In reverse order of importance:
Reese Witherspoon was arrested for something or other.
Some country guy who was “before my time” named George Jones died.
CISPA died in the Senate because they were too busy trying to pass an Internet sales tax bill.
Apparently the Elvis impersonator actually didn’t send ricin to Washington D.C., and the feds have dropped charges on him and arrested another guy. Good thing our drone assassins don’t make those kinds of mistakes!
SpaceX isn’t the only company working on rocket launches to send stuff to the International Space Station (and beyond?). Orbital Sciences had a successful test flight which also launched some smartphones into orbit for some NASA testing. Meanwhile, SpaceX test launched their reusable Grasshopper vehicle to a new record height of 80m.
Thirteen female corrections officers at a Maryland prison were indicted for helping a gang leader run CRAZY AMOUNTS OF ILLEGAL OPERATIONS from behind bars while he got FOUR OF THEM PREGNANT. Conservatives blamed society’s ignorance of traditional gender roles for having female guards, allowing the male prisoners to prey on the insecure ones, and I’m not sure they don’t have some kind of point here.
The FAA actually started cutting air traffic controller hours due to the Sequester which led to flight delays which led to annoyed journalists and Congressmen and other flying people. People on the Internet claimed that even after the Sequester the FAA’s budget was still larger than they originally requested and that it only cut them back to 2010 levels and that flying is down like 8% or something these days anyway and that a lot of airports don’t even have air traffic controllers and they don’t have any problems so it was all a big whiney pity party from the Obama administration but Congress quickly passed a fix that explicitly gave the FAA “flexibility” to implement Sequester cuts without cutting air traffic controllers so now none of it really matters except people can complain that rich people got their Sequester pain taken care of while poor people that got their programs cut are still out of luck.
A building collapsed in Bangladesh and killed a few hundred people. Libertarians, sometimes this is how regulations get stricter.
The United States sent more “nonlethal” aid to the rebels in Syria, where the civil war is still dragging on with no clear resolution. There also may be evidence that Syria’s government used chemical weapons against the rebels, which might be crossing a “red line” that means the US will “do something” about it. War hawks in Congress (a.k.a. John McCain) want Obama to send weapons or troops or something to the rebels. Good thing that kind of Middle East intervention has never come back to bite us in the past!
When you run a very large organization, you know that sometimes, somewhere, there will be big failures. Military, government and business leaders understand this. So, is it any surprise that the biggest prison industrial complex in the world* has a problem like this one? Not to me.
Having worked in the software world, I can see this from many angles. For example, when times are good, you tend to hire more mediocre people (you have to). When times are tough (in the industry) only the folks that really are dedicated professionals get the job. Unfortunately, since 9-11, security work has been one of the few growth opportunities for folks that lack math skills. In other words, these folks should have been working in the factory, not managing inmates.
But hey, we have to train the next generation of thugs somewhere — why not throw the stoners and crack heads into prison where they can learn from the experts?
* China imprisons more people in absolute number but a small fraction in proportion to their population. They have their own set of problems maintaining their totalitarian state — we just don’t here about those as much.
When you run a very large organization, you know that sometimes, somewhere, there will be big failures. Military, government and business leaders understand this. So, is it any surprise that the biggest prison industrial complex in the world* has a problem like this one? Not to me.
Having worked in the software world, I can see this from many angles. For example, when times are good, you tend to hire more mediocre people (you have to). When times are tough (in the industry) only the folks that really are dedicated professionals get the job. Unfortunately, since 9-11, security work has been one of the few growth opportunities for folks that lack math skills. In other words, these folks should have been working in the factory, not managing inmates.
But hey, we have to train the next generation of thugs somewhere — why not throw the stoners and crack heads into prison where they can learn from the experts?
* China imprisons more people in absolute number but a small fraction in proportion to their population. They have their own set of problems maintaining their totalitarian state — we just don’t here about those as much.