That photo made me very very sad. My night is now ruined.

Her observations are dead on...

Demons, she says?

Thanks, Jen. And as a special bonus, the typos that have been enshrined in this post for posterity have now been fixed. ;)

I'm not so worried about the birds.

Now, the impact on Pirates from this disaster will cause major setbacks and lead to more Global Warming, mind you.

I want these photos to play on a slideshow with Sarah Palin and Co. chanting "Drill Baby Drill" on a loop in the background.

Will, your post is in very poor taste.

The thing that upsets me the most about this is why, with its billions of dollars, BP isn't hiring the masses of unemployed in this country to go out there and A: rescue these animals and B: clean the damn mess up. If Obama is so freaked out by this - do something about it, damn it! Get this fucking company to take care of it - NOW!

@8 Well, if BP had a process in place for hiring thousands of people on short order and then training them in hazardous waste handling/disposal, I'm sure they'd consider it, and it probably wouldn't take more than month or two to find enough qualified applicants. But, they don't
(no oil company does), because no-one counted on this happening.

On the other hand, they have put the call out to all retired BP workers in the Gulf Coast to see if any of them are interested in volunteering in the clean up effort.

Depends on whether you view our way of life in terms of say SUVs or plentiful food and modern medicine, because without oil we got none of it.

and to add insult to this ultimate blasphemy, bp plans to pay out $10 billion in dividends this year.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0604/bp-10-b…

BP has hired people to help clean up (like it's possible) and those people are now sick, probably from the chemicals BP has added to the oil mess. And those workers had to sign promises that they wouldn't talk to reporters or anyone about their work. I don't think BP is a particularly good employer.

And it isn't that they didn't count on this happening. They just didn't care.

& the biggest OSHA fines go to....

yup you guessed it -- bp --
for not fixing their problems after the 2005 Texas City blast.

http://www.osha.gov/dep/bp/bp.html

I read the following comment to a post on DailyKos about these pictures and I saved it because it's so true:

I know that I'm anthropomorphizing here, but when I reflect on that picture, I see a symbol for one of the most common and certainly most painful of human existentialist dilemmas: suffering without meaning.

For that pelican, whose universe does not include ideas of petroleum, blowout preventers, capitalism, or greed, the suffering it is enduring must be that much more poignant and pronounced due to the fact that it can't attach any sort of meaning or reference to that suffering. Were it to die at the jaws of a natural predator, or of a natural disease, or even at the will of some other force of nature such as a strong hurricane, its psyche may be equipped, in its own way, to know that what is happening to it is part of some sort of natural order of the universe. One can come to terms with that sort of suffering.

But to die in that way, covered in an alien substance which has invaded its home and habitat must be truly horrifying. One could imagine crying out in helpless anger for being thrown into a universe where such suffering can happen for no reason and without any apparent meaning or order.

I do not see how any thinking, feeling human being to look at images like this one without coming to the conclusion that our entire way of life is the ultimate blasphemy.

Those photos of the oil-covered birds are sad to see but we humans have wiped out entire species of animals -- and will continue to do so -- as we continue to breed and voraciously consume natural resources in order to live. We love to fly to cool places on vacation and drive our big comfortable SUVs and live in nice big climate-controlled houses and drink bottled water that's shipped across an ocean and that requires a massive amount of energy.

And it's going to get much worse in the future. China and India have had huge populations for quite some time (currently they together have about 40 percent of the world's population) but, due to being very poor, didn't have that great of a demand for natural resources. Now that they're becoming wealthier, especially China, people in those countries want the same kind of lifestyle we have in the West.

It took until 1960 for the population of the world to hit three billion. It took just 39 more years, until 1999, for that population to double to six billion.

Basically what's not being said is that the only event that could change the course of human behavior from our current path of overpopulation and overconsumption is a catastrophic disaster that results in the extinction or near extinction of homo sapiens.

Nothing else will work.

@17 you are exactly right and for the rest of the planet, may it be sooner rather than later

@17 that's a fantastic excuse to stop trying, and one that's been expressed for many decades, now.

@18, you sound like a Westboro Baptist Church member.

wow, i want to barf.

@ 15, the tears have returned. Fuuuucccckkkkk.

"stop" trying??? Who is seriously trying to alter our current course? Nobody in any position of power.

About the only thing a person can do personally with long-term effect is to have 0 or 1 children.

That pelican is drowning the ashes of its ancestors: the dinosaurs.

This oil spill is bad enough. We don't need stupid pontificating from a hypocritical pompous artist/musician/spiritualist guit-tripping everybody.

@24 - You're right, we need more stupid pontificating from hypocritical pompous Slog commenters instead.