The new Goodyear blimps will be made by Zeppelin.
The existing ones were made by LockMart. I don't believe that Goodyear has made its own blimps for at least 30 years, possibly longer.
Find the rabbit!
21 hours ago
Friday, May 6, 2011
When the U.S. Government Connived in the Poisoning of Tens of Thousands of Americans
That happened in the Prohibition era. Since good ethyl alcohol immediately became expensive and hard to obtain, bootleggers and makers of cheap hard liquor for speakeasies used wood alcohol as a base for liquor. What was commonly referred to as "wood alcohol" was ethanol that was "denatured" with methanol to form methylated spirits.[1] Chemists working for bootleggers and organized crime tried, with varying degrees of success, to "renature" wood alcohol back to ethanol.
The Federal government's response was to require that wood alcohol be made even more poisonous. When the toll of the dead and maimed from drinking the stuff was pointed out, the Federal government's position was basically that the drinkers should have known it was poison, so it sucks to have been them.
So under the guise of trying to improve the health of the nation by banning the consumption of alcohol, the Federal government did not only turn a blind eye towards the carnage, they cheered at it.[2] In 1926, in New York City alone, 1,200 people were sickened or blinded by drinking various forms of wood alcohol and 400 people died.
There was, of course, an undercurrent of classism in all of this. Rich people could afford to buy good hard liquor that was smuggled in from Canada, the Bahamas and other places. High-class people in major cities often had connections with foreign embassies or consulates, where they could attend parties and drink legally. It was the workers and the poor who were drinking "bathtub gin". It was those people who filled up the hospitals and the morgues.
Prohibition was not only an abject failure, it exposed the moralists, people that I now would refer to as the American Taliban, as people who would willingly close their eyes to public health issues if they thought it served their goals. People of the same moralistic stripe would later initially oppose research into AIDS prevention and vaccines. They opposed, and continue to oppose, needle-exchange programs as a tool to prevent the spread of hepatitis and other diseases (including AIDS).
In point of fact, the carnage actually pleases them. They are just despicable.
More reading: "The Poisoner's Handbook" and the author's blog, Speakeasy Science. The Poisoner's Handbook also looks at how, back before the days of Federal regulations, companies willfully put poisonous compounds in consumer products.
____________________________________________
[1] I am vastly oversimplifying the chemistry and I'm lumping a lot of different types of denatured alcohol under the rubric of "wood alcohol". Alcohol taxonomy is not the focus of this post. So sue me.
[2] This was during the presidencies of Coolidge and Hoover.
The Federal government's response was to require that wood alcohol be made even more poisonous. When the toll of the dead and maimed from drinking the stuff was pointed out, the Federal government's position was basically that the drinkers should have known it was poison, so it sucks to have been them.
So under the guise of trying to improve the health of the nation by banning the consumption of alcohol, the Federal government did not only turn a blind eye towards the carnage, they cheered at it.[2] In 1926, in New York City alone, 1,200 people were sickened or blinded by drinking various forms of wood alcohol and 400 people died.
There was, of course, an undercurrent of classism in all of this. Rich people could afford to buy good hard liquor that was smuggled in from Canada, the Bahamas and other places. High-class people in major cities often had connections with foreign embassies or consulates, where they could attend parties and drink legally. It was the workers and the poor who were drinking "bathtub gin". It was those people who filled up the hospitals and the morgues.
Prohibition was not only an abject failure, it exposed the moralists, people that I now would refer to as the American Taliban, as people who would willingly close their eyes to public health issues if they thought it served their goals. People of the same moralistic stripe would later initially oppose research into AIDS prevention and vaccines. They opposed, and continue to oppose, needle-exchange programs as a tool to prevent the spread of hepatitis and other diseases (including AIDS).
In point of fact, the carnage actually pleases them. They are just despicable.
More reading: "The Poisoner's Handbook" and the author's blog, Speakeasy Science. The Poisoner's Handbook also looks at how, back before the days of Federal regulations, companies willfully put poisonous compounds in consumer products.
____________________________________________
[1] I am vastly oversimplifying the chemistry and I'm lumping a lot of different types of denatured alcohol under the rubric of "wood alcohol". Alcohol taxonomy is not the focus of this post. So sue me.
[2] This was during the presidencies of Coolidge and Hoover.
Morons Are All Around Us; Pundit Edition
It's hard to turn on a national news program and not see a story that President Obama's poll numbers have jumped on both the overall question of "how's he doing" and "how's the Afghan War going." The reporters talking about this and the editors approving the pieces are imbeciles who have no functional sense of history.
Turn on the Wayback Machine, Sherman, and set the dial to 1991. Coalition forces, acting by authority granted by the UN Security Council, had thrown the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. The loss of life of the Coalition's troops was very low. President George H. W. Bush had an overall approval rating of 91%. The following year, in a three-way contest, he would lose his bid to be re-elected.
What the President's poll numbers are now, following the killing of Osama bin Laden, are meaningless. So are the reporters jawing on the air about them.
Turn on the Wayback Machine, Sherman, and set the dial to 1991. Coalition forces, acting by authority granted by the UN Security Council, had thrown the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. The loss of life of the Coalition's troops was very low. President George H. W. Bush had an overall approval rating of 91%. The following year, in a three-way contest, he would lose his bid to be re-elected.
What the President's poll numbers are now, following the killing of Osama bin Laden, are meaningless. So are the reporters jawing on the air about them.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
And Then There Was One
Claude Stanley Choules, the last known combat veteran of World War I, died on Thursday in a nursing home in Western Australia. He was 110.There is one known veteran left alive: Florence Green. She was in the Women's RAF.
(Cross-posted from Babes in Open)
Fifty Years Ago
At 9:34 AM, Alan Shepard rode Freedom 7, a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone booster rocket, into space on a suborbital flight. He was the first American to fly a rocket into space.
20 days later, President Kennedy proposed to Congress that the nation commit itself to going to the Moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy's speech at Rice University about going to the Moon was made on September 12, 1961. (Excerpt, full speech, full text)
20 days later, President Kennedy proposed to Congress that the nation commit itself to going to the Moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy's speech at Rice University about going to the Moon was made on September 12, 1961. (Excerpt, full speech, full text)
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Captain Koloth, R.I.P.
William Campbell has died at age 87. He played the Klingon captain in "The Trouble With Tribbles.
Mocking Is Too Easy
Shorter Dianne Feinstein: "What did Pakistan not know and when did they not know it?"
We haven't heard from the Donald, because he hasn't figured out what stupid shit to say.
Anyway, if someone ever invents a time machine, I claim dibs on it. I'd seriously consider using it to go back and whack the clown who came up with the idea of "reality television."
We haven't heard from the Donald, because he hasn't figured out what stupid shit to say.
Anyway, if someone ever invents a time machine, I claim dibs on it. I'd seriously consider using it to go back and whack the clown who came up with the idea of "reality television."
Blowing the Levees
They did it, the river levels at Cairo, IL dropped a foot, but they may come right back up.
I have a bunch of mixed feelings about this. First off, as noted in the Times' story, flooding over 200 square miles of Missouri farm land may not have helped worth a damn. A lot of people's economic lives were ruined by blowing open the levee.
Second, the choice between Cairo and the farm land was a false choice. Cairo is a dying town and it has been dying for decades. The crime rate is roughly three times the national average. Only one business has opened there in the last five years or so and it went under in a few months. Some of the decline is due to good old-fashioned bigotry, but the population is not even a fifth of what it was at its peak ninety years ago. Detroit's and Cleveland's populations would have to fall by more than 50% in order to mirror Cairo's decline.
Cairo is a town on the way to extinction. It probably would not have been a completely bad thing if the current flood had put a coup de grâce into Cairo.
On the other side of the coin, one of the reasons why farmland along the Mississippi River is so productive is because the periodic flooding and silting renewed the land, or it did until the levees were built. The land will come back. The farmers who made their livings from that farmland may not be able to wait that long.
On balance, I'd have to submit that saving Cairo was probably the wrong thing to do.
I have a bunch of mixed feelings about this. First off, as noted in the Times' story, flooding over 200 square miles of Missouri farm land may not have helped worth a damn. A lot of people's economic lives were ruined by blowing open the levee.
Second, the choice between Cairo and the farm land was a false choice. Cairo is a dying town and it has been dying for decades. The crime rate is roughly three times the national average. Only one business has opened there in the last five years or so and it went under in a few months. Some of the decline is due to good old-fashioned bigotry, but the population is not even a fifth of what it was at its peak ninety years ago. Detroit's and Cleveland's populations would have to fall by more than 50% in order to mirror Cairo's decline.
Cairo is a town on the way to extinction. It probably would not have been a completely bad thing if the current flood had put a coup de grâce into Cairo.
On the other side of the coin, one of the reasons why farmland along the Mississippi River is so productive is because the periodic flooding and silting renewed the land, or it did until the levees were built. The land will come back. The farmers who made their livings from that farmland may not be able to wait that long.
On balance, I'd have to submit that saving Cairo was probably the wrong thing to do.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Welcome to the Party, Pal; Canadian Edition
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has returned to Ottawa a day after Canadians elected his Conservative Party to form its first majority government.Prime Minister Harper says that he won't make radical changes. Yeah, and pigs will fly. He's lying. He's reading from the same playbook that Bush and Cheney used.
I should feel sorry for the Canadians, but on one level, I really don't. At least this should end the smugness of "well, we'd never elect neocons" that I've been hearing for the last 12 years.
Now you have. Now you can stand by for a government that will attempt to weaken environmental rules so corporations can befoul your air and water for profit. You can look forward to a meaner and more spiteful government that will cut services to working and poor Canadians so that rich Canadians can get more tax cuts. You can watch as your corporate CEOs discover the joy of unalloyed personal greed, heedless of what damage they may do to their companies in the process. You Canadians can look forward to a more robust national security apparatus and a slow dismantling of the health care system that you have taken much pride in.
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