Think that the oil spill crisis is over, just because BP has finally, after three months, placed a cap on the Deepwater Horizon drill site in the Gulf of Mexico? Think again.

Yesterday morning, I mentioned a new oil spill in Dalian, China that occurred when two petroleum pipelines exploded. That oil spill has now doubled in size, to cover over 400 square kilometers. Just days into this spill, a long stretch of shoreline has already been fouled with thick black sludge.

The Dalian oil spill has also claimed a human victim, literally swallowing him up. Zhang Liang was one of a pair of firefighters who were attempting to loosen a pump that had been plugged by the thick crude – as deep as 20 centimeters on top of the water. He could not make it out alive.

These photographs of the incident were taken by Greenpeace China, whose campaign manager Ailun Yang commented, “Our planet’s over-reliance on petroleum caused this tragedy. It is a sad day for those involved in the clean-up effort, and for the planet as whole. Ultimately it is we human beings who pay the price for our oil addiction.”

Think that the oil spill crisis is over? No, it won’t be over until our addiction to fossil fuels is over.

Have we learned the lesson, or will we all sink into the filth of petroleum like Zhang Liang? The signs aren’t hopeful. Even as Zhang Liang was drowning in crude oil, Louisiana’s U.S. Representative John Fleming rose to give a speech before Congress in which he argued against even a 6-month delay in the expansion of offshore drilling along America’s coastline.

Congressman Fleming said that the delay in expanding offshore drilling was doing more damage than the oil spill itself. Mr. Fleming ought to take a step back before he makes statements like that. Has the temporary moratorium caused an explosion killing eleven workers? Has anyone drowned in the moratorium? Has the moratorium caused pollution that will linger for generations?

If we want jobs, fine. Let’s create jobs – in an energy revolution that will take us away from the deadly, outdated technology of the fossil fuel economy, toward a more sustainable future.

I had two bicycle visions this morning on Old Street in London. Walking East, my path was crossed by a woman wearing a tied up skirt as she pedalled her bicycle toward me. On her face was a ventilator mask.

100 feet further, where Goswell Road meets Old Street, I came across a bicycle painted white, and chained to a light post. Attached to the bicycle was a small sign reading, “Remember me.”

It was a ghost bike, a memorial to a bicyclist who had been killed in a collision with an automobile, a sacrifice to the greedy petroleum spirits that rule our world.

The City of London appears to have offered a new motto that defines the way of life there for residents and visitors alike: CCTV Surveillance in Operation.

It’s unnerving how pervasive these CCTV cameras are. On every street in the center of town there are multiple cameras aimed in multiple directions, making it impossible to have a moment of privacy. Along with the cameras come signs announcing the surveillance.

On the particular sign you see here, the viewer is warned, “CCTV Images are being recorded for the Prevention and Detection of Crime and for the Promotion of Public Safety”. I note how the phrases “Prevention and Detection of Crime” and “Promotion of Public Safety” are capitalized – as if they’re the names of some sort of unique institutions, instead of actual ordinary prevention, detection and safety.

It seems that the people installing CCTV systems throughout London are aware that they’re creating an institution in the name of crime prevention and safety that isn’t actually synonymous with crime prevention and safety.

When you buy one of our sweatshop-free t-shirts, you do more than spread a liberal political message across your chest. For every shirt we sell, we pledge to donate $1 to a progressive political cause and to send another $1 to someone starting up a small self-administered enterprise in the developing world.

This month, we’re combining the two pots of money and sending all of our donation to the World of Good Development Organization (related to but not the same as the World of Good network of Fair Trade shops) — and we’re doing so because World of Good combines progressive organizing with overseas microgrants. The microgrants are directed toward community improvement projects in the developing world, with local organizations hired to implement the projects in order to achieve a second-order infusion of community capital.

At the same time, World of Good seeks to empower the people who make goods and the people who buy goods with concrete information about existing and livable wage standards in countries across the globe. World of Good has a fair wage guide that provides four measurements for “fairness” and allows a person to compare what these fair wages would be to actual wages a factory worker receives in a country. Another project of World of Good is to gather empirical information about actual wages for particular types of jobs in a country. These sorts of information can provide bargaining power for factory workers and the power to make ethical decisions for consumers.

Executives from big oil companies are busy telling members of Congress that there’s no need for a moratorium on offshore drilling because the oil industry has already cleaned up its act, and there won’t be any more oil spills.

Really? No more oil spills? What’s that in the St. Lawrence River, then, stretching for almost two miles along the shore, and shutting down traffic in one of the busiest shipping channels in the world?

Yes, it’s another oil spill.

The United States of America is falling behind in marriage rights. Once, our nation set the example of liberty for others to follow. Now, the USA is a laggard.

Early this morning, Argentina became the latest nation to grant equal marriage rights to heterosexual and homosexual couples. The vote in the Argentine Senate wasn’t even very close: 33 to 27.

Yet, in the United States, our President and Congress have refused to even consider such equality. It seems that they don’t think that marriage is important enough to protect, ensuring that all consensual adult couples have access to the institution. If Argentina can legalize same-sex marriage, why can’t we?

Antipathy to marriage equality has transformed the USA from an exemplar to a cultural backwater, lowering our nation’s status in the world.

Do you remember the hubbub and hullaballoo this spring over claims that Prahlad Jani, an 83 year-old man of India, went for 15 days straight without eating a thing while under strict scientific supervision? Why, the scientists observing Prahlad Jani say he didn’t even take a single drink of water!

Of course, it’s turned out that he was allowed to regularly “gargle” and bathe during that time, that the presence of independent monitors were refused, that Prahlad Jani was allowed his “privacy,” and that the principal investigator’s pre-existing goal in his research is to prove Jain religious teachings about transcending bodily limitations through fasting. His research philosophy:

In fact, every single rule in Jain Darshan has a science behind it, as lord Mahavir was Omniscient. Our Modern science can have and has limitations & therefore we have to change our views every now and then. While Jain Darshan is shaswat & does not need to change.

Whatever mistakes we perceive in the religious texts , could be interpretation errors or perhaps science may evolve for our understanding of those facts ,or may be there were errors in translation or some texts are missing. We have to keep faith in our religion., Yes, absolute faith & devotion. A woshiping temper, rather than egoistic ruthless attitude.

You may recall that at the end of the purported experiment on May 6, principal investigator Dr. Sudhir Shah issued a press release in which he declared:

All the reports and results will be scientifically analyzed, subsequently and will take some
time. The entire study team will meet periodically to discuss the findings and draw valid conclusions.

Now Dr. Sudhir Shah has released an update on his Prahlad Jani experiment in which he explains that:

The investigators intend to carry on dialogue by periodic meeting among themselves with data
processing as and when the data come through, to come out with some scientific conclusions
which will take some time. The publication of the study in a scientific journal can only be
considered thereafter at the discretion of principal investigator.

It’s been two months after the completion of his study and with the data still “coming through,” we’ve seen none of it. We may never see the data if, “at the discretion of principal investigator,” publication of the study in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is avoided.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has now continued on for longer than last year’s offshore drilling disaster in Australia’s Timor Sea. At this time, therefore, it seems fitting to look elsewhere on our globe in memorial of others’ losses caused by the fossil fuel industry.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is hardly the only one that has caused suffering, after all, and won’t be the last to do so. It isn’t just BP that’s to blame – the risk and destruction is an industry-wide problem.

So, today, let’s take a moment to remember the people, more than 200 of them, that were killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Friday, when a truck carrying petroleum flipped over, and began spilling fuel, which then exploded.

There’s never been a windmill accident that’s killed over 200 people. Nor has there ever been a solar energy disaster of this scale. For our immediate safety, as well as for the sake of our planet’s ecological integrity, our global civilization needs to invest more in safe, clean energy, and pull back from the dangers of crude oil.

In the United States, politicians feel the need to take a strong pose of religious belief. In 2008, Barack Obama coordinated his campaign with networks of Christian churches and organized Christian gospel tours. Mike Huckabee declared that he would create a Christian nation as President and autographed Bibles at campaign stops. Atheists were evicted from the Democratic National Convention.

According to polls, a majority of Americans wouldn’t vote for any atheist to become President. It’s not a solely American attitude, though. In Brazil, for example, only 13 percent would vote for an atheist.

Why? Is an atheist an inherently ineffective leader?

Now, the world has a test of that presumption. Julia Gillard, who became Australia’s Prime Minister just a few days ago, is an open atheist. If she is able to be an effective national leader, will that change Americans’ resistance to voting an atheist into the White House?

Even as the sharpest minds in the American oil industry face two and a half months of their own impotence against the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling disaster, a new oil spill threatens a patch of the Atlantic across the waves. This spill comes from the Idoho-Usari offshore drilling rig off the coast of Nigeria. Mobil had denied that there was any oil spill at all, but oil has now reached the shores of Nigeria. There have been no CNN news crews waiting on Nigeria’s beaches, waiting for the slick to arrive, however.

Back in the Gulf of Mexico, tropical storm Alex is predicted to bring high winds within miles of the Deepwater Horizon wreckage site in a few days’ time. Alex is, of course, just the first in a long string of tropical storms that are likely to come through the Gulf of Mexico this season, and all the oil industry’s so-called “experts” aren’t sure how these storms will affect their ongoing failed efforts to stop crude oil from surging out of the sea floor and to contain the massive amount of oil that’s already reached the surface waters.

As we struggle against the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in our American waters, in Egypt, the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association is confronting a similar problem halfway around the world.

Reports of “dead sea birds and dead sea turtles scattered across the island covered in oil” sound like the stories we’ve come to expect from the beaches of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Adding to the similarities is an apparent coverup of the extent of the spill. In this case, however, the oil spill is in the Red Sea between Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula.

It’s a reminder that, despite oil industry PR, oil spills are not rare. It’s also a hint that people around the world have many problems in common, regardless of their disagreements about religious ideology. We should be cooperating on ways to take the world beyond its dependence on fossil fuels and offshore drilling, rather than fighting each other in wars of terror.

Nearly two months since the explosion ofthe Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, the drill site is still gushing tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil every day into the Gulf of Mexico. What can the American people do about it, though, without ruining their way of life? Wouldn’t using less petroleum wreck the economy?

Not necessarily. There’s a huge amount of waste in our national economy that we can cut without significant sacrifice to our way of life. Consider, for example, the role that plastic grocery bags play in our lives.

A few of them get reused or recycled. Most of them, however, are used just one time before they’re thrown away, or worse, before they become wind-borne litter, hanging in tree tops or clogging up storm drains.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Dealing with the same problem of waste, China instituted a law banning stores from offering plastic bags to shoppers for free. They’re reporting that the law has saved their country 3 million metric tons of petroleum per year.

Reducing our America’s consumption of crude oil by a few million tons per year would be a solid step toward reducing demand for offshore drilling. Are the American people really so lazy and so indifferent to the Gulf of Mexico that they won’t bother to make the effort to take re-usable bags shopping?

If you’ve been reading a Jane Austen novel, one of the Brontës’ tear-jerkers or some other piece of late 17th to early 18th Century English literature, you may have been wondering what all the exclamations about this barouche and that chaise or the other hack are about. They’re used as some indication of status, but it’s not clear what those indications are, not to those of us who toot about on Huffies and Harleys or sit in Greyhounds, Chevrolets and Mini Coopers. Ed Ratcliffe has written a very useful history of English transportation in the period, connecting each mode of transportation (including walking) to expectations of social class and to the typical behavior of novelists and their characters. It has enriched my reading experience. Back to the moors… ah!

For every shirt we sell through Skreened, we dedicate a dollar to a low-interest Kiva microloan fund to someone who is trying to start up an independent business. We won’t derive income from this; any money we make from these microloans will be sent back for more overseas development. Our latest microloan goes to Mamadou Barry of Senegal, who is starting a business by taking used and broken motorcycles, repairing them, and selling them to others.