- Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Crisis News:
- These Daily Kos community posts were the most shared on Facebook March 4:
What Would Jesus Shoot? Kentucky Baptists giving away 25 guns to attract converts, by Lefty Coaster
Apple Tells Limbaugh and His Ilk to Stick Their Money Where the Sun Don’t Shine, by ProgLegs
MUST-SEE: Stephen Colbert debunks Obamacare horror stories with special guest, by BruinKid
Eleven Southern states are home to more than 500 groups that promote hate speech, according to a detailed breakdown by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But it’s California that is home to the largest number of organizations that preach hate, the center found.
The SPLC tracks 939 active groups that promote racial, ethnic or religious segregation or hate. The eight types of hate groups the center has identified include white nationalists, black separatists, neo-Confederates, Christian identity, skinheads, Ku Klux Klans and neo-Nazis, along with a handful of miscellaneous groups.
- What getting older will do to you:
At 42, I see movies differently than I did as a kid. Ferris Bueller is now the story of a hard-working principal just trying to do his job.— @JElvisWeinstein
We’ve written a lot about the dangers of shipping extra-flammable oil in flimsy rail cars that are prone to puncture and explode. Turns out you can blame a fair bit of the problem on billionaire investor Warren Buffett. As the Sightline Institute’s blog reports, “Arguably, he is the single most important person in the world of oil-by-rail.”
It doesn’t take much scrutiny to see that oil trains get special treatment. After all, if a jet plane has a battery fire problem, regulators immediately pull it from service and will ground the entire fleet until the manufacturer makes modifications to reduce the risk of fire. If an auto regularly bursts into flame upon impact, the feds issue a recall and mandate retrofits for all the cars with the defect. Yet despite explosion after deadly explosion—and safety report after federal safety report—government regulators, at the urging of the industry groups that represent Buffett’s holdings, have allowed unsafe DOT-111s tank cars to haul crude oil and ethanol.
A recent study found that many Americans are lost when it comes to tech-related terms, with 11% saying that they thought HTML — a language that is used to create websites — was a sexually transmitted disease. [...]
• 27% identified “gigabyte” as an insect commonly found in South America. A gigabyte is a measurement unit for the storage capacity of an electronic device. [...] • 23% thought an “MP3″ was a “Star Wars” robot. It is actually an audio file.
• 18% identified “Blu-ray” as a marine animal. It is a disc format typically used to store high-definition videos.
The Stockman campaign defied convention, often spectacularly so. He made what the Dallas Morning News called a “rare public appearance” on January 14, and then he disappeared. He wasn’t seen for days, during which time he missed 17 consecutive votes and his House office refused to say where he was. Then his staff switched gears, revealing that he had been in Russia, Egypt, and Israel and chiding American reporters for not paying attention to a press conference he’d held overseas. He came back in time for the State of the Union, only to theatrically storm out midway through.
His campaign office was literally condemned. His staff, such as it was, refused to alert reporters to upcoming public events, which may have been because there weren’t any.
According to a new analysis published in Environmental Research Letters, roughly 136 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 720 World Heritage Sites, including the Statue of Liberty, Independence Hall, the Tower of London, and much of Riga, Naples, Venice, and St. Petersburg, will be underwater within the next 2000 years. That’s assuming just a 3-degree Celsius temperature increase over that time period (a full list of the sites is available in the paper).
- $ 30 million worth of buried gold coins not a mint heist says agent for finders. Here is a comment from a mint representative saying the same. Here is a newspaper story about the robbery. Check out the date.
“We’ve got a crack team of lawyers, and trust me, if this was U.S. government property we’d be going after it.” Richard Kelly, who wrote a book on the San Francisco Mint, sees a further issue with the dates of the uncovered coins—they’re stamped 1847 to 1894, and he thinks ones taken from the mint would be dated nearer to 1901.
“We assume from the times and all the records that they were new coins [taken]. Back then, once coins were printed they flew out of the mint.”
- On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, it’s Joan McCarter day! Topics: Bachmann haz a sad about Jews; CIA watches their watchers; GunFAIL “Where Are They Now?”; AMA, minimum wage, immigration roundup; Reid vs Koch & Lindsey Graham’s Benghazi freakout.
Midday open thread: Hate groups by geography, HTML as STD, submerged world cultural sites
