Knight of the Burning River

101 posts
KotBR is from the Midwest. Cleveland sports have been torturing him longer than some of you have been alive. Buy him a beer, and he'll probably tell you a story that's too long.

The Challenger Disaster: Frozen Rockets and Political Snow Jobs

Challenger_explosion

This is part two in a two part series exploring the Challenger disaster. You can find part one here.

With the January 27th launch officially scrubbed and the overnight forecast calling for even more intense cold, the NASA administrators and Morton Thiokol engineers responsible for the Challenger mission faced an increasingly difficult situation. With the launch already rescheduled due to the weather, the shuttle would sit on the launch pad overnight, further chilling the MT built boosters well below the 40°F for which they were launch-certified. Continue reading →

How the Reagan Administration and a Decade of Administrative Failures Doomed The Challenger

Challenger_explosion

In less than two weeks we will quietly pass the 27th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster-an unnecessary tragedy that cost the lives of seven astronauts on a frosty January morning in 1986. I was lucky enough this week to sit through a talk given by a former employee of Morton Thiokol-the company who manufactured the boosters used on and widely blamed for the Challenger disaster.

The commonly accepted explanation for the accident was that Thiokol’s booster design contained fatal flaws in the O-rings that held the boosters together, and coupled with poor organizational control that prevented the flaws from being addressed. The truth, however, was much greater, and much more troubling to anyone who believed in the greatness of the American space program or the infallible nature of President Ronald Reagan’s administration.  Continue reading →

AIG, Bank of America Remind Us of the Brilliance of Capitalism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9xuyB5mWdA

If you spent anytime watching the NFL playoffs on the old TV box over the weekend, it’s likely that you came across AIG’s not-terribly-subtle and entirely self-congratulatory commercials touting both their work in recent disasters and  gratitude towards the American public and the federal government that bailed the firm out during the 2008 crash. This being America, home of freedom, capitalism and blind plutocratic entitlement, that’s not all AIG was up to the last few days. Continue reading →

Election Night Live Blog: Which Half of the Country Will Hate Tonight’s Outcome?

Rich but Empty Calories Always Give Me HeartburnTwelve months of campaigning, billions of dollars in campaign spending and enough enough hacktastic advertising to shame even the slimiest local used car dealer finally comes to a head tonight. Based on the stories already coming out of the several states, fraught with reports of broken down voting machines and attempts at disenfranchisement, this is shaping up to be a long, painful night for all those involved.

As your intrepid live-blogger is a full-on masochist (he is a Cleveland Browns fan, after all), he will bring you all of tonight’s punditry, pontification and premature fapping at Florida going for Romney.

The polls start closing down at 7:30, but it seems plausible that many states will have voters going well past that based on them getting in line ahead of poll closings. We’ll start the party around 8:30, but feel free to bathe in your own vodka-glow in the comments before that.  Continue reading →

Crasstalk’s Official Presidential Endorsement, Now With 100% More Righteousness

A very special thank you to Ornery Babe and Cletar who helped put this endorsement together.

Listen, if Michael Bloomberg can take time out from hurricane recovery to endorse a Presidential candidate, it’s only fair for the wise and occasionally sober scribes of Crasstalk to do the same.

Admittedly, the path to this Election Day has been long-six years long for one candidate, in fact. The cost, has been excessive-more than $2.5 billion, to be precise. And on the eve of that election, through the speeches, the conventions and the ads-Good God- the ads, we must decide between two men for the opportunity to occupy the White House for the next four years.

Who do we, the brilliant minds at Crasstalk, believe best to lead this nation through the next four years of corporate pillaging?

Continue reading →