Nuke the Gulf

See the update to the preceding post.

Perspective on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Oil has been spilling for 45 days. The estimated rate is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 gallons per day. That's a lot of oil. (And a pretty loose estimate.) So, that's somewhere between 22.5 million and 45 million gallons so far. Horrifying!

But ten times as much oil was deliberately spilled from Kuwaiti wells by retreating Iraqi forces in the 1991 Gulf War. Ixtoc I spilled 140 million gallons in 1979. The collision between Atlantic Empress and Aegean Captain, also in 1979, spilled nearly ninety million gallons. Those figures are taken from a slideshow at Popular Mechanics: 10 Biggest Oil Spills in History.

Meanwhile, in Alabama,

Gov. Bob Riley complained that there are hundreds of private boats ready to get out in the waters with skimmers to try to protect the shoreline from oil. But they're waiting on authorization from the U.S. Coast Guard to be able to do so.

And in the White House, a panicky Obama is shutting down much of the industry in the Gulf. He has no idea of what to do, but knows that he must be seen to be doing something, and if he can do something that will damage the economy even further, then that's the way he will go.

A dyspeptic observer might say: Change!… Bush Restored the Iraqi Marshes – Obama Destroyed the US Marshes.

On a personal note, I recall that when I was a kid in the 1950's, a visit to the beach always entailed removal of black stuff from the feet. Kerosene was the usual solvent. We didn't have sunblock in those days, either, so fun in the sun was always followed by painful peeling sunburn and tarry feet. We loved it anyway.

Update: 3 brilliant comments by Bruce Hayden at Althouse. Start with this one.

Another update: Nuke it. Dan Foster at NRO:

It was September of 1966, and gas was gushing uncontrollably from the wells in the Bukhara province of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. But the Reds, at the height of their industrial might, had a novel solution. They drilled nearly four miles into the sand and rock of the Kyzyl Kum Desert, and lowered a 30-kiloton nuclear warhead — more than half-again as large as “Little Boy,” the crude uranium bomb dropped over Hiroshima — to the depths beneath the wellhead. With the pull of a lever, a fistful of plutonium was introduced to itself under enormous pressure, setting off the chain reaction that starts with E = MC² and ends in Kaboom! The ensuing blast collapsed the drill channel in on itself, sealing off the well.

The Soviets repeated the trick four times between 1966 and 1979, using payloads as large as 60 kilotons to choke hydrocarbon leaks. Now, as the Obama administration stares into the abyss of the Deepwater Horizon spill, and a slicker of sweet, medium crude blankets the Gulf of Mexico, slouching its way toward American beaches and wetlands, Russia’s newspaper of record is calling on the president to consider this literal “nuclear option.”

In the NYT: Nuclear Option on Gulf Oil Spill? No Way, U.S. Says. Is it a crisis, or not? We can do some things, but we'll have to see environmental impact statements for those berms, and we can't have just anyone going out in boats with skimmers. Skimmer skippers and crew must be properly trained. That could take months.

More from Foster, at The Corner:

a properly-executed 20-30 kiloton detonation beneath a solid layer of impermeable rock would let virtually no fallout escape into the waters of the Gulf. I am surprised that Green, like Wonkette, is treating one itty-bitty A-bomb as Vishnu, Destroyer of Worlds. Bikini Atoll, which was nuked to the high heavens in the 40s and 50s (twenty times, all told) has some radioactive coconuts to be sure, but is even as we speak safely inhabitable, and the waters around it are no worse for wear. In the Gulf case, BP has a detailed knowledge of the stratigraphic situation down there, and already has two ideal delivery sites in the form of the relief wells. The U.S. government has 60-plus years expertise in sub-surface nuclear detonations. Put all that together and this isn't "crazy." This is workable.

I wonder if the nuclear option is off the table because our nuclear weapons have not been maintained. They have not been tested in decades. Who's to know? Maybe none of them work any more, and Deepwater Horizon is calling our bluff.

Generation gap

Evil mutant rises from the dead ...

… to threaten industry and prosperity. First, it was Waxman-Markey; then it was Boxer-Kerry; now it's Kerry-Lieberman; but it's all cap 'n' trade.



Left to right, Kerry, Obama, Lieberman. Al Gore is out of the frame.

If it passes, it will be the American economy that's the zombie. But the Chicago Carbon Exchange will be doing fine.

Monorail dog

While looking for LOLcats for the preceding post, I came across this:



which reminds me of someone.

Not opposed to immigration ...

... opposed to crime. Illegal immigration is illegal. Even LOLcats can do tautologies. Sneaky cat is sneaky:



Illegal alien is illegal. It's not hard to understand. I'm old enough to remember when legal aliens were required to register at the Post Office annually.

Jan Brewer tells Obama that it's no laughing matter:



We are unwilling to enforce our own immigration laws. The Mexican government has much stricter immigration laws, which they enforce. J. Michael Waller in 2006: Mexico's Immigration Law: Let's Try It Here at Home.

Twitter phishing on the phone

Cory Doctorow thought he had all his ducks in a row.

Even so.

Via Jerry Pournelle's mail.

"Better late than never, dear"

The Sunday afternoon concert comes on Monday evening this week. Here's Janey Cutler, of Glasgow, Scotland. (Via Reality Rocks.)



Someone's already put up a website.

Bad language warning

I put that language warning right in the title so it would not be missed. This is ugly stuff.

Alternate title: Democrats are such lovely people.

At Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion:

Voices of Hate

There are many voices of hate, but the voices most ignored by the mainstream media come not from Tea Parties or maligned conservative groups, but from the intolerant left.

After someone who did commercial voice-overs for Geico was fired for leaving threatening messages at FreedomWorks (which has supported the Tea Parties), a call went out for others to leave threatening messages.

As a result, FreedomWorks has been inundated with threatening phone calls, leading blogger Tabitha Hale, who also works at FreedomWorks, to put together this video (via Right Wing News):

In light of GeicoGate and the recent accusations from the media regarding the violent rhetoric of the conservative movement, I've taken the liberty of editing together the voicemails and emails we've received as a result of DC Douglas' call to contact FreedomWorks. Here's the result.

WARNING: This is intense. Violent language is an understatement. I haven't censored - only edited to remove names and phone numbers.

Video at the link. When they say that the Tea Partiers are racist and violent, it's projection. And, of course, deflection, distraction, and deception.

Billions of 1099 forms

Lunacy in Washington, sheer lunacy. Via Reynolds, TaxProf quotes CNN:

CNN: ObamaCare's Massive, Hidden Tax Change

An all-but-overlooked provision of the health reform law is threatening to swamp U.S. businesses with a flood of new tax paperwork.

Section 9006 of the health care bill -- just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document -- mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year.

The stealth change radically alters the nature of 1099s and means businesses will have to issue millions of new tax documents each year.

Right now, the IRS Form 1099 is used to document income for individual workers other than wages and salaries. Freelancers receive them each year from their clients, and businesses issue them to the independent contractors they hire.

But under the new rules, if a freelance designer buys a new iMac from the Apple Store, they'll have to send Apple a 1099. A laundromat that buys soap each week from a local distributor will have to send the supplier a 1099 at the end of the year tallying up their purchases.

The bill makes two key changes to how 1099s are used. First, it expands their scope by using them to track payments not only for services but also for tangible goods. Plus, it requires that 1099s be issued not just to individuals, but also to corporations.

Taken together, the two seemingly small changes will require millions of additional forms to be sent out.

TaxProf has more links. Warren Meyer has a post: Horrible New Paperwork Requirement Slipped into Health Care Bill.

In the email this morning:
I guess we had to pass the bill to find out what was in it.

I wonder who inserted this provision, and what in the world it is supposed to have to do with health care or health insurance, or anything but destroying the private sector.

Eyjafjallajökull

That's the volcano in Iceland that's causing so much havoc. Looks like this:



They are saying it may erupt again. This, you see, is geoengineering, as done on the large scale, by Gaia herself. Piddling plans of self-styled climatologists to launch particles into the atmosphere to raise the Earth's albedo, to block those deadly warming rays from the Sun, are shown up as the silliness they always were. If we get another Tambora event ("eighteen hundred and froze to death") out of this volcano, will the cap 'n' traders and greenies finally realize that warmer is better? I expect not. There's too much money already invested in the contrary view.

Waco, Reno, Clinton

So the Waco massacre of the Branch Davidian children was not entirely Janet Reno's doing, after all. She ran the notion past President Bill Clinton, first. There's a fairly vigorous discussion going on at Althouse.

Morgan Freeberg makes one of those non-obvious connections

Warning to Young People. Go, listen, read. And get off my lawn!

QuickTime is a pain in the neck. What do you do?

Sooner or later you find this page: How do I stop QuickTime from playing audio files in my browser? Follow the instructions, and then, ahhh, the sigh of relief.

I was about ready to go to California, find Steve Jobs, and, well, I won't continue with that. Programs should not highjack file associations. I say that unequivocally. Furthermore, QuickTime is not a good player of mp3 files. It stutters too much. And what good is that, I ask you?

Apple, mend your ways. And your software.

Sunday afternoon concert: Katie

I suppose you'd want to imagine a man singing this, since it was written by Jimmy McCarthy. Yet this version by Mary Black is the canonical one, to my mind anyway. Lyrics. Lit-crit explication is beyond me, as with much of the modern Irish pop music. Too densely personal, too obscure, for easy comprehension. I like the sound of it.

Obama surrenders the high ground, without a fight

Three things.

An open letter from Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan, and 25 other astronauts, about Obama's new direction for NASA. They don't like it.

Charles Krauthammer says,

We are seeing the abolition of the manned space program.

When Neil Armstrong speaks out, that’s an event. This is a guy who is the most self-effacing American hero in our history. He could have been Lindbergh and he became J.D. Salinger.

And now he speaks out in an open letter together with [Eugene] Cernan, the last guy that walked on the moon, and James Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13. And they are saying that the program that Obama has abolished — has cancelled — is essentially the end of man in space. It turns NASA into an R&D agency for pie-in-the-sky ideas like having humans on asteroids and ends its role as the agency that actually gets us into space, even low-Earth orbit and back.

Obama spoke about — we’ve done the moon, so we are going to do asteroids and Mars. This is total pie in the sky. On what rocket? With what space capsule? With what simulators? With what training program? There’s nothing here of substance.

And when Kennedy committed us "in this decade," as he said, he meant it within his presidency. He intended to be — he expected he’d be — president until January 1969. Obama is talking about 2025, 2030. All of this is total speculation.

And what it does is it ends our human dominance in space, which we had for 50 years. We have no way to get into earth orbit. We’re going to have to hitch a ride on the Russians who are charging us extraordinary rates and are only going to increase that.…

All the private stuff [launching humans into space] is complete speculation. What we’re doing is we're ceding the certainty of access into space. We are not going to have it. The Russians will have it. The Chinese will have it.

We spent tens of billions on the space station and spent three decades in constructing it. We're not going to have any way to get there....

And we'll look up in a decade and there’s going to be a lunar base ... [there are] not going to be Americans on it.

Sarah Palin, on Facebook, asks,

"Mr. President, is a strong America a problem?"

Yesterday at 10:09am

Asked this week about his faltering efforts to advance the Middle East peace process, President Obama did something remarkable. In front of some 47 foreign leaders and hundreds of reporters from all over the world, President Obama said that “whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.”

Whether we like it or not? Most Americans do like it. America’s military may be one of the greatest forces for good the world has ever seen, liberating countless millions from tyranny, slavery, and oppression over the last 234 years. As a dominant superpower, the United States has won wars hot and cold; our military has advanced the cause of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan and kept authoritarian powers like Russia and China in check.

It is in America’s and the world’s interests for our country to remain a dominant military superpower, but under our great country’s new leadership that dominance seems to be slipping away. President Obama has ended production of the F-22, the most advanced fighter jet this country has ever built. He’s gutted our missile defense program by eliminating shield resources in strategic places including Alaska. And he’s ended the program to build a new generation of nuclear weapons that would have ensured the reliability of our nuclear deterrent well into the future. All this is in the context of the country’s unsustainable debt that could further limit defense spending. As one defense expert recently explained:

The president is looking to eliminate the last vestiges of the Reagan-era buildup. Once the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are “ended” (not “won”), the arms control treaties signed, and defense budgets held at historic lows while social entitlements and debt service rise to near-European levels, the era of American superpower will have passed.

The truth is this: by his actions we see a president who seems to be much more comfortable with an American military that isn’t quite so dominant and who feels the need to apologize for America when he travels overseas. Could it be a lack of faith in American exceptionalism? The fact is that America and our allies are safer when we are a dominant military superpower – whether President Obama likes it or not.

And the question is, Are the first two things related to the third thing?

Private space development would be great. But what Krauthammer says about ceding the certainty of space is not speculative.

Will NASA and the FAA and the rest of the government get out of the way of private space efforts? Encouragement would be too much to ask for.

Update: Harrison Schmitt, astronaut and US Senator, has more to say:

“I am very much of the mind that America can’t afford to be second-best in space. It’s the new ocean. It would be as if the United States decided in the last 200 years or so not to have a Navy. The oceans were where the competition between nations existed, and now that competition has moved into space. We should not be afraid of it. We should embrace it.”

Via Althouse. One of the commenters at the linked CapTimes article says,

"Wait, so here's an area where Obama would just as soon not spend $230 billion (likely more, because, remember, the shuttle program ultimately came in at a 55% cost over-run), and the same people who scream about the exploding deficit are saying we need the program, we need to spend the money? This just proves that nothing Obama could do would appease these people."

This is the kind of thinking that comes from someone who would eat the seed corn, or skip the oil changes to buy spinner hubcaps and mag wheels. Speaking of wheels, I'm inclined to agree that NASA has been spinning its wheels for years, as a result of being run by pork-minded bureaucrats who have lost sight of the mission, but what's called for is not abandonment of the mission, but a return to it. As I said in an earlier post, "Men will go to space; but no law of nature requires that they be Western, or free."

There are a couple of fairly zingy comments by yours truly on that Althouse thread.

Hope you like your house the way it is

Remodeling will become much more expensive, starting April 22. Small contractors might as well close up shop now. Neo-neocon has the story, and the comments: Next on Obama’s hit list: small contractors.

I can't recall another American President who thought that prosperity was a Bad Thing, and worked so actively against it.

I think I have finally found the W.C. Fields movie I was looking for — and its name is "Poppy"

Cascading absurdities, grandiloquent orotundity (or should that be "orotund grandiloquence"), a "talking" dog, a shell game, a fair amount of booze, "Purple Bark Sarsaparilla," without which "this mundane sphere of ours would be barren, bleak, and dank," a pretty girl and a romance, a highly unlikely plot device, a carnival, a certain amount of conniving, not too much bitterness, and the closing line, a bit of fatherly advice to the dear adopted daughter who is about to go straight, "Never give a sucker an even break."

I do not seem to be in agreement with the reviewers at IMDB, who regard this as a minor Fields flicker. The ones they cite as superior seem to me to suffer from excessive bitterness and cynicism. This one is sweet almost all the way through, with just enough bitter to make it tangy.

And the bit with the cigar-box cello and the hat:

Oh dear!

Sunday afternoon concert, second set

A couple of Henry Lawson's poems, set to music. Get out your hankies.

Priscilla Herdman sings "Do You Think That I Do Not Know." Sometimes I allude to this as if everyone else knew it, too. If you hear me say "in the days when our hair was brown," I am referring to this.



Another: Walter McDonough sings "The Outside Track." No video for this. I looked all over Youtube for a version I liked at least as much as this, but could not find one. Full text here, including some bits that Walter does not sing. I love the phrase, "the last of the careless men."

Sunday afternoon concert

Today, ladies and gents, Victoria Jackson!

Do you remember Victoria Jackson from Saturday Night Live? Here she is, to sing for you again. This is a poignant little ditty called "There's a Communist Living in the White House." Let's hear it for Victoria, folks!



Thanks, Victoria!

Potatoes come from Sycasuse

Speaking of potatoes. It was a big deal when Dan Quayle put an "e" on a potato. And why did he do that? He was "working from an inaccurate flash card prepared by a teacher," that's why. What a situation. Embarrass the teacher? Ask the student to add a letter? He should have embarrassed the teacher, we know that now.

But no teacher handed Barack Obama a flash card when he tried to spell "Syracuse" and failed. He did that all on his own.

I am the egg man ...

… and I'm hungry! Watch out, potatoes!
Sort of like the man in the crescent moon, only hungry. Looking at those taters with that big yellow eye, mouth wide open. You see it or you don't.

Klavan introduces a much-needed innovation

An actual BS detector that rings an alarm bell. He calls it the "crap alarm." Here it is in action, applied to Obama speaking. Oh, did I need to say more? Speaking about his "health care reform." Which, as you no doubt recall, has nothing to do with health care, but much to do with insurance, and the IRS, which is going to withhold the refunds of people who do not comply with its unConstitutional mandate.


I must look up Klavan's books, one of these days.

Animals that live without oxygen

"It's life, but not as we know it, Jim!"

"O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!"
"There are more things in Heaven and earth …"

Deep under the Mediterranean Sea small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by 'poisonous' sulphides. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology report the existence of multicellular organisms (new members of the group Loricifera), showing that they are alive, metabolically active, and apparently reproducing in spite of a complete absence of oxygen.

Rand Simberg says, "Pretty cool. What does this say about prospects for extraterrestrial life?"

Could these be survivors from the Archaean, before photosynthesizing plants gave Earth its oxygen-rich atmosphere? (Not likely, but considering the next paragraph …)

This month's Analog has a related story, "At Last the Sun" by Richard Foss. It must have been written before this discovery was announced.

Update: Author Richard Foss has stopped by to comment that he did indeed write the story months before the discovery was announced. It's a good 'un, so go ye forth and buy that Analog.

Stossel on Hayek's Road

The Road to Serfdom, that is. One of the necessary books. At Amazon in text, or on the web, illustrated and condensed. John Stossel discussed it for an hour — television hour, that is, about 44 minutes. UK Libertarian has the whole thing, in parts.