Archive for April 29, 2010
Wind Power Disaster — No Threats Reported
Follow the tweets here.
(Calm down. This is filed under “Humor/Satire.” The point is to mock what’s happening in Louisiana tonight, sad as it is.)
Without “Illegals” We’d Pay $10 for a Tomato
An Hispanic comedian was on “Countdown” just now (8:02 p.m. ET) — didn’t catch his name (apologies to him — I didn’t anticipate putting up a post). He was talking about Arizona’s new “immigration” law. His last sentence was, “Either we have cheap labor or we pay $10 for a tomato.”
Bravo! The reason the immigration issue hasn’t been dealt with is because corporations (who own Washington) need and want “illegals.” Pay low wages, charge low prices. Period.
If MSNBC puts video of the segment up, I’ll post it. The guy was great.
Thousands of People Marched on Wall Street Today
Thousands of people marched on Wall Street today, “angry over lost jobs and the taxpayer-funded bailout of banks.” They held “signs saying ‘Wall Street Overdrafted Our Economy’ and ‘Reclaim America’.”
As a not so aside of an aside, the president of the AFL-CIO was barred, literally, from the floor of the NYSE this morning.
I haven’t seen or heard a thing about this on corporate TV “news” today. Have you?
Sen. Mary Landrieu Defends Offshore Drilling
A giant oil slick is hours away from the shores of Louisiana and Mississippi but — it’s hard to fathom how bought this woman is — Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (D) said today that, “We must continue to drill.”
Sickening and incredibly out of touch. The governor of Louisiana has declared a state of emergency for God’s sake.
Predictions are that this slick is going to be devastating. It could be bigger than the Exxon Valdez “in just a few days.” Wonder how long it’ll take Landrieu to change her tune.
I’ll follow-up.
The Gulf Oil Spill Didn’t Have to Happen
A man named Walter Hang, of Toxics Targeting, was on “The Ed Show” on MSNBC just now (6:32 p.m. ET). He said there is a device that can be installed on underwater wells like the one in the Gulf that burned and tipped over a last week. That well is now spewing 5,000 barrels (not gallons) of oil a day, oil that in a matter of hours will hit the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. He described it as a thing that immediately caps the well if there is a problem above sea level. Both Norway and Brazil require that they be installed on all off-shore wells there, but they cost $500,000 and the U.S. government, lobbied by the oil companies, natch, hasn’t required that technology here.
Hang said at the very least, oil companies should be required to post bonds and get insurance that will cover the cleanup (the government should have to foot that bill — we might as well call that a bailout) and remunerate people who are harmed (like fishermen and landowners) if there is a spill.
Amen to that.
So, anyway, as always, (1) it’s about the money, and (2) the corporations win and We the People lose and the birds and the turtles and the fish lose.
Do I Look “Illegal”?
Buy your Do I Look “Illegal” T-shirt here and support Cuentame — the boycott Arizona movement.
Brain Activity Surges Immediately Before Death
Wow, this is food for thought (from Scientific American):
People who are resuscitated from near death often report strange sensory phenomena, such as memories “flashing before their eyes.” Now a rare assessment of brain activity just before death offers clues about why such experiences occur.
Anesthesiologist Lakhmir Chawla of George Washington University Medical Center and his colleagues recently published a retrospective analysis of brain activity in seven sedated, critically ill patients as they were removed from life support. Using EEG recordings of neural electrical activity, Chawla found a brief but significant spike at or near the time of death—despite a preceding loss of blood pressure and associated drop in brain activity.
“To our knowledge, this is the first time that this event has been shown to occur,” Chawla explains. “It occurs at a very peculiar time point, when most people would think your brain would physiologically die [because of] an absence of blood flow.”
The jolts lasted 30 to 180 seconds and displayed properties that are normally associated with consciousness, such as extremely fast electrical oscillations known as gamma waves. Soon after the activity abated, the patients were pronounced dead.
Chawla posits that the predeath spikes are most likely brief, “last hurrah” seizures originating in brain areas that were irritable from oxygen starvation. Living nerve cells constantly maintain an electrical charge gradient, similar to the difference in charge on the poles of a battery. Keeping up this polarity takes energy—in this case, energy created from oxygen. As blood flow slows and oxygen runs out, the cells can no longer maintain polarity and they fire, causing a cascade of activity that ripples through the brain. If these seizures were to occur in memory regions, they could explain the vivid recollections often reported by people who are resuscitated from near death, Chawla says.
It’s neat that they’ve proven that there is a surge in activity but who knows, maybe it more than brain cells seizing due to a lack of oxygen. Maybe it’s something else; something more spiritual or cosmic.
Halliburton Implicated in Gulf Oil Spill
Check out the last sentence of the last paragraph of this excerpt of an article from Reuters:
* Lawsuit is first for economic losses from blowout
* Suit filed on behalf of all coastal Louisiana interests
HOUSTON, April 29 (Reuters) – Louisiana shrimpers have filed a class-action lawsuit against oil giant BP Plc. and owners of the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, marking the first claim for economic losses stemming from the disaster.
The lawsuit was filed late on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in New Orleans as London-based BP and the U.S. Coast Guard fought to contain a massive oil slick expected to hit the Gulf Coast on Friday.
The suit was filed on behalf of two commercial shrimp fishermen named in the suit, and all other coastal Louisiana residents whose livelihoods are threatened by the spill.
The Coast Guard estimates that 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) of crude oil a day is gushing from the sea floor where the blowout occurred, and authorities have said it could take weeks to cap the leak as BP mounts what it calls the largest oil spill containment operation in history.
The suit names as defendants BP, which holds the lease to the offshore well; Swiss-based Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform that exploded in flames on April 20 and collapsed two days later; and Halliburton Energy Services Inc., which the suit says was engaging in cementing operations of the well and well cap.
Figures.
Louisiana Shrimpers File Suit Against BP Over Oil Spill
Wow, these guys are on the ball:
* Lawsuit is first for economic losses from blowout
* Suit filed on behalf of all coastal Louisiana interests
HOUSTON, April 29 (Reuters) – Louisiana shrimpers have filed a class-action lawsuit against oil giant BP Plc and owners of the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, marking the first claim for economic losses stemming from the disaster.
The lawsuit was filed late on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in New Orleans as London-based BP and the U.S. Coast Guard fought to contain a massive oil slick expected to hit the Gulf Coast on Friday.
The suit was filed on behalf of two commercial shrimp fishermen named in the suit, and all other coastal Louisiana residents whose livelihoods are threatened by the spill.
The Coast Guard estimates that 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) of crude oil a day is gushing from the sea floor where the blowout occurred, and authorities have said it could take weeks to cap the leak as BP mounts what it calls the largest oil spill containment operation in history.
The suit names as defendants BP, which holds the lease to the offshore well; Swiss-based Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform that exploded in flames on April 20 and collapsed two days later; and Halliburton Energy Services Inc., which the suit says was engaging in cementing operations of the well and well cap.
Break Time
This video is a time-lapse of a 24-hour period in a WalMart store. Amazing. The place essentially never slows down. And you can’t tell whether it’s night or day because there aren’t any windows.
(I can’t figure out why my blog will accept the embed code for YouTube videos but it won’t accept the embed code for Vimeo videos. Any ideas?)
CNN Trivializes Dorothy Height
The funeral for Dorothy Height was held today in Washington, D.C.
Height, who died on April 20 at the age of 98, was one of the most important African-American women to have lived in the United States. Thanks to a school curriculum that ignores people like Height and to the “liberal media,” I didn’t know much about her, but a read of her Wikipedia page shows that she devoted her entire life to both civil rights and women’s rights. How many of us do something like that?
Anyway, I just watched a segment on CNN about how people in D.C. are mourning Height. The report wasn’t about what Height did, or the causes she spent her life fighting for, it was about her love of big hats.
Really disgusting.
“Big Government” to Fight Gulf Oil Spill
I presume the Tea Partiers and birthers down in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida are on the way to the beaches to deal with that oil spill that’s headed their way. Don’t want to accept any help from “big government” now do they? Nah, they can deal with it themselves. Oh, and think of the cost!
Where are the protests?
Glenn Beck: Free Elections are a Progressive Plot
Glenn Beck’s insanity knows no bounds: In this 60-second video Glenn Beck says the term, “democratically elected” is “code language.” He doesn’t say for what, but I’m sure it’s bad.
I guess he wants us to say republically elected?
Seriously, this is Beck indoctrinating his followers into thinking that when elections don’t go their way (think: Obama), there had to have been fraud involved.
Who are the Real “2010 Time 100″ Most Influential People?
This is cool.
Nate Silver runs the website FiveThirtyEight. He’s a statistical analyst; kind of a geeky guy, a guy who loves to crunch numbers and play around with polls, but he’s the kind of geeky guy we can’t do without. His work was invaluable during the 2008 election cycle as his predictions were more accurate than the big boys like Gallup and Zogby.
His latest work takes on the list of Time magazine’s “2010 Time 100″ most influential people — the people who “most affect our world.“
Time breaks the list into five categories: Leaders, heroes, artists, thinkers. Below are the names of the top five people in each of those categories.
Nate Silver meanwhile, did away with the categories and looked at the Twitter and Facebook followers of each person and ranked them accordingly, arguing that, “there’s little doubt about who has more ability to change the course of our conversations at a moment’s notice — and in an interconnected world, that’s what influence is all about.”
So next to the names below, in bold, is the person’s rank per their Twitter and Facebook followers which, in this day and age, really is an indication of who most affects our world.
Leaders
Louiz Inacio Lula da Silva (43)
J.T. Wang (84)
Admiral Mike Mullen (33)
Barack Obama (1)
Ron Bloom (94)
Heroes
Bill Clinton (21)
Kim Yu-Na (28)
Mir-Hossein Mousavi (26)
Ben Stiller (7)
Temple Grandin (45)
Artists
Lady Gaga (2)
Conan O’Brien (9)
Kathryn Bigelow (52)
Oprah Winfrey (5)
Valery Gergiev (61)
Thinkers
Zaha Hadid (30)
Elizabeth Warren (51)
Douglas Schwartzentruber (79) and Larry Kwak (87)
Michael Pollan (39)
Atul Gawande (63)
Anti-Incumbency Means Republicans Are in Danger Too
We hear Republicans and the corporate media talk a lot about the November elections and the “anti-incumbency fervor gripping the country.” The message between the lines there is that Democrats are supposedly so hated that voters might just throw them all out. Well, obviously there are Republican incumbents out there too and it looks like Utah’s Republican Senator, Bob Bennett might be the first incumbent of them all to get booted out.
Glenn Beck’s Audience Plummets 30%
Glenn Beck’s television audience has plummeted 30% since the beginning of the year. Gosh. Could he be too crazy for the crazies?
Obama Warns of “Conservative” Judicial Activism
Righties are forever screaming about “activist” judges (which is code for judges who care about the rights of We the People over those of the corporatocracy), but according to the legal scholars I trust, the recent decision by the Supreme Court (stacked with conservatives) in Citizens United was the most radical, activist decision ever handed down by that court.
Yesterday President Obama turned the tables on the wingers and issued a warning about that kind of conservative judicial activism, and good on him for doing so:
President Barack Obama, preparing to make his second nominee to the Supreme Court, warned Wednesday of a “conservative” brand of judicial activism in which the courts are often not showing appropriate deference to the decision of lawmakers.
Obama made clear that his views on judicial restraint are not the only basis he will use in choosing his next nominee for the high court, a decision expected over the next few weeks.
But his comments underscore just how much he thinks courts are being vested with too much power and are overruling legislative will, a factor that will influence his nominee choice.
Obama already has openly criticized the Supreme Court for a January ruling – one led by the court’s conservative members – that allowed corporations and unions to spend freely to influence elections. Obama has vowed to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens with a like-minded justice who will not let powerful interests crowd out voices of ordinary people.
So, after Obama announces who he has nominated to replace Justice Stevens, take a listen to the screaming coming from the right. If it’s really, really loud, chances are good that Obama’s pick is someone who will look out for our rights instead of Wall Street’s.
Richard Trumka Barred From Entering the New York Stock Exchange
I was watching “Squawk Box” on CNBC this morning at 8:13 a.m. ET. Becky Quick, the co-anchor of the show, was signing off to go to a commercial while teasing an upcoming interview with Richard Trumka, the President of the AFL-CIO. Quick said Trumka wasn’t allowed inside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) so he would be interviewed outside the building. The topic of discussion would be the AFL-CIO’s march on Wall Street set for this afternoon.
I guess I’m naive but I was shocked when I heard that. Where would the businesses listed on the NYSE be without their workers? Yet a man who represents workers is seen as such a pariah that he is literally barred from the building? Wow. Does that ever speak to the divide between the haves and the have-nots in this country.
Good Morning
It’s a good morning because the ground was finally dry enough to work yesterday and I was able to plant a slew of perennials I bought last week, and just in the nick of time because it’s supposed to snow all day today.
