a pilot's panic call to Flight Service ..., as he believes he is about to crash... ... and how the Flight Service Controllers managed to help him right his plane to save him from crashing. more inside

Silenced by the President---Oregon Police Fire On Bystanders Watching Presidential Motorcade -- Published Oct. 16th in the _Iconoclast_, a story from the previous week week in Jacksonville, Oregon (the police using cayenne-pepper 'paintballs' to get critics off the street before the President drives through town). I guess he really doesn't hear anyone criticizing him! Quote: Trish Bowcock, a resident of Jacksonville and a retired attorney who is formerly of Austin, Texas, was an eyewitness to the disturbance and penned her impressions of the scene from a personal standpoint. She has agreed to allow The Iconoclast to reprint her thoughts. Mail Tribune staff members confirmed her contention that law enforcement concentrated on anti-Bush protestors, rather than pro-Bush demonstrators, and that the order to stop the protests came from the U.S. Secret Service. more inside

Does the math of the mortgage bubble work? Or are the securities, and the derivatives, and ... Are all those fancy other 'financial instruments' taking out more profits than the housing stock can be worth? An attempt to check the math, a government raid and destruction of the tools, and, eight years later, a court vindication.Backtrack from here to the root for more. This seems a sound few bytes that gets the flavor: "Hamilton’s Community Wizard enabled it as administrator of the loan sales to see what the real default experience in locales actually was in order to construct a better actuarial model on which to base pricing. ... Given that HUD’s defaulted loan portfolio was worth hundreds of billions of dollars, the difference between a 35% as opposed to a 90% recovery rate to the taxpayer who had funded the original loans in the first place was considerable. You have to wonder: why was a firm that was actually doing what it was contracted to do attacked and put out of business by its employer? more inside

Found in an old article on California's energy crisis: Why the US should invade Iran -- as of April 2001 Before 9/11, several documents made the argument to the Administration for taking over Iraq and its oil -- based on the spectre of the California energy crisis, and more to come, as explained by Enron's Kenneth Lay to the Administration -- all due to lack of control of foreign oil. Justifications were written and presented to the President for taking Iraq, to protect the US oil supply. April 2001. Read the footnotes -- this is amazing stuff, buried. more inside

“What I’m here to do today is to recruit you to be warriors of God’s kingdom.” Pointer is to an article within the Yurica Report website; I've quoted only a brief excerpt. Seymour Hersh commented in a radio interview recently that footnotes are one of the marks of the liberal position. There are upwards of 160 footnotes for this article. You judge ... more inside

roll stability "... The X-15's maximum altitude was extended to 354 200 feet, but not until after much trial and error..." more inside

While the votes are being tallied at the central computer, "inserting a very short (6-line) text file on any disk or CD, which self-executes" ... I dunno, I don't use Windows. Can this happen? "... 5. RISK MANAGEMENT FOR INSERTING VB SCRIPTS TO MANIPULATE ELECTION: ... manipulating the election with the GEMS central tabulator is easily achieved by inserting a very short (6-line) text file on any disk or CD, which self-executes upon placing the disk in the central server computer. The procedures I observed on 9/14/2004 (popping disks in and out of the server during the middle of the count, with very sloppy disk management) put this security risk at a high level for King County. ...." more inside

He was missing from his Reserve duties because ... he was working as ... a spy??!? Two strong pieces of writing worth a look; the first is noted in Metafilter -- the Joe Darby article. The second is this George Bush story, also from the current GQ. He was missing from his Reserve duties because he was ... a spy? And later assigned to be a Watergate burglar? And maybe Deep Throat? You can read both the Joe Darby story and this one from the same source, a few pages away. Work back from the printable-page link. more inside