Kidding? No. Dry sense of humor? No!

Ameri-biz twathole? CLANG. $408M a year divided by 1.3M people is . . *clackety* . . $313.85.

Buddy of mine worked over the weekend moving families from house to house, made $200 in tips.

So the REAL yearly bonus rate for the lucky ones came out to $1,200.

. . and $92M divided by 0.687M workers is . . *clackety* . . $133.92.

Google “Goldman Sachs” yourselves, I’m going to bed.

Sadly, it appears that Waveland, Mississippi, has become an early ground zero for the appearance of dead wildlife from the on-going BP disaster. While the vast quantities of oil that wash onto the barrier islands of Louisiana coat, poison and kill the precious biodiversity where it lays, in Waveland the sea life that once swam washes ashore.

While some of it may be naturally occurring, there’s little doubt that more of it resulted from what is probably the worst environmental disaster in America’s history.

I’ve lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for 33 years. Never have I seen a sea turtle on the beach either dead or alive. Today I saw 2 dead sea turtles covered in oil just miles from my home in Waveland, MS.

. . 47 sea turtles on average are reported stranded along the upper Gulf Coast each May, based on a five-year average, officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday. The range is from 15 to 80 on the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle in May each year.

But this month there have been 77 dead in Mississippi alone, said Moby Solangi with the Institute of Marine Mammals Studies in Gulfport. Most of these are the endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle . .

“These are the only three we’ve seen alive in the past three weeks,” Solangi said.

Came across these shocking images amongst some viewer submitted Gulf of Mexico oil spill photos on the New York Times website. The two photos show thousands of little fish washed up dead in Waveland, Mississippi. The photos are credited to Sabrina Bradford.

According to first hand accounts oil has been spotted washing up in Waveland. One person writes on the Gulf Oil Spill Tracker that,”We walked along the beach just outside of the Silver Slipper Casino area and saw many dead fish, 2 cats and at least 5 trout and a quite large fish we could not identify. In addition we saw upwards of 20 dead baby crabs spread out along the beach. We were not able to locate any tar balls or residues of any type.”

The increase in dead sea animals ashore along with the lack of an obvious cause of death, like their being coated with toxic tar, may point to a less obvious but troubling culprit: suffocation by oil. Specifically, oxygen starvation caused by being enveloped in oil plumes.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times underscored the possibility. Because the oil originates deep undersea and because BP has aggressively used hundreds of thousands of gallons of dispersant to prevent the oil from coating the Gulf’s surface (and then being photographed, some say), the millions of gallons of oil stay submerged as tiny droplets that loosely aggregate into large plumes.

The scientific work detailed in the article showed:
1). The plumes exist.
2). They are massive.
3). They are so oxygen-poor that they are capable of killing sea life in huge quantities.

Scientists Build Case for Undersea Plumes
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: May 28, 2010

. . The water samples they pulled up suggested that any oil in the plumes was highly diffuse — not even visible to the naked eye. But when several gallons of the water were forced through a fine filter, tiny black oil droplets appeared.

Even in that diffuse form, the plumes were having a drastic impact on the chemistry of the ocean, with dissolved oxygen levels plunging as each plume drifted through the sea.

That, Dr. Joye said, was most likely because bacteria were ramping up to consume the oil and gas — a good thing, over all, but it was creating a heavy demand for oxygen and other nutrients. Aside from the toxic effect of the oil, the declining oxygen was a potential threat to sea life. Slowly, as the Walton Smith and other boats worked the gulf this past week, the weird physics of a deep-water well blowout came into better focus.

We may be yet unaware of the oil’s terrible impact upon our ecosystems because it’s most evident within these lethal oxygen-less clouds, beneath the surface of the Gulf where nobody can detect it. No one outside a few hard-working scientists and their instruments . .

I wouldn’t recommend a giddy googling of your name every couple of hours:

I’m going to try to keep this brief. I just spent, oh, 3 or 4 hours reading up on the disaster (actually, I’m lying, it’s probably double that), and I think it’s pretty clear what happened. It’d be easy to go on and on about it, but I’ll try to avoid that.

They were working on a well that they drilled, found their expected oil, and decided to shut it down in order to return to it later. They were capping it, getting ready to leave it behind, when it blew up. They had a violent, catastrophic ‘blowout’ that killed 11 people, their remains never recovered, and the well continues to gush something like 5,000 barrels a day out of the sea floor, threatening thousands of miles of American coastline and ecology.

The key to understanding the catastrophe is to realize that the oil, mixed with gases, is 18,000 plus feet down, hot and highly pressurized. Once vented by drilling into it, they had to be careful how they managed it.

Having tapped it and held it in check, they were sealing it. It’s here where the testimony between the three operators differs as to what they did, and who was responsible for the explosion.

British Petroleum has the rights to the oil, so they own the well on the sea floor. Transocean ran the giant floating rig, now dead. Halliburton were the hands-on contractors doing most of the work. In testimony Tuesday, they all blamed each other. What I believe is clear is this: they never properly ‘capped’ the well. [see diagram here]

The ‘capping’ of a well is a tricky thing, having to make the transition between having a constant, dynamic control of the situation and sealing it off, leaving it behind. With so much pressure in the well, the important thing was to keep the thousands of feet of heavy ‘drilling mud‘ in the riser (‘pipe’) above the well in the line. Everybody recognizes that. It’s what pushes back on the considerable pressure in the well.

The typical capping procedure appears to go like this:

1.) Cement the upper well area between the drilled rock and outer edges of the metallic well lining to provide a gas-and-oil tight seal.

2.) Drop a cement plug deep into the bore hole, above the oil.

3.) Drop a 2nd cement plug above the first, separated by some amount of drilling mud.

4.) Wait some amount of time to allow the cement to seal and to allow some testing of the ‘cap.’

5.) If assured of the seal, pump salt water into the riser to extract the drilling mud. The well is capped.

We know this: they were capping the well. But someone ordered the heavy drilling mud removed before the cap was properly set. At least one and maybe both cement caps were never set, but they began to back off the well anyways. With minimal ceiling pressure, the gases exploded out of the well and then ignited only a minute or two later, killing 11 people, sealing the fate of the rig and the Gulf of Mexico.

Condolences to the family and friends of the 11 men killed in the explosion.

The resultant oil spill is an ecological disaster that may already be as large as the Exxon Valdez spill, and could end up being both far, far larger and more devastating. It’s an historic tragedy.

[click to get larger image]

That’s gone too far. I know, they don’t care.

You thought Sting was some sensitive touchy-feely? He sings for the night, dances for the desaparecidos, hopes the Russians love their children too, blah blah? The joke’s on you: he just pocketed a million pounds to play for the murderous, despotic ruling family of Uzbekistan.

Sting in the pay of tyrannical Uzbekistan regime
Sting accepted more than £1m to play for the Uzbek dictator’s daughter, reports Marina Hyde

Once again we must ponder the question “how much money is enough?”, inspired by reports that Sting accepted between £1m and £2m to perform for the glory of the brutal despotic regime in Uzbekistan.

The services of Sting – whose personal fortune is estimated well north of £150m – were engaged by Gulnara Karimova, the daughter and anointed heir of dictator Islam Karimov.

There he is, with Gulnara. But Islam “The Boiler” Karimov? A contender to the “I Think Saddam Hussein Was A Girl” title? This is what the guy does:

Uzbekistan: Two Brutal Deaths in Custody / Human Rights Watch
Deaths Reveal “Horror” of Uzbek Prisons
August 9, 2002

Two suspicious deaths with apparent signs of torture highlight Uzbekistan’s brutal ongoing crackdown against independent Muslims, Human Rights Watch said today. The bodies of Muzafar Avazov and
Husnidin Alimov, both religious prisoners at Jaslyk Prison, were returned to family members for burial in Tashkent Thursday.

Individuals who had seen one of the bodies told Human Rights Watch that it showed clear signs of torture. The authorities reportedly restricted viewing of the second body. Both men had been imprisoned at Jaslyk Prison, well-known for its harsh conditions and ill-treatment and torture of religious prisoners.

Human Rights Watch has learned that the body of Muzafar Avazov, a 35-year old father of four, showed signs of burns on the legs, buttocks, lower back and arms. Sixty to seventy percent of the body was burnt, according to official sources. Doctors who saw the body reported that such burns could only have been caused by immersing Avazov in boiling water.

Sting’s trying to spin it, but it ain’t working:

“I played in Uzbekistan a few months ago,” he begins. “The concert was organized by the president’s daughter and I believe sponsored by Unicef.”

You can believe it all you like, Sting, but it’s absolute cobblers – Lost in Showbiz has checked it out with Unicef, who tactfully describe themselves as “quite surprised” by your claim . .

The United Nations Children Fund?? Laaaaaaame. Can’t keep up on current events?

“Hey, Sting — what the hell are you doing here, in Tashkent, headlining the “Razor Straps for the Secret Police” event?”

“. . err . . Haiti.”

Better. Well, it was actually for the daughter, and maybe she’s not quite as evil, eh? No?

Sting. Seriously. At least pretend to give a shit. Or have all those seven-hour orgasms finally made you too tired to care? Because as bad as the father is, the daughter – Sting’s host – is right there with him.

Sting’s actual host, Islam’s daughter Gulnora, was named last year by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the World’s Worst Daughters for actions like deporting 24 of her ex-husband’s relatives to Afghanistan at gunpoint (and imprisoning three others), and dealing with competitors to her tea businesses by sending “hooded men with machine guns” to “liquidate their holdings.” (And while we have no proof, it’s entirely possible that “holdings” means “intestines.”)

Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray:

“This really is transparent bollocks,” observes Murray on his blog. “He did not take a guitar and jam around the parks of Tashkent. He got paid over a million pounds to play an event specifically designed to glorify a barbarous regime. Is the man completely mad?

“Why does he think it was worth over a million quid to the regime to hear him warble a few notes?

“I agree with him that cultural isolation does not help. I am often asked about the morality of going to Uzbekistan, and I always answer – go, mix with ordinary people, tell them about other ways of life, avoid state owned establishments and official tours. What Sting did was the opposite. To invoke Unicef as a cover, sat next to a woman who has made hundreds of millions from state forced child labour in the cotton fields, is pretty sick.”

This is a strange one. There’s some satire, and then there’s someone who merely skims it to criticize it on its face. Strange enough. Except the purpose of the piece was to point out the hopelessness of vital satire in an environment that’s over-wrought and partisan. So Michael Barone fell right into it.

It begins with Rochelle Gurstein writing in the New Republic:

The Baby Lottery
A rational redistributive plan.
Rochelle Gurstein

As someone who has long believed that there is something morally repellant about living in a country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy in the world but where the top one-tenth of one percent of the people “earn” as much money per year collectively as the entire bottom fifty percent of working people, I would like to offer a modest proposal that might “level the playing field,” as the popular saying has it, and thus provide a foundation for a democracy worthy of the name. Instead of the old Marxist plan to redistribute property–and let’s face it, that always took a bloody revolution and even then, it didn’t always work out so well–how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?

Every child is finally given a fair shot at the ‘good life’ in the greatest country on Earth. Races caring for each others’ babies creates a colorblind society. Knowing your ‘familial’ child lives with somebody else makes sectors and strata of society genuinely interested in the well-being of the once ‘outsiders’ — you don’t know where your kid ended up, so it’s important for everybody, rich and poor, to do well. You fight for the other because that’s probably who’s raising your own.

Yeah, it’s insane, nothing is more coveted than your own flesh and blood. And your family and your heritage are the first things you are, and that’s fine. And, certainly, forcing the well-off to submit their children into perhaps poverty (there’s plenty of that) would be mind-numbingly, tyrannically cruel. But, then, no one deserves it, right? That’s how satire goes: it’s to expose essential truths by way perhaps of a wild ‘proposal’.

Michael Barone, he of the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Examiner, took only a moment to read a few words, sniff a liberal rat and crank out a column:

She is kidding, isn’t she?
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst

I’ve been reading the New Republic for decades, even though (or perhaps because) it’s a wildly uneven publication. It can publish as thoughtful and intellectually rigorous a figure as William Galston, whose every word is worth serious attention. And it can publish some real garbage. In the second category (I think) falls what the website calls “Our New Columnist’s Rational Plan for Redistributing Babies.” The “new columnist,” Rachel Gurstein, writes, “how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?”

That’s right, not even close to her name.

It turns out (I think) that she’s kidding; her citation of Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” is one tipoff. But her proposal has some roots, as she notes, with the famed and in some liberal quarters revered political philosopher John Rawls. He argued that all public policy proposals should be assessed from the perspective of one who does not know into what station of life he or she is born. It turns out that when you do this you end up opting for a cradle-to-grave welfare state (or at least Rawls did). The problem with this, I have long thought, is that we aren’t born this way, we are born into families (or some other child care situation), we are raised in a particular milieu which is only part of a larger society and at a particular point in history.

In other words, “While I recognize this proposal is a satirical one, I would pause to add this: life simply doesn’t work this way. So this is a bad idea.”

Cough. Or: “Yes, yes, it’s satire. But it’s bad politics, you know.”

Stupefying. Well, to sharpen all the 90-degree vertices of his analysis, Barone adds:

So while Rachel [sic] Gurstein isn’t really suggesting that babies should be redistributed at birth, it seems that the idea is in some way appealing to her—even while she presumably understands that it will sound appalling to the very large majority of Americans. There are clues here to why the Democrats’ health care policies are so unpopular with the American people.

Amazing. Just brilliant. But it gets better, if that’s possible: the point of Gurstein’s piece wasn’t the utopian gambit or comedy. It was that in this wholly bizarre and hyper-partisan political world, the preceding satire seems to have become pointless ( . . and perhaps Barone should have read the whole thing?).

The lack of a common reality, of universal up and down, has rendered hyperbole almost impossible to detect and compass:

. . well-meaning friends have repeatedly cautioned me against it, for fear–baseless, no doubt–that my intentions will be misunderstood. The more I protest that my scheme is as clear as the night is long –the old New York lottery slogan “You gotta be in it, to win it” at last made universal; Rawls’s theoretical “veil of ignorance” finally put into practice–the more insistent and stern and dour these same friends become: “You’ll see, they will think you are trying to destroy their precious idea of the American family, the bedrock of society.” “You’ll see, they will accuse you of being a fascist, a Nazi.” . . Have we now come to the point, I wondered, that our shared sense of reality is so tenuous that something as outrageous to common sense as my big baby lottery will not immediately be recognized as political satire?

. . you are kidding, aren’t you?

. . Like Tina Fey mimicking Sarah Palin, what passes for satire today plays on our incredulity, presenting us with an exact replica of something real but at the same time so absurd that it beggars our belief. It gets a laugh, but what is missing is the wild, inspired, visionary flights of imagination that masters of satire like Jonathan Swift so excelled at. Through caustic hyperbole, Swift’s “Modest Proposal” to raise Irish babies like cattle and sell them to Englishmen for dinner in order to eliminate overpopulation and poverty in Ireland made his first readers–and us, too, almost three centuries after them–see and feel how the world appears from the standpoint of common decency.

And, for me, that’s it. When there’s no “common decency”, satire becomes hopeless, doesn’t it? There’s no one beating heart to it, no bullseye to hit. Communication becomes a crapshoot, like trying to squint and see one of those fractal space shuttles behind the multi-colored chaos. Did you get it — can you see it?

And when one side of the political world, as a matter of policy, becomes so mechanically bent on taking an axe to the other, no matter what’s said or done, the fragments are all that’s universal. As in: “Bringing down deficits is the decent thing to do, but if you proffer a pay/go rule before we do, not one of us will vote for it . .”

Nobody writes like that any more and I could not help wondering if the extinction of satire that attempts to shame people into recognizing that there are things higher and worth striving towards than what merely happens to exist was a sign of just how poverty-stricken our moral, political, and literary imaginations have become.

And there is the point. She could have paid Barone to write his post, but he did it for free.

The authorities really screwed this one up:

. . Amy Bishop, a mother of four and a Harvard-educated neurobiologist who had been denied tenure, is accused of shooting six people at a faculty meeting Friday in a rare workplace shooting by a woman.

She was charged with one count of capital murder, Huntsville Police Sgt. Mark Roberts said. “There will be additional charges,” he said…

The tragedy took an even eerier turn Saturday when it was reported that Bishop had shot and killed her teenage brother, Seth Bishop, in 1986 in Braintree, Mass. And late Sunday, The Boston Globe reported that Bishop was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor, Paul Rosenberg, in 1993. No one was charged in the incident.

So, would you have charged her in the brother’s killing if you knew she tried to commandeer a car and flee?

Quincy man recalls Amy Bishop holdup
‘For the last 23 years, it was just a cool story I could tell.’
Monday, February 15, 2010 – Updated 41m ago

A former auto-body worker claims Amy Bishop put a gun to his chest and demanded a getaway car just minutes after she shot her brother to death 24 years ago in a controversial case that is now being reviewed…

[Tom] Pettigrew said he heard noise coming from where car keys are stored, so he went to investigate.

“I go over to the door and I can sense that she’s right near the door,” Pettigrew said. “I’m thinking it’s a BB gun. I open the door and she’s right there and we basically bumped into each other and I got a shotgun right in my chest!”

“And she’s like, ‘Hands up!’ and I’m like, ‘Yes ma’am’ ”

Bishop appeared agitated and nervous, Pettigrew said. The University of Alabama professor now accused of killing three colleagues Friday said she needed a car because, “I got into a fight with my husband and he’s going to kill me,” the worker recalled.

Pettigrew then watched as Bishop walked through the dealership looking at cars, all the while grasping the gun.

. . or charged the brother-killer with attempted murder when a professor of hers got pipe bombs in the mail?

Alleged Ala. killer was suspect in attempted bombing of Harvard professor

The professor who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama on Friday was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993, a law enforcement official said today.

Amy Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, were questioned after a package containing two bombs was sent to the Newton home of Dr. Paul Rosenberg, a professor and doctor at Boston’s Children’s Hospital.

Came across this at StarkReports:

This is difficult to write. My grandfather suffered through dementia for the last 15 years of his life. It’s never easy to talk about, and in politics, it’s particularly difficult because of all the potential for cheap-shot concern-trolling…

But there’s a dirty little secret everyone is keeping in Pennsylvania and Washington. It isn’t difficult to puzzle it out for yourself; in fact, given the circumstances, it’s probably difficult to avoid developing nagging suspicions. But there are a lot of stories being told off the record and in hushed whispers. Tonight, I’ve decided to stop whispering and come forward with my own.

Mike is talking about Arlen Specter.

. . In the basement of the Russell Senate office building, there is a subway that ferries Senators and staff to and from the Capitol. Senator Spector was making his way over to the Capitol to cast a vote when I caught up with him and asked if he had decided to support or oppose the Bernanke nomination. He said he hadn’t decided. I asked him if he knew that Bernanke had said he was less concerned about unemployment than inflation. Specter answered gruffly that he was still making up his mind. Then he walked over to a call-button for the subway and pressed it several times.

The subway was already in the station.

It’s not like you can hide a subway.

The guard behind us yelled to the Senator, “Senator, he’s right there!” The driver of the subway yelled to the Senator, “Senator, I’m right here!” Specter continued to press the button for another coupla seconds before suddenly realizing the subway was already in the station and boarding.

A week ago, Specter inexplicably wandered up onto a ‘stage’ that his opponent was currently addressing a crowd from:

Arlen Specter’s Kanye West Moment

After refusing to debate his opponent and insisting on strict rules for tonight’s Senate forum with Joe Sestak Sen. Arlen Specter stormed the stage while the Congressman was speaking and seemingly tried to confront and/or intimidate him while he was speaking at the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit…

Obviously standing just off the ballroom listening not only to the questions but to Joe Sestak’s responses he cheated on the format. Then for some very strange reason he bounded for the stage and mounted it. Was he having a senior moment, was he trying to throw Sestak off his game on live TV or was he deliberately trying to sabotage what was a finely organized event?

Saturday, after winning the Pennsylvania State Democratic committee endorsement, he couldn’t recall the name of a Pennsylvania Senator he wanted to call out:

LANCASTER, Pa. — Even as he accepted the resounding backing of the Pennsylvania Democratic state committee here Saturday, party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter’s vulnerability was on vivid display as he botched the name of a key Democratic officeholder in his acceptance speech.

“I’ll be fighting hard for the entire Democratic ticket. Sen. Andy — Andy —” Specter said, before pausing briefly, squinting his eyes.

“From Chester County,” he continued, losing his train of thought after clinching an emphatic 229-72 Senate endorsement vote from party regulars just minutes earlier.

“Dinniman,” the crowd responded almost in unison, referring to the state senator who represents West Chester. One committee member seated in the audience dropped his head and shook it.

Senator Inouye’s phone#: 202-224-3934

Franken’s Anti-Rape Amendment May Be Stripped By Senior Dem, Sources Say

An amendment that would prevent the government from working with contractors who denied victims of assault the right to bring their case to court is in danger of being watered down or stripped entirely from a larger defense appropriations bill.

Multiple sources have told the Huffington Post that Sen. Dan Inouye, a longtime Democrat from Hawaii, is considering removing or altering the provision, which was offered by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and passed by the Senate several weeks ago.

Inouye’s office, sources say, has been lobbied by defense contractors adamant that the language of the Franken amendment would leave them overly exposed to lawsuits and at constant risk of having contracts dry up. The Senate is considering taking out a provision known as the Title VII claim, which (if removed) would allow victims of assault or rape to bring suit against the individual perpetrator but not the contractor who employed him or her.

“The defense contractors have been storming his office,” said a source with knowledge of the situation. “Inouye either will get the amendment taken out altogether, or water it down significantly. If they water it down, they will take out the Title VII claims. This means that in discrimination cases, they will still force you into a secret forced arbitration on KBR’s (or other contractors’) own terms — with your chances of prevailing practically zero.

What a bastard.