28 Years

Former president of Peanut Corporation of America, Stewart Parnell, was sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowing shipping salmonella contaminated peanuts around the country:

Former peanut company executive Stewart Parnell was hit with a virtual life prison term Monday for his 2014 conviction on crimes related to a salmonella outbreak blamed for killing nine and sickening hundreds.

A federal judge in Georgia sentenced the 61-year-old former head of Peanut Corporation of America to 28 years behind bars, imposing potentially the toughest punishment in U.S. history for a producer in a food-borne illness case.

U.S. District Judge W. Louis Sands also sentenced the former executive's brother, Michael Parnell, 56, to serve a 20-year prison term. The relative and co-defendant was a broker who provided food manufacturing giant Kellogg's with peanut paste from his brother's company.

Mary Wilkerson, 41, a former quality control manager at the now-defunct peanut firm, drew a five-year prison term for her conviction on obstruction in the tragedy.

Sands also ordered both Parnells to surrender, rejecting defense arguments that the two should be allowed to remain free on bond pending appeals. The judge deemed them potential flight risks.

………

The case stemmed from Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention findings that traced a national salmonella outbreak to the Parnell company's peanut roasting plant in Blakely, Ga. The outbreak sickened 714 people in 46 states and may have contributed to nine deaths, the CDC reported.

The illnesses began in January 2009 and ultimately prompted one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.

A federal jury convicted Parnell last September on 71 criminal counts, including conspiracy, obstruction of justice and introduction of adulterated food. The verdict came after prosecutors presented evidence that Parnell and the co-defendants knowingly shipped salmonella-tainted peanut butter from the Georgia facility to Kellogg’s and other customers — who in turn used it in products ranging from packaged crackers to pet food.

How about some similar sentences for corrupt bankers?

This is a Night for Weird History

I just discovered that Prescott Bush, George H.W.'s dad, and George W's and Jeb's grand dad, was one of the founders of Planned Parenthood:

Can you name any historical figures who helped Planned Parenthood kick off its first fundraising campaign back in 1947? If you first guessed some progressive liberal icon, you’d be wrong.

The die-hard public pro-life bona fides of George W. Bush and his brother and current GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush are undeniable. Jeb has repeatedly said that he would defund Planned Parenthood if he’s elected, and it’s been a promise he’s been making long before the Center for Medical Progress launched their viral undercover video campaign attacking the non-profit, claiming the organization was “selling baby parts.”

But a little known fact — first resurfacing in a 2005 article in SFGate — reveals that the grandfather and father of the last two Bush presidents, Prescott Bush, was the treasurer of the organization in its early years.

But even then, supporting a woman’s right to control over her own reproductive system was politically dangerous.

The political repercussions hit hard. Prescott Bush was knocked out of an expected victory for a Senate seat in Connecticut in 1950 after syndicated columnist Drew Pearson declared that it “has been made known” that Bush was a leader in the “Birth Control Society” (The old name of Planned Parenthood had been the Birth Control Federation of America.) Recall that contraceptives were controversial in those days — and remember that a constitutional right to use them wasn’t established until 1965, when the Supreme Court affirmed an implied right to privacy in Griswold vs. Connecticut.

Prescott Bush won a Senate seat two years later, and his son George and daughter-in-law Barbara continued to support Planned Parenthood even after George’s election to Congress from Texas. In fact, he was such an advocate for family planning that some House colleagues gave him the nickname “Rubbers.”

If I believed that there was an ounce of integrity in the Bush Crime Family, my head would hurt, but Poppy Bush made it patently clear that this was not the case when he turn his back on both his father's legacy and own his lifelong support of reproductive rights to become Vice-President.  (And let us not forget that Prescott Bush's investment firm was shut down for acting as an agent of Nazi Germany in 1942.)

I don't think that this family would walk a straight line if their lives depended on it.

Deep Thought

I just saw a guy drive by in a bright yellow Lamborghini convertible.

My first thought was, "Why, after spending something near half a million dollars on a car, would you paint it the same color as a taxicab?"

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Visiting My Daughter in the City

We couldn't for everything she needed in one trip, so we came up this week.

She loves the City, and she loves AADA .

Have a picture of the Empire State Building.

  

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F-35 Testing Beginning to Resemble Lance Armstrong Blood Tests

It turns out that the recent "successful deployment of the F-35 in US Marine Corps exercises was nothing of the sort:

The Marine Corps triumphantly declared its variant of the F-35 combat ready in late July. In the public relations build-up, the recent demonstration of its performance on the USS Wasp was heralded as a rebuttal to the program’s critics.

But a complete copy of a recent memo from the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) — obtained by the Project On Government Oversight through the Freedom of Information Act — reveals that a number of maintenance and reliability problems “are likely to present significant near-term challenges for the Marine Corps.”

The Marine Corps named this demonstration “Operational Test One,” but it turns out it wasn’t actually an operational test, “in either a formal or an informal sense of the term.” To count as an operational test, conditions should closely match realistic combat conditions.

But DOT&E found the demonstration “did not — and could not — demonstrate that Block 2B F-35B is operationally effective or suitable for use in any type of limited combat operation, or that it was ready for real-world operational deployments, given the way the event was structured.”

The details buried inside the report’s annexes also show just how much trouble the crew faced in attempting to keep the F-35s selected for the demonstration flightworthy. Before the demonstration even began the Marine Corps had to swap out one F-35B with another “due to a fuel system fault that would have been impractical to fix at sea given the maintenance workload.”

In combat, not only would this kind of replacement be impractical, it would likely be impossible.

It goes on to state that the the WASP was emptied of other aircraft in order to facilitate F-35 ops, critical hardware and software not being present on the system, around 80 civilian contractors on board to keep the aircraft running, a prognostics and maintenance system that is basically non-functional, and a much lower operational tempo than promised.

This aircraft is a turkey, and I see no prospect of it being fixed.

In Addition to Being a True Patriot, Edward Snowden Is Wicked Cool

He just showed up in robot form on Neil Degrasse Tyson's podcast to explain why we have not been contacted by aliens:

Whistle-blower Edward Snowden has some strong opinions on communications — even when those communications are coming from aliens.

The former intelligence-agency contractor turned fugitive was an unexpected guest on famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk podcast on September 18. And, inevitably, the two got to talking about extraterrestrials.

………

But Tyson scored an interview with him in New York City. How? Snowden rigged a robot that he can control from Russia, and rolled right into Tyson's office at the Hayden Planetarium in New York with his face displayed on the screen.

The conversation turned to encryption and cybersecurity, but here's where an astrophysicist differs from a journalist: Tyson's line of questioning quickly turned to how encryption relates to communication with ... aliens.

Tyson asked Snowden if a highly intelligent alien civilization might be communicating with encrypted messages. And Snowden had an unsettling answer.
First, Snowden said, let's assume that most advanced societies eventually realize that they need to encrypt their communication in order to protect it. This could also be the reason why we've never heard from other civilizations — their messages may have just been melding into the background static of the universe.
Here's Snowden's full answer, from the StarTalk podcast:

So if you have an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there's only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communication will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means.
So when we think about everything that we're hearing through our satellites or everything that they're hearing from our civilization (if there are indeed aliens out there), all of their communications are encrypted by default.
So what we are hearing, that's actually an alien television show or, you know, a phone call ... is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation.

So it could be possible there are alien messages constantly hitting our satellites, and we just don't recognize them because they're so heavily encrypted. (The cosmic microwave background radiation that Snowden mentions is thermal radiation throughout the universe left over from the Big Bang. It basically looks and sounds like static to us puny humans.)

(emphasis original)

This is way cooler than I will ever be.

Maybe Ron Paul Should Hit Marco Rubio with a Folding Chair at the next Debate

Looks to me like a sucker punch

Because if Rubio's staff is going WWE Raw on Paul's Staff, responding in kind might be well advised:

Video footage appears to show a top official for the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio punching the national political director of a rival candidate, Rand Paul.

The incident is alleged to have occurred during a conference on a Michigan island on Thursday night.

In a Facebook post early on Friday morning, John Yob, a Michigan-based political consultant who serves as national political director for the Paul campaign, said Rubio’s deputy campaign manager, Rich Beeson, punched him in a downtown bar on Mackinac Island.

“I ran into a guy named Rich Beeson, who frankly I didn’t even know who it was at first because he isn’t relevant in our political world,” Yob said.

“He literally physically assaulted me by punching me in the face. The state police are looking for him. I have it on video from multiple angles. This will play out in the national media in the next few hours.”

Shannon Banner, spokesperson for Michigan state police, told the Guardian it was not involved in the investigation, which is being handled by the Mackinac Island police department.

“It wasn’t a brawl,” the Mackinac Island police chief, Brett Riccinto, told the Guardian on Friday. “If anything, it was a shove. Literally, it was a shove. This thing has been blown way, way, way out of proportion.”

Riccinto, however, said a complaint had been made for assault, and it had been forwarded to the prosecutor to decide if charges would be filed. He confirmed the alleged incident occurred at Horn’s Gaslight Bar & Restaurant.

It really is the silly season in Republican politics.