And seeing a how, based on two decades of observations about how Sharon* is affected by weddings, my guess its that I will more make our to my trusty laptop tonight.
So have some pictures of our kitten, Destructo, age 8 months, I a picnic basket.
Why he went in, I have no idea, but he did NOT want to leave.
* Love of my life, light of the cosmos, SHE WHO MUST BE
OBEYED, my wife.
Posted via mobile.
My nephew is getting married tomorrow, in Baltimore, so I’m kind of busy.
Edward Snowden has told the The New York Times that he no longer has copies of any of his files:
Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them.
Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest,” he said.
“What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?” he added.
He also asserted that he was able to protect the documents from China’s spies because he was familiar with that nation’s intelligence abilities, saying that as an N.S.A. contractor he had targeted Chinese operations and had taught a course on Chinese cybercounterintelligence.
“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” he said.
American intelligence officials have expressed grave concern that the files might have fallen into the hands of foreign intelligence services, but Mr. Snowden said he believed that the N.S.A. knew he had not cooperated with the Russians or the Chinese. He said he was publicly revealing that he no longer had any agency documents to explain why he was confident that Russia had not gained access to them. He had been reluctant to disclose that information previously, he said, for fear of exposing the journalists to greater scrutiny.
I hope that he has made some sort of In The Event of Death (ITEOD) arrangements, because, this otherwise means that if the US and UK state security apparatus can get to Glenn Greenwald and documentarian Laura Poitras, particularly with him leaving the Guardian to move to a new journalistic endeavor funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
There are a lot of people in our government who are determined to destroy all of them, and to the degree that they are in a fledgling organization, this makes the task easier, because potential blow-back is less.
BAE’s vehicle manufacturing plant in Sealy, Texas is sbeing closed next year:
The U.S. subsidiary of BAE Systems Plc plans to close a military vehicle plant in Texas next year and lay off about 325 employees, the company announced.
The facility, located about 50 miles outside Houston in Sealy, since 1990 has produced tactical wheeled vehicles for the U.S. military, including blast-resistant trucks known as Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Humvee replacement Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV.
The London-based company said industry contraction drove the decision to shutter the site by June 2014.
When I worked there in the early 1900s, it was owned by Stewart & Stevenson, and was the center of the $1.4 billion contract for the 2½ and 5 ton military trucks.
The writing for this plant was on the wall when Oshkosh Corp. managed to decode a Sealy’s sub-par drawing package and win the latest FMTV Contract.
The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that gay marriages can go forward on Monday.
It’s been floating around the internet for a few days, and it is wrong on every level.
First, criminal charging your opponents for being your opponents is wrong.
We have hundreds of years of history to document that.
And then there is Congressional immunity, which guaranteed freedom from criminal or civil liability for official actions of Congress critters, no matter how mind boggling stupid those actions are.
Done with rant.
Julia Ryan at The Atlantic observes that when correcting for demographics, public schools outperform private schools:
Sarah Theule Lubienski didn’t set out to compare public schools and private schools. A professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she was studying math instructional techniques when she discovered something surprising: Private schools—long assumed to be educationally superior—were underperforming public schools.
She called her husband, Christopher A. Lubienski, also a professor at the university. “I said, ‘This is a really weird thing,’ and I checked it and double checked it,” she remembers. The couple decided to take on a project that would ultimately disprove decades of assumptions about private and public education.
Studying the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, they have found that, when controlling for demographic factors, public schools are doing a better job academically than private schools. It seems that private school students have higher scores because they come from more affluent backgrounds, not because the schools they attend are better educational institutions. They write about these conclusions—and explain how they came to them—in their book, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools. Here’s an interview with the Lubienskis about their work, edited and condensed for clarity and length.
This is not a surprise, but it does not matter for two reasons:
The biggest determinant of school quality has always been the “quality”, for lack of a better term, of the students.
To the degree that you put good students together in a self contained environment, their educational experience will likely improve, though this will be at the expense of those students, frequently poorer and more heavily pigmented, on the outside.
As to social connections, just look at Harvard, whose undergraduate program is widely considered to be one of the most overrated in academe,* they remain very exclusive.
The reason for this is the quality of the student body, and the social connections that are created by going there.
It seems like half of the Wall Street banksters went to Harvard, for example.
Nothing binds like those old school ties.
*So says my Radcliffe (Harvard) graduate, former college president, step-mom.
In the past 2 days, since the ‘Phants caved on the government shutdown, I have gotten more calls from recruiters than I did in the past 6 months.
It seems that there was a bit of pent up demand.
Posted via mobile.
There are numbers, but the government shutdown makes them totally unreliable.
Have a funny:
Tom Hiddleston (Loki from the Avengers movie) does Loki (from the Avengers movie) as played by Owen Wilson.
How many of you have an Albuterol inhaler for Asthma?
It’s great, isn’t it?
The drug is out of patent, so it’s cheap, and it works.
It’s not like a big pharma would lobby to get the FDA to ban the cheap inhalers because of their miniscule use of CFCs, and then wrap new propellants in a patent web and jack up the price, right?
Oh, silly me, that IS what they did:
The arsenal of medicines in the Hayeses’ kitchen helps explain why. Pulmicort, a steroid inhaler, generally retails for over $175 in the United States, while pharmacists in Britain buy the identical product for about $20 and dispense it free of charge to asthma patients. Albuterol, one of the oldest asthma medicines, typically costs $50 to $100 per inhaler in the United States, but it was less than $15 a decade ago, before it was repatented.
“The one that really blew my mind was the nasal spray,” said Robin Levi, Hannah and Abby’s mother, referring to her $80 co-payment for Rhinocort Aqua, a prescription drug that was selling for more than $250 a month in Oakland pharmacies last year but costs under $7 in Europe, where it is available over the counter.
………
Unlike other countries, where the government directly or indirectly sets an allowed national wholesale price for each drug, the United States leaves prices to market competition among pharmaceutical companies, including generic drug makers. But competition is often a mirage in today’s health care arena — a surprising number of lifesaving drugs are made by only one manufacturer — and businesses often successfully blunt market forces.
Asthma inhalers, for example, are protected by strings of patents — for pumps, delivery systems and production processes — that are hard to skirt to make generic alternatives, even when the medicines they contain are old, as they almost all are.
………
But in the United States, even people with insurance coverage struggle. Lisa Solod, 57, a freelance writer in Georgia, uses her inhaler once a day, instead of twice, as usually prescribed, since her insurance does not cover her asthma medicines. John Aravosis, 49, a political blogger in Washington, buys a few Advair inhalers at $45 each during vacations in Paris, since his insurance caps prescription coverage at $1,500 per year. Sharon Bondroff, 68, an antiques dealer in Maine on Medicare, scrounges samples of Advair from local doctors. Ms. Bondroff remembers a time, not so long ago, when inhalers “were really cheap.” The sticker shock for asthma patients began several years back when the federal government announced that it would require manufacturers of spray products to remove chlorofluorocarbon propellants because they harmed the environment. That meant new inhaler designs. And new patents. And skyrocketing prices.
“That decision bumped out the generics,” said Dr. Peter Norman, a pharmaceutical consultant based in Britain who specializes in respiratory drugs. “Suddenly sales of the branded products went right back up, and since then it has not been a very competitive market.”
The chlorofluorocarbon ban even eliminated Primatene Mist inhalers, a cheap over-the-counter spray of epinephrine that had many unpleasant side effects but was at least an effective remedy for those who could not afford prescription treatments.
………
A result is that there are no generic asthma inhalers available in the United States. But they are available in Europe, where health regulators have been more flexible about mixing drugs and devices and where courts have been quicker to overturn drug patent protection.
“The high prices in the U.S. are because the F.D.A. has set the bar so high that there is no clear pathway for generics,” said Lisa Urquhart of EvaluatePharma, a consulting firm based in London that provides drug and biotech analysis. “I’m sure the brands are thrilled.”
………
And here is the money quote:
This year the price of Advair dropped 10 percent in France, but in pharmacies in the Bronx, it has doubled in the last two years.
For what it is worth this is not technically a failure of the free market.
These companies’ profit margins are being directly supported by the state. That is the nature of patents and other exclusive licenses that we grant, particularly in the drug industry.
Then we allow for these exclusive licenses to be extended ad infinitum through evergreening.
The problem is that we as a society allow people to patent nothing at all, and sometimes we grant exclusive right to people who didn’t invent anything at all, as in the case of colchicine, where exclusivity was granted for a study of the drug which consisted primarily of a survey of the historical literature.
The price of colcicine went from $0.09 a pill to $5.00 a pill.
The House just passed the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling extension.
So, now we revisit the shut down in January, and the debt ceiling in February.
Woo hoo.
That being said, pretty much everyone but the Teabaggers are acknowledging that this is a big loss for said Teabaggers.
The reactionary wing of the Catholic Church, whose refrain under the reactionaries John Paul II and Benedict XVI was to say that obedience to the Pope is not optional, is now complaining that Pope Francis is considering how they feel about what he says:
Rattled by Pope Francis’s admonishment to Catholics not to be “obsessed” by doctrine, his stated reluctance to judge gay people and his apparent willingness to engage just about anyone — including atheists — many conservative Catholics areRattled by Pope Francis’s admonishment to Catholics not to be “obsessed” by doctrine, his stated reluctance to judge gay people and his apparent willingness to engage just about anyone — including atheists — many conservative Catholics are doing what only recently seemed unthinkable:
They are openly questioning the pope.
Concern among traditionalists began building soon after Francis was elected this spring. Almost immediately, the new pope told non-Catholic and atheist journalists he would bless them silently out of respect. Soon after, he eschewed Vatican practice and included women in a foot-washing ceremony.
The wary traditionalists became critical when, in an interview a few weeks ago, Francis said Catholics shouldn’t be “obsessed” with imposing doctrines, including on gay marriage and abortion. Then earlier this month, Francis told an atheist journalist that people should follow good and fight evil as they “conceive” of them. These remarks followed an interview with journalists this summer aboard the papal airplane in which the pope declared that it is not his role to judge someone who is gay “if they accept the Lord and have goodwill.”
Never mind that the pope has also made clear his acceptance of church doctrine, which regards gay sex and abortion as sins and bans women from the priesthood. Behind the growing skepticism is the fear in some quarters that Francis’s all-embracing style and spontaneous speech, so open as it is to interpretation, are undoing decades of church efforts to speak clearly on Catholic teachings. Some conservatives also feel that the pope is undermining them at a time when they are already being sidelined by an increasingly secular culture.
Gee, the shoe is on the other foot now. My heart bleeds borscht.
FWIW, I think that the new Pope IS undermining you and wants you sidelined, because he sees you as a threat to the church.
Obnoxious dogmatic intolerant f%$#s are not a selling point for the church.
As to any claim of morality, you lost that when you looked the other way at pedophile priests.
Mr. Fish: Thankfully – Mr. Fish mugs and t-shirts available.
I’m not joking. The IMF actually suggesting that countries need to tax the rich in order to reduce deficits and improve economies:
Tax the rich and better target the multinationals: The IMF has set off shockwaves this week in Washington by suggesting countries fight budget deficits by raising taxes.
Tucked inside a report on public debt, the new tack was mostly eclipsed by worries about the US budget crisis, but did not escape the notice of experts and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
“We had to read it twice to be sure we had really understood it,” said Nicolas Mombrial, the head of Oxfam in Washington. “It’s rare that IMF proposals are so surprising.”
Guardian of financial orthodoxy, the International Monetary Fund, which is holding its annual meetings with the World Bank this week in the US capital, typically calls for nations in difficulty to slash public spending to reduce their deficits.
But in its Fiscal Monitor report, subtitled “Taxing Times”, the Fund advanced the idea of taxing the highest-income people and their assets to reinforce the legitimacy of spending cuts and fight against growing income inequalities.
“Scope seems to exist in many advanced economies to raise more revenue from the top of the income distribution,” the IMF wrote, noting “steep cuts” in top rates since the early 1980s.
According to IMF estimates, taxing the rich even at the same rates during the 1980s would reap fiscal revenues equal to 0.25 percent of economic output in the developed countries.
“The gain could in some cases, such as that of the United States, be more significant,” around 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, said the IMF report, which also singled out deficient taxation of multinational companies.
I did not expect that the IMF would suggest this before pigs ……… Well, you know.
I guess they have been following the purchase levels of pitchforks and torches, and have become concerned.
Now if only they start supporting a Tobin Tax on financial transactions.
Longtime NSA operatives feel that Barack Obama has not been vocal enough in supporting on their spying on the rest of us:
Gen. Keith Alexander and his senior leadership team at the National Security Agency (NSA) are angry and dispirited by what they see as the White House’s failure to defend the spy agency against criticism of its surveillance programs, according to four people familiar with the NSA chiefs’ thinking. The top brass of the country’s biggest spy agency feels they’ve been left twisting in the wind, abandoned by the White House and left largely to defend themselves in public and in Congress against allegations of unconstitutional spying on Americans.
“There has been no support for the agency from the President or his staff or senior administration officials, and this has not gone unnoticed by both senior officials and the rank and file at the Fort,” said Joel Brenner, the NSA’s one-time inspector general, referring to the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md.
The weak backing from top administration officials has aggravated the relationship between Alexander and the White House, where he has never been warmly embraced. The NSA now finds itself without the strong, visible support of the President at a time of extraordinary political vulnerability, with the agency’s secrets laid bare and its future in doubt.
………
Obama has only made one set of substantial remarks about the NSA’s collection of Americans phone records and monitoring of Internet and email data, during a news conference in August. He did not distance himself from the programs, but he has not made a point of reminding the American people or lawmakers that he thinks they are vital. Neither the president’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, nor his top counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, have given any public remarks arguing that the NSA programs are legal and necessary. And no Cabinet official has mounted a concerted effort to back the agency in public.
Former intelligence officials who remain in regular contact with those still in government say that morale at the NSA is low, both because of the reaction to leaks by former contractor Edward Snowden, which put the normally secretive agency under intense scrutiny, and because of budget cutbacks and the continuing government shutdown, which has left some employees furloughed without pay.
Brenner, who also served as the government’s director of counterintelligence, said that Obama could have lifted morale had he gone to Fort Meade and made a speech vigorously defending the NSA’s work. “A president who had real feeling for the intelligence business and the people laboring in that vineyard would have paid them a visit,” Brenner said.
Instead, said former senior CIA official Mark Lowenthal, “They are hurting.”
Three words:
What a bunch of f%$#ing whiners.
Get over yourself.
The head of your agency (Keith Alexander) lies for you, and his boss (James Clapper) lies for you even more, and you are upset because Barack Obama isn’t playing cheerleader for the folks in Fort Meade.
Like the chicken said, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”
NPR just finished a series where it talked to prominent theologians about the nature of the afterlife.
One of the segments was immediately followed (it might have been preceeded) by a story about the government shutdown and potential debt default.
Then it hit me: No one that they had talked to even mentioned the possibility that we might already be in hell.
Of course, Gnosticism, the religion that most closely hews to this philosophy, no longer exists as an organized religion, but it does seem to me that this is a reasonable conclusion.
As a Jew, I find the discussion of the afterlife largely irrelevant. The afterlife is simply not a significant of Jewish theology.
The consensus on the afterlife in Judaism is, “Yes,” with some people going with a conventional heaven and hell, and some people, particularly Kabbalists, believe in reincarnation, and a whole range in between.
In Judaism, the important thing is that to whatever degree our world resembles hell, it is our job to fix it.
This concept is called Tikkun olam (תיקון עולם).
This reminds me of an old joke:
A Shmuel dies and is sent to hell, and he boards an elevator going down.
The elevator operators calls out, “Hell, level 1, all Atheists and Agnostics out.”
Shmuel looks out, and sees a bleak landscape, black sands, and a merciless sun beating down, and the air smells like.
The elevator moves further downward, and comes to a stop.
“Hell, level 2, all Muslims out.”
Shmuel smells brimstone, hears screams, and sees rivers of flowing lava under a black sky.
Shmuel is now rather concerned.
The doors close with a sepulchral finality, and the elevator drops.
“Hell, all Christians out.”
The door opens, and Shmuel can see nothing but flames in front of the door. He can feel his skin blisters from the heat even as he pushes himself against the back of the elevator.
As the doors close, Shmuel is now terrified.
“Hell, all Jews out.
The doors open, Shmuel feels a cool breeze on his face. He sees lush, green rolling hills. He smells citrus in the air.
Shmuel is stunned. To no one in particular, he says, “But ……… I thought it would be worse!”
The elevator operator looks up, and says, “It was. You cannot believe what they can do with irrigation.
Perhaps we should all spend some more time irrigating.
Case in point, the developers of a drug called, (I am not joking here) Lybrido, which is intended to increase sexual desire and response in women.
I don’t have a problem with this, though the idea that insufficient desire might be pathologized as hypoactive sexual-desire disorder (HSDD) is a bit troubling.
That being said, this following quote is even more troubling:
But of course swallowing a tablet can take us only so far. Chemically enhancing a woman’s desire might play out in all kinds of ways within a relationship. Some couples might feel closer, others might feel desolate because, despite more sex, their bond isn’t stronger. Wives might yearn for the old seductive efforts of their husbands, even if those gestures stopped working long ago. Women might feel yet more pressure to perform: Why not get that prescription? their partners might ask; why not take that pill? And men, if they are willing to confront the truth, might not be so happy about the reminder, as their partners reach for the pill bottle, that their women need chemical assistance to want them. All the agonies that have existed since the dawn of monogamy will still pertain, many of them coming down to the craving to feel special.
Beyond what might happen in millions of bedrooms, it’s even more difficult to foresee what societal transformations might be stirred. Just as with the birth-control pill, a foreboding not only about sex itself but also about female empowerment may be expressed in a dread of women’s sexual anarchy. Over the last decade, as companies chased after an effective chemical, there was fretting within the drug industry: what if, in trials, a medicine proved too effective? More than one adviser to the industry told me that companies worried about the prospect that their study results would be too strong, that the F.D.A. would reject an application out of concern that a chemical would lead to female excesses, crazed binges of infidelity, societal splintering.
“You want your effects to be good but not too good,” Andrew Goldstein, who is conducting the study in Washington, told me. “There was a lot of discussion about it by the experts in the room,” he said, recalling his involvement with the development of Flibanserin, “the need to show that you’re not turning women into nymphomaniacs.” He was still a bit stunned by the entrenched mores that lay within what he’d heard. “There’s a bias against — a fear of creating the sexually aggressive woman.”
Yes, giving 70 years erections to unleash upon the rest of society is a great profit center, but if women start wanting sex, it can create “societal splintering”.
So, men suddenly want to copulate with anything with a hole in it: Good.
Women wanting to have sex: Scary.
Someone needs to get their heads out of their ass.
Case in point, we have a bank examiner fired by the NY Fed because she refused to ignore the law to help Goldman Sachs:
In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.
Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.
That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.
Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.
“They wanted me to falsify my findings,” Segarra said in a recent interview, “and when I wouldn’t, they fired me.”
Today, Segarra filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the New York Fed in federal court in Manhattan seeking reinstatement and damages. The case provides a detailed look at a key aspect of the post-2008 financial reforms: The work of Fed bank examiners sent to scrutinize the nation’s “Too Big to Fail” institutions.
Segarra does not allege that Goldman was involved in the Fed’s decision to fire her, and I’m inclined to agree.
The nature of regulatory capture is that the regulators do the bidding of those that they regulate without being asked.
The question is how we fix this.
*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
Because former Blue Dog Steve Israel has as his goal the resurrection of the Blue Dog Caucus or something very similar, even at the expense of the possibility of Democrats taking back the house:
Last week, when MoveOn and PPP released their much buzzed about polls showing how Democrats could pick up many seats, the first thing I noticed was that these were all the Steve Israel seats they had polled. I spoke with them and asked them to poll some of the districts that the DCCC studiously ignores, districts we’ve been covering here at DWT and where Blue America has some great candidates. This morning MoveOn and PPP are releasing new polling data for some of those districts.
Outstanding, at top Blue America races where Lee Rogers is ahead of Buck McKeon (CA-25), Paul Clements is ahead of Fred Upton (MI-06) and Jason Ritchie is ahead of Dave Reichert (WA-08). In other districts, like FL-27, where Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz have actively discouraged Democratic opponents, there is a clear indication that if Pelosi manned up and fired Israel and cleaned out the nest of self serving incompetents who run the DCCC, the Democrats would win back the House hands down in 2014. In many of the districts where there are no Democrats– thanks to Israel’s agenda– voters see no alternative to the GOP incumbent but there is a clear indication that a Democrat could campaign and win. In FL-27 where Wasserman Schultz has been protecting Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for years, if an election were held today, an unnamed Democrat would beat her 47-45%. ………
You can read the rest at the article, but basically, the DCCC will drop big bucks on ConservaDem long-shots, and ignore competitive races where real Democrats are running against vulnerable Republicans.