On the Cover of the Rollin' Stone

We always knew that Rolling Stone was low life, and this week they proved it again.  They put a glamorous picture of Boston bomber Tsarnaev on the cover.  I gotta admit, he is cute, plenty of girls would like to take home a boy toy like that.  Betcha he wouldn't be on the cover if he wasn't so cute. 

This oughta teach 'em

Detroit is declaring bankruptcy.  A whole bunch of banks, and other money places loaned Detroit billions of dollars over the years to meet operating expenses.  Now they ought to loose all their money, just to make a point.
  The point?  It is irresponsible to waste precious capital lending to dead beats who won't be able pay it back.  It was perfectly clear to anyone with an IQ above room temperature, that Detroit was in a death spiral and would never be able to repay the humungous loans it took out.  The banks should not have made those loans.  Since they were stuck on stupid, and made dumbass loans, they oughta hurt for it.
   Capitalism works if capital is used constructively, to finance new factories, new products, and business operations.  If precious capital is pissed away on see-thru office buildings, Ninja mortgages,  Solyndra, mortgage backed securities, dirivatives, and credit default swaps, ethanol, and electric cars, we all get poorer.
  Let's hope the loan officers responsible for lending to Detroit get fired.

Distractions. Nutrition labels on booze

The Feds are talking up a plan to require nutrition labels on booze, (beer, wine, liquor).  Right, that will solve the obesity crisis.  Everyone knows that alcohol is fattening, and not nutritious.  Beer is beer, wine is wine, and liquor is liquor.   There is no difference between brands, it's the alcohol that does the fattening.  Alcohol is a fine fuel, lots of calories. Tasty too.
   I figure this is a ploy to distract the newsies from things like IRS and Benghazi. 

Whitey Bulger.

A witness in the Whitey Bulger trial turned up dead out in Lincoln.  What is a Southie guy doing out in Lincoln?  Lincoln is a tony, pricey, white bread suburb far outside Rte 128.  The T doesn't run there.  You gotta drive to get to Lincoln.  Mobsters don't retire to Lincoln after they have made their pile.  They settle in places like Melrose and Malden. 
   So if this stiff drove out to Lincoln and died of natural causes, or suicide, where is his car?  If he drove out to Lincoln in a friend's car, surely a friend would not just dump the body by the side of the road.  At least anyone who would do that ain't much of a friend. 
   One the other hand,  friends of Whitey's might take the dead man for a ride, and  Lincoln is as good a place to dump a body as anywhere. 
  Color this death highly suspicious. 

House Fly Day

Dunno why, but the house flies have been popping up all over the house.  They are big and fat, and slow enough to hand swat.  But it got so bad I resorted to chemical warfare.  This resulted in a shower of dead flies all across the kitchen floor.  I swept up a whole dust pan worth of flies, and an hour later I had to sweep the kitchen floor a second time and filled the dust pan again. 

Asiana 214 Has Automation Trumped Airmanship?

Asiana 214,  the 777 that crashed at San Francisco last week, came in too low and too slow, and hit the seawall at the end of the runway.  Apparently the crew had set the autothrottle to hold the proper airspeed (137 knots) and for some reason the autothrottle allowed the airspeed to slack off too much.   The crew didn't notice until it was too late.
    They haven't said if the autothrottle failed, or wasn't set correctly, or for some software reason decided not to hold the setting.  The Aviation Week article goes into some detail about the various modes of the autothrottle, in some modes, it doesn't work the throttles, and it can change modes on its own without notifying the pilot.
   Autothrottle is a new fangled luxury.  Back in my day, only the C141 jet transport had autothrottle, and that was part of the All Weather Landing System, unique to the C141.  All the other aircraft had a plain old throttle lever, the engine power stayed where it was set by hand.  And they all managed to land in one piece.

    Speed on landing approach is critical.  You want to come in as slow as possible.  Slow makes it easier to get the wheels on the runway (as opposed to in the weeds), easier to get the plane stopped before running off the far end of the runway, and  lessens the shock on gear and airframe.  Too much shock breaks things and blows tires.
  On the other hand, go too slow and the wing stalls, stops producing lift, and the aircraft falls like a stone.  All control is lost.  There is little difference between proper landing speed and stall speed.
   It's hard to understand how the crew failed to check their approach speed, and notice that the autothrottle was playing them false.  For that matter it's hard to understand why they used autothrottle at all.  Was it me, with few hours in the 777, I'd  tend to do things by hand, the old fashioned way, rather than find out what nasty bugs might lurk in a tricky newfangled autothrottle.
 

Stand your ground protects us against criminal justice crazies

Eric Holder is on a tear about stand your ground laws in the aftermath of the dreadful Martin-Zimmerman case.  He is claiming they promote violence.
Not true.  Stand your ground laws were enacted to curb abusive prosecutors, like Holder.  When they started to prosecute home owners who shot home invaders, motorists who shot car jackers, and store keepers who shot robbers,  the public took alarm and passed stand your ground laws to put a stop to this atrocious behavior by the criminal justice system. 
  The laws usually read something like this.  Use of deadly force is legitimate in defense of your home, your motor vehicle, your place of business, and any other place your have a right to be.  The last clause was added to prevent weasel lawyers from  twisting words and limiting the definition of home to exclude such things as rental property.  You know how it is with weasels.
  Stand your ground had nothing to do with the Martin-Zimmerman trial.  When your opponent has you flat on your back and is pounding your head into the cement, retreat is impossible.