Year: 2012

And I, For One, Welcome Our New Zombie Overlords

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Over the past few weeks, there has been an outbreak of zombie apocalypse sort of behaviors, we had the (all allegedly):

No wonder the CDC has issued a denial of the existence of any disease that causes zombiesim.

I don’t believe in the undead, but something weird is going one here. 

H/t CD at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

This Smells Like Karl Rove Punking Dan Rather

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We have a story that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker fathered a child out of wedlock, and was rather a cad about it, by noted brain injury specialist Dr. Bernadette Gillick, who said that it was her roommate.

There has since been a denial from the woman in question. (Actually, within hours of the publication of the story)

It smells to me a lot like the punking that Rove gave Dan Rather over George W. Bush’s Texas National Guard service (or lack thereof).

In the case of W, the stories were probably true, and the false story was likely floated in order to defuse the issue.

In the case of Scott Walker, I’m not sure if there is an actually baby that he abandoned, or this is an attempt to distract attention from the John Doe investigation which has already snared his closest political advisers, but it smells like a ‘Phant false flag operation.

In related news, the DoJ will be sending observers to monitor the elections.

I hope they bring cuffs to Waukesha county, because with county clerk Kathy Nickolaus running elections there, despite having been forced to delegate her duties to her deputy, I expect it to be an orgy of irregularities there.

In Other News, the Sky is Blue

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Gee, after a long history of blatantly political censorship in its reviews, the CIA is finally investigating its publications review board:

The CIA has begun an internal investigation into whether a process designed to screen books by former employees and protect national security secrets is being used in part to censor agency critics, U.S. officials said.

The investigation coincides with the publication of a flurry of books from CIA veterans, and it is largely aimed at determining whether some redactions have been politically motivated.

Among the publications expected to get particular scrutiny is a memoir by the former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who used his book, “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,” to mount a vigorous defense of interrogation methods that were widely condemned but that he asserts provided critical intelligence about al-Qaeda.

The target of the probe is the agency’s Publications Review Board. The PRB evaluates hundreds of submissions each year and is supposed to focus exclusively on whether publication of material would threaten national security interests.

The CIA declined to comment on the internal investigation or to answer questions about the composition and practices of the PRB.

U.S. officials familiar with the inquiry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that it reflects growing concern in the intelligence community that the review process is biased toward agency loyalists, particularly those from the executive ranks.

Gee, you think?

This process has been corrupt and self serving for at least a decade.

Bummer of a Birthmark, George

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Bummer of a birth mark

George Zimmerman’s bail has been revoked because the judge has determined that he lied about his finances at the bail hearing:

A Florida judge on Friday revoked the bond of George Zimmerman, who has been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, after state prosecutors argued that Mr. Zimmerman, with the help of his wife, had misled the court about his finances.

During an afternoon hearing in Sanford, Fla., a Seminole County Circuit Court judge, Kenneth R. Lester Jr., ordered Mr. Zimmerman, 28, a former neighborhood watch volunteer who himself aspired to be a judge, to surrender to authorities within 48 hours.

Judge Lester made his ruling shortly after an assistant state attorney, Bernardo de la Rionda, asserted that Mr. Zimmerman and his wife, Shellie, during a bail hearing on April 20, had “lied” and “were very deceptive” about assets available to them. That hearing cleared the way for Mr. Zimmerman’s release from jail on $150,000 bond. He had to put up 10 percent, or $15,000, to make bail.

The judge determined that Mr. Zimmerman, who has been in hiding because of concerns about his safety, had engaged in “material falsehoods.” At issue is the roughly $200,000 Mr. Zimmerman raised through a legal defense Web site, money that Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyer, Mark M. O’Mara, said he learned of several days after the bond hearing.

So, now in addition to going back to jail, the judge has just called him a liar.

His defense team has to be throwing a fit right now.

Some Good News From the Texas Primary

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Silvestres Reyes was defeated in the Tuesday primary by El Paso City Councelman Beta O’Rourke.

The district is overhwelmingly Democratic, so it means that O’Rourke is pretty much a shoe in for the general.

Why is this good news? Because Reyes was aggressively pro-drug war and pro drone, to the point of lobbying for drone stikes in Mexico, and O’Rourke supports Marijuana legalization.

It’s a big deal, and it shows that, as the NORML blog notes, the war on drugs is no longer the winning issue that it used to be.

Great Googly Moogly

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The latest monthly jobs report is out, and is sucks wet farts from dead pigeons. Only 68,000 new jobs were created, the March and April numbers were revised down to 78K, the unemployment rate (U-3) went up by a a tenth of a point to 8.2% (U-6 rose by .3% to 14.8%), and long term unemployment rose.

Note that while the private sectors payroll was a “Meh” +87K, but government payrolls fell by 19,000.

So, while we American governmental entities aren’t going austerity crazy like the Brits, we are kind of slow walking austerity. (Something that Obama’s campaign seems to be bragging about)

The Institute for Supply Management’s latest manufacturing index is headed in the wrong direction as well.

But at least we’re not Yurp which sucks a lot worseworse, with Euro zone unemployment climing to 11%. (Thanks Angela)

The Big Dog is Coming to Wisconsin

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Bill Clinton is heading to Wisconsin to campaign for Scott Walker’s recall:

Former President Bill Clinton has decided to go to Wisconsin to campaign against Scott Walker in the final days of the battle over whether to recall the Wisconsin Governor, a move that could give a boost to the anti-Walker forces in a campaign that will depend heavily on who turns out to vote, a source familiar with Clinton’s plans confirms to me.

As late as yesterday afternoon, it was still not certain whether Clinton would go to Wisconsin. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in a meeting with Democrats, seemed to suggest that he was trying to determine whether he would go. But neither the DNC nor Clinton’s camp would confirm whether it was going to happen, and Democrats cautioned that Clinton had not made up his mind.

But now he will go to Wisconsin, the source confirms.

Democrats badly want Clinton to campaign in Wisconsin for Tom Barrett, and had lobbied him heavily for weeks. But Clinton remaind undecided until today.

For the past month, the Democratic establishment has pretended that the recall does not matter, and now, suddenly they all showing up to campaign.

Either the internal polling is looking good, or the rank and file have been hammering them, or maybe both.

Either way, this is a positive development.

Google Wins

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The judge has now ruled on whether or not the Java API is covered by coopyright, and he said no.

This must be the one of the few federal judges out there who understands programming:

Oracle’s legal battle to break itself off a chunk of the smartphone market by attacking Android looks dead in the water today, after a federal judge who recently finished presiding over the six-week Oracle v. Google trial ruled that the structure of the Java APIs that Oracle was trying to assert can’t be copyrighted at all.

It’s only the code itself—not the “how-to” instructions represented by APIs—that can be the subject of a copyright claim, ruled Judge William Alsup. “So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API,” wrote the judge.

Google had copied certain elements—names, declaration and header lines—of the Java APIs. Alsup ruled that even though Google could have rearranged “the various methods under different groupings among the various classes and packages,” the overall name tree is “a utilitarian and functional set of symbols, each to carry out a pre-assigned function… Duplication of the command structure is necessary for interoperability.”

………

Alsup compared APIs to a library, with each package as a bookshelf in the library, each class a book on the shelf, and each method a chapter out of a how-to book. “As to the 37 packages, the Java and Android libraries are organized in the same basic way but all of the chapters in Android have been written with implementations different from Java but solving the same problems and providing the same functions.” The declarations, or headers, “must be identical to carry out the given function,” wrote Alsup.

Ninety-seven percent of the source code in the API packages is different; it’s only the three percent that overlaps that formed the heart of Oracle’s copyright claim. That three percent included packages, methods, and class names. But those declarations—like starting a function with package java.lang—can only be used in certain ways. “In order to declare a particular functionality, the language demands that the method declaration take a particular form,” notes Alsup (emphasis in original).

Alsup’s ruling comes less than a month after a European court made a decision along the same lines, finding that programming APIs can’t be copyrighted because it would “monopolize ideas.”

Judge Alsup gets it.

He understands the basic concepts, and he understands computers.

I am pleasantly surprised.

Edwards Not Guilty on 1, Mistrial on 6

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Considering the fact that the judge bent over backwards for John Edwards, this is a win for Edwards.

Considering the fact that the judge was clearly in the prosecution’s pocket, allowing testimony that had nothing to do with the underlying crime for the squick factor, and forbidding the presentation of an FEC ruling which said that the expenditures were legal, the prosecution has to be thinking that this case is a loser.

Why I’m Voting in November

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Because the bigots in Maryland have turned in sufficient signatures to put a repeal of same sex marriage on the ballot:

Activists working to repeal Maryland’s same-sex marriage law have collected more than twice the signatures needed for a referendum — likely ensuring that the measure will be on the ballot for voters to decide in November.

The law’s opponents submitted 122,481 signatures in favor of a referendum; 55,736 are required. If enough are verified as legitimate, as expected, Maryland will be in the center of a national debate on same-sex marriage, with groups on both sides preparing to spend millions.

I’m still debating between writing in Stewart/Colbert or Colbert/Stewart, but I’m voting against the hate amendment.

Why Newspapers are Dying

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Because their owners are draining them dry. First, it was the Bancroft family and the Wall Street Journal, and now it’s the Ochs-Sulzberger family the management and the New York Times:

About $11 million of [former NY Times CEO] Robinson’s exit package was from her pension and retirement plan. Another roughly $7 million consisted of her yearly compensation and awards, and stock options she was entitled to after her years at the Times. But she also received a $4.5 million consulting contract, a kind of gratuitous bonus that didn’t look or smell right to anyone who was toiling on Eighth Avenue and worrying over pensions in danger of being frozen in ongoing labor negotiations. That payout has since become the centerpiece of rancorous disputes between the Newspaper Guild of New York, the newsroom’s union, and management. The intense discussions are still in progress as of this writing, hung up on a suggestion made by the Guild to redesign the Times’ pension system.

In the era of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., when newspapers have flailed under new digital realities, the New York Times Company has shrunk dramatically. Once it was a wide-ranging media empire of newspapers and TV stations and websites, and even a baseball team, that was worth almost $7 billion; today it’s essentially two struggling newspapers and a much-­reduced web company, all worth less than $1 billion (for comparison, consider that the Internet music company Pandora is valued at almost $2 billion). Despite the shrinkage, the company has retained essentially the same top-heavy management, which it has kept well compensated. Even though the paper froze executives’ pensions in 2009, as it is threatening to do with union employees, the company created two loopholes, called the Restoration Plan and the Supplemental Executive Savings Plan, which allowed certain high-earning executives to take money out anyway. As a result, Janet Robinson received an additional lump-sum payment of over half a million dollars upon exiting the Times.

And the family wants to re-institute their $20+ million dividends.

Newspapers have a problem, and it’s largely Craigslist eating their lunch on classified ads.

Cutting reporting staff to make a crappier product won’t fix this in the long term, though it might get those damn dividends flowing for the nest few years.