I Just Got F%$#ing Pwned (Owned) by a Man Who Has Been Dead for 224 Years

I am referring, of course to Ben Franklin.

Andy Kaufman has nothing on post-death humor.

Specifically, when I blamed Ben Franklin for creating Daylight Saving Time, I neglected to do my research.

It turns out that Ben Franklin's suggestion was satire:

During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, publisher of the old English proverb, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise", anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.

I must remember: Google before shooting off my mouth.

It appears that I am not a hoopy frood who knows where my towel is.

The Intercept, Pierre Omidyar, and His Connections to CIA Operations in the Ukraine

There has a bit of a pissing contest between Mark Ames and Glenn Greenwald over the connections between the First Media news organization, and its subsidiary The Intercept magazine which employs Greenwald.

Part of this is that Greenwald and Ames have been involved in a long running pissing contest, which explains why Ames original article mentioned Greenwald prominently, even though his remit is surveillance, and not covert organic operations or the destabilization of disfavored governments by our state security apparatus.

Still, it raises some very valid points, and Greenwald's response addressed none of the underlying facts.

It's basically, Greenwald telling Ames that he's ugly and that his mom dresses him funny, and that the publisher doesn't matter.

This is not true generally, nor which is not true in this case, as Omidyar has a long history of intimate involvement with his media ventures, with The Intercept writer Jeremy Scahill saying that he is intimately involved with their messaging:

Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else. This guy has a vision.

With those two remarks, Scahill obliterates Greenwald’s claims of independence from his boss, publisher and sole quarter-of-a-billion-dollar backer.

There is no universe, current or imagined, in which Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen or any other venture capitalist would be allowed within a billion miles of Pando’s internal messaging system. And there is no planet within that universe on which Thiel, Andreessen or any of our dozen or so venture backers would be given any privileged line to our reporters (if they have something to say they can send us a letter to the editor, like everyone else). I would hope all of the other “billionaire-backed” media organizations Greenwald cites in his post would say the same.

(emphasis original)

So this is not one of the Glennster's greatest moments.

Of more significance is the fact that Marcy Wheeler (aka Emptywheel) who is covering the developments in the Ukraine for The Intercept, asked sometime before this article came out about information on intelligence ops masquerading as "civil society.  Quoting from Ames' article:

Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s “senior policy analyst,” speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep” forces on behalf of “Pax Americana”:

“There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.”

These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.

And now Wheeler is saying that there is no "there" there. This is the bit I find most interesting:

B) The Kyiv Post reported that in 2012 (the year after New Citizen received this grant, and therefore presumably the year it got spent), Omidyar Network funded 36% of New Citizen’s budget, Pact, a non-profit funded in part by USAID funded 54% of it, and other funding came from the National Endowment for Democracy.

USAID is, of course, a US Government agency, and while it is nominally independent, it is largely directed by the State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy, thought technically a non governmental not-for-profit is funded entirely by a line item in the budget of ……… wait for it ……… USAID.

Or as the best-named-blog ever, Cats not War, observes:

Now, I say Wheeler knows more than she lets on because she apparently understands enough to link to the excellent Moon of Alabama blog, dedicated to chronicling the less visible manifestations of imperial power, when comparing the Ukrainian and Syrian cases. And be reminded that Ames dug this information up about Omidyar at Wheeler's curiosity--viewing the Ukrainian fray, she clearly knew dirty tricks by their effects and felt compelled to ask about them in public. When Ames revealed that one such meddler was her boss, she employed a new skepticism about the existence of imperial meddling in Ukraine, writing, 'I don't see any evidence that [Omidyar's] donations were explicitly intended to pay for regime change... unless you presume transparency and better governance equates to regime change.' Soon down the text, Wheeler belittles Ames' suggestions about Omidyar's business operations by cueing 'Hollywood villain music' and asking what is wrong about Pact, Omidyar-funded NGO, promoting 'women in leadership,' a goal Pact offers up on its about page (clearly the only place to go when seeking to understand an institution's true workings). The insinuation of conspiracism mimics Greenwald's own, when he reduces Ames charges to the 'laughable hyperbole that Omidyar is now the mastermind who has secretly engineered the Ukrainian uprising.' To Greenwald I'd like to ask, But what if, like, the suggestion is not that Omidyar did anything alone, but that he belongs to a larger oligarchical-state network whose global investments make up that thing called imperialism? And to Wheeler I'd like to ask, But what if, like, an NGO doesn't outright come out with goals of regime change because they are manifestations of soft imperialism, crucial supplements to the harder stuff that use a language of liberal abstractions to work towards goals more nefarious?

Which brings us to my explanation of imperialism. There are two primary parts of which to keep track. The first is its role in capitalism--an odd concept to propose because imperialism is capitalism insofar as capitalism could not persist without it. Here, we are talking about capital and, more specifically, finance. The second is its expansion, which happens through hard imperialism (military operations of varying types--bombings, drones, invasions, covert ops, and so on) and soft imperialism (NGOs and PsyOps), because sometimes the mid-sized and small states fail to cooperate. When describing these activities, I will move from country to country with examples, fully aware that imperial tactics are employed differently in accordance with the needs of given contexts, but hoping still to establish that imperialism has a reliable repertoire, that it is global in scale, and that there can be no doubt about its purpose where it is to be found.

Read the entire Cats, Not War post.  I cannot do if full justice.

Run, Bernie, Run!!!!!!!

If Bernie Sanders runs for President, he has my vote:

Bernie Sanders says he is “prepared to run for president of the United States.” That’s not a formal announcement. A lot can change between now and 2016, and the populist senator from Vermont bristles at the whole notion of a permanent campaign. But Sanders has begun talking with savvy progressive political strategists, traveling to unexpected locations such as Alabama and entertaining the process questions that this most issue-focused member of the Senate has traditionally avoided.

In some senses, Sanders is the unlikeliest of prospects: an independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate but has never joined the party, a democratic socialist in a country where many politicians fear the label “liberal,” an outspoken critic of the economic, environmental and social status quo who rips “the ruling class” and calls out the Koch brothers by name. Yet, he has served as the mayor of his state’s largest city, beaten a Republican incumbent for the US House, won and held a historically Republican Senate seat and served longer as an independent member of Congress than anyone else. And he says his political instincts tell him America is ready for a “political revolution.”

I want to see someone who does more than pay lip service to liberal policies, and Bernie would do that.

I'm not sure how serious he is.

At this point, he does not even have an Act Blue page set up for the 2016 Presidential campaign.

Ben Franklin was a Very Evil Dude

He invented Daylight Savings Time, so he is evil, QED.

While I do not dispute his contributions to science and governance in the US, he had to be evil to devise Daylight Savings Time.

Aviation Week Comes to the Right Decision While Ignoring the Obvious

They have an editorial where they argue (Correctly IMNSHO) that the 50 year old U-2 is a superior reconnaissance platform to the Block 3 Global Hawk UAV:

With the presentation of the Obama administration's fiscal 2015 budget request last week, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced his decision in a battle that had been brewing for some time: U-2 (below) versus Global Hawk. With money as tight as it is, everyone knew it was becoming too expensive to have both options for high-altitude intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (ISR) missions.

It would be easy to portray this as a contest between modernity and nostalgia, pitting a cutting-edge unmanned system against a piloted Cold War relic—Hal the computer versus an aging jet jockey with a silk scarf. Indeed, when Hagel announced his decision, he said he is opting to phase out the “50-year-old U-2 in favor of the unmanned Global Hawk” beginning in 2016 (see page 30). But that comparison is not just an oversimplification, it is the wrong way to approach the question.

Hagel was more forthright when he acknowledged this was “a close call.” It surely is. The operating costs of the two fleets, for example, have been about the same.

They note that the U-2 is cheaper to buy, more flexible in its operations, flies higher, and has a sophisticated ECM suite.

But their editorial ignores the elephant in the room.

The reason that the Air Force, and the Congress, are supporting the very expensive ($200 million a copy) and inferior solution is because of pork and post-retirement employment opportunities for retired officers at defense contractors.

We really need to move to something like the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), to take the uniformed military out of the procurement equation.

Additionally, such an agency should have as its remit the analysis of subcontracting, to ensure that work is allocated on the basis of efficiency, and not in an attempt to spread work to politically significant Congressional districts.

Gee, You Think?

In the Armed Forced Journal, Army lieutenant colonel Daniel L. Davis calls for the forced retirement of most of the US general officer corps:

The U.S. Army’s generals, as a group, have lost the ability to effectively function at the high level required of those upon whom we place the responsibility for safeguarding our nation. Over the past 20 years, our senior leaders have amassed a record of failure in major organizational, acquisition and strategic efforts. These failures have been accompanied by the hallmarks of an organization unable and unwilling to fix itself: aggressive resistance to the reporting of problems, suppression of failed test results, public declarations of success where none was justified, and the absence of accountability.

………

Events have granted us a short window of time in which we might address the problem. America is drawing down after two intense wars, while the potential threats of the future are not quite upon us. Seven decades ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall surveyed an officer corps similarly ill-suited for the tasks to come. He forced into retirement scores of generals, clearing the way for the ones who would help win World War II.

Today’s times, like Marshall’s, call for a reformation of the general officer corps.

………

After each of these failures, one might expect the Army and program leaders to have suffered censure. Instead, the opposite seems generally to have been the case. The leaders of failed programs and other efforts received prestigious medals, promotion to higher ranks, and plum follow-on jobs; others retired and went to work for defense contractors, often with companies that had profited from the failed acquisition effort.

………

Shrink the general officer corps. In 1945, about 2,000 general and flag officers led a total of about 12 million citizens in uniform. Today, we have about 900 generals and admirals and 1.4 million troops, and the ratio of leader-to-led has accelerated upward in the two decades since the end of the Cold War. In an age of unprecedented communications technology and with the education and training opportunities for today’s soldiers, this is indefensible. Many general officer billets are redundant and should be eliminated; others can effectively be filled by colonels or even lieutenant colonels.

I highly remommend this as a read, though I would argue that the "Up or Out" officer promotion and retention policies have also contributed to these problems.

It makes the consequences to challenging the Pentagon's group think to be the end of a career.

Books to Read: Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force

I've got to read this book. Professor Robert Farley, an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky has written a book calling for the abolition of the US Air Force as an independent branch of the service:

The United States needs airpower, but does it need an air force? In Grounded, Robert M. Farley persuasively argues that America should end the independence of the United States Air Force (USAF) and divide its assets and missions between the United States Army and the United States Navy.

In the wake of World War I, advocates of the Air Force argued that an organizationally independent air force would render other military branches obsolete. These boosters promised clean, easy wars: airpower would destroy cities beyond the reach of the armies and would sink navies before they could reach the coast. However, as Farley demonstrates, independent air forces failed to deliver on these promises in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, and the War on Terror. They have also had perverse effects on foreign and security policy, as politicians have been tempted by the vision of devastating airpower to initiate otherwise ill-considered conflicts. The existence of the USAF also produces turf wars with the Navy and the Army, leading to redundant expenditures, nonsensical restrictions on equipment use, and bad tactical decisions.

I certainly agree with this idea.  The raison d'être for an independent air force is Douhet's theory about how strategic bombing could win wars.

History has shown this to be completely false.  Strategic bombing with the possible exception of the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, have never won wars, nor do they appear to have shortened wars.

H/t War is Boring.

Yes, the Consumer Financial Protection Board is Doing Things: For Profit Colllege Edition

The CFPB has filed suit against ITT Technical alleging that it behaves more like a payday lender than an institute of learning.

It's not just the CFPB, 32 state Attorneys General have filed suit as well, but the CFPB's involvement makes it far less likely that other federal agencies, most notably the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, will attempt to preempt the investigation:

Honest, well-run for-profit colleges can be helpful to students who do not qualify for traditional schools. But the robber barons in the for-profit sector represent a menace that requires more federal oversight. They saddle students with crushing debt while furnishing them useless degrees – or no degrees at all. These schools have been known to push students who are eligible for low-cost, federal loans into ruinously priced private loans that have fewer consumer protections and that give borrowers who get in trouble little choice but to default. That in turn makes it difficult for them to find jobs, get credit or rent apartments. And because private student loans are difficult to escape through bankruptcy, the stricken borrower might never recover.

Attorneys general in 32 states are actively pursuing this problem . This week the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally got into the act. On Wednesday it filed suit against an Indiana-based for-profit chain, ITT Educational Services, Inc., which has tens of thousands of students enrolled online or at one of roughly 150 institutions in nearly 40 states. The bureau, which paints a damning portrait of the company’s policies, accuses the chain of practicing “predatory student lending.”

………

The suit makes the company look very much like a storefront payday lender that ropes borrowers into loans that they cannot repay, then hammers them with fees and interest. In this case, the bureau asserts that the company rushed students through the application process without giving them a chance to understand what was happening. In some cases “ students did not even know they had a private student loan until they started getting collection calls.” Moreover, it says: “ITT knew that most of its students would ultimately default on their private student loans; it projected a default rate for its students of 64 percent.”

I really hope that this results in meaningful change.

The for profit college industry is full of parasites and predators who make their money off of federally guaranteed loans.

Full CFPB release after break:

Turns out that Snowden Did Take it to His Superiors

Yet another lie about Edward Snowden is disproved:

Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents revealing the agency’s surveillance operations, said he raised his concerns to more than 10 officials, “none of whom took any action to address them,” before he decided to give the documents to journalists.

Mr. Snowden’s comments, in written answers to questions by members of the European Parliament that were released on Friday, amplified previous assertions that he initially tried to raise concerns internally about surveillance collection he believed went too far.

An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment, but the agency has previously said its internal investigation, including interviews with co-workers, found no evidence that he had brought concerns to the attention of anyone.

But in his written testimony, Mr. Snowden insisted that he had, adding that his efforts had elicited two types of responses. Some people, he said, responded with “well-meaning but hushed warnings not to ‘rock the boat’ ” for fear of retaliation like being investigated by the F.B.I. as a suspected leaker.

“Everyone in the intelligence community is aware of what happens to people who report concerns about unlawful but authorized operations,” he wrote.

Other people, he said, told him to “let the issue be someone else’s problem.”

“Even among the most senior individuals to whom I reported my concerns,” he continued, “no one at N.S.A. could ever recall an instance where an official complaint had resulted in an unlawful program being ended, but there was a unanimous desire to avoid being associated with such a complaint in any form.”

Yes, "No evidence," from the folks have been caught lying time and time again by Snowden's revelations.

And the Snoden's testimony about how an official complaint has never resulted in reforms rings quite true.

The entire history of the US government state security apparatus has been one of excess reigned in from outside sources.

We Learned from The Last Airbender that Aasif Mandvi was a Bad Ass

Here, he f%$#ing destroys Fox Business Channel pundit Todd Wilemon on the American healthcare system.

He makes the Malevolent Murdoch Minion^™ look both stupid and evil.

I have never seen anyone as thoroughly owned, and that included Jon Stewart's epic takedown Jim Cramer.

This is the Best News Ever!!!!!!

I'm an engineer, and I have seen way too many PowerPoint slides.

So I exult in the fact that the forum for the Large Hadron Collider at Fermilabs has banned PowerPoint slides in their presentations:

A physicist is more than the sum of his or her slides.

That's why, about six months ago, organizers of a biweekly forum on Large Hadron Collider physics at Fermilab banned PowerPoint presentations in favor of old-fashioned, chalkboard-style talks.

“Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.”

In one recent meeting, physics professor John Paul Chou of Rutgers University (pictured above) presented to a full room holding a single page of handwritten notes and a marker. The talk became more dialogue than monologue as members of the audience, freed from their usual need to follow a series of information-stuffed slides flying by at top speed, managed to interrupt with questions and comments.

“We all feel inundated by PowerPoint," Askew says. "With only a whiteboard, you have your ideas and a pen in your hand."

If Zombie Osama bin Laden were to were to wage Jihad against PowerPoint, I would gladly join his evil minions.

Bitcoin Has Had a Disasterous Week

We've just had 3^rd Bitcoin exchange robbery in a week, the suspicious death of the CEO of another exchange, the discovery the mysterious founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is actually a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, and Japan has decided not to regulate it as currency.

I know what you are wondering why is Japan deciding not to regulate Bitcoin a bad thing?

Well, because if it is not currency, then it is subject to the VAT (sales tax) and the capital gains tax:

The Japanese government officially said Friday that it doesn't consider bitcoin to be a currency and has no plans at present to regulate it as a financial product.

As it tries to cope with the fallout from the bankruptcy of the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange, the government said that the crypto-currency would be treated like other goods and services, with commercial sales of bitcoin itself and bitcoin-based transactions subject to sales tax. In addition, any gains on exchange rates will be taxed as well.

"Any bitcoin transactions are taxable when they fulfill requisitions stated by laws on income tax, corporate tax and consumption tax," the government said in its statement, which came in response to questions over how bitcoins will be regulated.

At the same time, the statement ruled out treatment of bitcoin as a currency or a financial instrument.

"Bitcoin are neither Japanese nor foreign currencies and its trading is different from deals stated by Japan's bank act as well as financial instruments and exchange act," according to a document released by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's cabinet.

(emphasis mine)

I don't know if Bitcoin is done, but I think that a stake has been driven though the heart of the Randroid libertarian dream of completely unregulated and untraceable crypto currency.

Heh.

This is More than a Russian-Ukrainian Thing

At the New Yorker, Natalia Antelava notes that Crimean Tatars are completely without any ally or patron:

At first, Rustem Kadyrov could barely make out the mark outside his house, in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai, but it filled him with terror. It was an X, cut deep into the gray metal of the gate, and its significance cut even deeper, evoking a memory Kadyrov shares with all Crimean Tatars. Kadyrov, who is thirty-one, grew up hearing stories about marks on doors. In May of 1944, Stalin ordered his police to tag the houses of Crimean Tatars, the native Muslim residents of the peninsula. Within a matter of days, all of them—almost two hundred thousand people—were evicted from their homes, loaded onto trains, and sent to Central Asia, on the pretext that the community had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Crimea.

Kadyrov’s grandmother, Sedeka Memetova, who was eight at the time, was among those deported. “The soldiers gave us five minutes to pack up,” she told me, when I visited the family on Thursday. “We left everything behind.” Memetova still has vivid memories of her journey into exile: the stench of the overcrowded train carriage, the wailing of a pregnant woman who sat next to her, and the solemn faces of the men who had to lower the bodies of their children off of the moving train—the only way, she said, to dispose of the dead. Four of her siblings were among the thousands of Crimean Tatars who never even made it to their final destination, Uzbekistan.

Starting in the nineteen-sixties, the Soviet Union began to allow survivors of the deportation to return. Memetova and her family came back to Crimea almost three decades ago, in 1987. This weekend, at around 3 P.M. on Saturday, Memetova’s forty-four-year-old daughter, Ava, looked out the window and saw four young men, strangers to the neighborhood, walking down the street, armed with batons. The men were also carrying pieces of paper, Ava told me—which she believes were lists of homes belonging to Crimean Tatars. Seventy years after Memetova’s deportation, her house had been marked once again. “Just as we thought we finally had a future,” she said. “How could anyone do this in the twenty-first century?”

On one side of the conflict are the Russians, (Yes, I know that Stalin was a Georgian) who engaged in Genocide in 1944, and on the other side is the neo-Nazi influenced government in Kiev.

It's kind of like what happened to the Roma following the fall of the Warsaw pact.

The new Europe has some frightening echos to the interwar years.

Gee, Screwed By Your Cell Phone Provider. Why is this News?

OK, THIS time it's the Feds that they overcharged:

The President Barack Obama administration accused Sprint today of overcharging the government more than $21 million in wiretapping expenses.

Sprint, like all the nation’s carriers, must comply with the Communications Assistance in Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which requires telcos to be capable of providing government-ordered wiretapping services. The act also allows carriers to recoup “reasonable expenses” associated with those services.

Sprint, of Overland Park, Kansas, inflated charges approximately 58 percent between 2007 and 2010, according to a lawsuit (.pdf) the administration brought against the carrier today.

“As alleged, Sprint over billed law enforcement agencies for carrying out court-ordered intercepts, causing a significant loss to the government’s limited resources,” said San Francisco U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag.

The authorities said the suit, filed in San Francisco federal court, was a result of an investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.

It's kind of like having your Mother-In-Law drive your brand new Mercedes over a cliff.

Linkage

• There's No Real Difference Between Online Espionage and Online Attack (Bruce Schneier at The Atlantic) Basically, we are setting up an infrastructure to engage in unprovoked attacks on other nations computer infrastructure.
• Choosing Secure Passwords (Bruce Schneier, again)
• There's an App for What???? (Jezebel) A phone app to practice oral sex called Lick This. Just clean your screen before and after.
• David Cameron's porn-filter advisor arrested for possession of images of sexual abuse of children (Boing Boing) So not surprised.

J-Pop and Death Metal together at last.

Warning: That which is seen cannot be unseen.

Ukraine: Sniper Theory Leaves Tinfoil Hat Territory

We have another leaked conversation between high level diplomats involving the Ukraine, in this case Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton.

The big story in this discussion, a lot bigger than Victoria Nuland's, "F%$3 the EU," comment is Paet's statement that sources on the ground strongly implied that the snipers at the protests were from the opposition, not Yanukovich:

A leaked phone call between the EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet has revealed that the two discussed a conspiracy theory that blamed the killing of civilian protesters in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on the opposition rather than the ousted government.

The 11-minute conversation was posted on YouTube – it is the second time in a month that telephone calls between western diplomats discussing Ukraine have been bugged.

In the call, Paet said he had been told snipers responsible for killing police and civilians in Kiev last month were protest movement provocateurs rather than supporters of then-president Viktor Yanukovych. Ashton responds: "I didn't know … Gosh."

The leak came a day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said the snipers may have been opposition provocateurs. The Kremlin-funded Russia Today first carried the leaked call online.

The Estonian foreign ministry confirmed the leaked conversation was accurate. It said: "Foreign minister Paet was giving an overview of what he had heard in Kiev and expressed concern over the situation on the ground. We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition's involvement in the violence." Ashton's office said it did not comment on leaks.

During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga – who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor – blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters.

"What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides," Paet said.

Note that there is no accusation of blame for the snipers, nor for a cover-up in the phone conversation, but it does indicate that allegations that elements among the protesters were behind this bears further investigation.

Also, Paet gives an eyewitness account of a member of the Ukrainian Parliament being beaten just outside of the parliament building, and harassment of MPs by "uninvited visitors" (militiamen), which would imply that there is a use of violence or threat of violence against MPs to ensure that they vote "the right way."

I do not know what is up in the Ukraine, but it does seem that this sh%$ is all f%$#ed up and sh%$.

It's Jobless Thursday

323K with the 4-week moving average and continuing claims falling as well.

Not bad.

Well, this is Chilling

Former NSA Chief Keith Alexander is touting, "unspecified 'headway' on what he termed 'media leaks'” was forthcoming in the next several weeks, possibly to include “media leaks legislation."

One wonders whether some skullduggery he has gotten my distinguished cousin^* to back some sort of draconian equivalent to the awful Official Secrets Act that is in force in the UK.

This is a very bad idea.

It's a bad idea because it shreds the Constitution, and it's a bad idea because, as Dan Froomkin so aptly notes, "History has shown time and again that secrecy and bad decisions go hand in hand."

It will make us less safe, not more safe.

^*Dianne Feinstein, whoser grandfather, Sam Goldman, and my great-grandfather, Harry Goldman, were brothers.

I Called for Amputating the Financial Sector Years Ago

See here.

JD Alt at New Economic Perspectives has just called for the same thing:

All this talk about the 99% versus the 1%? I say the easiest—and likely the most useful—thing to do is just forget the 1%. Write them off. Let them have their gated communities, their mega-yachts, their island retreats and off-shore bank accounts. What do we need them for?

For one thing, we DON’T need their money. Even if we could get it—which we can’t because they steadfastly refuse to use it for anything other than casino gambling in their private and secretive financial networks. We wonder why we have a “jobless recovery”? Does it have anything to do with the fact that such a large percentage of our “capital” has, for all practical purposes, been removed from the economy?

Even when the 1% decides to invest some of their Dollars to manufacture or build something, they rarely decide to manufacture or build anything we really need—only things we really don’t need. Like strip-mines in the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, or pipe-lines across Nebraska’s freshwater aquifers, or rocket-planes for space-tourism. Thanks, but we really don’t need—or want—any of it. We’d much rather have fresh wild salmon (rather than the artificially colored hatchery-stuff) than more copper and gold, fresh water instead of tar-sands oil, and the good-old week-at-the-beach is just fine for a vacation.

He then gives the example of the huge transformers that are essential to our electrical grid.

We do not, and can not, make them in the United States, because the casino finance class doesn't care, because they can always get them from Korea, with a a 2 year lead time.

If that's a problem, they can always move to their summer house on a Greek island.

Here is how he poresents it going:

This little tale is made even more interesting by the fact that these very-large transformers—usually situated inside a compound protected by chain-link fencing—are easily destroyed with a few rounds of fire from a semi-automatic assault rifle. Thankfully, semi-automatic assault rifles are difficult to come by in the U.S., otherwise there might be cause for concern. The seventeen transformers recently shot to death in California (we can’t explain how this actually happened, since the NRA is only marginally active on the West Coast) are a cautionary tale: If this were repeated on just a little bit larger scale, the Department of Homeland Security has determined, our entire electric grid could be down for months—or even longer. (Come on South Korea, hurry it up…. We’re waiting!)

So my example is this: Why doesn’t President Obama propose that since the 1% have no interest in doing it, the U.S. sovereign government build a plant to manufacture very-large transformers, hire engineers to train unemployed people to do the labor, pay those unemployed trainees for making the effort to learn how to make a giant-sized transformer, then hire those newly trained workers to run the manufacturing process? We could build a backup supply of these critical electric grid components so that in the (increasingly likely) event some crazy, anti-government sociopath seizes the opportunity to turn out America’s lights, we could turn them back on in fairly short order.

It's an interesting mental exercise, and I am not sure how serious this proposal is,it has a Jonathan Swift — A Modest Proposal snarky feel to it.

Still, breaking the lock of the "Washington Consensus" of so-called free trade and the continuing financialization of our economy is a non trivial task.

That's why my calls for amputation involve a zero tolerance criminal prosecution policy. 

Senate Votes Down Sexual Assault Accountability and the Army's Top Sex Crime Prosecutor Relieved for Sex Crime

On the same f%$#ing day as a filibuster killed sex crime prosecution reform in the Senate,  Lt. Col. Joseph “Jay” Morse, the top sex-crimes prosecutor in the US Army, was Asuspended for alleged sexual assault:

The top Army prosecutor for sexual assault cases has been suspended after a lawyer who worked for him recently reported he’d groped her and tried to kiss her at a sexual-assault legal conference more than two years ago.

………

Morse was removed from his job when the allegations came to light, one source said. To date, no charges have been filed in the case.

………

Sources told Stars and Stripes that the Army lawyer alleged that Morse attempted to kiss and grope her against her will. The alleged assault reportedly took place in a hotel room at a 2011 sexual assault legal conference attended by special victims prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., before he was appointed as chief of the Trial Counsel Assistance Program.

So long as those ratf%$#s in the Senate are unwilling to protect the troops from the corrupt elements in our officer corps, this crap will continue.

Bigoted Moron of the Day

Randa Jarrar, who just penned, "Why I can’t stand white belly dancers," on Salon.

Seeing as how I know about 1 half dozen white who have made a study of traditional, as in pre 1600, Middle Eastern dance. Somehow Ms. Jarrar, the product of Sara Lawrence and UT Austin, believes that their interest is somehow inauthentic.

Art is supposed to be universal, and cross cultural art can produce some amazing things.

Feh.

Looters Gotta Loot

It's not enough that schools get tax dollars, and get showered with funds from private "charities" dedicated to destroying public education, they want taxpayers to pay for their rent as well:

Eva Moskowitz said she would go to the president of the United States to help her students if she had to. For now, she's stopping at Andrew Cuomo.

Moskowitz, C.E.O. of Success Academy charter schools in New York City, helped organize a massive rally outside the state Capitol on Tuesday, where she said she was “delighted” to have the governor's support.

………

During the mayoral campaign, de Blasio threatened to charge charter schools rent and pledged that Moskowitz's schools specifically would not enjoy the same treatment under his administration as they did under Michael Bloomberg's. He fulfilled that promise last week when he overturned three Bloomberg administration approvals for co-locations, all Success Academy schools.

“We never expected... I mean, I frankly thought the rhetoric of the mayor would change once he got into government,” Moskowitz said, responding to de Blasio's decision to reverse the co-locations. “Campaigning is generally different, so I didn’t expect to be in this position. And we're feeling very vulnerable.”

So, in addition to your getting taxpayer money, you want your basic overhead paid by the taxpayers as well, meaning that the schools are getting more funding than the regular public schools, which cover both their and your building costs.

And while we are at it, I would note that she pays herself a lot of money with taxpayer dollars:

The 990s for Success Academy are public record and located here, so see for yourself: http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2012/205/298/2012-205298861-095c435d-9.pdf

According to their 2012 tax filings, in 2011, Eva’s salary was $475,244.00 with an additional $12,459.00 in other compensation, totaling $487,703.00. The tax statement also says that was for providing “management and administrative supporting services to nine district charter schools…” Let me repeat, NINE SCHOOLS in 2011.

By comparison, the pay the same year for NYC Schools Chancellor Walcott for managing 1,700 schools was $212,614.00. Let me repeat, ONE THOUSAND AND SEVEN HUNDRED SCHOOLS. Then there is US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who oversees the massive federal Department of Education and earns a base salary of $179,700.

Eva’s salary is obscene. Charters want to be called public schools except when it’s more convenient to be labeled private, such as when asking for CEO salaries similar to private corporations, but their revenue is tax dollars –and for schools that pay no rent. If Eva wants a CEO salary similar to private enterprises, she should open up her own privately funded schools, not raid the public coffers.

See also here, where we discover that the "hero" of Waiting for Superman Geoffrey Canada pays himself over ½ million dollars a year.

Like I said, looters gotta loot.

H/t Atrios.

That's Mighty White of You

After much consideration, the CIA has admitted that it is supposed to follow the law:

The CIA has confirmed that it is obliged to follow a federal law barring the collection of financial information and hacking into government data networks.

But neither the agency nor its Senate overseers will say what, if any, current, recent or desired activities the law prohibits the CIA from performing – particularly since a section of the law explicitly carves out an exception for “lawfully authorized” intelligence activities.

The murky episode, arising from a public Senate hearing on intelligence last week, illustrates what observers call the frustrations inherent in getting even basic information about secret agencies into public view, a difficulty recently to the fore over whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) and its surveillance partners.

Last Wednesday, in a brief exchange at the hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked CIA director John Brennan if the agency is subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a three-decade-old law intended to protect computer systems, like those of financial and government networks, from unauthorized access.

Brennan demurred, citing the need to check on the legal complexities posed by Wyden’s question, and pledged to give the senator an answer within a week.

The answer, agency spokesman Dean Boyd told the Guardian, is: “Yes, the statute applies to CIA.”

That was about a month ago.

Well, today, we discovered what this was all about.

It turns out that the CIA was spying on the Congressional investigation of ……… wait for it ……… the CIA:

The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.

The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.

The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.

………

The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers – in possible violation of an agreement against doing so – that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to people with knowledge.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, a panel member, apparently was referring to the monitoring when he asked CIA Director John Brennan at a Jan. 29 hearing if provisions of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act “apply to the CIA? Seems to me that’s a yes or no answer.”

Brennan replied that he’d have to get back to Wyden after looking into “what the act actually calls for and it’s applicability to CIA’s authorities.”

The law makes it a criminal act for someone to intentionally access a computer without authorization or to go beyond what they’re allowed to access.

You know, even if they did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, this was a conspiracy to obstruct a Congressional investigation, so go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

What's more, it appears that Barack Obama knew of, and thus at least tacitly approved the CIA spying on Congress:

A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.

………


Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.

“As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday.

Independent observers were unaware of a precedent for the CIA spying on the congressional committees established in the 1970s to check abuses by the intelligence agencies.

“In the worst case, it would be a subversion of independent oversight, and a violation of separation of powers,” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s potentially very serious.”

(emphasis mine)

Not even Richard Nixon had the stones to use government agencies spy on the Congressional committees that were investigate him.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor ever.^™

Hillary Drops the H-Bomb

No, I do not mean thermonuclear weapons, I mean the full up Godwin.

She invoked Hitler on the events in the Ukraine:

Hillary Clinton Likens Russia's Passport Move In Ukraine To Nazi Germany

Hillary Clinton likened aspects of Russia's involvement in Crimean Ukraine to Nazi Germany during a fundraising event, according to two people present.

Buzzfeed, citing two sources, reported that the former secretary of State said at a fundraiser on Tuesday that Russia's move to start issuing passports in Crimean Ukraine was akin to "population transfers" that happened in Nazi Germany during World War II.

"Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s," Clinton said according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. "All the Germans that were ... the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous."

Seriously, her need to go to war at the drop of a hat was why she did not get the nomination in 2008, and here she is making John McCain look like Timothy Leary.

She is not going to be the President-Elect in November of 2016. Hillary Clinton just flushed that down the toilet.

Politics Trumps Good Policy

Congress just voted to continue subsidizing morons who choose to build in flood plains:

The House of Representatives, in a bipartisan vote of 306-91 Tuesday night, agreed to limit premium rate increases under the National Flood Insurance Program.

The bill must still pass the Senate or be reconciled with a version of flood insurance legislation that the chamber approved in January.

If the House version becomes law, with President Barack Obama’s signature, the measure would eliminate some of the changes made in a 2012 law that required the Federal Emergency Management Agency to raise rates to reflect flood risk. The law was intended to reduce losses to the insurance program, which is $24 billion in debt.

Conservative, libertarian, environmental and taxpayer watchdog groups opposed the bill, arguing that rates should be based on risk. Some said subsidies should be targeted only to people who couldn’t afford higher rates.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, said during the debate that he would oppose the bill because the flood insurance program was “one reason America is going broke.”

“It forces 96 percent of Americans to subsidize the remaining 4 percent, regardless of income or need,” Hensarling said.

You know, when Jeb F%$#ing Hensarling is one of the smarter people in the room, you are at a level of stupid that buggers the mind.

Of course, if I were in Congress, I would tell Mr. Hensarling that  the additional costs for the insurance program are a direct result of anthropogenic climate change, just to f%$# with him.

I am So Stealing This for My Blog

Surfing the net, I came across that a bon mot that former Nixon strategist turned not-Republican Kevin Phillips created for John Kerry following his disastrous run for President in 2004, "a Haircut in search of a brain."

I love it!

I am using it!

John Adams is Spinning in His Grave

The Senate has defeated the appointment of Debo Adegbile's appointment as head of the DoJ's Civil Rights division because he defended a black man accused of murdering a cop:

Senate Democrats on Wednesday rejected President Obama’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in an embarrassing rebuke of the president on the choice of a key legal adviser and one that left senior White House officials “furious” with members of their own party.

The nominee, Debo P. Adegbile, was litigation director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund when it represented Mumia Abu-Jamal on an appeal of his death sentence for killing a Philadelphia police officer decades ago. He could not overcome a campaign by Republicans, conservative activists and law enforcement organizations still infuriated by the murder of the officer, Daniel Faulkner.

But it was the votes of seven Democratic senators to reject Mr. Adegbile that doomed the nomination despite what White House officials described as a sustained closed-door effort by Mr. Obama and his top aides to save the nomination. The president personally appealed to Senate Democrats at a recent caucus meeting and made several calls to Democratic senators in the last week, officials said. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, continued making calls Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

I'm not blaming the Republicans here. They would oppose the appointment of Pope Francis to head the Office of Faith Based outreach.

Additionally, I can understand why they oppose Adegbile's record of strong protection of civil rights, particularly voting rights.

After all, if there is a defining characteristic of the Republican party in the 'Teens, it is that they want to stop n***ers from voting.

I do blame the 7 Democrats, who seem to find that the idea of a black man getting competent counsel is somehow a bad thing, and I do blame the various elements in law enforcement who seem to think that being a good lawyer should be a crime.

This is is evil, runs counter to the constitution, and hundreds of years of British jurisprudence before that.

It is a sacred duty for the defendant to have competent legal counsel. That is why John Adams defended the British soldiers who shot the demonstrators at the Boston Massacre.

If you have a problem with this, you should not be a lawyer, a legislator, or a cop.

Anyone involved in this effort, and the cowards who folded to it, are unAmerican, and need to have no further role in our public discourse.

Your Daily Dose of Ukraine Related Incompetence and Hypocrisy

It turns out that one of the first acts of the new parliament in the "no-bigotry, ethnocentrism, or fascist parties here" Ukraine was to rescind the status of the Russian language one of the official languages of the Ukraine: (and note how this was buried at paragraph 5 of the story)

Officials in Moscow continued Tuesday to express displeasure with events in Ukraine, if not as harshly as the day before. One bill that flew through the Rada on Monday downgraded the status of Russian as an official language, which struck critics as an unnecessary and incendiary move and which opened Ukraine’s new authorities to stinging criticism from their larger neighbor.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, tweeted Tuesday, “We want to curtail the influence of radicals and nationalists who are trying to play first fiddle in Ukraine.”

Note that this story was from February 25, 4 days before Russia sent troops.

Do you think that there is any connection?

As Ted Rall pithily observes that, "Millions of ethnic Russians in former Soviet Republics have suffered widespread discrimination and harassment since the 1991 collapse — and that their troubles began with laws eliminating Russian as an official language."

BTW, the person who seems to be deepest in our shenanigans in the Ukraine, you know, things like funding the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party the Pravyi Sektor militia, that would be Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, who is literally in bed with the Neocons.

I mean it.  She is married to Robert Kagan, who is not just a Neocon, but is pretty the much the ur-Neocon, having co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which has called for:

• The overthrow of Saddam Hussein (1999)
• The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, because he was behind 9/11 (2001)
• Called for American hegemony across the world
• Repeatedly called for preemptive military strikes
• Permanent U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia
• Hostilities with China

Yeah, he founded the group that more than any other organization put us in Iraq.

And his reward for this? 

Why, he is on the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

How do these folks, and here I am referring to both the Neocons like Kagan and Nuland, and Liberal Interventionists like the Samantha Powers, continue to maintain influence in our foreign policy?

Why is an an uninterrupted record of failure, misery, and the death of innocents considered an endorsement for greater responsibilities in Washington, DC?

It's like promoting the guy who designed the Edsel to run the company.

And NPR, they Suck Too

They put a holocaust revisionist who calls for genocide of the gays, and they neglect to mention these facts to their listeners:

National Public Radio’s Michel Martin did a segment on Uganda’s growing crackdown on its gay population, and decided to interview Holocaust-revisionist hate-group leader Scott Lively, who is truly one of the most horrific religious right extremists in America.

How did NPR’s Michel Martin describe Lively to her audience? Simply as “Evangelical leader Scott Lively.”

That’s it.

No mention of the fact that Lively was labeled a Holocaust revisionist by HateWatch for his “thoroughly-discredited” 1995 tome, “The Pink Swastika,” which tried to argue that gays were the really force behind the Holocaust.

No mention of Lively’s organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, that was officially-designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

He was extensively involved in Uganda's proposed "Kill the Gays" bill, and the now just passed "Jail the Gays" bill.

You don't just call him "Evangelical leader Scott Lively." At the very least you call him a controversial anti-gay activist, unless you are so cowed by the Talibaptists that you should quit journalism and take up knitting.

Why to Tell PBS to Go Cheney Themselves on Pledge Month, Part DCLXXI & DCLXXII

They throw some highbrow opera and such, and then they pursue the political agenda of right wing industrialists:

Last month, Pando’s “Wolf of Sesame Street” investigation broke the news that one of PBS’s flagship outlets had inked a secret deal with anti-pension billionaire John Arnold. That deal, which was not explicitly disclosed to viewers, was designed to broadcast anti-pension programming on public television stations throughout the country.
The story spotlighted how ideological billionaires and powerful corporations are increasingly – and stealthily – attempting to launder their political agendas through the trusted public-television brand, potentially in violation of PBS’s own rules.

Now, as part of our continuing investigation into who funds public television, Pando has learned that a new campaign is being launched against another major PBS station, once again over the issue of billionaire influence.

The campaign, sponsored by the environmental group Forecast the Facts, aims to remove one of the most influential and politically active fossil fuel magnates from the board of the PBS station that provides science-related programming to outlets across the US.

The campaign’s target is David Koch, who serves on the board and the Science Visiting Council of Boston’s WGBH. These are particularly powerful posts for the conservative financier — one of the infamous Koch brothers — because, like the Arnold-infiltrated WNET in New York, the Boston station produces many of the national PBS network’s programming. In fact, according to its own website, WGBH is “PBS’s single largest producer of Web and TV content.” That includes PBS’s iconic science show, NOVA.

And if you read further, you see that WGBH violated PBS guidelines repeatedly to appease the right wing billionaire.

It really sucks.

Quote of the Day

The Shrill One speaks:

To the extent that people have negative feelings about the one percent, the emotion involved isn’t envy — it’s anger, which isn’t at all the same thing. Envy is when you have negative feelings about rich because of what they have; anger is when you have negative feelings about the rich because of what they do.

—Paul Krugman

I differ slightly, I don't think that this is just anger, I think that it is well justified outrage.

Another Way that Michelle Rhee is Destroying America

Do you know what improves performance on tests, particularly those that do not require much in the way original thought?

If you are thinking cramming data you might be right, but this is not how Michelle Rhee is using her jihad against to hurt our children.

Have you ever had a strong cup of coffee to get on the bubble for a test? How about amphetamines? The military has used them for years to maintain focus for fatigued soldiers

How about Ritalin?

Ritalin, like other stimulants will improve performance in the short term, so it is no surprise that aggressive testing incentivizes schools to put children on stimulants:

There has been a lot of public agonizing lately about the steep rise in diagnoses of ADHD over the last two decades. There is growing, and justifiable, worry that a lot of kids are being put on stimulant medications who don’t need them.

What there hasn’t been is a plausible theory about what’s driving this explosion of diagnoses — 40 percent over the last decade and more than 50 percent over 25 years. The CDC now estimates that 12 percent of school age kids, and as many as 20 percent of teenage boys have been diagnosed with ADHD.

………

Now comes a book that, finally, offers a data-based analysis that could begin to account for an increase on this scale. “The ADHD Explosion,“ by Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, considers all kinds of factors that may contribute to the surge, from diagnosis by undertrained and harried pediatricians to pharmaceutical advertising. But the eye-opening insight from Hinshaw, a clinical psychologist, and Schleffler, a health economist, who are colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, is the correlation between educational policies and the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses.

Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. Based on the most recent survey, from 2011, a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada.

And these states aren’t just outliers. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses — Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina — are all over 10 percent of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed — Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California — are all under 5 percent. The disparity is even greater for kids prescribed ADHD medication. The same five states are at the top of the list, all of them with over 8 percent of kids getting medication. The states at the bottom of the list for medication — Nevada, Hawaii, California, Alaska and New Jersey — are all under 3.1 percent.

………

What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests. In more recent years, similar testing-based strategies have been championed by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. But many states passed these accountability laws as early as the 1980s, and within a few years of passage, ADHD diagnoses started going up in those states, the authors found, especially for kids near the poverty line.

ADHD diagnoses of public school students within 200 percent of the federal poverty level jumped 59 percent after accountability legislation passed, Hinshaw reports, compared with less than 10 percent for middle- and high-income children. They saw no comparable trend in private schools, which are not subject to legislation like this.

How do ADHD diagnoses help schools at risk of losing their funding? First, Hinshaw notes, for kids who do have ADHD, it should improve their performance in school, including their test scores. Second, it may help kids who are disruptive in class settle down, which could improve scores for the whole class. Finally, in many areas, the test scores of student with ADHD diagnoses aren’t counted. So even it if it doesn’t help the child, it might help the school.

The researchers missed the point that I made, that giving your kids uppers will help with their tests, even if they suffer from strokes or sudden heart failure at age 14, it's no skin off of the nose of Michelle Rhee and her ilk, if they hit their numbers, they win, and if they don't they convert the "failing" to hedge fund backed charter schools, and they still win because they have a future career as a well remunerated executive at an "educational foundation".

MicroFlaccid is Doomed

Seriously, there is doing the smart thing, and doing the stupid thing, and then there is putting Mark Penn in charge of your strategic planning:

In the biggest shuffling of Microsoft’s executive ranks since the company’s new chief executive, Satya Nadella, took over, Mark Penn, the former aide to the Clinton family, is becoming the company’s chief strategy officer.

The change will give Mr. Penn, who has been an executive vice president at Microsoft overseeing advertising and strategy, a bigger hand in determining which markets Microsoft should be in and where it should be making further investments, according to a person briefed on the change who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been publicly announced.

Tami Reller, the company’s executive vice president for marketing, who shared leadership of advertising and marketing at Microsoft, will leave the company, as will Tony Bates, Microsoft’s executive vice president of business development, this person said.

After the way he handled the Hillary campaign in 2008, when he thought that the Democratic primaries were winner take all, when delegates were proportionately allocated , I'm surprised that anyone would employ him at anything.

This is not bad strategy, this is death throes.

H/t Atrios.

While I Took Some Time Off From Blogging………

I missed bank failure Friday.

4. Millennium Bank, National Association, Sterling, VA
5. Vantage Point Bank, Horsham, PA

Full FDIC list

Nor sure what it all means.  It looks a lot like last year.

Here is the graph pr0n with last few years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

Quote of the Day on the Ukraine

Courtesy of Ian Welsh:

I will be frank: the West needs to stop fomenting these revolutions.  Russia is not going to allow NATO to creep up to their border without taking action.  You’d have to be crazy to think that Russia was going to allow the Ukraine, including Crimea, to become part of NATO, and yes, that was the West’s (or rather, America’s) endgame.  (The Europeans think the Americans are crazy to be baiting the bear like this.  But the Europeans need Russian natural gas.)

He also notes that since 1991, the official public spending on changing the Ukraine's government has been 5 billion dollars.

By comparison in 2010 California Senate race Barbara Boxer Spent $29,537,796.00, and Carly Fiorina Spent $21,521,397.00, for total spending of $51,059,193.00, (Link), and California's population is 37,253,959, so the spending was $1.37 per person.

So if you took the $5 billion that was spent over the last 23 years on the 44,573,205 residents of the Ukraine, you get $4.88 per person per year.

And this is in a place where the media market for the whole country has got to be considerably less than that of the Bay Area.

And BTW, much of this money is going to the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party and its accompanying Pravyi Sektor militia, which payed a large role in the current revolution.

Fail

H/t AS at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Tweet of the Millennium So Far………

Say what you will about George W Bush, but he wouldn't have stood for Russian aggression in Ukraine. He'd have invaded New Zealand by now.
— Donal O'Keeffe (@Donal_OKeeffe) March 1, 2014

Brilliant!!!

Comcast Doesn't Give a F%$#

I cannot add anything to this:

OK, I Don't Have Any Special Insights, But Here are My Unspecial Insights On the Ukraine

First, as in Georgia, the Russian operation was well considered and well executed. This was a tougher job than was done in Georgia, because as I noted at the time of that invasion, there was months of Georgian preparation for their attack on Sough Ossetia, and the Georgian military had been completely penetrated by the Russians, so the Russian forces had months to prepare.

In this case, it was all pulled together in about 1½ weeks:

At first, it wasn’t clear who exactly the armed men were—spotted at airports in Sevastopol and Simferopol overnight on Feb. 28. But on March 1, the Russian senate unanimously approved a request from Pres. Vladimir Putin to use the military “on the territory of Ukraine pending the normalization of the social and political situation in that country.”

The operation was already underway. Russian forces had launched a coordinated takeover of key sites, including airports, government offices, television stations and the two land routes connecting Crimea to the rest of Ukraine.

Someone sabotaged Ukrtelecom, which provides phone and Internet service to the peninsula.

Well executed, and John Kerry, aka the Clown Prince of Foreign Policy, has a response that is jaw dropping in its hypocrisy:

Secretary of State John Kerry made the round of Sunday shows this morning to condemn Russia’s “incredible act of aggression” in Ukraine, warning Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that the country faces harsh economic sanctions from the international community.

“It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country,” Kerry said on Face the Nation.

But in the seriousness of the situation, the irony of Kerry’s next comments may have gone missed. ”You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” he said.

Yes, that WAS his talking point of the day.

Meanwhile, the Ukranians are mobilizing their military, and a member of their interim government, and a member of the right-wing Svoboda party, Mikhail Golovko, is suggesting that the Ukraine will restore its nuclear arsenal.

Needless to say, this is a complete mess, and there are not a lot of lessons learned at this point.

The only one that immediately comes to mind is that the EU's hasty moves toward expansion work against its viability and continued existence.  (The start of this crisis was the rejection of an EU deal intended to lead toward Ukrainian accession)

I Take One F%$#ing Day off From Blogging………

And Putin occupies the Crimea.  The news gods mock me.

Seriously, I'll have more on the the turmoil around the Black Sea later, but because my kids were in a play, Once Upon a Mattress (Natalie was the Nightingale of Samarkand, and Charlie was in the pit orchestra) over the last two days, I've not blogged.

It was a nice production of a rather indestructible play. 

Asacia, who played the female lead Winnifred, cracked some ribs on Thursday, but she could go on, and so could the show.