Fly the Scaredy Skies

While [the FAA's former director of flight standards, Nick] Lacey says there was no immediate danger, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Eyeshum Cory says any noncompliance — no matter how small — is a safety issue, and the alternative is unthinkable.

"You may be inconvenienced for a few hours, you may be inconvenienced for a day. But you'll have that day. And you'll have another day," Cory says.
Airlines Scramble as Grounded Planes Cause Chaos - NPR

American Airlines has canceled thousands of flights to check the spacing of fasteners securing sleeves on bundles of wires in the wheelwells of MD-80 airliners. Cory's statement is a scare tactic, pure and simple, and relies on two basic premises, both of which are likely false:

1. Improper fastening of the bundles in the sleeves creates a significant likelihood of a fatal airplane crash.
2. Inspecting for proper fastening of the bundles in the sleeves eliminates the likelihood of a fatal airplane crash.

The job of the FAA isn't to be apologists for the airline industry. And I think that they really have no business attempting to frighten people into thinking that a massive disruption of the domestic travel industry is the only thing that stands between the flying public and a fiery death in an airplane disaster. I find it difficult to fathom that there wasn't a less disruptive means of accomplishing the same ends. But if nothing else, this is pretty much impossible to miss, and so the FAA and American are certainly seen to be doing something - even though it's something that they should have been doing behind the scenes for years.

Temporary Fury

Okay. So it's being shown that thousands of people are willing to line the streets, and attempt to extinguish the Olympic Torch as a way of making their displeasure with China known. And this is becoming somewhat of an embarrassment to China. These things are all fine and good, I suppose. But when it's all said and done, and the Olympics are over, and the Chinese no longer feel the need to burnish their international image - where will these people be then? Will the events of Tibet fade into Ancient History (even in the face of a retaliatory crackdown), like the World Trade Organization or the Genocide in Darfur?

The Ghost of Mount Rainier

Unless there's been a good rain a day or two before, the Puget Sound area tends to be somewhat hazy. This has the interesting effect of making it difficult (for me, anyway - especially given the distance involved) to photograph Mount Rainier. You can see the mountain through your viewfinder, but 4 times out of 5, the haze washes out the mountain in the actual photograph. I presume that I as I actually learn how to properly use my camera, I'll be able to get around this problem. And I have a couple of ideas in mind already. But until then, I'm going to find myself dealing with an effect that I've come to think of as "The Ghost of Mount Rainier." Not only because despite the fact that you can see the mountain, it's hard to photograph, but the haze makes the mountain itself look more phantasmal than real.

The Needle in Dusk Clouds

The Space Needle, in Seattle, is not only an excellent platform for photography, but it also makes an excellent subject. (Unfortunately, I am not an excellent photographer.)

I don't know why I like this particular picture of it so much. I have the nagging feeling that it could have been a much better snapshot, somehow. But it's cool, so it seems worthwhile to share it.

Progress

"We should all be familiar with the depressing fallout by now. Forty percent of the 2.2 million people in prison or jail are black, 20 percent are Latino. At the current rate, one in three black men will spend time behind bars before they die.

Those are stunning facts, but equally gripping are the ones that make clear how the prison-industrial complex has ballooned with black bodies as a result of Washington's quixotic war on drugs. Since its opening salvos in the early 1980s, the national prison population has grown at a faster rate than ever, according to Justice Department stats—by nearly 700 percent. Take that in for a second, it's a doozy. Now consider this one as well: In 1980, just 25 percent of federal prisoners were locked up for drug charges; today, the number is larger by half than the entire prison population of 1980.

Over the last two decades, conservative thinkers have peddled pseudoscience and played upon white fantasies about urban America to rig the system and produce precisely these results."
"5 Things You Should Know About Crack" Kai Wright | TheRoot.com

I've quoted a pretty big chunk of text here, mainly so that I didn't do too much damage to the context.

There's an idea that I want to call attention to here. Many black Americans are upset about the current prison system, convinced that Federal drug policy is deliberately aimed at locking up as many minorities as can be caught and charged. It's a mantra that's repeated again and again, to the point that it's taken as truth, pretty much without question. And it's the kind of thing that, if true, thinking people should be mad about.

But, as it turns out, there are some things left unsaid to help fuel anger at the system. Consider - according to Wright's analysis, the prison population is seven times what it had been in 1980. I'm going to monkey with his numbers a bit, to make the math easier, but if I do the math properly, the overall point should stand. Let's say that the numbers are a bit inflated, and that there are actually exactly 2.1 million people in prison now. If that number is 700% of what the numbers were in 1980, then there were 300,000 people in the federal pen back in 1980. 25% of that 300,000, the number of people that Wright says were locked up on drug charges in 1980, would be 75,000 people. If the number of people currently in prison on drug charges is 150% of the total 1980 prison population, then there are now 450,000 people in the slammer for drugs. But that's only 21.4% of the 2,100,000 that are currently incarcerated. So the number of people in prison on drug charges, while pretty high, has actually declined as a percentage of the total Federal prison population.

But that's not anything worth being angry about, so the numbers are presented in such a way that they do a little cloaking of the truth. And not very well, I might add. After all, I'm not what you would consider to be a wizard at math, and I figured it out.

In a way, it represents progress. Now, it seems, everyone is educated enough to understand how to meddle with statistics.