I have been allowing comments without having to approve them, but due to some pretty annoying spam practices by some I can no longer do this.
Effective immediately comments will not appear until approved.
Rest assured that there is only three things that will stop a comment from being approved; spam, hate speech and offensive language. Disagreeing with the post will not make a difference on your approval. I highly encourage differing views.
I apologize for having to take this step.
Paul
I watched the President as he has handled BP and the current crisis with confusion. I couldn’t understand his lack of anger. Why his demeanor was so calm, why he merely pointed out BP’s responsibility instead of calling for heads on a pike.
I watched his address from the White House. I was dumbfounded. How could our great leader sit there and talk as if describing a Sunday afternoon picnic while I was almost sick with anger? Slowly my anger began to turn to this man who refused to be as angry as I was. Who had the nerve not to demand the heads of BP’s top executives. I went to bed disappointed and angry at the man I had expected to be my voice.
The next afternoon I saw the news. BP agreed to set up a 20 billion dollar fund just as a start. Not only that, they agreed to a 100 million dollar fund to help the laid off oil workers due to the drilling moratorium!
Suddenly I understood.
My President hadn’t let me down. The man I expected to be my voice instead chose to be my guardian.
To understand the genius of his tactics you have to realize that by our own regulations, BP was limited to only 75 million in damages. Sure they were saying they would pay all costs but that could have stopped at anytime and there wasn’t much we could do about it.
Had the President set out like a head hunter out for BP blood, you can bet they would have turned it over to their legal department and it would have been many years before anyone saw a dime.
Barrack Obama had the forethought to stay calm; to firmly place responsibility and liability on BP’s shoulders while keeping care not to crucify BP.
You can bet in private BP saw a different face. I could just see our President informing BP that if they didn’t match action with words, things could get much worse for them. That not only would he publicly make them the face of evil incarnate, he would call for criminal charges for their top executives.
Instant cooperation!
I should have known better than to lose faith. I have seen his calm genius before and I am sure we will see it again.
Paul
I am worried.
Not about the Gulf coast oil leak. It will stop. Sooner or later they will get this thing plugged or it will simply run out of oil, but it will stop.
Not about the clean up. It will take time and whether BP or the government or volunteers takes care of it, it will get cleaned.
Nor am I worried about the Gulf recovering. That also will happen. It may take many years, and may in the end be different than it once was but it will recover.
What I am worried about is that we will not learn our lesson. That the rhetoric about the need for jobs and the need of the meager oil reserves that offshore drilling has the potential to tap, will allow things to continue with relatively minor changes.
I already hear that they may allow new permits for shallow water drilling. Didn’t anyone notice that the last couple of oil rig accidents were in shallow waters? And that like this disaster they also took months to stop the flow of oil?
Just because it is 500 ft or less doesn’t mean that the oil companies are any more prepared to deal with an accident.
This accident should be Obama’s rallying cry, instead of allowing the opposition to turn this against him. He needs to use this opportunity to gain support for his green energy agenda. He needs to use this like Kennedy use Sputnik to spur our space program. He needs to use this to call on all Americans to cut our fossil fuel use to a trickle by the end of the decade. But more immediately he must call for a complete offshore drilling moratorium.
If the powers that be insist we need this oil too badly not to drill, a decent compromise would be to allow offshore drilling only when;
Only when all these criteria are met should we allow offshore drilling to continue.
I don’t know about the rest of America but I can’t get enough of watching the live feeds from BP.
There is something about watching all theses underwater robots I find fascinating.
But watching has left me with a very bad taste in my mouth for BP’s efforts.
I watched as the diamond saw robot began to do its job. The hope was to get a smooth cut so that their cap could fit snugly capturing the flow of oil. After a bit of cutting the saw got into a bind (stuck) and I watched patiently until they got it unstuck and brought it to the surface for repair.
As a person fairly knowledgeable about how saws work, I know there are two causes for a saw getting in a bind. 1. The weight of the object you are cutting is leaning into your cut (pinching your saw) or 2. You are applying too much pressure. Both problems are easily fixed by either adjusting the position of your cut, your feed rate (pressure), or both.
So I was really surprised when they abandoned the saw cut with the diamond saw after only one attempt and decided to go with the brute force method of using a pair of sears. By their own admission this would leave a jagged edge on the riser pipe making for a poor seal.
If a smooth surface is the goal I don’t understand why they just didn’t unbolt the flange?
I still however, figured they could still get a good enough seal if they made the cap correctly. I am no engineer but I would have thought that the inside of the cap would have been a rubber funnel shape just big enough so it sealed around the outside edge of the pipe flange with some kind of clamping mechanism to apply pressure and to hold it securely.
As I watched the robots guide it into place, it looked as I thought it would. There was even some fin shapes at the bottom that appeared to be clamps of some sort.
Once in place I watched as the oil seemed to flow out from under this thing freely. I was flabbergasted when I realized there were no clamps. That the fins were just that, fins! I could even see the cap sway from the force of the oil coming from beneath it.
Then it dawned on me. Of course! It is so simple.
They don’t need to have a great seal. All they have to do is start pumping out the oil at the surface as fast (or close to) as it is exiting the hole at the ocean bottom and the oil would be under little or no pressure at the cap. If it leaked at all it would be minimal.
Once again I was shocked as I listened to the descriptions of relief valves on the caps and chokes at the surface. I realized in despair that they used a soft hose instead of solid piping to connect the cap to the surface (the solid piping seemed a no brainer to me), that the plan was to let the oil come to the surface under its own pressure. Of course with this scheme, anything but an absolutely perfect seal would leak horrendously.
I was dumbfounded at this realization. How could teams of BP’s top engineers possibly come up with such a lame doomed to fail scheme? They had to know that this would only capture a very small percentage of the oil. A child sucking on a soda straw would come up with a better plan.
It was then that one of my last remaining brain cells fired. We were duped.
I believe that BP wants to oil to stop. But they can’t do that so the only remaining option is the capture the oil. One would think that would be the best option for BP. Capture all the oil, collect the revenues.
BP has one tiny little problem. If they capture it all there will be an indisputable measure as to how much oil has spilled and that is a figure BP would rather not get out.
You see they not only have to pay royalties based on how much is spilled but they may also be fined as much as $4300.00 a barrel. So it is in their best interest to keep people guessing at the amount.
With the configuration they have now they can claim that whatever amount they capture is the “vast majority” of the oil when in actuality it is only a small fraction.
There will be those who will dispute the numbers but without definitive proof BP has the upper hand and they know it.
We are being scammed yet once again.
Update:
I just learned on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown that BP has announced plans to replace the cap with a bigger better fitting version next month. This new cap will be equipped with clamps to hold it firmly in place (sound familiar?).
I have to wonder why they didn’t use this cap in the first place and why take a month to replace it.
Could it be that BP never wanted the cap to fit well? That after seeing the oil still gushing, pressure was exerted to do better? Could it be that they are putting off replacing the cap as long as possible hoping the flow rate will slow?
We have a brand new look to start the summer. Along with this new look will come many new posts starting within the next week or so.
A good friend of mine named Shay graciously redesigned the site for me. As you can see she is very good. If you would like Shay to design a site for you just contact me and I will put you in touch with her.
I don’t know why I bother watching The Ghost hunters on TV? I wind up getting infuriated and cursing under my breath every time I watch.
The show is based on a couple of Roto-Rooter plumbers who go around conducting paranormal investigations.
Yes. You heard me right. Plumbers by day and Ghostbusters by night!
Anyway, they go to various locations of suspected paranormal activity. Unleash their troop of highly trained (although poorly educated) paranormal experts who proceed to setup and stage multiple cameras along with an assortment of scientific whirly-gigs and technical whatchamacallits. All in preparation for an intense four to six hours of some of the worst investigative techniques I have ever seen. After which they analyze the tons of data they have collected (during which, we are subjected to such riveting debates like “if an orb of light on the video is a speck of dust, an insect or a ghost” or “if a noise heard on a audio tape is an ghostly answer to a question they asked or a passing truck”). Once all the data has been analyzed, the so called evidence is then presented to person who called for the investigation along with their conclusions.
I don’t know where to start.
First off, the guys that are in charge are plumbers! These are not your “highly educated, I do plumbing because I like it” type of plumbers; they are “this is all I am qualified to do and barely smart enough to do that” plumbers!
I have nothing against plumbers. Most I have met have been quite intelligent, at least intelligent enough to realize that they are not qualified to do any type of scientific investigation.
The first thing they do after setting up their various cameras is turn out the lights. Somehow the lights must interfere ghost ability to manifest. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with man’s natural fear of the dark now could it?
But wait! If one of their batteries suddenly dies it must be the ghost sucking out the power. According to them the ghost need the power to manifest. But why don’t they like lights? Plenty of power there. Maybe they can only use DC and that is why the batteries suddenly die? Nope that doesn’t work either. Turns out our Ghost Hunters know nothing about batteries.
Batteries don’t work like a big bucket holding electrical power that you can just dump out all at once (that is called a capacitor). If they did sticking your tongue to one would have some very devastating results.
Batteries store electricity via a chemical reaction. That reaction has a maximum rate and as a result a battery sucking ghost may make the batteries drain a bit faster (kind of like your cell phones talk time versus standby time) but the more likely result would be the equipment not working or working poorly with fully charged batteries (the ghost re-routing the power from the batteries to themselves, bypassing the equipment). Walk away from the ghost and the equipment should work fine again and batteries should show a charge if this is the case.
Another way they claim ghost get energy is drawing it from the surrounding atmosphere creating cold spots (Damn ghost are all over my house!) You see them walking around with Infrared thermometers and infrared cameras looking for these cold spots.
If you ask any person that has ever worked in the Heating and Air Conditioning profession they will tell you that getting heat to flow evenly through a structure is challenging. Convection, while simple in its concept can and does create frustrating temperature differentials in complex structures such as the type of buildings we live in.
Throw together a bunch of different sized rooms all made of extreme right angles and add to that the different conductivity rate of all the materials that the building is made of and it’s a wonder we can keep them at any given temperature range. Now add to all that the fact that the buildings they tend to investigate are old and poorly insulated (if at all). I would be surprised if they didn’t detect a few cold spots.
I can’t help but laugh every time I see them go from room to room with their handy dandy EMF (Electromagnetic Field) detectors. Apparently ghost put out EMF waves. Along with about everything else in the modern world! Cell phones, radios, electric wire, walkie talkies, not to mention radio, TV and any other type of broadcast communication! If it uses an electrical current to work it is creating an electromagnetic field. Yet when the needle jumps and if no obvious electrical appliances are around then it must be a ghost. Just ask any ham radio operator. They will tell you that even a very weak electromagnetic signal can be detected miles away under the right conditions and in this modern age we are being bombarded with them. Detecting an EMF isn’t an indicator of anything except the modern age we live in. If they put themselves inside a Faraday cage and detected a signal that would be something worth investigating!
Now let’s get to the way they record their so called “evidence”. They basically have various cameras set up hoping to catch some strange event while they themselves walk around with voice recorders asking questions. I guess they are hoping to catch a ghost wanting to give an interview.
This is the part that irritates me the most. They will show you a recording of something strange that has happened on a camera and you never see a second angle! The same goes with the voice recorders you only hear it on one. We never hear if the same sound was produced on separate recorders.
This is just common sense. If you catch something on one camera alone it isn’t evidence of anything paranormal! Possibly faulty equipment, faulty recording media, faulty transmission lines, bad angle of a natural occurrence or just plain fraud, but not ghost! A great scientist named Carl Sagan once said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. In other words “Show me the money!”. Just because you can’t explain something doesn’t mean it’s a ghost.
To claim any occurrence is anything but just an abnormality you have to have more than just one recording from a single piece of equipment. If you catch it on one camera it’s just an abnormality, on two cameras at the same angle it becomes interesting. If you capture it on two of the same type of cameras from different angles, THEN you got something to brag about! If you caught it on multiple types of cameras from multiple angles, not only have you something to brag about but you also have some pretty solid scientific evidence.
The same goes for voice recorders. In order for it to mean anything the same occurrence should be caught on multiple recorders. These things only weigh a couple ounces, I’m sure they can handle carrying two.
They have a TV show, I am sure they can afford to have more than one camera trained on the area’s they are observing. I’m sure they realize having more than one recording device per area would greatly (if not completely) cut back on the amount of unexplained events.
While I have no doubt that these people do believe in ghost and also in what they are doing, I suspect fraud on both a conscious and subconscious level. There certainly is motive. You wouldn’t have a very interesting show if nothing happens.
I am not saying that they stage everything that goes on but I think that in some instances they may not have been completely honest in their evaluations.
The list of what they do wrong is endless. I wish I could point out some things they do right because they are likable people who are trying very hard but unfortunately, I cant think of a single thing.
These people do not even have a clue as to how to properly document an event, so conducting anything like a scientific investigation is way out of their league! Put together a physicist, a geologist and an electrical engineer. That would be a team of qualified investigators, not your local Roto-Rooter man.
