gulf oil spill a hole in the world

Video - Naomi Klein visits the gulf coast with the crew from Fault Lines.

Guardian | How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be "restored and made whole" as Obama's interior secretary has pledged to do? It's not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf – the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It's not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.

We do know this. Far from being "made whole," the Gulf coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast's legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages – much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company's Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not to make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal". Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like "make it right".)

If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money – not BP's recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.

"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."

This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday's congressional testimony, Hayward said: "The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear" on the crisis, and that, "with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime." And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as "Pandora's well", they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.

an energy independent future?

An Energy-Independent Future

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the limits of magic

ArchdruidReport | There’s a rich irony that one of the few contemporaries of Hitler who could match his understanding of the nonrational was Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi was not a reasonable man, either, but his mind rose as far above the level of reason as Hitler’s sank below it. In many ways, the task of prying loose “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire from its overlords was a more astonishing feat than pulling Germany out of its post-1918 death spiral, and Gandhi did the job without any of the institutional tools Hitler relied on to work his magic. The spectacle of the largest empire in human history forced to submit to the gentle will of a single elderly mystic may be taken as an example of the positive potential of magic; the cataclysmic failure of the Twelve Year Reich show just as clearly its potential downside.

The difference in results unfolded partly from the moral distance between the two enchanters. Ethics are as important in magic as sanitation is in surgery, and for the same reason; neglect either one and you can count on things going septic. Still, there are also differences of means and ends, and these bear directly on the theme of this essay. In order to accomplish his purpose, Gandhi needed only to affect the thoughts and decisions of people in Britain, India, and any other countries that might influence one or the other. His work, in other words, was ultimately a matter of causing changes in consciousness, and that was something that symbolic action could and did accomplish.

Hitler, for his part, started out working on similar lines. To bring his vision of a triumphant Germany into reality, he had to cause changes in the consciousness of the German people, on the one hand, and in the minds of the leaders of other European nations on the other, and the magical knowledge he got on the fringes of the Vienna occult scene proved more than adequate to that task. Once he went past those goals to pursue the fantasy of military conquest, though, he passed out of the range of effects that could be accomplished by changes in consciousness, and into a realm that depended on the hard material realities of oil, steel, and geography. Once he crossed that line he was doomed; magic can transform a failed state into a unified nation, but it can’t make a world empire in an industrial age out of a modestly sized European state with few resources, no petroleum, and no defensible borders.

All this is simply to say that magic, like any other tool, is very well suited to carry out some jobs and completely useless for others. If the troubles faced by an individual or a community are primarily a function of consciousness, magical methods can be extraordinary effective in dealing with them. If the troubles that have to be faced has its roots in the world of matter, though, there are hard limits to what magic can do. You can’t use incantations and rituals, for example, to put oil in the ground if it was never there in the first place, or if the oil fields have already been pumped dry. You can’t even use magic to run a successful coal-to-liquids program if the net energy of the technology you’re using is too low; Hitler’s regime did its level best to accomplish that, with some of the world’s best scientists and engineers, the substantial coal reserves of occupied Europe, and an unrestricted supply of slave labor – and the Wehrmacht still ran out of fuel.

These examples are particularly relevant to the present, because the movements led by Hitler and Gandhi both had plenty in common with revitalization movements. Both emerged in response to drastic social stresses resistant to any more practical or reasonable approach – the post-Versailles near-collapse of Germany on the one hand, the economic and social burdens of British imperial rule over India on the other. Both drew heavily on symbolism, incantation, ritual, and the rest of the hardware in the magician’s toolkit, and both became mass movements characterized by the wild enthusiasm and millenarian expectations common to revitalization movements everywhere. The success of Gandhi’s project and the failure of Hitler’s thus points up, among other things, the difference between what a revitalization movement can do and what it can’t.

oxytocin and group aggression

WorldScience | A chem­i­cal some­times called the “trust hor­mone” or “bond­ing hor­mone” be­cause of its role in so­cial rela­t­ion­ships can al­so pro­mote a type of con­flict, new re­search sug­gests.

Sci­en­tists have found that the com­pound, called ox­y­to­cin and pro­duced in the brain, leads hu­mans to sac­ri­fice their in­ter­ests for their own group while act­ing against out­side groups per­ceived as threat­en­ing.

The find­ings were pub­lished June 11 in the re­search jour­nal Sci­ence.

The re­search­ers, Carsten de Dreu of the Uni­vers­ity of Am­ster­dam and col­leagues, said the find­ings offer a bi­o­log­i­cal ex­plana­t­ion for why con­flicts be­tween groups es­ca­late when oth­er groups are seen as threat­en­ing. When such threat is low, for ex­am­ple be­cause there are phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers be­tween the group ter­ri­to­ries, con­flict es­cala­t­ion is less like­ly.

De Dreu and col­leagues con­ducted the study aim­ing to learn why ox­y­to­cin would pro­mote al­tru­is­tic be­hav­ior. Where­as clas­sic eco­nom­ic the­o­ry has trou­ble ex­plain­ing al­tru­ism, an ev­o­lu­tion­ary per­spec­tive sug­gests al­tru­ism func­tions to strength­en one’s own group, from which the in­di­vid­ual ben­e­fits in the long run.

Be­cause ag­gres­sion to­wards com­pet­ing groups may help one’s own group to be­come rel­a­tively stronger, ag­gres­sion is an in­di­rect form of al­tru­is­tic, loy­al be­hav­ior to­wards one’s own group, some bi­ol­o­gists the­o­rize.

Charles Dar­win noted that groups whose mem­bers are al­tru­is­tic to­wards their own are more likely to pros­per, to sur­vive, and spread. De Dreu’s team rea­soned that if this is true, mech­a­nisms should have evolved that sus­tain al­tru­ism to­wards the own group, and ag­gres­sion to­wards com­pet­ing oth­er groups. The new find­ings sup­port this per­spec­tive, they ar­gued.

capitalism and corporate journalism

medialens | n his latest excellent book, 'Beyond the Profits System', the British economist Harry Shutt observes that one of the most striking features of the financial crisis has been:

"... the uniformly superficial nature of the analysis of its causes presented by mainstream observers, whether government officials, academics or business representatives. Thus it is commonly stated that the crisis was caused by a combination of imprudent investment by bankers and others [...] and unduly lax official regulation and supervision of markets. Yet the obvious question begged by such explanations - of how or why such a dysfunctional climate came to be created - is never addressed in any serious fashion."

Shutt continues:

"The inescapable conclusion [...] is that the crisis was the product of a conscious process of facilitating ever greater risk of massive systemic failure." (Harry Shutt, 'Beyond the Profits System: Possibilities for a Post-Capitalist Era', Zed Books, London, 2010, p.6)

In several books and articles, David Harvey, a social theorist at the City University of New York, has cogently written of how capitalism has shaped western society, risking and even destroying nations, populations and ecosystems. Not only are periodic episodes of "meltdown" inevitable, but they are crucial to capitalism's very survival. The essence of capitalism is self-interest; and any talk of reforming it through regulation or by imposing morality - a kinder, gentler capitalism - is both irrational and deceitful.

The bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008 triggered the latest crisis of capitalism. Drastic action was required to save the system. And so, observes Harvey, a few US Treasury officials and bankers including the Treasury Secretary himself, a past president of Goldman Sachs and the present Chief Executive of Goldman, "emerged from a conference room with a three-page document demanding a $700 billion bail-out of the banking system while threatening Armageddon in the markets."

Harvey continues:

"It seemed like Wall Street had launched a financial coup against the government and the people of the United States. A few weeks later, with caveats here and there and a lot of rhetoric, Congress and then President George Bush caved in and the money was sent flooding off, without any controls whatsoever, to all those financial institutions deemed 'too big to fail'." (David Harvey, 'The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism', Profile Books, London, 2010, p. 5)

Shutt translates "too big to fail", that over-used defence employed by capitalists and their cheerleaders, as meaning that a tiny super-wealthy clique recognised that they risked losing vast fortunes if the markets were allowed to take their course free of intervention from the state. Wholesale nationalisation of insolvent banks would have posed an existential threat to elite power; or even led to the collapse of the capitalist profits system in its entirety. Rather than accept such a fate, rich investors tried to ensure that their toxic assets be "largely transferred to the state, thereby adding unimaginable sums - officially estimated at $18 trillion world-wide - to already excessive public debt." (Shutt, op. cit., p. 36)

As ever, the public were made to pay the price for private greed. In simple terms: it's socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the rest of us.

tony hayward stonewalls

Video - Hayward all day long reduced to four minutes.

you couldn't make this stuff up....,

Video - Michael Caine as Tony Hayward in On Deadly Ground.

joe barton's public teabagging demonstration

Video - Joe Barton goes down....,

open biology's quest to explode data

The Scientist | A “science commons” at the data-intensive layer will encourage scholarly collaboration and communication—and spur drug discovery.

Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet and the founder of 3Com, observed that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. This is known as Metcalfe’s Law, and it goes a long way toward explaining why we can create and realize so much value from the Web. As more users get online, the network gets more valuable, spurring more users to get online, and so on.

Getting Metcalfe’s Law to operate for data is a long-held goal of science. Indeed, the Web was created to share data—physics data—by making it easier to link, find, download, and browse information on disparate computers. But we don’t have the functionality of the consumer Web for biological data. And we’re not getting network effects for data in the spaces that would most dramatically affect our lives—in the study of human disease.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Studying human disease is complex and almost incomprehensibly expensive. And recent studies from inside the pharmaceutical industry itself draw on 60 years of data to show us that drug discovery is essentially a random process. It’s hard to force network effects onto this world.

That’s because it’s difficult to start an “open” biology process from scratch. The cost of entry is still in the tens of millions of dollars to develop a meaningful corpus of data sets one can legally share and analytic tools one can legally place under open source licenses. Even then you’d have to find incentives to get scientists to share their new data, their models of disease, their software tools—when they’re not rewarded for doing so. It is a tall hill to climb.

shock and age

The Scientist | The accumulation of misfolded protein marks the accrual of years as the body ages. Could heat shock proteins be used to reduce the effects of aging and diminish the risk of disease by untangling improperly folded proteins?

What does a molecular thermometer look like? This seemed to be a simple question, not much different from the many science fair projects I had done in grade school and high school in Chicago. But rather than the simple solutions I’d present on triptych posterboards, the answer to this question has kept me fascinated for my entire career. The cell’s thermometer appears to be a network of stress-sensing transcription factors and specialized proteins—molecular chaperones—that function as the guardian of the proteome, sensing damage and keeping the cell’s proteins properly folded as they roll off the production line of ribosomes. Exciting as that was, none of us working on this question at the time could have predicted that this thermometer might also control the body’s fountain of youth and provide new ways of thinking about disease.

Proteins are fundamental building blocks for the cell; they are the predominant products of the genome that provide much of the shape and functionality of cells, tissues, and organisms. The proper synthesis, folding, assembly, translocation, and clearance of proteins is essential for the health of the cell and the organism. Proteins also provide the essential parts to replenish molecular machines for biosynthetic processes and ensure their efficient functioning in the adult cell, a process critical for longevity. At the root of the problem is a fundamental process: protein folding. When quality control—as overseen by heat shock proteins and molecular chaperones—slips, errors occur and persist. This interferes with molecular processes, which can lead to disease. When these events occur in neurons, the consequences can be devastating, leading to major classes of neurological disorders, like multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.

genetic fix for hiv?

The Scientist | Genetically modifying the stem cells of HIV patients may one day prove to be an effective, one-time therapy against the hard-to-kill virus, according to the results of a proof-of-principle trial published this week in Science Translational Medicine.

In contrast to the widely used highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), which patients must continue for their entire lives to control the virus, such a genetic treatment has the potential to be "a single administration therapy," said bioengineer David Schaffer of the University of California at Berkeley, who was not involved in the trial, "where you introduce [a gene] into somebody's cells, and it stays there the rest of their lives. [That] has the potential to be a major plus," eliminating many of the toxic effects and financial costs of HAART.

Because of these potential advantages, gene therapy -- the integration of new genetic material into a patient's genome -- has been proposed as a treatment for HIV. In past clinical trials, however, the new genetic material has failed to persist more than 8 months or a year. But taking advantage of a golden opportunity in which a handful of HIV patients had to undergo bone marrow transplants, molecular geneticist John Rossi of the City of Hope cancer center in California and his colleagues introduced three different therapeutic genes into patients' blood stem cells, then found evidence of those genetic elements in the blood up to 24 months later.

"It showed us that you can introduce genes into somebody's blood cells, and it can stay around for years," said Schaffer, who wrote a perspective about the paper.

"That's a major finding," Rossi added. While the number of cells expressing those genes was too low to provide any therapeutic benefit, it's "proof of principle" that gene therapy may provide long-term HIV treatment, he said.

microcosmic mafia wars

The Scientist | When searching for an appropriate description of the mammalian immune system, the vast majority of scientists settle on the metaphor of a war. It’s a battle scene, with the foot soldiers of the immune system (e.g., killer T cells) battling the bacterial or viral particles in an open field (the host’s body). Painting a picture in such strong terms is a good way to attract attention (and funding), and in many ways, it is a good fit—one paper I stumbled on as a graduate student that elegantly modeled the conflict generated nearly identical equations to those used in traditional models of warfare, which predict that military losses are proportional to the size of enemy forces.

Over the last several years, however, scientists have begun to realize that the molecular interactions between a pathogen and its host are quite a bit more complex than simple open field battle, where the power of one’s army is measured by bodies alone. The immune system is a multifaceted defense system, and pathogens have evolved numerous molecular strategies to evade its wrath, including methods that resemble more the devious tactics of organized crime than those of traditional warfare, such as setting up fronts to conduct covert operations, going undercover to infiltrate the opposing gang, and terrifying the enemy into admitting defeat (or committing Seppuku).

In the late 1990s, the discovery of pathogenicity islands—large regions of bacterial and viral genomes unique to pathogenic species—led researchers to recognize that many pathogens were involved in some complex racketeering, says immunologist and microbiologist Igor Brodsky of Yale University. Encoding specialized systems to inject virulence proteins into cells, pathogens are able to manipulate cellular processes in the host for their own benefit, such as initiating immune cell death and blocking a continued immune response.

This prompted the field to start identifying specific virulence factors important for a particular pathogen—either by mining databases for genes that might be behind those factors, knocking them out, and observing the effects on the pathogen’s ability to infect its host, or doing random mutagenesis. Once scientists identified some factors important for virulence, “then the question was what were these genes or proteins doing,” Brodsky says.

viruses provoke organelle creation

cell.com | Highlights:

* RNA viruses generate specialized RNA replication organelles enriched in PI4P lipids
* Host PI4KIIIβ enzyme is co-opted by the virus to generate PI4P lipid-rich organelles
* Enteroviral RNA polymerases specifically and preferentially bind PI4P lipids
* PI4P microenvironment is essential for enteroviral and flaviviral RNA synthesis

Summary
Many RNA viruses remodel intracellular membranes to generate specialized sites for RNA replication. How membranes are remodeled and what properties make them conducive for replication are unknown. Here we show how RNA viruses can manipulate multiple components of the cellular secretory pathway to generate organelles specialized for replication that are distinct in protein and lipid composition from the host cell. Specific viral proteins modulate effector recruitment by Arf1 GTPase and its guanine nucleotide exchange factor GBF1, promoting preferential recruitment of phosphatidylinositol-4-kinase IIIβ (PI4KIIIβ) to membranes over coat proteins, yielding uncoated phosphatidylinositol-4-phosphate (PI4P) lipid-enriched organelles. The PI4P-rich lipid microenvironment is essential for both enteroviral and flaviviral RNA replication; PI4KIIIβ inhibition interferes with this process; and enteroviral RNA polymerases specifically bind PI4P. These findings reveal how RNA viruses can selectively exploit specific elements of the host to form specialized organelles where cellular phosphoinositide lipids are key to regulating viral RNA replication.

why have we not been able to get together on energy?

Video - President James Earl Carter Crisis of Confidence (Energy) Speech.

extinction level event?

Video - Busta Rhymes Gimme Some More.

TheOilDrum | As you have probably seen and maybe feel yourselves, there are several things that do not appear to make sense regarding the actions of attack against the well. Don't feel bad, there is much that doesn't make sense even to professionals unless you take into account some important variables that we are not being told about. There seems to me to be a reluctance to face what cannot be termed anything less than grim circumstances in my opinion. There certainly is a reluctance to inform us regular people and all we have really gotten is a few dots here and there...

First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc....forget that, it won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.

So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:

The well bore structure is compromised "Down hole".

That is something which is a "Worst nightmare" conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have "said" a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place...

emotiv mind control

Tan Le, co-founder and president of Emotiv Systems, gives a live demo of a mind control device that uses a person's thoughts to input computer commands.

how words color your world

Guardian | This tale begins with a Liberal leader and his innovative exploration of the colour blue. Not Nick Clegg and the Tories, but William Gladstone and his concern about Homer's use of colour in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Gladstone was the first prominent intellectual to notice something awry with the Greek poet's sense of colour. Homer never described the sky as blue. In fact, Homer barely used colour terms at all and when he did they were just peculiar. The sea was "wine-looking". Oxen were also "wine-looking". And, to Gladstone, the sea and oxen were never of the same colour. His explanation was that the Ancient Greeks had not developed a colour sense, and instead saw the world in terms of black and white with only a dash of red.

Guy Deutscher's interest in the Homeric eye is less about evolution or optics than it is linguistic. Can we see something for which we have no word? Yes. The Greeks were able to distinguish shades of blue just as vividly as we can now, despite lacking a specific vocabulary for them. Yet, writes Deutscher, even though Gladstone was wrong about the Greeks' sense of perception, his hunch about the emergence of colour words was "so sharp and far-sighted that much of what he wrote . . . can hardly be bettered today".

It turned out that it wasn't just the Ancient Greeks who never said the sky was blue. None of the ancient languages had a proper word for blue. What we now call blue was once subsumed by older words for black or for green. (In fact, this is why in Japan green lights are actually a bluer shade of green than in the rest of the world. The word used for the green of traffic lights is ao, which used to mean "green and blue" but now means blue. Rather than change the word, they changed the colour.)

Deutscher has a lot of fun relating the discovery that colour words emerge in all languages in a predictable order. Black and white come first, then red, then yellow, then green and finally blue. (Although sometimes green is before yellow.) Red is probably first because it is the colour of blood and of the easiest dyes to make in the wild. Green and yellow are the colours of vegetation. And blue is last because – with the exception of the sky – few naturally occurring things are blue and blue dyes are very difficult to make.

It takes Deutscher half his book to tell the story of blue, and fascinating and well written though it is, the discussion is a diversion from the point he really wants to make, which is that language can affect how we perceive the world. Is it possible that two people may think about the world differently purely by dint of the language they speak? Deutscher believes that this is the case, and he provides three examples: Guugu Yimithirr is an indigenous Australian language – it gave us the word kangaroo – that does not have words for "left" and "right". Instead, all directions are given in terms of where the speaker is standing in relation to the points of the compass. Experiments have shown that Guugu Yimithirr speakers have "perfect-pitch for directions": regardless of visibility conditions, or whether they are stationary or moving, they know where north is. This is the most striking example, says Deutscher, of how speech habits can have "far-reaching consequences beyond speaking, as they affect orientation skills and even patterns of memory".

feds under pressure to open u.s. skies to drones

AP | Like many robots, the planes have advantages over humans for jobs that are dirty, dangerous or dull. And the planes often cost less than piloted aircraft and can stay aloft far longer.

"There is a tremendous pressure and need to fly unmanned aircraft in (civilian) airspace," Hank Krakowski, FAA's head of air traffic operations, told European aviation officials recently. "We are having constant conversations and discussions, particularly with the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, to figure out how we can do this safely with all these different sizes of vehicles."

There are two types of unmanned planes: Drones, which are automated planes programmed to fly a particular mission, and aircraft that are remotely controlled by someone on the ground, sometimes from thousands of miles away.

Last year, the FAA promised defense officials it would have a plan this year. The agency, which has worked on this issue since 2006, has reams of safety regulations that govern every aspect of civilian aviation but is just beginning to write regulations for unmanned aircraft.

"I think industry and some of the operators are frustrated that we're not moving fast enough, but safety is first," Krakowski said in an interview. "This isn't Afghanistan. This isn't Iraq. This is a part of the world that has a lot of light airplanes flying around, a lot of business jets."

One major concern is the prospect of lost communication between unmanned aircraft and the operators who remotely control them. Another is a lack of firm separation of aircraft at lower altitudes, away from major cities and airports. Planes entering these areas are not required to have collision warning systems or even transponders. Simply being able to see another plane and take action is the chief means of preventing accidents.

The Predator B, already in use for border patrol, can fly for 20 hours without refueling, compared with a helicopter's average flight time of just over two hours. Homeland Security wants to expand their use along the borders of Mexico and Canada, and along coastlines for spotting smugglers of drugs and illegal aliens. The Coast Guard wants to use them for search and rescue.

The National Transportation Safety Board held a forum in 2008 on safety concerns associated with pilotless aircraft after a Predator crashed in Arizona. The board concluded the ground operator remotely controlling the plane had inadvertently cut off the plane's fuel.

Texas officials, including Gov. Rick Perry, Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, and Rep. Henry Cuellar, have been leaning on the FAA to approve requests to use unmanned aircraft along the Texas-Mexico border. FAA recently approved one request to use the planes along the border near El Paso, but another request to use them along the Texas Gulf Coast and near Brownsville is still pending.

50 statistics about the u.s. economy too crazy to believe

endoftheamericandream | Most Americans know that the U.S. economy is in bad shape, but what most Americans don't know is how truly desperate the financial situation of the United States really is. The truth is that what we are experiencing is not simply a "downturn" or a "recession". What we are witnessing is the beginning of the end for the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen. Our greed and our debt are literally eating our economy alive. Total government, corporate and personal debt has now reached 360 percent of GDP, which is far higher than it ever reached during the Great Depression era. We have nearly totally dismantled our once colossal manufacturing base, we have shipped millions upon millions of middle class jobs overseas, we have lived far beyond our means for decades and we have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. A great day of financial reckoning is fast approaching, and the vast majority of Americans are totally oblivious.

But the truth is that you cannot defy the financial laws of the universe forever. What goes up must come down. The borrower is the servant of the lender. Cutting corners always catches up with you in the end.

Sometimes it takes cold, hard numbers for many of us to fully realize the situation that we are facing.

So, the following are 50 very revealing statistics about the U.S. economy that are almost too crazy to believe....

in the singularity movement, humans are so yesterday...,

NYTimes | Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.

Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.)

The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.

Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing.

On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all.

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”

But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

rubbing, rubbing, rubbing - flashpoints for global war

neithercorp press | As the economic collapse progresses through 2010 and its fiscal consequences become more certain, the field of view reaching towards our social and political future has become more vague and unclear. Every analyst or researcher of the New World Order and the global elite now seems to have a different insight into how our situation will develop once the financial implosion peaks, and people actually start to react to the obviously severe circumstances.

While having a microphone in the middle of the annual Bilderberg conference in would surely clarify the details of exactly how the globalists plan to conduct themselves over the coming year, this is unfortunately not an option, and reports leaked from Bilderberg cannot always be taken at face value. One element nearly all of us can agree on, though, is the distinct possibility of expanded wars in the near term, used as a diversion by the elites to pull the focus of the masses away from their dire economic atmosphere, away from the bankers that created the meltdown, and towards an overseas adversary.

War on a broad scale creates fear, and fear often inspires a senseless brand of collectivism and misguided patriotism in those uninformed subsections of the public, a patriotism based on blind zealotry instead of individual liberty. The average citizen faced with an ample and immediate threat by a foreign enemy tends to fall in line with establishment policy, even if the conflict with that foreign enemy is entirely fabricated, even if establishment policy is ultimately a greater threat. War has always been utilized as a tool by aristocrats and monarchy to not only expand kingdoms and empires, but to keep the “peasants” of their empires weak, weary, and subservient.

The size of these wars seems to reflect the scope of the goal the globalists wish to accomplish at the moment, and today the stakes are very high. The world has reached a point of no return as far as the economy is concerned, and only two conclusions are possible: the people stand down, the elites prevail, and global government is established, or, the people stand firm, the elites fall, and their designs are put to an end perhaps forever. It is an all or nothing scenario, and one of the few tricks the globalists have left to turn the tide fully in their favor is war on a magnitude so humbling that it intimidates champions of free society into conceding without attempting a defense. To paraphrase the Chinese tactician, Sun Tzu: the best generals win without ever having to fight a real battle. They simply give their enemy the impression that fighting back would be utterly futile and force them to surrender before the battle ever begins.

In this article, we will examine some of the regions around the world in which such a “shock and awe” campaign could begin, facilitating the escalation of global war.

international energy outlook 2010

Video - Center for Strategic and International Studies Energy Outlook 2010
On May 25, 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) released the latest edition of the agency's long-term assessment of world energy markets at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Howard Gruenspecht, EIA's Deputy Administrator, will presented the briefing.

The International Energy Outlook 2010 (IEO2010) includes projections of world energy demand by region and primary energy source through 2035; electricity generation by fuel type; and energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. Among other topics, Dr. Gruenspecht will discuss EIA's view on long-term petroleum and other liquids fuel supplies, projections for global natural gas markets, prospects for worldwide growth in the use of renewable energy, and energy demand growth among the developing nations.

EIA | The International Energy Outlook 2010 (IEO2010) presents an assessment by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the outlook for international energy markets through 2035. U.S. projections appearing in IEO2010 are consistent with those published in EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2010 (AEO2010), (April 2010).

The Powerpoint presentation by Deputy Administrator, Howard Gruenspecht at the IEO2010 press conference on May 25, 2010 can be viewed on the EIA web site:

why atavisms flourish - now apply it to corporations..,

Video - Public Caning in Singapore.

JASSS | Most current attempts to explain the evolution—through individual selection—of pro-social behavior (i.e. behavior that favors the group) that allows for cohesive societies among non related individuals, focus on altruistic punishment as its evolutionary driving force. The main theoretical problem facing this line of research is that in the exercise of altruistic punishment the benefits of punishment are enjoyed collectively while its costs are borne individually. We propose that social cohesion might be achieved by a form of punishment, widely practiced among humans and animals forming bands and engaging in mob beatings, which we call co-operative punishment. This kind of punishment is contingent upon—not independent from—the concurrent participation of other actors. Its costs can be divided among group members in the same way as its benefits are, and it will be favoured by evolution as long as the benefits exceed the costs. We show with computer simulations that co-operative punishment is an evolutionary stable strategy that performs better in evolutionary terms than non-cooperative punishment, and demonstrate the evolvability and sustainability of pro-social behavior in an environment where not necessarily all individuals participate in co-operative punishment. Co-operative punishment together with pro-social behavior produces a self reinforcing system that allows the emergence of a 'Darwinian Leviathan' that strengthens social institutions.

simply tuuurrrrrible..., obama crackdown on whistleblowers

NYTimes | The Drake case epitomizes the politically charged debate over secrecy and democracy in a capital where the watchdog press is an institution even older than the spy bureaucracy, and where every White House makes its own calculated disclosures of classified information to reporters.

Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, who has long tracked the uneasy commerce in secrets between government officials and the press, said Mr. Drake might have fallen afoul of a bipartisan sense in recent years that leaks have gotten out of hand and need to be deterred. By several accounts, Mr. Obama has been outraged by some leaks, too.

“I think this administration, like every other administration, is driven to distraction by leaking,” Mr. Aftergood said. “And Congress wants a few scalps, too. On a bipartisan basis, they want these prosecutions to proceed.”

Though he is charged under the Espionage Act, Mr. Drake appears to be a classic whistle-blower whose goal was to strengthen the N.S.A.’s ability to catch terrorists, not undermine it. His alleged revelations to Ms. Gorman focused not on the highly secret intelligence the security agency gathers but on what he viewed as its mistaken decisions on costly technology programs called Trailblazer, Turbulence and ThinThread.

“The Baltimore Sun stories simply confirmed that the agency was ineptly managed in some respects,” said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of “The Secret Sentry,” a history of the N.S.A. Such revelations hardly damaged national security, Mr. Aid said.

wormy new gut-ecosystem model

Video - live trichuris in the cecum.

The Scientist | A new class of organisms may be cutting in on the classic, co-evolutionary, immune system-boosting tango between mammals and the beneficial bacteria that inhabit their guts: parasitic worms.

Researchers at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom report this week in Science that they have found that parasitic worms of the genus Trichuris -- inhabitants of many a mammal's large intestine -- are dependent upon common gut bacteria, such as E. coli, to reproduce inside their mammalian hosts. This means that the worms likely evolved alongside the bacteria that share their host and may play a more crucial role in building and modulating mammalian immune responses than previously expected.

"Having a low number of worms that don't cause disease may be effective in developing a robust and effective immune response," University of Manchester microbiologist Ian Roberts told The Scientist. "You end up with a kind of beneficial ecosystem."

Looking at a species of Trichuris that commonly infects mice, Roberts and his colleagues found that the worm's eggs would only hatch in the presence of bacterial cells, which clustered around tiny trap doors in the oblong egg capsules through which the worms would emerge. When bacteria were absent, hatching ceased.

This strategy makes sense for the worms, Roberts added, because their dispersal to different hosts depends upon a life spent in the nether regions of the digestive tract, during which they hatch out of eggs and lay more that are released in the host's feces. Trichuris worms don't hatch in stomachs or small intestines -- only in large intestines, where large numbers of bacteria also reside.

does the ruling class really want to commit suicide?

Video - Frankie "Five Angels" remembers his past.

Thiscantbehappening | the ruling class is trying to commit suicide. In and of itself, this would be a great boon to mankind. Imagine if the ruling class admitted their abject failure to get anything right, and did the honorable thing. Top management at Wall Street, the elite of both major parties, their lobbyists, the big pr firms, the worst hacks of the corporate press, most CEOs and COOs--what if they all just got in a big bathtub, conceded defeat and opened up a vein like Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather II? Who would miss them?

So suicide isn’t the problem, exactly. The problem is that they don’t know they’re trying to kill themselves, and it doesn’t occur to them to behave honorably. The ruling class is not Frank Pentangeli. The ruling class is the husband who is failing at work, having his home foreclosed, his car repossessed, his children are getting humiliated at school because they aren’t wearing the right clothes, the self-help books have failed, the church offers no solace, television won’t acknowledge his existence--so he shoots his wife and four kids and then puts the gun in his mouth.

Thus the problem is murder suicide. The husband wants to kill the only people in his life more powerless than himself, because they are living reminders of his own shame.

Let me spell that out. The ruling class is the husband. Everyone who works in the productive economy is the wife and four kids. The ruling class wants to commit suicide because it has so completely failed and because everything it believes is so obviously wrong. One part of the ruling class brain knows it doesn’t do anything worth doing, and another part of the ruling class brain doesn’t want to be reminded and lives in terror of being exposed. This is called denial. To keep the denial in place, evidence of failure must be destroyed. If you, oh reader, are the living evidence of ruling class failure, it is a dangerous situation.

The ruling class wrecked the economy. That was a stupendous failure, but at least they were wrecking a social construct that deserved wrecking. Organizing labor on the principle that the guy with the most money gets to tell everyone else what to do--how did that come to be considered a good idea? How did that get equated with freedom? Every major religion warns against greed, and somehow most of the United States has come to believe that letting the greedheads run everything is efficient.

That’s so 20th century.

The bigger problem is that the ruling class, in its murder suicide frenzy, is killing nature. Nature is not a social construct. It’s really there. It’s alive. As such, it is too painful for the ruling class to look at, so they are killing it. Anything that reminds them of life, anything that isn’t money, has to go.

It’s a mistake to fetishize all this evil and project it onto BP. BP is one sociopath in a culture of sociopathy. If you read its “plan” for dealing with oil spills in the Gulf, as some enterprising reporters did for the Associated Press, it is a contemptuous joke from beginning to end. It is full of bizarre lies and mistakes. The corporate flunkies who accepted it at the Minerals Management Service should be in prison. The company that wrote it, the company that had no plan whatsoever for dealing with a deep blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, cares about brown pelicans like Joran van der Sloot cares about young women.

The chorus of energy companies denying global warming wasn’t killing nature fast enough for BP, so it invited nature into a hotel room and strangled her.

A prophecy: At some point this summer, a hurricane is going to blow through the Gulf of Mexico. It’s going to drown New Orleans in carcinogenic sludge, again, and a day later it’s going to be raining tar balls on Nashville. People all over the South will go to church and demand that Jesus save them. Jesus will choose this moment to make his return to earth: “Hey, I told you 2000 years ago that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. I told you that the poor are blessed. I told you that as you treat the least of these, you have treated me. That means if you oppress the poor, you oppress me. That means if you drown pelicans in oil, you’re drowning me. But you didn’t read that part of the New Testament. You only read that weird symbolism in the Book of Revelations and argued about nothing while the ruling class destroyed everything. You came to believe that my teachings were somehow consistent with capitalism. I mean, where did you get that from? I’m the guy who threw the money changers out of the temple. You think the money changers of Wall Street are going to save you when the ocean dies? You think I’m going to save you with some kind of rapture and vacuum the believers into heaven? Not a chance. But you do have a choice. You can deal with the ruling class now, or you can burn in a hell of your own creation.”

simple operational incompetence...,

RollingStone | The Spill, The Scandal and the President - The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder.

It's tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office. But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill. "Bush owns eight years of the mess," says Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. "But after more than a year on the job, Salazar owns it too."

During the Bush years, the Minerals Management Service, the agency in the Interior Department charged with safeguarding the environment from the ravages of drilling, descended into rank criminality. According to reports by Interior's inspector general, MMS staffers were both literally and figuratively in bed with the oil industry. When agency staffers weren't joining industry employees for coke parties or trips to corporate ski chalets, they were having sex with oil-company officials. But it was American taxpayers and the environment that were getting screwed. MMS managers were awarded cash bonuses for pushing through risky offshore leases, auditors were ordered not to investigate shady deals, and safety staffers routinely accepted gifts from the industry, allegedly even allowing oil companies to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil before tracing over them in pen.

"The oil companies were running MMS during those years," Bobby Maxwell, a former top auditor with the agency, told Rolling Stone last year. "Whatever they wanted, they got. Nothing was being enforced across the board at MMS."

Salazar himself has worked hard to foster the impression that the "prior administration" is to blame for the catastrophe. In reality, though, the Obama administration was fully aware from the outset of the need to correct the lapses at MMS that led directly to the disaster in the Gulf. In fact, Obama specifically nominated Salazar – his "great" and "dear" friend – to force the department to "clean up its act." For too long, Obama declared, Interior has been "seen as an appendage of commercial interests" rather than serving the people. "That's going to change under Ken Salazar."

Salazar took over Interior in January 2009, vowing to restore the department's "respect for scientific integrity." He immediately traveled to MMS headquarters outside Denver and delivered a beat-down to staffers for their "blatant and criminal conflicts of interest and self-dealing" that had "set one of the worst examples of corruption and abuse in government." Promising to "set the standard for reform," Salazar declared, "The American people will know the Minerals Management Service as a defender of the taxpayer. You are the ones who will make special interests play by the rules." Dressed in his trademark Stetson and bolo tie, Salazar boldly proclaimed, "There's a new sheriff in town."

Salazar's early moves certainly created the impression that he meant what he said. Within days of taking office, he jettisoned the Bush administration's plan to open 300 million acres – in Alaska, the Gulf, and up and down both coasts – to offshore drilling. The proposal had been published in the Federal Register literally at midnight on the day that Bush left the White House. Salazar denounced the plan as "a headlong rush of the worst kind," saying it would have put in place "a process rigged to force hurried decisions based on bad information." Speaking to Rolling Stone in March 2009, the secretary underscored his commitment to reform. "We have embarked on an ambitious agenda to clean up the mess," he insisted. "We have the inspector general involved with us in a preventive mode so that the department doesn't commit the same mistakes of the past." The crackdown, he added, "goes beyond just codes of ethics."

Except that it didn't. Salazar did little to tamp down on the lawlessness at MMS, beyond referring a few employees for criminal prosecution and ending a Bush-era program that allowed oil companies to make their "royalty" payments – the amount they owe taxpayers for extracting a scarce public resource – not in cash but in crude. And instead of putting the brakes on new offshore drilling, Salazar immediately throttled it up to record levels. Even though he had scrapped the Bush plan, Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone – an all-time high. The aggressive leasing came as no surprise, given Salazar's track record. "This guy has a long, long history of promoting offshore oil drilling – that's his thing," says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "He's got a highly specific soft spot for offshore oil drilling." As a senator, Salazar not only steered passage of the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which opened 8 million acres in the Gulf to drilling, he even criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster.

Salazar was far less aggressive, however, when it came to making good on his promise to fix MMS. Though he criticized the actions of "a few rotten apples" at the agency, he left long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge. "The people that are ethically challenged are the career managers, the people who come up through the ranks," says a marine biologist who left the agency over the way science was tampered with by top officials. "In order to get promoted at MMS, you better get invested in this pro-development oil culture." One of the Bush-era managers whom Salazar left in place was John Goll, the agency's director for Alaska. Shortly after, the Interior secretary announced a reorganization of MMS in the wake of the Gulf disaster, Goll called a staff meeting and served cake decorated with the words "Drill, baby, drill."

Salazar also failed to remove Chris Oynes, a top MMS official who had been a central figure in a multibillion-dollar scandal that Interior's inspector general called "a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling." In the 1990s, industry lobbyists secured a sweetheart subsidy from Congress: Drillers would pay no royalties on oil extracted in deep water until prices rose above $28 a barrel. But this tripwire was conveniently omitted in Gulf leases overseen by Oynes – a mistake that will let the oil giants pocket as much as $53 billion. Instead of being fired for this fuckup, however, Oynes was promoted by Bush to become associate director for offshore drilling – a position he kept under Salazar until the Gulf disaster hit.

"Employees describe being in Interior – not just MMS, but the other agencies – as the third Bush term," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represents federal whistle-blowers. "They're working for the same managers who are implementing the same policies. Why would you expect a different result?"

sipri yearbook 2010 - armaments, disarmament, and international security

SIPRI | ‘The 12 chapters of SIPRI Yearbook 2010 and their accompanying appendices and documentation provide the single most comprehensive and in-depth assessment of developments in international security, armaments and disarmament over the past year’

Chapter 5. Military expenditure
Sample chapter (PDF)
Summary
Total global military expenditure in 2009 is estimated to have been $1531 billion. This represents an increase of 6 per cent in real terms compared to 2008, and of 49 per cent since 2000. Military expenditure comprised approximately 2.7 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009. All regions and subregions saw an increase in 2009, except the Middle East.

The global economic crisis had little impact on world military spending in 2009, as most major economies boosted public spending to counteract the recession, postponing deficit reduction. While military expenditure was not a major feature of economic stimulus packages, it was not generally cut either. Nine of the top 10 spenders increased military spending in 2009. However, some smaller economies less able to sustain large deficits did cut spending.

Natural resource revenues appear to be a significant driver of military expenditure in many developing countries, with rapidly rising revenues from oil and other commodities in recent years, due to increases in both price and production. This may lead to increased military spending as a means of protecting resources from internal or external threats, while resource revenues are often a source of funding for arms purchases. The drop in commodity prices in 2009 has slowed this trend in some cases.

The conflict in Afghanistan is proving increasingly costly to many of the countries with a substantial troop presence there and has also generated debates as to the focus of military spending, between equipment of use in current conflicts and major weapon platforms designed for power projection. In the UK a combination of the Afghanistan conflict, high deficits and an overambitious equipment programme have sharpened this debate.

US military spending is continuing to rise under the Obama Administration, partly due to the escalating conflict in Afghanistan. Spending is budgeted to rise further in 2010, and military spending is exempted from a general freeze on discretionary spending. The 2010 budget saw some refocusing of priorities, with cancellation of some major weapon systems and increased focus on information and communications technology, but no major strategic shift.

Military spending patterns in Afghanistan and Iraq both reflect the demands of rebuilding a country’s armed forces from scratch following external invasion and with continued requirement for substantial external funding.

remember where you read it first....,

Video - the great Brook Benton "Just a Matter of Time".

New Scientist | Children with autism appear to have a characteristic chemical signature in their urine which might form the basis of an early diagnostic test for the condition.

The finding also adds weight the hypothesis that substances released by gut bacteria are contributing to the onset of the condition.

Autism has previously been linked to metabolic abnormalities and gastrointestinal problems such as gut pain and diarrhoea. Several studies have also hinted at changes in gut bacteria in the faeces of children with autism.

To investigate whether signs of these metabolic changes might be detectable in children's urine, Jeremy Nicholson and colleagues at Imperial College London investigated 39 children with autism, 28 of their non-autistic siblings and 34 unrelated children.

Chemical fingerprint

Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to analyse the children's urine, they found that each of these groups had a distinct chemical fingerprint, with clear and significant differences between children with autism and unrelated controls.

"The signature that comes up is related to gut bacteria," says Nicholson. It is not yet clear whether the bacteria's metabolic products contribute to the development of autism, but it is a possibility worth investigating, he adds. A large proportion of autistic children have severe gastrointestinal problems that tend to appear at about the same time as the behavioural symptoms.

"It adds another link to the gut bacterial involvement in the onset of disorder," says Glenn Gibson of the University of Reading, UK, who has previously identified abnormally high levels of clostridium bacteria in children with autism.

One possibility is that the gut bacteria in children with autism are producing toxins that might interfere with brain development. One of the compounds identified in the urine of autistic children was N-methyl-nicotinamide (NMND), which has also been implicated in Parkinson's disease.

can the u.s. punish bp's shareholders?

NYTimes | Spewing oil and alienating Americans with its chief executive’s impolitic remarks, BP may be Public Enemy No. 1 in the United States. But in Britain, where the company is a mainstay of the stock market and a favorite of pension funds, investors and politicians are becoming increasingly angry at the blistering attacks from across the Atlantic.

BP’s share price, even after recovering some ground in New York trading on Thursday, has fallen more than 40 percent since the environmental catastrophe in April, and some analysts say the crisis could lead to the takeover or even the bankruptcy of one of Britain’s most valuable and iconic companies.

In that atmosphere, the stream of condemnations from Washington has stirred a protective backlash, even in this closest of American allies. Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, said Thursday that he was worried about “anti-British rhetoric” and “name-calling” from American politicians.

“When you consider the huge exposure of British pension funds to BP, it starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves,” Mr. Johnson told BBC radio’s Today program.

Prime Minister David Cameron refused to criticize the United States, however, saying he sympathized with its “frustration” in dealing with its worst environmental disaster in memory. But the chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, signaled careful support for BP, saying that he had spoken to its chief executive, Tony Hayward, and that it was important to remember “the economic value BP brings to people in Britain and America.”

BP is the third largest oil company in the world, after ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, with 80,000 employees worldwide as of last December, sales of $239 billion in 2009 and a market value — even after the recent losses — of more than $100 billion. At a time when Britain is desperate to reduce its deficit, BP is a huge contributor to British tax revenue, paying nearly $1.4 billion in taxes on its profits last year.

Its reputation for reliability and its generous dividends have long made it a favorite of British pension funds. The company’s dividend payments accounted for about 13 percent of the dividends handed out by British companies last year, according to FairPensions, a London-based charity.

Some Britons are irked at President Obama’s seeming determination to refer to the company as “British Petroleum” — even though it jettisoned that name in favor of initials years ago. In any case, they point out, it is truly a multinational company, traded on both the New York and London stock exchanges, with British and American nationals on its board of directors.

BP also has extensive holdings in the United States. It merged with Amoco, the former Standard Oil of Indiana, in 1998, and about 40 percent of its shares are held by American investors. It owns a refinery in Texas City, Tex., that is one of the world’s largest, and a 50 percent interest in the Trans Alaska Pipeline, in addition to a huge gasoline marketing operation.

But alarms went off in Britain when President Obama said earlier this week that he would have fired Mr. Hayward, BP’s chief executive, if Mr. Hayward worked for him and that he was looking for “whose ass to kick” in connection with the disaster. The Justice Department did not help matters when it said Wednesday that it was planning to take action to force BP to withhold its next dividend payment.

mega-disaster coverup?

Video - Matt Simons on magnitude of disaster.

Oilprice | WMR has been informed by sources in the US Army Corps of Engineers, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and Florida Department of Environmental Protection that the Obama White House and British Petroleum (BP), which pumped $71,000 into Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign -- more than John McCain or Hillary Clinton, are covering up the magnitude of the volcanic-level oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and working together to limit BP's liability for damage caused by what can be called a "mega-disaster."

Obama and his senior White House staff, as well as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, are working with BP's chief executive officer Tony Hayward on legislation that would raise the cap on liability for damage claims from those affected by the oil disaster from $75 million to $10 billion. However, WMR's federal and Gulf state sources are reporting the disaster has the real potential cost of at least $1 trillion. Critics of the deal being worked out between Obama and Hayward point out that $10 billion is a mere drop in the bucket for a trillion dollar disaster but also note that BP, if its assets were nationalized, could fetch almost a trillion dollars for compensation purposes. There is talk in some government circles, including FEMA, of the need to nationalize BP in order to compensate those who will ultimately be affected by the worst oil disaster in the history of the world.

Plans by BP to sink a 4-story containment dome over the oil gushing from a gaping chasm one kilometer below the surface of the Gulf, where the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and killed 11 workers on April 20, and reports that one of the leaks has been contained is pure public relations disinformation designed to avoid panic and demands for greater action by the Obama administration, according to FEMA and Corps of Engineers sources. Sources within these agencies say the White House has been resisting releasing any "damaging information" about the oil disaster. They add that if the ocean oil geyser is not stopped within 90 days, there will be irreversible damage to the marine eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico, north Atlantic Ocean, and beyond. At best, some Corps of Engineers experts say it could take two years to cement the chasm on the floor of the Gulf.

Only after the magnitude of the disaster became evident did Obama order Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to declare the oil disaster a "national security issue." Although the Coast Guard and FEMA are part of her department, Napolitano's actual reasoning for invoking national security was to block media coverage of the immensity of the disaster that is unfolding for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and their coastlines.

From the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency, Coast Guard, and Gulf state environmental protection agencies, the message is the same: "we've never dealt with anything like this before."

The Obama administration also conspired with BP to fudge the extent of the oil leak, according to our federal and state sources. After the oil rig exploded and sank, the government stated that 42,000 gallons per day was gushing from the seabed chasm. Five days later, the federal government upped the leakage to 210,000 gallons a day.

However, WMR has been informed that submersibles that are monitoring the escaping oil from the Gulf seabed are viewing television pictures of what is a "volcanic-like" eruption of oil. Moreover, when the Army Corps of Engineers first attempted to obtain NASA imagery of the Gulf oil slick -- which is larger than that being reported by the media -- it was turned down. However, National Geographic managed to obtain the satellite imagery shots of the extent of the disaster and posted them on their web site.

There is other satellite imagery being withheld by the Obama administration that shows what lies under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be around the size of Mount Everest. This information has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public, according to our sources.

maxed out...,

about that paper?