Charitable donations you can make in honor of father's day instead of buying neckties. Including giant, bomb-sniffing rats!

The Tea Party was launched mostly by lobbying groups funded and run by the Koch family of oil billionaires, mostly to pass the 2008 bill opening US waters for offshore drilling. Ames & Levine, writing on Alternet: "When you look at the poisoned Gulf of Mexico, and the ruined beaches of Florida, that's the Tea Party Vision turned into our reality."

Bruce Sterling on city culture. I really love this idea of his about how bankers are forming urban, male, insular, misogynist, misanthropic, hostile, highly politicized communities, very much like fundamentalist Muslim jihadi terrorist cells.

Oil spill cleanup volunteer health risks:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1657625/read-this-before-you-volunteer-to-clean-up-the-bp-oil-disaster Leave a comment

NYT on repeated efforts by BP to block media access to the Gulf oil spill, with widespread government collusion, especially at the local level

( The Economist diagnoses what ails the Republicans )

Not paying your debts is not a criminal offense, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the US in the 19th century, yet throughout the midwest, collection agencies are issuing warrants for debtors to appear in court, then having them arrested and jailed for not appearing. In many cases, the bail is set at the amount owed, and once friends or ( Read more... )

ANOTHER offshore Gulf well has been leaking for at least a month, and details are scarce. Just how often does this happen, anyway? All the time?

US fishermen have recently been robbed at gunpoint a few times by Mexican thieves on a lake that straddles the US-Mexico border. In fairness, they were on the Mexican side of the lake at the time, but this looks worryingly like Mexico's anarchy starting to spill into Texas.

by Flipside regular and Burner extraordinaire Marrilee ( Read more... )