Harvard Alums: When Your Alma Mater Comes Calling, Tell Them to Pound Sand

In response to poorly paid cafeteria workers going on strike at the university, Harvard is recruiting scabs:

Harvard is hiring. Applicants must be willing to work for free in the dining halls.

On Monday, the Ivy League school entered the sixth day of its standoff with dining hall workers, who have gone on strike for the first time in over 30 years. The cafeteria staff are demanding affordable health care and base pay of $35,000 for year-round workers. But workers and Harvard negotiators can’t come to an agreement. And while dining hall workers strike for better wages, Harvard is hiring scabs.

After nearly six months of bargaining with the university, cafeteria staff walked out on Wednesday. In anticipation of a strike, Harvard allegedly stockpiled three days’ worth of frozen foods. But now on the strike’s sixth day, students say they’re living on undercooked chicken prepared by untrained strikebreakers while administrators scour the faculty for any employees willing to serve breakfast.

The university is “actively seeking for volunteers all across campus,” an email from Harvard’s Campus Services implored. The email, obtained by the Harvard Crimson clarified that only employees who were not paid hourly and did not qualify for overtime would be allowed to work for free in the dining halls.

………

“Dining hall workers feel like they have really modest demands,” Tiffany Ten Eyck, a spokesperson for Local 26, the Boston-based union that represents Harvard dining hall workers told The Daily Beast. “Especially because Harvard has the resources that it does.”

The dining hall staff is asking Harvard to roll back a proposal that would hike health care costs for employees. The workers also want a guaranteed salary of $35,000 for year-round staffers.

Harvard has an endowment of nearly $40 billion, and it enjoys an annual operating surplus of over $60,000,000.00.

Harvard is balking at a $5000 a year raise for 750 employees, and it wants them to pay more in medical premiums and copays.

To quote Otto from Repo Man, "F%$# that."

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Today's Must Read

How Wells Fargo Exemplifies the Drivers of Big Corporate Fraud:

You should read the whole thing, but here are the bullet points from the article:

1. American businesses have become stock manipulation machinesAmerican businesses have become stock manipulation machines
2. Focusing on short-term stock prices leads to corruption 
3. Punishment means little until executive pay is understood

Go read the rest, and pay particular attention to the SEC under the Reagan administration legalizing stock buybacks in 1982.  Prior to that they were considered illegal stock manipulation. 

Amazon is a Petri Dish for Sociopaths

In 1996, an evolutionary biologist attempted to create an improved chicken by separating out the hens that outperformed their fellow hens.

It was an unmitigated disaster, and it bears notice in companies which use a similar process, "Stack Ranking", to manage their employees.

Amazon is the most notable, and most aggressive adherent of this philosophy:

Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, recently took some heat when the New York Times exposed working conditions and the corporate culture at his firm. ‘Ruthless’ and ‘demanding’ are two descriptors of the working environment, sink or swim. Amazon is not alone. Some of the leading recent startups have competitive employment requirements, a survival of the fittest approach. They want the best and push out the rest. It’s a simple notion to strengthening your company and the most efficient way to assemble optimally performing groups, organizations, and sports teams. Or at least that has been the dominant rhetoric behind models of group productivity within both the business and sporting industries. Stack-ranking and other business practices of individual selection have been widespread, from General Electric to Microsoft, and is a standard modus operandi in sports teams including the focus of this piece, the European soccer team, Real Madrid. However, the wisdom behind the application of these models, both in business and sport, is under scrutiny. To begin to see why, we turn to evolutionary biology.


In 1996, evolutionary biologist William Muir conducted a series of unusual experiments at Purdue University. Muir was looking to explore the various methods of group productivity with regards to egg production. He wanted to create a group of ‘Super-Chickens’ who would produce more eggs than any other coop. He followed the logic that many employers today tout: take the best individuals, put them in a group together, and then let the magic happen. Muir selected the most productive hens from each cage and bred the next generation from them. Muir also identified the cages that collectively were more productive at laying eggs in comparison to other cages. He then continued to selectively breed using these two separate groups and observed the levels of production.

The outcome of this study was striking; selecting the best group cages produced hens that thoroughly outperformed the line of individually more productive ‘Super-Chickens’. For the cage-selected line, after just five generations, the number of eggs per hen catapulted from 91 to 237, the mortality rate of the group crashed from 68% to 9%, and the hens also displayed improved wellbeing as a function of the reductions of pecking and negative social interactions.

The Super-Chicken group did not fare so well. In fact, this line of hens had some other, rather less desirable qualities. They presented signs of aggression, violence, dysfunction and waste. There was an extremely high prevalence of fatal cannibalistic pecking within the group and general agonistic behaviors. Those in the cage who did not die from these cannibalistic attacks (there was an 89% mortality rate) were left with severe feather loss, life-threatening abrasions and other serious physical injuries. The hens were more intent on fighting amongst each other than doing anything productive! Hopefully that doesn’t sound like any workplaces you know…

So what happened? Why did the best egg-layers from the first generation yield something akin to the Gremlins of the eponymously named 80s movie? What Muir realized was that instead of identifying the most efficient hens, he had identified the hens that successfully conveyed the appearance of being the most productive. Those hens that individually produced the most did so by being adept at aggressively suppressing the other hens from laying eggs
. Taking the more productive individuals meant taking the more aggressive hens. Breeding repeatedly from those which were most productive actually favored those which were most aggressive. Placing these hens together in cages led to extreme violence (only three of these psychotic hens actually survived!). Muir ended up running out of the Super-Chickens and had no choice but to end monitoring them and only continue with the other group. Ultimately, the process of selecting at the individual level took to an extreme the challenge of cooperation arising from individuals selected for selfishness.

The behaviour of the psychotic hens fits rather well with the normative assumptions of classical economic and game theory, which suggest that individuals will act selfishly in situations that afford them the opportunity. In group situations, individuals are consistently expected to identify, and act on, the dominant Nash strategy—the strategy that cannot be beaten. Just think of the classic ‘tragedy of the commons’, where people are predicted to free-ride on and exploit the contributions of others to a shared resource. Furthermore, the selfish actions of the Super-Chickens also support the theme of much evolutionary psychology from the 1960’s, which was based on the principle that individual interests will always outweigh the interests of the group.Given an opportunity to benefit from the efforts of others, selection will favor those which seize the day.

 ………

Some companies have begun to pay heed. Recently, Microsoft abandoned its longstanding stack-ranking approach. It recognized that stack-ranking was undermining team cooperation, employees withheld information to avoid damaging their own rank, sought teams where they could rank better, and ensured new team members failed. As an outcome to stack-ranking, it seems obvious. Yet many companies pursued it, just as breeders choose super-chickens. For Jeff Bezos, he may not agree. Amazon is a hugely successful company, at least in sales and turnover. It is not a particularly profitable company. When Microsoft was the behemoth of its domain, its aggressive policies eventually led it into trouble, barely avoiding being broken apart. Enron thought it had the smartest guys in the room. It’s endemic corruption ultimately crumbled the company. A company led by super-chickens may not be the best long-term strategy.

Much of the American management class, and Jeff Bezos in particular, seem to see Lord of the Flies as a model for how to manage employees.

They are selecting for narcissistic sociopaths in their organization, and in the long run that is not a good thing.

I Hate Being My Family's Tech Support Expert

3 hours working to root Charlie's new phone (Samsung J3), and Samsung has made it difficult.

3 F%$#ing hours later, and one system option that everyone assumed was set, and it works, and now he can use Titanium Backup to restore all his apps plus his data.

Still, Gaah!

This Would Have Been Unthinkable Just Ten Years Ago

The Walloonian Parliament just put a stake through the heart of the Canada/EU trade pact:

The EU’s once-mighty trade negotiators never dreamed that their powers would be stripped from them so unceremoniously — and possibly for good.

The Francophone parliament of the Federation of Wallonia-Brussels — only 10 minutes’ walk from EU headquarters — stands to win a place in history for sinking the EU’s landmark trade deal with Canada and potentially for scuppering the European Commission’s ability to lead the world’s biggest trade bloc for many years.

Failure to conclude the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) by this month’s deadline would be a devastating blow to the EU, which has spent seven years working on the tariff-slicing agreement with Ottawa.

………

The Federation of Wallonia-Brussels parliament, which focuses on the cultural and educational concerns of 4.5 million French speakers in Belgium, voted Wednesday evening to reject CETA because of worries about public services and agriculture. Laetitia Naklicki, a spokesperson for Minister-President Rudy Demotte, said this vote meant that the government of the French-speaking community “would not issue its full power for signing CETA to the federal government.”

Unless the Belgian central government can find an imaginative compromise quickly, the EU will be unable to corral the signatures of all 28 EU countries before an EU-Canada summit on October 27. The pressure on Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel is only likely to increase Friday, when another regional assembly, Wallonia, also voted against CETA.

Under Belgium’s complex constitution, all five regional governments must approve the trade deal before the federal government can give consent.

The fact that these deals have become increasingly more difficult to pass, and as such will become far more limited in scope.

This is a good thing.

I really do hope that this is the start of a trend.

The increasing investment of authority in anti-democratic institutions has been a disaster for everyone but the elites staff, and directly benefit from, those institustions.

The Computer is Your Friend

Facebook was accused of having a liberal bias in its trending news by the flying monkey right wing.

This might be true, but as Stephen Colbert noted, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Facebook's response was to replace them with an algorythm, and this algorythm has been repeatedly punked:

The Megyn Kelly incident was supposed to be an anomaly. An unfortunate one-off. A bit of (very public, embarrassing) bad luck. But in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system — and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended — the site has repeatedly promoted “news” stories that are actually works of fiction.

As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate. On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record.

“I’m not at all surprised how many fake stories have trended,” one former member of the team that used to oversee Trending told the Post. “It was beyond predictable by anyone who spent time with the actual functionality of the product, not just the code.” (The team member, who had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Facebook, spoke on the condition of anonymity.)

………

There was the thinly-sourced story, on Aug. 31, of a Clemson University administrator who kicked a praying man off campus. (The sordid tale, aggregated by a right-wing outlet, has been soundly debunked by the school.)

The next week, on Sept. 8, Facebook promoted a breathless account of the iPhone’s new and literally magical features, sourced from the real news site Firstpost’s satirical Faking News page. The day after, Facebook trended a news release from the “Association of American Physicians and Surgeons” — a discredited libertarian medical organization — as well as a tabloid story claiming that the Sept. 11 attacks were a “controlled demolition.”

………

Last May, however, Facebook faced a torrent of high-profile accusations about political bias on the Trending editorial team — so much so that, in the aftermath, the company decided to tweak the role humans play in approving Trending topics. On Aug. 26, Facebook laid off its editorial team and gave the engineers who replaced them a much different mandate when it came to vetting news. Where editors were told to independently verify trending topics surfaced by the algorithm, even by cross-referencing “Google News and other news sources,” engineers were told to accept every trending topic linked to three or more recent articles, from any source, or linked to any article with at least five related posts..

The previous editorial team could also influence which specific news stories were displayed with each topic, rejecting the story selected by the algorithm if it was “biased,” “clickbait” or irrelevant. Trending’s current quality review team does not vet URLs.

The lessons learned here are two fold:

• Computers are not there yet.
• Letting the Talibaptist wing of our citizenry to dictate your news dissemination leads to batsh%$ insane things being flagged as true.

Barack Obama Must Hate Elizabeth Warren

After a number of conflicts with SEC Chair Mary Jo White, Elizabeth Warren has called for Barack Obama to replace her as head of the SEC with another board member.

It's unlikely to happen, because, after 7 years of coddling banksters and a revolving door that could power Rhode Island, it's pretty clear that White is doing exactly what Barack Obama wants her to do:

A long-running feud between a leading critic of the finance industry in the Senate and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission reached a new peak Friday, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked President Obama to replace SEC chair Mary Jo White.

In a letter to Obama, Warren calls White the “biggest barrier” to progress on a push to force corporations to disclose their political spending, and she says that White “has refused to develop a political spending disclosure rule despite her clear authority to do so.”

“Enough is enough,” Warren writes to Obama, adding: “I respectfully urge you to exercise your unilateral authority under (federal law) to immediately designate another SEC commissioner as Chair of the agency.”

Later, she adds: “While demoting an existing Chair and selecting another from among the agency's current Commissioners would be an uncommon act, Chair White's extraordinary, ongoing efforts to undermine the agency's central mission make such a step necessary.”

Before she became SEC Chairman, she worked at a law firm which represented the financial industry, and her husband continues to work for a similar law firm, and prior her appointment to the Securities and exchange commission, she had no regulatory experience.

Obama knew all of this when he appointed her, which is why, in addition to his hiring of Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, Rahm Emanuel, William Daley, I think that Mary Jo White is doing what the President wants.

Obama has never been interested in creating meaningful accountability or reform in Wall Street.

After all, Presidential libraries don't pay for themselves.

Oh, Snap!

Harry Reid is retiring from the Senate this year, and his heir apparent Chuck Schumer has apparently been floating out the idea that Evan Bayh should be able to retain his seniority, from his first two terms, even though he has been out of the Senate for the past 6 years.

This would be unprecedented, and liberal heads exploded over this possibility:

A collection of left-leaning groups are mounting a public campaign to push Senate Democrats to make the Banking Committee less friendly to banks.

In a letter sent to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) Thursday, the group specifically urged him to rule out the possibility that Evan Bayh, a former Democrat from Indiana running to regain his old Senate seat, could somehow take control of the panel.
The theory that Bayh, who previously served in the Senate from 1999 to 2011 before not seeking reelection, could leapfrog to the top of the committee has been floating in financial circles for weeks. The thinking goes that Bayh could regain his old seniority from his previous term, placing him ahead of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), currently the top Democrat on the GOP-led panel.

If Democrats regain control of the Senate, the seat currently occupied by Brown would become the chairman’s and would dictate the panel’s agenda. And Schumer, who also sits on the committee, is expected to take over as Senate Majority Leader following the retirement of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Brown has established a reputation as a strong big bank critic, while Bayh, who took jobs with private equity firm Apollo Global Management and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce after leaving office, is viewed as friendly face for the industry.

………

“Granting Bayh seniority from his previous tenure in the Senate and installing him as chair would seemingly be without precedent,” the groups wrote. “The financial industry is floating his name to the media in a brazen, cynical attempt to tilt the Committee’s membership even further toward Wall Street.”

This story would not have been floating around Washington if Schumer weren't busy floating trial balloons.

Schumer, much like Bayh, is the finance industry's bitch.

Indiana is one Senate race where I would not be too unhappy if the 'Phant won.

I Want to Move to Iceland

And it has nothing to do with Bjork.

It has everything to do with jailing banksters:

Iceland’s Supreme Court has return[ed] a guilty verdict for all nine defendants in the Kaupþing market manipulation case, the court trial for which began in April 2015.

Back in June last year, the Reykjavik District Court found seven of the nine defendants guilty, acquitting two.

By fully financing share purchases with no other surety than the shares themselves, the bankers were accused of giving a false and misleading impression of demand for Kaupþingi shares by means of deception and pretence.

The Supreme Court has now overturned the acquittals, finding Björk Þórarinsdóttir (credit representative at Kaupþing) and Magnús Guðmundsson (former CEO of Kaupthing Luxembourg) also guilty alongside the other seven.

The rule of law:  Iceland has it.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?! Trump has Lost Falwell U?

At Liberty University, the "University" founded by Jerry Fallwell, and run by his son, Jerry Jr, is now experiencing student protests over the decision of Junior to endorse Donald Trump:

Students at Virginia’s Liberty University have issued a statement against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as young conservatives at some colleges across the country reconsider support for his campaign.

A statement issued late Wednesday by the group Liberty United Against Trump strongly rebuked the candidate as well as the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for defending Trump after he made vulgar comments about women in a 2005 video.

“Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him,” the statement said. “… He has made his name by maligning others and bragging about his sins. Not only is Donald Trump a bad candidate for president, he is actively promoting the very things that we as Christians ought to oppose.” 

I think that this might be a harbinger of the apocalypse.^*

I am so glad I took yesterday off from the world.

^*Full disclosure, no I don't think that this is, "A harbinger of the apocalypse." I don't actually believe in the apocalypse, the rapture, etc. It is not a part of normative Judaism.

Quote of the Day

They Can't All Leave for Mars Soon Enough, for Me.

—Lambert Strether, on wealthy idiots and cockamamie anti-democratic inclinations.

Headline of the Day

Romanian Villagers Decry Police Investigation into Vampire Slaying

—McClatchy DC

This story is profoundly weird, but the hed is probably a dead give away.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Linkage

• Soda Companies Are Paying Experts to Oppose Soda Taxes (Grub Street) Capitalism at its finest.
• Link between tech and productivity is elusive (Financial Times) Silicon snake oil.
• A woman had a baby. Then her hospital charged her $39.35 to hold it. (Vox) Because ……… markets!
• Needed Now: a Peace Movement Against the Clinton Wars to Come (CounterPunch) Yeah, pretty much.
• The Dash For Cash: Leaked Files Reveal RBS Systematically Crushed British Businesses For Profit (BuzzFeed) As Bill Black noted, Banks' profits derive entirely from various types of fraud.
• Where Did Satan Come From? (Live Science) In Judaism, it is generally synonymous with our own evil inclination, and some Jewish scholars see the dialogue between God and Satan as an internal one.
• Why the Deeply Held Ideas of the Nation’s Most Elite Economists Were Direct Causes of Extreme Inequality (Evonomics) A very nice survey on how mainstream economics has become delusional and useless.
• Risotto Tips From John Podesta (Epicurious) One of the less controversial emails release by Wikileaks.

Denis Leary channels the Trump Nation back in 1993:

He gets my Nostradamus award of the day.

Signs of Sanity from the DEA

Following a torrent of protest that included members of Congress, the DEA has has withdrawn a proposal to put kratom on the Schedule 1 List:

The Drug Enforcement Administration is reversing a widely criticized decision that would have banned the use of kratom, a plant that researchers say could help mitigate the effects of the opioid epidemic.

Citing the public outcry and a need to obtain more research, the DEA is withdrawing its notice of intent to ban the drug, according to a preliminary document that will be posted to the Federal Register Thursday.

The move is "shocking," according to John Hudak, who studies drug policy at the Brookings Institution. "The DEA is not one to second-guess itself, no matter what the facts are."

The DEA had announced in August that it planned to place kratom in schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive regulatory category, as soon as Sept. 30. But since announcing their intent to ban kratom, the "DEA has received numerous comments from members of the public challenging the scheduling action," acting administrator Chuck Rosenberg wrote in the notice, "and requesting that the agency consider those comments and accompanying information before taking further action."

(emphasis mine)

5 years ago, no one beyond the NORML crowd would have batted an eyelash, but with the rise of the Marijuana legalization movement, people no longer take the whole "War on Drugs" bullsh%$ as gospel.

This is a very good thing.

This is F%$#ed UP

In what is appears to me that a completely incoherent ruling, the DC Court of Appeals has ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's organizational structure is unconstitutional:

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the structure of the U.S. agency charged with guarding consumers' finances is unconstitutional, fueling an election-year political fight over one of the signature government responses to the 2007-09 financial crisis.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out a $109 million penalty against PHH Corp in 2014, saying the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gives its sole director too much power.

The three-judge panel, though, also sought to remedy the problem by giving the president the power to fire the director, which it said made the position similar to the Attorney General and other constitutionally sanctioned agency heads who answer to the White House.

"The CFPB has dodged the biggest bullet, which is to be declared unconstitutional and have all its prior rules and regulations voided," said Andrew Sandler, chairman of BuckleySandler law firm.

But he added "lawyers will be looking hard," at past agency decisions.

The CFPB is expected to request the entire appeals court conduct an "en banc" review of the case. The losing side will likely appeal to the Supreme Court.

This is a seriously f%$#ed up ruling that is akin to the courts rulings in the early 20^th century striking down wage, hour, and safety legislation on the basis of a imaginary "Right of Free Contract"^*.

As near as I can figure out, this ruling might technically provide a precedent for restructuring the Federal Reserve, but that's the glass half full view.

Here's hoping that the court hears an en banc appeal, and overturns this truly incoherent ruling.

^*Lochner v. New York, which affirmed the right of an employer to work his employee to death.

Had a Pretty Good Fast

During Yom Kippur I was a little bit thirsty, but that is it.

Everyone else (except for Natalie who wasn't fasting for medical reasons) had a pretty tough fast.

You can never tell one year to the next.

Off the grid for the next 26 hours

Yom Kippur starts in a couple of hours, and I will be busy fasting and atoning for my sins.

I have made the decision that during this time I will not be consuming news in any way shape or form.

This is not a form of atonement, but rather a gift that I am giving myself.

I am so completely sick and tired of trump and Clinton and the whole electoral season that I am considering taking a job as a neutrino detector maintenance technician.

I just want it to stop.

Posted via mobile.

More Evidence of Our Clusterf%$# in Syria

The US remains focused largely on its credibility in the Syrian conflict.

There are no meaningful goals, it promulgates fictions and allies itself with a state sponsor of terrorism (the House of Saud) as well as al Qaeda affiliate al Nusra (now Fateh al-Sham) in an increasingly incoherent quest by parts of the US state security apparatus (Dod &CIA) to overthrow the Assad regime while other elements are making half hearted efforts at damage mitigation.

It has created a situation where Bashir al Assad is the best alternative available for the US, the EU, and anyone not interested in the thousand year old great game between Shia and Sunni Muslims, which is a pretty good indication of just how thoroughly this pooch has been screwed.

And now we have some more repercussions of our failure to have any policy beyond mindless dick swinging, as Russia and Turkey have signed a gas pipeline deal, a part of a significant rapprochement between the two regimes:

The Russian and Turkish leaders have agreed to intensify military and intelligence contacts after a meeting in Istanbul.

President Vladimir Putin also said he and Recep Tayyip Erdogan had agreed on the need for aid to get to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

The two countries have signed a deal to construct two pipelines to send Russian gas under the Black Sea to Turkey.

Ties were strained after Turkey downed a Russian military jet last year.

But speaking at a joint news conference with Mr Putin, Mr Erdogan said he was confident that the normalisation of relations would take place rapidly.

Unlike Russia, Turkey is a member of Nato, but both countries currently have uneasy relations with the West and are also facing economic challenges.

………

This is a developing alliance defined as much by what Turkey and Russia oppose as by what unites them.

Both feel isolated. Both have taken a decidedly authoritarian turn in their politics. Both have significant tensions with Washington. And both have strategic stakes in Syria with Moscow and Ankara well aware of the need to deal with the other if these interests are to be protected.

It's something of a rapid reversal though. Less than a year ago Turkey shot down a Russian warplane and relations went into the freezer. But self-interest, notably Turkey's "post-coup attempt" resentment at Washington and the shifting balance of military advantage in Syria, gives this unlikely pairing a certain logic.

………

One pipeline will be for Turkish domestic consumption, the other will supply southeastern Europe, bypassing Ukraine.

(emphasis mine)

This is a lose-lose for the United States.

In addition to Syria going pear shaped, it means that the situation in the Ukraine has moved against the US agenda.

Russia, at far smaller cost, has been far more successful in both Syria and the Ukraine, and they have done so because they have realistically defined their essential interests, and only taken those actions that directly benefit those interests.

By contrast, US efforts have been a toxic mix of hubris and incompetence.

The Darkside of Obamacare

This is Grim

The problem with the PPACA is that it relies to a large degrees on the better angels of the insurance companies.

You probably notice the problem here. The Venn diagram of "Insurance Companies" and "Better Angels" is a null set:

The health care costs that Americans pay out-of-pocket are rising--both in total amount, which is perhaps not a surprise, but also as a share of incomes, which is perhaps more disturbing. Ann Foster discusses the pattern in "Household healthcare spending in 2014,"  written as a "Beyond the Numbers" short essay for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (August 2016, vol. 5, no. 13). She has lots of details of spending in particular areas, but here's an overall figure showing out-of-pocket spending by households as a total amount (left axis) and as share of total expenditures (right-hand axis).

Part of the reason for this rise is that more Americans have health care insurance with high deductibles: that is, the amount you pay out of pocket before the insurance kicks in. Here's some information from the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation 2016 Employer Health Benefits Survey.  The report notes:

"[T]he share of covered workers in plans with a general annual deductible has increased significantly over time: from 55% in 2006, to 74% in 2011, to 83% in 2016, as have the average deductible amounts for covered workers in plans with deductibles: from $584 in 2006, to $991 in 2011, to $1,478 in 2016."

One of the central conceits of Obamacare is that if "Consumers"^* have "Skin in the game" it will constrain healthcare costs.

This ignores the looting by insurance companies, pharma, as hospitals, as well as the fact that the price of medicine in all forms is ruinously expensive in relation to every other industrialized nation on the face of the earth.

Obama, and the rest of his nudge theory^† obsessed free market mousketeers, are completely captured by the Chicago School world view.

I would note that the Chicago boys have been wrong about everything since Mrs. O'Leary's cow knocked over that damn lantern.

^*Consumers, never citizens, because we have no significance beyond consumption.
^†Nudge theory posits that by making small market based influences, you can accomplish anything without significant government intervention.^‡
‡It's also almost complete bullsh%$.

Oh Snap

It appears that the European Commission got a legal opinion about the ISDS (Investor State Dispute System) that is central to the TTIP, the TPP, the CETA, and they were told that it was illegal under EU law.

We cannot be certain, but the fact that the EC is refusing to release the opinion and they are now being sued over this:

The European Commission faces an EU court battle to keep secret its lawyers’ analysis on whether the controversial investor-state-dispute (ISDS) clause in draft trade deals with the USA and Canada is illegal.

ClientEarth, an NGO of environmental lawyers, has slapped the Commission with a lawsuit after applying for the legal opinion using EU transparency rules.

It received heavily redacted documents that make it impossible to see the analysis of whether ISDS is legal under EU law. The redactions will be embarrassing for an institution that regularly claims to be the most transparent in the world and far more so than national governments.

ISDS is controversial because critics argue it will allow powerful multinationals to sue governments in international tribunals, which can have a chilling effect on their willingness to regulate in the public interest.

The Commission claims that the black-out is needed to protect its negotiations with the US on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) but that will now be tested by judges in the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg. The executive is mandated by member states to handle free trade agreement talks.

………

Were the Commission to be ultimately forced to publish analysis that found ISDS was incompatible with EU law, it could call the much-debated TTIP deal into question.

A legal precedent would also be set but the Commission would be able to appeal any decision to the European Court of Justice, which has so far resisted calls to issue an opinion on the clause’s legality.

………

The London-based NGO argues that ISDS is a “discriminatory legal tool” that creates an alternative legal system and may not be compatible with EU law.

The German Association of Judges and European Association of Judges have also expressed strong reservations. The Belgian parliament of Wallonia has called on the ECJ to give an opinion on the issue.

Lets be clear on this:  Secrecy here is not about negotiating positions.  It is about deceiving the general public and promulgating a deal which will hurt ordinary folk for the benefit of banksters and other rent seekers.

Words of Wisdom from Bill Black

William Black, who was largely responsible for prosecuting more than a thousand corrupt savings and loan executives observes that pretty much all of the profits from the financial industry come from various flavors of fraud.

He notes that the UK Parliament, under the control of the Tories made the very same finding.

Watch the video: (Starts at 17:31)

The Wonders of Capitalism and Competition

Google has decided to use the DMCA to lock out manufacturers who make hardware that is compatible with competing platforms from accessing Chromcast:

A closed-door unveiling of the forthcoming Google Home smart speaker platform included the nakedly anticompetitive news that vendors whose products support Amazon's Echo will be blocked from integrating with Google's own, rival platform.

These platforms are typically designed to allow their vendors to invoke Section 1201 of the DMCA, which makes it a felony to change their configurations in unauthorized ways, meaning that Google could convert its commercial preference ("devices either support Google Home or Amazon Echo, but not both") into a legal right ("we can use the courts and the police to punish people who make products that let you expand your device's range of features to support whichever platform you choose to use").

This is our modern economy: The free market has been supplanted by parasitic rent seeking.

The DMCA is merely one example of this. It permeates our economy.

We see it in our IP regulations, our finance system, and our so-called "free trade" deals.

It's money for nothing, and these rents are redirected toward our political process to buy more direct and indirect subsidies.

The only question is how it ends:  with an outbreak of sanity, or madame la guillotine.

Well, That Only Took Fifteen Years

After over a decade of reports that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were jailed on faulty information, we are finally getting something approaching an official acknowledgment of this fact:

The "Dirty 30" probably weren't all Osama bin Laden bodyguards after all. The "Karachi 6" weren't a cell of bombers plotting attacks in Pakistan for al-Qaida. An Afghan man captured 14 years ago as a suspected chemical weapons maker was confused for somebody else.

An ongoing review shows the U.S. intelligence community has been debunking long-held myths about some of the "worst of the worst" at Guantanamo, some of them still held today. The retreat emerges in a series of unclassified prisoner profiles released by the Pentagon in recent years, snapshots of much larger dossiers the public cannot see, prepared for the Periodic Review Board examining the Pentagon's "forever prisoner" population.

………

The documents also offer a window into the wobbly world of early war-on-terror intelligence gathering and analysis where a suspicion built on circumstances of capture gelled into allegations of membership in a terror cell that on reflection more than a decade later probably didn't exist. In a series of interviews, intelligence sources -- including people who served at Guantanamo at the time -- blamed bad intelligence on a combination of urgency to produce, ignorance about al-Qaida and Afghanistan at the prison's inception and inexperience in the art of investigation and analysis.

"It was clear early on that the intelligence was grossly wrong," said Mark Fallon, a retired 30-year federal officer who between 2002 and 2004 was Special Agent in Charge of the Department of Defense's Criminal Investigation Task Force. Most "weren't battlefield captives," he said, calling many "bounty babies" -- men captured by Afghan warlords or Pakistani security forces and sent to Guantanamo "on the sketchiest bit of intelligence with nothing to corroborate."

………

Fallon was responsible for some interrogations and evaluating intelligence with an eye toward prosecution by military commission. Now, more than decade later, he is in the final stages of publishing a book of his criticisms and said in a recent interview that it's no surprise that early prisoner profiles are imploding under Periodic Review Board scrutiny.

"That's why people are so successful doing cold case homicide cases," he said. "People make decisions based on what they knew then. I don't want to say that the facts changed. The facts grew. When you're working cases, cases evolve. As you get additional facts, you interpret it differently."

Guantanamo has been a complete fiasco.

We have the wrong people there, and it has served as one of the most effect recruiting tools for terrorists.

Remember When I Said That Hillary's Secrecy Backfired?

Now the Wikileaks email releases detailing Hillary Clinton's speeches to the Wall Street banks have pissed off Bernie Sanders something fierce.

This was foreseeable, and it was a direct result of her unwillingness to get ahead of the story and release the transcripts over the last 2½ months.

I know that politicians are not inclined to admit failure and move on, but the cover-up is always worse than the original mistake:

Supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday expressed anger and vindication over leaked comments made by Hillary Clinton to banks and big business that appeared to confirm their fears about her support for global trade and tendency to cozy up to Wall Street.

Clinton, who needs Sanders' coalition of young and left-leaning voters to propel her to the presidency, pushes for open trade and open borders in one of the speeches, and takes a conciliatory approach to Wall Street, both positions she later backed away from in an effort to capture the popular appeal of Sanders' attacks on trade deals and powerful banks.

The excerpts of remarks by the former secretary of state, made in 2013 and 2014 in closed-door meetings where audiences paid to attend, were published online on Friday by WikiLeaks, which sourced them to the email account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman.

………

"This is a very clear illustration of why there is a fundamental lack of trust from progressives for Hillary Clinton,” said Tobita Chow, chair of the People's Lobby in Chicago, which endorsed Sanders in the primary election.

………

“That is a big concern and this certainly doesn’t help,” said Larry Cohen, chair of the board of Our Revolution, a progressive organization formed in the wake of Sanders’ bid for the presidency, which aims to keep pushing the former candidate's ideas at a grassroots level. "It matters in terms of turnout, energy, volunteering, all those things."

Anyone with two brain cells, and a knowledge of the relationship between Wall Street and the Clintons (Bob Rubin anyone?) knew that this was the case, but Hillary Clinton has handled this in the absolutely worst possible way, and this is not the first time.

The past is prelude, and this does not bode well for a future Clinton administration.

This Took Way Too Long

The US has finally expressed reservations about the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets by Saudi Arabia in Yemen:

The US said its security cooperation with Saudi Arabia was not a “blank cheque” as Riyadh agreed to mount an investigation into a widely condemned air raid on funeral in Yemen that killed 140 people.

In one of the deadliest attacks of the country’s civil war, which Saudi Arabia entered in March 2015, airstrikes on Saturday hit a funeral hall packed with thousands of mourners in Yemen’s rebel-held capital, Sana’a. More than 525 people were wounded.

The Saudi-led coalition has not acknowledged responsibility for the attack, even as it announced an investigation, but is the only force with such air power in the conflict.

The White House issued a statement saying it had begun an “immediate review” of its support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen. The attack has been condemned by the UN, the European Union and the United States.

The issue is embarrassing for the US since it has decried the Russian failure to be more open about its role in the air attack on a UN aid convoy in Syria, and it will face allegations of double standards if it allows the Saudis to delay an inquiry.

So, now even the United States "has concerns."

It only took months of bombing civilian targets and this particularly egregious example.

BTW, in case you were wondering if the House of Saud still had some some hooks in ISIS, get a load of this:

In an unexpected twist, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks even though it is thought the deaths were caused by an air raid, and Isis has no access to aircraft.'

How convenient of them!

Why the US chooses to defend the clusterf%$# or a war that is Yemen, and the clusterf%$# of a government that is the House of Saud is beyond me.

It serves no one but Riyadh.

We Are So Completely Doomed

Great, now we have the US Military and CIA arguing for strikes against the Syrian government, and the Russians have responded by noting that any strike against government troops would imperil Russian advisors, and so their air defense units would take action to any attempted airstrike:

Russia’s Defense Ministry has cautioned the US-led coalition of carrying out airstrikes on Syrian army positions, adding in Syria there are numerous S-300 and S-400 air defense systems up and running.

Russia currently has S-400 and S-300 air-defense systems deployed to protect its troops stationed at the Tartus naval supply base and the Khmeimim airbase. The radius of the weapons reach may be “a surprise” to all unidentified flying objects, Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson General Igor Konashenkov said.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, any airstrike or missile hitting targets in territory controlled by the Syrian government would put Russian personnel in danger.

The defense official said that members of the Russian Reconciliation Center in Syria are working “on the ground” delivering aid and communicating with a large number of communities in Syria.

“Therefore, any missile or air strikes on the territory controlled by the Syrian government will create a clear threat to Russian servicemen.”

“Russian air defense system crews are unlikely to have time to determine in a ‘straight line’ the exact flight paths of missiles and then who the warheads belong to. And all the illusions of amateurs about the existence of ‘invisible’ jets will face a disappointing reality,”  Konashenkov added.

He also noted that Syria itself has S-200 as well as BUK systems, and their technical capabilities have been updated over the past year.

The Russian Defense Ministry’s statement came in response to what it called “leaks” in the Western media alleging that Washington is considering launching airstrikes against Syrian government forces.

And the person likely to be the next President of the United States is likely to be even more bellicose than Obama, who has apparently decided not to humor the wannabee General Jack Rippers in the DoD and CIA.

We are going to be sacrificed to their need for "Purity of Essence."

So Not a Surprise

Even Bayh is running for Senate again.

In February 2010, the day before the deadline for appearing on the primary ballot, he announced that he was not running for reelection, which was a complete surprise and made what would have been a difficult Senate campaign in a difficult year absolutely impossible for the Democrats.

Well, someone has looked his unexpected retirement, and has determined that he was furiously looking for rather significantly lucrative position before he announced, which raises some serious ethical questions.

This is not a surprise, given that his wife's sitting on a lot corporate boards when he was in the Senate:

Evan Bayh spent substantial time during his last year in the Senate searching for a private sector job even as he voted on issues of interest to his future corporate bosses, according to the former Indiana lawmaker's 2010 schedule, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press.

The Democrat had more than four dozen meetings and phone calls with headhunters and future corporate employers over the months, beginning days after announcing his surprise retirement from the Senate on Feb. 15, 2010, through December of that year as his term came to an end. Bayh is now running to get his old seat back and help his party regain Senate control.

Announcing his retirement, Bayh claimed he was fed up with the gridlock and that it was time for him to "contribute to society in another way." His announcement stunned party bosses; Democrats lost his Senate seat in the midterm elections later that year.

Two days after that announcement, on Feb. 17, Bayh was on the phone with a job headhunter, Jim Citrin of the Spencer Stuart firm.

What Bayh did may have been perfectly allowable under the Senate's self-policing rules.

………
"It's outrageous," said Craig Holman, a lobbyist with Public Citizen who helped Democrats write the ethics language intended to eliminate conflicts of interest. "What we were unaware of at the time was how Congress would manipulate the rule so that they really don't abide by it."

In June 2010, Bayh was among a small group of Democrats who helped kill a tax increase on private equity gains known as carried interest that was opposed by Apollo Global Management. That fall he stayed overnight three times at one Apollo executive's Central Park South residence in Manhattan, and met twice with the company's chief executive, Leon Black.

Weeks after Bayh left the Senate, Apollo announced he had been hired as a senior adviser.

In May 2010, Bayh lunched with a Marathon Oil board member. Then in June, he and a minority of Democrats joined with Republicans to defeat an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that would have eliminated billions in tax deductions and exemptions for oil and gas companies.

Marathon Petroleum Corp., a new Marathon spinoff, announced Bayh had been elected to its board in July 2011.

………

The schedule shows many other meetings with top Wall Street and corporate officials throughout the months, even as the Senate debated and voted on major legislation including the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and an extension of President George W. Bush's tax cuts. Bayh supported extending the Bush tax cuts and also voted for Dodd-Frank, while pushing to soften up some of the more onerous requirements on Wall Street.

………

Consider Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010.

The day begins with Bayh in Nantucket, staying at the Massachusetts waterfront mansion belonging to financier David Rubenstein, who once worked for Bayh's father, former Sen. Birch Bayh.

Evan Bayh then flies to New York, his Senate account picking up the tab, and heads to Aron's apartment to drop his bag.

Bayh meets with Rob Shafir, then the chairman of Credit Suisse, before taping an appearance with journalist Katie Couric on the topics "Reasons for your retirement from the Senate, the state of our politics (why are our politics so broken), fixing and reforming the institution of the Senate," according to his schedule.

Bayh goes on to meet with Deutsche Bank chief executive Seth Waugh before having dinner at a steakhouse with Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein. Bayh returns to Aron's apartment for the night.

This time around, the Democratic Party Establishment got the winner of the primary to drop out in June when Bayh decided to throw his hat into the ring.

Bad move, and they should have learned this when he f%$#ed them for a payday in 2010.

You Poor Delicate Flower, They Ignore Your Dazzling Brilliance!

Numerous prominent economists living and working in the UK are incensed that the current government will not consult foreign economists on how to manage the Brexit:

Leading foreign academics from the LSE [London School of Economics] acting as expert advisers to the UK government were told they would not be asked to contribute to government work and analysis on Brexit because they are not British nationals.

The news was met with outrage by many academics, while legal experts questioned whether it could be legal under anti-discrimination laws and senior politicians criticised it as bewildering.

“It is utterly baffling that the government is turning down expert, independent advice on Brexit simply because someone is from another country,” said Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ EU spokesman.

“This is yet more evidence of the Conservatives’ alarming embrace of petty chauvinism over rational policymaking.”

Sara Hagemann, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics who specialises in EU policymaking processes, EU treaty matters, the role of national parliaments and the consequences of EU enlargements, said she had been told her services would not be required. Hagemann tweeted on Thursday:

UK govt previously sought work& advice from best experts. Just told I & many colleagues no longer qualify as not UKcitizens #Brexit @LSEnews

— Sara Hagemann (@sarahagemann) October 6, 2016

………

It is understood up to nine LSE academics specialising in EU affairs have been briefing the Foreign Office on Brexit issues, but the school was informed by a senior FCO official that submissions from non-UK citizens would no longer be accepted.

The staff concerned were then made aware of the instruction in an email from the head of the LSE’s European Institute, Kevin Featherstone, which said the Foreign Office planned to approach academics to contract staff for a Brexit advisory panel – but that those to be contracted “must be UK passport-holders.” 

These are arguably the most delicate negotiations for the UK in at least a generation.  The idea that the details of negotiations would be classified as a "NoForn" (No Foreigners) is not a particularly surprising.

The resultant hissy fit is both unseemly and thoroughly predictable.

She Should Have Released the Transcripts in July

It appears that someone hacked some of Clinton's emails, and included in these documents were excerpts of her obscenely remunerated speeches to Wall Street:

In lucrative paid speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to elite financial firms but refused to disclose to the public, she displayed an easy comfort with titans of business, embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks.

The tone and language of the excerpts clash with the fiery liberal approach she used later in her bitter primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and could have undermined her candidacy had they become public.

Mrs. Clinton comes across less as a firebrand than as a technocrat at home with her powerful audience, willing to be critical of large financial institutions but more inclined to view them as partners in restoring the country’s economic health.

In the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions and corporate audiences, Mrs. Clinton said she dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. Reflecting in 2014 on the rage against political and economic elites that swept the country after the 2008 financial crash, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that her family’s rising wealth had made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.

The passages were contained in an internal review of Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches undertaken by her campaign, which was identifying potential land mines should the speeches become public. They offer a glimpse at one of the most sought-after troves of information in the 2016 presidential race — and an explanation, perhaps, for why Mrs. Clinton has steadfastly refused demands by Mr. Sanders and Donald J. Trump, her Republican rival, to release them.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign would not confirm the authenticity of the documents. They were released on Friday night by WikiLeaks, the hacker collective founded by the activist Julian Assange, saying that they had come from the email account of John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.

………

But Clinton officials did not deny that the email containing the excerpts was real.

The leaked email, dated Jan. 25, does not contain Mrs. Clinton’s full speeches to the financial firms, leaving it unclear what her overall message was to these audiences.

But in the excerpts, Ms. Clinton demonstrates her long and warm ties to some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures. In a discussion in the fall of 2013 with Lloyd Blankfein, a friend who is the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Mrs. Clinton said that the political climate had made it overly difficult for wealthy people to serve in government.

“There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” Mrs. Clinton said. The pressure on officials to sell or divest assets in order to serve, she added, had become “very onerous and unnecessary.”

We know the content of Hillary's speeches to Wall Street.

We know her history, we know her associates, we know what sort of support she has received from Wall Street, and we know that if she had actually talked tough to Wall Street, she would have released the speech transcripts at the beginning of the campaign, so the general shape of the contents of her speeches are known.

The contents are not a surprise, and so are not a hugely significant bit of news.

What is significant is that Clinton has had more than 2 months since the end of Democratic National Convention to release the contents on her own terms in a way that would minimize the impact on the campaign.

That she chose to continue sitting on this information IS significant though, because this sort of behavior amplifies the damage caused by the inevitable missteps that are an inevitable part of being a public figure.

While the recent Trump revelations might mitigate the impact of this particular incident, or any further outbreaks during the campaign, the furtive paranoia that characterizes Clinton's public life might very well prove disastrous as President.

As Richard Nixon proved, "It ain't the crime, it's the cover-up."

Linkage

• Ludicrous Patent of the Week: Rectangles on a computer screen (The Register) The USPTO needs to be burned to the ground.
• 90 Cents of Every “Pay-for-Performance” Dollar are Paid for Luck (The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation) Most of the luck involves who their parents are.
• The left in Europe needs to change political course (Financial Times) The financial meltdown showed the neoliberal center left to be a failure.  We need a real left.
• Where Local Governments Are Paying the Bills With Police Fines (Truth-Out) Rather unsurprisingly, Louisiana leads this hall of shame.
• Brace yourselves: Source code powering potent IoT DDoSes just went public (Ars Technica UK) Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride
• How Actual Nuts and Bolts Are Bringing Down Oil Prices (Bloomberg) Oil drillers have finally discovered standardization, creating significant efficiencies. What took them so long?

John Oliver opens a can of whup ass on the standard excuse used by police, that any misconduct is the fault of a few "Bad Apples."

Be Still My Beating Heart

Testimony in the Bridgegate trial implicates Andrew Cuomo in the coverup of the political retaliation by the Christie administration:

A onetime top ally of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the governor and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo discussed releasing a false report to tamp down questions over the George Washington Bridge lane-closure scandal, the prosecution's key witness testified Tuesday.

David Wildstein, who pleaded guilty in the gridlock scheme and is cooperating with prosecutors, said former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Chairman David Samson told him the governors discussed the idea in October 2013. The report would have attributed the lane closures to a traffic study, covering up the true reason for the closures: political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee for failing to endorse Christie's 2013 re-election, Wildstein testified.

………
 

Baroni, who served as Christie's top appointed staff aide at the Port Authority, and Bridget Kelly, Christie's former deputy chief of staff, are on trial facing wire fraud and civil rights charges. They have pleaded not guilty.

………
 

"My understanding was that (Republican) Gov. Christie and (Democratic) Gov. Cuomo had discussed this," Wildstein said under cross-examination Tuesday, according to the Bergen Record, adding he was told the information by Samson. "My understanding at the time was that it would put an end to this issue."

Wildstein also testified Tuesday that Port Authority executive director Patrick Foye, a Cuomo appointee, was to "sign off" on the false report. Through an attorney, Foye declined to comment.

I so hope that this is true, and that additional supporting information could be down.


If Bridgegate were to take down that sh%$heel Cuomo as well as Christie, it would be delicious.

Yeah, Right!

The White House is now accusing Russia of employing hackers to acquire embarrassing information from the DNC and to influence US elections, because, "Based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."

Because as we all know, the only reason that computer geeks would attempt to extract humiliating information from poorly secured servers of a political party is because the leader of a sovereign nation told them to.

I get it:  The Clinton campaign has decided that a (slightly) modernized campaign of red baiting will help them get votes, and the Obama administration is joining in this farce.

The fact is that if Putin wanted to sabotage the US political process, he would structure his intervention in a way that would minimize the legitimacy of whoever won the election.

The fact that Clinton and Obama seem determined cast aspersions on the legitimacy of this election would imply that either they are sacrificing the health of the body politics at the altar of their own electoral success or electoral legacy, or Putin is the smartest man on the face of the earth,^* and he has successfully manipulated the entire infrastructure of the Democratic Party to do his bidding.

I'm inclined to believe the first theory, because the second one is batsh%$ insane.

^*Or, to invoke a John Frankenheimer's magnum opus, "Vladimir Putin is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."

I Guess There's an Upside to the Opioid Epidemic*

WORLD MOURNS as Clippy the Microsoft Word Paperclip Dies from a Heroin Overdose

^*Not my line. As Michael Gat said this on Facebook.

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

The Department of Justice has dropped charges against a man accused of illegal weapons transfers to Libyan rebels because it raises uncomfortable questions about Hillary's role in the Libya clusterf%$#:

The Obama administration is moving to dismiss charges against an arms dealer it had accused of selling weapons that were destined for Libyan rebels.

Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion.

The deal averts a trial that threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as Secretary of State, and to expose reported Central Intelligence Agency attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi.

Government lawyers were facing a Wednesday deadline to produce documents to Turi’s legal team, and the trial was officially set to begin on Election Day, although it likely would have been delayed by protracted disputes about classified information in the case.

A Turi associate asserted that the government dropped the case because the proceedings could have embarrassed Clinton and President Barack Obama by calling attention to the reported role of their administration in supplying weapons that fell into the hands of Islamic extremist militants.

“They don’t want this stuff to come out because it will look really bad for Obama and Clinton just before the election,” said the associate.

How convenient.

Headline of the Day

It's Time We Crush the Putrid Roach Motels of Philanthro-Crony-Capitalism, Starting with the Clinton Foundation

It's a great headline, and the rest is a good read too.

My Life is Effectively Over

Such is the nature of my doing contract work that I need to find a new job on a fairly regular basis.

My new position is not transit accessible, so I had to get a car for commuting.

It's a used Prius, so now we own both a minivan and a Prius.

I am now suffering from terminal automotive dullness.

As an aside, the Prius is a pleasant car to drive, though I find it disconcertingly quiet, and the animated displays take some getting used to.

The outside visibility is excellent, which is a surprise given the spoiler midway up the rear windows.

Also, I am not sure why, but it feels huge, more like a full size car than the midsize that it is technically listed as.

This is not a handling thing, it's just the sense I get sitting in it.  It feels really big.

It's handling is rather crisp though.

Deep Thought

My son, Charlie watched the tail end of the Vice Presidential debate with me, and made the following observation:

Tim Kaine looks like a cartoon villain, and Mike Pence looks like a Bond villain.

It's true.  You can see Kaine saying, "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids.," and you can see Pence saying, "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."

Seriously, look at the side by side pictures:

 

My wife has raised a very wise young man.

I'm Getting Old

When I was younger, if I finally came home at 10 am in the clothes I was wearing the night before, it would be a very good night.

These days, if I finally came home at 10 am in the clothes I was wearing the night before, it is a very bad night.

Everyone in Chez Saroff is OK, but getting there was no fun at all.

Grownups in the Room, My Ass!

In Syria, at least, it appears that the United States only takes action in its own interest or in that of the Syrian people when they are shamed into doing so.

It appears that our state security apparatus has been thoroughly captured by the House of Saud:

Russia has now managed twice to shame the U.S. into action against Jihadis by publicly demonstrating that the U.S. is not really committed to its promises.

During 2014 and 2015 the U.S. did very little to attack the Islamic State. U.S. strikes hit irrelevant targets like an "ISIS excavator" or some lone truck. Meanwhile ISIS was making millions per day from pumping oil out of the Syrian desert and selling it to Turkish contacts. Hundreds of Turkish tanker trucks assembled near the oil wells in south-east Syria waiting to load. No airstrike would hit them.

The Russians saw this and were appalled. The loudmouth U.S. spoke about its big coalition and attacking ISIS but did essentially nothing. The Russian President Putin then decided to shame the U.S. and Obama personally. On November 15 2015 at the G20 meeting in Turkey he walked around the table and showed satellite pictures to his international colleagues. Hundreds of trucks waiting in the Syrian desert for loading without fear that anyone would harm them:

"I've demonstrated the pictures from space to our colleagues, which clearly show the true size of the illegal trade of oil and petroleum products market. Car convoys stretching for dozens of kilometers, going beyond the horizon when seen from a height of four-five thousand meters," Putin told reporters after the G20 summit.

The very next day on November 16 U.S. airplanes, for the first time, hit truck assemblies near ISIS oil wells in south-east Syria:

………

Something similar happened Friday and today. First the Russian Foreign Minister accused the U.S. of complicity with al-Qaeda:

The Russian foreign minister said Russia has "more and more reasons to believe that from the very beginning the plan was to spare Al-Nusra and to keep it just in case for Plan B or stage two, when it would be time to change the regime."

At the daily State Department press briefing on Friday, State spokesman Toner was grilled by multiple reporters over Lavrov's accusations and the lack of U.S. attacks on al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al-Nusra aka Jabhat Fateh al-Sham):

………

State spoks Mark Toner admits that no U.S. strike had hit Nusra since March this year. His excuses are paltry and in the end he punts to the Pentagon. He really got his balls squeezed.

But that pressure, initiated by the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, created results. The U.S. was shamed into action and today killed some Nusra number 2: Pentagon: US targets 'core al-Qaida' member in Syria strike.

Al-Qaeda confirmed the strike:

Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, former Nusra Front, says Egyptian alQaeda cleric Abu al-Faraj al-Masri killed in #US led coalition strike in #Idlib

— LBCI News English (@LBCI_News_EN) October 3, 2016

This is the very first strike on al-Qaeda in Syria, a UN designated terrorist organization which the U.S. vowed to fight, since March 2016. It comes a weekend after Lavrov accused the U.S. of not striking Nusra and a grilling at the State Department briefing.

The Russian shaming has again worked.

And in the context of all this, now there are reports  that U.S. has abandoned even the pretense of working with the Russians to fix the situation:

U.S.-Russia relations fell to a new post-Cold War low Monday as the Obama administration abandoned efforts to cooperate with Russia on ending the Syrian civil war and forming a common front against terrorists there, and Moscow suspended a landmark nuclear agreement.

The latter move, scuttling a deal the two countries signed in 2000 to dispose of their stocks of weapons-grade plutonium, was largely symbolic. But it provided the Kremlin with an opportunity to cite a series of what it called “unfriendly actions” toward Russia — from Ukraine-related and human rights sanctions to the deployment of NATO forces in the Baltics.

The United States, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement, has “done all it could to destroy the atmosphere encouraging cooperation.”

Of far more immediate concern, the end of the Syria deal left the administration with no apparent diplomatic options remaining to stop the carnage in Aleppo and beyond after the collapse of a short-lived cease-fire deal negotiated last month.

The State Department announced that it was withdrawing U.S. personnel who have been meeting in Geneva over the past several weeks with Russian counterparts to plan coordinated airstrikes against al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists in Syria. The coordination was to start as soon as a cease-fire, begun Sept. 12, took hold and humanitarian aid began to flow to besieged communities where civilians have borne the brunt of Russian-backed President Bashar al-Assad’s response to a five-year effort to oust him.

The House of Saud wants Assad gone, so the US wants Assad gone, even though it it's clear that this would be a complete disaster for the US, NATO, and the Syrian people.

You know that a situation has been well and truly f%$#ed when Bashar al-Assad is the best alternative available.

At every single stage of this catastrophe,  the Obama administration has made the worst possible choices.

This is why there is no good alternative.

China Working on a Conventional Aircraft Carrier

Note the towbar on the front gear

They are already in the process of developing a CATOBAR variant of the Flanker:

China has stepped up development of Catapult-Assisted Take-Off But Arrested Recovery (CATOBAR) operations for its carriers, with the appearance of a Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark carrier-borne fighter with CATOBAR apparatus and continued construction of supporting land-based infrastructure.

In mid-September photos surfaced online of a J-15 with what appears to be a catapult launch bar on its nose wheel. These are used to couple the aircraft to the catapult of the carrier during the launch sequence, and would be the latest indication that China’s rumored third aircraft carrier will utilize the CATOBAR system of aircraft launch and recovery.

It is not clear whether this aircraft is a new-build prototype for the CATOBAR J-15, or one of the six original J-15 prototypes modified with a new nose wheel. Also noteworthy is that this J-15 is powered by the indigenous Shenyang-Liming WS-10 Taihang turbofan. Although already in widespread use with China’s land-based J-11 fighters, the Chinese engine has never gone to sea during trials and operations on China’s current sole aircraft carrier, Liaoning.

This is not a surprise.

While getting the operations right (an aircraft carrier deck is a dangerous place) is a non trivial matter, the basic technology of steam catapult launches is over 60 years old.

As an aside, the Chinese are proceeding on this incrementally, so I would rather expect that their 1^st carrier with a catapult to be in the size range somewhere between the Clemenceau (25,000 T) and the Charles de Gaulle (48,000 T) size, much smaller than a typical supercarrier (~100,000 T).

I would expect China to field a CATOBAR carrier as a part of a full carrier group in the next 7-12 ears.

Further Adventures in Charter School Corruptions

ECOT online charter school has just been caught bilking the state of Ohio out of money with phantom students:

A judge today denied a request by the state’s largest online charter school to stop the state from requiring that it produce attendance records to justify the $106 million it got last year in state funding.

Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jenifer French ruled in favor of the Ohio Department of Education, rejecting a preliminary injunction request by the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow that would have immediately blocked the state from using log-in records and other data to determine how many full-time students actually attend the school

The department has already completed its attendance audit on ECOT for last school year. The ruling means ECOT could be forced to repay tens of millions of dollars based on recent state calculations that its enrollment numbers last year were heavily inflated.

This is a feature, not a bug.

The charter school industry was created in a way that makes it a petri dish for fraud, and rather unsurprisingly, fraud flourishes there.

Snark of the Day

USS North Carolina Attack Sub Retrofitted with LGBTQ-Friendly Toilets

—Deffelblog