Oil Hell Breaks Loose: Thursday June 10 BO Oil Update

UPDATED BELOW

1. Pensacola Beach Oilcast.

The Mobile regional NOAA weather station is forecasting isolated thunderstorms with one to two inches of rain along the broader central Gulf coastal area today, moving from southwest to northeast "around 10 to 15 mph." The heat index is expected to exceed 100 degrees.

When will the Mobile weather station begin including an oil forecast for this area?

FWIW, the Windmapper animation for the next twenty-four hours shows coastal winds near Pensacola Beach coming more directly from the south, where the forward edge of the oil slick lies, toward the north where we are.

2. The Wages of Sloth.

We take one crumby day off from this volunteer, nonprofit blog to voluntarily shepherd our nonprofit grandchild around to various end-of-school events and see what happens? Oil hell breaks loose.

• Tarballs and sheen invade Perdido Key.
• Oil booms start going up all over town.
• BP bans our favorite Pensacola independent journalist.
• County commissioners start a word-war.
• The national media gets tutored in math.
• NOAA director Jane Lubchenco begins walking back over the issue of undersea oil plumes.
• And, we turn our thoughts to the Big Picture and what it all could mean in the distant future.
  

3. Perdido Petroleum.

Travis Griggs of the PNJ has the details on Perdido Key:

A mile-long stretch of Perdido Key beach near the Florida-Alabama line was coated with greasy tar balls, about the size of peas, scattered in sheets like pepper below the high-tide line.

No fewer than 20 ships, ranging from charter fishing boats to barges fitted with cranes, loomed offshore, circling in the Gulf near the mouth of Perdido Pass on Wednesday.

Helicopters passed overhead and circled near the flotilla as a line of shrimp trawlers, four abreast, cruised down the beach, dragging oil skimmers about 300 yards offshore.

An earlier report from Perdido Key by a TV reporter from Tampa more or less predicted it (starting at :30 seconds):

4. Boom Town.

Jamie Page wins the Snappiest Lede of the Day award with this: "The battle to protect Escambia County waterways has begun."

As oil sheen and glops of crude infiltrated Perdido Pass on Wednesday afternoon, Escambia County put booms in place to impede oil from damaging waterways and environmentally sensitive areas.

At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard authorized the closure of Perdido Pass so a V-shaped boom could be deployed.
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Officials also approved deployment of booms within 72 hours at Bayou Grande; Bayou Chico, West Arm; Bayou Chico, North Arm; Davenport Bayou; Star Lake; Palafox Pier; LaFitte Cove; and Little Sabine Bay.

When the paper went to bed officials had not yet decided whether to close Pensacola Pass at the western end of Santa Rosa Island, although the state DEP reported seeing "tar balls and sheen... outside of Pensacola Pass."

5. Outzen Ousted.

A flaming war also started late Tuesday night when Rick Outzen, publisher of the Independent News weekly, blogged that he'd been "banned" from BP's scheduled press interviews with Pete Benson, "BP's head of operations at the Bayou Chico facility," and "Lucia Bustamante, BP’s Community Liaison in Pensacola."

Invitations were restricted to only four media outlets whom BP apparently expected "to share the video, photos and audio in a fair manner with any media outlet who asks." BP picked only one of the four local TV network affiliates serving the Pensacola area, one of two local commercial AM radio stations providing daily oil spill coverage, the one daily Pensacola newspaper, and a reporter from the Miami Herald.

Obviously, BP's PR flack-catchers haven't read Charles Kuralt's autobiography, A Life on the Road. Kuralt, as a cub reporter, learned "the old UPI trick" the hard way when he shipped an exclusive story back to CBS headquarters via a generous reporter for UPI, who then claimed the breaking story as his own. Next time, his boss wired him, "Throw your film in the water before giving it to UPI for shipping."

Not invited to the BP interview were wire service reporters, weekly newspapers, non-commercial public radio stations, out-of-town TV media reporters, bloggers, or any of the half dozen or more documentary film makers on site. And no local environmental or public health organizations providing regular news updates, either.

As Outzen says, "There is no valid reason" for the restrictions. It was, Rick figures, "BP’s way of punishing me and avoiding direct questions [from] one of their loudest critics." He might have added BP's motive might have been to avoid letting anyone who's been writing for The Daily Beast, a popular national news blog, in the door.

Rick Outzen is a bulldog. He fixed his teeth to BP's pants leg all day yesterday and didn't let up for the rest of the 24/7 blog cycle until BP admitted its mistake:

"Why Am I Banned?" went up on his blog soon after.
"Facts Continue to Belie BP Statements" was posted at mid-afternoon.
"BP Says Ban Was Symantics Error," came next.
"BP Apologizes for Pool Media,"
And, for good measure, he tweaked BP over its oafish effort to shut down the Twitter parody "BPGlobal PR." ["BPGlobal PR Asked to Identify Spoof"]

We're guessing the next time BP feels compelled to meet the press, they'll send a well-dressed butler to Rick with an engraved invitation, served up on a silver plate.

6. Word War.

After Jamie Page's snappy lede he writes that the war he's talking about is less against oil than the Unified Command and BP Corp. itself:

County officials Wednesday were upset at the last-minute way they learned about the initial oil sighting in Alabama waters, just across the state line, that launched the sudden boom deployment.

"It was a surprise to us, and we were angered by the fact that the oil was already coming through the pass, and I consider that a complete communication failure of the Unified Command," said John Temperilli, one the county's four oil spill experts.

For those who are wondering 'Where did this 'Unified Command' stuff come from? you can consult Jim Stemp's "Incident Command System: History and Need." It explains how the Exxon Valdez oil spill -- which BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster now dwarfs -- was one of the prime progenitors mandating "that when a spill occurs, the management of the incident will use a Unified Command that includes the responsible federal official, State or local official and the responsible party."

As for BP, the Paul Fleming writes in today's PNJ that Escambia County commissioners are mad at one of their "Unified Command" partners:

Escambia County wants to run the cleanup and wants more equipment from BP.

"If they were really serious, they'd be providing the resources," Escambia Commission Chairman Grover Robinson IV said Tuesday. "What we've got is a lot of placating to feel good. People want action."

Among other things, the county wants BP to pay for mechanical sand rakes.

"We've asked for eight of them," Robinson said. "I don't even know why we're arguing about these."

Interestingly, the hostility toward BP apparently is not shared by neighboring Santa Rosa County, although the evidence Fleming cites for this is thin. One commissioner, Gordon Goodin, "said he's pleased with cleanup-crew response: 340 people were shoveling up and disposing of oil in the two counties Wednesday. The first oil came ashore Friday."

Oddly, Gordon Goodin seemed to be on the other side of the fence just a month ago. Then, he claimed to be worrying "that dealing with the Federal Emergency Management Agency will seem like a breeze compared to working with BP PLC on reimbursements related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill."

There was a time when Commissioner Goodin enjoyed widespread public support, at least in south county. But over the past couple of years quite a number of voters have become disgusted with his inconstancy and concerned over suspected conflicts of interest between his developer business and his public office. For many, his foot-dragging on the Northwest Florida Zoo closure was the final straw.

Consequently, there is more than a little irony in Goodin's charge that "Escambia is being greedy." In case the insult wasn't obvious enough, he added, "I think they're being a little hoggish." Now, there's a classic pot calling kettles black.

7. Size Matters - Yet Again.

How many times have we said it? The size of the oil leak matters. But as often as we've said it, no one seems to have a reliable -- or truthful -- answer.

What we said almost a month ago, on May 11, remains true: "The facts about the oil spill were filtered through BP Corp., which, it is now apparent, is heavily invested in keeping them from public view" and "BP Corporation repeatedly falsified the size of the oil leak, either intentionally or through its own gross negligence."

Nothing in all of that has changed. The only improvement over the last month has been that a few universities sent research vessels into the Gulf. Not surprisingly, what they're bringing back confirms that BP has been deliberately misleading the Government.

Some journalists are beginning to catch on. "Forget those minimum estimates of BP's Gulf oil leak," reads the headline of Mark Seibel's recent blog report for McClatchy News.

Thad Allen's press briefing at the White House Monday makes one thing clear -- we can forget about that 12,000 to 19,000 barrels per day range that Obama administration officials have consistently cited, inaccurately, as the amount of oil likely to be gushing from BP's blown-out Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico well.
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The government's Flow Rate Technical Group never saw the 12,000 to 19,000 or the 12,000 to 25,000 as the full range of the leak's size. Rather those were the low-end estimates... .

The team didn't feel comfortable giving high end estimates... . Why not? They didn't have confidence in the information they'd been given.
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[R]ead the report itself. Here's a quote: "Based upon the incomplete and often poor quality data available to the experts, only a range of values that represent an estimated minimum can be given [emphasis added]." And that's just 10 sentences into the 43-page report.

Earlier this week, Renee Schoof and Erika Bolstad reported for McClatchy News that "BP's runaway Deepwater Horizon well may be spewing what the company once-called its worst case scenario — 100,000 barrels a day... ." The information originally was attributed to "a member of the government panel tasked with determining the size of the spill."

"In the data I've seen, there's nothing inconsistent with BP's worst case scenario," Ira Leifer, an associate researcher at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the government's Flow Rate Technical Group, told McClatchy.

Leifer said that based on satellite data he's examined, the rate of flow from the well has been increasing over time, especially since BP's "top kill" effort failed last month to stanch the flow. The decision last week to sever the well's damaged riser pipe from the its blowout preventer in order to install a "top hat" containment device has increased the flow still more _ far more, Leifer said, than the 20 percent that BP and the Obama administration predicted.

More than one of the Flow Rate panel members agrees. Another was quoted on Rachel Maddow's show the other night. Today, the Associated Press quotes Purdue professor Steve Wereley as saying, "the daily flow rate is, in fact, somewhere between 798,000 gallons and 1.8 million gallons."

8. Lubchenco walks back.

For over a month NOAA's director Jane Lubchenco was adamantly denying numerous scientific reports that any undersea pool of oil had been detected in the Gulf. It was as if she thought the scientific world was out of step with her -- not to mention her predecessor -- and how dare they?

Now, she's changing her tune.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said her agency had finished testing water samples collected by the USF team that confirmed the presence of the oil.

"The bottom line is, yes there is oil in the water columns," she told reporters. "That's confirmed for the sites we've done the analyses."

Lubchenco also has acknowledged that some of the the low-density oil plumes hundreds of feet below the surface of the Gulf have "fingerprints" that tie it to BP's exploded Deepwater Horizon well.

But Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen -- who had not mentioned the emerging scientific consensus until now -- wants to quibble over semantics. He "questioned the use of the term "plume" to describe that underwater oil.

"The term 'plume' has been used for quite awhile, [but] I think what we are talking about are concentrations," he said. "'Cloud' is a better term."

Holy oil spill! 'A cloud of oil is not a plume of oil.' That's deserving of a limerick or Haiku. BP Global PR ought to get working on it right away.

9. Dark Ages Revisited.

What's interesting about the response of these federal officials is a cloudy undercurrent of a different sort. Too often, Lubchenco and Allen seem to be acting in consort with BP to hide the truth from the public. What they really ought to appreciate is that BP's corporate interests are aligned against both the public and the federal government. The federal government should see the people who empower it not as the enemy, but as an ally against BP.

What leads us to say that is that we've begun ruminating over a book we read in college and re-read a couple of years ago. We mentioned it before in a related context: Barbara Tuchman's prize winning opus, "A Distant Mirror."

It is, as the reviewers say, a very detailed history of the "calamitous fourteenth century." The fourteenth century was a period when the nation-state in the nascent form of newly emergent, larger, and more powerful kingdoms first began to rival the thousand-year hegemony of the "Christian Church" in Rome. Hard as it is to imagine today, all of the Western world before then was largely ruled by the Pope (and from time to time Anti-Popes in places like Avignon). Even kings had to be sanctified as the Pope's local delegate.

In time, thanks in part to Henry VIII's marital infidelities, the nation-state separated itself from Rome, took a lot of property with it, and assumed the freedom to appoint government officials like the Chancellor wholly without Rome's assent. Protestantism was the first result before it, too, divided into fiercely quarreling sects. The "Christian Church" largely retreated from the secular world to fight its own internecine wars. The nation-state grew more powerful and evolved to become the world's leading organizer of economic life.

A respectable theory advanced by some serious scholars in the past few decades posits that we are on the brink of an analogous epoc, one in which the nation-state finds itself under siege to rival transnational corporations. Some see the two as symbiotic, each helping the other. Others are concerned that the explosive growth and exponentially increasing wealth of transnational corporations, who owe allegiance to no nation, ultimately poses a threat to the very sovereignty of the nation-state.

No one can be sure how it all will turn out, of course. We're still feeling the reverberations of the fourteenth century. But it's not hard to see the increasingly acrimonious struggle between BP Corp. and the federal government over who should "control" the BP oil disaster, and what the public should be told about it, as an early skirmish in the coming global war between Nation-State and Multinational Corporations.

Whom do you trust to 'organize the economic life' of repairing the entire Gulf of Mexico and all the human beings and sealife devastated by BP's oil spill? Our nation or BP's multinational corporate board of directors?

UPDATE Who would have thunk it? The director of the U.S. Geological Survey told reporters late this afternoon that the National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group has recalculated the oil spill flow rate as being in a range of "20,000 to more than 40,000 barrels per day." This compares with BP's public claims over most of the last month that only 5,000 barrels of oil was leaking each day.

The newly calculated rate does not take into account changes, if any, since June 3 when BP installed a small cap and began recovering some portion of still-leaking oil.
minor edit 6-10 pm
Update 5:15 pm CDT 6-10

Another Mining Disaster

This may seem like a month for mining disasters. But it happens too often to be a coincidence. As the AP reports:

Though the cause of the blast was not known, the operation run by Massey subsidiary Performance Coal Co. has a history of violations for not properly ventilating highly combustible methane gas, safety officials said.
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Massey Energy, a publicly traded company based in Richmond, Va., ... ranks among the nation's top five coal producers and is among the industry's most profitable. It has a spotty safety record.

In the past year, federal inspectors fined the company more than $382,000 for repeated serious violations involving its ventilation plan and equipment at Upper Big Branch. The violations also cover failing to follow the plan, allowing combustible coal dust to pile up, and having improper firefighting equipment.

The New York Times adds:

For at least six of the past 10 years, federal records indicate, the Upper Big Branch mine has recorded an injury rate worse than the national average for similar operations. The records also show that the mine had 458 violations in 2009, with a total of $897,325 in safety penalties assessed against it last year. It has paid $168,393 in safety penalties.

Although the exact cause of the latest disaster is not yet known, the Times reports that a United Mine Workers spokesman's "current theory was that the explosion might have been caused by a buildup of methane gas in a sealed-off section of the mine. A similar type of explosion occurred in the 2006 Sago mining disaster, which left 12 miners dead after trapping them underground for nearly two days."

Just last month, Massey Energy bought a rival coal company, further reducing competition in the energy market. The company paid $960 million.

That was a deliberate corporate choice. Although Massey Energy has one of the worst safety records in the nation, it chose to spend its profits on another corporate acquisition rather than improving mine safety.

Corporate greed over worker safety, Wall Street avarice taking the world economy to the brink of destruction, irresponsible bank lending run amok, oil and coal corporations outright buying congressmen and senators, federal financial regulators secretly using taxpayer money to soak up worthless brokerage assets, municipalities driven to bankruptcy's doorstep by "nomadic thievery"...... Something has gone seriously wrong with America's moral compass.

And this has consequences. This week, it was the lives of twenty-five or more miners. Next week, it could be yours.

minor edit 04-06am

Mine Rescue

As promised, history rhymes if it doesn't repeat: 114 mine workers rescued in Shanxi Province, China.

Avoiding 'Nomadic Thievery'

"We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over."
-- Matt Tabbi, Rolling Stone

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi has a caustic summary of the Jefferson County sewer fiasco that has reduced Birmingham, Ala. to "the status of an African debtor state." Today, every single resident of Birmingham, from new-born babes to the oldest nursing home resident, now owes Wall Street $4,800. ["Looting Main Street: How the Nation's Biggest Banks are Ripping Off American Cities with the Same Predatory Deals that Brought Down Greece"].

In Birmingham --

Here you can see a trail that leads directly from a billion-dollar predatory swap deal cooked up at the highest levels of America's biggest banks, across a vast fruited plain of bribes and felonies — "the price of doing business," as one JP Morgan banker says on tape — all the way down to [Birmingham resident] Lisa Pack's sewer bill and the mass layoffs in Birmingham.

Once you follow that trail and understand what took place in Jefferson County, there's really no room left for illusions. We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over. It's our turn to get laughed at. In Birmingham, lots of people have gone to jail for the crime: More than 20 local officials and businessmen have been convicted of corruption in federal court. Last October... Birmingham's mayor was convicted of fraud and money-laundering for taking bribes funneled to him by Wall Street bankers — everything from Rolex watches to Ferragamo suits to cash. But those who greenlighted the bribes and profited most from the scam remain largely untouched. "It never gets back to JP Morgan," says Pack.

At the root of the scandal one finds--

• ordinary city department heads unable to understand the impossible complexities of financing contracts cooked up by Wall Street
• a local politically-connected fixer paid by Wall Street to offer 'consultant' expertise who recommends those contracts to municipal officials
  
• criminal bribes handed out like Easter candy by Wall Street to greedy local politicians
• good-ol'-boy pay-offs by one Wall Street bank to another Wall Street bank to preserve the first bank's lucrative monopoly on farming Birmingham residents for every last nickle they own, and
• predatory lending practices that "at one point" left Birmingham holding more worthless toxic credit default swaps than New York City.

It's a cautionary tale for any municipal board of modest talents with an ambitious development project that's spending oodles of money for nothing much visible in an effort to find financing from out-of-state sources who won't make their own financial statements public except to a limited number of insiders.

What you want to avoid is the Birmingham fiasco, where the bankers "find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive."

In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. "It's not high finance," says Taylor, the former bond regulator. "It's low finance."

And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery.

History Rhymes, Again

"History never repeats, but it often rhymes."
-- Mark Twain (attr.)

Scholars can't really tell you where or when the witticism so commonly attributed to Mark Twain was uttered, but it's just the sort of thing which that biting skeptic of human nature might have said. In any event, he surely would have added a sarcastic rhyme this week after news of the latest coal mine disasters in China.

Five times this week -- five! -- scores of Asian miners have been killed by flooding, gas explosions, or sudden collapse of mine shafts. The worst appears to be in Shanxi Province where 153 workers have been trapped for over a week. Hopes were raised yesterday when mysterious "tapping" noises were heard coming from the mine Thursday, NPR reports.

Ironically, this same week at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, the centennial commemoration of the famous "Cherry Mine" disaster in Illinois was just winding up. Above ground a hundred years ago, mysterious tapping noises were keeping hopes alive in north-central Illinois, too.

The Cherry Mine disaster has historical importance beyond the grim numbers of the dead and surviving widows, mothers, and siblings left bereft and penniless. Subsequent investigations established that company executives were deliberately and repeatedly violating what few laws there were protecting worker safety and preventing under-age employment.

Those findings led to a number of progressive worker safety laws including, one year later, creation of the U.S. Bureau of Mines and, among the states, one of the first worker compensation statutes. A fascinating, and historically accurate, two-part diary on Daily Kos ["How Regulation Came to Be"] explains the connection in detail.

All of which provides a useful reminder, in today's era of Tea Party and neo-Republican attacks on "government" in general, of just what life was like before progressive ideas became the law of the land.

Subsidiary Shenanigans

When mega-insurance companies want a rate increase, they invariably pretend that their wholly-owned subsidiaries are entirely independent companies and state regulators shouldn't be allowed to look at the parent corporation's books. On the other hand, when the parent is desperate for money to stop its stock price from free-falling, guess where it finds it? You guessd it!

It only looks like A.I.G. is borrowing from itself. In fact, what it is doing -- just days after the 9-11 anniversary and two tropical storms whose destruction reached almost as far north as the city -- is reducing the cash reserves New York's state insurance regulators originally considered would be necessary in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.

Insurance company going broke under the regulatory rules? Simple solution: change the rules! Only the insurance company's customers will be at risk.

Diminishing Democracy

"Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, though a bit more extreme and really more transparent... in just how vapid they are, were really doing what the establishment media does pretty much without exception, in terms of how it covers our political culture."

Glenn Greenwald, interviewed on Democracy Now! by Amy Goodman:

From the transcript:

Now, leave aside the question as to whether or not journalists holding themselves out as political journalists have an obligation to focus on the more substantive matters, independent of what they can do in order to generate as high ratings as possible, even if you assume that political journalism ought to simply feed the public whatever the public wants, there’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the American public is more interested in Barack Obama’s bowling score or whether he wears a lapel pin than they are in how our political leaders are going to address the grave economic insecurity that the country faces or extricate ourselves from the debacle in Iraq that’s becoming increasingly savage and brutal without any end in sight. This is a fiction, an invention on the part of political journalists to justify their never-ending coverage of trash.

And in fact there’s much evidence to suggest—and you can ask any political elected official—that when they go back to their district, what they hear continuously are grave complaints from their constituents and others about just how ridiculous and inane political coverage is and how dominated it is by matters that have nothing to do with their lives and with the problems that they face. And these journalists believe that they’re sort of spokespeople for the people in the heartland and speak for them and patronizingly say that they’re interested in these insipid issues and that’s why they’re covered. The reality is there’s no connection between the establishment journalistic class and the people whom they claim to represent, and the reason they cover those issues is because they, the journalists, want to cover them, not because the people want to hear them.

War of the Words

We were away the other day and so didn't get to watch the war launched Sunday by the nation of Pakistan against the web site of YouTube. The war lasted two hours, far shorter than an Island Authority board meeting on Pensacola Beach.

If you're into such things as stealth jets zipping through the skies, exploding bombs, gut-wrenching screams of agony from someone who looks like the child of your enemy, and all the other thrills that war offers to lizard brains, you will be disappointed to learn that this war was silently conducted by software and digital coding, and no one died.

News.com has the gritty technical details. Here's a summary:

Network providers -- called autonomous systems, or ASs -- broadcast the ranges of IP addresses to which they'll provide access. One of the functions of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is managing the master list of AS numbers, which it does by allocating large blocks of 1,000 or so at a time to regional address registries.
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If the address information provided by AS is reliable, all is well. But if an AS makes a false broadcast, because of a configuration mistake or for malicious reasons, all hell can break loose.

This is what happened with YouTube, which Pakistan's government ordered blocked because of offensive material, apparently a video depicting cartoons about Muhammad that had been posted in a Danish newspaper. Some reports have said the video featured several minutes of a film made by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, an outspoken critic of Islam.

A spokesman for the Pakistani embassy said on Monday that the order to block access to YouTube came from the highest levels of the government. It would have been passed along to Pakistan's Electronic Media Regulatory Authority and then to Pakistan's telecom authority, the spokesman said, which in turn would have issued the formal order to the Internet providers.

Pakistan Telecom responded by broadcasting the false claim that it was the correct route for 256 addresses in YouTube's 208.65.153.0 network space. Because that was a more specific destination than the true broadcast from YouTube saying it was home to 1,024 computers, within a few minutes traffic started flowing to the wrong place.

More interestingly, CNN explores the strategic interests at stake. It turns out that this isn't the first time a nation-state has begun a war against YouTube. At one or another time a number of other countries have attacked the same video site:

The countries acted after concluding that YouTube videos were subversive (China), immoral (Iran), embarrassing to well-known figures (Brazil) or critical of a country's king (Thailand), the group said.

Governments also have sought to regulate user-supplied Internet content to stymie allegations that they abuse human rights, the group said

Furthermore, videos aren't the only web content under attack by governments, according to the BBC. A new study by the Open Net Initiative concludes, "The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world... ." At least 25 of 41 countries surveyed "showed evidence of content filtering" or government controlled censorship of web sites including the Internet telephone service known as Skype and Google Maps.

Don't imagine for a moment the U.S. Government isn't starting its own "wars of choice" against Internet sites it doesn't like, too. The White House has tried for years to forbid web site photos of the flag-draped coffins of our own soldiers coming home. Last year the Pentagon prohibited our troops overseas from accessing MySpace.com.

Even a U.S. court got into the swing last week by shutting down the U.S. hosted "whistle-blower" web site called Wikileaks. To see the Wkileaks site these days, embarrassingly enough for a nation that supposedly reveres the Constitution of our Founding Fathers, you have to navigate to an overseas mirror site.

As the Open Net Initiative points out, technically speaking the Wikileak censorship wasn't sought by the government but by "a bank registered in the Cayman islands." However --

The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests.

It's not really web sites like YouTube or Google Maps or even Wikileaks that U.S. corporate interests and dictatorial governments elsewhere want to bring to an end. It's the Age of Enlightenment, and in particular those once-upon-a-time American, quaint notions of freedom of expression and thought.