Archive for July 2010
How the Gulf of Mexico became the nation’s ‘toilet bowl’
When Nazia Dardar looks at the seemingly endless lake of water behind her stilted bayou home, the 76-year-old sees what once was a farm. Cows roamed there, she says, back when the lake was land.
“C’est le jour et la nuit,” she says in French, the most common language down here on the farthest and swampiest reaches of the Mississippi River delta. “It’s day and night.”
Perhaps nowhere is the protracted death of the Gulf Coast more apparent than in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana, and other indigenous bayou communities where, decades before the BP oil disaster, the marsh started disintegrating and environmental problems washed in from as far away as North Dakota and New York.
The Gulf of Mexico became, in effect, the United States’ toilet bowl — known for its seasonal “dead zones,” high erosion rates, dirty industry, ingrained poverty and, now, for the biggest oil disaster in the history of the country. Compare that legacy on the Gulf Coast with the East Coast, with its wealth, and the West, with its more-sterling record of environmental stewardship…
These wetlands, a 20-minute boat ride from the stilted homes of Pointe-Aux-Chenes, provide nearly all the needs of people here. Shrimp, crab, fish and oysters spawn and hide in the protective grasses. Those creatures are the basis for the local economy.
They’re also what everyone eats…
Since 1932, more than 1,875 square miles of Louisiana have shriveled and died, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That’s enough land to nearly cover Delaware…
The Corp of Engineers – BTW – can take credit for the taxpayer-funded portion of the destruction.
Ansel Adams glass negatives from garage sale = $200 million
Rick Norsigian’s hobby of picking through piles of unwanted items at garage sales in search of antiques has paid off for the Fresno, California, painter.
Two small boxes he bought 10 years ago for $45 — negotiated down from $70 — are now estimated to be worth at least $200 million, according to a Beverly Hills art appraiser.
Those boxes contained 65 glass negatives created by famed nature photographer Ansel Adams in the early period of his career. Experts believed the negatives were destroyed in a 1937 darkroom fire that destroyed 5,000 plates…
The photographs apparently were taken between 1919 and the early 1930s, well before Adams — who is known as the father of American photography — became nationally recognized in the 1940s, David Streets said…
Photography expert Patrick Alt, who helped confirm the authenticity of the negatives, suspects Adams carried them to use in a photography class he was teaching in Pasadena, California, in the early 1940s…
While most of the negatives appear never to have been printed, several are nearly identical to well-known Adams prints, the experts said…
“I have sent people to prison for the rest of their lives for far less evidence than I have seen in this case,” said evidence and burden of proof expert Manny Medrano, who was hired by Norsigian to help authenticate them. “In my view, those photographs were done by Ansel Adams.”
Norsigian, who has spent the last decade trying to prove the worth of his discovery, is now ready to cash in — by selling original prints of the photographs to museums and collectors.
RTFA. Interesting tale in several chapters: discovery of the negatives at a garage sale; why had they ended up in storage in the first place; Norsigian appears to have been casual about validating the negatives until about 6 months ago; how they were authenticated.
Our grocery trips to town on the weekend are occasionally punctuated by my question: “Oh, look. A garage sale. Want to stop and look around?”
The answer is always “No”. I hope I haven’t missed something.
US can’t account for $8.7 billion in Iraqi funds
Congress calls this nation-building
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
The U.S. Defense Department is unable to properly account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money tapped by the U.S. for rebuilding the war ravaged nation…
A report by the U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction offers a compelling look at continued laxness in how such funds are being spent in a country where people complain basic services like electricity and clean water are sharply lacking seven years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The audit found that shoddy record keeping by the Defense Department left the Pentagon unable to fully account for $8.7 billion it withdrew between 2004 and 2007 from a special fund set up by the U.N. Security Council. Of that amount, Pentagon “could not provide documentation to substantiate how it spent $2.6 billion.”
The funds are separate from the $53 billion allocated by Congress for rebuilding Iraq.
Which was wasted directly by the idols of the indolent Right – Bush and Cheney.
The audit cited a number of factors that contributed to the inability to account for most of the money withdrawn by the Pentagon from the Development Fund for Iraq. It said most of the Defense Department organizations that received DFI money failed to set up Treasury Department accounts, as required.
“The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss,” the report said.
Ever notice how right-wing beancounters never seem to get round to setting up oversight or regulation on the actual spending of the money so important to their lives and well-being?
Just because a self-serving political creep talks about cutting waste and reducing deficits doesn’t mean they’re ever going to do anything other than rant their slogans in the media. That’s usually enough to get them elected. And re-elected.
Meteorite lands on cricket pitch during match
When two spectators standing on the boundary at a cricket match saw an object hurtling down from the sky, their first instinct might have been to applaud.
However Jan Marszel, 51, and Richard Haynes, 52, were not witnessing a six, but an extremely rare meteor strike.
The rock, a few inches long and believed to be up to 4.5 billion years old, broke in two when it hit the ground in front of them close to the pitch.
The pair – both Sussex members – were sitting square of the wicket watching the England player Luke Wright bat with Monty Panesar when they spotted the black, five-inch rock hurtling towards them.
Mr Marszel, an IT consultant, said: “We were sitting at the boundary edge when all of a sudden, out of a blue sky, we saw this small dark object hurtling towards us. “It landed five yards inside the boundary and split into two pieces.
“One piece bounced up and hit me in the chest and the other ended up against the boundary board. It came across at quite a speed – if it had hit me full on it could have been very interesting…”
Retired Mr Haynes, said: “We were quietly supping our pints, both looked up at the same time and saw a black object coming towards us – we didn’t know what it was.
“If it had come from the other direction we might have suspected someone had thrown it, but we saw it come in straight over the ground from quite a way out – it was definitely a meteorite.”
I hope no one spilled their beer.
Plastiki Wraps Up an 8,300-Mile Voyage
The Plastiki, a boat made of bottles that set sail from San Francisco in March, glided past the Sydney Opera House at midday local time Monday in a grand finale to a voyage intended to highlight the problem of plastic waste.
“Overwhelmed! Wow! Need to breathe. Wow! Wow! Wow!” read one of the final tweets from the boat, whose buoyancy relied on the 12,500 plastic bottles encased in its hull…
Underlining the vessel’s mission, Plastiki estimated at its Web site that 8.7 billion plastic bottles, give or take, had been used in the United States since it set out…
Wearing a pink cap and a mariner’s full beard, the leader of the expedition, David de Rothschild, 31, strode up the dock at Darling Harbor to a welcoming ceremony that included the American ambassador to Australia, Jeffrey Bleich. “The journey of the Plastiki is a journey from trash to triumph,” Mr. Bleich said, in a nod both to the boat’s recycled nature and its path through a large garbage patch in the Pacific.
We posted on the start of this adventure back in March. We can stop worrying about the voyagers, finally.
And return to worrying about what we all do to this small planet.
Running your government with Google Apps
Google says its ready to offer its online office suite to the U.S. government.
At a press briefing…at its headquarters, Google announced a new version of its Apps suite designed specifically for government customers. This tier will be sold alongside the existing version of Google Apps and priced the same as the company’s premiere license–$50 per user, per year.
Google Apps for Government features all the same applications that can be found in other versions but comes with a higher level of security, which Google says meets the requirements set forth by the Federal Information Security Management Act. This includes segregated data centers, which Google says goes beyond FISMA regulations, and will keep government e-mail and calendar event data within U.S. borders.
Google says it got its FISMA certification late last week, after having to change a number of back-end security features and protocols…
According to Google, the federal government spends $76 billion on information technology, while some $56 billion is spent by state and local governments. Glotzbach pointed to examples from the existing Google Apps installations at the Berkeley Lab and the U.S. Navy–both of which he says will save those groups money over the systems they were using before. In the case of the Berkeley Lab, Google says it’s a projected savings of $1.5 million to $2 million over the next five years.
Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, who dropped in near the end of the news briefing, said the government organizations the company had talked with were “dying” to make the move to a cloud-based office infrastructure. “All of them have the same problem. They’re trapped in architecture that’s 15 to 20 years old. They would much prefer to have somebody manage the services than them manage the data centers,” he said…
You can bet the two biggest questions delaying acceptance will be a full-court press of lobbying from the traditional vendors of software and hardware systems to government – and bureaucrats falling over themselves to figure out how to maintain their own power and prestige.
And then there will still be those who fear technology beyond pencils.
Time for a Pentagon yard sale?
Some say that the United States is incurring too much debt, more than $1 trillion in the past fiscal year. Others say that the worst recession since World War II is no time to cut spending or raise taxes. They’re both right.
Happily, there is a third way to slow the growth of debt without curtailing federal economic stimulus: sell assets…
There’s the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example: Created during the Depression to help develop the impoverished Southeast, TVA today owns and operates 29 hydroelectric dams and six nuclear reactors, along with coal plants, wind farms and other power sources. In fiscal year 2009, the authority reported operating revenues of $11.3 billion and operating expenses of $9.3 billion…
And there are assets easier to quantify…
– More than a quarter trillion in gold.
– A quarter trillion in TARP assets.
– $35 billion of oil in the strategic petroleum reserve…
No longer stricken by malaria, no longer impoverished, the people in the TVA region can afford to pay the full cost of their power just as much as Con Edison ratepayers…
No one likes Wall Street these days. But it’s time to get some investment bankers on the phone and ask them how to get the best possible price for what the United States has to sell.
Frum is a conservative ideologue. He’s in favor of privatization at any cost. But, he does have a point about TVA.
And the Pentagon could have a helluva yard sale. We have a bad habit of passing along military hardware that’s four minutes over the sell-by date to our buddies. We not only do it for free. We throw in free training and supplies for a decade or so.
Sometimes long enough to see it fired back at us.
Let’s sell off some of that crap to the guys who are supposed to be on our side.
United Arab Emirates say BlackBerrys pose a security risk
“Who’s in charge of translations from the Gulf, today?”
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has said that it could move to restrict or monitor BlackBerry mobile phones, as they pose a “national security risk“.
The region’s telecoms regulator said “BlackBerry operates beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation” as it stores its data offshore. It said it was concerned that misuse may have “serious social, judicial and national security repercussions”…
The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority has taken issue with the encrypted networks used by Research in Motion (RIM) – the makers of the Blackberry handset…
“Currently, BlackBerry operates beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation, since it is the only device operating in the UAE that immediately exports its data offshore and is managed by a foreign, commercial organisation,” said a statement from the regulator.
“As a result of how BlackBerry data is managed and stored, in their current form, certain BlackBerry applications allow people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national security repercussions.
“Like many other countries, we have been working for a long time to resolve these critical issues, with the objective of finding a solution that operates within the boundaries of UAE law.”
In other words – it ain’t especially easy for the government to keep an eye on folks using Blackberrys in the UAE.
There are interesting facets to any discussion of censorship. Is a government trying to maintain secrecy for political dealings, business dealings? After all, some governments own and deploy the most significant assets in their economy.
In some cases, governments are in the middle of changing from a state economy to something utilizing portions of market economics.
Some governments are run by fear-driven politicians who simply don’t trust democracy or the enfranchised electorate to support their wishes – and try to keep the truth from affecting their agitprop.
Letters frozen in time arrive after 60 years
When an airliner crashed near the summit of Mont Blanc 60 years ago, rescuers fought desperately through storms to reach the site.
It took them three days, but their search proved in vain. There were no survivors from the 40 passengers and eight crew of the Malabar Princess, an Air India Lockheed Constellation bound for a stopover in Geneva on its way to London.
However, the story lived on. In the popular French film Amelie, Audrey Tautou’s character creates a fictional letter — from a lover who had died in the crash — for a lonely female concierge after hearing about mountaineers finding similar letters. Now a British student on a field trip to the Alps to examine global warming has added to the legend after stumbling upon a mailbag from the Malabar Princess.
Remarkably, some of the letters it contained have survived sufficiently for Freya Cowan, a third-year geography student, to embark upon a project to reunite about 75 letters and birthday cards with the senders or intended recipients…
A few letters from the Malabar Princess have been recovered previously but nothing on this scale. It would seem that none of the mail found by Miss Cowan was written by passengers on the plane, who were seamen bound for a new ship in Sunderland. The bag was destined for the US and the Dundee team has already succeeded in finding the owners of some correspondence.
Emergence of old mail considered long gone always makes for an interesting story.
Just hanging onto old mail can lead to new directions. My favorite autograph – of Ray Bradbury – is on a penny postcard he sent me in 1951. he had to add another 1-penny stamp because the rate had just been increased to 2 pennies.
And a discussion about it led me to an autograph letter and photograph from one of my favorite recent authors, Michel Faber.
Mexican prisoners let out for killings, borrowed guard’s guns
A group of drug cartel inmates who were allowed by guards to leave prison to commit murders are believed responsible for the massacre of 17 people earlier this month, the Mexican government said…
“They were allowed to leave the prison and use the weapons of the guards in these executions using official vehicles,” said Ricardo Najera, the spokesman for the federal prosecutors’ office.
“These criminals carried out their executions as part of the settling of accounts between rival gangs and disgracefully these cowardly criminals then murdered innocent civilians on their way back to their cells.”
Drug gang hitmen in five sports utility vehicles stormed a birthday party in the northern city of Torreon on July 18 and gunned down 17 revelers with automatic weapons. Another 18 people were wounded in the attack.
Two prison guards have so far been detained in the investigation into the case, Najera said.
Golly gee. Two members of the corrupt prison administration detained for questioning.
Don’t they have any influential friends or relatives at all?
