Only ten days prior to the blowout, Halliburton conveniently snapped up a giant marine firefighting corporation for $250.00 million. Persistent suggestions that Goldman Sachs shorted Transocean immediately ahead of the blow-out refuse to be erased from the record, although we removed our initial reference to this pending further research. Most tellingly of all, as always occurs after these atrocities, the stories keep a-changing. There was no Deadman switch. Now, all of a sudden, it is reported that there WAS a Deadman blowout preventer. And to rub in BP’s humiliation, corporation executives are now reported to have been on board at a party to celebrate BP’s safety record, and the first explosion occurred in the room next to where the party was being held. This would have been known days ago, one would have thought.
Given former US criminal Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s integration with Halliburton, what are the odds that this was indeed a malicious sabotage operation against this prime British,(more here)
The Angry Exile, upside down correspondent.
A couple of nights ago the ABC's Foreign Correspondent program covered the legal use of cannabis for medical purposes in California and how, given the huge financial hole the state is in, this could be expanded to provide a useful cash crop if the state grasped the nettle (or weed, as it were) and simply repealed the prohibition on adults smoking it. A few years ago I saw an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! that also dealt with drug prohibition, which if I recall claimed that there were only a handful of people in the whole US who were allowed to smoke cannabis for medical reasons. Judging by Tuesday night's Foreign Correspondent things have moved on a bit since then. The program, appropriately titled 'High Finance', is worth a look and is on the ABC's iViewer here, though I have no idea if that thing will work for anyone outside Australia or if, like Auntie Beeb's iPlayer, will show you the electronic door. If it doesn't work or you don't want to watch a half hour TV program the next best thing is the transcript, which is available here.
Interesting stuff.
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