Archives for category: news

CNN says Dennis Blair is resigning; BBC says he is being “replace(d).” Interesting disconnect in terminology there! I also think it’s interesting that, among the BBC’s laundry list of recent spy snafus, they didn’t include this doozy.

Meanwhile in intelligence failures,

(BP) spokesman Mark Proegler said Thursday that the siphon is now drawing about 5,000 barrels a day up to a ship on the surface. That’s as much as government and company officials had estimated the spill was pouring into the Gulf every day for a month. Proegler declined to estimate how much more oil was escaping.

…yeah, I bet he did. I’ve been pretty disgusted with the government’s complacency in regards to BP’s stranglehold on information. I understand that a lot of that complacency was built into the system— this  is, after all, the same regulatory regime that capped potential monetary damages, ostensibly to ensure “Mom and Pop,” smaller oil company firms could still compete in the offshore environment. Any system stupid enough to have ever bought that logic probably has a lot of stupid built into its peripheries.

But seriously— CBS had Coast Guard officials blocking camera crews from filming polluted beaches, with the officials insisting “(these are) BP’s rules, (they’re) not ours.” Whose damn Coast are you Guarding? The insinuation clearly seems to be its not “ours” either.

That’s what I thought to myself when I saw the headline “Fungus hits Afghan opium poppies” on the BBC News site tonight.

I wasn’t particularly surprised, then, to have “British and US accused of poppy plague warfare” be the other result in Google News.

Today, in the Southern County, I shared a bus stop with, I think, three generations of one family. The daughter— twenty, 350 pounds, manic  and eye-darty, wearing revealing clothing (revealing, of course, tramp stamp-esque body art). Swearing about how “fine, they’ll get fucking frozen pizzas if (her Mom)’s sick of macaroni and cheese!” The mom— I thought a sister at first (I thought the daughter older and the Mom younger) but later guessed thirty-five, heavily make-uped, matching body art, matching weight, huge (twenty centimeter wide) bruises on her lower legs. Wearing sunglasses; couldn’t figure out how to get her Mom onto the bus wheelchair ramp. The grandmother— sheen of dementia, smiling at nothing, mid-sixties, wheelchair, right leg in a cast (at a twenty degree angle towards her starboard side), top inexplicably buttoned down to reveal Victoria’s Secret-style push-up bra. It was a definite Stare At The Ground kind of situation.

Today in Shamelessly Stolen, we are proud to bring you (via reddit) “Kenny Strasser,” a phony “yo-yo champion” who managed to dupe multiple Midwestern television stations into having him on the air.

“I got really dizzy.” Make sure to check out the accompanying news story, where you’ll see such other gems as him forgetting his string at home (leading to a bizarre yo-yo free conversation with a yo-yo master) and him answering his phone, live on the air. Move over, Muntadhar al Zaidi— it’s time for a new Personal Hero.

…regarding today’s zany day on Wall Street. I’ve already always hated it when people celebrate wild upswing days— “stock market up X hundred points! System works!” Any system volatile enough it can swing multiple percentage points in a day— positive or negative!— does not strike me as a stable enough foundation to build modern society on.

The selling was a result of technical glitches that caused some stocks, including Dow component Procter & Gamble (PGFortune 500), to plunge 37% to $39.37 per share from the close of $62.12 Wednesday. The consumer products maker recovered most of that loss by the close, ending just 2% lower.

But the faulty P&G trading was responsible for 172 of the 998.50 points that the Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost at its worst, the biggest one-day point decline on an intraday basis in Dow Jones history.

A 22 point loss in one stock leads to a 172 point loss in an averaged index? Does anybody else feel like they’re either missing something or being fleeced over? While we’re at it… if all this glitch talk is meant to assuage us that this is abnormal, “special case” volatility— do they really think the idea of the world’s financial health being a typo away from catastrophe is going to make us feel any better?

Meanwhile, the Senate votes down the Brown-Kaufman amendment limiting the size of banks to something (theoretically) less than Too Big To Fail. I really enjoy this idiotic quote from Judd Gregg:

I don’t understand this Brown-Kaufman amendment. Basically, what it says is if you’re successful… you’re going to break them up? I mean, where does this stop? Do we take McDonald’s on?

You tell ’em, Judd! There’s no tradition in America of breaking up massive corporations with a stranglehold on the marketplace.

That “worst case” is the increasingly likely, Ian MacDonald derived leak estimate. So, uh, well… fuck.

An Obama joke from the stupid Press Club dinner to make up for that profanity (I learned it from Dick Cheney, after all):

Unfortunately, John McCain couldn’t make it. Recently he claimed that he had never identified himself as a maverick. And we all know what happens in Arizona when you don’t have ID. Adios, amigo.

Seeing comments on it like this gem from “60sCynic”

Well, I’m off to free parking and spending money in Bellevue & Issaquah. And no swerving to avoid Critical Masss Terrorists.

really helps validate my decision to internally ridicule today’s anti-McGinn editorial in the Seattle Times. Also, do you think the “mayoral dust storm” reference in the opening paragraph is meant to be a Pigpen reference?

When I see graphs like this,

it makes me think somebody thinks we’re just playing a video game.