Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, June 14, 2010

BP and the Floor of the Sea

by anderson


It appears certain now: the well casing of the Deepwater Horizon bore is
and has been leaking
into the sea floor at a depth of ~1000 ft. Leaking may not be entirely
the proper word. It is not known, nor even discussed, as to when this
may have occurred. This was discovered during the top kill drill mud
injection, which is now believed to have injected much of the drilling
mud into the sea floor where a disk joint failed. Which means, of
course, that when the drilling mud isn't in "open communication in the
strata or the rock formations below the sea floor," the oil, gushing
upward, is.

Well, at least BP had the sense to drill the relief
wells to a depth of 10,000 ft.  At least, this is what BP has said they're doing, drilling to 10,000 ft.  Perhaps this, too, is a lie.  One may surmise that, as the costs of the relief wells increase with depth, BP's internal cost-aversion governor could kick in and stunt the well depth.  Nonetheless, they've managed to keep this a secret until now,
knowing of the problem weeks ago. So, still dicks.

With
evidence of yet another problem -- perhaps the problem - it appears that the remote acoustic kill
switch, and the yowling surrounding it, is rendered somewhat moot, as it would not have actually prevented BP from drilling relief
wells.  Indeed, it seems plain that had the hole been successfully closed, the oil seepage into the subsurface strata would continue unabated, if not expressly accelerating with a well cap.  The reality of the situation would have been buried, at least until the inevitable bleed out began to occur, something that is now being seen on the sea floor.  The subsurface spill appears to be the source of multiple leaks
on the sea bed. From one, to many and one.

And what if there
should be other broken joints below 10,000 ft.? More oil squirting into
the sea floor way down deep? One presumes that BP's extensive
environmental impact studies of this scenario have evaluated the
situation across multiple parameter spaces within BP's cutting edge
subsurface modeling frameworks, and has thusly determined that "open
communication" of oil into the strata is acceptable to the strata at
that depth. So as not the harm the walruses.

Now, what does oil
gushing into the the sea floor at 1000 ft, or 10,000 ft, actually do?
Potential seismic calamity? now, tomorrow, months, years or ... never? Or just
eternal, befouling seepage? Now, there's an apropos and much deserved
epitaph for BP. Befouling Peckerheads.

It certainly
does seem like oil saturating the subsurface strata could grease the
slide of all sorts of seismic activity. But maybe not. Who knows? I
expect we can be certain BP does not, and couldn't give a shit either. I
also expect the 10,000 foot depth is the product of BP's extensive
modeling of this very problem, and that a conversation in summation may
have gone something like this:

"That
seems pretty frickin' deep, right? ten thousand? That's fuckin' deep."

"Yeah,
that'll do 'er."

"And oil in the sea floor at ten thousand,
that's okay, right?"

"No problem! Ten thousand feeta rock, man,
that's a lotta fuckin' rock, right."

"That is a shitlowda rock."

Ten thousand it is then.

I wonder when Americans are going to
start viewing BP as an elite, embedded, forward-operating covert destabilization force of
Britain. Really, they've been fucking up American territory and killing Americans
for decades now, making hand over fist in the process. What an
op. This foreign company, operating through domestic agents in US
government, essentially gets the oversight they want, which is none.
They make scads, ship off the blood-tinged dividends mostly to Britain, where
pensioners wail about those ghastly Americans dishonouring that fine
Tony Hayward and sullying the image of BP.  Even still, we were greeted to the marvelous sight of Toney Tony vigourously lying his ass off to BBC audiences when he said that the "top hat" was now collecting "the vast majority" of the oil pouring out of the Mocando hole.

As to the domestic
agents, well, those have been obvious for years of course, and recently
we've just learned of the BP-Rentboy
Emanuel
connection, and what a charmer it is. More agents.

I've
been rather amazed by the specious arguments surrounding defending BP
from seizure. 30,000 jobs in America is somehow supposed to justify
this clear threat to national security. The notion that umbrella corp
BP must not be dismantled to save jobs is risible. As an umbrella corp,
BP functions, as some have noted, as a bank: much of what they purport
to do, is actually done by other companies. And the work that BP
actually does, it does badly, and lethally so. It commits ecocide and
homicide with impunity and federal agency.

BP simply needs to be
deconstructed, reduced to its previously independent parts. Done in an
orderly fashion, this process will actually restore jobs that BP cut in
consolidation upon consolidation. This umbrella bureaucracy is as ruthless
as it is callous in cost cutting to point of evaluating workers lives with childhood
rhyme cost-benefit analysis. Beyond that sociopathy lies just the plain brutal
cheap-shitness of them. Land and human be damned. Capitalism in peak
form.

BP must be rent asunder. Doff that cloak of ill-gotten, black, and chintzy profit. Cast aside the damning shroud of that umbrella corp;  that useless,
smothering gob of venal executives, lawyering toadies, and sniveling, sell-anything PR flacks, existing to serve only their own glutenous maw. Do this, and lift the bleak pall cast by the black and oily shadow of this Beast Pandora.



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