Tried to upload a photo, but we’re so far away WP doesn’t want to play along.
Just take my word for it, we’re away.
Every Man is aware
On the 99th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, an excerpt from Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front:
|
EPA Rolls [over]
There’s one thing about electing a progressive president, well there are many, actually. But one is that, even though media narratives coalesce around ‘a political savior’ or whatever, no one actually thinks that. It’s just a great relief not have a C-plus Augustus at the helm for a while. Otherwise, all other caveats about agitation, feet and fire hold true. You keep your expectations high, no matter what. Obama can disappoint, as can his agencies; that doesn’t mean I don’t like him or what he’s said he stands for or that his progressive stance was all a ploy all along. But some things may make you wonder.
Residents of Pavillion, Wyoming, had been complaining for years that their well water started smelling and looking foul after the oil and gas company EnCana began drilling in a previously drilled field near their homes. Some contracted weird health problems, including neurological disorders and rashes, after drinking or bathing in the stuff.
After their concerns were essentially passed over by both EnCana and the state of Wyoming, the EPA stepped in to conduct its own tests in 2008. As ProPublica and High Country News reported, the agency found suspicious quantities of hydrocarbons and trace contaminants in residents’ wells that could be linked to gas development. Then, after drilling two 1,000-foot-deep monitoring wells, the agency found high levels of benzene and other carcinogens in the deep groundwater underlying Pavillion. An EPA report released late in 2011, concluded that:
(P)ollution from 33 abandoned oil and gas waste pits – which are the subject of a separate cleanup program – (was) indeed responsible for some degree of shallow groundwater pollution in the area. Those pits may be the source of contamination affecting at least 42 private water wells in Pavillion. But the (deep) contamination, the agency concluded, had to have been caused by fracking.
Then:
On June 20, though, after vigorous complaints from industry and Wyoming that the agency flubbed its study, as well as years of delays, the EPA announced that it is abandoning the project completely.
I remember JamesWatt. And if you don’t look him up. THAT was a travesty. But this is serious. We can do better. We have to.
Via LGM.
None Dare Call It Maize
Matt Taibbi has been on a roll with these “Everything is Rigged’ articles and blog posts on the RS site. And now he rolls out another doozy on the ratings agencies, which I would call corrupt if the word retained any meaning whatsoever:
Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation’s two top ratings companies, Moody’s and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.
In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.
“Lord help our fucking scam?.?.?.?this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at,” writes one Standard & Poor’s executive. “As you know, I had difficulties explaining ‘HOW’ we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it,” confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. “If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value,” complains another senior S&P man. “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters,” ruminates one more.
Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. These gigantic companies – also known as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, or NRSROs – have teams of examiners who analyze companies, cities, towns, countries, mortgage borrowers, anybody or anything that takes on debt or creates an investment vehicle.
Their primary function is to help define what’s safe to buy, and what isn’t. A triple-A rating is to the financial world what the USDA seal of approval is to a meat-eater, or virginity is to a Catholic. It’s supposed to be sacrosanct, inviolable: According to Moody’s own reports, AAA investments “should survive the equivalent of the U.S. Great Depression.”
Late capitalism is about all you can say. Every single descriptor is one that paints the picture of this crazy ‘system’ only working alongside dynamic constraints on human weakness and greed. Absent those, and we are absent most of those, we get this. It’s as indefensible as a plantation wedding in 2013, and everyone involved knows it. Read and share, especially enjoyable alongside the high-value TV commercials for multinational financial services corporations that support most programming these days.
June 12, 1963
Fifty years ago today, Medgar Evers was shot dead in front of his home by a white supremacist.
Still Howlin’
Born today in 1910, Mr. Chester Arthur Burnett, who we know better as Howlin’ Wolf. This seems appropriate
Hundred-year-flood
Every ten years. This is what central Europe looks like, with flooding of the Elbe and Danube Rivers, the worst in ten years because, well, oh who knows why.
Nice Things
Atrios made a really good point the other day, avec his typical pith:
And, yes, for whatever reasons, infrastructure projects, especially anything involving a tunnel or a bridge, are absurdly expensive compared to most countries. Other people can figure out just why that is and try to do something about it. But the choice is between increasing rail capacity into New York with an imperfect too expensive plan, or doing nothing at all anytime soon. We spend all kinds of money to do stupid destructive things that at best do nothing useful for us, so we should be willing to support spending all kinds of money on nice things when the opportunities present themselves.
I’d rather have a $10 billion pair of tunnels than spend $10 billion on equipment the military doesn’t even want. That probably isn’t a choice, either, but we do the latter all of the time. We shouldn’t get “sensible” when the former is an option.
This is the point, the rub, the crux and the nub all in one: spending money as the U.S. does on armaments and then rending garments about the costs of infrastructure projects, much less factoring in the externalities for things like car-driving and plane-riding, is our great contradiction as well as the most obvious quandary we are avoiding. This avoidance takes a lot of effort and, as he points out, resources that could be better-invested elsewhere.
Could mean all kinds of things
I draw your attention to the following sentence in a Guardian article, featuring an alternative use of the word hoarding:
Dame Judi Dench has come to the defence of the drama school where she learned her Oscar-winning craft.
The London borough of Camden has banned two advertising hoardings outside the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama on supposedly aesthetic grounds.
The Central says that it receives up to £150,000 a year from advertisers using the sites, which it donates to theatre charities involving thousands of young people nationwide, and that there have been no complaints since they went up 27 years ago. An appeal to the secretary of state will be heard on Tuesday.
Next up: a discussion of advertising row.
The moral burden of war
Sebastian Junger, journalist/author of The Perfect Storm and more recently a contributor to a film about soldiers (and the war) in Afghanistan, has a good Memorial Day reflection on war and what it does to people:
Typically, warriors were welcomed home by their entire community and underwent rituals to spiritually cleanse them of the effect of killing. Otherwise, they were considered too polluted to be around women and children. Often there was a celebration in which the fighters described the battle in great, bloody detail. Every man knew he was fighting for his community, and every person in the community knew that their lives depended on these young men. These gatherings must have been enormously cathartic for both the fighters and the people they were defending. A question like the one recently posed to me wouldn’t begin to make sense in a culture such as the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela or the Comanche.
Our enormously complex society can’t just start performing tribal rituals designed to diminish combat trauma, but there may be things we can do. The therapeutic power of storytelling, for example, could give combat veterans an emotional outlet and allow civilians to demonstrate their personal involvement. On Memorial Day or Veterans Day, in addition to traditional parades, communities could make their city or town hall available for vets to tell their stories. Each could get, say, 10 minutes to tell his or her experience at war.
Attendance could not be mandatory, but on that day “I support the troops” would mean spending hours listening to our vets. We would hear a lot of anger and pain. We would also hear a lot of pride. Some of what would be said would make you uncomfortable, whether you are liberal or conservative, military or nonmilitary, young or old. But there is no point in having a conversation about war that is not completely honest.
Whole thing, read the.