We Know One Thing, It Will Get Weirder

I am referring, of course to the Pro Publica expose showing that  Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took millions, if not tens of millions of dollars in gifts from Republican donor and conservative activist Harlan Crow.

In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.

If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Over ½ million dollars for just one vacation.

Thomas claims that Mr. Crow is just a very good friend of his, but the relationship did not start until after Thomas joined SCOTUS.

This was an explicit quid pro quo.

………

In a statement, Crow acknowledged that he’d extended “hospitality” to the Thomases “over the years,” but said that Thomas never asked for any of it and it was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.”

Through his largesse, Crow has gained a unique form of access, spending days in private with one of the most powerful people in the country. By accepting the trips, Thomas has broken long-standing norms for judges’ conduct, ethics experts and four current or retired federal judges said.

………

ProPublica uncovered the details of Thomas’ travel by drawing from flight records, internal documents distributed to Crow’s employees and interviews with dozens of people ranging from his superyacht’s staff to members of the secretive Bohemian Club to an Indonesian scuba diving instructor.

Federal judges sit in a unique position of public trust. They have lifetime tenure, a privilege intended to insulate them from the pressures and potential corruption of politics. A code of conduct for federal judges below the Supreme Court requires them to avoid even the “appearance of impropriety.” Members of the high court, Chief Justice John Roberts has written, “consult” that code for guidance. The Supreme Court is left almost entirely to police itself.

This should not be the case.  Congress should create legislation that creates criminally enforceable standards for Supreme Court justices, but there is no way that you'll be able to prevent the Republicans from filibustering it.

Also, we have what are fairly explicit laundering of cash payments to his wife, Ginny Thomas:

………

Crow met Thomas after he became a justice. The pair have become genuine friends, according to people who know both men. Over the years, some details of Crow’s relationship with the Thomases have emerged. In 2011, The New York Times reported on Crow’s generosity toward the justice. That same year, Politico revealed that Crow had given half a million dollars to a Tea Party group founded by Ginni Thomas, which also paid her a $120,000 salary. But the full scale of Crow’s benefactions has never been revealed.

Giving credit where credit is due, the LA Times reported on Thomas' relationship with Crow in 2004, but not as thoroughly as Pro Publica has don.

After the Times story, "Thomas appears to have continued accepting free trips from his wealthy friend. But he stopped disclosing them."

Thomas is now claiming that he, "Was advised lavish gifts did not need to be reported," but that assertion does not hold up to scrutiny.

In their follow-up, Pro Publica notes that his justifications are full of sh%$.

………

Thomas’ brief statement acknowledges joining Crow and his wife, who he described as among his “dearest friends,” on “a number of family trips” over the years. He also defended his failure to disclose them. 

“Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” Thomas said in the statement. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”

Clarence Thomas became a Supreme Court Justice in 1991.  He reported the gifts until 2004.  That is 13 f%$#ing years. 

He only stopped after the LA Times reported on that he was, "Accepting much more valuable gifts than his Supreme Court colleagues."

So, Pro Publica has done a deep dive, and a very real public service here.

Of course Democratic members of Congress have written a very strong letter to Chief Justice Roberts calling for him to do his job and enforce ethics rules on the court, which is perhaps the most useless, "Norms Fairy." bullshit I've heard from the Democratic Party since Nancy Pelosi knelt wearing Kente Cloth.

And here it gets a bit more interesting, starting with a veritable rogues gallery of disloyal conservative Democrats taking money from Harlan Crow as well.

………

But Texas billionaire Harlan Crow's largesse goes far beyond yacht trips and resort stays with the top conservative jurist. It also includes thousands of dollars in contributions to congressional Democrats known for bucking their party.

According to an Insider review of federal campaign finance data, Crow has given a total $5,800 to Democratic-turned-Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's campaign account and $5,000 in May 2022 to Getting Stuff Done PAC, a leadership PAC tied to the Arizona senator.

Crow first contributed $2,900 to Sinema's campaign in June 2021 before giving another $5,800 in November 2021 — prompting the campaign to refund half of it after Crow apparently exceeded federal contribution limits.

………

According to federal campaign finance data, the Texas billionaire has given $16,800 to Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey since 2018, contributing thousands as recently as October 2022.

………

And Crow has contributed $12,500 to Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas since 2006. Cuellar, a conservative opponent of abortion rights, faced a strong primary challenge from progressive activist Jessica Cisneros in 2022.

This is not a surprise, and not an uncommon thing.  Right winger major Republican donors spend a lot of time and money supporting Quisling Democrats.

On the other hand what follows starts to get really, REALLY,weird.

First, it turns out that Harlan Crow has been collecting some truly evil sh%$ for years, Nazi memorabilia, including a copy of Mein Kampf signed by Adolph Hitler, statues of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu in his back yard.

These were not commissioned, they were taken from official statues of the despots.

He wanted Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot, but his agents were unable to close the deal. 

………

A 2003 interview with the man who acquired the statues for Mr. Crow cited failures to acquire statues of Pol Pot, the former leader of the Khmer Rouge, during a trip to Cambodia in 1997, and of Saddam Hussein on a trip to northern Iraq in 1991, as the Persian Gulf war was winding down.

He also has some Hitler paintings, paintings BY, not OF Hitler hanging on his walls:

This man has some VERY serious issues:

When Republican megadonor Harlan Crow isn’t lavishing Justice Clarence Thomas with free trips on his private plane and yacht (in possible violation of Supreme Court ethics rules), he lives a quiet life in Dallas among his historical collections. These collections include Hitler artifacts—two of his paintings of European cityscapes, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and assorted Nazi memorabilia—plus a garden full of statues of the 20th century’s worst despots.

Crow, the billionaire heir to a real estate fortune, has said that he’s filled his property with these mementoes because he hates communism and fascism. Nonetheless, his collections caused an uproar back in 2015 when Marco Rubio attended a fundraiser at Crow’s house on the eve of Yom Kippur. Rubio’s critics thought the timing was inappropriate given, you know, the Hitler stuff.

“I still can’t get over the collection of Nazi memorabilia,” says one person who attended an event at Crow’s home a few years ago and asked to remain anonymous. “It would have been helpful to have someone explain the significance of all the items. Without that context, you sort of just gasp when you walk into the room.” One memorable aspect was the paintings: “something done by George W. Bush next to a Norman Rockwell next to one by Hitler.” They also said it was “startling” and “strange” to see the dictator sculptures in the backyard.

Norman Rockwell was, by all accounts, a pretty decent bloke, and it's a travesty that his work is hanging next to the amateur art from those two war criminals.

And then there is brother, the equally undeservedly wealthy Trammell Crow, Jr., who apparently hangs out with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, and has been credibly accused of throwing sex parties and engaging in human trafficking like Jeffrey Epstien.

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

A billionaire Texan property tycoon linked to the Duchess of York has been accused of financing a sex-trafficking ring in the US.

Trammell Crow Jr, who Sarah Ferguson has reportedly struck up a friendship with, has been named in a lawsuit by two women who claim he financed a sex and labour trafficking venture.

………

Mr Crow inherited his large fortune from his father Fred Trammell Crow, once known as America’s biggest landlord and a major Republican donor.

He reportedly struck up an unlikely friendship with the Duchess over their “shared interest in environmental issues".

It has since emerged that Mr Crow is facing a lawsuit from two women who claim they were sexually abused in a trafficking venture for which he provided the “essential financial assistance”.

Mr Crow's lawyer, Ken C Stone, said the accusations were “absurd and blatantly false”.

It is another embarrassing episode for the Duke and Duchess of York, following Prince Andrew’s settlement over sex abuse claims last year.

………

The lawsuit, filed in California last November, names Mr Crow “and at least eight other prominent Texas businessmen” in the venture.

The filing claims the trafficking venture made one of the women became "a virtual long-term sex slave" and claims another of the women was also beaten and raped.

The trafficking ring utilised doctors, a police officer and others to keep the women drugged and become “an illegal racketeering enterprise”, the lawsuit claims.

It claims Mr Crow was involved at the very start of the trafficking ring in 2010, and knew “all the details of the force, fraud, threat, and coercion... and without him the venture never could have succeeded”.

I know that this is going to get weirder and more twisted, but I also know that it will be something beyond my capability to imagine, see this New York Post (Yes, I know) story from 2016 where an old girl friend described him as, "A manscaping maven with an impeccable scent during their ménage-à-trois days." 

I'm not sorry about sharing that with you.  If I had to see this, you had to see this.

If people are serious about investigating, I expect to see some sh%$ come down the line that makes this look like Mr. Rogers neighborhood.

Well, Well, Well

It looks like Egypt was making plans to supply rockets to Russia.

It appears taht they were considering selling Sakr 45 rockets, which are compatible with the 122mm BM-21 Grad missile launcher. 

Egypt is denying these reports, and the source of these reports are the leaked files that showed up on Discord a while back, which the US is treating as an actual leak of classified information, so it seems that the credibility seems decent.

The question, of course, is why Egypt would take such a step when it has remained steadfastly neutral.

It's probably not money, an unguided Grad is rumored to cost about $1,000.00 on the open market, so the sale of 40,000 missiles would likely result in sales of only $40 million. (The roughly equivalent unguided M-26 for the MLRS costs about $40,000.00 each)

My guess would be that this was some sort of wheat deal, because the Egyptians are very well aware of the effects of food shortages and price hikes on political stability in the region. (The 2011 Egyptian revolution that turfed out Hosni Mubarak was largely driven by skyrocketing food prices).

President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi of Egypt, one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East and a major recipient of U.S. aid, recently ordered subordinates to produce up to 40,000 rockets to be covertly shipped to Russia, according to a leaked U.S. intelligence document.

A portion of a top secret document, dated Feb. 17, summarizes purported conversations between Sisi and senior Egyptian military officials and also references plans to supply Russia with artillery rounds and gunpowder. In the document, Sisi instructs the officials to keep the production and shipment of the rockets secret “to avoid problems with the West.”

The Washington Post obtained the document from a trove of images of classified files posted in February and March on Discord, a chat app popular with gamers. The document has not been previously reported.

………

In response to questions regarding the document and the veracity of the conversations it describes, Ambassador Ahmed Abu Zeid, spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, said that “Egypt’s position from the beginning is based on noninvolvement in this crisis and committing to maintain equal distance with both sides, while affirming Egypt’s support to the U.N. charter and international law in the U.N. General Assembly resolutions.”

………

A U.S. government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address sensitive information, said: “We are not aware of any execution of that plan,” referring to the rocket export initiative. “We have not seen that happen,” the official added.

Moscow and Cairo have inked several significant deals recently, including an agreement this year for Russia to build a massive railway workshop in Egypt. Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic energy corporation, also began construction last year on Egypt’s first nuclear power plant.

Perhaps most importantly, after the war in Ukraine disrupted access to Ukrainian wheat, Cairo began relying heavily on purchases of Russian grain. The arrangement has helped Egypt avoid wheat shortages that could spark social unrest in a country where poverty is widespread and bread is served with nearly every meal. Egypt is eager to avoid an uprising at home, where an acute economic crisis, including a devalued currency, high inflation and soaring food prices — fueled in part by the war in Ukraine — are stirring up frustrations among civilians.

Assuming that the Discord leaks are real,, this would imply a strategic advantage that Russia has over the west, as hard as it is to believe, the fact that they are an agricultural powerhouse.  (Yes, this is a complete mind-f%$#, but Russia supplies about ¼ of the world's export market for grains.)

It could also be that this is some sort of counter-intelligence operation by the US intended to push Egypt away from Russia, or it could Egyptian disinformation that was fed to western intelligence agencies to mitigate suggested aid cuts to Egypt in response to El-Sisi's abysmal human rights record.

This all is a f%$#ing hall of mirrors, and about the only thing that is certain is that professional liars are involved.

Of Course It Did

A truck carrying contaminated soil from the site of the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment has overturned in Columbiana County, Ohio, because you know that whatever remediation that Norfolk Southern planned, they would do it on the cheap:

A truck carrying toxic soil from the East Palestine train derailment site overturned just before 1 p.m. Monday in Columbiana County.

According to the Ohio State Highway Patrol, a commercial vehicle hauling 40,000 pounds of contaminated soil from the train derailment site was involved in a crash on state Route 165 near Waterford Road.

The driver was 74-year-old Phillip Falck, of McDonald, Pennsylvania. He suffered minor injuries from the crash and was cited for operating a vehicle without reasonable control.

The northbound tractor-trailer traveled off the right side of the roadway, hit a ditch and utility pole and overturned onto its right side. Highway Patrol estimates that approximately 20,000 pounds of soil spilled onto the roadway and berm.

Only one driver, it seems, and a fairly old one (נישט אזוי אלט) at that.

You can be sure that NS looked far and wide for the absolutely cheapest carrier without regard to safety, because that's what they do with their railroad as well.

Justin the Nick of Time

Gloria Johnson speaking truth to power.

4 days ago, Tennesee State House members Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were expelled from the  the Tennessee State House for participating in a gun protest at the Tennessee Capitol.

A third lawmaker, Gloria Johnson, who is neither a man nor Black, was not expelled by 1 vote, and when asked why she was not expelled, observed that, "Might have to do with the color of my skin."  (True dat)

Meanwhile, Justin Jones has been selected to replace Justin Jones by the a unanimous vote of the Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County.

This is despite the fact that senior Republicans in the legislature threatened to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for Nashville if they reinstated them.

Given the laws as I understand them here, and I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit,* threatening retaliation for the lawful exercise of power by the Council, probably State House Speaker Cameron Sexton or his Evil Minions™, would be a criminal act.

It appears that the Shelby County Council (Memphis) is poised to reinstate Justin Pearson in the next few days.

Meanwhile, it appears that a number of mrdia outlets are taking a deep dive on Speaker Sexton because of his recent notoriety, and, as often happens when large numbers of journalists decide to get up in someone's business, some interesting things have been discovered, such as his residence being falsified to run in his distract and potential misappropriation of state funds:

Last week, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) led the charge to expel two members of the Tennessee House, Justin Jones (D) and Justin Pearson (D). Jones and Pearson were expelled for expressing solidarity with protesters in the House gallery who were calling on the legislature to take action after a mass shooting left six people, including three children, dead. (Sexton also voted to expel Representative Gloria Johnson (D), but she retained her seat.) According to Sexton, Jones and Pearson were expelled for breaking "several rules of decorum and procedure" by speaking from the floor without being recognized. No one in the history of the Tennessee legislature has ever been expelled for a procedural violation.

But while Sexton is imposing draconian punishment for technical violations of procedural rules, an investigation by Popular Information reveals that Sexton may be in violation of the fundamental rules of the legislature prescribed in the Tennessee State Constitution. Specifically, Article II, Section 5a of the Tennessee State Constitution states: "Each district shall be represented by a qualified voter of that district."

Sexton represents the 25th district, a community located about 115 miles east of Nashville. It is a deep red district, and in 2022, Sexton won reelection with more than 82% of the vote. There is evidence, however, that Sexton is not a qualified voter of the 25th district.

On his official website, Sexton lists his address in Crossville as 186 Homestead Drive, a more than 4,000 sq foot, four-bedroom home that sits on more than an acre of land. But, according to property records, Sexton sold that house in October 2020 for $420,000. Sexton then purchased a much smaller, 1200 sq foot, two-bedroom condo in a nearby retirement community. Sexton listed that condo as his residence when he filed to run for reelection in 2022.

………

While the evidence suggests that Sexton lives in the Nashville area, Sexton still collects tens of thousands of dollars from Tennessee taxpayers based on the premise that he is a full-time resident of Crossville.

Under Tennessee law, during the legislative session, all members receive a per diem expense "for meals and incidentals equal to the allowance granted federal employees for such expenses in the Nashville area." In 2022, that was around $79 per day. But members who live more than 50 miles outside of Nashville are entitled to a much larger per diem, $313 in 2022, to cover the cost of lodging in Nashville. These per diems are also available when the legislature is out of session if a member has to travel to Nashville to conduct official business.

Sexton has taken the larger per diem, which is pegged to the cost of a hotel room in Nashville. On the form, Sexton claims a roundtrip commute of 236 miles. During the 2022 legislative session alone, he billed taxpayers $19,093.

As some random dude said a few years back, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," though honestly I prefer the expression, "F%$# around and find out."

Tennessee House Speaker Sexton has F%$#ed around, and he is about to find out.

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

NI Bheidh a Leithead Aris Ann, We Shall Not See His like Again

Al Jaffee, the creator of the Mad Magazine fold-in and Reuben Award winning cartoonist, has died at 102.

Not only is a bummer, I remember my days as a pre-adolescent reading and enjoying the publication, but I also think that it was a not so subtle incitement to a subversive way of thinking.

Oddly enough, the fold-ins were arguably one of the most straightforward bits of advocacy in the magazine.

I'm probably dating myself, but it's not like anyone else will:

Al Jaffee, a cartoonist who folded in when the trend in magazine publishing was to fold out, thereby creating one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable and enduring features, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 102.

His death, at a hospital, was caused by multi-system organ failure, his granddaughter Fani Thomson said.

It was in 1964 that Mr. Jaffee created the Mad Fold-In, an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message.

For instance, the fold-in from the November 2001 issue asked, “What mind-altering experience is leaving more and more people out of touch with reality?” The unfolded illustration showed a crowd of people popping and snorting various substances. But when folded, the image transformed into the Fox News anchor desk. 

Jaffee, and William Gaines, and the rest of that scurvy lot, managed to make subversion entertaining, as opposed to today's so-called subversion who seem to think that subversion is just theater.

Thomas and Tennessee

 I'll be getting to them, but Passover has kind of gotten in the way, and now I have two remarkably involved sh%$ shows to describe and opine on, and so it won't be tonight.

Bigotry Is as Bigotry Does, FAFO Edition

Yeshiva University banned an  L.G.B.T.Q. club at the school.

When they were told that they could not do this as a school that received (lots of) public funding, they decided that they were not a school, but a religious institution, so now some in the legislature are suggesting that they should return the $230,000,000.00 in public money that they have received over the years, because they would not be entitled to those funds as a religious institution.

It looks like we have a classic case of F%$#ed Around and Found Out.

It's clear that much of their operations are not religious in nature, the Cardozo School of Law, the Sy Syms School of Business, and the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, are examples.

They could, of course spin off the Seminary, and make sure that they are not operating out of facilities operated with state funds, but I don't expect to see that happen:

A state inspector has been asked to review whether Yeshiva University, which is in a court battle with a group of L.G.B.T.Q. students over whether it must recognize their campus club, should have received $230 million in taxpayer funds after the university has said that it is a religious institution.

The referral could lead to a significant escalation in a complex case in which the university has argued in court that it is a Modern Orthodox Jewish religious institution, which would exempt it from anti-discrimination laws and allow it to reject the club. Before the 2021 lawsuit, Yeshiva described itself as an educational institution, which made it eligible for taxpayer funds but obliged it to follow city and state nondiscrimination laws.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers said the university’s legal argument raised alarm bells because it had for decades accepted public funds to pay for the construction and renovation of its facilities. The lawmakers accused Yeshiva of misrepresenting itself to obtain at least $230 million and asked the university to provide a full account within 30 days of how it had spent those funds.

Yeshiva declined to do so, said Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the chairman of the State Senate Judiciary Committee. In a letter sent last week, he asked the New York State inspector general, Lucy Lang, to investigate whether the university had misled the government “to qualify for low-cost, tax-exempt bond financing.”

The college’s “discriminatory behavior and claimed status appear to be at odds with the statements Y.U. made to obtain state bond financing,” Mr. Hoylman-Sigal said in the letter. David King, a spokesman for the inspector general’s office, said on Thursday that it had received the referral and would review it.

In an interview, Mr. Hoylman-Sigal said, “Regardless of anyone’s motives, misrepresentation to procure public money is dishonest and could potentially violate state law.”

………

The central question in the legal dispute involving Yeshiva is whether it should be considered an educational corporation that is governed by state education law, which is what it says in the university charter, or whether it should be granted the First Amendment protections of a religious corporation, which is what the university has argued in court.

Judges have so far rejected the university’s argument.

In a ruling against Yeshiva last June, Justice Lynn R. Kotler of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan pointed to the university’s charter, which describes it as “an educational corporation under the education law of the State of New York” that was “organized and operated exclusively for educational purposes.”

After that ruling, Yeshiva made an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has taken a broad view of religious liberty in recent years and almost never ruled against a religious freedom claimant since Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the bench in 2020.

But the high court rejected Yeshiva’s request last year. It ordered the university to recognize the club, known as the Pride Alliance, and to exhaust its appeals at the state level.

Of course the Supreme Court rejected Y.U.'s request.  When they talk about religious freedom, it only applies to Christians, silly.

………

If Yeshiva succeeds at being recognized as a religious institution, more legally akin to a seminary than to a college, that would raise a tricky new question: What should be done about the large amount of public money it has received in recent years?

In his letter to the inspector general on Monday, Mr. Hoylman-Sigal said lawmakers’ concerns centered on at least three separate instances in 2009, 2011 and 2022 when the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York issued bonds on behalf of Yeshiva to raise money for construction projects.

The Dormitory Authority is a public finance and construction agency that works with health care and education institutions across the state. The authority has a long history of working with religiously affiliated colleges, said Jeffrey Gordon, an authority spokesman, but not religious institutions like Catholic seminaries.

Brad Hoylman-Sigal is both gay and Jewish, but this straight Jew agrees with him as well.

This level of blatant hypocrisy is not a good look for the University.

Changing Times

The Maryland legislature has passed a bill allowing the state Attorney General to prosecute police brutality.

Given that local States Attornies are loath to prosecute even the most egregious police misconduct, and when they have no alternative but prosecution, they try to lose the case, because they do not want to go up against the local police unions, this is a welcome development.

The Maryland House of Delegates voted Thursday to give final approval to legislation that will authorize the state’s Attorney General’s Office to prosecute police for unjustly killing or seriously injuring civilians.

Senate Bill 280, sponsored by Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee Chair Will Smith, passed on a vote of 99-37. Because it was not amended in the House chamber, it does not need final approval from the Senate before it is signed into law by Gov. Wes Moore.

The bill builds on 2021 police reform legislation tasking the Independent Investigations Division of the Attorney General’s Office with the responsibility of investigating circumstances where excessive force was potentially exerted by law enforcement.

Under current law, local state’s attorneys decide if officers should be prosecuted after they receive the attorney general report.

House Republicans didn’t pass Smith’s legislation without a fight, lobbing four amendments at the bill. They all failed.

………

[House Judiciary Committee Chair Luke] Clippinger explained that the legislation “takes the next step” to ensure prosecution after the “extensive debates” the General Assembly had regarding police accountability and reform in 2021. The House Chair also argued that giving current Attorney General Anthony Brown the power to pursue these cases — as Marylanders trust him to do with Medicaid fraud and environmental and organized crime — would remove doubt or bias in prosecutorial decisions because the attorney general is elected statewide and his office is an independent agency.

This would never have happened before the George Floyd protests.

There is an increasing recognition by society, and by the political establishment, that when police are allowed to act without restraint, abuse is the inevitable result.

Jon Stewart Gives a Good Interview

This Might be a self-own,
with an assist from Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart interviewed Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks about defense spending, and he completely destroyed her.

To be fair, this was not a particularly hostile interview, and but Stewart did his homework, and when Hicks refused to move from her talking points, she looked evasive and (quite frankly) delusional.

Stewart understood the reality, that our defense establishment is bloated and dysfunctional, and likely corrupt, and Hicks, a dutiful member of the Military Industrial Complex, is unwilling, or perhaps (more disturbing) unable to even concede the problems.

Entertainer Jon Stewart ripped military spending as out-of-control and unfocused during a wide-ranging interview with the Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks on Thursday, saying that more needs to be done to get money to troops and families instead of defense contractors.

“We got out of 20 years of war and the Pentagon got a raise,” Stewart said during remarks at the War Horse Symposium in Chicago on Thursday. “I can’t figure out how $850 billion to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps. To me, that’s f%$#ing corruption.”

(%$# mine) 

She also made the argument that the fact that the DoD has been unable to conduct an audit successfully is not an indication of a corruption problem.

The is a classic Jon Stewart interview, allowing his target to self-immolate.

More importantly, it is a an indictment of the defense establishment.

Tweet of the Day

Elon’s pettiness is boundless.

Searching Twitter for the word “substack” now returns search results for the word “newsletter.”

Elon is as big an asshole as I’ve ever come across in my life.

And I’m a Trump biographer. pic.twitter.com/xgQOzXk1XJ

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) April 8, 2023

This is literally mind boggling.

Mr. Abramson wrote Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America in 2018.

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

Not a likely platform

It looks like the earlier suggestion that some random Ukrainian group blew up the Nord Stream pipelines from using a rented yacht is being dropped, not the least of this is because the boat is not large enough to accommodate a full setup for deep diving, nearly a ton of explosives and related equipment, a decompression chamber, and related support equipment.

At the very least, the whole, "Rented Yacht," thing is now being dismissed, even though there are reports that explosive residues were found on board.

It appears that the investigators were thinking that those residues were an attempt to throw off investigators.

After saboteurs severely damaged the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines last September, German officials zeroed in on a rented sailboat that appeared to have taken part in planting explosive devices deep below the surface of the Baltic Sea.

But after months of investigation, law enforcement officials now suspect that the 50-foot yacht, the Andromeda, was probably not the only vessel used in the audacious attack. They also say the boat may have been a decoy, put to sea to distract from the true perpetrators, who remain at large, according to officials with knowledge of an investigation led by Germany’s attorney general. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details about the active inquiry, including doubts about the Andromeda’s role that haven’t been previously reported.

Officials hope that the true purpose of Andromeda in the deep-sea demolition will provide further insight in a high-stakes, international whodunnit that could eventually lead to those responsible and explain their motives, which remain unclear.

……….

Such an operation would have taken multiple dives, exposing the Andromeda to detection from nearby ships. The mission would have been easier to hide and pull off using remotely piloted underwater vehicles or small submarines, said diving and salvage experts who have worked in the area of the explosion, which features rough seas and heavy shipping traffic.

The German investigation has determined that traces of “military-grade” explosives found on a table inside the boat’s cabin match the batch of explosives used on the pipeline. Several officials doubted that skilled saboteurs would leave such glaring evidence of their guilt behind. They wonder if the explosive traces — collected months after the rented boat was returned to its owners — were meant to falsely lead investigators to the Andromeda as the vessel used in the attack.

“The question is whether the story with the sailboat is something to distract or only part of the picture,” said one person with knowledge of the investigation.

They found residues on the table?  They were making bombs with over 100kg of explosives on the dining room table of a yacht? Seriously?

If they were making, or assembling, bombs on the boat, residues would be everywhere, and if they were simply transporting the bombs, the residue would be nowhere.

No wonder investigators are skeptical.

………

The German investigation has linked the yacht rental to a Polish company, which is in turn owned by a European company that’s connected to a prominent Ukrainian, fueling speculation from Berlin to Warsaw to Kyiv that a deep-pocketed partisan may have financed the operation. The identity of the Polish company and the Ukrainian individual, as well as his potential motive, remains unclear.

………

Suspicion also has turned toward Ukraine as the culprit behind the Nord Stream bombings, based in part on intercepted communications of pro-Ukraine individuals discussing the possibility of carrying out an attack on the pipelines before the explosions, The Washington Post previously reported.

Only the Ukraine lacked the means to conduct such an operation.  Even if they found a way to transport their divers to the Baltic Sea with the requisite deep diving experience, they would have had deep sea experience in the far warmer, and far more docile, Black Sea, and so the entire team would have needed weeks or months of training. 

They might possibly have been able to hire people able to do this, but not without the knowledge and tacit assent of the United States, particularly given the economic reporting that would doubtless have to be otherwise made in order to comply with US sanctions.

………

For all the intrigue around who bombed the pipeline, some Western officials are not so eager to find out.

At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm, said one senior European diplomat: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” Leaders see little benefit from digging too deeply and finding an uncomfortable answer, the diplomat said, echoing sentiments of several peers in other countries who said they would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.

This level of diplomatic omerta is not about the Ukraine, who would continue to get support if they were found to be culpable, or the Poles, who are generally viewed with alarm by the other members of NATO.

Said diplomats are concerned that a serious investigation would point to the United States or the UK, and if that were the case, the repercussion would likely shatter the increasingly fragile consensus on the Ukraine war.

This is not evidence that the US or UK were involved, after all, the CIA was not involved in the JFK assassination, but they spent months worrying that someone that they supported was involved, but it says a lot about the current state of mind within the alliance.

The Fed Is Getting the Recession It So Desperately Wants

First, I want to note that the Department of Labor has come to my way of thinking, and modified their seasonal adjustments, with the result that the March 30 initial claims number was revised up significantly, from 198,000 to 246,000. and this weeks initial unemployment claims "fell" to 228,000.

The number of Americans applying for jobless benefits has topped 200,000 for nine weeks in a row and looks worse than previously reported, based on a change in how the government adjusts for seasonal swings in employment.

The newly revised data suggest the labor market has softened more than it had appeared.

In the seven days ending April 1, new jobless claims totaled 228,000.

That’s down from a revised 246,000 in the prior week. However, two weeks ago, the government had estimated just 198,000 new claims for that week.

The large 48,000 upward revision for the week of March 25 is one of many such instances in the jobless-claims data going back several years.

………

The changes in the jobless-claims formula do not affect the monthly employment report that comes out Friday. The government uses a different process to adjust those figures, and that has already been updated.

Key details: The Bureau of Labor Statistics changed how it adjusts jobless claims for seasonal swings after the pandemic because of the large distortions that caused.

Now the government has adopted a somewhat different process to try to make the adjustments more accurate. As a result, many claims reports over the past several past years have been heavily revised.

“In my nearly 30 years of tracking these unemployment insurance data, I can never remember an annual seasonal factor revision like this,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist of Santander U.S. Capital Markets.

(emphasis mine)

I think that the DoL is still trying to figure out how Covid is effecting the workforce, and given the rate of reinfection, and the rate of long Covid continuing to increase, this will likely be a moving target.

Meanwhile, the unemployment numbers for March show a slow-down in hiring, with 236,000 added to the non-farm payrolls, and the unemployment rate dropping by ⅒% to 3.5%.

The red-hot labor market cooled some in March, with hiring gains moderating and wage growth easing as more workers sought jobs.

Employers added 236,000 workers last month, a historically strong gain but the smallest in more than two years, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5%.

More Americans jumped into the labor market in March, helping take pressure off wage increases. Average hourly earnings rose 4.2% last month from a year earlier, the smallest annual gain since mid-2021 when inflation was surging.

Steady hiring growth last month could keep the Federal Reserve on track to consider raising interest rates again at its meeting in early May. But slower wage gains could also allow officials to hint at a pause after that. Fed officials have signaled they will pay close attention to other measures of economic activity including bank lending conditions as they debate their next move.

Bond yields and stock futures rose after the jobs report. The stock market was closed for Good Friday, and bond and futures markets closed early.

The March jobs numbers add to others indicating the U.S. economy has slowed after showing surprising strength at the start of the year. Consumer spending—the primary driver of growth—also rose more modestly in February and still-high inflation ebbed.

As to inflation, there are indications that inflation is already down, and we are seeing the tail effects of earlier inflation:

Slowing wage growth during the first quarter could comfort Fed officials who have worried that strong earnings gains would fuel continued inflation above the central bank’s 2% target. The personal consumption-expenditures price index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, rose 5% in February from a year earlier, down from a June 2022 peak of 7%.

Overall private-sector wage growth has been slowing broadly. Average hourly earnings on a three-month annualized basis returned to prepandemic levels, rising 3.2% in March and down from 4.9% in December.

Inflation is clearly coming down, and the Fed has already overshot, but they will continue.

I Have Had It with These Motherf%$#ing Snakes on This Motherf%$#ing Plane!

So, on an otherwise ordinary private plane flight, a pilot was confronted by a very pissed-off cobra mid-flight.

Needless to say, the pilot had exactly the same thought that I did:

A South African pilot is being hailed as a hero this week after he unexpectedly came face-to-face with a venomous snake 11,000 feet in the air.

The pilot, Rudolf Erasmus, 30, laughed about the incident in an interview on Friday, but he and his four passengers, all colleagues, were not hurling any “Snakes on a Plane” jokes on Monday, when he noticed a Cape Cobra, one of South Africa’s most dangerous snakes, slithering around the cockpit.

The group was on the second leg of its journey from the Western Cape to Mbombela, in the eastern region of the country, when Mr. Erasmus, a pilot for an engineer consulting company, felt something unusual. “I felt this cold sensation that was underneath my shirt, underneath where the hip area is,” he said.

He initially thought his water bottle was leaking. As he turned to the left, he saw the head of the snake under his feet. He estimated it to be between four and five feet long.

“I had a moment of stunned silence, like a moment of disbelief,” he said. “It’s as if my brain didn’t register what was going on.”

………

Cape Cobras typically live in the Cape provinces of South Africa, but are also found in southern Botswana and Namibia, according to the African Snakebite Institute. A bite from this snake, which comes in a range of colors and can grow to more than seven feet in length, can cause progressive weakness, issues with the respiratory system and even death. Most snakebite deaths in the southern portion of Africa come from Cape Cobras and Black Mambas, the institute said.

On the plane, Mr. Erasmus was considering what to do next. He was scared that the snake would slip through to the back of the cabin and cause panic among the passengers. Knowing that, he spoke over headsets to say that there was an uninvited guest onboard.

“No one was panicking or getting hysterical about the snake,” he said. “And there was a moment of silence in the cabin. You could hear a needle drop.”

It didn’t take long for Mr. Erasmus to make arrangements to land at the nearest airport. “That was definitely the longest 10, 15 minutes of my life,” he said.

………

“As I was standing on the wing, I moved the seat forward a little bit, and I saw this snake curled up in a nice little bundle underneath my seat,” he said.

 In case you are wondering, the only reason to watch the Snakes on a Plane is to hear Samuel L. Jackson say the quote in the title.

Tweet of the Day

Elon’s pettiness is boundless.

Searching Twitter for the word “substack” now returns search results for the word “newsletter.”

Elon is as big an asshole as I’ve ever come across in my life.

And I’m a Trump biographer. pic.twitter.com/xgQOzXk1XJ

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) April 8, 2023

This is a pretty remarkable statement.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!

And we have the 3rd credit union failure of the year, actually a forced merger with NCUA assistance, Richmond City Employees Federal Credit Union of Richmond, Indiana with the Kemba Credit Union, of West Chester, Ohio on April 3.

This follows the credit union being placed into conservatorship in December.

It's kind of a judgement call, but I'm counting it.

Here is the Full NCUA list, and here is the direct link for this year.

Baltimore Burns ……… In Hell!

Not all of Baltimore should burn in hell, just senior officials of the Baltimore archdiocese, who covered up the abuse of hundreds of children over more than 80 years.

I get that the Catholic Church, particularly in the western world, has trouble recruiting enough priests, but they need to be more selective in who they ordain as priests.

A four-year investigation of Baltimore’s Catholic archdiocese reveals the scope of 80 years of child sex abuse and torture and how church officials often covered it up and, in some cases, paved the way for further abuse.

Among the accounts: A deacon who admitted abusing more than 100 children. A priest who chained and whipped boys for his gratification. Another priest who, after receiving psychiatric treatment, went on to abuse 20 students at a Baltimore boys’ school.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office released Wednesday its “Report on Child Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.” Its nearly 500 pages tell how 156 clergy and other Church officials tormented more than 600 children and young adults, dating back to the 1940s. The Baltimore archdiocese covers Baltimore City and nine counties in Central and Western Maryland.

Spurred by the report’s publication, the General Assembly sent a bill Wednesday to Democratic Gov. Wes Moore’s desk that would make it easier for survivors to sue the institutions that employed their abusers.

The report names at least 36 abusers who are not listed on the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s online list of 152 priests and brothers credibly accused of abuse. Ten more abusers’ names were redacted. Other diocesan officials’ identities are redacted also, and the Catholic Church paid at least some of the legal costs for a group of people who sought to have their names shielded.

 So even in the midst of all of this, the Church is still covering up.

………

Victims lobbied the attorney general’s office to start the investigation, particularly after the Pennsylvania attorney general produced a similar report in 2018. Then-Attorney General Brian Frosh, a Democrat, launched Maryland’s probe shortly thereafter. Investigators interviewed hundreds of survivors and pored over hundreds of thousands of church documents.

The abuse’s breadth and depravity is “astonishing,” the report’s authors wrote.

………

Going beyond the horror of the individual cases, the report reveals the extent of the Catholic Church’s efforts to conceal the depravity within its ranks.

“The staggering pervasiveness of the abuse itself underscores the culpability of the Church hierarchy,” the authors wrote.

………

The report called for the state legislature to amend Maryland’s civil statute of limitations for child sex abuse. Just 40 minutes after its release, the Senate passed the Child Victims Act, which would remove the statute of limitations on such lawsuits. Moore vowed to sign it.

The Maryland Catholic Conference, which represents all three dioceses operating in the state, opposed the bill at every turn and is expected to challenge it in court.

The tactics of the Maryland dioceses does not indicate to me any evidence of honest contrition, much less atonement.

It makes me nostalgic for the Borgia Popes.

Baltimore Burns

Big fire


REALLY big fire


Complete with water drops


Soldiers Delight is a unique and beautiful place. Visit it if you can, when it reopens.

We just had a 700 acre brush fire in Baltimore County, a few miles from our home.

It never came anywhere near our house, though there were some concerns because it was very near the shop where Sharon's* car was being serviced. (Car and shop are fine too) 

29 homes were evacuated.

There is an interesting side note to all of this, this occurred in and around the Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area, which has some unique geography, flora, and fauna.

The area has been shrinking for decades, because it is, much like many places in California, Soldiers Delight is a fire sculpted ecosystem, and years of fire suppression have led to changes, including the increases presence of invasive species.

The area may experience a significant recovery as a result of the fire.

That being said, if I had wanted to live in California, I would have moved there, thank you very much.

The Maryland Forest Service is investigating the cause of a Tuesday brush fire in Reisterstown and Owings Mills that quickly sparked into the largest fire in Baltimore County’s recent memory.

Firefighters from across the state responded to the 700-acre wildfire and successfully prevented the flames from damaging any homes.

………

The eight-alarm fire, which started after 3 p.m. in the 5100 block of Deer Park Road and spread into the Soldiers Delight Natural Environment area, drew over 200 personnel — the largest response in the county since a major fire at a propane facility in the 1970s, according to Baltimore County spokesperson Elise Armacost.

The Maryland Forest Service says it responds to an average of 123 wildfires that burn more than 1,780 acres of forest, brush and grass each year.

This year, BWI Marshall Airport has measured 5.7 inches of rain compared to an average of 10.5 inches. Wagner said the state is at risk of seeing more brush fires until significant rainfalls.

Wednesday morning, Maryland National Guard helicopters carrying 250-gallon balloons of water were still dousing hot spots around Soldiers Delights and sparse surrounding neighborhoods where 29 homes were evacuated.

We have had no meaningful snow this year, even while New England got repeatedly hit by blizzards.

I'm going to give anthropogenic climate change credit for the assist here.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

There Were Elections Last Night

And the good buys won in both cases.

In what is arguably the more important election, Janet Protasiewicz beat Australopithecus Dan Kelly for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, giving the court a liberal majority for the first time in 15 years.

It wasn't just a victory, it was a blow-out, with Protasiewicz (this name is gonna kill me) beating the extreme right winger Kelly by 11 points. (Which was followed by a concession speech from Kelly that made Donald Trump look like a gracous loser.)

The Wisconsin Supreme Court election was a huge win for liberals, not only because they will have gained a majority on the court, but also because Justice-elect Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative Dan Kelly by an astonishing 11 points.

While Protasiewcz broke new ground Tuesday, gaining a court majority for the first time since 2008 in a record-turnout election for non-presidential years, Kelly landed in familiar terrain: He lost by 10.5 points in the 2020 Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

Protasiewicz’s victory came after conservatives aired concerns about Kelly’s rhetoric, saying his focus on defending the Constitution wasn’t resonating with voters nearly as much as Protasiewicz’s focus on abortion. Kelly pivoted his strategy toward the end of the race, seeking to portray Protasiewicz as soft on crime, but Tuesday’s results showed that his new message didn’t have its intended effect.

That's because Protasiewcz ran on an issue that voters knew that she will deliver on, protecting abortion rights, and Kelly ran on "The Constitution" which means nothing.

Hopefully, the new liberal majority on the court will take a critical view of the various actions taken by the legislator to keep minorities from voting.

And then there is Chicago, where Brandon Johnson defeated Paul Vallas in the race for mayor.

In this case, it's clear that Chicagoans were not interested in the Wall Street lackeys who had preceded him, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and Lori Lightfoot.

Vallas was very much in that mold, and additionally, he was a hatchet-man for Rahm Emanuel as schools chief, where he aggressively closed community schools in Black and Hispanic areas, and funneled money to Wall Street backed charters in whiter neighborhoods.

Despite a lot of money from big business, Johnson won by 1.8 points.

Brandon Johnson defeated Paul Vallas in Tuesday’s election to become the next mayor of Chicago, a stunning rebuke of the political establishment by the unapologetically progressive Cook County commissioner whose campaign themes of racial justice and uplifting the working class caught fire.

………

Johnson, a 47-year-old longtime Chicago Teachers Union leader, announced his candidacy for mayor in October by the Jenner Academy school building, where he started his career in education at the mostly Black elementary school that had served children who lived in the Cabrini-Green public housing complex next door.

His position as a CTU leader was important, because the union went up against Rahm Emanuel, and his political machine, and won.

………

CTU President Stacy Davis Gates often invoked the Chicago Board of Education vote to close 50 schools in 2013 as a pivotal moment for the city’s progressive movement. Her predecessor, late President Karen Lewis, declared that they needed to shift the political landscape to influence decisions from City Hall, setting a string of events in motion that culminated with Johnson’s election.

Despite formidable progressive labor support, Johnson entered the race as an underdog and was polling as low as 3% in December. Vallas emerged as the top vote-getter in the city’s Feb. 28 election after focusing on crime and public safety in a divided nine-candidate field where he was also the only white hopeful.

In February’s first round, Vallas won 33% of the vote to Johnson’s 22%, while Mayor Lori Lightfoot only received 17% of the vote en route to the first reelection defeat of a Chicago mayor since Jane Byrne lost her bid for a second term in 1983. So began a runoff campaign in which the two extreme poles of a once-crowded race jockeyed for the middle.

………

Tuesday, with roughly 99% of the city’s precincts reporting, Johnson was ahead with 51% of the unofficial vote to 49% for Vallas, who came close as ever but failed to shake off his history of never winning elected office.

Early returns also showed voter turnout among young adults aged 18 to 24, consistently the most reluctant to cast ballots but likely a core base for Johnson, surged compared to the Feb. 28 election, up 32%. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, that jump was 24%.

This is not a surprise, the young voters know that they will be paying for the sellouts of Vallas and his ilk.  They know that they have 61 years left on a larcenous parking meter deal with private equity signed by Richie Daley, and they were guaranteed that Vallas would do more of the same, because he had already done so with his advocacy of charters

………

As a CTU organizer, Johnson was an instrumental force in crafting the union’s brash political strategy that earned the group a formidable reputation as a progressive powerhouse but also raised criticisms from opponents that Chicago doesn’t need a mayor beholden to CTU. As his candidacy nonetheless gained momentum, eventually propelling him into the runoff, those attacks snowballed with Vallas trying to paint him as too radical.

………

Vallas had reassembled the vestiges of the Daley machine as well as Black establishment Democrats, the business community and labor groups representing first responders and the trades in propelling his candidacy as one that he signified would steer the city back to its former glory. 

As I noted above, people are sick of the, "Daley machine as well as Black establishment Democrats."

In the old days, the machine would deliver, and get streets fixed and make sure that the garbage was collected, but today, their goal is to privatize, and ensh$#tify these services in order to curry favor with big business.

The political calculus for supporting the Chicago machine simply no longer exists.

Americans Will Use ANYTHING but the Metric System

So, we're doing last minute cleaning for passover, and we do not want to cook in the kitchen that we just cleaned, and it is late, they roll up the sidewalks in Owings Mills at 10 pm, so headed to the Randallstosn IHOP, which is open 24 hours.

Then we saw this sign, and Charlie quoted the meme in the title.

I am not sure what sort of penguin or what sort of dance. 

For an Emperor Penguin, with a height of between 2.4 and 2.9 cubits, it would have to be a slow dance, but for a smaller penguin, they could be tap dancing, and for really small ones, the could be break dancing in this space.

Let's agree not to discuss Lovecraft's giant albino penguin.

I should note at this point that I have this rule, that I never (ever) pass up an opportunity to evoke the works of the great Bernard "Hap" Kliban:

Posted via mobile.

Speaking of Elon

The  U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit just told Elon Musk that he does not get to violate labor laws with impunity.

It appears that threatening employees with the loss of stock options, and firing a labor organizer because he is a labor organizer.

………

A federal administrative law judge ruled against Tesla and Musk in 2019, finding among other things that Musk violated labor law with the tweet. The NLRB affirmed that and most other portions of the judge's ruling in 2021. Tesla challenged in the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which sided with the NLRB in its ruling on Friday:

Tesla first argues that Musk's May 20, 2018, tweet "was not threatening on its face" because the tweet started out by saying that there was "[n]othing stopping" employees from unionizing and it is a strain to characterize "give up stock options for nothing" as a threat, because, unlike the threat of plant closure, compensation is not within the employer's unilateral control once employees unionize and the parties engage in collective bargaining.

However, because stock options are part of Tesla's employees' compensation, and nothing in the tweet suggested that Tesla would be forced to end stock options or that the UAW would be the cause of giving up stock options, substantial evidence supports the NLRB's conclusion that the tweet is as [sic] an implied threat to end stock options as retaliation for unionization. Moreover, the statement in the tweet is materially similar to other statements that the NLRB and our court have found to be threats.

To Elon though, this is probably a cost of business, but this second bit might irritate him.

 ………

As the ruling notes, Tesla challenged "the NLRB's finding that Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted an unlawful threat on Twitter" and "the NLRB's conclusion that employee Richard Ortiz was unlawfully terminated." The appeals court rejected both of Tesla's arguments and granted the NLRB's cross-application for enforcement of its order, which told Musk to delete the tweet and told Tesla to reinstate Ortiz with back pay.

The court also said the NLRB can enforce other portions of the order that weren't challenged in court. The NLRB found Tesla committed several other violations including interfering with employee leafleting, prohibiting employees from distributing union materials without approval and threatening them with discharge, prohibiting employees from communication with the media about their employment, interrogating certain employees about union activity, and disciplining employee Jose Moran for his union activity.

On the Ortiz firing, Tesla argued that it fired him for lying during an investigation into employee misconduct. Ortiz had posted two screenshots of Tesla employee profiles from the Workday application to a private "Tesla Employees for UAW Representation" Facebook page and criticized those employees for testifying in the California Legislature against legislation supported by the union. His post on the Facebook page also accused one of the employees of "kissing ass and ratting on people."

Ortiz later admitted that he lied when he told a Tesla investigator he didn't remember where he got the screenshots, which he had received from Moran. The appeals court found there is substantial evidence supporting the NLRB finding "that Ortiz was fired for lying about protected union activity and not related to his job performance or Tesla's legitimate business interests or workplace rules, and that union animus motivated—at least in part—the complaint, investigation, and decision to terminate Ortiz."

This, and illegal antitrust activities, should be cases where senior executives are frog marched out of their offices in handcuffs.

What's more, the law firms that sell themselves as putting a legal gloss on illegal anti-union tactics, I'm looking at you Jones Day, should be subject to similar sanctions.

Unless and until people are personally liable for breaking the law, or conspiring to break the law, nothing will change.

It Turns Out That Elon Is Not the Biggest Pissant in the World

But only because he does not have the power of the state behind him, as Emmanuel Macron does.

They just arrested a woman in northern France for insulting him on Facebook.

A woman in northern France is to be put on trial on charges of insulting President Emmanuel Macron after describing him as 'filth' in a Facebook post, a prosecutor said on Wednesday. The woman risks a fine of 12,000 euros but not prison if convicted at the trial due to be held in June.

She was arrested on Friday and held in custody for questioning after the state's local administrative office filed a complaint over her Facebook post, the prosecutor in the northern town of Saint Omer, Mehdi Benbouzid, told AFP.

The complaint focused on a post on her Facebook page made on March 21, the day before Macron gave a lunchtime interview to TF1 television to defend his controversial pension reforms that have sparked nationwide protests.

"This piece of filth is going to address you at 1:00 pm... it's always on television that we see this filth," she wrote.

………

She stands accused of "insulting the president of the republic" and will stand trial on June 20 in Saint Omer, the prosecutor said.

"They want to make an example of me," the woman told La Voix du Nord regional newspaper which first reported the accusations.

Emmanuel Macron is a piece of filth.  Period, full stop.

The Application of Classic Literature to Religious Based Barbecue Grill Cleaning

Not my actual grill. My grill is not as nice.

In this instance, I am defining, "Classic Literature," as stuff you were made to read in high school, and not that I necessarily consider said work is a good read.

I want to do some barbecue over Passover, specifically slow smoking.  (This becomes important)

So, I did some online research about how to Kasher a grill.

There are various techniques for making grills kosher:

Method	Definition
Libun Gamur	Heating metal to a glow
Libun Kal	Heating metal above the temperature that will burn paper for at least 40 minutes
Hagola	Purging through immersion in hot water
Iruy Roschin	Purging through a hot water pour
Miluy V’Iruy	Soaking

In the case of a grill, those parts of the grill that are in direct contact with the food must be rendered Libun Gamur, which means either using a torch, or placing the grills in between two layers of coals, and allowing it burn for at least an hour.  

As an alternative, you could replace the actual grills.

Well, I'm not going to grill on my grill, I am going to smoke on my grill, indirect heat, largely from the side smoker box, so I can put these in a pan, as we do with the oven, and it;s fine to kasher the grill with Libun Kal, much in the same way that one would treat your oven for Passover.

So, I just need to heat the grill to the temperature that will burn paper, and hold it for 40 minutes.

Only ……… What is the temperature of burning paper?  I don't know that!

Well ……… I don't know that for every type of paper, but I do know it, for one type of paper, specifically book paper.  It burns at 232.77°C, better known as 451° Fahrenheit, you know like the book by Ray Bradbury.

I am not a big fan of Ray Bradbury, and I hated Fahrenheit 451 when I read it in high school.

I managed to get the temperature over 550°F and hold it there for over an hour, so I am golden, and there is a 3 pound piece of brisket whose fate is sealed.  (Also some chicken, but that's the easy part)

If you think that this kind of a pain in the ass just to smoke some meat on Pesach, you are correct.

To quote Sholom Aleichem, "ס'איז שװער צו זײן א איד". (It's tough to be a Jew)

Tweet of the Day

🚨 BREAKING: JUSTICE DEPARTMENT CONFIRMS THAT TRUMP WILL BE TRIED AS AN ADULT pic.twitter.com/p8WcTe9SPW

— LeGate🤠 (@williamlegate) March 31, 2023

Yuo have just won the internet, my friend.

Well, This Is a F$#@-You

OPEC (Plus) has made a surprise announcement that it will be cutting oil production.

This is certainly a f$#@-you to the United States and the West, and one could argue that this is an attempt to take Russia's side in the Ukraine war, at least a bit.

In any case, with a Presidential election about 18 months away, it is highly likely that it can have a profound effect on  both the economy and the elections:

Saudi Arabia, Russia and their oil-producing allies announced on Sunday that they would cut production by more than 1.2 million barrels of crude a day, or more than 1 percent of world supplies, in an apparent effort to increase prices.

Oil prices soared as markets opened Sunday evening, with both the American and global oil benchmark prices rising by 7 percent.

The production cut was unexpected because leaders of the group, known collectively as OPEC Plus, said in recent days that they did not intend to make changes in their policies. While the announcement was a surprise, its significance may ultimately be slight, especially if the global economy slows.

It's likely that the cuts, and the resulting price increases, will slow the global economy in any case.

………

Still, the OPEC Plus action has symbolic importance at a time when oil prices are a third below where they were immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February. OPEC Plus members may be responding to growing fears of a recession later this year in the wake of the failure of several American and European banks as well as central bankers’ continued efforts to tame inflation. Oil demand has also been undercut by strikes in France, including at refineries.

………

Saudi Arabia and Russia will lead in making the announced cuts, with declines of 500,000 barrels each, followed by Iraq, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Some analysts said the move could spur more investor speculative interest in oil futures and help drive oil prices higher in coming weeks.

I don't think that market fundamentals drove this decision.  I think that it was foreign relations considerations.

Now We Know Why They Did Not Replace Their Chief Risk Officer

It turns out that Silicon Valley Bank changed its risk models when it was found that its risk assessments showed that it was accumulating significant risks.

Unless and until this sort of behavior comes with sanctions against the executives who sign off on such behavior, this will continue.

Arrest and personal liability are required to deter such behavior:

Flush with cash from a booming tech industry, Silicon Valley Bank executives embarked on a strategy in 2020 to juice profits that quickly triggered an internal alarm.

In buying longer-term investments that paid more interest, SVB had fallen out of compliance with a key risk metric. An internal model showed that higher interest rates could have a devastating impact on the bank’s future earnings, according to two former employees familiar with the modeling who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential deliberations.

Instead of heeding that warning — and over the concerns of some staffers — SVB executives simply changed the model’s assumptions, according to the former employees and securities filings. The tweaks, which have not been previously reported, initially predicted that rising interest rates would have minimal impact.

………

On March 8, the bank was forced to raise additional cash by selling securities at a $1.8 billion loss. That touched off panic among SVB clients, who staged one of the biggest bank runs in U.S. history. Fanned by social media, depositors tried to withdraw $42 billion in a single day. The next morning, the bank collapsed and federal regulators took control.

The episode shows that executives knew early on that higher interest rates could jeopardize the bank’s future earnings. Instead of shifting course to mitigate that risk, they doubled down on a strategy to deliver near-term profits, displaying an appetite for risk that set the stage for SVB’s stunning meltdown.

“Management always wanted to tell a growth story,” one former employee involved in the bank’s risk management said. “Every quarter, there was always this pressure to deliver earnings.

Arrest the, fine them, sue them, and ban them from finance for life.

Tweet of the Day

Holy shit. I’ve never heard the psychological effects of Christian theology explained better. pic.twitter.com/jZhwNxhIyp

— Rabbi Mike (@RabbiHarvey) April 2, 2023

One is commanded to, "Love thy neighbor as theyself." (Leviticus 19:18) If this is juxtaposed with a commandment to hate yourself, the end result is not the love of one's neighbor, instead it becomes a justification to hate one's neighbor.

This explains an awful lot.

Yes

In response to West Virginia banning abortions, the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia has purchased a former clinic just outside of Cumberland, Maryland, 3 miles from the border of West Virginia, where it will offer abortions, contraception, other gynecological services, and gender affirming treatments.

Making lemons when life hands you lemonade, and an opportunity to give a f$#@ you to the Talibaptists in West Virginia:

The Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, which will offer abortion care, has purchased property on U.S. Route 220 in Allegany County with plans to open a clinic there by June.

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According to Maryland real estate records, the property was purchased by health center representatives on Feb. 1 for $699,900.

Katie Quinonez, executive director of the Women’s Health Center, said the decision by lawmakers in West Virginia to ban abortion has forced the clinic to relocate.

“West Virginia legislators made it nearly impossible for people in our state to obtain abortion care,” Quinonez said in a news release. “Our communities deserve better — people should be able to access abortion care without delay or barriers.”

The move by Women’s Health Center to locate in Allegany County was discussed at last week’s regular meeting of the Allegany County Board of Commissioners. Cumberland resident Michael Mudge raised concerns and asked about the process for permitting the clinic.

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The Women’s Health Center of Maryland will provide abortion services into the second trimester and will accept Maryland Medicaid, which covers abortion. It will also offer annual exams, contraception, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, breast and cervical cancer screenings, as well as gender-affirming hormone therapy.

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The Women’s Health Center of West Virginia was the only clinic providing abortions in the Mountain State until it was forced to stop in September after state lawmakers passed a ban on the procedure at all stages of pregnancy. 

This is clearly not a best outcome, but it a good way to resist.

The resistance cannot end.  Capitulation should never be an option.

How to Handle These Things

It turns out that there is a flaw in early versions of some of the Creative Commons (CC) series of copyright licenses.

They are to allow content creators to specify the level of sharing possible with a relative fine granularity.

Unfortunately, some of the earlier versions of the license, relatively minor errors in attributions can be construed as terminating the licenses, and some so-called, "Copyleft Trolls," have been exploiting this in order to extort money.

The photograph sharing app Flikr has rolled out a policy that these trolls are to be immediately and permanently banned from the site.

Sic Semper Copyright and Patent Trolls:

Today's a big day for users of Creative Commons images: Flickr has declared zero tolerance for copyleft trolls, predators who exploit a bug in out-of-date versions of the CC licenses in order to threaten good-faith users of CC images who make minor errors in the way they credit the images.

First things first: Flickr's new community guidelines prohibit copyleft trolling: "Failure to allow a good faith reuser the opportunity to correct errors is against the intent of the license and not in line with the values of our community, and can result in your account being removed."

https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines

If you are targeted by a copyleft troll who demands that you pay them because of minor errors in your Creative Commons attribution, here's how to report them and get them kicked off Flickr forever:

https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404057906068-How-to-report-Community-Guidelines-violations

Now, some background. Early versions of the Creative Commons licenses have a bug, a clause that says that the permissions conferred by CC licenses "terminate automatically upon any breach" – that is, if you violate any term of the license, it ceases to be in effect:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299

Core to the CC licenses is the idea of attribution. When you use a Creative Commons image, you must name the creator and link to the original, and name the license and link to it. Many CC users don't understand this; they use an image and add something like "Image: Cory Doctorow/Creative Commons" with no links or specific licenses.

Under the pre-4.0 versions of the license, this can be construed as a "breach" which "terminates" the CC license. That's where the copyleft trolls come in.

Copyleft trolls post CC-licensed stock art and then wait for a naive person to make a minor attribution error, and then they pounce, sending a legal threat and a speculative invoice demanding hundreds or thousands of dollars, under the threat of a $150,000 statutory damages award.

………

But after Flickr was sold to Yahoo, it joined Yahoo's haunted armada of Web 2.0 ghost-ships, tossed back and forth in the storms created by the dueling princelings of Yahoo's bloated management layer, who spent more time sabotaging one another than they did making anything anyone else wanted to use. Yahoo eventually sold off all of those holdings at fire-sale prices to Verizon, who neglected them still further.

An abandoned ship is easy picking for the rats that live in its bilges. Pixsy and its photographers actually became official Flickr partners, pitching themselves as a way for photographers who didn't want their images shared to hunt down infringers – even as they facilitated a revolting campaign of copyleft trolling that depended on Flickr as their base of operations.

The depravity of copyleft trolls is truly boundless. Take Marco Verch, a prolific copyleft troll who hosts nearly 47,000 photos on Flickr. Verch hires low-waged gig work photographers through platforms like Upwork to take photos, then harasses people who make minor attribution errors:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252488167/Automated-image-recognition-How-using-free-photos-on-the-internet-can-lead-to-lawsuits-and-fines

Verch boasts that his predation lets him work for four hours a week, leaving him with ample time to focus on his hobby, running. Verch is a truly prolific predator, and his attacks have made untold numbers of victims miserable – including the small Dutch charity that was forced to shut down after paying his ransom demand. Pixsy has been Verch's US counsel and filed dozens of suits on his behalf.

………

The reason I thought Flickr might take this in hand is that it is finally under decent, responsive leadership – since 2018, Flickr has been owned by Smugmug, a family-owned business that really cares about photographers and the open internet.

Flickr hasn't taken all of my suggestions yet – my understanding is that they are laboring under enormous technological debt thanks to years of neglect by Yahoo and Verizon, and even small changes require weeks of all-hands technological work.

But what they have done is modify their policies to create a de facto CC 4.0 environment for their users, by promising to terminate the accounts of any user who repeatedly threatens legal action over bad attribution strings without first offering a 30-day grace period.

Flickr's done more than that, actually. For one thing, they ditched Pixsy, severing their relationship with the company (Pixsy still lists them on its "partner" page). They also created the Flickr Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to providing long-term, responsible stewardship for their CC and public domain image respositories:

I know that I frequently sound like I am implacably opposed to all forms of exclusive licensing, whether though copyright, patent, or trademark.  I am not.

But I do understand that the current IP regimes have lost their way.  The purpose of Copyright and Patent is public interest, specifically to, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts," while trademark's purpose is primarily to protect consumers from being defrauded.

By elevating limited time exclusive licenses to the level of eternal property without any exception does not serve the public good.

Support Your Local Police

It turns out that the New York Police Department, "Ignored 93 percent of surveillance law rules."

This is not a surprise.  Police will evade and subvert any attempt to constrain their behavior, no matter how outlandish, so efforts must be taken to prevent their actions and to punish those who transgress these rules.

Back in July 2020, then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act into law, which required the New York Police Department to reveal how it uses surveillance technology and to formulate surveillance policies.

The NYPD, however, has rejected 93 percent of the advice from an independent oversight body, the Department of Investigations' (DOI) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the force about how to comply with the law. According to OIG's Ninth Annual Report [PDF], the cop watchdog made 15 recommendations and the NYPD refused to implement 14 of them. 

These include recommendations like identifying the organizations with which NYPD shares surveillance data: "NYPD should identify in each IUP [Impact and Use Policy] each external agency, by name, with which the Department can share surveillance data.

………

Cahn from STOP took issue with that statement. "The NYPD continues to systematically hide the billions it spends on unproven and biased surveillance technology," he said in an email to The Register. "It's bad when the Department wastes money that puts New Yorkers in harm's way and shreds the Constitution, but it’s even worse when they lie about it.

"The City Council was clear in what they expected from the NYPD, and the Department simply isn't following the law. Now they just are flat out lying when they say they fully comply with the POST Act. The POST Act is one of the weakest surveillance oversight laws in the country, but the NYPD still refuses to meet even these minimal transparency requirements." 

Police should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one, and when they deliberately ignore the law, and the civil rights of the citizens that they are supposed to protect, there should be immediate and severe sanctions.

I Will Be Starting a New Job

I have decided to quit engineering, and become a child's ball bit attendant at a Chuck-E-Cheese to support myself while I pursue my dream of becoming a Fox News pundit.

You do know what today's date is, don't you?