Review: Cops and Robbers by Donald Westlake

Donald Westlake was a national treasure. He wrote more than one hundred novels and I doubt if there is a dud among them. This one is a stand-alone and while not funny, I suspect you'll have a grin on your face at the end, as did I.

A man in a cop's uniform, pulls his gun and holds up a store. Days later he relates what he did to his partner. What follows is how to destroy $12,000,000 in bearer bonds, turning them into confetti, in order to make $2,000,000 in cash.

This was intriguing and suspenseful. Enjoy.

Bork and OCAW v American Cyanamid: Company policy required women to be sterilized to keep their jobs.

While reading a book about the Bork nomination for the Supreme Court**, I ran across an interesting case that was used to build a case against his nomination.

The case involved a multitude of issues: the right of a company to assign workers based on sex, avoidance of hazards in the workplace, pollution, forced sterilization, and the right of workers to make their own decisions.

The facts as best as I can determine from reading articles and court documents is that in 1978 American Cyanamid Company, worried about lead exposure to its female employees who might become pregnant that forbade them working in areas of high exposure unless they had themselves sterilized. The purpose was to assure that no women who could possibly carry a fetus would risk of fetal exposure to toxic workplace chemicals. This policy applied only to women, however "According to OSHA rule making on the lead standard, "hazards to fetuses are not eliminated by keeping fertile and pregnant women out of a lead-exposure workplace;exposure of male employees may also be hazardous. Although the exposure of men to lead toxicity results primarily in decreased sex drive, impotence, and sterility, sperm cells can be affected and in some cases pass on genetic damage to fetuses.*

The company held a series of meetings with female employees explaining they would be terminated unless they could provide a physician's certificate of sterilization. Five women did so to keep their jobs.

In 1979, they were cited by OSHA:

The employer did not furnish employment and a place of employment which were free from recognized hazards that were causing or were likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees, in that: The employer adopted and implemented a policy which required women employees to be sterilized in order to be eligible to work in the areas of the plant where they would be exposed to certain toxic substances ....'

The company appealed that ruling and won both in the lower courts and the DC Court of Appeals in an opinion written by Judge Bork who "ruled that a policy requiring sterilization is not a "hazard" within the meaning of the general duty clause of the OSH Act." Now that ruling was merely on the narrow aspect of the OSHA ruling, but you can imagine the firestorm that erupted as it looked like Bork was saying it was OK for companies to require that workers be sterilized in order to work if the company required it. That, of course, was, in fact, the result. Richard Lewis, in the Penn Law Review wrote a rather scathing review of Bork's interpretation of the law. My interest was much broader. How can government or industry protect workers from a hazardous environment without requiring such drastic measures? The company's goal was a valid one. They didn't want a host of mutant children running around as a result of mothers having been exposed to lead and other noxious chemicals, but rather than try to clean up the environment, they chose a much more problematic response. (Proposed new OSHA regulation limited the amount of lead in the air were vigorously opposed by the industry.)

That they were treating the men differently than the women might also have been subject to scrutiny. And, in fact, the company was later sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for sex discrimination, but was settled in 1984 without a court resolution.

Bork's decision, writing for the court, changed the emphasis of OSHA's responsibility to one of protecting the business rather than the employee's health. "Given the choice between these two rules, the court's decision to limit liability was reasonably consistent with one of the Act's unstated constraints: "Congress does not appear to have intended to protect employees by putting their employers out of business ....The court's interpretation of the Act, however, gave short shrift to the primary purpose of the Act:protection of employee health" Bork reasoned that the sterilization policy lay beyond the Act's scope because the harm suffered by sterilized employees resulted not from the policy but rather from the employees' decision to be sterilized as influenced by "economic and social factors which operate primarily outside the workplace," a bizarre interpretation, indeed.


References:

Lewis, Richard. "OCAW V. American Cyanamid: The Shrinking of the Occupational Safety and Health Act." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 133, no. 5 (1985), 1167. doi:10.2307/3311995.

"OCAW wins settlement against Cyanamid." Chemical & Engineering News 57, no. 8 (1979), 7. doi:10.1021/cen-v057n008.p007.

*See OSHA Preamble to Final Standards, Occupational Exposure to Lead, 43 Fed. Reg. 52,952,52,959-60 (1978)

**Bronner, Ethan. Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America. New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 2007.

Review: Every Night I Dream of Hell by Malcolm MacKay and the latest Rhodenbarr

Picked this up for $1 at Dollar Tree on a whim. I was not familiar with the author and thought I would give it a try. I was a bit intimidated by the five pages of character lists at the beginning and it took a bit to get into, but I was rewarded with a good story of Glaswegian bad guys and thugs. Told primarily from the perspective of Nate, one of the gang's "security consultants" (enforcer), the crime boss has been jailed and there is a power struggle going on.

I have no idea if MacKay writes from personal experience. I hope not, but I will move on to his Glasgow Trilogy which promises to be just as good.

I had eagerly awaited what I thought was to be the next installment of the Rhodenbarr (The Burglar in Short Order) series only to discover that it's merely a collection of very short stories with Bernie as a vague theme and some essays discussing his genesis. Very disappointed.

Review: The Plantagenets by Dan Jones

Marvelous narrative history with everything you could want in a story: romance, lust, betrayal, conflict, odd personalities, heroes, and scoundrels.

As familiar as the story might be of the relationship between Beckett and Henry II, it was a reminder to me how little has changed: the church still battles the secular for primacy. 

I was quite unfamiliar with the reign of Edward I, especially his campaign against the Welsh and the use of the Arthruian legends to diminish the value of the traditional Welsh stories. He stitched the Arthurian legends into Plantagenet family lore. The campaigns against the Welsh were innovative. Edward insisted that roads be widened to 200 feet and trees and gullies and ditches be flattened so as to prevent attacks by the Welsh who were used to harassing his baggage trains and army with guerrilla tactics. He surrounded the Welsh major cities with rings of castles, many of which still stand and are remarkable in that they were designed for offensive as well as defensive use having abandoned the traditional keep for concentric towers connected by rings of walls and no central strong point. (Lots of pictures of these marvelous constructions on the Internet.) He also invented the arrow slits that gave excellent fields of fire to those inside at very little risk to the archer. Castles were used to enclose towns as well making them economic centers. All this was very expensive and this put Edward into an uncomfortable bargaining position so Parliament gained considerable power during his reign.

I certainly would not have wished to be an earl or duke or whatever during the reign of Edward II. Getting on the wrong side of whomever was in power, Isabelle or Edward meant you would run the risk of not just having your head chopped of, but having genitals removed with a bread knife, entrails cut out, dragged by multiple horses, quartered, and on and on. To the applause of crowds. 

Richard II, who most likely had some kind of personality disorder, struck me as having uncanny similarities to Trump. He was paranoid, required constant obsequious gestures from his subordinates, brooked no criticism, and when backed into a corner could become quite dangerous, lopping off heads with regular abandon. Watching Pence the other night (or, as George Will called him, the oleaginous sycophant) lead off with servile comments about our dear leader, just made the comparison to Richard II (who was deposed) more blatant.

Review: Through a Glass Darkly by Donna Leon

Donna Leon is a marvel. She has created a cast of appealing characters that deliver intelligent solutions to mysteries. You won't get a lot of shoot-em-ups or car chases or flying off cliffs and surviving thousand foot falls. What you will have is well-written, realistic dialogue, and an examination of Italian, or at least Venetian, culture.

The focus in this story begins with Brunetti helping the friend of a colleague who has been arrested at an ecology demonstration protesting workers' exposure at glass factories to harmful chemicals. That morphs into death threats from the owner of a factory and blame one of the workers assigns to those chemicals for the mental disability of his children. We all know a murder is on the horizon and it soon arrives for Brunetti to solve.

All her stories are told through Brunetti's eyes so we get a view of Venetian sprintime, the art of glass-making, as well as his wonderful relationship with Paula and the comic antics of Signorina Elletra as she and Brunetti suffer the foolishness of their superior Vice-Questore Patta, not to mention the food, culture and ambiance of Venice. 

Excellent if not the outcome Brunetti would have wished.

 

"Bloody Mary"

Interesting article in the Smithsonian trying to make the case that Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, was not the "bloody" Queen history would have us remember. I don't buy it. Burning hundreds of Protestants at the stake for their failure to recant their Protestantism doesn't strike me as particularly bloodless. A timely reminder though of the dangers of theocracy.

One quote: "To the 16th-century mind, heresy was a contagion that threatened not just the church, but the stability of society as a whole. Heretics were also deemed guilty of treason, as questioning a monarch’s established religious policies was tantamount to rejecting their divinely ordained authority. The justification for one heretic’s death, writes Virginia Rounding in The Burning Time: Henry VIII, Bloody Mary and the Protestant Martyrs of London, was the “salvation of many innocent Christians, who might otherwise have been led astray.” Even the gruesome method of execution had an underlying purpose: Death at the stake gave recalcitrant heretics a taste of hellfire, offering them one final chance to recant and save their souls."

I have ordered the book.

Review: The Electra Story: The Dramatic History of Aviation's Most Controversial Airliner by Robert J. Serling

There are many interesting parallels in this story to the current issues with the 737 Maxx: The CAA ( predecessor to the FAA) was heavily involved in certifying new aircraft, but because of reduced staffing many of the tasks were left to the company. For years the CAA had utilized a “designee” system to assure compliance with its regulations. Under this system, key employees of the applicant manufacturer were delegated to approve test methods and data, blueprints, design work, etc. The perennially money-starved CAA simply did not have the manpower to monitor aircraft design.  Sound familiar? The DC-6, Martin 202, and Constellation all developed bugs that made it through the certification process. 

Engineering progress is often measured by learning from mistakes. Unfortunately disasters are essential to help us learn as Henry Petroski has so eloquently written about in To Engineer is Human: The Roles of Failure in Succesful Design.

The Lockheed Electra, one of the most tested and lauded aircraft in the early sixties, was a marvel -- until the wings began to fall off.  It was a ship that fulfilled the pilot’s prerequisites for a transport better than any other plane in history. It had enormous reserve power. It handled smoothly, docilely, responsively. It was fast, versatile, uncomplaining and even — for such a huge aircraft — forgiving of mistakes. In brief, it was a pilot’s airplane.

Investigation following two crashes showed that the outboard engine mounts were not strong enough to damp a phenomenon called "whirl mode flutter" (analogous to the wobbling of a child's top as it slows down). "When the oscillation was transmitted to the wings and the flutter frequency decreased to a point where it was resonant with the outer wing panels (at the same frequency, or harmonically related ones), violent up-and-down oscillation increased until the wings would tear off."

After two violent crashes where the wings had been torn off, a crash (pathetic pun) effort was made to determine the cause. Resources of competing companies like Boeing and Douglas were offered and used. Wind tunnel tests and thousands of hours of test flights finally revealed the problem." Basically the trouble had nothing to do with the Electra’s strength. It involved stiffness — stiffness of the nacelle structure. Stiffness is not the same as strength. If one confuses the two, it is like thinking glass and air are the same because both are transparent. And in an airplane, stiffness is the chief resistant force against flutter. What had happened to the Electra was devastating in its deadly simplicity.

At enormous cost to Lockheed, the planes were all retro-fitted and it went on to have a reasonably successful commercial life. The hull plan is still being used in P-3 Orions. It took a while for the aircraft to get beyond its "jinxed" reputation, especially following a crash where on takeoff three of the planes engines shut down after ingesting hundreds of starlings. Yes, birds are still a problem. (The book was written in 1963.)

I remember flying in an Electra in 1968, several years after the problem was fixed. It was a nice airplane. But I won't get on a DC-10.