What does this mean?

Well, it means that the U.S. has officially fallen further behind the rest of the world in the realm of Internet technology but it also means something more. It means jobs for telecomminication workers who will be compelled to extend service to all households (in Finland). It also means empowering all ciitizens by providing the information that can transform lives and enrich cultures (in Finland). All fo this seems to be lost on the U.S. (…but not in Finland).

As for president Obama and his promise of broadband expansion in this country? Well, that seems like little more than a pipe dream at best. In fact, telecommunication providers in the U.S. are declining to accept government funding for just such a project. They claim accepting the funds would wrap them in government red tape and subject them to following government project rules.

Perish the thought.

One has to wonder if the real reason is simply that most corporate conservatives are just plain old anti-anything-Obama, even more than they are wildly (as a result of shear greed and ignorance) anti-regulation on any level.

Meanwhile, every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection by 2015.

Conclusion? The rest of the world gets it and we don’t.

The premise is simple. Internet services are no longer just for entertainment purposes, they are an essential part of every citizen’s life. Would any government deny their citizens of basic communication and telephone service? Probably not I’m guessing.

Why should the Internet be any different?

Read the full story on the BBC here…

A poll conducted for the BBC World Service earlier this year found that nearly four in five people around the world believed that access to the internet is a fundamental right.

I happen to agree.

(This article was re-printed from PetroleumWorld.com.) 

By Christian A. DeHaemer

The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum… shadow and flame.

 — Saruman, The Lord of the Rings

There is something primordial about BP’s quest for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s an Icarus-like story of super-ambition; of reaching too far, delving too deep. I don’t know if you’ve stopped to contemplate what BP was trying to do…The well itself started 5,000 feet below the surface. That’s the depth of the Grand Canyon from the rim. And then the company attempted to drill more than 30,000 feet below that — Mt. Everest would give 972 feet to spare. Furthermore, the company sought oil in a dangerous area of the seabed. It was unstable and many think BP sought it out because seismic data showed huge pools of methane gas — the very gas that blew the top off Deepwater Horizon and killed 11 people. More than a year ago, geologists criticized Transocean for putting their exploratory rig directly over a massive underground reservoir of methane. According to the New York Times , BP’s internal “documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of ‘well control.’ And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.” The problem is that this methane, located deep in the bowels of the earth, is under tremendous pressure… Some speculate as much as 100,000 psi — far too much for current technology to contain. The shutoff vales and safety measures were built for only 1,000 psi. It was an accident waiting to happen… And there are many that say it could get worse — much worse. Geologists are pointing to other fissures and cracks that are appearing on the ocean floor around the damaged wellhead. According to CNN: The University of South Florida recently discovered a second oil plume in the northeastern Gulf. The first plume was found by Mississippi universities in early May. And there have been other plumes discovered by submersibles…Some geologists say that BP’s arrogance has set off a series of events that may be irreversible. There are some that think that BP has drilled into an deep-core oil volcano that cannot be stopped, regardless of the horizontal drills the company claims will stop the oil plume in August. Need the mudlogs Geologist, Chris Landau, for instance, has called for a showing of the mudlogs. A mudlog is a schematic cross sectional drawing of the lithology (rock type) of the well that has been bored. So far, no one has seen them… BP keeps them hidden. Mr. Landau claims: It is a dangerous game drilling into high pressure oil and gas zones because you risk having a blowout if your mud weight is not heavy enough. If you weight up your mud with barium sulfate to a very high level, you risk BLOWING OUT THE FORMATION. What does that mean? It means you crack the rock deep underground; as the mudweight is now denser than the rock, it escapes into the rock in the pore spaces and the fractures. The well empties of mud. If you have not hit high pressure oil or gas at this stage, you are lucky. But if you have, the oil and gas come flying up the well and you have a blowout, because you have no mud in the well to suppress the oil and gas. You shut down the well with the blowout preventer. If you do not have a blowout preventer, you are in trouble as we have all seen and you can only hope that the oil and gas pressure will naturally fall off with time, otherwise you have to try and put a new blowout preventer in place with oil and gas coming out as you work. Obviously, the oil and gas pressure hasn’t fallen off. In fact… it’s increased. The problem is that BP may not only have hit the mother of high-pressure wells, but there is also a vast amount of methane down there that could come exploding out like an underwater volcano. I recently heard a recording of Richard Hoagland who was interviewed on Coast to Coast AM. Mr. Hoagland has suggested that there are cracks in the ocean floor, and that pressure at the base of the wellhead is approximately 100,000 psi. Furthermore, geologists believe there are another 4-5 cracks or fissions in the well. Upon using a GPS and Depth finder system, experts have discovered a large gas bubble, 15-20 miles across and tens of feet high, under the ocean floor. These bubbles are common. Many believe they have caused the sinking of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle. That said, a bubble this large — if able to escape from under the ocean floor through a crack — would cause a gas explosion that Mr. Hoagland likens to Mt. St. Helens… only under water. The BP well is 50 miles from Louisiana. Its release would send a toxic cloud over populated areas. The explosion would also sink any ships and oil structures in the vicinity and create a tsunami which would head toward Florida at 600 mph. Now, many people have called Hoagland a fringe thinker and a conspiracy theorist. And they may be right… But that doesn’t mean he isn’t on to something. EPA finds high concentrations of gases in the area The escape of other poison gases associated with an underground methane bubble (such as hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and methylene chloride) have been found. Last Thursday, the EPA measured hydrogen sulfide at 1,000 parts per billion — well above the normal 5 to 10 ppb. Some benzene levels were measured near the Gulf of Mexico in the range of 3,000 – 4,000 ppb — up from the normal 0-4 ppb. More speculation of doom The Oil Drum , an industry sheet, recently ran an article about the sequence of events that tried to stop the oil spill. The upshot of industry insiders was that after trying a number of ways to close off the leak, the well was compromised, creating other leaks due to the high pressure. BP then cut the well open and tried to capture the oil. In other words: BP shifted from stopping the gusher to opening it up and catching what oil it could. The only reason sane oil men would do this is if they wanted to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed… And that sort of leak — known as a “down hole” leak — is one of the most dangerous kind. No stopping it It means that BP can’t stop if from above; it can only relieve the pressure. So, more oil is leaking out while BP hopes it can drill new wells before the current one completely erodes. BP is in a race against time… It just won’t admit this fact. According to the Oil Drum: There are abrasives still present, a swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it’s way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?… No one really knows… Which leads us back to Mr. Landau’s point about the mudlogs and why BP won’t release them. I don’t know… Maybe I’m wearing my tinfoil hat too tight this morning… But this stuff seems possible — if it’s only a worst case scenario. What strikes me as odd is the way the leadership of BP and the Obama administration is acting.  BP is running around apologizing to everyone they can find. Obama says give us $20 billion in escrow and $100 million for the people Obama put out of work on the oil rigs due to his six month ban — and BP says, “Sure thing mate, no problem.” And all of this in a 20-minute meeting? I’ve been dealing with oil companies for a long time and it just doesn’t add up… Contrast it, for instance, with the Exxon situation in Alaska or the Union Carbide disaster in India. Exxon fought tooth and nail for its shareholders; it appealed court rulings for 19 years. Union Carbide wasn’t settled for 25 years. BP is rolling over like a simpering dog. Why? The only reason I can think of is that the company knows — better if not as well as the Obama administration does — that it will get worse. Much worse.

Read the full article here… 

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Known as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, the new law requires changes to Icelandic law to strengthen journalistic source protection, freedom of speech, and government transparency. It isn’t clear at this early stage if this new law will result in the desired effect but its potential is obvious, especially for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Experts and critics are already referring to it as a server safe law, meaning it would probably prevent servers from being forcibly shut down, if the powers that be deem them a nuisance..

There might be other benefits too.

Wikileaks says that it routes all submissions through Sweden, where investigations into the identity of an anonymous source are illegal. Whatever your opinion of their journalistic mission, they’ve proven remarkably crafty and quite adept at not getting caught or in some cases, killed. Other journalism organizations could gain some measure of legal protection for protection of their sources, if all communications were routed through Iceland based servers.

In the U.S., for example, we tend to jut arrest or fire journalists who refuse to reveal sources.

Curious isn’t it?  

It will be some time before the full effect of Iceland’s efforts are felt. It may even be years before we understand what an “offshore freedom of expression haven” means to journalists worldwide within the bounds of adversarial legal systems. One thing is certain and that is, if this law meets the certain barrage of legal and covert tests that it faces, it could redefine how information is disseminated to the public on a global scale, as well as the very quality and truthful contained within, rendering high-powered media conglomerates helpless to control what we see and read.

Read the full article here on Nieman Journalism Lab

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Link to the MSNBC story here…http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37252490/ns/health-aging/

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Did you know that almost all juices fight cancer but only for about two hours after ingested. It has long been established that fruits and fruit juices (vegetable juice too) contains super antioxidants that fight disease, particularly cancer. The problem is they only fight for a short time before they lose potency. That’s why you need to drink juice or eat some fruits and vegetables several times a day. This will keep these antioxidants fighting for you and keep your healthy!

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That seems a bit optimistic nowadays doesn’t it? 

From the start, when it was created as little more than a lobbying office located right in the Department of the Interior, courtesy of Ronald Reagan and James Watts in the 1980′s and after eight years of Bush-Cheney, MMS has been busy cuddling up to big oil. This was pushed to a logical and absurd conclusion when the Bush administration signed off on big oil’s desire for voluntary, “trust me,” self-regulation — and caved in to industry demands not to mandate the backup shut off switch for offshore rigs that Brazil and Norway require. In fact, this dangerous relationship was taken to the extreme and manifested in the  Sex-for-Oil scandal two years ago. 

Government officials handling billions of dollars in oil royalties engaged in illicit sex with employees of energy companies they were dealing with and received numerous gifts from them, federal investigators said Wednesday.

Between 2002 and 2006, nearly one-third of the staff in the Denver MMS office received gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies, the investigators found. There was also sex, allegations of drug use and the other usual ‘government workers behaving badly’ sorts of thing going on.

So now what are wer left with?

The United States is looking more like a third world country everyday. For all of Barack Obama’s and Ken Salazar’s talk of putting boots on company throats, we couldn’t remove ourselves from BP and their incompetence even if we wanted to. Ironically, for all BP’s hubris and lack of deep water safety know how, they are all we have standing between the oil leak in the gulf and a disaster that could have environmental effects as far away as Europe.  BP knows this and that’s why they’re are calling the shots in the Gulf. The oversight is a joke and Americans are still being hood winked by their own government. Fact is, we are joined at the hip with BP whether we like it or not, because the United States government has demonstrated once again that it is not capable to help itself or its citizens. We’ve out sourced our off shore environmental protection to oil companies. I hope we can endure it. 

To quote David Gergen, “If we fought World War II like we’re fighting this oil spill, we’d all be speaking German now.” 

I agree 100%.

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After a rather lengthy vacation, Capitol Street will begin to breath with new life. Look for regular posts over the next few weeks and into June. We’ll be back with all of your favorite daily info including “Your Morning Cereal” and “Saturday Morning Cartoons” along with some new stuff.

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