Diagram courtesy of Solar Impulse

With 12,000 solar-cells attached to wings the size of a standard jet, and with a body as light as a car, the Swiss made HB-SIA solar plane has finally left the runway for it’s 24 hour flight to test its ability to fly in darkness.

Being the first of two vehicles of the Solar Impulse Project, led by pilot Andre Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard, who gained fame for making the first trans-global flight in a hot air balloon in 1999, the HB-SIA has already accomplished a full day flight back in early April. “For seven years now, the whole team has been passionately working to achieve this first decisive step of the project,” Borschberg said before taking off on the flight. He’ll bring the experimental plane on a climb to 27,900 feet before starting a slow descent, flying the plane with the stored solar energy until Thursday morning’s sunrise. 

“If this mission is successful, it will be the longest and highest flight ever made by a solar plane,” the SIP team said, eyeing the future HB-SIB – a larger version of the current prototype with upgraded avionics and a pressurized cabin. The HB-SIB will be used to make the first solar-powered manned-Trans-Atlantic flight in 2012, and with a Trans-Global flight pre-scheduled for 2013. 

Though for now, they’ll settle for the excitement of a successful nighttime flight, as it will prove the practical benefits of solar power in the aviation industry, as well as acting as the “poster child” for the use of solar power in many other industries.

Atop the oil slicked surface of the Gulf waters, hired shrimp boats drag fireproof boom. Running parallel to one another, they “sweep” the surface of its oil, seaweed, and any other marine life which might get corralled before setting it all on fire. They’re called “Burn Boxes”, and from them the black plumes rising to the clouds can be seen from many miles away.

 Amidst the confusion of cleanup and rescue teams currently operating in the Gulf of Mexico, one such group has been shoved out of the way by BP, and now must sit idly by and watch helplessly as their dependents burn alive. 

Captain Mike Ellis, a charter boat operator in the Gulf, was hired to help rescue sea turtles. That includes the Kemps Ridley turtles, which because of their status as “critically endangered” are currently protected behind a law wielding criminal charges and a $50,000 price tag on anyone capturing or killing one.

Hired for a three week stint Ellis had to prematurely shut down his operations as BP stopped giving him access to search through the mucky contents of the burn boxes before setting them aflame. “Once the turtles are in there, they can’t get out,” Ellis said.

Blair Witherington, a research scientist from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, who is also a part of the sea turtle rescue effort told reporters, “It reflects the conventional wisdom of oil spills: If they just keep the oil out at sea, the harm will be minimal. And I disagree with that completely.”

Clinging to one of their main food sources – strips of Sargassum seaweed that in many instances stretch for miles, in which normally hide a variety of crustaceans, worms, and small fish – the turtles are only finding the sea-plants saturated in oil. “Most of the Gulf of Mexico is a desert. Nothing out there to live on. It’s all concentrated in these oases,” Witherington said. “…It’s the base of the food chain. And these areas we’re seeing here by comparison are quite dead.” He later added, “As far as I can tell, that whole fauna is just completely wiped out.”

It can hardly be expected for the heads of BP to care about anything other than the business they’ve built primarily on the theft of Iran’s natural resources in the early 1900’s – the theft which has brought upon so much anti-western sentiment that runs rampant throughout most of the middle-east even today. And how justifiable is slowing the cleanup process further for sea turtles when entire eco-systems are still endangered; still watching over the slicks ominously creeping straight toward them? To us who care about empowering the powerless it is very justifiable, as it’s only another instance of the same carelessness that brought this mess upon us in the first place.

Much to the chagrin of the Republican Party, a clear victory was scored today for the Obama Administration as British Petroleum executives have agreed to create a $20 billion dollar fund from which to pay the victims of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Though one administration official bluntly stated that the $20 billion is not a cap, and that if legitimate claims arise that exceed the holdings in the independently managed fund they too will be paid out by BP.

Now. we’ll have to watch how the fund’s manager, Kenneth Feinberg will handle the payouts. Known as Obama’s “pay-czar” Feinberg was the man who oversaw the payments that went to the vicitims of the 9-11 WTC disaster, and who was also put in charge of setting salary limits for companies that received money from the $700 billion government bailouts.

For Rand Paul and his Tea Party, and the GOP’s John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, forcing BP to pay for their mishap is a crushing blow, as they support the unregulated free market operations of the private sector. One could only guess that their answer to who pays for BP’s debacle would ultimately come from us, the tax payers, since there is no one else in line.

Though, it seems to me that it’s impossible to put a price tag of all that has already been lost, and all that will be lost as the crisis continues spilling into the Gulf by tens of thousands of gallons every day. It may just turn out to when we get a clear view of BP’s Tony Hayward shuffling around like Steve Martin in “The Jerk”, searching for his remote control and his paddle-ball while repo-men remove his belongings from his mansion. At least we can hope.

Carly Fiorina, the recent primary winner and Republican candidate for a California Senate seat currently occupied by Barbara Boxer, is donning the clothes of the anti-GOP, as she believes the Obama Administration should’ve played a greater role in government regulation over offshore drilling.

In an interview with right wing media outlet Newsmax, Fiorina told the reporter that the Obama Administration was “asleep at the switch” and according to the report “failed to monitor offshore drilling activities properly.” With her constituents almost wholly against regulating the free market which BP is a part of, Fiorina has slipped right into the murky waters that may leave her alienated from those who just elected her to represent them as their Congresswoman.

As ex-CEO of tech giant Hewlett Packard, Fiorina has expressed her beliefs that our government should be run like a business. Although her track record at the helm of HP was disastrous. Under her 5 year watch the company lost 30,000 American jobs either to “lay-offs” or to overseas outsourcing, and cut the company’s stock value by 60%.

Photo courtesy of AP

When asked about volume with regards to anything the non-statistician/“normal Joe” usually answers, “Tons!” when it’s a large amount or, “Not much,” when it is indeed not much. I would think that most people who are seriously concerned over the situation right now in the Gulf of Mexico would answer, “Tons!” because a precise figure is needed only by those who have either given up hope, and so now think it would be interesting to find out exactly how much of BP’s crude continues to flow into the waters of the Western Hemisphere, or by those who have forgotten how to think about the “here and now”.

On Sunday, 54 days into what is amounting to a global disaster, engineers from British Petroleum deployed deepsea sensors so they could produce a more accurate number of how much oil continues to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Initially BP officials measured the daily flow-rate between 1,000 and 5,000 barrels (42,000 and 210,000 US gallons respectively). It wasn’t long before “outside experts” got involved for that number to be pushed aside, however, and the tally has continued to grow ever since. For a long time it was nothing more than a guessing game, factored largely by the video captured of the endless spew from the broken pipe one mile beneath the water’s surface.

At the start of last week BP had pinpointed a number as the collection cap was securing the oil at a rate of 630,000 gallons a day. A sense of relief rippled, even through the relentless statisticians. But the measure was short-lived, however, as an unknown amount was still seen leaking from around the capture point of the broken pipe. From this point new estimates of the “new” amount being leaked came in, registering at approximately “hundreds of thousands” of gallons per day. Of course, the vague figure still left the curious-minded without that precise figure.

The most recent estimate reported between 760,000 gallons to 1.8 million gallons continues to pump from the broken pipe each day. Though with the assistance of these deepsea sensors – that seemingly have been left to sit in storage up to this point, perhaps along side of some contraption also idly awaiting to be put to use, called a Miracle Plug – we’re finally going to have an accurate number of gallons, or barrels still leaking from the floor of the Gulf. As if it really matters.

In 1992, the city of Chicago experienced a flood in which 250 million gallons of water leaked into a tunnel that was once used in the early 1920’s for the transportation of coal. It happened when construction workers were driving new pilings into the Chicago River. The hammering caused a weakening of the tunnel walls which cracked under the pressure, and resulted in the flooding of the intricate network of tunnels, passageways, and basements throughout Chicago’s downtown “Loop”.

In both cases, the errors were the fault of humans wholly ignorant to what effect their operations were having on the surrounding workspace. The difference in reaction was drastic, however, in the sense that the officials in Chicago knew they needed to focus on nothing but plugging the hole. They called in truckloads of cement, rocks, and dirt in their hasty attempts at stopping the leak. At one point they even tried closing off the hole with truckloads of mattresses. Yes, it sounds silly, almost comical that people would take the tampon method of plugging the leak, and figure that a mass amount of mattresses might do the trick, but we have to give them the utmost credit, simply because they spared nothing in their attempts to plug the hole. The point is, nobody sat around trying to figure out the flow-rate of the water as it passed through the city’s underground, only how to stop the flow completely.

To this point we’ve watched high definition video of the flow coming from the floor of the Gulf, and now we know we can do a fairly decent job of surgically manipulating the area as we witnessed a submersible clip the pipe with a fixed set of shears. We’ve watched BP set “hats” and “caps” on top of the pipe, and all the while oil flows steadily toward the shores of the United States and beyond, yet they still can’t seem to find the urgency in which to drop in everything that isn’t buoyant to try plugging the leak.

There’s a point when we should be able to discount the priorities of someone who seemingly lacks the urgency necessary to quell a situation, and simply shove them out of the way. These people who need an exact figure to measure whether or not we need to take immediate action in any potential dire situation, should be forced to remain sidelined until the situation has been remedied. It seems too often they need to be reminded of the situation at hand, and what is most important. Sure, we can keep them at the sidelines where they could be used to simply answer questions such as, “Have we tried stuffing it full of mattresses?” In the meantime, take a backseat while we panic our way to dumping everything including the kitchen sink to dam the flow from the hole BP punched into the earth, where really no human should be allowed to play.

Of course, members of the Tea Party movement throughout America could never connect their views and desires to the support of Venezuela’s own Hugo Chavez. To reach that conclusion it takes thinking through a short series of steps and the utilization of common sense.

The anti-Democratic crowd of Tea Partiers share in common the anti-government regulation, pro free-market sentiment that has spread throughout this nation like an infestation of Kudzu. They believe that anything the government touches dissolves into corruption, and though they will never cease to vote for “new” government officials – as if the new breed of politicians who hold a disdain for all things Washington will make Washington disappear by disbanding the house and senate, before heading home to collect unemployment… or something. They hold the “right to free operation” for corporations very dear to their heart. Essentially, they give full support to foreign corporations running our country – British Petroleum, Spanish owned highways and tolls, Chinese owned ports, Chavez’s Citgo….

Though Wall Street banks were mostly responsible for crashing our economy, and sending it into the toilet-flush like a bunch of Scrubbing Bubbles, Tea Partiers believe the same bankers should be free to operate as they choose to, and mostly rail against the recently passed regulations set for our financial institutions. They protest the regulation of the healthcare industry who charge so high a fee for their services that people are literally left homeless in order to afford to stay alive. Likewise, the Tea Party members believe in leaving the oil industry alone to operate as freely as they want to. The Tea Party hero of Kentucky, Rand Paul, stated that President Obama is un-American because he chastised BP for causing a global crisis.  They essentially believe in allowing the free-market to operate away from the prying eyes of the Federal Government, thinking that once the Feds move in all will go awry.

Tea Party supporters seem to be blind to the reality in front of their eyes – the true workings of the unregulated free market as their own shorelines become drenched in BP’s product. Of course, it isn’t BP’s fault because BP executives told us it wasn’t. They blamed it on Transocean – the rig’s operators. Transocean blamed it on Halliburton for installing faulty parts, who blamed it on BP, and just when we thought the round-robin of fingerpointing was over, we come to find out that BP flatly lied to the public with their original estimation of 5,000 barrels flowing from the Gulf of Mexico daily by over 8 times the amount. America is left with a saturated shoreline – decimated wetlands, and tributaries, and a hope that “…maybe by August,” BP will have the leak capped. They’re unregulated free-market giants who are without enough integrity to accept responsibility. Since they have the ability to push blame elsewhere, even the individuals at fault will never be held accountable for their actions, as that would indicate an admittance to internal failure. Why would they want to hold anyone accountable anyway? Why should they? They’re backed by a large body of politicians and their tea-bag adorned constituents.

One of these giants in the American oil industry is Citgo. The oil company that could be likened to being the Wal-Mart of gas stations is owned by the Venezuelan government, namely Hugo Chavez. Being the dictator that he is, Chavez is despised by the portion of the American poplulation who thinks we have a right in telling other nations how to operate. If a nation’s people are content enough to live beneath the rule of a monarch, Tea Partiers freely speak out against it – whether or not the people there are happy. If a person’s religious rites require they wear a garment that is alien to us, and we find that there are laws in their nation that enforce those religious rules, the right wing portion of America feels they have a right to condemn it. Just last year we watched the upheaval of the Iranian citizens finally take to the streets to speak out against what they deemed as a fraudulent election. The right-wing of America – the “let them take care of themselves” crowd – thought it would’ve been better if Barack Obama joined in, and voiced his opinion in support of the people.  

With Hugo Chavez, it isn’t difficult to spur a fight with a member of the Tea Party, simply by mentioning the dictators name with even a hint of favorable tonality. They’ll tell you in a breath that they’d never stop to refuel at a Citgo, yet they rail against President Obama for even mentioning a word about any free-market operation such as Citgo. They see it as the Feds inching toward the thought of free-market regulations. In the way many liberals wanted to see every one of Bush Jr.’s policies fail, so too would the Tea Party members back a corporation’s right to free operation over any federal decision if for only to see the president fail in his endeavors. Unwittingly, this brings them to directly support the Venezuelan dictator and his wholly owned Citgo.

I wonder, if Obama decided that Citgo was no longer allowed to operate in the United States, would the Tea Partiers cry out against forced removal of free enterprise? In the way that we’ve seen the conservatives try and guard the financial industries that drove our economy into the sewer, we could only guess they would.

There’s nothing that business-folk love more than a thoughtless, or half-witted consumer. Now, I will freely admit to be somewhat ignorant when it comes to oil drilling and the process that crude goes through to where it becomes pumpable gasoline for my car. I’m no oil magnate, and any stock that I might own in oil companies is so few that I’m never even regarded when it comes to proxy voting. And though my status in the industry is reduced to being not much more than that of your ordinary guzzler, there’s an element of common sense I seem to own that has seemingly gone by the wayside within the community of average Joes, and that leaves us constantly bent over the barrels and being pumped by the energy giants.

When news first spread of the Transocean oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the echoes of “There go gas prices”, reverberated throughout the comment sections of nearly every online article about the incident. The question I asked, “Why?” was largely ignored, and those who did respond did so with little enlightenment – “Cause they’ve got us bent over the barrel, that’s why!”

None of these bloggers seemed to ask that very question, “Why will prices throughout the industry increase, when only one company, BP, who was contracting the Deepwater Horizon rig at the time of the explosion, would suffer from production costs?” None of them even questioned why they don’t question.

The oil industry has rules that we consumers drink up like refined Kool-Aid. One of those rules is that which states that prices increase during the driving-season, namely the summer months. We simply graze on whatever excuse they feed us, and bleat and scratch our heads when we hear of their annual “record-breaking profits”.

Since the most recent oil crisis - when most Americans had either cut their driving to an “as-needed” basis, or took up the art of drafting behind 18-Wheelers on an open highway, we have watched the prices at the pump balloon all over again. We saw that an oil company can lower prices to $2.60 per gallon and still reap billions in annual profits. We learned that when the cost of production for one company increases, others in the same industry will hop on their back and ride the wave of profit right up to shore where the sheep are needy, and too tired to question anymore.

The answer to “Why?” is not because they can, but it’s because we let them.

by Brian Burns

It’s difficult to stimulate our nation’s economy when most of what our leaders collect from our earnings is immediately sent to foreign nations. One might think that investing in our nation, the $700 billion that the Bush Administration has spent so far in the Middle East, could have had a positive effect on our rotting job market, our failing health care, and our overly packed public schools. Maybe it would help to reinvest some of the war-money in private sector incentives to remedy our headache over energy costs, and our insatiable desire for alternative fuels. One would hope that eight years in office would buy the time needed to enact any pro-American policy, but domestic policy was seemingly another one of those things George W. Bush forgot back at the ranch.

It has been eight years of arguably the worst policy making in the history of our country, and the American ignorance towards that fact is astounding. Even though the majority of Americans have accepted that Bush’s presidential run was as close to an utter failure as anyone could imagine, the desire to rid ourselves of an administration whose partisan politics, corporatist policies, and self-serving ideals was seemingly short lived. Now, with presidential hopeful John McCain gaining enough support to where he is running a close race against a man whose campaign slogan includes the word “change”, it’s apparent that a great number of Americans would choose to forego changing our country’s policies for the better, and simply find happiness in knowing the name Bush is no longer carrying the tag ‘Commander in Chief’.

With regard to America’s economic situation, it seems that we’re stuck floating slowly downward like a feather in an abyss. Last Tuesday, the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, gave us the forecast in which we were told we would be continuing our descent right around the time our president announced that our economy is stable. This is important to note because John McCain agrees with the president’s assessment, and his campaign co-chairman went so far as to call Americans a “nation of whiners” who were stuck in a “mental recession”. They listen to Wall Street, and their economic advisors who believe that our degenerating housing market has already hit the bottom, and say that it will undoubtedly take a u-turn. They use the logic behind economics that shows how bad can actually be good. They say that our plummet to the housing market floor will bring out those who want to buy homes at rock-bottom prices. Consequently, the housing market will reverse itself and will once again grow strong. Their logic only works when employment opportunities are strong, however, since it takes a steady income to maintain the cost of owning a home. But with our job market being dragged down by our failing economy, and the misguided trust in free-trade policies, it seems our economists are either reporting their aspirations, or have lost the ability to think beyond step 1 in the process of coming to a realistic conclusion when thinking through a problem. Though both are things we should be used to after listening to the predictions from the Republicans over the past eight years.

We were told that our troops would be celebrated as liberators, and that they would be greeted with roses in Baghdad, while we were pointing out step 2 in the process of thinking that showed what happened to Russia when they tried occupying a Middle East nation. We were told Bush’s tax cuts would stimulate the economy, while we again pointed to step 2 which clearly shows that his Republican predecessors, both Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., helped drive our economy further into recessions with tax cuts. We were told NAFTA and CAFTA are beneficial for Americans, but once again, that pesky step 2 is showing that the federal government has regulations enacted that make it more expensive for foreign companies to operate here than in nations where they can setup shop without providing healthcare benefits, a safe work environment, and where they can pay the worker a pittance in comparison. Therefore, their prediction that there would be as much insourcing as there is outsourcing seems to be one dream through which John McCain seems to still be sleeping.

The problem Americans now face is who to choose to hasten the upswing. Barack Obama chants, “Change,” while John McCain claims he’s the “Best to lead since day one.” And though it appears McCain wants to continue upon the same trail from which Bush is preparing to flee, his supporters are coming out of the Kudzu in droves. The citizens are feeling the pressure from the cost of living, and are aware that it’s one of the few things on the rise. They’ve lost sight of our children’s education as it fell from their view of the price at the gas pump. They’ve forgotten about our troops in the Middle East because they can’t take their eyes off the price stamped on a milk jug. John McCain is fully aware of this and so he is doing what most Republicans do during their presidential campaigns - they avoid talking about their policy and scare the American public by threatening that their opponent in the donkey costume will raise their taxes. Judging by the numbers of supporters McCain has managed to recruit, the scare tactic apparently works well. 

John McCain’s plan on spending trillions of dollars in an attempt at occupying Iraq, for what he said could be a hundred years, is a wad of spit in the eyes of Americans who want the war to end and for our troops to return home safely. It’s an upturned middle finger aimed at the faces of us who want to reinvest our earnings into bettering our own country, and who can read where step 2 tells that the best method of securing our nation is not by trying to eliminate everyone who opposes our views. And like his predecessor, McCain has no plan on how to go about occupying Iraq. He avoids telling us that the money could only come from raising taxes, or by borrowing from foreign nations like the $150 billion loan Bush took from China. While we lose jobs, and watch the economy break beneath our feet, they spend our money building walls in Baghdad in their efforts to keep the local Muslim factions separated from each other. We’re led to believe that we’re giving them freedom, but creating tiny enclaves and setting up Baghdad to look like Algernon’s maze is hardly the blueprint for a free land.

It’s apparent the Republicans are back to their old selves – those who refuse to think their way through to step 2. If they read further to where it says that ending the war in Iraq would help our economy a great deal, even if it means the corporations backing the war having to lose out on hundreds of millions in annual profit, they might see that John McCain’s ‘tax and spend on foreign nations’ policy has no way of helping to regrow our economy. If they were to find a true sense of patriotism, unlike those they hang from flagpoles or stick to their bumpers, they might find that it’s best to vote for the candidate who is not wearing the elephant costume, but for the donkey-guy who at least wants to end the war and reinvest that money and our tax dollars into our own nation.

Rock Port, Missouri celebrated becoming the first town being fully powered by the wind. With 4 wind turbines erected on farmland, the town of 1,300 residents will be able to receive 16 million killowatt hours of electricity annually. Since they currently only use 13 million killowatt hours they will be able to sell what they don’t use to the Missouri Joint Municipal Utilities to be used elsewhere. This bodes well for the agricultural community, for farmland usually carries high property taxes in comparison to the income from the yield produced. Now the residents will see additional income, as they can lease a portion of their land to wind-energy developers such as the St. Louis based Wind Capital Group, who currently leases land in Rock Port for their 4 turbines.

Jim Crawford, a natural resource engineer at the University of Missouri Extension, stated that “Anybody who is currently using Rock Port utilities can expect no increase in rates for the next 15 to 20 years.” With 20 years being the lifespan of a wind turbine the residents would then have to have them replaced, but with recycling technology gaining ground in the field of heavy machinery, the cost could be substantially less for turbines 20 years from now.

Oddly enough even more income is coming by way of tourism, since the town has noticed an influx of “outsiders” funnelling in to catch a glimpse of the spectacle in their fields.

With a heap of issues to talk about, the G8 leaders are proving their annual summit is a waste of jet fuel and travel expenses. In what could be an annual meeting through video-conferencing, the leaders would rather spend their people’s money to gather for 3 days to bicker and cut business deals.

President Bush, a lone trooper on the issue of war, played out his usual childishness when he told the world that he will not help cut back on global pollution unless China and India agree to do the same. And as the job market in the U.S. continues to shrink he reiterated his belief that the only way to help the impoverished in the world is through free trade agreements.

Though he was able to boost the value of a buck by speaking highly of the world’s need of a strong dollar, the boost was less than one-hundredth of a cent against the Euro. And though he spoke out against the situation in Zimbabwe, calling Robert Mugabe’s election a “sham,” he is pushing for India to accelerate their nuclear development program, without signing anti-proliferation agreements, to where it can be in full swing before Bush leaves office.

With more issues yet to talk about, like the inflated cost of food and oil and the loss of wildlife and the environment, it appears that the G8 leaders are taking care of business the hard way. When they could be at home prioritizing their seemingly screwed up policies and taking action, they instead waste more time and money with words. Of course, that is assuming that government leaders can do more than setup walls of red tape and botch the processes in addressing global concerns.

Click here to read how mixed up the gene pool could be in the evolution toward a One World Government.