I honestly don't think it was Ted Cruz.Kimmel didn't just win the late night monologue Tuesday night, he won the world Tuesday night.
I don't think Ted Cruz looks at porn. Ted Cruz masturbates to pictures of poor people without health care.
In a stunning move, the House of Representatives on Tuesday approved an amendment to the Make America Secure and Prosperous Appropriations Act that will roll back Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s expansion of asset forfeiture.This is a good, if thoroughly unexpected, development.
Amendment No. 126 was sponsored by a bipartisan group of nine members, led by Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich. He was joined by Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna of California; Washington state’s Pramila Jayapal, a rising progressive star; and Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard.
Civil asset forfeiture is a practice in which law enforcement can take assets from a person who is suspected of a crime, even without a charge or conviction. Sessions revived the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, which allowed state and local police agencies to take assets and then give them to the federal government — which would in turn give a chunk back to local police. This served as a way for these local agencies to skirt past state laws designed to limit asset forfeiture.
The amendment would roll back Sessions’s elimination of the Obama-era reforms.
Some fans in the Monster Seats hung a banner over the wall that said, “Racism Is As American As Baseball.” Security removed them. pic.twitter.com/tVSai9XocY— Pete Abraham (@PeteAbe) September 14, 2017
Fans draped a sign reading “Racism is as American as baseball” over the Green Monster at Fenway Park during the Red Sox-Athletics game Wednesday night.When I first heard about this, I thought that it was a group of white supremacists endorsing racism.
Red Sox spokeswoman Zineb Curran replied with the following statement via email when asked about the incident:
“During the 4th inning of tonight’s game, four fans unfurled a banner over the left field wall in violation of the club’s policy prohibiting signs of any kind to be hung or affixed to the ballpark. The individuals involved were escorted out of Fenway Park.”
According to The Boston Globe, the sign was visible for about two minutes and no arrests were made in connection to the incident.
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One member of the group spoke to CSNNE anonymously Wednesday night, telling the network they expected to be kicked out of Fenway but were surprised by some people’s interpretation that their message wasn’t clear.
“I guess we should have seen that coming, but we also didn’t think of it as an ambiguous message,” the group member said. “It’s kind of telling that it is being interpreted as one.”
Martin Shkreli got slammed into jail Wednesday when a federal judge delivered a poetic punch line to the Pharma Bro’s Hillary Clinton jokes.Am a bad person because his pain amuses me so much?
Brooklyn Federal Judge Kiyo Matsumoto revoked Shkreli’s $5 million bail Wednesday evening, saying his $5,000 bounty on Clinton’s hair was the final straw.
She said his recent Facebook post calling for someone to pluck the ex-presidential candidate’s locks during her recent book tour could “cause a reasonable person to have concern.”
And even if Shkreli wasn’t being violent himself, no one knows what his online devotees were capable of doing, the judge said.
If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.Cory Robin uses this quote to explain his dissatisfaction with American Political Science Association, which has decided to have John Yoo, a man who supported the crushing of the testicles of a child of a terror suspect to extract information.—Victor Klemperer* in his book I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years
The reason Klemperer reserved such special contempt for the professors and intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s was that professors and intellectuals played a special role in bringing on the horrors of the Nazi regime, as Claudia Koonz and other historians have documented. Not only did those professors and intellectuals provide some of the leading arguments for the rise of that regime, but they also served in that regime: as doctors, population experts, engineers, propagandists. And lawyers.The APSA should be ashamed of themselves.
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I fear that with this invitation to Yoo to address our profession, as if he were simply the author of controversial and heterodox opinions rather than the architect of a regime of torture and barbarity, the American Political Science Association has written itself a chapter in those future histories.
How hard can it be to be the chief executive of a privatised British water company? Your customers are determined by geography, your prices set by a regulator and designed to offer ample scope to fund both capital expenditure and to pay returns to your investors. Pretty much all you have to do is to make sure your sewage plants work and to keep the public waterways clear of human waste.This observation is not a surprise, though the source is a bit of a shocker.
Yet even this bare minimum seems to have eluded Martin Baggs, the former boss of Thames Water. He, you might recall, was the man at the corporate stopcock when the utility’s malfunctioning plants spilled so much excrement into the Thames that locals in the Berkshire town of Little Marlow took to referring to the scum-covered surface as “crappucino”. The company was this year fined a record £20m for venting 4.2bn litres of raw sewage into the rivers Thames and Thame between 2012 and 2013.
Not that this escapade unduly crimped Mr Baggs’ career prospects. Despite evidence of negligence in its operations that later led a judge to brand the company’s actions “borderline deliberate”, he not only prospered after its disclosure, but received a rise of 60 per cent in 2015, taking his pay to a princely £2m. He stood down last year, showered with encomiums for his “huge contribution”.
To be fair to Mr Baggs, he is not alone. The boring job of plumbing seems almost an afterthought in determining the rewards of water supremos. Not only is pay uniformly high: Steve Mogford, chief executive of United Utilities, collected £2.8m last year, for instance. But if things go wrong, well, why should a bit of sewage stop those cheques rolling? In 2016, Yorkshire Water was fined £1.7m for polluting a lake near Wakefield and a section of the River Ouse. But that didn’t prevent it handing its boss Richard Flint £1.2m.
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The regulator needs to look again at the generosity of its regime, and its cock-eyed governance. As things stand, water privatisation looks little more than an organised rip-off. Quite why this natural monopoly should not operate through not-for-profit, public interest companies is ever less clear.
The unarticulated presumption, which Sullivan, Litman and Rich are not alone in making, is that Felt—the FBI’s deputy director in June 1972, and subsequently the parking-garage interlocutor who steered Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to reportorial heights—was an honorable, selfless whistleblower intent on exposing the lawlessness rampant in the Nixon White House. Or, as David Remnick spelled out in the New Yorker—echoing Deep Throat’s original hagiographers, Woodward and Bernstein—Felt “believed that the Nixon administration was corrupt, paranoid and trying to infringe on the independence of the bureau.” The president and his top aides ran, Felt believed, “a criminal operation out of the White House, and [Felt] risked everything to guide” the Post reporters. A new biopic about Felt, starring Liam Neeson, is due out on September 29 and shows every sign of continuing to portray Deep Throat as a profound patriot and dedicated FBI lifer.Here's the important thing: Felt's motives do not matter.
But here’s a heretical thought: Mark Felt was no hero. Getting rid of Nixon was the last thing Felt ever wanted to accomplish; indeed, he was banking on Nixon’s continuation in office to achieve his one and only aim: to reach the top of the FBI pyramid and become director. Felt didn’t help the media for the good of the country, he used the media in service of his own ambition. Things just didn’t turn out anywhere close to the way he wanted.
Only recently, more than four decades after Nixon’s downfall, has it become possible to reconstruct Felt’s design and what really happened during those fateful six months following the Watergate break-in. Doing so requires burrowing through a great number of primary documents and government records against the backdrop of a vast secondary literature. Nixon’s surreptitious tape recordings rank first in importance, but only mark the starting point. One has to also research documents from the FBI’s vast Watergate investigation; the bureau’s subsequent internal leak investigation; records from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force; documents from Felt’s own FBI file; and lastly, two unintentionally rewarding books: Mark Felt’s original 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid, and the slightly reworked version published in 2006, A G-Man’s Life. What you’ll end up with is the real story of Deep Throat. And you might be left with this realization: No matter what happens to Donald Trump—whether he’s absolved, exposed or neither—you should hope there’s nobody as duplicitous as Mark Felt manipulating our understanding of Russiagate.
Houston City Councilman Dave Martin, who represents hard-hit Kingwood, had a message for the public about the American Red Cross.This is a recurring theme with the American Red Cross.
"I beg you not to send them a penny," he said at Wednesday's council meeting. "They are the most inept unorganized organization I've ever experienced."
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"Don't waste your money," said Martin. "Give it to another cause."
Martin is not the only public official to go after the Red Cross' response to Harvey.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett has said he asked local nonprofit to set up a shelter at NRG Park in large part because he did not trust the Red Cross to do so.
"The Red Cross could not have done this. They wouldn't have had the wherewithal to do it," Emmett said. "Don't get me wrong, they're out there on the front lines, but I had already seen the difficulty and we needed to get this set up quickly."
The organization also has been faulted for failing to ensure supplies reached area shelters quickly enough. By sunrise Sunday, when much of the Houston area awoke under water, one of the city's two Red Cross shelters could not accept evacuees due to high water and the other had only 200 cots for what turned out to be more than 2,000 people. Cots did not arrive to the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown until after dark Sunday, and shortages there persisted for days.
When Boeing rolled out is 777, it decided that the best way to maximize profits was to recruit potential competitors to be risk sharing partners to minimize its upfront costs.The world’s largest plane makers are testing a seemingly simple formula to smooth production, cut costs and fatten profits: Make more of the parts that go into their jets themselves.
In the wake of United Technologies Corp.’s proposed $23 billion deal to buy Rockwell Collins Inc., that push is taking on more urgency. The deal is the latest in a round of consolidation among the world’s biggest suppliers of aviation parts—something Boeing Co. and European rival Airbus SE have eyed warily.
Earlier this week, Boeing said it might cancel some of its parts contracts if the deal undermines competition further in the aerospace supply chain. Airbus had previously expressed its skepticism over it.
This is not a surprise.
Worried about getting squeezed by the consolidation, Boeing and Airbus have moved to protect themselves by building more of their parts in-house. This month, Boeing will start construction of a new production facility in Sheffield, England, that will make some of its own actuation equipment—motors that help move a wing’s flaps. Airbus, meanwhile, is planning to build some of its own nacelles, the metal casings that house a plane’s engines. United Technologies is one of the world’s largest nacelle suppliers.
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Boeing decided two years ago to make some of its own nacelles after years of buying them. In July, the company also said it is planning to develop and build some aircraft electronics, a market dominated by companies such as Rockwell Collins and Honeywell International Inc.
The wings for a revamped version of Boeing’s new 777 jetliner also will be built at a new plant near Seattle rather bought from a supplier. Boeing bought the wings from a supplier for its last big project, the 787 Dreamliner.
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Bringing production in-house helps level the playing field.
Those parts makers have also traditionally been able to suck out more profit for their components than plane makers like Boeing and Airbus can extract for selling whole aircraft. Profit margins for plane and engine makers have averaged 9% over the past two years, compared with 14% for so-called “tier one” suppliers such as United Technologies and Rockwell Collins, which make finished parts directly for plane makers. Margins come in at 17% for tier 2 suppliers, which provide smaller components for those parts, according to Boston Consulting Group.
"Phew!" Mowry raised his eyebrows.The country has changed, and none of these changes to our benefit, and none of them were really required, but rather the product of mindless over-reaction.
"Finally, let's consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face."
"It nearly happened to me once."
Ignoring that, Wolf went on, "The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn't even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap."
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"However," Wolf went on, "the problem becomes less formidable than it looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge machine into the bargain." He paused, watching the other for effect, continued, "Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall, the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk."
Interestingly enough the memory that sticks with me is the most trivial: When I was driving home that afternoon, the roads were empty.A new survey by political scientists at Stanford University suggests a mostly straightforward answer — with one glaring twist. The study is the first comprehensive look at the political attitudes of wealthy technologists, whose views have long been misunderstood to the point of caricature by many outside the industry. The findings of the study, which is currently under peer review, were presented last week to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.These people are not liberals. These people are not progressives. They are poseurs, and to the degree that the liberals and progressives allow them to exert influence over their agendas, they are working to sabotage themselves.
The survey suggests a novel but paradoxical vision of the future of American politics: Technologists could help push lawmakers, especially Democrats, further to the left on many social and economic issues. But they may also undermine the influence of some of the Democrats’ most stalwart supporters, including labor unions. And they may strive to push Democrats away from regulation on business — including the growing calls for greater rules around the tech industry.
Over all, the study showed that tech entrepreneurs are very liberal — among some of the most left-leaning Democrats you can find. They are overwhelmingly in favor of economic policies that redistribute wealth, including higher taxes on rich people and lots of social services for the poor, including universal health care. Their outlook is cosmopolitan and globalist — they support free trade and more open immigration, and they score low on measures of “racial resentment.”
On most culture-war issues, they are unrepentantly liberal. They oppose restrictions on abortion, favor gay rights, support gun control and oppose the death penalty.
Now for the twist. The study found one area where tech entrepreneurs strongly deviate from Democratic orthodoxy and are closer to most Republicans: They are deeply suspicious of the government’s efforts to regulate business, especially when it comes to labor. They said that it was too difficult for companies to fire people, and that the government should make it easier to do so. They also hope to see the influence of both private and public-sector unions decline.
“You would think that people with enough money to influence the political system would obviously use that influence to increase social and economic inequality in ways that benefit them,” said David Broockman, an assistant professor of political economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a co-author of the study.
“What’s surprising to us,” he continued, “is that you could find this group that says, ‘Actually, our taxes should go up and more money should go to things like universal health care, or that we should do more to protect the environment’ — but at the same time believes that regulations and labor unions are a problem.”
Certain themes of critical importance have been constants in my writing here, in some cases for more than a decade. (See the two collections of Alice Miller essays discussed in this post, for many examples.) One of those themes is captured very accurately in the title of an essay from five years ago that I once again draw to your attention: "The Infinite Human Capacity to Deny the Obvious."(emphasis original)
I was reminded of that article because I recently read still another piece by a well-known "antiwar" writer bemoaning the fact that U.S. policy in Afghanistan has been a miserable failure. Not only that: it's been a miserable failure for 16 years! (The particular article and the specific writer are of no consequence, but I'll probably address a few aspects of this category of analysis in the next few weeks, using that and other examples.)
To call U.S. policy in Afghanistan a failure is, of course, unutterably wrong. Whenever you hear someone peddling this line, you can quickly and safely move along to find an analyst who actually knows what he's talking about. In my article from five years ago linked above, I discuss Robert Higgs and what I call The Higgs Principle. Here is that Principle, direct from Mr. Higgs himself:As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent "failed" policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: follow the money.If U.S. policy in Afghanistan were truly a failure -- a failure, that is, to the actual powers-that-be -- it would have been changed in five years at the outside, and probably sooner. The fact that it has not changed, certainly not in terms of essentials, means that the powers-that-be are achieving precisely what they want. In addition to the benefits identified by Higgs, there is one additional over-arching goal that the damnable powers-that-be share, and believe in to the core of their putrid, twisted little hearts: that the United States is entitled to and must have geopolitical dominance.
Trump hits new low in public opinion — but he's still beating Hillary ClintonAnd she's going on a book tour without an iota of self awareness.—Politico
The sale of nearly $2 million in corporate stock by high-level Equifax executives shortly after the company learned of a major data breach has sparked public outrage that could turn into another hurdle for the credit rating agency.Yeah, sure, "The executives did not know about the breach when they sold their shares."
The sales all occurred before the company publicly reported the breach, a disclosure that quickly sent its stock tumbling. The timing of the sales could attract federal scrutiny, legal experts say, though proving insider trading would be difficult. A company spokeswoman said the executives did not know about the breach when they sold their shares.
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Equifax, a major consumer credit reporting agency, disclosed Thursday that hackers had obtained sensitive information, including Social Security numbers and dates of birth, for 143 million people. The breach began in May and was discovered by the company on July 29. Shortly afterward, three company executives — Chief Financial Officer John W. Gamble; Joseph M. Loughran III, the president of U.S. information solutions; and Rodolfo O. Ploder, the president of workforce solutions — sold large amounts of their shares of Equifax stock.
Federal investigators are probing an internal program, dubbed "Hell," that Uber used to keep tabs on its leading competitor, Lyft, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.I really want to see Travis Kalanick frog marched out of his house by FBI agents in handcuffs.
"Uber created fake Lyft customer accounts, tricking Lyft’s system into believing prospective customers were seeking rides in various locations around a city. That allowed Uber to see which Lyft drivers were nearby and what prices they were offering for various routes," the Journal reports. "The program was also used to glean data on drivers who worked for both companies, and whom Uber could target with cash incentives to get them to leave Lyft."
Federal investigators are reportedly probing "whether 'Hell' constituted unauthorized access of a computer"—which is a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the anti-hacking statute Congress passed in 1986.
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As the Journal points out, Uber is now facing three separate federal investigations. In addition to the "Hell" investigation, Uber is also facing scrutiny for creating a special version of its app to mislead local officials trying to enforce tax regulations. The third investigation is considering whether Uber violated anti-bribery laws.
The organization that oversees the Nobel Peace Prize said Friday the 1991 prize awarded to Myanmar’s Aung Sang Suu Kyi cannot be revoked.I'm wondering where the outrage is over a program of targeted assassination by flying robots, including the deaths of thousands of non combatants hasn't generated a f%$#ing petition.
Olav Njolstad, head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, said in an email to The Associated Press that neither the will of prize founder Alfred Nobel nor the Nobel Foundation’s rules provide for the possibility of withdrawing the honor from laureates.
“It is not possible to strip a Nobel Peace Prize laureate of his or her award once bestowed,” Njolstad wrote. “None of the prize awarding committees in Stockholm and Oslo has ever considered revoking a prize after it has been awarded.”
An online petition signed by more than 386,000 people on Change.org is calling for Suu Kyi to be stripped of her Peace Prize over the persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority.
Suu Kyi received the award for “her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights” while standing up against military rulers.
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Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh have reported being ordered to leave Myanmar under the threat of death. They have described large-scale violence allegedly perpetrated by Myanmar troops and Buddhist mobs that included homes being set on fire and bullets sprayed indiscriminately.
Suu Kyi has dismissed the Rohingya crisis as a misinformation campaign.
