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The government of the United Kingdom released the Saville report on the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, and Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged the report’s findings, which shone a poor light on the British government of the time. It took four decades for the UK government to do so, and I wonder if after four decades we’ll see the US government take responsibility for the excesses on the war on terror. Right now, we’re still headed in the opposite direction. The Supreme Court has declined to grant Maher Arar access to US courts to sue the US government for sending him to Syria to be tortured after he was detained at a US airport on his way back to Canada. If he just waits another 20 or 30 years, I’m sure we’ll come around. ...

Ezra Klein’s Washington Post column today is about the externalities of gasoline: Most of us would call the BP spill a tragedy. Ask an economist what it is, however, and you’ll hear a different word: “externality.” An externality is a cost that’s not paid by the person, or people, using the good that creates the cost. The BP spill is going to cost fishermen, it’s going to cost the gulf’s ecosystem, and it’s going to cost the region’s tourism industry. But that cost won’t be paid by the people who wanted that oil for their cars. It’ll fall on taxpayers, on Gulf Coast residents who need new jobs, on the poisoned wildlife on the seafloor. ...

Turns out the most implausible aspect of Glee is that they could perform all of the popular songs they do without paying for the rights to do so: The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines. ...

Tyler Cowen on the problem with multitasking experiments: To sound intentionally petulant, the only multitasking that works for me is mine, mine, mine! Until I see a study showing that self-chosen multi-tasking programs lower performance, I don’t see that the needle has budged.

Mardi Gras was the star of Treme this week, with all of the attendant cultural references. Probably the first thing to understand about Mardi Gras is that there are a number of parades spread across the weekend of Mardi Gras right up to fat Tuesday itself. Here’s the 2010 schedule from nola.com. Personally, the one parade I always wanted to see that I never got to is Bacchus, the big parade on Sunday night. The Bacchagator is legendary. Endymion was mentioned and dismissed. It’s a huge parade that’s popular with tourists because it’s on Saturday night, the night of Mardi Gras that suits the schedule of out of town visitors the best. ...

Anti-bailout sentiment certain runs high these days, and I think it’s because people don’t see the effect that the credit crisis in the fall of 2008 was having on non-financial businesses. In an article in Inc explaining why he sold the company to Amazon.com, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh talks about the effect of the credit crisis on his company: At the time, Zappos relied on a revolving line of credit of $100 million to buy inventory. But our lending agreements required us to hit projected revenue and profitability targets each month. If we missed our numbers even by a small amount, the banks had the right to walk away from the loans, creating a possible cash-flow crisis that might theoretically bankrupt us. In early 2009, there weren’t a lot of banks eager to give out $100 million to a business in our situation. ...

This weekend I read a blog post that made me as angry as anything I’ve read recently, maybe ever. At Wonkette, Ken Layne writes about a mural at a school in Prescott, Arizona featuring kids who actually attend the school. The school attracted attention from racists in the town, led by a city councilman with his own radio show, and eventually the school principal decided to have the painters lighten the skin of the students of color in the painting. The facts speak for themselves, but do read Roger Ebert’s post on racism, written after he read about the mural. ...

Christopher Beam illustrates the point I was trying to make about political journalism and political science the other day with humor: A powerful thunderstorm forced President Obama to cancel his Memorial Day speech near Chicago on Monday—an arbitrary event that had no affect on the trajectory of American politics. Obama now faces some of the most difficult challenges of his young presidency: the ongoing oil spill, the Gaza flotilla disaster, and revelations about possibly inappropriate conversations between the White House and candidates for federal office. But while these narratives may affect fleeting public perceptions, Americans will ultimately judge Obama on the crude economic fundamentals of jobs numbers and GDP. ...

I’m fine with AT&T moving to a tiered pricing schedule for the data plans it offers to mobile customers. They have no obligation to offer an unlimited plan, and both of the new plans are cheaper than the old unlimited plan. The people who use a whole lot of data are going to be unhappy, but given AT&T’s capacity problems, implementing even this rudimentary version of congestion pricing should help them out a little bit. ...

My post yesterday was a well-timed given the news today that Nate Silver’s political blog will be published by the New York Times: Some exciting news this morning: We have reached agreement in principle to incorporate FiveThirtyEight’s content into NYTimes.com. Read the rest at FiveThirtyEight.