[mjkst27]

ahh, internet search engines...powering conspiracy theories since 1993

just joshin'

[mjkst27]

sleddog, on Aug 18 2003, 11:30 PM, said:

Well, I'm not a full blown conpiracy nut, yet? As I'm still making my tinfoil hat.

Just seems unusually high refinery fire and explosions lately, most of which are quietly forgotten.

I can't count the number of stories that are huge news but go un- or underreported. After Enron, it seems to me financial bad news is restricted to a down day in the major market averages. Sad. I still can't get over the way the Shrubadmin basically came out after Worldcom and said in not so many words "we will fix the corporate governance scandal - everyone keep cheating, we'll look the other way after we perp walk Rigas and Martha. Keep on doin whatcha doin"

[QuantumOnion]

sleddog, on Aug 18 2003, 07:30 PM, said:

Just seems unusually high refinery fire and explosions lately, most of which are quietly forgotten.

well, if we were to be scientific about this, we would try to establish a long term trend for refinery fires/incidents. the material provided only goes back as far as 12/02, and it is not clear what time duration your search covered. that is, it is not clear, for example, if the search engine you used covers events prior to 12/02. if it does cover earlier periods, and there are no hits then, yeah, i might sit up and take notice. if, on the other hand, it doesn't cover pre-12/02, then there's no conclusion we can draw from the data.

so, bottom line, in order to form some conclusions, we would need to determine what the average number of refinery incidents are, per year, and compare that to your results for 2003. too, even if the number of reported incidents is much higher than trend, we could still ask some questions along the nature of what source material the search engine covers. if it covers popular press exclusively, then one could make an argument that the trend is skewed due to the fact that energy issues, in general, are "selling more papers" in 2003 than they did in the late 90's.

then again, gas and oil are, uh, whatyacallit......oh yeah....flammable

qo

ps: seriously, if i were a terrorist (and, i'll state just for the wreckord, and for the neocons in the bush administration that may be reading this, that i am NOT a terrorist, no sir) i'd be looking at oil/energy infrastructure as a easy target providing a big bang for the buck, given that attacks against this infrastructure can negatively affect large swaths of the population/economy.