Not Enough Bullets

What a surprise, Peabody Energy, the biggest coal company in the country, has been bankrolling pretty much every nutty climate change denier they can find.

Who cares about the destruction of the world, we have profits to make:

Peabody Energy, America’s biggest coalmining company, has funded at least two dozen groups that cast doubt on manmade climate change and oppose environment regulations, analysis by the Guardian reveals.

The funding spanned trade associations, corporate lobby groups, and industry front groups as well as conservative thinktanks and was exposed in court filings last month.

The coal company also gave to political organisations, funding twice as many Republican groups as Democratic ones.

Peabody, the world’s biggest private sector publicly traded coal company, was long known as an outlier even among fossil fuel companies for its public rejection of climate science and action. But its funding of climate denial groups was only exposed in disclosures after the coal titan was forced to seek bankruptcy protection in April, under competition from cheap natural gas.

Environmental campaigners said they had not known for certain that the company was funding an array of climate denial groups – and that the breadth of that funding took them by surprise.

………

“The breadth of the groups with financial ties to Peabody is extraordinary. Thinktanks, litigation groups, climate scientists, political organisations, dozens of organisations blocking action on climate all receiving funding from the coal industry,” said Nick Surgey, director of research for the Center for Media and Democracy.

“We expected to see some denial money, but it looks like Peabody is the treasury for a very substantial part of the climate denial movement.”

Peabody’s filings revealed funding for the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate lobby group which opposes clean energy standards and tried to impose financial penalties on homeowners with solar panels, as well as a constellation of conservative thinktanks and organisations.

I really hope that someone can find a way to send their executives to a federal PMITA prison.

They deserve it.

So Now Clippy will Be In Charge of My Online Job Search

Microsoft is buying LinkedIn:

Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, a deal in which one of the world's biggest social networks will join a software and computing giant as it tries to broaden its reach in online services.

Under the agreement the two companies announced Monday, LinkedIn will continue to operate independently, and LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner will report to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. The deal with Microsoft values each of LinkedIn's shares at $196; LinkedIn's stock was up nearly 47 percent at the end of Monday trading.

The two companies cater to similar customers. Under Nadella's tenure, Microsoft has sought to become a cloud-computing powerhouse that largely serves businesses. LinkedIn also primarily targets professionals and is the United States' 11th-largest website by traffic and visitors, according to the online index Alexa. In a sign of LinkedIn's importance to corporations, executives have been known to publish blog posts on the platform that act as corporate statements.

Monday's deal will allow Microsoft to infuse its professional software and services with LinkedIn's technology, a move that could give users of Windows, Microsoft Office and even the company's personal assistant, Cortana, access to new features and elevate Microsoft's suite of enterprise products. Meanwhile, by tapping into Microsoft Office's user base of 1.2 billion people, LinkedIn hopes to become a central player in many companies' day-to-day business, increasing engagement with the platform.

LinkedIn is kind of a roach motel, and deleting your account difficult, but thanks to Kevin Drum, here is the primer on how to deactivate your account.

Considering what Microflaccid tid to Skype, expect the crapification of LinkedIn to commence.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS

I'm With Jim………

Specifically Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut.

As much as I hate praising a vice chair of the Wall Street loving New Democrat Coalition, particularly one who is an alumnus of the Vampire Squid, but he is right when he announces that he is going to boycott the Congressional moment of silence for the Tampa shooting victims, because it is hypocritical political theater that is used to excuse cowardly inaction:

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) says he won’t participate in any more moments of silence on the House floor for victims of mass shootings out of frustration that they don’t lead to action on gun control.

In a House floor speech on Monday, the day after the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Himes said the moments of silence offer a symbol of lawmakers’ lack of a legislative response to mass shootings.

“Silence. That is how the leadership of the most powerful country in the world will respond to this week’s massacre of its citizens,” he said.

“Silence. Not me. Not anymore. I will no longer stand here absorbing the faux concern, contrived gravity and tepid smugness of a House complicit in the weekly bloodshed,” Himes said angrily.………

………

“As you bow your head and think of what you say to your God when you are asked what you did to slow the slaughter of innocents, there will be silence,” Himes said.

Himes first declared his boycott of future moments of silence in a series of tweets late Sunday night, writing that they “have become an abomination.”

He may be a conservadem, but he's completely right on this issue.

The moment of silence is a completely hypocritical excuse for doing nothing.

Why We Love Cats

H/t ECop at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Linkage

• How Windows 10 became malware (Computerworld) If software attempts to fool the user into installing it, it is malware. Windows 10 attempts to fool the user into installing it. QED.
• Coder fired after 6 years for automating his job (Boing Boing) Coder gets job. Coder figures out how to have the computer do his job. Boss finds out, and he gets fired.
• Migrant workers in US seafood industry exposed to forced labor conditions (The Guardian) The program, called H-2B is designed to create peonage.  It is a feature, not a bug.
• The Pub: Paul Krugman. VSP (The Pub) A VERY well deserved examination of Krugman's descent into hackery so as to support Hillary Clinton.
• Finance is Just Another Industry (naked capitalism) An essential discussion of the destructive and parasitic role of modern finance.
• Spice gull: seabird turns orange after falling into vat of curry (The Guardian) The Donald Trump of birds. (Click for larger popup)
• US Tax Receipts Signaling Recession?(MishTalk) Yes.

Star Wars and central bank policy, what could be more exciting. (Answer: almost everything) H/t Naked Capitalism

Maybe If the FBI Spent More Time Pursuing Real Terrorists, and Less Time Manufacturing Them for High Profile Arrests………

We don't know everything now, but what we do know is that a gunman murdered 50 people at a gay bar in Tampa, Florida, and that he contemporaneously made ISIS claims:

A man who called 911 to proclaim allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group, and who had been investigated in the past for possible terrorist ties, stormed a gay nightclub here Sunday morning, wielding an assault rifle and a pistol, and carried out the worst mass shooting in United States history, leaving 50 people dead and 53 wounded.

The attacker, identified by law enforcement officials as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old who was born in New York, turned what had been a celebratory night of dancing to salsa and merengue music at the crowded Pulse nightclub into a panicked scene of unimaginable slaughter, the floors slicked with blood, the dead and the injured piled atop one another. Terrified people poured onto the darkened streets of the surrounding neighborhood, some carried wounded victims to safety, and police vehicles were pressed into service as makeshift ambulances to rush people to hospitals.

Joel Figueroa and his friends “were dancing by the hip-hop area when I heard shots, bam, bam, bam,” he said, adding, “Everybody was screaming and running toward the front door.”

Of course, we have calls for effective gun control, but, as always, we can expect them to come to nothing.

Here is what we know so far:

• He worked for G4S, a UK based private security firm which is big into (among other unsavory things) the private prison system.
• He had previously been under investigation by the FBI.
• He bought the guns used recently.
• This is the largest mass shooting in US history.
• The shooter was a big fan of the New York Police Department repeatedly posting selfies of himself in NYOPD gear.

I tend to think that gay bashing was at the core of the shooting, though in what is probably an unrelated event, an Indiana man drove to West Hollywood with a car full of bombs and guns to attack a gay pride parade:

Police in Santa Monica, California, arrested a man intent on attacking a nearby gay pride parade on Sunday, hours after a terrorist opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing at least 50 and wounding over 50 more people in the worst mass shooting attack in modern U.S. history.

20-year-old James Wesley Howell was arrested in Santa Monica after assault rifles and chemicals capable of creating an explosive device were found in his vehicle early Sunday morning, police say. He reportedly admitted to officials that he was planning to “harm” the West Hollywood gay pride parade that was taking place about seven miles away later Sunday.

The most obvious point to made here is that the FBI has been too busy engaging in sting operations against people who constitute no meaningful threat to actually do their job on real threats:

The attack on a gay club in Orlando in which 50 people were killed and more than 50 wounded — now the largest mass shooting in U.S. history — demonstrates how potential threats are escaping the FBI’s vast counterterrorism dragnet.

While it’s unclear whether gunman Omar Mateen’s inspiration was hatred of gays, the Islamic State, or something else, attackers like him are the intended targets of the FBI’s post-9/11 prevention program. Federal law enforcement’s top priority today is to stop the attacker of tomorrow.

But Mateen’s mass shooting is an example of how dangerous men slip past the FBI’s watch while federal agents focus on targets of questionable capacity.

………

According to The Daily Beast, whose reporter quoted an unnamed “senior law enforcement source,” Mateen was a person of interest to the FBI in 2013 and again in 2014. The Intercept has been unable confirm independently from sources that Mateen had been under FBI investigation during those years.

If the FBI had in fact investigated Mateen, his capacity for violence would have been easily verified: He had a state firearms license.

With connections to homes in Martin and St. Lucie counties, Mateen would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the FBI’s Miami office, which has among the bureau’s most active and aggressive counterterrorism units.

The Miami FBI investigated the so-called Liberty City 7 in one of the earliest and most controversial post-9/11 counterterrorism stings, and prosecutors in Florida’s Southern District have prosecuted dozens on terrorism related charges in the last 15 years.

………

For more than a year ending in April — a time during which investigators will now be looking for any clues from Mateen that might have been missed — the FBI in Miami focused on a counterterrorism sting that targeted James Medina, a homeless man with mental problems.

………

According to the FBI’s affidavit, the informant, not Medina, came up with the idea of crediting the planned attack to the Islamic State.

“You can do all that,” Medina told the informant. “Yeah, we can print up or something and make it look like it’s ISIS here in America. Just like that.”
………

Does the FBI’s focus on men like Medina and Suarez — questionable targets of questionable mental fitness — prevent agents from identifying and investigating armed and dangerous men like the one behind what is now America’s worst mass shooting?

It’s a question the FBI, which has faced little congressional scrutiny over its counterterrorism program, has never been forced to answer.

The Orlando shooting isn’t the first case to raise this question. In 2011, when the FBI investigated Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, agents did not deem him a threat.

Instead, at about the same time, the Boston FBI started a nine-month sting operation against Rezwan Ferdaus, who had no weapons and no connections to international terrorists, and whose mental wellness had deteriorated so much that he was wearing adult diapers at the time of his arrest on terrorism charges.

I've not heard about a successful FBI counter-terrorism operation that did not involve them using informants to manufacture the a high profile arrest in a very long time.

It's pretty clear that the FBI desperately needs some adult supervision.

Quote of the Day

Today, we went to the Ruckus Festival, a 7 hour long mmusic festival with about a dozen bands.

One of the bands was there was Parallel Heights, which put on a fine show, but they had some technical issues.

Specifically, one of the band members, in addition to backup vocals, played ukelele, saxophone, and bagpipes.

There were some technical issues, with the clip on mic for the Sax not working, and the bagpipes had a similar problem, and so it was downed out by the other (amplified) music instruments.

On the way home were talking about the concert, and when we discussed Parallel Heights' set, and Charlie said, "That's the only time that I wished I could hear the bagpipes better."

Heh.

Your Daily Guck Foogle

I've just discovered a web site that monkey wrenches your Google search history.

Seeing as Google Alphabet has gone full Monty privacy invading evil, I recommend this service, particularly since it is a bit of a screw you to the NSA as well:

Unless you’ve specifically told it not to, Google remembers everything you’ve ever searched for—a fact that’s been useful for artists, Google’s bottom line, law enforcement investigations, among many other things. We’ve all searched for stuff we probably shouldn’t have from time to time, but a web developer has decided to take the shared experience of regretting a specific search to its logical extreme.

“Ruin My Search History” promises to “ruin your Google search history with a single click,” and that’s exactly what it does. Click on the magnifying glass and it’ll take over your browser and immediately cycles through a series of search terms ranging from the mildly embarrassing (“why doesn’t my poo float,” “smelly penis cure urgent”) to the potentially relationship-ruining (“mail order paternity test,” “attracted to mother why”) to the type of thing that might get your name on a list somewhere (“isis application form,” “cheap syria flights,” “how to kill someone hypothetically”).

………

“I [Jon, the guy who authored the site] thought better of that and went down the route of things you'd hate for people to see in your search history,” he said. “I tried to make a semi-story out of the searches to add to the horror. And added in the person's location to the queries (though people don't seem to have noticed that).”

………

“Really not sure how I came up with the idea originally,” Jon wrote. “It was probably sparked by the never ending surveillance saga in the news: Snowden, NSA, phone taps, metadata, who searches for what.” I asked Jon if he thought there’s something to the idea that if we all search for words that are likely to be on a watchlist somewhere, we can confuse the NSA or make a comment about mass surveillance.

“I had the idea that the best way to make the government’s search surveillance useless is for us all to be on ‘the list,’” he said. “Maybe it does a bit, but if that's enough to throw their surveillance off course, it's probably not great surveillance.”

After it was posted, the website quickly went to the top of Reddit’s /r/internetisbeautiful, where people immediately began to freak the f%$# out over the inclusion of ISIS-related search terms. The reaction has been so visceral, in fact, that one of the moderators has had to step in and defend leaving the link to the site—which now has warnings all over it—on the page: “We've taken adequate steps to warn redditors that this link might be something you shouldn't just blindly click,” internetisbeautiful moderator K_Lobstah wrote in an incredibly long post. “I promise the NSA is not going to black bag you in your sleep (unless you are a terrorist). I promise the police are not calling a judge off his poker game tonight to obtain an emergency search warrant for your apartment.”

It's mostly harmless, but one warning:  one search term is "Donald Trump".

A Start, But Not Enough

Yesterday, the Supreme Court made what was a very important ruling.

It said that judges have a constitutional requirement to recuse themselves from cases where they have a significant personal stake:

………

On Thursday morning, the Supreme Court decided an actual case of judicial bias, voting 5-to-3 that a judge may not rule on a case in which he previously played a significant and personal role as a prosecutor.

The case before the justices was an appeal by a Pennsylvania man named Terrance Williams, who was convicted of a brutal murder committed in 1984, when he was 18, and sentenced to death.

There was never any question that Mr. Williams committed the crime. But at his trial, he denied knowing his victim, a man named Amos Norwood, and the prosecution’s case was that he had killed Mr. Norwood in the course of robbing him. It later came to light that Mr. Norwood had been sexually assaulting Mr. Williams and other underage boys, and that the prosecutors had known this fact but kept it from the jury.

A trial court agreed that this was prosecutorial misconduct and overturned Mr. Williams’s sentence, but the state supreme court unanimously reversed that decision. And that was where things went wrong, according to the United States Supreme Court. The chief justice of the Pennsylvania supreme court, Ronald Castille — who wrote separately to denounce the trial court’s decision and defend the prosecutors — had been the district attorney who personally approved seeking the death penalty in Mr. Williams’s case.

In 2012, Mr. Williams asked Justice Castille to recuse himself, and the justice refused.

In an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court ruled that this violated Mr. Williams’s right to due process, and tossed out his sentence. “Where a judge has had an earlier significant, personal involvement as a prosecutor in a critical decision in the defendant’s case, the risk of actual bias in the judicial proceeding rises to an unconstitutional level,” Justice Kennedy wrote.

………

As the majority noted, this ignores not only the significance of the decision Mr. Castille made as a prosecutor, but also the fact that he did not simply sign off on the decision to seek death for Mr. Williams and then forget about it. To the contrary, he was deeply invested in his tough-on-crime reputation as a prosecutor. In his campaign for the state supreme court seat, he boasted about the 45 men, Mr. Williams included, he had sent to death row.

This is a big deal, and Judge Castille should not be allowed to judge a dog show.

You No Longer Have to Listen to TED Talks

Because here is literally every TED Talk ever given:


H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS

And Tonite's Theme of the Incompetent Foreign Policy Elites Continues………

And in this case, I find myself agreeing with a writer at The National Interest, which I find particularly disturbing, since the magazine was founded by the godfather of the Neocon movement, Irv Kristol.

In this case, Christopher Preble is suggesting that we toss the entire foreign policy establishment out on its ear:

The public is pretty cranky these days: Americans are unhappy with the presumptive nominees of the Democratic and Republican Parties. The dislike for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is at record-breaking levels relative to other major party standard bearers over the last thirty-six years. Americans are also gloomy about the state of the economy (Republicans more so than Democrats), and anxious about foreign entanglements, especially in the Middle East.

These sentiments are nothing new. American officials and those who run for office are generally unpopular. And an individual’s economic outlook is notoriously volatile, contingent on a few relevant factors that are subject to change.

Foreign policy views are more consistent in the sense that few Americans are committed interventionists, but, as I noted last week, the elites who populate the American foreign policy community tend to see public will as essentially irrelevant, because it is malleable in the hands of a skillful leader. The trouble arises when public sentiment shapes leaders’ perceptions of what is possible at a given time, but not enough to change their positions. The end result is often a dramatic gap between the ends that policymakers seek and the means available to achieve them.

………

Ambitious leaders can shape public opinion through threat inflation and fearmongering. Interventionist elites know that skeptics will have a very difficult time ending a war once it is started. The hawks puts the nation’s prestige on the line. When things turn sour, the public wants to double down, unwilling to see the country to suffer an ignominious defeat. Americans are especially loathe to admit that the heroic sacrifices made on their behalf by U.S. troops might ultimately have been in vain.

There’s something unseemly about a U.S. foreign policy community that consistently defies the wishes of the American people, repeatedly making mistakes, and expecting things to magically turn around. But it is worse, to attempt grandiose foreign policies geared to shaping major regions in the face of clear public sentiment for a more modest approach. That leads to strategies that are almost sure to fail, given the limited resources available.

Ian Bremmer had it right in his book, Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World. After a thorough review of three distinct approaches, Bremmer opts for what he calls “Independent America”. This includes leading the world by example, and focusing on domestic priorities in order to establish a strong and vibrant society here at home in order to engage with the rest of the world through voluntary and peaceful means. This is different, however, from attempting to dictate how others should live their lives. If U.S. leaders adhere to such an approach, he explains, they “will make fewer costly mistakes,” and, crucially, they can count on “strong and lasting public backing.”

When we look at our interventionist foreign policy, intelligence, and military establishments, the interventionists have had a record of uninterrupted failure and misery since before I was born, and I am one seriously old fart.

We need to completely break the foreign policy elites before they break us.

Operation Ridiculous Clusterf%$#

Speaking of US military, intelligence, and foreign policy failures, it appears that our efforts to overthrow Assad are failing, in part because CIA's and the Pentagon's proxies are literally at war with each other:

Two Department of Defense officials told The Daily Beast that they are not eager to support the rebels in the city of Aleppo because they’re seen as being affiliated with al Qaeda in Syria, or Jabhat al Nusra. The CIA, which supports those rebel groups, rejects that claim, saying alliances of convenience in the face of a mounting Russian-led offensive have created marriages of battlefield necessity, not ideology.

“It is a strange thing that DoD hall chatter mimics Russian propaganda,” one U.S. official, who supports the intelligence community position, wryly noted to Pentagon claims that the opposition and Nusra are one in the same.

But even if the rebels were completely separated from Nusra, there would still be something of a strategic conflict with U.S. military goals. The rebels in Aleppo, these Pentagon officials note, are fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime; the American military effort, on the other hand, is primarily about defeating the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

………

The intelligence community, which backed opposition forces in Aleppo, believes ISIS cannot be defeated as long as Assad is in power. The terror group, they say, thrives in unstable territories. And only local forces—like the ones backed by the CIA—can mitigate that threat.

………

“The U.S. has two isolated programs that are not mutually supporting each other and are actually sometimes at odds with each other,” said Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

Following the lead of the House of Saud, and allowing the CIA to engage in its regime change fantasies are no way to run a foreign policy.

Nuland's Folly

Following the US supported coup, The Ukraine has turned into an open air arms bazaar for criminals and terrorists:

When the the Ukrainian Security Service, the SBU, announced recently that it had detained a 25-year-old French citizen, Grégoire Moutaux, who was trying to cross the country’s border into Poland in a vehicle full of explosives and weapons, that sounded like a major blow against terrorism.

SBU spokesman Vasyl Hrytsak declared that after two weeks of investigation, which is to say of interrogation, “The Ukrainian Security Service managed to prevent 15 terrorist attacks targeting the territory of France.”

According to the SBU this alleged French criminal attempted to smuggle five Kalashnikov assault rifles, more than 50,000 bullets, two RPG-7 anti-tank grenade-launchers, 100 electronic detonators, and 125 kilograms of TNT across Ukraine’s frontier.

Perhaps. But in Kiev, the announcement was greeted with deep skepticism. Neither local journalists nor independent observers place much trust in SBU reports these days, and with good reason.
………

“Unfortunately, when both Ukraine and Europe are endangered by terrorism and need professional security services more than ever, there is not much confidence in what the SBU tells us,” independent journalist Saken Aymurzaev told The Daily Beast.

The ideological and ethnic conflict that has torn Ukraine apart over the last two hears has attracted radical nationalists from different countries, some of them involved in weapon smuggling. Among these, notably, were a few French volunteers, ideological supporters of pro-Russian forces who were fighting in eastern Ukraine two years ago.

Poland had to increase security measures last year to try to prevent criminals attempting to transport weapons from Ukraine into its territory. If in 2013 Polish police seized only three firearms smuggled from Ukraine, last year law enforcement arrested smugglers with 53 guns, and there are many, many more where those came from.

Between right wing Neocons, and Liberal Interventionists, our foreign policy establishment is going to destroy us all.

Panglossian Bullsh%$

I just love the techno-utopians who seem to think that your car spying on your driving habits and phoning home will create a travel paradise,

The author thinks that Tesla invading your privacy is the bee's knees:

………

The majority of cars sold in the U.S. now have event data recorders—sometimes described as black boxes—that log data to be examined in the event of an accident.

Most of those devices don’t record as much detail as Tesla does, or send it out over the Internet. But Internet connectivity in cars is becoming more common, and carmakers are keen to make use of whatever data they can get from our vehicles.

Only about a quarter of new cars have the necessary technology today, but that's expected to reach over 90 percent by 2020. Companies such as GM are open about their interest in expanding the range of data they collect on driver actions to open up new business opportunities.

One big motivation for car companies is to get into the insurance business. Some insurance companies already offer discounts if you install a device in your car with sensors that monitor your driving habits, and GM has partnerships with several that tap into its OnStar system. But insurance companies could have much to gain by getting more detailed data as Tesla does, so they can see not only the car’s motion but every action of the driver.

The word for this is dystopian.

Big Brother, Big Auto, whatever.

The Poor Do Have Self Control

One of the myths about the poor is that they cannot defer gratification for greater future benefits.

Well, scientists have found a way to objectively test for the ability to handle stress, it involves "Vagal Tone", activity of the Vagus nerve, which is an indicator of how well people handle stress.

What they discovered is that poor children who are best able to think things through the take the immediate reward, while rich kids will delay gratification.

It turns out that poor children use a different calculus:  Having never experienced the stability of their more fortunate cohorts, they go for the the immediate payoff, because experience has shown them that the any plans for the future will make their plans moot:

In the late 1960s, Walter Mischel, a researcher at Stanford University, invited several hundred children to participate in a game in which they were given a choice: They could eat one sweet right away, or wait and have two a little later. Initially, the goal was simple: to see how and why people (kids in this case) delayed gratification. But after the end of the experiment, Mischel began to check in with as many of the participants' families as he could, and over the following decade he learned that his little experiment probably had much larger implications than he had anticipated.

Many of the children had trouble resisting the single, immediate treat (a marshmallow), which was to be expected. The magnetic force that exists between kids and candies is no secret. What was surprising, however, was that that tendency — the inability to forego something good right now in exchange for something better in a bit — was associated with all sorts of negative life outcomes, including lower levels of academic achievement and higher rates of obesity.

………

The realization has sparked concerns that poverty begets a certain level of impulsiveness, and that that tendency to act in the moment, on a whim, without fully considering the consequences, makes it all the more difficult for poor children to succeed. But there's an important thing this discussion seems to miss. Poor kids may simply not want to delay gratification. Put another way, their decisions may not reflect the sort of impulsive nature we tend to attribute them to.

"When resources are low and scarce, the rational decision is to take the immediate benefit and to discount the future gain," said Melissa Sturge-Apple, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who studies child development. "When children are faced with economic uncertainty, impoverished conditions, not knowing when the next meal is, etc. — they may be better off if they take what is in front of them."

A recent two-part study conducted by Sturge-Apple shows how the tendency of poorer children to pounce on immediate rewards might not be the result of impulsiveness but rather of careful consideration.

In the first experiment, she monitored the heart rate of 200 low-income 2-year-olds. The monitoring allowed her to approximate each child's vagal tone — a measure of the activity of the vagus nerve, which has been shown to indicate how well a given individual performs under stress (i.e., reads social cues, reacts to environmental contexts, and adjusts behaviors). High vagal tone is good: it suggests a heightened ability to act relatively calmly under stress. Low vagal tone is bad: it suggests just the opposite.

Two years later, at the age of 4, the same children were presented with a choice. Each was sat a table where two plates and a bell were placed. One plate held two M&Ms, while the other held five. The children were told that they could either ring the bell and have the two M&Ms immediately or enjoy the plate of five as soon as the experimenter returned.

Interestingly, each child's vagal tone appeared to have a significant effect on their decision. But — and this is an important but — it didn't have the sort of effect many would have imagined. The higher the child's vagal tone — the greater, in other words, a child's ability to act calmly under pressure — the more likely the child was to ring the bell. The calmer the children were to think it through, the more likely they were to choose the immediate reward.

………

The children born to college-educated mothers of high socioeconomic status acted exactly as one would expect. The higher their vagal tone, or calmness under stress, the more likely they were to hold out for the five extra M&Ms. For children born to non-college-educated mothers of low socioeconomic status, on the other hand, the outcome was exactly the opposite. The higher their vagal tone, the less likely they were to wait.

The chart below, plucked from the study, shows just how stark the divergence is.

This is rational behavior, not evidence of lack of moral fiber.

If you don't know where your next meal is coming from, you eat whenever you can.

QED.

Crap

Given last night's results, except for something on the order of Hillary Clinton being indicted for smuggling black market geckos, she has the nomination.

Politics sucks sometimes.

The Libertarian Candidate Has the Best Campaign Slogan

I do not support the Libertarian candidate for President, Gary Johnson.

He's on record wanting to slash Medicare and Medicaid, repealing Obamacare, etc.  the whole Libertarian shtick.

If he were running on the VP candidate, and his running mate Bill Weld were at the top of the ticket, I might consider it, but not in the current configuration.

That being said he has the best campaign slogan of the season.

Heh.

Good on Them

As you may be aware, the FBI's current headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, is crumbling, and they are building a new one.

It has not been named yet, but the smart money is on their naming it after Hoover as well.

It appears that a fair number of FBI agents don't like the idea of naming the building after a rogue and corrupt law enforcement official:

A debate is brewing inside the Beltway and beyond, pitting some current and retired FBI agents against one another in a fight over the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover and whether the name of the Bureau’s first and most controversial director should grace the FBI’s proposed new $1.8 billion headquarters.

For more than 40 years since Hoover’s death a debate has raged about how to remember the man -- as an anti-crime and national security hero, a civil liberties-squashing villain or something in between -- and new interviews conducted by ABC News show that even among current and former agents and officials, there’s widely varying opinions on Hoover and the naming of the new headquarters.

“Hoover would have never let me become an agent because I’m a woman and Jewish,” a former FBI agent, who now works in private industry, told ABC News. “He did a lot of things he shouldn’t have done because he was given absolute power. He did a lot of hateful things. I would not like to see his name on the building.”

………

For more than a decade, members of Congress have, so far to no avail, introduced legislation to strip Hoover’s name from the current, sprawling headquarters at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, just blocks from the White House and Capitol. The last bill was introduced in 2015. Hoover died in 1972 after heading the FBI and its predecessor, The Bureau of Investigation, for nearly five decades.

James Comey, a former federal prosecutor who became the FBI’s seventh director in September 2013, publicly made critical comments about Hoover and his abuse of power. And the New York field office last year removed a mannequin-like figure of Hoover in the lobby because of objections of bureau workers who thought he no longer represented the FBI of today.

Hoover didn't just spy on people that he did not like. He blackmailed politicians to keep his position as well.

His name should no more go on a building that should that of Timothy McVey.

How Convenient

Over at IBT David Sirota relates how he requested Clinton's emails , and the is dragging its feet to keep the release until after election day:

Trade is a hot issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. But correspondence from Hillary Clinton and her top State Department aides about a controversial 12-nation trade deal will not be available for public review — at least not until after the election. The Obama administration abruptly blocked the release of Clinton’s State Department correspondence about the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after first saying it expected to produce the emails this spring.

The decision came in response to International Business Times' open records request for correspondence between Clinton’s State Department office and the United States Trade Representative. The request, which was submitted in July 2015, specifically asked for all such correspondence that made reference to the TPP.

The State Department originally said it estimated the request would be completed by April 2016. Last week the agency said it had completed the search process for the correspondence but also said it was delaying the completion of the request until late November 2016 — weeks after the presidential election. The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department documents.

Clinton’s shifting positions on the TPP have been a source of controversy during the campaign: She repeatedly promoted the deal as secretary of state but then in 2015 said, "I did not work on TPP," even though some leaked State Department cables show that her agency was involved in diplomatic discussions about the pact. Under pressure from her Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Clinton announced in October that she now opposes the deal — and has disputed that she ever fully backed it in the first place.

It gets even better, the State department has set a release date of November 31, a non-existent date.

And now the Donald Trump Campaign has gotten into the act, and is demanding the emails as well.

I know!  She'll release the emails when everyone else does.

Who Says that Irony is Dead?

I have no words, just the headline, "Hillary Clinton Wore a $12,495 Armani Jacket during a Speech about Inequality."

On the Superdelegate Canvass

G'night, all. pic.twitter.com/9F7Roh5v23

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 7, 2016

Jake Tapper Wins with a Chinatown Reference

I was watching TV last night, and flipped over to Maddow and found her over the moon because some anonymous source told the AP that they had Canvassed the superdelegates, and Clinton had secured the nomination.

NBC officially called the nomination last night.

It turns out that being pissed off about this is something that both the Sanders campaign and Clinton campaigns can agree on.

Why the Sanders campaign would angry is self-evident.

For the Clinton campaign, it short circuited what they hoped to be a golden moment tonight.

As to the story, it smells:

Last night, the Associated Press — on a day when nobody voted — surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “superdelegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors, and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive superdelegates who said this.

Although the Sanders campaign rejected the validity of AP’s declaration — on the ground that the superdelegates do not vote until the convention and he intends to try to persuade them to vote for him — most major media outlets followed the projection and declared Clinton the winner.

One question that is raised by all of this is who made the call to the AP to get this ball rolling.

I can think of 3 possibilities:

• Someone who is both completely incompetent and in a blind panic about the possibility of the aftermath of the last days of the primary, and a potentially contested convention that they did something mind buggeringly stupid. (I call this the Debbie Wasserman-Schultz hypothesis.)
• Someone at the AP is a complete idiot, and convinced his similarly dim cow-orkers that this was a plan so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. (I call this the Baldrick hypothesis)
• This is a ratf%$#ing from someone who wants to sow dissent between the Clinton and Sanders camps while diminishing whatever Clinton says today.  (I call this the Roger Stone hypothesis)

My money is on Baldrick.

Linkage

• How Bank Networks Amplify Financial Crises: Evidence from the Great Depression (naked capitalism) The interconnectedness of our banking system is a clear and present danger.
• Diamond Geysers: Rule-Breaking Iceland Completes Its Miracle Economic Escape (Epoch Times) Prosecuting the banksters and telling the bond holders to go Cheney themselves worked.
• President Obama's horrible, terrible legacy on student loans (The Hill) Much like the TARP, it's all about extracting rents on the vulnerable.
• Desperate Christians try luring millennials to faith with ’emoji’ Bible (Raw Story) Desperation much?
• Sausage-wielding ‘fascists’ terrorize Georgian vegans (Politico)  Not The Onion.
• The Night I Almost Peed on Henry Kissinger (OZY) "Fair warning, Henry. Wear your storm rubbers."
• King Tut's dagger blade made from meteorite, study confirms (CBC News) Not a surprise: There are no metallic meteorites around the Mediterranean. They all got dug up during the Bronze Age, because it was the only source of workable iron.
• Asbo dwarf jailed after impersonating a Dalek and threatening woman with a butterknife (Telegraph) I have no words.

How Germany and the US differ: nakedness, small talk, children's freedom, etc.

Ruck Falph

What a surprise, Ralph Nader's PIRGs, which have been abusing and burning out idealistic college students for more than 40 years, hates the new overtime requirements, because it would force them to treat their employees fairly:

Scott referred to this in his post yesterday, but PIRG’s statement opposing the new overtime rule is outrageous and entirely appropriate given its founding, history, and mode of operation. The argument itself is pure Lochner^* (public interest indeed!)

Doubling the minimum salary to $47,476 is especially unrealistic for non-profit, cause-oriented organizations. Organizations like ours rely on small donations from individuals to pay the bills. We can’t expect those individuals to double the amount they donate. Rather, to cover higher staffing costs forced upon us under the rule, we will be forced to hire fewer staff and limit the hours those staff can work – all while the well-funded special interests that we’re up against will simply spend more.

The logic of the rule, as applied to non-profit, cause-oriented organizations, makes no sense. A person of means – in service of a cause to which they feel deeply committed – can volunteer to work for our organization for free for as many hours as they wish, but a person of lesser means – who is no less committed to the work we do – cannot agree to work for our organization for less than $47,476 without having their work hours strictly limited in order to keep our costs affordable. This raises First Amendment concerns.

Yes, paying people overtime is a violation of their First Amendment rights! If this theoretical and entirely non-existent individual who wants to work for low wages specifically for PIRG and finds themselves limited to a mere 40 hours a week of this work, there are clearly no other outlets for their speech! Of course, this is complete garbage. Said individual could always donate the extra pay she made back to the organization, for instance.

PIRG is an utter disaster of an organization. It identifies an always available source of labor–young people, usually college or immediate post-college students, who don’t have a good job lined up and want to do some good. That’s actually a good thing–I wish other left-leaning organizations could find a way to take idealistic people and put them to work doing some good. But all PIRG uses them for is door-to-door fundraising. PIRG has no interest in building organizing skills in these people, no interest in long-term movement building, no interest in helping these people advance to long-term investment in either the organization or larger progressive causes. You can work there for years and advance no further than supervising other fundraisers. All it does it burn out those idealistic people.

………

None of this should be surprising because Ralph Nader, founder of PIRG, has always hated unions in his own shop.

Ralph Nader, and his orgs, have been a horror show for a very long time before his campaign in 2000.

^*This refers to the Lochner Era, when the Supreme Court invalidated almost all forms of workplace and safety regulations, because of an imaginary "liberty of contract".

I Really Want to Move to a Cave

After the phony story about Bernie Sanders skydiving, now we have this:

Hillary’s Foreign Policy Speech: Queen Galadriel Before Her Magic Mirror

The silly season is upon us.

Insanity Is Defined as Doing the Same Thing over and over Again and Expecting Different Results

Barack Obama has decided that terrorizing the population of Yemen with drones, and allowing the House of Saud to indiscriminately bomb civilians is a successful antiterrorism strategy.

The net effect has been to quadrupling the size of al Qaeda in Yemen:

On September 10, 2014, President Obama gave a speech advocating for the same kind of approach to counterterrorism against ISIL his Administration had been using with Yemen (and Somalia).

………

Today, the Soufan Group wrote up an alarming detail from the State Department Country Report on Terrorism for last year: AQAP has quadrupled in size since Obama’s speech.

This is what happens you have a failed policy, and you stick with the conventional wisdom.

It is a failure of intellect.

It is a failure of imagination.

It is an unalloyed failure.

Some Chart Pr0n that Explains Why So the Voters are Pissed Off

This table shows it all. (click on the picture for a larger popup)

Basically, it shows that the wealthy and powerful have become even more wealthy and powerful by stealing from the rest of us.

Even if people don't know the actual numbers, they know that our society has descended into a morass of, "Crony capitalism, pay-to-play politics, [and] special interests," that have further enriched the rich and their pet politicians.

It's why populism on both sides of the political has been so popular lately.

Mme. la Guillotine is looking increasingly attractive to a lot of people for this reason.

H/t naked capitalism.

Thanks Duncan.

Ever since the Reagan administration, the "Very Serious People" VSPs in Washington, DC have tried to find a way to cut/privatize Social Security.

For the first time in recent political memory, expansion of Social Security has become a top of serious discussion, and the impetus for this came from one person, Duncan "Atrios" Black:

In May 2012, ABC broke into its daytime coverage to show President Obama endorsing same-sex marriage, the culmination of years of activist work to take the idea from the radical fringe into the mainstream. We saw an economic version of that this week, and while none of the networks fired up their “Breaking News” graphics for it, the impact on society could be just as large, and the people who helped make it happen should be just as lauded.

“It’s time we finally made Social Security more generous,” said the president in Elkhart, Indiana, to applause, “and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.” This was totally unexpected: We knew the Elkhart speech was about the economy, but we didn’t know Obama would concur with a rallying cry on the left for several years now: Expand Social Security.

This movement crystallized from research into the looming retirement crisis. Too many Americans are headed into their golden years without nearly the kind of savings needed to maintain their standard of living. And their defined-benefit pensions have gradually transitioned into defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s, which have rewarded Wall Street with hidden and excessive fees while eating away at individual gains. The change also shifted market risks from employers onto employees, who must hope to avoid a drop in stocks as they hit retirement age.

………

Despite all this, the initial impulse from the Obama administration was to use Social Security cuts as a bargaining chip in a larger deal with Republicans. Grand bargain talks from 2011 to 2013 repeatedly invoked a different way to calculate the consumer price index (known as “chained CPI”), which would have resulted in $1,000 less a year for the average 85-year-old. Obama put chained CPI in his fiscal year 2014 budget.

Contrary to some after-the-fact snickering, this was a very credible threat, and it allowed Republicans to point to a Democratic president favoring entitlement cuts. Only the Tea Party’s unwillingness to consider anything resembling a compromise saved retirees from cuts.

At first, liberal groups played defense on chained CPI, accustomed to mobilizing in opposition rather than staking out a bolder claim. But the expansion movement can really be traced back to one blogger: Duncan Black, popularly known as “Atrios,” who waged an initially lonely crusade in a series of 2012 columns in USA Today, explaining why the retirement crisis was coming and how expanding Social Security represented the cleanest solution.

………

Lawmakers followed the rank and file consensus. Elizabeth Warren jumped aboard the Harkin bill in late 2013. A House bill quickly got dozens of co-sponsors. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who holds down the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, endorsed an expansion amendment. Bernie Sanders made it a campaign plank, one that Hillary Clinton eventually had to endorse, albeit in a more targeted fashion.

Now President Obama, who started this all by embracing the opposite position years ago, has explicitly endorsed the expansion of Social Security. This victory is a great credit to Duncan Black and everyone who moved a minority opinion in the corridors of power in the Democratic Party into the mainstream.

(emphasis mine)

Obama was dragged kicking and screaming into this.  So is Hillary Clinton.

He has seen cutting Social Security as a major legacy goal since he entered office in 2009: He thought could show himself reaching across the aisle if he could ground the proverbial "3^rd rail" of American politics.

Thankfully, he was foiled by the Teabaggers in Congress, just as Bill Clinton effort to privatize Social Security was foiled by Gingrich's impeachment efforts in the late 1990s.

Duncan Black has done this country a service by short-circuiting the efforts of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party to divert money from retirees unto the the pockets of the banksters.

So Not Surprised

It turns out that our attempt to create a viable Iraqi military has largely failed:

A 17-month U.S. effort to retrain and reunify Iraq's regular army has failed to create a large number of effective Iraqi combat units or limit the power of sectarian militias, according to current and former U.S. military and civilian officials.

Concern about the shortcomings of the American attempt to strengthen the Iraqi military comes as Iraqi government forces and Shi’ite militias have launched an offensive to retake the city of Falluja from Islamic State. Aid groups fear the campaign could spark a humanitarian catastrophe, as an estimated 50,000 Sunni civilians remain trapped in the besieged town.

The continued weakness of regular Iraqi army units and reliance on Shi’ite militias, current and former U.S. military officials said, could impede Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s broader effort to defeat Islamic State and win the long-term support of Iraqi Sunnis. The sectarian divide between the majority Shi'ite and minority Sunni communities threatens to split the country for good.

………

Retired U.S. Lieutenant General Mick Bednarek, who commanded the U.S. military training effort in Iraq from 2013 to 2015, said the Iraqi army has not improved dramatically in the past eight months. He blamed a variety of problems, from a lack of Iraqis wanting to join the military to the resistance of some lower-level Iraqi officers to sending units to American training.

This is not a surprise.

Iraq was always a country loosely stitched together by the diktat of the new colonial rulers of the region following the First World War, and the invasion knocked Humpty Dumpty off of that wall, and we cannot put him back together again.

Peter Thiel's America

There are a lot of people out there who support Peter Thiel using his billions to harass Gawker through the legal process because they and its founder and CEO Nick Denton are bad people who practice shallow gossip journalism.

Well, this sort of action most often cuts against ordinary citizens who choose to raise their voices against the powerful as is shown in the case of the $30,000,000.00 lawsuit against activists in Uniontown, Alabam who have the temerity to object to Green Group Holdings and Howling Coyote's poisoning their water by dumping of millions of pounds of toxic coal ash there:

“We all should have the right to clean air and clean water.”

Would you agree with that sentence? Would you say it yourself? It seems uncontroversial — something kids might be taught in school. Something any of us might say without blinking an eye. Unless, that is, you happened to say it in Uniontown, Alabama — an overwhelmingly Black and poor rural town in the heart of the South’s Black Belt. In Uniontown, it turns out that having the audacity to fight for your fundamental human rights — for instance, by saying the exact sentence above — can get you sued for $30 million in federal court by companies seeking to silence their critics.

………

Fighting for justice in Uniontown means opposing the trains that roll into town carrying hazardous coal ash from 33 states to deposit it at the Arrowhead landfill — a dump bewilderingly located in a residential neighborhood, near wetlands, within this spacious county full of rolling fields and open space. It means worrying about the safety of that coal ash — the very same coal ash that catastrophically leaked out of a Tennessee facility in 2008 and destroyed the surrounding environment before it was hurriedly redirected to Uniontown.

………

In the lawsuit, Green Group and Howling Coyote claim that by advocating against hazardous waste in their town, Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis have engaged in “defamation” that’s harmed them to the tune of a cool $30 million. But the only harm evident in this lawsuit is the gripping terror that average citizens — not scientists or paid policy wonks — feel after being sued for millions for speaking their truth in order to protect their community. Fortunately, the First Amendment protects a person’s right to do precisely what Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis have so bravely done.

Think again about that sentence: We all should have the right to clean air and clean water. Would you say it if you knew a powerful corporation would sue you for (more than) everything you’ve got? No one should have to make that choice.

The law in this case may focus on the First Amendment, but the story of Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis is one about racial justice. In Uniontown, racial justice means environmental justice. And the road to justice starts with voices calling out injustice. The ACLU is representing [6] Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis to make sure their voices are not silenced.

This is exactly the same thing that Peter Thiel is doing.

The only difference is that these companies are not attempting to claim that this is some sort of act of philanthropy, as the PayPal founder does.

These are all SLAPP suits, and they are all profoundly corrupting and profoundly evil.

Today In Idiocy

1,014 Miles Distance Might Explain the Coverage

Over at Tablet Magazine,Yair Rosenberg wonders what sort of liberal antisemitism makes The New York Times condemn single sex hours at a Brooklyn swimming pool for Orthodox Jews, but say nothing at all about a similar program for Muslims in Minneapolis.

Ummmm....Here is a clue: One happened in Minneapolis, the other in Brooklyn. Why would the New York Times would take more interest in one than the other?

Perhaps because one is happening in New York, the Times home town and the other is happening a about 1,014 miles away as the crow flies?

Mr. Rosenberg, were you dropped on your head as a youth?

I Have an Irresistable Urge to Live in a Cave for the Next 5 Months

It appears that a low level Bernie Sanders staffer was doing advance work for a rally in California, and was looking at holding the event at an airport.

It turns out that there was a sky diving concern there, and said staffer name dropped to get a chance at doing a tandem jump with the proprietor of NorCal Skydiving, Jimmy Haliday.

This ended up with (I'm not joking here) international coverage about Bernie Sanders skydiving:

Bernie Sanders will not be skydiving into a California rally, as was briefly, but widely speculated on Friday.

Yet remarkably, it does seem that the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign team explored the idea of parachuting the 74-year-old candidate into the event.

The unlikely rumor was widely shared on social media after a story in the Press Democrat, a local paper in northern California, suggested the Vermont senator might skydive at an evening rally hosted by a skydiving company at the Cloverdale Municipal airport, about 90 miles north of San Francisco.

The campaign was swift to shoot down the rumor. “Ha I wouldn’t count on it,” Sanders spokeswoman Sarah Ford texted the Guardian when asked for confirmation.

………

On Thursday, Halliday, whose business is renting out airport space to the campaign, even did a trial jump with a member of the Sanders team. “They tested me out ... I kind of showed them what Bernie might expect.”

It appears that the staffer who jumped with Halliday was a (possibly overzealous) member of the campaign’s “advance team”, which scouts locations and prepares for rallies. It is unclear if queries about the senator jumping out of an aircraft were sanctioned by his campaign headquarters.

If you had any doubt, we are officially in the silly season, and it's only going to get worse.

I just want to get away from it all until the damn election is over?

Anyone know of any AirBNB vacancies in Pyongyang?

I'm sick of this crap.

Deep Thought

Your Daily Schadenfreude

Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos has just had her personal wealth recomputed by Fortune. Yesterday,   it was $4,500,000,000.00 today it is $0.00:

Last year, Elizabeth Holmes topped the FORBES list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a net worth of $4.5 billion. Today, FORBES is lowering our estimate of her net worth to nothing. Theranos had no comment.

Our estimate of Holmes’ wealth is based entirely on her 50% stake in Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003 with plans of revolutionizing the diagnostic test market. Theranos shares are not traded on any stock market; private investors purchased stakes in 2014 at a price that implied a $9 billion valuation for the company.

Since then, Theranos has been hit with allegations that its tests are inaccurate and is being investigated by an alphabet soup of federal agencies. That, plus new information indicating Theranos’ annual revenues are less than $100 million, has led FORBES to come up with a new, lower estimate of Theranos’ value.

FORBES spoke to a dozen venture capitalists, analysts and industry experts and concluded that a more realistic value for Theranos is $800 million, rather than $9 billion. That gives the company credit for its intellectual property and the $724 million that it has raised, according to VC Experts, a venture capital research firm. It also represents a generous multiple of the company’s sales, which FORBES learned about from a person familiar with Theranos’ finances.

At such a low valuation, Holmes’ stake is essentially worth nothing. Theranos investors own preferred shares, which means they get paid back before Holmes, who owns common stock. According to VC Experts, investors in Theranos own a particular kind of preferred equity, called participating preferred shares, which take precedence to common stock in the event of a liquidation. FORBES is not aware of any plans to liquidate. If that were to happen, participating preferred investors would get their money back and more before Holmes gets a cent.

We now know the difference between a typical Silicon Valley company and one that actually has to produce a real physical product:  The emperor's new clothes are revealed far sooner for the companies who make actuall "stuff".

It appears that the medical testing industry does not lend itself to the "long con."

I So Hope that the Banksters Lose This One

Puerto Rico is in debt, and, as befitting their colonial status, they have very few options to renegotiate their debt. This is a fact of life for colonial societies: Debt peonage to your imperial masters.

That being said, and audit of Puerto Rico's debt seems to indicate that many of the debts were issued illegally, and so the contracts under which the debt was issued, and hence the debt itself, may be unenforceable:

An audit report published on Thursday suggests that debt-laden Puerto Rico may be able to void some of its borrowing because politicians exceeded constitutional debt limits and their own authority. 

 The report, shared with MarketWatch, states that some of Puerto Rico’s debt may have been issued illegally, allowing the government to potentially declare the bonds invalid and courts to then decide that creditors’ claims are unenforceable. The scope of the audit report, issued by the island’s Public Credit Comprehensive Audit Commission, covers the two most recent full-faith-and-credit debt issues of the commonwealth: Puerto Rico’s 2014 $3.5 billion general-obligation bond offering and a $900 million issuance in 2015 of Tax Refund Anticipation Notes to a syndicate of banks led by J.P Morgan.

Money for those debt payments is not in the commonwealth’s proposed budget, either. On Tuesday Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, sent a proposed 2016-17 budget to the island’s legislature that provides for only $209 million of the $ 1.4 billion of current debt-service cost. As García Padilla told reporters at a news conference: “This is simple: either we pay Wall Street or we pay Puerto Ricans. If the legislature decides we pay Wall Street more, well, each has his responsibility. I will continue defending Puerto Ricans. Money I send to Wall Street, I do not have to provide services here.”  

………

The Puerto Rican constitution contains a balanced-budget clause that explicitly prohibits borrowing to finance operating deficits, but its politicians borrowed to cover deficit financing in its 2014 General Obligation Bond Offering, according to the commission’s initial review. The March 2014 General Obligation Bond states that the proceeds would be used in part to cover deficits that had accumulated and that were expected to occur in the year of the offering. The documents include a chart showing deficits financed with borrowing during the past and that were expected to recur.

In addition, Puerto Rico did not inform bondholders that its constitution forbids it from using debt to finance deficits. That, the commission’s report says suggests “substantive” noncompliance with the letter of the constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said in the Litchfield v. Ballou case and, more recently, in litigation related to Detroit’s bankruptcy that borrowing above a debt ceiling may allow the issuer to declare debt invalid and, therefore, unpayable. Detroit went to court to invalidate $1.45 billion in certificates of participation, debt issued by two shell companies called “service corporations.” The parties settled before the case went to trial, but, while refusing two initial proposed settlements, the judge stated that Detroit’s argument had “substantial merit” and that the suit would have had a “reasonable likelihood of success.”

I really hope that the people of Puerto Rico win, and the bond holders lose.

This is Our Dystopian Future

Couldn't adjust my air conditioning today because my thermostat was offline. The future is amazing! pic.twitter.com/hlMgaImAiz

— Adam Driscoll (@adamdriscoll) May 31, 2016

People in tech talk about the "Internet of Things" all the time.

They think it will make our lives a paradise.

I think that it will mean that the technology will be less reliabl.

I am also not particularly keen on my regrigerator spying on me when I raid it at 1 in he morning. 

I want to be alone with my fruit stuffed pasties, thank you very much.

H/t naked capitalism.

Well, This is a Fine F%$# You

The German Parliament just voted to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and Turkish President Erdogan's head is exploding:

The German Parliament overwhelmingly adopted a symbolic but fraught resolution on Thursday declaring the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 a genocide, escalating tensions with Turkey at a diplomatically delicate juncture.

The Turkish government angrily denounced the vote as “null and void,” and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called his ambassador in Germany back to Ankara for consultations.

“The way to close the dark pages of your own history is not by defaming the histories of other countries with irresponsible and baseless decisions,” Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, wrote on Twitter. In Ankara, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, “There is no shameful incident in our past that would make us bow our heads.”

Germany needs Turkey’s help in following through on a deal with the European Union to manage the refugee crisis attributed in large part to the Syrian civil war. At the same time, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been under pressure not to be seen as caving to pressure from Ankara to compromise on Western values, particularly after a recent dust-up over freedom of speech set off by a German comedian’s satire that outraged Mr. Erdogan.

………

Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its coalition partners supported the resolution, which was originally proposed for last year, to mark the centennial of the start of the killings. But it was repeatedly delayed, most recently in February, over concerns about angering Ankara.

As the vote approached, debate intensified in Germany, which is home to an estimated three million people of Turkish descent, many of whom have dual citizenship. About 2,000 Turks demonstrated last weekend in Berlin, rallying to say that Parliament is not a court and therefore should not pass judgment.

………

Her decision to do so, despite those objections, may have been influenced by an episode in March, when a German comic, Jan Böhmermann, lampooned Mr. Erdogan with a crude poem. Ms. Merkel initially criticized the verses, giving the impression — which she later said was a mistake — that she advocated restrictions on freedom of expression in Germany. Critics portrayed her as weak.

Cem Ozdemir, the co-chairman of the opposition Greens and a driving force behind the resolution, accused Ms. Merkel of paying little heed to Turkey for most of her decade in power, until circumstances forced her to engage with Mr. Erdogan.

On Thursday, Mr. Ozdemir said there was “never a favorable time to speak about something as dreadful as genocide.”

Mr. Ozdemir read century-old statements by officials of the German Empire showing they knew that up to 90 percent of Armenians had been killed. “Working through the Shoah is the basis of democracy in Germany,” Mr. Ozdemir said, referring to the Holocaust. “This genocide is also waiting to be worked through.”

There have been people fighting for this for decades.

Merkel is not one of these people. She felt a political need to push this through because she is seen as kowtowing to an increasingly megalomaniacal and despotic Turkish leader.

Still, this is a positive move, and hopefully we will see more of this.

The Clintons Really Do Hate the Working Man

Yesterday in Cranford, NJ, Bill Clinton discussing Donald Trump's surprising political success noted that "Non-college-educated Americans need to be brought along to the future."

I shouldn't be surpriaed.  After 40 years in politics, demonizing the poor, diminishing labor unions, embracing the powerful, helping send decent middle class jobs to Mexico and China, I guess the fact that they hold the ordinary working American in disdain should have been obvious.

The Clintons think that people who work on their feet, "need to be brought into the future."

They are avatars of the professional class in the Democratic Party, and smug condescension drips from them.

The Secret Allure of the Sharing Economy

You can form a big company and create pseudo free agents who are free to be bigots:

This is a story of an Airbnb experience I recently went through. I met this awesome lady Crissie in my Facebook group. Super nice lady, successful business owner, beautiful family, and they live in a small town in Idaho.

Crissie would post these amazing videos of the land and the snow, and the mountains and trees, and I told her one day I would come visit.

It‘s so absolutely beautiful there!

………

I like my space when I travel, and thought it would be fun to find a cool cabin.

………

Everything was set! As usual, I included a bit of info about myself on the Airbnb listing to put the host at ease

………

First response: Dang! No luck, even though the dates were available all of a sudden, the host said she was going to use the place.

………

No biggie, I’m really flexible. Crissie told me late June is good as well, so I rebooked for June.

CANCELLED! Well damn. So it wasn’t really the dates—the host cancelled my new request and ignored all future messages.

So I had a white friend book for my same dates, and all of a sudden her plans changed back. Approved immediately!

There are some similar stories and links described at the article.

I rather expect to find the same thing in all the similar apps.

My guess is that a black man finds getting an Uber or Lyft just as hard as finding an old fashioned taxi.

In fact, it might be harder, because there is no taxi commission collecting data on fares and origination and destination points.

That's why this sh%$ needs real regulation with teeth.

I'm Afraid to Click Through on the Link

Over at Alicub blog, I came across the phrase "This may be the worst thing McArdle has ever written.

Megan "Math is Hard" McArdle might very well be the stupidest f%$#ing person on the internet, and her writing makes my head hurt on the best of days.

If I read This article, might have unfortunate results.