Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Five years after Federal Flooding, 100,000 New Orleanians have yet to return ~Jonathan Tilove

4 Days 2 Year 5:
A Photographic Journey
~NOLAFemmes


Still long on charm, short on remorse ~James Gill

First catch from the Gulf: Is the seafood safe?
~Rick Jervis

Gulf's Dolphins: "Man Needs To Make Right Their Waters"
~Georgianne Neinaber


No guarantees wild well won’t spew oil again~David J. Williams
~A wild well blowout in Assumption Parish stopped on its own about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, allowing contractors to prepare to cap the well that had sprayed oil, gas, sand other matter high into the sky for almost two weeks, authorities said.

1 comment:

Horatio Algeranon said...

Georgianne Nienaber asks " What is a journalist to do when claims are made, but no one will offer up any facts, leads, names or documents to prove the claims made by bloggers who visited the same area in previous weeks and had no documentation, but published anyway?

I left days before my scheduled departure, completely demoralized by lawyers, do-gooders and eco-activists who seemingly have no interest in a rigorous quest for the truth. These sycophants and carpetbaggers have thrown veracity out the window in favor of money, book sales, political expediency, possible movie deals, and sensationalism.

Why has this happened? A friend suggested to me that it is because reporting on this catastrophe has been lacking a spiritual dimension. There is no doubt that the BP river of oil has taken a terrible spiritual toll on the people of the Gulf coast and beyond. "When grief levels are high, people do strange things," my friend suggested.

When people are running scared they will do anything to protect themselves."

//end Nienaber quotes

Why has this happened?

Horatio would guess that after all the conflicting information (including half-truths, false-assurances, obfuscation and outright lies) in this case, ordinary folks (The "small people", as BP's President calls them) simply do not know who to believe.

They are not sure what the truth actually is (for good reason), but there is one thing they are pretty certain of: that what they have been told so far is not "the whole truth and nothing but the truth".

It certainly did not help that their own government issued a report just a couple days after the well was "capped" that assured everyone that most of the oil was already(!) gone and that what remained was little to worry about.

One need not be a scientist to question the accuracy, validity and timing of that report -- though those who do have scientific training (eg, FSU's Ian McDonald) view the report as little more than PR "spin", essentially a pathetic "joke" from a scientific standpoint.