BP burns creatures alive in incompetent "cleanup"

Androcles comment on BP site:

Please stop burning turtles and other sea life. Please don't make your so-called cleanup actions as murderous as your first assault, which was not an accidental "oil spill." It was a releasing of grotesque calamity through your carelessness. It can be compared to detonating a bomb larger than the one over Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

The consequences will extend through many lifetimes.

In addition, perhaps the most troubling part of your company's response to this terrible catastrophe has been the sickening "spin" and public relations convolutions of all that BP says or publishes. It's known your corporation is bigger than the Roman Empire at its greatest; BP is larger and stronger than most nations in the world.

I can speculate that this note will go into the trash or some other collection marked irrelevant. But why cannot your company in its richness and vastness see that it has caused the most grievous assault yet by a single entity upon the planet?

You may call me an idealist or a dreamer but I think the only moral response for BP in its immensity is to take a position never before assumed in human history. BP could become the first empire company of the earth to say something simple and direct: "Yes, our company is responsible for this catastrophe. We cut corners and pushed our subordinates to cut costs in irresponsible ways. Yes, we were encouraged to go further by the multitude of safety violations that piled up without any appreciable notice from the public or from governments.

"Our position has arisen from corporate hubris and our mission to maximize every iota of money possible for our top tier officers and our shareholders. Maximizing profits has surmounted all other matters. We have no adequate plan to repair or to avert this disaster, nor to clean it up. We have caused an assault that affects the entire ecological system of the planet. We are wrong. We were wrong. We are in the process of dismantling the corporation to draw every bit of funding possible so that what remains of the company may be dedicated to doing what can be done in the Gulf of Mexico. Once these resources are exhausted, the corporation BP will no longer exist."

Even then, the end of your empire will not compensate for what you have done.

NY Times asks about the decision to have children

Peter Singer of the New York Times asked for comments on "whether to have a child? . . . what factors entered into your decision?. . . the desirability of adding to the strain that .. .nearly seven billion people already are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself. . . . consideration of family history and possibility of a devastating illness, physical or mental? ..."

Androcles commented: "I think it's unwise and edging into a kind of egoist insanity to bring into the world children who will have great suffering. Yet there is the question of, for example, Stephen Hawkins. If genetic testing would have revealed his inevitable condition, should that potential being have been aborted? Is the gene pool so assorted and rich that someone else would have arrived at his conclusions? I think a tentative yes, but obviously the answer is not known.

The American idea of individualism has a lot to answer for -- isn't it the case that most humans are more similar to each other than not? Mathematical/probability question: How many times do we have to toss the genetic dice in order to get a genius or a gifted athlete?

The arrival of Birth Control was a watershed in human history, yet powerful forces throughout the world fight against it. Religions, governments and some cultural forces fight birth control as if it were an evil -- what do they gain from that viewpoint? Could it be thought of as a global version of the suppression of women expressed in the colloquial saw: "Keep them barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen." The concept of a woman's being "caught" by pregnancy and therefore revealed as a sexual (not to say sinful) being is still valid in most of the world. Americans in particular are still juvenile about sex, regarding it as something separate from life, fighting sex education and so on.

Remember "Zero Population Growth?" This valid movement was buttressed with wise thought. Yet, among the questions that arise: If so-called sophisticated societies eschew large families or any families and so-called emerging societies are denied the same birth control and knowledge that brought about this decision in the former societies -- what are we to do with this conundrum?