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So I'm listening to the radio earlier today, and at one point there was a report on the
Curiosity Mars rover mission, which is apparently about 10 days from arriving at Ye Olde Red Hunk of Rock & attempting to land the rover. It seems there is some trepidation among the crew overseeing the mission's progress, as the spacecraft carrying the rover was designed with a "new & innovative" setup to deposit the rover on the surface of Mars which employs a combination of parachutes, braking rockets, and eventually dangles the rover from a cable intended to sort of plop it down whilst the lander hovers over the spot chosen for the rover to touch down. To me, this sounds quite like a disaster waiting to happen - but then, they supposedly landed the last pair of rovers dispatched to the Red Planet in what amounted to super-strong bubble wrap cocoons which bounced along the surface at the last stage of landing until coming to rest & disgorging their six-wheeled charges to chug merrily about, so who knows.
The other thing that struck me about this report, however, was the fact that they are apparently going to have "grief counselors" on hand at
Curiosity mission control just in case it goes tits up & the thing spatters itself all to hell, and... ...well, I guess all the geeks in the room commence to bawling their eyes out over a machine being wrecked...
This prompted me to think to myself -
Geez, you didn't see friggin' Gene Kranz and his boys gathering up any goddam 'grief shittlers' when they hadda bring Apollo 13 back from the Abyss by having the crew patch it up with some hunks of cardboard and duct tape... ...or when some rocket blew up on the pad and the next week they hadda put a crew into the same model and fire it up 'cos the schedule was the schedule & all... ...what the hell is NASA coming to..?!
I guess I'm just unrealistic.
Then later in the day I hear that some Wall Street son of a bitch who led the charge to get the Glass-Steagall Act repealed back during the Bubba Clinton regime is now apparently of the opinion that it wasn't such a good idea after all. Glass-Steagall was the legislation enacted to separate the activities of investment banks from the "plain old ordinary kind" that folks put their savings into after the Great Depression, so that the brain deads - I MEAN -
trusts of the world of finance couldn't gamble away everybody's money, or get "too big to fail", &tc.
A rare instance of gob'mint getting something right, if I may say so.
Well... ...apparently, "Mister Dumb-Ass" (I forget the nauseating piece of human garbage's name) has come to the realization that "mistakes were made" since he achieved his life's ambition of removing this "roadblock to the rich becoming even richer" - and, incidentally, the net worth of both commercial and investment banks withering away since the act was repealed - and now feels that maybe the safety measures should be put back in place.
Sweet Holy Jesus God Almighty and His Legion of Slaughtered Saints !!!
I ain't heard nothin' that made me want to put a bullet in the back of somebody's head and toss their corpse in a lime pit since Allan Greenspan admitted that he was all wrong about de-regulating the financial industry because the market could not "police itself", after all.
How the hell do these people make it to the top of the heap in this goddam world ?
Must be 'cos shit floats.
