August 2010 archive

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Unchecked migration would see Singapore swell, Haiti halve

by Jordi Zamora and Karin Zeitvogel, AFP

20 mins ago

Everything is getting really blurry now and nothing makes any fuckin’ sense any more.

War is Peace now, poor is rich, the Gulf of Mexico is a never ending domestic supply of oil that will get us off the foreign oil habit, and everything else is upside fuckin’ down too. Or backwards or inside out, at least.

It’s anybody’s bet how long this planet is going to keep letting us do the shit we do before it shakes us off like a bad case of fleas, the ocean and the air are poison, it’s a good bet that some asshole somewhere is planning to start the next war, everybody’s broke, there are no jobs, my school wants to give equal time to the creationist bullshit and wants me to believe that it isn’t bullshit, we can’t even eat fish anymore much less feed multitudes with one, and you want me to pay for all your fuckups.

I’m not as dumb as you think, and you clueless so-called adults really piss me and my friends off, you know that?

Talk to me.

BP Oil Spill Settlements Likely to Shield Top Defendants

By IAN URBINA, The New York Times

Published: August 20, 2010

WASHINGTON – People and businesses seeking a lump-sum settlement from BP’s  $20 billion oil spill compensation fund  will most likely have to waive their right to sue not only BP, but also all the other major defendants involved with the spill, according to internal documents from the lawyers handling the fund.

…

“To be clear, it is BP’s position, consistent with this indemnification, that any settlement between Transocean and any of its injured or deceased employees must include a full release of all BP entities from any and all claims or liability in connection with the Deepwater Horizon incident,” said the letter, from John T. Hickey, a lawyer for BP. “This full release of all BP entities would indeed bar any subsequent claims against the fund being established by BP and the claims facility that will be administered by Mr. Feinberg.”

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

August 20 is the 232nd day of the year (233rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 133 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1911, the first around-the-world telegram sent, 66 years before Voyager II launch

On this day in 1911, a dispatcher in the New York Times office sends the first telegram around the world via commercial service. Exactly 66 years later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sends a different kind of message–a phonograph record containing information about Earth for extraterrestrial beings–shooting into space aboard the unmanned spacecraft Voyager II.

The Times decided to send its 1911 telegram in order to determine how fast a commercial message could be sent around the world by telegraph cable. The message, reading simply “This message sent around the world,” left the dispatch room on the 17th floor of the Times building in New York at 7 p.m. on August 20. After it traveled more than 28,000 miles, being relayed by 16 different operators, through San Francisco, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Bombay, Malta, Lisbon and the Azores–among other locations–the reply was received by the same operator 16.5 minutes later. It was the fastest time achieved by a commercial cablegram since the opening of the Pacific cable in 1900 by the Commercial Cable Company.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft is an unmanned interplanetary space probe launched on August 20, 1977. Both the Voyager 2 and the Voyager 1 space probes were designed, developed, and built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California. Identical in form and instruments with its sister Voyager program craft Voyager 1, Voyager 2 was launched on a slower, more curved trajectory that allowed it to be kept in the plane of the Ecliptic (the plane of the Solar System) so that it could be sent on to Uranus and Neptune by means of utilizing gravity assists during its fly-by of Saturn in 1981 and of Uranus in 1986. Because of this chosen trajectory, Voyager 2 could not take a close-up look at the large Saturnian moon Titan as its sister space probe had. However, Voyager 2 did become the first and only spacecraft to make the spaceflight by Uranus and Neptune, and hence completing the Planetary Grand Tour. This is one that is made practical by a seldom-occurring geometric alignment of the outer planets (happening once every 175 years).

The Voyager 2 space probe has made the most productive unmanned space voyage so far, visiting all four of the Outer Planets and their systems of moons and rings, including the first two visits to previously unexplored Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2 had two sensitive vidicon cameras and an assortment of other scientific instruments to make measurements in the ultraviolet, infrared, and radio wavelengths, as well as ones to measure subatomic particles in outer space, including cosmic rays. All of this was accomplished at a fraction of the amount of money that was later spent on more advanced and specialized space probes Galileo and Cassini-Huygens. Along with the earlier NASA Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, sister probe Voyager 1, and the more recent New Horizons, Voyager 2 is an interstellar probe in that all five of these are on one-way trajectories leaving the Solar System.

Thursday Night Throwball- Patriots @ Falcons.  Last Chance for our Boys until Monday.  I’ll be surprised if Rachel is back from Iraq yet.

• Comedy– Futurama (premier @ 10)
• Food– Extreme Cuisine With Jeff Corwin (Season Premier)
• History– Time Travel and Stan Lee’s Freaks (Umm… why do they call it History again?)
• Lifetime– Project Runway (premier)
• Turner Classic– Man Hunt, Madame Curie (Walter Pidgeon night)
• Discovery– Mythbusters and Pitchmen (Season Premier)
• TLC– Sr. v. Jr. (Last week’s season premier and new), BBQ Pitmasters (why isn’t this on Food Channel?)
• Toon– Repeats of Monday’s premiers
• Travel– Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (Repeats from the 18th and the 16th, what kind of schedule are they running?)
• USA– Burn Notice, Royal Pains (premiers)

At 10 pm Disney is running some Phineas and Ferb.  I ♥ me some good trainwreck, guess what I’ll be watching.

Later-

• AMC– Repeat of Mad Men and Caddyshack
• FX– The Departed
• SciFi– WCG Ultimate Gamer (Season Premier, if you like watching other people play video games)

Jon has Jennifer Aniston, Stephen Jon Krakauer.  Did I mention new Futurama?  Alton does Wontons.  Now You Museum, Now You Don’t (thought this was last night, can’t tell you for sure because my cable was partly down for maintainance).

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas.

A looper?

A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald… striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one – big hitter, the Lama – long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga… gunga, gunga-lagunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

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Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Scores expelled in French crackdown on Roma

by Isabelle Wesselingh, AFP

Thu Aug 19, 11:08 am ET

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Robert Reich: Mitt Romney’s Wet-Noodle Economics

Mitt Romney is smart enough not to join Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin in using the proposed mosque at Ground Zero to launch a presidential bid. While Gingrich is busy comparing Muslims to Nazis (“Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the holocaust museum in Washington”), and Palin is calling on New Yorkers to “refudiate” the plan (she subsequently corrected her word choice), Romney is offering an economic plan.

That’s a wise choice. Mitt knows Americans don’t care about mosques in Manhattan. They care about money in their own mitts.

Romney is intent on selling himself to America as the businessman who can turn the country around (sad to say, unemployment is likely to remain high all the way through November, 2012). Unlike Palin and Gingrich, Romney did, after all, run a business (yes, it was a firm that bought and sold companies and laid off lots of people along the way but, hey, that’s business).

Mitt Romney: Grow jobs and shrink government

IT’S NOT happening the way President Obama had planned. Unemployment blew past his 8 percent ceiling and hasn’t looked back. Private sector investment in new jobs and capital has languished. Even the head of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, has resigned.

Almost every action the president has taken has deepened and lengthened the downturn. The private sector has retreated, frightened by his agenda and paralyzed by the uncertainty, lack of predictability, and outright hostility he has engendered.

His policies are anti-investment, anti-jobs, and anti-growth. Raising taxes – with a 15 percent hike on certain small business corporations, new taxes to pay for ObamaCare, and an increase on the dividend tax from 15 percent to nearly 40 percent – depresses new investment throughout the economy. Promoting an open-ended cap-and-trade tax dissuades expansion by employers in the energy sector. Bowing to the demands of unions to tilt the table in their favor – with proposals for card check and mandatory arbitration as well as the installation of a labor stooge at the National Labor Relations Board – chills new hiring.

Dear Dr. Dean, It’s not a mosque, it’s a Cultural Center that will house a culinary school, an auditorium, a swimming pool, a basketball court, and yes, space for prayer. It is intended to be open to ALL, to promote understanding through education. If I remember correctly, that is how we are supposed to fight ignorance and prejudice.

It is not at Ground Zero. It is located two blocks away and not even within sight of the World Trade Center site. It has operating there for a year without any opposition until a hate campaign was started by Pamela Geller, a anti-Muslim right wing blogger and the New York Post using fear, lies and innuendo.

Did you know that Muslims worship at the Pentagon and have a prayer room there, 80 feet from where the plane crashed into the building? Should that be moved, too?

This is more than the rights of people to worship where they live and work or even the private property rights as Mayor Bloomberg so eloquently spoke in his support of the Cultural Center. It is standing up against fear, ignorance and bigotry. Where would the Civil Rights movement be if we had not marched in the streets and died for equality for African Americans? Where would women be if not for the 19th Amendment and the Feminist movement if we hadn’t marched, petitioned, got arrested and, yes, burned our bras in protest?

So big deal the majority of people think the Center should be moved. So what? Since when, especially when we know the majority is dead wrong about an issue, do we cave to their wishes?

Even Republicans understand why it is important to support the building of the center. Ted Olson, former Bush White House Solicitor General, who lost his wife on 9/11, has come out in support. And Peter Beinhart, of all people, is telling Democrats to “grow  pair”. It is hard to believe you don’t have the courage of these two men.

American Muslims died on 9/11, too. Americans Muslims did not attack us on 9/11. Are we to allow fanatics to hijack a religion of 1 billion because we are afraid? The fear mongering about Islam over the last 9 years has addled peoples’ brains. Has it addled yours, too?

Your reasons for opposing this project are lame, to be kind, and go against the grain of every principle that we have fought for over the last 234 years. There are some times we need to be “inflexible” this is one of them.

I expected better of you, Dr. Dean.

Sincerely, TMC

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

August 19 is the 231st day of the year (232nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 134 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1909, the first race is held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, now the home of the world’s most famous motor racing competition, the Indianapolis 500.

The rectangular two-and-a-half-mile track linked four turns, each exactly 440 yards from start to finish, by two long and two short straight sections. In that first five-mile race on August 19, 1909, 12,000 spectators watched Austrian engineer Louis Schwitzer win with an average speed of 57.4 miles per hour. The track’s surface of crushed rock and tar proved a disaster, breaking up in a number of places and causing the deaths of two drivers, two mechanics and two spectators.

The surface was soon replaced with 3.2 million paving bricks, laid in a bed of sand and fixed with mortar. Dubbed “The Brickyard,” the speedway reopened in December 1909. In 1911, low attendance led the track’s owners to make a crucial decision: Instead of shorter races, they resolved to focus on a single, longer event each year, for a much larger prize. That May 30 marked the debut of the Indy 500–a grueling 500-mile race that was an immediate hit with audiences and drew press attention from all over the country. Driver Ray Haroun won the purse of $14,250, with an average speed of 74.59 mph and a total time of 6 hours and 42 minutes.