Disgraceful

Argentine President Javier Milei has had to be forced by a judge to distribute food in warehouses to the poor.

It seems that he would rather let the food rot than distribute it to hungry children, because he derives pleasure from hurting people.

If he were an American, he'd be on his way to being the Republican nominee:

By order of Judge Sebastian Casanello, President Javier Milei was forced to distribute food that was intended for social assistance programs for the poorest Argentines.

On Tuesday, the Argentine army began distributing food valued at approximately US$4 million that had been stored unused and was about to expire.

This situation triggered a scandal, leading to the resignation of senior officials from the Human Capital Ministry. Prosecutor Paloma Ochoa is leading an investigation into the matter.

About 5,000 tons of food, abandoned in two state warehouses, must be distributed in the next two weeks under an immediate delivery protocol due to the expiration dates of the products.

With the support of the highway police, food distribution operations are being carried out in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Tucuman.

………

Specifically, the food will be distributed by the Foundation for Child Nutrition (CONIN) in community dining halls in Buenos Aires peripheral settlements such as Hurlingham, Merlo, Jose Paz, Escobar, and Tigre, which are areas severely affected by poverty.

………

The Human Capital Ministry announced that it will design a new emergency aid storage system to be overseen by presidential advisor Federico Sturzenegger, who is considered the architect of the Milei administration's anti-regulation and anti-state reforms. 

Yeah, let's put one of the, "The cruelty is the point," psychopaths in charge of this. That's going to end well.

40+ years of international Neoliberal economics has left an electorate that see no hope beyond burning everything down.

This is what you get.

 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

Them: "If Covid were damaging people's abilities to fight other infections then we'd see a huge rise in illnesses right across the board"

The Other Infections: <see picture>

Them: "No, not like that" pic.twitter.com/bwMvjtcfqS

— tern (@1goodtern) July 20, 2024

Wear our f%$#ing mask.

All of those, "Mysterious," recent outbreaks of diseases are not so misterious.

I’m with the Insurance Companies on This One

And I cannot f%$3 believwe that I just f%$#ing wrote that, but the insurers are right here, building standards in fire prone areas must be improved.

Actually, strike the, "Fire prone areas," modifier.  Given climate change, everywhere has the potential to be a fire prone area:

The insurance industry is setting homes on fire — just to make a point.

The fires are controlled, kindled in a research lab or staged at training facilities used by fire departments. They are designed to simulate the conditions that help wildfires spread through neighborhoods and cause what the insurers call a “conflagration event,” like the one that killed 102 people and destroyed the town of Lahaina on Maui in Hawaii last August.

The message to homebuilders is stark: Homes in certain parts of the United States must now be constructed with wildfires in mind, or they most likely will not be insured, which would mean they couldn’t be bought with a mortgage.

In part because of climate change and the resulting increase in catastrophic storms and fires, insuring homes in some parts of the country has become a money-losing proposition for the industry. Across the United States, insurers lost $33 billion in 2023 on personal home and auto insurance, according to AM Best, a ratings agency for the industry.

………

That “something” could be the biggest overhaul of building standards in more than 30 years. After Hurricane Andrew devastated part of South Florida in 1992, pressure from the insurance industry compelled homeowners and builders in the state to switch to stronger windows and roof ties. The industry is applying a similar kind of pressure now in response to growing wildfire risk.

I would also note that we have a significant "Fire debt" in those regions as a result of over a century of aggressive fire fighting, so prescribed burns should be a part of this as well.

Not only will it make larger and more extreme fires less likely, but it will return the ecology back to what it was, because the west is largely fire sculpted ecology.

But Bibi Does Not Care

We now have increasing indications of a polio outbreak in Gaza as a result of the war, the IDF has started vaccinating soldiers.

This means that there is a very real chance of a spread of polio both in Gaza and throughout Israel, but Benjamin Netanyahu will continue to prosecute the war, because once it ends, he loses power and goes to jail for corruption.

He will likely be directly responsible for a plague being unleashed in Israel.

If that does not sound like some seriously biblical sh%$, as in the earth swallowing Korach, and the  plague that followed in בְּמִדְבַּר (Numbers), you have not studied תַּנַ״ךְ (Tanakh).

The Israeli army will begin on Sunday to vaccinate against polio all soldiers operating in Gaza or due to enter there soon, after a high concentration of the virus was found in sewage in Gaza.

Vaccination of the soldiers will take place in Israel over the coming weeks. The army says that, according to its information, there are no active cases of polio among Gazans.

Given that there is no healthcare system remaining in Gaza, there is no good information about potential polio cases either.  (Note also that in over 90% of cases, one would see only mild symptoms without paralysis)

Last Wednesday, the army was informed by the Health Ministry that a high concentration of the poliovirus was found in sewage samples from Gaza that were monitored.

As a result, the Health Ministry and IDF Medical Corps held an assessment and decided to launch a polio vaccination campaign for all ground forces in Gaza, including the combat forces and auxiliary forces.

Polio vaccines are given in Israel during childhood as part of the routine vaccination program, and the vaccination rate is 95 percent. Thus, the soldiers now in Gaza have been previously vaccinated against the virus.

Nonetheless, after situational assessment conducted by the IDF, with the participation of public health service chief Dr. Sharon Elroi-Price and senior Medical Corps officials, it was recommended that the soldiers be vaccinated again in order to further reduce the risk of infection and of transmission of the virus in Israel.

This is getting worse and worse.

Another Update on the Democratic Presidential Nomination

J.B. Pritzger and most of the Illinois Democratic Congressional Caucus have endorsed Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, Illinois's most prominent political figure, Barack Obama, has come out in favor of an open convention. 

The most charitable assessment that I con offer for this, and I have never been inclined to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, is that he wants to play king-maker at the convention, because he wants to make sure that what he sees as his legacy, including the increasingly dysfunctional PPACA (Obamacare) is preserved.

Considering the fact that the only person even briefly making noises right now about challenging Harris for the nomination is ex-Democrat Jim Manchin, though only for about 18 hours.

As it stands now, it appears that Harris might get sufficient delegates pledged to her to put her over the top in the next few days.

I expect the proverbial fat lady to sing some time in the next day or so.

Support Your Local Police

After an LA Times reporter received a list of cops whose records made them unreliable witnesses, the L.A. County sheriff launched a criminal investigation into the reporter. 

You know, maybe it would be a better do launch an investigation of the deputies who planted evidence, lied on the stand, brutalized people, filed false reports, and sexually assaulted children.

Then again, maybe I just don't understand policing:

For at least three years, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department secretly investigated — and ultimately urged the state attorney general to prosecute — a Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote about a leaked list of problem deputies, according to internal department records.

The probe began in 2017 when investigators under then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell tried to figure out who slipped the list of roughly 300 names to reporter Maya Lau. The case soon fizzled out. But after Alex Villanueva took office in 2018, the department revived it, according to a 300-page investigative case file recently reviewed by The Times.

The department eventually deemed Lau a criminal suspect — alleging she knowingly received “stolen property.” And it fingered Diana Teran, its own constitutional policing advisor, as the source of the leak, even though Teran was the one who’d initially reported it and denied passing along the information.

Sheriff’s officials sent the case to Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta in 2021, and in May of this year his office formally declined to prosecute. The office declined to answer specific questions, saying only that it “found insufficient evidence” to merit criminal charges.

………

The years-long attempt to prosecute Lau is not the only time the Sheriff’s Department has targeted a reporter in recent years. In 2020, LAist reporter Josie Huang was slammed to the ground and arrested by sheriff’s deputies while covering a protest. Her press ID was visible on a lanyard around her neck. Villanueva defended his deputies’ handling of the incident and referred the case to the district attorney’s office so Huang could be prosecuted. Prosecutors declined to take up the case, and Huang sued, settling with the county last year for $700,000.

Two years after Huang’s arrest, Villanueva targeted another Times journalist in a criminal leak investigation for her reporting on a departmental cover-up. After announcing the probe at a public news conference, he backed off under a barrage of criticism and denied that he considered the reporter a suspect.

Both of those cases received widespread media coverage, and this week independent journalist Cerise Castle reported on department records showing that sheriff’s officials had been keeping an eye on her as far back as 2021.

As bad as police departments can be, Sheriffs departments tend to be even worse, because unlike chiefs of police, they have no civilian oversight at all.

This will not change until criminal prosecutions for this sort of behavior become the rule rather than the exception.

We Have a Winner!

For the worst possible take on Biden dropping out of the race.

Rather unsurprisingly, it comes from serial misogynist Aaron Sorkin, and it was published in the New York Times.

He suggests that the Democrats nominate 77 year old Mitt Romney, because when Aaron Sorkin is not busy stealing lines from Keith Olbermann's dad for his scripts, he's a self-important moron who fancies himself a super genius for writing a political porn series on network television starting in the last century.

So, you want someone almost as old as Donald Trump, someone who had dismissed 47% of the US population as leeches, someone who made his money laying off workers while at a private equity fund, someone who joked about the pooping dog on the roof of his car, etc.?

Aaron Sorkin, please f%$# off.  Now.

As for the New York Times, the, "Paper of record," is now beyond parody.  It has degenerated into little more than a telethon for the over-privileged.

A Slightly More Measured Take on the News

First, I continue to believe that Biden's withdrawal makes Trump's election more likely.

Second, it's clear that the nominee, as all of the usual suspects, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, Phil Murphy, and Gretchen Whitmer have endorsed Kamala Harris. (Here and here)

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzger has issued a statement, but has not formally endorsed Harris.

So it is clearly going to be Harris.

My predictions:

• Trump will weasel out of a debate with Harris.
• Vance will weasel out of a debate with whoever the VP choice is.
• The VP choice will be a right of the party center white guy like Tim Kaine in Hillary Clinton's ill starred 2016 campaign.

I expect that her campaign and related strategy will be run by the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), which is a bad thing, because they are corrupt self-serving incompetents.

I would note that my predictive powers are limited, but I am not optimistic.

Holy Fucking Shit!

Biden had announced that he is dropping out of the race.

My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024

Call me a pessimist, but I think that the Democrats have just lost the election.

The next question is, "Who will be Harris' VP pick?"

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez turns 35 in October.

Just sayin'.

In the meantime, I'll be kind of busy, looking at selling the house and the process for making Alyiah to Israel.

Yeah, I think it's that bad.

Posted via mobile.

Mandy Rice-Davies Applies

Facing regulatory pressure, RealPage is claiming that it is not an illegal tool to allow collusiion on rents.

If RealPage just reported the rents entered from its clients, it might have a case, but it also requires that its customers follow the recommendations for rents.

Not gonna fly:

RealPage says it isn’t doing anything wrong by suggesting to landlords how much rent they could charge. In a move to reclaim its own narrative, the property management software company published a microsite and a digital booklet it’s calling “The Real Story,” as it faces multiple lawsuits and a reported federal criminal probe related to allegations of rental price fixing.

RealPage’s six-page digital booklet, published on the site in mid-June, addresses what it calls “false and misleading claims about its software”—the myriad of allegations it faces involving price-fixing and rising rents—and contends that the software benefits renters and landlords and increases competition. It also said landlords accept RealPage’s price recommendations for new leases less than 50 percent of the time and that the software recommends competitive prices to help fill units.

………

Allegations of price-fixing that may constitute antitrust violations have dogged the software company since late 2022, when ProPublica published an investigation alleging that RealPage’s software was linked to rent rises in some US cities, as the company used private, aggregated data provided by its customers to suggest rental prices. (In response to ProPublica's reporting, RealPage commented that it “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”)

RealPage’s software is powerful because it anonymizes rental data and can provide landlords and property managers with nonpublic and public data about rentals, which may be different from that advertised publicly on platforms like real estate marketplace Zillow. The company contends that it’s not engaging in price-fixing, as landlords are not forced to accept the rents that RealPage’s algorithm suggests. Sometimes it even recommends landlords lower the rent, RealPage claims. But antitrust enforcers have alleged that even sharing private information via an algorithm and using it for price recommendations can be as conspiratorial as back-room handshake deals, even if landlords don’t end up renting apartments at those rates. The reported antitrust investigation is ongoing.

………

RealPage’s algorithmic pricing model is among one of the first subject to scrutiny, perhaps due to its involvement in housing, a necessity that has ballooned in price as housing supply languishes. Typical rent in the US is just under $2,000, according to Zillow, up from around $1,500 in early 2020. “Housing affordability is a national problem created by economic and political forces—not by the use of revenue management software,” RealPage says. But renters can’t tell whether their rates are rising because of algorithms or not.

“It’s almost impossible to know if you are just a spectator or a victim,” says Shanti Singh, legislative and communications director with Tenants Together, a California-based coalition of tenants activists. If tenants call a hotline over raised rent or fees, “we’re not necessarily going to be able to see or connect that their landlord is using RealPage.”

The state of Arizona sued RealPage and nine landlords in February, claiming a conspiracy between the company and landlords led renters in Phoenix and Tucson to pay “millions of dollars” more in rent. That followed a similar lawsuit out of Washington, DC. In the capital’s greater metropolitan area, more than 90 percent of rental units in large apartment buildings were priced using RealPage software, according to DC’s attorney general.

The cases against RealPage put algorithmic pricing to the test; as the technology becomes more common, antitrust law has yet to keep pace. Officials have other concerns around algorithms used for alleged hotel price fixing, as well as e-commerce algorithms. “The concern of regulators that algorithms can be used in ways that harm competition—that idea is here to stay,” says Ed Rogers, a partner at law firm Ballard Spahr who focuses on antitrust cases. “RealPage could end up really being a test case, not just for the real estate rental industry but for this aspect of AI and software and its role in a competitive landscape.”

………

In June, The New York Times asked Assistant US Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s top antitrust official, if he would view an AI tool communicating pricing information as the same as humans colluding, with the question referencing the reported RealPage investigation. Kanter replied: “I often say that if your dog bites somebody, you’re responsible for your dog biting somebody. If your AI fixes prices, you’re just as responsible.”

The Justice Department also last year filed a statement of interest in the RealPage combined class action lawsuit, as the case could become a precedent setter in algorithmic pricing. The statement mirrored Kanter’s argument that the method of price setting doesn’t matter, and algorithms are just the latest evolution in information gathering and sharing.

“In-person handshakes gave way to phone and fax, and later to email. Algorithms are the new frontier,” the Justice Department argued in a statement of interest it filed in the class action lawsuit against RealPage and landlords. “And, given the amount of information an algorithm can access and digest, this new frontier poses an even greater anti-competitive threat than the last.”

Illegal collusion is not a minor side-effect, it is the core business plan for RealPage.

Note that this is a criminal offense.  In the old days, before the 1980s, executives were not infrequently thrown in jail for this behavior.

We need to go old school on RealPage's managers.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

It’s amazing how clearly he lays it out and how literally no one has picked it up.

pic.twitter.com/90QKgIwwX7

— Chłoddy (@OfSymbols) July 5, 2024

The late Dave Graeber nails it.

The, "radical centrists," are truly radicals, and they are radical and uncompromising because they have no ideas beyond pleasing their big campaign contributors, who want low taxes and a precarious and cooperative workforce.

It's all performative bullsh%$.

Support Your Local Police

It appears that the Chicago Police Department is just fine with hiring right-wing terrorists.

Perhaps the City of Chicago might want to consider replacing the CPD with something that is not terrorist friendly:

The city of Chicago’s Inspector General is back at it, pointing out things are very, very wrong with the Chicago Police Department. Not that anyone needed any reminders. A long history of disinterest in disciplining misbehaving officers has led to everything from an off-the-books black site operation to more than 100 misconduct charges being racked up by officers involved in a single wrong house raid.

Like lots of other law enforcement agencies, the Chicago PD has officers who are members of far right extremist groups. A lot of this came to light during the FBI’s investigation of the January 6 insurrection, where it was discovered that law enforcement officers from all over the nation traveled to Washington DC — not to help secure the Capitol building or protect those inside, but to engage in criminal activity of their own.

The Chicago PD is no exception. This latest report details how many officers are involved with far right groups like the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters. It also details how little the PD has done to root out the potential insurrectionists in its midst. (via Chicago Fox affiliate FOX 32) 

………

After detailing the history of and harmful acts committed by far right extremist groups (the three detailed are the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters), the OIG moves on to point out that the CPD has, in the past, rooted out cops with ties to bigoted extremist groups. You know, like the KKK, to name just one.

………

As the OIG notes, allowing officers to join extremist groups — especially ones that consider lawbreaking an essential part of their “resistance” and consider themselves to be, if not actual white nationalists, closely aligned with their philosophies — further damages already tenuous relationships with the communities these officers serve. Looking the other way only encourages more officers to associate with extremists, which is the sort of thing that leads directly to officers committing federal crimes while attempting to overturn a lawful national election.

………

There’s a good chance CPD brass considers membership in the Proud Boys, et al to be a feature, not a bug. After all, plenty of police officials have openly stated they won’t enforce laws they don’t like (mainly things like gun control efforts or sanctuary city statutes). And there’s no law enforcement agency in the land that doesn’t generously deploy double standards to protect the worst officers they employ. The fact that these extremist groups direct most of their animosity against liberals, minorities, and LGBTQ+ persons is just icing on the cake. It aligns with the implicit biases that have plagued law enforcement agencies since their inception.

(emphasis mine)

I think that it is completely reasonable to assume that the police leadership considers their officers' membership in right-wing terrorists to be a feature and not a bug.

This is why I think police forces need to be metaphorically demolished right down to their foundations.

It is impossible to build something good from the existing structure.

White Boys Failing Up

I missed one of the more significant bits of information about the CrowdStrike debacle, that its CEO, George Kurtz, was CTO at McAfee over a decade ago when they were responsible for a similar disaster.

The degree to which people like Kurtz continue to succeed at jobs for which they are patently ill suited just buggers the mind:

A good portion of the world stood still on Friday, resulting in one of the most widespread tech outages of all time.

The outage disrupted operations at major banks, airlines, retailers, and other industries after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant used by Microsoft and others, pushed a faulty update.

Many industries were still digging out of the debacle on Saturday. The fallout is expected to last weeks.

………

Naturally, blame has begun to target the man at the center of it all: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.

Tech industry analyst Anshel Sag pointed out that this isn't the first time Kurtz has played a major role in a historic IT blowout.

On April 21, 2010, the antivirus company McAfee released an update to its software used by its corporate customers. The update deleted a key Windows file, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and repeatedly reboot. Much like the CrowdStrike mistake, the McAfee problem required a manual fix.

Kurtz was McAfee's chief technology officer at the time. Months later, Intel acquired McAfee. And several months after that Kurtz left the company. He founded CrowdStrike in 2012 and has been its CEO ever since.

"For those who don't remember, in 2010, McAfee had a colossal glitch with Windows XP that took down a good part of the internet," Sag wrote on X. "The man who was McAfee's CTO at that time is now the CEO of CrowdStrike."

Seriously, how has this guy risen in the ranks of IT security after being at the helm of a huge f%$# up?

Oh, right, CrowdStrike.  The CIA's favorite security firm.

The CIA loves incompetence.

Headline of the Day

For the Rest of the World, the U.S. President Has Always Been Above the Law

—Foreign Affairs

This is a commentary on the disgraceful and corrupt Supreme Court ruling on Presidential immunity for Donald Trump.

It's true, as any wedding party droned by the United States can attest to.

Speaking of Computer F%$# Ups

12-hour timelapse of American Airlines, Delta, and United plane traffic after what was likely the biggest IT outage in history forced a nationwide ground stop of the three airlines. pic.twitter.com/wwcQeiEtVe

— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) July 19, 2024

This Time Lapse of Airline Flights is Nuts

It appears that the US State Security Apparatus' favorite cybersecurity operation, CrowdStrike, blue screen of deathed a significant proportion of the business machines running Windows 10 offline much of today, causing airlines, banks, hospitals, etc. to shut down worldwide. 

They appear top have found the problem, but I do not expect any meaningful consequences for this cluster-f%$#:

Airlines grounded flights. Operators of 911 lines could not respond to emergencies. Hospitals canceled surgeries. Retailers closed for the day. And the actions all traced back to a batch of bad computer code.

A flawed software update sent out by a little-known cybersecurity company caused chaos and disruption around the world on Friday. The company, CrowdStrike, based in Austin, Texas, makes software used by multinational corporations, government agencies and scores of other organizations to protect against hackers and online intruders.

But when CrowdStrike sent its update on Thursday to its customers that run Microsoft Windows software, computers began to crash.

………

A cyberattack did not cause the widespread outage, but the effects on Friday showed how devastating the damage can be when a main artery of the global technology system is disrupted. It raised broader questions about CrowdStrike’s testing processes and what repercussions such software firms should face when flaws in their code cause major disruptions.

No, this did NOT raise, "Broader questions about CrowdStrike's testing process," it answered questions.

The answer is that CrowdStrike does not care, and they do not have to, because f%$#ing sh%$ up like this never results in significant sanctions against incompetent software vendors.

………

But problems stemming from CrowdStrike’s products have surfaced before. In April, the company pushed a software update to customers running the Linux system that crashed computers, according to an internal CrowdStrike report sent to customers about the incident, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The bug, which did not appear to be related to Friday’s outage, took CrowdStrike nearly five days to fix, the report said. CrowdStrike promised to improve its testing process going forward, according to the report.

So, it's happened before, and there were no meaningful consequences.  

This ain't even a cost of doing business.  They save money by not doing proper quality control, and their customers pay for it. 

Cybersecurity and fault tolerance don't make them any money, so companies like CrowdStrike don't bother.

Today in Health Data Insecurity

General practitioners in the UK are miffed because two software systems have been updated to allow 3rd parties to update patient records without the knowledge or approval of the patients or their doctors.

My guess is that this change is yet another attempt to bring the private sector into the operations of the NHS, but in any case, this appears to be insecure and dangerous for patients:

The UK's doctors' union has advised members running GP surgeries to turn off certain functionality in their IT system to prevent outside organizations adding to their workloads.

The row has broken out between the prestigious British Medical Association (BMA) and NHS England over data sharing capabilities in two common systems, TPP and EMIS.

In a YouTube video, Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer, chair of the BMA's GP Committee, said GP Connect – a feature that allows data to be shared between general practices and other healthcare organizations – had introduced a new function called Update Record. At the moment, it is only being used to allow pharmacists to add data to GP records in a limited way.

However, concerns had been raised when the GP system providers had "tipped off" the BMA that doctors' ability to turn off the Update Record function was set to be removed.


"EMIS and TPP tipped us off that NHS England have asked for that 'off switch' to be removed," she said.

Because GPs are legally controllers of patient data under the UK's data protection law, they need to be able to prevent third parties updating records when necessary.

Even without the data protection law, it would seem to me that GPs would have a professional and moral obligation to prevent third parties from updating patient records without permission.

………

In a prepared statement, Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair and digital lead of BMA's England GP Committee, said: "We are recommending to GPs that they turn off the Update Record facility on GP Connect at the present time while we engage in discussions with NHS England to better understand the implications of this software.

"We are concerned about changes that allow others to add diagnoses, observations, and medications. These changes could have unintended consequences and add further pressure to the GP needing to ensure follow-up and ongoing care is provided to the patient due to other clinicians' decisions and actions. This will include more requests for follow-ups and support for patients for work initiated by others outside the practice team."

Given the predilection for the now former Tory government to ward privatizing NHS functions, and they tried to push while the elections were going on.

I cannot attribute this to anything but a desire for the Conservative appointed NHS executives to further put the privatization camel's nose further in the tent .

Go Long on Fig Newtons

In the 2018 farm bill, Congress legalized the growing of hemp, basically marijuana with a, "delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol [THC] concentration of not more than 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis."

However, it does not control the level of cannabidiol (CBD), which is non intoxicating, nor does it control the level of delta-8 tetrahydrocannabinol, which is intoxicating, though delta-8 is generally only present in small quantities.

However, it is relativelystraightforward to convert CBD to delta-8 THC.

So technically, you can grow hemp (legal) and extract delta-8, but you can also market supplements containing the delta-9 molecule at less than 0.3% in the formulation.

………

Hemp-based intoxicants aren’t limited to delta-8 THC. The Farm Bill also appears to authorize  the creation of hemp-based delta-9 THC products as long as the total delta-9 content is 0.3 percent or less of the product’s dry weight. This turns out to be easy to do. Carolindica, for instance, sells a 10-gram gummy that contains 30 milligrams of hemp-derived delta-9 THC, which is exactly 0.3 percent of the gummy’s total weight. The Florida-based company Crispy Blunts sells a cookie that weighs 22 grams and contains 50 milligrams of delta-9 THC. At 0.23 percent by weight, that’s well under the Farm Bill’s threshold, but the total THC content is five to 10 times as high as the legal per-serving limit in many of the states that have legalized recreational-marijuana edibles.

Oops.

It will be interesting to see what happens in court.

Headline of the Day

ChatGPT Isn’t ‘Hallucinating’—It’s Bullshitting!

—Scientific American

Yes, I know I did not Bowdlerize the swear word, even though it's not January, but it is too good not to quote completely, particularly as a headline for Scientific American.

It's also accurate.  The failures of the LLM artificial intelligence are not some sort of bizarre artifact, they are the result of a deliberate decision by ChatGPT and its competitors to bullsh%$ in the hope that they can create the illusion of actual useful intelligence:

Right now artificial intelligence is everywhere. When you write a document, you’ll probably be asked whether you need your “AI assistant.” Open a PDF and you might be asked whether you want an AI to provide you with a summary. But if you have used ChatGPT or similar programs, you’re probably familiar with a certain problem—it makes stuff up, causing people to view things it says with suspicion.

It has become common to describe these errors as “hallucinations.” But talking about ChatGPT this way is misleading and potentially damaging. Instead call it bullshit.

We don’t say this lightly. Among philosophers, “bullshit” has a specialist meaning, one popularized by the late American philosopher Harry Frankfurt. When someone bullshits, they’re not telling the truth, but they’re also not really lying. What characterizes the bullshitter, Frankfurt said, is that they just don’t care whether what they say is true. ChatGPT and its peers cannot care, and they are instead, in a technical sense, bullshit machines.

 Frankfurt's essay was On Bullsh%$, and Dave Graeber's Bullsh%$ Jobs, further explored the concept of bullsh%$.

………

This isn’t rare or anomalous. To understand why, it’s worth thinking a bit about how these programs work. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini chatbot and Meta’s Llama all work in structurally similar ways. At their core is an LLM—a large language model. These models all make predictions about language. Given some input, ChatGPT will make some prediction about what should come next or what is an appropriate response. It does so through an analysis of enormous amounts of text (its “training data”). In ChatGPT’s case, the initial training data included billions of pages of text from the Internet.

From those training data, the LLM predicts, from some text fragment or prompt, what should come next. It will arrive at a list of the most likely words (technically, linguistic tokens) to come next, then select one of the leading candidates. Allowing for it not to choose the most likely word each time allows for more creative (and more human-sounding) language. The parameter that sets how much deviation is permitted is known as the “temperature.” Later in the process, human trainers refine predictions by judging whether the outputs constitute sensible speech. Extra restrictions may also be placed on the program to avoid problems (such as ChatGPT saying racist things), but this token-by-token prediction is the idea that underlies all of this technology.

Now, we can see from this description that nothing about the modeling ensures that the outputs accurately depict anything in the world. There is not much reason to think that the outputs are connected to any sort of internal representation at all. A well-trained chatbot will produce humanlike text, but nothing about the process checks that the text is true, which is why we strongly doubt an LLM really understands what it says.

It's bullsh%$, they know that it's bullsh%$, but these snollygosters know that they can exploit the AI mania before it all collapses like a bunch of broccoli.

If the US government were to actually prosecute tech bro fraud, we'd see 80% of the giants of Silly-Con valley in the dock.

Gee, Here's a Surprise

Supporters of private school vouchers in Arizona claimed that they would save the state money.

They haven't.  They never were going to save the state money.

While giving a (for example) $10,000/student voucher seems a money saver compared to the $15,000/student cost of a public education, what has happened, as it was foretold, is that most of the money is going to people who are already putting their kids in private schools or home schooling their kids.

That does not matter to voucher supporters, because their real goal is to defund public schools so that they can create their own segregation academies:

In 2022, Arizona pioneered the largest school voucher program in the history of education. Under a new law, any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year.

………

Advocates for Arizona’s universal voucher initiative had originally said that it wouldn’t cost the public — and might even save taxpayers money. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank that helped craft the state’s 2022 voucher bill, claimed in its promotional materials at the time that the vouchers would “save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide.” Families that received the new cash, the institute said, would be educating their kids “for less than it would cost taxpayers if they were in the public school system.”

But as it turns out, the parents most likely to apply for these vouchers are the ones who were already sending their kids to private school or homeschooling. They use the dollars to subsidize what they were already paying for.

The result is new money coming out of the state budget. After all, the public wasn’t paying for private school kids’ tuition before.

(Emphasis mine) 

I pretty much guarantee you that the private schools and home schooling collectives started holding classes on how to apply for the vouchers as soon as this was passed.

The people lobbying for this and the legislators voting for this knew that this would happen, and they did not care.

Yes

Has Private Equity Become a Ponzi Scheme?

—UnHerd

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

More seriously, the way that private equity conducts business is indistinguishable from fraud:

The economist Hyman Minsky’s name can once more be heard in ominous whispers around Wall Street. Private equity firms have recently been undertaking such funny financial manoeuvres that those who invest in the funds have had to put a stop to it. With private equity markets depressed, fund managers have been taking on so-called net asset value (NAV) loans to pay their investors’ dividends. Far from being happy to get their money, investors realised that the funds they had invested in were borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and told them to cut it out.

In his stellar 1992 paper “The Financial Instability Hypothesis”, Minsky argued that there were three types of borrowing which corporate entities engaged in. He called these: hedge, speculative, and Ponzi. Hedge financing involves loans which are taken on, typically for business operations, and can then be paid back using a company’s cash flows. Speculative financing describes loans usually taken on to invest in the company, which can then ideally be paid off by the future cash flows generated by the new investment. Meanwhile, Ponzi financing refers to loans taken out by desperate companies which use them to simply pay interest on previous loans.

Minsky argued that when Ponzi financing units became predominant in an economy — or in part of the economy — this indicated that a financial crisis was brewing. The clue is in the name: a Ponzi scheme is upheld only through finding more and more people to pay up in the promise of money that is itself a result of convincing more and more people to pay up. It is hard not to see in private equity’s use of NAV loans to pay off dividends a classic Ponzi-financing regime.

Private equity’s entire model is based on Minsky’s concept of speculative financing. Fund managers buy up companies and then load them up with debt. This debt is typically used to drastically increase investment in the companies — and in doing so grow them and produce returns for investors. This carries risks. If too many of the investments go bad, the fund might go bankrupt and investors might pull out. There is more than a little speculation that the NAV loans signal that much of the sector has already gone bad and is engaged in increasingly funny tricks to try to cover it up.

………

There are also questions surrounding the links between private equity investing and the property markets. After the 2008 crisis, the central banks and regulators said: “Never again”, and imposed strict regulations on bank lending. When we look at mortgage-lending data, we see that banks are not providing the credit for the current rise in house prices — leading to suggestions that it might be the so-called “shadow-banking” sector of private equity and hedge funds which is driving the market.

If the current murmurs proves correct, this could all collapse in a Minsky moment reminiscent of 2008, but with private equity and hedge funds responsible rather than the banks. Pension funds would be affected, but so would banks allocating capital to the private equity sector. If this scenario were to play out, expect there to be bailouts just as there were in 2008. The central banks and the regulators may have said “Never again”, but speculative credit, like life, tends to find a way.

The regulators never said, "Never again," they, specifically timothy "Eddit Haskell" Geithner said, "Foam the runway," and Barack Obama, said, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

The regulators said, "Don't worry, no matter how badly you broke the law, no one is going to jail, and no matter how incompetent you are, you will still have a job, except, of course for the scapegoats at Lehman."

Less than 2 decades later, we are on a path to repeat the mistakes that Obama made.

And they wonder why people are drawn to an spray tanned fraud who promises to burn it all down.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, not a great week according to the unemployment stats.

Initial claims rose by 20,000, about double forecasts, to 243,000, while continuing claims rose by 20K to 1.867 million.

Now, part of this is the impact of Hurricane Beryl, and part of this is due to automobile plant shut-downs for the new model year, but those are accounted for in the forecasts that were blown past.

The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits increased more than expected last week, but that did not signal a material shift in the labor market amid temporary automobile plant closures and disruptions from Hurricane Beryl.

The weekly jobless claims report from the Labor Department on Thursday, however, suggested that it was getting harder for the unemployed to land new jobs relative to last year. Unemployment rolls swelled to the highest level in more than 2-1/2 years in the first week of July, in line with a recent increase in the jobless rate.

A loosening labor market and ebbing inflation position the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in September, with financial markets anticipating additional cuts in November and December.
"Taking a step back from the noise in the data, jobless claims have drifted higher since the start of the year," said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. "We think the rise so far is consistent with a cooling labor market that is characterized more by a slower pace of hiring rather than by higher layoffs."

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 20,000 to a seasonally adjusted 243,000 for the week ended July 13, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 230,000 claims for the latest week.

The rise pushed claims back to a 10-month high touched in early June and right to the upper end of their 194,000-243,000 range for the year. It wiped out the drop in the prior week, which was attributed to difficulties adjusting the data around holidays, like the U.S. Independence Day.

In addition, auto makers typically shut down assembly plants starting the July 4 week to retool for new models. But the shutdown schedules are different for every manufacturer, which can throw off the model that the government uses to smooth out the data for seasonal fluctuations. Plant shutdowns were also more concentrated this year relative to prior years.

……….

Unadjusted claims jumped 36,824 to 279,032 last week. Filings surged 11,537 in Texas, likely boosted by Hurricane Beryl. They advanced 6,917 in California.

There were sizeable increases in Georgia, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Applications also rose in Kentucky, Kansas, Alabama and Ohio. Most of these states have motor vehicle assembly plants. The increases more than offset declines New Jersey, Indiana and Massachusetts.

The Fed looks to be getting the recession that they want.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

NEW — Patrick Orlando, the former chief executive of the SPAC that took Trump Media public, has been charged with securities fraud over the deal pic.twitter.com/BLkfR3ugva

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) July 18, 2024

What a surprise. Donald Trump's Trump media is already swamped in criminality.

As Mehdi Hasan observes, if we had a functioning press, this would be front page news, but we're just getting crickets.

Trump being corrupt is not news, I guess.

Only 6.8%

Cloudflare, the content delivery and cyber security company, has done a study and determined that 7% of internet traffic is, "Malicious."

I'm surprised that it is that low. 

My guess is that this number does not involve scams like cryptocurrency.

In its latest State of Application Security Report, Cloudflare paints a sobering picture of the internet's threat landscape in 2024. How sobering? Try 6.8% of internet traffic is malicious, up a percentage point from last year's study.

What's driving this increase in threats? Cloudflare, the content delivery network and security services company, thinks the rise is due to wars and elections. For example, many attacks against Western-interest websites are coming from pro-Russian hacktivist groups such as REvil, KillNet, and Anonymous Sudan.

What's particularly alarming is the speed at which new vulnerabilities are exploited. In one case, attackers attempted to exploit a JetBrains TeamCity DevOps authentication bypass a mere 22 minutes after the proof-of-concept code was published. That speed is faster than most organizations can read the security advisory, let alone patch their systems. 

Here's an idea.  Hold software vendors liable for selling us insecure pieces of sh%$.

Security is not a priority because there is no money in that.

It's Called a Shot Across the Bow

Joe Biden is preparing to propose major changes to how the Supreme Court operates.

Among other things, he will be proposing a legally binding ethics code and term limits as well as possibly proposing a constitutional amendment to overturn the Trump immunity decision.

Your mouth to God's ear:

President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.

He is also weighing whether to call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad immunity for presidents and other constitutional officeholders, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The announcement would mark a major shift for Biden, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has long resisted calls to make substantive changes to the high court. The potential changes come in response to growing outrage among his supporters about recent ethics scandals surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas and decisions by the new court majority that have changed legal precedent on issues including abortion and federal regulatory powers.

Biden previewed the shift in a Zoom call Saturday with the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The start of such an effort needs to begin with a statement that the current justices are partisan and corrupt.

The current court deserves no deference, nor any respect.

It's in Mélenchon's Court Now

French President Emanuel Macron has finally accepted Prime Minster Gabriel Attal's resignation.

So, it's up to the left wing coalition, which has the most seats in parliament to form a government.

All they have to do is get their sh%$ together, which for any left-wing party is no small feat.

In addition to that, they need votes either from Macron's party or the right wing to get the majority necessary to appoint a prime minister:

President Emmanuel Macron accepted the resignation of the French government on Tuesday, July 16, and asked Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to head up a caretaker government for now. It will "handle day-to-day business until a new government is named", the Elysée Palace said, after Macron's centrist alliance was beaten in snap parliamentary polls earlier this month. It will stay in place for a number of weeks, until at least the Olympic Games are over.

Following their resignation, Attal and other cabinet members will be able to take their seats in Parliament and participate in any coalition building. The Assemblée Nationale reconvenes on Thursday and will start by filling the chamber's presidency and other key positions.

French politics have been in gridlock since this month's inconclusive snap election with parties in the Assemblée Nationale scrambling to put together a governing coalition, and no successor to Attal in sight.

A broad alliance called the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) which includes Socialists, Communists, Greens and the hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI) won the most seats, with 193 in the 577-strong lower chamber. Macron's allies came second with 164 seats and the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) third with 143.

Macron told Tuesday's cabinet meeting that it was the "responsibility" of his allies to come up with a proposal "for a majority coalition or a wide-ranging legislative pact." This, he said, would help preserve his government's "economic achievements" and favor "social justice."

………

The divided NFP alliance has been scrambling to come up with a consensus candidate for prime minister. But internal conflicts – notably between LFI and the more moderate Socialists – have thwarted all efforts to find a personality able to survive a confidence vote in parliament.

The Socialists are basically the equivalent of the Social Democrats in Europe, and I'm pretty sure that they are not interested in negotiating in good faith.

If the NFP gets much of what it promised, the phony left like the Socialists relegated to the dust bin of history, so they do not have a much an incentive to play nice.

I am not optimistic about the NFP's prospects, which would advantage to Marine Le Pen and her merry band of Fascists in the long run.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

Bernie Sanders reminding everyone that he’s Jewish. pic.twitter.com/ngo0FxcwYQ

— Yonah Lieberman 🔥 (@YonahLieberman) July 17, 2024

This is truer than taxes. 

To be a Jew is to worry.

I am not sure why this is so, but it is, as Mt. Everest is, and Alma Cogan isn't.

Good Point

Carl Beijer makes the obvious observation that, not withstanding all of the pious assertions that violence has no place in American politics following the Trump assassination attempt, the right-wing has enthusiastically endorsed political violence in America.

How many times have various reactionaries talked about, "2nd Amendment solutions?"

They actively support political violence and the threat of political violence:

“There’s no place for this kind of violence in America.” - President Joe Biden

“Violence such as this has no place in our nation.” - Vice President Kamala Harris

“There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy.” - President Barack Obama

“Violence has no place in America, especially in our political process.” - President Bill Clinton

“This horrific act of violence at a peaceful campaign rally has no place in this country and should be unanimously and forcefully condemned.” - Speaker Mike Johnson

Yesterday an American citizen took up arms against the former and potential next president, Donald Trump. And in response, politician after politician has given us some variation on the same statement: political violence is absolutely unacceptable in the United States.

But if this is true, can someone please explain to me why we still have the Second Amendment? Because one of its most common justifications today goes something like this:

“If [Clinton] gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks…Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” — President Donald Trump

“A well-armed citizenry acts as a major check on the ability of would-be tyrants, enabling the people to forcibly resist oppression.” — The Heritage Foundation

“The 2nd Amendment’s purpose is to guard against tyranny…” — Cornel West

“The Constitution’s Framers knew that a free society could exist only if the people were truly sovereign and able to act as a check against tyrannical government.” — Rep. Bob Good

“…the Second Amendment…serves as a fundamental check on government tyranny.” — Sen. Ted Cruz

I have to admit, I cannot understand how one can say that political violence has no place in America and also believe that we have a sacred right to political violence that is supposedly enshrined in our Constitution. If you believe that then you can argue, perhaps, that Trump is not a tyrant — but that is a very different thing from taking the stance a lot of conservatives are taking right now, one which pleads that political violence is inherently illegitimate.

(emphasis original)

When Republicans object to political violence, they only object to political violence directed toward them.

Wear Your F%$#ing Mask

First, we have a couple of studies showing that COVID-19 causes long term impairment of its victims' immune system, in particular serum cytokine levels.

Conclusion from the first link:

………

According to the researchers, the long-term consequences of COVID-19 are presumably caused by an infection and the resulting long-term impairment of the function of the bone marrow, the central production site of immune cells. "Our results provide a possible explanation that certain long-term consequences of COVID-19 could be related to the damage to the cellular immune system caused by SARS-CoV-2 and the apparently reduced maturation and/or emigration of immune cells from the bone marrow," Winfried Pickl and Rudolf Valenta summarize the study results. This hypothesis forms the basis for further research in order to achieve a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying Long-COVID.

And the second link: 

………

Whole blood flow cytometric analyses revealed that 10 m after COVID-19, convalescent patients compared to controls had reduced absolute granulocyte, monocyte, and lymphocyte counts, involving T, B, and NK cells, in particular CD3⁺CD45RA⁺CD62L⁺CD31⁺ recent thymic emigrant T cells and non-class-switched CD19⁺IgD⁺CD27⁺ memory B cells. Cellular changes were associated with a reversal from Th1- to Th2-dominated serum cytokine patterns. Strong declines of NC- and S-specific antibody levels were associated with younger age (by 10.3 years, p < .01) and fewer CD3⁻CD56⁺ NK and CD19⁺CD27⁺ B memory cells. Changes of T-cell subsets at 10 m such as normalization of effector and Treg numbers, decline of RTE, and increase of central memory T cell numbers were independent of antibody decline pattern.

And if that ain't enough, it looks like Covid is associated with a massive increase in type-1 diabetes among children, which is rather unsurprising, since juvenile diabetes is associated with immune dysfunction:

COVID-19 may accelerate progression of presymptomatic type 1 diabetes in youth, a German study suggested.

Incidence of clinical type 1 diabetes nearly doubled after the pandemic started among 591 youth ages 1 to 16 known to have presymptomatic type 1 diabetes, Anette-Gabriele Ziegler, MD, of the Institute of Diabetes Research at Helmholtz Munich in Neuherberg, Germany, and colleagues wrote in a JAMA research letter.

During the prepandemic period, the incidence rate for clinical type 1 diabetes development was 6.4 (95% CI 4.9-8.2) per 100 person-years, compared with 12.1 (95% CI 10.1-14.4) in the pandemic period (P<0.001).

"A key question was whether this increase was predominantly in those children who had been infected," Ziegler told MedPage Today. "The answer was yes."

Of the 353 kids that had COVID infection information, the incidence rate was 8.6 per 100 person-years (95% CI 6.2-11.7) for participants testing negative for COVID-19. This wasn't significantly different compared with the prepandemic period (P=0.16).

When people say that Covid doesn't effect children, they are either stupid, or lying, or both.

H/t E-Cop at the Stellar Parthenon BBS. 

Yeah, Not a Surprise

It appears that the New York State Education Department has finally taking action against special education fraud, and Orthodox yeshivas' strong opposition to reform.

Call me a cynic, but my guess is that said yeshivas were gaming the system to get undeserved state support:

In an effort to combat fraud, the New York State Education Department yesterday adopted a new rule that will change how special education funding is distributed for services to students who attend New York City’s non-public schools, including yeshivas.

The change comes after a 2022 New York Times report that found New York City was paying over $350 million a year “to private companies that provide services in Hasidic and Orthodox schools.” Since proposing the change in May, NYSED officials have worked to allay fears that the rule would not just punish fraudsters, but also make it harder for people who genuinely need special services to access them.

At their meeting on Monday, NYSED’s governing body, the Board of Regents, adopted the change as an emergency rule which will go into immediate effect before the start of the school year.

The subhead of the Times story pretty much says it all, "New York has paid companies millions of dollars to help children with disabilities in religious schools. But the services are not always needed or even provided."

That's a nice way of saying, "Fraud."

………

The rule targets a special education service called “special education teacher support services,” known as SETSS, which is similar to tutoring and only offered in New York City. According to the 2022 Times report, about 80% of requests for such services came from Orthodox districts in the prior year. The service, which is often one-to-one and takes place outside the classroom, is ill-defined and thus vulnerable to fraud, according to the Times.

The city is willing to pay up to $125 per hour for this service, but many tutors charge more than that, forcing parents who want to hire them to go through the complaint process that NYSED now seeks to limit.

According to Lloyd Donders, a lawyer who represents parents in such cases, the standard rate for the service is $42, but since “you can’t actually get someone at that rate,” the city has an “enhanced” rate of $125. “I don’t think the DOE puts up a fight unless you ask them for more than $125,” Donders told Shtetl.

At a public meeting on Monday, NYSED Commissioner Betty Rosa said too many people are profiting from rates that go far beyond $125 an hour.

I'm thinking that some private schools might have arrangements with the tutors.

It may not be something as blatant as kickbacks, it might be a way for schools to supplement salaries of their employees for state money, but I would not rule out the former.

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

The most incredibly guilty politician in the United States, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, has been convicted on all 16 corruption counts.

They caught him with a sh%$ load of gold bars in his house, so the conviction is not a surprise.

Good riddance:

Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted Tuesday of taking bribes from three businessmen who showered him and his wife with cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz, an extravagant bounty for his help securing deals with foreign officials and trying to derail several criminal investigations in New Jersey.

The jury in Manhattan federal court found the once powerful New Jersey lawmaker guilty on all 16 felony counts. They include bribery, extortion, wire fraud, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt from 2018 to 2022, when Menendez was at the height of his influence in Washington, serving as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or as the panel’s top Democrat while his party was in the minority.

………

Menendez did not testify in his own defense. He vowed to appeal, and legal experts say he could be helped by the Supreme Court’s rulings in recent years narrowing the scope of federal bribery laws. 

Anyone want take bets on whether or not Clarence Thomas has gold bars in his house?

It does appear that conservatives on the court have been determined to narrow the scope of corruption with a zeal that implies some degree of self interest.

Vance, Huh?

Why on earth would Donald Trump choose someone like JD Vance as his running mate?

Vance is a serial exaggerator, a hypocrite, a narcissistic manipulator, and corrupt, so why would Trump  ……… Oh, now I get it.

It's like he is running with the son he never had, because no one in their right mind would run with the sons that he DOES have:

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Donald J. Trump’s newly chosen running mate, has made a shift from the Trump critic he was when he first entered politics to the loyalist he is today. It was a shift both in style and substance: Now, on topics as disparate as trade and Ukraine, Mr. Vance is closely aligned with Mr. Trump.

In some ways, Vance may be worse than Trump, because he is in the pocket of literal vampire Peter Thiel.

Amazon Lying? Pshaw!!!!!

In the latest news about the bunch of contemptible rat bastard monopolists headquartered in Seattle  ……… No, not that one ………No, not that one EITHER ……… OK, it's Amazon, and they are lying through their teeth about their carbon footprint.

Of course they are lying.  It's kind of their thing:

Today, Amazon announced that it hit its 100% renewable electricity goal seven years early. But a group of Amazon employees argues that the company’s math is misleading.

A report from the group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, argues that only 22% of the company’s data centers in the U.S. actually run on clean power. The employees looked at where each data center was located and the mix of power on the regional grids—how much was coming from coal, gas, or oil versus solar or wind.

Amazon, like many other companies, buys renewable energy credits (RECs) for a certain amount of clean power that’s produced by a solar plant or wind farm. In theory, RECs are supposed to push new renewable energy to get built. In reality, that doesn’t always happen. The employee research found that 68% of Amazon’s RECs are unbundled, meaning that they didn’t fund new renewable infrastructure, but gave credit for renewables that already existed or were already going to be built.

Carbon credits are a scam, as I have noted many times.

Amazon is aware of this, and they don't care.  They just want some public relations mojo.

If federal or state regulators want to make the world a better place, antitrust lawsuits, and the rollback of direct and indirect subsidies provided by governments to Amazon would go a long way to doing just that.

Finally

I do not expect it to pass this Congress, but someone has finally introduced a bill cracking down on looting in the charter school system.

Basically, for profit entities will find or create a non-profit entity which will receive funding to operate a charter, and then the for-profit entity will own the building and collect rent, or license the curriculum, or be the employer of record for the teachers, or "manage" the school, and skim their vigorish off the top.

It needs to be ended:

In almost every corner of the U.S., charter schools are non-profit. And yet, there are numerous ways to run a non-profit for profit.

In two reports (Chartered for Profit and Chartered for Profit II), the Network for Public Education showed numerous examples of the most common techniques. Some charters lease their buildings back from related businesses. In one New York case, a chartering organization leased a space from the diocese, then leased that space to its own charter school for over ten times the amount it was paying.

………

To address the issue of charter schools operated for a profit, United States Representative Rosa DeLauro (CT-03) and Representative Suzanne Bonamici (OR-01) this month introduced the Championing Honest and Responsible Transparency in Education Reform (CHARTER) Act. Said DeLauro,

………

The CHARTER Act would ensure that for-profit education management organizations can no longer jump through loopholes that have given them access to funding that has always been intended for nonprofit entities. Educating our children should be for their enrichment and future prosperity – not to maximize the profits of their owners and investors.

The bill adds to the definition of a charter school given in Section 4310 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In addition to the other qualifiers already in the federal definition of a charter school, the bill would add that a charter school:

does not enter into a contract with a for-profit entity, or have a charter management organization or other nonprofit entity enter into such a contract on behalf of such school, under which the for-profit entity operates, oversees, manages, or otherwise carries out the administration of such school, which may include curriculum development, budget management, and faculty management (such as hiring, terminating, or supervising school-level staff);

 The bill also specifies that a charter school may contract for food, payroll, facilities maintenance, transportation services, classroom supplies or other ancillary services.

The bill then goes on to require the amended definition be used for ESEA and IDEA, thereby blocking charters that don’t meet the amended definition from receiving any federal funds.

Even if charter schools did a better job of educating our children, and the evidence indicates that they do not, allow for profit entities to skim the money with a complete absence of public oversight is an abomination.

Good on DeLauro and Bonamici for trying to shut the door on corrupt charter operators.

Even if one supports charter schools, it should be a no brainer not to support charter school corruption.

Nakedly Corrupt

Judge Eileen Cannon took the clue supplied by Clarence Thomas in the Trump immunity case, and has used Thomas' nonsensical and self-serving assertion that a special prosecutor needs Senate approval and used it as an excuse to dismiss the document handling case against Donald Trump.

One hopes that Jack Smith appeals, and gets her thrown off the case.

In a just world, she would be thrown off the court:

A judge on Monday dismissed the federal indictment against former president Donald Trump on charges of mishandling classified documents — his second seismic legal victory in less than a month, after a historic Supreme Court decision on immunity.

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s 93-page ruling that special counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed is a triumph for Trump, even if it is eventually reversed. Smith’s office vowed to appeal the ruling, saying the judge’s legal reasoning was at odds with past decisions on the issue.

………

By dismissing the entire indictment, Cannon’s decision also means that the charges are dropped for Trump’s two co-defendants, Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. The Justice Department’s appeal of the issue might eventually reach the Supreme Court.

“The dismissal of the case deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a Special Counsel,” said Peter Carr, a spokesman for Smith. “The Justice Department has authorized the Special Counsel to appeal the court’s order.”

………

Trump advisers have long considered the classified documents case to be the strongest of the four criminal cases against him — in part because the acts in question occurred mostly after he left the White House — and it was the case that most worried them. The case has been particularly concerning to those advisers because if it went to trial, it would feature first-person accounts from people in Trump’s inner orbit describing conversations with him.

The former president was charged with 40 counts of illegally retaining classified defense information and obstructing government efforts to retrieve the material. Some of the documents found in an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, contained information about top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them, The Washington Post reported last year.

Cannon’s opinion delves into the legal minutiae of special counsel regulations and does not address the crimes Trump and his co-defendants are accused of committing, or the merits of the evidence that prosecutors have collected. 

No, it doesn't.  It overturns over a hundred years of precedent and a number of laws passed because Clarence Thomas issued a concurrence, one that has no legal force, explicitly giving her a detailed set of instructions on how to throw a spanner into the works.

………

But the legal argument gained momentum this month, after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the presidential immunity case that the special counsel’s office needs to be established by Congress and that Smith needed to be confirmed by the Senate. Thomas urged lower courts to explore the issue. The justice wrote that he tacked on his concurring opinion to the immunity ruling to “highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure.”

In Monday’s ruling, Cannon cited Thomas’s opinion — which none of the other justices signed on to — multiple times.

This is how you engage in a conspiracy to obstruct justice without the conspirators saying a word to each other.

Jack Smith should have been trying to get her removed from the case since day 1.  That's on him.

Thomas and Clarence though?  They should be investigated for obstruction of justice.

The complete lack of shame and blatant corruption exhibited by these two judges is more appalling and a disgrace.

Of Course He Did

Everyone's 2nd favorite narcissistic psychopath, Elon Musk has endorsed Donald Trump, everyone's favorite narcissistic psychopath.

More accurately, since he has already been donating to pro-Trump PACs, he has made it official. 

Elon Musk endorsed former President Trump minutes after Trump was ushered off stage by Secret Service agents at a rally in Pennsylvania following apparent gunshots.

Why it matters: Musk is one of the richest men on the planet and controls of one of the world's biggest social media platforms. Trump has reportedly considered offering an advisory role to Musk, who has moved sharply to the right of the political spectrum in recent years.

• Musk's tweet endorsing Trump came a day after Bloomberg reported that he had donated to a pro-Trump PAC.
• "I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery," Musk wrote on X, sharing a video of Trump getting to his feet after the incident with a bloodied ear and pumping his fist to the crowd.

I guess, unlike much of the rest of the world, Donald Trump is still willing to blow smoke up Elon's ass.

Elon is such a delicate snowflake.