While We Are on the Subject of, Treason, Bribery, or Other High Crimes and Misdemeanors ………

It does appear that Donald Trump (père, not fils) may have been using his position as President in an attempt to secure a bailout for a disastrous real estate deal made by Jared Kushner.

Specifically, Trump's immediately taking the side of the House of Saud in their dispute with Qatar on Twitter may very well have been retaliation for their turning down a deal with his son-in-law:

Not long before a major crisis ripped through the Middle East, pitting the United States and a bloc of Gulf countries against Qatar, Jared Kushner’s real estate company had unsuccessfully sought a critical half-billion-dollar investment from one of the richest and most influential men in the tiny nation, according to three well-placed sources with knowledge of the near transaction.

Kushner is a senior adviser to President Trump, and also his son-in-law, and also the scion of a New York real estate empire that faces an extreme risk from an investment made by Kushner in the building at 666 Fifth Avenue, where the family is now severely underwater.

Qatar is facing an ongoing blockade led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and joined by Egypt and Bahrain, which President Trump has taken credit for sparking. Kushner, meanwhile, has reportedly played a key behind-the-scenes role in hardening the U.S. posture toward the embattled nation.

That hard line comes in the wake of the previously unreported half-billion-dollar deal that was never consummated. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Jared Kushner and his father, Charles, negotiated directly with a major investor in Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, known as HBJ for short, in an effort to refinance the property on Fifth Avenue, the sources said.

Trump himself has unsuccessfully sought financing in recent years from the Qataris, but it is difficult to overstate just how important the investment at 666 Fifth Avenue is for Kushner, his company, and his family’s legacy in real estate. Without some outside intervention or unforeseen turnaround in the market, the investment could become an embarrassing half-billion-dollar loss. It’s unclear precisely how much peril such a loss would put Jared’s or his family’s finances in, given the opacity of their private holdings.

HBJ, a former prime minister of Qatar who ran the country’s $250 billion sovereign wealth fund, is a billionaire and one of the world’s richest men. He owns a yacht worth $300 million called Al Mirqab, the same name he gave to the private investment firm that Kushner pitched. The former emir of Qatar summed up HBJ’s power with a quip: “I may run this country, but he owns it.”

HBJ ultimately agreed to invest at least $500 million through Al Mirqab, on the condition that Kushner Companies could raise the rest of a multibillion refinancing elsewhere. The negotiations continued long after the election, carried out as recently as this spring by Charles Kushner. “HBJ basically told them, we’re good for 500, subject to a lot of things, but mainly subject to you being able to raise the rest,” said one source in the region with knowledge of the deal. The talks were confirmed by two additional sources with knowledge of the talks. One of those sources claimed that the potential deal was not contingent on the rest of the money being raised and that the HBJ investment was on hold as the overall structure of the financing was reconsidered. None of the sources would agree to talk on the record about a private financial transaction that has until now remained a secret.

………

The revelation of the half-billion-dollar deal raises thorny and unprecedented ethical questions. If the deal is not entirely dead, that means Jared Kushner is on the one hand pushing to use the power of American diplomacy to pummel a small nation, while on the other his firm is hoping to extract an extraordinary amount of capital from there for a failing investment. If, however, the deal is entirely dead, the pummeling may be seen as intimidating to other investors on the end of a Kushner Companies pitch.

………

On June 6, President Trump took sides, taking credit for the moves by the Gulf nations.

...extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar - look!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

On June 9, after Saudi Arabia and the UAE had begun to blockade Qatar, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sought to calm nerves, calling for mediation and an immediate end to the blockade.

Within hours, Trump, at a White House ceremony, contradicted Tillerson, slamming Qatar again and claiming it had “historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”

Trump’s White House remarks, Tillerson came to believe, had been written by UAE Ambassador Yousef Al-Otaiba and delivered to Trump by Jared Kushner.

(emphasis mine)

This is Teapot Dome level crap.

It's easy to understand, and the violation of the law is clear.

What's more from a power politics perspective, if this becomes a major political issue, it would scare off any potential investors for 666 5^th Avenue, which would likely cripple the Kushner Company empire when the balloon payment comes due.


Quoting Billy Ray Valentine from the movie Trading Places, "The best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people."

OK, This is Now Officially a Legitimate Sh%$ Storm

TheNew York Post states the obvious.^*

OK, so now we know that in June of last year, Donald Trump, Jr., aka "Fredo", was setting up a meeting with a Russian lawyer at the request of a publicist for a Russian to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. (Yes, this is profoundly weird and f%$#ed up)

This is now a big deal, not because this was necessarily a crime, I find the claims of a violation of Section 30121 of Title 52 to be a stretch in the world of Citizens United, but because we now have evidence of a conspiracy and a coverup.

It was a conspiracy to obstruct justice that took down Richard Nixon, after all.

I don't think that this is the most impeachable thing that Trump has done (that will be a later post), but this has a potential to hamstring the Trump administration, particularly if the Democrats take back the House and Senate in 2018.

The underlying crime here is still a violation of campaign finance law, not espionage, not treason^† or some similar heinous crimes.

From a political perspective, I do not think that this is a good thing for the Democratic Party.

This provides yet another opportunity for the Dems to miss the opportunity to reform, and ditch the incompetent and clueless deadwood that populate the party's professional consultant class.

As opposed to a movement toward some sort of ideological coherence, the national Democratic Party will remain in, "A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin," mode, which I do not believe will resonate with voters.

If hostility toward Russia were a political winner nationwide, Hillary Clinton would be President now.

My guess is that right now, Republicans will slow walk any investigation, saying that they need to wait for Special Prosecutor Muller's report.

I expect months of overwrought press coverage over this, because this is a classic example of catnip for reporters.

^*I cannot f%$#ing believe that I am f%$#ing citing the f%$#ing New York f%$#ing Post.
^†It was never treason. Treason is specifically defined in the US Constitution because of at least a millennia of abuse in Europe, and this does not meet that very specific definition.^‡
‡That being said, Nixon's sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968, and Reagan and Poppy Bush's deal with Iran to keep the hostages held in Iran in 1980 might meet the statutory requirements of Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution.

France is About to Get What it Voted For

I admit that the French voters were caught between the Scylla and Charbdris in the second round of voting for President. 

While Emmanuel Macron was in a number of ways a better choice than Marine Le Pen, but both the self-absorbed banker and the polished bigot were a losing proposition for the French people.

Now they have Macron, and they know that in addition to having the values of a lifelong banker, he has the ego of one as well.

First, is is attempting to make Frances nearly dictatorial Presidency even more overbearing by aggressively issuing and changing regulation by decree.

In particular, he is fixated on gutting worker protections in France, because ……… Capitalism.

Second, Macron, someone for whom distancing France from the EU is unthinkable, is looking to shower tax cuts on bankers and the finance industry, because as a banker, he believes that whatever is good for the bankers is good for the country:

The French Prime Minister on Friday laid out a raft of measures aimed at boosting Paris's attractiveness to high finance in order to cash in on Britain's exit from the European Union, including cutting income tax for high earning bankers and opening international schools.

France continues to make eyes at London's bankers and on Friday the Prime Minister Edouard Philippe laid out a raft of measures to attract financiers who may have to leave London when the UK leaves the EU.

Among them are scrapping a plan to widen a current 0.3 percent tax on financial transactions, eliminating the top income tax bracket for top earning bankers (those picking up over €150,000 a year), and keeping bonuses out of the calculation of severance pay for "risk-takers" such as stockbrokers in order to make redundancies less expensive.

Those measures might have been unthinkable in France under the previous government of former President François Hollande, who famously declared the world of finance was his "enemy", but given the fight for the scraps from the Brexit fallout, France under former banker Emmanuel Macron seems prepared to do whatever it takes to fight off the competition.

This really isn't about competing with Frankfurt or Brussels, they simply lack the living infrastructure to appeal to the banksters, the bankers who would want to move there already live in these (dull) cities or (even duller) Switzerland.

Places like Madrid and Rome are simply too unstable politically and socially to compete, given the secessionist movements (Spain) and a potential Greek style economic collapse (Italy).

I suppose that Amsterdam might be a possibility, but it's rather eclectic nature (see their red light district, defacto legalization of pot, etc.) might require a significant change in the governance and culture of that city.

The real reason that he is making much of a competition for bankers. even though it's pretty clear that they contribute to the overall well-being of society in the same manner that tapeworms contribute to the overall well-being of a dog, is because he wants to make nice with People Like Him.

It's bankster tribalism, and the French people will suffer for it.

Thankfully, his latter effort might be blunted by EU budget rules, as it would open a gaping hole in the French budget, and the Germans won't tolerate that, both because they fetishized balanced budgets, and because want the to draw as as much of the finance industry to Germany as possible.

Now We Know Why the Republicans Hate the CFPB

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has just issued a rule for banks that prohibits them from using arbitration agreements to ban class action suits:

In roughly 240 days from now, banks and other financial companies will no longer be allowed to prohibit customers from banding together in class-action lawsuits through the use of binding arbitration clauses, as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today released a long-awaited finalized rule on arbitration.

The 775-page rule [PDF] doesn’t ban the use of forced arbitration clauses outright, but it dictates when financial institutions, lenders, and others can use the provisions and creates specific language to be included in consumer contracts. 

………

The most troubling aspect of arbitration clauses is the fact they almost universally contain bans on class actions. This means that if several customers are all wronged by a bank in the same way, they must each go through the arbitration process individually.

To make matters worse, arbitration rulings are final, even when the arbitrator made an error that would have changed the outcome. In some instances, the arbitrator doesn’t even give a reason for their decision — just a simple ruling in favor of one party.

………

Instead, affected companies can still use arbitration rules in their contracts with individual customers, but they can not use these clauses to stop consumers from being part of a group action.
The rule includes specific language that companies must use if they include an arbitration clause in a new contract.

The rule, which will take effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register and become enforceable after 241 days, does not apply to all consumer contracts. For instance, the CFPB notes that existing accounts are not subject to the arbitration ban.

………

In addition to prohibiting certain uses of forced arbitration, the CFPB’s rule aims to make the arbitration process more transparent.

Because companies claim that arbitration actually benefits consumers, these businesses will be required to provide information to the CFPB regarding the number of arbitration claims that are filed against it and details on the awards provided to consumers who arbitrate.

The information such as initial claims, counterclaims, answers to claims, and awards issued in arbitration must be submitted to the CFPB with customer information redacted. The Bureau intends to publish these redacted materials on its website beginning in July 2019.

By gathering this data the CFPB says it will be enabled to better understand and monitor arbitration, including whether the process itself is fair.

Of course, this is an anathema to Republicans:  They want to ensure that there is no accountability of big business ever, because they should be ordinary folks' lord and master.

It's a toxic mix of neo-feudalism, Objectivism, and class bigotry that drives Republicans, and it ain't pretty.

Here is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's press release.

Headline of the Day

Martin Shkreli Will Not Shut The F%$# Up!

—Wonkette

(%$# mine)

Mr, Shkreli is on trial for fraud, and he is continuously mouthing off to reporters, to the degree that the judge has banned him from talking in and around the court house.

I am sure that his defense attorneys are losing their minds about this right now.

Me, I'm just amused.

Linkage

• Why Roman concrete still stands strong while modern version decays (The Guardian) I love me some history of technology.
• Cats shun expensive toys in photos on Boredom Therapy (Daily Mail Online) You buy a cat toys, it plays with the box it came in instead.
• Lots of ‘craft’ beer is brewed by Anheuser-Busch. Here’s how to spot the real stuff. (Washington Post) Basically, it's a private label that purports that the beer is not made by a conglomerate. Meh.
• Facebook: We're not just sexist, we're also innumerate! (Felix Salmon) Notes that Facebook's defense against accusations of sexism is to issue a correcting factor that that acknowledges existing sexism.
• Welcome to Our Startup Where Everyone is 23 Years Old Because We Believe Old People Are Visually Displeasing and Out of Ideas (McSweeney’s) Parody, but remarkably close to the truth.
• Ringless voicemail spam won’t be exempt from anti-robocall rules (Ars Technica) It turns out that there is a level of awfulness in business that even Republicans won't support in public.
• The Best Keyboard Ever Is Back  (Popular Mechanics)  Someone is releasing an updated version of IBM's buckling spring keyboard.  At $300, it's kind of pricey though.

John Oliver on Sinclair Group and media consolidation in the local news sphere:

Not Enough Bullets

Hedge fund workers in London, England, have been given a button on their desk to order Champagne:

Soho office workers will be able to order a glass of champagne for their desks at the touch of a button in a new £100 million “five-star” development.

The planned “at desk” champagne buttons will allow the hedge fund workers expected to be its occupants to order a celebratory drink after a “good day at the office”.

The buttons were inspired by one of Kylie Minogue and Tamara Ecclestone’s favourite restaurants, nearby Bob Bob Ricard, where every table has a “press for champagne” button.

Workers will be able to order cocktails or caviar, as well as bubbly, from the ground floor Sticks’n’Sushi restaurant. They will delivered to the relevant office floor by dumb waiterstyle lifts running through the building.

On the bright side, they can't do any worse than they did sober.

Still, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Also, this is not The Onion.

Baltimore Just Got Smaller

It's alt-weekly, The Baltimore City Paper, will be closed down by the end of the year:

The Baltimore Sun Media Group plans to close City Paper later this year. No official end date has been announced for the alt-weekly, now in its 40th year.

"Like many alternative weeklies across the country, declining ad revenue at City Paper continues to be a challenge," BSMG's director of marketing, Renee Mutchnik, said in a statement. "It became clear to us this past fall that we would cease publishing City Paper sometime in 2017. Details about the closing date are still being discussed. This is a difficult decision and we are mindful of how it affects our employees, the readers and advertisers."

Editorial staffers found out about the news in June during a meeting with senior vice president Tim Thomas, who cited declining ad revenues and future projections for those numbers as reasons for the closure.

City Paper editor Brandon Soderberg offered the following: "This is Brandon Soderberg, City Paper editor reporting live from the deck of the Titanic. Yes, we're being closed by BSMG/Tronc/and so on. We were told this news last month and there isn't a clear date but what we've been told is no later than the end of the year. We were trying to hold off announcing it because, well, it's very sad, but also because I'm not sure about how this is all going to play out and I'm half-convinced this won't be the end of the paper and someone will swoop in and buy us."

The Sun bought the paper from Times-Shamrock Communications, which had owned the paper for more than two dozen years, in early 2014. In an announcement of the purchase, BSMG's then-publisher, president, and CEO Tim Ryan praised City Paper's independent streak. 

(emphasis mine)

That last bit, about The Sun is the most important bit: The fate of the City Paper was sealed when The Sun bought it.

As A. J. Liebling noted in his seminal book The Press, the only way to make money by buying a newspaper is to be a competitor in the market, and the profit comes from shutting it down, which allows the survivor to increase its own advertising revenue.

Even if only 10% of the ads in The City Paper go to The Sun, they will get a non trivial amount of revenue from this.

I think that Baltimore is too large and too dynamic not to have an alt-weekly.

I'm considering starting a crowd funding effort to buy them from the Tribune Company.

Any advice/aid would be appreciated.

For the Love of God, Please Make it Stop!!!!!

Gaahhhhhh!

There I am, cruising down the information superhighway, and then this headline popped up in front of me, and I found myself in the ditch:

Hillary Clinton Looks for Her Role in Midterms.

You lost a Presidential election to an inverted traffic cone, and were it not for numerous self inflicted wounds, you would be in the White House now, bombing Syria and Iran and engaging in nuclear brinksmanship with Russia..

Certainly, you, and your campaign's, foibles were not the only reason that you lost, but as close as it was, it's clear that if there had been a meaningful attempt to address these problems, you would have won.

And now, you are trying to buy your way back to the cool kids table with your "Onward Together" PAC.

Please make it stop!!!!!!

Once again I feel compelled to murder the genius of Dr. Seuss for political commentary. (After the break)

"Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don't care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!
I don't care.
You can go
By bike.
You can go
On a Zike-Bike
If you like.
If you like
You can go
In an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!
Please do, do, do, DO!
Hillary Rodham Clinton
I don't care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
If you wish.
If you wish
You may go
By lion's tale.
Or stamp yourself
And go by mail.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Don't you know
The time has come
To go, go, GO!
Get on your way!
Please Hillary C.!
You might like going in a Zumble-Zay.
You can go by balloon . . .
Or broomstick.
Or
You can go by camel
In a bureau drawer.
You can go by bumble-boat
. . . or jet.
I don't care how you go.
Just get!
Hillary Rodham Clinton!
I don't care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
I said
GO
And
GO
I meant . . .
The time had come
So . . .
Hillary WENT."

OK, I Did Not Expect This

In 2001, Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) following 9/11.

She found it over-broad, and has been trying to repeal it ever since.

History has proved her right, as it has authorized dozens of military actions, the majority having nothing to do with the original attack, since then.

Lee has been trying to roll it back ever since, and the House Approriations Committee has finally voted to add repeal of the AUMF it its latest appropriation bill:

In September 2001, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) was the only member of Congress to object to an Authorization for the Use of Military Force, a resolution in response to the terrorist attacks that paved the way for the war in Afghanistan.

In the 16 years since, the resolution has been used by President George W. Bush, President Obama and now President Trump as justification for more than 35 military actions in nearly 20 countries around the world -- which means those presidents have not gone back to Congress for new permission to send troops into harm's way.

On Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee opened the door to ending that 2001 authorization when it added Lee's amendment to a Defense Department measure. Congress would have 240 days to debate a new authorization. At the end of that time the 2001 authorization would be repealed.

Lee has lobbied hard just to get to this first step, which was approved by a voice vote in the Republican led committee.

"I've been working on this for years and years and years. I'm just really pleased that Republicans and Democrats today really understood what I've been saying and I've been explaining for the last 16 years, and that is, this resolution is a blank check for perpetual war," Lee said.

I don't expect this to make it through the House, and if it did I would not expect it to make it through the Senate,  and I would expect a veto threat from the White House, so I don't expect this to make it into law, but it is a first step.

Boaty McBoatface Lives

I still think that that the whole boat should have been so named, but I am still heartened by the maiden voyage of the remotely operated submersible:

A yellow submarine dubbed Boaty McBoatface has obtained “unprecedented data” from its first voyage exploring one of the deepest and coldest ocean regions on Earth, scientists have said.

The robotic submersible was given the name originally chosen for a new polar research ship by irreverent contestants in a public competition. Embarrassed officials decided to ignore the popular vote and instead named the vessel the RRS Sir David Attenborough in honour of the veteran broadcaster. A storm of protest led to a compromise that allowed the name to live on.

The submarine plunged to depths as far as 4,000 metres to obtain information about temperature, water flow speed and turbulence from Orkney Passage, a region of the Southern Ocean about 500 miles from the Antarctic Peninsula.

 Huzza!

Reality 1 : Republican Dogma: 0

In Illinois, with significant Republican support, the state legislature has overridden the Governor's veto of the latest budget, which increases taxes:

After more than two years of political sparring, missed payments to creditors and plunging credit ratings, Illinois did on Thursday what most states do every year. It finished a budget.

Yet as some lawmakers and state officials cheered an end to the longest state budget impasse in the nation’s modern history, at least one prominent and unyielding critic remained. Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican who has clashed with the Democratic-held Legislature since the moment he took office, had vetoed the spending plan, which includes a tax increase.

The governor doubled down on his disgust even as at least 10 members of his own party joined Democrats to override his veto, ending the standoff.

“This is a two-by-four smacked across the foreheads of the people of Illinois,” he said this week, imploring fellow Republicans to stand by him. “This tax hike will solve none of our problems and in fact, long run, it’ll just make our problems worse.”

The narrow veto override in the state House, with exactly the 71 votes that were needed, ended a stalemate that had gone on so long that Illinois had fallen $15 billion behind on bills and been warned that its credit rating might fall to junk status, worse than any other state.

Rauner has been demanding a property tax freeze, term limits, worker's comp reductions, restrictions on lawsuits, and a wide range of measures to cripple unions.

This happened in Kansas too.

Republicans have been selecting for insanity level extremism for decades, and now it appear that they have achieved it.

Luckily for the rest of us, it appears that not everyone in the GOP is along with for the ride.

Yes

The Guardian asks, "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?"

Why yes, yes it is.

With reasonable regulation and antitrust enforcement, parasites like Elsevier have plundered publicly funded knowledge.

The end of this business model has been predicted for years, but with great profits comes the resources to engage aggressive rent seeking, which mitigates against this.

I don't think that we will see any change in this until the government mandates another model for research that it funds.

Meanwhile in Oregon*………

Oregon has passed passed "Fair Work Week" Legislation, which requires a week's notice of employee schedules and a 10 break between shifts:

Oregon is set to become the first U.S. state requiring certain businesses to furnish workers with a week's notice of their job schedules and a minimum of 10 hours rest between daily shifts under a bill that won final legislative approval on Thursday.

The bill, dubbed the "fair work week" act by supporters, is aimed at giving greater predictability to low-wage employees whose hours tend vary widely from day to day or week to week. Democratic Governor Kate Brown is expected to sign the bill into law.

The measure would go into effect next year and apply to Oregon workers on the payrolls of retail, food service and hospitality companies with at least 500 employees worldwide.

Under the bill, those companies must provide employees in Oregon, starting on July 18, with written estimates of their work schedules seven days in advance, with the required scheduling notice increased to two weeks beginning in July 2020.

Workers also would be entitled to a break of at least 10 hours between work shifts from one day to the next, and to receive extra pay if they agreed to a shorter rest interval - typically between closing hours at night and opening hours the next morning.

Moreover, the bill protects employees from workplace retaliation for merely expressing a scheduling preference to their bosses.

Work schedule predictability has emerged as a major issue causing growing anxiety in the American labor force even as the U.S. jobless rate has fallen to below-average levels.

My daughter works in a restaurant, and their weekly schedules frequently come out less than 24 hours before the new week.

It's lazy management, and it they do it because they can.

Putting a cost of laziness on the employer is a very good thing.

^*If I had said "Texas" or "Florida" instead of "Oregon", you know that it would be a clusterf%$#, but in most other states, you have to read the article to figure out which way it goes.

Why J-School Sucks

In the old days, someone would become a journalist by working as a copy boy or a cub reporter and working their way up, and they saw themselves as tradesmen.

Now, they get a Bachelors in Journalism, and they fancy themselves professionals, and the contrast is both striking and depressing:

I was talking to this person whom I’d just met. They told me about their job and where they worked. They asked me about mine. I told them I’d worked in public media in Alaska before moving to the Lower 48. I was a couple of months from wrapping up my time as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford. They asked about what I worked on and I explained my research around collaboration in journalism and that I intended to continue working in this space after the fellowship ended.

“Well, what does your husband do?”

“He’s a truck driver and a mechanic.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah, right now he drives for a trash company.”

“That must be…an interesting perspective to have around.”

While they didn’t explicitly say it, the person was very much thrown off by the nature of my husband’s work. I was left with a very strong feeling they were expecting a more middle-class answer than a garbage worker. Their facial reaction has been stuck in my head for a while now. Surprise. A little confusion. And just enough distaste to notice. Obviously, this one instance isn’t representative of an entire industry. But it is a symptom.

The last two 'graphs say it all:

If that conference interaction is how a journalist responds to my husband’s job while idly chatting, how do they cover the sanitation worker that ends up in a story they are working on? If talking about someone to that person’s spouse isn’t enough to cause one to mask aversion, how do they talk about people to whom they feel even more distance from? What does this mean for our audience’s ability to trust us?

Our industry needs to think hard about the worlds we’re living in, the kinds we’re building with each hire we make and ones that we want to reach with our reporting.

It's natural for professors to see themselves as professionals, but by inculcating their students in this mindset, they have created a generation of journalists who afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.

This is not a recipe for good or responsible journalism.

Normally, I Would Condemn Anything That a Eurocrat Says, but I Can't This Time

'Tis but a scratch

The reason that I endorse his statement is because one of my hard and fast rules in rhetorical technique, if you invoke Monty Python, you win.

The win is double plus good if invoke Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

The first vice-president of the European Commission has mocked the UK's post-Brexit trade ambitions by comparing a Ukip MEP to a comically over-confident character from a Monty Python film.

Frans Timmermans likened Eurosceptic politician Ray Finch to the Black Night in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a hopelessly optimistic character who refuses to concede a fight even after all his limbs are severed.

Mr Finch had told the Strasbourg assembly the EU would suffer while Britain was negotiating new trade agreements with countries outside the bloc.
………

“Mr Finch really reminds me of a character created by John Cleese in Monty Python’s the Holy Grail, the Black Knight, who after being defeated terribly and having all his limbs cut off says to his opponent ‘let’s call it a draw’," he continued.

I have no choice but to congratulate Mr. Timmermans for the proper and appropriate use of Monty Python.

Well played, sir.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!

Because of a slightly confusing site, I missed am about 2 weeks late on some credit union closings:

6. LOMTO Federal Credit Union, Woodside, NY
7. Citizens Community Credit Union , Devils Lake, ND
8. Riverdale Credit Union , ​Selma, AL

Here is the Full NCUA list.


So, once again there are more credit union failures than there are commercial bank failures.

I still don't know why this is so, but it is profoundly odd to me.

Snark of the Day

A bunch of privileged white boy dotcommers have decided that, because they got lucky, they should determine the future of the Democratic Party.

They call their nascent movement "Win the Future", yes, it has the initials "WTF", and it has debuted to much derision.

They are referring to themselves as a "Virtual Party", and their most substantive policy proposal appears to be pushing Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins as a political party.

In any case, this characterization of  the founders is prize:

Mark Pincus is the co-founder of Zynga, your grandmother’s favorite video game publisher. Reid Hoffman is co-founder of LinkedIn, a networking website that’s harder to escape than a Scientology outpost buried underneath a gulag. These tech visionaries decided they’d had enough of business as usual in politics, put their brains together, and created an exciting new group called Win The Future. Its mission is to influence the Democratic party platform and assist the #Resistance. If you’re skeptical of this project, keep these facts in mind: People in tech are smarter than you are; disruption makes everything better; everybody loves winning; the internet is the future; and the group is called Win the Future. Enough said.

(emphasis mine)

Is it just me, or does Silicon Valley increasingly seem to be a charity to support the lifestyles of over privileged youth?

Headline of the Day

Corbyn's Earned the Right to Do What He Pleases – and He's Decided to Leave Mewling Self-Entitled Blairites out in the Cold

—The Independent

I wholeheartedly approve of this.

Blair's political innovation was finding a way to suck up to media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and all it cost was the Labour Party's soul, and he was the only Labour candidate to win using that formula.

"New Labour", much like the "New Left" and the "New Democrats", have proven disastrous for both their own movements and for their countries.

It really is time for Labour to clean house.

This is Not an Accident

Does anyone believe that Uber made an honest mistake in tax calculations when it took hundreds of millions of dollars from its drivers?

I certainly don't:

Amid the turmoil at Uber that resulted in Travis Kalanick’s stepping down as chief executive, the company announced a series of changes in late June aimed at improving its drivers’ work experience, including a new tipping option in its passenger app.

But even as Uber makes a concerted effort to win over drivers, it has not acknowledged all the ways it may have squeezed them in New York State.

In May, Uber admitted to taking excessive commissions out of the fares of its New York drivers, who are independent contractors, and promised to make amends. Increasing evidence, however, suggests that the company may have shortchanged the drivers by far greater sums than it acknowledged.

The following are signs that the ride-hailing service improperly deducted what could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars from drivers’ earnings to pay taxes that, under New York State law, are technically due from passengers:

• Uber receipts from other states reflect a tax accounting at odds with the company’s justification for deducting sales tax from the fares received by its New York drivers.
• Language from Uber’s recent contracts indicates that the company should not have taken the taxes from those fares.

Uber has insisted there was nothing improper in its handling of the taxes. Here is a look at the law and the evidence on the question — including the way a major competitor, Lyft, deals with the same issue.

If anyone believes that Uber was acting in good faith, they haven't been following the news lately.

The Glory That Is the Free Market

As you are no doubt aware, Apple has locked down its iPhone platform something fierce.

Among other things, it makes security research much more difficult, which makes bugs a rare commodity in the Apple security community.

Of course, under the laws of supply and demand, it means that the price of the bugs would increase, which means that Apples iPhone bug bounty program has no takers, because it's not enough money:

For now, security researchers who have been invited by Apple to submit high-value bugs through the program prefer to keep the bugs for themselves.

In August 2016, Apple's head of security Ivan Krstic stole the show at one of the biggest security conferences in the world with an unexpected announcement.

"I wanna share some news with you," Krstic said at the Black Hat conference, before announcing that Apple was finally launching a bug bounty program to reward friendly hackers who report bugs to the company.

The crowd erupted in enthusiastic applause. But almost a year later, the long-awaited program appears to be struggling to take off, with no public evidence that hackers have claimed any bug bounties.
 The iPhone's security is so tight that it's hard to find any flaws at all, which leads to sky-high prices for bugs on the grey market. Researchers I spoke to are reluctant to report bugs both because they are so valuable and because reporting some bugs may actually prevent them from doing more research.

"People can get more cash if they sell their bugs to others," said Nikias Bassen, a security researcher for the company Zimperium, and who joined Apple's program last year. "If you're just doing it for the money, you're not going to give [bugs] to Apple directly."

Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker and researcher at Synack who now specializes in MacOS research and was invited to the Apple bug bounty program, agreed. He said that iOS bugs are "too valuable to report to Apple."

………

But it's not just about the immediate reward. iOS is such a complex, locked-down, and secure operating system that simply to inspect and do research on it, one needs multiple, unpatched, zero-day bugs, perhaps even a full-fledged jailbreak, according to researchers. In other words, you need unknown bugs just to find bugs in other parts of the operating system that might be otherwise locked.

That's why some prefer to keep their bugs and continue doing research rather than handicapping themselves for a reward of few thousand dollars.

"Nobody is going to kill bugs unless they're fucking dumb," Luca Todesco, a well-known iPhone jailbreaker, told me a few months ago. "Just because they will kill their own future […] If I kill my own bugs then I'm not able to do my own research."

………

While the researchers were visiting Cupertino, they asked Apple's security team for special iPhones that don't have certain restrictions so it's easier to hack them, according to multiple people who attended the meeting. These devices would have some security features, such as sandboxing, disabled in order to allow the researchers to continue doing their work. One researcher described them as "developer devices."

But Apple, for now, isn't willing to provide those special devices, according to three researchers who recounted the exchange.

These bugs actually have a legal market, helping law enforcement breaking into phones, as well as firms that sell jailbreak (which is legal) software to end users, which allows end users to evade Apple's frequently arbitrary rules on how a user might choose to use their own phones.

In any case, Apple's opacity has raised the cost of bugs to more than Apple is willing to pay.

As to whether this is a good or a bad thing, I will leave that to the reader.

These Are the Most Overpaid People in the World

Not exactly the most inspiring political slogan, @dccc: pic.twitter.com/oIE9bTBHa0

— Derek Willis (@derekwillis) July 5, 2017

Yes, this is real.

"Arby's: Cause, you know, Jared"

— Richard T. (@Miceelf88) July 6, 2017

The best tweet in response

I am, of course, referring to the political consultants for the Democratic Party.

Case in point, the geniuses at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), who have a proposed, "Have You Seen the Other Guys?"

No, this is not satire.

The campaign arm for House Democrats on Wednesday tried out a new slogan: “I mean, have you seen the other guys?”

The sticker slogan, one of several floated as part of a fundraising effort by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), caused a stir on social media, where many wondered why the party would try out such a self-deprecating campaign line.

Why would they do this?

Because they are incompetents who are unqualified to work at a fast food joint?

Seriously donors, this is what your money is paying for.

If you don't start demanding accountability, by which I mean firing their hapless flabby asses.

Also, keeping the DCCC, DSCC, and DNC from fobbing off their incompetent brothers-in-law on state and local campaigns and party committees would be a good thing too.

H/t Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Linkage

• Saudi Arabia’s New Crown Prince Is a Bumbling Hothead. Trump Needs to Treat Him Like One. (POLITICO) Significant, because it comes from Tiger Beat on the Potomac (Politico), which is the font of conventional inside the Beltway "thinking".
• Major correction to satellite data shows 140% faster warming since 1998 (Carbon Brief) Applying the effects of orbital decay. We are f%$#ed.
• Trump Ally Alex Jones Endorses Insane Conspiracy About NASA’s Child Slave Colonies on Mars (News Corpse) No, this is not parody, unless Mr. Jones is some sort of long term performance art project.
• A programmer turned Wikipedia into a classic text adventure  (Ars Technica) Reminds me of a computer game written in the macro language for Lotus 1-2-3 called Templates of Doom.
• Did NSA Start Using Section 702 to Collect from VPNs in 2014? (Emptywheel) Use a non US VPN.
• NotPetya – So Easy Anyone Could Do It (Weapons Grade Shenanigans) All the requisite components for this cyber attack were available online for a long time before the attack. Anyone who knew where to look could have done this.
• Silicon Valley is becoming a commercial real estate disaster (Business Insider) Less than 10 years after the financial meltdown, we are seeing this again.

This makes me want to learn to play the bass, and it's just a promo.

As I have said before, a symphony orchestra on just 4 strings:

God Bless The Onion

U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths

Truly this is, "America's Finest News Source."

Meanwhile, Back in Silicon Valley

We now find rampant sexual harassment and discrimination at Tesla Motors, wunderkind Elon Musk's most high profile project:

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day was “be bold for change” in the fight for a “more gender inclusive world” – but some at Tesla had a different plan for the day.

It was an opportunity for women to discover essential oils. A “health and wellness group” at the electric car company invited female staff members to an 8 March “lunch ‘n learn” about oils and how they can help improve people’s “health and happiness”, according to emails seen by the Guardian, which reveal that the proposed event was quickly met with vocal criticism. It was particularly offensive to some given that a week earlier, AJ Vandermeyden, a female engineer, had publicly accused Elon Musk’s company of sexual harassment and discrimination.

Tesla postponed the oils session. The company organized a town hall meeting on diversity for that day, which included six male executives and one woman, according to multiple attendees. At the crowded meeting at the Fremont factory, women took the microphone one-by-one and shared stories of sexual harassment, mistreatment by male managers, unfair promotion decisions and more, sources said.

Vandermeyden, who attended the meeting, thought the outpouring of comments validated her own story. But soon after, Tesla fired her, accusing her of pursuing a “miscarriage of justice” by filing a lawsuit that alleged “pervasive harassment” and pay discrimination. Testimony from the town hall – along with internal emails from Musk, and Vandermeyden’s first interview since her termination – paint a picture of a company that has struggled to respond to mounting complaints about gender discrimination and has aggressively attempted to discredit a woman who publicly criticized it .

………

Musk also appeared to reference Vandermeyden in a company-wide email sent two days after her termination. In the email – with the subject “Doing the right thing”, sent at 2.29am – Musk lamented the scrutiny that his company faces, saying, “The list of companies that want to kill Tesla is so long, I’ve lost track.”

As as a result, he continued, employees must work harder and faster than competitors, adding they can’t be a “jerk” in the process.

Musk did not name Vandermeyden, but went on to offer what seemed to be a thinly veiled attack on her lawsuit: “If you are part of a less represented group, you don’t get a free pass on being a jerk yourself. We have had a few cases at Tesla where someone in a less represented group was actually given a job or promoted over more qualified highly represented candidates and then decided to sue Tesla for millions of dollars because they felt they weren’t promoted enough. That is obviously not cool.”

(emphasis mine)

What a classic example of a narcissistic self entitled tech bro, and Elon Musk is supposed one of the "good" guys in Silicon Valley, someone who is out to save the world.

If this is their best, there is something seriously rotten in the immediate vicinity of San Jose.

Fail

Yesterday, the Teabaggers had a major case of butt hurt over a series of tweets sent out by National Public Radio.

They claimed that they were an attempt to provoke a revolution against Donald Trump.  They were claiming that it was "fake news" and left wing propaganda.

One small problem, the series of 113 tweets was the declaration of independence:

For about 20 minutes Tuesday, NPR traveled back to 1776.

To echo its 29-year on-air tradition, the public radio network’s main Twitter account tweeted out the Declaration of Independence, line by line.

There — in 113 consecutive posts, in 140-character increments — was the text of the treasured founding document of the United States, from its soaring opening to its searing indictments of King George III’s “absolute tyranny” to its very last signature.

Who could have taken issue with such a patriotic exercise, done in honor of the nation’s birthday?

Quite a few people, it turned out.

Perhaps it was the Founding Fathers’ capitalization of random words or the sentence fragments into which some of the Declaration’s most recognizable lines were broken. But plenty of Twitter users reacted angrily to the thread, accusing NPR of spamming them — or, worse, trying to push an agenda.

Seriously?

You are claiming that the quoting the Declaration of Independence on Independence Day is a communist plot?

What the actual f%$#?

Where did you get your education, Hamburger University?

Seriously, if you freaked out over this, then you seriously need to evaluate your value system.

Also, take a history course, and try to actually read the founding documents that you claim to have so much affection for.

For All Your Craft and Hobby Needs, Now with Grave Robbing

I am referring, of course to Hobby Lobby, which has been caught smuggling antiquities to provide exhibits for their "Museum":

The packages that made their way from Israel and the United Arab Emirates to retail outlets owned by Hobby Lobby, the seller of arts and craft supplies, were clearly marked as tile samples.

But according to a civil complaint filed on Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, they held something far rarer and more valuable: ancient clay cuneiform tablets that had been smuggled into the United States from Iraq.

Prosecutors said in the complaint that Hobby Lobby, whose evangelical Christian owners have long maintained an interest in the biblical Middle East, began in 2009 to assemble a collection of cultural artifacts from the Fertile Crescent. The company went so far as to send its president and an antiquities consultant to the United Arab Emirates to inspect a large number of rare cuneiform tablets — traditional clay slabs with wedge-shaped writing that originated in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.

In 2010, as a deal for the tablets was being struck, an expert on cultural property law who had been hired by Hobby Lobby warned company executives that the artifacts might have been looted from historical sites in Iraq, and that failing to determine their heritage could break the law.

Despite these words of caution, the prosecutors said, Hobby Lobby bought more than 5,500 artifacts — the tablets and clay talismans and so-called cylinder seals — from an unnamed dealer for $1.6

million in December 2010.

In addition to the complaint, the prosecutors on Wednesday filed a stipulation of settlement with Hobby Lobby that requires the company to return all of the pieces, and to forfeit to the government an additional $3 million, resolving the civil action.

………

Hobby Lobby’s purchase of the artifacts in December 2010 was fraught with “red flags,” according to the prosecutors. Not only did the company get conflicting information about the origin of the pieces, its representatives never met or spoke with the dealer who supposedly owned them, according to the complaint.

Instead, on the instructions of a second dealer, Hobby Lobby wired payments to seven separate personal bank accounts, the prosecutors said. The first dealer then shipped the items marked as clay or ceramic tiles to three Hobby Lobby sites in Oklahoma. All of the packages had labels falsely identifying their country of origin as Turkey, prosecutors said.

Multiple transfers to accounts, deliberate and varied mislabeling of their country of origin, and the CEO of Hobby Lobby is claiming that they should have been better at dotting their "I"s and crossing their "T"s.

This is bullsh%$.  This was an organized effort by Hobby Lobby boss Steve Green to smuggle artifacts into the United States: He went to the UAE to inspect the artifacts, ignored conflicting data regarding provenance, and was scrupulous in using an intermediary to avoided dealing directly with the dealer of the artifacts.

Prosecutors should be pursuing him personally over this.  The federal conspiracy statutes should cover this nicely.

And Today in Charter School Corruption

Kipp Schools, the star of the hagiography Waiting for Superman, has been caught ripping off poor parents by demanding illegal fees, and when caught they refused to refund them:

Charter schools claim they are public schools. They are not. What public school is part of a corporate chain? What public school operates for profit? What public schools charges fees for service?

The KIPP schools in Houston have been charging fees to poor parents. Now that the scam has been exposed, KIPP refuses to refund the money to parents who need the money far more than the multi-million dollar KIPP organization does. KIPP [should] ask its patron, the rightwing Walton Family Foundation, for a few more dollars, enough to reimburse the needy families that it ripped off.

Supporters of school privatization will claim that this is an aberration.  It isn't.

This is a natural and foreseeable consequence of applying the for-profit business model to a public good.

It's all about maximizing profit on while being paid by the taxpayers.

This is a feature, not a bug.

If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them

Reverse flow operation (starts at 45s)


See also this diagram


The GE Engine

GE will be attempting to challenge Pratt & Whitney in the turboprop market, where the PT6 turboprop completely dominates the market.

Of interest to me is that GE will be copying the basic operating principals of the PT6,(paid subscription required) P&W's reverse flow operation.

The inlet is at the back of the engine, and air flows forward. This allows the compressor and the compressor turbine to be completely separate from the power turbine and prop.

While the air flow is rather more circuitous than that of a straight through engine, it has a number of significant advantages:

• No need for concentric shafts while still maintaining a two spool compressor and turbine.
• A smaller and lighter starter motor.
• More easily adopted to different power levels.
• Greater simplicity and reliability.

The PT6 has used this formula to completely dominate the market, and it looks like GE will be aping their approach, with a lot of additive manufacturing throw into the mix:

………

Then there’s the ATP, GE’s Advanced Turboprop engine (see photo, above). This is a very big deal in terms of technology and targeting.

For those cloistered monks among you, some background: Pratt & Whitney Canada’s PT6 family has reigned supreme among turboprops since, well, forever. And for good reason. The type ranges in power from 500-2,000 shp and has demonstrated rock-solid reliability through decades of operation. Its bulletproof reputation is the reason almost all single-turboprop-powered aircraft—from the Piper’s owner-flown M600 to Beechcraft’s PT-6 Texan II military trainer to the do-it-all Pilatus PC-12—are fitted with a PT-6. More than 51,000 PT6s have been produced since the engine’s introduction in the 1960s. It has been expanded to include 69 versions that power some 100 different aircraft models, including all production King Airs.

GE hopes the ATP will break Pratt’s near monopoly. Developed at the company’s “turboprop center of excellence” in Prague with a $400 million investment, this, the world’s most “printed” engine (additive manufacturing has replaced 855 parts with a mere dozen 3D-printed components)features a single-lever integrated engine and propeller control, 16:1 pressure ratio, reverse-flow combustor and output of 850-1,650 shp. The design promises 20% better fuel burn, 10% more power and longer maintenance intervals than you know what.

This is, in its own way, a tribute to the genius of the design team that first devised the PT6.

Good for the Canadians

The Canadian government has decided to pay Can$ 10 million to Omar Khadr.

To recapitulate the story, he was taken to Afghanistan by his father as a 15 year old, and then threw a grenade in a firefight that killed a US soldier.

He was taken into custody, tortured repeatedly, and eventually pled guilty, he was later repatriated to Canada, and then released on bail in 2014.

Khadr filed suit against the Canadian government for depriving him of his rights, and illegally treating as an adult while in detention, and now Canada has settled with him, paying him Can$10 million settlement:

Canada's Liberal government will apologize to former Guantanamo Bay inmate Omar Khadr and pay him around C$10 million ($7.7 million) in compensation, two sources close to the matter said on Tuesday, prompting opposition protests.

A Canadian citizen, Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 at age 15 after a firefight with U.S. soldiers. He pleaded guilty to killing a U.S. Army medic and became the youngest inmate held at the military prison in Cuba.

Khadr later recanted and his lawyers said he had been grossly mistreated. In 2010, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Canada breached his rights by sending intelligence agents to interrogate him and sharing the results with the United States.

The case proved divisive: defenders called Khadr a child soldier while the then-Conservative government dismissed calls to seek leniency, noting he had pleaded guilty to a serious crime.

The US took a child soldier and treated him as a criminal, they then tortured him abd coerced a confession out of him with the active support of the Canadian state security apparatus, a fact that Canada's judiciary has repeatedly taken a dim view of.

This is a good thing, though I am not surprised that former PM Stephen Harper had to exit the scene for the right thing to be done.  Harper was to doing the right thing as Josef Stalin was to rule of law.

It's nice that the Canadian government is doing the right thing.

It will never happen here, since Obama decided to normalize this behavior, (Looking forward, not backward) and then systematically promoted the people who aided and abetted crimes against humanity in the US state security apparatus.

There will never be an accounting for the torturers, much like there will never be an accounting for the banksters who blew up the world in 2008.

If Only Classic Economic Theory Could Provide a Solution

There seems to be much hand wringing over the fact that not enough people want to work construction these days:

About two-thirds of the contractors who are struggling with the labor shortages gripping the construction industry say it has become a challenge to finish jobs on time, according to a new survey.

More than one-third of contractors said they are being forced to turn work down and 58% said they are putting in higher bids, said the survey sponsored by USG Corp. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Three-quarters of those who said they are having difficulty finding skilled labor said they are simply asking their employees to work harder.

“Basically they’re just making people work harder as a way to cope,” said Steve Jones, senior director of Dodge Data & Analytics, which was the research partner of USG and the Chamber on the project.

If you have a shortage of workers, increase wage and non-wage remuneration to a level where you have enough workers.

This is literally Econ 101.

Evil Megalomaniac Seeks to Revive Monster from Primeval Times

There are certain people who I will assume that anything they do is in furtherance of evil.

One of them is Peter Thiel, who literally has aspirations to be a vampire.

Now, he's dropping big bucks on an attempt to revive the species of the Woolly Mammoth.

I do not know how reviving the Woolly Mammoth will make life more miserable for the rest of us, but given that Thiel is funding it, I guarantee that it will make life more miserable for the rest of us.

At least he's not a one of the megalomaniacs planning on mounting a private operation to mine asteroids, which could easily be turned into a devastating weapon.

Linkage

• It’s no surprise that the Kansas tax cut experiment failed to create jobs (Equitable Growth) The Austerity Fairy once more fails to deliver.
• Australia announces plan to ban working cryptography at home and in the US, UK, New Zealand, and Canada (Boing Boing) Morons.
• Why Wall Street Isn't Useful for the Real Economy (Evonomics) My point for a while, and given the explosion of interconnected networks, probably more true today than it was yesterday.
• Judges refuse to order fix for court software that put people in jail by mistake (Ars Technica) Live in obedient fear, citizen.
• Solving the heroin overdose mystery: how small doses can kill (Aeon Ideas) Basically, even small doses in a novel environment (for example going from a private to a public setting) increases the chance of opioid overdose.
• Meet Rare Sea Wolves Who Live Off The Ocean And Can Swim For Hours (Bored Panda) Nature in all its glory.
• Testimony: Shkreli’s plans to fleece patients is what hooked big investors (Ars Technica) This is not about Martin Shkreli.  It's about business, and particularly finance, in the United States basing their entire business of immorality, rent seeking, and deception.
• Pando: The State of Pando 2017: Dropping the paywall on stories from the Silicon Valley Swamp (Pando) This is a big deal. They are, "Dropping our paywall on all stories that involve harassment, discrimination and any of the other swampy behavior plaguing Silicon Valley." Here's hoping that their revenue stream remains intact.

We are the most powerful warship in the world:

Just Read This Now

Holocaust History: My Aunt Had a Dinner Party, and Then She Took Her Guests to Kill 180 Jews

Both fascinating and horrifying.

The Republican Politician in a Nut Shell

For those of you not living in the Garden State, you may be unaware that New Jersey is in the middle of a government shutdown.

Hizzoner wants to get money earmarked for handling the opioid crisis to avoid breaking his no new tax pledge.

As a result of the shutdown, all but emergency government services are shut down.

This includes things like government offices and state parks, unless you are Governor Chris Christie, in which case you have the beach to yourself:

People hoping to visit Island Beach State Park this holiday weekend were not allowed in because of the state government shutdown Gov. Chris Christie ordered amid the state budget standoff in Trenton.

But there was one family there: Christie's. They are using the summer beach house provided by the state for a weekend down the Shore.

And here are exclusive aerial photos by NJ Advance Media showing Christie surrounded by wife, Mary Pat Christie, and others.

It was taken early Sunday afternoon before the governor headed to Trenton to hold another news conference about the shutdown.

At that news conference, Christie was asked if he got any sun Sunday.

"I didn't," he said. "I didn't get any sun today."

When later told of the photo, Brian Murray, the governor's spokesman, said: "Yes, the governor was on the beach briefly today talking to his wife and family before heading into the office."

"He did not get any sun," Murray added. "He had a baseball hat on."

(emphasis mine)

Bad move Governor.  I've seen your poll numbers, and they are so low that about the only way for you to salvage your political career would be to get cancer.

It make some voters feel sympathy for you.  (Not me, but some voters ……… maybe)

Take off the hat, and no sunscreen.

About that Minimum Wage Study in Seattle

The weepy table

The state of Washington commissioned a study of Seattle's minimum wage, and found that low wage workers lost money as a result.

This comes as a surprise, since all the other studies found no effect, but this has not stopped the economic journalist community from touting this as conclusive evidence that raising the minimum wage does now work.

What the study concluded was that for low wage workers, the number of hours worked decreased, resulting in a loss of wages, but the devil is in the details.

The study appears to have been deliberately structured to deliver this results:

• They did not include any multi-location employers, about 40% of the data set.
• It defines "low wage" as earning less than $19 an hour, in a labor market where wages have increased by 18% over the period in question, so if a worker's pay goes from $16.50/hour to $19.25/hour, (a 16% increase), this would be counted as lost low wage hours. (Bracket creep)
• Downplays the fact that employment at the single site employers that they survey increased total hours worked at all wage levels by 18% as well. 
• Assumes that increases in higher wage jobs NEVER involved lower wage employees making more.

This is complete crap:

Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before they confessed what the University of Washington team got them to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees of single site establishments was 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That is an annual increase of almost 8 percent. For two and a quarter years in a row. Not bad. And the number of hours worked of ALL employees of single site establishments? Up 18 percent in a little over two years. That too is an increase of almost 8 percent per annum.

Now multiply that wage by those hours and the total payroll for all employees rose 39.5 percent over the course of nine quarters. An annual rate of increase of 17.5 percent. These are BIG numbers. They are freaking HUGE numbers.

It must have taken a team of at least six academics to extract a 9.4 percent decline in hours from the 86,842 workers (out of a total of 336,517) earning under $19 dollars an hour at these single-site establishments. Look at the Table and weep.

(emphasis original)

Sources as diverse as the Economic Policy Institute and the Financial Times have excoriated the methodology here as well for much the same reasons.

Since the study has not yet been peer reviewed, I'd like to see the results, because I think that the the authors had a conclusion, and then cherry picked data to confirm their desired outcome.

Quote of the Day

Nothing against new ideas. Some of them might even be good ones! But just because a company is based in the Bay Area and does something on your smartphone doesn't really make it "tech" at this point any more than something which uses that new-fangled electricity is tech.

—Duncan "Atrios" Black

He's right.  Uber is basically a taxi service.  Grubhub is food delivery.  Air B&B is a B&B.  Stubhub is a scalper.

But all these guys think that they are geniuses of the first order, because ……… Internet. (or because ………Smart Phone)

This is why we find Silicon Valley to be a lot like Lord of the Flies. 

It's the only way to keep the all balls into the air is to never stop.

This is a Grammatically Correct Use of the Term Irony

Donald Trump has commissioned vote fraud commission to prove that he actually won the popular vote in 2016. (Yes, this is Narcissistic insanity)

He has appointed prominent figures in the voter suppression movement including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Korbach and Hans "Der novotenführer" von Spakovsky, whose primary goal has been to keep blacks and Hispanics from voting, primarily through purging them from voter rolls.

This commission is a clear attempt to go national with the voter purges in an attempt to gain partisan political advantage, and, in an attempt to go national programs to disenfranchise minorities.

Basically, the commission will manufacture data, and then manufacture outrage, and use this to jump start national legislation to suppress minority voting.

This is clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, so when the commission requested complete voter registration data from the states and the District of Columbia, over half of the states election officials have told the commission to go pound sand.

It turns out that, due to vagaries in state election law, one of the Secretaries of State that is telling Kris Korbach to go pound sand, is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Korbach:

Kris Kobach, the co-chair of Donald Trump’s glorious Find The Five Million Illegals Who Voted For Hillary Commission, has been running into a bit of pushback to his letter asking all 50 states to submit detailed voter information to be used in a great big study that would supposedly root out all the voter fraud. At least 25 states have said they won’t or can’t comply — or will not submit all the data Kobach requested, either because they’re restricted by state law, or they don’t trust the commission, which is expected to skew the data to support Republican claims of massive voter fraud, and to recommend restrictions on voting rights.

Among the states that won’t be giving the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” all the data Kris Kobach wants is Kansas, where Secretary of State Kris Kobach explained that under state law, he can’t release the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers. The state will release all other information requested in the letter, like voters’ names, addresses, dates of birth, voting history, party affiliation, and felony criminal history. Kobach explained,

 “If the commission decides that they would like to receive Social Security numbers to a secure site in order to remove false positives, then we would have to double check and make sure Kansas law permits,” Kobach said.

“I know for a fact that this information would be secured and maintained confidentially,” he added in response to security concerns.

He happens to personally know the commission’s co-chair, after all, and he trusts Kris Kobach not to pull any funny stuff.

Several other states, however, know exactly who Kris Kobach is, and have decided not to play along with Kobach, like Virginia, where Gov. Terry McAulliffe issued a statement saying

This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November […] At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, was a bit more blunt. His statement not only said Mississippi wouldn’t comply with the request for voter records, he also told Kobach that while he hadn’t yet received the letter, based on the copies he’d seen, his reply to the commission would be “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”

(emphasis mine)

I think there is a method to Republican madness here: They want to institute nationwide voter suppression, and they are using Trumps ego to push this whole effort along.

Unlike prior Republican Presidents, who had the hubris to believe that they could pick the lock of the minority vote, Trump is personally hurt by the 2.8+ million voter deficit, and really believes that this was from widespread voter fraud.

As such, Trump is the perfect patient zero for the plague of voter suppression.

Who Found Pictures of the Registrar of the Copyright Office Engaging in Carnal Congress with a Goat?

After decades of interpreting copyright in the most bone headed and restrictive way possible, the US Copyright Office has come out in favor of a "Right to Repair".

This means that , which will allow people who own products to repair them, despite licensing terms that lock down the products and attempt to force them to drive them to expensive service arrangements.

John Deer for example, is attempting to force farmers to do even the most basic maintenance on their tractors, oil changes, new spark plugs, etc., at the dealers.

This office literally had to be overruled by an act of Congress, the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, because the office decided that consumers should have no right to unlock the phone that they owned.

I think that what happened was that the interim registrar (the last permanent registrar was fired in part for IP extremism) has realized that some common sense needed to be applied:

Last week, to little fanfare, the US Copyright Office took its first baby steps towards stopping auto-makers wrapping their software in copyright rules.

The decision is important because auto-makers use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's “technical protection measures” (TPMs) provisions to restrict diagnosis and repair to an approved ecosystem.

That's especially galling for farmers in remote locations who have argued that they can't always wait for a factory rep to okay fixes to agricultural machines, while in the more mundane world of automobile mechanics, legitimate repair shops complain that Detroit uses the DMCA to exert market power.

In a lengthy report (PDF) that also canvasses how exceptions to the TPM rules could apply to accessibility technologies, device unlocking, and library archives, the office proposes legislation that sides at least in part with the “right to repair” lobby.

………

Since “bona fide repair and maintenance activities are typically non-infringing”, the report suggests using the DMCA to tie up the repair market wasn't a legitimate use of the law.

Hence “to the extent section 1201 precludes diagnosis, repair, and maintenance activities otherwise permissible under title 17, the Office finds that a limited and properly‐tailored permanent exemption for those purposes, including circumventing obsolete access controls for continued functioning of a device, would be consistent with the statute’s overall policy goals”.

While this sounds like basic common sense, but the application of common sense to IP law has been virtually non-existent over the past 30+ years.

This constitutes a revolutionary shift in culture, even if it is a minor change in policy.

We are finally seeing meaningful push-back against a copyright and patent regime that increases inequality, reduces innovation, and perverts our economy and our society.

I Know That Stereotypes Are Bad, but ………

I was just listening to NPR, and they were talking about the Canada Day celebrations, which is a big deal because this is the sesquicentennial (150^th year) since the founding of the Canadian Confederation.

There was a mention of security precautions being taken, and mention was made of an, "Elite Canadian Anti-terrorism Unit," (This would probably be JTF2) being on alert as a precaution. (No mention of any specific threats.)

I know that this is rank stereotyping, but the image that came into my head was of a bunch of guys in cardigans apologizing profusely.

This is clearly an inaccurate characterization of Canadian soldiers in general, but the image remains in my head.

Does this make me a bad person?