Amateur Flyover Video: BP Slick Covers Dolphins and Whales
Around the 6:33 mark, the narrator/filmer, John Wathen, comes to a pod of 36 dolphins stranded in oil, “struggling just to breathe”. Another 18 are discovered later, and then A GODDMAN FUCKING SPERM WHALE TRAPPED IN OIL UP TO ITS GODDAMN BLOWHOLE. “Across his back we could see red patches of crude as if he’d been basted for boiling,” says the narrator, before cutting to ANOTHER pod of dead and dying dolphins.
It’s one of the saddest things I have ever seen, and makes me wonder why, if God exists, He hasn’t struck down humanity yet. Or as my buddy Tim put it, “we’re the new dinosaurs, this is our greed-driven asteroid.”
Fuck you BP. fuck you Tony Hayward. Fuck You Carl-Henric Svanberg. I hope all of you die slow, miserable deaths. I hope the good people of the Gulf have the capacity to kidnap one of you, stuff you into a burlap sack and keelhaul you through the muck before exercising their new SCOTUS-decided individual rights to bear arms.
And for that matter, FUCK YOU US GOVERNMENT for letting BP take the lead in this, for allowing them to harass and chase of journalists, for allowing them to continue to lie and cover-up, and for believing them in the first place when they have 760 fucking safety violations.
Fuck all ya’ll. YOU FUCKING SUCK SHIT YOU ASSHOLE FUCKING SHITBAGS.
June 30th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
And fuck you, us. We’re the ones consuming all that oil.
June 30th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
ya know, for a variety of reasons, i reject that argument, although i respect where it comes from. I’m going to post on it, but here’s my rationale:
1: many of us (most of us?) do not remember a time when there was no such thing as an internal combustion engine. we had no say in the decisions that were made in the 1920s and on. So yes, we’re the ones using all that oil, but you might as well blame a crackbaby for being addicted to crack. It was like this when we got here!
2: Most of “us” don’t get to set energy policy: the most we can do is harass our politicians to do the right thing. We saw how well that worked out for a public option, for financial reform, and for the Iraq War. We may be a representative democracy, but it’s often not that representative.
3: pursuant to 2, if the government would really get behind alternatives perhaps we wouldn’t be so trapped by THEIR choices. Reagan’s the obvious goat for doing away with Carter’s tax credits for solar, and god knows the republicans are a joke, but the cast of the energy farce includes democrats like Kennedy (anti-wind power in Massachusetts), Rockefeller (big coal supporter), Dingell (has opposed raising fuel efficiency standards for YEARS), and Landrieu (still shilling for oil drilling despite what’s happened to her state).
3: while all oil production is by definition a dirty and polluting industry, it wasn’t “us” that forced BP to sidestep safety regulations (to the tune of 760 violations in the past 5 years compared to exxon’s 1), it wasn’t “us” that gave BP a waiver on an environmental impact study, and it wasn’t “us” that decided that cleanup efforts in the Gulf were better spent on cover-up efforts. that was pretty much all BP, with a helping hand from the US Department of the Interior and the Mineral Management Service. And to piggyback on that, there were plenty of “us” who objected vocally and publicly to the appointment of Ken “industry friend” Salazar to lead the department, but nobody listened. and when ken appointed Sylvia Baca to a deputy admin position at MMS, none of “us” learned about it until after the disaster. In fact, Obama AND Salazar told “us” specifically they would clean up Interior, and they didn’t.
and that doesn’t even begin to touch on land use policies (again, set by political elites) that encourage sprawl, the role of various industries in encouraging waste (like when the plastic bag industry managed to kill a proposed anti-plastic bag law here in Philly).
So yeah, we bear no small responsibility in this disaster: but not everyone is a leader, which is why so many of “us” depend on “them” to make the right decisions moving forward. we are constrained by the choices made for us, often by people who have a personal financial investment in the status quo.