CNNTech reports the death of Ivy Bean. We all tried to tell her, didn’t we? Sooner or later, Gram, all that tweeting was going to catch up to you.

The Rude Pundit has gone to a Big Oil rally in New Orleans so you don’t have to. Read his report. Sadly, he’s right.

This might get conservatives to start believing in global warming:

Global warming could drive millions more Mexicans into the United States in search of work by 2080 due to diminishing crop yields in Mexico, a study released Monday showed.

“Depending on the warming scenarios used and adaptation levels assumed … climate change is estimated to induce 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or two percent to 10 percent of the current population aged 15-65 years) to emigrate as a result of declines in agricultural productivity alone,” the study said.

Global warming leads to illegal immigration? Caramba! Somebody call Lou Dobbs, and Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck, and Tom Tancredo, and all the other race-baiting protozoans who dwell in the depths of the Republican party’s lizard brain. Spread the word high and low, high carbon emissions mean more illegal Mexicans!

If this doesn’t persuade them to go green …

Yesterday the world changed and a new epoch was ushered in with Wikileak’s release of the Afghan War Diary, 2004 – 2010. In case you’ve been vacationing off-planet, Afghan War Diary is a compilation of “raw data” derived from 90,000 leaked ground reports from the war in Afghanistan (approximately 15,000 have been held back for possible redaction before their release). The importance of this event is certainly not that the data uncovers shocking new revelations about how abysmally the war in Afghanistan has been conducted — an epic fail of such proportions is hard to cover up completely no matter how obedient the national media are. The true awesomeness of this development is that, in one brilliant and well-coordinated play, the rules of the game have been changed — forever after — and, not only has the playing field been leveled, it’s been moved out of town — no more home-field advantage.

Part of the genius of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange’s release was his gambit to assure that mainstream media would not obstruct or trivialize the importance of the leak — by giving them the scoop. Wikileaks provided the roughly 91,000 reports dated from January 2004 to December 2009 to three media outlets, The New York Times, the Guardian of London and Der Spiegel of Germany, under agreement to publish their individual coverage simultaneously on Sunday…

  …Read on

In case you missed it, yesterday’s Washington Post had an op-ed by Neel Kashkari, a former Goldman Sachs man who oversaw the TARP program. In it, he warns an unsuspecting public about the dangers of the growing deficit and the need to choke it off at the source, entitlement spending. His piece is called “No ‘Me First’ Mentality On Entitlements.”

Our belief in free markets is founded on the idea that each individual acting in his or her self-interest will lead to a superior outcome for the whole. The financial crisis has reminded us that free markets are not perfect — but they do allocate capital better than any other system we know. A “me first” mentality usually makes markets more efficient.

But this “me first” mentality can also lead to shortsighted political decision making. Most Americans agree that we need more energy from clean sources, such as wind power — until someone proposes installing a transmission line near their homes. Most people are against earmarks — unless it is their representative scoring money for their district.

Cutting entitlement spending requires us to think beyond what is in our own immediate self-interest. But it also runs against our sense of fairness: We have, after all, paid for entitlements for earlier generations. Is it now fair to cut my benefits? No, it isn’t. But if we don’t focus on our collective good, all of us will suffer.

Let’s put this in perspective. Neel Kashkari worked at Goldman Sachs and later directed TARP. In between he worked at the Treasury Department under that notorious skin-flint and deficit hawk George W. Bush. Did he rant about deficits then, I wonder? Now, after his golfing buddies have ruined the economy and run off with the loot, he comes out in the Washington Post and scolds us about the need to rise above our immediate self-interest and make sacrifices for the collective good. How fucking noble.

By the way, while this apostle of selflessness was overseeing the distribution of TARP payments, where exactly were those payments going? Um, let’s see …

In the fall of 2008, with the financial system on the verge of collapse, 17 large banks that were being propped up by taxpayers doled out $1.6 billion in bonuses.

On Friday, the Obama administration’s pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, passed judgment.

He said the payouts were “ill advised.” But he also said he did not believe the payments were “contrary to the public interest,” and he does not plan to ask the companies to pay the money back.

The 17 companies making the excessive bonus payments while on government life support included Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. Feinberg described the payments in an interview with NPR after he delivered his report on executive pay to the Treasury Department.

“Some of the payments ... many of them were over $10 million per individual, which were in our view ill-advised,” Feinberg said.

I assume his former Wall Street colleagues were spared any lectures about the virtue of self-sacrifice. In their case, you see, a ‘me first’ mentality is good. It allocates capital better than anything else the human race has ever invented. It makes markets more efficient. But when it comes to you, Mr. and Mrs. Kramden, a ‘me first’ mentality leads to short-sighted political decision making and all kinds of other scary things, like debts and deficits. A $10 million dollar bonus payment to a paper pushing con-man is an economic boon; collecting a six-hundred dollar a month social security check is narrow short-sightedness and constitutes a dire threat to the economy. Somebody get me a bucket.

To steal a line from The Outlaw Josey Wales, don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining. The day we cut back on the $700 billion plus we spend every year on defense is the day I’ll listen to patriotic calls for self-sacrifice. Until then, go back to your freakin’ golf course and leave the rest of us alone.

From the Hartford Courant:

And that’s why there’s a bidding war growing for the estimated 750,000 tons of garbage that 70 towns and cities pay more than $500 million a year to burn at a trash-to-energy plant in Hartford…

Last year, the most cost-effective route for Stamford was a vendor that shrink-wrapped the city’s trash to keep it compact and easily portable and trucked it to a landfill in Ohio.

Oh, God, and I thought this whole Twilight saga was bad. We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet:

Get ready for “Goldman Sachs: The Movie.”

That isn’t a real movie title. But filmmaker Ric Burns, who created the PBS series “The Civil War” with his brother Ken, is shooting a documentary about the Wall Street firm. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is paying for the film, has editorial control and is overseeing the project through its marketing department, a Goldman spokesman said.

It’s not enough that they wreck the economy and pilfer the U.S. Treasury. It’s not enough they’ve driven the country into near penury while they prance around like the Bourbons or the Romanovs. It’s not enough that they own the US government and now, as a result of Citizens United, will own it for all time. No. They want more. They want us to love them for it. They have our bodies, now they want our souls as well. Why not? There’s nothing else left among the ruins they’ve created. It’s the only thing left to steal.

Apparently this movie is “for employees only.” So I guess this is going to be used as in-house propaganda to convince themselves that they aren’t, in fact, wicked parasites whose criminality is ushering us into an economic dark age, but just swell, hard-working folks who deserve six-figure bonuses and a house in the Hamptons. After all, they hire gardeners and maids, don’t they? What service to the economy do gardeners and maids provide, huh?

But that’s beside the point. This film will be leaked and Goldman knows it, just as surely as they knew the housing bubble would collapse. They are many things, but they aren’t stupid. When that movie does make the rounds on the Internet, we’ll all see the inner workings of Goldman Sachs precisely as they want us to see it. We’ll be embedded, as it were, and come away with whatever impression they want us to have.

Do you suppose it’s possible that our banker friends are panging for a little of the glamour that accompanies other wealthy professions? Let’s face it, bankers are boring. The only way they can achieve any color is by being villainous, but not even that works for the current gang on Wall Street, who manage to be both deadly villainous and deadly boring, Lex Luthors without charisma. This is doubly true for bald-headed, lisping Lloyd Blankfein, who would be selling life insurance or working as a grocery clerk in a more just world. It must rankle that on any given day, he, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of the great Goldman Sachs, gets less — and less positive — media coverage than Justin Bieber or Lindsay Lohan. It’s all so unfair. The solution? Pimp yourself in the only medium that matters. Make a movie. It can make you a celebrity, and once you become a celebrity you are beyond good and evil in American culture.

I have no idea how big or little this story really is, but I know it must be true because I read about it in the Wall Street Journal.

Today’s Auburn Journal reports an uncharacteristic burst of sanity and good sense on the part of our judicial system:

Outlaw barkeeper Travis Kevie was ordered released from jail today with the buzz of media attention spreading his exploits to a widespread audience.

But in the eyes of the law, he’ll still have to belly up to a misdemeanor charge of illegal alcohol sales.

Kevie, 29, was arrested Tuesday after four days of bamboozling about 30 customers a day into believing that he had re-opened the recently vacated Valencia Club in Penryn.

The story of a homeless man entering a vacant bar and buying a six-pack from a convenience store to get business started soon turned from a local story into a regional one – and then a national one on the Internet and TV.

So the heroic Travis Kevie walks among us once again. Hallelujah, justice is not yet dead. I assume he’ll get something mild like community service for the illegal liquor sales, but hasn’t he already performed that service by selling the booze in the first place? Think about it, wouldn’t the world be a nicer place if everybody just went around mildly high all day long?

I have a question for any lawyers out there: if he was to claim that he was merely taking donations for the drinks, could he dodge the rap? Just curious.

But here’s the best part of the article:

Badattitudes.com called Kevie “an example for us all.”

“His only capital – a mere six-pack of beer – was used to open a small business that was apparently off to a successful start,” Badattitudes.com posted, lauding Kevie for “vision, guts, initiative and determination.”

[…]

But any attempts to drum up a “Free Travis Kevie!” campaign – as Badattitudes.com was pushing for – were premature.

Bad Attitudes has penetrated the Sierra Nevada foothills. We’re takin’ this baby mainstream, so sit back and enjoy the ride, everybody!

Suck on that, Kos!

From the Washington Post:

At a media breakfast Wednesday, House Minority Leader John Boehner attempted to show that he sympathizes with the unemployed. But in the process he admitted that he didn’t even know whether his own siblings had jobs.

“I’ve got real empathy for those who are unemployed,” the Ohio Republican said. “As most of you know, I’ve got 11 brothers and sisters. I know that three of my brothers lost their jobs. I’m not sure whether they’ve found jobs, yet, so I’ve got a lot of empathy for those caught in this economic downturn.”

Who is Travis Kevie, you ask? Only one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, I answer:

A Placer County man has been arrested after he broke into a shuttered bar, reopened the business and started selling drinks to unwitting customers, according to the Placer County Sheriff's department.

The Placer County Sheriff's department arrested 29-year-old Travis Kevie of Newcastle after his 4-day stint as the barkeep of the historic Valencia Club in Penryn which had been shutdown for more than a year.

[…]

Deputies describe Kevie as a transient. They say he broke into the Valencia Club and put an open sign in the window on July 16th. Kevie kicked off his business with a six-pack of beer he bought and resold at the club. He used his profits to buy more alcohol keeping the club open throughout the weekend serving about 30 customers a day, deputies say.

This man is an example for us all. This hard-luck ‘transient’ used his only capital — a mere six-pack of beer! — to open up a small business that was apparently off to a successful start. This guy has vision, guts, initiative, and determination. He also has sound business sense. Unlike Wall Street banks, he was providing a service that people actually want and need. Sooner or later, he would have had to hire another employee or two — a virtuous act in this recession. Instead, this great spirit languishes in jail and the bar he sought to revive will remain a decayed, boarded-up eyesore on the town’s main drag. Only in Obama’s socialist America could such a travesty occur.

The other day, former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein wrote that the majority of people who get laid off have “poor work habits and poor personalities.” He said that diligent and hard-working people seldom lose their jobs. Well, Travis Kevie was obviously diligent and hard-working. A genuine Horatio Alger story. Will Stein and all of his entrepreneur-worshipping brethren in the Republican party come to this man’s defense? I say it’s time for them to put their vast amounts of money where their vastly big mouths are.

It’s getting harder and harder to extend the benefit of a doubt to BP:

KENNER, LA. — In the hours before the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, BP pumped into the well an extraordinarily large quantity of an unusual chemical mixture, a contractor on the rig testified Monday.

The injection of the dense, gray fluid was meant to flush drilling mud from the hole, according to the testimony before a government panel investigating the April 20 accident. But the more than 400 barrels used were roughly double the usual quantity, said Leo Lindner, a drilling fluid specialist for contractor MI-Swaco.

BP had hundreds of barrels of the two chemicals on hand and needed to dispose of the material, Lindner testified. By first flushing it into the well, the company could take advantage of an exemption in an environmental law that otherwise would have prohibited it from discharging the hazardous waste into the Gulf of Mexico, Lindner said…

When the well became a gusher on April 20, a fluid that fit the general description of the mixture rained down on the rig. Stephen Bertone, chief engineer on the rig, said in testimony earlier in the day that part of the rig was covered in an inch or more of material that he said resembled “snot.”

This showed up in my inbox just now. I pass it along as evidence that there may be hope for our species yet. (H/T to commenter mfd)

On Saturday, April 24th, the Opera Company of Philadelphia teamed up with the Reading Terminal Market Italian Festival for a large-scale “Flash Opera” event! Over 30 members of the Opera Company of Philadelphia Chorus and principal cast members of LA TRAVIATA performed the famed “Brindisi” in the aisles of Reading Terminal Market.

From the New York Times:

KABUL, Afghanistan — The chief judge asked God’s forgiveness if he had reached the wrong decision, and then he sentenced four members of an Afghan family charged with making bombs: two brothers to 10 years in prison and two other family members to time already served…

This trial was the beginning of a confusing period in which two legal systems will be running in parallel at the Parwan detention center — an Afghan one and an American one. Under the American one, detainees, all of whom are detained by American soldiers usually working with Afghan forces, can be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Maureen Dowd shoves it to the Pontiff:

“The future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.”

If Roman Polanski were a priest, he’d still be working here.

Here is something especially made for you T.E.A Party types. Thanks to Emma Goldman and her Revolutionary folk music progeny, Emma’s Revolution, for this fantastic parody of what this fake tea revolution is about. Let me remind the Republican Party that you stole this political Tea Party designation from the Howard Dean campaign. My wife has a tea shirt to prove it. He'll be expecting to collect his royalties soon.

And by the way. Emma was NOT a Socialist. Enjoy the weekend folks.

Imagine this: you’re a fifty-something four-star general in the US Army; you have achieved that lofty summit largely by laboring in the relatively peaceful halls of military academe. You spend 1970 – 1974 learning to be an officer and a gentleman at West Point during the death throes of what the Vietnamese people call “The American War” — which is really too bad, in a way, because the timing robbed you of the chance to see, up close and personal, just how horribly wrong things can go for a military that finds itself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong strategy. Not for you the “fragging, the drugs, the widespread AWOLs and outright mutiny that occurs when young men are asked to risk death for absurd reasons against insurmountable odds.

Nevertheless you are young, smart and enthusiastic so your lack of first-hand experience doesn’t keep you from weighing in on the “lessons learned” from “The American War” when it comes time for you to tender your doctoral dissertation at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International affairs; your thesis, “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era,” is a hit and you are duly awarded your Ph.D.

Now you are on the fast-track for brainy soldiers with political skills that will undoubtedly land you at “Ground Zero” (aka The Pentagon) or — who knows, maybe the Oval Office, someday. So it is that you eventually find yourself a general who has never seen combat — until Iraq. Unfortunately, you don’t get your hands on that command until things are so thoroughly screwed up that all the sensible people are looking for the exits and making their escape plans. But, as you are fond of saying: “just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s hopeless.” Iraq in 2007, however, is more than hard, it’s a disaster — and a disaster of our own making so the US can’t exactly declare it all a big mistake and walk away…

Galveston copes, the New York Times notes:

The mayor, Joe Jaworski, began a whirlwind of promotional events and appearances, canvassing beaches and creating a video to remind people that it was still business as usual in town.

“O.K., so tar balls have washed up, and I think we’d all agree, it’s not a disaster, it’s a nuisance,” Mr. Jaworski said in an interview, after doing a radio broadcast with a visiting Houston D.J. from the lobby of one of Galveston’s largest resorts…

Last week, a representative from BP came to the Galveston City Council meeting. “He seemed like a credible fellow,” Mayor Jaworski said. “He came right up and listened to us and said he would help us pay for public relations.” A spokeswoman for BP said no deal had been reached yet.

Others are shrugging off the news about the beaches, which have seen oil many times before. In the 1970s and ’80s, slicks and tar balls were such a common sight on the beach that owners of vacation houses stocked their patios with baby oil and WD-40 for guests to clean off with, and regular visitors kept a separate pair of “tar sandals.”

The Associated Press reports:

Alvin Greene action figures are here. The Charleston RiverDogs, a minor-league affiliate of the New York Yankees, will give out statues of the Democratic candidate for United States Senate at Saturday’s game. Mr. Greene, who won the primary without campaigning, has suggested that manufacturing action figures of himself could spur economic growth. The statues are actually Statue of Liberty figures that the team planned to give away as part of a different promotion, but the RiverDogs decided to put a picture of his face on them. The team once tried to have Vasectomy Night on Father’s Day, but canceled it when fans complained that it was crass.

…and not all of them are on octopuses (see previous post). Or on octopoi. Or octopi (see comments on previous post). The excerpt below, from Yahoo! News, suggests that the Madrid Zoo is run by suckers. Or, more probably, by showmen who figure Madrileños for suckers.

MADRID — The Madrid Zoo said Thursday that it has made an offer to buy Paul, the octopus who became a pop culture sensation by correctly predicting the outcome of as many World Cup matches as he has legs — all seven of Germany's games plus the Spain-Netherlands final.

Unlike you I know an octopus keeper, and he blogs as Mark H and he runs the Biomes Marine Biology Center in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, and, working slowly toward my point, he says Paul the World Cup Soccer Winner Picker is as big a fraud as Zoltan Karpathy, that hairy hound from Budapest. (Look Zoltan up for yourself. I can’t do everything for you.)

Below is part of Mark’s argument. All of it is here. Writhe on over.

It should also be noted that the common octopus (Paul is the same species as all of mine were) has a life span of only one year. The German sea-life aquarium claims he is a two-year-old octopus, hatched in Britain in 2008. All octopuses are born in the spring, so this makes Paul well over two years old. This isn’t possible, so this is the second, or even third, “Paul.” Most commercial aquariums keep multiple octopuses in reserve and switch them out when the exhibit animal dies, keeping the name for continuity or innocent deception. Paul’s not only a fraud, he’s surely not even the original “Paul.”

CNN reports:

Young delivered his sermon, but he couldn’t hear or see his congregation respond: He wasn’t physically there.

Young’s parishioners were instead looking at a high-def video image of their pastor beamed into their sanctuary from a “mother” church in Grapevine, Texas.

Young is part of a new generation of pastors who can be in two places at one time. They are using technology — high-def videos, and even holograms — to beam their Sunday morning sermons to remote “satellite” churches that belong to their congregation…

Esposito is a member of Fellowship Church, where he has listened to Young preach for the last five years.

“I feel closer to the sermon than I would if I ever attended in person,” Esposito said. “The screen is so big; it’s almost lifelike. I would rather see Ed [Young] on the big screen than somewhere live…”

From the McClatchy Newspapers:

WASHINGTON — The number of naturally occurring microbes that eat methane grew surprisingly fast inside a plume spreading from BP’s ruptured oil well, an oceanographer who was one of the first to detect the plumes said Tuesday…

On the other hand…

However, the microbes also use oxygen in the water, and Joye said the repercussions of the resulting oxygen depletion aren’t yet known… They’re also looking to see if the microbes will draw down oxygen to levels that would make the waters unsuitable for life. The Gulf of Mexico already has dead zones created by nutrients from fertilizer carried from the Midwest by the Mississippi River.

NEW YORK — Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston say they're engaged and hope to get married within six weeks in Alaska, an abrupt turnaround for the couple that just months ago was fighting over child support and Johnston's critical comments about the family…

The couple is ready to get married but Palin told the magazine they'll probably see a marriage counselor, Schaefer said, adding that Plain made it clear that Levi will have "a lot of work to do."

Asked whether the magazine paid for the interview, Schaefer would not discuss details of the arrangement except to say that the magazine paid for the expenses of the photo shoot.

Posting about Kagan and Coburn the other day led me back to Richard A. Posner’s book, Overcoming Law. Posner, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Reagan appointee, is nobody’s idea of a liberal. But he is everybody’s idea of a thinker. In a brilliant chapter called “Bork and Beethoven,” here’s what he has to say about the childish and ahistorical theory of orginalism with which Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia rationalize their prejudices:

Originalism is not an analytic method; it is a rhetoric that can be used to support any result a judge wants to reach. The conservative libertarians whom Bork criticizes (Richard Epstein and Bernard Siegan) are originalists; his disagreement with them is not over method, but over result. The Dred Scott decision — to Bork, the very fount of modern judicial activism — is permeated by originalist rhetoric…

Some of the most activist judges, whether of the right or of the left, whether named Taney or Black, have been among the judges most drawn to the rhetoric of originalism. For it is a magnificent disguise. The judge can do the wildest things, all the while presenting himself as the passive agent of the sainted Founders — don’t argue with me, argue with Them.

…this one from the Associated Press:

NEW YORK – A federal appeals court on Tuesday tossed out a government policy that can lead to broadcasters being fined for allowing even a single curse word on live television, concluding that the rule was unconstitutionally vague and had a chilling effect on broadcasters.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan struck down the 2004 Federal Communications Commission policy, which said that profanity referring to sex or excrement is always indecent.