One degree of Don Bacon!

Left: Don Bacon; Right: Augusto Pinochet

You don't have to go through all that 6-degrees-with-Kevin rigamarole with this game—it's easy!

    The photo on the right is of Augusto Pinochet, pal to Henry Kissinger but not so much to the mothers of the thousands of Chileans he "disappeared" and the tens of thousands he had sadistically tortured.

    What does any of this have to do with Don Bacon, youse of little faith may well ask! Well, piglets... Don and Augusto have/had the same sugar daddy—BAE Systems!

    The British merchants of death secretly paid Pinochet (and Pinochet-linked groups) more than $1,000,000 through a front company in the British Virgin Islands as recently as 2014—even though Pinochet was arrested (in London!) in 1998 and died in 2006

    Bacon hasn't yet collected $1,000,000 from BAE's U.S. tentacle, but he is on the take for $8,000 so far—enough to pay for about 8 attack ads on KETV during its evening newscast. Every penny helps!

Click above table to enlarge

The company they keep? TWO locally famous homophobes spoke at Omaha's #BackTheBlue copfest today!

On the left, you have homophobe lite James Patterson, who sort of testified — in a disjointed, unfocused ditzy way (watch AKSARBENT's video) against Ben Gray's proposed modification of Omaha's anti-bias ordinance in 2012 to protect LGBTs from job discrimination, presumably because of Jesus's many pronouncements on the subject.

Cavanaugh

    Above, on the right, you have homophobe  extraordinaire, Hal Daub, whose priors go back to at least 1978, when he ran an infamous "typewriter" ad against Rep. John Cavanaugh, accusing him of capitulating to or surrendering to or advancing (we forget which) the "homosexual agenda."

     Cavanaugh had voted against a GOP amendment to stop the Legal Services Corporation from representing poor LGBTs who had been screwed over by government agencies or landlords or employers or whatever. Voters weren't fooled by Daub's attack ad. They reelected Cavanaugh.

KFAB airs claim that 11-Worth protester tried to extort $500,000 from cafe; Omaha Mayor mets with Caniglia, cops & prosecutor to see if protesters can be charged with felonies

Note: the twitter video below contains edited (for time and emphasis) audio from KFAB.
To hear the unedited, broadcast version go to KFAB's web site podcasts,
at the link provided in this post's last paragraph

Today Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert meets with the police chief, city prosecutor & owner of a racist greasy spoon that protestors put a fork in last week, to see if any of them can be charged with felonies. KFAB aired accusations of a $500,000 extortion attempt by the organizer. pic.twitter.com/f5zvMugi62

— ＡＫＳＡＲＢＥＮＴ (@aksarbent) June 23, 2020

Until this month, the 11th-Worth Cafe, a greasy spoon at 24th and Leavenworth had, for 44 years, served food to blue collar denizens of one of Omaha's poorest neighborhoods.
     That some of that food was named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee (a decades-long "fuck you" to black people) never seemed to bother owner Tony Caniglia Jr., until black (and white) Omahans appeared on his sidewalk last weekend, fit to be tied, and not only about Tony's menu-naming preferences.
     Tony 2's son, Tony 3, recently drew rather unsavory attention when he apparently reacted to news about scattered vandalism during police brutality protests by urging, on Facebook, that cops' rubber bullets be replaced by real ones. "It's time to go lethal," he alleged wrote, adding that target practice be practiced.
      Daddy, Tony 2, (who isn't very good at do-it-yourself damage control) tried to social-media-distance himself from any racism in his restaurant or his child-rearing by protesting that protesters were "trying to link Tony Caniglia, owner of the 11-Worth Cafe to a negative post on face book that was not made by him."
     This didn't impress many black Omahans, but KFAB's Gary Saddlemyer seemed to buy what Tony Caniglia was selling..
     Saddlemyer is Omaha's rightwing version of Radio North Korea; on Monday he made it his AM drivetime mission to nail the 11-Worth Cafe to KFAB's Konservative Kross and canonize the Caniglias, with the help of always-available (to KFAB) Mayor Jean Stothert.
     Without telling KFAB's gullible listeners why the Caniglias provoked so much revulsion that people took to the streets, Saddlemyer laid on the victimization narrative with a trowel.
     (For a much more honest look at what happened, look to KMTV, the OmahaWorld-Herald or virtually any mainstream local news source.)
     Saddlemyer went so far as to repeat an accusation, on air, that David Mitchell, a protest organizer, tried to extort $500,000 from the Caniglias.
     Mitchell has denied this, saying that another activist suggested that the Caniglias make a donation, and not to any individuals, but to the Malcolm X Foundation, which has emphatically denied any role in any of this. (Anyone who didn't know better could be forgiven for concluding from Saddlemyer's toxic insinuations that Mitchell was involved in a personal stick-up.)

     As an aside, we think Gary Saddlemyer should read the only part of Nebraska's Theft by Extortion statute that could possible apply in his fictional scenario:

(1)(e), Bring about or continue a strike, boycott, or other collective unofficial action, if the property is not demanded or received for the benefit of the group in whose interest the actor purports to act;

     The above applies only, one assumes, if whoever allegedly asked the Caniglias for a donation actually posed as an rep of the foundation, which is about as likely as Gary Saddlemyer apologizing for habitually broadcasting half-truths and/or rumors and then vowing to leave the state.
     The Omaha Police Department, for its part, aren't taking the Saddlemyer/KFAB trash talk seriously, much to the likely dismay of Mayor Stothert who seemed very excited about the prospect of charging Mitchell with extortion on Monday's KFAB morning program.

    As for Stothert, she expertly shone as the Mistress of Innuendo, to wit, this translation of her between-the-lines dog whistling: If some — not ALL, of course, but some! — of the black protestors have stabbed, burned and buried any of the Caniglias in their North Omaha back yards, I certainly would want to get to the bottom of it!
     But seriously, Stothert vowed to "confer" with the police chief, Tony Caniglia, and the city prosecutor to see if they could gin up any felony charges against people who are sick and tired of people like the Caniglias and are willing to say so on the sidewalk.
     Anyone who doesn't already know how brazenly disingenuous Mayor Jean Stothert is should consider this: during Gary Saddlemyer's puffball interview, she recounted how abused she was when she met angry protesters on City Hall Plaza (who were demanding that she have club owner Jake Gardner charged for killing protester James Scurlock.) Video of Stothert shows her explaining that she as mayor cannot charge anyone with a crime; only prosecutors can do that.
     That was then. Now, her hands don't seem to be as tied. Tuesday Stothert met with Tony Caniglia, Jr., the police chief, and the city prosecutor to see if any 11-Worth protesters can be charged with felonies. 

     At the top of this post is exclusive, but boring, video of the scary(!) protests Mayor Stothert and KFAB are so concernstipated about.

     It is a highly edited (condensed for Twitter) version of some of the most disturbing parts of KFAB's 10-minute Monday broadcast. To hear the entire thing, go here, but don't listen while you're eating.

How to make hand sanitizer with 91% Isopropyl alcohol if you don't know any algebra

Note: This post has been substantially written, for clarity. The information in the earlier version is correct, but difficult to absorb.
     We tried it. It's runny and it stinks— but only for a few seconds; after which the odor completely disappears and your hands feel fine: smooth, not too dried out from alcohol and no hand lotion stickiness. Aloe rocks, but some of the gel tends to sink in the alcohol so shake before each use!
     You can make this stuff and you may have to if you live in Omaha, where hand sanitizer is almost impossible to find as of this writing, weeks into the American coronavirus epidemic.
     We found some isopropyl alcohol at Walmart Neighborhood Market and snagged the last two bottles of a very nice Walgreens-branded "After Sun" aloe gel (on sale if you buy two!)

Omaha is the home of Marianna, a world-wide supplier of hair products, which has 145,000 square feet of FDA approved production space in Omaha but isn't making any hand sanitizer, even though other cosmetic companies (like L'OrealUSA) here and in Europe have stepped up to the plate. GOP Mayor Stothert praised an Omaha brewery making hand sanitizer (for first responders) but apparently hasn't bothered to ask Marianna, which could really crank out the stuff, to do something for the wider local community. Neither evidently, has GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts.

Pencils ready, class?

How to make hand sanitizer with 91% isopropyl alcohol

     The ratio is simple: Mix aloe gel with 100% alcohol, which must constitute no less than 60% of the total mixture. (Most commercial hand sanitizers are 70% alcohol.)
     That's straightforward: 60-40 alcohol/aloe or 3 parts alcohol and two of aloe.
     But most drug store alcohol (DSA) is 91%, not 100%, so what's the correct ratio, to get to say 70%?
     Here's the math, set off with rules, which you can skip, if you wish:
____________________________________________________

My 8 oz. bottle of hand sanitizer was nearly empty, so I emptied it into the 3 oz. travel bottle in the truck. Then I washed it out to be refilled.
     I needed to make 6 oz. of mixed hand sanitizer in the 8 oz. bottle (room to shake).
     70% of 6 oz. occupied by 100% alcohol is 4.2 oz, but you bought Drug Store Alcohol (DSA), which was only 91% alcohol.
     So how much more DSA do you need to get to 4.2 oz of pure alcohol?

     The answer is about 1/2 an ounce more, or 4.6 oz.

Here's the equation (involving some very simple algebra.)

.91 x DSA = 4.2 oz. (4.2 oz. is the 70% of 6 oz. that must be 100% alcohol.)

You solve the equation for DSA, the volume of Drug Store Alcohol you need, by dividing both sides of the equation by .91

.91 x DSA            4.2
----------     =     ------------
    .91                    .91

which simplifies to:

DSA   =  4.6 oz, the same amount of alcohol as 4.2 oz. of 100% alcohol

4.5 is close enough, since you're aiming for 70%, more than you need.

Now all you need do is:

• Pour exactly 4.5 ounces of water into the empty 8 oz. bottle, and mark it.
• Then pour exactly 1.5 more oz. of water, to make 6 oz., and mark it again.
• Pour out the water.
• Pour in the 91% DSA up to the first mark.
• Add aloe gel up to the second mark (no higher!)
• Close the bottle, and shake.

You're done and you're welcome.
____________________________________________________

No-algebra cheat for using 91% Isopropyl alcohol to make hand sanitizer:

3 parts 91% isopropyl alcohol
1 part aloe gel

Three-to-one (75/25) makes hand sanitizer with an alcohol content of 68.25%, comfortably above what you need and close to the 70% in commercial preparations.

BUT YOU MUST MEASURE PRECISELY!

...And don't drink isopropyl alcohol (yuck, have you smelled the stuff?) or leave it unsecured around desperate alcoholics or senseless teenagers who will do anything on a dare.

Fracking/oil shale radioactive waste: Rolling Stone magazine vs. what the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission told the Unicameral

Rolling Stone magazine just published a shocking expose, America's Radioactive Secret, about hitherto-ignored amounts of radioactivity in oil/gas industry waste brine. Some excerpts:

Many industry representatives like to say the radioactivity in brine is so insignificant as to be on par with what would be found in a banana or a granite countertop, so when Peter demanded his supervisor tell him what he was being exposed to, his concerns were brushed off; the liquid in his truck was no more radioactive than “any room of your home,” he was told. But Peter wasn’t so sure.
     “A lot of guys are coming up with cancer, or sores and skin lesions that take months to heal,” he says. Peter experiences regular headaches and nausea, numbness in his fingertips and face, and “joint pain like fire.”
     ...Radium, typically the most abundant radionuclide in brine, is often measured in picocuries per liter of substance and is so dangerous it’s subject to tight restrictions even at hazardous-waste sites. The most common isotopes are radium-226 and radium-228, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires industrial discharges to remain below 60 for each. Four of Peter’s samples registered combined radium levels above 3,500, and one was more than 8,500.
    ...Tanks, filters, pumps, pipes, hoses, and trucks that brine touches can all become contaminated, with the radium building up into hardened “scale,” concentrating to as high as 400,000 picocuries per gram. With fracking — which involves sending pressurized fluid deep underground to break up layers of shale — there is dirt and shattered rock, called drill cuttings, that can also be radioactive. But brine can be radioactive whether it comes from a fracked or conventional well; the levels vary depending on the geological formation, not drilling method.

Oil shale / fracking brine is saline enough that the salt content alone can ruin surrounding farmland near spills. It is usually dumped into "injection wells," specifically Class II injection wells — the only such class not regulated by the Nebraska Department of Environmental Control, to wit:

Class II wells are associated with oil and gas production, and are regulated by the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. NDEQ has authority over and manages Class I, III and V wells.

And what does the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission think about radioactivity in the Class II injection wells containing waste brine from Gas/Oil operations? Below is what it told the Unicameral, reiterated here, on page 11.

Hardly what the EPA said about radioactive brine in class II wells last year, is it?

Extraction of oil and gas usually produces large amounts of brine. Often saltier than seawater, this brine can contain toxic metals and radioactive substances. Brines can damage the environment and public health if discharged to water or land...

In that year, 2015 there were already 115 such injection wells in Nebraska when Terex proposed a facility accepting "upwards" of 80 trucks/day of waste brine from Wyoming.
     You really should read NetNebraska's excellent story about panhandle opposition to the project, linked in the paragraph before this one.

After stonewalling Tucker Carlson, Sen. Sasse finally responded. Carlson mocked him some more.

Yesterday, Tucker Carlson briefly recapped his Tuesday Fox News show about how hedge fund (Elliott) manager (Paul Singer) wrecked Cabela's and its home, Sidney, NE with typically rapacious, predatory business practices, destroying 2,000 Cabela's jobs there.
     Carlson suggested that NE GOP Sen. Ben Sasse's stubborn silence on the Sydney economic apocalypse (1/3 of the town lost its jobs) might have something to do with the fact that Paul Singer gave him the maximum allowable contribution for his senate race.
     Though Sasse ignored Carlson's attempts to speak to him before the episode was shown, he released 77 words of pandering, evasive drivel a statement after the fact:

     Melissa and I know the families in Sydney and I've constantly told companies, including Cabella’s and Bass Pro Shops, that nobody outworks or outhustles Nebraskans. Sydney hasn't given up and neither have we. There's a real problem with American communities coming apart, and it's going to require creative policymaking. But this problem isn't going to be solved by the easy overpromising big government advocates on either the left or the right.

     Back to Carlson:

     Creative policymaking is what Senator Sasse says we need. And of course, we agree with him. Here are three creative policies the U.S. Senate ought to consider in response to what happened in Sydney and Nebraska. First, call it what it is. This wasn't creative destruction. Nothing was created. It was just destruction. Destruction for the enrichment of a tiny number of people at the expense of many others. You don't have to make this illegal to call it disgusting, because that's exactly what it is. So, our first creative policy ought to be to tell the truth.
     Second, return the money. We're not saying Ben Sasse, or any other senator is doing Singer's bidding purely for the cash, but why not remove all doubt about it? If one of your biggest donors turned out to be a pornographer or a mass distributor of OxyContin, you'd send back the donation. You wouldn't want to be associated with someone like that. You'd want to be clear about your own values. Senator Sasse should be clear about his.
     Third, and finally, Republican senators ought to resolve to speak to the rest of us like adults. No more baby talk. Stop with the bumper sticker phrases from 1986. It's a different country now... Wake up. We're almost out of time. If we don't rein in the excesses of our system, and soon, we could very easily lose it.

     Elliott Management, which refused to respond to Carlson, posted a response on Medium, denying responsibility for the Cabela's sale. The company was exploring a sale before Elliot bought a stake, Elliott said, adding that it did not exert "direct influence on the Cabella's board to pressure them into that decision."
     Carlson then noted that SEC findings contradict Elliott Management's claim:

     Capella's did consider selling itself before Paul Singer arrived, but in August 2015, they rejected that path. Suddenly, after Singer's purchase, they reversed course."

Trump may still be hiding his taxes, but WaPo found out where he gets his face concealer

It's sold by a Swiss firm which calls the line Bronx Colors... and who would be more Bronx streetwise than Zurich Huenenberg chemists, we ask you.
     The president's makeup is not listed among the products "For Men" on the manufacturer's web site, but the Trump administration has no policy so far penalizing the transgender application of concealer.
     Shady Trump's shade is Orange BHC06 Boosting Hydrating Concealer and it isn't removed from his shirt collars easily. Just ask the minion Trump yells at for failing to do so. Or Melania, whose clothes go into a separate washing machine.
     Unlike Trump, Bronx Colors are a cruelty-free cosmetic.

Best Buy's Black Friday $90 5TB hard drive: quite a deal, considering it holds the the data of nearly 46 billion punch cards

A nearly 1-ton IBM 5-megabyte hard drive
being fork-lifted into a plane in 1956. It would
take 1,048,576‬ of these to equal a $90
5-terabyte Black Friday external hard drive
that a toddler could hold in his hand.

So Best Buy is selling a Black Friday Western Digital 5-terabyte portable hard drive for 90 bucks.
     Such a device holds the equivalent of almost 46 billion IBM punched cards (120 bytes each), which would have set you back (in 1996) $800 million dollars (at $42.085 for a box of 2000) and some change (that being $3,349,771.78)
     Forty-six billion punched cards would have taken IBM's 1930s Endicott factory more than 12 years to make (10 million per day, 7 days a week).
     In 1956, IBM introduced a 5-megabyte hard drive weighing nearly a ton; it had to be fork-lifted onto a truck or plane. Best Buy's portable hard drive, which fits a jacket pocket, stores as much data as a mere million of those.

Bits in an 80-column 12 row IBM punched card: 960
Bytes: 120
Bytes in a Terabyte: 1,099,511,627,776
Bytes in a 5-terabyte hard drive: 5,497,558,138,880
Number of IBM punch cards required to hold 5 terabytes: 45,812,984,490 2/3
Size of IBM punch card: ​7 3⁄8 by ​3 1⁄4 inches (187.325 mm × 82.55 mm)
Height if stacked: 5,056 MILES (143 per inch)

WD Easystore 5TB External USB 3.0
Portable Hard Drive: Width: 3.2"
Height: .8", Weight 8.1 oz.

Length if laid end-to-end: 5,332,556 miles
Cost of IBM punch cards (UC Davis 1996 Central Stores Online Catalog): $42.085 per box of 2,000
Cost per byte of above: 1.75354166666667
Cost to store 5,497,558,138,880 bytes on punch cards: $803,349,771.78

https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.html
https://themindcircle.com/move-5mb-ibm-hard-drive-1956/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

Donna Reed: "The easiest 50 bucks I ever made"

John Barrymore, the villainous Mr. Potter in 1946's It's a Wonderful Life, didn't believe that Donna Reed (25 when she costarred in Frank Capra's most enduring and endearing film) was really the country girl she made herself out to be
     One day, when a cow was on the set, Barrymore saw his chance to bust Reed, so he offered her $50 if she could milk it. After doing so easily, Reed, who grew up in small town Dennison, IA, said it was the easiest 50 bucks she ever made.
     P.S. The basketball court that slid apart to reveal a swimming pool in It's a Wonderful Life was not a studio set. It was Beverly Hills High's "Swim Gym" and is still in use. The cinematic Bedford Falls, 75 buildings in four acres in RKO's Encino Ranch was demolished in 1954.
     Also, and this is VERY IMPORTANT: the bird in the office of the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan was Jimmy the Raven, who appeared in every Frank Capra film after 1938.