Wednesday, July 7, 2010

In the news...

First, a few updates on the Gulf situation:

"Gulf Oil Spill 'Could Go on for Years and Years'"

The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.

In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” [1]

According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.”[2] Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight

He stresses, “It is difficult to estimate how big this leakage is. There is no objective information available.” But taking into consideration information about the last BP ‘giant’ discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tiber field, some six miles deep, Kutcherov agrees with Ira Leifer a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara who says the oil may be gushing out at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day.[5]

According to a report from Washington investigative journalist Wayne Madsen, “the Obama White House and British Petroleum 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.’” [6] Madsen cites sources within the US Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, and Florida Department of Environmental Protection for his assertion.

The White House has been resisting releasing any “damaging information” about the oil disaster. Coast Guard and Corps of Engineers experts estimate 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 of Mexico.


When the Army Corps of Engineers first attempted to obtain NASA imagery of the Gulf oil slick, which is larger than is being reported by the media, it was reportedly denied the access. By chance, National Geographic managed to obtain satellite imagery shots of the extent of the disaster and posted them on their web site. Other satellite imagery reportedly being withheld by the Obama administration, shows that what lies under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be the size of Mount Everest. This information has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public, according to Madsen’s sources.

Without doubt at this point we are in the midst of what could be the greatest ecological catastrophe in history. The oil platform explosion took place almost within the current loop where the Gulf Stream originates. This has huge ecological and climatological consequences.

A cursory look at a map of the Gulf Stream shows that the oil is not just going to cover the beaches in the Gulf, it will spread to the Atlantic coasts up through North Carolina then on to the North Sea and Iceland. And beyond the damage to the beaches, sea life and water supplies, the Gulf stream has a very distinct chemistry, composition (marine organisms), density, temperature. What happens if the oil and the dispersants and all the toxic compounds they create actually change the nature of the Gulf Stream? No one can rule out potential changes including changes in the path of the Gulf Stream, and even small changes could have huge impacts. Europe, including England, is not an icy wasteland due to the warming from the Gulf Stream.

Yet there is a deafening silence from the very environmental organizations which ought to be at the barricades demanding that BP, the US Government and others act decisively.

That deafening silence of leading green or ecology organizations such as Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club and others may well be tied to a money trail that leads right back to the oil industry, notably to BP. Leading environmental organizations have gotten significant financial payoffs in recent years from BP in order that the oil company could remake itself with an “environment-friendly face,” as in “beyond petroleum” the company’s new branding.


Are we now in the midst of a "Police State"? Really?

"New Rule makes violating BP oil spill 'safety zone'"


The U.S. Coast Guard, acting under the authority of British Petroleum (BP), recently issued a blurry order requiring everyone - including bloggers, journalists, photographers and reporters -- to reportedly stay 20 meters away from any oil clean-up boom, operation, equipment or vessel in the Gulf of Mexico. Violating the rule can result in arrest, felony prosecution, and a $40,000 fine.

Critics of the rule claim it intentionally tries to prevent the media from showing the true magnitude of the death and destruction being inflicted in the Gulf of Mexico and violates First Amendment rights. CNN's Anderson Cooper expressed his disdain over the Coast Guard's rule, repeatedly claiming "We are not the enemy here." Cooper said the safety zone law prevents reporters and photographers from getting close to just about any place they need to be, workers won't talk to the press because they're afraid of losing their jobs and private security -- usually local LA police or Sheriff's departments -- are blocking cameras and access to many parts of the oil-soaked Gulf coast.

Meanwhile, as tar balls from the spill wash up on Texas shores -- meaning that all the Gulf Coast states have now been hit by oil from the spill -- it appears that the crude deceptions over the Gulf Coast oil spill will continue as local police and federal officials work with BP to deter journalists, by any means possible, from uncovering the truth about the BP oil spill and the total devastation unleashed on the Gulf Coast and it appears that BP is still running the show.


Then we see this:

"The BP/Government police state"


The very idea that government officials are acting as agents of BP (of all companies) in what clearly seem to be unconstitutional acts to intimidate and impede the media is infuriating. Obviously, the U.S. Government and BP share the same interest -- preventing the public from knowing the magnitude of the spill and the inadequacy of the clean-up efforts -- but this creepy police state behavior is intolerable. In this latest case, the journalists were not even focused on the spill itself, but on BP's other potentially reckless behavior with other refineries, and yet there are DHS agents and local police officials acting as BP's personal muscle to detain, interrogate, and threaten a photographer. BP's destructive conduct, and the government's complicity, have slowly faded from public attention, and there clearly seem to be multiple levels of law enforcement devoted to keeping it that way, no matter how plainly illegal their tactics are.

This is clearly a deliberate and systematic pattern of preventing access and coverage that has been going on since the beginning of the spill. And, as we find in so many realms, it's impossible to know where government actions end and corporate actions begin because the line basically does not exist.



Moving to the Middle East, we see the following interesting articles today:

"Top U.A.E. diplomat endorses striking Iran nuclear sites"


The United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al-Otaiba, said Tuesday that the benefits of bombing Iran's nuclear sites eclipse the short-term costs such an attack would entail, the Washington Times reported.

"We cannot live with a nuclear Iran," he concluded.

Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard, the country's most powerful military force, has warned that it will retaliate should Iranian ships be searched.

Ahmadinejad reiterated that warning.

"We reserve the right to retaliate," Ahmadinejad said. "We were not interested in getting to this stage. But if some insist [on going in this direction], experience has shown that we can defend our rights. They will strongly regret any action they may take."


Once again, we see the utter uselessness of the UN:

"UN Contradicts Itself in Blaming Israel"


The IMRA news analysis agency reports that while Hizbullah brags about crippling the UNIFIL peacekeeping force in Lebanon, UN chief Ban Ki-moon blames Israel for “stirring up trouble.”

The head of the Hizbullah faction in the Lebanese parliament, Mohammed Raad, has even been quoted as bragging that UNIFIL had lost its ability to move freely south of the Litani River – prompting a lukewarm UN complaint. “UNIFIL’s freedom of movement was violated and UN troop-contributing countries are quite concerned,” said Michael Williams, the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon. “We must insist that the freedom of movement of UNIFIL is fully respected.”

“Senior IDF officers” have been quoted in Israeli media as saying that Hizbullah has turned 160 villages and towns in southern Lebanon into military compounds from where it can fire its array of rockets at Israel.


And to close, I just couldn't resist this one from The American Thinker - a thought-provoking article published this morning. WARNING: This article is NOT politically correct (the truth often isn't):

"The Arab Veil of Deception and the Left"

Just a few quotes:

Leftists will always invoke liberal values, but if they truly cared about them, they would first address the Arab-Muslim political culture that by its very nature is inimical to liberalism. And when such leftist hypocrisy is exposed, the Left always retreats to the tawdry defense of hurling charges of Islamophobia and racism at all who attempt to correct it.

Indeed, left-wing attempts at silencing critics who question the Left's manic obsession of only attacking Israel merely continue to hurt the millions of Arab-Muslims who suffer within societies still rooted in a 7th-century mindset. The leftist and progressive so-called human rights activists and college-age drones, while obsessed with attacking the Jewish state, remained astonishingly silent on the massive human rights abuses endemic in the Arab and Muslim world.

If the radical Left and progressives (today's communists by another name) are so concerned about "justice and peace" -- words which have now become terminally tarnished by their utterances in the mouths of so many hypocrites and charlatans -- they should be challenged about how their persistent and obsessive attacks on Israel wound terribly the Jewish survivors of Palestinian Arab terror, or the Jewish refugees from the Arab and Muslim world. Or is Jewish blood of no consequence to the radical Left?

If the Left, radical and otherwise, is for justice, why then do its members ignore the Jews who were persecuted, uprooted, and forced from their homes in Araby into exile simply because they were Jews? The question every leftist should be asked is why does the Left not demand justice for these victims instead of obsessively attacking the ancestral and biblical homeland these Jewish refugees now live in?

One wonders if leftists truly understand geographical, historical and political realities in the Middle East and North Africa from which some 800,000 Jews were brutally expelled -- a number greater than those Arabs who needlessly followed the commands of their corrupt leaders and left their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israel War. One wonders if leftists know that in 1922, Britain tore away almost 80% of Mandatory Palestine that lay east of the Jordan River and arbitrarily created a new Arab state today called Jordan? Or that, in reality, Jordan is Palestine? Do the leftists and progressives know, or even care, that Jews were immediately and ethnically cleansed from four fifths of Arab occupied areas -- parts of the very land they had been promised by the British government in 1917 as a future national Jewish home?


Of course liberalism and reality have never actually met, but thats another story for another day.

Back to prophecy watching.

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