Year: 2012

Newspapers Are Not Dying, They Are Being Murdered by Management

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Because instead of reinvesting in their business, they are spending their money on dividends and stock buybacks:

The Washington Post Company‘s dismal quarterly earnings release last week was received with something of a shrug—more of the same. But the report is worse than the reaction suggests and raises fundamental questions about the Post’s strategy, not just for the newspaper, but for the whole company.

If you hadn’t heard, the Washington Post Company is basically a for-profit college/SAT-prep firm that sidelines as a cable-TV provider and newspaper publisher. The august Washington Post (I’ll italicize Post here when referring to the newspaper and won’t when referring to its parent) contributed just 15 percent to its namesake company’s revenue in the first quarter but was a $23 million drag on the bottom line.

Kaplan, the Post’s education division, is the company’s cash cow, and a few years ago looked like the newspaper’s savior. But its revenue has fallen sharply over the last year and a half since for-profit schools, very much including Kaplan’s, came under pressure for predatory practices. Its sales tumbled 14 percent from 2010 to 2011 and dropped another 11 percent in the first quarter.

Its deteriorating prospects spells more trouble for the Post’s newspaper division, whose very bad first quarter included not only that $23 million loss but also a 7 percent decline in revenue. Crucially, its digital ad revenue—the paper’s main hope for the future—went into reverse and hit negative 8 percent. It’s just the latest in a long line of bad results.

The Post’s newspaper division (which includes Slate) has posted losses in thirteen of the last fifteen quarters, a trail of red ink that has led to cumulative losses of $412 million over the period. Its revenue has declined in twenty of the last twenty-two quarters and last year it brought in fully one-third less—$314 million—than it did at its peak in 2006. Layoffs have reduced the Post’s newsroom to a little more than half its peak size.

Despite this, the company continues to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. The Post is disgorging the cash, as JW Mason calls it, to investors and depriving its businesses of resources.

…………

This is financialization at work. Instead of investing in its business operations, the Post is investing in its stock, which is a very different thing. The only way this bet pans out is if the Post’s shares rebound significantly in coming years. Would you put money on that? I sure wouldn’t (moreover, the company effectively levered up to buy them. The Post rolled over $395 million in debt in early 2009 to mature in 2019—at a 1.75 percent premium to its old bonds).

Where would the Post be if its parent company had invested even one-quarter of that nearly one billion dollars in its newspaper, or in some other profit-making, preferably non-predatory venture? That’s unknowable, of course, but it’s worth thinking about when you ponder why newspapers haven’t better adapted to the digital age.

The facts are stark, though I think that part of the the author’s thesis, that the WaPo should go behind a paywall, is fundamentally wrong.

People have not payed for news in newspapers since the beginning of the modern mass market newspaper, they have paid for ink on paper, and the content has been paid for by advertising.

The problem is not the internet, it’s Craigslist. The classifieds have always been the most profitable source of ad revenue for papers, particularly in local markets.

Unfortunately, as opposed to finding a way to fight this, or another potential source of revenue, the news papers go for Wall Street rules, which means asset stripping rather than investment.

JP Morgan Chase Goes Wile E. Coyote

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So, JP Morgan Chase just lost at least $2 billion in ill conceived derivatives trades:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said the firm suffered a $2 billion trading loss after an “egregious” failure in a unit managing risks, jeopardizing Wall Street banks’ efforts to loosen a federal ban on bets with their own money.

The firm’s chief investment office, run by Ina Drew, 55, took flawed positions on synthetic credit securities that remain volatile and may cost an additional $1 billion this quarter or next, Dimon told analysts yesterday. Losses mounted as JPMorgan tried to mitigate transactions designed to hedge credit exposure.

“There were many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment,” Dimon said as the company’s stock fell in extended trading. “These were egregious mistakes, they were self-inflicted.”

The chief investment office was thrust into the debate over U.S. efforts to ban proprietary trading when Bloomberg News reported last month that the unit had taken bets so big that JPMorgan, the largest and most profitable U.S. bank, probably couldn’t unwind them without losing money or roiling financial markets. Dimon, 56, had transformed the unit in recent years to make bigger and riskier speculative trades with the bank’s money, five former employees said.

Just so you know, the “Synthetic credit securities” mentioned means that this is basically pure gambling.  There is no ownership or insurance interest in the underlying investment.

It’s not surprising that the SEC has decided to look at this.

As a result of this blowup, Fitch’s and S&P have downgraded the bank.

Henry Blodgett accurately obaserves that, “It’s Just Kids Playing With Dynamite“.

Rather unsurprisingly, advocates of more regulation of the financial industry, are calling for an aggressive implimentation of the Volker rule.

Of course, Jamie Dimon does not think that this shows a need for more regulations, because, “Just because we’re stupid doesn’t mean everybody else was.”

No, actually,  you’re all stupid f%$3s, and you blew up our economy 4 years ago, and the taxpayer dumped more money into you keeping you afloat than we spent on the WW II.

Why no senior banksters have been indicted is beyond me.

Lamest Political Party in the History

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Professor Pongoo
Pole to poll: Professor Pongoo won more votes than the Liberal Democrats in a council election in Edinburgh. Photograph: Ali Tibbitt/ STV

While there are significantly less viable parties out there, Canada’s Rhineroceros Party, and the Monster Raving Looney Party in the UK, but because they fancy themselves as being in the big leagues in Britain, the Liberal-Democrats win the prize:

If there was a symbol of the Liberal Democrats’ discomfiture as their vote plummeted across Scotland and the rest of the UK, it came in the shape of a penguin.

In the Pentland Hills ward for Edinburgh city council, the Lib Dem candidate won fewer votes than Professor Pongoo, or independent candidate Mike Ferrigan, who ran his campaign in a full penguin suit.

Professor Pongoo, who stood to raise awareness of social and environmental issues, took 5.6% of first-preference votes to the Lib Dems’ 4.7%.

On the brighter side ……… Ummmm ……… There is no brighter side. You were outpolled by a bloke in a f%$#ing penguin suit!

About the only thing more embarrassing would be to be out-polled by the  Fabian Socialists.

MoD Goes Back To Jump Jet

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About a year ago, the British decided to switch from the STOVL F-35B to the catapult and arrestor hook F-35C.

They were building two carriers, but they would only equip one with the necessary equipment to launch and land the aircraft, leaving the remaining carrier as the world’s most expensive helicopter carrier.

Well, they are back to the B model: (Paid subscription required)

In the depths of the crisis about 18 months ago surrounding the Stovl model, the U.K. walked away from the F-35B, saying it would instead buy the F-35C and denigrating the jump-jet version as an inferior aircraft. But since the F-35B gained the Pentagon’s blessing as having its Stovl-unique questions resolved, London is now embracing the variant it abandoned, in part citing the development progress. “The Stovl aircraft has made significant progress since the SDSR was published over 18 months ago,” the Defense Ministry says.

The back-and-forth is not just about semantics. The U.K. decision during the 2010 Strategic Defense and Security Review to opt for the F-35C added weight to those hoping to cancel the F-35B, irking U.S. Marine Corps officials who were eager to see the version survive.

U.K. Defense Secretary Philip Hammond, in announcing the move to Parliament, still defends the 2010 ruling. He says the decision on carriers “was right at the time, but the facts have changed and therefore so, too, must our approach. This government will not blindly pursue projects and ignore cost growth and delays.”

The U.K. expects to take delivery of its first Lockheed MartinF-35B Joint Strike Fighter in July. Credit: Lockheed Martin

In the end, it was cost that brought the U.K. back to the F-35B. The price to fit HMS Prince of Wales—the second Queen Elizabeth-class carrier—with catapult launch and arrestor gear doubled to £2 billion ($3.2 billion) since the initial estimates were made going into the 2010 review , Hammond asserts. Moreover, U.K. planners were increasingly concerned about higher manpower costs associated with operating such an aircraft carrier. The decision is a setback for General Atomics, which hoped to sell its electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS) to the U.K.

Hammond also says the conversion would have delayed the restoration of the U.K.’s carrier strike capability by three years to 2023. The current plans call for HMS Queen Elizabeth to begin sea trials in 2017, with aircraft to fly from the deck in 2018 in preparation for an operational capability around 2020.

Understand that the Brit carriers are gas turbine powered, and so could not be retrofitted with steam catapults, and EMALS is still showing problems, and the cost is increasing.

Also, the MoD was committed to building both ships (the cancellation clauses are pricey) but only had money to convert to CTOL, which meant that when it was in retrofit, they would have no carrier capabilities.

It is yet another testament to David Cameron’s “genius” at governance:

For the government, the about-face on JSF is domestically embarrassing. While vowing to fix the lax acquisition practices that it blamed on the Labour administration, it is now reversing course on the first major item in its procurement agenda.

Yeah, like that competence is fairly oozing from the Tories.  (Not)

The Pedophile Protection Society Goes After Girl Scouts

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Well what do you know, in their latest attempt to distract people from their actions protecting child predators, they have put the the Girl Scouts in their cross hairs.

Why the Girl scouts, because it’s not like they are going to f%$# them, that’s the boy scouts:

The sometimes tense relationship between the Catholic Church and the Girl Scouts appears to be moving toward a resolution, as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has asked scout leaders to clarify programs and material that some religious conservatives think promote contraception and abortion.

Potentially at stake is whether troops can continue meeting in Catholic churches, and whether many Catholic girls, who make up a quarter of the nation’s 3 million Girl Scouts, will continue in scouting as the organization marks its 100th year.

In a letter dated March 28, the head of the bishops committee that has been looking into concerns about the Girl Scouts said he wanted to identify and address all remaining questions. The letter was written by Kevin C. Rhoades, bishop of Fort Wayne, who was a leading critic of the University of Notre Dame when it awarded President Obama an honorary degree in 2009.

The Associated Press reported on the letter Thursday, referring to it as an “official inquiry.”

The Girl Scouts???  Seriously?!?!?!? The US Confrence of Bishops has gone off the f%$#ing deep end.

Just Lovely

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India is looking to start MIRVing its nuclear missiles:

Agni-V, India’s most powerful missile with a strike range of over 5,000 kms, is set to get substantially higher destruction capabilities with plans to equip it with multiple warheads.

“We are working in this area. It will take time for us to develop but our work is on,” DRDO Chief Dr V K Saraswat told the news agency when asked whether the agency is developing capabilities to produce a variant of Agni-V missile which can hit multiple targets.

Known as Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV), the missile would be capable of carrying multiple warheads to destroy several targets.

Asked about the plans in that regard, he said, “Basic vehicle (missile) will remain the same. The first three stages will also remain the same and only the kill vehicle or the payload delivery system will need changes.”

Terming it as a “force multiplier”, the DRDO chief said, “If I am able to do force multiplication with this… where I was using four missiles, I may use only one missile. So it becomes a force multiplier given the damage potential.”

It also destabilizes the the situation with Pakistan, because it allows multiple warheads to be taken out in a single strike.

Not good news.

Huh, this Might Explain the Current Turn in Israeli Politics

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Benyamin Netanyahu had announced that he would be holding snap elections in the fall, which would was assumed to give the Likud a better electoral position.

Then, he announced that there would be no election, because he had formed a coalition with the 2nd place party, Kadima.

For Kadima, which looked to be destroyed in a future election, dropping to 4th or 5th place, it made sense, but it didn’t appear to make sense either Netanyahu or Likud.

I kind of shrugged, and put it off to the rather Byzantine nature of Israeli electoral politics, but Harvard’s Noah Feldman appears to have an explanation, and, in what might be a first for Benyamin Netanhahu, it appears that he reshuffled the coalition in order to make a deep and fundimantal change in Israel’s society,  and the only reason that we would make that change is because he thinks that it was the right thing.

If this calculus is true, I agree with him:

Israel’s newly expanded governing coalition may be more cautious about bombing Iran, and it may be marginally more open to serious negotiations with the Palestinians. But neither issue was the immediate reason the centrist Kadima party joined the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 8.

The fundamental issue was the relationship between Israel’s secular and ultra-Orthodox populations.

A looming crisis in Israeli politics was created when the country’s highest court ruled in February that ultra-Orthodox men studying in Israeli yeshivas, academies of higher Talmudic learning, must be drafted into the Israeli army as of Aug. 1. Since Israel was founded in 1948, ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students have been exempt from compulsory military service, as have religious Jewish women and Palestinian Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship. Those exempt can choose nonmilitary national service, but few do.

The exemption was the product of a deal between David Ben- Gurion, Israel’s legendary first prime minister, and the ultra- Orthodox minority, which was then tiny. At the time, many ultra- Orthodox Jews in Israel and abroad rejected the very idea of a Jewish state, believing that only God had the authority to re- create Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. To hasten the messianic age was a sin, and secular Zionism was its incarnation.

…

The latest round of coalition building may have broken that cycle. [Of having to kowtow to small religious parties to maintain the coalition] Netanyahu feared that passing a new law to address the high court’s ruling might bring down his government, and had called early elections to avoid the conflict. He canceled that plan two days later, however, after expanding his government. With 94 of the 120 seats in parliament, the new government can address the ruling without fear of collapsing because of defections. The centrist and secular Kadima, led by former military chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, is likely to see eye to eye with Netanyahu’s Likud party on this issue.

If these maneuvers are intended to change this policy, then it is an unalloyed good.

The idea that Yeshiva Bochers are to be exempted from the basic requirements of citizenship is wrong.

Furthermore mandatory service (largely military, though the Orthodox might end up working in public service) has the effect of exposing members of this community to the rest of society in a day-to-day professional environment.

Should this new policy come into effect, it will have a major impact on the coming generations of Heredim.

One hopes that this will also result in more of them working for a living, as opposed to sponging off subsidies from the government, which is good both from a societal and halachic (religious law) perspective.

The sages clearly state that, “Torah is not a spade,” meaning that religious scholarship should not be an excuse not to support one’s self and family.

Despicable People, Heredi Edition

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Specifically, the Orthodox Jews in New York, who are shunning and harassing co-religionists who report child rape to the authorities:

The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.

Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?”

By cooperating with the police, and speaking out about his son’s abuse, Mr. Jungreis, 38, found himself at the painful forefront of an issue roiling his insular Hasidic community. There have been glimmers of change as a small number of ultra-Orthodox Jews, taking on longstanding religious and cultural norms, have begun to report child sexual abuse accusations against members of their own communities. But those who come forward often encounter intense intimidation from their neighbors and from rabbinical authorities, aimed at pressuring them to drop their cases.

Abuse victims and their families have been expelled from religious schools and synagogues, shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews and targeted for harassment intended to destroy their businesses. Some victims’ families have been offered money, ostensibly to help pay for therapy for the victims, but also to stop pursuing charges, victims and victims’ advocates said.

This behavior is profoundly and deeply evil.

Retaliating against people who report child rape to the authorities is contemptible, and I call on the Brooklyn DA to pursue anyone who does participates in these efforts at intimidation to the fullest extant of the law.

What’s Genocide Between Friends?

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There have been some stories about Islamaphobes, but now we know that these whack jobs were calling for a genocide against Muslims:

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to make sure it doesn’t contain similarly hateful material, a process that is still ongoing. But the officer who delivered the lectures, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia college, pending an investigation. The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.

For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.

…………

International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina[‘s] destruction.”

Dooley’s ideological allies have repeatedly stated that “mainstream” Muslims are dangerous, because they’re “violent” by nature. Yet only a few of al-Qaida’s most twisted fanatics were ever caught musing about wiping out entire cities.

Let’s be clear here, this is not some guy ranting on a street corner, this is a lecturer at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, and he called for genocide, and he still has a position there.

Of more concern is that these people are taken seriously.

I am Disappointed in Myself

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You see, I’ve been watching the kerfuffle over Obama and gay marriage since Biden’s statement on Sunday, and what appeared to be a full on weasel by Obama, or at least his Press Secretary Jay Carney, from which I inferred that the President would give the weasel answer.

I had been drafting my scathing response to this in my head for days, so when he actually made a clear and unambiguous statement I was surprised.

But my first reaction wasn’t surprise.  My first thought was, “Son of a bitch!  I have to rewrite now!”

At least I had the basic level of self awareness to be ashamed.

Obama Supports Gay Marriage

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In an interview with ABC, Barack Obama has announced that he now supports gay marriage:

Before President Obama left the White House on Tuesday morning to fly to an event in Albany, several aides intercepted him in the Oval Office. Within minutes it was decided: the president would endorse same-sex marriage on Wednesday, completing a wrenching personal transformation on the issue.

As described by several aides, that quick decision and his subsequent announcement in a hastily scheduled network television interview were thrust on the White House by 48 hours of frenzied will-he-or-won’t-he speculation after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but forced the president’s hand by embracing the idea of same-sex unions in a Sunday talk show interview.

Advisers say now that Mr. Obama had intended since early this year to define his position sometime before Democrats nominate him for re-election in September. Yet many of the president’s allies believed he would not do so, trusting instead in his strong support from gay voters for having ended a ban on openly gay people in the military and disavowing a federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Such caution was understandable, the allies said, given the unpredictable fallout the president would face by taking a clear stand on one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day, before what is likely to be a close election. Mr. Obama’s closest advisers say only the timing was in question. Mr. Biden’s unexpected remarks undoubtedly accelerated the timetable.

Initially Mr. Obama and his aides expected that the moment would be Monday, when the president was scheduled to be on “The View,” the ABC daytime talk show, which is popular with women. Certainly, they thought, he would be asked his position on same-sex marriage by one of the show’s hosts, who include Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.

Yet the pressure had become too great to wait until then, his aides told him; on Monday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was pummeled with questions from skeptical reporters about Mr. Obama’s stance. After the Tuesday morning meeting, Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s communications director, contacted ABC and offered a wide-ranging interview with the president for the following day.

Oh snap. They took a scoop away from the ladies of The View. There will be consequences.

All joking aside, this is an unambiguous good.

BTW, the best comment I’ve heard about this so far was made by Kurt_T (His web site, www.kurttrue.com should be coming on line shortly):

Hahahaha! I really DID want people to marry their pets and climb Mount Rushmore in nipple clamps and buttless chaps! And this makes it all possible!

Suckers!

OK, I’m off to the Kinko’s to print up some recruitment materials for your children.

-kurt_t
President and Supreme Cher Impersonator for Life
Secret Gay Agenda

The timing was disappointing though, it seem to be calculated to avoid any impact on the North Carolina hate amendment vote, for which the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans rightly castigates him, (scroll down) though partisan considerations might have informed his statement.

Another Election Night

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And while the primaries really didn’t matter, as Romney is pretty much it now, but there were other significant results, with Lugar getting destroyed in the India primary, Tom Barret earning a rematch against Scott Walker after the Democratic primary for the Wisconsin Recall, and the citizens of North Carolina voting to enshrine hatred and bigotry into their constitution.

I was amused by Obama’s performance against a federal inmate in the West Virginia primary:

With all his rivals except Rep. Ron Paul now out of the race, Mitt Romney easily won the Indiana, North Carolina, and West Virginia primaries, giving him an estimated 911 of the 1,144 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination. But plenty of GOP voters still saw fit to register their preference for a different candidate: Romney got 65 percent of the vote in Indiana, 66 percent in North Carolina, and 69 percent in West Virginia. By comparison, the 2008 nominee, John McCain, got 70 percent or more in every primary once his last major rival, Mike Huckabee, quit the race. But the protest-vote story of the night was on the other side of the aisle. In West Virginia, Obama was pulling just 62 percent of the vote while Keith Russell Judd, an inmate at a federal prison in Texas who somehow got his name on the primary ballot, was drawing 38 percent.

I’m not sure what it means, though I’m sure that Obama’s political operatives will be dropping a hundred grand or so on polling to figure it all out.

Damn

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Children’s book author Maurice Sendak has died at 83:

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83.

The cause was complications of a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor. Mr. Sendak, who died at Danbury Hospital, lived nearby in Ridgefield, Conn.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

A Good Essay on Putin

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Stephen Cohen makes some very good points, like the fact that Russia has become less corrupt, journalists and dissidents are less likely to be murdered, his elections are fairer, etc.

Of course, better and more democratic than Yeltsin is not a tough act to follow.

Yeltsin and his cronies looted the country, splitting the proceeds with western banksters, murdered journalists as a fairly brisk clip, impoverished the nation, literally prostituting many of its citizens, and shelled the parliament when they did not do his bidding.

What he misses though is why the west hates Putin so much. It all comes down to the, “Splitting the proceeds with the western banksters,” bit.

One of the rules of the modern neocolonial finance regime is that finance’s masters of the world get to steal other people’s stuff, and those people never get it back.

We Look Like Scared, Fearful, Losers Because We Are Scared, Fearful, Losers.

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I cannot believe that I am quoting Iraq War booster Fareed Zakaria, but his take on the new invasive US state security apparatus:

While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end.

………

We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.

(emphasis mine)

Osama bin Laden did not win, he’s dead, but we lost, and we did it to ourselves.

The 2nd Underoos Bomber is a CIA Double Agent

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So we have another bomb plot “foiled”:

The successful blocking of an ambitious Al Qaeda plot to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner was an international sting operation worthy of Hollywood, with spies tricking terrorists into showing their cards.

Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, working closely with the CIA, used an informant to pose as a would-be suicide bomber. His job was to convince the Al Qaeda franchise in Yemen to give him a new kind of non-metallic bomb that the militants were designing to easily pass through airport security.

But the double agent instead arranged to deliver the explosive device to U.S. and other intelligence authorities waiting in another country, officials said Tuesday. The agent is now safely outside Yemen and is being debriefed.

Experts are analyzing the sophisticated device at the FBI’s bomb laboratory at Quantico, Va., to determine if it really could evade current security measures. It appears an upgraded version of the so-called “underwear bomb” that failed to take down a passenger jet over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

So, we’ve had four attempts to blow up a US plane:

And now we have  the 2nd underoos bomber.

I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to wonder if the CIA is doing the same thing as the FBI, and finding a bunch of losers, and then build them up, so that they can have a high profile bust.

(on edit)

And yes, those I forgot those folks who were drying those dumb ass liquid bombs which require us to buy overpriced sodas on the airlines.

Jeebus, They Are Claiming that API’s are Copyrightable?

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That appears to be the jury ruling in the Oracle-Google lawsuit:

In what could be a major blow to Android, Google’s mobile operating system, a San Francisco jury issued a verdict today that the company broke copyright laws when it used Java APIs to design the system. The ruling is a partial victory for Oracle, which accused Google of violating copyright law.

But the jury couldn’t reach agreement on a second issue—whether Google had a valid “fair use” defense when it used the APIs. Google has asked for a mistrial based on the incomplete verdict, and that issue will be briefed later this week.

The results aren’t clear going forward. Both sides are going to write briefs arguing how to proceed from here, with Google likely arguing the verdict needs to be thrown out, while Oracle somehow tries to hang on to its win on question 1A, the fundamental question about whether Google infringed copyright.

No one knows the jury’s internal deliberations, so it’s speculative to guess at what led to the partial verdict. But one reason could be the unusual construction of this trial. Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing the case, ruled that the case would be decided by a jury of 12, which is large for a civil case and increases the possibility of having one or more “holdout” jurors. Alsup also ruled that the jury must decide unanimously, a requirement for criminal cases that’s not always imposed on civil juries.

Now let’s be clear here: The judge apparently instructed the jury to assume that APIs are copyrightable, in order for them to make decisions about the facts, but that decision will actually be rendered by the judge later. (Yeah, the law is a bitch)

Speaking as a non-lawyer and non-computer programmer, if this stands, it stands a very good chance to shut down much of the software industry in the United States, because any supplier of a platform, at any time, on the machine that you owe, could ban, or demand usurious licensing fees, for any 3rd party software.

So Microsoft could demand fees from (for example) Open Office in order to run on Windows.

In any case, the substantive ruling is the judge’s and that is clearly subject to appeal, you appeal on the law, not the adjudicated facts, so the final decision will likely be either the court of appeal of SCOTUS.

Yet another example of just how %$#ed up our IP system is.