They wear their traditional dress and want to enroll in business classes.  They hope their daughters go to med school.  But they still hold to their religion, it’s deeply important to them, and are keenly aware of the choice they’re making.

This blew my mind as a young feminist in college. I was so surprised to find such strong women when I started teaching English.  If a ban on burqas was ever proposed in my city, I’d be the first protester in line.

Steve Benen:

As of about a decade ago, there was an assumption among much of the public that the government was pretty good at disaster response. By 2000, the Clinton administration’s FEMA was considered a model government agency, able to act quickly and effectively to almost any scenario.

A decade later, the public’s confidence has been badly rattled, and for good reason — among its many problems, the Bush administration’s mismanagement on this front became a national embarrassment. It wasn’t long before it became a template for those hoping to discredit the efficacy of government itself — if the government can’t even respond ably to a hurricane in New Orleans, how can we expect it to [fill in the blank]?

With that in mind, Marc Ambinder raised an important yesterday that often goes overlooked: the government’s disaster response efforts have already vastly improved over the last 16 months.

An eternal fact of Washington is that government gets much more attention when it performs badly than when it performs well. As an illustration of the former, recall the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. To illustrate the latter, consider how the media is covering government right now. By my count at least three major natural disasters have occurred in recent weeks: the Nashville flooding, the deadly Oklahoma tornadoes, and the BP oil spill (admittedly not "natural" but threatening to be a major environmental disaster). Let’s throw in an attempted terrorist attack in Times Square, too. On every front, government has performed ably — and often better than ably. And yet it’s understating things considerably to say this success has not been widely recognized.

It should be recognized, though, because when it comes to government disaster response, the Bush years marked a low point and right now we’re experiencing a high point.

That may seem like cold comfort to those along the Gulf Coast — there’s only so much the government can do about the BP oil spill disaster, and at this point, the crisis is getting considerably worse — but Ambinder’s observation is nevertheless an accurate one. Obama was intent on quickly improving the federal government’s ability to respond to these kinds of disasters, and those efforts have been successful.

Ambinder noted several recent examples from the last month, but let’s not overlook at the administration won (and deserved) plaudits for his handling of the H1N1 epidemic, and the administration’s response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti has not only been exemplary, but it’s even exceeded expectations.

Paul Waldman noted recently, "[I]t seems that the better job the Obama administration does with this [BP oil spill] and future disasters, the less it will matter in the public’s perception of what government is capable of."

I hope that’s right, because the debate in recent years has gone in a ridiculous direction. At issue has never been whether the government can effectively respond to disasters, but rather, the difference between an administration that guts response agencies and promotes incompetent lackeys, and one that takes these issues seriously.

Also, watch the Jon Stewart clip at this post by Ed Brayton. In particular, note the bit at the end:

I love his mocking of how the Republicans keep comparing Obama’s problems to Bush’s scandals — after spending 8 years denying that those scandals were a problem at all.

That little montage of Republicans spouting the various Bush disasters—which at the time the very same people said were not disasters at all—shows an interesting capability of the Republican mind.

David Sirota in Salon:

Imagine, if you can, an alternate universe.

Imagine that in this alternate universe, a foreign military power begins flying remote-controlled warplanes over your town, using on-board missiles to kill hundreds of your innocent neighbors.

Now imagine that when you read the newspaper about this ongoing bloodbath, you learn that the foreign nation’s top general is nonchalantly telling reporters that his troops are also killing "an amazing number" of your cultural brethren in an adjacent country. Imagine further learning that this foreign power is expanding the drone attacks on your community despite the attacks’ well-known record of killing innocents. And finally, imagine that when you turn on your television, you see the perpetrator nation’s tuxedo-clad leader cracking stand-up comedy jokes about drone strikes — jokes that prompt guffaws from an audience of that nation’s elite.

Ask yourself: How would you and your fellow citizens respond? Would you call homegrown militias mounting a defense "patriots," or would you call them "terrorists"? Would you agree with your leaders when they angrily tell reporters that violent defiance should be expected?

Fortunately, most Americans don’t have to worry about these queries in their own lives. But how we answer them in a hypothetical thought experiment provides us insight into how Pakistanis are likely feeling right now. Why? Because thanks to our continued drone assaults on their country, Pakistanis now confront these issues every day. And if they answer these questions as many of us undoubtedly would in a similar situation — well, that should trouble every American in this age of asymmetrical warfare.

Though we don’t like to call it mass murder, the U.S. government’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan is devolving into just that. As noted by a former counterinsurgency advisor to Gen. David Petraeus and a former Army officer in Afghanistan, the operation has become a haphazard massacre.

"Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders," David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum wrote in 2009. "But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed."

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I got to thinking about Christianity and the peculiar directions it has taken.

For example, the Christians who believe the Bible is both literal and infallibly true. Where did they get that? Not from the Bible, certainly: no such statement about its infallibility is to be found in it, and the marks of its evolution (e.g., folding together different creation myths in Genesis to get one inconsistent account) strongly undercut the notion. So the answer is obvious: they just made that up, with no justification in the Bible at all.

The big problem, though, is God—Jesus in the New Testament. Now you’d think that if God actually became one of us and walked among us and talked to us, people would pay very, very careful attention to what he said and didn’t say. Not (most) Christians.

For example, many Christians—and notably the Catholic church—focus a lot of anger and hatred at homosexuality. God (Jesus) said not a single word about homosexuality. For Jesus/God, clearly, it’s not only not a great sin, it wasn’t even worth mentioning. So where do they get all that outrage?

For the Protestant fundamentalists, there’s another problem: Jesus/God did talk about divorce—and he was definitely against it. The fundamentalists ignore that teaching because they themselves (in the intensely religious states known as the Bible belt) have very high divorce rates—much higher than in more tolerant states. (Jesus/God also talked about the importance of tolerance, but that also has not made much impression among many Christians.)

Even stranger, Jesus—God, remember—did talk at length about wealth and how it was bad. Very bad, in fact. Wikipedia:

…I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

The parallel versions appear in Matthew 19:23-24, Mark 10:24-25, and Luke 18:24-25.

The saying was a response to a young rich man who had asked Jesus what he needed to do in order to inherit eternal life. Jesus replied that he should keep the commandments, to which the man stated he had done. Jesus responded, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” The young man became sad and was unwilling to do this. Jesus then spoke this response, leaving his disciples astonished.

Indeed. It’s so astonishing that modern Christians—especially the “Taxed Enough Already” variety—are in the main devoted to keeping as much money as they can. (Certainly this isn’t true of all Christians—quite apart from the professionally religious (like nuns) who take vows of poverty, some Christians do indeed see wealth as a problem. But few ministers talk about how the rich should stop being rich already. For whatever reason. But it was God who said that. I’d pay attention to things God said if I believed in that God.) The Catholic church is, oddly, very tolerant (if not fawning) about wealth, which Jesus/God condemned, but highly intolerant of homosexuality, which Jesus/God gave a complete pass to.

A wonderful shave (again) today: Truefitt & Hill make just the one shaving soap, but it’s a winner: terrific lather and wonderful light fragrance that I fully enjoyed this morning as I worked up the lather with the Plisson Chinese Grey that The Wife bought for me in Paris. The Edwin Jagger ivory-handled Chatsworth with a newish Polsilver blade did a terrific job—though I have to admit that for me the Swedish Gillette blade is superior—and then a hearty splash of Stetson Sierra to finish the job.