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Jul 04 2010
What Day Is It Agin?
Every Fourth of July, Americans gather to celebrate the country’s declaration of independence from … um, what country was that again?
If you answered the above question with the word “England” or “Britain,” you would be obviously correct. But a new Marist poll finds that more than a quarter — 26 percent — of Americans polled couldn’t bring to mind the name of the country from whom the original 13 colonies gained independence.
Results were especially poor among the young: Of respondents aged 18 to 29, only 60 percent correctly identified Great Britain. A full one-third were unsure.
Maybe history class was too long ago. Or maybe, as the New York Daily News would have it, Americans are “pretty dumb.”
Overall, 20 percent of the population answered “not sure” to the question, while six percent declared it to be a country other than Great Britain. “Among the countries mentioned are France, China, Japan, Mexico, and Spain,” Marist reports.
China? Maybe all this poll tells us is that six percent of people who answer surveys like to screw around with them.
That’s a possibility that Jack Stuef at the Wonkette blog is ready to consider.
Consider that a good 10% of Americans probably have Alzheimer’s. Then another 5% are just regular crazy people. And probably 11% of Americans got offended that some annoying academic called them up during dinner to ask them this single, inane question and answered “the United States won its independence from the country of My Ass.”
Let’s hope Stuef is right. Or this country is in big trouble.
Jul 03 2010
Global Economic Crisis Explained, or How Much To Make Good?
Sociologist David Harvey, Professor in the Graduate Centre of City University of New York, asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?
Harvey’s influential books include The New Imperialism; Paris, Capital of Modernity; Social Justice and the City; Limits to Capital; The Urbanization of Capital; The Condition of Postmodernity; Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference; Spaces of Hope; and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography.
This narrated animation is based on a lecture, “The Crises of Capitalism”, given by Professor Harvey in April this year at the RSA. For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.
Radical sociologist Professor David Harvey visits the RSA to explain how capitalism came to dominate the world and why it resulted in the current financial crisis.
Taking a long view of the current crisis, Professor Harvey exposes the follies of the international financial system, looking closely at the nature of capitalism, how it works and why sometimes it doesn’t.
Examining the cycles of boom and bust in the world’s housing and stock markets, and the vast flows of money that surge round the world daily, Harvey shows that periodic episodes of meltdown are not only inevitable in the capitalist system but, in fact, are essential to its survival. Harvey argues that the essence of capitalism is its amorality and lawlessness and to talk of a regulated, ethical capitalism is to make a fundamental error.
Can crises of the current sort be contained within the constraints of capitalism? Or is it time to make the case for a social order that would allow us to live within a different type of system – one that really could be responsible, just, and humane?
“Capitalism never solves its crisis problems.”
“It moves them around geographically.”
Jul 03 2010
BP Texas Refinery Had Huge Toxic Release Just Before Gulf Blowout
About 8:30PM PST…
TEXAS CITY, TEXAS — Two weeks before the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the huge, trouble-plagued BP refinery in this coastal town spewed tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the skies.
The release from the BP facility here began April 6 and lasted 40 days. It stemmed from the company’s decision to keep producing and selling gasoline while it attempted repairs on a key piece of equipment, according to BP officials and Texas regulators.
BP says it failed to detect the extent of the emissions for several weeks. It discovered the scope of the problem only after analyzing data from a monitor that measures emissions from a flare 300 feet above the ground that was supposed to incinerate the toxic chemicals.
The company now estimates that 538,000 pounds of chemicals escaped from the refinery while it was replacing the equipment. These included 17,000 pounds of benzene, a known carcinogen; 36,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides, which contribute to respiratory problems; and 189,000 pounds of carbon monoxide.
Jul 01 2010
The 50 Year Struggle, & Deepwater Horizon
AlJazeeraEnglish | 30 June 2010
Hurricane Alex, with winds of up to 100km an hour, is hampering efforts to clean-up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The state department has welcomed help from 12 countries offering to assist with the clean-up. And there has been a rare offer of support from an indigenous community from Ecuador for another indigenous tribe in Louisiana that has been affected by the spill.
Al Jazeera’s Scott Heidler joined the Ecuadorians in Louisiana’s Bay Baptiste. They underwent a long and tough journey in a boat to visit the oil-tained wetlands.
Jul 01 2010
BP’s Well May Leak For 55 Years Or More Into The Gulf Of Mexico?
On June 15, 2010 the US Department of Energy announced that a group of federal and independent scientists convened by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and Chair of the National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG) Dr. Marcia McNutt (Director of the U.S. Geological Survey) had developed a new estimate for the amount of oil gushing from the ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico that indicated the leak could be spewing up to 2.52 million gallons of crude oil per day into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from British Petroleum’s Macondo Well.
“This estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP’s well,” said Chu, who then expanded with “As we continue to collect additional data and refine these estimates, it is important to realize that the numbers can change. In particular, the upper number is less certain – which is exactly why we have been planning for the worst case scenario at every stage and why we are continuing to focus on responding to the upper end of the estimate, plus additional contingencies.”
Estimates from both BP and from the US Government of the amount of oil gushing from the blown out wellhead on the gulf seabed have been almost continually revised upwards since the well blowout and leak began on April 20, with widespread suspicions that BP has deliberately understated the leak rate in attempts to limit liability for the company.
It now appears that Chu may have been somewhat prescient with his statement that “it is important to realize that the numbers can change”, and that the estimate of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico may need to be increased again, since an undated internal BP document (.PDF) obtained by Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) was released by Markey on Sunday June 20 showing that BP’s own internal analysis believed that a worst-case scenario, based on damage to the well bore, could result in a leak rate from the well of 55,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil per day.
Jun 30 2010
And In Other News…
It appears that possibly Tony Hayward of BP has been keeping late nights surveying Colorado for drilling sites, or perhaps Nancy Pelosi or Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh or maybe some Orange RecLister has moved to Colorado?
Western Slope woman blames vampire for car crash
FRUITA, Colo. – If a Western Slope woman is to be believed, vampires may be lurking in Colorado’s Grand Valley.
The woman claims she spotted a vampire in the middle of a dirt road near Fruita, Colo. Sunday night. She told Colorado State Troopers she was startled by the undead being, threw her SUV into reverse, and crashed into a canal.
She was not injured.
State Troopers say the woman’s husband arrived at the scene and took her home. The vampire, which was not seen by anyone else, apparently let her get away.
Troopers do not suspect drugs or alcohol to be factors in the crash.
Jun 29 2010
The Third Depression & G20, The Shape Of Things To Come?
Paul Krugman outlines a serious warning in his NYT Op-Ed Sunday :
Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline – on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.
We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost – to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs – will nonetheless be immense.
And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world – most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting – governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.
In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.
It is [the] the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times. And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.
Jun 28 2010
G20 Police Attacking Journalists
The Real News Network’s Jesse Freeston and other journalists attacked by police during what began as peaceful street demonstrations at the G20 Summit in Toronto…
Real News Network – June 27, 2010
Real News journalist attacked at G20
Jun 27 2010
Ok, Now Look….
Everything is getting really blurry now and nothing makes any fuckin’ sense any more.
War is Peace now, poor is rich, the Gulf 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.
And it’s anybody’s bet how long this planet is going to keep letting us do the shit we do before it deals with us seriously.
And it is still the weekend, after all.
Maybe it’s just time to get back to basics. 😉
Jun 26 2010
G-20 Protest in Toronto
While world leaders descended upon Toronto to discuss financial reform and the global economy at the G-20 summit, protesters clashed with riot police.