[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- The Bad, The Worst And The Ugliest (Hullabaloo – Digby)
- Usually, the first estimates in any crises are too low. That is true here. 1000 barrels a day is now 5000, and some estimates of spillage are trending higher. No one knows exactly. The containment and boom mechanism is subject to weather cooperation as we can see this weekend. Soon we are entering the hurricane season. The thoughts of a storm stirring up the Gulf, hampering any cleanup or remediation drilling effort and creating a huge 10,000 square mile black stew is frightening to every professional in the business.
This will be a financial calamity for many firms, not just BP and its partners and service providers. Their liabilities are immense and must not be underestimated. The first estimate of $12.5 billion is only a starter.
Thousands of small and independent businesses as well as larger public companies in tourism are hurt here. This is not just about the source of half the nation’s shrimp. That is already a casualty. It’s also about the bank loans for the $200,000 shrimp boat and the house the boat owner and/or his employees live in and the fact that this shock piles on a fragile financial system that is trying to recover from a three-year financial crisis.
- Court Reporter » Blog Archive » 50 Open Courses to Become a Real Life CSI
- You’ve seen the TV shows, and now you’re interested in fighting crime as a crime scene investigator. You’ll need a solid education with a background in crime, DNA, science, and more to make this dream a reality. Take a look at these open courses to get started in your CSI education.
[Possibly also useful to fiction writers. --L.]
- Solving The Wrong Problem (Hullabaloo – Digby)
- Note: click through to the McClatchy article to see a video of a truly decent man talking about illegal immigration. He's what I would call an old-school American straight arrow. There are more of them than we think. They just don't prance around in costumes screaming about birth certificates and pretending to be patriots.
- Alien Rule (Hullabaloo – Digby)
- The good news is that all this "discomfort" has nothing to do with race or ideology. It's just that Obama <s>-</s> and presumably all of us from foreign places like San Francisco, Chicago, New York <s>-</s> are foreign occupiers. That certainly clarifies things for me.
I appreciate the president's call to listen to one another, I really do. But for some reason, I just have a sneaking suspicion that people who consider the current Democratic majority and African American president to be a foreign occupation might not speak the same language.
- Losing Ground (Hullabaloo – Digby)
- Charles Blow's column in today's NY Times shows that the war against a woman's right to own her own body is taking its toll. We are losing this debate.
[Warning: This short blog post starts grim, strays into tearjerker territory, and comes back through Oh My God All Fundie Politicians Should Die In A Fire territory. --L.]
- New York Times Loses More Mindshare This Morning
- If you wanted to find a stupider example to try to support the claim that "differences in policy really do not matter very much" than comparing American Indians in South Dakota and Asian-Americans in New Jersey, I suppose you probably could.
But it would take a really long time to find one, and you would have to work really hard to do so.
- Recommended reading for May 4, 2010
- meowser: BADD 2010: The Total Erasure of Partial Disability
In order to “make it” at anything I thought was worth doing, you had to be willing to do some serious OT, put in the extra time, go the extra mile, get that extra degree while still working full-time, put your nose to the grindstone. In other words, prove you weren’t just some lazy slacker who didn’t want to work. And I knew I…just couldn’t. And I felt terrible about that, especially when I got into my 30s and realized that all those overworked, underpaid copy editors (and other people who had done the nose-to-the-grindstone thing) now had real careers making real money, and I was still stuck at the McJob level.Latoya: Open Thread: Science, Conclusions, and Assumptions
[O]ne of the most common requests for content on Racialicious tends to come from people who work in public health. One issue in particular they have asked me to spotlight is the issue of clinical trials. For many years, the assumption was that the effects of medical conditions and medicine side effects would be similar on everyone, even though the only people involved in clinical trials were white males.
- Today's Action Alert
- Lilith magazine is holding an online auction. You can help an old and important feminist magazine by bidding often and high!
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