Some Advice to OWS

A brief message to the rapists, puppetry artists, and lice groomers occupying various public spaces across our great land:

It is bad policy to represent a political system as having no charm but for robbers and assassins, and no natural origin but in the brains of fools and madmen, when experience has proved that the great danger of the system consists in the peculiar fascination it is calculated to exert on noble and imaginative spirits; on all those who, in the amiable intoxication of youthful benevolence, are apt to mistake their own best virtues and choicest powers for the average qualities and attributes of the human character.

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Edmund Burke, as quoted in Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Reginald James White, 1938.

OK, that's all.  You may return to your raping, puppetry and nit picking, you sorry sons of bitches.

Condensed Explanation of DOJ Raid on Gibson Guitars

Today's Nutshell

The Wall Street Journal:

To put it another way, the real roots of Mr. Obama's economic problems are intellectual and political. The Administration rejected marginal-rate tax cuts that worked in the 1960s and 1980s because they would have helped the rich, in favor of a Keynesian spending binge that has stimulated little except government. More broadly, Democrats purposely used the recession as a political opening to redistribute income, reverse the free-market reforms of the Reagan era, and put government at the commanding heights of economic decision-making.

Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have succeeded in doing all of this despite the growing opposition of the American people, who are now enduring the results. The only path back to robust growth and prosperity is to stop this agenda dead in its tracks, and then by stages to reverse it. These are the economic stakes in November.

Modern Septic System

Parasites, leeches, and blood suckers

Public employee unions:

Public unions' traditional strength - the ability to finance their members' rising pay and benefits through tax increases - has become a liability. Although private-sector unions always have had to worry that consumers will resist rising prices for their goods, public sector unions have benefited from the fact that taxpayers can't choose - they are, in effect, "captive consumers."

At some point, however, voters turn resentful as they sense that:

-- They are underwriting, through their taxes, a level of salary and benefits for government employment that is better than what they and their families have.

-- Government services, from schools to the Department of Motor Vehicles, are not good enough - not for the citizen individually nor the public generally - to justify the high and escalating cost.

We are at that point.

Of course, the author, Peter Sheer, has to ruin a perfectly fine editorial with this complete howler for advice:

Public employee unions need to reboot. The old strategy of cynically buying political influence and excluding the public from decision making has run its course. Unions can rebuild public support by recommitting to an agenda of open government in the public interest. If they don't, they will be further marginalized.

Yeah, right, that will happen.

Crush them, shame them, banish them, soak them in salt.

H/T: Mish

The Next Crisis

The Deepwater Horizon was - and is - the future of deep water drilling. It was an ultra-deepwater dynamic position semi-submersible oil rig. Deep water drilling is the future of hydrocarbon exploitation.

Here is a picture of a similar ultra-deepwater rig - the Deepwater Nautilus under dry tow:

These mammoth ships are the equivalent of the Saturn Vs, Space Shuttles and International Space Station. Designed to work under extreme and uncertain conditions and requiring the highest levels of engineering and brawn to make them successful. These things require the purest combinaiton of American white collar and blue collar skill. It is damned dangerous work. It always has been and it always will be no matter how many rules and regulations you write or procedures you put in place.

Here are the type of rigs is use today:



But what they do is not new; where they do it, in the deep waters of the Gulf, is.

Seventy-seven years of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1933, the first well drilled on state offshore lands was drilled at Creole, LA, approximately, 3,000 ft. off the beach in 12 ft. of water.

In 1947 Kerr McGhee drilled the first well out of sight of land in Ship Shoal Block 52.

In 2001, BP and Exxon announced the largest deepwater oil discovery to date in the Gulf of Mexico, located in 5,640 ft. of water, called Thunder Horse.

In 2002, Marathon and TotalFinaElf marked another milestone for deepwater operations by successfully installing a natural gas pipeline tie in 7,209 ft. of water.

Within the span of these milestones, approximately 4,000 oil platforms and drilling rigs have been erected.

Seventy-seven years. Here's a schematic of the total rigs under operation:



It is unreasonable and simply stupid to be surprised that such endeavors can be subject to total failure and destruction. You'd think that Deepwater Horizon was the first rig attempting to tap into the Earth, only to be snapped in half and pulled into her remorseless blue maw.

A tragic accident, human stupidity, a work of Fate, the manifestation of some enviro-terrorist plot, annular gas migration through the cement sheath, the fruition of an Al Quds in Venezuela training exercise.

As they say, who the fuck knows?

Many, many could bes and now we are told that until we understand what it could be, it must stop. Man must stop. Industry must stop. The rigs anchored up the rivers. The permits cancelled. The roustabouts, the toolpushers, the roughnecks, the mudengineers, the derrickhands, and the engineers are to be laid off, fired, or not hired. Hands must be wrung. Souls searched. Tears shed. Lobbyists deployed. Speeches written. Subpoenas issued. Accusations hurled. Suits filed.

Empty caskets buried.

11 empty caskets. Men lost in the conflagration. Their bodies consumed by fire and water.

Jason Anderson - Toolpusher

Dewey Revette - Driller

Donald Clark - Asst. Driller

Stephen Curtis - Asst. Driller

Dale Burkeen - Crane Operator

Roy Kemp - Derrickhand

Karl Kleppinger - Floorhand

Shane Roshto - Floorhand

Adam Weise - Floorhand

Gordon Jones - Mud Engineer

Blair Manuel - Chemical Engineer

Rest in peace.

Let's remember, too, that 115 people made it off that rig. Most of them will recover and they'll head back out onto some rig and face the same catastrophic risk again.

There have been many accidents, much loss of life, defilement of the environment. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed 109 oil platforms and 5 drilling rigs.

According to one report, workers in pursuit of oil and natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico have been dying in accidents at the rate of one every 45 days since the mid-1990s.

And what is President Obama’s reaction?

New exploration and drilling must stop.

Really? For how long?

A transparently political reaction allowing him to avoid meeting his half-assed policy of opening new offshore areas to drilling. If he was truly concerned, he’d call for a moratorium and shutting down of all drilling in the Gulf. The accident has nothing to do with new drilling or exploration. It was a drilling accident, involving existing drilling techniques failing under human action or Earthly force, presumably being put into practice on any other one of those 4,000 platforms glowing yellow on that map above. So the President's initial reaction is like all his other reactions - turn a one time event into a crisis of indeterminate length.

Of course the disaster requires the best forensic response and the cleanup, but a moratorium on new drilling and exploration is irrelevant to the accident. Given the outcomes of all the other crises this country has been through the past two years, it would not be surprising to the complete federal takeover of the oil drilling industry.

The girls running the administration's departments of concern are “frightened.”

"It is of grave concern," David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press. "I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling."

Then get the fuck out of the way, Mr. Kennedy. Frightened and mind boggled. Really?

And of course Mother Nature’s priests are creaming their pants over the thought of broad scale destruction of the Louisiana coast.

"It’s quite possible this will end up being worse than the Valdez in terms of environmental impact since it seems like BP will be unable to cap the spill for months. In terms of total quantity of oil released, it seems this will probably fall short of Exxon Valdez. But because of the habitat, the environmental impact will be worse," John Hocevar, oceans campaign director for Greenpeace USA, told MSNBC Thursday.

Or this:

"There are grave environmental concerns which this horrific spill has highlighted," said Bob Deans, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which opposed the policy. "We need a time out on any action to go forward with new offshore drilling because this has obviously raised a bunch of questions. We need a full comprehensive independent investigation."

Hopefully, it will take years to complete the investigation, Mr. Deans thought but didn’t say. Better get moving on those fund raising letters and multi-million dollar ad campaigns excoriating Big Oil and Fat America.

In the world SBD inhabits, the President would stand before the country and announce that 11 good men lost their lives on that platform; 115 others survived because of their training and the hard effort of local fisherman and the USCG; they worked at the forefront of entrepreneurialism and technological prowess to feed our nation's future; their industry is of national strategic importance; and their sacrifice will not be sacrificed to hand wringing, political hackery and bureaucratic immobilization at the hands of the enviro-religious. But we don't have that President. And we don't live in that fantasy world.

Sunday of Shame

Wreckers of the Economy Will Be Rooted Out!

"Counter-Revolutionary Wreckers"

The Enlightened Redneck:

The bureaucrats and politicians in Washington are out to get Toyota because of ongoing recalls of the Japanese automaker’s popular vehicles. The House held one hearing yesterday, and another is scheduled for today. Toyota also is target of a U.S. criminal probe and a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.

This morning SBD chanced to hear a caller on a radio talk show wonder in dismay about why the Japanese CEO of Toyota had not yet committed suicide, but, short of that, he allowed that he would be satisfied to see long prison sentences for Toyota America's executive suite.

Yes, bring on the show trials!

The WSJ's Kimberly Strassel suggests that the government's aggressive stance is quite possibly spinning out control and the pols are nervous about it:

Yet having revved up the drama, the administration is now all but obliged to take action against Toyota, say with civil penalties. Mr. Rockefeller and other Democrats with ties to the carmaker are under pressure to get rough. And if Toyota bungles Washington as badly as it did the initial recall PR, this could go on a long time.

Toyota has not yet laid off a single one of its 34,000 U.S. workers, but that may change. Only a year ago, Democrats were wailing about economic damage if GM or Chrysler went bust. They forestalled that with government ownership. They, and Toyota, are now dealing with the all-too-easy-to-predict political behavior that followed such meddling in the private economy.

Yes, Toyota's products cettainly have a problem and they may or may not have taken it seriously. They are now. And they are attempting to fix it. And it will cost them a few billion in the process and quite a few unionized floors in order to ensure a quality product going forward. But that is all irrelevent. They opened the closet and hanging there for them is but one three piece suit of corporate greed, corruption and obeisance. The Obamocracy is their tailor. When all is said and done, Toyota will dress strictly to the left.