And Yet Martha Stewart Went to Jail

Three years ago, the politicians were fighting over bailing out the banks to the tune of $700 billion. It was sort of a fight between "you want to have all the banks fail and throw us into another depression" and "our ideology must be pure-- no bailouts", with Mr. Conservative himself, Richard (the Torturer) Cheney going personally to Republicans to plead with them not to saddle their party with causing a second depression in eighty years.

But while that was going on, the Federal Reserve was quietly loaning the banks eleven times that much money in interest-free loans. Nobody outside the Fed knew that it was going on, other than the banks, and they kept their mouths shut.

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It was a hell of a scam. Some banks borrowed a hundred billion dollars in virtually interest-free money. What they did was then to buy Treasury bills at 3% interest. Think about that for a minutes. What if someone came up to you and said: "Here's a hundred million bucks. Do whatever you want with it, but you have to give back to me in a year, plus fifty grand in interest." You would take that money, buy a hundred million in T-bills at three percent interest. At the end of the year, you'd cash in the T-bills, pay back the hundred million, toss in the fifty grand and you'd go home with two million, nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all at zero risk.

Now here is the best part: You and your benefactor tell nobody about this. So you can pretend to the world that you're a real smart businessman who managed to make nearly three million clams in tough times. When what you did was something that was readily apparent to your average fifth-grader.

All of the big banksters did this. And because they were playing on a huge scale, they individually were making billions of dollars. So their banks seemed profitable and they then badly sprained their arms by patting themselves ont he backs and handing out huge bonuses.

Talk about a rigged game.

We, the American people, bailed those greedy fucksticks out, not with $700 billion, but $8.4 trillion. Yet when it came to trying to do something for the tens of millions of Americans whose home values are underwater, the banks screamed: "No way, no bailouts!!"

So now here we are, today. The Party of Hoover is trying to do whatever it can to strip away the modest banking regulations enacted by the Dodd-Frank bill. They are going to the mat to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Board. Because the Republicans are, when you get right down to it, in favor of Half-Socialism for the Rich, where the rich get to keep their profits and everyone else gets stuck with their losses.

Jon Stewart had the right question: How the fuck is it that Martha Stewart went to jail?

Tweeting the Second World War

It is December 4, 1939 on Twitter, where you can follow the course of World War II in real time.

Heh. Heh. Heh. (Riflery Edition)

Old School Guns has a tale of some mall-ninja at the range, shooting a tricked out M-1A and not able to hit the broad side of barn from the inside of the barn. Meanwhile, said blogger is punching paper with a standard-issue M-1 at 100 yards.

Sad to say, crap like that is not unusual. Too many people fall in love with the expensive hardware and add-ons, but they don't know how to do the basics.

Medicating the Cat

As I mentioned yesterday, Gracie is recovering from an extraction. When I took her home, they gave me a bottle of an antibiotic, a syringe, and instructions to give her 2ml/day.

Thee first night was bad. She came out of the anesthesia hard. I kind of sort of had to pour her out of the carrier, for she couldn't stand up, much less walk. But there were places she wanted to go, so I held up her belly and followed her lead. The first stop was her food dish. Second stop was the litter box, where she sort of fell into her own pee and got the litter clumped into her fur. I got some of it out, figured the rest would dry up and fall off, and I put her on a heated cat bed. When she could move, she went under the couch, only to come out the following morning.

The antibiotic was a real laugh riot. A 2ml shot of that caused her to barf it back up this morning, along with her breakfast. Four 0.5ml doses, spread out over the day, worked. I should have known, for yesterday I gave her 1.5ml and she almost retched. (That does was an accident, I saw later that there was some more left in the syringe, so I gave it later to her.)

She's spending a lot of time on that bed. It's one of her favorite places to be.

Asshat Parkers; Aviation Edition

This particular Asshattus Americanus parked his spiffy Cessna 185 amphib right in front of the self-service gas pump and left it there while he had lunch at the airport cafe.

I'm guessing that the self-important asswipe is either a surgeon or a lawyer.

Not Only Is Bloomberg a Fascist Megalomaniac, He's Also Wrong.

You might recall that ol' Billionaire Mike boasted that he has, in the NYPD, the world's seventh largest army.

Not even close, Mikey. The NYPD has 35,000 officers and 4,000 auxiliary officers. For active forces, they rank just behind Georgia, which has 37,000 people on active duty in its armed forces.* Singapore, which is probably as close to a comparable nation-city as Bloomberg seems to want New York City to be, has 72,000 on active duty and 300,000 in reserve.**

Seventh is South Korea, with over 600,000 on active duty and over 2,400 tanks. The Korean Marines would probably handily wipe out the NYPD without even breaking a sweat.
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* Georgia handily lost a short war with Russia in 2008. The Russians only sent a few regiments into the conflict, they were poised to take the capitol of Georgia when the war ended though negotiations.
** Singapore also has eight airports. NYC has two open airports, LGA and JFK, and two closed airports that conceivably could be used for military use, Floyd Bennett Field and Flushing Airport, though Flushing would require total rebuilding.

Dear American Jews: Thank You For Your Money and Support, But Don't You Dare Marry Our Kids! Fondly, Bibi

That is pretty much the message that the Israeli government has sent to American Jewry, in a heavy-handed ad campaign aimed at Israeli ex-patriates.

The ads were produced by a right-wing thug, an Israeli Ann Coulter, who is angry that American Jews would see her ads as insulting.

I suspect that the ads are exactly in line with the thinking of the Netanyahu government: That American Jews are not "real" Jews to them. "Thank you for your money and for persuading your government to send us foreign aid and military equipment, you filthy pseudo-Jews in the the Diaspora." For, as Dana Goldstein pointed out, this isn't the first time that Netanyahu's government has trotted out this line of crap. You can see this type of attitude in past debates, were even mild critiques of Israel by American Jews results in them being blasted for being "self-hating Jews".

A basic rule of persuasion: You don't deepen relationships with friends and relatives by insulting them. If someone has a disagreement with you, such tactics can turn a mild dissenter into an enemy. So if Netanyahu wants to turn American Jews into people who will be more and more willing to criticize him and his country, he is doing exactly what he should be doing.

Caturday

Gracie had to go in for dental work this week. Besides a cleaning, she had one extraction. You can see where they shaved a bit of one of her legs.

She was not terribly happy about all of this. She has been spending time under my couch.

Bella is in one of her favorite spots. Her owner, for years and years, regarded putting towels on furniture as "tacky". Too much time spent cleaning upholstry eventually changed her mind.

Rocky, the Maine Coon. He is a one-person cat and I am not that person.

Jake is recharging his solar cells.

Wir Fahren auf Hoboken

During a speech at MIT yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg called the NYPD his ‘own army’, and claimed that it is the world’s seventh largest.



An "army". From the arrogance of both the mayor and the police commissioner, to their eagerness to shoot people full of holes, it explains a lot.

Phoenix Crash

For this discussion, I need to do a quick airspace lesson. There are several classes of airspace over the U.S. Class A airspace is from 18,000' to 60,000'.* Class B airspace is highly controlled and it is over very busy airports. Class B typically, at the surface, is five to ten miles in radius and start at the ground. As one moves further from the airport, the bottom of the airspace moves up to facilitate operations at smaller outlying airports and the radius expands. Class Be airspace typically terminates at 7,000' over the airport and the airspace has a maximum radius of 20 miles.

If you were to look at Class B airspace in 3-D, it would look like an upside-down wedding cake.

Just over a week ago, an airplane with six people on board crashed into the Superstition Mountains. As the video plays, watch the lover of the two dots, moving from left to right.



The airplane had left Falcon Field. Apparently, it was flying VFR.

Several years ago, the FAA redesigned the Class B over the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Among the features of the FAA's redesign was to lower the floor of the Class B over the Superstition Mountains. At the time, it was pointed out to the FAA that bringing the airspace so low was a recipe for disaster.

The second point, discussed on aviation boards, but not generally noted in the press, is that while aircraft flying by Visual Flight Rules can fly in Class B airspace, they need clearance from air traffic control to enter Class B airspace. The take on the controllers who work the Phoenix Class B is that they are almost uniformly unhelpful to VFR aircraft. That situation would probably be even worse the evening before Thanksgiving, when the crash occurred. That is a very intensive time for ATC and the airlines.

But put the two together and you end up with a crash that was foreseeable years ago.

None of this, of course, takes away from the responsibility of the pilot. Flying low over sketchy terrain at night is a bad idea. It was his duty to plan his flight so that he would remain clear of the ground. So no doubt, the NTSB will pin primary responsibility for the crash on the dead guy.

But have no doubt about this: The FAA bears its share of responsibility for designing its airspace over PHX with very low transit paths for VFR aircraft. Oh, they'll probably fix it, now that six people have died.

Not for nothing is the FAA known as a "tombstone agency".

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* Technically, "flight levels" are used above 18,000'. That only matters if you're flying up there.