Cap and Blow?

What the hell are they thinking in Washington, and down at the “Unified Command” in New Orleans, letting BP try to close off the oil volcano spewing out the top of the damaged Blowout Preventer (BOP) stack?

And what the hell is the mainstream press doing not asking about the clear evidence of oil or gas spewing out under pressure from cracks in the seafloor around the base of the BOP? (See the image of oil spewing from the sea floor.)

Sure the initial partial closing of the valves is working, but they haven’t built up much pressure yet--just to 6000 lbs/square inch, which isn’t much above the 5000 lbs/square inch at that depth of the ocean--and a lot could go wrong. seriously wrong, and good reason to think it will.

I made a call to the media office of the Unified Command, the office set up to respond to public and media inquiries about the disaster, which is supposedly composed of people from the US Coast Guard, other federal agencies, and BP. When I mentioned the videos taken by BP’s own remote operating vehicles (ROVs) of the oil and/or gas spewing from cracks in the sea floor, I was told I had to call the press office in Houston, “because you’re asking us a question about the sub-surface well.”

But here’s the thing. The press office in Houston is not run by the Unified Command. The people at the office there answer the phone with the phrase: “BP Press.” They do this because they are BP employees, and the office is in BP headquarters.

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MSNBC Alludes To Second Hole Spewing Oil

How could 300-400 million gallons flow into the GOM through a 6 inch wide pipe?

The lies will continue until the truth becomes obvious to everyone.

How does Dylan get this info onto the MSM?

Iran accuses US and UK of supporting group behind mosque attacks

Iran is vowing to hunt down a Sunni separatist group which claimed responsibility for a double suicide bombing that killed 28 people at a mosque in the south-eastern city of Zahedan.

Jundullah – Arabic for "the soldiers of God" – said it carried out the twin attacks yesterday at Zahedan's grand mosque in retaliation for the execution of the group's captured leader. Provincial officials said a further 167 people were injured, some of them critically. Three days of mourning were declared. General Hossein Salami, deputy commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, claimed in Tehran today that the victims "were martyred by the hands of mercenaries of the US and UK". Ali Mohammad Azad, governor of Sistan-Baluchestan province, blamed "the intelligence services of arrogant powers."

The US and Britain – which are at odds with Iran over its controversial nuclear programme – issued statements condemning the attacks.

Shia worshippers were celebrating the birthday of the prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein when the first bomb detonated, according to reports from the scene. A second explosion took place 15 minutes later as people rushed to help – a technique used by Sunni groups in Iraq to maximise casualties. The dead reportedly included several Revolutionary Guards.

Iranian media said the aim was to sow discord between Shias and Sunnis in the Sunni majority area, which borders on Pakistan. Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan, has seen several mass casualty attacks in recent years.

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Fed Gets More Power, Responsibility

WSJ

After fending off most challenges to its independence and winning new powers to oversee big financial firms, the Federal Reserve has emerged from a bruising debate on the overhaul of U.S. financial rules as perhaps the pre-eminent regulator in the sector. But that could only bring it added blame if things go wrong again.

 Just a few months ago, amid populist anger at the Fed for failing to prevent the financial crisis of 2008 and bailing out Wall Street, Congress was talking of stripping the central bank of its supervisory oversight of banks or forcing it to submit to congressional audit of its interest-rate decisions.

Instead, the new law gives the Fed more power and a better tool box to help prevent financial crises. It will become the primary regulator for large, complex financial firms of all kinds, such as American International Group, the insurer which built a massive derivatives portfolio that regulators didn't see until it was too late.

This isn't the first time Congress has expanded the Fed's role. After the Great Depression, it passed the Employment Act in 1946, charging the Fed with averting the huge unemployment seen in the 1930s. After the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, the Fed was formally given a dual mandate of promoting both price stability and maximum sustainable employment. In the wake of the latest financial crisis, the Fed is effectively being told to add the maintenance of financial stability to its responsibilities.

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NSA Falsified Intercepted Communications in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident

NY TIMES

WASHINGTON — In an echo of the debates over the discredited intelligence that helped make the case for the war in Iraq, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday released more than 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts that show senators of the time sharply questioning whether they had been deceived by the White House and the Pentagon over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

“If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress, has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the world, the consequences are very great,” Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, the father of the future vice president, said in March 1968 in a closed session of the Foreign Relations Committee.

The documents are Volume 20 in a regular series of releases of historical transcripts from the committee, which conducted most of its business in executive session during the 1960s, before the Senate required committee meetings to be public. The documents were edited by Donald Ritchie, the Senate historian, and cover 1968, when members of the committee were anguished over Vietnam and in a deteriorating relationship with the Johnson White House over the war.

Historians said the transcripts, which are filled with venting by the senators about the Johnson administration and frustrations over their own ineffectiveness, added little new to the historical record. Even at the time, there was widespread skepticism about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the North Vietnamese were said to have attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after an earlier clash.

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Gulf Oil Spill Altering Food Web Scientists Say

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Scientists are reporting early signs that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is altering the marine food web by killing or tainting some creatures and spurring the growth of others more suited to a fouled environment.

Near the spill site, researchers have documented a massive die-off of pyrosomes - cucumber-shaped, gelatinous organisms fed on by endangered sea turtles.

Along the coast, droplets of oil are being found inside the shells of young crabs that are a mainstay in the diet of fish, turtles and shorebirds.

And at the base of the food web, tiny organisms that consume oil and gas are proliferating.

If such impacts continue, the scientists warn of a grim reshuffling of sealife that could over time cascade through the ecosystem and imperil the region's multibillion-dollar fishing industry.

Federal wildlife officials say the impacts are not irreversible, and no tainted seafood has yet been found. But Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who chairs a House committee investigating the spill, warned Tuesday that the problem is just unfolding and toxic oil could be entering seafood stocks as predators eat contaminated marine life.

"You change the base of the food web, it's going to ripple through the entire food web," said marine scientist Rob Condon, who found oil-loving bacteria off the Alabama coastline, more than 90 miles from BP's collapsed Deepwater Horizon drill rig. "Ultimately it's going to impact fishing and introduce a lot of contaminants into the food web."

Simmons' Take on the Oil Spill in the Gulf

7-15-10 -- BP intentionally misled the public and the U.S. government about the extent of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to save their company and avoid criminal liability, said Matthew Simmons, an oil industry insider who has analyzed the industry for the past 40 years. They continue to do so, he said, risking not just the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem and economy, but threatening the health of those who will be exposed to the highly toxic oil in the coming months.

"There is no way BP would not know they were misleading everyone," said Simmons. "They would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind and they're not. These are smart guys."

Simmons presented a daunting analysis of the BP blowout, why it happened, how it happened, and how BP knowingly failed to respond appropriately. He gave the talk to 150 attendees at the request of local people, but he has been speaking about the spill and what he says is BP's malfeasance publicly - including on MSNBC and other national outlets - for months. Fortune magazine's headline to its June 9 interview with Simmons read, "The Gulf Coast Oil Spill's Dr. Doom."

At Tuesday night's talk in Camden, Simmons said BP has misled the public and the government into focusing on a smaller spill at the site of the oil riser that viewers can see on television. It looks big on cameras, said Simmons, but the plume of oil is only six feet high. The oil riser is attached to the sunken oil rig, not to the oil well itself, said Simmons.

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Risk Of Global Climate Change By BP Oil Spill

Gianluigi Zangari

Frascati National Laboratories (LNF) - National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN)

Frascati 00044, Via E. Fermi, 40, ITALY

Correspondence to: Gianluigi Zangari Email: gianluigi.zangari@lnf.infn.it

Abstract: BP Oil Spill may cause an irreparable damage to the Gulf

Stream global climate thermoregulation activity.

The Gulf Stream importance in the global climate thermoregulation processes is well assessed. The latest real time satellite (Jason, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat Follow-On, ERS-2, Envisat) data maps of May-June 2010 processed by CCAR(Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research), checked at Frascati Laboratories by the means of the SHT congruent calculus past years data, show for the first time a direct evidence of the rapid breaking of the Loop Current, a warm ocean current, crucial part of the Gulf Stream. As displayed both by the sea surface velocity maps and the sea surface height maps, the Loop Current broke down for the first time around May 18 generated a clock wise eddy, which is still active (see Fig. 1).

Real time sea surface heights maps and sea surface velocity maps (below) starting from april 22 until June 9 processed by CCAR and checked at LNF (Frascati) by SHT calculus “Deepwater Horizon”. The yellow arrow indicates the breaking of the Loop Stream.

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The Fed is Steering U.S. Economy into Deflation

The Fed is steering the economy into deflation. It's a political calculation that will keep unemployment high, increase excess capacity, and deepen the recession. C.P.I. continues to fall, bank lending is down 4 percent year-over-year, housing prices are slipping, business investment is off, and consumer credit continues to shrink.  On Wednesday, the Commerce Dept reported that retail sales fell 0.5 percent, more than analysts expected. This is the second drop in retail purchases in the last two months signaling weakness in consumer demand.

The slowdown hit nearly every sector including auto sales, furniture, computers, building materials, clothing and sporting goods. There was also bad news on housing on Wednesday. The Mortgage Brokers' Association reported that loans purchase applications fell to a 13-year low last week, and refinancing contracts continued to slide despite record-low mortgage rates. The housing depression is ongoing and is adding to deflationary pressures in the broader economy.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke claims the recovery is still "on track", but more than 60% of last quarter's GDP can be attributed to fiscal stimulus and inventory adjustments. That means demand will drop as the stimulus runs out and restocking ends. Then the economy will have to stand on its own.  Expect negative growth by the forth quarter 2010 or first quarter 2011.

There are things the Fed can do to fight deflation.  Bernanke can resume his bond purchasing program (quantitative easing), this time buying US Treasuries to increase inflation expectations and add to the money supply. Or the Fed can purchase corporate bonds to increase business investment and hiring.

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The Fed's broken crystal ball

CNNMoney.com

How nervous should investors be about the Federal Reserve being more nervous?

The latest forecasts from the Fed released Wednesday cut estimates for economic growth, predicted that high unemployment will be more persistent than previously thought and raised the risk of a fall in prices, or deflation, which in itself can cause businesses to cut output and staffing.

Still, investors seemed to shrug off the outlook. Stocks drifted lower immediately after the Fed forecasts were released at 2 p.m. Wednesday, then rallied in the last 90 minutes of trading to end little changed from the previous session.

That may be because growing concerns about U.S. economic recovery possibly stalling out were already priced into the market. But it could be partly because the Fed hasn't had the best track record at predicting these numbers.

In its forecasts of June 2008, seven months after the recession is now known to have begun, the Fed's forecast still projected the economy would avoid a recession, and that the annual unemployment rate would show little change, remaining in the 5% range over the following three years. Instead, it shot up like a rocket, topping out at 10.1% in late 2009 and averaging 9.7% so far this year.

And the Fed hasn't always been so sunny. It has also been too pessimistic at times, which has also drawn criticism.

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Banks Gain in Rules Debate

WSJ

The world's banks appear to be winning a reprieve from tough new capital requirements and curbs on risk-taking, as regulators and central bankers are moving toward less stringent rules than initially proposed.

Bowing in part to fears that tougher requirements would diminish the credit needed to revive a sluggish global economy, officials gathered in Basel, Switzerland, are trying to strike a compromise over a set of new international banking standards initially proposed in December. The final accord will have a more global reach, and thus in some respects a more potent impact, on banks and borrowers than the financial regulatory bill likely to pass the U.S. Congress Thursday.

The new Basel rules, as they are called, would still be stiffer than existing standards. Industry officials fear the changes could shrink bank profit margins and make credit tighter and more costly for consumers and businesses. Alterations under discussion this week would ease key requirements that have been under discussion for months. Advocates for a tougher line have argued that excessive concessions could leave the financial system vulnerable to problems the entire process is intended to address.

"I think there's a growing feeling among finance ministers that... growth is anemic. Do you really want to threaten a fragile recovery?" Stephen Green, chairman of Britain's HSBC Holdings PLC, said in an interview. "I think this will end up in a sensible way."

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Bank-reform bill a convoluted mess

By Red Jahncke

GREENWICH, CONN. -- The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 is over 2,300 pages long.

The Glass-Steagall Act, the landmark bank-reform bill of 1933, was about 100 pages long.

Less is more.

Glass-Steagall gained strength from its simplicity. The 1933 Congress concluded that the combination of investment banking and commercial banking (and other businesses) had led to the stock-market crash and the failure of thousands of banks. Therefore, it separated the two forms of banking. It severely restricted the activities of commercial bank-holding companies by banning any cross-ownership with any other industry, financial or otherwise.

To re-establish public confidence in banks, it created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to insure bank deposits, and said that only commercial banks, with their less-risky activities, could hold such deposits.

Finally, it limited the size of banks by mandating that national banks operate within state limits on branching in their headquarters state. That’s the whole Glass-Steagall Act.

Simple, straightforward and powerful: It broke up the House of Morgan, the banking combine founded by the early 20th Century’s most powerful banker, John Pierpont Morgan

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Big Pharma nanotechnology encodes pills with tracking data that you swallow

NaturalNews

The emerging field of nanotechnology is currently gaining a lot of attention across many industries. Nanotechnology allows scientists to manipulate individual atoms and molecules to create unique materials and even micro-scale devices, and this is leading to a wide range of applications in clothing, textiles, electronics and even food and medicine.

Sounds great, right? Except for the fact that, like genetic modification of food crops, nanotechnology tampers with Mother Nature in a way that's largely untested for safety. And here's something really bizarre: The pharmaceutical industry may soon begin using nanotechnology to encode drug tablets and capsules with brand and tracking data that you swallow as part of the pill.

To really explain how this works, let me simplify how nanotechnology works so you'll see why this is so bizarre (and potentially dangerous). Instead of using materials and elements as they're found in nature to build and construct things, nanotechnologists are deconstructing the basic building blocks of these materials and elements to make completely new ones. In other words, nanoscientists are reconstructing the molecular building blocks of our world without yet knowing what it will do to humans and to the environment.

The long-term consequences of nanotechnology are still largely unknown because not a single formidable study has ever been conducted on this emerging science that proves it to be safe.

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Iran denies that returned citizen is nuclear scientist

Iran says the man at the center of a murky intelligence caper -- stretching from the deserts of Saudi Arabia to the strip malls of Tucson to the diplomatic outposts of Washington and back to Tehran -- is a nobody, a simple researcher with no special knowledge of the country's nuclear program.

Shahram Amiri, whose plane landed in Tehran on Thursday, had been described by Iranians up until now as a radio isotope scientist employed by the nation's Atomic Energy Organization, as well as an affiliate of an elite university that turns out specialists for the Revolutionary Guard. In a report Thursday, the Washington Post cited unnamed U.S. officials as saying Amiri had been paid $5 million for defecting and cooperating with American intelligence.

But Hassan Qashqavi, a deputy foreign minister appearing alongside Amiri at a press briefing this morning, insisted that Amiri knew nothing about Iran's nuclear program.

"We deny that Amiri is a nuclear scientist," said Qashqavi. "Amiri is a researcher at one of Iran's universities."

In appearances Thursday on the Al Jazeera news channel and Iranian state television, Amiri insisted that he had been kidnapped, psychologically tortured and grilled for information in an attempt to forge intelligence against Iran.

"I can say for sure that I was kidnapped by the CIA with the assistance of Saudi Arabia, and this is definitely what happened," he told Al Jazeera. "Over 14 months, I was subjected to several kinds of pressure inside America."

He added that he did not have "any expertise in any nuclear domain or anything else pertinent to the military nuclear domain."

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RealtyTrac: Banks repossess US homes at record pace

July 15 (Reuters) - Banks repossessed a record number of U.S. homes in the second quarter, but slowed new foreclosure notices to manage distressed properties on the market, real estate data company RealtyTrac said on Thursday.

The root problems of job losses and wage cuts persist, making a sustained U.S. housing recovery elusive.

Banks took control of 269,962 properties in the second quarter, up 5 percent from the prior quarter and a 38 percent spike from the second quarter of last year, RealtyTrac said in its midyear 2010 foreclosure report.

Repossessions will likely top 1 million this year.

"The underlying conditions haven't improved," RealtyTrac senior vice president Rick Sharga said in an interview.

The housing market still grapples with "unemployment, economic displacement in general, and still sits on over 5 million seriously delinquent loans that in all likelihood will at some point go into foreclosure," he said.

In 2005, the last "normal" year in housing, Sharga said, about 530,000 households got a foreclosure notice and banks took over a comparatively minuscule 100,000 houses.

This year more than 3 million households are likely to get at least one foreclosure filing, which includes notice of default, scheduled auction and repossession, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac forecasts.

In the first half of the year, foreclosure filings were made on 1.65 million properties. That was down 5 percent from the last half of 2009 but up 8 percent from the first half of last year.

One in every 78 households got at least one foreclosure filing in the first six months of this year.

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Darpa Plots Death From Above, On-Demand

Before a bomb gets dropped in Afghanistan, dozens of people weigh in: Air controllers bark coordinates over a radio; officers double-check the target’s location against digital maps; pilots survey the scene with cameras from on high; far-flung intelligence analysts scour the plane’s footage and discuss it in a secure chat room; military lawyers make sure the strike complies with the rules of war; commanders weigh the potential combat benefits of a bomb against the risks of civilian deaths.

Darpa would like to cut out all those middle men. Instead, the Pentagon’s R&D arm wants to build an air strike network with exactly two nodes: the air controller on the ground, and the robotic, heavily-armed airplane in the sky. Darpa calls the project Persistent Close Air Support, or PCAS. Think of it as death-from-above — on demand.

The goal, Darpa says in an announcement to prospective researchers, is to give the Joint Terminal Attack Controller — that’s the guy who usually coordinates air strikes in an infantry unit — “the ability to visualize, select and employ weapons at the time of their choosing.”

The JTAC will dial up these munitions from an “optionally manned/unmanned” A-10 “Warthog.” Armed with an array of rockets, missiles, bombs and a 30mm gatling gun, it’s one of the most brutally effective airplanes ever invented for hitting ground targets. In a firefight in early 2008, a single Special Forces sergeant called in Warthogs for more than 70 air strikes, incapacitating as many as 240 insurgents.

But that’s not how U.S. troops roll these days. Concerned that civilian casualties were handing the Taliban propaganda victories, General Stanley McChrystal issued tight new restrictions on the use of air power in Afghanistan; everyone from the very top of the chain of command down to the grunt can get involved in the decision to drop a bomb.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/darpa-plots-death-from-above-on-demand/#ixzz0tlaBhXeV

Justice: Sanctuary cities are no Arizona

The Obama administration said this week that there is no reason to sue so-called sanctuary cities for refusing to cooperate with federal authorities, whereas Arizona's new immigration law was singled out because it "actively interferes" with enforcement.

"There is a big difference between a state or locality saying they are not going to use their resources to enforce a federal law, as so-called sanctuary cities have done, and a state passing its own immigration policy that actively interferes with federal law," Tracy Schmaler, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., told The Washington Times. "That's what Arizona did in this case."

But the author of the 1996 federal law that requires states and localities to cooperate says the administration is misreading it, and says drawing a distinction between sanctuary cities and Arizona is "flimsy justification" for suing the state.

"For the Justice Department to suggest that they won't take action against those who passively violate the law --who fail to comply with the law -- is absurd," said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and chief author of the 1996 immigration law. "Will they ignore individuals who fail to pay taxes? Will they ignore banking laws that require disclosure of transactions over $10,000? Of course not."

Officials in Arizona say they've been unfairly singled out by President Obama and Mr. Holder, who last week sued to overturn Arizona's law, arguing it could lead to a patchwork of state laws.

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Why BP is Readying a 'Super Weapon' to Avert Escalating Gulf Nightmare

(CHICAGO) - In a desperate attempt to stop a huge area of the Gulf ocean floor from possibly rupturing due to subterranean methane gas (leading to a calamity no human has ever seen) BP has ripped a page from science fiction books.

The giant oil company is now quietly preparing to test a small nuclear device in a frenzied rush against time to quell a cascading catastrophe. If successful they will have the capability to detonate a controlled fusion generated pulse.

While the world watches BP's attempt to contain the oil gusher at the former Deepwater Horizon site, company officials have given the green light on an astounding plan to use what is known as a nuclear EPFCG charge if all else fails.

Sea floor compromised

Reports still indicate that methane is flooding the Gulf waters at a rate one million times more than normal, and the NOAA research vessel, Thomas Jefferson has reported spotting new fissures. [1]

Last week the science ship stunned some reporters with the revelation that the oceanographic team had discovered and measured a rift in the ocean floor miles from the BP wellhead. The rift was reported to be more than 100 feet long and widening. Oil and methane continues to plume from that rift.

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Foreign Complicity in the Devastation that Still Besets Haiti

Six months ago a devastating earthquake killed more than 230,000 Haitians. About 100,000 homes were completely destroyed, alongside a thousand schools and many other buildings. The scenes of devastation filled TV screens around the world.

Half a year later the picture is eerily familiar. Destroyed during the earthquake the presidential palace remains rubble and a symbol of the vast destruction. Port-au-Prince is still covered in debris. About 1.3 million people live in 1,200 makeshift tent camps in and around the capital.

According to one estimate, less than 5% of the earthquake debris has been removed. Of course, with 20 million cubic meters of rubble in Port-Au-Prince alone, removing the debris is a massive challenge. If a thousand trucks were working daily it would take three to five years to remove all this material. Yet, there are fewer than 300 trucks hauling debris.

The technical obstacles to reconstruction are immense. But the political roadblocks are larger.

Immediately after the quake $10 billion in international aid was pledged. As of June 30 only 10 percent of the $2.5 promised for 2010 had been delivered. A lot of it has been held up in political wrangling. The international community – led by the US, France and Canada – demanded the Haitian parliament pass an 18-month long state of emergency law that effectively gave up government control over the reconstruction. Holding up the money was a pressure tactic designed to ensure international control of the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, authorized to spend billions.

These maneuvers were met by protest and widespread hostility in Haiti, which forced the international community to back off a little. Initially, a majority of seats on the Commission were to represent foreign governments and international financial institutions.

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Chinese rating agency strips Western nations of AAA status

Dagong Global Credit Rating Co used its first foray into sovereign debt to paint a revolutionary picture of creditworthiness around the world, giving much greater weight to "wealth creating capacity" and foreign reserves than Fitch, Standard & Poor's, or Moody's.