And then for their next trick they'll levitate the Pentagon!

With No Gulf Solution in Sight, Louisiana Turns to Prayer

And I suppose it just almost somewhat, on a psychological level, is a little better than doing absolutely nothing--right? But what sort of intervention would actually be effective and divine? I mean, it looks like we're really waiting on the relief wells which should be completed in August to stem this tar-y, nasty tide, but I'm guessing if any of the following things happen, we can just go ahead and call them miracles.

1) The Kraken is released. It patiently sits on the fractured well, effectively blocking any further flow.

2) Super-intelligent Giant Octopi bearing crude tools recovered from deep-sea ship wrecks swarm in wearing protective garments cobbled from the scuba gear of downed divers to protect themselves from the oily sploodge. They work tirelessly to build their own version of "top-hat", which, because they know far more about sea pressures than we do and having very little notion about top-hats, is surprisingly effective.

3) An underwater volcano erupts nearby, burying all of the well with tons of lava, effectively cutting off the spew and sealing all of the seabed fissures that may or may not be down there.

4) The sea parts over the area so that there is a channel of dry land through which the oil, as if drawn by some irresistible force, slowly starts creeping towards the direction of the nearest refinery, as if it were seeking its "home".

5) An oil-devouring organism spontaneously appears that has no possible genetic relationship to any life form we've heretofore witnessed. It not only eats oil--it excretes oxygen-rich pH-balanced water that immediately revivifies the local fauna and flora.

6) The oil is miraculously transformed into some kind of manna that feeds all the nearby stunned, poisoned wildlife so that they become stronger and happier than ever before. We suddenly understand the language of the porpoises, and learn things from a fellow sentient species that we really needed to know.

7) A whirlpool develops right over the oil so that it only flows up and not out. It continues up until it breaks the surface of the water, where it then appears to be "beamed" upwards into the atmosphere. Radar detects an anomaly that could quite possibly be a cloaked spaceship of some kind, but a fight breaks out among observers who posit that a life form sophisticated enough to have interstellar travel probably wouldn't still be using oil, anyway.

8) Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh, and hundreds of similar-minded folks, are seized with an insatiable, vampire-like thirst for oil. They need to drink it--they wade into the water at first, scooping tar-balls into their ravening maws, but as the thirst compels them, they begin to mutate, Innsmouth-like, to gilled and flippered things with a hive mind that only seeks out the oil. Their cold-blooded and newly scaly bodies are hard and silvery as they suck and suck their way down to the source of their one true love, and they capture about a million gallons a day with their unfathomable oil-lust.

9) Big-ass meteor lands with laser-precision in exactly the spot we really think a massive boulder should land. It plugs up the gusher in a heartbeat, and the resulting splash uniformly paints the coastline with a surprisingly easy to clean rim of thick, viscous tarry stuff that mostly just rolls up and off the sand like a Jello "wiggler". The sea is suspiciously cleaned by this one splash--miracle!

10) A big, ethereal hand comes down and pinches the well closed. Another hand with a humongous trowel slaps a fresh coat of firmament over the whole bleeding thing. A booming voice, somewhat rhetorically, inquires what we all would do if he wasn't about to clean up our messes and further conjectures that our stupidity is why we can't have nice things. Also, we seem to be heating the whole out-of-doors and can't we stop that. We are threatened with the taking away of our cable television if we can't behave properly, and then the hands retract back up to--erm, Heaven?

Or that's the sort of thing I think a miracle would look like. But I'm mostly counting on the science-type answers.

An Act of God in the Gulf?

It's mostly because I "collect" this sort of feature:

Rick Perry: Oil spill may be 'act of God' (Politico)

The Republican governor, speaking at the Chamber of Commerce in Washington, warned against a “a knee-jerk reaction” to the spill and said the government doesn’t know what caused the leak, which took 11 lives and threatens the Gulf coast’s vast fishing industry.


“We don’t know what the event that has allowed for this massive oil to be released,” Perry said alongside several other governors on a panel Monday. “And until we know that, I hope we don’t see a knee-jerk reaction across this country that says we’re going to shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, because the cost to this country will be staggering.”


Perry questioned whether the spill was “just an act of God that occurred” and said that any “politically driven” decisions could put the U.S. in further economic peril.


“From time to time there are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented,” Perry said.

Or, the cost of human errors such as the ones that likely resulted in this catastrophe could be staggering. I'm loathe to put an economic value on some of the potential damage that could be done by a man-made disaster like this, particularly because some things aren't translatable to money. Tell me what the value of sea turtles are, and how we bring a species back from the brink. Tell me about how shrimp and oyster beds recover, and when we get back fishing as a resource and Gulf-area fisherman can count on that as a livelihood.

That's BP's oil, Transocean's rig, and Halliburton's fractured cement job billowing out crude to the tune of 5000 barrels a day. I don't think it's necessary to go blaming God--did he knock something over with an earthquake? Not that any seismologists noticed. And why would he, if we're bringing him up? Saying something like this is an "act of God" is like pre-emptively absolving the nearest parties of culpability. It seems to me that a halt to assess what went wrong would be necessary to understand how similar events can be prevented, and whether it really is safe to continue. That isn't a knee-jerk liberal response--that's just a common-sense safety response. It's also not a bad assessment for the oil companies to take heed of, because this could be hellaciously expensive for BP--and I think they should want to learn, if they can, from any possible human mistakes, so they don't also take on a similar burden.

Like most invocations of "God's will" to explain events, this is convenient to an agenda, and not especially helpful from a practical standpoint. (And in my opinion, tells me a certain Governor is ready to bend over backwards for corporations at the expense of his state's coastline. That's so lame, Gov. Perry.)