Dear Major General Smedley D. Butler
Letter to a dead man. May your ideas never die.
I have come to ask for your help. You are dead, but alive through your actions and your written words. I write to people that tell me they are alive. But really they are dead. Dead to their fellow man's suffering. Dead to the planet, our environment. Dead to the animals they abuse. They place money where only they and a few friends will benefit. They build their dreams on paper and electronic noise. Nothing has changed in 70 years. Are you surprised?
I agree with you 100%. You summed it up perfectly. How does one get it across to each new generation of young people that get sucked into each new profitable war?
Most will only learn this near the end of their lives, that they were just a pawn in somebody else's manipulative game.
I used to believe the old saying that when old men can not agree, young men die. And of course "War is good business. Invest your sons."
Now I believe it is, "War is good business. Invest your neighbor's sons."
It is the quiet grey men that we really have to be afraid of. Those that manipulate the politicians and the public for their own gain. Those that keep their friends close and their enemies closer. Those that learn our psyche but never let others know theirs.
I think before we wage any war, the public must be made aware of the military contracts and who will benefit from this new war. Their profits should be published weekly in the press. On the front page, there should be a column of companies listing not only the weapons, the food, the beds, the tents, the trucks, the planes, the paper, the pens that are being used, but companies should not be allowed to use other "shell companies" to hide their involvement.
Follow the money trail may stop many wars. Let the man in the street see who profits, before he acts before thinking.
A geologist trying to stop oil drilling into a gigantic fault zone off the coast of southern California
Now I am a geologist trying to stop the oil drilling into the 3000 mile fault zone crossing the Pacific Ocean. There was a massive blowout and environmental disaster in 1969 off the Santa Barbara coast. It is much like what is happening now off the Louisiana Coast with the Deep Water Horizon oil rig that exploded and sank that was operated by Transocean and leased by BP that was the cause of this new ecological disaster. I think that the crew got careless and were not watching their mud weight and nobody was paying attention to the background units of gas and the many gas horizons that they must have intersected. I think that Halliburton did a shoddy job of cementing the well casing. If they were running the e-logs which is an instrument, let down on a thick cable all the way to the bottom of this 18000 foot well, that measures resistance, conductivity, porosity, pH and many more technical parameters. They were probably down the open hole too long or had got the instrument stuck. In any case this time delay allowed the heavy drilling mud to fill with gas and oil and to turn to froth, which lowered its density and allowed this high pressure well to blow out.
Some past history
I prevented a blowout south of Sacramento as the logging geologist, by informing the company man to weight up the mud. The company man said my instruments were wrong and I did not know what I was talking about as he had been in this business for 28 years. I called the drilling engineer off site who wanted to know what the background gas and the gas shows were(those many layers, up to 30 in a single well that produce oil or gas) When I informed he told the company man to weight up the mud. I was removed from the well and sent to another well. The well began to flow of its own accord, a sign that you have lost control of the situation. The blowout preventers were actuated and a disaster averted. The lower 3500 feet of well was cemented closed as they could not control the tremendous pressure at 11500'. They used the upper 8000 feet in a producing well.
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