US Take Over British Petroleum? Updated

Obama should take over British Petroleum so says Robert Reich former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton .

“[But] under temporary receivership, BP would continue to have the equipment and expertise. The only difference: the firm would unambiguously be working in the public's interest. As it is now, BP continues to be responsible primarily to its shareholders, not to the American public.”

Mr. Reich argues that President Obama should take over British Petroleum giving the US authority until the gusher is controlled. He maintains that it is the only way the US public will be confident that enough resources are being put to use to stop the disaster.
What follows are his five reasons for take over and the final (and I think most persuasive) paragraph of his argument for take over.

The President should temporarily take over BP's Gulf operations. We have a national emergency on our hands. No president would allow a nuclear reactor owned by a private for-profit company to melt down in the United States while remaining under the direct control of that company. The meltdown in the Gulf is the environmental equivalent.

Here are his five reasons and a link to the full article CLICK

1. We are not getting the truth from BP.
2. We have no way to be sure BP is devoting enough resources to stopping the gusher.
3. BP's new strategy for stopping the gusher is highly risky.
4. Right now, the U.S. government has no authority to force BP to adopt a different strategy
5. The President is not legally in charge.

UPDATE:Follow-up from TPM

Closing the Hole in the Gulf: A Petroleum Engineer Responds by Robert Reich
A petroleum engineer who's worked in the oil industry tells me BP is doing the minimum to clean up the oil and everything it can to protect its bottom line. According to the engineer, here's what BP should be doing right now to mitigate the damage.

Vermont Yankee leaking news:The Weekend Report

Today's Vermont Yankee News

"The observed short duration and small volume of leakage from the drain line appears to indicate that the event did not result in any impact to public health and safety," according to an NRC statement.

Vermont Yankee by coincidence or design never fails to make a small headline sometime on Friday afternoon or some sleepy Saturday or Sunday morning .What are the odds?
The latest caps a busy couple weeks getting the beast back online after refueling.
The newest hi-jinks at the troubled plant comes on the heels of misleading Vermont state officials about under ground pipes leaking tritium and the state senate vote against re-licensing ,strontium 90 was discovered in a fish near the plant and almost as a side show the entire unit was “Scrammed”, automatically shut down due to a switching problem during power up.

Picture this power plant running for twenty more years, 2032?
Safe, clean and reliable headlines released every slow news day.

A new leak of radioactive material has been found and fixed at the troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, officials said Saturday.
Vapor and water containing 13 different radioactive substances was found late Friday coming from a pipe in a hole workers dug to find the source of an earlier leak.

"This was a new leak," Vermont Yankee spokesman Larry Smith said in an e-mail. "The leak has been stopped. ... There is no threat to public health or safety."
The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission also said the public faced no danger.

also posted at Green Mountain Daily

Chicken Suits Banned from Polling Places!

"Wearing a chicken costume would constitute 'wearing any type of insignia which tends to promote the success or defeat of any particular candidate'," said a Nevada voting official.
In Nevada voting officials peck away at our freedom of expression. In a move many would consider most foul, we have lost one more bit of our freedom and more than a little humor.

Voters wearing chicken costumes will be barred from polling stations in Nevada, election officers have decided.

Democrats have mocked Republican Senate hopeful Sue Lowden, accusing her of suggesting that people barter for medical care using chickens.
Activists in chicken costumes started appearing at Ms Lowden's rallies.

In the 'olden days'

In response to Ms Lowden's comment that her grandparents "would bring a chicken to the doctor", Democrats set up a website entitled Chickens for Checkups.

Sweet Crude Deals

Like oil, issues surrounding the Deepwater Horizon leak are flowing out into the media. Some details have been lying near the surface.

Taxpayers are receiving significantly less of a bang for their buck from offshore oil development—even though energy companies have access to six times as many leases as they did in the early 1980s.

Two research professors from the University of California and University of Louisiana published the results of their Federal oil leasing study last June. It can be found online in Miller-McCune magazine. A blog post here by Elizabeth McGowan revisits the issue in light of the British Petroleum oil leak.

Statistics compiled by two researchers studying the last 30 years of leasing policy show that per-acre lease rates have plummeted almost nine-fold from shortly after the time Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency to the tail end of President George W. Bush’s second term.
An average of $2,224 per acre for all federal leases sold between 1954 and 1982 careened to $263 per acre for federal leases sold between 1983 and 2008.

In March President Obama announced his plans to extend oil leasing he spoke of his overall energy policy strengthening the economy, but no plans were apparent to revamp the current leasing program that was originally altered in the Reagan era and again under Clinton to favor the oil industry.

The leasing study points out how the country could benefit from a change.

Big picture arithmetic shows that such leasing by MMS (Minerals Management Service) is second only to the Internal Revenue Service in dollars destined for Uncle Sam.
“The 300 million-plus Americans are the ones who own this offshore oil source,” he [Professor Bill Freudenberg] continues. “It’s precious and there isn’t that much left. We could use the money to pay for schools, parklands and other necessities, instead of just saying nobody should make money off of this except for top executives of oil companies.”

Successful Auto Hacking

Back in March an employee laid off by a Texas auto center sought revenge by hacking into the web based immobilization system installed in the cars. This system was for “getting the attention of consumers delinquent in their car payment.” The particular system will not stop a running vehicle but it does trigger the horn to honk continuously.

Hacking and gaining access to the main systems of a vehicle may be much more complex but a team of researchers at two universities have shown that they can “adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input-”

The University of Washington and UC San Diego researchers say that through lab experiments and on-the-road trials with two vehicles and a program dubbed CarShark, they have demonstrated “the fragility of the underlying system structure” for modern cars that are “pervasively monitored and controlled by dozens of digital computers, coordinated via internal vehicular networks.” Bottom line, they say a typical car built in recent years has very little resilience against a digital attack on its internal components.

It would be possible, according to the paper, for an attacker to “adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input — including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on.” Hackers could also cover their tracks, embedding malicious code in a car’s telematics unit that would “completely erase any evidence of its presence after a crash.”

They do stress that the attacks while successful are fairly unlikely in the real world but that it is a vulnerability that needs addressing in
As one researcher said: “what’s important is not that you have a glitch, [but] how the system responds to it.”

“Beyond Petroleum” or “Swoosh, Boom, Run”

Oil rig veterans say that in the event that pressure forces gas up to the surface “swoosh, boom …run”.

According to one interview transcript, a gas cloud covered the rig, causing giant engines on the drill floor to run too fast and explode. The engines blew off the rig and set "everything on fire," the account said. Another explosion below blew more equipment overboard.
"The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing."

Now, after the first attempt at capping the runaway well with a giant dome has failed a BP executive can’t quite come clean. The gases and methane hydrates implicating in the original explosion quickly gathered in the dome causing the effort to be abandoned.

Heckuva comment Suttles

“I wouldn’t say it has failed yet,” said Doug Suttles, the operating officer for exploration and production for BP, the company that was leasing the oil rig when it exploded April 20. “What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn’t work.”

I suppose the man has a point, as the Gulf fills up with oil.

Neanderthals and Human Hybrids!

What did they see in each other 45,000 years ago?
‘She made me laugh, we had some great times together, but it over now ’says Grok



Who is going to tell the creationists?

Any human whose ancestral group developed outside Africa has a little Neanderthal in them – between 1 and 4 per cent of their genome, Pääbo's team estimates. In other words, humans and Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring. A small amount of that genetic mingling survives in "non-Africans" today: Neanderthals didn't live in Africa, which is why sub-Saharan African populations have no trace of Neanderthal DNA.
It's impossible to know how often humans invited Neanderthals back to their cave (and vice versa), but the genome data offers some intriguing details.

"It must have been at least 45,000 years ago," says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was involved in the project. That's because all non-Africans – be they from France, China or Papua New Guinea – share the same amount of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that interbreeding occurred before those populations split. The timing makes the Middle East the likeliest place where humans leaving Africa and resident Neanderthals did the deed.

Click here to read more

Giant Pigweed and Johnsongrass ! Updated below

Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more

It took ten years from the first appearance of Roundup (the miracle chemical weed killer) resistant weeds for 10 super weeds to spread to 22 states infesting soybeans, corn and cotton. Common and giant ragweed, pigweed and most recently johnsongrass are all species of weeds exhibiting roundup resistant tendencies.

New York Times reports
Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.

But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.

Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.
Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.

Strategies for fighting glyphosate resistant weeds are underway but currently they involve more applications of herbicides and therefore cause greater expense to the farmer .

Delta Farm Press reports
Pace Hindsley, a Marvell[Ark.] farmer, said the problem is forcing growers to go back to older ways of farming, including hand-hoeing to get the weeds out of the fields.
“We’re not just worried about the problem this year, but also next year and the year after that and each year until we can get a solution to the problem,” said Hindsley.
In addition to the frustrations caused by battling pigweed, cost is also a major consideration.
“You get to a point where it’s just not financially feasible to do anything else and you have to live with the results you’ve got,” said Jim Hubbard, who also farms in Marvell. “You pull your hair out because you’ve done everything you know to do and you just can’t beat this weed.”

UPDATE:
A great follow-up to this in the Room for Debate feature in the New York Times, which asks seven people familiar with the issue the following three questions:

What should farmers do about these superweeds?
What does the problem mean for agriculture in the U.S.?
Will it temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for genetically modified crops that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup?

Michael Pollan, author, “Food Rules”
Stephen Powles, plant biologist and grain farmer
Blake Hurst, farmer
Anna Lappé, Small Planet Institute
Scott M. Swinton, agriculture economist
Micheal D.K. Owen, professor of agronomy

Left Handed Cat blogging

I needed a late Monday excuse for cat blogging and found it with this item from the world of science.

With cats, the team from Queen's University in Belfast concluded that females tend to favour their right paw when trying to extract a treat from a jar while toms prefer their left, with the same gender divide applying to dogs.
Fish tend to have a dominant eye when looking at potential predators, with right-eyed specimens circling threats clockwise and their left-eyed counterparts moving anti-clockwise.

The team's report in the New Scientist even suggests that dogs wag their tails to the right when they're relaxed and to the left when they feel agitated.

Science you can do in the comfort of your own home!


Dogs:
See if Fido wags his tail to his left or right. If he's like most dogs, furious wagging to the right means he is relaxed and ready to approach whatever he sees; if he wags to the left he might prefer to withdraw.

Cats and rodents:
Give your cat, rat or hamster a jar with a tasty treat and see which paw they use to try and extract it. If your pet is a cat, expect toms to use their left paws and the females to use their right.

More here