‘I see all of the many, many, many helicopter flights following that same flight path. They come right down over the marina. And it’s one thing, when there’s an urgent need or a security issue, to move people by military helicopter to the White House or from one base to another in the D.C. area. It’s another to do it for convenience for generals and “very important people” who don’t want to sit in traffic.’

Who knew wee Reagan Airport was one of the most dangerous places to land/take off in America? If you grew up here, like ol’ UD, you think of Reagan as the dinky downhome alternative to sleek vast Saarinen-designed Dulles (with BWI — we’re really spoiled; lots of terminals near ‘thesda — a kind of afterthought for a quick hop to Bermuda). Now it turns out that self-important assholes have been jamming the place and creating a hellscape people in charge of the airport have been screaming about forever. Reagan Airport “is probably the most dangerous airport in the United States,” one pilot wrote in 2015. “The controllers are pushing, pushing, pushing in an attempt to handle the traffic they have.”

And ain’t it sweet that little Wichita’s Rep. pushed and pushed and got a daily flight out there THAT THE AIRPORT CAN BARELY HANDLE AND ITS ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN BEGGING FOR ALL THE ADDITIONAL FLIGHTS TO STOP.

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That copter thing. Reminds me of the Rennert/Bloomberg thing of just landing your immense thundering personal helicopter whenever and wherever you feel like it — illegality, and torment of homeowners, be damned.

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“Every senator in particular wants a nonstop flight to and from wherever they live,” said [Peter] DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat. He noted that a reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration passed last year added even more flights to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. “The airport said, ‘Don’t do it.’ And they did it. So they added to what DCA said is already an overly congested and over-capacity airport.” (Congress has added more than 60 new flights to Reagan since 2000, over the objections of airport officials.)

… The airport authority said, “We are over capacity. We cannot accommodate more flights, and we think this is going to be disruptive.” Unfortunately, … Congress mandated adding more flights into National Airport, so that more senators can have direct flights. I was chairman of the committee, and I always had to connect somewhere. I didn’t ask for a direct flight. So, that’s a problem. That is a problem, the political influence over the airport, as most recently exhibited in the last FAA bill. So, I think we might need to revisit the amount of traffic.

How third world, my dears. Bigass military egos, bigass senatorial egos, and here we are. Disgusting.

In literature, Scrooge alters at the end of life.

We prefer – we even assume – this trajectory, in which human character is not utterly set at birth, but expands toward some form of realization and even – given a strikingly bad set of character traits – conversion over time.

The story of one of this blog’s minor, persistent, characters – Yeshiva University benefactor Ira Rennert – represents an all too human reminder of the difference between literature and life. For as this multi-billionaire enters his 83rd year of life, as he winds down his tale, he simply persists in his awfulness.

And this is interesting. UD finds it interesting to contemplate such a man, with his Long Island residence so notorious that, when he was on trial for looting the retirement fund of one of his businesses (he was found guilty), his lawyer begged the judge not to allow the jurors to see photographs of it because it would “inflame” them; a man, who having been made to repay the retirement funds, is now suing his lawyers for that amount.

Whenever America’s obscenely rich behave obscenely, there you will find Rennert — flying his private helicopter illegally; polluting the world’s environment; cheating on his taxes, bankrolling illegal settlements.

Like Bernard Madoff’s right-hand man, Ezra Merkin, Ira Rennert is a very high-profile pious person. His name ornaments a business institute for Orthodox Jewish entrepreneurs; he was until recently head of New York’s most prominent synagogue. Ezra Merkin’s synagogue. All three men (along with comrade in whatever Zygi Wilf, after whom a Yeshiva campus is named) were/are majorly involved with/major donors to the extremely curiously run Yeshiva University.

But that, of course, is literary: religious hypocrisy.

Sometimes it’s about mandated vaginal ultrasounds; and sometimes…

… it’s about helicopters.

The Ira Rennert – Michael Bloomberg lifestyle seems finally to have alienated New Yorkers.

Throughout the race, Mr. de Blasio overshadowed his opponent by channeling New Yorkers’ rising frustrations with income inequality…

I’m sure, as Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow insist, it’s all just petty envy. Once these millions of New Yorkers understand that their progressive politics are simply an embarrassing epiphenomenon of their desire to be as rich as Ira Rennert, no doubt they’ll go back to voting for the I’ll land my fucking helicopter wherever and whenever I fucking want crowd.

“[L]ast year, the company paid $3 billion in fines to the federal government because it had earlier promoted some antidepressants for unapproved uses and failed to report the status of studies about our diabetes drug. We are committed to ensuring that this never happens again.”

Let’s see… That was July 6, 2013, and today is July 18, 2013, and the head of Glaxo North America was telling the New York Times on July 6 that her company was definitely going to avoid the massive corruption (her dainty description of what Glaxo did wrong doesn’t quite cover the matter – unless you think three billion dollars in fines for failure to report the status of a couple of studies sounds about right) for which Glaxo has long been renowned.

And maybe Glaxo will avoid that form of corruption – I mean, the form that involves paying American university professors to put their names on bogus studies your advertising people have written and thereby endangering, well, basically endangering the entire population of the world… While ripping the world off to buy the drugs that will kill it…

Anyway, that was then. This is now, several days later, and now this humongous story about Glaxo using whores and bribes to take over the Chinese market is breaking all over the place, and I’m sure Glaxo is again shocked shocked that hundreds of millions of impoverished Chinese people are unable to afford medicine because the price of pills has been jacked up by Glaxo paying prescribing doctors to jack off.

“Each doctor had a credit card from the company. The kickbacks were transferred to the cards the day after drugs were prescribed,” [one] newspaper claimed.

[An investigator] said consumers were being defrauded. The official Xinhua news agency, which was given access to [a Glaxo executive] in detention, quoted him allegedly saying medicine that cost 30 yuan to make could be sold for 300 yuan.

The sums quoted by the police, if correct, suggest GSK was spending a significant proportion of its annual sales revenue on bribing doctors. In 2012, the company’s sales in China rose 17pc, to nearly £759m, from 2011, according to its annual report.

I wonder if Glaxo is also offering sexual relief to UCLA professors.

You know, lots of university professors are walking around with Glaxo in their name. Take this one, at today’s scandal-plagued darling, Rutgers University: Ah-Ng Tony Kong, Professor II and Glaxo Professor of Pharmaceutics. When does the name of a person (the Paterno Chair, the Ira Rennert Professor) or a company get so yucky you kind of think you might want to refuse it?

A company like Glaxo – could its vileness become so generally known that universities would begin turning down naming rights for their faculty?

Nah.

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Update: The Yellow Peril made us do it!

We don’t do this sort of thing.

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