on living off campus

So I've been living in a four-bedroom house just off campus for about a week now. Moved in on Thursday, built some furniture, ordered a wireless adapter for my desktop... and then waited. And waited. And got scared half to death by the tornado sirens on the 17th.

Then I learned the most awesome thing about this house: it's right next to High Street, so I can just catch a 2 bus or walk to basically anything from Old North Columbus to downtown.

And I did so all weekend, going to Blue Danube on Saturday night and Bodega on Sunday. That night, my loans (minus tuition) finally got deposited into my checking account; the next night, I paid for a 100-swipe meal plan for the quarter; and last night, I chilled out and reinstalled Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Naturally, being a college student and therefore having the worst sleeping habits known to man, I managed to fall asleep at 4 AM last night and woke up around 10. (Thankfully, my only class of the day - Political Science 245 - started at 2:30!) Today introduced the most unspeakable horror of the off-campus experience: being put on hold by utility companies for half an hour just to arrange to receive bills in my name. In my case, all my housemates are splitting utilities, such that I get to pay the electric bill and, accordingly, get to deal with FirstEnergy.

Thankfully, that was over shortly before the next tornado-warning storm flew through, during which my housemates and I decided it would be funny to imitate the sound the nearest siren makes. (Lesson learned: my sister can hold a note a damn sight better than I can.) Then it was off to the first College Dems meeting at the Union, where I met a few new people, talked to a few people, and signed up for tabling [note: basically, tabling is the foundation of political organization - you register voters, talk to swing voters, sign up volunteers, and can even fundraise] on the Oval on Friday afternoon. (I could've signed up for Thursday, but then I'd have no free time between Bio and British Lit...)

After that, it's back to the Union for another College Dems event that afternoon, the Progressive Involvement Fair; more textbook rentals, and a stop at Barnes and Noble for what I just can't get for a fourth of the price  anywhere else; shopping at CVS for a new razor; a party at my house for several hours; and then we're off to week 2! (And it's all so much easier now that I don't have to walk the entire width of the 'Shoe, plus the RPAC, just to get to classes... because I have a bike!)

on kittens

Sometimes I'm just going to post a picture and not type at length for 3 pages... this is one of those times. This is the newest addition to the Waltrip cat family, Rasta, and she's five months old! (And still as hyper as she was three months ago)

on the deepwater horizon oil spill

Pictured here: the spill as of May 1, already to that point containing a whopping 300,000 barrels (12 million gallons) of crude oil covering 6,500 to 24,000 square kilometers - in other words, an area ranging from the Ile-de-France district to the state of New Jersey.

Despicable.

Ridiculously self-serving.

Hideously unable to man up for their own failures.

And I'm not even talking about BP, Transocean or Haliburton yet.

The Minerals Management Service, a government agency I'm sure no one had ever heard of before the Deepwater Horizon rig suddenly combusted and sank in a time period from April 20 to 22, is at fault primarily for outright neglect in their oversight of the construction and operation of that very rig. In particular, the agency made several decisions almost in defiance of their raison d'etre - regulation of energy sources in the respective outer continental shelves of the country, corresponding to an area approximately 200 nautical miles (370 km) from the coastline.

First: MMS decided in 2009 not to require the usage of acoustically controlled BOPs, blowout preventers, to guard against exactly this kind of uncontrolled spill.

Second, after a 2004 report calling into question the reliability of those exact valves when electronically controlled, regulators at MMS utterly failed to recommend any other fail-safe mechanisms, meaning that exactly those unreliable electrically-controlled BOPs were put into use in the rig.

Third, still in 2009 and prior to the appointment of the current director of the agency, and in a move more expected from the fourth Futurama film than from a federal government agency, MMS gave BP outright the ability to flout federal environmental policy in granting them a categorical exclusion waiver, ironically concluding that the spill risk was "minimal or nonexistent". What's worse about this waiver is the fact that hundreds of them have been granted for offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf! If Deepwater Horizon failed when everyone but the NOAA was pretending it wouldn't, who's to say any other rig in the Gulf is structurally sound

Speaking of which, this was reported in the New York Times yesterday:

The federal Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species — and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf.

Under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Minerals Management Service is required to get permits to allow drilling where it might harm endangered species or marine mammals."

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is partly responsible for protecting endangered species and marine mammals. It has said on repeated occasions that drilling in the gulf affects these animals, but the minerals agency since January 2009 has approved at least three huge lease sales, 103 seismic blasting projects and 346 drilling plans. Agency records also show that permission for those projects and plans was granted without getting the permits required under federal law. 

In addition to all of that gross oversight, as if it wasn't enough:

The Minerals Management Service, or M.M.S., also routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers who raised concerns about the safety and the environmental impact of certain drilling proposals in the gulf and in Alaska, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists.

So we've got a government agency supposedly overseeing the "safe" regulation of offshore energy.... routinely making decisions that do not, in any way, come off as ensuring the safety of anything but the cash reserves of oil companies. (In addition to all of this, several of their employees and chairmen have either held ties with the oil/natural gas industries or have committed multiple ethics violations on the job, including what the Washington Post described in 2008 as such:

Government officials in charge of collecting billions of dollars worth of royalties from oil and gas companies accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drug use and illicit sex with employees of the energy firms, federal investigators reported yesterday.

Investigators from the Interior Department's inspector general's office said more than a dozen employees, including the former director of the oil royalty program, took meals, ski trips, sports tickets and golf outings from industry representatives. The report alleges that the former director, Gregory W. Smith, also netted more than $30,000 from improper outside work. 

Now this tirade against the MMS doesn't mean I'm saying Haliburton, BP and TransOcean are free of blame, because they most assuredly are not - not in a million years. Especially disgusting in the wake of everything - the explosion, the sinking, the rage of the public, and every revelation printed by the Associated Press - is the inability of anyone in each of those three corporations to actually take any blame for the explosion.

From the Associated Press: Oil Spill Testimony: The Blame Game

And from, of all places, the Daily Show: There Will Be Blame

BP is blaming Transocean for the failure of the rig itself... Transocean, in turn, are blaming Haliburton for the failure of the underwater components of the rig, specifically cement and casing... and Haliburton and BP, in turn, failed outright to attempt any further course of action prior to the rig's explosion.

Basically, everyone's blaming each other for something where they share basically equal amounts of blame (already substantial), the MMS has routinely seen levels of corruption reminiscent of the Harding administration throughout its existence, and the President's pissed that everyone's acting like a baby.

Kill the music industry? Try killing the oil industry.