World's Most Expensive Crash

Gotta love it:

Eight Ferraris and a Lamborghini were part of a 14-car crash in Japan yesterday that wrecked more than $1 million of vehicles.

“The accident occurred when the driver of a red Ferrari was switching from the right lane to the left and skidded,” said Mitsuyoshi Isejima, executive officer for Yamaguchi Prefecture’s Expressway Traffic Police unit. “It was a gathering of narcissists.” The drivers were aged between 37 and 60 years old, he said.

A gathering of narcissists...isn't that a GOP Presidential debate?

And maybe a car crash as well.

Bunch of Endings

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) announced his retirement from Congress today -- he won't be running again next year -- at age 71. This is a huge bummer legislatively, but hopefully he'll turn up on news commentary a lot more, especially as he promising not to become a lobbyist. Consistently the smartest and wittiest guy in the House, Frank was no different today:

[Barney Frank] on the House under Republican rule: “It consists half of people who think like Michele Bachmann and half of people who are afraid of losing a primary to people who think like Michele Bachmann and that leaves very little room to work things out.”

Goodbye to Ken Russell, legendary British film director known for his combination or erudition and over-the-top visuals. Classics include: Women in Love (Oscar for star Glenda Jackson), Altered States, Tommy, The Lair of the White Worm, The Devils. Who can ever forget Tina Turner as the Acid Queen?

Goodbye to pre-IPO Facebook, between April and June 2012. The stock options will never mean the same thing again, the innocence lost, time for quarterly analyst calls and big annual reports. Guaranteed to have more investors than anyone imagines.

Goodbye to 2000's European prosperity. And maybe the Euro.

And, as much as we all hope not, we may be saying hello to a new global depression.

Steel Carnage

A month or so ago I was very moved by the Senna documentary, which now seems like a too-timely release with the death of two-time Indy winner Dan Wheldon at the Las Vegas Speedway on Sunday. It's a spectacular tragedy from afar -- Real Steel, as it were, Twisted Metal. Fifteen cars and one championship driver killed.

One can only imagine the horror of being in this crash, whether you survived, were injured, or, for poor Dan, killed. It brings up all sort of questions, philosophical and regulatory. It's the thing that makes you remember that racing cars at high speeds is exceedingly dangerous, that's why there's a premium paid for those that are good at it. It's the thing you usually forget -- and want to forget -- when you're watching a race.

The crazy thing about this one is the footage captured during the event and played after, replaying it from so many different angles. Like a videogame, but real and deadly:

At times it looks like a 3D animated reconstruction. I'll bet it'll be studied for movement, to understand what happened and how to prevent these kinds of accidents in the future...and to for some sort of special effects extravaganza to come, someday not so far away, to a multiplex near you.

Mechanized death.

BP

“There’s no shrimp,” explained Grant Bundy, 38. The dock should smell like a place where 10,000 pounds of shrimp a day are bought off the boats. Not this year. In all of September, Bundy’s Seafood bought around 41,000 pounds.

White shrimp season began in late August, and two months in, the shrimpers here say it is a bad one, if not the worst in memory. It is bad not just in spots but all over southeastern Louisiana, said Jules Nunez, 78, calling it the worst season he had seen since he began shrimping in 1950. Some fishermen said their catches were off by 80 percent or more.

“A lot of people say it’s this, it’s that, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s BP,” Mr. Nunez said. “We just don’t know.”

We all know.

More from the Death Eaters

It's like the evil characters in Harry Potter that work for Valdomort: they cheer death:

This was the CNN/Tea Party Debate. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the teabaggers are the most bloodthirsty Republicans of all (is that possible?) but they do worship their own self-righteous anger.

A vote for a Republican is a vote to dismantle the Federal government's ability to help we the people. The only winners will be the mega corps, the mega churches and mega defense. It's a vote for more and earlier death for our aged and infirm, our sickened no matter how suddenly, our children through the environment and educational neglect.

And CNN decides to partner up with this staunch political group. The John Birch Society, mainstreamed by our media.

Come on Irene

This, on the busy weekend before Labor Day weekend:

- It now appears Irene may hug the coastline potentially making a landfall in southern New Jersey Sunday afternoon with the center coming very close to or over New York City Sunday evening.

- This track means more people could have catastrophic impacts from Irene in the Northeast beginning Saturday night in southern Virginia and lasting into Monday in Northern New England.

- Even though Irene should weaken some it will still bring hurricane force winds, extreme rainfall, significant coastal flooding, and a tornado threat.

- Irene should be hitting the Northeast near the new moon when tides will be higher before adding Irene's surge and wave action.

- Heavy rain could track as far west as western Virginia, western Maryland, central Pennsylvania and central and western New York.

- Widespread wind damage and power outages are likely throughout the Northeast.

- Plan ahead ... Make sure that you have plenty of water, non-perishable food, flashlights and a transistor radio.

Good luck, me droogies, friends and family.

Presenting The Tea-cession

Here's the actual passage from the S&P downgrade announcement:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said it best himself today:

"I believe this is without question the Tea Party downgrade," he said. "This is the Tea Party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered the will of even many of Republicans in the United States Senate who were prepared to do a bigger deal."

Kerry intimated that the "grand bargain" that President Obama initially negotiated with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), a package of larger spending cuts and revenue increases, was scuttled by a smaller group of Republicans who were unwilling to negotiate at any cost.

"There were some people in the Republican party - and Mitch McConnell even admitted this - who wanted to default," Kerry said. "He said there were people in his party who were willing to shoot the hostage. In the end they found that the hostage was worth ransoming."

The meme is spreading: It's The Tea Party Downgrade. Next comes the Tea Party Recession, hopefully not Tea Party Depression.

Thank you, Tea Party. For revealing that you're willing to send America back into a deeper recession that will likely take longer to get out of -- watch those interest rates this week -- all because of your inflexible anti-taxation ideology.

Let's see how much support they have after the pension funds get hit.

"Don't call my bluff."

Eric Cantor overplaying his hand against the man who killed Bin Laden:

"Eric, don't call my bluff. I'm going to the American people on this," the president said, according to both Cantor and another attendee. "This process is confirming what the American people think is the worst about Washington: that everyone is more interested in posturing, political positioning, and protecting their base, than in resolving real problems."

Cantor, speaking to reporters after the meeting, said that the president "abruptly" walked off after offering his scolding.

Or, as someone else who was in the room put it:

“He (Obama) lit up Eric Cantor like he’s never been lit up,” said one in the room.

Light him up, baby. And the rest of the Tea-rants with him.

Mitch McConnell at least has the good sense, a day after revealing his hand, to go full weasel. Admitting abdication of governance for pure Party politics, admitting it in public, no less:

Watching silently was McConnell, who had used a conservative radio interview earlier in the day to bluntly warn his party it was setting itself up for a fall at the polls in 2012.

“I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy,” McConnell told his host, Laura Ingraham. “The reason default is no better an idea today than it was when Newt Gingrich tried it in 1995 is that it destroys your brand and would give the president an opportunity to blame Republicans for a bad economy.”

He's already (and often) said that thwarting President Obama's reelection is his single goal as Senate Minority Leader, so McConnell admits he is only concerned with making the President look bad, not with getting America back to work, not with putting guardrails on the greed that caused our most recent financial meltdown, not with saving the planet from destruction. Not even bringing peace to the Middle East.

That not governance, that's certainly not statesmanship.

That's simply sabotage.

Dead Seas

It's a report like this that make me worry for my children:

The preliminary report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) is the result of the first-ever interdisciplinary international workshop examining the combined impact of all of the stressors currently affecting the oceans, including pollution, warming, acidification, overfishing and hypoxia.

“The findings are shocking," Dr. Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director, said in a statement released by the group. "This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children's and generations beyond that."

The scientific panel concluded that degeneration in the oceans is happening much faster than has been predicted, and that the combination of factors currently distressing the marine environment is contributing to the precise conditions that have been associated with all major extinctions in the Earth's history.

According to the report, three major factors have been present in the handful of mass extinctions that have occurred in the past: an increase of both hypoxia (low oxygen) and anoxia (lack of oxygen that creates "dead zones") in the oceans, warming and acidification. The panel warns that the combination of these factors will inevitably cause a mass marine extinction if swift action isn't taken to improve conditions.

The report is the latest of several published in recent months examining the dire conditions of the oceans. A recent World Resources Institute report suggests that all coral reefs could be gone by 2050 if no action is taken to protect them, while a study published earlier this year in BioScience declares oysters as "functionally extinct", their populations decimated by over-harvesting and disease. Just last week scientists forecasted that this year's Gulf "dead zone" will be the largest in history due to increased runoff from the Mississippi River dragging in high levels of nitrates and phosphates from fertilizers.

A recent study in the journal Nature, meanwhile, suggests that not only will the next mass extinction be man-made, but that it could already be underway.

Makes me think that Cormac McCarthy's vision is the most prescient -- this is The Road that we've set our civilization and planet on:



Someday maybe it'll be like this:



Is Mars the oh-so-obvious warning next door?

Wake of Ruins

America is finding extreme weather to be the new normal, but it's still devastating for the victims of monster Mother Nature:

Wednesday's storms followed a deadly outbreak Tuesday in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas that killed at least 15 people. The nation's deadliest single tornado since 1950 killed 125 on Sunday in the southwest Missouri city of Joplin.

Joplin seems hit the worst so far:

Standing in a wreckage-strewn park across from a hospital that is now only a concrete shell, the mayor pro tem, Melodee Colbert-Kean, said that officials understood the need to be careful about how fast they moved forward. In addition to the considerable logistical challenges, there are the emotional considerations imbued in the splintered lumber, crushed brick and strewn personal possessions — as well as the remains of the missing.

“To a lot of people, it’s just rubble,” she said. “But to a whole bunch more, it’s lives.”

That rubble was once assembled neatly into more than 5,000 buildings stretching through nearly a third of the city. Now it is where at least 125 people died, the most in a single tornado since modern record-keeping began in the United States in 1950. It is a rolling junkyard presided over by the jagged forms of denuded trees. The mess revealed a prosthetic leg, a college thesis, a live guinea pig, an empty wheelchair, a pocket watch, and a child’s doll.

Still, even residents of the hardest-hit area seemed to carry a gloomy resignation about what was surely ahead. “What else can you do but bulldoze it?” said Anna Kent, 54, as she wandered through rubble that once was a friend’s home in search of missing items. “They ought to draw a perimeter around all of it and take it all. What else can you do?”

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