Gun Free Zone

This is a followup to my post WTF Boeing? This is what happens when you think of yourself a stock value and not a technology company.

From Ars Technica:

NASA declares Starliner mishap a “high visibility close call”

No fucking shit.

After pondering the totality of issues that arose during a December test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft this week, NASA chief of human spaceflight Doug Loverro said Friday that he decided to escalate the incident.

The $4.3 billion dollar rocket failed to make it to space because of testing shortcuts and he’s going to “escalate the incident.”

How about this:

I’m a PE.  Something I take a lot of pride in.  If I sign off something that isn’t safe because I cut corners, I get sued and could even go to jail for negligence.

How about we have something equivalent for C-Suite management.  If they rush testing or something, they get to go to prison too.  No golden parachute for the executive who says they need to skip a test to make a deadline.  He gets an orange jumpsuit.

Fuck it, I’m running for Congress at some point and I’m going to propose that law.

So he designated Starliner’s uncrewed mission, during which the spacecraft flew a shortened profile and did not attempt to dock with the International Space Station, as a “high visibility close call.” This relatively rare designation for NASA’s human spaceflight program falls short of “loss of mission” but is nonetheless fairly rare. It was last used by NASA after a spacewalk in 2013 when water began to dangerously pool in the helmet of astronaut Luca Parmitano.

Ooo… a “high visibility close call.”  Thems are fighting words.

How bout “Boeing fucked the dog while NASA held it by the collar so that we could make a timetable.”

About Luca Parmitano, he almost drowned in space.  Most people don’t realize how powerful of a force surface tension is when gravity is not there to overpower it.  A little leak caused water to cover his head.  The helmet didn’t need to fill up, just a thin film of water slowly engulfed his face, covering his nose and mouth.  He was heard gurgling on the coms in his suit.  Here’s the thing.  His suit leaked before and it wasn’t detected.

I want big wins in space for NASA.  I really do, from the bottom of my heart.

In the early days of the space race, we knew nothing.  We needed brave men to agree to sit on top of a converted ICBM and hope the best happened.  But it’s been 59 years since we launched Alan Shepard into space and 50 since we put Neil Armstrong on the moon.  We know a thing or two.  There are engineers at NASA whose grandfathers worked for NASA.

There is no justification for rush-to-launch and ignorant mistakes.

By declaring the Starliner mishap a “close call,” Loverro also formally opened a process during which the space agency’s Safety Office will investigate the organization elements that may have led to the incident—likely focusing on why NASA did not detect the errors in Starliner’s flight software.

Yes, tell me why?

Loverro said no decisions are close to being made on when Starliner will return to flight or whether Boeing will have to fly another uncrewed demonstration test flight before NASA astronauts fly on Starliner. The next step, he said, is for Boeing to prepare a “corrective action plan” to implement the review team’s findings, and that will include a schedule.

Slow the fuck down and test things properly.  What a concept.

NASA will evaluate that plan and then it may be in a position to decide whether another test flight is needed.

Yes, it is needed.  Emphatically yes.  Absolutely run another test.

Hopefully, this will get NASA to have a reevaluation of their current culture where the only cost was money and not lives.

One was needed after Challenger.  It seems that NASA has slipped back into that mentality.  If this gives NASA a proper course correction without astronauts plunging into the Atlantic to die on impact than it was worth the $410 Million.

If they choose to stay the course on how they do things, they are going to blow up astronauts on the launchpad.

From Ars Technica:

Inside Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week—and settle Mars

How badly does Elon Musk want to get to Mars? Let me tell you a story. On Sunday, February 23, Musk called an all-hands meeting at the South Texas site where SpaceX is building his Starship spacecraft.

It was 1am.

At an hour when most Americans were throwing down their last shots before closing time, at home in bed, or binge-watching The Office before it leaves Netflix, Musk brought his team together. He wanted to know why the Starship factory wasn’t humming at all hours. Why steel sheets weren’t getting welded into domes and fuel tanks, why tanks were not being stacked into rockets, why things weren’t going as fast as he wanted.

Elon Musk is the billionaire CEO of SpaceX, and he owns the fucking company.  He can do what he wants.

The people he called in at 1:00 AM on Sunday morning are not people with stock equity in the company.  They are assembly-line workers and engineers who get a paycheck.

They deserve a work-life balance that doesn’t involve a 1:00 AM all-hands meeting because Musk gets a bug up his ass.  If that all-hands meeting had waited until 8:00 AM Monday, it wouldn’t have changed the time table for launch in any significant way.

What I don’t understand is why do we glorify CEOs who do this shit?

“Eccentric CEO wants to shake up world so tortures employees.”

Once upon a time, we praised unions that fought for a 40-hour workweek and paid vacation from robber barons who would be happy to work a man to death.

Now, if some CEO with a Twitter account and a turtleneck does the same thing, the media lauds him for being some sort of maverick thinker.

Why?

So a bunch of hourly workers who were asleep or in bed with their spouses on a weekend, having just come off a 50+ hour week, could turn a multi-billionaire into an even bigger multi-billionaire for $20 per hour (SpaceX’s high reported salaries are due to the 50-60 hour workweek they do and the overtime they are forced to pay, their hourly rate is not racically above market).

It isn’t great for fantastic or anything else when a billionaire CEO treats his employees like this.  It’s abuse.

If you want something to laud a billionaire CEO over, find me one who makes the announcement that instead of pocketing a huge bonus, he’ll keep people on payroll during a downturn and figure out something to do with them other than lay them off.

That would be fucking praiseworthy.

I have two dogs.  The older one has figured out how to jump up and hit the lever shaped door handle with her paws and open the back door and let herself in.

My wife and I joke about this saying “the raptors have let themselves in” or “the dog velociraptored the door again.  This is, of course,  a reference to the 1993 classic, Jurassic Park.  Which stands as one of the greatest movies ever made.

I dare you to challenge me on that.  That movie is 27 years old and still holds up like it was just released.  It’s one of those movies that when I see it on TV, I’m going to watch it.  It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it, I don’t get bored of it.

There are some movies that are supposedly “great movies” that to me are a chore to watch.  Casablanca, La Dolce Vita, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather, all bore the pants off of me.  Jurassic Park, Silence of the Lambs, Apollo 13, Jaws, The Fugitive, Dirty Harry and Magnum Force, The Untouchables, I could watch those on a loop.

Back to Jurassic Park…

The dogs let themselves in again this morning and we told the boy “the velociraptors are in, close the door.”  He is a dinosaur fanatic and an extremely literal child and explained to us in no uncertain terms that dogs are not velociraptors, velociraptors are dinosaurs.

We apologized and said it was in reference to a dinosaur movie that he was not old enough to watch yet.  That spun off into a conversation about how old we were when we were first allowed to watch Jurassic Park because tody the Jurassic Word franchise is aimed at kids, with toys and action figures and all sorts of other stuff.  The main protagonist of that series is Chris Pratt, who also is Star-Lord in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it’s obvious that Hollywood is trying to capitalize on his appeal to younger kids with the MCU to draw younger kids into Jurassic World.

Jurassic Park, by contrast, was clearly not a kids’ movie.  I can’t think of a kids’ movie starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, or Richard Attenborough made before 1993.

The question arose, at what age is it appropriate to see Jurassic Park, since by today’s standard, it’s a kids’ movie.

My parents didn’t take me to see it in theaters.  They saw it and then decided I could watch it rented on VHS from Blockbuster (I am so old) when it came out, I was eleven.  My wife saw in theaters, so would have been eight.  I feel that nine or ten is appropriate for Jurassic Park.  Then said that I do not want to expose my children to Jurassic World, that series has been poisoned for me.

This lead to a discussion as to why Jurassic Park, and to a slightly lesser extent The Lost World: Jurassic Park are the only two good ones and the rest can die in Hollywood fire.

There is a scene in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that ruined the Jurassic World franchise for me.  The bad guy, played by the excellent Ted Levine, gets his arm ripped off by the Indominus Rex.  This was horrifically graphic because you see him sitting there, bleeding, drooling, crying in obvious shock and agony before the dinosaur kills him.

There is no comparable scene in Jurassic Park or Lost World.  You see people get eaten, but it’s not as graphic.  It’s implied off-screen.  It’s obscured by vegetation.  Or it’s done in low light, wide-angle, where the character getting eaten is just a small part of a big shot including the whole dinosaur and background.

This is clearly the work of Stephen Speilberg, who made Jaws, one of the greatest and scariest movies ever made, about a shark that eats people, and you hardly ever see the shark, and you only see it eat one person.  Speilberg left the shark munching up to your imagination and did the same with the dinosaurs as much as possible.

When Nedry gets eaten, you only see the Jeep shake.  When Muldoon gets eaten, you only see palm frons and the top of an animatronic velociraptor. You don’t see John “Ray” Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) get eaten, and the movie is better for it.  The most graphic death is of the lawyer picked off the toilet and it’s dark, it’s raining, and he’s tiny on the screen.

Jurassic World created dinosaur torture porn, and I hate torture porn.

It did this because the nature of the Jurassic World morality play shifted.

Jurassic Park, both the novel and the first draft of the screenplay, were written by the fantastic Michael Crichton.  Crichton is one of the best science fiction authors of the later part of the 20th century.

He often gets discounted as a paperback pulp author, but he’s not.  His take on science fiction is different and was very pertinent to the era he wrote in.  Great sci-fi teaches a lesson.  It uses technology to illustrate a point.  I love Starship Troopers, which was a political treatise on Western Freedom (the Terran Federation) vs Chinese Communism (the Bugs).  Farenheight 451 was about the dangers of oppressive government and ignorance.  The Forever War was a treatise against the Viet Nam war and the troubles of soldiers returning home from war to a society that was changing on them.

For Crichton, the fictional technology was the threat itself.  One of my favorite Crichton books is The Terminal Man, about the dangers of playing around in the human brain.  Westworld and Prey were about the dangers of AI.  Jurassic Park was a lesson in the hubris of man playing god with genetic engineering.

The people getting eaten were not getting eaten because of their specific actions, but as representatives of the human race which has played god by resurrecting the dinosaurs.  Ian Malcolm gives that speech over a lunch of Chilean sea bass.

In Jurassic World the morality play was different.  The dinosaurs were victims and the people were evil.  The people who died deserved to die because they were bad.  This both justified torture porn, and took away the suspense of who would get eaten.  Bad guys get eaten, good guys don’t.

There were other things as well.  In Jurassic World, the bag guys were clearly stereotypical Hollywood bad guys.  Vincent D’Onofrio was a military contractor, i.e., Blackwater, so not just military but miliary for hire.  In Hollywood, the military are either heroes or sociopathic killers.  Military contractors are sociopathic killers because they do it for money.

Ted Levine’s character wasn’t just a military contractor but a psycho who pulled the teeth from dinosaurs to make a dino tooth necklace.  To Hollywood, he deserved to die a horrible and suffering death.

In Fallen Kingdom, one of the people who was eaten was a rich guy who wanted to buy a dinosaur as a pet for his daughter.  But he’s rich, which is bad, and he wants a dino to be a pet, which is animal exploitation, so he had to die.  This was unnecessary and cruel.  A loving father doesn’t deserve to die because he wants to get his daughter a pet.  I wonder how the Hollywood executives who have horses for their daughters to ride on their ranches in Sonoma feel about that?

Moreover, the contractors were stupid.  Crichton didn’t write stupid characters.  Muldoon was a professional hunter and safari guide.  Him getting eaten by a raptor was supposed to show how smart the raptors were.  By the time you get to Jurassic World, dino security are idiots who get munched like popcorn.  It’s ridiculous to have one dinosaur take out a squad of guys.

Jurassic Park was better because the cast was small.  You could identify with each character, there were no Red Shirts or Stormtroopers to be dino-fodder.  This made getting stalked by dinosaurs more realistic and scarier.

A dozen nameless ex-special forces soldiers with M4s and Stormtrooper level accuracy shooting into the trees to be taken out by raptors isn’t scary, it’s dumb.  The dinosaurs stop being animals and become invincible.

Spielberg and Crichton were an amazing combination that made a truly great and scary movie about the hubris of man biting him in the ass, literally, in the form of engineered dinosaurs.  That movie stands the test of time and when my kids are my age, and I sit down with my grandkids, that movie will still hold up.

Generic Hollywood has made mediocre moralizing torture porn with dinosaurs that is more of a two-hour commercial for toys than anything else, that isn’t worth watching a second time.

Knowing that there are a couple of Gun Bloggers who are into chickens…

I wonder if they had a Lease to Own option.

There are several old and new movies dealing with Nazi Hunters, but for me the  gold standard has always been The Odessa File: great acting, great script and you are both learning and at the edge of your seat. Maybe it has to do with being based in the great book by Frederick Forsyth who also was involved in the script.

And last night the Love of My life and yours truly sat to watch Amazon’s Hunters. The movie started and I was bit disappointed that by the looks and overacting and really weird clothing and photography, this was not a serious thing but a parody, sort of Inglorious Bastards. Imagine my surprise when I found out it is a drama and not a comedy and with a demand for a overly elevated suspension of disbelief.

I tried very hard to watch it because it has Pacino in it and he acts, but his shoulders cannot carry such a bad project.  Even the kitschy 1978’s movie The Boy from Brazil runs laps around this grotesque production.

Hard pass on this one.

Former Iranian ambassador to Syria and a hostage-taker of U.S. diplomats, Hossein Sheikholeslam, died Thursday from a Covid19 infection, local news outlets report.

An advisor to the Islamic Republic Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, 68-year-old Sheikholeslam was one of the leaders of the so-called “Muslim Student Followers of Imam’s Line,” who took 52 U.S. diplomats hostage, on November 4, 1979, and released them after 444 days.

Former Hostage Taker Of US Diplomats Dies Of Coronavirus In Iran

And now back to your regular programming.

It seems that Orthodox Jews are not the only ones to beset by savages in the New York City neighborhood of Crown Heights.

Teenage girls wearing nice sneakers are also targeted for random and devastating violence.

Teens beat up 15-year-old girl and steal her Air Jordans in Brooklyn

A group of teenagers beat up a 15-year-old girl and stole her Air Jordan sneakers during a robbery in Brooklyn, surveillance footage released by cops on Friday shows.

The teenager was walking on Utica Avenue near Sterling Place in Crown Heights at 4:10 p.m. Thursday when she was spotted by the dozen youths, cops said.

When she reached the corner, the gang lunged at her and punched and kicked her repeatedly, the video shows.

Here is the video:

OUTRAGE:this is sickening video of a 15 year old girl viciously attacked by a group of school children. One young man takes the sneakers right off the unconscious victim’s feet. The teenager is in the hospital recovering. We CAN NOT allow this behavior in our community. #Speakup pic.twitter.com/VLLb91fDOM

— NYPDBrooklynNorth (@NYPDBklynNorth) March 6, 2020

She was taken to NYC Health & Hospitals/Kings County to be treated for bruising and head trauma, cops said. It was unclear what provoked the attack.

Let’s take a guess, shall we…

They stole her shoes, debit card, and cell phone.

She is a girl and she’s 15 years old.

I’d say that the boys who attacked her assumed that she was weak and would be easy to rob.

Watching this, I’m reminded of wildlife videos where a bunch of jackals or hyena spot a gazelle with a bad leg and tear it to shreds.

These boys are pure predators.  The police can say “We CAN NOT allow this behavior in our community” but with bail reform and the fact that they all looked like teens themselves, absolutely nothing of consequence will happen to them.

Every day, it seems, that New York City inches closer and closer to being a place that only Snake Plissken can survive.