Deep Thought

If I had a penny for every time I said, "I shouldn't have eaten that," to myself, I would own an Island in the Caribbean.

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What Is Wrong with Academe with One Obtuse and Self Serving Presidential Campaign

Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig is planning to run the stupidest Presidential campaign of the season, and considering that what we have running right now, that says a lot:

Today I announced the formation of a committee to explore my entering the Democratic Primary for President. By Labor Day, I will decide whether a run makes sense.

I want to run. But I want to run to be a different kind of president. “Different” not in the traditional political puffery sense of that term. “Different,” quite literally. I want to run to build a mandate for the fundamental change that our democracy desperately needs. Once that is passed, I would resign, and the elected Vice President would become President.

Mr. Lessig, right now, you are making Jeb Bush look like a freaking genius.

Quote of the Day

This is the best comment this far on what is now the ongoing election for the Labour leadership in the UK:

The fervour around Jeremy Corbyn is extraordinary, but it wouldn’t be fair to suggest he’s the only Labour politician who can bring large crowds on to the streets to greet him. Tony Blair is just as capable. In his case the crowds are there to scream that he should be arrested for war crimes and to throw things at him, but that’s being pernickety; he can certainly draw an audience.

Heh.

Today's Lesson from Sesame Street

Silly poor kids, educational TV is for rich kids:

For more than four decades, the television show Sesame Street has existed to teach children lessons. Today’s lesson is that people without disposable household income are in an inferior position and should be happy to receive secondhand goods.

The original purpose of Sesame Street was to provide uplifting educational programming to the widest possible audience of young children. Yesterday, the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces the program, announced that for the next five years, new episodes will not run on the nonprofit, over-the-air Public Broadcasting Service, but will be distributed through HBO, a premium cable channel owned by the for-profit Time Warner media megacorporation.

In the press release, Sesame Workshop CEO Jeffrey Dunn described the arrangement as “a true winning public-private partnership model.” What does this winning model entail? It entails removing public goods and services from the commons, to repackage them as luxury products for affluent consumers.

………

Now Sesame Street will be restricted to a network that reaches less than one-third of American households. According to the announcement, with the money it gets from HBO, Sesame Street “will be able to produce almost twice as much new content as previous seasons.” And poor kids won’t be able to see any of it. 

………

Or, more precisely, they will be able to see it after the expiration of a nine-month HBO window of exclusivity—at which point the no-longer-new episodes will be passed on to PBS, while the children whose parents can afford to pay for premium cable are watching new-new episodes. The old Sesame Street block has been gentrified, so that HBO can build a sleek high-rise with a separate poor door. 

We have become an ugly society.

This is a Lot of Additional Bang for the Buck

It looks like Eurofighter has engineered some significant improvements in performance to the Typhoon fighter with some almost invisible aerodynamic tweaks:

Flight tests of a Eurofighter Typhoon with a suite of aerodynamic modifications show they have measurably improved the fighter’s subsonic agility, say engineers and pilots involved in the project. The alterations can be easily retrofitted to any Typhoon, it is claimed, and have been demonstrated to pilots from Typhoon partner nations. The Aerodynamic Modification Kit (AMK) is being considered as part of future improvement packages for the aircraft.

The AMK comprises small leading-edge root extensions (Lerxes), new delta-shaped fuselage strakes that replace the existing rectangular “step” strakes beneath the canopy sills, and larger flaperons (13% inboard, 8% outboard) that provide more forward sweep to the wings’ trailing edge. The primary function of the Lerx and reshaped fuselage strakes is to make vortex flows more stable and predictable as the angle of attack (AoA) increases. The larger flaperons provide more roll authority and also counteract the larger nose-up pitching forces introduced by the Lerxes and strakes. “We already have the most unstable production aircraft in the world,” one engineer says. “We don’t need any more pitch-up.”

No new surfaces are added and the existing structure and flaperon actuators can cope with the changes, Eurofighter says, so the main tasks for transition to production would be the design of series-type AMK components and definition of a retrofit process.
The effects of the AMK changes are dramatic, Eurofighter says. Operational AoA limits are increased by 45% and total lift by as much as 25%. The corner speed—defined as the lowest speed at which the aircraft can generate maximum g force, and hence the speed at which the aircraft achieves its highest turn rate and tightest radius—has been “significantly reduced,” increasing maximum turn rate. The usable pitch rate is increased “by far,” according to project test pilot Raffaele Beltrame, and roll rate by up to 100%. The largest improvements are at lower speeds, but performance and handling are also improved in the subsonic regime, and supersonic maneuverability—where the Typhoon is second only to the Lockheed Martin F-22—is unaffected.

………

At low speeds, limits on AoA, pitch rate and other parameters are often associated with vortices that form around the forebody and canard at high AoA, and which can cause severe lateral-directional instability if they develop or burst asymmetrically. Very small features toward the front of the aircraft can cause strong vortices.

The step strakes on Typhoon were designed to generate stable vortices, based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology available then. “Today we have much better tools,” Osterhuber says, and CFD is better integrated with wind tunnel testing. (The AMK configuration underwent extensive testing by the German-Dutch DNW wind tunnel consortium, and in Calspan’s transonic tunnel.) He also notes that, in the past few years, Airbus has improved the sharing of expertise and tools between its commercial and military divisions, including its work with government research institutions.

This is some impressive engineering.

This is a pretty impressive expansion of the flight envelope at a marginal cost of €0.00.

I Worked Up Some Presidential Nicknames

Just the Democrats, because there are too many 'Phants to name, and new Republican candidates keep popping up like some twisted game of Whack-a-Mole.

It's one of those things that happens when we are all on a drive of any length.

Here goes:

• Miss Congeniality (Hillary Clinton: Likable enough, but she is not going to win.)
• Who? (Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island)
• The Republican running as a Democrat (James Webb, who opposes the Iran nuclear deal, supports the Confederate flag, etc.)
• Too dull for a nickname (Martin O'Malley)
• The Berninator (Bernie Sanders)

If you have any suggestions, feel free to contribute them in the comments.

Deep Thoughts

Last night, I watched the Dr. Who episode The Waters of Mars, the episode in which astronauts are infected by evil water that they use on the crops that they are growing.

Today, on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, they were discussing the fact that the astronauts on the space station had just grown crops on the station, and had a salad made from the greens.

I found this somewhat unsettling.

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An Interesting Point About Donald Trump………

Ian Welsh notes that "The Donald" has many policies that place him at the left of the Republican field:

Let’s state the obvious about Trump.

No, not that he’s a joke, or a sign of fascism, or any of that.

Rather that a lot of what he says makes sense. His policies aren’t as crazy as people make out, and people who support him aren’t as stupid as the media pretends.

• He doesn’t want to cut Social Security. Jeb Bush does. Obama has talked this up.
• He wants full universal healthcare. Yeah, he badmouths Obamacare, but he’s badmouthing it from a position of, “Give them the real thing.”
• His idea of returning manufacturing to the US and doing bilateral trade deals is not insane, or crazy, except to neo-liberal apologists and people too stupid to realize they’ve imbibed the economic philosophy of neo-liberalism, whose results have been the stagnation and then absolute decline of ordinary American wages. This is how capitalism worked for about half of capitalism’s history. Disagree if you like, but it’s not crazy.
• His idea of simplifying the tax code enough so that ordinary people don’t need professionals to fill out their tax forms is a good one. Jimmy Carter, by the way, wanted to do the same thing.

I’m not a fan of Trump, there are plenty of reasons why he’s problematic, but he’s actually an economic populist on many issues. People shouldn’t overlook that this comes married to some nasty nativism, but I’m tired of people who are lumping all parts of the Trump campaign together.

It's an interesting point, and it actually places Trump in what has been a common meme in American politics, the racist populists, also known as the "Dixicrat."

There has been a long tradition of politics who promise benefits for their communities while promising to keep them from perceived outsiders.  (No Irish need apply is an example)

So, Donald Trump reduces to Strom Thurmund with a flamboyant hair.

Russia Declares Blatant CIA Front Organization to Be "Undesirable"

Russia has now officially declared that the National Endowment for Democracy is an undesirable organization, which limits their actions, and the actions of organizations that they fund, in that country:

Vladimir Putin! Now you’ve really done it. You have had the temerity to declare our National Endowment for Democracy (NED), America’s most important Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to be “undesirable.” Where will this end? Don’t you respect our right, as a US Government-financed NGO, to meddle in internal Russian affairs? After all, we are the most important NGO of the world’s Sole Superpower. We can go wherever we want and do whatever we like. We are truly upset!

This is the clear reaction of Washington to the decision by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office on July 28 to declare the activities of the US National Endowment for Democracy as “undesirable in the territory of Russia.” The official statement stated that, “the National Endowment for Democracy used Russian commercial and non-commercial organizations under its control to take part in campaigns aimed at denying the legitimacy of results of Russian elections; organize political actions designed to influence the authorities’ decisions and discredit the service in the Russian Armed Forces.” It further elaborated, “In pursuit of these goals, the fund allocated about 2.5 million US dollars to Russian commercial and non-commercial organizations in 2013-2015.”

Vladimir Putin! Now you’ve really done it. You have had the temerity to declare our National Endowment for Democracy (NED), America’s most important Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to be “undesirable.” Where will this end? Don’t you respect our right, as a US Government-financed NGO, to meddle in internal Russian affairs? After all, we are the most important NGO of the world’s Sole Superpower. We can go wherever we want and do whatever we like. We are truly upset!

This is the clear reaction of Washington to the decision by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office on July 28 to declare the activities of the US National Endowment for Democracy as “undesirable in the territory of Russia.” The official statement stated that, “the National Endowment for Democracy used Russian commercial and non-commercial organizations under its control to take part in campaigns aimed at denying the legitimacy of results of Russian elections; organize political actions designed to influence the authorities’ decisions and discredit the service in the Russian Armed Forces.” It further elaborated, “In pursuit of these goals, the fund allocated about 2.5 million US dollars to Russian commercial and non-commercial organizations in 2013-2015.”

Under Russia’s law on Undesirable NGOs, adopted by the Duma or parliament and signed into law by President Putin this May, any foreign or international non-governmental organization could become “undesirable” if it threatened the foundations of Russia’s constitutional order, the country’s defense capability and the security of the Russian state.

Significantly, in a statement regarding the decision, Russia’s Foreign Ministry named Carl Gershman, the neo-conservative who has been president since NED was founded in 1983. They noted that Gershman said – absolutely openly – that the NED organization was intended to be a beautiful facade for distributing funds among opposition circles in foreign countries. That suggests they have done their homework very well before banning the NED.

………

The NED, along with Freedom House, has been at the center of all major US State Department-financed ‘color revolutions’ in the world since 2000 when it was used to topple Milosevic in Serbia. The NED was created during the Reagan Administration to function as a de facto CIA, privatized so as to allow more freedom of action. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, said in a Washington Post interview in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

………

The majority of the historic figures linked to clandestine CIA actions have at some time been members of the Board of Directors or the Administrative Council of the NED, including Otto Reich, John Negroponte, Henry Cisneros, and Elliot Abrams. The Chairman of the NED Board of Directors in 2008 was Vin Weber, campaign fundraiser for George W. Bush in 2000. Gershman, head of the NED since its creation to the present, worked closely with Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams and Frank Gaffney. Gershman was in a sense ‘present at the creation’ of the political-intelligence faction known as neo-conservativism.

On September 26, 2013, weeks before Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich announced he would join Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union rather than the less appealing EU “associate membership”, Gershman wrote an OpEd to the Washington Post where he called Ukraine “the biggest prize,” explaining that pulling it into the Western camp could contribute to the ultimate defeat of Russian President Putin. Gershman wrote, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

In other words, NED is a US government-financed entity that intends to topple Russia’s elected President because he displeases the folks in the Washington neo-con war faction.

Notably, at the same time as Russia is banning NED under its new Undesirable NGO law, China has just signed into law its Overseas NGO Management Law to restrict foreign NGO’s there. Last October, the same National Endowment for Democracy financed the Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution protests and the NED is financing Uygur separatists in China’s Xinjiang Province, cross-roads of all major Chinese oil and gas pipelines from Russia and Kazakhstan.

The NED, Freedom House, and their ilk are bad for a number of reasons:

• These government funded organizations are structured with their primary goal of removing activities promulgated by the state security apparatus from Congressional oversight.  This has been the case since (at least) William Casey took over the CIA with the goal of exempting it from all budget constraints and oversight in 1981.
• It has the effect of tarring all NGOs with the stigma of involvement with the CIA and its ilk.
• It makes it too easy for the CIA to overthrow and destabilize foreign governments, which almost always ends up biting us in the butt.

This is a Very Interesting Perspective on Black Lives Matter

Even more than the now moribund Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter appears to be a movement without goals.

There is nothing approaching a statement of goals, just a vague statement of principles, which are unattainable because they are little more than a word salad of good sounding words.

Over at Orchestrated Pulse, R.L. Stephens II says that this serves a purpose, and that many of the "leaders" of the nominally leaderless Black Lives Matter movement have personal career goals at the core of their actions:

The latest effort to storm Bernie Sanders’ appearances is only making the problem more obvious. The two women that interrupted Sanders last weekend seemingly did so unilaterally. You can’t build real mass political power that way, but building effective power is not their point. Make no mistake, this Bernie Sanders hoopla is ultimately about campaign jobs and foundation funding, not emancipation for the masses. These interruptions will create career opportunities for a few activists and political operatives—the Black leadership desired by [BLM activist] Tia [Oso] and others—but, as with Ferguson, the masses of Black people will be unaffected. 

I have heard variants of this complaint for decades, that some elements of the Black political class are driven more by a desire for patronage positions than by a desire for substantive change.

Certainly, this would explain why BLM activists have not been as active, or as effective, at confronting Hillary Clinton.

If the name of the game is patronage, than it naturally makes sense to hitch your star to Hillary, who has been a creature of this sort of politics, for decades.

Read the rest.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Have Some Sukhoi T-50 Video Pr0n

The folks at War is Boring came across this.

I'm not sure if it will ever see service in significant numbers, but it sure does fly good:

Deep Thoughts (2016 Edition)

Watching the Presidential campaign, I have come to the conclusion that Jeb Bush is the stupid Bush brother, not GW.

I am as stunned as you are about this.

I Have Never Heard of Something like This in Academe Before

One of the bigger clusterF%$#s in academe recently has been the hiring, and subsequent "un-hiring" of Steven Salaita, a professor of literature with a focus on American Studies at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

During Operation Cast Lead, he was rather "emphatic" on the Twitter machine regarding military operations in Gaza, and as a result of pressure from the legislature and the alumni, his offer was rescinded.

It was a done deal, and Salaita had already resigned his prior (tenured) position when the offer was revoked.

In the ensuing kerfuffle,  it was discovered, it was discovered that the Chancellor, who was the bag man for this sordid affair, was conducting business over her personal email with the specific goal of evading Illinois open record laws.

After all this came out, a new president came in, and started cleaning house.

The Chancellor, Phyllis Wise, offered her resignation, but the trustees rejected her resignation, and instead fired her, which cost her a significant retention bonus and a paid sabbatical year:

University of Illinois trustees Wednesday rejected a $400,000 bonus payment for outgoing Chancellor Phyllis Wise, backpedaling on a resignation deal made last week and instead choosing to begin dismissal proceedings against her.

The unanimous decision to reject Wise's resignation came six days after she announced she would step aside just ahead of the revelation that she had been using a personal email account to hide discussions of sensitive and controversial issues from the public. The deal had been recommended by new U. of I. President Timothy Killeen.

But the terms of her resignation, including the bonus intended to acknowledge four years in the job, were roundly criticized by Gov. Bruce Rauner and others, and the board's three-member executive committee decided Wednesday to take the more contentious — and legally risky — path of firing Wise for cause instead.

The board will next provide Wise with "a statement of the reasons" for firing her and will hold a dismissal hearing, according to a letter U. of I. board Chair Edward McMillan sent Wise after Wednesday's meeting. Until then, Wise will be assigned as an adviser to the U. of I. president on biomedical affairs and continue to draw her salary of $549,069. She will retain her tenured faculty appointment, as the dismissal applies only to her administrative role. The board Wednesday appointed Dean Barbara Wilson as the acting interim chancellor.

………

Killeen said discussions about Wise's resignation began early last week when she was presented with the findings of an investigation into her deliberate use of a personal email account to hide information. Killeen said he did not "directly" ask Wise to resign and that she "indicated interest or willingness" to do so. She publicly cited "external issues" as the reason after a tumultuous year at the state's flagship public campus.

………

U. of I. on Friday released about 1,100 pages of emails that showed Wise and other campus administrators used personal email accounts in an attempt to circumvent state public records laws, a violation of university policy. The emails were related to three of the university's most significant and controversial decisions from the past year: the decision to withdraw a job offer to professor Steven Salaita, the hiring of felon James Kilgore and the proposal to open an engineering-based medical school on the Urbana-Champaign campus.

………

Rosenstein said he had disagreed with how Wise handled the situation with Salaita, whose job offer was withdrawn last year after he wrote dozens of critical and sometimes profane comments on Twitter about Israel and its military policies. And Rosenstein said he was further disturbed by the content of some of the emails that Wise tried to keep private.

First, let me say that I think that Wise deserved to be fired, if just for the aggressive evasion of open record acts.   (The James Kilgore thing is a typical bullsh%$ tempest in a teapot.  He's an adjunct who has done his time)

On the Salaita matter, it is clear that just everything was handled badly, but I get the sense that she was less the boss on this than she was the bag-man, and she was also the sacrificial lamb.

As Atrios so pithly put it,  "I hate the phrase "Thrown Under A Bus, but it certainly applies here. Thanks for doing our dirty work, no thanks for making us look bad, piss off."

District Attorneys in California Have One Fewer Way to Let Killer Cops Walk

California has just passed a law that forbids the use of secret grand juries to investigate police involved shootings:

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday making California the first state in the nation to ban the use of grand juries to decide whether police officers should face criminal charges when they kill people in the line of duty.

The ban, which will go into effect next year, comes after grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, made controversial decisions in secret hearings last year not to bring charges against officers who killed unarmed black men, sparking protests across the country. Calls for transparency also have come amid national concerns about disparate treatment of blacks and other racial minorities when encounters with cops turned deadly in Baltimore, Cincinnati and South Carolina.

"What the governor's decision says is, he gets it -- the people don't want secrecy when it comes to officer-involved shootings," said retired judge and former San Jose independent police auditor LaDoris Cordell, the first African-American appointed as a judge in Northern California and a key supporter of the bill. "We're not trying to get more officers indicted. We're saying, 'Whatever you decide, do it in the open.'"

What we have seen recently is that there are a lot of DA's out there who use grand juries to justify not pursuing bad cops.

Now those DA's will no longer have plausible deniability.

Now it will go to a preliminary hearing, with a judge, and where defense counsel can contest the facts and the law, in public.

It's not creating a state level prosecutor who's only job is investigating and prosecuting police shootings, but it's better than the status quo.

Belay that Upgrade to Windows 10

No verification yet, but there has been a semi credible report that Microsoft's new operating system is literally sending everything you do to the Redmond Borg:

Note: Some readers have commented that the original source for the article is of questionably validity. If anyone can confirm or refute the original author's finding with actual data, please let me know in the comments, and I'll update this post accordingly.

Some Czech guy did a traffic analysis of data produced by Windows 10, and released his findings the other day. His primary thesis was that Windows 10 acts more like a terminal than an operating system -- because of the extent of the "cloud" integration, a large portion of the OS functions are almost dependent on remote (Microsoft's) servers. The amount of collected information, even with strict privacy settings, is quite alarming.

Information transmitted

All text typed on the keyboard is stored in temporary files, and sent (once per 30 mins) to:

oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com

There isn't a clear purpose for this, considering there there's no autocorrect/prediction anywhere in the OS (There is autocorrect in certain text fields, but the supposed purpose for transmitting these keystrokes is to improve autocorrect across devices. Whether a full keylog is necessary for this (as opposed to just corrections) is questionable. Furthermore, this appears to still occur even if the user is not signed in to a Microsoft account, eliminating the "across devices" benefit. Perhaps there is a global autocorrect dictionary that benefits all users, but the privacy implications of an un-disableable always-on keylogger outweigh these potential benefits.). The implications of this are significant: because this is an OS-level keylogger, all the data you're trying to transmit securely is now sitting on some MS server. This includes passwords and encrypted chats. This also includes the on-screen keyboard, so there is no way to authenticate to a website without MS also getting your password.

………

………In another example, typing the name of any popular movie into your local file search starts a telemetry process that indexes all media files on your computer and transmits them to:  ………

………

It's hard to imagine any purpose for this other than the obvious piracy crackdown possibilities.

When a webcam is first enabled, ~35mb of data gets immediately transmitted to: 

………

Everything that is said into an enabled microphone is immediately transmitted to: 

………

If this weren't bad enough, this behaviour still occurs after Cortana is fully disabled/uninstalled. It's speculated that the purpose of this function to build up a massive voice database, then tie those voices to identities, and eventually be able to identify anyone simply by picking up their voice, whether it be a microphone in a public place or a wiretap on a payphone. 

……… 

While the inital reflex may be to block all of the above servers via HOSTS, it turns out this won't work: Microsoft has taken the care to hardcode certain IPs, meaning that there is no DNS lookup and no HOSTS consultation. However, if the above servers are blocked via HOSTS, Windows will pretend to be crippled by continuously throwing errors, while still maintaining data collection in the background. Other than an increase in errors, HOSTS blocking did not affect the volume, frequency, or rate of data being transmitted. 

So it appears that Microsoft does key-logging under Win 10, which means that they have your password, they phone home with your media files, meaning that the RIAA and MPAA can go after you for your bootlegs, and they have created a voice profile, so that the NSA can listen to you when they recognize your voice..

Again, this is preliminary, but if half of this is true, my next computer will be a Linux box.

Jon Stewart Just Hurt Me

You can see the many hairstyles of Bernie at Buzzfeed

He is, of course, in reruns now, but he was doing his monologue, and I had had not heard it before.

And then he said:

Sure, Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds in the thousands, but for some reason the 'media' has decided you can't be a serious candidate if your hair looks like your dick got caught in an electrical socket.

I started laughing, and I just had to share this with Sharon.^*

So, laughing hysterically, I started up the stairs, but I could not catch my breath I was laughing so hard, and ended up falling down the stairs.

Thankfully, nothing but some bruising minor bruising, and a majorly freaked out wife.

Actually, it freaked out my cats too.

As I lay at the bottom of the stairs, giggling, Destructo was staring at me with obvious concern.

I'm OK, just a bruise on my left radius and wrist.

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

Props to Bernie

On Face the Nation, Bernie Sanders said that much of the criticism of Hillary Clinton is motivated by sexism:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on Sunday that some of the criticism directed at his Democratic primary rival Hillary Clinton is motivated by sexism.

“I can’t think of many personalities who have been attacked for more reasons than Hillary Clinton,” Sanders told John Dickerson on “Face the Nation.”

“And by the way, let me be frank – and I’m running against her – some of it is sexist. I don’t know that a man would be treated the same way that Hillary is,” Sanders added.

Sanders remarks came in response to a question about whether Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state has hurt her trustworthiness in the eyes of some Americans. Sanders refused to comment on the scandal or Clinton’s honesty, and went on to emphasize that his concerns with her as the Democratic nominee are about her policies, not personality.

That's actually pretty classy, particularly in the context of the 2016 campaign.

TPP: the Fat Lady Ain't Singing, but She Is Warming Up

At the end of last month, the negotiations that were supposed to put the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) ended without an agreement.

What's more, there wasn't even a date set for a followup summit:

Trade negotiators from the United States and 11 other Pacific nations failed to reach final agreement on Friday, with difficult talks on the largest regional trade agreement ever deadlocking over protections for drug companies and access to agriculture markets on both sides of the Pacific.

Trade ministers, in a joint statement, said late Friday they had made “significant progress” and will return to their home countries to obtain high-level signoffs for a small number of final sticking points on the agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with bilateral talks reconvening soon.

“There are an enormous number of issues that one works through at these talks, narrowing differences, finding landing zones,” said Michael B. Froman, the United States trade representative. “I am very impressed with the work that has been done. I am gratified by the progress that has been made.”

Still, the breakdown is a setback for the Obama administration, which had promoted the talks here as the final round ahead of an accord that would bind 40 percent of the world’s economy under a new set of rules for commerce.

This is a failure, and a big one.

In a normally unproductive summit, the Japanese would oblique.

When a Japanese diplomat says, "It would be difficult," it should be read "No!" with the explanation point, and when a Japanese diplomat says that, "It would be very difficult, it's the equivalent of "F%$# You White Man."

This time, the Japanese Economy Minister, who is their lead on this deal, just explicitly stated that the US were too wimpy:

Japan has expressed concern about a loss of momentum in talks on a pan-Pacific trade pact after participants failed to agree to meet again this month to try to clinch a deal that would cover 40 percent of the global economy.

Ministers from the 12 nations negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would stretch from Japan to Chile, fell short of a deal at talks last month on the Hawaiian island of Maui, despite early optimism.

Japanese Economy Minister Akira Amari, in a blog circulated on Tuesday, also questioned why the United States appeared to have lacked its usual "stubborn persistence" at those talks, despite a willingness of some countries to stay to try to reach an agreement.

If this were translated into standard American discourse, it would use language that would make George Carlin uncomfortable.

And from Australia, a country whose foreign policy is defined by a desperate need to be "In the Club", the Trade Minister is saying that a deal is unlikely:

Australia’s trade minister, Andrew Robb, has appeared at the National Press Club in Canberra today, where he admitted that concluding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal is looking increasingly unlikely.

According to AAP, Rob said that sugar and dairy access remained key sticking points, along with motor vehicle assess between Mexico, the US, Canada and Japan. He also noted that “the closer we get to a US presidential election, the more prospect (there is) of it falling over”.

There is also the upcoming Canadian elections later this year.

Seeing as how this deal sucks, it's a good thing that it appears to be comatose.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

It turns out that the DHS no fly list is basically based on hunches with a pseudo-scientific gloss:

The Obama administration’s no-fly lists and broader watchlisting system is based on predicting crimes rather than relying on records of demonstrated offenses, the government has been forced to admit in court.

In a little-noticed filing before an Oregon federal judge, the US Justice Department and the FBI conceded that stopping US and other citizens from travelling on airplanes is a matter of “predictive assessments about potential threats”, the government asserted in May.

“By its very nature, identifying individuals who ‘may be a threat to civil aviation or national security’ is a predictive judgment intended to prevent future acts of terrorism in an uncertain context,” Justice Department officials Benjamin C Mizer and Anthony J Coppolino told the court on 28 May.

“Judgments concerning such potential threats to aviation and national security call upon the unique prerogatives of the Executive in assessing such threats.”

It is believed to be the government’s most direct acknowledgement to date that people are not allowed to fly because of what the government believes they might do and not what they have already done.

………

On Friday, the ACLU asked Judge Anna Brown to conduct her own review of the error rate in the government’s predictions modeling – a process the ACLU likens to the “pre-crime” of Philip K Dick’s science fiction.

“I believe this is the first case in which a court is being asked to review the basis for the government’s predictive model for blacklisting people who have never even been charged, let alone convicted, of a violent crime,” said ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi.

In March, as a result of the lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security began informing people of their inclusion on a flight blacklist and permitting them to file a “redress inquiry”. The resulting non-adversarial process has the government perform “careful consideration” of its reasons for blacklisting, with the Transportation Security Agency director as final arbiter. The ACLU considers the new process insufficient.

But the Obama administration is seeking to block the release of further information about how the predictions are made, for the same reason it opposes providing greater information for challenging watchlist inclusion: damage to national security.

………

In April 2014, five people, all of whom are Muslim, claimed that they were suddenly forbidden from flying after declining FBI pressure to become informants or in order to place pressure upon them to do so. Informants, along with social media postings, have become a driving factor in the FBI’s uptick in arrests of people suspected of ties to al-Qaida and the Islamic State.

In July 2014, the Intercept published an internal watchlisting guidance indicating that nominations to government watchlists were growing, with few rejections. Social media posts were among acceptable criteria, and acquittals in court did not necessarily lead to removals from the list, the Intercept’s document showed.

We are living in an era where the state security apparatus, and the executive that is supposed to ensure that they work in accordance with our interests and our values are thoroughly corrupted by power and fear.

Obama's message is to tell us not to worry, because he is a good and trustworthy man.

The whole point of our system, with its separation of powers, is that we are not supposed to rely on the the good nature of our leaders.

Obama has taken the worst excesses of the Bush administration, and normalized them.

This will Obama's most important legacy, and it is not a positive one.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever!^™

Another Climate Change Denial Talking Point Bites the Dust………

It turns out that the evidence that we are in a period of some sort of freakishly high sunspot activity is just an artifact of how counting was modernized in 1947, which means that suggesting that it's all sunspots is a load of bunk:

A bunch of boffins has completed the first-ever revision of the world's most important sunspot data repository, along the way challenging the theory that climate change is substantially attributable to the prevalence of sunspots.

It turns out, in fact, that the pro-sunspots argument relies on a statistical artefact introduced in 1947 and not corrected until this year.

While the change officially took place in July, rendering obsolete the data that climate deniers use to “prove” that it's sunspots driving global warming rather than CO2, it came to prominence at the end of last week in a presentation to the International Astronomical Union's current general assembly in Hawaii.

The most important correction to come out of the new data, the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations (SILSO) project says, is “a lowering by about 18% of all numbers after 1947, to remove the bias produced by a new counting method started in 1947 in Zürich”.

………

As SILSO explains, the sunspot data set (which, courtesy of Galileo (the man, not the spacecraft), stretches back 400 years) was first collected into an index by Rudolph Wolf in 1849. Startlingly, SILSO says, “this series was left unchanged since its creation … without any backward verification”.

………

The adoption of the new Sunspot Number doesn't change our understanding of the Maunder Minimum, the low sunspot activity period between 1645 and 1715 that coincided with the “Little Ice Age”.

However, the recalibration does overturn a previous consensus that the data set showed a 300-year upward trend in sunspot activity, culminating in a “grand maximum” in the 20th century.

As Physicsworld says, the dataset “nullifies the claim that there has been a modern grand maximum”.

In response, I expect some right wing nut-job state Attorney General to subpoena scientists private communications.

This Is All F%$#Ed up and Sh%$

After many years of complaints by the US that China should let its currency float according to market forces, the Bank of China has broadened the range that it will allow the Yuan to float, having the effect of devaluing the currency:

As China contends with an economic slowdown and a stock market slump, the authorities on Tuesday sharply devalued the country’s currency, the renminbi, a move that could raise geopolitical tensions and weigh on growth elsewhere.

The central bank set the official value of the renminbi nearly 2 percent weaker against the dollar. The devaluation is the largest since China’s modern exchange-rate system was introduced at the start of 1994.

………

China’s devaluation represents a difficult dilemma for the Obama administration. The United States Treasury has tried to use quiet diplomacy in recent years to encourage China to free up its currency policies, while blocking efforts in Congress to punish China for major intervention in currency markets over the past decade to slow the rise of the renminbi. Many in Congress have long accused China of unfairly building up its manufacturing sector at the expense of American jobs by undervaluing the renminbi, and the Chinese devaluation could fan those criticisms.

In a seeming nod to such concerns, the central bank said that it would begin to use the market closing, not the previous morning’s official setting, to calculate the renminbi’s official daily fixing against the dollar. But China’s economic weakness now means that further opening up of the currency to market forces could mean a weaker renminbi, not a stronger one. That, in turn, would make Chinese goods even more competitive in the United States and Europe.

China’s central bank “has finally thrown in the towel on supporting the renminbi,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University. At the same time, he added, easing its grip on the currency’s value “has blunted criticism by combining the currency devaluation with a more market-determined exchange rate.” The United States and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund have called on China to be more hands-off in managing the renminbi.

Obviously there is irony here, but this is real news.

To quote Joe Biden, "This is a big F%$#ing deal."

This is the last best effort by Chinese economists to try to keep the economy moving.

I don't know where this is going, but it is not going to be pretty.

Can We Please Given Texas Back to Mexico?

Some cracker judge in the Lone Star State just sentenced a man to marry his girlfriend and write down bible verses:

A Texas man was sentenced to marry his 19-year-old girlfriend, write down Bible verses and attend counseling by a judge as punishment for punching another man in the jaw, according to local television station KLTV.

The court case stemmed from a February altercation between Josten Bundy, 20, and the ex-partner of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Jaynes. He told the TV station he hit the man twice.

During his sentencing, Judge Randall Rogers told Bundy he would have to marry his girlfriend within 30 days as a condition of his probation. Bundy said that Rogers gave him the option to sit behind bars for 15 days.

Bundy asked if he could call his employers to tell them he was going to jail, but the judge declined. Bundy and Jaynes said they feared Bundy would lose his job, so they applied for their marriage license and scheduled a date with the justice of the peace.

In a state where the body politic was not congenitally insane, this judge would be suspended pending a judicial review, a state bar review, and a 24-hour psychological evaluation.

I Cannot Believe that I am Saying This………

But I was wrong when I suggested a few days back that the disruption of a Bernie Sanders speech by Black Lives Matter was likely an exercise in Nixonian rat-f%$#ing by the Clinton campaign.

It turns out now that the best evidence now is that at least one of the protesteris a bit of a nut, who was in the not too distant past a Teabagger supporter of Sarah Palin.

IMNSHO, you cannot manufacture this kind of lunacy, so I'm going with a small group of nuts:

An interesting development has occurred within the Black Lives Matter movement and it has caused many outside and from within the movement to question the wisdom in the most recent interruption of Bernie Sanders campaign. While no one can deny its effectiveness, especially considering Senator Sanders newest addition to his team is a Black Lives Matter activist, this interruption happened after Bernie had already begun shifting his campaign towards publicizing his stance on racial issues.

When individuals place themselves in the public eye they become scrutinized at every level. While looking into these activists for the Black Lives Matter movement, it became readily apparent that either they were not officially a part of the BLM movement, or they were not organized until just around the time of the incident.

………

Then more startling information came out concerning Marissa Johnson, the main agitator who berated Bernie for being a racist. According to her own Facebook profile she was a huge Tea Party supporter and had supported Sarah Palin in her 2008 Vice Presidential candidacy.

………

While none of that necessarily qualifies her as being a troll, or as some on the internet have accused an operative who is just trying to delegitimize the Sanders campaign. It is very possible that Johnson was a staunch Tea Party supporter in 2008 and has now changed her political persuasion to more closely mirror that of Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley. Eight years are a long time for an individual to reflect upon politics and their effects in the real world.

Although it is quite disquieting when you dig deeper into the facts. The Facebook page and social media presence of Johnson’s faction BLM Seattle did not exist until the day of the rally. Two hours after the interruption her Facebook page had been live for less than 24 hours and had garnered less than 50 followers. Again, this may all relate back to poor planning and nothing nefarious, but it is certainly not indicative of someone attempting to achieve legitimacy within the political spectrum. Johnson is also a member of a group called Outside Agitators 206, a movement within the larger Black Lives Matter movement, based out of Seattle. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to hold the same goals as the larger movement and actually made a public statement declaring their intent was to “declare war on the Democratic Party“. ………

I would note that there has been no formal comment by BLM on this protest, and I would argue that there can't be one, because, much like the Occupy movement, there is no head, there is no tail, and there is no way to determine if someone is official, a nut, or an agent provocateur.

On the other hand, I think that the preponderance of the evidence here is that this specific protest is the product of the bat-sh%$ insane wing of BLM, so I apologize to the Clinton campaign.

BTW, read what the Bear who Swims has said about Occupy and its ilk about the tendency of groups like Occupy, and BLM to function as "Useful Idiots".

Here is a particularly good bit:

Say what you like about the reactionaries, they have spent the last 30 years do these things. They have

• Used mass media to explain their theories, and why they are better.
• Popularized goals and objects and made them part of the political discussion through poltical organizing and outreach.
• Created a cadre of individuals who are willing to take on public office at all levels of govenment to implement their policies.
• Created a core group of constituencies who are loyal to their cause -- even against their own interested.

Let us put that another way, they have play practical electoral politics effectively.  In the course of this they have created a separate reactionary nationalism, which while at odds with the views of many, has no counter balance.

Go read what the Bear, AKA my brother, AKA the hairiest Saroff, AKA Stephen wrote.

He has been involved in politics for a long time, and has little patience for folks who think that it is noble to rearrange deck chairs on a certain White Star Line ocean liner as an alternative to identifying and avoiding icebergs.

Deep Thought

For the past 3 weeks, the escalators at Lexington Market station have been set up with the one that you use on the right.

Today this had been reversed, so now one is supposed take the one on the left.

I'm beginning to think that the Maryland MTA is just screwing with us.

Posted via mobile.

This is About to Go All Pear Shaped

Because their indiscriminate bombing of civilians has failed to secure "hearts and minds", the Saudi led coalition is sending in ground troops:

An Arab coalition source confirmed to Defense News that 2,800 troops landed in Yemen on Aug. 2 and are targeting the country's largest military base.

The coalition source stated that the forces — comprised mostly of Saudi special operations, intelligence and logistics personnel — are placed to secure Aden and take over Al-Anad military base north of Aden.

"The units are also supported by personnel and equipment from the United Arab Emirates and trained Yemeni fighters," the source said.

Images of LeClerc main battle tanks, which are operated by the UAE land forces and Presidential Guard strike force, BMP armored vehicles, and M-ATVs being offloaded at a port in the southern city of Aden appeared on social media Sunday.

In what I am sure is a completely unrelated development, a suicide bomber struck a mosque inside Saudi Arabia near the Yemenese border:

A suicide bomber struck Thursday at a Saudi mosque used by security forces near the border with war-
battered Yemen, officials said, killing more than a dozen people.

The Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online activities of militant groups. The blast follows a spate of suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia claimed by the Islamic State.

It also comes as Saudi Arabia and its allies have escalated their four-month-old war against rebel forces in Yemen.

The official Saudi Press Agency said that at least 10 security personnel and three workers were killed in the mosque blast, which occurred in the southern Asir region.

The House of Saud, concerned about nothing beyond their eternal war against the Shia, are actively aiding ISIS and al Qaeda by bombing their most determined opponents and completely unsurprisingly, ISIS uses this fact to further their campaign against the Saudis.

This has fail written all over it.

So Not Surprised………

It turns out that drug sniffing dogs are little better than a coin flip, so they are yet another way that law enforcement manufactures probable cause for a search:

Police are now speaking out about a decision from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that drug dogs signal for drugs nearly every time they are sent to sniff a vehicle or home. This decision shows that police dog searches are not legitimate and that they are just used as a pretense for officers to violate the rights of innocent people.

The case stemmed from a 2010 traffic stop in which 20 kilograms of cocaine were found in a vehicle after a search from a police dog named “Lex.”

The suspect ended up taking the case to court, and while his sentence was upheld, some very interesting points were uncovered during the investigation.

It was revealed that Lex, the drug dog in question, signaled for drugs 93% of the time, even when there were no drugs present. These findings show that dog sniffs are not accurate and are simply used as a tool to justify a full police search. The findings also indicated that Lex was incorrect roughly 40% of the time.

“Lex’s overall accuracy rate … is not much better than a coin flip,” the ruling stated.

………

Last year, we reported on the high-profile case of Timothy Young. Young was pulled over for failure to use his turn signal when a police K-9 was said to have alerted to his vehicle. After police found no evidence of drugs in his car or on his person, he was then handcuffed and driven to a hospital an hour away. During this forced visit to the hospital, Young was x-rayed and sodomized in search of non-existent substances.

Still think if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear? Ask Mr. Young that question…..

Live in obedient fear, citizen.

It's a Good Start

This is kind down in the weeds finance, but the fact that the EU is requiring a central facility for clearing all derivatives:

The European Commission adopted new rules Thursday mandating central clearing of certain over-the-counter interest rate derivatives contracts. Phased in over three years, the mandate, which can begin in April of next year at the earliest, covers interest rate swaps with certain features denominated in euros, pounds sterling, Japanese yen or U.S. dollars.

Central clearing of derivatives was first agreed to by world leaders at the G-20 Pittsburgh Summit in 2009. It began in the US in 2013, followed by a requirement in 2014 that certain swaps begin trading on swaps execution facilities (SEFs).

The lack of coordination in the way derivatives markets reforms have been implemented in different jurisdictions has long led to complaints about cross-border fragmentation. As far back as January 2014, when the US has implemented central clearing but before US mandates for trading on SEFs had kicked in, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) had already published a research note titled "Cross-Border Fragmentation of Global OTC Derivatives: An Empirical Analysis."

In September of last year, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Commissioner J. Christopher Giancarlo sounded alarms that uncoordinated cross-border regulations in the swaps market had the potential to degenerate into a regulatory "trade war" that could further fragment cross-border swaps trading.

"Rather than controlling systemic risk, the fragmentation of global swaps markets into regional ones is increasing risk by Balkanizing pools of trading liquidity and market pricing," he said at the time.

This is important for a number of reasons:

• It means that we are closer to get meaningful data as to the volume of what Warren Buffet called, "Financial weapons of mass destruction."
• It will allow for irregular trades to be flagged more easily, because they will stand out in comparison to the rest of the market.
• It will allow for effective taxation of these instruments.

It is some rare good news in the financial regulation front.

Has Black Lives Matter Been Hijacked by the Hillary Clinton Campaign?

So, for the second time in as many months, Black Lives Matter has disrupted a Bernie Sanders speech:

Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally in Dallas in July. (Mike Stone/Reuters)

Bernie Sanders came to Seattle on Saturday with plans to give two speeches.

The first didn’t happen. An appearance by the senator from Vermont at an event celebrating the anniversary of Social Security and Medicare was scuttled after protesters from a local Black Lives Matter chapter took over the stage.

Hours later, Sanders, who has been drawing bigger crowds than any other presidential contender, drew his largest yet: about 15,000 at the college basketball arena where the Washington Huskies play.

Aides said Sanders, who has emerged as the leading alternative to Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, spoke to a full house of 12,000 inside the arena and to what police estimated to be an overflow of 3,000 people outside of it.

………

Sanders was the final speaker on a long program held at a city park. Shortly after he took stage, a small group of protesters from a Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter took the microphone and demanded that the crowd hold Sanders “accountable” for not doing enough, in their view, to address police brutality and other issues on the group’s agenda.

The question that I am asking is why we aren't seeing this at any of Hillary Clinton's events?

I am not alone in this. Over at B.A.R., Bruce Dixon is wondering the same thing, though he extends his net to Obama and the "Black political class", and he makes this trenchant observation:

There are ominous signs. Last month folks whom Alicia Garza described as “part of our team” disrupted two minor white male candidates at NetRootsNation, the annual networking event for paid and wannabe paid Democratic party activists, embarrassing them with demands over structural racism and “say her name”. If they were positioning themselves for careers inside the far-flung Democratic party apparatus, it was a smart move, because Hillary wasn't there. Hence they got noticed in that crowd of Democrat operatives without antagonizing the people with the real money and connections.

When Hard Knock Radio's Davey D interviewed Garza on July 21, just before the Cleveland #BlackLivesMatter conference, Garza dropped several more indications that seem to point toward an eventual affiliation with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

The fact that Black Lives Matter appears to be studiously avoiding a confrontation with Hillary Clinton is telling.

I do not have quite the cynicism of Mr. Dixon, but I do find the pattern here to be extremely suspect.

Au Revoir, Mr. Stewart

I just saw his final show as host as The Daily Show.

I think that it did a decent job of balancing between acknowledging the history, and memories, and not being a downer.

Spoiler:  Springsteen played at the end.

It is the end of an era.

I'm sure that I'll get used to Trevor Noah in a few months.

If You Cannot Make Charter Schools in Sweden, You Cannot Make Them Work at All

It turns out that when you take well funded and competently run public schools, and decide to sh%$ can that and throw public monies at privately run schools, it all turns into crap:

Sweden's education system has often been cited by Michael Gove as a role model, especially for its policy of state-sponsored free schools providing increased choice for parents. In 2008 Gove told the Conservative party conference that Sweden's school reforms would be introduced if he was in government – and in 2010 promptly did so, with the advent of free schools.

A few years later and Sweden's star has dimmed. The 2012 Pisa results show Sweden's exam results falling abruptly across all three measures of reading, maths and science – with the country recording the largest drop in maths performance over 10 years. Anna Ekström, head of Sweden's National Education Agency, said in response: "The bleak picture has become bleaker with the Pisa review that was presented today."

………

In recent months a number of for-profit companies running free schools in Sweden have been in financial difficulties, while a recent TV exposé revealed that the state-funded privately-run schools were prepared to bend selection rules to admit bright pupils.

Sweden's education minister, Jan Björklund, said the Pisa results were "the final nail in the coffin for the old school reform," and speculated that the central government could take over running schools from Sweden's municipalities.

This is not a surprise.

The way to fix public schools is to actually fix public schools.

The charter school movement is based on the twin goals of destroying teachers' unions and transferring public funds to the parasites on Wall Street.

Charters have not, nor has they ever been about our kids learning.

H/T Angry Bear.

So, It Appears That It Wasn't Aliens

We now have confirmation that the debris from the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370:

A piece of debris found washed ashore on a beach in the Indian Ocean came from missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, the Malaysian prime minister has announced, confirming the first trace of the plane since it vanished last year with 239 people on board.

“Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts has conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris ... is indeed MH370,” Najib Razak said on Wednesday.

Razak said he hoped the positive identification of the two-metre fragment, which was found last week on the French island of Réunion, would “lift the fog of uncertainty” for grieving relatives.

This is not a surprise.

The conspiracy theories were bullsh%$.

Worthy of Dick Tuck

.@ScottWalker received a $900 million novelty check from #KochBrothers today in #NH. #nhpolitics #FITN #climate pic.twitter.com/gWOvKTZnM8

— Tyler McFarland (@tmcfarland29) August 3, 2015

This is a truly an epic political prank what got pulled on Scott Walker in New Hampshire.

What Does a Cop Have to Do to Get Fired?

It appears that plotting to murder someone is not enough:

A police officer in Alabama proposed murdering a black resident and creating bogus evidence to suggest the killing was in self-defence, the Guardian has learned.

Officer Troy Middlebrooks kept his job and continues to patrol Alexander City after authorities there paid the man $35,000 to avoid being publicly sued over the incident. Middlebrooks, a veteran of the US marines, said the man “needs a god damn bullet” and allegedly referred to him as “that nigger”, after becoming frustrated that the man was not punished more harshly over a prior run-in.

The payment was made to the black resident, Vincent Bias, after a secret recording of Middlebrooks’s remarks was played to the city’s police chiefs and the mayor. Elected city councillors said they were not consulted. A copy of the recording was obtained by the Guardian.

………

“This town is ridiculous,” Bias, 49, said in an interview. “The police here feel they can do what they want, and often they do.” Alexander City police chief Willie Robinson defended Middlebrooks. “He was just talking. He didn’t really mean that,” he said in an interview.

………

Middlebrooks, 33, made the threatening comments to Bias’s brother-in-law during a May 2013 encounter at his home, which Bias was visiting. Police came to the home after they discovered an unleashed dog.

A lawsuit from Bias that the city paid to settle before it reached court stated that while Bias remained inside the house and out of earshot, the officer remarked to Bias’s brother-in-law, who is white, that he was tired of “that nigger” being released from jail.

………

The officer did say he had been cleared by a state inquiry into the incident and referred the Guardian to the state bureau of investigation (SBI) and Larkin Radney, the city attorney for Alexander City. A spokesman for the SBI, however, said: “We have no record of us investigating this case.” Radney said: “I really don’t know what he’s talking about.”


During the interview at his office, Robinson said Middlebrooks “was disciplined” when the recording came to light, but declined to elaborate. Asked if the officer was ever suspended from patrols, Robinson repeated: “He got disciplined.” When it was put to him that some agencies might have terminated the officer’s job, the police chief said: “I don’t know what other departments do, but I made that call, and I’m going to live with that.”

Robinson tried to stress that Middlebrooks was in fact proposing that the brother-in-law carry out the killing. “He wasn’t saying that he was going to do that,” said the police chief. “He was talking about the man doing it himself.”

So a criminal conspiracy to commit murder under the color of law is not a grounds to fire this thug?

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

In Denver, a man started handing out fliers to people entering the courthouse explaining their rights as a juror.

It turns out that, even though a judge will not allow it to be argued in court, that jurors are free to vote their own conscience, invalidating unjust laws and ignoring judge's instructions.^* (See here)

Prosecutors just charged him with 7 felony counts of jury tampering:

A Denver man has been charged with multiple felonies after he was caught distributing fliers to educate potential jurors about the practice of “jury nullification.”

The Denver Post reported that 56-year-old Mark Iannicelli set up a small booth with a sign reading “Juror Info” outside the Lindsay-Flanigan Courthouse in Denver last week. The Denver District Attorney’s Office charged Iannicelli with seven counts of jury tampering after members of the jury pool were found to be in possession of fliers describing jury nullification.

Jury nullification allows juries to acquit a defendant who they may believe is guilty if they also believe that the law is unjust. The practice has been used by juries in the United States since the 1800s to nullify anti-free speech laws and laws punishing northerners for helping runaway slaves. It has most recently been used in drug cases when juries have viewed laws as discriminatory.

A copy of the criminal complaint obtained by Kirsten Tynan of the Fully Informed Jury Association says that Iannicelli “unlawfully and feloniously attempted directly and indirectly to communicate with” seven jurors.

A probable cause statement added that Iannicelli was accused of “handing out information to potential jurors.”

Tynan pointed out that the complaint “does not accuse Mr. Iannicelli of advocating for or against any case in progress” and “it does not accuse Mr. Iannicelli even of targeting individuals for sharing information with them.”

This is complete bullsh%$, and an abuse of prosecutorial discretion.

Any Colorado lawyers out there who wants to throw a complaint to the Bar Association?

^*See the John Peter Zenger libel case from 1735, where the jury ignored the law and said that the truth is an absolute defense against libel, and William Penn's acquittal for unlawful assembly (even though the judge threatened the jury when they refused to acquit).

It Now Appears that We Have Seen the Political Troll of the 2016 Election

It has now been revealed that before he decided to really run for President, he and Bill Clinton discussed this, and Clinton gave him some advice.

Somehow I think that the current situation, where the the bigotry, xenophobia, and ……… well ……… batsh%$ insanity of the Republican base has been revealed as "The Donald's" poll numbers continue to skyrocket:

You do not have to love Bill Clinton, or even like him just barely, to agree that this right here is amazesauce awesomeballs THE BEST:

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men.
Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

Do we think that The Big Dog himself sincerely believes America would benefit from Donald Trump hogging all the Republican primary limelight to proclaim which someones are doing the raping, and how he will make Mexico pay for his fence, by kicking its ass, right in the butt? Or do we imagine the former president making that jerking motion with his hand while he tries not to crack up on the phone as he fondles Trump’s YOOOGE ego right into the race, to the detriment of the GOP, say hello to Madam President? (It’s the second one, we think, what do YOU think?)

………

Guys. GUYS. Do you know what this means? It means we might all owe Bubba, for gently and oh so subtly nudging The Donald in the general direction of the White House, wink wink, and thereby humiliating the entire Republican Party so much, for being Republicans, that even they hate themselves right now.

I am not a fan of Bill Clinton's Eisenhower Republican policies, but I do have to admit that he is a master of politics and of people.

I believe that Clinton knew that Trump would be the turd in the Republican punch bowl, and he encouraged Trump to run, even while convincing Trump that it was his idea.

Whether intentional or not, this is an Epic troll.

Well played, William Jefferson Clinton, President of Trolls.

If I Did this, My Liver Would Jump Out of my Thorax and Beat Me to Death

Matt Taibbi has come up with what he calls, "The Official GOP Debate Drinking Game Rules."

This is potentially a VERY hazardous activity.

Hundreds of people perish from alcohol poisoning every year in the United States.

Playing a drinking game based on the level of Republican stupidity in the debates is French kissing cobras, or trusting in the honesty of investment bankers.

I am not going to be watching the debate.

I'm sure that after 5 minutes of listening to them, I would feel compelled to start mainlining bat guano and licking toads by way of self medication.

Well, It's Nice That Someone at the CIA Can Tell the Truth

The CIA's former executive director (#3 in the chain of command), Buzzy Krongard, has admitted that the CIA tortured detainees:

The CIA tortured terror suspects in its programme of "enhanced interrogation", the agency's former executive director, Buzzy Krongard, has admitted to the BBC's Panorama programme.

The agency's position has always been that the "enhanced interrogation" techniques it used under George W Bush, did not amount to torture, because they were legally approved by the White House at the time.

………

I asked Buzzy Krongard, the CIA's former executive director, if he thought waterboarding and painful stress positions were torture:

"Well, let's put it this way, it is meant to make him as uncomfortable as possible. So I assume for, without getting into semantics, that's torture. I'm comfortable with saying that," he explained.

………

A report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released last December highlights a number of unauthorised interrogation techniques that were also used on detainees in the CIA's secret prisons, including excessive beatings, and ice water dousing and baths.

In a public rebuttal to the Senate committee's report, the CIA has admitted to significant lapses in the monitoring and development of its initial interrogation activities, including instances of using unauthorized techniques.

I would not expect this level of honesty from a former CIA man, even one who only spent most of his career outside of the agency.

It does kind of f%$# the CIA rebuttal, though.

This Almost Makes Me Wish That I Was German

Please note the modifier here, "Almost".

Living in an America where pretty much every FBI anti-terrorism operation involves paying an informant to entrap some loser, it is heartening that a German prosecutor has been given the sack over investigating journalists for treason:

Netzpolitik.org, the website at the centre of the treason scandal in Germany, is the real winner in the whole furore as a senior German official was forcibly retired over the scandal, editor Markus Beckedahl told el Reg this morning.

Last night, Germany's chief federal prosecutor Harald Range was given the boot by German Justice Minister Heiko Maas over his handling of the affair. Technically, Range resigned, but it was his decision to pursue Beckedahl and fellow journalist Andrew Meister for treason that led to his downfall.

The journalists, meanwhile, have seen donations to their website come flooding in. The pair were under investigation for treason for supposedly betraying state secrets after they published leaked documents relating to plans to monitor Twitter and Facebook chats, as well as a €2.75m project to process massive online data sets.

This sort of law enforcement and prosecutorial overreach gets promotions in the US.

It's nice to see that there are countries where this bullsh%$ is not tolerated.

Bummer of a Birth Mark, Rand

The Department of Justice has just unsealed a criminal indictment naming three close Rand Paul aides conspiracy for fraud and bribery relating to the 2012 Republican primary:

Two top allies of presidential candidate and US Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) were charged with violating campaign finance laws during the 2012 presidential campaign, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.

Jesse Benton, who worked on the presidential bid of Paul's father, Ron, was named as one of three political operatives in the alleged scheme to conceal payments to an Iowa state senator.

According to a National Journal report last April, Benton was tapped to run a Paul-sanctioned super PAC, America's Liberty PAC, supporting the senator's 2016 presidential bid.

John Tate, who is listed as the group's founder and president, was also named in the charges. The other operative named was Dimitrios Kesari, a former deputy campaign manager on Ron Paul's campaign.

The indictment was based on six counts, including conspiracy, filing false records, false statements, and obstruction of justice.

Though the indictment did not name which 2012 presidential candidate Benton, Tate, and Kesari worked on, there is little doubt that it is referring to former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Rand Paul's father.

Note that one of these people, Jesse Benton, is married to Rand Paul's niece, so it is all in the family.

At the rate that this is going, the Republicans are going to nominate Donald Trump.

Way Too Much Free Time………

On Google using the Lynx text mode browser

Some guy took his early 1980s vintage TRS-80 Model 100 and set it up to surf the net:

The true test of a man's patience is crimping pins onto the end of a cable that leads to building a custom serial cable—especially if it's the first time you've even handled a serial cable in a decade. So as I searched under my desk, using my phone for a flashlight, I wondered whether I had finally found the IT project that would send me over the edge. On a recent day, I set out to turn my recently acquired vintage Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 computer into a working Internet terminal. And at this moment, I crawled on the floor looking for a DB-25 connector's little gold pin that I had dropped for the sixth—or maybe sixteenth—time.

Thankfully, I underestimated my patience/techno-masochism/insanity. Only a week later, I successfully logged in to Ars' editorial IRC channel from the Model 100. And seeing as this machine first saw the market in 1983, it took a substantial amount of help: a Raspberry Pi, a little bit of BASIC code, and a hidden file from the website of a certain Eric S. Raymond.

I respect how the author has gotten his geek on.

It means that he is doing his bit to prevent overpopulation, because with that under his arm, he is so never going to get his porcupine whacked.