Later On

You really must watch Terrorists. A wonderful comedy, played absolutely deadpan. Funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.

UPDATE: The cover shown by Netflix is the cover for a different movie (The Terrorists). Terrorists is the title of the movie I’m recommending.

It is well known now—despite decades lost to tobacco companies’ strategy of raising a smoke cloud of doubt—that cigarettes are deadly: highly addictive and statistically killing many, often via an agonizing death, before they would normally have died.

So the tobacco companies know what will result from their initiative described here:

Source: MySinchew.com, April 29, 2010

As smoking rates decline in the developed world, tobacco companies are searching for new markets, and they are finding them in developing south Asian countries, and countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia. People in rural areas of Bangladesh see advertisements that are unimaginable in other parts of the world. Ads tell smokers that they are smarter, more energetic and better lovers than non-smokers. Kasi Saifuddin Bennoor, a Bangladeshi chest doctor, recalls seeing an ad in a rural part of the country saying that "if a lady smokes, her baby will be smaller and it will be easier to deliver, the labor will be less painful." He says, "These are very ruthless advertisements." Such promotions are linked to an alarming rise in tobacco use among women and youth in impoverished south Asian and other developing countries. The World Health Organization warns that tobacco companies are targeting women in developing countries as new growth markets, and says doctors report treating more female patients with lung disease.

 

Does anyone still believe that you can trust a business (absent regulation, laws, and aggressive oversight) to do the right thing?

Kevin Yamamura in the Sacramento Bee:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger withdrew his support Monday for a controversial new offshore oil drilling project off the Santa Barbara coast in the wake of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Republican governor for two straight years has pushed the Tranquillon Ridge project as a way to raise money for California’s strapped budget. In his January plan, Schwarzenegger sought to raise $119 million in 2010-11 and $1.8 billion over 14 years by allowing a company to drill into California waters from an existing oil platform in federal territory.

"I think that first of all, it’s clear that we have to make up that $100 million a year that we (would) make from that," he said. "But if I have a choice between the $100 million and what I see in the Gulf of Mexico, I’d rather just figure out how to make up for that $100 million."

The plan drew sharp criticism from environmentalists, who raised the specter of another disaster comparable to one that occurred in 1969 in which oil from a spill drifted on to beaches in Santa Barbara.

Schwarzenegger wanted the Legislature to approve the deal because …

Continue reading.

Christine Stapleton in the Palm Beach Post:

David Kinnaird, BP’s liaison to Plaquemines Parish, spent Saturday night ripping up the contracts that hundreds of local commercial fishermen had signed to work for BP cleaning up the slick that could wipe out the local seafood industry.

It’s not that BP didn’t want to hire them. And there is nothing these fishermen would hesitate to do to save the bayous, canals and rivers where they and their families have made a living for generations – except this: Sign a contract with BP saying they will "hold harmless and indemnify … release, waive and forever discharge the BP Exploration and Production, Inc., its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, directors, regular employees, and independent contractors … from all claims and damages" arising from helping to clean up the mess that BP has made.

No one wanted to waive the right to sue BP, but some fishermen, desperate for cash, signed the waiver anyway.

"I shouldn’t have signed it," Louie Barthelemy said after leaving a three-hour training course for commercial fishermen interested in a BP cleanup job. Barthelemy was one of hundreds of fishermen who showed up at Boothville Elementary School on Saturday morning for the BP-sponsored class.

Sheriff’s deputies parked along the side of the road with their lights flashing to guide the stream of fishermen into the parking lot. Some who signed the contract did not speak English. Others admitted they could barely read or write but needed work and signed without knowing what the contract said.

"I was 8 or 9 years old when I started on a shrimp boat. I quit school. I can barely read or write," said Darrell Moreau, a shrimp boat captain. "Who’s going to pay my bills? I got bill collectors calling."

Confusion reigned. About 200 fishermen, many still in their muddy white rubber fishing boots, discussed BP’s offer to lease their boats and hire crews to lay booms to retain the slick and prevent it from leaking to their precious bayous.

The document they were asked to sign did not specify how much BP would pay, but some captains said they had been offered as much as $3,000 a day for their large boats and crews.

But who wanted to sign away their right to be part of a class-action lawsuit against BP? Many fishermen already have been contacted by lawyers who want to represent them in lawsuits against BP.

That was the problem, Kinnaird said. BP never intended for them to relinquish their right to sue the company. That is not what the document said. The document was merely a standard safety waiver – not a work contract, Kinnaird said.

"I am sitting her right now tearing them up and putting them in the trash," Kinnaird said. More than 400 captains had signed documents allowing BP to lease their vessels. "It was just a standard waiver, something the lawyers like. But it just caused so many problems." …

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Lee Fang at ThinkProgress:

Earlier today, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is funded by dues-paying corporations like BP and Halliburton, hosted a “Free Enterprise” conference to push deregulation and anti-tax policies. During a press availability after the morning session, a reporter raised the point that the oil rig disaster, the Massey mine disaster, and the overall financial crisis seemed to have all occurred as a result of too much free enterprise and not enough regulations. Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), one of several governors in attendance, lashed out at the reporter and said regulations would not have prevented the economic collapse.

Later in his response, Perry said he feared a “knee-jerk reaction” to the oil spill, and said the oil spill could be just another “act of God that cannot be prevented“:

“We don’t know what the event that has allowed for this massive oil to be released,” Perry said alongside several other governors on a panel Monday. “And until we know that, I hope we don’t see a knee-jerk reaction across this country that says we’re going to shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, because the cost to this country will be staggering.” Perry questioned whether the spill was “just an act of God that occurred” and said that any “politically driven” decisions could put the U.S. in further economic peril. “From time to time there are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented,” Perry said.

As Climate Progress’ Joe Romm has noted, BP cut corners by violating numerous safety regulations and refused to install “a remote-control shutoff switch that two other major oil producers, Norway and Brazil, require.” In fact, the Chamber, which is one of BP’s many trade associations and lobbying fronts, has worked aggressively to oppose regulations and fight for more offshore oil drilling.

“Project No Project,” a lobbying initiative of the Chamber, fights environmental and safety regulations as job killing “red tape.” Project No Project has attacked environmental and safety concerns levied against BP’s proposed liquefied natural gas plant on Pelican Island, near Galveston, Texas.

Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing writes:

Laszlo Thoth’s bank has a security procedure that uses customer-created questions and answers. When you call the bank, the customer service rep asks you the question, and you provide the answer. Here are some sample Q&A’s that Thoth and his readers came up with.

Take a minute to dream up your own Q&A combination.

Then take a look at these.

James Fallows:

How would it respond to this weekend’s Times Square bomb threat? Well, by extrapolation from its response to the 9/11 attacks and subsequent threats, the policy would be:

- All vans or SUVs headed into Midtown Manhattan would have to stop and have their contents inspected. If any vehicle seemed for any reason to have escaped inspection, Midtown in its entirety would be evacuated;

- A whole new uniformed force — the Times Square Security Administration, or TsSA – would be formed for this purpose;

- The restrictions would never be lifted and the TsSA would have permanent life, because the political incentives here work only one way. A politician who supports more permanent, more thorough, more expensive inspections can never be proven "wrong." The absence of attacks shows that his measures have "worked"; and a new attack shows that inspections must go  further still. A politician who wants to limit the inspections can never be proven "right." An absence of attacks means that nothing has gone wrong — yet. Any future attack would always and forever be that politician’s "fault." Given that asymmetry of risks, what public figure will ever be able to talk about paring back the TSA?

Something about airplanes and air travel heightens the emotional response to such threats (as Bruce Schneier and I discussed in a Second Life conversation recently). Thus the mood of fear and panic after this event seems less than after the foiled "underwear bombing" airline plot at Christmas time. But as a matter of logic, the steps above are what the TSA approach would necessitate. After all, we still feel the consequences (shoes off! no liquids!) of the failed "shoe bomber" in 2001, and there is no foreseeable reason to expect that to change.

There is one other crucial element in the Times Square case, and it can’t be stressed often enough. So far we have seen a New York-style rather than a Washington-style response to the threat. And while New York is the least "American" of U.S. cities, its emotional and social response is just what America’s should be. Let me explain:

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Brian Beutler at TPMDC:

Nearly two years after the Wall Street meltdown drove the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse, and forced the U.S. government to prop up major financial institutions with hundreds of billions of dollars, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now claims that the Bush Administration prohibited its own top officials who were handling the emerging crisis from briefing Congress until a complete financial collapse was only hours away.

In little-noticed statements to reporters over the last few weeks, Pelosi has alleged that the Bush administration knew well in advance of its intervention that the financial crisis would hit, and that Congress would need to authorize a historic and unpopular bailout – but that top officials, including then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, told her that they had been barred from briefing Congress about true extent of the crisis.

If accurate, the allegation could constitute a major indictment of the Bush administration, which may have worsened the crisis and resulting economic fallout by delaying the call for congressional action. Pelosi says the admissions from Bush administration officials that they had kept Congress in the dark came in private conversations between her and those officials in person and by phone. None of the other parties to those conversations would comment for this story. Nor is it clear if the Administration’s alleged decision not to brief Congress earlier was a calculated strategy to avoid spooking the already shaky financial markets thus hastening the crisis or, as Pelosi suggests, a political calculation in advance of the 2008 presidential elections, or a combination of the two.

During her weekly press conference on April 15, a reporter asked Pelosi a seemingly innocuous question about taxes. Pelosi prefaced her response with a fairly standard litany: explaining the dire state of the U.S. economy inherited by President Obama and setting the blame at the foot of the Bush administration. But she also added this: "When [then-Senator Obama] accepted the nomination in Colorado, the [Bush] Administration had kept from the public the idea that, in a matter of weeks, the financial community would be in crisis, and we would need to pass the TARP legislation."

Much has been written about the days, weeks, and months leading up to the financial crisis, which culminated with Lehman Brothers declaring bankruptcy on September 14, 2008. We know, for instance, that Treasury officials in the Bush administration had conceived of a contingency plan along the lines of the TARP bailout months before they actually called for one: a "break the glass" Bank Recapitalization Plan. And it was no secret to anybody paying attention that the financial system had suffered major shocks throughout 2008. But Pelosi appeared to be saying that Paulson and others knew that the glass would have to be broken weeks before they begged her and other congressional leaders to step in.

To clarify, I followed up with her after that press conference.

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Eric Kleefeld at TPMDC:

The Minnesota Republican Party’s official candidate to succeed Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who is looking ahead to a 2012 run for President, is a staunch conservative well to Pawlenty’s right who has a long history of "Tentherism," the attempts by the far right-wing to invoke the Tenth Amendment and nullify federal laws on various liberal initiatives. He has even proposed a state constitutional amendment that would allow federal laws to operate in Minnesota only if they were consented to by super-majorities of the state legislature.

State Rep. Tom Emmer picked up the official Republican endorsement at the party’s convention this weekend, and he also walked away with the backing of Pawlenty himself. "We don’t have any doubt about what Tom Emmer stands for or what his values are," Pawlenty said at the convention. "He is strong. He is steadfast. He is clear. … He is going to be the next governor of the state of Minnesota." Emmer also has the support of Sarah Palin, who praised him just before the convention got underway as a "hockey dad" who once played for the University of Alaska-Fairbanks — a move that may have been a tipping point, according to the Star-Tribune.

Emmer was first elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2004. He is a co-author of a proposed state constitutional amendment that would, to borrow the words of Nigel Tufnel, turn the Tenth Amendment all the way up to 11, with Minnesota preemptively nullifying all federal laws unless a state supermajority consents to them. Here is the key quote from the amendment’s text: "A federal law does not apply in Minnesota unless that law is approved by a two-thirds vote of the members of each house of the legislature and is signed by the governor. Before voting to approve a federal law, each legislator must individually affirm that the legislator has read the federal law and understands it."

Last September, Emmer proposed another state constitutional amendment that would prohibit any individual or employer mandate to carry health insurance in the state of Minnesota, if one were to eventually pass at the federal or state level (as it did eventually pass at the federal level). Here is a YouTube video of Emmer announcing his proposed amendment, courtesy of our friends at The Uptake: …

Continue reading.

I trust Minnesota will reject this clown.

It seems that the modern GOP has totally abandoned reality.

Steve Benen:

For conservative proponents of the Arizona immigration measure, there’s one argument that trumps them all: the law is necessary to address a public safety crisis. There’s a drug war in Mexico, the argument goes, which in turn has led to deadly incidents in Arizona. Officials in Arizona, then, have no choice but to adopt extreme measures to protect the citizenry.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who frequently struggles with details and facts, insisted on the Senate floor last week that problems along the border have "led to violence — the worst I have ever seen." Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said her new state law is in response to a "crisis" borne of "border-related violence."

The argument doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny. (thanks to reader P.O.)

Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town.

"We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico," Bermudez says emphatically. "You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America."

FBI Uniform Crime Reports and statistics provided by police agencies, in fact, show that the crime rates in Nogales, Douglas, Yuma and other Arizona border towns have remained essentially flat for the past decade, even as drug-related violence has spiraled out of control on the other side of the international line. Statewide, rates of violent crime also are down.

This is more than just another instance of conservatives fudging the facts. Public safety is at the core of the defense of the Arizona law. It’s the driving force for the entire effort — but it’s wrong.

This isn’t to say crimes haven’t happened. The murder of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz has been well reported. But the right has painted a picture of escalating violence, justifying overly-aggressive policymaking.

It’s just not true.

By many measures, Arizona has become safer since illegal immigrants began pouring into the state in the 1990s.

Crime has dropped all across the country since then, but the decrease has been as fast or faster in Arizona…. That’s no surprise to those who study immigration — both sides, whether for or against increased immigration, agree that immigrants tend to commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. [...]

What most in law enforcement here do agree on is that the victims of crime by illegal immigrants tend to be other immigrants. Community activists argue that the new law will make it worse for law-abiding immigrants because few immigrants, whether documented or not, will want to deal with police.

Better conservative talking points, please.

DougJ at Balloon Juice:

No one could have predicted:

Attorney General Troy King has asked BP to cease circulating settlement agreements among south Alabamians.Alabama Attorney General Troy King said tonight that he has told representatives of BP Plc. that they should stop circulating settlement agreements among coastal Alabamians.

The agreements, King said, essentially require that people give up the right to sue in exchange for payment of up to $5,000.

Big government liberal regulations get in the way of Galtian superhero business.

When something goes wrong, no one could have predicted it.

Once it starts going wrong, nothing can be done unless you can do underwater surgery with robotic submarines, you naive fucking hippie.

Tort reform!

Countdown to the Mickey Kaus/Gregg Easterbrook about the good news about the oil spill.

And how come we never hear about all the oil rigs that aren’t spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico?

Let the eagle soar.

Sascha Meinrath and James Losey in Slate:

Given the dismal state of broadband connections in America, it was illuminating recently to hear a major telecom executive paint a rosy picture of where the country stands. When Wall Street Journal Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray asked how the United States ranks in broadband, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg didn’t hesitate: "One. Not even close."

To support his statement, Seidenberg claimed that "in the U.S., there is greater household penetration of access to the Internet than any country in Europe." Compare that with what Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski recently told a Senate committee: "Our record shows roughly 65 percent adoption in the U.S. compared to significantly higher adoption percentages—up to 90 percent or more—for some countries in Asia and Western Europe."

How can two people arrive at such radically different assessments? Seidenberg is deliberately conflating "access" and "adoption"—the difference between who has the option of buying broadband service and who has actually done so. Using Seidenberg’s logic, Americans also have universal access to health care, college, and employment. Dispelling this sort of misinformation, however, isn’t always easy. One of the big problems in this debate is that the data about broadband are as spotty and unreliable as the connections themselves. And, taking a page from the playbook of big oil and tobacco, the telecom companies are spending millions to further confuse the issue, spending about$100 million in 2009 alone in lobbying fees. With all the bogus information out there, hucksters like Seidenberg can lie through their teeth and get away with it.

Here’s what we do know: If you simply look at broadband "penetration"—a measure of broadband subscribers relative to the population—the U.S. is ranked 15th by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, with 27 broadband subscribers per 100 people (check out Table 1d). And another key organization, the International Telecommunications Union, ranks the United States 16th. Just one decade ago, the United States was at the top of the list.

But penetration doesn’t tell the whole story. To get an up-to-date picture of where we actually stand, the New America Foundation—where we both work—recently took a very close look at both speeds and prices in more than a dozen leading broadband countries. As it turns out, U.S. residents paid more for bandwidth than nearly every other country surveyed. Typically, the lowest price for broadband in the United States, not counting promotions and bundled deals, costs an average of $35 a month for a measly 1 megabit per second connection. Twice this speed is available in Denmark and Canada for lower prices; more strikingly, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sweden have broadband available for under $20 a month. Additionally, the fastest speeds in the United States are comparatively slow. The common top speed available for residential services in the Unites States is 50 Mbps (and costs $145 a month), while several nations have speeds available that are up to four times faster, for less than $60 a month.

According to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, the no. 1 reason that those without broadband cite for not having broadband is cost. Given that broadband is more expensive here than abroad, it’s no surprise the United States lags behind a growing list of other countries. Subscribers in the United States pay more per megabit of bandwidth than countries across both our oceans. To remedy this, the FCC has a plan that’s the equivalent of the United States entering the Grand Prix with the goal of finishing last. The National Broadband Plan wants all Americans to have access to 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds by 2020. In that same time frame, the plan also proposes a neatly framed 100 Mbps download, 50 Mbps upload connection for 100 million homes…

Continue reading.

Annie Lowrey in the Washington Independent:

Over the weekend, David Kotok of Cumberland Investors, a much-watched CNBC market analyst, put out a very gloomy analysis of the economic impact of the BP offshore oil spill. Entitled “Oil Slickonomics,” the note traces out three possible scenarios, depending on how quickly the government and BP contain the spill, but Kotok reminds us, “There is no ‘good’ [scenario] here.”

In the best case, he thinks:

Containment chambers are put in place and they catch the outflow from the three ruptures that are currently pouring 200,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf every day. If this works, it will take until June to complete. The chambers are 30-foot-high steel configurations that must be placed on the ocean floor at a depth of one mile. This has never been done before. If early containment is successful, the damages from this accident will be in the tens of billions. The cleanup will take years. The economic impact will be in the five states that have frontal coastline on the Gulf of Mexico: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

And in the worst, he thinks:

This spew stoppage takes longer to reach a full closure; the subsequent cleanup may take a decade. The Gulf becomes a damaged sea for a generation. The oil slick leaks beyond the western Florida coast, enters the Gulfstream and reaches the eastern coast of the United States and beyond. Use your imagination for the rest of the damage. Monetary cost is now measured in the many hundreds of billions of dollars.

Moreover, he teases out the macroeconomic impact in any possible case:

Federal deficit spending will certainly rise by tens, and maybe hundreds, of billions as emergency appropriations are directed at larger and larger efforts to clean up this mess. At the same time, federal and state revenues tied to Gulf-region businesses will fall….

We expect that the Federal Reserve will extend the timeframe that we have come to know as the “extended period” in the making of its monetary policy. We do not expect the Fed to raise interest rates at all for the rest of this year, and maybe well into next year. We expect to see the deterioration of the economic statistics for the US to reveal the onset of this oil-slick crisis in May, and the negative impact will intensify during the summer months. A “double-dip” recession probably has been made more likely by this tragedy.

We are at the highest level of cash in our U.S. stock accounts that we have seen in over a year and a half. We expect a market correction will present entry points at lower stock prices. We have exited the financial sectors, including the insurance ETF. We now worry about the banks that are exposed. We do not own the major oil stocks now. Some of them face enormous liability payments.

In short, Cumberland believes that the oil spill has likely increased the chance of a double-dip recession due to the enormous economic damage to the Gulf states (already not faring too well, particularly Florida), financial and energy company exposure to the crisis, the outsize impact on small businesses and the new federal deficit spending required — all of this on top of the tremendous environmental impact.

Marcy Wheeler at Firedoglake:

As you’ve no doubt heard, BP’s own liability for the damages the Deepwater Horizon spill will cause may be limited to $75 million (though it will have to pay for cleanup).

The federal government has a large rainy day fund on hand to help mitigate the expanding damage on the Gulf Coast, generated by a tax on oil for use in cases like the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Up to $1 billion of the $1.6 billion reserve could be used to compensate for losses from the accident, as much as half of it for what is sometimes a major category of costs: damage to natural resources like fisheries and other wildlife habitats.

Under the law that established the reserve, called the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, the operators of the offshore rig face no more than $75 million in liability for the damages that might be claimed by individuals, companies or the government, although they are responsible for the cost of containing and cleaning up the spill.

That’s obviously puny. But to give you a sense of just how puny it is, consider that, at its current levels of spending on lobbying, BP will spend as much every six years on politicians in DC.

BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States. Its 2009 revenues of $327bn are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence US policy and regulatory oversight.

In 2009, the company spent nearly $16m on lobbying the federal government, ranking it among the 20 highest spenders that year, and shattering its own previous record of $10.4m set in 2008. In 2008, it also spent more than $530,000 on federal elections, placing it among the oil industry’s top 10 political spenders.

But the puny amount for which BP will be liable for damages didn’t stop them from potentially trying to make their liability even punier. The early contracts it drew up to pay Alabama fishermen to help contain the spill included a $5000 damage limit, which presumably wouldn’t even cover the cost of a fishing boat.

Alabama Attorney General Troy King said tonight that he has told representatives of BP Plc. that they should stop circulating settlement agreements among coastal Alabamians.

The agreements, King said, essentially require that people give up the right to sue in exchange for payment of up to $5,000.

[snip]

By the end of Sunday, BP aimed to sign up 500 fishing boats in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida to deploy boom.

BP had distributed a contract to fishermen it was hiring that waived their right to sue BP and required confidentiality and other items, sparking protests in Louisiana and elsewhere.

Darren Beaudo, a spokesman for BP, said the waiver requirement had been stripped out, and that ones already signed would not be enforced.

Next time some DC politico gets $5000 from BP, I hope they reflect on the fact that that’s all BP wants to pay for putting a family’s entire livelihood on the line.

Back to basics. Via the Consumerist:

Jason Leopold at TruthOut:

A former contractor who worked for British Petroleum (BP) claims the oil conglomerate broke federal laws and violated its own internal procedures by failing to maintain crucial safety and engineering documents related to one of the firms other deepwater production projects in the Gulf of Mexico, according to internal emails and other documents obtained by Truthout.

The whistleblower, whose name has been withheld at the person’s request because the whistleblower still works in the oil industry and fears retaliation, first raised concerns about safety issues related to BP Atlantis, the world’s largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans, in November 2008. Atlantis, which began production in October 2007, has the capacity to produce about 8.4 million gallons of oil and 180 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

It was then that the whistleblower, who was hired to oversee the company’s databases that housed documents related to its Atlantis project, discovered that the drilling platform had been operating without a majority of the engineer-approved documents it needed to run safely, leaving the platform vulnerable to a catastrophic disaster that would far surpass the massive oil spill that began last week following a deadly explosion on a BP-operated drilling rig.

BP’s own internal communications show that company officials were made aware of the issue and feared that the document shortfalls related to Atlantis "could lead to catastrophic operator error" and must be addressed.

Indeed, according to an August 15, 2008, email sent to BP officials by Barry Duff, a member of BP’s Deepwater Gulf of Mexico Atlantis Subsea Team, the Piping and Instrument Diagrams (P&IDs) for the Atlantis subsea components "are not complete" and "there are hundreds if not thousands of subsea documents that have never been finalized, yet the facilities have been" up and running. P&IDs documents form the foundation of a hazards analysis BP is required to undertake as part of its Safety and Environmental Management Program related to its offshore drilling operations. P&IDs drawings provide the schematic details of the project’s piping and process flows, valves and safety critical instrumentation.

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From the Center for American Progress in an email:

Twelve days ago, an oil rig owned by energy giant BP exploded, killing eleven workers, and causing an oil leak that has continued ever since, spilling up to one million gallons of oil a day into the waters off the Gulf Coast. Yesterday, Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar said that the environmental outlook for the Gulf Coast is "very grave," and that it could take up to three months for the leak to be fully plugged. "It potentially is very catastrophic. And I think we have to prepare for the worst," Salazar said. At its current rate, the spill will eclipse the Exxon-Valdez disaster of 1989 (if it has not done so already), placing it "on the scale of the largest oil spills in history." Towns all along the coast are bracing for oil to begin washing ashore. Admiral Thad Allen, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard — who was named the "national incident commander" for the spill response — said that it’s only a matter of "when and where" the oil finally hits the shoreline, adding that "it’s logical to assume" that the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida will be affected. It’s also possible that the Gulf Stream and varying weather patterns will move the oil up the East Coast. "It will be on the East Coast of Florida in almost no time," said Hans Graber, executive director of the University of Miami’s Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing. Though it is too soon to accurately determine the exact amount of damage wrought by the spill, various industries will surely be affected, and the environmental and economic effects of the spill will linger for years to come.

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Melinda Moyer in Scientific American:

Eat less saturated fat: that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years. But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer. Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why: investigators may have picked the wrong culprit. Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does—a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.

In March the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis—which combines data from several studies—that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years. The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.

The finding joins other conclusions of the past few years that run counter to the conventional wisdom that saturated fat is bad for the heart because it increases total cholesterol levels. That idea is “based in large measure on extrapolations, which are not supported by the data,” Krauss says.

One problem with the old logic is that “total cholesterol is not a great predictor of risk,” says Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Although saturated fat boosts blood levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, it also increases “good” HDL cholesterol. In 2008 Stampfer co-authored a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that followed 322 moderately obese individuals for two years as they adopted one of three diets: a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet based on American Heart Association guidelines; a Mediterranean, restricted-calorie diet rich in vegetables and low in red meat; and a low-carbohydrate, nonrestricted-calorie diet. Although the subjects on the low-carb diet ate the most saturated fat, they ended up with the healthiest ratio of HDL to LDL cholesterol and lost twice as much weight as their low-fat-eating counterparts.

Stampfer’s findings do not merely suggest that saturated fats are not so bad; they indicate that carbohydrates could be worse. A 1997 study he co-authored in the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated 65,000 women and found that the quintile of women who ate the most easily digestible and readily absorbed carbohydrates—that is, those with the highest glycemic index—were 47 percent more likely to acquire type 2 diabetes than those in the quintile with the lowest average glycemic-index score. (The amount of fat the women ate did not affect diabetes risk.) And a 2007 Dutch study of 15,000 women published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that women who were overweight and in the quartile that consumed meals with the highest average glycemic load, a metric that incorporates portion size, were 79 percent more likely to develop coronary vascular disease than overweight women in the lowest quartile. These trends may be explained in part by the yo-yo effects that high glycemic-index carbohydrates have on blood glucose, which can stimulate fat production and inflammation, increase overall caloric intake and lower insulin sensitivity, says David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Will the more recent thinking on fats and carbs be reflected in the 2010 federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, updated once every five years? …

Continue reading.

Put down the cracker, but eat the cheese.

This looks extremely cool and time-saving.