How bad will it be for BP? Think Toyota | Lou Ann Hammond on carlist.com

How bad will it be for BP? Think Toyota | Lou Ann Hammond on carlist.com

No car company that is using brake override has the lawsuits looming that Toyota has in their future. The number of deaths related to these lawsuits are unparalleled. This incident is a marketing nightmare for the once golden global car company.

The 2010 Gulf oil spill will be a marketing nightmare for BP as well. Lives have already been lost. Gone is the flower power, beyond petroleum, buy from us because even though our core product is oil we are investing in alternative energies campaign.

The campaign for both companies now is damage control, and this campaign will cost both companies billions of dollars.

A complete disaster, that could have been averted, or minimized by utilizing one piece of equipment that was available.

Al Gore, Tipper Gore snap up Montecito-area villa - latimes.com

Al Gore, Tipper Gore snap up Montecito-area villa - latimes.com

Al Gore to worshipful followers: "SUCKERS!"

Nasa: Evidence of life on Mars | The Sun |News

Nasa: Evidence of life on Mars | The Sun |News

A special mission to the Red Planet has revealed the likely presence of a form of pond scum - the building blocks of life as we know it.

NASA has announced that due to budget changes the next Mars mission rather than carrying more sophisticated measurement equipment will instead will be a simple robotic arm equipped with a can of Lysol.

Video - Addressing America's Addiction to Deficits - WSJ.com

Baby boy survives for nearly two days after abortion - Telegraph

Baby boy survives for nearly two days after abortion - Telegraph:

"Most abortions at 22 weeks simply involve the induction of the birth which normally results in the death of a young foetus.

The case is causing uproar in Italy because it is the second involving a foetus of that age surviving the procedure in just three years.

The other involved a baby in Florence who weighed just 17oz when he was aborted at 22 weeks because of a suspected genetic disorder but lived for three days."

Reports Show BP Opposed New Safety Rules - WSJ.com

Reports Show BP Opposed New Safety Rules - WSJ.com

As BP touted the scale of the cleanup, documents showed that it was one of several companies that opposed efforts to tighten up safety procedures offshore. Last year, the MMS studied more than 1,400 offshore incidents that led to 41 deaths and hundreds of injuries between 2001 and 2007. Many of them, the MMS found, were linked to factors such as communications failures, a lack of written procedures and the failure of supervisors to enforce existing rules, and proposed mandatory requirements to reduce the number of incidents. That would have replaced a system under which many safety procedures were voluntary.

iPhone Leak Investigation Pauses As DA Ponders Gizmodo Shield Law Defense

iPhone Leak Investigation Pauses As DA Ponders Gizmodo Shield Law Defense

When I asked if it was typical for the DA to evaluate the relevance of these shield laws after removing evidence, Wagstaffe did concede that it was unusual. Which makes the situation extremely odd— it should have been readily apparent that Gawker would defend its actions using this shield law defense, why put the brakes on after the fact?

DUH!

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

No argument here.

The leftist propaganda of American media is not new | The Real Revo

The leftist propaganda of American media is not new | The Real Revo

The evidence, however, is blatant and undeniable. Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian contemporary of Duranty and described him as “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.” He also wrote this of Duranty and his fellow travelers in Moscow.

Wise old [Bernard]Shaw, high-minded old [Henri]Barbusse, the venerable [Sidney and Beatrice] Webbs, [Andre] Gide the pure in heart and [Pablo] Picasso the impure, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, driveling dons and very special correspondents like Duranty, all resolved, come what might, to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook nothing, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thorough-going, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth could be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives.

America allowed itself to be deceived by Western propagandists of terror and murder. We lived in denial while horror was imposed on millions. The tradition continues. The willingness of today’s mainstream media to grovel at the feet of totalitarianism has a long and extensive pedigree.

The Washington Post Makes A Major Factual Error « The Baseline Scenario

The Washington Post Makes A Major Factual Error « The Baseline Scenario

Given that the Washington Post still has a large staff of excellent journalists working around the world, they could try asking G20 deputies about this in detail – or even just consult with top regulators in the UK who can lay this all out for them. And while they are at it, it would be worth writing a story on why there is no G20-level process to establish a cross-border resolution mechanism – and no likelihood of such a mechanism for the next 20 years.

Absolutely Pathetic: AP Report Says GM, Chrysler Lost 400,000 Jobs in 2008 | NewsBusters.org

Absolutely Pathetic: AP Report Says GM, Chrysler Lost 400,000 Jobs in 2008 | NewsBusters.org

For the record, total U.S. employment at General Motors at the end of 2007 was about 110,000, according to this early February 2008 item. This November 2007 link indicates that Chrysler at that point had 71,000 employees worldwide (59,000 expected to remain plus 12,000 jobs expected to be eliminated). The two entities combined obviously did not have 400,000 U.S. jobs to shed at the beginning of 2008. Whether they are even legitimately "rebounding" is also more than a little questionable, but will be left alone for now.

Superville's stunner makes it clear that, in journalism and so many other endeavors, the problem isn't only that basic math skills have fallen so steeply (which they have). It's that people who one would expect to be able to detect self-evidently out of line numbers like the one above, i.e., journalists like the AP's Superville reviewing her own work, as well as the layers of alleged editors at the self-described "Essential Global News Network," clearly can't or won't do it.

Tech.view: Hydrogen tries again | The Economist

Tech.view: Hydrogen tries again | The Economist

From the beginning, the cloud hanging over the whole hydrogen enterprise has not been the power source as such, but the intractable difficulty of distributing and storing the stuff. It is not hard to see why. Hydrogen atoms are the smallest and lightest in the universe. The next heaviest element in the periodic table, the inert gas helium, is used for detecting cracks in pressure vessels and the like. Even though helium atoms are four times chunkier than hydrogen atoms, they are still small enough to find all the weak spots as they worm their way through the crystalline structure of solid steel several centimetres thick. If hydrogen were used as a crack detector (it is not because of the fire hazard), it would escape four times faster.

Facebook Is Taking Over The Internet: Why Isn't Everybody Freaking Out?

Facebook Is Taking Over The Internet: Why Isn't Everybody Freaking Out?
From the comments a beauty:

Something born so crooked as F*c*book, with 'sociopath' written all over the corporate DNA in neon, will only implode sooner or later.

I just wonder what apparently ethical and intelligent people like Paul Bucheit (who seems to have penned the "don't be evil" at Google, and come in with an acquisition) are doing there. Must be waiting for money timed to sale contract clauses. Most expensive money he ever got.

Wallison: Fannie and Freddie Amnesia - WSJ.com

Wallison: Fannie and Freddie Amnesia - WSJ.com

One chapter in this story took place in July 2005, when the Senate Banking Committee, then controlled by the Republicans, adopted tough regulatory legislation for the GSEs on a party-line vote—all Republicans in favor, all Democrats opposed. The bill would have established a new regulator for Fannie and Freddie and given it authority to ensure that they maintained adequate capital, properly managed their interest rate risk, had adequate liquidity and reserves, and controlled their asset and investment portfolio growth.

These authorities were necessary to control the GSEs' risk-taking, but opposition by Fannie and Freddie—then the most politically powerful firms in the country—had consistently prevented reform.

The date of the Senate Banking Committee's action is important. It was in 2005 that the GSEs—which had been acquiring increasing numbers of subprime and Alt-A loans for many years in order to meet their HUD-imposed affordable housing requirements—accelerated the purchases that led to their 2008 insolvency. If legislation along the lines of the Senate committee's bill had been enacted in that year, many if not all the losses that Fannie and Freddie have suffered, and will suffer in the future, might have been avoided.

Why was there no action in the full Senate? As most Americans know today, it takes 60 votes to cut off debate in the Senate, and the Republicans had only 55. To close debate and proceed to the enactment of the committee-passed bill, the Republicans needed five Democrats to vote with them. But in a 45 member Democratic caucus that included Barack Obama and the current Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), these votes could not be found.

» The New GOP Agenda: GOV2.0 - Big Government

» The New GOP Agenda: GOV2.0 - Big Government

The watchword for Republicans needs to be “productivity.” As in, “Why the hell hasn’t our government gotten more productive?” Here’s why:

For more than two decades, the Bureau of Labor Statistics had collected, analyzed, and published data on labor productivity in the Federal Government. Due to budgetary constraints, the Federal Productivity Measurement Program has been terminated. This article presents some of the statistics produced by the program during the 27 years of its operation. It provides a brief history and explains conceptual underpinnings of the program. Results from the program show a small, but steady increase in output per employee year in the Federal Government from 1967 to 1994, with the rate slowing somewhat after 1982.

WTF? Right? While the US private sector saw its largest productivity gains since the steam engine, the US public sector stuck one thumb in its ass, another in its mouth and took a frigging nap. And got huge pay raises.

Say it with me, boys and girls, “Public Employee Unions are EVIL.”

Brass Tacks: Companies that deploy IT and web services can fire workers while increasing output and reducing prices. Wal-Mart’s got me checking myself out. I spend $30 a year for unlimited phone calls. Look at any government web site. It’s like 1997.