Eideard

Scarabeo 9 – owned by Italy’s Saipem
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

A large oil rig has arrived off the coast of Cuba to begin searching for offshore oil deposits.

Several international companies will use the rig to drill exploratory wells in deep water in the Florida Strait, which separates Cuba from the US. Cuba is hoping to confirm estimates that it has billions of barrels of oil in offshore fields.

But there is concern in the US that a deep water spill could devastate the coast of Florida.

Semi-hogwash! Concern from American companies forbidden by idiotic laws from bidding on the contracts? Worries from my environmental peers who never noticed the thousands of wells drilled safely round the world – until BP and Halliburton screwed-up in the Gulf of Mexico?

The Chinese-built rig – known as Scarabeo 9 – could be seen from the Cuban capital Havana as it moved slowly west.

First to use it will be the Spanish oil company Repsol YPF, which plans to drill an exploratory well around 100km from the Florida Keys. Other foreign companies are also planning to hire the rig…

If confirmed, the estimated offshore deposits could turn Cuba into an oil exporter and transform its troubled socialist economy…

Repsol has said that its operations will comply with all US safety regulations, and the rig has been inspected by US officials.

Hopefully, the Spanish company will live up to the general standards for deepwater drilling which are more demanding and rigorous than what passes for regulations in the United States.

The ongoing boycott of normal relations with Cuba is a special category of stupid.

Emissions regulations do have an environmental impact, according to a long-term study of acidic rainfall by researchers at the University of Illinois.

The National Atmospheric Deposition Program collects rainfall samples weekly from more than 250 stations across the United States and analyzes them for pollutants. The program recently released a report detailing trends in acidic rainfall frequency and concentration over 25 years, from 1984 to 2009.

“This is the longest-term, widest-scale precipitation pollution study in the U.S. In particular, we wanted to see how the trends in the pollution and the rain correlated back to emissions regulations,” said Christopher Lehmann, a researcher in the program…”We’re seeing regulations on emissions sources having direct and positive impact to reduce pollutants in rain.”

The phenomenon commonly known as “acid rain” has widespread effects not only on the ecosystem, but also on infrastructure and the economy. Polluted precipitation adversely affects forestry, fishing, agriculture and other industries. Acid also erodes structures, damaging buildings, roads and bridges.

According to the report, acidic precipitation – rain or snowfall with a pH value of 5.0 or less – decreased in both frequency and concentration over the 25-year span.

The researchers largely attribute the decrease to the amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990 regulating emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, the gases that become sulfuric and nitric acid when mixed with rain water…

“You want to make sure that the regulations you put in place are effective, that they do what they were designed to do,” said David Gay, the coordinator of the deposition program. “…This study shows clear, significant evidence of the direct impact of regulation.”

Overdue. The progress – not the regulation or studies confirming that progress.

Please, let’s don’t waste time kissing the butt of know-nothing, anti-science politicians and pundits. There are sufficient creeps around who continue to deny any responsibility for environmental degradation by corporate sleaze. No need to add to their credibility by offering them time and space on the public dime.

The National Rifle Association has filed a lawsuit challenging a new federal regulation requiring gun merchants along the border with Mexico to report bulk sales of certain semiautomatic rifles, contending that the Obama administration exceeded its powers by imposing the rule last month without Congressional permission.

The N.R.A. is bringing the lawsuit in the name of two firearms dealers in Arizona. Its complaint asks a judge in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia to issue an injunction barring enforcement of the rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“N.R.A. has always viewed this as a blatant attempt by the Obama administration to pursue their gun control agenda through back-door rule-making, and the N.R.A. will fight them every step of the way,” said Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the gun rights group…

“We think that the action we have taken is consistent with the law,” Eric Holder told reporters, “and that the measures that we are proposing are appropriate ones to stop the flow of guns from the United States into Mexico.”

The rule requires licensed firearms dealers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas to report within five days whenever someone buys more than one weapon like a variant of the AK-47 assault weapon. The rule covers any semiautomatic rifle capable of accepting a detachable magazine and ammunition larger than .22 caliber.

The rule is meant to make it harder for Mexican drug cartels to obtain military-style weapons and smuggle them to Mexico, where they are illegal to sell to consumers. American weapons — often bought by “straw buyers” who have a right to buy them for themselves — have been flooding across the Southwest border for years, fueling drug violence in Mexico.

We’ve blogged about “straw buyers” before. None of this means much of anything to the monomaniacs running the NRA. There was a time when they were a useful organization supporting sensible practices for hunting and sports gun owners. Now, they’re the military center of the nutball brigade.

Plus – I get to crap on people who really defame my background. Just as I can joke about flying with my wife’s family full of pilots – I come from an extended family full of gunsmiths, trap shooters and hunters. Some of the best fun I’ve had in the Southwest was handgun hunting when I lived in the Navajo Nation. Would I join the NRA? Not even with counterfeit money from the Koch Bros.

It’s hard for physicians to determine with much precision how long anyone with a terminal disease can expect to live, but it’s particularly challenging when the disease is advanced dementia.

“People with dementia get sicker inch by inch,” said Lin Simon, director of quality at Gilchrist Hospice in Baltimore, the largest hospice organization in Maryland. “Trying to say, ‘Now, she’s ready for hospice’ is much harder.”

Yet doctors serve as the gateway to hospice, which provides palliative care for the dying and support for their families. Medicare regulations require a physician to certify that a patient entering hospice is likely to die of his or her disease within six months. Doctors are more likely to do so when the disease is cancer or heart failure, which have more predictable trajectories.

That’s the major reason that dementia patients — who can benefit from the better pain control, fewer hospitalizations (so often associated with aggressive treatments that confer no measurable benefit) and greater family satisfaction that hospice has been shown to provide — are under-enrolled in hospice programs…

A 2004 study in The Journal of General Internal Medicine estimated that fewer than one in 10 people dying of dementia receives hospice services. A study of Michigan patients with advanced dementia, conducted about a decade ago, found that just 5.7 percent of nursing home residents and 10.7 percent of those receiving home care died with hospice care.

Nationally, by way of comparison, more than 40 percent of Americans who die each year are in hospice care.

When people with advanced dementia do get a hospice referral, “they’re enrolled quite late, within a few weeks or even days of death,” said Dr. Susan Mitchell, a senior scientist at the Hebrew Senior Life Institute for Aging Research in Boston.

Better prognoses might mean less suffering.

RTFA.

Less bureaucratic fiddling with paperwork instead of solutions – might mean less suffering, as well. Less regulation designed by beancounters instead of physicians might help, too.

Authorities in the South Korean capital are trying to untangle themselves from a slimy row: how many octopus heads is it safe to eat?

Octopus heads are a favorite dish on the peninsula — for their apparent aphrodisiac qualities.

In September, the Seoul city government enraged restaurateurs and the fishing industry when it announced octopus heads contained hazardous amounts of cadmium, a carcinogen that poisons the liver and kidneys.

It advised against eating more than two heads a day.

Enraged fishermen threatened to sue the government and their cause caught the imagination of the public when lawmakers representing their constituents took an octopus into a national assembly session, causing laughter as it tried to escape the jar.

Lee Wan-beom, a fisherman from the county of Muan, told the Korea JoongAng daily that prices for octopus had halved since the government’s warning.

Eeoough!

I’d stick with kimchi.

The European Parliament has strongly rejected a deal that would have allowed U.S. authorities continued access to data on European bank transfers, striking a blow to the Obama administration’s effort to continue a controversial global terrorist finance tracking program begun under the George W. Bush administration.

The lawmakers’ 378 to 196 vote is sure to spark a transatlantic tussle over what the United States has said is a significant tool in tracking and disrupting terrorist plots aimed at the U.S. and Europe.

The vote came despite intense lobbying in recent days by top U.S. officials including Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The U.S. mission to the European Union said it was “disappointed” with the EU move, calling it “a setback for U.S.-EU counterterror cooperation…”

“There’s a whole list of concerns that have to do with insufficient redress for EU citizens, no sufficient clarity about whom the data will be shared with and the fact that it is bulk data that are shared,” said Sophie in’t Veld, a Dutch member of parliament opposed to the deal. “The data handed over is a huge pile, not targeted at all. So that was a huge issue.”

Craven beancounters needn’t cower too far under the covers, though. American banks are still forced upon pain of death, doom and destruction to comply with Bush-era rules.

There wasn’t any such thing as flu vaccine in 1918

President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect noninfected patients…

Health authorities say more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 100 children, have died from the strain of flu known as H1N1, and 46 states have widespread flu activity. So far only 11 million doses have gone out to health departments, doctor’s offices and other providers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials…

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius now has authority to bypass federal rules when opening alternative care sites, such as offsite hospital centers at schools or community centers if hospitals seek permission…

The national emergency declaration was the second of two steps needed to give Sebelius extraordinary powers during a crisis.

On April 26, the administration declared swine flu a public health emergency, allowing the shipment of roughly 12 million doses of flu-fighting medications from a federal stockpile to states in case they eventually needed them. At the time, there were 20 confirmed cases in the U.S. of people recovering easily. There was no vaccine against swine flu, but the CDC had taken the initial step necessary for producing one.

”As a nation, we have prepared at all levels of government, and as individuals and communities, taking unprecedented steps to counter the emerging pandemic,” Obama wrote in Saturday’s declaration.

The most contemptible political contradictions in this process come from conservatives and libertarians who started out fear-mongering over vaccines and have now switched to finger-pointing, trying to blame the government for the inability of producers in the U.S. to come up with an adequate supply to match demand.

RTFA to understand how the regs mostly concern quarantine and treatment centers.

Beginning Saturday, many air travelers will be asked their birth dates and genders when making airline reservations.

It’s the latest “publicly visible” expansion of Secure Flight, a program that transfers responsibility for checking air passengers’ identities from the airlines to the federal government, the Transportation Security Administration said…

Currently, the airlines check passenger identifications against lists of suspected terrorists. But the 9/11 Commission said the job was better suited for the federal government, which compiles the “terror watch lists.” Government control increases security, according to the TSA, while reducing the number of instances in which innocent people are mistakenly confused with possible terrorists having similar or identical names.

In May, the federal government began the first public phase of “Secure Flight” when four small airlines began asking passengers to provide their names, as the names appeared on the government-issued IDs they would be traveling with, when making reservations. Since then, additional airlines have begun asking for full names, TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said, though she declined to say how many airlines are participating for security reasons.

The new change requires travelers to provide three pieces of information when making reservations: the passenger’s full name as it appears on the government-issued ID they will be using, their birth date and their gender. The airline will transmit that information to the TSA, which will compare it to a “no-fly” list of people prohibited from flying or a list of “selectees” who can fly after they pass additional physical screening…

“Secure Flight is a key tool in confirming that someone identified as a ‘No Fly’ does not receive a boarding pass,” TSA acting Administrator Gale Rossides said in a statement Wednesday. “Secure Flight will make travel safer and easier for passengers.”

So, you can look forward to every stage of air travel encountering double the bureaucratic fear and trembling. All managed by folks unqualified for more than $2 an hour above minimum wage.

When will these fumble-brained beancounters step back and run the equation of time and money wasted on absolutely unnecessary “precautions” vs. number of attempts and successes at killing off the civilian population by demented gangsters?

MPs have taken up the case of two young newlyweds who are being forced apart as an unintended consequence of a new immigration law aimed at protecting Asian women from forced marriages.

Adam Wallis and Canadian Rochelle Roberts, who married in the UK a week after her visa ran out, face an enforced year and a half of separation until she is 21…

Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said last night the case could prompt a change in the law, adding: “This is clearly a case which needs to be looked at by a minister. What needs to happen is the government needs to say, ministers in the Home Office need to say, that this is not what we intended with this act…”

This is as stupid as the Zero Tolerance regulations much beloved of school administrators in the United States. Removing the requirement to think – removes responsibility for stupid decisions. Supposedly.

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A federal anti-terror law that requires longshoremen, truckers and others to submit to criminal background checks has ensnared another class of transportation worker — mule drivers.

Mule skinners must abide by federal law and apply for Transportation Worker Identification Credentials, TSA says.

Yes, so-called mule skinners — in this case, seasonal workers who dress in colonial garb at a historical park in Easton, Pa. — must apply for biometric Transportation Worker Identification Credentials (TWIC), according to the Transportation Security Administration, which says it is bound by federal law.

The requirement has officials of the Hugh Moore Historical Park perplexed.

“We have one boat. It’s pulled by two mules. On a good day they might go 2 miles per hour,” said Sarah B. Hays, the park’s director of operations.

The park’s two-mile canal does not pass any military bases, nuclear power plants or other sensitive facilities. And, park officials say, the mules could be considered weapons of mass destruction only if they were aimed at something resembling food…

Each of the park workers on the canal boat – who already are Coast Guard certified [an older bureaucracy] – will have to spend $100 apiece for appropriate biometric ID and background check.