Where can we find the money?

This is going around. I've gotten it in comments, more than once, Steve Barnes has it on his facebook. A link to a posting on Kos shows it coming from a place called, "Christian Left".

I didn't want to be left out.

Some of it is shaded language. The "tax loophole" isn't. It's a conscious decision which says money earned by playing with money is more important than money made by making things, or selling them. It's not, from the point of view of those who passed those laws a loophole; it's the purpose. In other words, it's a feature, not a bug (for those who want to be a bit more overt in the politics of it, it's class warfare).

But it does show that we aren't "broke", we just aren't willing to, "work", to, as Scott Walker said, "all sacrifice together" in the face of our "imminent fiscal doom", caused by the budget deficit.

More security theater

This one is worse than most, because unlike the nuisance of not being able to take toothpaste aboard a plane, or having to buy water one's kid from a kiosk, this one is likely to kill people.

That's problem the first, and problem the worst; the theater was done as a private performance.

Airworthiness Directive 2011-04-09(pdf).

So great was this threat the directive was kept secret.

"We have determined that notice and opportunity for prior public comment on AD 2011-04-09 were contrary to the public interest and good cause existed to make the the AD effective immediately." That's how serious this is, so great that it had to be done right away, and so grave a threat that time for public comment was contrary to the public good.

What was this massive threat? This grave danger which requires retrofitting any plane which carries more than 20 passengers? Oxygen in the toilets. They have already removed them from 6000 planes, and the crews may not be aware of it.

The Federal Register version of the AD* is different from the individual notices previously issued. These individual notices contained a time-limited flight crew notification procedure. This procedure required that the pilot in command be notified that the oxygen generators in the lavatories had been rendered inoperative, and instructed the pilot in command to brief the crew in the event of a rapid decompression the lavatories needed to be checked. Since the flight crews have been made aware of this AD by the actions in the individual notices, and these procedures [notifications] were to be applied for a limited time (30 days) only, the procedures are no longer considered necessary, and are not included in this AD. Flight Crews are still made aware of corrective actions taken by this AD since maintenance activities are recorded and made available to the the flight crew using existing maintenance procedures.

So, right now, there are 6,000 planes which have no oxygen in the toilets in the event of a loss of cabin pressure. The crew is supposed to know because someone is supposed to have checked that aspect of the maintenance logs.

Got it.

In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure the cabin attendants are to don their masks and help the people in the toilets back to the their seats.

Right. It's going to be so calm in that plane when that happens. And the crew is going to be able to get the people to their seats (or the nearest open one) while they are passed out.

Because if there is a sudden decompression event (which happens between 40 and 50 times a year) the cabin pressure goes from about 8,000 feet, to what, 35,000-40,000 feet. It's only a couple of seconds to being passed out from oxygen debt.

The argument seems to be that some terrorist could pull out the generator (which is a chemical packet, of some sort, if I understand things correctly) and use it in some nefarious way. I don't think the cure to someone being able to design something lethal in the toilets, is to make them lethal by design.

Are the odds of any one of us dying in such an event likely? No. If we assume there are say, 10 toilets on a plane, and 40-50 events a year, no more than 500 people are at risk, of the hundreds of thousands who fly in a year. I mean, it will suck to be one of them, and I'll feel for their families, but we need to accept that sort of risk to be safe from the overwhelming risk to all of us which is clearly posed by the number of terrorist attacks we deal with each year.

Or maybe not. Maybe this is a Movie Plot, and the risk of anything like this happening is a lot less than the odds of a couple of hundred people being killed, or maimed, when one of those "uncommon" events happens.

The airlines, on the down-low, know that people are likely to die from this, anonymous sources made comment to a Houston news source, " If you have a rapid decompression and you're in the bathroom, there's a good chance you won't survive it, and the rest of the airplane will," the airline industry source said.

SKYbrary has a really nice set of pages on Hypoxia

There is a chart here of Times of useful consciousness At 35,000 feet, it's 30-60 seconds, if one is in good health and not engaged in physical activity, such as "moving about the cabin.

So there you are, the FAA is saving us from the terrorists.

*I don't know when the Federal Register version was published. Reports have indicated that until this broke the AD was not listed in the list of ADs, there was a skipped number.

Lenten thoughts

I'm reading, Paul Among the People by Sarah Rudens. It's a scholarly reading of Paul, by someone who was trained not as a theologian, but as a classicist.

First, this is not a book for the faint of heart. The comparative texts she uses to illustrate the questions of what Paul meant, are from Martial, and Juvenal, Aritsophanes and Sophocles. She rips into Plato, and takes swipes at Cotton Mather. So I am coming to a different understanding of the Pauline letters, esp. those, like Corinthians, and Galatians which seem so problematic to the moderns age.

It made me think of Johnny Cash.