On 20 April, pressure built up in the well 1,500 metres beneath the Deepwater Horizon, an exploratory oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The pressure catapulted up the pipeline, overcoming the concrete keeping it in place, as well as the blowout preventer designed to stop exactly this type of occurrence.

The gas exploded as it hit the rig sending it to the ocean floor and taking the lives of 11 of its 126 crew. The immense pressure in the rupture is propelling some 5,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil up into the ocean every day.

No-one knows what went wrong. Whether it was direct negligence on the part of the various operators, or whether something unforeseen happened that we can learn from … for next time. Full story »

President Barack Obama yesterday took a shot at America’s culture of noise and the media and entertainment technologies that foster it. In addressing the commencement exercises at Hampton University, Obama said:

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

He bemoaned the fact that “some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction,” in the clamor of certain blogs and talk radio outlets. Full story »

“A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step,” my horoscope said. I’ll literally be taking a journey of a thousand-plus miles when I get to China in another week, but I got the sense that this meant something less literal and more metaphoric.

And so, quite by surprise, I found myself inexplicably drawn to the place where my current journey began. I’d been driving to Virginia for battlefield duty when I felt a sudden urge to go see my brother outside of Gettysburg—but as I got closer, I was struck by an even more powerful urge to take an even wider detour.

The sign along U.S. Rt. 322 calls Hershey, Pennsylvania, “The sweetest place on earth.” I call it the place where I grew up. Full story »

I can’t believe I am so self-centered that I would post something all about me on Mother’s Day. Talk about a selfish baby boomer! It’s much better to talk about me in the context of my mom. She would understand, since I was, for a short while, the favorite. If you’re not your mom’s favorite, I’m sorry, because I was and it was great! But to better understand why my mom loved me best of all, you only need to contemplate her options.

My older brother Glenn, the first born son, arrived 14 months before I did. He was small, sullen, and he liked to break things. I was large, stupid, and the owner of most of the broken things just mentioned. We weighed the same from the time I was 2. For me, Darwin’s Theory was survival of the fattest. My older brother loathed me from birth, so the only way to protect myself was by eating a lot and eating often. The fact that he couldn’t easily intimidate me unbalanced him. As we grew older, I passed him in height and weight. Only in raw hostility was he the master, so when we broke into open conflict, he almost always won. The only way I could assert any authority at all was by stating, after every battle between us, that I let him win. This would, inevitably, bring on another thrashing. It was worth it. Full story »

We haven’t had any good musical arguments in a while, so what better way to get some going than guitar solos? Guitar solos are one of the wonders of the universe. As many people (mostly male, it has to be said) understand, they’re emotional, visceral channels to the space where you think, if that’s the word, Jeez, where did that come from? You can do things with electric guitars that you can’t do with any other instrument. And, as classical guitarist John Williams once pointed out, music composed for other instruments just sounds different when played on a guitar anyway. Twentieth century music is distinguished, in part, by the re-emergence of improvisation as an important component of music making, in all sorts of musical genres, and the electric guitar was one of the revolutionary technologies that furthered, and indeed accelerated, this process. And while the electric guitar is inexorably bound up with the history of rock and roll, it’s had a much broader musical influence. Thank you, Les Paul!
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Monday is the 149^th day of the school year, leaving me with 31 days of work before the long, cold night of unemployment settles in. My wife and I spent much of last month looking at other possible teaching destinations. We’d whittled our list down to two, one in Mississippi and the other in Wyoming. Then the tornado came, and the list went to one. Go cowboys. I’m happy about the prospect of living on Wyoming. Really, I am. Stop laughing. It’s a great state.

But tonight, I’m struggling again. What I need is inspiration. I have to find someone who has overcome hardship on a grand scale, who has, through his own effort, fought back through adversity and risen, yeah, risen brother, to new heights. Someone who has been so far down that he would have to stretch his neck to see the bottom magma chambers in an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano. Someone like…someone like…

Dan Uggla. Amen. Full story »

Well, this has gotten a lot more interesting than anyone would have predicted. At the moment, the facts are as follows:

(1) There are still 30-something seats that are undecided, most going through recounts at the moment;

(2) even once all those are decided, no single party will be able to form a parliamentary majority;

(3) at the moment, the Conservatives have 291 seats, Labour 251, the Lib Dems 52, and various small parties 27 (and this will probably change shortly); Full story »

Hey, I’m not making this stuff up.

We have met Neanderthals, and they are us – or about 1 to 4 percent of each of us.

That is one implication of a four-year effort to sequence the Neanderthal genome – essentially setting out in order some 3 billion combinations of four key molecules that together represent the Neanderthals’ genetic blueprint. (Full story…)

Interesting. So, if some folks have more Neanderthal slouching around their genome than others, who might these four percenters be? I have theories. Full story »

So the results are starting to come in, and thus far, sixteen areas have reported; Labour has won seven, the Tories two, Lib Dems one, and other parties (mostly in Scotland and Northern Ireland) six. Granted, these are all in the northeast, traditionally a strong Labour supporter area, so this isn’t a huge surprise. But the pundits are making something, or trying to anyway, of the fact that there has been a definite swing from Labour to the Tories in some of these areas. Of course, this is the general trend anyway, which is why the Tories are supposed to win more seats than Labour or the Lib Dems according to exit polls. But not enough to actually gain a majority.

At this point it’s all blather anyway. The major commentators are just making stuff up now—Jeremy Paxman just seriously asked someone “Who won the election tonight?” Really, we’ve got sixteen constituencies in, out of 560 or so ultimately to report.
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This should come as no surprise, but The New York Times breathlessly informed us yesterday that US farmers are starting to have a hard time coping with Roundup-resistant weeds. That’s right. Straight from the heart of the country where people don’t want to see evolution taught, farmers are getting a real-life lesson in evolutionary theory. I bet no one, absolutely no one, saw this one coming. Full story »

more at www.LeeCamp.net

WARNING: Something Not Safe For Work after the jump.

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A few days ago FCC Chair Julius Genachowski suggested that the administration was seriously considering abandoning the president’s uncompromising pledge to enforce net neutrality. Some suggested at the time that the comments had the vague odor of trial balloon about them. If so, the president found out, quickly and unequivocally, what folks thought. Some reasoned, some entreated, while others of us nard-stomped for all we were worth.

If, in fact, Obama was using Genachowski to test the waters, the conclusion had to be that it’s full of alligators. So today, it looks like the administration might complete the 360:

FCC to Overhaul Regulation of Internet Lines Full story »

“Follow the money – it’s all about the research grants.”

This and similar accusations are commonly made against anyone who advocates on behalf science-based climate policies at all levels, all they way from national academies of science down through professional scientific societies, universities, research groups, and even down to individual scientists. S&R decided to follow the money to see who profits the most from climate disruption, the fossil fuel-related industries or the global climate science community. Note: Many of the numbers below are so large that there’s not a common style convention for writing them. For this post, trillions of dollars will be indicated like this: $1464 billion.

Fossil fuel-related industries are more than just the organizations that extract the crude oil, coal, and natural gas from the ground. There’s also the groups that transport the fuels via ship, train, and pipeline. Then there are the refiners who turn the crude oil or natural gas into unleaded, diesel, plastic, and fertilizer feedstock. And there’s the utilities that keep the lights on by burning natural gas and coal. All of these industries make a great deal of money because carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are not priced or regulated, and they all risk losing a great deal of money should that change. Full story »

The legendary Ernie Harwell, perhaps the greatest baseball announcer who ever lived, is dead at 92.

Perhaps nothing ever written better encapsulates the sacred place of the national pastime in American life better than his 1995 essay, “A Game for All America,” in which he notes:

Baseball? It’s just a game — as simple as a ball and a bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It’s a sport, business — and sometimes even religion.

Baseball is Tradition in flannel knickerbockers. And Chagrin in being picked off base. It is Dignity in the blue serge of an umpire running the game by rule of thumb. It is Humor, holding its sides when an errant puppy eludes two groundskeepers and the fastest outfielder. And Pathos, dragging itself off the field after being knocked from the box.

Thanks, Ernie. You’ll be missed.

Looking gift horsemen in the mouth.

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Many of us hoped for more from the Nuclear Posture Review (of government policy on nuclear weapons) — such as that it stand up like a man instead of continue to work from the crouch. Still, as with the new START treaty, it may not be transformational, but it is transitional. As Jeffrey Lewis, these days one of the media’s automatic go-to guys (and deservedly) when it comes to nuclear weapons, writes about the details, “none of that will matter a year from now. I suspect we will look back at this period — the release of the Nuclear Posture Review, the signing of the Prague Treaty, the Nuclear Security Summit and the NPT Review conference — and say that this was a pivot point, the moment when we began talking about nuclear weapons on terms that are different from those of the Cold War.”

But just because we’re talking about nukes in terms different from those of the Cold War doesn’t mean that there aren’t many of us who aren’t on good terms with the new NPR. Let’s begin by reviewing one of the circumstances that helped pave the way for President Obama to negotiate the new START, revise the NPR, and arouse hopes for an international security meeting this month and the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference that has just begun. Full story »

We love The Agonist. And we love poetry. So it’s only natural that we’d love The Agonist’s “A Poem for Tuesday” feature.

Today Bruce Jacobs has some thoughts on one of my favorite poems ever, Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” By all means, click over there and have a look.

Y’all remember my good friend Sen. David Vitter, he of the errant penis. You remember the Louisiana senator who described himself as “a conservative who opposes radically redefining marriage, the most important social institution in human history.” And you’ll remember that “his phone number was among those on a list of client numbers kept by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called D.C. Madam, who is accused of running a prostitution ring in Washington,” sayeth The New York Times.

But what you may not remember is I twice encouraged S&R readers (here and here) to forget Vitter’s penis and follow his money. As I wrote two years ago, “Sen. Vitter’s ‘serious sin’ has nothing to do with sex. It’s the sin far too many senators and members of Congress seem to commit with corporate abandon: ‘Give me money to get elected and I’ll make sure you go to the head of the line for federal cash.’”

Vitter is a fixer. He gets campaign contributions, particularly from Louisiana construction and defense contractors, and, lo and behold, those donors get money from the feds.

Now he’s back in the hot water, this time over donations from … a dry cleaning firm?
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There’s been an interesting upsurge in decidedly old-fashioned chorale-style music of late. Perhaps we should have seen it coming a few years ago with the emergence of the upbeat, multi-layered harmonies of The Polyphonic Spree, but now the trend is upon us in full throat, if you will. A capella is big enough that it spawned a TV show, The Sing-Off, won by the outstanding Puerto Rican ensemble Nota. The involvement of Ben Folds added instant credibility to the tournament, although perhaps not enough to fully overcome the incoherent involvement of Nicole Scherzinger (who’s dumb as fried dirt and carries a tune about as elegantly as a free bleeder carries a rabid tomcat). Full story »

During the campaign then-candidate Barack Obama kept reminding us that “politics is the art of the possible.” We were encouraged to understand “possible” in the same context as “Hope^®” and “Change We Can Believe In™.” That is, the Obama presidency was to usher in a new age where the old business as usual politics of the Beltway wouldn’t be tolerated. “Yes We Can^©,” he insisted, summoning the disaffected masses into an arena of engagement where the entrenched forces of corporatism and corruption could be, would be, overthrown.

That was the promise. That was the dream.

The reality of the Obama administration has been a smidge less kumbayah than many might have hoped, though. The health care “debate” was as nasty and dishonest as anything the Republic has seen since … well, honestly I can’t quite think what the applicable touchpoint might be here. Civil rights? The Summer of 1968? The entirety of the Reagan years? Blowjobgate? Heck, I don’t know. Suffice it to say that from one end of the process to the other, if a government or corporate official’s lips were moving, somebody was being played. Full story »