Underwater robots dived to the ocean floor yesterday in a new effort to staunch the 42,000 gallons of oil a day being pumped into the Gulf of Mexico in America’s worst offshore oil rig spill in 40 years.

The robots will attempt to activate a blowout preventer, a 450-tonne valve on the ocean floor that offers the only timely option for stemming the flow.

With the oil now coating 1,800 square miles of water, BP officials acknowledge it could take months to entirely contain two separate leaks from the wrecked oil rig.

The US coastguard discovered the leaks on Saturday, two days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig leased by BP sank off the coast of Louisiana. The rig was destroyed in an explosion last Tuesday, with 11 workers missing and presumed dead.

“Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Underwater robots trying to seal well” by Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian 4-26-10

Weird how this goes down so soon after Our Lord and Pharaoh Barakhenaton gave the magic go-ahead to expand offshore drilling.  Between this and the “Papeles, por favor?” shit in Arizona and Mexico’s recent half-assed gesture in the direction of narcotics decriminalization, I’d love to brashly predict that our amigos to the south will not be joining the NAU (or whatever) anytime soon – but Calderón and Obama are scheduled to conspire discuss shit in secret next month, and I’m'a cynically predict the upshot will be, with a few tweaks, full steam ahead with the continental serf-state.

Kinda relatedly, how many times, over, say, the past four years, have eleven miners been trapped in Chinese mines?  After just a cursory search, more times than even I would have thought possible.  Moving on,

Eleven suspected Somali pirates accused in separate attacks on two Navy ships off the coast of Africa were indicted in U.S. federal court Friday.

There was heavy security at the courthouse when the men appeared wearing handcuffs and either bright orange or olive drab prison outfits. One used crutches and had a bandage wrapped around his head. Another used a wheelchair, with his leg covered in bandages because it had been amputated below the knee.

The government said the injuries were the result of the men’s alleged battle with the Navy.

***

The 11 had been held on U.S. ships for weeks off Somalia’s pirate-infested coast as officials worked to determine whether and where they could be prosecuted and prepare legal charges against them.

The transfer of the case to a U.S. court comes amid discussions about setting up an international court to prosecute piracy suspects. Some nations have been reluctant to do that because of difficulties transporting suspects, fears they may claim asylum and thorny jurisdiction issues.

“11 Somailis in U.S. Court on Piracy Charges” AP 4-23-10

This NWO pirate court business is something the grand poobahs of Russia, Germany, Turkey and other nations fed up with the hassle of trying/imprisoning buccaneers have been fondly pushing for some time, and it looks like it might actually instantiate (15-0 vote, yo), which sucks.  The real mystery here, though, is, “Why eleven pirates?”

Don’t say apophenia or I’ll sic the numbers on ya.

Yo ho ho and cuídate.

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.

Luke 2:1, King James mix

So, I’m just now enrolling myself, mailing my form to the Data Capture Center in Essex, MD 21260-1111 (11-4, 15, etc.) and have yet to receive a visit from a GPS-guided, clipboard-toting minion of the Empire, though for reasons unrelated to the census I haven’t been home much since April Foo’s Day.  Course, as A. Richard Miller points out, there’s pretty much no way to not perjure yourself with this mind unfuck of a census form.  Can the presumption of oracularity, the various categorical Catch-22s here be attributed to mundane bureaucratic sloppiness in the service of sleazy data mining?  Are the postcard exhortations (I got 3 so far) to mail the shit back ASAP from Robert “Bohemian” Groves just bean-counter chest-pounding and pedestrian, paper-pusher intimidation a loving ploy to save YOU money on hiring the minions and sending them ’round?  Or are we instead witnessing with Census 2010 a sophisticated attempt by the powers-that-wanna-be to derail the masses from pursuing the sort of intuitive, utilitarian futurology in which we’d all do well to be engaged, even, dare I suggest, an attempt to manipulate burgeoning acausal awareness for the benefit of whatever hyperdimensional parasites happen to be pulling the polbots’ strings at the moment?

Whatevs, here goes nothin’, census form AWAY!

The following cavalcade of  census multimedia kicks off with an Alex Jones rant from 5-6-2009 (11-11) and concludes with an old Christopher Walken/Tim Meadows sketch, though the most over-the-top material is in the meat, as it were, of the sammich.

We can’t move forward until you have fun and cuídate.

Update, 6-13-10

Via Roderick Long, Dr. Who blows a census worker’s mind at 2:35.

I’m currently reading The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, The Sion Revelation by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, T.C. Boyle’s latest story collection Wild Child and Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight (at least the last two of which will receive longer, though not necessarily more substantial, reviews once I finish ‘em).  They’re all pretty rad so far, anyway.

Happy reading and cuídate.

11-11-2009 = 15

2-15-2010 = 11

On 11-15-09, Kurt Nimmo covered Borghezio’s comments on PrisonPlanet.

You can see 317 to Borghezio’s right for most of the video, and 371 behind him in the final shot, for another 11-11 (or 1111 [15, as I mentioned elsewhere, in binary]).

It’s all true, yo!

Have fun and cuídate.

Liebe! Liebe! Liebe! ist die Seele des Genies.

Johann Caspar Lavater (b. 11-15-1741), Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe

Well, that and a little occult knowledge…

Love is an essential part of the story of the 1,100-ton mansion created from Florida coral and limestone. There’s a staircase carved out from a single piece of rock, a sundial, the world’s largest carved heart and a coral hammered into the shape of Florida — complete with a small pond meant to represent Lake Okeechobee.

Built over many years beginning in the 1920s, the Coral Castle seems like something erected by the slaves who built the pyramids or whoever it was who constructed Stonehenge. But the Coral Castle was allegedly built by a single, sickly, skinny man named Edward Leedskalnin, who just wanted to impress the girl he loved in his native Latvia. As he waited for his Agnes to come back to him, Leedskalnin’s love apparently empowered him to move mountains.

“Two-hundred-eighty-three people who lived in Homestead signed a notarized affidavit saying this man built this castle at night, alone,” said Rusty McClure, who coauthored the book, The Mystery of Ed Leedskalnin and his American Stonehenge.

The museum notes that Leedskalnin had an acute sense of balance and movement, as if that somehow might be enough reason to understand how a five-foot-six, 100-pound man could erect a nine-ton door that can be pushed by a toddler.

Or how a man believed to have grade school-level education could create his own electricity generator and his own radio from old car parts. Or make a sundial that accounted for the changing of the seasons.

Leedskalnin died alone in 1951, and took the secret of the Coral Castle to his grave — saying only that he gained the power to build it through something called “magnetricity.” Just what that was has fascinated everyone from geologists to purveyors of the paranormal to McClure himself, whose book is listed in the genre of “unexplained phenomena.”

“We don’t know the how,” McClure said. “But we do know the why. This is a love story.”

“Mysteries of love celebrated at mysterious Coral Castle” by Robert Samuels, Miami Herald 2-14-10

So who is Fulke Greville, and why is such an esteemed group of experts so convinced that he may be about to reveal extraordinary secrets from beyond the grave?

Greville, who was born in Stratford in 1554, ten years before Shakespeare’s official birth date, was without a doubt one of the most extraordinary men of his age.

Among a mind-boggling list of achievements he was a judge, a rear admiral in the Navy, an Army captain, an ‘intelligencer’ who travelled all over Europe recruiting spies for the Crown, a champion horseman, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite courtier and, in his latter years, Chancellor of the Exchequer under James I.

As far as Greville himself was concerned, however, his true calling was in the arts.

Indeed, his personal plea before his death in 1628 was that he wished ‘to be known to posterity under no other notions than of Shakespeare’s master’, according to a mid-17th century biography.

It is this claim, at once straightforward and obscure, which has led the historian A.W.L. Saunders to spend the past decade investigating Greville’s ties with Shakespeare.

In an exhaustive book, The Master Of Shakespeare, Saunders has identified 177 profile matches between the life and works of Fulke Greville and William Shakespeare.

These include that they lived in the same street, had the same friends, among them Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon, the same enemies and moved in the same literary circles.

Pointing out that Stratford-upon-Avon at the time had an adult male population of just 600, Mr Saunders argues that the chances of two men matching the same precise profile to such a degree are infinitesimal.

***

‘Fulke spent the equivalent of £300,000 today on it, but he is buried elsewhere,’ Saunders said this week.

‘No man would build something like that and leave it empty, but his body was placed in the crypt below the church, not in the monument itself.

‘What you have to recognise about Fulke is that he was not only a great statesman, he was also a trained and highly effective spy, and as such was been familiar with codes and secret symbols.

‘Ben Jonson referred to his friend William Shakespeare as “a monument without a tombe”, and that is exactly what we have in the Chapter House at St Mary’s.

‘In his writings, Fulke left clear hints that he wrote the play Antony And Cleopatra, and that he had given it “a far more honourable sepulture than it could ever have deserved”.’

Again we are drawn to this astonishing monument.

‘There is also a strong body of evidence to suggest that Fulke was a leading Rosicrucian – a member of an esoteric society of mystics whose symbol is a cross of roses.

Many tens of thousands of Masons hold the sincere belief that Fulke was the first Grand Master of the Rosicrucian order – and a sword placed on the monument appears to bear its Rose Cross symbol,’ explains Saunders.

“A murdered spy and coded messages from beyond the grave…” by Richard Price, London Daily Mail, 2-11-10