Posts from — November 2013

Via Digby the latest on the Marissa Alexander case.

Ms Alexander has been granted a new trial and been released on bail, but we still don’t know why she was charged or convicted of assault.

These are the undisputed bare facts of the case: during a confrontation with her husband Ms Alexander fired one round into a wall in her kitchen.

Her husband had been convicted of domestic violence for attacking earlier. She had an active restraining order against him. She had a valid concealed weapons permit.

From my perspective as a former law enforcement officer I don’t understand why this went to trial. She was in her home, and the husband was violating a judicial order even being there. The state had already proven he was a threat to her. This is a classic self-defense situation, made even more clear cut by existing court records [i.e. you don’t need to believe her about her husband being a threat, the courts said he was].

Ms Alexander was given “a 20-year prison sentence under the state’s mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines because she had fired a gun during the assault.”

Her husband wasn’t hurt in any way in the incident, but Ms Alexander was given 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot.

Of course it makes no difference to this case, but another undisputed fact is that Ms Alexander is an African-American. [/sarcasm]

Dr Masters sums up the season that wasn’t:

The end of the unusually quiet Atlantic hurricane season of 2013 is at hand. The final tally of thirteen named storms was above the average of eleven for a season, but the two hurricanes (Ingrid and Humberto) and zero major hurricanes were well below the average from 1950 – 2012 of six and three, respectively. The 2013 season ranked as the sixth-least-active Atlantic hurricane season since 1950, in terms of the collective strength and duration of named storms and hurricanes (ACE index), which was just 33% of the 1981 – 2012 average. The 2013 hurricane season was the first time since 1994 no major hurricanes formed, and was only the third below-normal season since the high-activity period for Atlantic hurricanes began in 1995. NOAA and the U.S. Air Force Reserve flew 45 hurricane hunter aircraft reconnaissance missions over the Atlantic basin this season, totaling 435 hours–the fewest number of flight hours since at least 1966, said NOAA in a press release summarizing the 2013 hurricane season.

All of the major players predicted an active season, but the assumptions behind those predictions were wrong. Tropical weather is not acting like it has for decades.

There was a large Saharan Air Layer, dust in the atmosphere picked up over the desert, and consistently high wind shear which hampered development, but the sea surface temperatures were more than warm enough.

Some of it may be because of droughts on land causing large masses of dry air aloft, but things are not working the way they did when the prediction models were developed.

We need more satellites to watch these systems as they are changing their behavior. So far the changes have led to ‘Frankenstorm Sandy’ followed by a nothing season. It would be nice to know what to prepare for as early as possible.

Yes, it’s the time of year when the Sun dies and must be re-born through an elaborate ceremony that involves some form or type of sacrifice, such as finding gifts for people you can’t stand and smiling brightly as you receive yet another gift based on an urban legend that you actually like truly stomach-wrenching color combinations.

Of course there was a time when the Solstice sacrifices were more visceral and the evergreen was covered in things that pleased only ravens and such, but we have put all that behind us by opting for the possibility of electrocuting one another and causing chaos on the power grid.

What a brilliant idea: moving a large supply of pre-kindling soaked with highly flammable resins into your house, loading it down with petrochemical-based ornaments, lacing it with heat-producing electrical devices, and surrounding the base with cardboard boxes and tissue paper. You just can’t have a traditional celebration without a proto-bonfire in your living room.

I do think that followers of Mithras might want to curtail their typical birthday service in light of Mad-Cow Disease, but global warming will certainly make the services in the oak wood in traditional druidic robes more comfortable.

When you put up your stocking on the mantel and put out the turnips for Gouger, Rooter, Tusker, and Snouter as well as the pork pie and sherry for the Hogfather, you can rest assured the Sun will come up, because it just slipped around back to return the lager it rented.

Enjoy! You have nothing to fear, except that sniveling little creep with the camera/phone at the office party or the eggnog that was put out rather early causing you to suspect that the bits on top aren’t nutmeg. [The pictures probably won’t appear on the ‘Net and the brandy will surely take care of the salmonella.]

A Calendar of Coming Events

[Read more →]

Excise Annoyed

Scottie always gets more power…

[Editor: Excise is not convinced that I am doing everything I can to make him comfortable during the cold snap.]

Friday Ark

Gizmodo has The 7 Best Deep-Fried Turkey Disaster Videos.

As a point of information, the gas in the canister that is heating the oil, like all bottled gas, is heavier than air and goes down, not up like natural gas. That means that when the line ruptures after the initial explosion, you can expect the tank to become a flamethrower before it explodes.

Since the end of the shuttle program, NASA has launch pads available for lease at Cape Canaveral, so if you really insist on deep-frying a turkey, you might consider renting space where the necessary emergency equipment is readily available.

My view of Thanksgiving was skewed by my Father’s attitude. Having grown up on a poultry farm, he saw the holiday as the culmination of weeks of work “processing” dozens of turkeys to be frozen and readying a few dozen more for fresh delivery. We generally ate ham when he was alive.

Having been on my Grandfather’s farm at this time of year I can understand my Dad’s attitude: our meal was subject to interruption by people picking up a fresh turkey at the last minute. A sale is a sale when you are business for yourself.

Watching the WKRP turkey giveaway was long a tradition at our house. It’s availability is not guaranteed. [update: Mustang Bobby has it this year.]

Enjoy your meal and try to forget about the world’s problems for a day – they’ll still be there on Friday along with a few people who think it’s essential that they buy stuff. There won’t be as many this year, but those with money will try anything to make it stretch.

[I should have kept my mouth shut about freezes, because we are having one this morning for the first time in years.]

Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish friends. I miss the latkes and jelly doughnuts my roommates received for the holiday at college. [Their grandmothers were afraid they wouldn’t celebrate or couldn’t get “real” food at that terrible Baptist university.] It was a great break.

One of the nice things about Hanukkah is that there are established “gifts”, so you don’t have to rack your brains about what to get: a card and gelt covers just about everyone.

General background at Wikipedia’s entry for Hanukkah and even more at Chabad’s Chanukah page.

[Note: on the Jewish calendar the day changes at sundown, not midnight.]

When I last wrote about the 501(c)(4), ‘Social Welfare Organizations’ I noted that the IRS rules from 1959 were actually not in agreement with the clear wording of the 1954 law that they were based on. The rules allow for a lot more latitude in the conduct of the organizations, than the law, as written, allows.

After the faux-scandal of the ‘IRS targeting conservative groups’, the IRS was sued to get its rules changed to reflect the law.

CBS among others are reporting the changes as limits on non-profits. That is not correct, the IRS is being pushed to actually enforce the law, and this will cost a lot of the political action committees who have been hiding behind their wrongfully obtained 501(c)(4) status. The loss of the status means, they are going to have to report the names of their donors.

The rule-making process takes a long time, so nothing will actually change until the 2016 election. Even then, tracking the money will be a major task, because people with money tend to hire PR firms to keep their name out of the press.

The Pennsylvania bloggers, like Susie Madrak and Noz have been whooping about their governor, Tom Corbett, being rated the least popular governor in the US, beating out Florida’s fraudster-in-chief.

Hah, that’s nothing, Charlie Pierce notes the fraudster-in-chief is so unpopular with Republicans that he can’t find a running mate for reelection.

Lieutenant Governor in Florida is a $125K no show job unless the Governor decides to make you work. There are a lot of unemployed people in the state, so you would think it would be easy to find someone willing to apply. [/snark]

Charlie Pierce reports that Pope Francis has denounced ‘trickle down’ economics, saying the facts don’t correspond to the claims of supporters.

A lot of supporters of ‘trickle down’ are fond of saying that ‘a rising tide raises all boats’. That is true, but the benefits depend on the individual’s ability to have a boat. If you don’t have a boat, the rising tide forces you to tread water until you are too tired, and then you drown.

The 401K was the new solution for the ‘old-fashioned’ defined-benefits plans that corporation once offered. People now know they traded in a dependable Mae West life vest, for something that was supposed to inflate when needed, only to find out the gas cylinders had been emptied by Wall Street. The back-up was home-equity, but that too went underwater thanks to Wall Street.

The people at the top having been seeing triple-digit increases in their wealth, while everyone else is sinking lower in the water.

The only thing that trickles down is sewage.

Susie Madrak has more on the Pope’s document.

The BBC had a couple of interesting stories up today –

Microsoft acknowledges Xbox problem with disc drive:

Microsoft has acknowledged that owners of its new Xbox One console are experiencing problems with the disc drive.

Some users say the drive is making very loud noises when they try to insert a disc and in some cases is not reading discs at all.

Microsoft says only a very small number of users are affected.

The Xbox One was launched on Friday and sold more than one million units in the first 24 hours.

I betting on the healthcare.gov site being fixed before this is.

And the latest US export – NSA ‘infected’ 50,000 networks with malware:

The US National Security Agency (NSA) infected 50,000 networks with malware, Dutch newspaper NRC has reported.

The Tailored Access Operations department used it to steal sensitive information, according to a censored slide leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

NRC said 20,000 networks had been hit in 2008, with the program recently expanded to include others in Rome, Berlin, Pristina, Kinshasa, Rangoon.

There is nothing like spreading malware to make the Internet more secure. The last I knew people go to prison for doing this sort of thing.

The first recorded remarks from Bibi Netanyahu about Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon was in 1992 and he claimed they would have one in 1997. He has continued to make the claim, and continued to be wrong.

As expected he called the Geneva agreement concerning Iran’s nuclear program an ‘historic mistake’. Sorry, but it will take a while for history to say anything about this agreement, but after more than two decades of Netanyahu claiming that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, history can certainly record that he is wrong.

The latest BBC report, Iran welcomes nuclear deal which Israel calls ‘mistake’, notes that this is a short-term confidence building agreement that requires both sides to do certain specific things. Iran has already met most of its goals in an earlier agreement with the IAEA inspectors, so now it is up to the West to deliver their side of the deal and reduce the sanctions. There is no guarantee that Congress will go along, so the West could once again have ‘lied’ to Iran.

If that happens, you can realistically expect the sanctions to break down, as other countries decide that the US is the party that can’t be trusted, not Iran.

Oil is already trading lower based on this agreement, so Congress’s failure to act will increase the cost of gas in the US during an election year. Of course opponents of Congresscritters running for reelection would never deign to point this out [yeah, right] 😉

The BBC is reporting Iran nuclear: Geneva talks ‘reach deal’. There is no real information on what was agreed to, but something has been signed that will be immediately condemned by the Israeli government and its lobbyists in and out of the US government.

John McCain will no doubt be on one of the Sunday talk shows to complain that we aren’t bombing Iran instead of negotiating with them.

James Rosen at McClatchy confirms something I’ve suspected for a long time: Military spending defies efforts to track it.

Throughout the Rumsfeld reign of error at the Pentagon he made numerous statements to the effect that various complaints were unjustified because he could only work within his budget. In many of those cases which involved improvements to personal and vehicle armor, I knew that the money had been specifically appropriated and the suppliers were just waiting for the word to ramp up production, but the word wasn’t sent. I was constantly blogging about a need to audit the Pentagon’s books, because billions of dollars seemed to have been misplaced.

So they attempted to audit and discovered the bookkeeping is so bad you can’t really do an audit, and this problem goes back twenty years with no progress being made by the military to fix a worthless system. The bottom line is that the military doesn’t really know how much money it has, or how much it spends. They have no real inventory control, even on nuclear and nuclear-related items.

Apparently the latest target date to fix these problems is 2017, after the next Presidential election naturally. There are probably a lot of unemployed people available to inventory all of the stores of equipment, and to actually institute a new, unified bookkeeping system, if the government really wanted to fix this. and it could be fixed a lot sooner than 2017.