Linkage

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

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

Well, Now We Have the Indictment

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

………

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

………

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

………

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day

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

—Eschaton

(%$# mine)

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

New York City is notorious for this.

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

Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

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

Yeah, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯:

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

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

………

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

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

………

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

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

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

………

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

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

Watching YouTube

Why are ⅔ of the ads that I am seeing on the video sharing coming from Donald Trump's campaign?

I thought that Google was spying on me to make sure that they would deliver things that would interest me, but, much like it was 13 years ago, when this blog was inundated with John McCain Presidential campaign ads.

At the time, I was calling him a pathetic corrupt hypocrite, and every time that I did, they served ads on this blog.

You would think that they would have revised and unproved their ad targeting some in the intervening years, since it's clear that they have stopped even pretending about giving a f%$# about the quality of their search.

Well, I would have thought that, but I would have been wrong.

Once again, I'm beginning to think that online advertising is more than just an exercise in monopolistic rent extraction, that it's actually fraud in the strict definition of the term.

At least, I'm not seeing Trump ads on the blog though.

He Who Hesitates is Lost

Hello FBI you may also want to look into why this fire chief was driving a lambo around Chelsea last week https://t.co/9FZ4XDhHb0 pic.twitter.com/EWBbR5dZq7

— Huge Ma (@turbovax) September 16, 2024

Hmmm...

Over the past few weeks, I have been following the developments in the corruption investigations of the administration of New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

It's been a slow drip, drip, drip, and I have been saving links for a future post where I run down what is actually happening.

Well, I now have 22 links that I am still going  through, and it's f%$#ing exhausting.

OK, I have 23 links now, because Eric Adams has been indicted.

I f%$#ed up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No details on the indictment yet, but it appears to be related to (at least) campaign finance shenanigans.  I'm not surprised.  I have been describing Hizzoner as a delusional and sanctimonious snollygoster for some time.  After all, he has literally suggested that it is God's will that he is Mayor.  

Unless you are Jake or Elwood Blues, such an assertion is an indication of some sort of personality disorder.

What's more, it appears that the almost all of entire senior cadres in New York City's first responders are corrupt, the above mentioned fire chief being an example.

Of course, the fire chief could have bought the Lamborgini in the non-illegal way, by massively abusing overtime. but it is still as corrupt as f%$#.

Normally, I'm not inclined to prejudge someone simply on the basis of a warrant or an indictment,* but it's pretty clear that Eric Adams has been corrupt, even if it turns out not to be technically criminal.

I'm going to enjoy following this, but right now I have to do a deep dive on 23 24 25 articles that I have been sitting on.

^*OK, you got me. In fact I am extremely inclined to prejudge people when they are this f%$#ing guilty. This is Max Bialystock levels of guilt.

Well, This is Revolting

In Alabama, jailed inmates are being forced to work at fast food franchises.

I do understand that the 13th amendment has a carve-out for, "Punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," but renting out prisoners to fast food joints, a purely private endeavor is truly awful.

It might be a good idea for federal authorities to do a complete audit of the finances and of the behavior of the Alabama Department of Corrections.

I can say with almost complete certainty that if they are doing this, then there is other shady sh%$ going on:

“Walk into a McDonald’s in Alabama, and the worker flipping your McDouble could be an incarcerated person,” warns a recent video from the digital news outlet More Perfect Union.

The idea that an inmate in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) might be working the kitchen at a fast-food restaurant is shocking, even to seasoned observers of the fast-food industry and the American prison system. Yet as two lawsuits filed in federal court in the last year attest, the practice is so pervasive that it’s become a reliable source of income for the state.

According to the first suit, filed by the legal nonprofit Justice Catalyst on behalf of inmates last September, ADOC transports dozens of incarcerated people per day to jobs at government agencies and private businesses around Alabama, including KFC, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s franchises. ADOC also delivers inmates to meatpacking plants run by companies like Koch Foods and Gemstone Foods. At each of their jobsites, inmates do the same work as any employee, sometimes for twelve hours or more per day. From 2018 until the suit was filed last September, one McDonald’s franchisee alone put an estimated 122 ADOC inmates to work in its restaurants.

………

As both suits allege, inmates who refuse to work on a given day can face consequences, including revocation of privileges (like time on the phone with family members), stints in solitary confinement, lengthening of sentences, or transfer to one of Alabama’s medium- or high-security prisons — some of the most violent prisons in the country. 

………

In their suits, CCR and Justice Catalyst cite a 2022 amendment in the Alabama constitution that prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude in all circumstances. This standard goes beyond the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which permits slavery “as punishment for a crime.” An Alabama judge recently dismissed CCR’s suit on jurisdictional grounds, though Jessica Vosburgh, a Birmingham-based lawyer for the organization, told Jacobin it is currently weighing options for an appeal. The Justice Catalyst case is ongoing. In the meantime, Vosburgh says, ADOC continues to transport workers to private businesses around the state, including fast-food restaurants, just as before.

The FBI and the DoJ should be on the ADOC like white on rice, and when corruption is found, these guys need to be prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law, and then sent to those prisons that they used to run, the maximum security ones.

Here's Johnny!

No, Johnny Carson is still dead, though it appears that dotard Donald Trump is not aware of this, seeing as how he wants Carson, who has been dead for almost 20 years, to replace Jimmy Kimmel on the Jimmy Kimmel Live!

So, he wants a dead man to replace a late night host, and he got the show wrong.  Carson was the host of The Tonight Show, currently hosted by Jimmy Fallon, and this is on a completely different network.

For all the talk about Joe Biden's neurological state, it's pretty clear that something is very wrong with Trump's brain, and it has gotten a lot worse recently:

Donald Trump is still sore at late night host Jimmy Kimmel for making him the laughingstock of the 2024 Academy Awards ("Isn't it past your jail time?") back in March. So much so that he thinks Johnny Carson should take over the show and make late night great again.

Trump told his worshipers at a Pennsylvania rally that the jokes Kimmel and Colbert tell aren't funny. "It's supposed to be comedy," he rued. "It's hatred."

"Where's Johnny Carson?" a dazed Trump queried the crowd. "Bring back Johnny."

No one in the bleachers had the heart to tell their leader — who is starting to look and behave like the embunkered Hitler in Downfall — that Carson retired from the show in 1992 and died in 2005. Or it just could be that his followers believe Trump has the power to raise Carson from the dead and put him back at his desk to interview fresh young talent like Angie Dickinson and Joey Bishop.

Even before the cognitive decline, Donald Trump was not right in the head.  This is not a surprise, he was the child of an abusive alcoholic father.

But his brain is beginning to resemble a slice of Swiss Cheese, or perhaps Stinking Bishop.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

Kevin Robert the architect of the right wing's plans to destroy America, aka Project 2025,  has been revealed to have beaten a neighbor's dog to death because its barking annoyed him.  He also considered beating to death his neighbor's puppies.

So, he's a f%$#ing psychopath.  Hoocoodanode?

The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.

Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004 while he was working as a still relatively unknown history professor at New Mexico State University.

“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” said Kenneth Hammond, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time.

Two other people – a professor and her spouse - recall hearing a similar account directly from Roberts at a dinner at his home. Three other professors also said they heard the account at that time from the colleagues who said they had heard it directly from Roberts.

None recall Roberts – who worked at the university as an assistant professor from 2003 to 2005 – ever saying that the dog he allegedly said he killed was actively threatening him or his family.

………

Project 2025, which was written by the Heritage Foundation under Roberts’s watch, has become a focal point of the 2024 presidential election as Democrats warn that its radical policy prescriptions – such as the eradication of the Department of Education and imposing further restrictions on abortion – will serve as a blueprint for Trump’s administration if he is elected. Both Trump and Vance have sought to distance themselves from the 900-page report, with Trump claiming he had not read it. But in a foreword to Roberts’s book written by Vance, the vice-presidential nominee praises Roberts’s “depth and stature within the American Right” and says that, “in the fights that [lie] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon”.

Roberts is one of the most prominent rightwing voices in Washington. He has close ties to Opus Dei, the Catholic group, and has spoken openly about how he considers the outlawing of birth control to be one of the “hardest” political battles facing conservatives in the future.

………

Marsha Weisiger, a colleague of Roberts at the time who is now an environmental history professor at the University of Oregon, recalled being invited to dinner at Roberts’s home with her husband, and Roberts telling both of them the story about how he had hit a neighbor’s pit bull with a shovel and killed it.

“My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it. If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it,” she said.

To make matters worse, she recalled Roberts saying that the neighbor in question also had puppies and that he had considered killing them, too. Weisiger’s husband, who asked not to be named, recalled Roberts saying he had complained about the dog to the police, who were not responsive, and that the dog sometimes got into his yard.

(Emphasis Mine)

This is a deeply, deeply evil man.

Missouri Governor Mark Parson Just Lynched a Black Man

Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams has been executed in Missouri, despite requests from prosecutors and the family that he was innocent.

The Governor, as well as state AG Andrew Bailey, did not care.  They know that their political base likes lynching, and so they gave them a lynching:

Missouri executed a man on death row on Tuesday, despite objections from prosecutors who sought to have his conviction overturned and have supported his claims of innocence.

Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, was killed by lethal injection, ending a legal battle that has sparked widespread outrage as the office that originally tried the case suggested he was wrongfully convicted.

In an extraordinary move condemned by civil rights advocates and lawmakers across the US, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, pushed forward with the execution against the wishes of the St Louis county prosecuting attorney’s office.

Williams was convicted of the 1998 killing of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. He was accused of breaking into Gayle’s home, stabbing her to death and stealing several of her belongings.

But no forensic evidence linked Williams to the murder weapon or crime scene, and as local prosecutors have renounced his conviction, the victim’s family and several trial jurors also said they opposed his execution.

………

Williams, who served as the imam in his prison and dedicated his time to poetry, twice had his execution halted at the last minute. He was days away from execution in January 2015 when the Missouri state supreme court granted his attorneys more time for DNA testing. In August 2017, Eric Greitens, the Republican governor at the time, granted a reprieve hours before the scheduled execution, citing DNA testing on the knife, which showed no trace of Williams’s DNA.

Greitens set up a panel to review the case but when Mike Parson, the current Republican governor, took over, he disbanded that board and pushed for the execution to proceed.

Just a note here, if your behavior looks callous and stupid when compared to the actions of rapist former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, you are wrong.

There is a special place in hell for these folks.

Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

It appears that many of the hyper-wealthy residents of London are considering leaving in response to potential tax increases.

Let them go.

They drive up costs for ordinary folks, they cheat on their taxes, and they generally make London unlivable: 

In Mayfair’s financial enclave and the sleek offices of advisers to the ultra-rich, the talk is getting louder: everyone knows someone who's thinking about their exit strategy — or already gone.

Moves that were once confined to whispers and rumors have burst into the open since the Labour Party came into power with promises to clamp down even further on preferential tax treatment for well-heeled foreign residents, known as non-doms, as well as private equity investments and private school fees.

Some are simply cashing in UK investments, but others — from scions of mega-rich families to City of London bosses — have mapped out or already executed departure plans, according to about three dozen wealth advisers and high-net-worth individuals interviewed by Bloomberg, who mostly asked not to be named.

………

For the wealthiest, the UK’s most contentious plans include 40% inheritance tax on offshore wealth, and having carried interest — a portion of investment returns, shared between fund managers — taxed at a rate as high as 45%, rather than 28% currently.

If they are willing to ditch the UK because they don't want to pay their taxes, you don't want them in the UK at all.

Just make sure that you ding them for money on the way out.

South Carolina Bans Bible

It appears that in an attempt to ban work and sexually explicit books, the state schoolboard has banned the bible and Shakespaere.

It was only a matter of time, and I thought that it would be Texas or Florida that went first, but it's the birthplace of Stephen Colbert:

We’ve mostly steered clear of S.C. Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver’s effort to take over decisions about what books can and can’t be available in public schools, because we agree that schools shouldn’t offer books that are essentially how-to manuals for having sex.

And yes, a few such books actually have showed up in our schools — although schools generally have removed them as soon as they were made aware of them.

But as complaints have mounted about what critics call an unclear new regulation, and as state officials have refused to clarify any of the text, we’ve looked more closely at the rules that took effect Aug. 1 — and we’ve become concerned. Our concern isn’t that the regulation is unclear. It’s that at least parts of it are quite clear — and quite broad.

What’s unclear is whether the Board of Education intends to enforce its regulation as written, or if it will treat it as though it means what most people would assume it means if they read only the regulation — and not the sweeping definition in state law that it incorporates by reference but doesn't quote.

Teachers have been asking what seem like ridiculous questions designed simply to make a point: Can they still teach the works of William Shakespeare, or even include them in their libraries? What about the Bible? Can it be available in the library?

By our reading, the answers to those questions would be no. And that’s ridiculous.

As the Japanese say, "バカにつける薬はない".

You Know that AI Has Jumped the Shark When

Microsoft proposes restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to power their LLM efforts.

Truth be told, this is more like jumping C. megaladon.*

Are these people even listening themselves? 

What's next? Restarting Chernobyl or using Fukushima for cooling water?

The idle Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear power plant may soon be coming back online in Pennsylvania, thanks to a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) between Microsoft and Constellation Energy, which owns the shuttered facility.

TMI Unit 1, which was retired for economic reasons in 2019, is slated for a potential revival as the Crane Clean Energy Center (CCEC), according to Constellation's announcement of a new PPA with the IT giant.

While the terms of the deal remain undisclosed, reopening the facility will require approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, though that might not be a hard sell.

It SHOULD be a hard sell.  It should be a f%$#ing hard sell.

Constellation noted that Unit 1 will need "significant investments" to restore the plant, with work needed on the turbine, generator, main power transformer, and cooling and control systems.

So basically, they have to replace or refurbish or refuel everything?  That's reassuring.

Lest you think this is the same Three Mile Island facility that had a partial meltdown in 1979, described as the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history, it's not: That happened at TMI Unit 2, located next door.

By next door, they mean in the same facility, and designed by the same firm, with slight differences in size and power output.

Unit 1, on the other hand, "operated at industry-leading levels of safety and reliability for decades before being shut down for economic reasons," according to Constellation. The facility was shut down after it failed to get a needed subsidy renewed that the company said was key to competing with cheaper fossil fuels.

Yeah, that's kind of like saying, "Yeah, what happened at Grenfell Tower was bad, but look at all the other buildings with aluminum faced polyisocyanurate panels.  None of them have burnt down.

^*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). So in jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever. 

Normally, When You Say That a Newsie Is in Bed With Their Sources………

It is not meant literally, but it appears that Olivia Nuzzi (Pronounced, "Newsie," As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.") has been suspended from New York Magazine for sexting RFK, Jr.

No seriously.  Don't make me quote Anna Russel again:

New York magazine on Thursday said its Washington correspondent, Olivia Nuzzi, is on leave after learning the star journalist had allegedly engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a reporting subject. That person is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to people familiar with the matter.

"Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures," a spokesperson for New York magazine said in a statement in response to questions from Status.

"Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign," the spokesperson added. "An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust." 

 In her own statement, provided to Status after this story initially published, Nuzzi confirmed that “earlier this year, the nature of some communication” between herself “and a former reporting subject turned personal.”

“During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source,” Nuzzi added. “The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.” 

Two interesting things, first, it appears that Ryan Lizza is now her EX fiancee, and the fact that Ryan Lizza is the less hackish journalist in a journalism power couple is kind of mind blowing.

Second, it appears that this story broke because RFK, Jr. was bragging about it to his friends.

Mr. Kennedy, that is JD Vance f%$#ing a couch creepy.

Linkage

• In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention (Futurism) We really need to prosecute those rat-f%$#s.
• Microsoft Bing Copilot blames reporter for crimes he covered (The Register) Yes, that singularity is coming any day now.
• Embedded Bias: How cardiologists addressed bias in a clinical algorithm (Stat News) It turns out that zipcode works better than race.
• Arrhenius 1896: First Calculation of Global Warming (Protons for Breakfast) We've known about anthropogenic climate change for 128 years.
• The Cell Phone and Its Double (The Anarchist Library) How to use burner and other phones to maximize your privacy.
• Don’t Take Advice From a Habsburg (The Dial) Eduard Habsburg has advice for all of us on how to make the world a better place.  It has been a bad idea to take advice from a Habsburg for over 1,000 years.
• He Worked for a Law Firm Consulting on an Anti-Trans Supreme Court Case. Then We Asked About These Racist Posts  (WIRED) Gee a lawyer forking for bigots is a bigot, hoocoodanode? (H/t Atrios)
• Our values: killing pensioners to save money (Alex Krainer's TrendCompass) Keir Starmer wants the poor elderly in the UK to freeze this winter.
• Apple Vision Pro’s Eye Tracking Exposed What People Type (WIRED) Tech bros are not your allies, ever.
• CFPB Bans Navient from Federal Student Loan Servicing and Orders the Company to Pay $120 Million for Wide-Ranging Student Lending Failures (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) This is the former Sallie Mae, who used to be THE student loan servicer in the nation.  Big deal this.
  

The Z-80 chip has finally ended production.  The end of an era:

I Can Haz Prro

So, now we know that former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was the one that altered the mortality data from New York nursing homes.

I don't mean that he directed it, I mean that he was the one who changed the numbers himself. 

If this is not a crime, then the law needs to be changed.

Actually, it is against the law, because he lied under oath to Congress about it, but that law only applies to little people, and not "Rat-Faced Andy" Cuomo:

Earlier this summer, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo squared off for a closed-door interview with seven members of a Republican-led congressional subcommittee investigating how New York handled the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Cuomo was asked repeatedly about a State Health Department report that deflected blame for the thousands of people who died of Covid at nursing homes in early 2020. Mr. Cuomo stood by the report and said he certainly did not review it and insisted he had no memory of seeing it before its release.

But a review of emails and congressional documents appears to show how Mr. Cuomo not only saw the report, but personally wrote parts of early drafts.

………

Mr. Cuomo apparently inserted language to underscore how “community spread among employees or possibly visitation by family and friends were relevant factors” that contributed to nursing home deaths.

“The larger text,” Ms. Kennedy noted, “is what he added.”

The email exchange among Mr. Cuomo’s aides, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was one of many sought by the Justice Department and a law firm retained by the State Assembly as it prepared to impeach Mr. Cuomo in 2021.

In another example cited in congressional documents, one of Mr. Cuomo’s top aides wrote an email on June 29, 2020, asking for someone to “please print two copies and drop at mansion,” referring to the State Health Department report and Mr. Cuomo’s Albany residence. A week later, the report was released with some of Mr. Cuomo’s revisions included.

Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the early stages of the pandemic initially brought him national attention and widespread praise, and became fodder for his memoir, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the Covid-19 Pandemic.”

Now there is a book that has not aged well.

But as months passed, the state’s response began to draw critical scrutiny, with the more than 15,000 Covid-related deaths among nursing home residents emerging as a focal point. The Times reported in 2021 how top aides to Mr. Cuomo pushed to hide the number of deaths in state nursing homes during the early days of the pandemic.

………

The renewed focus on the state’s pandemic response comes at what may be a politically sensitive moment for Mr. Cuomo, who is said by some to be weighing a run for mayor of New York City next year.

Those rumors have intensified as controversies have surrounded the current mayor, Eric Adams. Last week, the city’s police commissioner, Edward Caban, and Mr. Adams’s counsel, Lisa Zornberg, both quit after federal investigators sought information from or searched the homes of several top officials and seized their phones, including Mr. Caban’s.

As an aside, I have been following the whole Adams corruption investigations, keeping track of the various reports, and this has begun to resemble Fibber McGee's closet.

Rat Faced Andy may be the only person looking at a Mayoral run who is worse than Eric Adams, and Eric Adams may the most corrupt Mayor in New York history.

Andrew Mark Cuomo, would you please go now?

This is Called a Democracy Deficit

I think that this was the inevitable result of the imperial Presidency set up by Charles de Gaulle, it just had to wait for someone more arrogant and conceited than de Gaulle, which as mind-boggling as it sounds, applies to Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron.

His undemocratic selection for Prime Minister just announced a cabinet containing no members of the two parties that got the most votes in the last election.

I'm thinking that Macron is well on his way to ending up like Benito Mussolini.

French Prime Minister Michel Barnier unveiled the country’s new government Saturday, seeking to end months of political uncertainty, if not the accompanying acrimony.

Barnier’s newly named cabinet marks a tilt to the right and will need to maintain enough support across France’s National Assembly to avoid being dissolved with a no-confidence vote. Members of the left-wing alliance that won the most seats in July’s legislative elections — and led the effort to keep the far right out of power — objected that the slate of ministers was undemocratic, representing the election’s losers.

Like Macron, or Barnier for that matter, give a flying f%$# in a rolling doughnut about all of this.

They represent the real France, the urban wealthy bankers and suchlike. 

This sort of, "Let them eat brioche," attitude (that's the real quote), does not have a happy history in France.

………

Two weeks of talks with the various blocs have resulted in the naming of 39 ministers. At the core are 17 senior cabinet members, who together form a predominantly center-right government: Seven cabinet ministers are from Macron’s centrist movement, which finished second in the election, and three are from Barnier’s right-wing Republicans, which finished a distant fourth.

None of the ministers represent Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which placed third. But also excluded are representatives of the left-wing alliance New Popular Front, which placed first.

………

Barnier could get by without the support of lawmakers on the left. He has backing from the centrist and conservative camps. But to make the math work, and avoid a censure vote that would topple the government before it even got started, Barnier needed at least the tacit approval of National Rally.

Why on earth would the Fascists in the RN want to do that?

Being complicit in an establishment government, when their entire electoral strategy is based on condemning establishment politics and establishment parties, should be a complete non-starter.

If there is anything to be learned from the fates of anti-establishment parties like M5S in Italy, is that cooperating with the establishment for a few crumbs ends up destroying the party and its associated movement.

Macron, l'état ce n'est pas vous.

Support Your Local Police

The LA Sheriff has banned police gangs in his organization.

It should be noted here that he has done so YEARS after a law was passed requiring this, and he has done so in a manner that seems calculated to have a minimal impact: 

The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department has announced a long-awaited — and legally required — policy banning deputy gangs — an issue that has challenged the department for decades.

Max Huntsman, L.A. County's inspector general, said the policy released Wednesday doesn't go far enough.

"We've gotten a policy that seems to be the bare minimum required by law that they could have put in place two-plus years [ago] now," Huntsman said.

………

The new policy is just over 800 words and says officers can be disciplined and fired for being in a law enforcement gang or hate group.

It also said the department will investigate alleged officer gangs within its ranks and cooperate with other authorized agencies conducting similar investigations. 

………

A report by a special counsel appointed by the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission last year called deputy gangs a “cancer” on the department and identified at least six deputy gangs or cliques within its ranks.

Yeah, doing the absolute minimum to ensure that your peace officers are not members of criminal gangs.

Not a good look.

Not a Shock

It's been less than 2 months, but already Keir Starmer is less popular than his predecessor Rishi Sunak.

This is not a surprising development.  He was elected not to be the Tories, and his governing to this point is to be the slightly less insane Tories:

Keir Starmer has suffered a precipitous fall in his personal ratings since winning the election, according to a new poll for the Observer that comes before his first Labour conference as prime minister.

The latest Opinium poll reveals that Starmer’s approval rating has plunged below that of the Tory leader Rishi Sunak, suffering a huge 45-point drop since July. While 24% of voters approve of the job he is doing, 50% disapprove, giving him a net rating of -26%. Sunak’s net rating is one point better.

The prime minister is not alone in suffering from a major drop in personal support since the election. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, who has cut winter fuel payments for all but the poorest pensioners and promised tough decisions on welfare and tax in the forthcoming budget, has seen a 36-point drop in her net approval since July.

While Labour continues to lead on most issues, it has almost lost its lead on the economy. It is ahead by only one point on the issue, down from a 10-point lead in July. A third see the government as being open about the challenges facing the country, but more than half think the government has been bad at providing optimism or rebuilding trust in politics.

This is not a messaging problem, this is a policy problem.

Keir Starmer thinks that the Tories are the opposition, but that the left is the enemy, much in the same way that Tony Blair did. 

………

James Crouch, head of policy and public affairs at Opinium said: “While the prime minister might have a world-beating new wardrobe, voters are refusing to wear his government’s austerity drive.

A quick aside here, top labor figures have received gifts of designer clothes from rich supporters worth many thousands of pounds, because they are corrupt hypocrites.

I expect to see the Tories, or heaven help the UK, Nigel Farage's Reform Party, winning the next election.

If Labour is determined to be a pale copy of the Tories, the voters will select the real Tories.

That F%$#ing Paper

This is a very well deserved take down of Pamela Paul's paean to Dr. Marty Makary in her latest New York Times OP/ED.

Dr. Makary has written a book bemoaning the tendencies of the so-called "Medical Establishment" to discard and suppress any argument that challenges the orthodoxy.

What she neglects to mention is that this doctor has been a proponent of the "Herd Immunity" strategy to address the Covid-19 pandemic, and has refused to acknowledge that he was deeply and disastrously wrong on:

Dear Ms. Paul,

I recently read your article title The Medical Establishment Closes Ranks, and Patients Feel the Effects. [link removed, I am not sending Pamela Paul  or the NYT clicks] Your article was an homage to a Dr. Marty Makary. I am very familiar with Dr. Makary. You had nice things to say about him and his calls for medical professionals to abandon incorrect positions. You wrote about children peanut allergies and said:

This avoidable tragedy is one of several episodes of medical authorities sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence that Marty Makary, a surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, examines in his new book, “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.”…

While these mistakes are appalling, more worrisome are the enduring root causes of those errors. Medical journals and conferences regularly reject presentations and articles that overturn conventional wisdom, even when that wisdom is based on flimsy underlying data. For political or practical reasons consensus is often prized over dissenting opinions.

“We’re seeing science used as political propaganda,” Makary told me when I spoke to him by phone. But, he argues, mistakes can’t be freely corrected or updated unless researchers are encouraged to pursue alternative research.

You told your readers that Dr. Makary’s book would educate them about medical authorities sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence

That’s ironic.

Since 2021, there have been few better examples of someone sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence than Dr. Marty Makary himself. To pick one example amongst many, in February 2021, Dr. Makary authored the article We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April. Listen to what he had to say then.

………

All of this is just a small sample of some of Dr. Makary’s pandemic pronouncements. He spread gross misinformation about COVID’s risk to children, as well as the vaccine’s risk to them. He wrote error-filled articles with titled such as The Flimsy Evidence Behind the CDC’s Push to Vaccinate Children. In the interview below Dr. Makary says that natural immunity is 27 times better than vaccine immunity, even though natural immunity killed 1.2 million Americans. Meanwhile Jim Jordan spins conspiracies about the COVID’s origins. Just watch. I can give you volumes of such material.

And yet, I have never seen Dr. Makary acknowledge he was wrong about any of this. Maybe he does so in his book, but I’ve not seen him write an article titled I Was Wrong About Herd Immunity or Natural Immunity Wasn’t So Powerful After All or As It Turns Out, the Delta and Omicron Variants Mattered.

Incredibly, despite his track record, you depicted Dr, Makary as an exemplar of a brave medical truth-teller, a maverick with integrity, a rightful correction to those dastardly “medical authorities” who stick to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence.

You want to read the whole thing, but more generally it is a take-down of  how the New York Times appears determined to take the worst that the Ivy League produces, and make them the arbiters of acceptable discourse.

If you have a subscription to the Times, cancel it now.

Mind Blown

You just need to watch the first few minutes of the intro, though with Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and Leonard Nimoy starring in this particular episode, it is worth a full watch:

By comparison, look at this:

I did not realize how closely Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker hewed to the original.

Finally

The NHTSA is finally getting off of its ass and proposing rules to make the popular "Murder Mobile" SUVs less dangerous.

It's about f%$#ing time.

These vehicles are ridiculously heavy, but there is no reason that the design has to express a level of hostility that is literally getting people killed:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is proposing new regulations for vehicle design intended to reduce the number of pedestrians killed and seriously injured in crashes on U.S. roads.

The proposal announced Monday comes as the number of annual pedestrian deaths is up more than 75% since reaching its lowest point in 2009.

“We have a crisis of roadway deaths, and it’s even worse among vulnerable road users like pedestrians,” said Sophie Shulman, NHTSA’s deputy administrator, in a statement announcing the proposed regulation. “This proposed rule will ensure that vehicles will be designed to protect those inside and outside from serious injury or death.”

Regulators say their proposal would establish new test procedures that simulate a head-to-hood impact, along with performance requirements to minimize the risk of head injury. The agency estimates that could save 67 lives each year.

………

“It will bring American standards more in line with global leaders in Europe and Asia, who in many cases have traffic fatality rates that are a fraction of ours,” said Angie Schmitt, the author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America.

Lawmakers in Congress introduced a bill last month that would require federal standards for hood height and visibility to protect pedestrians and other vulnerable road users.

Traffic and pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. climbed sharply for over a decade before leveling off last year. The reasons for that rise are complicated, and likely include road and sidewalk design, an increase in speeding and a corresponding decline in law enforcement, as well as the growing size and weight of vehicles.

Safety advocates argue that vehicle design also plays an important role. Vehicles with higher front ends and blunt profiles are 45% more likely to cause fatalities in crashes with pedestrians than smaller cars and trucks, according to a study of real-world crashes by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

There is absolutely no reason that the hoods are so long and so high that manufacturers are starting to equip these monstrosities with FRONT cameras.

These designs are not about anything beyond intimidating the people around them.  It needs to stop.

 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

"We need some lawyers to host this Harris fundraiser."
"OK, the Democratic Party is crawling with lawyers, pick anyone."
"Great, I got Uber's lawyer and the guy who represented Nestlé's right to enslave children."
"Now wait, that seems like a bad ide-" pic.twitter.com/5N2SfGkcoP

— David Dayen (@ddayen) September 19, 2024

It's funny because it is true.

It's sad because it is true.

It's also a serious mistake.  There are plenty of lawyers out there.

I guess that I should be glad that Roy Cohn is no longer around, or they might have picked him.

Interesting Concept

People are looking into using metals for reaction mass in electrical spacecraft propulsion. (Alternate link)

We are talking about things like Hall Effect Thrusters, Ion Drives, and Plasma Drives.

They are looking at replacing various noble gasses, like xenon, krypton, and argon, with cheaper and denser metals, like zinc, bismuth, and the like.

I do recall that cesium was favored as a reaction mass a few decades ago, but that is corrosive and difficult to handle:

Move aside, xenon, krypton and argon. There is a new, heavier-weight class of spacecraft propellant: metals.

This year, several startups are testing electric thrusters that run on metal propellants. The companies say the hard stuff packs a greater punch for its volume and is cheaper and easier to handle than conventional gases.

In March, propulsion company Benchmark Space Systems launched its Xantus plasma thruster system, which uses molybdenum as a propellant, on Orion Space Solutions’ 12U cubesat. In August, Neumann Space and the University of Melbourne announced the successful completion of on-orbit tests of the Neumann Drive, an ion thruster that also uses molybdenum, on a nanosatellite. And in January, Starlight Engines plans to test its Crucible Hall-effect thruster on orbit using zinc propellant.

Metal propellants work inside electric propulsion systems in a similar way to gaseous propellants: After being vaporized, they are ionized and then accelerated out the back of the system using an electrical field. Because metal propellants have greater atomic weight, the elements require less storage volume to generate equivalent thrust.

Typically such systems provide very low thrust, from the 10s of micronewtons to a few millinewtons, but they provide somewhere between 4 and 10 times the ISP (Fuel efficiency) meaning that for station keeping in orbit or long duration missions, they can offer significantly better performance once in space.

I'm keeping my eye on this.

Best Healthcare System in the World?

Nope.

At least according to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, which showed that the US has the worst healthcare outcomes of any of the world's wealthiest nations:

The United States health system ranked dead last in an international comparison of 10 peer nations, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund.

In spite of Americans paying nearly double that of other countries, the system performed poorly on health equity, access to care and outcomes.

“I see the human toll of these shortcomings on a daily basis,” said Dr Joseph Betancourt, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation with a focus on healthcare research and policy.

Gee, you mean turning healthcare over to contemptible greed-heads and overpaid managers is a bad thing?

Hoocoodanode?

………

The Commonwealth Fund’s report is the 20th in their “Mirror, Mirror” series, an international comparison of the US health system to nine wealthy democracies including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, Sweden and Switzerland. The foundation calls this year’s report a “portrait of a failing US health system”.

But if the government spends more on healthcare, we won't be able to buy the hyper-expensive and under performing F-35s or the cruise missile magnets known as aircraft carriers.

Wut, you some of commie pinko?

You know, I generally hold the position that we as a society cannot arrest our way out of serious problems, but I think that frog marching healthcare executives out of their offices in handcuffs might help.

So would the establishment of a UK style National Health Service.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unemployment


Existing Home Sales
The weekly unemployment numbers came out today, with initial claims falling by 12,000 to 219,000, better than the consensus forecast of 230,000, while the less volatile 4 week moving average fell by 3,500 to 227,500, and continuing claims fell by 14,000 to 1.829 million.

Additionally, we have news regarding home market, with home sales fell 2.5% month over month and 4.2% year over year with median home prices rising 3.1% year over year.

I would note that a bit of that price increase is due to a significant decrease in the sales of less expensive homes over the past year.

When you take out the low end, the remaining sales look increasingly pricey. 

This is not a surprise.  First time and less expensive home buyers are much more sensitive to housing costs, of which interest rates are a major component.

I would note that this does work its way up the market over time, because there are fewer people trading up to bigger and better houses.

That is probably why the fed cut rates by 1/2% yesterday.

Nice to See, Even Though It Will Fail

It's an old story, neoliberal French President tries a hail Mary by calling snap parliamentary elections, French President's party gets destroyed by the right wing fascists in the first round, collaborates with the left in the second round, defeating the right wing fascists, but with his party coming in third.

Then the aforementioned neoliberal French President delays in appointing a Prime Minister, and then ignores the fact that the left has the most seats in parliament and appoints a right-wing party apparatchik in alliance with the Fascists that he campaigned against, and then impeachment proceedings are initiated against the scumbag French President.

What's more, the first step of the impeachment passes through almost immediately.

Impeaching a French President is a very involved process, and this is only the first of somewhere around a dozen steps, but it is a well deserved slap in the face for Emanuel Macron:

The radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) party's effort to remove Emmanuel Macron from office passed a first crucial step on Tuesday, September 17. The bureau of the Assemblée Nationale, the institution's top decision-making body, validated the admissibility of the procedure initiated by LFI, with the support of the Greens, the Communists and even the Socialists.

Since the lengthy late-night session at the installation of the 27th legislature on July 19, the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) coalition has held a majority of 12 of the 22 seats on the bureau of the Assemblée, which is chaired by Assemblée Nationale president Yaël Braun-Pivet, a member of Macron's Renaissance party.

This new majority has emboldened LFI, which on August 17 threatened Macron with impeachment if he did not appoint Lucie Castets, the NFP candidate for prime minister. After Macron decided not to name Castets, LFI put their money where their mouth was and submitted their text.

………

Introduced by the 2007 constitutional amendment, this procedure for the impeachment of the president has never been successful and requires a two-thirds majority in Parliament to form a High Court. The procedure is limited to a single reading in each chamber, all within a fortnight. Article 68 of the Constitution stipulates that the president can only be removed "in the event of a breach of duty manifestly incompatible with the exercise of his mandate."

This ambiguous definition allows lawmakers to assess for themselves what constitutes a breach of duty by the president. The sanction is, above all, political, as the president remains immune from criminal, civil and administrative liability while in office.

It's clear that Macron sees the right wing as the opposition, but the left wing as the enemy, and it's also clear that he sandbagged them throughout this process.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it's that the left should never trust the center (centre?) anything .  They would rather, as Boise Penrose noted, "Preside over the ruins."

I expect Marine Le Pen to be the next French President, because the center prefers mass deportations and race riots than the prospect of even the smallest restoration of the welfare state.

Walkie Talkies Now?

Yesterday, it was pagers, todays, it's Walkie-Talkies detonating.

 As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

I hate reruns:

Hezbollah was hit Wednesday by another wave of exploding devices, as Israel signaled it was moving toward more aggressive military action against the Lebanese militant group.

Walkie-talkies used by the group blew up in homes, cars and in operatives’ hands across the country, people familiar with the matter said, just a day after thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah members exploded at roughly the same time. The new attack killed 20 people and injured more than 450, after Tuesday’s bombings killed 12 and injured more than 2,800 people, according to Lebanon’s government, which blamed Israel.

The militant group was scrambling to assess the extent of the two days of explosions. Details emerging from investigations into Tuesday’s massive attack pointed to a complex plan carried out by Israel, in which explosives were planted in thousands of devices destined for Hezbollah members and then detonated by a remote signal.

………

Wednesday’s blasts widened the scale of an already unprecedented attack. Israel has faced criticism for triggering a wave of untargeted explosions that put civilians at risk. Tuesday’s attack filled many hospital emergency rooms to capacity and left two children among the dead.

Hezbollah members said some explosions on Wednesday were stronger than those in the pager attack, which left victims with severed hands, damaged eyes or gashes in their hips and sides.

………

Senior officials from the militant group ordered an immediate, broad investigation to identify how the attack happened and understand its implications. Hezbollah was also looking at the possibility of insider collaborators who might have leaked information about the procurement of the pagers.

It was the General Secretary of Hamas, Hassan Nasrallah, who publicly announced this earlier this year.

Solved it for you.

One major concern for Hezbollah is that the attack has exposed the identities of many of their operatives and commanders. The group has been struggling with information leaks and informants on the ground, a security gap that has helped Israel kill hundreds of Hezbollah militants since exchanges of fire began last October.

I am worried about the conflict across Israel's northern border further escalating.

That being said, the fact that Hezbollah's operations and communications have been profoundly and deeply and disrupted does not worry me at all.

Today in Bad Ideas

There are bills in the Senate Judiciary Committee that would restore patents for software and genes, because ……… a f%$# tonne of lobbyists and corrupt campaign contributions I guess?

I don't think that this Supreme Court has done much good, but their work in reining in excesses of our current IP regime is good.

The current regime is a license for parasite rent seekers.

It creates massive inequality and it destroys innovation when some patent troll can shake you down at a moment's notice:

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider two bills Thursday that would effectively nullify the Supreme Court's rulings against patents on broad software processes and human genes. Open source and Internet freedom advocates are mobilizing and pushing back.

The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (or PERA, S. 2140), sponsored by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), would amend US Code such that "all judicial exceptions to patent eligibility are eliminated." That would include the 2014 ruling in which the Supreme Court held, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing, that simply performing an existing process on a computer does not make it a new, patentable invention. "The relevant question is whether the claims here do more than simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea of intermediated settlement on a generic computer," Thomas wrote. "They do not."

Yeah, Clarence f%$#ing Thomas got this right. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

That case also drew on Bilski v. Kappos, a case in which a patent was proposed based solely on the concept of hedging against price fluctuations in commodity markets.

………

Software and Internet advocates have taken notice. This week, the Linux Foundation, working with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), announced an expanded partnership with Unified Patents, intended to defend open source software against what it gamely calls "non-practicing entities" (NPEs), but most people would term patent trolls. "As the risk and volume of frivolous litigation against open source projects grows, the need to provide accessible protection from NPEs has become crucial," the Linux Foundation writes.

In interviews with The Register, leaders at CNCF and Unified Patents described patent trolls as actively chasing any widespread technology, aiming for settlements over the cost of trials. Nearly 98 percent of NPE claims are settled, according to Unified Patents, but NPE claims challenged at the US Patent and Trademark Appeals Board lose 67 percent of the time.

Challenging patent claims, however valid, could get tougher under the PREVAIL Act, the other bill being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. PREVAIL would, among other changes, limit patent challenge petitions to 14,000 words, hampering attempts to debunk complex patents. The Act would also eliminate clearance patents, which companies can use to clear any infringement claims prior to their own products' release.

………

Another wrinkle in the PERA bill involves genetic patents. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2013 that pieces of DNA that occur naturally in the genomes of humans or other organisms cannot, themselves, be patented. Myriad Genetics had previously been granted patents on genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, which were targeted in a lawsuit led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The resulting Supreme Court decision—this one also written by Thomas—found that information that naturally occurs in the human genome could not be the subject to a patent, even if the patent covered the process of isolating that information from the rest of the genome. As with broad software patents, PERA would seemingly allow for the patenting of isolated human genes and connections between those genes and diseases like cancer.

This is a horrendously bad idea. 

Shut it down

Delighted to be Wrong

I was wrong, the Federal Reserve has cut its benchmark interest rate by 50 basis points (½%) rather than my prediction of a 25 basis point cut.

I think that this was more of an accommodation of market expectations than it was concerns about employment:

The Federal Reserve voted to lower interest rates by a half percentage point, opting for a bolder start in making its first reduction since 2020. The long-anticipated pivot followed an all-out fight against inflation the central bank launched two years ago.

Eleven of 12 Fed voters backed the cut, which will bring the benchmark federal-funds rate to a range between 4.75% and 5%. Quarterly projections released Wednesday showed a narrow majority of officials penciled in cuts that would lower rates by at least a quarter point each at meetings in November and December.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s decision to trim rates by a larger amount than most analysts anticipated until just a few days ago moved the central bank unwaveringly into a new phase of its inflation battle: It is now trying to prevent past rate increases, which last year took borrowing costs to a two-decade high, from further weakening the U.S. labor market.

“We are committed to maintaining our economy’s strength,” Powell said at a news conference. “This decision reflects our growing confidence that with an appropriate recalibration of our policy stance, strength in the labor market can be maintained.”

In its policy statement, the Fed said the decision reflected “greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%” and that the central bank “judges that the risks to achieving its employment and inflation goals are roughly in balance.”

………

Some Republicans are upset that a rate cut might boost sentiment ahead of the November election. The rate cut is a sign the economy is “not good. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do it,” Trump said at a town hall on Tuesday night. Powell has said the Fed doesn’t take political considerations into account.

I'm surprised but pleased.

Covid F%$#s Up Your Immune System

Public health officials in Kansas are wondering why a spike in Covid infections has been accompanied by a spike in tuberculosis infections.

Once again, I need to remind people that Coronavirus infections tend to compromise their victim's immune systems for a long time, perhaps forever. 

People try to ignore this, but we saw this with RSV, and Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), MPox, etc.

I would also note that Measles infections have a similar effect, wiping out prior vaccine acquired immunity.

It's Covid, and it ain't over:

As the Kansas and Missouri medical communities prepare for respiratory illness season, health officials grapple with an early COVID-19 infection spike and higher-than-normal tuberculosis infections in Wyandotte County.

COVID positivity rates have been steadily increasing in Kansas, Missouri and across the country since July. The increase is higher than last summer’s rates and similar to the surge in infections seen this January, doctors said during a Friday morning medical update from the University of Kansas Health System. 

………

However, the level of COVID-19 activity detected in wastewater systems throughout Kansas is on the rise, as is the case regionally and nationally, according to the channel. Monitoring wastewater can offer early warning signs that infections are increasing or decreasing in a given community without relying on whether people present with symptoms, according to the CDC’s website. 

………

Kansas has recorded 82 confirmed cases of active tuberculosis this year, which is almost double last year’s total of 46 cases. All of the active cases are being treated to limit the spread, Jill Bronaugh, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said in an email. More than half of this year’s cases, 57, originated in Wyandotte County, and six were reported from Johnson County.

“TB is an infectious disease that most often affects the lungs and is caused by a type of bacteria,” Bronaugh said. “It spreads through the air when infected people cough, speak, or sing.”

Two people have died from tuberculosis in Kansas this year. A cause for the increase this year has not been identified. Bronaugh said the state and county health departments are working with the CDC to monitor and prevent the spread of tuberculosis.

I know that I am an engineer, not a public health expert or a doctor, dammit,* but it's pretty clear that the damage has something to do with the latest, and still active pandemic.

Efforts to dismiss this Covid as "Over" or "Endemic" serve only to interfere with efforts to remediate the spread of the disease, and make the problem worse.

Not only are there spikes in many contagious diseases, but in cancer in young adults.

It's Covid.

Wear your f%$#ing mask.

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

This Is 2 Years Old, but New to Me

Douglas Rushkoff, writing in The Guardian in September 2002, describes a bizarre seminar with rich tech bros in which they were asking him how to make sure that their security detail doesn't just kill them and take their stuff in the event of an apocalypse.

By apocalypse, we mean a situation where currency, and Bitcoin, and possibly even a Honda with a trunk full of silver, are less important to survival than ammunition and canned goods.

His suggestion was that they start making friends with their security team now, but these self described genius billionaires could not wrap their heads around the idea of being decent human beings.

What a surprise:

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.

………

The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.

………

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

They are sociopaths, and it is literally impossible for them to put themselves in another person's place.

The best that they can do is pretend to have empathy.

………

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

………

That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?

Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.

Once again, I feel compelled to quote John "Kung Fu Monkey" Rogers about all of this, who has the final word on Rand and her Randroid followers like these losers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

We need to find a way to deal with the sociopaths who are running large swaths of our economy and our society.

I'm thinking broken window zero tolerance law enforcement, with lots of arrests.