Thursday News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians!!! As usual these days, there isn’t a whole lot of positive news out there.

After watching Anderson Cooper last night, I wondered if anything the President said was more than “just words.”

I learned that many in New Orleans still think Obama is completely out of touch with events on the ground. The clean-up effort is still completely disorganized and ineffective, and parish leaders are still calling for the President to cut the red tape. And this is day 58 of this crisis. Why doesn’t Obama see that it is, in fact, a national emergency?

I learned that Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser thinks Thad Allen should be removed as point man in charge of supervising BP’s efforts to stop the leak as well as the clean up effort. From an AP story at NOLA.com:

“He’s not the right man for the job,” said Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser. “If the president of the United States does not make some drastic changes it’s going to give him a bad rap that he doesn’t deserve.”

Nungesser’s comments came Wednesday after workers under his direction resorted to sucking up oil from delicate marshes with ordinary shop vacuums.

He was furious after he said the Coast Guard shut down oil-vacuum barges while paperwork was being processed.

“Not only is the leadership not there, they’re standing in our way. They’re crippling us,” Nungesser said.

I also learned that $20 billion probably is only a down-payment on what the true cost of the BP gusher will be. I saw BP CEO Tony Hayward smirking as he walked out of the WH with President Obama. And I saw Hayward and the other BP execs practically high-five-ing each other as they walked away from the question and answer session. They apparently think they rolled Obama pretty good. And to back up that conclusion, BP’s shares surged after the agreement was announced.

This morning, I decided to go to the horse’s mouth so to speak, and see what they are saying at NOLA.com. Here are the latest updates from ground zero. I’m sure Dakinikat will have more to add later on. It seems that the $100 million that Obama has said he’ll set aside to help oil workers who have lost their jobs is woefully inadequate. On that amount, the lead editorial says:

The $100 million fund is a drop in the bucket. The losses for laid-off rig workers alone could range from $150 million to $300 million a month.

More significantly, the president’s statement fails to acknowledge the moratorium’s wider damage. To be sure, rig workers are the first in line to lose their livelihoods while exploratory rigs shut down in compliance with Mr. Obama’s moratorium. But the devastation to the economies of Gulf Coast states will be broader than the loss of rig worker jobs. The boat operators, contractors, caterers and myriad others who service the drilling platforms will also lose out, with an estimated loss of 20,000 jobs in Louisiana alone. This narrowly targeted fund doesn’t begin to address the true impact of the drilling shutdown, which could result in idled rigs quitting the Gulf long term.

President Obama surely realizes that this money doesn’t solve the problem. Instead of pushing forward with a broad moratorium he should listen to those pressing for a more nuanced approach that addresses safety concerns without threatening a vital industry that affects the lives of so many people.

Another op-ed, by Stephanie Grace: “Another president, another set of promises,” compares the responses of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Katrina and the BP gusher, respectively:

Here was Bush in September 2005, 17 days after Katrina: “Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.”

And here was Obama Tuesday night, 57 days after the Deepwater Horizon exploded: “We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”

There’s one more similarity: In addition to offering hope to a besieged region, each president tried to use his speech to recast his own role in the tragedy — to hit the restart button, to get ahead of the story, to finally appear in control of the situation, not at its mercy.

Grace goes on to say that she is willing to give President Obama a chance to fulfill his promises, but cautions:

The problem is that the longer the oil gushes, the more gunk creeps into the marshes, the more loudly local officials vent their frustration over poorly deployed resources, the larger the gap between the Obama administration’s ambitions and reality grows.

When you raise expectations, it’s always harder to live up to them.

Both James Carville and Paul Begala are now praising Obama in the wake of the Best Oval Office Speech Evah!

Carville: Oil response critic concedes Obama’s getting it right

Obviously, I was not in the meeting that President Obama had with the BP officials. I suspect I’m even less welcome at the White House these days than Tony Hayward, given my heartfelt and vocal criticism of how Obama was handling the Gulf crisis.

But it looks as if President Obama applied a little old- school Chicago persuasion to the oil executives, because BP’s chairman not only agreed to the full $20 billion that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu asked for, he also pledged to suspend quarterly dividends immediately. Paying victims before shareholders — what a concept.

Look, we have a long way to go before this Cajun stops ragin’. But just as I hammered the White House when I thought they were too lackadaisical, honesty compels me to praise the president for his concrete, significant — and eloquent — action today.

Begala is more enthused than Carville: Nothing But Net

His high school teammates called the future president “Barry O’Bomber” for his proclivity for launching long-range jump shots, and tonight he took yet one more high-pressure shot from downtown. Nothing but net.

The timing of when you shoot a tre is important: the later they come in a game, the more they matter. Three-pointers are the dagger that can put the game away or bring a team back from the dead. Tonight’s speech was the latter.

If Marshall McLuhan was right, then for this presidential address the setting was the message. For the first time in his presidency, Barack Obama sat behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and addressed his fellow Americans. From that room presidents have sent millions of Americans to war. They have sought to heal broken hearts, to remake our government and revive our economy. Barack Obama has, at turns, done all those things — but never from the Oval Office. Even before he opened his mouth he communicated the most important message: dealing with the Gulf oil disaster is, as Joe Biden would say, a BFD.

‘Scuse me, I think I’m going to be sick.

OK, Begala really laid it on thick there. Maybe he’s trying to encourage Obama with excessive flattery? I don’t quite know what was going on in Begala’s head when he wrote that column.

At CNN, a “language guru” claims that Obama’s speech bombed because it was “too professorial.”

President Obama’s speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Tuesday night’s speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.

You know how slow-witted we “small people” are. We just can’t understand that when the President speaks in vague generalities, he really means something very specific–if only we were smart enough to read between the lines….or something.

I suppose everyone has already seen this “worst case scenario” that was posted at The Oil Drum, but it’s worth repeating. If this is true, we could be facing a much worse disaster than anyone thinks, and let’s hope the Villagers are aware of how bad it could really get. The gist is that there is probably damage down below the ocean floor which could cause the well structure to collapse and leave us with a great big hole gushing vast amounts of oil at a rapid rate…and it would be unstoppable.

Here is a summary with commentary at Mother Jones and another one at Science Blogs.

In other news,

Bill To Help Unemployed Fails In Senate

A beleaguered bill to extend benefits for the long term unemployed stalled on Capitol Hill Tuesday, when the Senate voted 45-52 to block the $140 billion catchall bill that also would delay a Medicare fee cut, extend a hodgepodge of expiring tax cuts, and other provisions that Democrats say will help stimulate job growth.

Although the bill also included tax increases on investment managers and oil companies to help offset the cost, it has run into opposition from Republicans as well as many Democrats who are worried about adding to the burgeoning budget deficit.

All this worry about the deficit is going to lead us into Great Depression 2.0.

Administering Fund, a Master Mediator

Kenneth R. Feinberg bristled when reporters dubbed him the compensation czar for his Treasury Department job monitoring executive pay at companies that received government bailouts. The term, he lamented to ABC News last year, “makes it sound like I’m going to issue some imperial decree.”

[....]

Mr. Feinberg, named Wednesday by President Obama as the independent administrator of a $20 billion fund set up by BP to compensate victims of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, may not have the powers of a king. But he does seem to specialize in Solomon-like decisions.

Over the course of his long career as a mediator, he has helped settle a variety of thorny disputes, including a class-action suit by Vietnam veterans protesting the use of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange, and a determination of the fair market value of the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

He also oversaw the compensation fund for survivors of 9/11 victims. Those victims who accepted payments had to sign away their rights to sue for damages later. I imagine that will also be the case for BP’s victims.

Prop. 8 trial: Closing arguments end as judge presses both sides

Closing arguments concluded Wednesday afternoon in the Proposition 8 trial with more pointed questions from U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who is presiding over the landmark proceedings to determine the constitutionality of California’s ban on gay marriage.

More Than 90 Banks Miss TARP Payments

More than 90 U.S. banks and thrifts missed making a May 17 payment to the U.S. government under its main bank bailout program, signaling a rising number of lenders are struggling to meet their obligations….

The number of banks missing their TARP payments rose for the third straight quarter. In February, 74 banks deferred their payments; 55 deferred last November.

That’s all I’ve got. Please post your links in comments–good news would be greatly appreciated if you can find it. Have a terrific Thursday, everyone!!!

Lazy Saturday Oil News: BP Atlantis and Other Dangerous Gulf Oil Rigs

BP's Atlantis Platform in Gulf of Mexico

Good morning Conflucians!! This morning I’ve been trying to educate myself a little bit about oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP ATLANTIS

Did you know that BP has another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that is drilling even deeper than the Deepwater Horizon–more than 7,000 feet under water? It’s called Atlantis.

Considered one of BP’s most technically challenging projects ever, the Atlantis platform is currently the deepest moored floating dual oil and gas production facility in the world and weighing in at 58,700t, it is also one of the largest. BP is operator of Atlantis with 56% ownership with its partner in the venture, BHP Billiton, having a 44% working interest.

The platform is located 190 miles south of New Orleans in 7,070ft (2,150m) of water, the field itself occupying five blocks – Green Canyon 699, 700, 742, 743 and 744 – with water depths ranging between 4,400ft and 7,100ft (1,338m and 2,158m)….

Atlantis has a production capacity of 200,000 barrels of oil and 180 million cubic feet of gas a day, with the expectation that it will have reached plateau production by the end of 2008.

The field has an estimated life of 15 years and oil reserves of 635,000 million barrels of oil equivalent.

Like Deepwater Horizon, Atlantis was approved to drill “without critical safety documents,” according to Food and Water Watch (via Democracy Now) If there were an oil spill from Atlantis, it could be far worse than the accident at Deepwater Horizon.

Food and Water Watch has started a new website devoted to convincing the Obama administration to stop BP’s Atlantis operations until the rig is shown to be safe and reliable. Here is a video from the site:

Via Food and Water Watch, on May 16, 60 Minutes ran an interview with a whistleblower, Kenneth Abbott.

Mr. Abbott tried to warn BP executives about missing engineering documents that are critical to the safe operation of Atlantis. It is because of Kenneth Abbott that we have an opportunity to prevent another disaster that could be several times more destructive than the Horizon explosion and bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill in just two days. Atlantis poses an enormous safety risk, one that could seriously endanger its workers and the environment in and around the Gulf of Mexico, including the livelihoods and well being of residents in surrounding communities. BP management has noted that an accident resulting from “catastrophic Operator error” on Atlantis could occur.

You can watch the 60 Minutes segments here.

MORE UNSAFE OIL RIGS
IN THE GULF OF MEXICO

Via Democracy Now, the Center for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit to close down 49 more drilling sites in the gulf that were approved by MMS without any environmental review. From the press release:

Just like BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling plan, all 49 plans in today’s suit state that no environmental review is necessary because there is essentially no chance of a large oil spill, and if a spill were to occur, it would be quickly cleaned up with no lasting damage.

“Secretary Salazar continues to exercise extremely poor judgment in approving these plans without meaningful environmental review,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center. “He seems to have learned nothing from the oil pouring out into the Gulf of Mexico. Since Salazar is unwilling to shut down the use of environmental waivers that even the president has denounced, we are asking the courts to do so.”

President Obama has “suspended” new drilling projects, but has done nothing yet to make sure that these dangerous oil rigs already operating in the Gulf are reviewed to see if they have sufficient back up plans in case of a blowout.

As you can see, I’m still obsessed with the oil spill, but feel free to post links to any kind of news in the comments. And have a great Saturday and a relaxing Memorial Day weekend.

I’m soothing myself with this after my morning of oil research:

Wednesday Morning News

Good Morning Conflucians!!

What an interesting week we’re having so far. Mmm, love me some greed on wall street. And between the New Wall Street (don’t look at the man behind the curtain) Dem party and the Batshit Crazy (socialist, or now mexican, under every rock) Repub party, no one is noticing that our ship is headed straight for the iceberg. But never mind, we’ll fix that by bailing out the iceberg consortium. So let this be a bit of a distraction with some other news.

Laughter acts like exercise:

Dr. Lee S. Berk, a preventive care specialist and psychoneuroimmunology researcher at Loma Linda University’s Schools of Allied Health (SAHP) and Medicine, and director of the molecular research lab at SAHP, Loma Linda, CA, and Dr. Stanley Tan have picked up where Cousins left off. Since the 1980s, they have been studying the human body’s response to mirthful laughter and have found that laughter helps optimize many of the functions of various body systems. Berk and his colleagues were the first to establish that laughter helps optimize the hormones in the endocrine system, including decreasing the levels of cortisol and epinephrine, which lead to stress reduction. They have also shown that laughter has a positive effect on modulating components of the immune system, including increased production of antibodies and activation of the body’s protective cells, including T-cells and especially Natural Killer cells’ killing activity of tumor cells.

Their studies have shown that repetitious “mirthful laughter,” which they call Laughercise©, causes the body to respond in a way similar to moderate physical exercise. Laughercise© enhances your mood, decreases stress hormones, enhances immune activity, lowers bad cholesterol and systolic blood pressure, and raises good cholesterol (HDL).

As Berk explains, “We are finally starting to realize that our everyday behaviors and emotions are modulating our bodies in many ways.” His latest research expands the role of laughter even further.

A clown a day will keep the doctor away.

The fun part of social networks is when you’re engaged in the social hunt:

Kevin Wise, an assistant professor of strategic communication at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, studied people’s habits when they navigate Facebook. Wise says previous studies on social networking sites involved merely surveying study participants. Wise conducted his study differently.

“Rather than asking people to report their uses of Facebook, we wanted to see them in action,” Wise said. “We wanted to see if there is a way to categorize Facebook use, not based on what people say about it, but what they actually do when they are using it.”

Wise categorized participants’ actions into two different groups: social browsing and social searching. He defines social browsing as navigating the site without a targeted goal in mind. Wise says people use social browsing when they survey the general landscape, such as their newsfeed or wall, without looking for specific information. Wise defines social searching as searching the social networking site with the goal of finding certain information about a specific person, group, or event.

Wise found that participants tended to spend much more time on social searching than social browsing. Not only did participants spend more time on social searching, but they seemed to enjoy it more as well.

“We found a more positive response from participants during social searching, or when they had homed in on a particular target,” Wise said. “Ultimately, it appears that Facebook use is largely a series of transitions between browsing the environment, then focusing in on something interesting or relevant.”

So hunting your friends and acquaintances is what we like to do. Nothing like a good hunt to start off the morning.

Some progress in fuel cell research:

A new form of platinum that could be used to make cheaper, more efficient fuel cells has been created by researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Houston. The process, described in the April 25th issue of Nature Chemistry, could help enable broader use of the devices, which produce emissions-free energy using hydrogen.

“This is a significant advance,” said scientist Anders Nilsson, who conducts research at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, a joint institute between SLAC and Stanford University. “Fuel cells were invented more than 100 years ago. They haven’t made a leap over to being a big technology yet, in part because of this difficulty with platinum.”

Fuel cells hold significant promise for clean energy because the cell’s only byproduct is water. But current fuel cell designs can require as much as 100 grams of platinum, pushing their price tags into the thousands of dollars. By tweaking platinum’s reactivity, the researchers were able to curtail the amount of platinum required by 80 percent, and hope to soon reduce it by another 10 percent, greatly trimming away at the overall cost.

“I think with a factor of ten, we’ll have a home run,” Nilsson added.

We launched a secret min shuttle the other day:

The X-37 has had a long and chequered development history. It was built by Boeing’s “Phantom Works” advanced-concepts shop, originally for NASA – though it had Air Force heritage from the beginning, drawing heavily on the USAF’s X-40 experiments.

NASA saw the craft as a potential “lifeboat” for the International Space Station, but that requirement wouldn’t really call for a winged re-entry vehicle: the ISS lifeboat is in fact a common-or-garden Soyuz capsule – perhaps now to be replaced at some point by an American Orion salvaged from the ruins of the Constellation moonbase programme. Neither has wings, or any real need for them.

So we no longer want much of a civilian manned space program, but a military one is just fine and good. Alrighty then.

So our lovely senators have noticed the recent changes from Facebook:

Last week, Facebook launched some major new products, including social plugins, its Like button for the web, and its Open Graph API. It also launched a product that has some serious privacy issues: ”Instant Personalization”, which automatically hands over some of your data to certain third-party sites as soon as you visit them, without any action required on your part. I’ve previously discussed at length why I think this could lead to a major backlash. And now four Democratic US Senators — Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken — are calling on Facebook to change its policies.

This morning the senators sent a letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg that details these issues (they’ve also separately reached out to the FTC, urging it to establish more rules around social networks). Here are the senators’ three main concerns, along with my own commentary:

1. Publicly available data. Facebook’s expansion of publicly available data to include a user’s current city, hometown, education, work, likes, interests, and friends has raised concerns for users who would like to have an opt-in option to share this profile information. Through the expanded use of “connections,” Facebook now obligates users to make publicly available certain parts of their profile that were previously private. If the user does not want to connect to a page with other users from their current town or university, the user will have that information deleted altogether from their profile. We appreciate that Facebook allows users to type this information into the “Bio” section of their profiles, and privatize it, but we believe that users should have more control over these very personal and very common data points. These personal details should remain private unless a user decides that he/she would like to make a connection and share this information with a community.

We all know how they’re all about protecting us from large powerful corporations. I believe Facebook and related organizations will recognize this for what it is, the Senators have noticed new players making big money, and they want their cut. Wonder how I’ve become so cynical.

The Arizona’s new “papers please” law may hurt H-1B workers:

H-1B workers in Arizona that can’t immediately prove they’re working in the U.S. legally may find themselves detained by police or even jailed under the state’s new immigration law.

Legal experts said that an H-1B worker questioned by a police officer that has “reasonable suspicion” about his or her immigration status could be arrested while doing nothing more than going to a restaurant, grocery shopping or even taking a walk around the block if they don’t have their H-1B papers at the ready.

Federal immigration law requires that all non-U.S. citizens, including H-1B workers, have documentation showing that they are in this country legally, but visa workers are rarely asked to produce their papers at any time or place, said legal experts.

Many visa holders aren’t likely to carry valuable and hard-to-replace paperwork on them at all times for practical reasons — they could be lost or stolen. Under the new Arizona law, though, every police officer becomes, in effect, an immigration enforcement agent that can demand the paperwork at any time.

The main documents that foreign workers would need to show if asked include their I-94 card, which shows their lawful status, and most likely their passport.

Immigration experts noted that there are a number of ways that an H-1B worker can be in this country legally, but not have the paperwork to prove it.

For example, a worker could be carrying an expired I-94 card while waiting for new paperwork from U.S. immigration authorities, a process that could take months. Under current laws that worker could be in the U.S. legally even though the paperwork doesn’t reflect it, said Gregory A. Wald, an attorney at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey LLP. “Is a police officer in Arizona going to understand that?”

Here are a few stories related to the evils of Powerpoint. I can attest to this myself. First up, how the main enemy from the militaries point of view isn’t the terrorists, but in fact Powerpoint:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Famous information designer Edward Tufte agrees:

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

And finally here’s another article on how Powerpoint makes you dumb:

In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship’s foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft’s well-known ”slideware” program.

NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide — so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ”It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,” the board sternly noted.

PowerPoint is the world’s most popular tool for presenting information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider?

This year, Edward Tufte — the famous theorist of information presentation — made precisely that argument in a blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft’s ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ”faux analytical” technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker’s responsibility to tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ”an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”

The Supremes will tackle an interesting case about disclosure and transparency in a case about ballot measures:

In a high-profile legal challenge, the U.S. Supreme Court will today tackle questions about freedom of speech, the nature of signing petitions for ballot measures, the public’s right to know and the government’s interests in preserving the integrity of the election process.

Depending on the scope of the court’s ruling, ripples could be felt not only among the other 23 states that utilize ballot initiative and referenda (only one of which does not have public disclosure of information about petition signers), but potentially also in the arenas of campaign finance disclosure, public availability of voter registration lists and the open caucus systems used in some states to select party nominees.

“This case holds the potential to unravel decades of court precedent upholding the importance of meaningful disclosure in educating voters about how money is being spent to influence their votes on Election Day,” Paul Ryan, an attorney at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, told OpenSecrets Blog.

The Center for Responsive Politics, which filed an amicus brief with the court that supported neither party but implored justices not add any new impediments to campaign finance disclosure, will attend and cover today’s oral argument at the Supreme Court.

And finally, a bit more about the terrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

Rear Adm Mary Landry, who is in charge of the government clean-up effort, said work on sealing the leaks using several robotic submersibles could take months.

About 1,000 barrels (42,000 gallons) of oil a day are gushing into the sea.

An investigation has been ordered into the cause of the leak, which began when an oil rig exploded and sank last week.

The joint investigation, by the interior and homeland security departments, will have the power to compel witnesses to testify, and will look into possible violations by the operators of the rig, Transocean.

Eleven of the rig’s workers are still missing and presumed dead in the disaster off the Louisiana coast.

Workers on a nearby oil platform were evacuated by the US authorities on Monday after the oil slick came dangerously close.

The leaks – about 5,000ft (1,525m) under the surface – were found on Saturday, four days after the Deepwater Horizon platform, to which the pipe was attached, exploded and sank.

The resulting oil slick now has a circumference of about 600 miles (970km) and covers about 28,600 sq miles (74,100 sq km).

British oil company BP, one of the firms operating the rig, has not been able to activate a device known as a blow-out preventer, designed to stop oil flow in an emergency.

That’s a bit of the news today. Chime in with what you’re hearing. Tell some jokes. Post something silly. We need to laugh. Even more than usual.

Sunday News Roundup

Good Morning Conflucians!!

It’s been an amazing week with Blago and all the unseemly Chicago political dirt pointing to Obama and his henchmen at one end and Goldman Sachs and related financial revelations, or more accurately well timed releases of old news well after the damage was done for maximum benefit also pointing to Obama and his henchmen at the other. The corporatists and their puppet have been having a wild ride and collecting your money all the way. Ah, good times. Well, for those on the take.

It appears the efforts towards a bipartisan climate bill are collapsing:

In one of the proudest moments of his long legislative career, Senator John F. Kerry was poised to unveil a long-awaited climate change bill tomorrow that would put a price on carbon emissions and provide billions of dollars in incentives to industry to drastically cut greenhouse gases.

Kerry had brought business on board, and even forged something rare in Washington, a bipartisan compromise with a key Republican leader.

Then his effort ran headlong into the Senate’s partisan snarl, and last night the release of the bill was postponed indefinitely.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who had allied himself with Kerry on the issue, abruptly abandoned the effort last night, saying he was irate that the Senate’s Democratic leadership might proceed with a controversial immigration bill first.

“Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,’’ Graham said. “I know from my own personal experience the tremendous amounts of time, energy, and effort that must be devoted to this issue to make even limited progress.’’

Harry Reid signaled last week that he wanted to proceed with immigration reform before this climate bill. They had signaled just after the health insurance bailout catastrophe that they would likely postpone immigration reform until next year. I assume they got blowback from that and are pushing it forward. But who knows. This may be quite the political blunder, but it’s hard to imagine Republicans’ were really going to play along with a climate change bill anyway.

Though it’s been covered here this week, more fun bits about GS are worth monitoring. Here’s more WP on the GS emails cheering the housing market decline:

As the U.S. housing market began its epic fall nearly three years ago, top executives at Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs cheered the large financial gains the firm stood to make on certain bets it had placed, according to newly released documents.

The documents show that the firm’s executives were celebrating earlier investments calculated to benefit if housing prices fell, a Senate investigative committee found. In an e-mail sent in the fall of 2007, for example, Goldman executive Donald Mullen predicted a windfall because credit-rating companies had downgraded mortgage-related investments, which caused losses for investors.

“Sounds like we will make some serious money,” Mullen wrote.

Lawmakers said the internal e-mails, released Saturday by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, contradict what they said are Goldman’s assertions that the bank was not trying to profit from the decline of the housing market in 2007 and was merely seeking to protect itself if prices collapsed.

The clash between Washington and Wall Street is intensifying ahead of the scheduled testimony this week of Goldman chief executive Lloyd C. Blankfein and fellow executives, which itself comes as Congress weighs legislation that would overhaul financial regulation in the United States. President Obama and congressional Democrats are pushing hard to finalize legislation that would much more strictly regulate the activities of Goldman and other Wall Street firms. The full Senate could begin to debate financial reform legislation — already passed by the House — as early as Monday.

“Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs . . . were self-interested promoters of risky and complicated financial schemes that helped trigger the crisis,” said Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate panel. “They bundled toxic mortgages into complex financial instruments, got the credit rating agencies to label them as AAA securities and sold them to investors, magnifying and spreading risk throughout the financial system and all too often betting against the instruments they sold and profiting at the expense of their clients.”

Here’s my favorite part:

“We did not make a significant amount of money in the mortgage market,” Lucas van Praag, a Goldman spokesman, said Saturday. Van Praag said Goldman, which turned over 18 million pages of documents to the Senate committee, lost $1.2 billion in its mortgage business in 2008. “As a firm, we obviously could not have been significantly net short since we lost money in a declining housing market,” van Praag said.

Levin said the documents obtained by his committee contradict Goldman’s assertion that it didn’t seek to profit from the housing downturn. “Goldman made a lot of money by betting against the mortgage market,” Levin said.

With friends like these. Here’s something to ponder, compare the damage done to this country by our own financial corporations and their government henchmen over recent years vs. the money we wasted on our unjustified and probably illegal war in Iraq. Which is the greater threat and thus more of an enemy of the country? Here’s another thought exercise, if you put this and the last corporatist puppet presidents back to back and the damage done on their watch, esp. debt racked up, and compare that to all the years and money spent on the cold war, which has been worse for the country, the cold war with the old Soviet Union, or Bush-Obama? Sadly I don’t think Bush-Obama/Corporatist bleeding of this country is over yet. After all, the insurance companies haven’t had the better part of their cut yet. Stay tuned.

And speaking of, what do both parties have in common, why donations from Wall Street of course:

Although painting Republicans as pawns of Wall Street is a cornerstone of the Democratic strategy to overhaul financial regulation, financial interests have given campaign money generously to both political parties for years.

“No one party has any firm hold on righteousness here,” said David Levinthal, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks donations.

In the past two election cycles, when Democrats controlled Congress, the Democrats benefited most. So far in the 2010 cycle, the finance/insurance/real estate sector has given $65.2 million, or 56 percent of its contributions, to Democrats. Republicans have received $51.7 million.

People and political committees affiliated with securities and investment banking interests have been particularly kind to Democrats, giving them $21.7 million, or 63 percent of their donations so far.

Commercial banks, though, prefer Republicans; they’ve given GOP hopefuls $4.7 million so far, or 54 percent of their total.

In recent days, critics and journalists have been asking lawmakers to return certain funds, notably those from Goldman Sachs. Most lawmakers find the suggestion ridiculous.

“This is our system,” Cornyn said. “I think the system needs more transparency, so people can more easily reach their own conclusions. But if you didn’t have this system, the alternative would be to have taxpayers fund elections, and I’m not in favor of that.”

Ah, so John Cornyn doesn’t want taxpayers to fund elections. He wants GS and insurance companies and big oil, etc. to fund it. So that the taxpayers can then give all their money to bail them all out I guess. You know John, I think if we had to fund elections, we’d save money. If anyone votes for an incumbent, they need their head examined.

And with all that’s going on, and being more tied to Obama and his gang, here comes the koolaid sipping Joe Klein to say:

The anti-Obama forces, it seems clear, are rooted in classic American know-nothing populism–nativist, isolationist, paranoid.

He uses as his example for today Drudge saying really crazy things about the new $100 dollar bill. Yea, Drudge is nuts. What else is new. But notice how Joe ties that in with anyone who is anti-Obama. Keep sipping Joe. Notice anything else going on in the news Joe? You might want to put down that drug. Just maybe there are actual rational reasons for being against Obama.

In the technical universe, a big earthquake hit with Facebook making some massive changes. The gist of what they’re doing is to reach out throughout the internet and figure out everything you do and who you’re connected too, and bring that into Facebook. You know, for your own good, so you can more easily find people and manage your identity. The last bit is of course the money line. As in irony and big money for them. Here are a few article on the subject.

Slate has an article about how their planning on taking over the internet:

Your favorite Web sites are now plugged in to the Facebook brain. On the streaming music service Pandora, you can now press “Like” on any song you hear; that preference will get shuttled back into the social network, alerting your friends to your newfound musical interest. You can do the same for a movie on IMDb, a restaurant on Yelp, a news story on CNN.com, cosmetics at Sephora.com, jeans at Levi’s, and dozens of other products and services all over the Web, including everything published here on Slate. These tiny, new “like” buttons look quite friendly and unassuming. Don’t be fooled. They’re the vanguard of Facebook’s brilliant, unstoppable plan to catalog the entire Web, and there’s a good chance that over the next few years they’ll help the social network remake everything online.

Techcrunch has an article about Facebook’s misuse of the term open for their open graph announcement (the taking over the internet bit again):

Grab the popcorn. There is a serious nerd fight brewing.

Following Facebook’s big Open Graph announcements at f8 a couple days ago, many of the leaders of the so-called “open web” are taking exception to Facebook’s use of the term “open” for its grandiose plans. While the Open Graph may be a lot of things, it is not open, is the feeling many of them have, as Erick laid out earlier.

Specifically, most of them are targeting the new Like button that is appearing everywhere on the web (including on TechCrunch). It’s an obvious target as it’s the most visible part (at least so far) of the Open Graph protocol. Investor/Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon is leading the effort for a new OpenLike button (though he wants someone else to be in charge). And Google’s Open Web Advocate, Chris Messina, has already ripped apart Facebook’s Like button in a blog post.

And the best for last, BuzzMachine has a thoughtful article about how what Facebook is doing is the opposite of what we want:

My identity already exists online. It is my name, my email address(s), my URL(s) (for my blog, work, etc.), my Twitter account, my Flickr, my YouTube, my reputation culled from various services, and more. It is distributed. I have control over most of that.

What’s needed versus the present? Three things, I think:

* Organization. As Google organized our information, the war here is to organize us.

* Verification. No one, I hope, wants to verify as passports do. But Facebook has a leg ahead of everyone else on nearly verified identity simply because of how its service works: fake identities tend to be ejected from the bloodstream because they are irrelevant and irritating; Facebook is about real identities and real relationships and the one feeds the other.

* Connections. That, I think, is what Mark Zuckerberg means when he talks about making things social, about the social graph. He wants to link us to each other and information and that enhances our identities (what do I like and do and think….).

Fine. But I don’t think Facebook approached that opportunity asking first, “What can we do for the world of users online,” and second, “How can Facebook benefit?” If Facebook adds value, I have no objection to it benefiting, just as I believe Google should benefit by organizing our information and creating platforms; it’s what makes that benefit sustainable. But Facebook clearly asked the questions in the wrong order: It figured out what would benefit it most and then we get a few dividends: we get to tell our friends what we like and find out what our friends like.

But in the process, Facebook controls our identities with no relationship to our true identities online — that list above from email addresses to blogs to photos. Indeed, I’d argue that Facebook separates us from our true identities, for that is in Facebook’s favor; it gives Facebook control.

And of course, just as you’d suspect, all this stuff happens by default. And to opt out is a bit of work. Here’s an article about how to control these issues and opt out of the new features. I’ll write more about these and other privacy related issues.

That’s a brief summary of the week. There is a lot more so please chime in with other things you’ve found and with what’s on your mind.

Wednesday News

Good morning Conflucians!!

It’s hump day and I’m getting a slow start. Let’s throw out a few things going on to get the ball rolling.

A study finds that bureaucracy is linked to a nations growth. Yep, it’s a good thing:

“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work,” said Albert Einstein, sharing a popular view about bureaucracy grinding progress to a halt.

But it now appears that the organizing functions of bureaucracy were essential to the progressive growth of the world’s first states, and may have helped them conquer surrounding areas much earlier than originally thought. New research conducted in the Valley of Oaxaca near Monte Albán, a large pre-Columbian archaeological site in southern Mexico, also implies that the first bureaucratic systems may have a lasting influence on today’s modern states.

The research by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through its Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate, is published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“The earliest evidence of state organization is contemporaneous with the earliest evidence of long-distance territorial expansion,” said lead researcher Charles Spencer, curator of Mexican and Central American Archaeology at the AMNH. “This pattern was consistent with the territorial-expansion model of primary state formation, which I have proposed in a number of publications over the years.”

Spencer’s territorial-expansion model argues that states arise through a mutual-causal process involving simultaneous territorial expansion and bureaucratization. Spencer’s model breaks with previous ideas that suggest states rise through a protracted, step-by-step process–first the state forms, then an organizing bureaucracy takes hold, and sometime later, the state begins to expand into other regions in an “imperialistic” fashion, thus giving birth to an empire.

The PNAS paper compares Spencer’s work in Mesoamerica with archaeological data from five other states most anthropologists recognize as the only other locations of true primary state formation in history: Peru, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and China. Primary states are first-generation states that evolved without contact with other pre-existing states. In each case, Spencer’s territorial-expansion theory holds. But he says more research needs to be done at the other locales.

“This result may provide a cautionary lesson as we think about international relations in our contemporary world,” said Spencer. “Since the bureaucratic state as a political form originally evolved through a process of predatory expansion, we should not be surprised if states continue to have predatory tendencies, regardless of their particular ideologies.”

Spencer said his research results could be seen as reason to support development of international organizations such as the United Nations to serve as a check on the expansionistic tendencies of individual states. “But, the administration of those organizations is also likely to be bureaucratic, so we should be watchful for predatory behavior from them as well,” he said.

Paulson’s going on the defensive about Goldman Sachs:

John Paulson hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing. But the hedge-fund billionaire has gone on the offensive to reassure investors that his huge firm will emerge unscathed from a case that has drawn him into a political and legal vortex.

The steps, including a conference call with about 100 investors late Monday, come amid indications from some clients that they might withdraw money from his firm after a lawsuit brought by the government against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. related to an investment created at his firm’s request.

Investors have indicated they are concerned that scrutiny over the firm’s deals may spread, including to overseas regulators. They said they wanted to protect themselves in case new information emerges that could damage the hedge fund, they say. Another issue, they say: The legal case could simply prove a distraction for Mr. Paulson.

“Some of the callers asked pointed questions, almost like a court inquisition, but most people were supportive,” said Brad Alford, who runs Alpha Capital Management. “I felt reassured that he did nothing wrong.”

“It’s not a rush for the doors,” said another investor in Paulson & Co. who has communicated with larger Paulson investors since Friday, when the government unveiled its Goldman case.

Mr. Paulson sent a letter to investors Tuesday night saying that in 2007 his firm wasn’t seen as an experienced mortgage investor, and that “many of the most sophisticated investors in the world” were “more than willing to bet against us.”

And so it begins.

The supreme court naming game continues:

The Big Three. Most press attention has focused on three folks: Solicitor General Elena Kagan, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland, and Chicago-based federal judge Diane Wood.

Obama looked at those three last year when he nominated Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and those were the names that surfaced right after Stevens announced his retirement on April 9.

The Expanded List. In the days since Stevens’ announcement, other possible candidates began popping up. Among them: Former Georgia Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears; Montana-based federal judge Sidney Thomas; and former Yale law school dean Harold Koh.

The Politicians. Former President Bill Clinton and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy — who will be at today’s White House meeting — have urged Obama to consider someone with a political background. They said elected officials would have a better understanding of how court decisions can affect everyday Americans.

Potential political names include homeland security Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Both were considered for the high court slot that opened last year.

What’s your guess?

The Anti-Counterfiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been released. Here’s some analysis:

Under ACTA, ISPs are protected from copyright lawsuits as long as they have no direct responsibility for infringement. If infringement merely happens over their networks, the infringers are responsible but the ISPs are not. This provision mirrors existing US and European law.

Two key points need to be made here, however. First, the entire ISP safe harbor is conditioned on the ISP “adopting and reasonably implementing a policy to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of materials protected by copyright.” (This is much like existing US law.)

An earlier footnote found in a leaked draft provided a single example of such a policy: “Providing for termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts in the service provider’s system or network of repeat infringers.” In other words, some variation of “three strikes.” That footnote is now gone from the text entirely.

New to this draft is an option, clearly targeting European law, that would explicitly allow Internet disconnections. Countries will be allowed to force ISPs to “terminate or prevent an infringement” and they can pass laws “governing the removal or disabling of access to information. So, basically, Internet disconnection and website blocking.

The option also allows rightsholders to “expeditiously obtain from that provider information on the identity of the relevant subscriber” and it encourages countries to “promote the development of mutually supportive relationships between online service providers and right holders.” This option has not been approved by all ACTA members.

The ACTA draft also makes clear that governments cannot mandate Internet filtering or affirmative action to seek out infringers.

Second, the ISP immunity is conditioned on the existence of “takedown” process. In the US, this is the (in)famous “DMCA takedown” dance that starts with a letter from a rightsholder. Once received, an ISP or Web storage site (think YouTube) must take down the content listed in order to maintain its immunity, but may repost it if the uploader responds with a “counter-notification” asserting that no infringement has taken place. After this, if the rightsholder wants to pursue the matter, it can take the uploader to court.

This will strongly affect countries like Canada, which have no such system.

While the ACTA draft adopts the best part of the DMCA (copyright “safe harbors”), it also adopts the worst: making it illegal to bypass DRM locks.

ACTA would ban “the unauthorized circumvention of an effective technological measure.” It also bans circumvention devices, even those with a “limited commercially significant purpose.” Countries can set limits to the ban, but only insofar as they do not “impair the adequacy of legal protection of those measures.” This is ambiguous, but allowing circumvention in cases where the final use is fair would appear to be outlawed.

Fortunately, a new option in this section would allow countries much greater freedom. The option says that countries “may provide for measures which would safeguard the benefit of certain exceptions and limitations to copyright and related rights, in accordance with its legislation.”

(Emphasis mine.)

There’s more analysis in the article, and more to come.

Looks like the people behind that hitler movie that is used in so many fun parodies on youtube has ordered that all the parodies be taken down. Lots have. Here is EFF’s complaint about the takedowns:

One the most enduring (and consistently entertaining) Internet memes of the past few years has been remixes of the bunker scene from the German film, The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich (aka Der Untergang). EFF Boardmember Brad Templeton even got in on it, creating a very funny remix with Hitler ranting about troubles with DRM and the failure of DMCA takedowns to prevent fair uses. (Ironically enough, that video resulted in the Apple Store rejecting an EFF newsfeed app.)

In a depressing twist, these remixes are reportedly disappearing from YouTube, thanks to Constantin Film (the movie’s producer and distributor) and YouTube’s censorship-friendly automated filtering system, Content I.D. Because the Content I.D. filter permits a copyright owner to disable any video that contains its copyrighted content — whether or not that video contains other elements that make the use a noninfringing fair use — a content owner can take down a broad swath of fair uses with the flick of a switch. It seems that’s exactly what Constantin Film has chosen to do.

This is hardly the first time that Content I.D., has led to overbroad takedowns of legal content. Copyright owners have used the system to take down (or silence) everything from home videos of a teenager singing Winter Wonderland and a toddler lip-syncing to Foreigner’s Juke Box Hero to (and we’re not making this up) a lecture by Prof. Larry Lessig on the cultural importance of remix creativity.

YouTube users do have options for response (read our “Guide to YouTube Removals” for details.) But YouTube’s procedures for “removing” videos have created considerable confusion among users, and it’s a fair bet that most YouTube users aren’t aware of their ability to “dispute” these removals. Others may be leery of exercising the dispute option. While the risks may be low, our broken copyright system leaves users facing the prospect of paying outrageous statutory damages and even attorneys’ fees if they stand up, fight back and, despite overwhelming odds in their favor, lose. It’s a gamble many people just aren’t willing to take, even when their works are clear fair uses.

If copyright owners want to block remix creativity, they should have to use a formal DMCA takedown notice (and be subject to legal punishment if they fail to consider fair use), rather than a coarse automated blocking tool. That is one reason we called on YouTube to fix the Content ID system so that it will not automatically remove videos unless there is a match between the video and audio tracks of a submitted fingerprint and nearly the entirety (e.g, 90% or more) of the challenged content is comprised of a single copyrighted work. That was over two years ago, and YouTube told us then that they were working on improving the tool. If YouTube is serious about protecting its users, it is long past time for YouTube to do that work.

That’s a few of the things going on today. Please chime in with other things you’re finding.

Wednesday Pre Tax News

Good morning Conflucians!!

Mmm, doing taxes. Nothing better. Oh wait, a stick in the eye would be better. OK, lots of things would be better. Let’s see what’s happening today.

Imagine a world in which the US no longer leads, or hardly even participates in space exploration. Imagine waking up to news of amazing discoveries of new aerospace technology and basic science figured out by the new exciting Chinese (or other countries) space program. Imagine waking up to new moon landing done by someone else. Imagine watching years of progress with a moon base, people getting to mars, brand new amazing technologies in air travel and space travel and other discovered technologies because of those efforts, all by people other than the US. Imagine sitting back and watching other countries lead the way with us only occasionally invited as a tacit acknowledgement that we used to do that. Good you say. We don’t need to spend money in those areas. We should take care of our people in need instead. I won’t argue that we don’t have high priorities and people suffering, but if a group doesn’t push the envelope in science research and in leading edge exploration, then that group is not helping humankind. Yea, that’s a big presumptuous thing to say I agree. But we’re on this little rock in a vast space. Either we explore and figure out what’s out there, and frankly get ourselves spread around a bit, or we’ll go the way of the dodo bird. Here are a few things on what Obama is doing to our space program:

Neil Armstrong had this to say the other day:

President Obama’s plans for NASA could be “devastating” to the U.S. space program and “destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature,” three legendary astronauts said in a letter Tuesday.

Neil Armstrong, who rarely makes public comments, was the first human to set foot on the moon. Jim Lovell commanded the famous Apollo 13 flight, an aborted moon mission. And Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan remains the last human to have walked on the lunar surface.

In statements e-mailed to the Associated Press and NBC, Armstrong and other astronauts took exception with Obama’s plan to cancel NASA’s return-to-the-moon program, dubbed Project Constellation.

Armstrong, in an e-mail to the AP, said he had “substantial reservations.” More than two dozen Apollo-era veterans, including Lovell and Cernan, signed another letter Monday calling the plan a “misguided proposal that forces NASA out of human space operations for the foreseeable future.”

The statements came days before Obama is to visit Kennedy Space Center on Thursday to explain his vision for NASA.

Not all former astronauts have come out against the plan. Armstrong’s crewmate Buzz Aldrin, the second man to stand on the moon, has endorsed Obama’s plan, which includes investing $6 billion to develop commercial space-taxi services for astronauts traveling to and from the International Space Station. Aldrin said the proposal will “allow us to again be pushing the boundaries to achieve new and challenging things beyond Earth.”

The plan would also extend the space station operations through 2020. It would cancel Project Constellation and the Ares rockets, which NASA has been developing for six years at a cost of more than $9 billion. Obama would retain the Constellation project’s Orion capsule. The capsule, which was to go to the moon, will instead be sent unoccupied to the International Space Station to stand by as an emergency vehicle to return astronauts home.

Administration officials told the AP that NASA will speed up development of a rocket that would have the power to blast crew and cargo far from Earth, although no destination has been chosen. The rocket would be ready to launch several years earlier than under the moon plan. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to not detract from the presidential announcement.

The former astronauts said, “It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus-billion investment in Constellation. … Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downward slide to mediocrity.”

I agree. Of course some of us remember that during the campaign Obama actually promised to cut NASA funding. Somehow the Obots and others who just coasted along with lots of assumptions about who he was, didn’t really noticed that. And so it goes.

Obama is heading over to NASA to explain his vision:

President Obama will seek to promote his vision for the nation’s human space flight program on Thursday, just two days after three storied Apollo astronauts — including Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the Moon — called the new plans “devastating.”

In an announcement to be made at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the president will personally talk for the first time about the sweeping upheaval of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s human spaceflight program outlined in his 2011 budget request: canceling the current program that is to send astronauts back to the Moon, investing in commercial companies to provide transportation to orbit and developing new space technologies.

A senior administration official said Mr. Obama would describe a vision “that unlocks our ambitions and expands our frontiers in space, ultimately meaning the challenge of sending humans to Mars.” The official spoke with administration approval, but on the condition of anonymity so that the comments would not upstage the president’s remarks.

Mr. Obama’s budget request called for the cancellation of Orion crew capsule, which was to be used to carry astronauts to the International Space Station and then to the Moon, as well as other components of the current program known as Constellation.

The president will propose that a simpler version of the Orion be used as a lifeboat for the space station. Russian Soyuz capsules currently provide that function. Because the Orion lifeboat would not carry astronauts to the space station, it could be launched on existing rockets.

You know Mr. Obama, when you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. As we ride on Russian rockets to get to the space station, the negative symbolism and utter sadness of that will eventually be noticed. But then it will be too late. Our programs will be mothballed. Other grand ideas you’re pushing will not happen. Why? Because you aren’t really planning on them happening. It’s all theatre. The plan is to shut it all down.

Here’s a nice bit from EETimes:

Shifting plans for U.S. human space exploration and the proposed termination of the Constellation program clearly call for a strategic plan taking us forward. Space planning takes years, and for us to be ready for what follows the retirement of the International Space Station around 2020, we need to consider a path to the next human steps in space and, eventually, to Mars.

Having a mighty goal or a series of goals embedded in the strategy will serve to organize NASA’s work and congressional fiscal priorities, since there will always be defined programmatic objectives that need funding.

Planning this strategy should involve NASA, Defense, NOAA and the intelligence community. There should be input from the administration’s National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. This coordination is vital because decisions made by one agency can have a significant impact on investments by the aerospace industry, and may result in the loss of capabilities that other government agencies rely on. Recent decisions at NASA, for example, will result in loss and disruption of thousands of space jobs.

What might such a strategy look like? We believe it should set out long range goals for at least a generation so long term investments can be made. A strategy must address the industrial base, our current and future workforce and space’s role as critical infrastructure. And of course, the strategy must be backed with appropriate financial resources.

Despite the financial troubles that lapped at his feet, President Kennedy stepped up to the challenge and urged us forward, with a goal and a vision and a plan. This is what we need ‘ a roadmap for the future and milestones along the way. And this is what we require ‘ leadership on an issue that has helped define our nation and proclaims in clear terms that this is who we are as Americans.

Emphasis mine. It would be nice if a bold plan happened, and was implemented. Don’t hold your breath for this president to do that. It’s hard work. And as we all know, president’n is just too hard for this one.

OK, that stuff is clearly personal for me. This former NASA scientist has a few biases in that regard. So give me a little leeway on that. Your mileage may vary.

Oh brother, people are dumpster diving for Palin papers again:

Students at Cal State Stanislaus discovered evidence that documents related to an upcoming speaking engagement by Sarah Palin were shredded and dumped after the university claimed that no public documents existed, a state senator said on Tuesday.

The students appeared at a Sacramento news conference with state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, Tuesday morning and said they found the documents on Friday in a trash bin outside the university’s administration building in Turlock.

On Tuesday afternoon, Attorney General Jerry Brown said he was launching a “broad investigation” into the alleged dumping of documents and to examine finances of the CSU Stanislaus Foundation, which is hosting the June 25 event featuring the former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate.

“This is not about Sarah Palin,” Brown said in a statement. “She has every right to speak at a university event…. The issues are public disclosure and financial accountability in organizations embedded in state-run universities.”

The CSU Stanislaus Foundation is a private, nonprofit entity that raises money to supplement state funding to the campus and has offices in the university’s administration building.

Among the documents found by the students outside the building were five intact pages of a contract for a “speaker” who will be traveling from Anchorage. Although the speaker is not identified by name, Yee said it is clearly Palin’s contract despite the university’s denial last week that it had any documents related to Palin’s engagement.

“I never thought I would have to relive Watergate again, but to some extent this is our little Watergate in the state of California,” said Yee, who said it was a “dark day” for the CSU system and especially CSU Stanislaus.

OK, step away from the drugs. She’s only going around giving light, fluffy speeches. She’s not in government any more. And likely won’t be again. You’re not actually going to discover any secret plans of any import. Just leave it alone.

Man oh man, we’ve been having lots of earthquake and volcano activity lately. Is it me, or does it feel like the end is nye? You’ll all be sorry we can’t just leave the planet in a space ship… OK, enough on that old chestnut already. Anyway, another earthquake, in China this time:

BEIJING — A series of strong earthquakes killed hundreds of people in western China on Wednesday, badly damaging at least two schools, shattering homes and spreading fire through a remote town high on the Tibetan plateau.

The early morning quakes hit China’s Qinghai Province, an impoverished region 1,200 miles southwest of Beijing that is inhabited mainly by ethnic Tibetans. The province borders Sichuan, where a catastrophic earthquake in 2008 killed some 80,000 people.

“I heard dogs barking and the huge rumbling sound of houses collapsing,” said Li Hailong, a local finance official in Jiegu Town, a Qinghai settlement hit hard by today’s disaster. Houses made of earth and wood, he said, “collapsed the moment the earthquake struck.”

Authorities said at least 400 people had been killed and that many more remained buried in the rubble, including some 50 people entombed in a collapsed vocational school. Thousands are reported to have been injured. Chinese television newscasters said 20 people had been pulled from the school but only three of those victims survived.

China’s Earthquake Network Center put the magnitude of the strongest quake on Wednesday at 7.1, but the U.S. Geographical Survey estimated it at 6.9. Chinese authorities reported six quakes and aftershocks during a four-hour period that started with a relatively minor quake at 5:39 a.m. (5:39 p.m. on Tuesday in Washington). The most devastating tremors came at 7:49 a.m.

Here’s another article about earthquakes:

First Haiti, then Chile, and now Mexico. Why all of a sudden do there seem to be so many earthquakes?

Actually, there are no more earthquakes happening than usual; it’s just that these three quakes happened to strike areas where a lot of people live, so we heard about them.

According to Walter Mooney, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (he’s a physicist who studies earthquakes), most earthquakes occur in remote parts of the world. “There are 14 to 17 magnitude-7 earthquakes on Earth every year,” Mooney said. “Only a few are near population centers.”

A magnitude-7 quake is big enough to do a lot of damage. But how much damage an earthquake does depends on the buildings in the area. In many earthquake-prone regions, governments require especially strong construction standards so that buildings can withstand a lot of shaking. The earthquake in Mexico earlier this month, which was also felt in Southern California, was measured at 7.2, but it did relatively little damage because of strict building standards. In Haiti, though, where few structures were well built, the magnitude-7.3 quake in January destroyed huge parts of the capital city and killed more than 200,000 people.

What’s frustrating to scientists is that they have no way to tell where an earthquake will strike next; they can only make educated guesses. “As we go for longer and longer periods of time, then the probability slowly increases” that an earthquake will happen soon in a given region, Mooney said. “But the Earth is very complicated, and we are unable to do better than giving a probability.”

OK, that’s not so much news. But hey, I’m working on my taxes. Please chime in with news your finding. What’s happening in your neck of the woods.

Sunday News Roundup

Good morning Conflucians!!

It’s a lovely Sunday here in Tommy Jefferson’s neighborhood. Let’s see what’s brewing in the news.

A Harvard economist decided to try an experiment in education. He decided to simply bribe kids to do better and see how that worked. Turns out it worked really well and is a whole lot cheeper than most any other program to improve kids performance:

[A] Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects. He got death threats, but he carried on. The results, which he shared exclusively with TIME, represent the largest study of financial incentives in the classroom — and one of the more rigorous studies ever on anything in education policy.

The experiment ran in four cities: Chicago, Dallas, Washington and New York. Each city had its own unique model of incentives, to see which would work best. Some kids were paid for good test scores, others for not fighting with one another. The results are fascinating and surprising. They remind us that kids, like grownups, are not puppets. They don’t always respond the way we expect.

In the city where Fryer expected the most success, the experiment had no effect at all — “as zero as zero gets,” as he puts it. In two other cities, the results were promising but in totally different ways. In the last city, something remarkable happened. Kids who got paid all year under a very elegant scheme performed significantly better on their standardized reading tests at the end of the year. Statistically speaking, it was as if those kids had spent three extra months in school, compared with their peers who did not get paid.

“These are substantial effects, as large as many other interventions that people have thought to be successful,” says Brian Jacob, a University of Michigan public-policy and economics professor who has studied incentives and who reviewed Fryer’s study at TIME’s request. If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids’ performance as much as or more than many other reforms you’ve heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost.

The results began to trickle into the lab last summer. In New York City, the $1.5 million paid to 8,320 kids for good test scores did not work — at least not in any way that’s easy to measure. In Chicago, under a different model, the kids who earned money for grades attended class more often and got better grades, two major accomplishments. Those students did not, however, do better on their standardized tests at the end of the year.

In Washington, the kids did better on standardized reading tests. Getting paid on a routine basis for a series of small accomplishments, including attendance and behavior, seemed to lead to more learning for those kids. And in Dallas, the experiment produced the most dramatic gains of all. Paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted their reading-comprehension scores on standardized tests at the end of the year — and those kids seemed to continue to do better the next year, even after the rewards stopped.

The kids had much in common. In all four cities, a majority were African American or Hispanic and from low-income families. So why did the results vary so dramatically from city to city?

One clue came out of the interviews Fryer’s team conducted with students in New York City. The students were universally excited about the money, and they wanted to earn more. They just didn’t seem to know how. When researchers asked them how they could raise their scores, the kids mentioned test-taking strategies like reading the questions more carefully. But they didn’t talk about the substantive work that leads to learning. “No one said they were going to stay after class and talk to the teacher,” Fryer says. “Not one.”

The last bit is fascinating. First it works when the incentive is designed around more basic things like attendance and behavior vs. just about grades. And it works best when the incentive is just about reading books. Amazing. But what was most interesting was the last paragraph. When asked how they could raise their scores, kids came up with lots of ideas about strategy, but not one kid could conceive of working/studying harder.

Scientists developed an underwater robot powered entirely by the oceans thermal energy:

A team of researchers recently developed Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangrian Observer Thermal RECharging (SOLO-TREC), the world’s first underwater robotic vehicle powered entirely by thermal energy, a completely renewable resource. The robot is poised to revolutionize ocean monitoring: Because it is not limited by a depleting energy source, it can stay underwater for unprecedented amounts of time.

A team of researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the US Navy developed SOLO-TREC. The autonomous underwater robotic vehicle relies on a thermal recharging engine, which derives its power from the temperature differences found at varying ocean depths. The engine can produce about 1.7 watts of energy each dive, enough power to operate the robot’s science instruments, a GPS receiver, a communications device and a bouyancy control pump.

Robots used to be able to spend only a limited amount of time underwater because whatever power source they relied on would eventually run out. SOLO-TREC gets all its juice from the ocean water itself, meaning it can spend indefinite amounts of time beneath the waves. Based on SOLO-TREC’s technology, new underwater robots are sure to revolutionize ocean monitoring for climate and marine life studies, exploration and surveillance.

SOLO-TREC recently completed a three-month endurance test off the coast of Hawaii and is now on an extended mission. NASA and the US Navy say they plan to use thermal recharging engines in next-generation submersibles.

I for one welcome our new thermally powered underwater robot overlords.

A new hominid species found in South Africa called Australopithecus Sediba is dated to be a bit under 2 million years old. It’s an exciting find and sheds new light on our evolutionary path and changes a few things:

Two partial skeletons unearthed from a cave in South Africa belong to a previously unclassified species of hominid that is now shedding new light on the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens, researchers say. The newly documented species, called Australopithecus sediba, was an upright walker that shared many physical traits with the earliest known Homo species — and its introduction into the fossil record might answer some key questions about what it means to be human.

The fossils are between 1.95 and 1.78 million years old, and in this week’s issue of Science, the peer-reviewed journal published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society, two reports describe both the physical characteristics of this new Australopithecus species as well as the ancient environment in which it lived and died. The emerging picture is one of a hominid with a bone structure similar to the earliest Homo species, but who employed it more as an Australopithecus, like the famed “Lucy,” would have.

These new fossils, however, represent a hominid that appeared approximately one million years later than Lucy, and their features imply that the transition from earlier hominids to the Homo genus occurred in very slow stages, with various Homo-like species emerging first.

“It is not possible to establish the precise phylogenetic position of Australopithecus sediba in relation to various species assigned to early Homo,” wrote Lee Berger, a lead author of one of the Science reports. “We can conclude that… this new species shares more derived features with early Homo than any other known australopith species, and thus represents a candidate ancestor for the genus, or a sister group to a close ancestor that persisted for some time after the first appearance of Homo.”

Many scientists believe that the human genus Homo evolved from Australopithecus a little more than two million years ago — but the origin has been widely debated, with other experts proposing an evolution from the Kenyanthropus genus. This new Australopithecus sediba species might eventually clear up that debate, and help to reveal our direct human ancestors.

“Before this discovery, you could pretty much fit the entire record of fossils that are candidates for the origin of the genus Homo from this time period onto a small table. But, with the discovery of Australopithecus sediba and the wealth of fossils we’ve recovered — and are recovering — that has changed dramatically,” Berger said.

If you see the end coming, and you have a spare $10 million, you can make a really nifty doomsday shelter:

A doomsday bunker envisioned by California company Vivos can offer you, your family, and 4,000 other people the chance to escape the end of the world in a network of 20 underground shelters. Surely even the skeptics can’t resist the allure of scary music played over scenes of comfortable underground habitation, as NPR’s All Tech Considered reports.

The company claims to be a privately-funded venture with no religious affiliations, except perhaps to the gods of commerce. It certainly takes an agnostic view by listing all the possible reasons why you might want to pony up and help build those $10 million bunkers, including predictions by Nostradamus, the Mayans, the Hopi, and the Bible.

I don’t know, normally I think these things are crazy. But there’s something about going underground for a few years to see how things sort out.

Poland had a tragedy some describe as the biggest since the end of WWII:

Lech Kaczynski and many other leading Polish military, civic and cultural figures died when their plane crashed near the Russian city of Smolensk.

In west London, several hundred people filled the Polish Roman Catholic Church in Ealing to pay their respects.

Other services were being held in Edinburgh, east Belfast and Cardiff.

The Polish ambassador to the UK has described the crash as “the biggest tragedy for Poland since the end of WWII

Among the dead was Ryszard Kaczorowski, the country’s president in exile during the Communist years. He lived in London and was well known by many in the city’s Polish community.

Also killed was Monsignor Bronislaw Gostomski, a parish priest at St Andrew Bobola Roman Catholic Church in west London.

In central London, floral bouquets were laid outside the Polish Embassy in Portland Place – many of them with flowers in the red and white colours of the Polish flag.

At one of London’s largest Polish Roman Catholic churches, a series of services are taking place throughout the day.

The BBC’s Andy Moore said mourners were kneeling on the pavement outside the church, because so many people came to pay their respects.

A Polish newspaper in London has printed a special edition, featuring a picture of the late president alongside former president Ryszard Kaczorowski.

In Edinburgh, a special Polish Mass was held at the city’s St Mary’s Cathedral on Saturday.

Another dedicated service is being held at Belfast’s St Anthony’s Parish Church on Sunday morning. It follows a Saturday night vigil outside Belfast City Hall.

Fr Andrzej Kolaczkowski, who is taking Sunday’s service, said the tragedy was hard to come to terms with.

“The loss of one person has a huge effect,” he said.

“But the loss of 96 people who also played an important role in Polish politics and Polish social life is very, very daunting.”

It’s a very sad time for the entire country. Our hearts go out to them.

Hungary looks be moving to the right in upcoming elections:

The centre-right Fidesz party – narrowly beaten by the Socialists in the last election in 2006 – could take more than 60%, the latest poll said.

The far-right Jobbik party also looks set to capture seats in parliament for the first time.

Many Hungarian voters are thought to be driven by a sharp economic downturn.

The country has been badly hit by the global financial crisis, and has had to be bailed out with 20bn euros (£18bn) from the IMF, the World Bank and the EU.

The Socialist government of Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai has imposed a tough austerity programme to reclaim some of the money, but measures like tax rises and salary and pension cuts have made it very unpopular.

Sigh. That’s all people know to do: if things are really bad, shift to the other side, no matter what that is. It’s frustrating out there.

But not to fear, you can always have a haggis flavored chocolate:

The 43-year-old came up with the idea after creating chocolates inspired by chestnut and cranberry stuffing.

Her recipe includes a range of spices used in haggis, such as nutmeg, black pepper and oatmeal, but excludes the offal part of the dish.

The recipe for haggis varies but it can be made using a sheep’s stomach bag which holds a mix of sheep’s liver, heart and lung, oatmeal, suet, stock, onions and spices.

Ms Ellingham, founder of the Thinking Chocolate firm, said she “scoured around lots of different haggis recipes to find a lot of the common ingredients”.

It was embarrassing enough for VA to get a far right governor — thank you very much Obots (VA Dem Party) for not choosing the obvious only candidate who could have won, great move — but now he’s gone and really screwed things up with his confederate history month crap. And went even further and left out the slavery issue in his pronouncements. This VA native considers the confederates and the secession movement treason.The Post asked a few people about the topic:

Does Gov. Robert F. McDonnell truly believe that Virginians should be proud that, a century and a half ago, their state joined and participated in a violent effort to dissolve the Union? Secession was and is a form of treason.

McDonnell’s proclamation uses the familiar code words of the Confederacy’s defenders, describing the Civil War as “a war between the states for independence.” That wording contains within it the doctrines of state sovereignty and rebellion that have justified the Confederacy’s cause since the day the South Carolinians bombarded Fort Sumter. Either McDonnell is ignorant of what these words mean, understands them but is using them in a politically self-serving way, or actually believes them. All of these possibilities are disquieting.

Recent years have brought the resuscitation, mainly on the fringes of the political right, of defenses of secession and of its close political cousin, nullification. These writers rail against the government as an illegitimate or quasi-legitimate “regime,” which upholds an oppressive, vaguely defined establishment. Coming in this increasingly toxic political atmosphere, McDonnell’s proclamation is all the more disturbing, because it is fully in line with the politics of today’s extremist fire-eaters. As we have seen, associating himself with this fringe will not help his political image.

There are a few people asked, and mostly they give lame answers of oopsie, he made a little mistake, but he apologized. Yea, right. Read the article for the responses. I’d like to see a recall myself. But I’m not holding my breath. What an ass he his. Did I say, thanks a lot Obots. You own this guy, just like you own the gov of NJ, the new senator of Mass, and oh yea, that great light bringer himself.

And speaking of… Obama is to hold a bipartisan meeting on finance reform:

“Enacting financial reform has been a goal of President Obama’s since well before taking office, and he will discuss the choice he sees in this debate — whether to stand with the American people or stand on the side of the status quo,” the official said.

Obama has made passage of financial regulatory reform legislation a high priority after achieving his top domestic policy goal of overhauling the U.S. healthcare system.

“We believe momentum is on the side of real reform for the American people and consumers,” the official said, noting that the president had called during his State of the Union address for regular meetings with bipartisan members of Congress.

Obama proposed a series of changes to the rules that govern the financial industry in mid-2009. The House of Representatives approved most of them in December, but the Senate has yet to act, with many Republicans and lobbyists for banks and Wall Street fighting to block reforms.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, a Democrat, has said he hopes his bill on the matter will be debated on the Senate floor later this month.

Dodd says his bill ends the idea that some financial firms are ‘too big to fail,’ creates a strong consumer protection watchdog and addresses problems in the over-the-counter derivative markets, credit rating agencies and debt securitization, among other issues.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans would likely be able to find common ground with Democrats on the issue of ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions.

“On financial reform, to the extent that we can target it at ‘too big to fail,’ I think we can potentially get an agreement,” McConnell said, according to a spokesman.

OK, time to invest in one of those underground bunkers. Can’t afford one though. Maybe I’ll just dig a hole and stick my head in it.

And of course, in the obvious news of the day, seniors are continuing to work past retirement. Which means of course less jobs for the younger set:

Older workers have delayed retirement because of a drop in household wealth tied to the real estate and stock market falls of the past decade, according to the report released by Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers.

While employment for older workers remained low compared with the rest of the population, the over-65 group was the only one to increase its employment rate over the past decade, the report said.

“Given the size of the baby-boom generation, if the shift toward later retirement persists it will mean added pressure on the entry of younger workers on the labor force,” said Richard Curtin, director of the surveys, in a statement.

Employment among the youngest workers fell substantially from the start of 2008 to the end of 2009 for both men and women. It fell for those aged 18-19 by 8.8 percentage points for men and 9.6 percentage points for women. For those aged 20-24, employment fell by 11.5 percentage points for men and 4.3 percentage points for women.

“The data suggest an extended period of adolescence, a trend that may be encouraged by new parental health care coverage until age 26,” Curtin said.

The recently passed health care reform will extend the cutoff age for health care for children under their parents’ coverage to 26.

That may reduce pressure on young adults to find their own health insurance before age 26, the report said.

The U.S. unemployment rate is at 9.7 percent, still near its historic high.

That’s a bit of what’s happening. Chime in with any news you see and with what’s happening in your area. And whatever else is bugging you.

Sunday Morning News – Happy Easter!

Good morning Conflucians!! And Happy Easter!!

Today is the most important religious holiday to Christians. May they and everyone find peace and bliss in their lives. The picture above is not really about Easter, but Easter Island looks pretty cool.

On to some news. It looks like Justice Stevens will be retiring pretty soon:

Stevens, who turns 90 later this month, isn’t quite ready to say. “I can tell you that I love the job, and deciding whether to leave it is a very difficult decision,” he said in an interview. “But I want to make it in a way that’s best for the court.”

That would mean a decision sooner rather than later, in time for the nomination and confirmation process to be completed before a new term begins in October, he said. He acknowledged that he told a reporter early last month that he would decide in about 30 days, but he said with a laugh that he hoped “that wasn’t being treated as a statute of limitations.”

His departure will hand President Obama his second chance to leave a lasting mark on the nine-member Supreme Court. “I will surely do it while he’s still president,” Stevens said, who plans to leave either this year or next.

NYT has an article about it as well. Nothing definite, but it sounds very likely to be soon.

Post says Dems have been raising more money than GOP despite the polls:

Democrats in both chambers are enjoying the traditional advantages of majority-party status — and then some. They lead in donations by political action committees, by committees affiliated with the national political parties or with House and Senate leaders, and in individual contributions to incumbent lawmakers. In some instances, their lead exceeds what the Republicans had when that party controlled both chambers in the 2005-06 midterm election cycle.

To no surprise, analysts differ by party on the causes and significance of the disparity. Some Republicans say a donation surge may still come, particularly as the party courts new, small donors outside Washington. They also complain that donations to party stalwarts have been affected by internal squabbles with rebellious “tea partiers,” which they hope will end soon.

So not a surprise given the incumbent, large majority status. Then why is it news he asked knowing full well they’re all in it together. I’d guess the money isn’t coming from the lowly voting peasants out here given the polls. So it’s most likely their getting money from their corporate bosses. It will be interesting to see if the bosses turn on them even though they’ve done their bidding so nicely.

Pilots are now permitted to fly on antidepressant medication:

The Federal Aviation Administration will let some pilots who take four popular antidepressants return to the skies, saying Friday that it is easing its long-standing ban on psychiatric medications.

The old policy stemmed in part from concerns over possible side effects of psychiatric drugs, including sedation. But newer medications have fewer side effects, and pilots’ associations have pressured the agency to reconsider the ban.

FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said some pilots with depression likely weren’t being treated or were doing so in secret out of fear of losing their jobs. “We need to change the culture and remove the stigma associated with depression,” said Mr. Babbitt.

Starting Monday, the agency will consider granting waivers that will allow pilots to fly while taking Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa or Lexapro, as well as their generic equivalents.

Medical experts and mental-health organizations supported the move, noting that untreated depression itself has an impact on job performance. They cautioned that the FAA needed to monitor the changes and keep pilots’ confidentiality in mind.

On the one hand, drugs, that is, more drugs? On the other hand, depressed and pilot don’t sound like a good combination.

Apparently the census is a disorganized mess:

In their ambitious effort to count every citizen, U.S. Census Bureau officials formed 125 committees in the Chicago area, many composed of community organizers who saturated ethnic neighborhoods with volunteers to allay fears and encourage people to fill out their forms.

But some community activists say the effort was disorganized and that local census officials provided little support, leaving them to devise their own plans. Census officials complain that some community groups may have confused wary immigrants by asking them to sign pledge cards and, in some cases, asking sensitive questions about citizenship.

Those were some of the problems that came to light this week after census officials reported that Chicago had one of the lowest response rates in the country, despite a regional promotion campaign heralded as a national model.

The mail return rate in Chicago rose to 44 percent Friday, but it was still lower than the national rate of 56 percent.

Some of us have been quite enjoying basketball this season. But apparently the NCAA is going to ruin everything by some big changes for next year:

Beware the man who stares at perfection and proclaims, “I can improve this!” He most certainly can’t, and if you dare let him try, the only thing that’s certain is that he’ll end up ruining it.

And ruin, sadly enough, is the near-certain fate of what for a quarter-century has stood as one of the sports world’s last pillars of unspoiled perfection: the NCAA basketball tournament. As this year’s edition of March Madness climaxes in Indianapolis, it has become clear that the NCAA will junk the current tournament format and expand to a 96-team field starting next season.

A few days ago, the NCAA released a blueprint for its beefed-up bracket, laughably claiming that it was all theoretical and that no decisions had yet been made. Don’t be fooled. It was only the latest step in a tightly scripted rollout that began a year ago. Soon, the NCAA will sever its tournament contract with CBS and ratify the new postseason format. Then the bidding will begin.

And money, no matter what they claim, is what this is about. More than ever, television advertisers covet live events like the tournament, which still deliver the large, broad audiences that scripted sitcoms, dramas and movies-of-the-week delivered a generation ago. To accommodate 96 teams, 16 games– spaced out over two days — will be added to tournament. A few years ago, ESPN (which can blow the broadcast networks out of the water, thanks to cable subscriber fees) bid more than $1 billion to air one NFL game a week. Imagine what it’ll pay for 79 do-or-die basketball games.

Time will tell.

According to this report, after the oh so rough and tumble bitter battle over healthcare (president’n is hard), Obama is not inclined to have a battle over immigration or climate change. Of course not:

President Obama’s victory on healthcare gave him some much-needed political momentum. But he seems disinclined to ride that into another all-in battle this year on his keystone domestic agenda items of climate change and immigration.

Instead, the White House is planning to focus on narrower efforts to pump up the economy, rewrite financial regulation, amend campaign finance laws to limit corporate donations and impose new fees on banks to repay federal bailout funds.

The White House is careful to say that it remains strongly committed to overhauling immigration and limiting greenhouse gases. But so far, the Obama administration has shown little appetite to engage aggressively in crafting legislation and rounding up votes on Capitol Hill for what would probably be deeply partisan fights over those issues as congressional elections near.

Significantly, regardless of the specific issue, Obama so far is following the same playbook he used in the early phase of the healthcare fight: deferring to Congress and giving lawmakers wide latitude in writing legislation and plotting strategy.

“Our approach is to lay out the parameters and to challenge the Congress” to pass bills, said White House senior advisor David Axelrod, adding: “There’s this myth that if the president arrives on the steps of the Capitol with stone tablets, people will bow and vote accordingly. I think that’s a naive view of how laws are made.”

The prospect that the administration will not go all in this year on its signature initiatives alarms several Democratic interest groups. They say a firmer White House hand is needed for the bills to have any chance of passing before November’s midterm elections.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, which advocates for a new immigration system, said that with healthcare, “the mistake [the White House] made was to wait too long and leave Congress in charge of the process for too long. And quite frankly, they’re on the verge of making a similar mistake with immigration reform.”

Similarly, environmentalists want to see action in the Senate on the energy bill that would establish a controversial emissions cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases.

Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said the White House and Democratic congressional leadership “should not . . . move anything that shows gridlock or Democratic division.”

Silly liberals, Obama is for big corporations. And well, that all sounds like really hard work.

After getting Sarah Palin to campaign for him, John McCain now has a comfortable lead of 57-32 in his primary:

A new Research 2000 poll sponsored by Daily Kos, out Friday, showed McCain beating Hayworth easily, 52-37. Meanwhile, McCain ended the first quarter of 2010 with $4.5 million in the bank, after raising more than $2.2 million this year so far. Hayworth announced that he raised more than $1 million, but didn’t say exactly how much. (And one of his top advisors, Arizona public relations mogul Jason Rose, recently quit because Hayworth couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give him a paying contract to keep working on the campaign.)

McCain is taking the race deadly seriously, running all over Arizona in an effort not to let Hayworth carve out much space to his right. His campaign aides push back against the slightest provocation from Hayworth with overwhelming force. And of course, Sarah Palin — who he launched from Alaska to global superstardom in 2008 — came through to rally the faithful for him last weekend. True, the state’s Republicans are rabidly conservative, and some of them have never liked McCain; his push a few years ago for immigration reform hurt him among some segments of the GOP base. Hayworth has had some luck raising money from tea party groups outside Arizona who think McCain is an apostate.

Clearly Palin is still a superstar, and I’m sure that drives the Republican establishment that hates here and the Democratic establishment that keeps bipartisaning in their pants.

Grammy-nominated Deborah Henson-Conant is known as the 'Hip Harpist'

Hey, how come we don’t have these? Wales had a pop harp festival:

Wales is thought to have more harpists per head of population than any other country, so it’s a natural setting for an international harp festival.

From Sunday 4 April the Galeri arts centre is the venue for the second Wales International Harp Festival, with concerts and competitions, lectures and master classes.

It also incorporates the celebration of an important anniversary as John Parry, the blind musician who put Welsh harp music on the map, was born 300 years ago this year.

“He was born in Nefyn to a poor family, but had a great talent,” explained festival director Elinor Bennett.

“He came to the attention of Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn and went to London and mixed with the gentry, playing with people like the composer Handel. He published the first collection of Welsh harp music in 1742.”

To commemorate his contribution each competitor in the festival must play one of his works, as well as a piece by a modern Welsh composer.

“It’s nicer performing in front of the public and not just three judges. The performance element is always important, right from the beginning.”

But you don’t have to be an experienced harpist to take part. There will be a taster session for adult beginners.

Meinir Llwyd explained: “It seems that a lot of adults wanted to play as children, but didn’t get the chance, so now they’re retired they’ve decided to fulfil their dreams.”

Elinor Bennet now hopes the festival will be held every four years.

She said: “We’ve had a harp festival in the William Mathias Music Centre in Caernarfon since it opened in 1999, but we wanted to lift the profile of the harp not only in Wales, but on an international scale.

“That was the idea behind the festival in 2006 and it was so successful that we wanted to do it again.”

Shuttle Discovery is readying for launch on Monday. The Shuttle program is coming to a close:

Only three shuttle flights remain after this one. President Barack Obama will visit the Cape Canaveral area April 15 – while Discovery is in orbit – to elaborate on his post-shuttle plans. He created a furor in the aerospace community in February when he killed NASA’s Constellation program, which had been aimed at returning astronauts to the moon. That will mean even more lost jobs for Kennedy Space Center and NASA’s other hubs for human spaceflight operation.

Launch manager Mike Moses told reporters that even as the shuttle program winds down, the work force remains as loyal and dedicated to the job as ever.

“But I don’t want to take away from the fact that this is a very human space program, not just with the humans flying in the shuttle, but the folks building it and preparing it and getting ready to launch it,” he said.

As excitement builds toward Monday morning’s launch, “I don’t think there are too many people out there right now at their desks, worried that we’re about to end,” Moses said. “You ask that question on Tuesday, we might get a little different answer. But right now, I think spirits are very high and geared up toward that launch.”

Discovery will spend 13 days in orbit, on its next-to-last flight.

After that we’ll have to do much of our work via broken down Russian rockets. The symbolism is interesting.

What does the easter bunny have to do with Easter. Nothing, but…

Bunnies, eggs, Easter gifts and fluffy, yellow chicks in gardening hats all stem from pagan roots. They were incorporated into the celebration of Easter separately from the Christian tradition of honoring the day Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

According to University of Florida’s Center for Children’s Literature and Culture, the origin of the celebration — and the Easter bunny — can be traced back to 13th century, pre-Christian Germany, when people worshiped several gods and goddesses. The Teutonic deity Eostra was the goddess of spring and fertility, and feasts were held in her honor on the Vernal Equinox. Her symbol was the rabbit because of the animal’s high reproduction rate.

Spring also symbolized new life and rebirth; eggs were an ancient symbol of fertility. According to History.com, Easter eggs represent Jesus’ resurrection. However, this association came much later when Roman Catholicism became the dominant religion in Germany in the 15th century and merged with already ingrained pagan beliefs.

The first Easter bunny legend was documented in the 1500s. By 1680, the first story about a rabbit laying eggs and hiding them in a garden was published. These legends were brought to the United States in the 1700s when German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania Dutch country, according to the Center for Children’s Literature and Culture.

The tradition of making nests for the rabbit to lay its eggs in soon followed. Eventually, nests became decorated baskets and colorful eggs were swapped for candy, treats and other small gifts.

So in addition to technologically stripping us (with later photos on the internet to prove it) and poking and prodding us, it looks like the US is finally going to start officially profiling us as well:

The United States will announce Friday it plans to begin profiling U.S.-bound passengers in a major shake up of air travel security measures.

Under the new measures to begin this month, which will apply to U.S. citizens as well, the level of screening of travelers will depend on how closely their personal characteristics match against intelligence on potential terrorists.

The measures will replace mandatory enhanced screening of all passengers traveling to the United States from 14 mostly-Muslim nations, put into place following a failed Al-Qaeda attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day.

“It’s much more tailored to what intelligence is telling us and what the threat is telling us, as opposed to stopping all individuals from a particular nationality,” said an unnamed U.S. official quoted by The Washington Post.

Forbes has an article about how and why big corporations pay little or no taxes:

As you work on your taxes this month, here’s something to raise your hackles: Some of the world’s biggest, most profitable corporations enjoy a far lower tax rate than you do–that is, if they pay taxes at all.

The most egregious example is General Electric. Last year the conglomerate generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.

Avoiding taxes is nothing new for General Electric. In 2008 its effective tax rate was 5.3%; in 2007 it was 15%. The marginal U.S. corporate rate is 35%.

Read on for their logic of why.

That’s a bit of the news today. Chime in with what you’re hearing and reading, and what’s on your mind.

Wednesday Morning News

It’s hump day already. Let’s have a look at a bit of the news.

Though it’s hump day, you may not necessarily want to take that literally. Apparently Gonorrhea may become a superbug:

Catherine Ison, a specialist on gonorrhea from Britain’s Health Protection Agency said a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting in Manila next week would be vital to efforts to try to stop the bug repeatedly adapting to and overcoming drugs.

“This is a very clever bacteria. If this problem isn’t addressed, there is a real possibility that gonorrhea will become a very difficult infection to treat,” she said in a telephone interview.

Gonorrhea is a common bacterial sexually-transmitted infection and if left untreated can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility in women.

Globally, the WHO estimates that there are at least 340 million new cases of curable sexually transmitted infections — including syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis — every year among people aged 15 to 49.

Ison said the highest incidences of gonorrhea were in south and southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but as yet the WHO has no breakdown by individual infection type.

Yikes. But let’s continue to have abstinence only sex ed in some quarters because, you know, what could possibly go wrong.

The guy that came up with the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock, says we should dump democracy in order to save ourselves from a climate change catastrophe:

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

It follows a tumultuous few months in which public opinion on efforts to tackle climate change has been undermined by events such as the climate scientists’ emails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.

“I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change,” said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. “The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.”

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is “modern democracy”, he added. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

Lovelock, 90, believes the world’s best hope is to invest in adaptation measures, such as building sea defences around the cities that are most vulnerable to sea-level rises. He thinks only a catastrophic event would now persuade humanity to take the threat of climate change seriously enough, such as the collapse of a giant glacier in Antarctica, such as the Pine Island glacier, which would immediately push up sea level.

Um, what democracy? If there is a place where they actually count your votes for these election thingys, I’d like to know. He’s got a point about people not making changes very easily. But then I’d say having leaders, and by that of course I mean corporations, who’s own self interest precludes such things, whether you have a pretend democracy or a dictatorship, the results will be the same since the very same oligarchy would be in charge either way. A large disaster like he says is the only thing that will do it. I personally think it’s too late, so who cares. Go out and party like it’s 2012!

USDOT is bringing in NASA scientists to help with the Toyota acceleration investigation:

The US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration today said it was doing just by bringing in NASA engineers with expertise in areas such as computer controlled electronic systems, electromagnetic interference and software integrity to help tackle the issue of unintended vehicle acceleration in Toyotas.  The NHTSA review of the electronic throttle control systems in Toyotas is to be completed by late summer.

The DOT said engineers from the National Academy of Sciences – an independent body of scientific experts – will also look into the overarching subject of unintended acceleration and electronic vehicle controls across the entire automotive industry.

For NASA, the space agency’s engineers will focus on technology such as electromagnetic compatibility as part of a shorter-term review of the systems used in Toyota vehicles to determine whether they contain any possible flaws that would warrant a defect investigation, the DOT stated.

NASA’s expertise in electronics, hardware, software, hazard analysis and complex problem solving ensures this review will be comprehensive.  Currently there are nine experts from NASA assisting NHTSA, and additional personnel will join the team if needed, the DOT stated.

“We are determined to get to the bottom of unintended acceleration,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in a statement.  ”For the safety of the American driving public, we must do everything possible to understand what is happening. And that is why we are tapping the best minds around.”

It’s not unusual for NASA to get involved in such investigations.  Previous technology examinations involved electronic stability control and airbags.

And here we have it, it’s all the fault of magnets. I knew it wasn’t me. Apparently magnets can mess with your sense of morality according to a recent study:

Magnets can alter a person’s sense of morality, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it more difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have big implications for not only neuroscientists, but also for judges and juries.

“It’s one thing to ‘know’ that we’ll find morality in the brain,” said Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. “It’s another to ‘knock out’ that brain area and change people’s moral judgments.”

Of course that can only mean one thing. Soon in court cases around the country, we’ll be seeing… the “magnet defense.”

While we’re looking at Discovery, here’s a nice find. A written language has been discovered of ancient Scotland:

The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.

The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.

“We know that the Picts had a spoken language to complement the writing of the symbols, as Bede (a monk and historian who died in 735) writes that there are four languages in Britain in this time: British, Pictish, Scottish and English,” lead author Rob Lee told Discovery News.

Although Lee and his team have not yet deciphered the Pictish language, some of the symbols provide intriguing clues. One symbol looks like a dog’s head, for example, while others look like horses, trumpets, mirrors, combs, stags, weapons and crosses.

The later Pictish Stones also contain images, like Celtic knots, similar to those found in the Book of Kells and other early works from nearby regions. These more decorative looking images frame what Lee and his team believe is the written Pictish language.

“It is unclear at the moment whether the imagery, such as the knots, form any part of the communication,” Lee said. He believes the stones also contain semasiographic symbols, such as a picture of riders and horn blowers next to hunting dogs on what is called the Hilton of Cadboll stone. Yet another stone shows what appears to be a battle scene.

Drill baby drill!! Obama’s going to push for more drilling for oil in Alaska among other places:

President Barack Obama today will announce a compromise to broadly open new areas off the U.S. coast to oil and natural gas drilling while protecting specific swaths, including Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

The plan, to be announced at a late morning energy security event at Andrews Air Force Base may help Obama court bipartisan support for contentious climate change legislation but also could chafe environmental activists in states affected by expanded drilling.

A White House aide describing the details ahead of the announcement said that an upcoming Interior Department lease sale 50 miles off the Virginia coast would mark the first new offshore oil and gas sale in the Atlantic in more than two decades.

Drilling off the coast from the mid-Atlantic to the Southeast could be broadly expanded, pending further study. Drilling off the Florida coast would be subject to a minimum 125 mile distance. A previously scheduled lease sale in Alaska‚s Cook Inlet could go ahead, but Bristol Bay and pending lease sales in the Chuckchi and Beaufort Seas, in North Alaska, will be canceled. No West Coast exploration is being announced.

“To set America on a path to energy independence, the President believes we must leverage our diverse domestic resources by pursuing a comprehensive energy strategy,” said the aide who was not authorized to speak on the record ahead of the president’s announcement.

Bill Clinton to co-chair committee overseeing funds to Haiti:

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton will co-chair a committee overseeing at least $3.8 billion in post-quake aid to Haiti, the ravaged country’s prime minister said.

The announcement was made ahead of a critical donors conference Wednesday at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Haitian officials will ask representatives from more than 130 countries for reconstruction help at the meeting chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former president’s wife, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

A senior U.S. official said the Obama administration would pledge $1.15 billion over the next two years to rebuilding Haiti. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Hillary Clinton would announce the pledge at the conference later Wednesday.

Some serious rumbling is happening in the gene business world after a ruling throwing out a gene patent:

Many biotechnology stocks fell on Tuesday as investors struggled to understand the impact of a ruling that threw out parts of two gene patents and called into question thousands more.

Stock market losses were muted, with two major indexes that track the shares of the industry falling by less than 1 percent each. In part, that was because biotechnology executives hastened to reassure their investors that the ruling would not necessarily undermine their businesses, at least in the short run.

But the executives themselves were struggling on Tuesday to figure out what the long-term impact would be. Biotech companies spend billions every year trying to develop new tests and treatments based partly on genes they have isolated and patented.

Those are a few things rattling around in the news today. Chime in with anything you’re finding to day. Or just whatever is on your mind.

Sunday News and Other Fumbles

Image used by permission. Copyright 2010 by Indigogrrl, all rights reserved.

Good morning Conflucians! It’s cold in Virginia and there’s a lot of snow on the ground. The weather had been teasing us into thinking it was spring already with flowers and trees budding. And now this. Thanks to Indigogrrl for the use of her barn again. Just spectacular. Below is some of the weeks news plus a few new bits here and there. Please chime in with any news you’re seeing.

On with a bit of random News

The tragedy in Haiti continues. There are some recent issues with the airlift efforts:

A senior US medic told the BBC that scores of patients could die if they did not get treatment in the US soon.

The US military stopped the flights to Florida on Wednesday.

A White House spokesman told the BBC the move was due to “logistical issues”, not over medical costs as had been reported earlier.

JD Salinger dies:

J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.

Catcher in the Rye had a big impact on me as a kid. He had me with the first line in the book:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

In a hopeful bit of news, a step towards making fusion based energy looks brighter with a laser based test.

The controlled fusion of atoms – creating conditions like those in our Sun – has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.

However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion.

An article in Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected.

The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams.

…

In the approach Nif takes, called inertial confinement fusion, the target is a centimetre-scale cylinder of gold called a hohlraum.

…

Crucially, the recent experiments provided proof that the plasma did not reduce the hohlraum’s ability to absorb the incident laser light; it absorbed about 95%.

But more than that, Dr Glenzer’s team discovered that the plasma can actually be carefully manipulated to increase the uniformity of the compression.

“For the first time ever in the 50-year journey of laser fusion, these laser-plasma interactions have been shown to be less of a problem than predicted, not more,” said Mike Dunne, director of the UK’s Central Laser Facility and leader of the European laser fusion effort known as HiPER.

Adding momentum to the ignition quest, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced on Wednesday that, since the Science results were first obtained, the pulse energy record had been smashed again.

They now report an energy of one megajoule on target – 50% higher than the amount reported in Science.

In related news, there is another line of work using levitating magnets for clean energy, also based on fusion:

A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion — the process that generates the sun’s prodigious output of energy.

U.S. citizen to be put on CIA hit list

No U.S. citizen has ever been on the CIA’s target list, which mainly names Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, according to current and former U.S. officials. But that is expected to change as CIA analysts compile a case against a Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico but now resides in Yemen.

China threatens sanctions against us for Taiwan arms sales.

According to Henry Paulson, apparently Russia was being very naughty

Russia urged China to dump its Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 in a bid to force a bailout of the largest U.S. mortgage-finance companies, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said.

Paulson learned of the “disruptive scheme” while attending the Beijing Summer Olympics, according to his memoir, “On The Brink.”

Also in the news, the president speech-ified and gave the SOTU and then talked to some Republicans. Consistent with his well documented track record to date, he said some words that signified nothing. But some people peed their pants, witnessed the rapture, and were taken up to heaven. Or so it seems from reading the Obot blogs. And we learned after the speech that Chris Matthews is a full blown racist. Though funnily enough MSNBC didn’t care. Perhaps the tingle was back, going up his leg, and who knows where, and that’s what made him forget the thing Chris is most obsessed about. To me this was all a big fumble. But then I didn’t expect any better.

And just when you thought it was safe out there, apparently police are now using prayer to fight crime. I keep calling for Scotty to beam me up, but nothing happens.

There are a pile of news shows today. They are on way too early to start drinking, so I’ll have to miss them. Don’t even try to watch those sober people.

eBook News

We discussed the new iPad this week. A fascinating outcome is that apparently eBook wars have begun now with Amazon launching the first salvo by deleting Macmillan books from their store.

The problem publishers have with Amazon is two-fold: Amazon’s overwhelming marketshare in ebooks (because that leads to more control for Amazon, and less for them) and the establishment of $9.99 as the price of a book, which publishers feel cheapens the value of books. (Hardcover bestsellers go for up to $30, after all.)

Sounds like the usual large market share owner, i.e., near monopoly, not liking new competition coming in. Amazon is trying to flex their muscles. Come on guys, play nice.

And while we’re talking about eBooks, just a reminder that there over 100,000 free books available online. Mostly books past their copyright term, but some newer books that have been offered for free. Among many free libraries available, a favorite of mine is Project Gutenberg. Reading is fundamental.

Sports News

Serena Williams wins the Australian Open. And what’s amazing about it is that she catches Billy Jean King with now 12 grand slam titles. Congrats Serena!

As we saw last week amid all the fumbles and interceptions with such a painfully close game between the Vikings and the Saints, football is closing up shop for the season soon. Next week will be the Superbowl between the Indiana Colts and the New Orleans Saints. The Saints have never been and it would certainly be a great thing for them to win. But alas the Colts are the favorites. Perhaps it’s just an excuse to have an indoor picnic. Place your bets soon.

The winter olympics will be starting in two weeks. Thanks to SoD for this link to a nice gallery of the top 15 winter olympic moments. Opening ceremony will be February 12th. Here’s the Vancouver schedule and the NBC schedule.

Other News

Grammys are tonight. Taylor Swift is favored to win big. Maybe Jay Leno will interrupt her speech and take her spot this time.

Apparently aliens may  no longer be able to hear us. Yes, you heard that right. Because we’re all moving to digital and mostly wired communications (cable, DSL, etc.), we just not broadcasting over the air like we used to.

At a special meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti), the US astronomer Frank Drake – who has been seeking radio signals from alien civilisations for almost 50 years – told scientists that earthlings were making it less likely they would be heard in space.

Stupid earthlings.

Tell us what’s newsy in your neck of the woods.