Cost v Benefit

It's a given that oil runs the economy; that we're dependent on oil - addicted, in the words of GW Bush.  And addiction is an apt analogy.  With just about any substance abuse issue, you don't start out having problems.  At first, there's a nice high - a good feeling - some kind of benefit, even tho' there's also a cost.  You have a great time drinking too much, and then you suffer some because of the hangover the next day.  You figure "the goin' up was worth the comin' down".  But if you do it too much, over time, the cost starts to outweigh the benefits.

From a story at Market Watch:
Ocean tourism (as opposed to that offered by Orlando theme parks) and recreation are among Florida's main industries, contributing an estimated $20 billion a year to the state's economy, data from the National Ocean Economics Program show. In 2008, 84.2 million visitors spent over $65 billion in Florida, supporting the more than 1 million residents directly employed by the tourism industry, according to Visit Florida, the state's official tourism-marketing arm.

Out of the $65 Billion a year tourists spend in Florida, they spend $20 Billion playing in and around the water.  But now all that beautiful water is about to become a stinking toxic sludge made of crude oil, poisonous detergents, and dead rotting plants and animals.

Here's a nice kicker:  BP has sent a $25 Million "grant" to Florida to assist the state in their PR and advertising campaign.  It seems so perfect.  They won't spend the money on technology or procedures that could prevent the fuckups, but they'll sure as hell spend a boatload of it on efforts to tell us "it's not as fucked up as you think".

The tourists have to have the oil products if they wanna get to their favorite vacation spots in Florida, but if they know the place is trashed, why bother?

Likewise, the shrimpers have to have fuel for their boats, but if the oil spill has killed the fishery, there's nothing for them catch.

There's such a thing as Business Ecology - every enterprise is connected in some way to all other enterprises.  And every business is connected in some way back to the earth.  It's all part of a system in which every part is interdependent on all the other parts.  When do we finally get it thru our thick skulls?  If the air and the water and the land are spoiled, then people don't thrive.  Without a thriving population, you don't have anybody to employ; you don't have anybody to buy anything from; and there's nobody to sell anything to.  And then there's no reason for your business to exist at all.

Yeah - That's What It's All About

There's just nothing else worth anything.

Duke Sucks

I suppose I should try to be a little more magnanimous about it, but I just really wanted to see Duke fall.  They're scrappy and they played smart and they had individuals step up to do great things at the right times and they got lucky - all of which have to happen to win the big one.  So, good on you, Duke - you preppy fucks.

The weekend wasn't a total loss - here's a pic that Irene got of Nick (far right) and his crew in front of USS Constellation at The Inner Harbor in downtown Baltimore.

Maria Muldaur

A bit of a chestnut, but I never get tired of hearing Amos Garret's amazing riffs at the break.

What About Me?

What Marvin Said

What's Goin' On --Marvin Gaye

Natural Response

Aliens

Close encounters of the fungal kind?

This thing is growing near the tree line behind the house.

The Mosque At Ground Zero

There's a meltdown occurring because the community board in lower Manhattan has approved plans to build a good-sized Mosque/Muslim Community Ctr a couple of blocks away from the WTC site.

The Brain Free Zone (aka Fox News and other Wingnut Media) is going ape shit, yelling about "those insensitive bastards...; it's a slap in the face...; blah blah blah.

I only know two things about any of this:
Fear is the opposite of love, and forgiveness is the opposite of hate.

BTW: the proposed mosque is to replace one that's already within spittin' distance anyway.  If you're opposed to any mosque "on hallowed ground", then you need to have been a little more aware of what's been goin' on all along.

This non-troversy is typical reactionary bullshit and I'm callin' it for what it is.

The Deficit As Hangover

From a post at The New Rupublic, Chait argues that Obama isn't wrong, he's just not right.

Now, I think it's fine for a story to eschew "balance"when one side is making an unsupportable or hypocritical case. But Obama's case isn't wrong -- it really is true that the economic and budgetary problems we're facing were inherited from the previous administration. What's false is the Republican effort to imply that Obama caused the problems -- an argument that collapses upon the slightest empirical pressure. But somehow the standard here is not what's correct but what's polite, and it's impolite for Obama to blame Bush.

God Love The Onion

Wise Words

That's Entertainment

It's gettin' fun now, by golly.

Bombing of a Mosque in Florida.

Joe Arpaio = Sheriff of Nottingham.

Arizona threatens retaliation for boycott.

Yay, Germany - I think

The Germans decided to ban the practice of Naked Short Selling when it comes to European Gov't debt, and a lot of the snakes on streets named Fleet and Wall have their panties in a bunch because of it.

The way I understand it is that short selling is a necessary aspect of keeping the markets "honest" - or at least as honest as some of these assholes are willing to let it be.  But anyway, shorting is a time-honored device that lets me borrow shares of a company's stock, sell them at a price below current market value, and then buy them back when the market price goes down.  Usually, "shorting" is a bet that the market in general, or the price for that particular stock is heading down.  And it's a good thing to have because it can be a safety valve.  Properly applied, short selling can help prevent bubbles.  But if you do it on a big enough scale, you can actually force the price(s) down, and then shorting becomes just another means of manipulation and speculation.  And that's where Naked Shorting comes in.

Naked Shorting (to my mind) is really just a statement that you want the price of something to be a lot lower.  You've not borrowed the stock or the bond or whatever - and so you're not risking your own money- but you're saying you'll sell it at a price well short of the current asking price if others are interested in buying it.  This creates a kind or impromptu consortium of players which dramatically multiplies your market power.

So I'm a little uneasy about shorting because like any other useful tool it can be a weapon of malice, causing undue harm to good companies (and the PEOPLE who make up those companies) solely in the name of turning a few extra profit points for guys who never actually produced anything in their lives.  Don't get me wrong - bankers and brokers are necessary to a healthy economy, but when they elevate themselves above it, they become threats to the system and have to be beaten back.

When you sell something that doesn't belong to you, we call it fraud and you're supposed to go to jail for that.

The Awesome Power Of Rationization

The Pro-Gunners all seem nice and reasonable when it comes to abiding by the law banning all guns in order to attend their convention. I have to assume not all Pro-Gunners feel the same as the people in this clip, but these few say they're just fine with the kind of gun control restrictions at their convention site that their organization went apeshit over when WashDC tried to ban handguns. And the irony is completely lost on them. The real kicker is the guy at the end. He actually says he's more worried that the Anti-Gunners might bring guns and make trouble; and so, in the interest of everybody's safety, disarming everybody is a good idea.

Religiosity

A Catholic nun and longtime administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix was reassigned in the wake of a decision to allow a pregnancy to be ended in order to save the life of a critically ill patient.

The decision also drew a sharp rebuke from Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, who indicated the woman was “automatically excommunicated” because of the action.

Neither the hospital nor the bishop’s office would address whether the bishop had a direct role in her demotion. He does not have control of the hospital as a business but is the voice of moral authority over any Catholic institution operating in the diocese.

The actions involving the administrator, mostly taken within the past couple of weeks, followed a last-minute, life-or-death drama in late 2009. The patient had a rare and often fatal condition in which a pregnancy can cause the death of the mother.

Sister Margaret McBride, who had been vice president of mission integration at the hospital, was on call as a member of the hospital’s ethics committee when the surgery took place, hospital officials said. She was part of a group of people, including the patient and doctors, who decided upon the course of action.

So, if you're a kid-fucking priest, the church takes great pains to protect you and send you from parish to parish to spread your shit.  But if you're a nun who takes a little initiative in an attempt to salvage something less than completely fucked up out of a situation that's nothin' but fucked up, then they come down on you like a truckload of rocks.

Oil Spill

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

"The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We're not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It's not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."

There's a fairly simple rule about Project Management and Problem Solving that applies universally.  It goes like this: If you don't appreciate the full scope of the task, you are almost certain to fail.

2 probabilities - BP knows it's worse than they're saying it is publicly; and they're gambling that the bulk of the oil will stay below the surface, which gives them some plausible deniability. 

I guess I worry that the "anti-oilers" are seen as overstating the problem. If the catastrophe then doesn't quite materialize the way they say it will, there's an opportunity for the "pro-oilers" to whip up a backlash, and we're right back to Drill Baby Drill.

Lastly, what happens to the booms and the sandbag dikes and to the oil blob itself when there's a storm?

Solution Of The Month part 2

Conflation

As always, nothing happens all by itself.  Everything happens in some kind of context; concomitantly;  in conjunction with...etc.  So the oil flood south of New Orleans comes at a time when the dead zone (also just south of NO - and the 2nd largest in the world) is gearing up for the summer season as the Mississippi dumps a jillion tons of animal waste, lawn care chemicals, farm fertilizers, parking lot runoff, and partially treated human shit into the Gulf of Mexico.

From discovery.com

From mindfully.org

I guess we can hope that this disaster contains the usual 30% sawdust-as-dramatic-filler-material that our Press Poodles love to pimp to us.  Or maybe we shouldn't hope for that at all.  What if the media types tell us it's gonna be huge, and then it isn't so huge, and then we get the feeling that this isn't as bad as it actually is?  We can all go back to pretending that we're not driving ourselves over the cliff.

A Fitting Tribute to Ken Cuccinelli

The Coochster is taking lots of heat.

Listen to the mp3, and follow along with the lyrics below.

As published in Richmond Times Dispatch (by Bart Hinkle 5-7-2010)

I am the very model of a mad Attorney General,
My politics are paleoconservative and visceral --
I'll sue the pants off Democrats and wreck their plans historical
With writs and briefs that I'll compose, tendentious and rhetorical . . . .
I'll stop environmentalists from regulating greenhouse gas
By proving carbon dioxide does not have an atomic mass --
That solar-radiative forcing's nothing but a liberal plot
And dendroclimatology is superstitious tommyrot.
I'll prove the EPA is overrun with Commie militants
Who haven't shown a single lick of scientific diligence --
In short, in matters legal, ecological, and federal
I am the very model of a mad Attorney General.

I'll stop the federales, too, from passing mandates medical --
Our Founding Fathers would have found them utterly heretical:
There's nothing in the Constitution that allows the government
To take upon itself an act of such obscene aggrandizement.
Our hospitals and clinics do not need yet more bureaucracy
The whole scheme is most antithetical toward democracy;
ObamaCare could mean as well a case of hip dysplasia
Might put your grandma on a gurney, bound for euthanasia.
The situation's reached the point that it is nearly critical --
And so I'll sue to save the life of our corpus political.
In short, in matters Hippocratic, curative, and medical,
I am the very model of a mad Attorney General.

I'll save our universities as well from filthy sodomites;
The colleges have got no grounds to grant those fellows equal rights.
The legislature has declared they constitute a second class --
Though some might find that attitude as dated as Depression glass
I do not think we need more men who know how to redecorate
Or women dressed like lumberjacks -- God meant us all to procreate.
It's right there in Leviticus: Verse seventeen of chapter eight
Requires colleges to let their faculties discriminate.
I simply want to guarantee our young men's masculinity
By keeping Sapphic types far from the commonwealth's vicinity
In short, in matters non-Euclidian or homosexual
I am the very model of a mad Attorney General.

I also like to think myself a rather high-browed classisist
And artifacts of history are something I cannot resist
But images of Virtue that expose her breast and mamelon
Are too risqué -- they're apt to turn the concupiscent rabble on.
There's nothing more erotic than the Iliad or the Odyssey
And so I'll substitute a pin that manifests more modesty
(One mustn't risk the chance that some poor lad's Attic exuberance
Could lend itself to lusty thoughts and some turgid protuberance).
I'm simply trying to keep things clean, I don't believe in censorship --
But won't go down in history as the man who let a nipple slip.
In short in matters glandular, lactiferous, and sensual
I am the very model of a mad Attorney General.