The gamblers working the Wall Street casinos have no connection to real life. It doesn’t occur to them that you can’t eat money, and if any of a number of things go wrong, you may not be able to buy food.

During Katrina the people in a high class hotel for a conference found out that their credit cards were just slices of plastic when the electricity and communications are out. If they wanted food and water, they had better be prepared to “loot”.

Over at the Left Coaster Mary found a comment by an investment banker, Weighing Oil vs The Environment. The banker thought the oil was much more important than the health of the Gulf because it was generating billions, while the fishing industry only generated about three-quarters of a billion dollars per year.

According to this banker, if the oil covers my beaches all we have to do is scoop up the oily sand and put new sand in its place. There is no problem.

Mississippi will be fine because people go to their shore for the casinos and the odor is the only problem he can see for them.

He concludes that it is obvious that oil is more important than the environment.

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Here’s the latest from A.B. “Tony” Hayward who said the oil spill was “relatively tiny”, and the environmental impact would be “very very modest.”

According to the Pensacola News Journal BP disputes claims of underwater oil plumes

During a tour of a BP PLC staging area for cleanup workers, CEO Tony Hayward said the company’s sampling showed “no evidence” that oil was suspended in large masses beneath the surface. He didn’t elaborate on how the testing was done.

Hayward said that oil’s natural tendency is to rise to the surface, and any oil found underwater was in the process of working its way up.

“The oil is on the surface,” Hayward said. “There aren’t any plumes.”

However the University of South Florida, the University of Georgia, Southern Mississippi University and other research institutions, using their own independent testing and procedures have stated that the plumes exist.

Anyone interested can see for themselves the video of diving in the Gulf done by ABC’s Good Morning America. The surface is clear but if you swim down the oil is suspended below the surface in drops. When the divers returned to the surface they were covered in oil. This is what the hundreds of thousands of gallons of dispersant do – they weigh it down.

BP knows this, because the guys they have been hiring to do water sampling have been telling them this. One of them was on NPR and showed Melissa Block that the oil droplets settled to the bottom of the bucket.

The BBC reports that there were Deaths as Israeli forces storm Gaza aid ship

More than 10 people have been killed after Israeli commandos stormed a convoy of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army says.

Armed forces boarded the largest vessel overnight, clashing with some of the 500 people on board.

It happened about 40 miles (64 km) out to sea, in international waters.

If they had done this within the internationally accepted 12-mile limit, they might have a case. If they had hailed the ship during daylight and boarded, they might have a case. When you drop in at night and seize a vessel in international waters, that is piracy.

The latest story is that the people on ship seized weapons from two Israeli commandos and started firing. I’m not joking – they honestly have said that two of Israel’s elite commando force were mugged by hippies. I don’t know about the peace activists, but the Israeli government spin-doctors really need their meds adjusted.

Bibi canceled a White House visit to “deal with the crisis”, rather than the truth “to avoid getting yelled at”. That’s assuming that Raum didn’t call and tell him that this would not be a good time to visit Washington.

This may be the final straw for the Turkish government, Israel’s only true non-enemy in the Mideast. The ship was Turkish.