Joni:
Scotch and soda
Manhattan Transfer:
Happy Hour: Hank Mobley – Uh-Huh
http://youtu.be/Yj1NxbwBnrA
Hard times ahead
I do fear for our future — not the least because of the kind of batshit crazy wingnuts who, seeing themselves as Marvel superheroes, are itching for a civil war. Here’s an ad from a Tea Party newsletter:
Knowledge economy
I was in the supermarket yesterday, waiting in line to pay. A haggard-looking man asked me if I knew what was in a string bean casserole.
“Sure,” I said, and told him: string beans, cream of mushroom soup, and french-fried onion rings. (My sister used to insist I make this for every family gathering.)
Thanks, he said, and went off to find the ingredients.
He returned with a customer service rep: “Are the onions in the freezer section?”
No, they come in a can, I said. He went off to look again. When they finally found them, he returned to the back of the line. “How long do I cook these?” he wanted to know.
“Do you have a computer?”
Yes, he said.
“You can find all that online.”
“Okay, thanks. It’s my turn to cook for the guys in work, and one of them really wants this string bean casserole. I never made it before,” he said. He was wearing a Parking Authority shirt. Do they work in shifts, like a firehouse? I guess I’ll never know.
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
R.I.P. Terry Greenwood
With the death of Terry Greenwood, farmer and anti-fracking activist, from a rare form of cancer, calls for mandated health research are rising:
Last month, Terry Greenwood, a Pennsylvania farmer whose water had been contaminated by fracking waste, died of cancer. He was 66 and the cause of death was a rare form of brain cancer.
His death drew attention from around the globe in part because Mr. Greenwood was among the first farmers from his state to speak out against the gas industry during the early years of the state’s shale gas rush.
Mr. Greenwood went up against a company called Dominion Energy, which had drilled and fracked a shallow well on his small cattle ranch property under a lease signed by a prior owner in 1921.
In January, 2008, Mr. Greenwood had reported to state officials that his water supplies had turned brown and the water tasted salty. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection subsequently found that the company, whose gas well was drilled 400 feet from the Greenwoods’ water well in 2007, had impacted the Greenwoods’ water. State officials ordered Dominion to temporarily supply the family with drinking water.
Mr. Greenwood’s death was mourned by environmentalists around the world. In London, for example, attendees at a fracking education event recorded video messages for the Greenwood family and raised over $500 for Terry’s survivors.
“Terry Greenwood was one of the most compelling people you could ever listen to,” wrote filmmaker Josh Fox. “There was just something about the way he spoke, there was a decency and a positivity that shone through every word no matter how distressing or disturbing the subject matter was.”
But the story of Mr. Greenwood’s fight against the drilling industry and lax oversight by state regulators does not stop there.
Continue reading “R.I.P. Terry Greenwood”
Why is this not a big frickin’ deal?
They just asked for an apology? WTF? Still think the CIA wasn’t behind our political assassinations?
WASHINGTON — An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.
The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information, according to a summary of findings made public on Thursday. One official with knowledge of the report’s conclusions said the investigation also discovered that the officers created a false online identity to gain access on more than one occasion to computers used by the committee staff.
The inspector general’s account of how the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities touched off angry criticism from members of the Senate and amounted to vindication for Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s Democratic chairwoman, who excoriated the C.I.A. in March when the agency’s monitoring of committee investigators became public.
H/t Thomas Soldan.
That cat’s been hanging off the roof for two years now
Remember my joke about “the cat’s on the roof”? TEPCO and the Japanese government was so obviously lying, I couldn’t believe how I was attacked by readers over at the other site for “fearmongering”:
The meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s third reactor building was even worse than initially believed, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has announced.
In fact, the power company’s new appraisal of the Fukushima No. 3 reactor building shows that all – or nearly all – of the fuel rods contained inside were melted, dropping onto the floor of the containment vessel. If true, the news means the power plant could be even tougher to decommission.
According to the Japan Times, TEPCO first estimated back in November of 2011 that roughly 63 percent of the reactor’s fuel rods had melted.
But TEPCO now believes that after studying conditions surrounding the fuel core, the reactor’s cooling system stopped functioning more than five hours earlier than previously estimated. As a result, the meltdown would have started around that same time period.
As reported by the Yomiuri Shimbun, it is possible that with more nuclear fuel resting in the containment vessel than originally estimated, removing it will require even more careful planning.
“As the core meltdown is now believed to have started earlier than was previously thought, the amount of melted nuclear fuel that passed into the containment vessel through the pressure vessel is considered to have been greater, making it technically more difficult to extract the melted fuel and dispose of it,” the newspaper stated.
Despite the new findings, however, TEPCO spokesman Shinichi Kawamura said the company is still hoping to find some fuel that had not melted down.
“We think some fuel still remains at the core part based on the actual plant data,” he said, as quoted by the Japan Times.
Damned Commie!
Pope Frank is really taking this religion thing seriously:
Long a champion of the poor and vulnerable, Pope Francis went one step further during the Sunday Angelus message at the Vatican when he told his followers that, “Jesus teaches us to put the needs of the poor ahead of our own,” according to the National Catholic Register. “Our needs, even if legitimate, will never be so urgent as those of the poor, who lack the necessities of life,” he added.
Pope Francis denounced unnecessary luxuries early on in his career, choosing to drive a humble Ford Focus rather than a more opulent car, living in the Vatican guesthouse rather than the Apostolic Palace, and famously declaring, “Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.”
The rest of the Angelus focused on the parable of Jesus feeding the multitudes with loaves and fishes. “Compassion, sharing, Eucharist: This is the path Jesus indicates for us in this Gospel,” he said, according to Today’s Catholic News. “It is a path that leads us to face the needs of this world with brotherhood, but one that leads us beyond this world because it starts with God the father and returns to him.”