Editorial: Hey BP, F**K YOU!

From the NY Times:

BP’s new chief executive said Monday that its rivals and the media had helped cause a climate of fear during the summer when the oil giant’s blown-out Gulf of Mexico well caused the worst ever oil spill in the United States.

I like the sentence above. This WAS the worst ever oil spill in the U.S....EVER. So if the public wants to be fearful, if fisherman along the Gulf Coast want this foreign oil giant to be appropriately contrite and if environmentalists and people who just generally care about stuff want to be pissed off, I think it's properly warranted here.

I love how BP went for the Sarah Palin counterattack of blaming their own stupidity and malfeasance on the "media."

Anyway, I'm outraged by this. Not because I oppose offshore drilling (I do), but because when you f**k something up so royally that it can be called the "worst ever" of anything, you need to suck it up and just admit that you're the asshole, not everyone else.

Birds Die All the Time (Alternative Title: A Preview of BP's Next Shameless Excuse)

From Marginal Revolution (again), Here are the number of birds killed annually by a variety of sources.

Number of birds killed by the BP oil spill: at least 2,188 and counting.
Number of birds killed by wind farms: 10,000-40,000 annually.
Number of birds killed by cars: 80 million annually.
Number of birds killed by cats: Hundreds of millions to 1 billion annually.


There was also a fascinating if depressing recent New Yorker piece about the mass-killing of song birds in Europe, millions a year in Italy, Malta and Cyprus.

More insanity from BP

Fast Company reports that BP has now taken to photoshopping photos of its response command centers to make them look busier. In other words, they're adding in more people, more monitors, etc. Well, as with all of the shady shit that BP has tried to pull since the spill, they got busted.

From Fast Company:

On BP's "Response in pictures" site, one photo, purported to be taken on July 16, 2010, sat for days, unquestioned. The photo shows BP's Houston Command Center, a desk with some massive monitors, lots of complicated things happening on them, and employees monitoring the situation in the Gulf. But all is not as it seems.

Yesterday, AmericaBlog took a good, hard look at the photo--but in retrospect, a mediocre, slightly firm look would have sufficed. The photo was altered in Adobe Photoshop CS4 (last year's model, it should be noted). That's bad enough--the last thing BP needs is to cover up anything they're doing right now--but what really stings is how insanely incompetent the editing was. It's insulting to anyone who's played around with Photoshop: any 15-year-old DeviantArt user could have done this job without detectable artifacts, and BP's "professional photographers" did a ridiculously amateur job.