Film review: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022)

A recent post of mine discussed how the airline manufacturing company Boeing, despite having had a well-earned reputation for producing quality safe aircraft, suddenly in 2018 and 2019 had two crashes within five months of its new 737 Max planes that resulted in everyone on board being killed. The subsequent inquiry into what happened revealed that Boeing had been in decline for some time, especially after the merger with defense contractor McDonaldMcDonnell Douglas, when the shoddy practices of defense contractors and the drive for company profits to boost shareholder value and executive compensation became the main focus, as a 2019 article by Andrew Cockburn revealed that I linked to.

In a comment to that post, Sunday Afternoon pointed me to this documentary that looked at the results of the subsequent inquiry into what went wrong. What it reveals is infuriating about how Boeing executives ignored all warning signs that they were putting a dangerous plane into circulation and not giving pilots the training they needed to deal with its new features.
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Trump’s strange behavior in court

In the defamation case against him, serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) was so disruptive during the testimony of E. Jean Carroll that it clearly exasperated the federal district judge Lewis Kaplan, so much so that he admonished him.

When Carroll first took the stand, Trump could be seen whispering to his lead attorney, Alina Habba. He sat with slightly hunched shoulders as Carroll testified.

As Carroll spoke, Trump complained audibly and appeared to double down on defamatory denials, her lawyer said during a morning break in the proceedings.

“Mr Trump has been sitting at the back table and has been loudly saying things throughout Ms Carroll’s testimony,” said attorney Shawn Crowley.

“It’s loud enough for us to hear it,” Crowley said, so “I imagine it’s loud enough for the jury to hear it.”
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Banning football for young children

I have been highlighting for some time the danger of brain injury that is posed by American football, evidence for which keeps increasing. My preference would be for schools and universities to not offer football as an extracurricular activity. If adults choose to risk their long-term brain health by playing football, we cannot stop them, anymore than we can stop them from doing other dangerous things. But there is no reason why educational institutions should be encouraging it.

I really had no hope that my proposal would go anywhere in this football-crazy country (see the extent of fan devotion in this article) but I was pleased to learn that there have been efforts in some state legislatures to pass laws that ban children under 12 years of age from playing it, although none have passed it. California is the latest to try and fail.
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I wish we could say, “Bye, bye, Vivek”

The Iowa caucuses were held yesterday and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) won easily as expected, getting roughly half the votes (51%) and half the delegates (20). Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley split the remaining votes (21% and 19%) and delegates (9 and 8) respectively. After the results were announced , Vivek Ramaswamy (who got 7.7% and 3 delegates) and Asa Hutchinson announced that they were suspending their candidacies.

I wish we could say that we have seen the last of Ramaswamy whose personality is even more grating than DeSantis, and that is saying something. But I think he is going to be around for a long while. He will likely be a fixture on right wing media as an all-purpose provocateur, a role that he would clearly relish since he seems to love being in the media spotlight

He has also endorsed SSAT, no doubt hoping that if SSAT wins in November, he will be awarded some post by him. That alone should be enough to vote against SSAT.
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The horror in Gaza and the media bubble in which Israelis live

Following the attacks by Hamas on October 7th that killed 1,200 Israelis and the massive retaliation by Israel that seeks to level Gaza and make it into a moonscape, currently over 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, 70% of whom are women and children. Furthermore, pretty much all of the entire two million population is now displaced and homeless due to the widespread and incessant bombing, and famine is imminent because Israel refuses to allow in adequate levels of humanitarian aid. The sheer scale of the indiscriminate assault and attacks on refugee camps makes laughable the claims by the Israeli government and military that they are targeting only militants. They are clearly seeking to terrorize the entire population of Gaza, destroy the infrastructure, and make life a living hell for the people there.
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Why the Pentagon pays more for less

With regard to the recent troubles with quality and safety of Boeing aircraft, I linked to an article by Andrew Cockburn titled THE MILITARY- INDUSTRIAL VIRUS: How bloated budgets gut our defenses in the June 2019 issue of Harper’s Magazine, where he said that following the merger of Boeing with McDonnell Douglas where the latter defense company basically took over, the long standing wall that separated Boeing’s civilian aircraft division from its military division was breached and the more lackadaisical practices of the military division seeped into the civilian division, resulting in cost overruns, failures to meet schedules, and poor quality.

But the main point of his article was not about Boeing but about how the poor practices in military contracting was built into the system so that companies could gouge the taxpayer while at the same time not providing anywhere near the amount of hardware that had been promised.
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Deja vu all over again?

In a move that did not get too much attention in the news, 13 Republicans members of the hard right caucus voted with 203 Democrats to defeat by 216-203 an effort to ‘pass the rule’ for three Republican bills to be brought to the floor, thus stymying their speaker Mike Johnson. Without the rule being passed, Johnson will need a ⅔ majority. (In a post back in November, I explained what this procedural stuff is all about.)

Why did they do this? Apparently they are unhappy with the deal that Johnson made with the White House and the Democratic leadership over the spending bills for the budget, because it did not contain all the measures they sought. I can understand the frustration of the hard right caucus. As Kevin Drum writes, the framework of the deal that Johnson agreed to is pretty much the same that former speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to with the White House eight months ago.
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Trump spoke at his trial after all

The lawyer for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) asked the judge for permission for SSAT to speak for two or three minutes during closing arguments and the judge asked “Do you promise to just comment on the facts and the law?”. But then SSAT immediately started speaking without answering and did his usual rigamarole about this being a persecution by the prosecution and the judge. SSAT spoke for five minutes before the judge cut him off.

I am not sure what the point of this was other than for SSAT to let off steam. After all, there was no jury to convince. All it does is further tick off the judge who is going to make the final determination of the size of the penalty.

Trump’s planned courtroom antics foiled by judge

Yesterday we saw another attempt by serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to turn the legal system into a circus. All witness testimony in the fraud trial involving his business enterprises that was brought by the attorney general of the state of New York Letitia James, and which is being conducted in a Manhattan courthouse presided over by judge Arthur Engoron, is over and all that remains is the summing up by the two sides. Note that Engoron had already ruled that the documentary evidence had established fraud and this trial was to determine the size of the penalty. James had initially asked for $250 million and then raised it to $370 million.

SSAT said that he wanted to give his side’s closing argument, in addition to his attorneys. I do not think that this was because he thought his attorneys were incompetent, although they apparently forgot to check the box at the beginning that asked for a jury trial and thus this was a bench trial to be judged exclusively by the judge. That did not prevent SSAT from repeatedly whining how he was being deprived of his constitutional right to be tried by a jury even though that right has to be requested and he did not do so. I think that he may have not wanted to have a jury at all, anticipating that he would lose and thinking that it would be easier to argue that the judge was biased against him rather than a jury.
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Covid-19 cases are on the rise again

Covid cases are on the rise again in the US, fueled by a new variant known as JN.1. Since many people now test at home, health officials are using wastewater to get measures of its prevalence.

The variant is linked to about 60% of new cases, according to CDC data. A member of the omicron family, JN.1 is descended from the BA.2.86 variant. Its most notable new mutation changes the spike protein that latches onto cells, enhancing its ability to evade our immunity. But even if JN.1 is more skilled at dodging antibodies from previous infections and vaccinations, it is not entirely resistant to them.

A recent study of disease spread found that length of exposure was the biggest factor in transmission. A team led by University of Oxford researchers found that 82% of cases were acquired from exposures that lasted longer than one hour.

Despite COVID’s omnipresence, the chance of hospitalization and death is unmistakably lower than in previous years. The number of people in California hospitals with COVID grew to about 2,000 by the end of December, half of last winter’s peak, and just a tenth of the record high.

But the nebulous threat of developing what is known as long COVID remains, and millions across the United States have already experienced it.

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