There is a Racist Thread Running Through Silicon Valley

As further corruption by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX unwinds as a result of its bankruptcy, we have found that he diverted funds to the racist advocacy group Litecone. (H/T Atrios)

Lightcone claims that they are into "Longtermism" and "Effective Altruism", but it appears that their real mission is to create a scientific and philosophical gloss for bigotry.

(on edit) I feel compelled to add my conclusion at the beginning, what we see here is not just a cabal of bigots, but rather an exclusive club where the price of admission (in addition to a few years at Stanford and/or growing up white in Apartheid South Africa) is subscribing to a toxic mix of Ayn Rand, eugenics, and racism.

So, I went down an FTX bankruptcy rabbit hole, and here we go:

Multiple events hosted at a historic former hotel in Berkeley, California, have brought together people from intellectual movements popular at the highest levels in Silicon Valley while platforming prominent people linked to scientific racism, the Guardian reveals.

But because of alleged financial ties between the non-profit that owns the building – Lightcone Infrastructure (Lightcone) – and jailed crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, the administrators of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange, are demanding the return of almost $5m that new court filings allege were used to bankroll the purchase of the property.

During the last year, Lightcone and its director, Oliver Habryka, have made the $20m Lighthaven Campus available for conferences and workshops associated with the “longtermism”, “rationalism” and “effective altruism” (EA) communities, all of which often see empowering the tech sector, its elites and its beliefs as crucial to human survival in the far future.

At these events, movement influencers rub shoulders with startup founders and tech-funded San Francisco politicians – as well as people linked to eugenics and scientific racism.

Since acquiring the Lighthaven property – formerly the Rose Garden Inn – in late 2022, Lightcone has transformed it into a walled, surveilled compound without attracting much notice outside the subculture it exists to promote.

So, what bigots are they promoting?

Well, they had a conference, and:

………

Alongside these guests, however, were advertised a range of more extreme figures.

One, Jonathan Anomaly, published a paper in 2018 entitled Defending Eugenics, which called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. The publication triggered an open letter of protest by Australian academics to the journal that published the paper, and protests at the University of Pennsylvania when he commenced working there in 2019. (Anomaly now works at a private institution in Quito, Ecuador, and claims on his website that US universities have been “ideologically captured”.)

Another, Razib Khan, saw his contract as a New York Times opinion writer abruptly withdrawn just one day after his appointment had been announced, following a Gawker report that highlighted his contributions to outlets including the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine and anti-immigrant website VDare.

The Michigan State University professor Stephen Hsu, another billed guest, resigned as vice-president of research there in 2020 after protests by the MSU Graduate Employees Union and the MSU student association accusing Hsu of promoting scientific racism.

Brian Chau, executive director of the “effective accelerationist” non-profit Alliance for the Future (AFF), was another billed guest. A report last month catalogued Chau’s long history of racist and sexist online commentary, including false claims about George Floyd, and the claim that the US is a “Black supremacist” country. “Effective accelerationists” argue that human problems are best solved by unrestricted technological development.

………

Several controversial guests were also present at Manifest 2023, also held at Lighthaven, including rightwing writer Hanania, whose pseudonymous white-nationalist commentary from the early 2010s was catalogued last August in HuffPost, and Malcolm and Simone Collins, whose EA-inspired pro-natalism – the belief that having as many babies as possible will save the world – was detailed in the Guardian last month.

The Collinses were, along with Razib Khan and Jonathan Anomaly, featured speakers at the eugenicist Natal Conference in Austin last December, as previously reported in the Guardian.

Daniel HoSang, a professor of American studies at Yale University and a part of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, said: “The ties between a sector of Silicon Valley investors, effective altruism and a kind of neo-eugenics are subtle but unmistakable. They converge around a belief that nearly everything in society can be reduced to markets and all people can be regarded as bundles of human capital.”

HoSang added: “From there, they anoint themselves the elite managers of these forces, investing in the ‘winners’ as they see fit.”

“The presence of Stephen Hsu here is particularly alarming,” HoSang concluded. “He’s often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people like Ron Unz, Steven Sailer and Stefan Molyneux and more mainstream figures in tech, investment and scientific research, especially around human genetics.”

And then there is a string revealed in a random link:

………

Prediction markets are a long-held enthusiasm in the EA and rationalism subcultures, and billed guests included personalities like Scott Siskind, AKA Scott Alexander, founder of Slate Star Codex; misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri).

 That link for Scott Siskind, is to a 2021 article about a blog/discussion space called, as is noted here, "Slate Star Codex."

It was shut down after this story, and later reestablished under a different name.

So, what is Slate Star Codex?

The website had a homely, almost slapdash design with a light blue banner and a strange name: Slate Star Codex.

It was nominally a blog, written by a Bay Area psychiatrist who called himself Scott Alexander (a near anagram of Slate Star Codex). It was also the epicenter of a community called the Rationalists, a group that aimed to re-examine the world through cold and careful thought.

In a style that was erudite, funny, strange and astoundingly verbose, the blog explored everything from science and medicine to philosophy and politics to the rise of artificial intelligence. It challenged popular ideas and upheld the right to discuss contentious issues. This might involve a new take on the genetics of depression or criticism of the #MeToo movement. As a result, the conversation that thrived at the end of each blog post — and in related forums on the discussion site Reddit — attracted an unusually wide range of voices.

There is a whole lot of corrosive sh%$ that is covered under, "An unusually wide range of voices."

“It is the one place I know of online where you can have civil conversations among people with a wide range of views,” said David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar who was a regular part of the discussion. Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints. “They range politically from communist to anarcho-capitalist, religiously from Catholic to atheist, and professionally from a literal rocket scientist to a literal plumber — both of whom are interesting people.”

The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” They were considered a threat to one of the core beliefs driving the discussion: free speech.

Yeah, it's all wokeness. That's the problem.

………

Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche. There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions.

And Silicon Valley, a community of iconoclasts, is struggling to decide what’s off limits for all of us.

Yeah, that's reassuring.

………

The allure of the ideas within Silicon Valley is what made Scott Alexander, who had also written under his given name, Scott Siskind, and his blog essential reading.

But in late June of last year, when I approached Mr. Siskind to discuss the blog, it vanished.

Because the Randroid racist coffee klatch is profoundly allergic to the light.

To quote P.C. Hodgell, "That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be."

………

The roots of Slate Star Codex trace back more than a decade to a polemicist and self-described A.I. researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who believed that intelligent machines could end up destroying humankind. He was a driving force behind the rise of the Rationalists.

The Rationalists saw themselves as people who applied scientific thought to almost any topic. This often involved “Bayesian reasoning,” a way of using statistics and probability to inform beliefs.

………

But it was the other stuff that made the Rationalists feel like outliers. They were “easily persuaded by weird, contrarian things,” said Robin Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University who helped create the blogs that spawned the Rationalist movement. “Because they decided they were more rational than other people, they trusted their own internal judgment.”

So, they are arrogant.

Of course arrogance does not inevitably lead to bigotry, though I would argue that this sort of arrogance is required for white supremacy and the like.

Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin, who held racist beliefs and decried American democracy. They were mostly white men, but not entirely.

………

Last June, as I was reporting on the Rationalists and Slate Star Codex, I called Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab backed by a billion dollars from Microsoft. He was effusive in his praise of the blog.

(emphasis mine)

So, I've always wondered how Altman, who has an unbroken record of failure, his social media idea was a privacy nightmare and a failure, he was removed as president of Y Combinator for self dealing and a toxic management style, etc.

Now I think that I see:

It was, he said, essential reading among “the people inventing the future” in the tech industry.

Mr. Altman, who had risen to prominence as the president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, moved on to other subjects before hanging up. But he called back. He wanted to talk about an essay that appeared on the blog in 2014.

The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”

But as the man behind Slate Star Codex saw it, there was one group the Blue Tribe could not tolerate: anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe. “Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?” he wrote.

So, Mr. Altman is a big supporter of the idea that being a racist is actually brave and forward looking.

It is an entry point, along with going to Stanford for a while, it seems, into the world of the high wealth tech entrepreneurs, like everyone's favorite literal vampire and gay basher in his student days at Stanford, Peter Thiel:

In 2005, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, befriended Mr. Yudkowsky and gave money to MIRI. In 2010, at Mr. Thiel’s San Francisco townhouse, Mr. Yudkowsky introduced him to a pair of young researchers named Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis. That fall, with an investment from Mr. Thiel’s firm, the two created an A.I. lab called DeepMind.

And what is the allure?  A tacit acceptance of racism:

………

Part of the appeal of Slate Star Codex, faithful readers said, was Mr. Siskind’s willingness to step outside acceptable topics. But he wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed.

"A willingness to step outside of acceptable topics," is a code word.  It means saying that women are less capable in IT, that blacks are genetically inferior, and that we should be practicing eugenics to improve the species, all while pretending that it is just, "Asking questions."

………

As he explored science, philosophy and A.I., he also argued that the media ignored that men were often harassed by women. He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books. He said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.”

In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”

He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.

In 2017, Mr. Siskind published an essay titled “Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due to Offensive Attitudes.” The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.

That week, a Google employee named James Damore wrote a memo arguing that the low number of women in technical positions at the company was a result of biological differences, not anything else — a memo he was later fired over. One Slate Star Codex reader on Reddit noted the similarities to the writing on the blog.

Mr. Siskind, posting as Scott Alexander, urged this reader to tone it down. “Huge respect for what you’re trying, but it’s pretty doomed,” he wrote. “If you actually go riding in on a white horse waving a paper marked ‘ANTI-DIVERSITY MANIFESTO,’ you’re just providing justification for the next round of purges.” 

So, according to Mr. Siskind, the problem with writing that women can't code is not that this is misogynist bullsh%$ unsupported by the facts, it's that woke folks will come after you.

In 2013, Mr. Thiel invested in a technology company founded by Mr. Yarvin. So did the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, led in the investment by Balaji Srinivasan, who was then a general partner.

That year, when the tech news site TechCrunch published an article exploring the links between the neoreactionaries, the Rationalists and Silicon Valley, Mr. Yarvin and Mr. Srinivasan traded emails. Mr. Srinivasan said they could not let that kind of story gain traction. It was a preview of an attitude that I would see unfold when I approached Mr. Siskind in the summer of 2020. (Mr. Srinivasan could not be reached for comment.)

“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts,” Mr. Srinivasan said in an email viewed by The New York Times, using a term, “Dark Enlightenment,” that was synonymous with the neoreactionary movement.

You remember Mr. Srinivasan, don't you?  He's the one who called for the ethnic cleansing of San Francisco, and Marc Andreeson thinks that he is one of the most interesting people in the world.

You do not need a tinfoil hat to conclude that Silicon Valley "Bro" culture is toxic and racist.

I would argue that these attitudes are a requirement for playing for the big boys in and around Santa Cruz, California. 

They think that they are all John Galt, and that everyone else is mud people.

Linkage

• Studies uncover the critical role of sleep in the formation of memories (ScienceDaily) Sleep is a really really complicated thing.
• Ditching paper money has made Sweden a haven for online scams (The Straits Times) This was foreseeable, but the purpose is surveillance and control.
• Hackers ‘jailbreak’ powerful AI models in global effort to highlight flaws (Financial Times) Yeah, and the criminals who want to do this have a profit motive.  Delightful.
• Neo-Nazis Are All-In on AI (WIRED) Yeah, Nazis fetishisizing stupid useless tech, that sounds AWFULLY familiar
• The destruction of public health and the growing threat of an H5N1 bird flu pandemic (World Socialist Web Site) They have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing 
• The Ineptitude is The Point "So when you see the CDC or the FDA doing a bad job or shocking health experts with their ineptitude, understand that some of it, or even a lot of it, isn't just incompetence. It's on purpose." 
• Fast Crimes at Lambda School (Benjamin Sandofsky) A code camp that relied on fraud to get VC funding.
• The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales (Plough) The Disnification of things like Grim's Fairy Tales and The Little Mermaid is a bad thing.

Lewis Black has a fun take on the Tesla Cybertruck:

Less Police, Less Crime?

There appears to be a correlation between Police department staffing and crime falling.

Of course correlation does not prove causation, the correlation points to something going on.

In late May, Politico ran an article with the trollish headline “White House to the left: We told you so on crime.” The piece was built on interviews with two anonymous advisers to President Joe Biden, who asserted that falling violent crime rates and the electoral defeat of a “progressive” prosecutor in Oregon had validated the administration’s “toughness” and vocal support for increased law enforcement funding. Its framing depicted the politics of law and order as a zero-sum game in which leftists—especially those who called to “defund” law enforcement in 2020 after numerous high-profile instances of police brutality—have been routed.

But while it’s true that voters generally chose not to support defunding efforts amid rising COVID-era crime rates, the administration’s more-cops triumphalism might not tell the entire story either. In a New Republic piece published the day after the White House’s Politico victory lap, for instance, Michelle Phelps—a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies policing—noted that thanks to retirements and resignations, there are actually fewer police officers working in the Minneapolis Police Department now than there were before the protests triggered by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by an MPD officer. And according to numbers compiled by the Police Executive Research Forum, a respected independent group, that’s true of major cities across the country as a whole. “In large agencies, sworn staffing slightly increased during 2023,” PERF writes, “but it is still more than 5 percent below where it was in January 2020.” (Caveat: PERF’s data relies on departmental self-reporting.)

In other words, while voters may not have wanted it to be the case, and it didn’t happen in the way that activists would have chosen either, many U.S. police departments have gotten smaller—and the violent crime rate is still plummeting. So what is going on? Slate spoke to Phelps, author of the new book The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence and the Politics of Policing in America, about the fallout from Floyd’s death in Minnesota and how it might relate to the politics of police and crime nationally. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

So, why is crime falling even has police department staffing has fallen?

Ms. Phelps gives a number of potential reasons,

• That a reduction in police leads to a reduction in over-policing, things like stop and frisk, pulling people over for burnt out tail-lights, etc., and so police are actually more focused on crime.
• That police reform efforts have led to non-police intervention efforts.

What Ms. Phelps does not consider, that the police who have left the force have been bad cops.

The ones who are most likely to leave or take early retirement because of increased scrutiny or Covid vaccine mandates, are more likely to be the violent, brutal and incompetent cops. 

This is why I have always felt that using training to improve policing is a recipe for failure:  The bad cops are largely impervious to training.  The solution is to make sure that the bad cops are no longer cops.

In News That Should Surprise No One

The New York City Comptroller looked at the effectiveness of the Shotspotter gunshotdetector, and found it to be worthless.

There have been reports showing this for nearly a decade, and this ruling is well justified.

I guess that, unlike the NYPD who signed the contract, Shotspotter could not sway the comptroller with a few steak dinners at strip clubs:

Well, we’ll see how long ShotSpotter/SoundThinking will keep making that New York money. The outlook is not good. A lot of this will depend on how well the NYPD can defend the useless product it’s spending millions on, but at the end of the day, the city still holds the purse strings and it has the power to terminate contracts that simply aren’t worth paying for.

The NYC comptroller performed an audit of the NYPD and ShotSpotter not with the intent of burying them, but simply to determine whether or not the NYPD was paying its bills on time and whether or not ShotSpotter was fulfilling the obligations of its contract.

The answer to both questions is “No.”

First, the comptroller takes on ShotSpotter and its guarantees of certain amount of law enforcement success: 

When measured against the contractual performance standards set by NYPD, ShotSpotter met its 90% target for avoiding missed incidents in almost all boroughs except Manhattan, but when measured against the number of confirmed shootings, performance is far lower. During the sampled months of review in 2022 and 2023, ShotSpotter alerts only resulted in confirmed shootings between 8% and 20% of the time. 

That’s pretty terrible, especially by the standards ShotSpotter claims to hold itself. When you’re wrong that often, you start costing cities real money while providing very little value in exchange. 

During the month of June 2023, for example, out of the 940 ShotSpotter alerts that NYPD responded to 771 could not be confirmed as shootings upon arrival at the scene (82%), 47 were determined to be unfounded (5%), and 122 were confirmed as shootings (13%). NYPD officers spent 426.9 hours investigating alerts that were not confirmed as shootings. If only one officer responded, this equates to almost 36 twelve-hour shifts; if two officers responded, this number doubles. 

More than 427 hours of wasted payroll in a single month. That’s pretty f%$#ing terrible. But it could actually be much worse. There’s no way to know how much payroll is being blown by officers responding to ShotSpotter alerts because (surprise surprise!) the NYPD does not “track the amount of time — or associated staff costs — spent responding to such instances.”

(%$# mine)

………

Law enforcement agencies and ShotSpotter itself (although more often the latter) continue to defend this questionable tech with vague statements about safety and even more vague representations about its usefulness. But pretty much any city that’s actually dug into the data has come to the same conclusions: ShotSpotter may be an innovative use of acoustic detection tech, but it’s really not worth paying for.

It's not worth paying for.  It never has been.

In a Non-Ideological Ruling, the Supreme Court Gets One Right

I chose the report from Forbes, because of this bit of weirdness on the byline, "John Hyatt is a NYC-based Forbes staff writer covering billionaires."

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?  They have a dedicated billionaires beat?

But as you may have heard, the Supreme Court struck down the provision of the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy that indemnified the members of the Sackler family, which pretty much puts a stake through the heart of the deal.

Their ruling was rather straightforward, that there was nothing in the bankruptcy code that allows the process to protect non-parties to the bankruptcy.

That's true.  This action is pretty much a construct of the mega-bankruptcy courts in as a part of their attempts to attract litigants from large companies.  (They do so, because it adds to their prestige)

On Thursday, the Supreme Court overturned the multi-billion-dollar settlement agreement that Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy estate had struck between the Sackler family, the firm’s billionaire former owners, who agreed to pay $6 billion to opioid victims in exchange for full immunity from any future civil lawsuits.

“In this case, the Sacklers have not filed for bankruptcy or placed all their assets on the table for distribution to creditors, yet they seek what essentially amounts to a discharge. No provision of the [bankruptcy] code authorizes that kind of relief,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch for the five-to-four majority.

The decision will have far-reaching implications for future bankruptcy cases by prohibiting the application of non-debtor releases, which are often used in mass-tort bankruptcy cases to release non-debtors (in this case, the Sacklers) from future immunity. Edward Morrison, a bankruptcy professor at Columbia Law School, called the decision “a tragedy for the bankruptcy system and litigation more generally.”

This is no tragedy, this is a triumph.  People like professor Morrison are simply invested in a system where the well heeled can avoid the consequences of their actions, while the "Little Fish" get hooked and gutted.

He supports, to quote (the composer, not the political theorist) Frank Wilhoit, "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

His reasoning deeply corrupt.

It may also be a tragedy for Sacklers. By eliminating non-consensual third-party releases, as they are known in bankruptcy lingo, the court decision increases the likelihood the Sacklers will remain bogged down in opioid-related litigation for years to come. It could also cost the Sacklers dearly: Several bankruptcy attorneys with whom Forbes spoke said they believe the Sacklers will have to increase their $6 billion offer if they want to secure unanimous approval on a new deal from Purdue Pharma’s over 100,000 opioid victim claimants.

John Hyatt calls this a, "Tragedy".

It's no tragedy, it's the imposition of consequences on people who are wealthy and powerful enough that they thought that they were above the law.

I can see how Forbes, "Staff writer covering billionaires," might consider this to be a tragedy though, he's clearly gone native.

“The floor is now $6 billion. It seems to me that the number will go up,” says Daniel Gielchinsky, a restructuring attorney and partner at DGIM Law. “If they want to avoid decades of costly and distracting litigation… they’re going to put more money on the table to gain those consensual releases.”

The Sacklers have plenty more cash. Bankruptcy filings showed that they withdrew approximately $11 billion from Purdue Pharma between 2007 and 2018 ($4.6 billion of which was used to pay taxes), prior to the company filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019. Earlier this year, Forbes estimated that the Sackler family held at least $11.2 billion in cash and liquid securities (after accounting for estimated taxes and investment returns). As of February, Forbes estimated the Sackler family’s collective net worth to be $5.2 billion, treating the pending $6 billion payment as a liability.

“What happened is the Sacklers wanted the benefits of getting all these lawsuits stopped against them, but they didn’t want to kick in enough money to make it a viable, consensual release,” says Nancy Rapoport, a bankruptcy attorney and professor at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. “The court pointed out the $11 billion in profit, plus all the other money they've been making. In other words, put up some significant money given the harm you've caused.”

Oh the humanity.  The Sacklers are not going to get off on the cheap.

Many of the family, who were directing their program of aggressive sales and fraudulent claims should be going to jail.

Indicted for Cowardice

I have mentioned on a number of occasions that police are trained to be cowards, but I never expected to see some Uvalde police to be indicted  for their cowardice.

The wording of the charges does not call them cowards, they charge child endangerment and abandonment, but at it's core, these are charges for cowardice:

The former Uvalde schools police chief and another former officer have been indicted over their role in the slow police response to the 2022 massacre at a Texas elementary school that left 19 children and two teachers dead, according to multiple reports on Thursday.

The Uvalde Leader-News and the San Antonio Express-News reported that Pete Arredondo, the former schools police chief, and Adrian Gonzales, a former officer, were indicted by a grand jury on multiple counts of felony child endangerment and abandonment. The Leader-News reported that Christina Mitchell, the local district attorney, confirmed the indictment.

The Austin American-Statesman also reported that two former officers had been indicted but did not identify them.

Mitchell did not immediately return messages from the Associated Press seeking comment. Several family members of victims of the shooting did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

The indictments would make Arredondo, who was the on-site commander during the attack, and Gonzales the first officers to face criminal charges in one of the deadliest school shootings in US history. A scathing report by Texas lawmakers that examined the police response described Gonzales as one of the first officers to enter the building after the shooting began.

I don't think that the charges will stick, the Supreme Court ruled in Warren v. District of Columbia that the police have no duty to protect, and I think that this will make its way to federal court where that precedent would apply.

Cowardice is only a criminal offense under military law (UCMJ, Article 99).

Given the increased militarization of police, and the increased use of fear as a justification for unjustifiable acts, perhaps cowardice should be criminalized for police.

Supreme Court Comes Out in Favor of Bribery

Short version is that if someone offers a gratuity AFTER an official act, it's OK, which sounds a lot like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito vacation junkets.

They are a bunch of corrupt rat-F%$#s:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a federal anti-bribery law does not make it a crime for state and local officials to accept a gratuity for acts that they have already taken. Writing for a six-justice majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained that state and local governments already regulate gifts to officials, and so the federal law “does not supplement those state and local rules by subjecting 19 million state and local officials to up to 10 years in federal prison for accepting even commonplace gratuities.”

The question came to the court in the case of James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Ind., who was convicted and sentenced to 21 months in prison for violating the federal law at the center of the case, known as Section 666. That law bars state and local government officials from “corruptly” accepting “anything of value of any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded” for an official act. In 2014, Snyder received $13,000 from a truck company that had recently received contracts totaling over $1 million for new trash trucks for the city. Snyder maintains that the payment was for consulting services, but federal prosecutors called it an illegal gratuity.

………

Kavanaugh closed his opinion by noting that “Congress can always change the law if it wishes to do so” – but it has not, since 1986.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. In her view, the plain text of the statute led easily to the conclusion that Section 666 applies to gratuities paid to state and local officials after they have acted. She emphasized that the statute makes it a crime to accept “anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded.” “The term ‘rewarded,’” she contended, “easily covers the concept of gratuities paid to corrupt officials after the fact — no upfront agreement necessary.”

Jackson pushed back against Kavanaugh’s contention that the government’s interpretation of Section 666 could sweep in too much conduct without clear notice to state and local officials. She argued that the law “was not designed to apply to teachers accepting fruit baskets, soccer coaches getting gift cards, or newspaper delivery guys who get a tip at Christmas.” In particular, she wrote, the text of Section 666 itself imposes limits on the scenarios in which it can apply – for example, it applies only when state, local, or tribal governments receive at least $10,000 per year from a federal program, it does not apply to legitimate compensation, and the official who accepts the payment must do so “corruptly.”

The Supreme Court conservatives support bribery because they take bribes.

Boeing F%$#ed Up Again

This is not a safety issue per se, but rather a sales weasel releasing embargoed data to the press about the door blowing off the 737 without notifying the NTSB.

This is safety investigation 101, and as a result, the NTSB has rescinded Boeing's access to the investigation data as a result:

The National Transportation Safety Board late Wednesday offered a sharp rebuke of Boeing after learning the company held a media event on June 25 with around four dozen U.S. and international journalists inside its Renton, Washington factory, which included brief comments about Alaska Airlines 1282.

Boeing is a party to the NTSB’s investigation of the Jan. 5 accident, which occurred when a plug exit violently departed a newly built 737 Max 9 soon after takeoff from Portland International Airport in Oregon. Preliminary information indicates that the bolts designed to hold the exit in place were not on the airplane when it left Boeing’s factory in Renton.

“During a media briefing Tuesday about quality improvements at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, a Boeing executive provided investigative information and gave an analysis of factual information previously released,” the board said in a statement to The Air Current. “Both of these actions are prohibited by the party agreement that Boeing signed when it was offered party status by the NTSB at the start of the investigation. As a party to many NTSB investigations over the past decades, few entities know the rules better than Boeing.”

In an unusual step, the NTSB is taking action against the plane maker for its comments, including removing its access to the docket of information gathered through the investigation. The NTSB will subpoena any relevant records from Boeing, and the plane maker will not be given the opportunity to ask questions of witnesses at the planned August hearing into the accident. Boeing remains a party to the investigation.

Additionally, the NTSB said, “Given that Boeing is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice in relation to its Deferred Prosecution Agreement stemming from Boeing’s interactions with the FAA prior to the Boeing MAX fatalities, the NTSB will be coordinating with the DOJ Fraud Division to provide details about Boeing’s recent unauthorized investigative information releases in the 737 MAX 9 door plug investigation.”

This is the first time ever that I have heard of the NTSB referring something to the DoJ.

Generally, the Bureau is loathe to involve criminal authorities in their investigation.  They believe that that doing so will prevent cooperation, and hence prevent safety lessons.

It appears that the NTSB is sick and tired of Boeing's bullsh%$.  

Not a good look.

Another Boeing Whistleblower

This time, it's the 787 that is in the crosshairs:

A mechanic who was contracted by Boeing’s supplier Spirit AeroSystems to repair airplanes in Everett has filed complaints with regulators, saying he witnessed substandard work on the Boeing 787 and was terminated after reporting the issues.

Attorneys filed complaints with the Federal Aviation Administration and Occupational Safety and Health Administration on behalf of Richard Cuevas, an employee of Strom Aviation, a contractor for Spirit AeroSystems.

Cuevas alleges that, without Boeing’s permission, Spirit changed manufacturing and assembly specifications on drilling holes in the fasteners of the forward pressure bulkhead of 787s, according to a news release sent by the law firm Katz Banks Kumin. That could compromise power and air pressure on planes, says Cuevas, who filed an initial complaint in October using Boeing’s ethics hotline.

In the complaint sent to FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker, attorneys asked that the FAA launch an investigation into flaws in the 787 forward pressure bulkhead, which is a dome-shaped structure at the front section of the plane.

………

Cuevas began working at Boeing’s Everett hangar in March 2023. His primary duties were to remove and replace cargo doors on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, and he claims he witnessed problems with three planes.

He says Spirit moved him to Wichita, Kan., in September to work in a manufacturing plant for Atlas, a Spirit supplier. While in Wichita, Cuevas said he noticed manufacturing flaws, such as the size of the holes being drilled into the forward pressure bulkhead. A month later, he returned to Everett to work on installing the forward pressure bulkheads into aircraft, and he saw more issues, including workers taking shortcuts to speed up production, he alleges.

When Cuevas expressed his concerns, according to the complaint, Boeing and Spirit were in the midst of addressing increased scrutiny from the Jan. 5 incident on an Alaska Airlines flight where a panel blew off a 737 MAX 9 plane as it flew out of Portland. The panel was a door plug used to seal a hole in the fuselage sometimes used to accommodate an emergency exit.

After Cuevas raised the issues with Spirit management and Boeing, according to his claims, he was fired in March, on the same day FAA officials came to the Boeing hangar for a compliance inspection.

Boeing said Wednesday it is not involved in the personnel decisions of subcontractors.

That last statement is complete bullsh%$. I spent 30 years working as a contractor (temp), and almost all removals of was at at the specific request of the client.

The only ones that weren't were about things like complaints about payroll or benefits.

We need to start arresting executives.

We Have Lost a Giant

A ClassicRichard Samet "Kinky" Friedman, has died at age 79 of Parkinson's Disease.

Singer, songwriter, author, and the best candidate for Governor of Texas this century.

He is best known from his work with his band, The Texas Jewboys.

His music and writing were very much in in the vein of Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, and I had a cassette tape of his single, "We Reserve The Right to Refuse Service to You," back in the day.

Just Fire Him Already

It now appears that, British authorities believed that current Washington Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis  was actively impeding the investigation of the phone hacking scandal. 

This guy is dirty as hell.  Fire his lily white ass:

Will Lewis, now the publisher of the Washington Post, was in full crisis mode in 2011. Then an executive at a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, he was an intermediary to the police detectives investigating a British phone-hacking scandal that had placed the company’s journalists and top leaders in legal peril.

For years, reporters at News Corporation’s best-selling British tabloid had landed scoops by paying public officials and illegally listening to the voice mail messages of royals, politicians, celebrities and even a murdered girl. Mr. Lewis was supposed to cooperate with the police, identify wrongdoing and help steer the company through the crisis.

His role, he would later say, was as a force for good. He was “draining the swamp.”

But confidential documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with people involved in the criminal investigation show that, almost from the beginning, investigators with London’s Metropolitan Police were suspicious of the company’s intentions, and came to view Mr. Lewis as an impediment.

The police suspected that the company was trying to “steer the investigation into a very narrow remit” by pointing the finger at a few journalists “while steering the investigation away from other journalists and editors,” one of the lead detectives wrote in a previously undisclosed internal summary of events.

Scotland Yard detectives were shocked to learn that the company had deleted millions of internal emails, despite notices from a lawyer for an alleged phone hacking victim and the police explicitly asking that any documents related to the investigation be preserved, according to police records and interviews with investigators.

You don't "just" delete millions of emails by accident.

………

High-profile lawsuits are also moving forward in London, brought against News Corp. by Prince Harry and other victims of hacking. The claims have not yet been tested in court but they include new details about Mr. Lewis’s role in the scandal. The episode has attracted even greater interest since Mr. Lewis tried to suppress news coverage of the litigation.

He covered Rupert Murdoch's ass, and followed this up by a stratospheric rise though Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp(se).  No evidence of a quid pro quo here, huh?

There is no light at the end of the tunnel for Mr. Lewis, nor for Mr. Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, because you are not in a tunnel, you are digging a hole.

Cannot Make Space Ships Either

I'm not sure what exactly is currently wrong with the Boeing Starliner, but NASA is not comfortable using it for reentry, which has left its team stranded in the ISS for the current time:

Boeing is doing damage control as its first crewed commercial spacecraft remains on the International Space Station (ISS) with no confirmed return date.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams traveled in Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on June 5 after a series of technical delays and were scheduled to stay docked in space for between eight and 10 days.

However, 12 days after the crew's arrival, Boeing delayed the spacecraft's return until June 26.

Another delay was announced on Friday. The aviation company said it needed time to schedule two spacewalks and to assess issues on board following five helium leaks.

As Business Insider previously reported, helium supports Starlink's reaction control system thrusters, which allows them to fire.

In a statement to the Financial Times, Boeing said the delays were not considered a failure.

It should be noted here that the only thing that Boeing considers a failure is something that prevents them from using stock buybacks to goose the value of the options that senior executives hold.

About F%$#ing Time

The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that Heredim must be conscripted like the rest of the Jewish citizens of Israel* (Heredim [יהדות חֲרֵדִית], literally fearful ones, are extreme ultra-Orthodox Jews)

The law has always said that they should serve like everyone else, and so has Torah,  but generations of spineless politicians have allowed them to defer service until they age out of the draft.

Considering the enormous state subsidies that they receive, this is a good thing.

As an added bonus, this may be the thing that finally drives Benjamin Netanyahu (יִמַּח שְׁמו) from office:

Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the military must begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, a decision that threatened to split Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government amid the war in Gaza.

In a unanimous decision, a panel of nine judges held that there was no legal basis for the longstanding military exemption given to ultra-Orthodox religious students. Without a law distinguishing between seminarians and other men of draft age, the court ruled, the country’s mandatory draft laws must similarly apply to the ultra-Orthodox minority.

In a country where military service is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, both men and women, the exemption for the ultra-Orthodox has long prompted resentment. But anger over the group’s special treatment has grown as the war in Gaza has stretched into its ninth month, requiring tens of thousands of reservists to serve multiple tours and costing the lives of hundreds of soldiers. 

………

The decision threatened to widen one of the most painful divisions in Israeli society, pitting secular Jews against the ultra-Orthodox, who say their religious study is as essential and protective as the military. It also exposed the fault lines in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, which depends on the support of two ultra-Orthodox parties that oppose their constituents’ conscription, even as other Israelis are killed and wounded in Gaza.

Israeli courts have ruled against the exemption before, including Supreme Court decisions in 1998, 2012 and 2017. The top court has repeatedly warned the government that to continue the policy, it must be written into law — though that law would be subject to constitutional challenges, as previous ones were — while also giving the government time to hammer out legislation.

………

But for seven years, since the last law was struck down, successive Israeli governments have dragged their feet in drafting new legislation. In 2023, the law finally reached its expiration date, leading the Israeli government to order the military simply not to draft the ultra-Orthodox while lawmakers worked on an exemption.

………

Gali Baharav-Miara, Israel’s attorney general, in a letter to government officials on Tuesday, said the military had committed to draft at least 3,000 ultra-Orthodox religious students — out of more than 60,000 of draft age — during the coming year. The letter noted that the number would come nowhere near to bridging the gap in military service between the ultra-Orthodox community and other Israeli Jews.

Instead, the ruling included a means of pressuring the ultra-Orthodox to accept the court’s judgment: the suspension of millions of dollars in government subsidies given to religious schools, or yeshivas, that previously supported the exempted students, striking a blow to revered institutions at the heart of the ultra-Orthodox community.

Pirkei Avot 4:5 notes, "On studying Torah, Rabbi Zadok said: do not make them a crown for self-exaltation, nor a spade with which to dig." 

We should now add to that, "Nor a way to dodge the draft or a way to live on the public dole."

There are already significant numbers of Heredim who volunteer to serve in the IDF, so accommodating their religious observance in the context of military is a problem which is already solved. 

^*It should be noted that the Druze in Israel petitioned for, and got, the right to be conscripted as well.

Yeah, I Went There

I saw the debate sober.

I had to, because I expected to have to pick up Nat from the ball park. (Orioles: 11 — Rangers: 2)

They got a ride, so I could have drunk and I should have drunk, and I should BE drunk right now.

Quick take:

• The CNN moderators were absolutely horrible.  There was absolutely no falsehoods by Trump.
• Case in point, when Trump said that former JCS Chief Milley was lying when he said that Trump said the dead and wounded soldiers were, "Suckers".  One of the moderators, Jake Tapper, was the reporter who f%$#ing broke that f%$#ing story, and he allowed it to go out unchallenged.
• It was low energy, particularly for Biden.
• Donald Trump was focused on immigration.
• Trump is not a skilled liar, but he is an amazingly shameless one.
• It's better when you just listen to the audio, and do not have to see them.

That is all.

Truer than Taxes

Private Investment Cannot and Should Not Drive Decarbonisation. It's Obvious: We Need the State.

 —The Break Down

We have seen the results of, "Market Based Interventions," to reduce carbon emissions.

They do not generate emission reductions, they generate fraud, where you have outfits like the Nature Conservancy selling forests that are already protected as carbon offsets.

The private sector is motivated by profits, and the most effective way to generate profits is through fraud, period, full stop.

It's the Same Old Story

UAW tries to unionize a Mercedes plant in Alabama, Daimler Benz engages in a scorched union busting campaign, which includes a promise for increased pay and benefits, and once the UAW loses the election, the carmaker reneges on its promises of increased remuneration.

I'm totally not shocked:

On Thursday, an email from United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain to the leadership of the Mercedes-Benz General Works Council and IG Metall was posted to X by Luis Feliz Leon of the labor news publication Labor Notes. The General Works Council represents over 100,000 German Mercedes workers and IG Metall is a German metalworkers’ union.

In the email, Fain wrote that Mercedes “management is telling workers that they are unable to follow through on promised increases to wages, benefits, and working conditions because the UAW filed objections to last month’s union election.”

He specifically stated that Rolf Wrona, a MBUSI vice president of human resources, “told several Group Leaders that MBUSI could not pay workers for an upcoming plant shutdown because they were still in ‘status quo.’”

“Status quo refers to a specific legal standard in U.S. labor law that requires unionized employers to notify the union prior to making any changes to wages, benefits, or working conditions and bargain with the union over any proposed changes prior to implementation,” Fain said. “However, MBUSI is not currently unionized, so no status quo condition exists” [emphasis in original].

………

Fain’s email follows the union filing several unfair labor practice charges against Mercedes during the months before the weeklong union election in May, which the UAW lost by a few hundred votes. At the end of May, the UAW also filed a petition asking the National Labor Relations Board to rerun the election.

If you believe your that employer is a bunch of contemptible greed-heads who think that their workers are worthless, lazy, and defensible, you need to unionize to protect yourselves from those bastards. 

If you believe that your employer is a benevolent group of people interested in your well being, you need to unionize to protect yourselves from the next group of managers who rotate in and are a bunch of contemptible greed-heads.

Any questions?

A Good Start

It looks like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are looking at rolling back subsidies to Medicare Advantage plans.

This is a good thing,  Medicare Advantage increases costs and engages in all the dirty tricks that private insurers use to screw their customers, because they they are private insurers.

This has always been the proverbial camel's nose under the tent, an attempt to privatize Medicare gradually:

It appears HHS and CMS are taking action with Medicare Advantage plans and their payments to brokers selling Advantage plans. They allowed Kaiser Family Foundation healthcare to republish a Modern Healthcare article. I am lucky enough to have access to and republished at Angry Bear.

According to the article, “insurers increasingly not only pay commissions to brokers and agents but also contract with field marketing organizations that pay the same marketers.” A double dipping of fees. CMS’s rule rectifies the issue by establishing a standardized compensation limiting whether a field operation is involved or not.

Medicare Advantage has been overpaying insurance companies offering the plans for years now. Maggie Magar, Kip Sullivan, Merrill Goozner, myself, and others have been pointing out the over payments to MA for their insurance plans.

………

Citing public complaints, CMS concluded the Medicare Advantage and Part D insurers (especially the big corporation) were boosting compensation to marketers in ways that impedes competition and lures beneficiaries toward plans paying brokers more but are not necessarily most suited to their customers.

………

“CMS is taking bold action to expand enrollee protections and taking unprecedented steps to address predatory marketing of the Medicare Advantage and Part D programs.”

Prior to this regulation, which takes effect for the 2025 plan year, CMS already capped compensation for third-party marketers selling Medicare policies. For example, brokers and agents may receive up to $611 for new Medicare Advantage enrollments and up to $306 for renewals during the 2024 plan year. 

………

According to a HHS spokesperson, the Health and Human Services Department “issued a final rule to stop certain companies from circumventing the agency’s compensation limits in ways that funnel beneficiaries into higher-paying plans instead of the ones that are best for each enrollee. While we can’t comment on any ongoing lawsuits, HHS believes that compensation should be structured to create incentives for agents and brokers to enroll individuals in the plan that is intended to best meet their healthcare needs, as the law requires.”

Rather unsurprisingly, the Medicare Advantage goniffs are suing to keep their ill gotten gains.

F%$# them.

I Have a Dilemma

I have three options:

1. Drink heavily, and risk death or injury while live blogging it.
2. Don't watch the debates.
3. Watch it sober. (I tried this once, and I nearly died)

Suggestions?







Link (Click image for full size)

Primary Elections Tonight

And following AIPAC contributing over $15 million dollars against him Jemaal Bowman lost to corrupt racist right-wing Democrat George Latimer, who, in addition to slow walking efforts to reduce housing discrimination throughout his career has promised to vote against any additional taxes on the hyper wealthy.

AIPAC wanted to defeat Bowman in the worst way, and they succeeded in defeating him in the worst way.

Also, everyone's least favorite audience member, Lauren Boebert, won the primary in the blood red Colorado 4th Congressional district, meaning that it is almost certain that she will win another term in Congress.

It sucks.

I Need to Purchase the World's Smallest Violin

The bankruptcy trustee presiding over the Alex Jones bankruptcy intends to liquidate his whole media empire.

Good.  This guy has been a pox on society for way too long:

A court-appointed bankruptcy trustee has signaled intentions to liquidate assets belonging to Alex Jones, including the media platform Infowars, as part of the conspiracy theorist’s bankruptcy proceedings.

The proposed liquidation is meant to help pay $1.5bn in lawsuit judgments Jones owes for repeatedly calling the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting a hoax.

US bankruptcy court trustee Christopher Murray indicated for the first time in an “emergency” motion filed Sunday intentions to “conduct an orderly wind-down” of the operations of Infowars’ parent company Free Speech Systems and “liquidate its inventory”.

Murray, who was appointed by a federal judge to oversee the assets in Jones’s personal bankruptcy case, did not give a timetable for the liquidation, but requested the judge to temporarily block efforts from families of Sandy Hook victims to collect money they are owed to “allow an orderly process to take its course”.

The demise of InfoWars would represent an end to the platform’s decades-long tenure as a major source of far-right news stories and conspiracies. 

Following my condemnation of the relentless persecution of Julian Assange, this does seem like a flip flop, but isn't.

Journalism is predicated on the search for the truth, and Alex Jones has only been interested in the pursuit of rubes to buy colloidal silver.

Libel and defamation torts can, and should be used against dishonest media operators, and this is qualitatively different from criminal prosecution and imprisonment for revealing the truth.

Assange Freed

Short version is that he pled guilty to infections of the Espionage Act, and will be sentenced to time served, and is expected to return to Australia.

It's good that he is out, but it needs to be noted that his plea was basically coerced, and the whole prosecution was basically criminalizing the practice of journalism.

The plea deal Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has reached with prosecutors is bad for American press freedoms. But the outcome also could have been worse.

The deal, which was finalized on Wednesday in a courtroom in a remote U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific, cleared the way for him to walk free after more than five years in British custody, most of which he spent fighting extradition to the United States. In exchange, he pleaded guilty to one charge of violating the Espionage Act.

The result is an ambiguous end to a legal saga that has jeopardized the ability of journalists to report on military, intelligence or diplomatic information that officials deem secret. Enshrined in the First Amendment, the role of a free press in bringing to light information beyond what those in power approve for release is a foundational principle of American self-government.

The agreement means that for the first time in American history, gathering and publishing information the government considers secret has been successfully treated as a crime. This new precedent will send a threatening message to national security journalists, who may be chilled in how aggressively they do their jobs because they will see a greater risk of prosecution.

But its reach is also limited, dodging a bigger threat. Because Mr. Assange agreed to a deal, he will not challenge the legitimacy of applying the Espionage Act to his actions. The outcome, then, averts the risk that the case might lead to a definitive Supreme Court ruling blessing prosecutors’ narrow interpretation of First Amendment press freedoms.

“He’s basically pleading guilty to things that journalists do all the time and need to do,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It will cast a shadow over press freedom — but not the same kind of a shadow that would have been cast by a judicial opinion holding that this activity is criminal and unprotected by the First Amendment.”

In short, he added, the outcome was complicated from the perspective of press freedom and could be seen as neither “all bad or all good.”

………

But for the purposes of press freedom, what matters is not who counts as a journalist, but whether journalistic-style activities — whether performed by a journalist or anyone else — can be treated as crimes. And the charges against Mr. Assange are not about Moscow’s covert efforts to help Donald J. Trump win the 2016 election.

Rather, the charges centered on the earlier publications that vaulted him to global notoriety and made him a hero to the antiwar left: a video of a U.S. helicopter gunning down people in Baghdad, including a Reuters photographer; troves of military incident logs documenting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; a quarter-million diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world; and dossiers about Guantánamo detainees.

The narrow criminal information to which Mr. Assange pleaded guilty centers on one count of conspiring to violate the Espionage Act. The court document says that Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, and Mr. Assange agreed that she would send him national-security files, even though he had no security clearance, and that he would then “communicate them” to others who were also “not entitled to receive them” — that is, publish them.

………

But successfully indicting a nongovernment official for publishing national-security information of public interest that he had obtained while working with a source is different. No one had ever been charged under the Espionage Act for a journalistic act, in part because there had long been a widespread assumption that applying that law to such acts would be unconstitutional.

The charge against Mr. Assange, then, crossed a line. It showed that the 21st-century crackdown on leakers could expand to encompass criminalizing the same sort of actions that brought to light important post-Sept. 11, 2001, abuses like warrantless wiretapping and torture, as well as day-to-day journalism about military, intelligence or diplomatic matters that help people better understand the world.

The charges are literally the performance of journalism.

The facts of whose oxen were gored is irrelevant to the real issue here.

These are Bad Companies

One of the facts about all of the social media companies is that their customer service is incredibly awful.

At the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™, it is so bad that people are filing small claims cases against the company as a way to get support.

If Facebook is bad, Google is immeasurably worse, and Ecch (formerly Twitter) was bad before the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ took it over.

Last month, Ray Palena boarded a plane from New Jersey to California to appear in court. He found himself engaged in a legal dispute against one of the largest corporations in the world, and improbably, the venue for their David-versus-Goliath showdown would be San Mateo's small claims court.

Over the course of eight months and an estimated $700 (mostly in travel expenses), he was able to claw back what all other methods had failed to render: his personal Facebook account.

Those may be extraordinary lengths to regain a digital profile with no relation to its owner's livelihood, but Palena is one of a growing number of frustrated users of Meta's services who, unable to get help from an actual human through normal channels of recourse, are using the court system instead. And in many cases, it's working.

Engadget spoke with five individuals who have sued Meta in small claims court over the last two years in four different states. In three cases, the plaintiffs were able to restore access to at least one lost account. One person was also able to win financial damages and another reached a cash settlement. Two cases were dismissed. In every case, the plaintiffs were at least able to get the attention of Meta’s legal team, which appears to have something of a playbook for handling these claims.

While one cannot be represented by a lawyer at small claims court, a law firm could provide tools for these sorts of filings and assistance, and perhaps someone already is.

Certainly having to file lawsuits for the most basic customer support is a disgrace.

Yet Another Thing That Private Equity Wants to Ruin

This time, it's worker owned cooperatives.

Short version, PE has bought a lot of crap, and with interest rates rising, they are desperately looking for some rube to foist this garbage off on. 

So, they will polish the proverbial turd, provide dishonest numbers to the workers, and get them to overpay for the deal:

A recent Financial Times article on private equity woes in an era of high interest rates contains many amusingly coded admissions against interest. Before we get to the industry’s new clever gimmick, that of dumping companies on new greater fools, here their employees, we’ll look at some of the discussion of oh how hard it is to be private equity kingpin when the Fed no longer has your back.

The opening whinge is the canard that private equity funds can’t sell the companies they own:

Higher interest rates and a still sluggish new listings markets have made it harder to sell holdings and return cash to investors. That in turn has made it more difficult to raise new funds because pension funds, endowments and family offices have less money to allocate and a growing array of other options.

The people who run these funds and their investors are presumably investment literate. The first rule of finance is that every problem can be solved by price. The problem here is not that these companies cannot be sold, but that their private equity masters don’t like the prices they would fetch.

You can always sell something, but they want someone to overpay for the privilege.

………

Ahem. For those who have followed the tale of increasing wealth at the top, the way to share the benefits of productivity gains with workers is via higher wages, not by giving them less pay than they should get and giving them equity or equity chits at a valuation over the fair market value of the business.

Admittedly, employee ownership can be very motivating and productive when employees really do own the company, as opposed to being along for the ride, as the are here. But even then, advocated of employee stock ownership programs would warn that they could represent a danger to the financial health of the employee-investors. They are already heavily exposed to the fate of the company by virtue of working there. If it has a disaster, like an explosion at a key operation, its staffers could suffer big pay cuts or even job losses. Having some or a lot of their net worth tied up in the company increases their exposure.

Remember Liz Warren's bill that I mentioned a few months back?

It's this sort of sh%$ that shows that she does not go far enough.

Claw-backs and criminal prosecutions for everyone, please.

Please Let This Be True

We now have reports that federal prosecutors have recommended that Boeing be criminally prosecuted.

I hope that this is true, but my guess is that this is a strategic leak to get a settlement, and there are no serious plans to to actually to file charges:

Federal prosecutors are recommending to senior Justice Department officials that Boeing face criminal charges for failing to meet the terms of a 2021 agreement that would have shielded it from prosecution in connection with crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Criminal charges are only one of several options the department is considering and no final decision has been made, one of the sources said. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

………

The Justice Department in May said Boeing had violated terms of a 2021 “deferred prosecution agreement” that would have allowed the company to avoid criminal prosecution in exchange for meeting a number of conditions.

Since that announcement, prosecutors have been weighing how to move forward. While criminal charges are a possibility, the government has other options including reaching a settlement under a new deferred agreement, levying additional fines and imposing other conditions, including requiring an independent monitor to ensure that Boeing meets is obligations. Independent oversight of the company was not part of the 2021 agreement. Prosecutors also could opt for a trial. The department faces a July 7 deadline for how it will proceed.

I know that hanging Boeing executives by their thumbs is unconstitutional, because of the 8th Amendment, but it is tempting.

Unbelievably Lame

As I have mentioned earlier, Kathy Hochul suspended New York City's congestion pricing program.

In addition to being bad policy, which she supported by falsehoods, and possibly being illegal, it also resented in a major hole in the MTA's budget, both because it cut billions in revenue, and because the money had already been spent on the technology to implement this.

When questioned by a reporter on replacing the revenue, the Governor's response was to eject the reporter from the press conference, because her spirit animal is apparently the Karen:

At a Sunday event in the Bronx, Governor Kathy Hochul refused to provide details on her plans to fund mass transit after her decision earlier this month to pause congestion pricing punched a $15 billion hole in the budget of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

A New York Focus reporter repeatedly asked her how she plans to provide cash to the authority, which was scheduled to begin a program on Sunday that would charge drivers $15 to enter downtown Manhattan during peak hours. Without replacement funding, the nation’s largest public transit system will be forced to cancel projects ranging from new subway stations to elevator installations, and could fall into general disrepair.

………

After Hochul entered the side room at the Bronx event, New York Focus’s reporter was ejected from the venue, the Latino Pastoral Action Center, and told to wait for the governor to come outside for further questions. She still hadn’t emerged from the main entrance by the time her security and press staff left the venue, suggesting that she may have departed through a side door.

Liam Buckley, a Hochul press aide, apologized for the reporter’s ejection and said it “shouldn’t have happened.” He declined to answer questions about congestion pricing and directed New York Focus to the governor’s press office, which has also declined to provide details to the press in recent days.

She really is a complete chicken sh%$.

 

I Like This

Elizabeth Warren has introduced a bill that would provide for criminal penalties and claw-backs for private equity executives who kill people in pursuit of profits.

About f%$#ing time:

Last week, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) introduced a bill that seeks to tackle corporate greed in the healthcare sector. The bill, called the Corporate Crimes Against Health Care Act of 2024, goes after private equity firms.

The nation’s private equity fund assets have more than doubled over the past 10 years, totaling $8.2 trillion last year. A recent report from the American Hospital Association shows that private equity firms account for 56% of all physician practice acquisitions since 2019.

………

The senators’ concerns are backed by years of research showing that private equity ownership often decreases care quality at provider facilities. One of these studies, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in December, showed that patients receiving care at private equity-owned hospitals experienced a higher rate of hospital-acquired adverse events — such as bloodstream infections, falls and medication errors — than patients receiving care at hospitals that are not private equity-owned.

Not only is private equity ownership problematic for patients’ health and safety, but it can also jeopardize their access to care. In a joint press release, Warren and Markey pointed out that private equity mismanagement was a key reason Steward Health Care filed for bankruptcy last month and is now scrambling to sell its physician group and 31 hospitals.

………

If passed, the act would establish a new criminal penalty of up to six years in prison for private equity executives whose business decisions result in a patient’s death.

Should a healthcare portfolio company experience serious, avoidable financial difficulties as a result of their private equity ownership, the bill would allow the Department of Justice and state attorneys to claw back all compensation issued to private equity and portfolio company executives within a 10-year period before or after those financial difficulties begin. There would also be an associated civil penalty of up to five times the clawback amount, the bill stated.

Now, how about applying to ALL private equity?  That would be good.

Quoting Tallyrand

The suggestion being made by the German Minister of Defense to reinstate conscription is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

This is not about the defense of the Reich Republic, it is about supporting NATO's (actually the United States') proxy war against Russia.

The political consequences of this are positively suicidal, both for the current German government and for NATO:

Germany scrapped the draft in 2011, but Russia's war in Ukraine is forcing a rethink.

“I’m convinced that Germany needs some kind of military conscription,” Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told an audience at Johns Hopkins University in the United States last week, calling the decision by former Chancellor Angela Merkel to end conscription a "mistake."

"Times have changed,” he said.

While the idea of reinstating some form of national military service is gaining ground, doing so could require changing the constitution and raising billions to cover the extra costs of mustering, feeding, training, arming and housing tens of thousands of new recruits.

Pistorius' team has spent weeks drafting proposals for how such a system could work, and officials say he plans to kick-start a public debate on the topic before the summer parliamentary recess.

On April 22, defense ministry planners presented a report with three options: Keeping the military as it stands but increasing efforts to boost recruitment; reactivating conscription for 18-year-old men, and selectively choosing up to 40,000 a year to serve, as is done in Scandinavia; or going all the way and making military service mandatory for all men and women.

I can predict with a significant amount of confidence that if military service is not mandatory for everyone, and likely even if it is mandatory for everyone, that the sons and daughters of privilege will find a way out of this.

Even absent this, it's likely to enrage younger voters, who had the biggest swing toward the right wing  AfD in European Parliament elections.

This is a remarkably stupid move.

Fasten Your Seat Belts, It's Going to Be a Bumpy Ride

Ocean temperatures, 2005 vs. 2024 So, it's the end of June, and we already have 2 3 named storms including Hurricane Beryl, the earliest category 4 hurricane ever.

I think that there is a good chance that we might end up running out of letters this year, as we did in 2005, when Hurricane Katrine devastated New Orleans:

Hurricane Beryl strengthened into what experts called an “extremely dangerous” category 4 storm as it approaches the south-east Caribbean, which began shutting down Sunday amid urgent pleas from government officials for people to take shelter.

Beryl had strengthened into a category 3 hurricane on Sunday morning, becoming the first major hurricane east of the Lesser Antilles on record for June, according to Philip Klotzbach, Colorado State University hurricane researcher.

It took Beryl only 42 hours to strengthen from a tropical depression to a major hurricane – a feat accomplished only six other times in Atlantic hurricane history, and with 1 September as the earliest date, according to hurricane expert Sam Lillo.

Beryl is now the earliest category 4 Atlantic hurricane on record, besting Hurricane Dennis, which became a category 4 storm on 8 July 2005, hurricane specialist and storm surge expert Michael Lowry said.

………

Following behind it, tropical storm Chris formed near eastern Mexico on Sunday, but will begin to weaken after landfall, the US National Hurricane Center said in an advisory. The storm is expected to produce rainfall totals of 10 to 20cm across portions of eastern Mexico through Monday, the Miami-based forecaster added.


Hurricane Ivan in 2004 was the last strongest hurricane to hit the south-east Caribbean, causing catastrophic damage in Grenada as a category 3 storm.

“So this is a serious threat, a very serious threat,” Lowry said of Beryl.

………

Warm waters were fueling Beryl, with ocean heat content in the deep Atlantic the highest on record for this time of year, according to Brian McNoldy, University of Miami tropical meteorology researcher. Lowry said the waters are now warmer than they would be at the peak of the hurricane season in September.

Beryl marks the farthest east that a hurricane has formed in the tropical Atlantic in June, breaking a record set in 1933, according to Klotzbach.

Clearly, anthropogenic climate change is a myth, amiright?