Linkage

• Public records are my passion. They can be yours too. (Brutal South) A good primer on how to get access to public records.
• ‘Office Space’ Star Stephen Root Says Every Time He Joins a New Set, He’s Given a Box of Staplers (Cracked.com) You remember.  If not, see the video below.
• Iceberg lovers go wild over viral photos of the 'dickie berg' off Newfoundland's coast (CBC News) Yeah, it's stupid and juvenile, but I am stupid and juvenile.
• Carmakers like VW are bringing back buttons because drivers loathe all the touch screens. (Slate) Touch screens suck. Another reason not to buy a Tesla
• U.S. Supreme Court justices take lavish gifts — then raise the bar for bribery prosecutions (Ohio Capital Journal)  The Supreme Court is deeply and profoundly corrupt.
• Washington passes law requiring consent before companies collect health data (The Verge) Hopefully, we will see more of this.
  

This is Cool

With the exception of some water added in 1972, a terrarium has been operating sealed for 63 years.

Of course, "Sealed," is a relative term.  The sunlight is a major external contributor, to the tune of 100s of thousands of kilowatt hours, over 63 years, of course.

Still, this is wicked neat:

In 1960 David Latimer got curious and decided to plant a glass bottle with seed. He would have never guessed it would turn into a beautiful case study of a self-sustaining sealed ecosystem that has been called “the world’s oldest terrarium.”

In fact, after all these years, David’s sealed bottle garden is still thriving and robust. With thriving plant life, despite not watering it since 1972.

David planted the terrarium back in 1960 by placing a quarter pint of water and compost in the ten-gallon bottle. He then lowered in spiderworts seeding with a wire. Finally, sealing it and put it in a corner filled with sun. Letting mother nature do its thing through photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis puts moisture and oxygen in the air through the plants.  The humidity then builds and begins to rain back down on the plants.  Leaves will also fall and rot, producing carbon dioxide that the plants need for nutrition.

It’s a beautiful example of how nature can support itself.

Larimer did open the bottle in 1972 to water the plant. But, since then, it has remained sealed without fresh water or air.

For some reason, this story just makes me feel good.

Do You Want Cheese with That Whine?

It seems that Supreme Court Justice Alito has major butt-hurt because people are criticizing the Court.

You have lifetime tenure, enormous and unchallenged power over what happens in the United States, but you want to be worshiped as a god.

Sam Alito, go f%$# yourself:

Justice Samuel Alito would like everyone to know that in the wake of the Supreme Court revoking 50 years of abortion rights and then being plagued by corruption scandal after corruption scandal, our criticism of him and his institution is very much hurting his feelings.

Alito told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Friday that attacks on the “legitimacy” of the high court are “new during [his] lifetime.”

“We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us,” he said. “The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organized bar will come to their defense.” But “if anything,” the justice continued, “they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks.”

Let’s briefly roll through some of the Supreme Court ethics scandals that have surfaced just in the past two weeks: Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni tried to overturn a presidential election, is being financed by a billionaire GOP megadonor who literally collects Hitler memorabilia and has a garden full of dictator statues (oh, and who doesn’t charge Thomas’ mother rent). Neil Gorsuch, who discloses gifts as small as cowboy boots and a fishing rod, did not disclose that he sold a 40-acre Colorado property he co-owned to the CEO of a law firm that often argues cases before the court. And Insider reported Friday that Chief Justice Thomas Roberts’ wife, Jane, was paid 10.3 million in commissions from “elite law firms” that, of course, also had business before the court.

And as story after story come out about just how corrupt, unethical, and frankly, bought the people are who are deciding things like what we can do with our bodies and who gets voting rights in this country, Alito is complaining that they are the victims in all this, because someone leaked his draft opinion in Dobbs a month early and people protested.

If you behave like a bunch of corrupt tools, don't be surprised when you are treated like a bunch of corrupt tools. 

Respect is not granted from high, it is earned.

I am Not Surprised

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that companies are colluding to game the H-1B visa guest worker program.

Finding corruption in the H-1B system, and the related L-1 visa, is not a surprised.  Notwithstanding the stated purpose of these programs, to allow companies to hire foreign employees where there are no domestic alternatives, these programs are actually designed to be a corrupt way for employers to get cheap labor and suppress wages.

Cheating is the point of the programs:

The Biden administration says it has found evidence that several dozen small technology companies have colluded to increase the chances that their prospective foreign hires will win a coveted H-1B visa for skilled foreign workers in this year’s lottery.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that awards H-1B visas, said it has found that a small number of companies are responsible for entering the same applicants into the lottery multiple times, with the alleged goal of artificially boosting their chances of winning a visa. The findings were laid out in a notice to employers viewed by The Wall Street Journal and set to be released Friday.

That practice, according to the agency, is in large part responsible for inflating demand for the visas to a record high this year, with 781,000 entries into the lottery for 85,000 visa slots.

The solution to the problem is fairly straightforward:

• Make the lotteries monthly rather than yearly, reducing the stakes, and making it easier for smaller companies with actual needs for specific skills to participate.
• Change the lottery for visa slots into a bidding process.  The price will reach a level where companies looking for cheap labor, which is technically against the law, will no longer have an economic incentive to participate.

Of course, this will never happen, because that is not what the program is really about.

………

A much greater share of the increase, the data shows, can be attributed to applicants whose names were submitted by multiple companies. A large proportion of the duplicate entries, the immigration agency says, were submitted by a handful of the same companies. Some 96,000 people submitted multiple visa entries, for a total of about 408,000 entries.

Though it isn’t technically illegal for a foreign worker to have multiple companies submit visa applications on their behalf, companies submitting applications must attest that they have a real job for the employee in question if they win a visa. If companies that win a visa then quickly contract an employee out to third parties, or lay off an employee on the visa so he or she can switch companies, that could potentially amount to fraud.

Of course it's fraud.  That is a feature of this system not a bug.

Tweet of the Day

Have we really become so cynical that we believe that $10 million in bribes could affect the decisions of the Chief Justice of the highest court in the land?

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) April 29, 2023

Needless to say, the New York Times Pitchbot is a parody account.

It does, however do a near perfect job of describing the solipsistic and corrosive world view that infests the Gray Lady.

It also does a very good job of predicting what we will see in the New York Times.

We are Unbelievably Screwed

This is not a boating accident

We have the latest data on ocean temperatures, ane there is an unprecedented heating event going on.

The numbers are worrying, put putting it in context with a picture makes it f%$#ing terrifying: (See the black line)

To call what’s happening in the oceans right now an anomaly is a bit of an understatement. Since March, average sea surface temperatures have been climbing to record highs, as shown in the dark line in the graph below.

Since this record-keeping began in the early 1980s—the other squiggly lines are previous years—the global average for the world’s ocean surfaces has oscillated seasonally between 19.7° and 21° Celsius (67.5° and 69.8° Fahrenheit). Toward the end of March, the average shot above the 21° mark and stayed there for a month. (The most recent reading, for April 26, was just a hair under 21°.) This temperature spike is not just unprecedented, but extreme.

“It’s surprising to me that we’re this far off the trajectory,” says Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit that gathers climate data. “Usually when you have a particular warming event, we’re beating the previous record by a little bit. Right now we’re sitting well above the past records for this time of year, for a considerable period of time.”

Rohde points out that temperatures this week were just under two-tenths of a degree warmer than the previous record. “Two-tenths doesn’t sound like a lot—but in ocean terms two-tenths is actually a lot because it doesn’t warm as quickly as the land,” he says.

This is a F%$# tonne of energy.

………

We're gonna need a bigger boat


Enough with the Jaws quotes, we are f%$#ed

Last year, researchers reported that climate change has made extreme heat events in the ocean the new normal. Thanks to historical data collected from ships all over the world, they determined the highest surface temperatures between the years 1870 to 1919—essentially setting a baseline for extremes. They found that in the 19th century, 2 percent of the ocean was hitting these extremes, but because of climate change it’s now 57 percent. In other words, extreme heat events in the ocean are now typical. (These differ from an overall increase in heat, in that temperatures come down from extreme peaks, but the general upward trend isn’t reversing itself.)

At this point, disaster is largely inevitable.  The only question is how bad it is going to get.

I think that it is inevitable that we will see significant areas of the world rendered uninhabitable for humans for at least part of the year, and a sea level rise of at least 3 meters.

What's more, I expect to see this earlier than anyone is predicting, which is not an unreasonable supposition given that the actual progress of anthropogenic climate change has exceeded the worst case scenarios from climatologists.

Integrity, Schmintegrity, This Is Self-Preservation

Only this time, it's the elephants, and we are all the better because of it

In South Carolina and Nebraska, some Republicans in their state houses switched sides and killed draconian anti-abortion bills.

This was not a concern for the public welfare, nor was this an exercise in courage of any sort.

The politicians in question simply realized that these bills, particularly when they have the effect of preventing life-saving care for women suffering complications in pregnancy, are electoral poison.

I won't begrudge the cowardice of some Republicans, but neither will I laud it.

It serves the public weal, so it is a good thing, even if it is down by bad people.

Not this Sh%$ Again

Another day, another hack suggesting that the inflation problem is being caused by workers getting their first raise in decades.

Wages have increased at less than the rate of inflation, though the wages in the bottom ⅓ have outpaced inflation, so they are not the proximate cause of inflation.

It started with supply chain issues driven by Covid, and now, in our increasingly concentrated economy, we have massive greedflation from oligopolies who are raising prices because they have no meaningful competition.

Of course the real problem is workers getting paid better.

All it took was about ¾ million workers dead, another ¾ million workers having retired because they are sick of this sh%$, and about 3 million workers disabled by long Covid.

Clearly the Fed needs to create misery to keep ordinary folk from acting uppity.

F%$# that.

This is My Shocked Face!

The Guardian is noting that the Senate investigation rape and sexual assault that surfaced against Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated for the Supreme Court was grossly inadequate.

Well, color me shocked.

Also, what about Kavanaugh's vanishing debt and the $¼ million down payment for the purchase of his home in Bethesda.

It's clear that the entire nomination process for Kavanaugh was an exercise in multiple cover-ups, both by the White House and by the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Kavanaugh is dirty, and he always has been:

A 2018 Senate investigation that found there was “no evidence” to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault against the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh contained serious omissions, according to new information obtained by the Guardian.

The 28-page report was released by the Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the then chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. It prominently included an unfounded and unverified claim that one of Kavanaugh’s accusers – a fellow Yale graduate named Deborah Ramirez – was “likely” mistaken when she alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a dormitory party because another Yale student was allegedly known for such acts.

The suggestion that Kavanaugh was the victim of mistaken identity was sent to the judiciary committee by a Colorado-based attorney named Joseph C Smith Jr, according to a non-redacted copy of a 2018 email obtained by the Guardian. Smith was a friend and former colleague of the judiciary committee’s then lead counsel, Mike Davis.

Smith was also a member of the Federalist Society, which strongly supported Kavanaugh’s supreme court nomination, and appears to have a professional relationship with the Federalist Society’s co-founder, Leonard Leo, whom he thanked in the acknowledgments of his book Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State.

Smith wrote to Davis in the 29 September 2018 email that he was in a class behind Kavanaugh and Ramirez (who graduated in the class of 1987) and believed Ramirez was likely mistaken in identifying Kavanaugh.

Instead, Smith said it was a fellow classmate named Jack Maxey, who was a member of Kavanaugh’s fraternity, who allegedly had a “reputation” for exposing himself, and had once done so at a party. To back his claim, Smith also attached a photograph of Maxey exposing himself in his fraternity’s 1988 yearbook picture.

The allegation that Ramirez was likely mistaken was included in the Senate committee’s final report even though Maxey – who was described but not named – was not attending Yale at the time of the alleged incident.

In an interview with the Guardian, Maxey confirmed that he was still a senior in high school at the time of the alleged incident, and said he had never been contacted by any of the Republican staffers who were conducting the investigation.

Kavanaugh could have, "Put half a dozen children on a spit and toast(ed) them at the flame that comes out of his mouth," on national television, and the Republicans would have stated that there was no reason for any further investigation."

The fix was in at from the very start.  Anyone who thinks otherwise has the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie..

Some Good News from the UK

No, King Charles has not abolished the monarchy, but the UK Competition and Markets Authority has blocked Microsoft's merger with Activision Blizzard.

Given Microsoft's current position, it is a major console manufacturer, Windows is a major gaming platform, it's a major player in cloud computing, and it dominates cloud gaming, it's buying up the publisher of Call of Duty, Tony Hawk, Warcraft, Candy Crush, and Guitar Hero creates significant competion issues.

The FTC is suing to prevent the merger as well:

Today I’m writing about the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority’s move to block Microsoft’s takeover of Activision in a $69 billion deal. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this challenge, and I’m going to focus on the logic of the CMA, and what it means for the development of technology going forward.

Here’s what happened. Microsoft was trying to buy Activision to expand its gaming portfolio, which it had rolled up with a series of acquisitions. Activision would have been its largest purchase to date. What was the rationale for the acquisition? As I wrote when the deal was announced:

Activision has important gaming franchises, like Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Warcraft and Tony Hawk. With this purchase, Microsoft will be the third biggest gaming firm in the world, controlling the X-Box console platform and a lot of game development and intellectual property (as well as Activision’s in-game advertising business line). The key strategic rationale behind this deal is to build up a walled garden for Microsoft’s gaming division, which runs a Netflix-style subscription service called Game Pass.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the deal, arguing that Microsoft would foreclose its games to its rival in game platforms, Sony.

“Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” said Holly Vedova, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets.”

The idea was that Microsoft would make games exclusive to its own platforms, in order to block rivals from ‘must-have’ content in the gaming industry. A lot of people didn’t understand why Microsoft’s deal was so dangerous, because Sony is both bigger in the gaming space, and has a lot more game exclusives.

………

This dynamic is very clear when examining how the CMA thought about its challenge. Originally, in its statement of objections, the CMA claimed that Microsoft could gain market power in both consoles and cloud computing. But then in March, it dropped its claims about consoles, effectively brushing aside Sony’s worries. A lot of observers thought Microsoft would then be able to get its deal approved, assuming the logic for gaming on cloud computing is similar to that of consoles.

………

While this may sound like a compelling rationale, the CMA was unpersuaded, noting that “there seem to be other, less anti-competitive ways, through which Microsoft could reasonably attempt to enter this market, such as by licensing mobile gaming content from publishers.” Basically, you don’t have to own games to sell them through an app store, unless you are trying to monopolize a vertically integrated sector.

So what happens now? Well, Microsoft can appeal, and Brad Smith says they are planning to do so. Appeals are tough in the UK. And Activision must agree to that, since an appeal will take the merger past the merger agreement due date. Moreover, Activision has a $3 billion break-up fee, and has already been planning a strategy based on the assumption the deal won’t go through. So we’ll see. Meanwhile, the FTC is still gearing up for trial in the U.S., and this move helps American enforcers in their arguments here.

Your mouth to God's ear, Mr. Stoller. 

We desperately need aggressive anti-trust enforcement, including criminal penalties against executives who do this.

We Have a New Definition of Chutzpah

And it is pissing off the judge overseeing the lawsuit against Elon Musk for the demonstrably false statements that he has made about the autonomous capabilities of Tesla automobiles.

His lawyers are now claiming that Musk cannot recall making any exaggerated statements about the capabilities of Tesla's self-driving systems, and that it all might be, "Deep Fakes." 

The ability of the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir™ exceed my lowest expectations buggers the mind.  

I am left staring with an expression on my face that must surely resemble that of a cow that just stepped on its own udder:

The judge overseeing a wrongful death lawsuit involving Tesla's Autopilot system rejected Tesla's claim that videos of CEO Elon Musk's public statements might be deepfakes.

Tesla's deepfake claim "is deeply troubling to the Court," Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Evette Pennypacker wrote in a tentative ruling this week. "Their position is that because Mr. Musk is famous and might be more of a target for deep fakes, his public statements are immune. In other words, Mr. Musk, and others in his position, can simply say whatever they like in the public domain, then hide behind the potential for their recorded statements being a deep fake to avoid taking ownership of what they did actually say and do. The Court is unwilling to set such a precedent by condoning Tesla's approach here."

Plaintiffs want Tesla to admit the authenticity of various statements Musk made about the self-driving capabilities in Tesla cars. Pennypacker's tentative ruling ordered Musk to be interviewed for a deposition at which plaintiffs can ask whether he made the statements.

"Mr. Musk was either at these places or he was not; he either said these things or he did not. Ironically, Tesla's refusal to answer these questions only makes a clearer record that Mr. Musk is the only person that has this information to respond to this discovery, one of the pre-requisites to permitting an Apex deposition," Pennypacker wrote.

That is a pissed off judge.

………

As Pennypacker wrote, the court stated at a February 23 hearing that "it is not necessary to have a chain of custody like history for a video for a person depicted in the video to confirm (a) if that is the person, (b) if the person did or did not perform the act shown in the video and/or (c) if the person did or did not say something depicted in the video."

Pennypacker decided that the deposition of Musk could last up to three hours "and can only address the Requests for Admission seeking to confirm that Mr. Musk was at specific interviews and made specific already identified statements during those interviews. Plaintiffs must bring the recorded statements and show them to Mr. Musk at the deposition, so that he can state under oath whether or not he made the statements."

In one case, "audio is attributed to Mr. Musk that he says he did not say," Pennypacker wrote. "Tellingly, Mr. Musk is able to identify that these videos are fake because (as must be the case) he can recall that he did not give that particular Ted Talk (even though he did give a Ted Talk) or actually give an interview about nude photos. Thus, plainly, Mr. Musk is able to have some recall as to what interviews he did and did not do."

Oh dear.  There are nude Elon photos?  Make it stop.

Tesla's claim that Musk didn't necessarily make statements on video shows the company is "still trying to have it both ways, or, perhaps put more accurately, Tesla is trying to avoid at all costs tying itself to Mr. Musk's statements or denying outright that Mr. Musk made the statements," the judge wrote.

This is one pissed off judge. 

Musk will probably win, but his lawyers will not have a good time doing so.

It's Thursday

Last week's jobs report came in initial unemployment claims fell by 16,000 to 230,000, while continuing claims fell by 3,000 to 1.86 million.  (basically flat)

We also get the GDP numbers for the 1st quarter, and GDP growth slowed to a 1.1% annual rate, 1½% less than the last quarter of 2022, and 0.9% below what was generally forecast.

My guess is that the Federal Reserve will continue its Jihad against the average working person, probably to the tune of a ¼% increase in the Federal Funds rate at their next meeting.

I think that we are already in recession, the income tax withholding numbers seem to indicate that, but we will see an official start date to the recession only a few months after it has started.

The Fed doesn't care, they don't have to, they're the Fed.

Oh Snap!

Normally, the FAA does not ground a rocket after a failure, but normally, the launch pad is not chosen in a location where debris rains downs on homes, businesses, beach goers, and protected wetlands. 

Elon Musk, being Elon Musk, thought that worrying about debris raining down on the surrounding neighborhoods was beneath him.

I don't care, I don't have to ……… I'm Elon.

He's Ernestine the telephone operator without Lily Tomlin's comic genius.  (Or much genius at all for that matter)

It turns out that Elon was wrong. and the FAA has grounded his latest booster because he is putting people's lives at risk.

Musk was not that far from an Intelsat 708 disaster, where a Chinese Long March rocket malfunctioned and killed at least 6 people in the surrounding countryside.  (Some estimates put it in the hundreds)

America's Federal Aviation Administration has grounded SpaceX's Starship to conduct a safety investigation after the heavy-lift rocket destroyed a chunk of the launch pad, malfunctioned, and had to be blown up mid-test.

SpaceX was unable to get Starship, said to be the world's most powerful rocket, into orbit during that experiment last week. The rocket started rotating mid-air when it failed to break free of its booster shortly after takeoff on April 20. It fell uncontrollably back to Earth, and was deliberately detonated over Boca Chica, Texas, for safety reasons within minutes of launch.

Before it even got to that point, Starship had damaged the pad and nearby space center infrastructure during its blastoff, and scattered ash and dust over wildlife areas and a nearby town.

A video recording of the flight showed chunks of concrete being kicked up by the launch and smashing the windows of a car, and created a cloud of ash and dirt. The stuff descended onto Port Isabel, where residents reported hearing the roar of Starship's engines and feeling the ground shake.

The FAA is concerned about two things, neither of which have much to do with the primary systems of the rocket.

First, there is the fact that the launch threw debris for miles, because some of the pad preparation was not done, and might have been inadequate in any case, the acoustic engineers are reported to have recommended a water deluge system.  (This happened because Elon wanted to launch on April 20 because, you know 420)

Elon, the 420 joke was not funny the first 20 times that you made it.  It's immature and stupid.

The second issue is that the flight termination (self-destruct) system did not work as intended.  It was more than 50 seconds between when the destruct command was issued and when the rocket broke up.  (See a quick take from Scott Manley here.)

50 seconds is a VERY long time in this sort of scenario, and I imagine that the FAA will be looking at a more robust termination system. 

This would have the effect of complicating recovery of the first stage, and given Musk's commitment to reusable boosters, this could create a relatively complex technical issue.

Well, That's One Way Around Sanctions

The US Navy will find this tough to interdict

According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran is allegedly shipping munitions to Russia via the Caspian Sea.

This would have the effect of reducing shipping costs by at least 80%.

It really is remarkable how effectively Russia is bypassing US sanctions.

I am sure that other nations of the world at risk for US sanctions, which would mean every other nation on earth except perhaps for Canada, the UK, Israel, and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, are probably taking notes:

Russian ships are ferrying large quantities of Iranian artillery shells and other ammunition across the Caspian Sea to resupply troops fighting in Ukraine, Middle East officials said, posing a growing challenge for the U.S. and its allies as they try to disrupt cooperation between Moscow and Tehran.

Over the past six months, cargo ships have carried more than 300,000 artillery shells and a million rounds of ammunition from Iran to Russia, according to the officials and documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Intelligence about the shipments has been shared with the U.S., people familiar with the matter said.

………

The U.S. and its allies have been looking for ways to disrupt transfers of weapons from Iran, which has also been an important supplier of drones to the Russian military, U.S. officials say.

Iran has primarily used cargo planes to ship weapons to Russia, according to U.S. officials, making it all but impossible to intervene. And taking action in the Caspian Sea would require help from former Soviet republics on its coastline.

As the United States is effectively at are at war with both nations, a blockade is legally an act of war, and any of the former Soviet republics taking actions against Russia and Iran would carry enormous costs.

If either Armenia nor Azerbaijan would support the sanctions it risks Russia taking the other side in their long running conflict, while Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan would face major economic issues if the borders to Russia and Iran were closed.

………

Officials in the Middle East said the most recent weapons shipment known to have crossed the Caspian Sea to Russia left Iran in early March aboard the Rasul Gamzatov, a 460-foot-long Russian cargo ship named after a writer famous for a poem lamenting the death of Soviet soldiers in World War II.

The ship carried 1,000 containers with 2,000 artillery shells, the officials said, a previously unreported shipment. Some other Iran-to-Russia shipments were previously reported by Sky News.

………

One contract from September 2022, viewed by Journal, showed a deal between Iran’s Defense Ministry and Russia’s JSC Rosoboronexport for more than 74,000 artillery shells to be sold to Russia for $1.7 million.

………

The Biden administration has warned that the deepening ties between the two nations pose a threat beyond Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO view Russia’s war in Ukraine as a threat to global security, especially to nations in the military alliance on Russia’s western borders.  Russia’s use of Iranian drones to hit Ukraine’s Kyiv, a European capital, has heightened the concern in Western capitals.

Russia and Iran have had active diplomatic relations for centuries, and they have a common enemy in the US, so cooperation was more than just foreseeable, it was inevitable.

The ineptitude of the US foreign policy establishment continues unabated.

Remember That Financial Fad That Is Blowing Up?

Remember Saroff's Rule(12)
"If a financial transaction is complex enough to require that a news organization use a cartoon to explain it, its purpose is to deceive
Cartoon from here.."

No, not that one  ………

Or that one ………

Or that one ………

I am referring to the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which created a way for a company to go public with no due diligence.

The short version is that you create an empty company that goes public, and hence has literally nothing to declare.

The company then goes public, and then uses the money to buy and take over another company, a real company with a real product without the normal financial deep dive.

The real company gets some of the proceeds, the Wall Street goons get their vigorish, and theoretically everyone is happy, except, perhaps, the people who bought into an IPO with none of the normal guide rails.

They were all the rage until about a year ago, and now we are seeing a spike in bankruptcies and companies running out of money, because the companies were never viable.

I can haz prosecushuns?

The SPAC boom took hundreds of risky companies to the stock market. The next stop for many is bankruptcy court.

Dozens of companies that merged with SPACs are running out of cash, joining at least 12 that have already gone bankrupt after combining with special-purpose acquisition companies.

More than 100 companies, including electric-scooter firm Bird Global Inc., Owlet Inc. and electric-car startup Faraday Future Intelligent Electric Inc. are running out of cash, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the companies’ cash and cash flow from operations data disclosed in regulatory filings.

Shares of many of these companies trade under $1, more than 90% below where they did when they went public, and are in danger of being delisted. Those that have raised cash typically have done it on onerous terms. Bird extended its runway by merging with its Canadian partner.

Many of these businesses were worth billions when they hit the market and drew in small investors excited at the prospects of space tourism, cryptocurrencies and electric cars. Companies that went public this way have since collectively lost more than $100 billion in market value.  

Fraud seems to be the dominant business model on Wall Street.

Headline of the Day

Pensioner Urinating on Train Tracks Killed by Flying Cow Launched 100ft into the Air by Carriage

—LBC News

I guess you never know when there will be a cow with your name on it, but "Another man in the area narrowly escaped being caught by the flying animal carcass."

To quote Depeche Mode, "I think that God has a sick sense of humor."

A pensioner was killed in a freak accident when he was struck by a flying cow launched 100ft into the air by an express train.

Shivdayal Sharma, 82, was reportedly urinating next to a train track in the region of Alwar, India, when the incident occurred on April 19.

It's thought the animal was hit by the Vande Bharat express train before landing on Mr Sharma.

Another man in the area narrowly escaped being caught by the flying animal carcass.

Mr Sharma had worked as an electrician at Indian Railways, before retiring 23 years ago, India Today reports.

It really is remarkable how much mischief cows do in our world, heart disease, methane emissions, deforestation in the Amazon basin, and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

If I didn't know better, I would think that cows are merely masquerading as slow-moving cud-chewers, and that they are in fact the malevolent agent of some sort of alien empire determined to bring humanity to its knees.

Today in Corrupt Supreme Court Justices not Named Clarence Thomas

Unlike the case with Clarence Thomas, the conflicts of interest seem to be far more direct.

You see just 9 days after he was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Brian Duffy, the head of the white shoe law firm Greenberg Traurig bought some land that he co-owned, which he had been trying to unload for some time.

Rather suspiciously, Brian Duffy's name was not mentioned in Gorsuch's disclosure forms.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that since Neil Gorshuch was seated Greenberg Traurig has been involved in dozens of cases before the court.

It appears that there is an ethics problem at the court, but don't expect anything to change, Chief Justice John Roberts just told the Senate to go pound sand on their ethics investigation:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. told Senate leaders Tuesday that he would “respectfully decline” to testify at a Senate hearing focused on the Supreme Court, offering instead a statement signed by all the justices in which they “reaffirm and restate foundational ethics principles and practices” to which they abide.

There did not seem to be new proposals or guidelines in the “Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices.” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) immediately labeled it insufficient, noting recent revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas that the senator said illustrated the need for more scrutiny.

The Senate Juciciary Committee needs to subpoena John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch. but they can't because Dianne Feinstein* is unable to attend meetings right now, and is not coming back, and her staffers are desperate to maintain the illusion, and the status to go on with their positions, so we won't see a resignation and replacement.

That leaves the executive branch to go and do a deep dive on every single member of the court, including a forensic audit, but Merrick "Slow Walk" Garland would never do that, because pursuing lawbreaking by some of the most powerful people in the country might lead to people thinking that the DoJ is engaging in partisan prosecutions.

Deciding not to prosecute criminals because politicians will talk smack about you is not an exercise in non-partisan integrity, it is craven cowardice.

For nearly two years beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colo.

Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court. Gorsuch owned the property with two other individuals.

On April 16 of 2017, Greenberg’s Brian Duffy put under contract the 3,000-square foot log home on the Colorado River and nestled in the mountains northwest of Denver, according to real estate records.

Let's be clear, Gorsuch and his partners could have sold their land in a lot less than 2 years, but they could not get the price that they want.  The head of  Greenberg Traurig paid that price, 9 days after his confirmation.

How convenient.

………

He and his wife closed on the house a month later, paying $1.825 million, according to a deed in the county’s record system. Gorsuch, who held a 20 percent stake, reported making between $250,001 and $500,000 from the sale on his federal disclosure forms.

Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser. That box was left blank.

The box was left blank?  How convenient.

Since then, Greenberg Traurig has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court, according to a POLITICO review of the court’s docket.

At least 22 cases?  How convenient.

………

Duffy, who in addition to serving as CEO is chief of Greenberg’s entire 600-lawyer litigation department, said he has never personally argued cases before Gorsuch or met the justice socially.

“I’ve never spoken to him,” Duffy said. “I’ve never met him.”

Once he learned Gorsuch was among the owners, Duffy said, he cleared the sale with his firm’s ethics department.

His doing a multi-million dollar favor to a Supreme Court Justice and his business partners was cleared by the Greenberg Traurig ethics department?  How convenient.

Gorsuch did not respond to inquiries about the sale, his disclosures or whether he should have reported Duffy’s identity as the purchaser.

He did not respond? How convenient!

………

Unlike Crow, who bought properties from Thomas, Duffy says he is neither a friend nor a confidant of Gorsuch. But he is one of the nation’s most powerful attorneys.

One of the nation’s most powerful attorneys?  How convenient.

………

Gorsuch and his associates purchased the property in 2005 through their LLC, the Walden Group, which was dissolved after the 2017 sale. The home was originally listed, in July of 2015, for $2.495 million. The fact that the property had sat on the market for so long and that its price had been lowered a couple times suggests the partners were having trouble finding a buyer.

How convenient! 

Nothing to see here, move along.

^*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

We Lost Another Great One

With the Muppets

Harry Belafonte has died at age 96.

I'm sad, so here is the Muppet Show version of the Banana Boat Song.

Activist, actor, singer, and mensch.

Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a dynamic force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.

At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a while no one in music, Black or white, was bigger.

Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” His album “Calypso,” which included both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.

………

But making movies was never Mr. Belafonte’s priority, and after a while neither was making music. He continued to perform into the 21st century, and to appear in movies as well (although he had two long hiatuses from the screen), but his primary focus from the late 1950s on was civil rights.

We will not see his like again.

For the Love of God, Make it Stop

I have the ear worm from hell.

Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry Be Happy.

If I have to suffer, you have to suffer.

Linkage

• Iconic Renaissance Artist Leonardo da Vinci was a Jew (The Jewish Press) His mother may have been a Jewish woman enslaved by the Turks and sold to someone in Italy.
• Our Problem Isn't Polarization. It's Fascism. (Noah Berlatsky) By normalizing this behavior, we encourage more and worse behavior.
• ‘It’s like an infectious diseases textbook from the turn of the century’: Doctors alarmed at rise of ‘retro’ diseases (The Toronto Star) Covid immune disregulation in Canada be causing outbreaks of Whooping Cough?
• Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks (The Economist) American pickup trucks are getting too large and unwieldy for American Farmers, who are importing Japanese "Kei" trucks.
• The heightened risk of autoimmune diseases after Covid (Eric Topol) I occasionally call Covid the, "Andromeda Strain," for a reason.
• How Philly Cheesesteaks Became a Big Deal in Lahore, Pakistan (Philadelphia Magazine) Well, duh.  Because Philly Cheesesteaks are awesome.

Why, "Florida Man," is a thing. (It's a good reason)

Looking for Proof of a Supreme Being is an Exercise in Futility, but

The fact that Kyrsten Sinema's most recent poling has her at -23% certainly does reinforce one's faith in the divine.

-23% puts her well behind any potential Republican or Democratic candidate in Arizona.

Hell, -23% puts her behind hemorrhoids and French kissing Ted Cruz

A new poll out of Arizona by a well-trusted national pollster, Public Policy Polling, shows that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I) stands to lose re-election badly in virtually any potential matchup this November and is deeply unpopular among voters.

The survey results, first obtained by Jezebel via an internal Ruben Gallego campaign memo, show that just 27 percent of voters in the state view Sinema favorably and want her to run again, compared to 50 percent of Arizonans who view her unfavorably and 54 percent who say she shouldn’t run again. Rep. Gallego (D-Ariz.), her likely Democratic challenger, has a net positive favorability, with 39 percent of voters approving of him and 28 percent disapproving.

In any likely three-way matchup among Sinema, Gallego and whatever Republican candidate wins their primary, Sinema appears to have virtually no chance of winning. If the GOP candidate is election denier Kari Lake, for example, the new PPP survey shows that Gallego would pull in 42 percent of the vote, Lake 35 percent, and Sinema just 14 percent. The numbers are similar if you plug Jim Lamon or Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb in as the Republican candidate.

About the only political figure in Arizona I could see her beating in a statewide campaign would be impeached AZ Governor Evan Mecham, and he has been dead since 2008.  

I am pretty sure that zombie Barry Goldwater would beat Sinema by double digits.

So, Harlan Crow Never Had a Case Before the Supreme Court?

Not so much.

And Clarence Thomas did not even consider recusing himself.

Justice Clarence Thomas said he was advised he didn’t have to disclose private jet flights and luxury vacations paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow because, although a close friend, Crow “did not have business before the court.”

But in at least one case, Crow did.

Bloomberg reviewed dozens of state and federal cases involving companies that the Crow family has owned or had a financial stake in since Thomas’ 1991 confirmation. Nearly all of these disputes played out at the trial and appellate level and didn’t reach the Supreme Court.

In January 2005, though, the court declined to hear an appeal from an architecture firm that wanted more than $25 million from Trammell Crow Residential Co. for allegedly misusing copyrighted building designs. When the court issued a one-sentence order denying the petition, there were no noted recusals — indicating that Thomas participated — and no noted dissents.

The Crow family had a non-controlling interest in the company at the time, according to a statement to Bloomberg from Harlan Crow’s office. Thomas had already reported a 1997 private flight and high-dollar gifts from Crow, both documented in a December 2004 report from the Los Angeles Times. The justice had described Crow and his wife Kathy as “personal friends.”

I don't want impeachment, I want him frog marched out of the Supreme Court in handcuffs.

And while they are at it, a deep dive into the dodgy finances of Brett Kavanaugh is merited as well.

Tucker Carlson Fired

It appears that this is not directly related to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, but rather to the lawsuit by former staffer Abby Grossberg, which presented very credible allegations (she literally has tapes) that Carlson his executive producer (who was also fired) created a remarkably hostile workplace.

There were also accusations that Fox News lawyers attempted to suborn perjury from for the aforementioned defamation trial.

Fox News dropped Tucker Carlson, its controversial yet top-rated prime-time host, on Monday — a sudden and surprise parting with one of the most influential voices in Republican politics, who had helped define the network’s bombastic tone in the Trump era.

His firing came less than a week after Fox settled a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, which had sued the network for airing false claims that it had conspired to rig the 2020 presidential election, for $787.5 million — the largest publicly disclosed monetary settlement ever in an American defamation action.

Though Carlson largely avoided trafficking in those specific conspiracy theories, his private messages were among thousands of internal communications made public during its progress through the courts that caused angst and embarrassment for Fox and heightened the company’s legal jeopardy.

More recently, Carlson’s staff culture had come under scrutiny, after a former booker for his show sued Fox News for discrimination, claiming that she endured sexist treatment while working for him, and messages revealed in the lawsuit showed Carlson referring to Sidney Powell, a female attorney affiliated with Donald Trump, as a “c---.”

But Carlson’s comments about Fox colleagues, as partly revealed in the Dominion case, also played a role in his departure, a person familiar with the company’s thinking told The Washington Post.

………

In another message, Carlson referred to management with an expletive: “Those f-----s are destroying our credibility.” He later wrote: “A combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down is what’s happening.”

Carlson, who works from a remote studio in Maine, did not respond to repeated messages asking for comment on his departure — which came an hour before rival cable network CNN ousted longtime host Don Lemon.

………

Notably, Carlson was not given a chance to say goodbye to the audience he had amassed in his years as a prime-time host. His executive producer, Justin Wells, is also leaving the network, according to a person familiar with the changes.

According to Keith Olbermann, Rupert Murdoch made the call to fire him personally, and I am inclined to favor that account.

In any case, I am very amused.

Those Stock Buybacks Were Brilliant

After wasting billions of dollars on stock buybacks, Bed Bath & Beyond has declared bankruptcy, and liquidation is likely to follow.

According to Allan Sloan, they have spent billions on stock buybacks

We all know that the Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) retail chain is in such big trouble that it’s likely to file for bankruptcy. But what most people don’t know is this: A major reason the company is so messed up is that when it comes to its own stock, the company violated a key rule of retailing — buy cheap.

Would you believe that Bed and Bath has spent more than $11.7 billion to buy back almost three quarters of its own stock? At an average cost about 15 times the stock’s current price? And that only a couple of months ago, when it was already in desperate financial shape, it kept buying back its shares? (For no rational reason, as far as I can tell.)

Well, you should believe it, because it’s all true.

According to its financial filings, Bed and Bath has spent $11.73 billion buying back its own stock since 2004 at an average cost of more than $44 a share. The stock’s price, when last I looked, was a smidge under $3.

………

And as I said, the company kept buying back its own shares late last year even after it had become clear that its finances were deep in it.

………

Wall Street loves stock buybacks, which it calls “returning money to shareholders.” By reducing the number of shares outstanding, buybacks can enhance a company’s stock price by raising its earnings per share. Higher earnings per share generally translate into a higher share price.

It  also has the effect of making the stock options that constitute much of the remuneration for senior executives much more valuable.

If you have a million options to buy company stock at $20, they are worthless at a share price of $19.99/share, and worth a million dollars at $21 a share.

More than anything else, stock buybacks are a form of looting by management, also known as control fraud.

………

I was critical of the company’s buybacks in an article that I wrote for Yahoo Finance months ago.

Why am I writing about this again? Because Bed and Bath’s self-destructive buybacks make me deeply angry.

………

But if Bed and Bath had spent a few hundred million dollars less buying back stock, it would have a lot more financial staying power. Staying power that it could sure use now.

America's business culture is fraudulent to its core, at least at the MBA level.

H/t Atrios.

What's the Difference Between a Cockroach and Science Publisher Elsevier?

As near as I can determine, it is that cockroaches are far less expensive.

The rentier capitalism of Elsevier, in which they have the articles peer reviewed, and pay the reviewers nothing or next to nothing, charge the authors to publish the articles, and then charge (a lot) so that people can read the articles, is an exercise in parasitism, and the editors at NeuroImage and Imaging Neuroscience have resigned en masse in response to their rapacious greed.

More than 40 editors have resigned from two leading neuroscience journals in protest against what the editors say are excessively high article-processing charges (APCs) set by the publisher. They say that the fees, which publishers use to cover publishing services and in some cases make money, are unethical. The publisher, Dutch company Elsevier, says that its fees provide researchers with publishing services that are above average quality for below average price. The editors plan to start a new journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT Press.

The decision to resign came about after many discussions among the editors, says Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and editor-in-chief of one of the journals, NeuroImage. “Everyone agreed that the APC was unethical and unsustainable,” says Smith, who will lead the editorial team of the new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, when it launches.

The 42 academics who made up the editorial teams at NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports announced their resignations on 17 April. The journals are open access and require authors to pay a fee for publishing services. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450; NeuroImage: Reports charges $900, which will double to $1,800 from 31 May. Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access journal, including editorial and peer-review services, copy editing, typesetting, archiving, indexing, marketing and administrative costs. Andrew Davis, Elsevier’s vice-president of corporate communications, says that NeuroImage’s fee is less than that of the nearest comparable journal in its field, and that the publisher’s APCs are “set in line with our policy [of] providing above average quality for below average price”.

Lets look at the charges:

• Copy editing? For an article, well under $100.
• Typesetting?  Pennies, done automatically by computers.
• Archiving? Pennies, done automatically by computers.
• Indexing? Pennies, done automatically by computers.
• Peer review?  Most peer reviewers are not paid or a very small fee? 
• Editorial services?  That should mostly be covered peer review, so it's a bullsh%$ profit center.
• Marketing and Administration?  Again a bullsh%$ profit center.

Publishers have introduced APCs — part of a pay-to-publish model — as an alternative to pay-to-read subscriptions as journals increasingly become freely accessible, and researchers typically pay APCs from their grant funds. Journal APCs vary, typically depending on factors such as the publisher’s size, the proportion of papers sent for peer review and metrics such as impact factor, as well as whether they employ in-house editors and press officers. The Lancet Neurology, published by Elsevier, has an APC of $6,300; the fee at Nature Neuroscience, published by Springer Nature, is $11,690; and Human Brain Mapping, published by Wiley, charges $3,850. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of Nature Neuroscience and of Springer Nature.)

Pay to read has stopped working because researchers are increasingly unwilling to pay to read the journals or to put their articles behind paywalls.

Additionally, Sci-Hub, which has made millions of articles that were previously behind paywalls freely available, has made the old business model unsustainable, though the be fair, the ever increasing levies charged by the for-profit publishers likely made something like Sci-Hub inevitable.

………

The editors decided to set up an open-access journal with MIT Press, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Ted Gibson, who sits on MIT Press’s editorial board and is an editor of its cognitive-science journal Open Mind, looks forward to hosting the new title. “These editors have done it the right way. I think it’s a slow process but eventually more scientists will resign from the profit-oriented journals,” Gibson says.

The journal move echoes a 2019 case, in which the editorial board of an Elsevier scientometrics journal — the Journal of Informetrics — resigned in protest over the publisher’s open-access policies, including the journal’s APCs. The researchers launched a free-to-read journal with MIT Press called Quantitative Science Studies, with the same editorial board.

The for profit model of academic publishing is consuming itself through its own unbridled greed.

The current IP regime, particularly copyright, serves no one but the gate-keepers who contribute nothing to society.

Tweet of the Day

- living five adults to a two room apartment

- being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you

— anton 🏴‍☠️ (@atroyn) July 5, 2018

You know,the parallels between Silicon Valley and the Soviet Union are striking.

There is a whole long thread.

I know that this is from almost 5 years ago, but it bears repeating.

Twitter Blue is More Popular than I Had Thought

This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth. Perhaps we should shoot him.*

You know the deal, you pay $8/month and verify your phone number, and you get a blue check mark.

It's so popular that Kobe Bryant, Chadwick Bozeman, Andan Kashoggi, Anthony Bourdain,  Michael Jackson, Kirstie Alley, Barbara Walters, and Norm McDonald have signed up.

I did not think that the program would be so popular dead celebrities would be signing up.

Oops!

Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant and Anthony Bourdain are the latest celebrities to be verified under Twitter Blue, the social media platform’s paid-subscription service that allows anyone to get a blue check mark by their display name if they pay $8 a month and confirm their phone number.

Except the actor, athlete and celebrity chef died years ago, before Twitter Blue even existed.

Their accounts — and those of at least a dozen other dead celebrities — now feature a blue check, which, if hovered over, displays the message: “This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.”

It was just the latest in a series of changes under new owner Elon Musk, who purchased the company for $44 billion in October. Since then, Musk has terminated more than 75 percent of the company’s employees, changed the way users’ timelines worked and, on Thursday, removed check marks from thousands of legacy verified accounts belonging to celebrities, journalists, politicians and others.

But it quickly became clear over the weekend that some high-profile individuals still had the check mark, which is now available as part of an $8 a month subscription, even if they said they weren’t paying for it.

………

Several high-profile people who said they had automatically gotten Twitter Blue complained that the check mark, previously a status symbol, now felt like a reprimand.

Model and television personality Chrissy Teigen tweeted, “wait I’m crying they’re giving them for punishment now !!?!!” When Jon Favreau, co-host of the left-wing political podcast “Pod Save America,” bemoaned getting one, Teigen advised him that changing his account handle would make the check mark disappear.

Among the deceased public figures listed Sunday as Twitter Blue subscribers were two performers — Michael Jackson, who died in 2009, and Malcolm James McCormick, known professionally as Mac Miller, who died in 2018 — as well as John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona who also died in 2018. The accounts of actress Kirstie Alley, TV host Barbara Walters and Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington, all of whom have died, also had blue check marks.

………

Some questioned whether giving check marks to deceased public figures or celebrities who have not paid for the emoji could violate federal and state laws prohibiting defamation, false insinuations that someone has endorsed a product or service, or use of a person’s likeness for publicity without their consent.

………

Many Twitter users pointed to the blue check mark on the account of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist who was assassinated in 2018, in what U.S. intelligence agencies say was a hit ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“This is obscene,” said Mohamad Bazzi, an associate professor of journalism at New York University.

Of course this is obscene.  What part of, "Elon Musk," don't you understand?

Seriously, the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir™ must be the most overrated man in America.

^*What, you've never seen Ruthless People? Great movie.

The Joys of an Empty Nest

Nat is spending 6 days a week at working at a conference center, and Charlie just started spending about 5 days a week at College Park, where is he working at his bachelors.

What this means is that we can make things that our kids would not eat.

Tonight, it was New England Boiled Dinner.

Nat cannot tolerate red meat, and Charlie hates boiled cabbage, so this sublime dish has been off our family menu.

I made some tonight, and added some things, because even if it comes with a spice packet, it's not enough.

Specifically, in addition to bay leaf, pepper, and possibly pickling spice, adding the now-obscure spice Grains of Paradise and the not-so-obscure spice Juniper berries add a lot to the mix.

Support Your Local Police

Remember Myles Cosgrove? He fired the fatal round into Breonna Taylor's, and was fired by the Louisville Police Department.  He appealed, but the judge reviewing the case ruled against him.

Well now, the Carroll County Sheriff's Department has hired the disgraced officer.

It appears that being a bad cop, if you are not quite bad enough to get charged with a crime, and a police force further down the food chain will hire you.

I'm not sure if they are doing this because Mr. Cosgrove still has a law enforcement certification, and so will not require them to spend any money on them, or they just get off from offending black people and anyone who wants the police to do better:

The Louisville police officer who delivered the bullet that killed Breonna Taylor in March 2020 is back working in law enforcement.

Myles Cosgrove, who was fired by the Louisville Metro Police Department in January 2021, has been hired by the Carroll County Sheriff's Office, Chief Deputy Rob Miller told The Courier Journal on Saturday.

The county is about an hour northeast of downtown Louisville and has a population of around 10,000.

Cosgrove was one of three officers who fired their weapons during a raid of Taylor's apartment March 13, 2020. Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were asleep when LMPD officers attempted to serve a search warrant as part of a narcotics investigation. Walker, who has said he thought an intruder was breaking in, fired a single shot that hit an officer. Officers returned fire, with Cosgrove firing the fatal bullet, according to Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron's investigation.

Cosgrove was fired in January 2021 for violating use-of-force procedures and failing to use a body camera during the raid. He fired his gun 16 times. He filed a lawsuit appealing his termination, but a judge ruled in favor of the department's decision earlier this year.

………

Carroll County's Chief Deputy Miller pointed to this fact [that there were no charges files] in reference to Cosgrove's hiring.

The Sheriff's Office did a background check on Cosgrove, which he passed, Miller said. He said the federal and state investigation did not lead to charges against Cosgrove and he has nearly two decades of police experience.

"We think he will help reduce the flow of drugs in our area and reduce property crimes," he said. "We felt like he was a good candidate to help us in our county."

The man got fired for being not just a bad cop, but for being a murderously bad cop, and he is snapped up by another department, where he can continue his reign of terror.

Not good.

 

It's Friday

Have some medieval Haggis:

Dodged a Bullet, For Now

The Supreme Court has now extended the stay on Matthew Kacsmaryk's legally incoherent and hypocritical order to take Mifepristone off of the market.

Rather unsurprising, Alito and Thomas dissented, because they claimed that banning the drug immediately would not be making a statement on the ruling.

The fact that the rest of the Corrupt Christofascists did not go along points to the fact that there is a real possibility that should they have allowed the stay to end, there was a very good chance that the Biden administration would have done the equivalent of, " “John Marshall has made his decision now let him enforce it.”

If the executive branch refuses to enforce the ruling against the drug manufacturers, and refuses to aid the US Post office in intercepting prescriptions, which would require a subpoena in many cases, the court could just be ignored:

The Supreme Court on Friday retained full access for now to a key drug that has been taken by millions of women to terminate early pregnancies, its first major abortion-related decision since overturning Roe v. Wade’s constitutional guarantee of abortion rights last year.

The court put on hold a lower court’s ruling in favor of antiabortion groups, which said the Food and Drug Administration was wrong to make the drug mifepristone more widely available. A legal battle over whether to permanently reimpose restrictions, and whether the FDA had properly approved use of the drug more than 20 years ago, will continue.

As is typical in emergency actions, the majority did not explain its reasoning for putting the lower court decision on hold. In the only noted dissents, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would not have granted the Biden administration’s request for a stay of the lower court decision. Thomas did not explain his reasoning. Alito said the administration and the public would not have been harmed by agreeing with the lower court to roll back restrictions loosened by the FDA in recent years.

Not be harmed, what the f%$#?

………

The court’s order on Friday was the latest development in what has been a rapid and at times confusing legal battle over mifepristone, which is used as part of a two-drug regimen in more than half of the nation’s abortion procedures. The second drug, misoprostol, can also be used on its own to terminate early pregnancies, usually with more cramping and bleeding.

Abortion medications have increased in importance as states limit or ban abortions after the Supreme Court’s ruling last June in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in part because they can be sent by mail and taken at home.

Antiabortion groups have attacked the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, as well as more recent changes making the drug more accessible. Drugmakers, the Biden administration and abortion providers say all the agency’s decisions are science based and proper, based on two decades of accumulated clinical studies of the drug’s use.

The majority on the court right is corrupt and partisan.  

They should be treated as such, and not be sprinkled with "Norms Fairy" dust,

Do You Want Some Cheese with That Whine?

It appears that Microsoft has decided that paying $40,000.00 a month (not a decimal place error) to access the Twitter API is not worth it, so they are dropping the microblogging service its offerings.

Now Elon Musk has announced that he plans to sue Microsoft.

I'd call him a complete tool, but a tool has a useful purpose:

Elon Musk seems to take a personal affront to anyone who says “dude, we’re not going to pay your crazy prices for stuff.” For example, he pulled the NY Times “verified” badge weeks before everyone else was set to lose it after they announced they wouldn’t pay.

Now, Microsoft has announced that it is dropping Twitter from its Smart Campaigns advertising platform, in part because of the $42,000 per month API fee (the “small” package) that Musk is trying to charge. This comes right after Intercom, one of the giant customer support companies, which many organizations use to manage their customer support work on Twitter, announced that it was also dropping Twitter support from its platform over Musk’s API fees.

The Microsoft move is a big deal, because it means even fewer advertisers will likely be putting ads on Twitter. But, Microsoft realizes that it’s just not worth it to pay the ridiculous fee for very little benefit, so it has told customers that Twitter will be gone as of next week.

………

Musk, in his typical fashion, responded by throwing a little tantrum, and suggesting he’s going to sue Microsoft… for “illegal” use of Twitter data.

“They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time” the man says.

This is another tell from Musk. I mean, he made the same bullshit claim about Substack after he had the company (temporarily) block users from interacting with any tweet that had a Substack link in it, claiming (falsely) that Substack was “trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone.”

I have not been surprised by Musk's public implosion since buying Twitter.

I have always thought that he was a narcissistic fraud.  I am just surprised that the rest of the world has come to agree with me so quickly.

It's Thursday, So

Blah, blah, blah!

We have the initial jobless claims for last week, 245,000 up 5,000 from last week, slightly better than forecast, and continuing claims rose by 61,000 to 1.87 million, slightly worse than forecast.

In any case, it does appear that if we are not in the recession that the Federal Reserve wants, we are certainly recession adjacent.

Adding more weight to this is the fact that the United States Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index has fallen to the lowest level since May 2020, the height of the pandemic lock-down.

Meanwhile, housing sales fell by the the largest amount in 11 years, down 2.2% month to month, and 22% for the year.

Still, the President of the New York Bank of the Federal Reserve says that we need more rate hikes, because sadism for its own sake is baked into being a central banker. 

We are screwed.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee

After the brief, and indisputably racist expulsion of Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, it now appears that one of their the walking pieces of excrement who voted to kick them out has been forced to resign after sexually harassing interns.

As lawmakers filed into the House chamber after a lunch break on Thursday, the desk of former Rep. Scotty Campbell sat empty, the characteristic lawmaker name plate missing from its front.

Campbell, R-Mountain City, resigned from the General Assembly in a sudden move Thursday, less than two hours after he told The Tennessean he had no plans to step down from a Republican caucus leadership position over a harassment policy violation.

House Speaker Cameron Sexton, R-Crossville, confirmed Thursday afternoon Campbell had issued a letter of resignation after an ethics subcommittee last month found Campbell had violated a workplace discrimination and harassment policy.

………

The memo was first reported by NewsChannel5, which reported at least one legislative intern complained of alleged sexually harassing communications from Campbell.

There are also allegations of payoffs, etc., but no actions were taken until it hit the news.

Republican family values.

Florida, Man

A local judge in Florida, Jared Smith was turfed out by voters for denying permission for an abortion for a girl because he though that her grades were not high enough (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.").

In response to this, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed him to the appellate court, because there no opportunity to make the world a worse place that he will miss.

Now, the Governor is considering appointing this legal lunatic to the Florida Supreme Court, because he wants to own a (another?) Supreme Court Judge:

A Florida judge rejected by voters after denying a teenage girl an abortion citing her poor school grades is in line for a seat on the state supreme court as the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, continues to turn the bench to the right.

Jared Smith will be interviewed alongside 14 others next month by a nominating commission that will make recommendations to DeSantis, who last week signed a six-week abortion ban into law.

The governor appointed Smith to the newly established sixth district court of appeal in December, four months after voters in Hillsborough county ousted him from the circuit court following his controversial ruling.

Smith said the 17-year-old was unfit to obtain an abortion as he questioned her “overall intelligence, emotional development and stability”. The decision was overturned by a three-member appeals court that said Smith abused his judicial discretion.

DeSantis’s decision to disregard that rebuke was the second time he had looked favorably on Smith, having first appointed him to the circuit court in 2019.

The Florida supreme court seat opened up last month when the long-serving justice Ricky Polston announced he was standing down. Filling the vacancy will mean DeSantis will have picked five of the court’s seven members, a potentially crucial factor for the future of abortion laws in the state.

Seriously, I'm thinking that Ronda is a secret plot by Donald Trump to make him look good in comparison.

If Trump is a dumpster fire, Ron DeSantis is the Centralia, Pennsylvania mine fire.