Mother Jones, “It’s BP's Oil”: Mac McClelland runs the anti-press gauntlet set up by BP with compliant local sheriffs to see what a major spill looks like when it washes up to shore.
It seems BP has learned at least one lesson from the Iraq war: keep the press out, or at least tame, and you can do what you like.
JUSTICE BUILDING BLOG: FUN AT DCJ explains the various steps needed for a lawyer to see a client in the Dade County Jail. It's not easy.
For some odd reason this story reminds me of an incident when we were fixing up our house. We were having trouble getting a permit for one of the many many steps involved in the remodeling, and the contractor suggested that we consider hiring a “permit babe”. What's that?, we asked. It seems a permit babe is an out-of-work or underemployed Miami model who moonlights as a permit runner — someone who takes your paperwork to the city and gets it approved.
Runners are commonly used by people who don't have time to stand in line — it can be a long wait — and also because they know the system, and know who to talk to if the front-line staff balk at approving the drawings and forms.
Permit babes, we were told, take this one better. They do all the things runners do, but they do them in very short skirts, which often speeds the permit process considerably.
(We did not hire a permit babe. It took a year and half to get our approval.)
Gulf oil spill live feed via the Washington Post.
Here's a somewhat effective piece of agitprop from Rep. Grayson: War Is Making You Poor Act – NEWS RELEASE.
Congressman Alan Grayson (FL-08) introduced a landmark bill last night, called the “War Is Making You Poor Act”. The bipartisan bill does three things
1) It limits the amount of funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
2) It eliminates the federal income tax on the first $35,000 of every American’s income ($70,000 for married couples), and
3) It cuts the Federal deficit by $15.9 billion.
Congressman Grayson said, “All three of those things need to be done. This bill brings them all together.”
The bill attracted an eclectic group of supporters.
The terrible thing about it is that the math is true. But of course there's no way we're about to cut a third of the non-war-related defense budget. Not until long after we have to.
It's odd in a way that more members of Congress don't try stunts like this, though. If enough did there might in the end be some movement on the issue.
Seth Godin writes about a way to have a convenient low-security privacy shield:
The internet is constantly, relentlessly public. Post something and it's there, for everyone, all the time.
Acar has come up with a clever idea, a small idea that makes things just a little protected. Trick.ly is a url shortener with a twist. You can share a URL but hide it behind a question that only insiders can easily answer.
So, for example, you could tweet, “Here's the source for my world-class chili: http://trick.ly/2L5”. Anyone can go there, but only people who can figure out the clue can discover the site you were pointing to.
It's not secure. It's sort of private. Neato.
For people who don't have their own servers and don't want to mess with .htaccess files, this probably is a great thing. Of course, some people will over-rely on this or a related service, and the blackmail will start…
It seems there's a nifty new free tool out to explain Where has your Windows memory gone?:
… for us Windows geeks, today is a red-letter day, … RAMMap is a memory analyzer, a lightweight tool (272KB) that gives you a very detailed look at exactly what is your system’s memory is up to right now. It presents its report in a tabbed dialog box whose opening page is a colorful, well-organized bar graph
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