I am following the story on the Israeli attack on the Palestinian aid marine convoy carefully, though at this time I don’t have any comment. If anyone would like to participate in fact finding, you are invited to post relevant comments, videos, articles or other media in the comment area. Thank you.

PS, not also — I am looking for as many sources of the data as possible. If you see the data published, please include that with the source in a comment. Thank you.

Witnessing: when 2nd Lt. James Cathey's body arrived at the Reno Airport, Marines climbed into the cargo hold of the plane and draped the flag over his casket as passengers watched the family gather on the tarmac. Todd Heisler, The Rocky Mountain News

“To the victors go the spoils,” is how the old saying goes. The winners get the “goods or property seized from a victim after a conflict, especially after a military victory.”

Indeed.

The spoils of America’s wars since the First Persian Gulf War began in 1990 have mainly been foreign oil; it’s the underlying thrust between our two current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The big oil corporations and government have tried to put a much more genteel face on all of it: chasing down terrorists and spreading democracy. Many people knew the real motive from the beginning; many more have finally come to the understanding.

For a number of years we were banned from seeing the signs of something really “spoiled” in these wars: the lives of men and women who died fighting in them. To spoil also means “to damage irreparably; ruin.” You can’t get much more “irreparable” than dead, and to stem potential outrage of this ruin, the American government banned the press (and therefore all of us) from witnessing the return of flag-draped caskets holding fallen soldiers, flown in under cover of darkness. That ban was finally lifted a while ago. We finally have a chance to see images of one cost of these wars. We have a chance to see, and we have a chance to act.

This Memorial Day, the holiday holds even more poignancy as we watch the Gulf of Mexico become a giant marine grave for countless forms of sea life. The sticky red crude is washing up on our shores, spoiling them to be sure. Too much oil is spilling; too much blood has been shed by too many people due to the pursuit of that oil. Too much red is mixing in the blue; we could all stand to bring a little more white (light) into the equation.

We’ve been a little spoiled in our lifestyles, to be sure, and I am no exception. The oil company executives have been spoiled beyond belief, though their run of childish tyranny may be starting to wane. The shift will not come easily, and it won’t happen all at once; it won’t happen today. We can take today to stand witness to the image of the Gulf, the image of the flag-draped casket, the images of lives that have been, including our own. Today we allow for a little stillness to honor memory, for tomorrow we must be fully in the present so that we may have a future.

Five years ago, a National Academy of Sciences study concluded that the decision to use a dispersant requires making a choice: saving the beach at the expense of the ocean. By Carol van Strum, edited by Eric Francis.

While BP tries one Rube Goldberg remedy after another to stop the oil gusher it unleashed in the Gulf, one of the most frightening aspects of the disaster is how totally clueless BP, the oil industry, and the government are about how to stop the gusher — misleadingly called a spill, leak or oil slick — or how to prevent or mitigate shoreline destruction.

Rube Goldberg's design for an automatic toothpaste applicator. Rube, who lived from 1883 to 1970, was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. Goldberg is best known for a series of popular cartoons he created depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways – now known as Rube Goldberg machines.

Worse yet, they seem to be violating all common sense and scientific knowledge on the effects of the dispersants being used to conceal the damage caused by the plume of petroleum.

It’s not as if this disaster was actually unprecedented — though we’re being told over and over that it is. Way back in 1979, a drilling rig exploded, burned, sank, and gushed oil into the Bay of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico, sending 10,000 – 30,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea for more than nine months. Like the BP explosion, the catastrophic Ixtoc blowout was caused by a malfunctioning blowout preventer. Although the Ixtoc wellhead was located in only 170 feet of water and was accessible to dive teams and submersible vehicles, all efforts to stop the flow — including the top-kill lunacy repeated by BP last week — failed until the Mexican government-owned oil company drilled two relief wells. Oil continued to flow for three months after completion of the first relief well. Use of the same Corexit dispersants at Ixtoc failed to prevent some 3 million barrels of oil from crossing the Gulf and washing up on the Texas shoreline.

Note that relief wells are considered to be the definitive solution in this kind of runaway well, and BP is currently digging two such wells, which will be used to plug the currently active well with concrete. Time estimates on that happening are for August, at best. This is a deep well, and it’s located beneath miles of solid rock. [See BP graphic of the process.] BP was originally going to drill one well — the Obama administration told them they had to drill two. This is a good thing, since they are trickier than anyone is letting on. [We're working on coverage of this issue.]

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By Len Wallick

We are able to find everything in our memory
–Marcel Proust

Today is Memorial Day in the United States, a national holiday set aside in tribute to those who have given their lives in military service. It is synchronistic that this is also the first full day of Saturn out of retrograde, once again moving forward, affording us a review of the past and a clue to the future. The ringed one stationed direct yesterday (just after 19:08 UTC) at twenty-seven degrees, forty-nine arc minutes, fifty-seven arc seconds in late Virgo.

Let us remember.

Saturn first entered Virgo on Sept. 2, 2007. While there, it exacted its first of five oppositions (180 degrees aspect) to Uranus in Pisces — this, on the same day Pres. Obama was elected. On Oct. 29, 2009 it dipped a toe into the next sign, Libra, much as Chiron (in Pisces) and Uranus (in Aries) are doing now. Soon thereafter it exacted its first of three square aspects (90 degrees of separation) with Pluto in Capricorn.

On April 8 of this year, Saturn retrograded back into Virgo as if to get its affairs in order. It will return to Libra this coming July 21st to exact one more opposition to Uranus, one more square to Saturn and one more square to Pluto in the weeks to follow. Then it will move on to enjoy a vacation of sorts in Libra, a sign in which the ringed one is exalted. That transit that will last until Oct. 5, 2012.

For now, until late July, there will be a glimpse of the future in remembrance of the past. Among other things, Saturn in astrology represents the principles of contraction, limits and boundaries. It has an affinity for definition in structure. Among other things Mercury, the ruling planet of Virgo represents adaptability with regards to our thinking as well as being amenable to variable means of communication. The challenge of Saturn’s transit in Virgo has been to integrate the qualities of the two planets — a challenge that for the most part, has been unmet. These are affairs to be gotten in order, yet two successive Mercury retrogrades in Earth signs, Capricorn and Taurus, have not helped. These disruptive transits have periodically placed the mutable at odds with the grounded at what seemed to be the worst possible times.

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Today’s Oracle takes us back to the Aquarius monthly of July 1, 2001

There exists in every person the struggle between the need to conform and the need to be an individual that is the hallmark of the sign Aquarius. Far from being the only one who goes through this, you are, more accurately, in a position of mastery and expertise when it comes to the inner negotiation of this issue. That’s a good thing, because the events of July and in particular August will call you to task. You may have to make some serious decisions about what you feel is right or wrong, and you may not be especially popular for your opinions. It’s rather easy for an Aquarian to chalk it all up to, “Who the hell cares!” But because, as it appears, so much is at stake, you’ll need to win some people to your viewpoint. So, kid, you’re going to need to adopt some subtlety. You’re not above it and it’s not above you. You can, however, console yourself with the knowledge that people who know far less than you have a lot on the line. Just don’t put it that way.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Today’s Oracle takes us back to the Aquarius daily of March 21, 2006

Few things in the world are as neat as we want them to be. Anyone who presumes to know someone’s feelings in advance has pretty much left the human realm and entered some other realm. You’re even having a difficult time deciding what is important to you. You can doubt all you need to doubt, but that does not change a basic fact: in one certain situation, someone really does care how you feel. But all of this is getting a bit soggy, and you have some important mountains to climb. Doing something ambitious would help you clear your mind.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

By Eric Francis with help from Carol van Strum
from Cosmic Confidential, the 2010 annual edition of Planet Waves

The Shaving Brush and Mug

Discovering my first shaving brush (at the local food coop) and mug (with some searching around town) was what inspired the idea that some very cool old things can have a new role in a sustainable world. Well, it was actually my second encounter with the shaving brush — when I was about five and my father showed me how to shave, half of the instructions involved the use of the brush and mug; they were still in common use in the Sixties.

Photo by Eric Francis.

Decades and many cans of Edge later, I discovered that the shaving brush and soap were better, less expensive, more fun, cheaper and far more environmentally friendly than canned chemical shaving cream.

These became the criteria for “Everything Old is New Again”: the old item or method had to be better, less expensive and more ecologically friendly than the new one. Yet nearly everything we suggest on this list has one other common theme: it requires a skill. In every case, the older, better method requires you to know something, or take care of something, in a way that the modern method does not. The little cake of shaving soap you put at the bottom of a ceramic cup will last for a year or longer, if you keep it dry between uses. Part of the skill is keeping it dry. The soap comes in a cardboard box; that’s the only packaging. A good brush, if you keep it dry between shaves, will last for years. It’s fun to whip up all that lather, which comes out warm if you use warm water. And for ladies it’s the most fun of all: the brush has the approximate consistency of a tongue. You’ll be sitting on the edge of your tub for hours on end.

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Brown pelican standing on the fishing pier in front of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, over Tampa Bay, Saturday afternoon. Pelicans roamed the Earth for 40 million years before industrialism arrived in the 19th century. Photo by Eric Francis.

As I was driving toward the Gulf yesterday, I started to feel the environment: a secluded inland sea, a mile deep, its floor carved with canyons, with warm, powerful currents. I was wondering how many days it would take a dolphin to swim across from Florida to Mexico.

The floor is open to discussion of solutions – and it always has been. I will invoke a bit of A Course in Miracles: “Let me recognize the problem so it can be solved.” I would like to hear what you think the problem is, and what you think the solution is. Or, skip the problem and go right to the solution.

In my view we’re not dealing with something that has happened, though – something is happening. That’s different. So we would need proposed solutions to something in motion. Part of the problem we face is a public relations team at BP that still has us convinced that the company produces organic salad, and if we are not careful that ideology will succeed in blaming President Obama for BP’s negligence. They sense the convenient blame point and will exploit it to the max, if allowed.

Quick survey:

When you took a shower this morning, did you use traditional soap (based on a vegetable oil or a fat, such as Bronner’s) or did you use a commercial bar soap (really a detergent, based on petroleum)? These are the kinds of simple choices we certainly can be making, old fashioned.

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