Engineer, Meet Petard

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

A MAGAt restauranteur is facing the lost of his business as a result of Trump's revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.

Trump said that he would do this.  He accused Haitians of eating dogs.

Now you are surprised that he has done this.

As they say in Japan,  "バカにつける薬はない." (There is no medicine for stupidity)

Wilkinson "Ken" Sejour, who owns Miami Chef Creole, says customers and others in the community are scared, and he might have to shut down two of his restaurants.

The effects of the Trump Administration's ending of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants are already starting to affect Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood.

At eateries such as Chef Creole, a well-established restaurant that famously serves comfort food inspired by traditional Haitian and Bahamian dishes, the end of TPS has led to confusion, with rumors spreading about potential raids and arrests. Wilkinson "Ken" Sejour, who told CBS Evening News that he voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, says the end of TPS for more than 350,000 Haitians might effectively end his career in the hospitality space.

………

"The end of TPS means for me that my future in the hospitality business is almost gonna be non-existent," he added. When asked why he voted for Trump, Sejour admitted that Trump "sold to me that he was a businessman and that he would make business decisions."

You mess with the bull, you get the horns.

Speaking of Bill Ackman

You may recall that Bill Ackman led the charge to get Harvard president Claudine Gay fired.

In my not so humble opinion, it was because at least in part because it fit in nicely with his anti-DEI Jihad.

Because she is black, and her parents immigrated from Haiti, he thinks that she was an affirmative action hire.

She's not.  Her family owns the largest cement factory in Haiti, and she went to high school at very exclusive, and very expensive, Phillips Exeter Academy.

Still, he, and his merry band of jack booted thug racists went after, and found misattributions in some of her parers, most notably her PhD thesis, and eventually the furor forced her out.

They do not appear to rise to the level of deliberate plagiarism, but appear to be some sloppy work.

Well the good folks at Business Insider started looking around Ackmanand they discovered that his wife, Neri Oxman, had a similar pattern of sloppiness and misattribution in her PhD thesis.

What we are talking about here largely things like missing quote marks, or footnotes, things in both case that are typically addressed by public announcements of corrections, and not disciplinary proceedings.

BTW, if you want to understand Oxman's work, you could check out her TED talk to see what she got her PhD for, but I only made it through 5 minutes, and as near as I can tell, she is in the bullshit bingo business.

Bill Ackman, lost it completely, see my earlier post, and started threatening the staff of Business Insider, and later he threatened  the entire faculty of MIT, because, this was like using nuclear weapons, and bad, as he had learned from The Barbie Movie Oppenheimer.  (Mr. Ackman, I believe that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki want a word with you.)

Well, BI dug deeper, probably because when someone loses their shit and starts issuing threats over a story, it often means that there is more to come, and they discovered that Oxman had, among other problems with her sources, had cut and paste entire paragraphs from Wikipedia.

That is not sloppiness, that is middle school level fraud:

Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found.

Oxman is married to billionaire Pershing Square Capital Management founder Bill Ackman, who has been vociferously campaigning for numerous university presidents to resign over what he perceives as their mishandling of student protests related to Israel's war in Gaza. Ackman has termed plagiarism a "very serious" offense.

………

On Thursday, Business Insider identified four instances in which Oxman had lifted passages from other scholars' work in her doctoral dissertation, completed at MIT in 2010. Three of those were passages where she should have used quotation marks but did not, and one included language from another author without any citation. In a post on X, Oxman admitted the plagiarism, apologized, and said she would review the primary sources and request corrections as needed.

………

In her response, Oxman described her mistakes as instances in which she "omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used." The cases she apologized for were similar in character to some cases that the Washington Free Beacon found in Claudine Gay's academic history — failures to use quotation marks around passages from works that were otherwise cited.

But a thorough review of her published work revealed that Oxman's failure to cite sources went beyond that — and included multiple instances of plagiarism in which she passed off writing from other sources as her own without citing the original in any way. At least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation were lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries.

The instances of plagiarism BI found on Friday are closer to a more common definition of plagiarism — the use of someone else's words without any indication that you are passing them off as your own.

"Both warp and weft can be visible in the final product," Oxman wrote. "By spacing the warp more closely, it can completely cover the weft that binds it, giving a warp faced textile. Conversely, if the warp is spread out, the weft can slide down and completely cover the warp, giving a weft faced textile, such as a tapestry or a Kilim rug."

The passage is presented in the dissertation as Oxman's original writing, without reference to any source for the sentences.

………

Oxman's cribbing from the "Weaving" article was one of 15 examples that BI found Oxman plagiarizing from a Wikipedia article in her dissertation. The articles she pulled from were primarily technical, covering topics like "Functionally graded material," "Manifolds," and "Constitutive equation."

(emphasis mine) 

It goes on from there, and it gets uglier and uglier.

It appears that Mr. Ackman has had a change of heart now though, and says that making errors in citations is almost inevitable in academe, so we should give his wife a break.

Glass houses, dude.

Bill Ackman is a whiny little bitch.

Maybe a State Sanction of Corruption?

During the US involvement in Afghanistan, the growth of opium poppies exploded.  Now that the Taliban is in charge, something in excess of 80% of opium poppy crops have been eradicated,

This raises the obvious question, given that eradication of opium production in Afghanistan was an explicit goal of US occupying forces, why was the US eradication program so ineffective?

There are three possible explanations:

1. The US was just that incompetent in Afghanistan.
2. The US local allies were tremendously corrupt and involved in the opium trade, and the US turned a blind eyes to their activities.
3. Elements of the US occupation of Afghanistan **cough** contractors **cough** were involved in the opium trade.
   

My money is on some combination of numbers 2 and 3:

The Taliban government in Afghanistan – the nation that until recently produced 90% of the world’s heroin – has drastically reduced opium cultivation across the country. Western sources estimate an up to 99% reduction in some provinces. This raises serious questions about the seriousness of U.S. drug eradication efforts in the country over the past 20 years. And, as global heroin supplies dry up, experts tell MintPress News that they fear this could spark the growing use of fentanyl – a drug dozens of times stronger than heroin that already kills more than 100,000 Americans yearly.

It has already been called “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history.” Armed with little more than sticks, teams of counter-narcotics brigades travel the country, cutting down Afghanistan’s poppy fields.

In April of last year, the ruling Taliban government announced the prohibition of poppy farming, citing both their strong religious beliefs and the extremely harmful social costs that heroin and other opioids – derived from the sap of the poppy plant – have wrought across Afghanistan.

It has not been all bluster. New research from geospatial data company Alcis suggests that poppy production has already plummeted by around 80% since last year. Indeed, satellite imagery shows that in Helmand Province, the area that produces more than half of the crop, poppy production has dropped by a staggering 99%. Just 12 months ago, poppy fields were dominant. But Alcis estimates that there are now less than 1,000 hectares of poppy growing in Helmand.

Instead, farmers are planting wheat, helping stave off the worst of a famine that U.S. sanctions helped create. Afghanistan is still in a perilous state, however, with the United Nations warning that six million people are close to starvation.

Yeah, the threat of starvation has the authorities moving from cash crops (poppies) to staple crops like wheat.  Go figure.

The Taliban waited until 2022 to impose the long-awaited ban in order not to interfere with the growing season. Doing so would have provoked unrest among the rural population by eradicating a crop that farmers had spent months growing. Between 2020 and late 2022, the price of opium in local markets rose by as much as 700%. Yet given the Taliban’s insistence – and their efficiency at eradication – few have been tempted to plant poppies.

………

The Taliban’s successful campaign to eradicate drug production has cast a shadow of doubt over the effectiveness of American-led endeavors to achieve the same outcome. “It prompts the question, ‘What were we actually accomplishing there?!'” remarked [Former State Department Official Matthew] Hoh, underscoring:

This undermines one of the fundamental premises behind the wars: the alleged association between the Taliban and the drug trade – a concept of a narco-terror nexus. However, this notion was fallacious. The reality was that Afghanistan was responsible for a staggering 80-90% of the world’s illicit opiate supply. The primary controllers of this trade were the Afghan government and military, entities we upheld in power.”

Hoh clarified that he never personally witnessed or received any reports of direct involvement by U.S. troops or officials in narcotics trafficking. Instead, he contended that there existed a “conscious and deliberate turning away from the unfolding events” during his tenure in Afghanistan.’

Suzanna Reiss, an academic at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the author of “We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of U.S. Empire,” demonstrated an even more cynical perspective on American counter-narcotics endeavors as she conveyed to MintPress: 

The U.S. has never really been focused on reducing the drug trade in Afghanistan (or elsewhere for that matter). All the lofty rhetoric aside, the U.S. has been happy to work with drug traffickers if the move would advance certain geopolitical interests (and indeed, did so, or at least turned a knowingly blind eye, when groups like the Northern Alliance relied on drugs to fund their political movement against the regime.).”

Afghanistan’s transformation into a preeminent narco-state owes a significant debt to Washington’s actions. Poppy cultivation in the 1970s was relatively limited. However, the tide changed in 1979 with the inception of Operation Cyclone, a massive infusion of funds to Afghan Mujahideen factions aimed at exhausting the Soviet military and terminating its presence in Afghanistan. The U.S. directed billions toward the insurgents, yet their financial needs persisted. Consequently, the Mujahideen delved into the illicit drug trade. By the culmination of Operation Cyclone, Afghanistan’s opium production had soared twentyfold. Professor Alfred McCoy, acclaimed author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” shared with MintPress that approximately 75% of the planet’s illegal opium output was now sourced from Afghanistan, a substantial portion of the proceeds funneling to U.S.-backed rebel factions.

The US support drug running allies in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua, in South East Asia, in Panama, and in Haiti are well documented.

The tacit or active support of drug traffickers by elements of the US state security security apparatus has been a constant since WWII.

This has almost never ended well.

Welcome to Hell, Here is Your Accordion

Pat Robertson has died at the age of 93.

Just a brief rundown of his greatest, hits. 

• Gay people and abortion caused 911.
• Haiti deserve the earthquake that devastated the country.
• Feminist force people to become lesbians.
• Feminists kill babies.
• Feminists practice witchcraft.
• Abortion caused Hurricane Katrina.
• Gays and Muslims are Nazis.
• Towels in Kenya transmit AIDS.
• Called non-Christians, "Termites." 
• Called Hindus "Demonic."
• Supported war criminal Charles Taylor.
• Established charities that were for his personal benefit.
• Called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
• Accused gays of deliberately spreading AIDS.

After 93 years, he has finally done something to make the world a better place, by leaving it.

Linkage

• The Bunker: Déjà amnesia (POGO) The US military is spending too much on high tech bling, and not enough of basics like ammunition.
• The U.S. Volunteers in Ukraine Who Lie, Waste and Bicker (New York Times) It turns out that the various US groups trying to volunteer to fight in the Ukraine are riven by corruption, incompetence, and ego.  This is not a surprise.  Whenever you have high profile event like this, the grifters and fakers show up.  Frequently, it's the American Red Cross, see their behavior following the Haiti earthquake.
• ‘Now or Never’: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine (Journal of Military and Strategic Studies) A impartial analysis of Putin's public statements regarding the Ukraine in the years long runup to the war. It's a good read, about 27 pages.
• Why pushing for the break up of Russia is absolute folly (Responsible Statecraft) Such an activity would further exacerbate tensions, which are already at a fever pitch.
• CFPB funding is constitutional, 2nd Circuit court rules (Banking Dive) This contradicts the 5th Circuit's ruline, and will doubtless be be ruled on by the Supreme Court. I am inclined to believe that the corrupt Justices will hamstring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
• Congress Sat Back and Let Trucks Become Heavier, Taller, and Deadlier (Business Insider) Modern trucks and SUVs have become so high and the front hoods so flat that an, "M1 Abrams battle tank had better a sightline than some everyday trucks.."  The modern SUV, styled as an expression of naked hostility, is killing people.
• American Airlines to Temporarily Suspend Route Due to Boeing Dreamliner Delays (Wall Street Journal) Boeing can no longer manufacture airlines, and they can no longer be relied to.
• Denmark invites Nord Stream owner to recover mystery object (Hürriyet Daily News) "Mystery object," huh?  Interesting.
• The Scammer Tricking Instagram Into Banning Influencer Accounts (ProPublica) Short version: Blackmailing asshole exploits huge gaps in the security system of the the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™, and bribes staffers to take down accounts and then they blackmail the owners of the accounts to get them restored.  I wonder how much of this is a feature and not a bug.
  

Have some Llamas with hats. It starts strong, but gets a bit tedious at the end1
:

When Discussing the Lab Leak Theory, Remember,

"There is no lab leak theory," as Jonathan M. Katz so ably notes.

When you look at the various lab leak theories, which is that the there was an accidental leak of the virus, strengthened by gain of function experiments, from the Wuhan Institute of Technolgy, it turns out that there really is no coherent theory.

First, people conflate the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was about 15 km from the wet market, and the Chinese CDC lab, a few hundred meters from the wet market where the first 2 (at least) outbreaks occurred.

The thing is, if it did leak from the latter lab, it would have been a natural virus, because the CDC lab does not do gain of function tests.

Of course, that would not explain why the first TWO outbreaks (the first one did not "take") occurred at the wet market, as opposed to, for example the households of CCDC or WIT staff.

As an FYI, Mr. Katz, has some significant priors in reporting about disease outbreaks, as he is largely responsible for the revelation of the source of the introduction of Cholera to Haiti by UN troops.

It goes on from there:

………

Given that experience, you might think I’d have been among the first to buy into the allegations of the “lab leak” origin of COVID-19. Indeed, I’ve heard through the grapevine that some of my old Haiti cholera crew are buying the hype. But I’m not. At least not yet. That is because the lab leak is still missing the key element of the U.N. cholera story that made it more than just a bunch of rumors: an actual, coherent theory of the case that could be refuted or confirmed.

When you peel back the label, it seems “lab leak” is a jaunty alliteration that papers over a variety of wildly different, often mutually exclusive, ideas. It isn’t a theory but a bundle of loose hypotheses that contradict each another on basic facts: the nature of the virus in question, the timeline of introduction — even the identity of the lab at which the alleged leak occurred.

………

So first, let’s get something out of the way. A pair of incontrovertible facts underlies most of the lab leak narratives: SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was first detected in the city of Wuhan. And there is at least one lab that studies coronaviruses in Wuhan.

But that is not a theory. It isn’t even a hypothesis. It’s just a vibe: two facts, possibly correlated, possibly not, that are a good jumping-off point for formulating a question. And, to be clear, it is a valid question! Though it is a question that has been asked, repeatedly.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal spurred the newest round of question-asking when it published a front-page story headlined: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says.

………

I probably don’t have to tell you that was all bullshit. But I will anyway. For one, there is nothing in there about a “Chinese military biolab” in the WSJ story. In fact, the WSJ flatly refuted that entire line of speculation, noting: “the update reaffirmed an existing consensus … that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.” 

………

The WSJ had no idea. The reporters did not actually see a copy of the five-page report; the unnamed officials who told them about it “declined to give details.” (FBI director Christopher Wray repeated his agency’s conclusion in a Fox News interview Tuesday, also refusing to provide details.) But CNN claims to have the goods:

Three sources told CNN that the Department of Energy’s shift was based in part on information about research being conducted at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control in Wuhan, China, which was studying a coronavirus variant around the time of the outbreak.

Take a closer look at the name of the lab in that quote. If you have been reading anything about the lab leak for the last three years, or even just looking at the pictures, you will no doubt recognize the name Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Well, it may interest you to know that the Chinese Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention] is not the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is, in fact, an entirely different institution — nine miles away, on the other side of Wuhan, across the Yangzi River. To put it in American terms: If the CCDC was near the White House, the WIV would be somewhere in Falls Church, Virginia.

………

As it happens, switching the lab at the center of the story would solve one big problem the lab leakers have been struggling with for three years: that the earliest known cluster of COVID cases was nowhere near the WIV. During the initial wave of unexplained pneumonia, doctors immediately identified the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, on the west side of Wuhan, as the common link. That was why, to the chagrin of investigators since, Chinese officials immediately closed and sanitized the market on January 1, 2020. Since then, evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey and his colleagues have provided even more detail for the case that the market was the “epicenter” of the pandemic. 

………

The irony is that the very DOE story Carlson was piggybacking off of fits better with the market being the first major site of contagion. That’s because, while the Huanan market was far from WIV, it was very close to the CCDC. So, points for the lab leakers, right?

Maybe, maybe not. While switching out the lab does solve the distance issue, it creates bigger problems for the lab leakers. That is because it would probably invalidate their most cherished idea: that the virus not only escaped from a lab, but was engineered in one.

The problem here is that, while WIV does have a history of doing potentially dangerous gain-of-function research, all indications are that the CCDC in Wuhan does not.………

………

Is the theory that the reported three sick WIV workers carried the virus to a nearby hospital? Or are they irrelevant, which is why they don’t even bear mentioning in the Republican House Intelligence report? How can Chan and Ridley — who wrote an entire book implicating the Wuhan Institute of Virology — shift seamlessly to offering evidence that a totally different facility was at fault? Does Carlson think the FBI and DOE are lying deep staters when they say COVID wasn’t a bioweapon, but telling the truth when they say — for apparently different reasons! — that they think it is most likely that it came from … some lab? Somewhere?

Contrast all of that to the parsimony of the market hypothesis: In a city of 11 million people, bigger than all five boroughs of New York City combined, the first known cases were clustered around a single market. That market housed caged mammals capable of contracting and spreading SARS-CoV-2: animals farmed in areas suspected of being a source of the virus. The samples taken from the surfaces on the area where the animals were housed tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Vendors and customers at the market got infected, they brought the virus home and to jobs elsewhere, and soon it spread across Wuhan, and then the world.

That story is not without holes: most notably, researchers haven’t yet produced the intermediary species needed for it to work. But it is coherent, clear, and more importantly, testable. (It also happens to be a story that resembles the way nearly every other viral epidemic in human history began, including the original SARS-CoV-1 in 2003.)

It's not just that there is little if any evidence of the outbreak originating from labs, it is that there are many conflicting lab leak theories, and none of them have little if any evidence backing them up.

My Brain Just Broke

Haiti is about 200 miles from Cuba. If they reach our shores, most Haitians are deported. Most Cuban refugees are granted asylum. Suspicion has long been that it is a function not of race, but of Florida politics. Most Cubans will vote Republican. Most Haitians become Democrats.

— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) September 21, 2021

The statement is fairly anodyne, and it certainly explains a lot of the politics around the issue, but look at the author.

The fact that Geraldo F%$#ing Rivera is saying it is a sign of the apocalypse.

Snark of the Day

Apparently, the Afghan Military Had Something in Common With the Massachusetts State House

—Charlie Pierce

The invaluable Mr. Pierce is referring, of course, to the Beacon Hill tradition of no-show jobs.

I cut my teeth covering politics in the Massachusetts State House, which is where Captain Blood would have done business had he gone to parochial school in Dorchester. I became very familiar with the activities of politicians in the wild—their quirks, their penchant for nickel-and-dime graft, the mysterious ability of their otherwise unemployable relatives to appear on state payrolls. After three years, I was Marlin Perkins in that Wild Kingdom. Or maybe I was Jim Fowler, the guy who had to wrestle snakes while Marlin sold life insurance during the breaks.

Imagine the shock of the familiar that came over me when I was reading the Special Investigator For Afghanistan Reconstruction report from 2015 and saw this:

Despite 13 years and several billions of dollars in salary assistance to the Afghan government for the ANP, there is still no assurance that personnel and payroll data are accurate. Since 2006, U.S. government audit agencies have consistently found problems with the tracking and reporting of Afghan National Police (ANP) personnel and payroll data.

………

In January 2015 SIGAR reported that more than $300 million in annual, U.S.-funded salary payments to the Afghan National Police were based on only partially verified or reconciled data, and that there was no assurances that personnel and payroll data were accurate. SIGAR found similar deficiencies during the course of the April 2015 audit of Afghan National Army personnel and payroll data. There are continuing reports of significant gaps between the assigned force strength of the ANDSF and the actual number of personnel serving.

………

All that money going all that distance around the globe, and we end up with a no-show job scam. All that high-falutin’ rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and we find out that our war is being run as though it were a Middlesex County road crew. I admire the departed Afghan government’s dedication to the classics, however.

Yes, the US State Security Apparatus created an even more corrupt and dysfunctional version of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!) (as Charles P. Pierce would say) in Afghanistan.

The problem here is that the interventions^* the US has made, notwithstanding the assertions otherwise, have never had the slightest concern about human rights and the rule of law.

They have been exclusively about enriching politically connected actors in the United States, and advancing US geopolitical goals.  (The Great Game)

We invariably act brutally and stupidly, and we put the worst of the worst in charge, because they will kowtow to US demands, and equally invariably, we fail, and are left with a country hostile to US interests.

This is not a sustainable strategy.

^*Just since WWII, and not a complete list: Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Vietnam, and Iran, and Italy, and Korea, and Syria, and Guatemala, and Nicaragua, and Brazil, and Indonesia, and Cuba, and Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, and Guyana, and Laos, and Cambodia, and Chile, and Bolivia, and Ecuador, and Panama, and Grenada, and Libya, and Somalia, and Iraq, and Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia, and Greece, and Russia, and Australia.

Of Course We Trained Them

It appears that some of the Colombian mercenaries alleged to have participated in the assassination of Jovenel Moïse were trained by the US.

I would be unsurprised to discover that at least some of them were trained at the, "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation," which used to be known as the "School of the Americas."

It was a petri dish for coups and right wing death squads in Latin America for decades:

Some of the former Colombian servicemen arrested after last week’s assassination of Haiti’s president previously received U.S. military training, according to the Pentagon, raising fresh questions about the United States’ ties to Jovenel Moïse’s death.

“A review of our training databases indicates that a small number of the Colombian individuals detained as part of this investigation had participated in past U.S. military training and education programs, while serving as active members of the Colombian Military Forces,” Lt. Col. Ken Hoffman, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

………

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), whose legislation provides oversight of foreign defense aid used in human rights abuses, said the episode was a grim reminder that U.S. assistance to other countries can take unexpected turns.

“This illustrates that while we want our training of foreign armies to build professionalism and respect for human rights, the training is only as good as the institution itself,” Leahy said.

“The Colombian army, which we have supported for 20 years, has a long history of targeting civilians, violating the laws of war and not being accountable. There has been a cultural problem within that institution.”

As Zathras would say, "At least there is symmetry." 

Colombian officials initially said that 13 of 15 Colombian suspects in the July 7 assassination plot once served in that country’s military, including the two killed by Haitian authorities after Moïse was fatally shot inside his home.

It is common for Colombian troops and other security personnel across Latin America to receive U.S. training and education. Colombia, in particular, has been a significant U.S. military partner for decades, receiving billions of U.S. dollars since 2000 in its effort to battle drug trafficking organizations, leftist guerrillas and far-right paramilitary groups.

That's an interesting way of saying that the Columbian military has been training, arming, supporting, and in some cases staffing murderous far-right paramilitaries for decades.

………

“The recruitment of Colombian soldiers to go to other parts of the world as mercenaries is an issue that has existed for a long time, because there is no law that prohibits it,” the commander of Colombia’s armed forces, Gen. Luis Fernando Navarro, told reporters last week.

This is a feature, not a bug.  If you hire people inclined to murder peasants, labor activists, etc. they are the sort who will want to cash in as mercs at the end of their time in the service.

Foreign military training provided by the United States is intended to promote “respect for human rights, compliance with the rule of law, and militaries subordinate to democratically elected civilian leadership,” Hoffman, the Pentagon spokesman, said in his statement. He did not immediately respond to questions seeking additional information.

We can add, "Foreign military training provided by the United States is intended to promote “respect for human rights, compliance with the rule of law, and militaries subordinate to democratically elected civilian leadership," to the list of the big lies in our discourse.  I'd put it ahead of, "I'll respect you in the morning."

In the western hemisphere, at least, training by the US military is pretty much a prerequisite for any officers overthrowing a democratically elected government in Latin America in the past 100 years.

Blaming Trump for This One

Trump has made bigotry fashionable in large segments of society, and he has demonized immigrants and refugees, and now we have a mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh:

Eleven people are dead and six more are wounded — including four police officers — after a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood Saturday morning.

The shooter, who officials said had an assault-style rifle and three handguns, is in custody, Pittsburgh police report. Officials have confirmed he is Robert Bowers, 46, of Baldwin Borough. He is in Allegheny General Hospital in fair condition with multiple gunshot wounds, officials said.

………

Gunfire erupted shortly before 10 a.m. as a baby-naming ceremony was getting underway, officials confirmed.

………

The Anti-Defamation League said it believed it was the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the U.S. history.

There was an initial confrontation in which two officers were injured, Mr. Hissrich said. Two more who are members of SWAT were injured in a later confrontation, Pittsburgh Police Chief Scott Schubert said at the news conference. Officials said they believe the suspect was acting alone.

It appears that his actions were a juxtaposition of antisemitism and anti-immigrant bias, making hime the very modern model of the modern Trump Republican:

Someone posting under the name Robert Bowers on the social media site Gab.com, wrote on or around Oct. 10: "Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided," and included a link to the website for HIAS National Refugee Shabbat, formerly the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society.

HIAS was founded in 1881 to help Jews fleeing Eastern Europe. In the 2000s, it expanded its work to include non-Jewish refugees, including those fleeing Afghanistan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Hungary, Iran, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Tunisia and Vietnam.

HIAS led events held last weekend and billed online as "a moment for congregations, organizations, and individuals around the country to create a Shabbat experience dedicated to refugees." Jewish Family and Community Services is listed on the HIAS website as a partner of the organization. The website indicates that JFCS and three Pittsburgh congregations were participating in the group's awareness campaign last weekend: Beth Shalom, Dor Hadash and Makom HaLev.

Robert Bowers on Gab.com indicated a week ago that he "noticed a change in people saying 'illegals' that now say 'invaders' I like this." He also called one other poster on Gab.com a "deceptive little oven dodger" in response to a post debunking a rumor that trucks marked with the Star of David were bringing Central American migrants to the U.S.

This is a direct result of Donald Trump and his rhetoric.

The right wing has been weaponizing bigots and the mentally ill to intimidate the rest of us since at least the Reagan administration.

We've seen it with mass shootings, the assassination of Alan Berg, violence against abortion clinics, etc.

There is an entire domestic terrorist infrastructure that the right wing has built, and it needs to be taken down.

Good Proposal

One of the features land reform historically has been expropriation, and these days, that frequently is made very difficult by modern trade deals, and extra-territorial court decisions, where you see people seizing assets once they are out of countries.
There is another way, rigorously enforced property taxes at a significant , with a reasonable homestead exemption, something on the order of 20 hectares for agricultural use, and 2 hectares for other uses:

………Most of the land, and all the best land, is owned or controlled by absentee natives or by outside organizations—foreign corporations, banks or governments. Local government is corrupt, incompetent, and obligated to outsiders if not actually controlled by them. There’s a two-fold net effect. On the one hand, there’s a continuing drain of working capital and labor to the outside, as rents, interest, profits flow out and young adults emigrate. On the other hand, the extraction process cripples the economy, by cutting off working capital and killing labor incentives. The local government, cannot or will not provide adequate services, due to corruption and lack of tax money. Metaphorically, these colonies are being bled dry.

Suppose a reform government were to come to power in these places and suppose it could stave off foreign threats. How could it stop the bleeding?

………

The same strategy can work for modern colonies. A reform government can heavily tax the value of real estate, possibly with exemptions for small resident property owners. Better yet, and much easier to implement, tax only the land component of real estate. Such a tax would force absentee owners to send euros or dollars back to the colonies. The government could then begin to provide services and repair infrastructure. But why tax real estate? Why not tax income or imports? Because absentees and foreign based corporations can easily avoid income taxes by funny accounting. Taxes on most imports are regressive and a drain on the economy. The real money is in real estate.

All but the most primitive governments keep some sort of registry of property, crude and out of date in Greece, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. A reform government can easily create new cadastral maps—that’s what George Washington did as he surveyed Native American land. In the age of GPS it’s even easier. The government can then place the existing claims on the map. The recorded “owner” may be a shell corporation based in the Bahamas, but no matter. Just tax it. Where claims overlap, they can be taxed twice—forcing owners to resolve the boundaries. The government can claim any blank spots—forcing hidden informal owners to declare themselves or lose the property.

If you juxtapose this with a stated goal of land reform through eminent domain, where the owners are paid a fair market value for their properties, you can create a simple assessment of the property:

Another strategy for getting initial property values is to ask owners to declare the values themselves, with the government having the right to purchase the properties at the declared value. The government right to purchase, if enforced, takes away owners’ incentive to understate the value.

As an aside here, if you require this declaration for a reduced tax rate, say 20% if the owner does not make a declaration versus 2% if they do, and you require the land to be tied to an actual person for a homestead exemption, which means that obscure ownership arrangements become economically unsustainable.

The downside, of course, is the urge of politicians to cut tax deals with large corporations for the immediate political benefit, even though any sane analysis shows that this ends up costing more than it generates in revenue.  (Amazon's grotesque competition for its second headquarters is simply the most egregious example ……… so far.)

So Not a Surprise

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin is telling people not to donate to the Red Cross:

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin, who represents hard-hit Kingwood, had a message for the public about the American Red Cross.

"I beg you not to send them a penny," he said at Wednesday's council meeting. "They are the most inept unorganized organization I've ever experienced."

………

"Don't waste your money," said Martin. "Give it to another cause."

Martin is not the only public official to go after the Red Cross' response to Harvey.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett has said he asked local nonprofit to set up a shelter at NRG Park in large part because he did not trust the Red Cross to do so.

"The Red Cross could not have done this. They wouldn't have had the wherewithal to do it," Emmett said. "Don't get me wrong, they're out there on the front lines, but I had already seen the difficulty and we needed to get this set up quickly."

The organization also has been faulted for failing to ensure supplies reached area shelters quickly enough. By sunrise Sunday, when much of the Houston area awoke under water, one of the city's two Red Cross shelters could not accept evacuees due to high water and the other had only 200 cots for what turned out to be more than 2,000 people. Cots did not arrive to the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown until after dark Sunday, and shortages there persisted for days.

This is a recurring theme with the American Red Cross.

They raised hundreds of millions after storms Sandy and Isaac, and f%$#ed it all up, and it raised half a billion dollars for Haiti, and built 6 houses.

Then there are its deceptive claims about overhead and serviced delivered.

The Red Cross is a broken organization. The management is driven by "the appearance of aid, not actually delivering it."

The organization is not just dysfunctional, it is completely broken, and without a top to bottom revamp of its management, it will remain broken.

What's more, the problems predate the current management, my father recalls an inadequate response to the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage, and in the 1980s and 1990s, it gave AIDS to most of the hemophiliacs in the United States, because it refused to screen its blood supply properly.  (Liddy Dole was a part of that clusterf%$#, dragging her feet for years over changes to the program)

The Red Cross, and its charter from Congress, need to be fixed.

Rule #1 of Giving Disaster Aid Is Not to Give to the American Red Cross

Rule #2 is to refer to rule #1.

Pro Publica has some quick tips for donating after a disaster in response to the massive flooding in the Houston area from hurricane Harvey, and the lede paragraph mentions the American Red Cross mismanagement in Haiti.

The comments mention their mismanagement of the super storm Sandy.

On a more personal level, I was in the Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage in 1964 (No memories, I was less than 2), and my father has vivid recollections of the general uselessness of the Red Cross, he was involved on some of the (ultimately ignored) after incident analysis and recommendations.

He recalls that the Salvation Army did a much better job than the ARC.

Just don't give to them.  It will end up going to new carpets in their Washington, DC offices.

Props to Charles Grassley

Yeah, I cannot believe that I said this either.

He has gone on mdeieval on Red Cross efforts to stonewall a GAO investigation:

Sen. Charles Grassley is demanding more information about the American Red Cross and its “apparent unwillingness to fully cooperate” with a government investigation into its disaster relief work.

Grassley asked the head of the Government Accountability Office for a list of material the Red Cross refused to provide to investigators, as well as the names of officials who didn’t cooperate and any communications in which the charity explained why it was not cooperating.

“The lack of transparency is cause for concern as the Red Cross is a federal instrumentality created by Congressional charter and receives millions of dollars every year from donors across the country,” Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote in a letter today to the head of the GAO.

The GAO report, released earlier this month, explored the Red Cross’ government mandated role in responding to disasters. It found that there is no regular oversight of the Red Cross despite a string of flawed disaster responses. It also recommended Congress find a way to fill that gap.

………

The head of the GAO inquiry said earlier this month that the Red Cross had not given “unfettered access” but that investigators were able to get the information they needed “to sufficiently answer our research questions.”

Seeing as how the American Red Cross seems to have a long history of inefficiency in the execution of large scale disaster aid, as well as bait and switch in their fund raising,^* there seems to be some justification in heightened oversight, particularly given their federal charter.

This sort of crap has been going on since the late 1980s, when Red Cross refusal to properly test their blood products killed a significant portion of the US hemophiliacs.

^*And there is that whole thing in Haiti, where they took in nearly ½ billion dollars for Haiti aid, and built a grand total of 6 homes.

Yet Another Reason to Not Give to the Red Cross

In addition to killing off most of the hemophiliacs in the United States because of their unwillingness to test blood for HIV and discard HIV tainted clotting factor, of course.

It turns out that the America Red Cross raised $½ Billion for post earthquake aid to Haiti, and built just 6 homes:

The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.

In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.

Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.

The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.

The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.

The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.

After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.

Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. [They f%$#ed up Katrina and 911 too, and my father's recollections of their help during the Anchorage earthquake in 1964 is similar.  He remembers the Salvation Army outperforming them by all metrics] Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.

One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.

In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”

The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.

Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.

The American Red Cross has a long history of over promising, excessive fund raising, and under delivering.

This is not a well run organization in my lifetime.

If you want to give blood, find a local non profit blood bank.

If you want to donate money to the victims of a disaster, find a bit less ponderous and self-aggrandizing organization.

^*http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-29/news/mn-63591_1_blood-banks

Well, The Next Time I Ask What the F%$# He is Smoking, I'll Know the Answer

Everyone's favorite hypocritical and corrupt televangelist cum politician, Pat Robertson has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana:

For a second it looked as if someone had mischievously switched teleprompter scripts on Pat Robertson, the tele-evangelist and founding member of the Christian Coalition. There he was on The 700 Club, a religious affairs TV talk show talking breezily about why America should legalise marijuana.

But this is the season for compassion and Mr Robertson – who usually makes waves nowadays only when he finds celestial or satanic cause for assorted disasters like the Haiti earthquake (a pact with the Devil to eject the French two centuries ago) or Hurricane Katrina (legalised abortion) – seemed to be serious. He said incarcerating people for taking "a couple of puffs" of pot might not be effective public or social policy.

Here's a surprise, he's significantly to the left of Barack Obama on this, probably because he's at a point in his life where good government policy trumps electoral success.

Final Child Trafficker Released in Haiti

Laura Silsby, the leader of the "missionary" expedition to rescue Haitian "orphans", wasconvicted on charges related to human trafficking and sentenced to time served, so she has been released, and I assume that she is heading back to Idaho:

All 10 of the Americans were initially detained by the Haitian authorities, but only Silsby was charged.

Prosecutors first accused her of abducting the children, but the charge was downgraded to one of "irregular travel" - a crime which covers people smuggling.

Prosecutor Jean-Serge Joseph said she had been sentenced to three months and eight days in jail - the exact time she had spent in custody waiting for her trial.

IMHO, she used the tragedy, as well as the fervor of her fellow church members, who believed that they were rescuing from Catholicism and damnation by raising them as Evangelicals, to get the ball rolling, and I think that at least part of her motivation was money.

Considering her own problems with her failing online shopping business and her association with a man under investigation for sex trafficking, there is a strong stench of corruption and the profit motive.

Older posts are here.

Haiti Will Shortly Free Last Two American Kidnappers Missionaries

This is not an exoneration. It's an acknowledgment that the courts in Haiti are a shambles, and that they are getting a lot of pressure from the US.

It's clear from the back story that something very wrong was going on:

A judge in Haiti has said the last two Christian US missionaries being held on suspicion of abducting children after the earthquake may be freed in days.

Bernard Sainvil told Reuters the case, which involves 33 children, should be closed this week because there were no criminal grounds to pursue it.

A lawyer for the two said he thought they would be freed by Thursday.

Eight fellow missionaries were released last week but their leader and her assistant were kept in custody.

The other 8 are claiming that they had been scammed by Silsby and Coulter, and I am inclined to believe that something more than inattention to the finer points of Haitian immigration law is involved.

8 of 10 Jailed Haitians Released

The two apparent ring leaders remain in custody, and as a condition of their release, they must return later to Haiti to answer investigator questions:

While Judge Saint-Vil’s ruling allows eight of the Americans to leave Haiti on the condition that they return to the country to answer further questions in the case, it requires that Laura Silsby, the Idaho businesswoman who led the group, and her live-in nanny, Charisa Coulter, remain in jail to answer questions about traveling to Haiti before the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Some of the freed Americans had already contended this month that they were misled by Ms. Silsby, who had faced more than a dozen legal complaints connected to her online shopping business before she persuaded fellow Baptists from Idaho to assist her in setting up an orphanage for Haitian children.

“We are disappointed that all in the group are not being released,” said Terry Michaelson, a lawyer for Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, where five of the detainees, including Ms. Silsby and Ms. Coulter, attended church.

The church mission’s lawyer had put forward about $7,000 to help pay for the first month’s rent for the orphanage that Ms. Silsby planned to establish in the Dominican Republic.

…………

Some of the freed Americans had already contended this month that they were misled by Ms. Silsby, who had faced more than a dozen legal complaints connected to her online shopping business before she persuaded fellow Baptists from Idaho to assist her in setting up an orphanage for Haitian children."

(emphasis mine)

This is beginning to sound like something written by Dashiell Hammett.

Have I Mentioned that I Love Alan Grayson*

He lays into Pat Robertson's comment on Haiti and the devil, and further notes that the religious right, and particularly Pat Robertson's supporters have achieved none of their goals, specifically a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, and a ban of abortion, and he asks, "What about your own pact with the Devil? How's that worked out for you?" (3:07)

I don't think that everyone should be like Alan Grayson, but I think that it's essential that the Democrats have a few of these sorts of firebrands to describe the wrong that the Republicans do in stark and moralistic terms.



^*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.