The Obama administration is in BP's pocket and is f***ing us over

Forgive the bad word, but sometimes a nice anglo-saxon expletive is what is needed.  OK, the word didn't show up until the 14th century in English, but it definitely descends from the old German, where it meant approximately the same thing.

Point 1:  BP payed off the Obama administration and other politicians "spending just shy of $20 million on federal lobbying over the last two years". Very clever.  

Point 2:  The Obama administration is stuffed full with former BP executives.  (We must assume they must jostle for room with the Goldman-Sachs boys.)

The regulatory agency for the deep-sea drilling vampires (don't believe the vampire hype, they're really in the hire of those with the deepest pockets; how else do they pay for the dry-cleaning bills on their lace shirts?) is MMS, the Land and Minerals Management agency.  Obama hired someone off an 8 year stint as an executive at BP (Sylvia Baco) as a deputy administrator.

What did this get BP?

Federal documents show that the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) gave BP a "categorical exclusion" on April 6, 2009 to commence drilling with Deepwater Horizon even though it had not produced the impact study required by a law known as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The report would have included probable ecological consequences in the event of a spill.

And so the story goes. We, and the pelicans, and the bayou, and the whole gulf of Mexico were sold out for a pittance.

Of course, the administration and BP have been lying to us for what, 6 weeks?  about the size of the spill.  First BP said 1000 barrels a day, then they upped it to 5000 barrels.  Now, that they're capturing their all that they can, upwards of 15,000 barrels, with lots more left, they (the Obama administration --Stephen Chu,  I trusted you, what was I thinking?-- are admitting, finally that just perhaps the spill was  an order of magnitude (50,000 barrels) or more, all the way up to 100,000 barrels a day.  Here's a nice non-hysterical chart of how  much oil has probably leaked into the gulf.  It's pretty scary,

BP should spend all of its resources cleaning  this up,  every last penny.  Seeinng as how they made $17 Billion (notice the B) last year, they should be able to do so,

Update--the NYT has an article on newest estimates of the flow rates prior to the riser being cut.   Lede? Estimates double, and this is before the riser cut which has been estimated to add another 20% to the flow. 

Down with Different-Race Marriage!

In May 2009, the New York Times wrote an article about high schools with proms segregated by race. Let me repeat. In 2009. If it were left to the people of the US, who doesn't believe that there would still places where it would be illegal for people of different races to marry?

Maine just voted down same-sex marriage. We the people always seem to lag behind liberty, freedom, equality. Hey court system....


Photograph by Gillian Laub. [Minor editing for clarity.]

O'Reilly Should Be Fired

O'Reilly does not understand the most basic concepts regarding percentages and statistics. How can he be trusted to offer any kind of news analysis if he does not understand the relevant math any normal 12 year old would?

Watch this: O'Reilly "explains" that the U.S. naturally has a shorter life expectancy than Canada because we have ten times more people. That means ten times as many accidents, crimes, and so on.....



That was July 27th. Apparently no one at FOX has been able to explain the most rudimentary ideas in statistics to him since then. Watch him make the same mistake here, August 3rd. After it is pointed out that (approx.) 40% of Americans have tried pot, and only 22% of people in the Netherlands have, he seems to think this explains it:

"The way they do statistics in the Netherlands is different. Plus, it's a much smaller country, a much smaller base to do the stats on."

It seems like he is saying the population over there is smaller, so naturally a smaller percentage of people have tried pot-----so he is missing the whole point of what percentages mean. What an incredible idiot!



FOX News should have their licensing pulled for their irresponsible standards regarding news reporting in the US. There needs to be some sort of standard.

What Does Ahmadinejad Stand For?

I was really hoping that the Iranians would vote Ahmadinejad out of office as a signal that they wanted Iran to move forward in a reality-based way. Now it appears that even though he was voted out, he is unwilling to let Iran move in a different direction.

This is terribly important as Ahmadinejad is even more extreme in his beliefs than most Westerners seem to want to understand. To get an idea of just how extreme he is, one need only consider his role during the Iran-Iraq war. Ahmadinejad was a trainer and organizer of the basij, the children martyrs that would roll on the ground, detonating the mines so that soldiers and expensive equipment would be spared. (Handicapped children were often preferred for this duty, because that way families could keep their able-bodied children.)

In pondering the behavior of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I cannot help but think of the 500,000 plastic keys that Iran imported from Taiwan during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. At the time, an Iranian law laid down that children as young as 12 could be used to clear mine fields, even against the objections of their parents. Before every mission, a small plastic key would be hung around each of the children’s necks. It was supposed to open for them the gates to paradise....

....Today, however, Ahmadinejad appears in public in his Basiji uniform. During the war, he served as one of the Basiji instructors who turned children into martyrs. The generation that fought in the Iran-Iraq War has come to power along with Ahmadinejad. He owed his election in Summer 2005 to the contemporary Basiji movement. In Fall, he announced a “Basiji Week.”

Ahmadinejad subscribes to the extreme fundamentalist view that this life is of no value, and that suicidal, homicidal acts in the name of Islam are the highest form of virtue. His anti-Israel and the West rhetoric needs to be taken at face value. His regime would be likely to use nuclear weapons against Israel and the West, should they be able to build them.

Some would rationally argue that that would make no sense as it would kill even more Palestinians than Jews, but that consideration is meaningless to anyone of Ahmadinejad's mindset. Any Muslims killed during an assault on Israel would be guaranteed martyr status, so really, he would be doing them a favor. Any Iranian citizens killed by the inevitable retaliation would likewise join that enviable designation, so Ahmadinejad would be doing them a huge favor too.

Sadly, the restraint imposed by MAD just does not apply when delusionally apocalyptic tyrants are at the helm. Let's hope that Iranians are able to dislodge this evil megalomaniac once and for all.

Bizarro post of the day: AT&T for the American Idol Kris Allen Win!

Read about it here.

In short, Adam Lambert (I might call him Screechy McScreech on a bad day), the flamboyant Queen-fronting Kiss-singing-off-the-stage (not that that's difficult) colouratura trilling American Idol superstar lost to Kris Allen, a sweet guy from Arkansas who couldn't hold a tune. How could this happen? Now we know.

According to the New York Times link above,

AT&T, one of the biggest corporate sponsors of “American Idol,” might have influenced the outcome of this year’s competition by providing phones for free text-messaging services and lessons in casting blocks of votes at parties organized by fans of Kris Allen, the Arkansas singer who was the winner of the show last week.

Why would they want Kris Allen to win? Thinking...Thinking....

Portugal finds drug decriminalization works!

Scientific American has an article up, here, about Portugal's five year experience with decriminalizing all formerly illegal drugs. Short answer, all good.

"Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they're learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely," report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

But the results are much more positive than the article indicates. Glenn Greenwald also talks about Portugal's success here.

For every drug that was in use since 2001 -- every one -- absolute drug usage rates declined in the five years following decriminalization, and that occurred as drug usage rates in most other EU member-states was increasing, often severely.

We here in the United States are bankrupting ourselves with the money used to house non-violent drug users. For example, California spends 9 Billion dollars annually on prisons (with a recidivism rate of 70%! You learn how to be an even better criminal in prison, who would have thunk?)

The Pew Center report reveals that, nationwide, corrections spending outpaces funding for education, transportation and public assistance.

Not to mention our fourth amendment rights, which have atropied to close-to-noexistence due to the aforementioned drug war. And (there's always an 'and'), people in the US caught with drugs often then have their lives thrown away even after they've done their time; yet another casualty of the drug war.

Additionally, (one does get tired of 'and' occasionally) let's not even talk about the growing problem of the spillover violence from Mexican drug cartels that would disappear instantly (for all practical purposes)if drugs were legal--see our own dalliance with alcohol prohibition for support.

So, decriminalizing drugs would lead to less addicts, less money burned up in the prison system and less violence. Any possibility we'd implement this? I'm guessing Naaaaah.

A New Threat-----Coming To A Neighborhood Near You.

EMBED-Strange Cat Door Surprise - Watch more free videos

I can't help but wonder what the home owner would be allowed to do----although pretty clearly this one was complicit.

A most awesome rant

Geebee has posted a righteous rant over at his site, somesense and nonsense. Plus it's funny. You should dash right over and read it.

Happy Darwin Day!!!!

Today Darwin (or at least his bones in Westminister Abbey) turns 200. It is also the 150th anniversary of the publication "The Origin of Species," the book above all others (there might be a bit, but just a bit of hyperbole here) that changed my life.

I grew up Mormon. To save the feelings of family members that might, just might, read this blog, I will not mention the nightmare that this was for me as a child, but basically, I could not get the world to make any sense at all. Here I was, a child, faced with a world controlled by a nightmare of a supreme being (any surprise that I was afraid, among other things, of my closet?)--God has a tissy fit and drowns everyone but a single family? God hardens Pharoh's heart? Then why, if God caused it, is it Pharoh's fault? And what's with Job? That, combined with my father's rather more than dangerous line of work (he was a navigator in the air force, friends of mine regularly disappeared off of the air force bases we lived on when their fathers died) gave me a vision of a world that was a darker place than I could handle.

I was 10ish. And severly depressed; which my parents, due undoubtedly to the time and their own fanaticism, didn't recognize as an illness; rather, I was trouble. An honest assesment for a mormon family, which has a very narrow range of "trouble." In their own defense, I think I read much more fundamentalism into my childhood than actually existed. But, you see , I paid obsessive compulsive razor sharp attention at church ( a feat that has served me well in other aspects of my life, just not this one) and believed that my parents must believe all the wacky stuff I heard over the pulpit. I also didn't trust them enough to ever (ever! My mother died without a heart-to-heart with me) tell them my difficulties, due to the fear I had of being thrown out of the house if I dared express any sort of insufficiently rah-rah-nature to the totally alien world I was born into--I was a coward. I blame myself.

But, my parents had a copy of the "Great Books" in its own bookshelf in the house. This saved my sanity, or quite possibly my life. One of the volumes included both "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man," by the man--Darwin-- himself. I read them. I devoured them.

It was odd, my uber religious family was so pleased that I'd pick up and actually absorb such awkward tomes. Perhaps they were more accepting of my plight than I understood at the time. I'd sleep with the two books and wake up with bruises.

Those two books changed my life. Evolution! The world was beautiful and finally made sense. Monsters there certainly were, but understandable non-omnipotent fickle ones without an odd taste for goat meat smoke and a hankering for smiting.

Thank you Darwin, thank you Mom and Dad.

With all my love to the living and those that have passed on;

Djinn

On being stupid.

I have a very curious disease. Officially, it's called either "inner ear concussion" or "Post-traumatic vertigo."

How does this affect me? The smarter I feel, the stupider I am.

I am much more likely to spuriously match patterns stupid than smart; that is, I see correlations where none exist. For example,I somehow figure that George is acting mean to me when he's just trying to get coffee and wake up.

I'm also, I belive, not as nice when stupid , but feel more justified in my meanness.

This this totally uncalled for, but my inadvertant experiment has proven to me that being intelligent is really stupid. That is all.

I'm planning on worshipping Darwin

Suggestions for headwear?

Merry Christmas! My Christmas wish, listen to more Pogues and skip church, for the children.

First, the most beautiful Christmas song of modern times--The Pogues, live, inexplicably, on St. Patrick's day, singing "Fairytale of New York." Shane Mcgowan is a world treasure.


Second, looks like churchgoing may make you less honest. So, once a year, month, week, skip church and have fun with your kids instead!

Here is an enjoyably impudent piece of research from Innsbruck University. People were observed buying newspapers, using an honesty box to pay. They were interviewed later - so the person with the clipboard seemed unconnected with the newspaper purchase - and asked about age, occupation and attitudes. Men cheated more than women; people over 50 cheated more than the young; higher education made no difference; and by a long chalk churchgoers cheated most. This may be a statistical anomaly. But we all know one thing: religion no more makes people good than lack of it makes the rest of us bad.

From The Guardian.

And to get everyone even more in the spirit: "Christmas 1979" by Billy Childish and the Musicians of the British Empire. Not to give the plot away, but "Merry F****** Christmas to you all."



And as a final Christmas present, yet another Pogues song, live, "If I should fall from grace from God." My youngest, Snapdragon, listening to the Pogues when she was all of, what, five? Said "Irish Punk is just like normal Irish music, only faster."

Tiny refutation of Michael Behe's Black Box

Say structure X is composed of A, B, and C, each necessary for function; that is A, B, and C together are "irreducibly complex." However, the structure could have started out as A, B+, C, and D. B+ modified to take over the role of D, turning into B, and D dropped out. This gives us A, B, and C.

Or, X was initially composed of A alone; B appeared, (perhaps as a result of the mutation of A into two copies of A, a common occurrence, and then as B could be used to perform some of the functions of A, A and B both modified in ways that made B required. Now A and B together appear to be irreducibly complex.

This outcome of evolution was first spotted by the Nobel prize winning biologist H. J. Muller in papers that came out in 1919 and 1939. [Edit] Specifically, the mechanisms go under the name Muller's Morphs) [/Edit]

So, Behe took something previously shown to be a natural consequence of evolution and, uh, missed the point somewhat spectacularly.