For some reason I’ve been thinking about bad management decisions and when employees get to “disobey” management. One of the classic examples of recent times was NASA managment’s overruling of the Morton Thiokol engineers who told them that the O rings wouldn’t work in cold weather. I went looking and found a post I wrote on the subject back in January 2007.

A remark in Thomas Kida’s splendid book Don’t Believe Everything You Think (Prometheus) snagged my attention yesterday. Page 193:

However, overconfidence can also cause catastrophic results. Before the space shuttle Challenger exploded, NASA estimated the probability of a catastrophe to be one in one hundred thousand launches.

What?! thought I. They did!?! They can’t have! Can they?

Another in the continuing series, Weird Bullshit From Religious Fanatics Who Think They Need to Tell Everyone How to Live: meet Fix the Family.

It has a blog. The blog has a picture.

What do they tell us? It’s pretty simple really. Man the boss. Woman the obeyer. The end.

Here’s their most recent post, which claims to be about American Catholic Marxism. It’s a transcript of a guy talking, and I’m not going to watch that. There’s a limit.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Fix the Family. My name is Raylan Alleman, and we are bringing you truth without compromise for the family. Welcome to our blog edition. A little Quick Fix for you, the unplugged edition

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the Momentum guy said in the Q&A that prompted Ruth Smeeth to say “How dare you?!” and a few seconds later walk out. There are videos but all the ones I’ve seen start with her “How dare you” so you don’t get what the guy said. Like this one for example.

It’s not that I think anyone’s lying, it’s that I can’t find the details. The reporting is frankly rather muddled.

A tweet by a Telegraph journalist who was there (and who is on video asking the Momentum guy if he’s going to apologize) helps some:

Then Momentum man gets Q, accuses @RuthSmeeth of colluding with Telegraph journo (me) despite Corbyn warning

Helen Lewis delicately points out that marketers of quack remedies aren’t allowed to tell lies but marketers of quack politicians and quack policies are.

If there is one sentence that explains the referendum result, though, it’s this one from the website of the Advertising Standards Agency. “For reasons of freedom of speech, we do not have remit over non-broadcast ads where the purpose of the ad is to persuade voters in a local, national or international electoral referendum.” In other words, political advertising is exempt from the regulation that would otherwise bar false claims and outrageous promises. You can’t claim that a herbal diet drink will make customers thinner, but you can claim that £350m a week will go to

Also in news from UK / English/Welsh politics today –

A Jewish Labour MP has left Jeremy Corbyn’s launch of an antisemitism report in tears after being accused of colluding with the right-wing press.

I watched the video clip in which she leaves and I didn’t see any tears or signs of tears.

…a man handing out leaflets linked to Momentum, an activist group that supports Mr Corbyn, then verbally attacked Ruth Smeeth.

Witnesses said the campaigner accused the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North and Kidsgrove of “colluding” with the right-wing media, after refusing to hand a leaflet to Ms Smeeth and taking down her name.

Ms Smeeth said she was “verbally attacked” and accused of being part of

107 Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging Greenpeace to stop fighting GMOs.

The letter asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block introduction of a genetically engineered strain of rice that supporters say could reduce Vitamin-A deficiencies causing blindness and death in children in the developing world.

“We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against ‘GMOs’ in general and Golden Rice in particular,” the letter states.

The letter campaign was organized by Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer of New England Biolabs and, with Phillip Sharp, the winner of the

Another one:

Well now I too have witnessed my very own racist incident. In London. An angry old 6’3″ white man shouting at a BME university lecturer (apparently Muslim, I didn’t bother to ask), and one of his BME students. He didn’t seem to mind much about the white female student.

After finishing his rant about all the Muslims coming over here to impose Sharia law, and being challenged on it, he asked why they’d all done 7/7. At that point we left, which is when he tried to become violent.

‘Glad’ (?) to say I’d got involved in the ‘discussion’ ten minutes before to offer support and will be reporting it to the police. If you find yourself

Ben Riley-Smith at the The Telegraph reports a febrile atmosphere in Labour politics at the moment:

Labour MPs have been forced to call in the police over death threats in the last 48 hours after they refused to back Jeremy Corbyn, The Telegraph has learnt.

Vicky Foxcroft, a Labour whip, received a call to her constituency office which said: “If she doesn’t support Corbyn I will come down to the office and kick the fuck out of you.”

Police officers had to rush her office, close the shutters and attempt to trace the call after the man said he was on his way and hung up.

Another MP received a threat to her or his child.

Lucy Powell, the

Jehovah’s Witnesses destroy an indigenous religious site in Mexico on the grounds that it’s not Christian.

Members of the Christian sect Jehovah’s Witness reportedly destroyed a sacred Indigenous archaeological heritage site in central eastern Mexico in an act of apparent religious intolerance, claiming the traditional rituals practiced at the ancient ceremonial place were “not Christian,” local media reported Monday.

I don’t suppose they claim to be Christian, either, but so what? Do other religions have to ask permission of Christian sects to practice their religion? Is that a general rule? I’d love to see what the JWs would make of some Hindu vandals smashing up their temples.

The attack on the more than 7,000 year-old Makonikha sanctuary in the central

Interesting.

Jonathan Warner ‏@JonathanRWarner 21 hours ago
London Young Labour chair took BME spot at LGBT conference because his dad’s girlfriend was black.

Christ…

Why are you currently occupying the Black member’s position when you do not have an experience of oppression on the basis that you are Black?

The open letter is from 2012 but the tweet is from yesterday. The question is a live one.… Read the rest

The vote to recall Harney County Judge Steve Grasty failed overwhelmingly, Peter Walker reports on Facebook.

Wham. Go home, Bundyites, you’re drunk.

 … Read the rest

Some guys have been arrested over that racist incident on the Manchester tram.

Police were made aware of alleged racial abuse at around 07:40 BST on a tram travelling towards the city centre after a video was posted online.

Two men, aged 20 and 18 and a 16-year-old boy, were detained on suspicion of affray, Greater Manchester Police said.

The video shows a man on a tram at Shudehill being called “an immigrant” and told “get back to Africa”.

The guy told them they’re young and none too bright.

One of the men continued to shout “get off the tram now”, as he spoke.

One of the group, who were holding beer bottles, then apparently approaches the man and

Istanbul’s turn:

A suicide gun and bomb attack on Istanbul’s main airport, one of Europe’s busiest, has killed at lest 32 people and injured 60 more.

Three attackers were involved, with one reportedly firing a Kalashnikov as they targeted an entry point to Ataturk international airport.

The BBC reporter Mark Lowen is stuck in a plane at that airport.

Two South African tourists, Paul and Susie Roos from Cape Town, were at the airport and due to fly home at the time of the explosions.

“We came up from the arrivals to the departures, up the escalator when we heard these shots going off,” Mr Roos told the Associated Press news agency.

“There was this guy going roaming around,