Not a Surprise

Attempting to outflank right-to-repair legislation, John Deere made promises to ease repair of their tractors and other agricultural equipment.

They lied.

This is not a surprise.  Extracting maximum money to the detriment of their customers is a core business strategy for Deere:

US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has sent a letter to John May, CEO of agricultural equipment maker Deere & Company, questioning whether John Deere is living up to the promises it made to support people's right to repair.

And if it's not fulfilling those promises, it may be failing in its obligations under America's Clean Air Act, she added.

In January 2023, following years of legal challenges from farmers wanting to simply fix their own farm equipment outside authorized dealerships, John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF).

The agreement [PDF] calls for the manufacturing giant to provide farmers and independent repair shops with the tools, software, and documentation necessary to fix broken Deere-made agricultural machines, such as tractors and harvesters. In exchange, the AFBF agreed "to refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state 'Right to Repair' legislation" that goes beyond what's promised in the MOU.

Essentially, Deere promised to play nice and help people fix their machines, by providing the tools and support needed, and the federation would back off from pushing for tough laws enshrining the right to repair.

But according to Senator Warren's missive [PDF], dated Wednesday, John Deere has not lived up to those commitments, and the MOU looks like a gambit to sabotage strong right-to-repair legislation, which is being adopted in various states and has the support of the Biden administration. 

John Deere has been promising to play nice for some time, and they never keep their promises.

Stop negotiating, and fire up the lawsuits, lobbying for right to repair laws, and institute administrative actions to make their business plan untenable.

Trusting the company is a losing proposition.

Lovely News

In the journal Nature Medicine, a paper is showing that,"SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells are not durably established in the bone marrow long-lived compartment after mRNA vaccination.

Translated into English, it means that immunity to the disease falls off of a cliff after 3 months.

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) mRNA vaccines are effective at protecting from severe disease, but the protective antibodies wane rapidly even though SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells can be found in the bone marrow (BM). Here, to explore this paradox, we enrolled 19 healthy adults at 2.5–33 months after receipt of a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine and measured influenza-, tetanus- or SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody-secreting cells (ASCs) in long-lived plasma cell (LLPC) and non-LLPC subsets within the BM. Only influenza- and tetanus-specific ASCs were readily detected in the LLPCs, whereas SARS-CoV-2 specificities were mostly absent. The ratios of non-LLPC:LLPC for influenza, tetanus and SARS-CoV-2 were 0.61, 0.44 and 29.07, respectively. In five patients with known PCR-proven history of recent infection and vaccination, SARS-CoV-2-specific ASCs were mostly absent from the LLPCs. We show similar results with measurement for secreted antibodies from BM ASC culture supernatant. While serum IgG titers specific for influenza and tetanus correlated with IgG LLPCs, serum IgG levels for SARS-CoV-2, which waned within 3–6 months after vaccination, were associated with IgG non-LLPCs. In all, our studies suggest that rapid waning of SARS-CoV-2-specific serum antibodies could be accounted for by the absence of BM LLPCs after these mRNA vaccines.

The study does not do a comparison between mRNA and other vaccines, so it is unclear whether this is an artifact of the Covid virus or of the mRNA vaccines, but I'm due for a booster, and I am getting Novavax, and I recommend that you do to.

Remember though, I am an engineer, not a doctor, dammit*, so my advice is simply based on my very flawed gut, and nothing else.

Any shot is better than no shot.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

White People Affirmative Action

California has banned legacy admission at all colleges and universities in the state, including private institutions.

This is a good thing.  Legacy admissions as defined in this law get us people like Jared Kushner:

It will soon be illegal for public and private universities in California to consider an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors when deciding whether to admit them.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a ban on the practice known as legacy admissions, a change that will affect prestigious institutions including Stanford University and the University of Southern California.

California’s law, which will take effect Sept. 1, 2025, is the nation’s fifth legacy admissions ban, but only the second that will apply to private colleges.

………

Like other states, California won’t financially penalize violators, but it will post the names of violators on the state Department of Justice’s website.

California will also add to data reporting requirements that it implemented in 2022, when private colleges had to start sharing the percentage of admitted students who were related to donors and alumni. Schools that run afoul of the new law will also have to report more granular demographic information about their incoming classes to the state, including the race and income of enrolled students as well as their participation in athletics.

Technically, this would unlawful, not illegal. If it were illegal, there would be a possibility of fines and arrests.

When some District Attorney arrest school administrators because they engaged in a criminal conspiracy for doing this, I'll believe that people are serious about enforcing this.

Actually, I'll believe this when we see mass arrests at Stanford University.

And the Strike is Over Suspended

Following an improved offer on wages, the International Longshoremen’s Association has agreed to suspend its strike until January while further negotiations continue.

Basically, I think that the United States Maritime Alliance expected Biden to invoke Taft-Hartley to force the longshoremen back to work, and Bidens strident refusal to do so, basically f%$# no, forced them back to the bargaining table:

The International Longshoremen’s Association agreed on Thursday to suspend a strike that closed down major ports on the East and Gulf Coasts. The move followed an improved wage offer from port employers.

The strike, which the dockworkers’ union began on Tuesday, threatened to weigh on the economy five weeks before national elections. Employers, represented by the United States Maritime Alliance, have offered to increase wages by 62 percent over the course of a new six-year contract, according to a person familiar with negotiations who did not want to be identified because the talks were continuing. That increase is lower than what the union had initially asked for, but much higher than the alliance’s earlier offer.

As an FYI, that's about a 10.1% a year increase per year when you figure in compounding.

In a statement, the union said that it had reached “a tentative agreement on wages” and that its 45,000 members would go back to work, with the current contract extended until Jan. 15. The union said it was returning to the bargaining table “to negotiate all other outstanding issues.” The alliance issued a similar statement.

The agreement came after the White House pressed both sides to reach a deal to end the strike, the union’s first full-scale walkout since 1977. The wage increase is a clear victory for the I.L.A. and its combative president, Harold J. Daggett, a 78-year-old, third-generation dockworker who has led the union since 2011.

 ………

 A 62 percent increase would raise the top longshoremen’s wage to just over $63 per hour at the end of a new six-year contract, from today’s $39 per hour. And at $63 an hour, the wages of East and Gulf Coast longshoremen would slightly exceed those that will be earned by West Coast longshoremen, who belong to a different union, at the end of their contract in 2027.

In the resumed talks, the issue of how much automation can occur at the ports could divide the sides. The union has also been pressing for improved retirement benefits.

Another potential sticking point is the pay of longshoremen who are just starting out and don’t earn the top wage rate. Mr. Daggett’s son, Dennis A. Daggett, a senior official at the I.L.A., said in an interview on Tuesday on a picket line in Bayonne, N.J., that the union wanted to get higher wages for less experienced members.

This is a good thing, though I would have preferred that the union suspend the strike for a shorter period. If Trump wins, they will have to conclude negotiations with the certainty of a Taft-Hartley back to work order on January 21.

Monthly Jobs Report is Out

It is a real stem winder, with the non-farm payroll jumping by 254,000, much higher than the consensus forecast of 150,000, and the unemployment rate fell by 0.1% to 5.1%.

Additionally the jobs games in July and August were revised up, and wages were up 4% year over year vs a 2.5% increase in the consumer price index.

It's good news, unless the Federal reserve chooses to make it bad news.

Wages picked up slightly last month, according to the Labor Department. Average hourly earnings rose 4% from a year earlier, the strongest increase since May. That was well above the pace of inflation, which is positive news for price-pinched consumers. The consumer-price index was up 2.5% in August from a year earlier.

………

Inflationary pressures have eased markedly over the past two years, and the Fed’s focus has shifted more to hiring than price increases. That means the jobs market will play an outsize role in Fed officials’ decisions on the path of interest rates.

Conventional wisdom holds that cooling inflation comes hand-in-hand with a sharp slowdown in the labor market. However, over the past couple of years, U.S. employers have muscled through high interest rates with continued hiring, and inflation has fallen significantly. That combination, if sustained, would amount to a big win for the Fed.

The wage increases are because workers have become more militant, and, because of Covid deaths and long Covid disability, there are fewer workers to take the jobs.

A lot of this may be in response to the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates and implying that further rates are coming down the pipe.

Senator Marco Rubio is claiming that the numbers are fake which is a lie, but we are talking about Marco Rubio, so lying is a mandatory feature.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Filed Under, "Pass the Popcorn"

The Jack Smith filing has been released in redacted form to the public.

There is a lot to go over, but the short version is that the President has no role in elections, and as such attempts to subvert the election are not an official act.

Also, the filing appears to show that Trump knew that he had lost which eliminates even that potential loophole.

Also, I think that it inevitable that former VP Mike Pence will be a witness in the trial. 

When the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged former President Donald J. Trump last year with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, the federal indictment filed in Washington had only one defendant: Mr. Trump himself, who stood accused of working with a small team of conspirators.

But in a court filing unsealed on Wednesday, Mr. Smith drew on the actions of a much larger group to tell the tale of how Mr. Trump lost the race but sought to stay in the White House.

He populated his brief with a sprawling cast of characters — lawyers, longtime Trump aides, campaign operatives, even some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — who all played a supporting role either for or against Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power.

Most of them were not named in the 165-page filing, and were referred to only by numeric monikers, though many of their identities could be divined from details in the brief. And the sheer scope of the crew was evidenced by the fact that the anonymized references started with Person 1 and went all the way to Person 71.

………

Among those characters was Eric Herschmann, a lawyer who had met Mr. Trump through his childhood friend, Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law.

Identified as Person 9 in the brief, Mr. Herschmann started working in the White House as an assistant to the president in August 2020. During the chaotic weeks after Mr. Trump had been defeated, Mr. Herschmann offered what Mr. Smith described as “the unvarnished truth” about the “claims of fraud” that Mr. Trump and his allies were advancing.

……… 

As the brief says, Mr. Herschmann — whose name appears unredacted but slightly misspelled at one point in the document — was aware that two outside consulting firms had looked at and debunked most of the claims. At one point, he warned Mr. Trump that if he brought them into court “they would get slaughtered” because they were “all bullshit.”

………

The brief asserts that Mr. Trump had a conversation with Mr. Bannon a little less than 15 minutes before he called Mr. Pence on Jan. 1.

During that call, Mr. Trump is said in the brief to have told Mr. Pence that if he did not go through with the plans, hundreds of thousands of people were “gonna hate your guts” and were “gonna think you’re stupid.”

First, it's clear, giving Trump's history of stochastic terrorism, that this is an explicit threat.

Second, it makes clear how Pence has to testify.

………

If Mr. Smith’s filing was in many ways a trial brief, setting forth the most detailed picture yet of how Mr. Trump had sought to disrupt the lawful transfer of power, it also had a much more narrow legal purpose: It was sent to the judge in the case, Tanya S. Chutkan, to help her determine how much of the indictment can survive the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling granting Mr. Trump a broad form of immunity for many official acts he took in office.

Which reminds me, we need to start getting serious about reforming the deeply corrupt Supreme Court.

9 Years

That's the sentence given to former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters for election tampering.

It probably won't mean more than 3 years behind bars, but it's a good start:

Tina Peters, a former county election official in Colorado, was sentenced Thursday to nine years behind bars after being found guilty of charges connected to efforts to copy election data from her office as Donald Trump and his allies spread false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and searched for evidence to prove it.

Judge Matthew Barrett, who presided over the sentencing, also ordered Peters, the former Mesa County clerk, to pay thousands of dollars in fines.

Peters, who had asked for probation, emphasized earlier in Thursday’s sentencing that maintaining her innocence was not a form of disrespect of the law, saying, “I’m not a criminal, and I don’t deserve to go to a prison where other people committed heinous crimes.”

But in his sentencing decision, Barrett said Peters used her privilege “to obtain power, a following and fame.”

“You are no hero, you abused your position, and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be a snake oil time and time again,” the judge remarked before handing down the sentence.

That is one seriously pissed off judge.

………

In August, a Colorado jury found Peters guilty on seven of 10 charges, including several counts of attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation.

Prosecutors charged Peters in 2022 and accused her of helping to secretly copy Dominion Voting Systems hard drives by sneaking Conan Hayes, a former professional surfer and purported computer expert, into secure areas of her office in 2021 using someone else’s security badge. Within months, data from her office appeared online and was featured at a symposium held by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who continues to trumpet false claims about elections and seeks to end the use of machines that count ballots.

This sort of sh%$ needs to be slapped down hard.

Not because it reduced confidence in the election, but because what she did could have been, and might very well have been, an attempt to change the vote totals. 

When the Republicans make accusations of election fraud, they are projecting.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unemployment and layoffs


Economic indicatorsInitial unemployment claims rose by 6,000 by 250,000 last week, with continuing claims falling by 1,000 to 1.826 million.

So not a big change, and the Purchasing Manager Index seems to be generally positive.

So it looks like for the next month or so, we won't see any big moves in the economy:

The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits increased marginally last week, but the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Helene in the U.S. Southeast and strikes at Boeing and ports could distort the labor market picture in the near-term.

The report from the Labor Department on Thursday showed the labor market gliding at the end of the third quarter, a state of affairs that could allow the Federal Reserve to be in no rush to deliver large interest rate cuts. The economy also ended the third quarter on solid footing, with another report showing services sector activity rose to the highest level in just over 1-1/2 years in September amid strong growth in new orders.

"For the moment, the labor market looks steady as a rock and the economy appears to have missed falling headlong over the cliff into the depths of recession," said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at FWDBONDS. "Fed officials are unlikely to hurry ahead with aggressive interest rate cuts unless the labor market deteriorates further."

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased by 6,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 225,000 for the week ended Sept. 28. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 220,000 claims for the latest week.

 —

The economy appears to have retained most of its strength from the second quarter. The Institute for Supply Management said in a separate report on Thursday that its non-manufacturing purchasing managers index (PMI) jumped to 54.9 last month, the highest level since February 2023, from 51.5 in August.

A PMI reading above 50 indicates growth in the services sector, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy. While services sector employers are holding back on hiring, workers are also scarce in some industries. The ISM noted that responses from businesses in the survey last month included "employees leaving, and it's tough to find new ones."

I'm not sure what this all means, and trying to make predictions about the economy is a path to madness.

And not the good kind of madness.  I mean the kind of madness that makes you gibber, Tekeli Li!"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Have a Friday Night Video

It's a Schoolhouse Rock type video about Project 2025.

I think that this is more horror than it is comedy.

H/t Boing Boing

In Related News, Water is Wet

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Amazon has illegally refused to bargain with its drivers’ union.

We really need to start prosecuting these rat-f%$#s criminally. 

If Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy spent a few years cooling their heels in Club Fed, or even a few days waiting for bail to be adjudicated, there would be a lot less law breaking.

Whink of it as "Broken Windows Policing" for white people:

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed charges against Amazon, alleging that the e-commerce giant has illegally refused to bargain with a union representing drivers who are frustrated by what they claim are low wages and dangerous working conditions.

Back in August, drivers celebrated what they considered a major win when the NLRB found that Amazon was a joint employer of sub-contracted drivers, cheering "We are Amazon workers!" At that time, Amazon seemed to be downplaying the designation, telling Ars that the union was trying to "misrepresent" a merit determination that the NLRB confirmed was only "the first step in the NLRB’s General Counsel litigating the allegations after investigating an unfair labor practice charge."

But this week, the NLRB took the next step, signing charges soon after Amazon began facing intensifying worker backlash, not just from drivers but also from disgruntled office and fulfillment workers. According to Reuters, the NLRB accused Amazon of "a series of illegal tactics to discourage union activities" organized by drivers in a Palmdale, California, facility.

Amazon has found itself in increasingly hot water ever since the Palmdale drivers joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union in 2021. The NLRB's complaint called out Amazon for terminating its contract with the unionized drivers without ever engaging in bargaining.

Amazon and its executives knew what they were doing, and they made extensive plans to do so.

That's a felony, and is also covered by the RICO statutes, and it's a felony.

Frog march them out of their offices in handcuffs.

Best Healthcare System in the World

The heart transplant program at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center had a problem, the one year survival rate of their program was well below the national average.

Rather than addressing the issues that led to poor performance, they adopted an interesting tactic, they kept patients on life support until the year had passed, boosting their statistics.

This is a classic example of Goodheart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

This is also highly unethical, and likely constitutes criminal fraud:

In 2018, Darryl Young was hoping for a new lease on life when he received a heart transplant at a New Jersey hospital after years of congestive heart failure. But he suffered brain damage during the procedure and never woke up.

The following year, a ProPublica investigation revealed that Young’s case was part of a pattern of heart transplants that had gone awry at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in 2018. The spate of bad outcomes had pushed the center’s percentage of patients still alive one year after surgery — a key benchmark — below the national average. Medical staff were under pressure to boost that metric. ProPublica published audio recordings from meetings in which staff discussed the need to keep Young alive for a year, because they feared another hit to the program’s survival rate would attract scrutiny from regulators. On the recordings, the transplant program’s director, Dr. Mark Zucker, cautioned his team against offering Young’s family the option of switching from aggressive care to comfort care, in which no lifesaving efforts would be made. He acknowledged these actions were “very unethical.”

ProPublica’s revelations horrified Young’s sister Andrea Young, who said she was never given the full picture of her brother’s condition, as did the findings of a subsequent federal regulator’s probe that determined that the hospital was putting patients in “immediate jeopardy.” Last month, she filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the hospital and members of her brother’s medical team.

You know, if we treated crooked doctors and crooked stock brokers with even half of the severity and ferocity that our criminal justice system treats black graffiti artists, these folks would be held without bail awaiting trial.

………

The 2019 CMS investigation determined that Newark Beth Israel’s program placed patients in “immediate jeopardy,” the most serious level of violation, and required the hospital to implement corrective plans. Newark Beth Israel did not agree with all of the regulator’s findings and in a statement at the time said that the CMS team lacked the “evidence, expertise and experience” to assess and diagnose patient outcomes.

The same could be said for the doctors and managers at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

Jail the doctors and the administrators, and shut down their transplant program.  

Simple as that.

Yeah, Still Evil

Remember when Disney said that a years old agreement for a trial membership in Disney+?

Well now Uber is forcing a couple to arbitration because their daughter clicked on a popup for Uber eats.

It turns out that the marketing devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation will be be the SECOND group of mindless jerks up against the wall when the revolution comes:

A New Jersey couple seriously injured when their Uber driver ran a red light and collided with another car has lost a bid to take legal action against the company in court.

John McGinty and Georgia McGinty argue Uber is enforcing an arbitration agreement after their daughter clicked “agree” when presented with updated terms and conditions while ordering food via her mom’s Uber Eats account.

Uber says that Georgia McGinty’s account on its app received a “full-screen pop-up” on several occasions, which required the user to accept updated terms of use before accessing its service.

It comes amid heightened scrutiny around the terms of leading tech platforms. This summer Disney faced a backlash after its attorneys initially argued the terms and conditions a widower agreed to on the Disney+ streaming service protected the company from a wrongful death lawsuit he brought over his wife’s death after eating at a Disney World restaurant.

Last month, a New Jersey court of appeals sided with Uber against the McGintys, allowing the ride-hailing and delivery company to enforce an arbitration agreement requiring the couple to arbitrate their personal injury claims, rather than litigating them in court.

………

The couple added that they were “horrified” that a large corporation like Uber could “avoid being sued in a court of law by injured consumers because of contractual language buried in a dozen-page-long user agreement concerning services unrelated to the one that caused the consumers’ injuries.”

To quote Elvis Costello, " I used to be disgusted and now I try to be amused." 

I am not all surprised by this, but I am still disgusted.

Congress needs to repeal the Federal Arbitration Act.

A Good Start

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is proposing a sweeping changes to the Supreme Court, including adding 6 justices.

This is a good thing:

A sweeping bill introduced by a Democratic senator Wednesday would greatly increase the size of the Supreme Court, make it harder for the justices to overturn laws, require justices to undergo audits and remove roadblocks for high court nominations.

The legislation by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is one of the most ambitious proposals to remake a high court that has suffered a sharp decline in its public approval after a string of contentious decisions and ethics scandals in recent years. It has little chance of passing at the moment, since Republicans have generally opposed efforts to overhaul the court.

Wyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said the goal of the bill is to restore public confidence in a battered institution. He said he hopes to get parts of the bill passed, even if the whole package is not embraced by lawmakers.

………

The bill’s most significant measure would increase the number of justices from nine to 15 over the course of 12 years. The staggered format over two or three administrations is aimed at diminishing the chance that one political party would pack the courts with its nominees.

………

The bill would also require a ruling by two-thirds of the high court and the circuit courts of appeals, rather than a simple majority, to overturn a law passed by Congress. Wyden said the current court has been too quick to discard precedent and curtail rights by narrow majorities.

The legislation would also require Supreme Court nominees to be automatically scheduled for a vote in the Senate if their nominations have lingered in committee for more than 180 days.

The measure would prevent senators from blocking a president’s nominees by refusing to hold a vote on them, as then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did after President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016.

………

Another provision in Wyden’s bill would expand the number of federal judicial circuits from 13 to 15, adding more than 100 district court judges and more than 60 appellate-level judges.

Supreme Court justices must report income, dividends, property sales and gifts, among other things, but the bill would bolster financial checks, disclosures and other transparency measures. It would require the IRS to initiate an audit of the justices’ tax returns each year, release the results and make the tax filings public. Nominees to the court would have to disclose three years of tax returns.

It's a good start, but considering the blatant corruption on the court, I'd like to see criminal investigations and justices being marched out of their offices in handcuffs.

 

Headline of the Day

MAGA Is Claiming “Political Violence” Over a Giant Nude Trump Statue

—The New Republic

Seriously, the MAGAts are such snowflakes. 

You can get images at the link, but I am not posting here.

Just let me say that the anonymous artists have depicted him as less than, "Heroic."

It's On

For the first time in 47 years, Biden has flatly ruled out invoking Taft-Hartley to stop the strike, and is accusing the shipping companies, particularly foreign ones, as profiteering: 

Earlier today, over 45,000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) went on strike against the United States Maritime  Alliance(USMX), an association of various shipping employers dominated by multinational shippers.

The strike was the first time that workers in East Coast ports went on strike since 1977.

Unlike previous decades, when the presidential administration would invoke Taft-Hartley to stop a strike, the Biden Administration has vowed not to do this.

"There's collective bargaining, and I don't believe in Taft-Hartley," Biden told reporters on Monday.

………

"We're gonna win this f%$#ing thing," said ILA President Harold Daggett at a rally of dockworkers earlier today. "Trust me, they can't survive too long and we're gonna get what the f*ck we deserve. Believe me."

(%$# mine)

………

As a Vice President of the ILA, who has been at the table with the port employers, Riley says he is impressed by the way the Biden Administration has handled things.

Biden has publicly called out the port employer association United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), whose board is dominated by foreign-flag carriers Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), Maersk, CMA CGM, and Cosco Shipping.  

"Now is not the time for ocean carriers to refuse to negotiate a fair wage for these essential workers while raking in record profits," Biden said in a public statement, "My Administration will be monitoring for any price gouging activity that benefits foreign ocean carriers, including those on the USMX board."

Even behind closed doors, Riley says that Biden has applied heavy pressure on the foreign owned carriers at the bargaining table.

Here's hoping that the ILA has the USMX's lunch.

BTW, the New York Times coverage is horrible, with the reporters (and their editors) attempting to portray the longshoremen as pampered princesses.

As Atrios says, that f%$#ing paper. 

No clue about the potential repercussions politically though.

God Help Me

I'm desperately trying to wrap things up at work before I take two days off for Rosh Hashanah, so I ended up leaving work late, so I had to drive home, Sober listening toe the Vice Presidential debate.

When I got home, I just wasn't up to catching up on the booze, so I listened to the whole thing while I went through my blogroll for interesting stories, again I was Sober.

The horror ………

My overall take is that Vance was glib but evasive, and, yes,  kind of weird, and that Walz appeared very sincere.

The moderators were crap, but not as bad crap as the white hot dense neutron star of awfulness that was Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at the CNN debate between Biden and Trump.

In terms of providing a summary as to the effect, I'm probably not a good person for this.

A lot of people seem to find the candidates telling their personal life stories to justify policies to be a positive thing, and I simply find it contrived and meaningless.

Vance did this more often than Walz, but they both did it a lot, and it pissed me off.

Also, I found that they were far too solicitous toward each other, and so they minimized the policy differences between them.

That being said, even while Vance was more disciplined than Trump (So are my cats in the presence of catnip) I think that you still got the Opus Dei adjacent weirdness that has been a feature for him for a rather long time.

Who won?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Why Yes, Academic Economists Are Corrupt

In fact, this is what the theories of most economists would predict.  They act in a manner which serves their own personal interest, which includes shilling for monopolists and other rich pigs.

After 40 years of rampant corporate crime, there's a new sheriff in town: Jonathan Kanter was appointed by Biden to run the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and he's overseen 170 "significant antitrust actions" in the past 2.5 years, culminating in a court case where Google was ruled to be an illegal monopolist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Kanter's work is both extraordinary and par for the course. As Kanter said in a recent keynote for the Fordham Law Competition Law Institute’s 51st Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy, we're witnessing an epochal, global resurgence of antitrust:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-fordham-competition-law-0

Kanter's incredible enforcement track record isn't just part of a national trend – his colleagues in the FTC, CFPB and other agencies have also been pursuing an antitrust agenda not seen in generations – but also a worldwide trend. Antitrust enforcers in Canada, the UK, the EU, South Korea, Australia, Japan and even China are all taking aim at smashing corporate monopolies. Not only are they racking up impressive victories against these giant corporations, they're stealing the companies' swagger. After all, the point of enforcement isn't just to punish wrongdoing, but also to deter wrongdoing by others.

………

As welcome as this antitrust renaissance is, it prompts an important question: why didn't we enforce antitrust law for the 40 years between Reagan and Biden?

That's what Kanter addresses the majority of his keynote to. The short answer is: crooked academic economists took bribes from monopolists and would-be monopolists to falsify their research on the impacts of monopolists, and made millions (literally – one guy made over $100m at this) testifying that monopolies were good and efficient.

These were not bribes, they were economic incentives, exactly the sort of economic incentives that right wing economists are always crowing about.

………

This assault on reason itself is at the core of Kanter's critique. He starts off by listing three cases in which academic economists allowed themselves to be corrupted by the monopolies they studied:

i. George Mason University tricked an international antitrust enforcer into attending a training seminar that they believed to be affiliated with the US government. It was actually sponsored by the very companies that enforcer was scrutnizing, and featured a parade of "experts" who asserted that these companies were great, actually.

ii. An academic from GMU – which receives substantial tech industry funding – signed an amicus brief opposing an enforcement action against their funders. The academic also presented a defense of these funders to the OECD, all while posing as a neutral academic and not disclosing their funding sources.

iii. An ex-GMU economist, Joshua Wright, submitted a study defending Qualcomm against the FTC, without disclosing that he'd been paid to do so. Wright has elevated undisclosed conflicts of interest to an art form:

That's not a conflict of interest, it's a business model?  What are you, a communist?

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/google-lawyer-secret-weapon-joshua-wright-c98d5a31

Kanter is at pains to point out that these three examples aren't exceptional. The economics profession – whose core tenet is "incentives matter" – has made it standard practice for individual researchers and their academic institutions to take massive sums from giant corporations. Incredibly, they insist that this has nothing to do with their support of monopolies as "efficient."

Weep for the poor misunderstood corrupt economist. 

They must be crying all the way to the bank.

Headline of the Day

When Odious Foreign Policy Elites Rally Around Harris

— Responsible Statecraft

When Dick Cheney endorses you, you are doing something wrong.

Efforts to bolster the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris by the D.C. foreign policy establishment kicked into overdrive over the course of the past week with the near simultaneous release of two open letters signed by hundreds of former U.S. national security officials.

It is an accelerated version of previous campaigns in 2016 and 2020, where ex-officials and military officers on both sides of the aisle vocalizing major opposition to Trump offer to give national security cred to the Democratic candidate — in this case Harris. For their part, the candidate virtually ignores that many of these endorsements are in many cases coming from odious individuals, including architects of wars and interventions that Democrats have openly criticized as stains on recent American history.

………

Critics of course point out that many of these people are the same Washington creatures who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited from them for 20 years straight — and until this day support cruel, authoritarian dictators when convenient to U.S. policy. They are not wrong.

………

Yet for the most part, the letter carried with it the odor of the consensus minded War Party, if not 9/11-era neoconservatism. In the past this would have been a problem for traditionally liberal and progressive outlets, but Mother Jones and the New Republic were quick to applaud the letter as a “win” for the Harris campaign. Not surprisingly, only The Nation has called out their fellow liberals and progressives for making common cause with the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, both of whom have also endorsed Harris in recent days (except for columnist Joan Walsh, who found Liz Cheney's endorsement of Harris "strangely moving," writing, "Liz, I told you we could find common ground. Let’s have a cup of coffee. Or even a beer?"

………

The second letter, boasting 700 signers and released on September 22 by the group National Security Leaders 4 America, is a more serious effort if only because the caliber of people, whether you agree or disagree with them, is far higher.

………

While the signatories were mainly retired generals, flag officers, and diplomats, the letter boasted its own share of armchair militarists, very much including the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The inclusion of a number of the most reckless and irresponsible civilian national security leaders of our time only serves to dilute the seriousness of the message — any letter featuring John Brennan, Victoria Nuland, Michael McFaul and Leon Panetta is one that can and should be safely ignored.

 One hopes, in private at least, that Harris is embarrassed.

Newsom Sucks

It appears that the California Governor decided that campaign donations from agribusiness are more important than farm workers dying of heat stroke.

His decision is not surprising, given that he has a record of favoring the haves over the have nots.

Remember this when he wants to run for President in 2028 or 2032.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced today he has vetoed a bill to bolster farmworkers’ heat illness claims as they face the increasing dangers of extreme heat.

The unique proposal would have made it easier for farmworkers to get workers’ compensation when claiming they suffered heat illness on the job. Senate Bill 1299 was pitched by the United Farm Workers, which said it was needed to supplement weakened enforcement of the state’s workplace heat safety rules.

In his veto message, Newsom wrote the enforcement of heat safety rules should be done only by the state’s workplace safety agency, the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) and not be determined by the workers’ compensation system.

The outdoor heat rules, in place for nearly 20 years, require employers to provide shade, water and rest breaks for outdoor workers and further monitor them for signs of heat illness in high-risk jobs like agriculture and construction. The state this year added similar rules for indoor workers.

But the understaffed Cal/OSHA has in recent years conducted 1,000 fewer heat inspections of worksites a year, and issued hundreds fewer violations, compared to pre-pandemic, CalMatters reported this summer. That’s despite heat waves in California growing longer and more intense.

The United Farm Workers said SB 1299 would have forced employers to comply with the heat rules, by more strictly tying them to liability for workers’ compensation claims. The bill would have required workers’ comp judges to presume farmworkers who claim heat illness developed it at work.

Keep Him Out of the Hall of Fame

Baseball superstar Pete Rose has has died at age 83.

While there is no denying that Rose was a generational talent, but he gambled on baseball games both as a player and as a coach, and he was banned from baseball, and as such is ineligible for the Hall of Fame.

This ban should remain, not because he bet, but because he bet on baseball.

While there are many athletes who have done contemptible things, racism and bigotry, partner abuse, drug abuse, and murder, but these are crimes against the society as a whole, they are not crimes against the sport.

He keeps his record, the most hits of any ballplayer ever, but he should never be readmitted to baseball or installed to Cooperstown.

Linkage

• Opinion | Israel’s Pager Attacks Have Changed the World (New York Times) Bruce Schneier, makes the obvious observation, "Developed countries like the United States will be especially vulnerable, simply because of the sheer number of vulnerable devices we have."
• Delivery Robot Knocked Over Pedestrian, Company Offered ‘Promo Codes’ to Apologize (404 Media) This robot struck the pedestrian, repeatedly, and they are offering some coupons. We really need to start arresting Tech Bros.
• Linux boots in 4.76 days on the Intel 4004 (Ars Technica) The 4 bid Intel 4004 is generally thought to be the first microprocessor. (Processor on a single chip) It's not, that was actually the F-14 Central Air Data Computer, but it was the first commercial microprocessor.  In an extremely literal example of too much free time, someone booted Linux on the chip.  It took a while.
• The Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece (The Nation) Marx was wrong about a lot, but he completely changed how we approach economics, and how we run the world.
• EU state declares war on beavers (RT) Poland claiming that beavers are worsening flooding (Beavers in fact do the opposite) is doing this, which is a pity, a little beaver is good for everyone. 
• Progressives Sound Alarm as Harris Courts Crypto Industry (Common Dreams) Yeah, this is concerning.  Crypto a scam, its promoters are psychopaths, and this does not bode well for a future Harris administration.
• The Scourge of the Long Train (Pat Garofalo) Trains are now routinely longer than a mile, and can completely divide an area for hours at a time, and it is killing people, even when it does not result in accidents. Deregulation kills.

A well deserved take-down of tech bros claiming to invent sh%$ that already exists

Get the F%$#ing Vaccine

No, I am not referring to the Covid vaccine, I am referring to the HPV vaccine. 

A historic new study out of Scotland shows the real-world impact of vaccines against the human papillomavirus: The country has detected no cases of cervical cancer in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.

Many previous studies have shown that HPV vaccines are extremely effective in preventing cervical cancer. But the study, published on Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the first to monitor a national cohort of women over such a long time period and find no occurrence of cervical cancer.

(Emphasis mine)

………

The authors of the Scotland study monitored the records of all women born between 1988 and 1996 who were eligible for cancer screening, about 450,000 women. Of that group, 40,000 were vaccinated between the ages of 12 and 13, and 124,000 received the vaccines at or after 14 years of age. The remaining women, nearly 300,000, were not vaccinated.

No cases of cervical cancer were found among the women who were vaccinated before they turned 14, even if they had only received one or two doses of the vaccine rather than the full, three-dose protocol. Also noteworthy is that women who received the three-dose protocol between the ages of 14 and 22 also benefited significantly. While some cases of cervical cancer were recorded in this group, the incidence (3.2 cases per 100,000 women) was two and a half times lower than among unvaccinated women (8.4 cases per 100,000 women).

………

The types of vaccine administered to the cohorts monitored in the study changed as newer ones became available, covering more types of HPV. Until 2012, the vaccine in use was the bivalent Cervarix, targeting HPV 16 and 18. Then the quadrivalent Gardasil was administered until 2023, when the nonavalent Gardasil 9 was introduced.

This is why it’s still possible that cervical cancers may still arise even in vaccinated women, caused by the HPV strains not targeted by the earlier vaccines. “There are obviously other HPV types that cause cancer,” Palmer said, noting that the current results don’t mean cases of cervical cancers, caused by less high-risk strains of HPV, won’t emerge in the analyzed cohort in the future.

It should be noted that boys as well as girls should get the vaccine for two reasons, first, it mitigates the spread of HPV, and second, HPV associated penile cancer is rather common.

It is never too late to get the shot, but the sweet spot is 9-14 years old.

Headline of the Day

A “Biosafety” Organization Partnering With Dr. Jay Bhattacharya To Guard Against Viruses Is Like A Zebra Teaming Up With A Lion To Promote Vegetarianism

—Science-Based Medicine

It should be understood that Jay Bhattachary is an antivax doctor, who has argued against vaccinating children and was a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, which suggested that no measures at all should be taken and that herd immunity would result in 3 months.

He continues to maintain this.

In a previous article, I discussed scientists who believe that allegedly leaking SARS-CoV-2 from a lab was one of the greatest crimes in human history, but that purposefully spreading it was merely a forgivable oopsie. Specifically, I discussed the partnership between Biosafety Now, an organization that purports to be dedicated to preventing a potential pandemic, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an anti-vaccine doctor who partnered with a pro-tobacco, child-labor advocate to deliberately spread SARS-CoV-2 during an actual pandemic. A “biosafety” organization partnering with Dr. Bhattacharya to guard against viruses is like a zebra teaming up with a lion to promote vegetarianism.

Dr. Bhattacharya, a member of the Board of Directors at Biosafety Now, identified two core problems with SARS-CoV-2: 

1. It likely came from a lab
2. Not enough unvaccinated people contracted it

………

Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff are not merely wrong. They are charlatans and quacks who are dispensing deadly advice, and who need to be held accountable for their role in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

This man is a dangerous quack.

Another Reason to Oppose the Death Penalty

The case of Iwao Hakamada, who was on death row for 46 years based on fabricated evidence.

An 88-year-old man who is the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been acquitted by a Japanese court, after it found that evidence used against him was fabricated.

Iwao Hakamada, who was on death row for almost half a century, was found guilty in 1968 of killing his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.

He was recently granted a retrial amid suspicions that investigators may have planted evidence that led to his conviction for quadruple murder.

The 46 years spent on death row has taken a heavy toll on Hakamada's mental health, though, meaning he was unfit to attend the hearing where his acquittal was finally handed down.

Hakamada's case is one of Japan's longest and most famous legal sagas, and has attracted widespread public interest, with some 500 people lining up for seats in the courtroom in Shizuoka on Thursday.

As the verdict was handed down, Hakamada’s supporters outside the court cheered “banzai" - a Japanese exclamation that means "hurray".

A note to the BBC editors, you do not need to tell people what, "Banzai," means.  We know.

………

A former professional boxer, Hakamada was working at a miso processing plant in 1966 when the bodies of his employer, the man’s wife and two children were recovered from a fire at their home in Shizuoka, west of Tokyo. All four had been stabbed to death.

Authorities accused Hakamada of murdering the family, setting fire to their home and stealing 200,000 yen in cash.

Hakamada initially denied having robbed and murdered the victims, but later gave what he came to describe as a coerced confession following beatings and interrogations that lasted up to 12 hours a day.

This pattern of intimidation and violence by law enforcement is the rule rather than the exception in Japan, as Human Rights Watch has observed.  (HRW called it the, "Hostage justice system.")

Abuse of the law is unavoidable in law enforcement, adding to that the possibility of state sanctioned murder makes it worse.

Support Your Local Police

The Department of Justice has determined that police in Lexington, Mississippi systematically target black people for arrest and fines.

Basically, they were a heavily armed criminal enterprise running a shake-down racket:

A tiny police department in Lexington, Miss., whose chief was fired two years ago for using a racial epithet, has engaged in the systemic use of excessive force, jailed suspects improperly and targeted Black people, the Justice Department said in a report released Thursday.

The results of a nearly 11-month federal civil rights investigation found that the Lexington police force, which has fewer than 10 officers, pursued overly aggressive tactics in response to relatively minor infractions, in part as a strategy to drive up revenue through fines and processing fees.

During the past several years, the police department’s revenue grew sevenfold in a jurisdiction in one of the poorest counties in the nation, as officers routinely violated suspects’ civil rights, federal authorities said.

Among the findings of the federal probe was that the Lexington police jailed people who were unable to pay fines, conducted stops and searches without probable cause, and violated free speech rights of residents who criticized the police department.

………

“In America, being poor is not a crime, but in Lexington, their practices punish people for poverty,” [assistant attorney general for the civil rights division Kristen] Clarke said at a news conference. She added: “For too long, this department has been playing by its own rules and operating with impunity. It’s time for this to end.”

………

All told, fines and fees have supported more than one-quarter of the police department’s budget, amounting to an average of $1,400 for every one of the town’s 1,200 residents, federal officials said. There are a total of $1.7 million in outstanding fines that have yet to be paid.

The police “turned the jail into the kind of debtor’s prison that Charles Dickens wrote about in his novels written in the 1800s — only this happened in Mississippi in 2024,” [U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Todd] Gee said.

If this ends with nothing more than a requirement to, "Go forth and sin no more," then this will be a failure.

The officers must be tried as the criminals that they are.

They Are Pounding the Table

Does this show to you that it is easy not to use Google when buying or selling ads?There is an old saying in the law, "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table."

It appears that the lawyers representing Google in its monopoly trial over its advertising business realize that they have nothing.

Google wound down its defense in the US Department of Justice's ad tech monopoly trial this week, following a week of testimony from witnesses that experts said seemed to lack credibility.

The tech giant started its defense by showing a widely mocked chart that Google executive Scott Sheffer called a "spaghetti football," supposedly showing a fluid industry thriving thanks to Google's ad tech platform but mostly just "confusing" everyone and possibly even helping to debunk its case, Open Markets Institute policy analyst Karina Montoya reported.

"The effect of this image might have backfired as it also made it evident that Google is ubiquitous in digital advertising," Montoya reported. "During DOJ’s cross-examination, the spaghetti football was untangled to show only the ad tech products used specifically by publishers and advertisers on the open web."

One witness, Marco Hardie, Google's current head of industry, was even removed from the stand, his testimony deemed irrelevant by US District Judge Leonie Brinkema, Big Tech On Trial reported. Another, Google executive Scott Sheffer, gave testimony Brinkema considered “tainted,” Montoya reported. But perhaps the most heated exchange about a witness' credibility came during the DOJ's cross-examination of Mark Israel, the key expert that Google is relying on to challenge the DOJ's market definition.

………

On cross-examination, [DoJ attorney Aaron] Teitelbaum called Israel out as a "serial 'expert' for companies facing antitrust challenges" who "always finds that the companies 'explained away' market definition," Big Tech on Trial posted on X. Teitelbaum even read out quotes from past cases "in which judges described" Israel's "expert testimony as 'not credible' and having 'misunderstood antitrust law.'"

………

Perhaps most damaging, Teitelbaum asked Israel to confirm that "80 percent of his income comes from doing this sort of expert testimony," suggesting that Israel seemingly depended on being paid by companies like Jet Blue and Kroger-Albertsons—and even previously by Google during the search monopoly trial—to muddy the waters on market definition. Lee Hepner, an antitrust lawyer with the American Economic Liberties Project, posted on X that the DOJ's antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, has grown wary of serial experts supposedly sowing distrust in the court system. 

I think that I need to be clear that I am not a disinterested observer.

I want Google to get taken down, not just broken up, but I want Google executives to be charged criminally for conspiracy.

I want to see Google crushed and driven before the DoJ and hear the lamentations of their women.

 

They Got Him

The toll so farYesterday, I heard that Israel had launched an airstrike at Hezbollah headquarters in an attempt to kill its leader Hassam Nasrallah.

Today, at synagogue, our rabbi announced that the strike had been successful, and he was dead.

Thankfully, I had enough self-possession not to pump my fist in the air as a celebratory gesture, which says something about my state of mind.

That being said, I think that it is highly likely that Hezbollah's ability to prosecute this conflict will be constrained for the short term, but not in the long term.

In the long term, any effects on Hezbollah and its conflict with Israel will be a function of what policies are adopted by new leadership of the party.

That last bit, "The party," is an important part of any calculus.

Hezbollah is not a militia, it is a polity that operates a militia, and as such, the militia is a tool of the party. (It is a fact of life in Lebanon that political parties need to have an armed wing)

As to what the policies of Hezbollah under new leadership will be, damned if I know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As to Iran's relationship to, and support of Hezbollah, is likely to be largely unchanged.

Iran's primary justification for supporting Hezbollah is not as a part of making war on Israel, but rather that it sees itself as a defender of Shia Muslim communities across the world.

As such, Iran will likely to provide similar levels of support.

I should note here that this sort of imperative is not unique to Iran.

In France, for example, there is broad consensus across their polity that France has a moral obligation to support the French language and French culture in its former colonial possessions.

In the United States, there is a similar consensus that it must be the indispensable nation, which has led America into many self-destructive and expensive adventures.

In the long run, I expect the conflict to continue, and I expect that Benjamin Netanyahu (יִמַּח שְׁמו) to continue to be the greatest threat that Israel faces for its continued survival.

It's going to get worse before it gets better.

Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary-General of Hezbollah and one of Israel's most formidable enemies, was killed on Friday in a massive Israeli airstrike on Beirut. Israel confirmed his death on Saturday morning.

………

Nasrallah, 64, led Hezbollah for 32 years, since Israel assassinated his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, in 1992. His charismatic leadership and political savvy made him one of the most influential figures in Lebanon and the wider Middle East.

The Israeli strike on Hezbollah's headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut also killed the commander of the organization's southern front, Ali Karaki, as well as the commander of the Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, Abbas Nilforushan.

According to estimates by Israeli defense officials, about 300 people were killed in the air force strike. Some of the victims were in nearby buildings. IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari said that the facility that was targeted is located underneath residential buildings. 

Nice to See When Someone is Dragged Kicking and Screaming Into Doing the Right Thing

In this case, it is the game distribution service Steam, which has removed its requirement for arbitration from its subscriber agreement.

This was not out of the goodness of its heart, it is that a number of law firms have been recruiting thousands of plaintiffs for file arbitration through them, at a cost of $3,000.00 per filer to stream.

All the law firm does is get the people to take them on as counsel, and then they do bulk arbitration requests, at a cost to the company of $3 million per thousand users.

Said law firm then suggests that perhaps settling for only $2500.00 or $2,800.00 might be a good path. 

Valve Corporation, tired of paying arbitration fees, has removed a mandatory arbitration clause from Steam's subscriber agreement. Valve told gamers in yesterday's update that they must sue the company in order to resolve disputes.

The subscriber agreement includes "changes to how disputes and claims between you and Valve are resolved," Steam wrote in an email to users. "The updated dispute resolution provisions are in Section 10 and require all claims and disputes to proceed in court and not in arbitration. We've also removed the class action waiver and cost and fee-shifting provisions."

The Steam agreement previously said that "you and Valve agree to resolve all disputes and claims between us in individual binding arbitration." Now, it says that any claims "shall be commenced and maintained exclusively in any state or federal court located in King County, Washington, having subject matter jurisdiction."

………

One likely factor in Valve's decision to abandon arbitration is mentioned in a pending class-action lawsuit over game prices that was filed last month in US District Court for the Western District of Washington. The Steam users who filed the suit previously "mounted a sustained and ultimately successful challenge to the enforceability of Valve's arbitration provision," their lawsuit said. "Specifically, the named Plaintiffs won binding decisions from arbitrators rendering Valve's arbitration provision unenforceable for both lack of notice and because it impermissibly seeks to bar public injunctive relief."

Mandatory arbitration clauses are generally seen as bad for consumers, who are deprived of the ability to seek compensation through individual or class-action lawsuits. But many Steam users were able to easily get money from Valve through arbitration, according to law firms that filed the arbitration cases over allegedly inflated game prices.

………

Valve used to prefer arbitration because few consumers brought claims and the process kept the company's legal costs low. But in October 2023, Valve sued a law firm in an attempt to stop it from submitting loads of arbitration claims on behalf of gamers.

Valve's suit complained that "unscrupulous lawyers" at law firm Zaiger, LLC presented a plan to a potential funder "to recruit 75,000 clients and threaten Valve with arbitration on behalf of those clients, thus exposing Valve to potentially millions of dollars of arbitration fees alone: 75,000 potential arbitrations times $3,000 in fees per arbitration is two hundred and twenty-five million dollars."

(Emphasis original)

Nice to see that this tactic is working.

Now let's see the class action suits.

I Expect Nothing Less from ASSLaw

Ilya Somin, a right-wing professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, (It was originally called the Antonin Scalia School of Law, but the changed the name when they realized what it spelled) has released a paper titled, "The Presumptive Case for Organ Markets," where he argues that people should be allowed to sell their organs, most notably kidneys.

Among his arguments is that laws against selling organs are an affront to the concept of bodily autonomy.

Yeah, this guy is spouting off about bodily autonomy when he was defending the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade.

F%$# him with Cheney's Dick.

I Believe that is Legalese for, "You Can Try, You Pathetic C%$#s"

As you may be away, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith filed a briefdescribing the evidence evidence related to the Donald Trump sedition case yesterday.

He asked for, and got, permission to file a brief that is far longer than is customary, as much as 180 pages as opposed to the normal 45 page brief.

One of the questions is whether this brief will be released to the public in whole or in part, and now federal Judge Tanya Chutkan has given the Trump lawyers until Tuesday to offer an argument to keep the information under seal.

Let's see ……… 180 page brief ……… 2½ working days or 4½ calendar days to make an argument to keep this information out of the public eye.

I'm an engineer, and not a lawyer, dammit,* but it does seem to me that Chutkin is disinclined to take any arguments made by the Trump legal team seriously.

This is not a sign of bias, but rather an argument that the Trump legal team has not made any arguments that have come even close to being serious:

A federal judge on Friday gave lawyers for Donald Trump four days to challenge the partial public release of a nearly 200-page special counsel filing on why the former president can be criminally prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In an order posted on the public docket of Trump’s criminal case in Washington, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan gave Trump until noon Tuesday to dispute the government proposals on what to disclose and keep secret in its massive filing, and until Oct. 10 to object to similar proposed redactions in four attached documentary exhibits. The filing is a key part of the criminal case alleging Trump illegally attempted to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory, and it was expected to reveal new details of the evidence investigators had gathered.

Prosecutors said the main filing could include roughly 90 pages of new and previously disclosed facts explaining why Trump should still face trial after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in July that gave presidents broad immunity from prosecution for their official actions.

Chutkan also made public a request by prosecutors to keep certain sensitive information secret in its opening immunity briefing filed Thursday. That sensitive information includes the names of witnesses other than those already identified in Trump’s 36-page indictment — such as former vice president Mike Pence — grand jury testimony, materials obtained through sealed search warrants, transcripts and reports of witness interviews, and materials obtained from other governmental entities, prosecutors wrote. 

I think that Chutkan is likely to approve a motion keeping things like witness names secret, because Trump and his attorneys have already engaged in stochastic terrorist threats against witnesses when their names were revealed, as well as prosecutors, Judge Chutkan, other judges, the families of judges and prosecutors, and employees of the various courts.

This certainly won't result in a trial before the election, but I'd love to see the redacted version of the filing in the next few weeks.

Linkage

• Banana wine: Malawi's growing industry to beat climate change (BBC) I am definitely going to have to try this.  They make the wine because the bananas are rpiening too early.
• Reassessing William the Conqueror (History Today) Much like Richard III, he probably got a bum wrap.
• Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder (Dave Karpf ) Money quote, "Graham’s cultural influence has been elevating and exalting “founders” as a unique and special boys. And the broader tech industry is worse off as a result."
• The Worst Magazine In America (Current Affairs) The Atlantic, of course.  Because they pretend to have ideas when it is all just click bait and mindless contrarianism.
• How Elon Musk’s Security Detail Has Grown Following Death Threats and Stalkers (New York Times) It is not that there are not real threats, but Musk's detail has grown largely grown with his increasing paranoia and his self importance.
• We Spent $20 To Achieve RCE And Accidentally Became The Admins Of .MOBI (watchTowr Labs) To quote the case Pillars v. R.J.Reynolds, "Someone has been very careless."
• How to kill your tech company (Elon Musk edition) (The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places) I love this bit, "No, it's much bigger than that. It's the equivalent of the Coca Cola Company inventing New Coke, then marketing it with the idea what if we put pictures of brutally murdered children on every can."
• Tiny Hippos And Elephants Once Roamed Cyprus, Until Humans Arrived (ScienceAlert) Now I want a Shetland Elephant.
• What Happened to Easter Island? New Research Refutes Best-Selling Population Collapse Theory 
•  (Sci Tech Daily) Genetic analysis shows that there was no population collapse, at least not before the European colonizers arrived.
• Cat Missing in Yellowstone Returns Home to California After an 800-Mile Journey (New York Times) Your feel good story of the day.

Something from the TV Series Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman Season.  Not great TV, but fun, if a bit contrived:

Well, Now We Have the Indictment

The details have been released, and he is a corrupt sanctimonious rat-f%$#.

And to think, just a few months ago, the chattering classes were calling him the future of the Democratic Party, because 

Mayor Eric Adams is accused of trading his power for international flights, luxurious hotel stays and illegal campaign contributions in a 57-page federal indictment unsealed on Thursday morning.

A federal grand jury indicted him on five counts: conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national and bribery. The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York is prosecuting the case.

The charging papers are peppered with text messages between Adams, a staffer, a member of his campaign, Turkish nationals and others who prosecutors say attempted to circumvent campaign finance laws and hide misconduct.

In one case, the indictment describes a 2021 exchange between a staffer who was trying to book a last-minute flight to Istanbul for the mayor, and a Turkish airline manager who offered to charge the mayor just $50 for tickets worth about $15,000.

………

Prosecutors allege Adams sought and accepted illegal contributions from foreign nationals dating back to 2016, when he was Brooklyn borough president; that he used the illegal contributions to leverage millions of dollars in public matching funds; and that he continued the scheme after he was elected mayor and into his re-election campaign. The charging papers also chronicle extensive efforts prosecutors say Adams and others undertook to hide the pay-for-play scheme. 

………

The lengthy indictment tells a sweeping tale about a politician who for years has accepted lavish gifts from Turkish nationals who expected — and sometimes demanded — that he use his influence to their benefit. The U.S. attorney’s office accuses Adams of taking business-class plane tickets worth tens of thousands of dollars, expensive meals and illegal donations, among other bribes. Prosecutors also allege that Adams omitted the gifts from financial disclosure forms and created fake paper trails to hide them.

………

The indictment also accuses Adams of accepting straw donations from a construction businessman described as a prominent member of a different ethnic community. Prosecutors say he sought help arranging national heritage events and resolving issues with the city's Department of Buildings.

………

Throughout the indictment, prosecutors accuse Adams and his circle of trying to conceal what they were doing. Many of the allegations are accompanied by text messages between Adams, a staffer, a fundraiser and those attempting to curry his favor.

………

Prosecutors say Adams answered “no” when asked if he had received gifts worth $50 or more from anyone who had business with New York City, even though he allegedly accepted far more from people seeking his political sway.

The indictment also describes a panic when federal agents executed search warrants and seized electronic devices last fall. The U.S. attorney’s office says Adams campaign fundraiser Brianna Suggs called the mayor five times while FBI agents knocked on her door, and that the mayor rushed back from a trip to D.C. Prosecutors say she also refused to tell law enforcement who paid for a 2021 trip to Turkey.

When agents interviewed one of Adams’ staffers, according to the indictment, she excused herself to the bathroom and deleted encrypted messaging apps she had used to communicate with Adams and Turkish nationals. Agents also struggled to get information from Adams’ phone when they confronted the mayor near NYU’s campus and seized his electronic devices days after raiding the fundraiser’s home, the indictment says.

Adams told the FBI that he had just changed the password on his phone and extended it from four digits to six, but he couldn’t remember his new code, according to the indictment.

Yeah, this isn't an oops, or something that started when he was running, this is a years long pattern of corruption and coverups.

Quote of the Day

If there's any merit to the concept of "broken windows" policing, it certainly should apply to this practice by the cops themselves.  Free parking sounds like a small thing, but it's created a class of cop and cop-adjacent people who think they can do whatever the f%$# they want in the city.

—Eschaton

(%$# mine)

Duncan Black is talking about the fact that cops, and their families, and their friends, routinely use "Official" placards to park wherever they want without fear of being ticketed or towed.

New York City is notorious for this.

It's small corruption, but it is corruption nonetheless, and it poisons the whole institution.

Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, a week after the Fed FINALLY cut rates, we get the news that initial unemployment claims fell by 4,000 to 218,000, beating the consensus forecast of an increase of 3,000 to 225,000.

On the other hand, continuing claims rose by 13,000 to 1.834.

Yeah, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯:

The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits dropped to a four-month low last week, suggesting that the labor market remained fairly healthy.

The upbeat outlook on the economy was underscored by other data on Thursday showing corporate profits increased at a more robust pace than initially thought in the second quarter.

………

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 4,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 218,000 for the week ended Sept. 21, the lowest level since mid-May, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 225,000 claims. Unadjusted claims decreased 5,957 to 180,878 last week.

Though the labor market has lost momentum amid declining job openings and a step-down in hiring, layoffs have remained low.

………

The number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, increased 13,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.834 million during the week ending Sept. 14, the claims report showed.

The so-called continuing claims have dropped from more than 2-1/2-year highs touched in July, attributed to policy changes in Minnesota that allowed non-teaching staff to file for unemployment aid during the summer school holidays.

The other economic news released today was generally positive, with increases in durable goods orders and a favorable revision to GDP:

………

Separate data published simultaneously on Thursday showed monthly durable goods orders were stronger than expected, and gross domestic product grew faster in 2022 and 2023 than previously reported. US Treasury yields rose after the releases while S&P 500 futures and the dollar were little changed.

I have no clue as to what is going on here.