nuke baby nuke!

Video - An Atomic Bomb will stop the Gulf Oil Leak.

NYTimes | The chatter began weeks ago as armchair engineers brainstormed for ways to stop the torrent of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico: What about nuking the well?

Decades ago, the Soviet Union reportedly used nuclear blasts to successfully seal off runaway gas wells, inserting a bomb deep underground and letting its fiery heat melt the surrounding rock to shut off the flow. Why not try it here?

The idea has gained fans with each failed attempt to stem the leak and each new setback — on Wednesday, the latest rescue effort stalled when a wire saw being used to slice through the riser pipe got stuck.

“Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapon system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil,” Matt Simmons, a Houston energy expert and investment banker, told Bloomberg News on Friday, attributing the nuclear idea to “all the best scientists.”

Or as the CNN reporter John Roberts suggested last week, “Drill a hole, drop a nuke in and seal up the well.”

This week, with the failure of the “top kill” attempt, the buzz had grown loud enough that federal officials felt compelled to respond.

Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said that neither Energy Secretary Steven Chu nor anyone else was thinking about a nuclear blast under the gulf. The nuclear option was not — and never had been — on the table, federal officials said.

“It’s crazy,” one senior official said.

return of the orange book?

WaPo | The U.S. government is seeing "hints" that adversaries are targeting military networks for "remote" sabotage, the head of the Pentagon's recently launched Cyber Command said in his first public remarks since being confirmed last month.

"The potential for sabotage and destruction is now possible and something we must treat seriously," said Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who also heads the National Security Agency, the nation's largest intelligence agency. "Our Department of Defense must be able to operate freely and defend its resources in cyberspace."

Alexander spoke Thursday before more than 300 people at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In remarks afterward, Alexander said he is concerned about the safety of computer systems used in war zones. "The concern I have is when you look at what could happen to a computer, clearly sabotage and destruction are things that are yet to come," he said. "If we don't defend our systems, people will be able to break them."

James A. Lewis, director of CSIS's Technology and Public Policy Program, said advanced militaries are capable of destroying U.S. computer systems. "That wasn't true four years ago, but it's true now and Cyber Command will have to deal with it," he said.

The Cyber Command, launched last month at Fort Meade, was created by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to streamline the military's capabilities to attack and defend in cyberspace, supported by NSA's intelligence capabilities.

Alexander stressed that the Command will focus on protecting the U.S. military's 15,000 computer networks under oversight of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Congress and the administration. His remarks were aimed at assuaging concerns over the NSA's role in helping to protect civilian and private-sector networks, as well as fears of a "militarization" of cyberspace.

"We spend a lot of time with the court, with Congress, the administration, the oversight committees to ensure they know what we're doing and why we're doing it," Alexander said.

collective intelligence?

world wide mind @ Yahoo! Video

MIT Spectrum | Can collective intelligence save the planet? “It’s the only hope we have,” says Prof. Thomas Malone, adding that “no one really knows whether we’ll succeed.”

Malone — who is “basically an optimist” and believes that in the end, we will probably make choices that will, in fact, save the Earth — is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

He launched the Center in 2006 in part to learn how to harness the collective intelligence of the planet to help solve the world’s biggest problems — climate change, poverty, terrorism, healthcare, or crime — problems too big to be solved by any one expert or group. While, he says, groups like countries, companies, armies, and families have used various forms of collective intelligence for centuries to solve problems, the goal of the Center is to combine pooled human brainpower with new information technologies “to solve problems in ways that would never have been thinkable before.”

Google, Wikipedia, Linux, and YouTube already are using pooled brainpower to bring forth new solutions, he says. Consider Google. Millions create websites linked to each other; the information is harvested by Google algorithms, so when you type in a question, the answers are amazingly intelligent. Or take Wikipedia, where thousands across the globe create a huge, high-quality intellectual project with almost no centralized control. To best use these systems, he says, we need to better understand them. That’s a main goal of the Center, where the big question is: How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done before?

One of their main projects is the Climate Collaboratorium, which harnesses the collective intelligence of thousands across the world to develop plans for what we can do about global climate change. Most recently, more than 2,000 users have visited the site, with 350 registered users, who have contributed 22 finalized plans with another 35 in progress. Users of the site include: the general public; world-class experts; moderators, who help organize and manage the input; and national and international policymakers.

Malone says: “We believe that for this site to realize its potential it should have at least thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people involved. Of course, we don’t know if this will happen, but we think it’s an experiment worth doing.”

mobile phones and honey bees?

Telegraph | The growing use of mobile telephones is behind the disappearance of honey bees and the collapse of their hives, scientists have claimed. Their disappearance has caused alarm throughout Europe and North America where campaigners have blamed agricultural pesticides, climate change and the advent of genetically modified crops for what is now known as 'colony collapse disorder.' Britain has seen a 15 per cent decline in its bee population in the last two years and shrinking numbers has led to a rise in thefts of hives.

Now researchers from Chandigarh's Punjab University claim they have found the cause which could be the first step in reversing the decline: They have established that radiation from mobile telephones is a key factor in the phenomenon and say that it probably interfering with the bee's navigation senses.

They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behaviour and productivity of bees in two hives – one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed.

After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phon, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey.

The queen bee in the "mobile" hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive.

They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen. Because of this the amount of nectar produced in the hive also shrank.

Ved Prakash Sharma and Neelima Kumar, the authors of the report in the journal Current Science, wrote: "Increase in the usage of electronic gadgets has led to electropollution of the environment. Honeybee behaviour and biology has been affected by electrosmog since these insects have magnetite in their bodies which helps them in navigation. Fist tap Dale.

snoop on your neighbor's energy use?

Fast Company | Ever wished you could find out whether your eco-obsessed neighbor is really an energy hog? Enter Microsoft's Hohm Scores, an online tool that allows you to view energy efficiency data about a specific home address. There are already 60 million homes listed in the database, and results can be compared to averages of other homes in the neighborhood and across the U.S.

Hohm Scores gets its information from a mashup of public records, including information about a home’s size, age, location, and average utility bills. Add in data about local weather patterns and some advanced analytics from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy, and voila, the tool can tell you just how energy efficient your home is--and how efficient it could be with a few home improvements.

Hohm provides an energy efficiency rating of 0 to 100 for each home. "Users can update the info that's driving their score and improve accuracy," says Troy Batterberry, general manager for Hohm, in an interview with FastCompany.com. So if you add insulation or fix up the windows, you can input your updated information and get a higher score.

Hohm Scores doesn't yet sync up to smart meters, and it can't provide information for apartment dwellers, either. But Batterberry tells us there are many other Hohm Scores improvements in the pipeline: "Users will also the have ability to provide info and publish their home score even if their home isn't already in the database."

The real goal for all of this is presumably to encourage Hohm Scores users to sign up for Microsoft's Hohm energy management system. And there's no denying that offering people the ability to snoop on their neighbors is a savvy marketing tool--even if it does raise some privacy questions. Fist tap Chando.

something's wrong with this picture....,

CSMonitor | The rate at which the United States is becoming more energy-efficient has soared since 1995, when the computer-based Internet and communications revolution began soaking into US society.

That conclusion – from a groundbreaking study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) last week – stands in sharp contrast to recent concerns that the computer backbone of the Internet was gobbling up huge amounts of energy.

Indeed, all America's servers – the computers that direct traffic on the Internet – and the systems that cool them use about 1.2 percent of the nation's electricity, according to a study last year. That's still a lot of power, comparable to the energy used by color TVs in the US.

But it turns out that for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used by information and communications technologies, the US saves at least 10 times that amount, the new ACEEE report found.

"Acceleration of information and computer technology across the US landscape post 1995 is driving much of the nation's energy-productivity gain," says John Laitner of the ACEEE and coauthor of the study. "Had we continued at the historic rate of prior years, we would today be using the energy equivalent of 1 billion barrels of oil more [per year] than we were" in the early 1990s.

After the oil embargoes of the 1970s, America quickly became more efficient and its "energy intensity" fell sharply. Energy intensity is the amount of energy required to produce a dollar of economic output. But its efficiency improvements slowed to less than 1 percent per year between 1986 and 1996.

Then something dramatic happened: Efficiency improvements sped up and the decline in energy intensity reached an average 2.9 percent annually between 1996 and 2001. Most of that decline came from technological innovation, according to the ACEEE study. Since 2001, the pace of US energy efficiency gains has remained remarkably high, at a robust 2.4 percent annually, at least half due to technology gains, researchers say.

Companies are making big improvements. Not long ago, delivery giant UPS introduced new software to develop more efficient routes and help drivers avoid left-hand turns. Result: 28.5 million fewer miles driven and 3 million gallons of gas saved each year. Fist tap Dale.

dudus worried about public perception

Video - Jamaica Primetime News.

Jamaica Observer | REVEREND Al Miller says Christopher 'Dudus' Coke maintains he is misunderstood by those who failed to see the many initiatives implemented by him in West Kingston to make the crime rate in that police division the lowest.

Miller, who last met with Coke — now a fugitive — two days before the security forces took control of his Tivoli Gardens stronghold, said Coke spoke openly about, among other things, the role he played in helping the elderly and providing a start to many youth who would otherwise have turned to a life of crime.

Miller said Coke spoke of the perception that the public had of him which caused them to view him differently from who he really is.

"He voiced his concern that his side of the story was not being told," Miller told the Observer on Monday.

Miller said Coke insisted that were it not for his input, violence would be a constant feature of Downtown Kingston. Instead, he said that he tried to do the positives which no one spoke about.

"He felt he took the initiative and called together the men from other communities and encouraged the peace and unity for those areas as well," Miller said.

According to the pastor, Coke not only maintained that crime was the lowest in that police division but he was able to quote exact statistics.

Coke attributed this to his influence in West Kingston.

"He asked why people thought he is trying to create mayhem and war when he has done everything to ensure peace," Miller told the Observer in an interview Monday night.

Coke, Miller said, also spoke of encouraging other communities to examine the development model being used for Tivoli Gardens where many persons were encouraged to start their own small businesses and to stay away from crime and violence.

"He said he tried to get into the heads of youths the need to develop themselves and work and to cease from their violent ways," said Miller, adding that Coke also spoke of helping the elderly, organising after-school programmes within West Kingston while insisting that young children must attend school and be off the streets by a certain time nightly.

america's complicity in evil

Video - Finkelstein on Gaza flotilla attack.

Counterpunch | As I write at 5pm on Monday, May 31, all day has passed since the early morning reports of the Israeli commando attack on the unarmed ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, and there has been no response from President Obama except to say that he needed to learn “all the facts about this morning’s tragic events” and that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu had canceled his plans to meet with him at the White House. Thus has Obama made America complicit once again in Israel’s barbaric war crimes. Just as the US Congress voted to deep-six Judge Goldstone’s report on Israel’s war crimes committed in Israel’s January 2009 invasion of Gaza, Obama has deep-sixed Israel’s latest act of barbarism by pretending that he doesn’t know what has happened.

No one in the world will believe that Israel attacked ships in international waters carrying Israeli citizens, a Nobel Laureate, elected politicians, and noted humanitarians bringing medicines and building materials to Palestinians in Gaza, who have been living in the rubble of their homes without repairs or medicines since January 2009, without first clearing the crime with its American protector. Without America’s protection, Israel, a totally artificial state, could not exist. No one in the world will believe that America’s spy apparatus did not detect the movement of the Israeli attack force toward the aid ships in international waters in an act of piracy, killing 20, wounding 50, and kidnapping the rest. Obama’s pretense at ignorance confirms his complicity.

Once again the US government has permitted the Israeli state to murder good people known for their moral conscience. The Israeli state has declared that anyone with a moral conscience is an enemy of Israel, and every American president except Eisenhower and Carter has agreed.

Obama’s 12-hour silence in the face of extreme barbarity is his signal to the controlled corporate media to remain on the sidelines until Israeli propaganda sets the story.

The Israeli story, preposterous as always, is that the humanitarians on one of the ships took two pistols from Israeli commandos, highly trained troops armed with automatic weapons, and fired on the attack force. The Israeli government claims that the commandos’ response (70 casualties at last reporting) was justified self-defense. Israel was innocent. Israel did not do anything except drop commandos aboard from helicopters in order to intercept an arms shipment to Gazans being brought in by ships manned by terrorists.

Many Christian evangelicals, brainwashed by their pastors that it is God’s will for Americans to protect Israel, will believe the Israeli story, especially when it is unlikely they will ever hear any other. Conservative Americans, especially on Memorial Day when they are celebrating feats of American arms, will admire Israel for its toughness. Here in north Georgia where I am at the moment, I have heard several say, admiringly, “Them, Israelis, they don’t put up with nuthin.”

Conservative Americans want the US to be like Israel. They do not understand why the US doesn’t stop pissing around after nine years and just go ahead and defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. They don’t understand why the US didn’t defeat whoever was opposing American forces in Iraq. Conservatives are incensed that America had to “win” the war by buying off the Iraqis and putting them on the US payroll. Israel murders people and then blames its victims. This appeals to American conservatives, who want the US to do the same.

israeli sense of reality dangerously distorted

Video - Russia Today Flotilla Raid State Piracy?

Independent | An old Israeli saying describing various less-than-esteemed military leaders says: "He was so stupid that even the other generals noticed." The same derisive remark could be applied almost without exception to the present generation of Israeli politicians.

Such healthy scepticism among Israelis about the abilities of their military and political leaders has unfortunately ebbed in recent decades. As a result, Israelis are left perplexed as to why their wars, military interventions and armed actions have so often ended in failure since the 1973 war, despite the superiority of their armed forces.

The latest example of this is the assault on the Gaza aid convoy by naval commandos, a confrontation initiated by Israel which thereby ensured that the convoy's organisers achieved their objectives to a degree beyond their wildest dreams. By using assault troops in a police action against civilians with predictably bloody results Israel managed to focus international attention on its blockade of Gaza, which the world had hitherto largely ignored. The Israeli action infuriated Turkey, once its strongest ally in the region, and strengthened the claim of Hamas to Palestinian leadership.

The capacity of Israel to shoot itself in the foot needs explanation. From the beginning the operation was idiotic, since Israel was always likely to look bad after any confrontation between élite troops and civilian protesters. Even more ludicrous is the Israeli explanation that their élite and heavily armed soldiers were at risk of their lives because they had to use thick gloves to protect their hands when sliding down cables from a helicopter and therefore could not use their weapons.

The nature of the fiasco should cause little surprise because such botched Israeli military actions have been the norm for years. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon was discredited by the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Christian militias loosed on them by Israeli army commanders. Syria, not Israel, became the predominant power in Lebanon. In south Lebanon, the Israeli army fought a long and unsuccessful guerrilla war against Hizbollah. The bombardments of Lebanon in 1996 and 2006 left Hizbollah stronger, and a similar attack on Gaza in 2008 failed to weaken Hamas.

The problem is that nobody believes Israeli propaganda as much as Israelis. Pro-Palestinian activists often lament the fluency and mendacity of Israeli spokesmen on the airwaves and the pervasive influence of Israel's supporters abroad. But, in reality, these PR campaigns are Israel's greatest weakness, because they distort Israelis' sense of reality. Defeats and failures are portrayed as victories and successes.

The slaughter of civilians is justified as a military necessity or somehow the fault of the other side. Opponents are demonised as bloodthirsty terrorists. Comforted by such benign accounts of their activities, Israeli leaders are consumed by arrogance because they come to believe they have never made a mistake. Denial that errors have occurred makes it extremely difficult to sack generals or ministers, however gross their incompetence or record of failure.

the flotilla fiasco

Video - IDF video of freedom flotilla assault.

WaPo | THE ISRAELI commandos who landed on the deck of the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara off the coast of the Gaza Strip early Monday were totally unprepared for what they encountered: dozens of militants who swarmed around them with knives and iron bars. The result was a bloody battle in which at least nine passengers were killed -- and a diplomatic debacle for the government of Binyamin Netanyahu. Though the investigations to come will find many to blame, it's already clear that Israel's response to the pro-Palestinian flotilla was both misguided and badly executed.

We have no sympathy for the motives of the participants in the flotilla -- a motley collection that included European sympathizers with the Palestinian cause, Israeli Arab leaders and Turkish Islamic activists. Israel says that some of the organizers have ties to Hamas and al-Qaeda. What's plain is that the group's nominal purpose, delivering "humanitarian" supplies to Gaza, was secondary to the aim of provoking a confrontation. The flotilla turned down an Israeli offer to unload the six boats and deliver the goods to Gaza by truck; it ignored repeated warnings that it would not be allowed to reach Gaza. Its spokesmen said they would insist on "breaking Israel's siege," as one of them put it.

Yet the threat to Israel was political rather than military. So far there's been no indication the boats carried missiles or other arms for Hamas. Mr. Netanyahu's aim should have been to prevent the militants from creating the incident they were hoping for. Allowing the boats to dock in Gaza, as Israel had done before, would have been better than sending military commandos to intercept them. The fact that the soldiers who roped down from helicopters to the lead Turkish ferry were unprepared to subdue its passengers without using lethal force only compounded the error.

Israel will now endure days, if not months, of condemnations by its many enemies. Middle East peace talks are at risk again, as are Israel's once-strong relations with Turkey. What was to have been a conciliatory meeting between Mr. Netanyahu and President Obama Tuesday has been cancelled. The White House has been properly cautious so far in responding to the incident; it should be careful to distinguish itself in the coming days from the anti-Israeli chorus. U.S. diplomacy should aim at ensuring that the inevitable calls for an international investigation do not lead to another one-sided setup like the United Nations' Goldstone commission, whose report on Israel's 2008 invasion of Gaza has become another weapon in the international campaign to de-legitimize the Jewish state.

explains what's happening in kingston jamaica...,

Video - Nils Gilman Fora.TV Deviant Globalization. Fist tap Dale.

LongNow Foundation | Gilman described deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration."

There's nice tourism, and then sex tourism, such as in Thailand and Switzerland. The vast pharmacology industry is matched by a vast traffic in illegal drugs. The underside of waste disposal is the criminal dumping in the developing world of toxic wastes from the developed world. Military activities worldwide are fed by a huge gray market in weapons. Internet communications are undermined by floods of malware doubling every year. Among the commodities shipped around the world are exotic hardwoods, endangered species, blood diamonds, and stolen art worth billions in ransom. Illegitimate health care includes the provision of human organs from poor people---you can get a new kidney with no waiting for $150,000 in places like Brazil, the Philippines, Istanbul, and South Africa. Far overwhelming legal immigration are torrents of illegal immigrants who pay large sums to get across borders. And money laundering accounts for 4-12% of world GDP---$1.5 to 5 trillion dollars a year.

These are not marginal, "informal" activities. These are enormous, complex businesses straight out of the Harvard Business Review. The drug business in Mexico, for example, employs 400,000 people. A thousand-dollar kilo of cocaine grows in value by 1400-percent when it crosses into the US---nice profit margin there.

The whole phenomenon is driven by state regulators acting on ethical taboos. When we outlaw or tax certain goods and services, we reduce supply while demand increases, and that provides an irresistible opportunity for risk-taking entrepreneurs.

Also, historian Gilman points out, international development practices are partially to blame. From 1949 to 1989 the Cold War was played out with the US and USSR trying to create new states like themselves. It mostly failed, and it ended with the end of international Communism. Then came the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" theory of structural adjustment---governments in developing countries must "stabilize, privatize, and liberalize." That sort of worked, but it hollowed out the governments and dismantled their regulatory capacity. People in those countries realized they were on their own, forced to "survival entrepreneurship." In some places like Eastern Europe criminals took over the economy.

There is a certain Robin Hood effect on the large scale. Serious money is moving from the rich global north to the poor global south and enriching some people there.

Politically, the deviant entrepreneurs don't want to take over the state, just undermine it. For their own communities they often provide state-like services of infrastructure, health care, and even education. They are "post-modern, post-revolutionary, and post-progressive." They resort to violence against the state only when the state suddenly attacks them---as is playing out in (Kingston Jamaica) Mexico now.

What to do? If you try to shut down the deviant economy, you just make the profit margins greater and exacerbate the problem. If you shrug and legalize everything, you condone hateful practices like child sex slavery and the total deforestation of tropical hardwoods.

We are left with making judicious choices about which deviant practices to take most seriously, and then dealing with them patiently in a non-sudden way, realizing that the unsavory economy will never be fully eradicated.

bacteria control weather....,

NYTimes | Walking across the campus of Montana State University here, David Sands, a plant pathologist, says the blanket of snow draped over the mountains around town contains a surprise.

The cause of most of it, he said, is a living organism, a bacterium, called pseudomonas syringae.

In the last few years, Dr. Sands and other researchers have accumulated evidence that the well-known group of bacteria, long known to live on agricultural crops, are far more widespread and may be part of a little-studied weather ecosystem. The principle is well accepted, but how widespread the phenomenon is remains a matter of debate.

The accepted precipitation model is that soot, dust and other inert things form the nuclei for raindrops and snowflakes. Scientists have found these bacteria in abundance on the leaves of a wide range of wild and domestic plants, including trees and grasses, everywhere they have looked, including Montana, Morocco, France, the Yukon and in the long buried ice of Antarctica. The bacteria have been found in clouds and in streams and irrigation ditches. In one study of several mountaintops here, 70 percent of the snow crystals examined had formed around a bacterial nucleus.

Some of the bacteria promote freezing as a means of attacking plants. They make proteins that will trigger freezing at higher temperatures than usual and the resulting water ice damages the plant, giving the bacteria access to the nutrients they need.

This ability to promote freezing of water at higher-than-normal freezing temperatures has led Dr. Sands and other scientists to believe the bacteria are part of an unstudied system. After the bacteria infect plants and multiply, he says, they may be swept as aerosols into the sky, where it seems they prompt the formation of ice crystals (which melt as they fall to earth, causing rain) at higher temperatures than do dust or mineral particles that also function as the nuclei of ice crystals. Fist tap Nana.

alligator mouth, hummingbird backside....,

NYTimes | The Obama administration scrambled to respond on Sunday after the failure of the latest effort to kill the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. But administration officials acknowledged the possibility that tens of thousands of gallons of oil might continue pouring out until August, when two relief wells are scheduled to be completed.

“We are prepared for the worst,” said Carol M. Browner, President Obama’s climate change and energy policy adviser. “We have been prepared from the beginning.”

Even as the White House sought to demonstrate that it was taking a more direct hand in trying to solve the problem, senior officials acknowledged that the new technique BP will use to try to cap the leak — severing the riser pipe and placing a containment dome over the cut riser — could temporarily result in as much as 20 percent more oil flowing into the water during the three days to a week before the new device could be in place.

“This is obviously a difficult situation,” Ms. Browner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “but it’s important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge.”

“We have been directing BP to take important steps,” including the drilling of a second relief well, she added.

The White House said that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would make his eighth trip to the region and that the number of government and contract employees sent to work in areas affected by the spill would be tripled.

But despite the White House efforts, the criticism also intensified. Colin L. Powell, who served as secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC’s “This Week” that the administration must move in quickly with “decisive force and demonstrate that it’s doing everything that it can do.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, appearing on “Meet the Press,” again criticized the administration’s efforts, saying: “We need our federal government exactly for this kind of crisis. I think there could have been a greater sense of urgency.”

The administration has left to BP most decisions about how to move forward with efforts to contain the leak. But Ms. Browner made a point of saying that the administration, led by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, had told BP that the company should stop the top kill. Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they worried it was putting too much pressure on it. BP announced Saturday evening that it was ending that effort.

oil disaster shows our disconnect from physical world

Video - Spill Here Spill Now Ad. Fist tap Bro. Makheru.

AP | Obama touched on the disconnect between those of the grounded physical world and everyone else during his news conference. He showed that he knows what he can't really feel.

"When I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that their comments are fair," he said. "On the other hand, I probably think to myself, these are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are."

The land, sea and factory are less and less an integral part of Americans.

If Aristotle were blogging about all of this, he would probably have little patience with the armchair experts and the pontificators who think the solution should be as easy as Malia Obama suggested when she asked her father, "Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"

The Greek philosopher said "those who dwell in intimate association with nature" are apt to understand the big picture. "Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view."

His way of saying, you have to be there to get it. Americans, these days, are not.

a most unnatural disaster

Video - Who is liable for this catastrophe?

NYTimes | President Obama spoke critically a couple of weeks ago about the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the federal government. It’s not just a cozy relationship. It’s an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.

Forget BP for a moment. When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily sand?

President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was “moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.” Well, he can’t ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee future disastrous spills.

The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.

Mr. Hayward of BP was on television on Friday referring to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent fouling of the Gulf of Mexico as a “natural disaster.” He was wrong, as usual. Like the unholy alliance of government and big business, this tragedy set in motion by Mr. Hayward’s corporation is a grotesquely harmful and wholly unnatural disaster.

matt simmons: theres another leak, much bigger, 5 to 6 miles away

Video - Matt Simmons: "Theres another leak, much bigger, 5 to 6 miles away"

BP shipped in workers for president's visit

CNN | A Gulf Coast official accused BP of shipping workers into Grand Isle, Louisiana, for President Barack Obama's visit to the oil-stricken area Friday and sending them away once the president left the region.

Early Friday morning, "a number of buses brought in approximately 300 to 400 workers that had been recruited all week," Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts told CNN's "Situation Room."

Roberts said the workers were offered $12 an hour to come out to the scene at Grand Isle and work in what he called a "dog and pony show."

But, when Obama departed, so did the workers, he said, adding that he's never seen more than 20 workers at the Grand Isle cleanup site since the effort started.

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles downplayed the claim Friday evening, telling CNN it is not unusual to see people wrapping up work in the afternoon.

"These individuals are working out in the heat of the sun. These are long days. They start early in the morning and they stop early in the evening," he said. "So the fact that they were leaving the location late in the afternoon was not unusual. It's not associated with the president arriving."

Suttles added that the workers would be back Saturday morning to continue working.

12 investment opportunities before the 'Collapse of Eaarth'

Video - SurvivalAcres Collapse of Civilization.

MarketWatch | Bill McKibben, an environmental economist, recently published "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet." Tough? Worse. Earth is dead.

McKibben's vision for the new Eaarth we created is bleak. No upbeat high-tech hope for a "green revolution" as in Tom Friedman's "Hot, Flat & Crowded." Remember, two decades ago McKibben's "The End of Nature" was one of the first books warning of global warming, climate change, a dying planet. His new Eaarth is a funeral dirge. In Foreign Policy magazine last year, McKibben summarized his relentless message:

"Act now, we're told, if we want to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. Trouble is, it might be too late. The science is settled, and the damage has already begun. The only question now is whether we will stop playing political games and embrace the few imperfect options we have left."

Stop the political games? Never. Remember Kyoto and Copenhagen defeats? Recent coal mine disasters? The BP-Gulf oil catastrophe? And when the long-awaited 1,000-page Kerry-Lieberman climate bill finally surfaced last week, it was quickly blasted as D.O.A., a "gift to polluters." Politicians love games.

In the end, 'Eaarth itself will force us to bend to new rules'

The truth is politicians will never stop in time. The planet really is dying, Eaarth is on an irreversible self-destruct path. Washington will not "stop playing political games." They cannot: There are too many "special interests" fighting for their "fair" share of the federal government's $1.7 trillion budget jackpot ... too many stockholders in publicly-traded corporations demanding bull-market returns and perpetual economic growth ... and too many lobbyists who make enormous short-term payoffs by ignoring the long-term warnings of McKibben and others.

After quoting a 2003 Pentagon report -- "as the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge" -- McKibben offers three sane solutions: Cut carbon emissions, reduce our obsession with economic growth and return to sustainable local farming. But while agreeing in his New York Times review, even advocate Paul Greenberg sees little chance of McKibben's ideas changing opinions or reversing the destiny of Eaarth:

"In the absence of some overarching authority, a kind of ecologically minded Lenin," McKibben's solutions "will remain hipster lifestyle choices rather than global game changers." But eventually, says Greenberg, "Eaarth itself will be that ecological Lenin, a harsh environmental dictator that will force us to bend to new rules."

Yes, the new rules will be forced on self-interested politicians ... forced on Wall Street's bonus-obsessed CEOs and short-term high-frequency traders ... forced on Main Street's 95 million investors. Fist tap Arnach.

the perfect storm: six trends converging on collapse

Video - Message to Anonymous Subgenius.

HuffPo | There are dark clouds gathering on the horizon. They are the clouds of six hugely troubling global trends, climate change being just one of the six. Individually, each of these trends is a potential civilization buster. Collectively, they are converging to form the perfect storm--a storm of such magnitude that it will dwarf anything that mankind has ever seen. If we are unsuccessful in our attempts to calm this storm, without a doubt it will destroy life as we know it on Planet Earth!

There is a popular saying that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result." If we keep doing business in the same way as we have for the past century, each of these six trends will continue their steep rates of decline, collapsing the natural systems that form the foundation for our civilization and the lifeblood of the global economy. Perhaps the current Gulf oil spill is the wake up call that mankind needs to snap us out of our complacency, realize that we are soiling our nest and that continuation of "business as usual" will destroy the world as we know it? Time will tell whether we heed this warning, go back sleep once the oil spill is contained, or simply tire of the endless media coverage, numb ourselves, and set these critical issues to the side.

We already have the technology and the means to turn this dark tide, but we lack the commitment to make the hard choices and sweeping changes that are necessary for shifting the future of our world from its current course of collapse to a new course of sustainability.

The following six trends are converging to form the perfect storm for global destruction, each of which is a potential civilization buster in its own right, if left unchecked:

the web shatters focus, rewires brain...,

Wired | During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers—three experienced Web surfers and three novices—for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics—the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car—the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow.

The two groups showed marked differences. Brain activity of the experienced surfers was far more extensive than that of the newbies, particularly in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving and decisionmaking. Small then had his subjects read normal blocks of text projected onto their goggles; in this case, scans revealed no significant difference in areas of brain activation between the two groups. The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.

The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. “Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.

When first publicized, the findings were greeted with cheers. By keeping lots of brain cells buzzing, Google seemed to be making people smarter. But as Small was careful to point out, more brain activity is not necessarily better brain activity. The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”

What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

Back in the 1980s, when schools began investing heavily in computers, there was much enthusiasm about the apparent advantages of digital documents over paper ones. Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on monitors would be a boon to learning. Hypertext would strengthen critical thinking, the argument went, by enabling students to switch easily between different viewpoints. Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed pages, readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections between diverse works. The hyperlink would be a technology of liberation.

By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.” Fist tap Dale.