Today in a Foreign Language, the Queen's English

It appears that in the late 1980s, in attempt to expand their flagging market for dedicated word processing workstations, they launched a maintenance program called WangCare.

This was well received in the United States, but despite warnings from the UK office, the British release was greeted with protests and mockery, and the name was changed in less than 48 hours. 

Trying to sell a homophone for "Wanker", a term which was then not well known in the US, did not go over well in Blighty.

That being said, I cannot imagine that there are not at least a few snarky comments about Microsoft's OneCare internet security product in the early 2000s.

Some people never learn.

Thank God!!!!!

The FCC has decided not to end its ban on mobile phone voice calls during commercial flights. 

There is very little that could make today's airline experience worse, but having some asshole in the seat next to me berating his executive assistant via his mobile is something much, MUCH, worse.

We dodged a bullet here.

Good

A spokesman for Republican Senator John Cornyn has declared that Neera Tanden's nomination for head of the Office of Management and Budget is dead on arrival. 

This is a good thing, even if the reason, "She says mean things about Republicans on Twitter," is stupid beyond belief, because she yet another case of a member of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) failing upwards while wasting millions dollars of donors.

The bill of particulars against Tanden is extensive:

• Covered up sexual harassment by senior CAP staff, and retaliated against those who reported it (Including outing one anonymous whistle blower). 
• Has called for cuts to Social Security.
• Opposes single payer, while claming that it might be possible when the time is right (maybe in the year 2525).
• Argued for stealing Libya's oil to pay for our costs for bombing them. (And creating a civil war, and creating slave markets, and creating a refugee crisis)
• Opposed the $15/hour minimum wage, and then lied about it.
• Assaulted an employee for questioning Hillary Clinton's support of the Iraq war.
• Her ringing endorsement by William Kristol, the Neocon Moron (that rhymes) nepotism hire who has never been right about anything substantive in his entire life.
• She was worked closely with Bruce Reed on Bill Clinton's truly horrible welfare "reform".
• She shut down Think Progress after it unionized.
• Her former staff leaks negative items to the press like a sieve, so her ability to assemble and maintain a good staff is suspect.
  

The bigger case against her nomination is that it is CLEARLY motivated, at least in part, as another indignity directed towards Bernie Sanders that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

Neera Tanden has been the most vociferous critic of Bernie Sanders online, accusing him of being racist, sexist, a Russian agent, and everything short of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.

As OMB chair, her nomination would be managed the ranking member (or chairman if the sky falls in Georgia) of the Senate Budget Committee, one Bernard Sanders of Vermont.

It's clearly an attempt to, "Try to publicly humiliate," Sanders.

To quote someone not named Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, "It is worse than a crime, it was a mistake."

Spending political capital on "Hippie Punching" because it gives the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) a stiffie is stupid and wasteful.

There is a midterm election in 2 years, and neither Nancy Pelosi nor Chuck Schumer are going to bring out the base.

Linkage

• Is military integrity a contradiction in terms? (John T. Reed) A veteran of the military on the hypocrisy of the "Go along to get along" ethos of the military.
  
• Obama the pretender (The Week)  A review of Obama's book, and the money quote is at the end, "Obama had a golden opportunity to knit the country back together after a disastrous Republican presidency and a brief moment of Wall Street helplessness. He didn't do so because he couldn't stomach the radical action necessary to heal the nation's wounds and repair the social contract, and instead invented a lot of excuses why he had to sit on his hands and do nothing. The name for such a person is a coward."
• Devil horns meet sutras in Taiwan's Buddhist death metal band (Barrons) They set Buddhist chants and prayers to death metal, and Buddhists are chill as f%$# about it.
  
• John Carpenter, Apocalyptic Filmmaker (Jacobin) A paean to director John Carpenter.  Much or his oeuvre has become more respected over time, in part because his dystopian vision (They Live) has becoming increasingly relevant.  (He has also directed two of my top 10 movies)
  
• How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism (New Yorker) A chronicling of how VC money resembles nothing so much as a Ponzi scheme.  The money quote, "And, eventually, you start to realize: no matter what happens, the V.C.s still end up rich."
• Fugging hell: tired of mockery, Austrian village changes name (The Guardian) After years of mocking by tourists, and stolen signs, the Austrian village has changed its name to "Fugging". Also, "Just across the border in Bavaria in Germany there is a village called Petting." 
  

The Buddhist Death Metal is below:

My Nephew Got Married Today

Mazel Tov Meir and Rachel.

We were there in spirit, and virtually through a YouTube live stream, because traveling to New Jersey in the middle of a pandemic is insane.

We watched much frivolity.

Weird, but 2020 sucks.

Quote of the Day

While I'm thinking about the psychology of people, it has occurred to me that there is a generation of people in DC (politics, media, associated) who were youngish and had their peak formative moment when they helped to kill a million people in Iraq. What a high that must have been (those of us who paid a lot of attention then know just how high out of their gourds they all were on their righteous crusade).

Imagine being 25 and convincing yourself that you saved the world by helping to blow the shit out of so many people. Habit forming high.

Those chemicals start hitting their brains again every time the opportunity to blow up some other country presents itself.

Every "humanitarian intervention" is just another big line of coke.

—Atrios

This is the most coherent explanation of what drives the "Liberal Interventionist".

They do this, despite always failing, because it gets their rocks off.

It's a twisted juxtaposition of a psychotic need for a dopamine rush, and careerism.

Finally, Someone Finally Fires Henry Kissinger

Donald Trump once again did the right thing for the wrong reason, because he fired one of the worst war criminals in American history from the Defense Policy Board in a fit of pique.

Why this ghoul still prowls the halls of power is an indictment the whole US foreign policy and defense establishments:

Several members of the top federal advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Defense have been suddenly pushed out, multiple U.S. officials told Foreign Policy, in what appears to be the outgoing Trump administration’s parting shot at scions of the foreign-policy establishment.

The directive, which the Pentagon’s White House liaison Joshua Whitehouse sent on Wednesday afternoon, removes 11 high-profile advisors from the Defense Policy Board, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright; retired Adm. Gary Roughead, who served as chief of naval operations; and a onetime ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman. Rudy De Leon, a former chief operating officer at the Pentagon once considered by then-Defense Secretary James Mattis for a high-level policy role, will also be ousted.

Madeline Albright, who was the strongest advocate of the sanctions on Iraq, which resulted in something approaching 100,000 deaths as well.

The board seems to be primarily to be a way to provide a veneer of historical wisdom, and most brutal, policies of the American empire.

Also booted in today’s sweep of the board, which is effective immediately, were former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and David McCormick, a former Treasury Department undersecretary during the George W. Bush administration. Both had been added to the board by Mattis in 2017. Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton administration deputy attorney general; Robert Joseph, a chief U.S. nuclear negotiator who convinced Libya to give up weapons of mass destruction; former Bush Deputy National Security Advisor J.D. Crouch II; and Franklin Miller, a former top defense official, have also been removed.


………

The board, overseen by the Pentagon’s top policy official, the undersecretary of defense for policy, serves as a kind of in-house think tank on retainer for top military leaders, providing independent counsel and advice on defense policy. The Defense Policy Board includes former top military brass, secretaries of state, members of Congress, and other senior diplomats and foreign-policy experts. The status of two other members of the panel—or who would replace the ousted members—was not immediately clear.

………

The White House had sought to add Scott O’Grady, a former Air Force fighter pilot shot down over Bosnia, to the board to prepare him to be nominated for a top Pentagon position, as well as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a close ally of President Donald Trump. The administration had also vetoed adding retired Adm. Eric Olson, a former U.S. Special Operations Command chief, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as well as Gordon England, a former deputy secretary of defense during the Bush administration, over perceived anti-Trump ties. 

Like I said, the wrong reason to fire them all, but good riddance to this bastion of conventional (and wrong) thinking.

Our Own Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation*

I am referring of course, to the "White Shoe" consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, which has increasingly made justifying the illegal and immoral, and whose latest bit of evil was a proposal for Perdue Pharma to pay distributors a bounty for overdose deaths, because, like any good dope dealer, it's all about the Benjamins.

The short version is that in order to convince distributors not to share their concerns about how Oxycontin was resulting in an explosion of deaths with regulators, or ending their relationship with Perdue, McKinsey & Company proposed a $14,810.00 payment for death or hospitalization.

It's blood money, and it is a criminal conspiracy to bribe those distributors not to take actions that would harm the bottom line.

Even if the Sacklers and their Evil Minions^™ never took up this suggestion, it is a felony to even discuss this, and McKinsey is guilty.

They really need to get the Arthur Anderson treatment.

Their name, and memory, should be effaced:

When Purdue Pharma agreed last month to plead guilty to criminal charges involving OxyContin, the Justice Department noted the role an unidentified consulting company had played in driving sales of the addictive painkiller even as public outrage grew over widespread overdoses.

Documents released last week in a federal bankruptcy court in New York show that the adviser was McKinsey & Company, the world’s most prestigious consulting firm. The 160 pages include emails and slides revealing new details about McKinsey’s advice to the Sackler family, Purdue’s billionaire owners, and the firm’s now notorious plan to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales at a time when opioid abuse had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

In a 2017 presentation, according to the records, which were filed in court on behalf of multiple state attorneys general, McKinsey laid out several options to shore up sales. One was to give Purdue’s distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they sold.

The presentation estimated how many customers of companies including CVS and Anthem might overdose. It projected that in 2019, for example, 2,484 CVS customers would either have an overdose or develop an opioid use disorder. A rebate of $14,810 per “event” meant that Purdue would pay CVS $36.8 million that year.

………

Though McKinsey has not been charged by the federal government or sued, it began to worry about legal repercussions in 2018, according to the documents. After Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against Purdue, Martin Elling, a leader for McKinsey’s North American pharmaceutical practice, wrote to another senior partner, Arnab Ghatak: “It probably makes sense to have a quick conversation with the risk committee to see if we should be doing anything” other than “eliminating all our documents and emails. Suspect not but as things get tougher there someone might turn to us.”

Why the F%$# haven't they been charged? 

They not only engaged in a criminal conspiracy which would include bribery and other racketeering, they initiated the proposal to do so.

Mr. Ghatak, who also advised Purdue, replied: “Thanks for the heads up. Will do.”

It is not known whether consultants at the firm went on to destroy any records.

The two men were among the highest-ranking consultants at McKinsey. Five years earlier, the documents show, they emailed colleagues about a meeting in which McKinsey persuaded the Sacklers to aggressively market OxyContin.

The meeting “went very well — the room was filled with only family, including the elder statesman Dr. Raymond,” wrote Mr. Ghatak, referring to Purdue’s co-founder, the physician Raymond Sackler, who would die in 2017.

Mr. Elling concurred. “By the end of the meeting,” he wrote, “the findings were crystal clear to everyone and they gave a ringing endorsement of moving forward fast.”

………

McKinsey’s involvement in the opioid crisis came to light early last year, with the release of documents from Massachusetts, which is among the states suing Purdue. Those records show that McKinsey was helping Purdue find a way “to counter the emotional messages from mothers with teenagers that overdosed” from OxyContin.

………

“This is the banality of evil, M.B.A. edition,” Anand Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant who reviewed the documents, said of the firm’s work with Purdue. “They knew what was going on. And they found a way to look past it, through it, around it, so as to answer the only questions they cared about: how to make the client money and, when the walls closed in, how to protect themselves.”

………

McKinsey put together briefing materials that anticipated questions Purdue would receive. [At an FDA oversight hearing] One possible question: “Who at Purdue takes personal responsibility for these deaths?”

The proposed answer: “We all feel responsible.

Shut them down, and shame and jail anyone associated with McKinsey and Company.

They are ineluctably evil.

^*Immortalized by Douglas Adams as, "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

Tweet of the Day

Ordered to pay Pennsylvania's legal expenses. Jesus Christ.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) November 27, 2020

Honestly, if the poster did not have the alias, "Richard M. Nixon", I might never have noticed the tweet.

I will note that in addition to the complaint being dismissed with prejudice, meaning that the Trump campaign cannot refile, they have also have been ordered to pay court costs.

It's a f%$#ing clown show.

Privatizing Profits and Socializing Losses

The World Bank has now come out in favor of a program that would make taxpayers responsible for guaranteed profits of private business all around the world.

This is an obscenity:

The World Bank has been leading other multilateral development banks (MDBs) and international financial institutions to press developing country governments to ‘de-risk’ infrastructure and other private, especially foreign investments.

They promote public-private partnerships (PPPs) supposedly to mobilize more private finance to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. PPP advocacy has been stepped up after developing countries’ pleas for better international tax cooperation were blocked at the third United Nations’ Financing for Development conference (FfD3) in Addis Ababa in mid-2015.

………



De-risking?

The World Bank’s latest Guidance on PPP Contractual Provisions measures progress in terms of “successfully procured PPP transactions”. The Bank explicitly recommends ‘de-risking’ PPPs, effectively involving ‘socializing’ risks and privatizing profits.

But the term ‘de-risking’ is misleading as some risk is inherent in all project investments. After all, projects may encounter problems due to planning mistakes, poor implementation or unexpected developments. Hence, Bank advice does not really seek to reduce, let alone eliminate risk, but simply to make governments bear and absorb it.

………

Off the books, out of sight

Both World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) research has found many governments using PPPs and other similar arrangements to keep such projects ‘off the books’ of official central government accounts, effectively reducing transparency and accountability, while compromising governance.

Such project financing typically involves government-guaranteed – rather than direct government – liabilities. Not booked as government development or capital expenditure, it is also not counted as part of sovereign or government debt, e.g., for parliamentary reporting and accountability.

………

Shifting responsibility

PPP financing is typically booked as government-guaranteed liabilities, rather than as sovereign debt per se. Being ‘off the books’, governments face fewer constraints to taking on ever more debt and risk. With such commitments, they also become much more vulnerable to ‘unforeseen’ costs.

Such contractual arrangements, typically set by private partners in most PPPs, do little to improve governance and accountability. To be sure, normal government budgetary accounting and audit procedures for PPPs may not meaningfully improve transparency and accountability.

………


Moral hazard

World Bank guidance is clear that even a private partner who fails to deliver as contracted must be compensated for work done before a government can terminate a contract. Whether private partners actually deliver as promised does not seem to matter to the Bank which provides no guidance for addressing their failures to meet contractual obligations.

The Bank thus contributes to ‘moral hazard’ in PPPs: the less likely the private partner stands to lose from poor performance, the less incentive it has to meet contractual obligations. Guaranteeing cost recovery, revenue and profit erodes the motive to deliver as promised and to consider project risks.

Enthusiastic PPP promotion – by the Bank, other MDBs and donors urging developing country governments to bear more risk – is not only encouraging ‘moral hazard’, but also creating more opportunities for the corruption and abuse they profess to lament.

Instead, private partners have greater incentives to try gouging rents from government partners, e.g., by renegotiating existing contracts to their advantage. Conversely, governments have to choose between bearing the costs of failed projects, and paying even more to save problematic ones in the hope of cutting losses.

………


Ignoring evidence

Many governments can undertake large infrastructure projects themselves, or alternatively, make much better procurement arrangements. IMF research has also found, “In many countries, PPPs have not always performed better than public procurement”.

Ironically, Bank research has shown that “well-run public firms tend to match the performance of private firms in regulated sectors”, concluding, “There is no ‘killer’ rationale for public-private partnerships”.

Even the Bank’s Research Observer has published a summary of “some of the most compelling examples of this kind of emerging critique” of infrastructure PPPs in telecoms, transport, water and sanitation, waste management and electricity.

Yet, the Bank continues to promote PPPs as the preferred mode of infrastructure financing, trying to shift more risk to governments, ostensibly to attract more private investment. Meanwhile, Bank guidance typically fails to warn governments of the risks involved and their implications.



Prejudiced guidance

Bank and other PPP advocates dismiss criticisms as ‘ideological’ despite growing empirical evidence. Such damning findings have had little impact on their PPP advocacy. Instead, the new fad is for more ‘blended finance’ to PPPs, using official concessional finance to subsidise and attract more private investment.

………

Unsurprisingly, despite Bank, donor and other efforts, PPPs have only generated 15~20% of developing countries’ infrastructure investments, according to the Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, while remaining negligible in the poorest countries.

PPPs, and related institutions are little more than looting by private actors.

This Will Not End Well

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's most senior nuclear scientist, was assassinated outside of Tehran today.

The Iranians are blaming the Israelis, but the timing of this action would imply that this may be the part of a coordinated attempt between Israel (whose Mossad, unlike the CIA, doesn't routinely screw up such operations) and the US, specifically the Trump administration, to foment an actual shooting war with Iran before Biden takes office.

Or, it could be just some random group of dudes with an amazing intelligence network and operational experience:

Iran has vowed retaliation after the architect of its nuclear programme was assassinated on a highway near Tehran, in a major escalation of tensions that risks placing the Middle East on a new war footing.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was ambushed with explosives and machine gun fire in the town of Absard, 70km (44 miles) east of Tehran. Efforts to resuscitate him in hospital failed. His bodyguard and family members were also wounded.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said Israel was probably to blame, and an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed retaliation. “We will strike as thunder at the killers of this oppressed martyr and will make them regret their action,” tweeted Hossein Dehghan. 

There will be no claim of responsibility.  Whoever did this was a pro, and pros don't make claims of responsibility.

The killing was seen inside Iran as being as grave as the assassination by US forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani in January.

Israel will face accusations that it is using the final weeks of the Trump administration to try to provoke Iran in the hope of closing off any chance of reconciliation between Tehran and the incoming US administration led by Joe Biden.

Which is why reports of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's secret meeting with both Netanyahu, and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is significant. 

You had three people who are all forceful backers of open warfare between the United States and Iran allegedly in a room together, with the knowledge that a less confrontational approach to the Islamic Republic was in the works with the new administration in a room together.

It does not strain credulity that they all agreed that an immediate escalation of tensions would be beneficial for them agendas.

Fakhrizadeh had been described by western and Israeli intelligence services for years as the leader of a covert atomic bomb programme halted in 2003. He was a central figure in a presentation by the Israeli prime minister, Benajmin Netanyahu, in 2018 accusing Iran of continuing to seek nuclear weapons. “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh,” Netanyahu said during the presentation.

I don't think that the Iranians have any hard evidence, but I do believe that their conclusions are a reasonable conjecture by the Iranian state security apparatus.

There Are Two Choices for a Thanksgiving Post

You either post Arlo Guthrie's Alices Restaurant, or that WKRP in Cincinnati episode.

I choose the latter:

As God as my witness, I thought Turkeys could fly.

Throw the Book at Them

The National Rifle Association has admitted to looting by senior executives in tax filings.

Given the level of corruption of this organization, the option of the dissolving it should be seriously considered by authorities:

After years of denying allegations of lax financial oversight, the National Rifle Association has made a stunning declaration in a new tax filing: Current and former executives used the nonprofit group’s money for personal benefit and enrichment.

The NRA said in the filing that it continues to review the alleged abuse of funds, as the tax-exempt organization curtails services and runs up multimillion-dollar legal bills. The assertion of impropriety comes four months after the attorney general of New York state filed a lawsuit accusing NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre and other top executives of using NRA funds for decades to provide inflated salaries and expense accounts.

The tax return, which The Washington Post obtained from the organization, says the NRA “became aware during 2019 of a significant diversion of its assets.” The 2019 filing states that LaPierre and five former executives received “excess benefits,” a term the IRS uses to describe executives’ enriching themselves at the expense of a nonprofit entity.

The disclosures in the tax return suggest that the organization is standing by its 71-year-old chief executive while continuing to pursue former executives of the group. The filing says that LaPierre “corrected” his financial lapses with a repayment and contends that former executives “improperly” used NRA funds or charged the nonprofit for expenses that were “not appropriate.”

"Corrected", my ass.  The organization is a complete scam, and it needs to be shut down.

Bad Day at the Office

Ouch

There was a mishap when a 70-ton Merkava tank rolled over after screwing up getting onto a transport trailer.

Thankfully, the only person on the tank was the driver, and he was not seriously injured:

An Israel Defense Forces tank flipped over on Sunday while trying to drive up onto a transport truck, the military said.

No one was injured in the incident, the IDF said.

In a video of the incident (above), the tank can be seen slowly driving onto the transport truck in the Jordan Valley. After it boards the truck, however, the tank continues traveling forward, gaining speed and flying over the side of the truck before landing upside down.

The tank’s fire suppression system was then apparently activated.

The driver of the tank, 24, was taken to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital Mt. Scopus. He was lightly bruised, but was not found to be seriously injured. “He will remain for treatment and observation until tomorrow,” a hospital spokesperson said.

I did not expect a tank to move that way.

They Are Guilty, Give Them the Death Penalty

I am referring, of course, to Purdue Pharma, who just pled guilty to pushing drugs on millions of Americans, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

They are guilty of felony murder, and should be subject to the death penalty.

I'm opposed to the death penalty for human beings, but for corporations, I'm cool with that.

Fines are not enough, and the Sackler clan needs to be reduced to penury:

Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty on Tuesday to criminal charges that it misled the federal government about sales of its blockbuster painkiller OxyContin, the prescription opioid that helped fuel a national addiction crisis. The admission brought a formal end to an extensive federal investigation that led to a multibillion-dollar settlement between the company and the Justice Department.

“The abuse and diversion of prescription opioids has contributed to a national tragedy of addiction and deaths,” Jeffrey A. Rosen, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. “Today’s convictions underscore the department’s commitment to its multipronged strategy for defeating the opioid crisis.”

Purdue’s chairman, Steve Miller, acknowledged in a remotely conducted hearing in federal court in New Jersey that in order to meet sales goals, the company told the Drug Enforcement Administration that it had created a program to prevent OxyContin from being sold on the black market, even though it was marketing the drug to more than 100 doctors suspected of illegally prescribing OxyContin.

Purdue also pleaded guilty to paying illegal kickbacks to doctors who prescribed OxyContin and to an electronic health records company, Practice Fusion, for targeting physicians with alerts that were intended to increase opioid prescriptions. Practice Fusion has paid $145 million in fines for taking those kickbacks.

Doctors overprescribing OxyContin, along with illicit distribution of the drug, have contributed to the deaths of more than 450,000 Americans since 1999.

The premeditation for capital murder is in the underlying felony.

The company should be wiped from the earth, and the ill-gotten gains of the Sacklers should be clawed back from them.

No quarter.

Initial Claims Up Again

And the 4-week moving average rose for the first time since April.

Not good:

Jobless claims rose for the second straight week, to 778,000, a sign the nationwide surge in virus cases was starting to weigh on the labor-market recovery.

Claims haven’t risen for two consecutive weeks since July. Worker filings for unemployment insurance are down sharply from a peak of nearly seven million in late March. But they remain higher than in any previous recession—the pre-pandemic peak was 695,000 in 1982—for records tracing back to 1967.

Unemployment filings can be more volatile around the holidays, due to workweek changes that can cause seasonal-adjustment anomalies. The four-week moving average, which smooths out weekly variation, increased by 5,000 to 748,500, the Labor Department said Wednesday.

………

A nationwide surge in Covid-19 cases threatens to weigh on the economic recovery, as many states and localities impose new restrictions on businesses, though less stringent than the ones introduced in the spring, economists say. Further, the spread of the virus, combined with the onset of winter, is likely to send more consumers indoors and hamper spending and employment in industries like restaurants.

And the $600 a week unemployment subsidy has ended, and extended claims and support for unemployed gig economy workers, will be terminated with the new year.

This won't end well.

Cuck Fomcast

After billions in public subsidies, Comcast has instituted data caps throughout its network.

The lesson here is that if you want to expend tax dollars for broader internet access, it is best that the networks receiving those subsidies should be owned by the taxpayer:

With millions of Americans trapped at home to protect themselves from a deadly pandemic during the holiday season, the Internet is one of the only conduits connecting them to friends, family and the outside world. Now, Comcast, one of the monopoly corporations that controls the conduit, is extending its fees on bandwidth usage to all 39 states where it operates — even as the company has received hundreds of millions of dollars of public subsidies and new tax breaks.

Whether or not those data caps remain permanent could hinge on whether president-elect Joe Biden and Democrats are willing to take action against a corporation that has been one of their major campaign donors.

At issue is Comcast’s move on Monday that caps home internet usage at 1.2TB of data per month for its customers in 12 additional states, and charging customers up to $100 per month if they exceed the cap. Comcast’s move was flagged by Stop The Cap, which discovered that the company had quietly updated language on its website.

The new limits, which will take effect in March, are being imposed in states that have given Comcast and its subsidiaries more than $738 million in tax subsidies in the last few decades. Those states include New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, where state and local governments have given Comcast and its subsidiaries $484 million, $132 million, and $79 million in tax subsidies, respectively, according to data from Good Jobs First.

In all, Comcast and its subsidiaries — which include NBC and MSNBC — have received nearly $1 billion in state and local subsidies. Additionally, Comcast received $861 million in federal tax subsidies during the first year of the Trump tax cuts, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.

“This is why monopolies are bad,” tweeted Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. “Comcast can arbitrarily exploit us for profit during a pandemic just because it feels like it. Meanwhile, Comcast collects tons of tax breaks and government subsidies. Comcast should be broken up.”

No, Comcast should be expropriated and become a public agency operated for a public benefit. 

Creating 50 Comcasts where there was only 1 is not a fix.

Neither will happen though, they gave big bucks to the Biden campaign.

Well, This Sucks

Today, literally a day after a security audit stated that the security for the Baltimore County Public Schools computer network was so much Swiss cheese, they were hit with a massive ransomeware attack. 

My wife works as a special education consultant, primary in Baltimore county, and her meeting today was cancelled, and it looks like BCPS may not sort out this cluster-f%$# until the new year.

I'm not entirely sure how to fix this, but I think that relying more on internal expertise, as opposed to over-paid consultants, would be a good start:

Baltimore County’s school system was shut down by a ransomware attack that hit all its network systems and closed school for 115,000 students Wednesday.

While little has been made public about the extent of the attack, school officials said at an afternoon news conference outside the county school headquarters in Towson that they are working closely with state and federal law enforcement and the Maryland Emergency Management Agency to investigate.

………

Superintendent Darryl Williams said he has no timeline for when school will resume. School officials said the network issue has affected the district’s website, email system and grading system. Until the problem is resolved, students will have no school.

The attack comes as the school system continues to operate online only, with all in-person classes delayed, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

………

The school system stopped communicating to staff and parents by email and began using Twitter and robocalls to inform its community about the attack. The district is advising all students, parents and teachers not to turn on their school laptops, and some students have taken any county applications off their phones as a precaution.

………

Baltimore County’s network is the conduit for grades, lesson plans, and communication between teachers and students and parents. Unlike some other school systems in the region, Baltimore County began giving students devices more than a decade ago.

………

It’s unclear when the attack started, but the school board meeting video stream abruptly cut out late Tuesday evening. And according to social media accounts, school system teachers began noticing problems about 11:30 p.m. as they were entering grades.

It actually knocked the virtual BCPS school board meeting that was held last night.

What a mess.

Deep Thought

 

Tru dat. (Found on the random internet)

Hunter S. Thompson Prophesied the Spite Voter

On a number of occasions, I have referenced Mark Ames seminal essay, "Spite the vote," in which he posits that the hoi polloi (οἱ πολλοί) are not mindless zombies brainwashed by Fox News and Karl Rove (this was written in 2004), and realized that they literally had no place in the future envisioned by liberals, and so tried to pull everything down around the heads.

This sounds even more relevant 16 years later, but I think that using the word seminal may have been an overstatement, because before Mark Ames, there was Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote about this same phenomenon in his breakthrough book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966:

In late March, Donald Trump opened a rally in Wisconsin by mocking the state’s governor, Scott Walker, who had just endorsed his Republican opponent, Ted Cruz. “He came in on his Harley,” Trump said of Walker, “but he doesn’t look like a motorcycle guy.”

“The motorcycle guys,” he added, “like Trump.”

It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. It grew out of a piece first published in The Nation one year earlier. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, editor of the magazine from 1955 to 1975, commissioned the piece from Thompson—it was the gonzo journalist’s first big break, and the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would last until my grandfather died in 1980. Because of that family connection, I had long known that Hell’s Angels was a political book. Even so, I was surprised, when I finally picked it up a few years ago, by how prophetic Thompson is and how eerily he anticipates 21st-century American politics. This year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read Hell’s Angels.

Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.

………

Thompson would want us to see this: These are men and women who know that, by all intellectual and economic standards, they cannot win the game. So whether it be out of self-protection or an overcompensation for their own profound sense of shame, they lash out at politicians, judges, scientists, teachers, Wall Street, universities, the media, legislatures—even at elections. They are not interested in contemplating serious reforms to the system; they are either too pessimistic or too disappointed to believe that is possible. So the best they can do is adopt a position of total irreverence: to show they hate the players and the game. 

Understood in those terms, the idea that Trumpism is “populist” seems misplaced. Populism is a belief in the right of ordinary people, rather than political insiders, to rule. Trumpism, by contrast, operates on the presumption that ordinary people aren’t going to get any chance to rule no matter what they do, so they might as well piss off the political insiders using the only tool left available to them: the vote. 

54 Years ago, and it sounds like today.

It's telling that this awareness seems to flow down dynastic lines, Susan McWilliams' grandfather gave Thompson the assignment to cover the motorcycle gang, and her current position as a tenured professor at an expensive and respected private liberal arts college, (Pomona) certainly as a results of advantages that came from who her parents (and grandparents) were.

Far too many people who have won the birth lottery, and so were born on third base think that they hit a triple.

Amazon Again

We don't care, we don't have to ……… we're Amazon.

The Monster from Seattle is engaging in a systematic program of spying on its workers and activists, because they don't care, they don't have to, they're Amazon.

Seriously, this company is ineluctably evil:

A trove of more than two dozen internal Amazon reports reveal in stark detail the company's obsessive monitoring of organized labor and social and environmental movements in Europe, particularly during Amazon's “peak season” between Black Friday and Christmas. The reports, obtained by Motherboard, were written in 2019 by Amazon intelligence analysts who work for the Global Security Operations Center, the company's security division tasked with protecting Amazon employees, vendors, and assets at Amazon facilities around the world.

The documents show Amazon analysts closely monitor the labor and union-organizing activity of their workers throughout Europe, as well as environmentalist and social justice groups on Facebook and Instagram. They also indicate, and an Amazon spokesperson confirmed, that Amazon has hired Pinkerton operatives—from the notorious spy agency known for its union-busting activities—to gather intelligence on warehouse workers.

Internal emails sent to Amazon's Global Security Operations Center obtained by Motherboard reveal that all the division's team members around the world receive updates on labor organizing activities at warehouses that include the exact date, time, location, the source who reported the action, the number of participants at an event (and in some cases a turnout rate of those expected to participate in a labor action), and a description of what happened, such as a "strike" or "the distribution of leaflets." Other documents reveal that Amazon intelligence analysts keep close tabs on how many warehouse workers attend union meetings; specific worker dissatisfactions with warehouse conditions, such as excessive workloads; and cases of warehouse-worker theft, from a bottle of tequila to $15,000 worth of smart watches.

The documents offer an unprecedented look inside the internal security and surveillance apparatus of a company that has vigorously attempted to tamp down employee dissent and has previously been caught smearing employees who attempted to organize their colleagues. Amazon's approach of dealing with its own workforce, labor unions, and social and environmental movements as a threat has grave implications for its workers' privacy and ability to join labor unions and collectively bargain—and not only in Europe. It should also be concerning to both customers and workers in the United States and Canada, and around the world as the company expands into Turkey, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and India.

Amazon intelligence analysts appear to gather information on labor organizing and social movements to prevent any disruptions to order fulfillment operations. The new intelligence reports obtained by Motherboard reveal in detail how Amazon uses social media to track environmental activism and social movements in Europe—including Greenpeace and Fridays For Future, environmental activist Greta Thunberg's global climate strike movement—and perceives such groups as a threat to its operations. In 2019, Amazon monitored the Yellow Vests movement, also known as the gilet jaunes, a grassroots uprising for economic justice that spread across France—and solidarity movements in Vienna and protests against state repression in Iran.

………

"Like any other responsible business, we maintain a level of security within our operations to help keep our employees, buildings, and inventory safe," Lisa Levandowski, a spokesperson for Amazon told Motherboard. "That includes having an internal investigations team who work with law enforcement agencies as appropriate, and everything we do is in line with local laws and conducted with the full knowledge and support of local authorities. Any attempt to sensationalize these activities or suggest we’re doing something unusual or wrong is irresponsible and incorrect."

Levandowski denied that Amazon hired on-the-ground operatives, and said that any claim that Amazon performs the described activities across its operations worldwide was "N/A."

In a report from November 2019, however, an analyst wrote that Amazon hired Pinkerton spies who were "inserted" into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that management coached job candidates on how to complete job interviews and possibly even conducted the process for them.

………

The report refers to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States supplied detectives to infiltrate unions and hired violent goon squads to intimidate workers from engaging in union activity in steel mills. Today, Pinkerton is a subsidiary of the Swedish security company Securitas AB, and has supplied operatives to monitor strikes in West Virginia as recently as 2018.

………

"It’s not enough for Amazon to abuse its dominant market power and face antitrust charges by the EU; now they are exporting 19th century American union-busting tactics to Europe," Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, a global federation of trade unions that represents more than 20 million workers, told Motherboard. "This is a company that is ignoring the law, spying on workers, and using every page of the U.S. union-busting playbook to silence workers' voices."

………

Since Amazon posted job listings for two intelligence agents who could track "labor organizing threats," journalists have obtained more documents that reveal some of the sophisticated technology and strategies the company has used to surveil its workforce and gain intelligence on worker organizing. In September, Motherboard obtained evidence that Amazon had been using a social media monitoring tool to spy on dozens of private Facebook groups for Amazon Flex drivers in the United States and Europe. Last month, a report in Recode revealed that Amazon has made significant investments in a new geospatial tool that tracks threats to the company. Out of 40 or so data points Amazon that tracks at least half are labor or employee-related, including “Whole Foods Market Activism/Unionization Efforts,” “union grant money flow patterns,” “and “Presence of Local Union Chapters and Alt Labor Groups."

You know, it would be a good idea to put someone's head on a pike at the beginning of the Biden administration, and Jeff Bezos would be a particularly good guy to make an example of.

If the Feds could take down Capone, they can take down Bezos.

Tweet of the Day

There's a lot of work going into 10 page memos on why putting poor people into wood chippers is a bad idea, because some of the "Obama people" economists are obsessed with the idea after CBO scored it well.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 20, 2020

I know that this is snark, but I can think of no better metaphor for the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

A Shanda Fur Die Goyim

After health authorities came down on like a ton of bricks on plans for a 10,000 person wedding of the grandson of the chief rabbi of the Satmar ultra-orthodox sect, the wedding of the grandson of other chief rabbi of the Satmar sect held a huge wedding in direct contravention of Covid-19 rules. (Yes, other chief rabbi. Some sort of schism whose details I do not know, or care to learn of) 

Fines is not enough.  People need to be jailed over this:

The city is investigating a wedding in the Satmar Hasidic community that reportedly drew thousands of people to an indoor celebration in Brooklyn without masks, in violation of pandemic social distancing restrictions.

Thousands of guests, most of them men, gathered earlier this month for the wedding of the Satmar Grand Rebbe Aaron Teitelbaum's grandson, Yoel Teitelbaum, according to videos obtained by the New York Post. The videos appear to show wedding-goers packed inside the Yetev Lev D'Satmar synagogue in Williamsburg on Hooper Street, singing and dancing with no face coverings.

………

Last month, rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum's rival (due to a longtime feud and split within the Satmar sect) Grand Rebbe Zalman Leib Teitelbaum planned to hold a large wedding for his grandson in which an estimated 10,000 guests from Brooklyn and Rockland County were expected to attend.

After pressure from officials and news coverage of the event, the synagogue's leaders announced it would only be attended by close family members following what a spokesperson called "unwarranted attacks." The state health commissioner issued a pre-emptive order to limit the number of guests.

This wedding, however, was planned in secret, according to the Post, citing a Yiddish-language newspaper, Der Blatt. The newspaper reported the wedding was planned by word-of-mouth to avoid "ravenous press and government officials," according to the reports.

"If that happened, it was a blatant disregard of the law," Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday when asked about the wedding. "It's illegal. It was also disrespectful to the people of New York."

"If it turns out that because we stopped that wedding, the reaction was, 'Well, we'll have a secret wedding,' that would be really shocking," Cuomo added. "I'm sure [the city] will be able to figure it out, and then we'll bring the full consequence of legal action to bear."

I Do Not Approve

I do not approve of Wall Street rich pigs trying to dictate political outcomes, even if it is put a boot into Donald J. Trump's flabby white ass.

Wall Street executives are threatening not to drop money on the Georgia Senate runoffs unless Trump concedes.

I get that they want this.  I want Trump to die in flagrante delicto with Mike Pence, but that does not mean that I am entitled to this.  

Get over yourselves.  You are lucky and rich, and not better than anyone else.

You deserve no special favors:

Concerned that President Trump’s refusal to accept the election results is hurting the country, more than 160 top American executives asked the administration on Monday to immediately acknowledge Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect and begin the transition to a new administration.

Even one of Mr. Trump’s stalwart supporters, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of Blackstone, the private equity firm, said in a statement that “the outcome is very certain today and the country should move on.” While he did not sign a letter sent to the administration by the other executives, he said he was “now ready to help President-elect Biden and his team.”

Signatories to the letter included the chief executives of Mastercard, Visa, MetLife, Accenture, the Carlyle Group, Condé Nast, McGraw-Hill, WeWork and American International Group, among others. They included some of the most important players in the financial industry: David M. Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; Laurence D. Fink, chief executive of the asset management giant BlackRock; Jon Gray, Blackstone’s president; and Henry R. Kravis, a prominent Republican donor who is the co-chief executive of KKR, a private equity firm.

The letter was also signed by George H. Walker, the chief executive of the money manager Neuberger Berman and a second cousin to President George W. Bush, and Jeff T. Blau, the chief executive of one of New York City’s largest private developers, the Related Companies, who has been a major donor to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, filings show.

………

As a way of gaining leverage over the G.O.P., some of the corporate executives who signed on to the joint letter Monday have also discussed withholding campaign donations from the two Republican Senate candidates in Georgia unless party leaders agree to push for a presidential transition, according to four people who participated in a conference call Friday in which the notion was discussed. The two runoff elections in Georgia, which will take place in early January, will determine the balance of power in the United States Senate.

………

At least one participant, Rob Speyer, the chief executive of Tishman Speyer, suggested that some wealthy donors had already been considering withholding support, according to four people with knowledge of his comments.

Call me old fashioned, but I think that if you are going to chase a monster out town, it should be peasants with torches and pitch forks, not the princelings of finance.

This Was the Weirdest Bit of TV I've Seen in a Long Time

I watch Perry Mason reruns. The real show, not the Freddie Silverman semi-regular movies that resembled Matlock more than the the original TV noir show that ran for more 9 seasons.

In the original series there was only color episode, The Case of the Twice-Told Twist, which was the only episode of the original series to be filmed in color.

It was intended to be a dry run for a 10^th season, which was to go full color, but it was canceled at the end of season 9.

It was just ……… wrong.

First, Perry Mason is clearly a product of black and white TV, but second, the script just ……… off somehow.

In going for color, they decided for a more frenetic direction, with William Hopper as Paul Drake chasing a potential witness down a Mexican street, and repeated split second car stripping that looked like they had come out of a heist movie.

The full color version makes the episode more real, and some of the conventions of the show, smoking, drinking, and ethnic stereotyping, become far more jarring, as opposed to a relic of a bygone era.

Finally, the episode was replete with references to Dickens, specifically Oliver Twist.

If you are a Perry Mason fan, I'm not sure if I would recommend it unless you want to watch it stoned.

I think that it would be good to watch stoned.

All in all, it's the second weirdest bit of TV I've seen this year, after the Presidential debates.

They Will Collapse in a Major Accounting Scandal Scandal

A Kazakh "Fintech" company just debuted on the London Stock Exchange with a $6.5 billion valuation. 

The people hawking this company are touting it as the future of personal finance and E-Commerce of Kazakhstan.

It's Wirecard all over again, or the third film in the Borat Sagdiyev movie trilogy, but this sets off my scam warning something fierce:

With most staff working from home, the headquarters of Kazakhstan's fintech hero Kaspi.kz exudes a sleepiness ill-fitting for a company whose rapid rise has been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Kaspi, Kazakhstan's payment systems and e-commerce leader, became the Central Asian country's most valuable firm after it was valued at $6.5 billion on the London stock exchange in October in what was the United Kingdom's second largest float of this year.

The listing took commentators by surprise, coming after a failed attempt -- falling short of a $4 billon market cap valuation -- the year before.

But Kaspi's Georgia-born CEO Mikheil Lomtadze, told AFP that the company and its investors, including Goldman Sachs and CIS-focused Baring Vostok -- were not fazed by the false start.

"We believe that we have a lot of space for further growth, and we were not in any hurry to do our IPO," said Lomtadze in the company's head offices in Almaty.

Lomtadze, sporting an open-necked shirt and jeans, told AFP that beyond China, where online payment systems Alipay and WeChat have become ubiquitous, there are few markets that have seen user behaviour so utterly transformed by mobile payments as Kazakhstan.

"We are frontrunners in digitising the country," Lomtadze said.

I don't know about you, but I just filled up my bullsh%$ bingo card.

Linkage

• How to Avoid a Surprise Bill for Your Coronavirus Test (New York Times) The best healthcare system in the world.
  
• A cop shoots a Black man and a city resumes battle with police union (Reuters) It's long read, but a good example of how a police force in a large city Rochester, NY. is corrupt top to bottom.
• Social democracy or feudalism (interfluidity) This makes a very good case that these are the only two alternatives moving forward.
  
• Be Very Sparing in Allowing Site Notifications (Krebs on Security) If you say yes when a site asks for permission to send notifications, you are opening up a security hole
  
• UK sourced PPE from factories secretly using North Korean slave labour (The Guardian) Capitalism in all of its splendor. 
• Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up (Scientific American) This is going to get much worse.
• Apple lobbies against Uighur forced labor bill (Washington Post) Shorter Apple, "Genocide, schmenocide."
• Declassify America's Dirty Secrets in Syria to Stop a Biden War (The American Conservative) Yes, I'm quoting them.  Half their stuff is neoliberal bullsh%$, and half is an argument against American empire.  I like the second half.
• Uber driver says company isn't offering aid after assault (AZ Central.com) As an independent contractor, Uber says that they have no responsibility to protect him, or help with his job related injuries.  This is why the gig economy is evil.
  

 

David Rakoff's Take on Rent. It is perhaps the most perfect take down of a Broadway show ever.

Jessica Davis 3 · David Rakoff's Take on "Rent"

Maybe, I Should Be Phone Banking for the Republicans in Georgia

Trump supporters are threatening to boycott the Senate election runoffs in Georgia because the Governor and the Secretary of state are not swallowing Trump's false allegations of voter fraud.

Don't Throw Me into That Briar Patch!!!

I would gladly, and repeatedly make obnoxious phone calls to Republicans explaining that Trump has lost, and that they need to get over it, and vote for Kelly "Covid Positive" Loeffler and David Perdue.

I think that I could depress votes all on my own.

Certainly, it will be a more cost effective course of action than anything that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will be doing down there, which will spend money like water, and take their cut of the media buy:

President Donald Trump supporters protesting the outcome of the 2020 election have a new and surprising opponent: the Republican Party.

A viral video of protesters, as well as posts on social media platform Parler, indicate that Trump supporters are looking to boycott the upcoming Georgia Senate runoff elections.

A video, shared on Twitter on Saturday, shows a protester speaking into a mic criticizing Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who are both Republicans. The protester calls them "traitors."

Seemingly reacting to certification from Georgia election officials that President-elect Joe Biden had indeed won the Peach State following an election recount, the protesters disavowed the GOP.

My mother was accused of raising a "Russian child" when I was age 6, so I think that rat-f%$#ing an election is something well within my wheel house.

Student Athlete My Ass

It appears that when college football players decide to sit out the season because the sport is a Corona virus infested hellhole, the colleges pull their scholarships in violation of both human decency and NCAA regulations.

NCAA Division 3 sports are slavery, pure and simple:

Henry Bazakas embodied everything the University of California wants in a football player.

A third-generation Cal student who grew up in Berkeley, Bazakas arrived on campus five years ago as a walk-on offensive lineman. Three times he earned an award for having the team’s highest grade-point average. He and a teammate spearheaded a summer reading program at local elementary schools. He won another award, for his commitment to strength and conditioning while recovering from a torn knee ligament. And last season, after he finally earned an athletic scholarship, he started three games at left tackle.

But none of that counted for much in June, when Bazakas called the Cal football coach, Justin Wilcox, to say that he was opting out of his final season because of health concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic.

The call was the beginning of an odyssey that illustrates the normally unseen, cutthroat side of the business of college football, with tensions that have been magnified for athletes by the determined push to play during the pandemic.

Nine days later, Bazakas found his scholarship had been cut off, and he was then billed more than $24,000 halfway through his summer term because the athletic department had revoked the financial aid that it had already paid.

The summer school aid was ultimately reinstated by a university appeals committee, which said the school had violated N.C.A.A. rules by abruptly pulling Bazakas’s aid before giving him an opportunity for a hearing.

Bazakas also asked for his scholarship back for the fall semester, but the appeals panel sided with the athletic department’s decision to not renew it. While most of his teammates arrived at Cal with scholarships pledged for four years, walk-ons, like Bazakas, who eventually earn scholarships may not get them in subsequent years, and Cal had met an N.C.A.A. deadline in July not to renew his.

………

As major college football has lurched through the pandemic in pursuit of billions in television revenue — Cal had its first two scheduled games canceled, then lost Sunday to U.C.L.A. in a game arranged two days before kickoff — not even mandated protections for players have been ironclad.

In August, Washington State receiver Kassidy Woods, who opted out because he has the sickle cell trait, was allowed to keep his scholarship but removed from the team when Coach Nick Rolovich told Woods it would be “an issue” that he was aligned with a player rights’ movement. Utah State Coach Gary Andersen, before he was fired after an 0-3 start, said there was a reason none of his players had opted out. “It’s not an option,” he told reporters. “If you opt out, you’re not with us.”

Yet "Great American Institution" that is rotten to the core.

Div 3 sports are a profit making institution, and they should be treated as such.

Not Just the Worst Attorney General Ever, Also Corrupt

It looks like Trump's Attorney General William Barr may have intervened to quash the tax evasion case against Caterpillar, one of Barr's former clients, when he became AG.

Certainly, the timing is HIGHLY suspect:

Before William Barr became President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the U.S. Department of Justice, he represented Caterpillar Inc, a Fortune 100 company, in a federal criminal investigation by the department.

Much was at stake for Caterpillar: Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service has been demanding $2.3 billion in payments from the company in connection with the tax matters under criminal investigation. The company is contesting that finding.

A week after Barr was nominated for the job of attorney general, Justice officials in Washington told the investigative team in the active criminal probe of Caterpillar to take “no further action” in the case, according to an email written by one of the agents and reviewed by Reuters.

The decision, the email said, came from the Justice Department’s Tax Division and the office of the deputy attorney general, who was then Rod Rosenstein.

………

Since then, a source close to the case says, the investigation has “stalled.” The order to freeze the Caterpillar investigation has not been previously reported.

Reuters was unable to determine why Justice issued the “no further action” directive. It was not issued by Barr, as it came before he was confirmed. A Justice Department spokesperson said Barr recused himself from any Caterpillar discussions once he became attorney general, but declined further comment. Barr, in testimony during his confirmation hearings, said rules of legal privilege precluded him from discussing his work for the company.

………

Potential conflicts of interest, whether real or apparent, often arise when high-powered lawyers switch between private practice and government service. Bruce A. Green, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Fordham Law School, said it is not unheard of for attorney generals to have clients who had business before the DOJ. He noted that in 2009, President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, recused himself from a case involving Swiss Bank UBS, a prior client.

But Green said he could not recall a case where agents were told to take no further action on a matter involving an incoming attorney general’s former client without some kind of explanation. “Why would you just stop?” he asked.

Because Barr made it clear that he would be Trump's guy, but he just needed a "little favor", that's why.

………

The government’s questions about Caterpillar’s tax structure started with a whistleblower lawsuit in 2009 that laid out what it said was a complex “tax dodge” to route Caterpillar profits on parts sales through a company in Switzerland. Then, in 2014, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations dug into the issue, and alleged the company adopted a sales strategy that “shifted billions of dollars in profits away from the United States and into Switzerland, where Caterpillar had negotiated an effective corporate tax rate of 4% to 6%.” The Senate investigators quoted company insiders who said the system was structured for “tax avoidance.”

………

The next year, a federal grand jury in Illinois launched a criminal investigation. In March 2017, federal agents raided three Caterpillar offices, wheeling out evidence in large black plastic boxes. In a report written for the government, a consultant for the investigators, Leslie Robinson, called the tax strategy “fraudulent rather than negligent.”

Two weeks after the raid, Caterpillar Chief Executive Jim Umpleby announced the hiring of Barr as company counsel. Barr would “take a fresh look at Caterpillar’s disputes with the government, get all the facts, and then help us bring these matters to proper resolution based on the merits.”

………

This October, Robinson communicated again with the investigators. In emails reviewed by Reuters, she asked what had happened to the case, explaining that a Reuters reporter had inquired. That’s when LeBeau explained, copying other agents and a prosecutor on the email, that they had been told to take no further action a week after Barr’s nomination 20 months ago.

“We were given no additional explanation,” he wrote.

I REALLY want to see Barr lose his law license, but if he loses his license to practice law, that would be good too.

This guy is openly, and aggressively corrupt.

Ha Ha!

It appears that Donald Trump's efforts to f%$# with the US Census will come to naught, because there are data processing issues that will not allow them to get the final results in time:

In a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to strip unauthorized immigrants from census totals used for reapportionment, Census Bureau officials have concluded that they cannot produce the state population totals required to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives until after President Trump leaves office in January.

The president said in July that he planned to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.

But on Wednesday, according to three bureau officials, the Census Bureau told the Commerce Department that a growing number of snags in the massive data-processing operation that generates population totals had delayed the completion of population calculations at least until Jan. 26, and perhaps to mid-February. Those officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the Trump administration.

………

Under law, the White House must send a state-by-state census tally to the House of Representatives next year that will be used to reallocate House seats among the states. On Mr. Trump’s order, the Census Bureau is attempting to compile a separate state-by-state tally of unauthorized immigrants so that their numbers can be subtracted from official census results before they are dispatched to the House.

Good.

Yeah, I had to Write About this One

It turns out that many, if not most of the Soviet/Russian submarine incursions that occurred 1980s and 1990s were probably herring farts.

Anyone who knows me knows that I HAD to write about this, it juxtaposes my interest in thing military and things fart.

This story is me.

It's perfectly feasible that in the 1980s a major diplomatic incident between nuclear superpowers could have been triggered by fish farts. In fact, Russia and Sweden nearly came to blows over this very thing. They just didn't know it at the time. 

Before we move on to farts, first, some background. In 1981, a Soviet submarine ran aground on the south coast of Sweden, just 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from a Swedish naval base. The Soviets claimed that they were forced into Swedish territory by severe distress, and later navigation errors, while Sweden saw it as proof that the then Soviet Union was infiltrating Swedish waters. It didn't help that when Swedish officials secretly measured for radioactive materials using gamma-ray spectroscopy, they detected what they were 90 percent sure was uranium-23[sic, probably U-238] (used for cladding in nuclear weapons) inside the sub, indicating that it may be nuclear armed.

The submarine was returned to international waters, but the Swedish government remained alert, convinced that Russian subs could still be operating near their territory. Which is when they started to pick up elusive underwater signals and sounds. In 1982, several of Sweden's subs, boats, and helicopters pursued one of these unidentified sources for a whole month, only to come up empty-handed.

………

But it was farts.

In 1996, Magnus Wahlberg, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, became involved in the investigation of the strange signals.

………

He and a colleague began the task of figuring out what could be making bubbles on a scale that would make Sweden think it was dealing with a nuclear submarine.

"It turns out herring have a swim bladder... and this swim bladder is connected to the anal duct of the fish," Wahlberg said. "It's a very unique connection, only found in herring. So a herring can squeeze its swim bladder, and that way it can blurt out a small number of bubbles through the anal opening."

In layman's terms, they let one rip. Herrings swim in gigantic schools that can reach several square kilometers and up to 20 meters (65 feet) deep. When something near them frightens them – say, a hungry school of mackerel or a submarine on the lookout for Russian spies – they can generate a lot of gas.

………

The good news was that Sweden wasn't under threat from Russia, the bad news was it had spent 10 years deploying its military in pursuit of fish farts. Since it figured out what was and wasn't fish farts, there have been zero reports of hostile intruders in Swedish waters.

This story was literally made just for me.

Bad Day at the Office

Oops

A Ukrainian SU-27 pilot executing a landing on a highway as a part of a military sucked a highway sign into his air intake.

According to authorities, there was no damage to the aircraft, and no injuries.

When one considers that it not only took in the sign, which was probably either thin aluminum and wood, but also parts of the sign post (probably steel) and bolts attaching the sign to the post, this is an indication of how Soviet era engine designers prioritized resistance to foreign object damage: (FOD)

Ukrainian Su-27 fighter jet rammed into a street sign during military drills, 2+2 broadcaster reported, showing the video of the incident. The plane was landing on the Kiev-Chop highway when it grazed the sign and then pulled up in the sky again, with a metal part stuck in its air scoop. The Ukrainian air forces later stated it was a minor incident, noting that the plane was not damaged and the pilot didn't sustain any injuries.

Tweet of the Day

pic.twitter.com/OAFtUSNmBs

— Tony Banks (@Banks429) November 10, 2020

This. 

When Tony Banks, says to Trump supporters, "From the bottom of my ball sack, F%$# you!," I feel like cheering.

What's In the Mail Today?

You will not believe what we got in the mail on Wednesday. 

Yes, we got a notice from the US Postal Service to make sure to vote early if we plan to vote by mail.

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE ELECTION.

I know that the Post Office performs many essential services, try getting a your medications through email, for one, and I am loath to make all the standard jokes, but seriously ……… What is up with this?

I guess I should feel grateful about this, because how often do I get to look for and then watch a video of guy in a bear suit rocking out about mail delivery.

I Said That This Would Happen, and I Am the Second Worst Prognosticator in History*

Once again, initial unemployment claims are rising under the dual whammys of a Covid explosion and the expiration of stimulus measures:

The number of applications for unemployment benefits rose sharply last week, indicating continued challenges for the U.S. economic recovery as coronavirus infections increased around the country.

Initial claims for jobless benefits, a proxy for layoffs, rose to a seasonally adjusted 742,000 last week, up from the 711,000 filed a week earlier. That level is more than three times higher than the roughly 210,000 typically filed each week in the first two months of 2020, though it is down sharply from a peak of nearly seven million in late March.

At present levels, initial jobless claims are still higher than they were in any other recession on record.

This is going to get worse before it gets better.

^*The worst prognosticator in history was my dad, Ron Saroff ז״ל, who in 1968 famously said, "Those bastards nominated Richard Nixon, there is no way that they can win!"