Because It's Friday

A rather eventful day on the Durango & Silverton

The Death of the Pocket Camera

I recently completed a trip. For decades, I always had a camera with me when traveling. That has been a 35mm SLR, a 35mm compact and, for well over a decade, a compact digital camera of some flavor.

On this trip, I took none of them. I used only my phone.

Chicago, looking to the north:

To the left, on the riverfront, is the (in)famous Watergate. To the right of that is the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This photo was shot during the Potomac River Arrival into National Airport.

The photos are almost as good as I could have taken with my pocket camera. The tradeoff is that I had one less thing to bring along.

Unclear on the Constitution; Trump Ed.

Trump, asked about impeachment by Congress, called it a “dirty word” and said he couldn’t imagine the courts allowing him to be impeached. “I don’t think so because there’s no crime,” he said.

Maybe one of his lawyers can do a "How Impeachment Works" coloring book for Trump.

I do not feel a need to expound on impeachment procedure. I believe that every reader of this blog knows that.

But Trump doesn't, bless his heart.

Funding Medicare for All

A nonpartisan coalition of economists has published the findings of an intensive report they conducted, and have concluded that the United States could “pretty easily” fund a universal healthcare program for 400 years just by charging people a dollar to punch Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the face.

“There is no smugger a face to be punched in all of Washington, so if you charge a buck to do it, you’ll make a fortune,” Prof. Sherry Lamb told reporters this morning at a press conference announcing the report’s findings.

I'd pay a lot more if I could get to cut the line.

Flameouts Are No Fun

There is this stuff called "diesel exhaust fluid". It's not supposed to be used as a fuel additive. Diesel engines don't like that.

But Murphy being the bastard that he is, DEF has been added into fuel stocks. it is really bad when it is added to Jet-A, which is essentially diesel fuel that is made to a higher purity level.

DEF has been found in Jet-A. What seems to be happening is that instead of adding anti-icing additive to Jet-A, the guys at the fuel farms at airports have added DEF.

A Cessna Citation made a deadstick landing last month because of DEF contamination.

For the jet drivers, the problem is that once DEF is in Jet-A, it's not detectable. If the FBO has mixed fuel additive with Jet-A in the refueling truck's tank, there's no way to know that they didn't accidentally add DEF. If it's done at the point of refueling, then the pilot can oversee the refueling. Which may be not much fun, but it's better than having one or all of your engines flameout in flight.

Petty Is as Petty Does; Trump Ed.

The White House asked the Navy to hide a destroyer named after Senator John McCain in order to avoid having the ship appear in photographs taken while President Trump was visiting Japan this week, White House and military officials said Wednesday.

Although Navy officials insisted they did not hide the ship, the John S. McCain, they did give all of the sailors aboard the day off on Tuesday as Mr. Trump visited Yokosuka Nhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/us/politics/uss-mccain-navy-ship.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

aval Base.
...
A Navy service member based on Yokosuka said that all of the American warships in the harbor were invited to send 60 to 70 sailors to hear Mr. Trump’s address, with the exception of the McCain. When several sailors from the McCain showed up anyway, wearing their uniforms with the ship’s insignia, they were turned away, the service member said.How fragile is the ego of Der Trumpenfuhrer, that his staff fears that even the sight of a USS John S. McCain patch on a sailor's uniform would send him into a mouth-foaming rage.

The sad thing is that nobody seems to really be surprised that Trump's childish jealousy of McCain has reached such levels.

By the way, in case your first instinct is to bleat about the "liberrrull media," the Wall Street Journal is reporting the same story.

A Tough Sell in Court; Nazi Ed.

After [Asswipe] pleaded guilty to charges in connection with painting swastikas on an Indiana synagogue’s property and setting the yard ablaze, his attorney argued in court documents that the 21-year-old man did not deserve prison time.
...
Prisons are hotbeds for brainwashing by white supremacists, [Asswipe's] lawyer, Samuel Ansell, wrote in a sentencing memo filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. Probation and significant community service were more appropriate punishments, Ansell wrote.
...
Ansell argued that [Asswipe's] radicalization was heavily influenced by what his wife, who was 17 at the time of the crime, had been reading online. “According to [Asswipe], she began with rightwing yet mainstream views such as those presented on Fox News,” Ansell’s sentencing memo said. “She then moved on to writings by Ben Shapiro and articles on Breitbart News which bridged the gap to the notorious white supremacist and anti-Semitic propaganda site Stormfront.”

[Asswipe] “bought into the propaganda,” Ansell wrote.

I guess I have a twinge of sympathy for Asswipe's attorney. He had a pretty tough sell to make. But the judge didn't buy it, Asswipe got three years.

Asswipe's attempt in court to throw Mrs. Asswipe under the bus must have been unconvincing as fuck. She got probation in state court, the Feds apparently didn't think she was the primary culprit.

Hate speech has its consequences. I believe that these low-wattage fools think that Trump sympathizes with what they are doing. The remind me of gay-bashers who are shocked when the cops arrest them for their crimes.

WW2 Vets: Let's Not Repeat the Mistake From the Great War Vets (In Lieu of My Usual Screed About Memorial Day)

Stickied for the day, newer posts follow..

(The usual screed)

You may remember Frank Buckles. He was the last living American doughboy from the First World War. When he passed away, eight years ago, there was a movement to have him lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda to honor all of the veterans of the War to End All Wars.

That request was denied by the then-Speaker of the House, John Boehner, in one of the pettiest political acts in modern memory.

We should not repeat that mistake. There should be a law that when the last living veteran of the Second World War goes west, whomever he or she happens to be, that person gets a state funeral, including lying in state in the Capitol, to honor the millions of men and women who served in the war. It should not be left to the whims of whatever gasbags are the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader at the time.

I once knew a man who was born in 1930 and who was a combat vet in the war. He had signed up when he was fourteen. When he wrote his father from boot camp to ask his dad's help in proving his that he was too young, his father wrote back: "Boy, you got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out of it." (He did, when he retired after thirty years of service.)

I've long ago forgotten his name. I don't know if he's alive. But there were probably other kids who did that. They answered the call at a time of great peril; the veterans of WW2 have richly earned such a final honor.

So we may have time to make sure that this honor is enshrined into law. But we shouldn't dawdle.

Pardoning War Criminals

As far as the rule of law in armed conflict, Trump's anticipated move to pardon a boatload of war criminals would be as though Chancellor Adenauer did the same after the Second World War. The Germans weren't aggressive in going after those guys, but they didn't formally shake their hands.

That's what Trump is going to do.

Which is why you should read this post on Lawfare.

NPO's Losing Trust

The Florida-based Wounded Warrior Project (WWP) ran into a media storm about its spending and fundraising practices at the beginning of 2016. As had happened with Susan G. Komen before it, there was an extended period of denial, followed by high level staff departures, then precipitous fundraising losses. Komen, in fact, slipped from its high rank of 21st among the nation’s fundraisers to 127th, or from a high take of nearly $350 million in 2011 pre-scandal to $198 million in 2015.

Similarly, the Wounded Warrior Project raised almost $373 million in donations for the 2015 fiscal year, but the next two years’ financials show the effects of the public scandal on public support. In 2016, the new executive director announced the organization had lost between $90 and $100 million in donations as a result of the scandal. Its latest Form 990 shows those revenues continued to drop; it raised only $211 million in donations in 2017.

Losing public trust for a non-profit organization is a serious matter. It's one thing if one person gets sticky-fingers; for they can call in the cops, press charges and ratchet down on audits and cross-checks. It's another thing if the management is being seen to living the high life at the expense of the donors.

(Past posts about Komen and WWP)

So I'm pretty sure that Trump is in Japan, doing his usual routine of shitting oh his hosts (if they are democracies) and praising autocrats/dictators, but you can go read the news yourself. As it seems, giving large amounts of money to Trump and then trying to leverage that for personal favors is turning into a risky affair.