Year: 2013

Stupidest Idea in Maryland

No Comments

While Maryland is not generally considered a good government state, witness the regular indictments of Maryland politicos, but the Prince George’s County Board of Education takes the cake:

There are some absolutely ridiculous situations created by the fact that all creative works are automatically granted a copyright on being put into a fixed form. Mostly, we just ignore these situations, because the vast majority of them never matter. But, as copyright has become more and more ridiculous, some people are beginning to start to make use of the stupid fact that all kinds of things can be “owned” that probably shouldn’t be “ownable.” Take, for example, school work. If a student creates something, it is covered by copyright, though most people never really consider or care about that. However, the board of education for Prince George [sic] County in Maryland is apparently considering a new “copyright policy” in which all students and staff would have to assign all of those copyrights over to the school system itself.

(emphasis original)

I don’t see how they have a leg to stand on with the children, who are not employees, and so could not be seen as producing work for hire.

This is nucking futs.

Facepalm

No Comments

Yes, considering the disaster that was the Israeli rump state in Lebanon, the idea that Israel is planning to establish a “buffer zone” in Syria does not bode well:

ISRAEL is considering creating a buffer zone reaching up to 10 miles inside Syria to protect itself from fundamentalist rebels on the other side of the border.

 The proposal, which has been drawn up by the military and presented to Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is intended to secure the 47-mile border against a growing Islamist threat if President Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime loses control of the area.

 The buffer would be modelled on the Lebanese security zone, in which the Israeli defence forces patrolled jointly with the South Lebanon army, a militia, up to 16 miles inside Lebanon from 1985 to 2000.

Yeah, and that whole Lebanese buffer zone worked so f%$#ing well.  derf

This is insanity.

Considering the Privacy Agreement They Have for Me

No Comments

I have no sympathy for all for the bank executives who had their personal data posted online:

Following attacks on U.S. government websites last weekend, Anonymous seems to have made a new “Operation Last Resort” .gov website strike Sunday night.

Anonymous appears to have published login and private information from over 4,000 American bank executive accounts in the name of its new Operation Last Resort campaign, demanding U.S. computer crime law reform.

A spreadsheet has been published on a .gov website allegedly containing login information and credentials, IP addresses, and contact information of American bank executives.

If true, it could be that Anonymous has released banker information that could be connected to Federal Reserve computers, including contact information and cell phone numbers for U.S. bank Presidents, Vice Presidents, COO’s Branch Managers, VP’s and more.

This has been your moment of schadenfreude.

I wonder what Blankfein’s home phone number is.

Good

No Comments

Jenny McCarthy has been has been dropped from a cancer fundraiser because of her anti-vaccine bullsh%$:

The Ottawa Cancer Foundation has reversed its decision to hire actress and model Jenny McCarthy to headline its one-day fitness fundraiser Bust A Move.

In a statement released late Friday afternoon, the foundation said McCarthy would be replaced by Canadian celebrity fitness instructor and former CFL player Tommy Europe.

The statement said that since the announcement of McCarthy’s appearance, “…attention has shifted away from breast cancer awareness and fundraising.”

On Tuesday, McCarthy was revealed as Bust A Move’s guest fitness instructor, which caused many to question why an organization supporting cancer research would invite someone with a history of promoting erroneous ideas about health and disease.

Despite reams of scientific research to the contrary, McCarthy writes and speaks publicly about the supposed link between child vaccination and autism. The former Playboy Playmate also blames her son’s autism on vaccinations.

Word of McCarthy’s appearance at a charity cancer event sparked a #dropjenny hashtag on Twitter, which generated many comments about whether the actress was a credible choice. Similar online debate occurred on Bust A Move’s Facebook page.

I’m not saying that Jenny McCarthy should not be able to work because of her beliefs, but allowing her to be a spokesperson for anything remotely medical is like having António Egas Moniz (the inventor of the prefrontal lobotomy) as a spokesman for psychological counseling.

Deep Thought

No Comments

As I won’t through the scanner at the airport security check point, I had to hold my hands above my head and together, making a letter”A”.

I was REALLY tempted to start with the hand symbols for “Y”, “M”. and “C”, but I didn’t.

I figured that my homage to the Village People result in a strip search.

Posted via mobile.

Buh Bye Scotty

No Comments

Scott Brown will not be running for Senate in the special election.

My guess is that he decided that the Republican Party is just too damn radioactive in Massachusetts this year.

It looks like the Republicans may try to convince former Governor William Weld, the only Republican I ever voted for,* but I cannot imagine that the Club for Growth crowd would not end up subverting a campaign of his.

He is an old-line New England liberal Republican, and there are significant elements of the Republican base that would support a Democrat against him, just as the did with Lieberman over Weiker in the 1980s.

*He was running against BU President John Silber, who was a f%$#ing lunatic. Even though I still believe that it was the right thing, but I felt dirty afterward.

You Tell Them to Go Cheney Themselves

No Comments

Another Cave

Obama tries to split the baby again, offering a compromise on birth control:

The Obama administration proposed yet another compromise on Friday in an effort to address the concerns of religious organizations that object to its policy requiring health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women at no charge.

 Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the proposal would guarantee free coverage of birth control “while respecting religious concerns.”

 Churches and religious organizations that object to providing birth control coverage on religious grounds would not have to pay for it.

 Under the proposal, female employees could get free birth control coverage through a separate plan that would be provided by a health insurer. The institution objecting to the coverage would not pay for the contraceptives. The costs would instead be paid by the insurance company, with the possibility of recouping the costs through lower health care expenses resulting in part from fewer births.

Obama does not get it.

The Catholic Church, and its Talibaptist allies, are want the right to enforce their religious beliefs on others.

This is all about a naked assertion of power, and the proper response is “F%$# You”, not fence mending.

Why Unions are In Decline

No Comments

Kris Warner compares union penetration of the labor market in the United States, and compares it to that of Canada, and rather observes that there are some real reasons for this, and that they exist because labor rights have been under legislative assault in the United States since the passage of Taft-Hartley:

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual summary of unionization in the U.S. It reports that in 2012, the union-membership rate of wage and salary workers was 11.3 percent, compared with 11.8 percent in 2011. The trend has been downward for some time: Fifty years ago, the figure was almost 30 percent.

It’s conventional wisdom that the post-industrial workforce doesn’t want to be unionized. But survey data show that workers’ desire to join unions has been growing since the 1980s, and a majority of nonunion workers would now vote for union representation if given the opportunity. So if workers want unions, why is unionization falling?

Commentators have also blamed the decline on everything from globalization to technological advances to the hollowing-out of American manufacturing. But those factors are only part of the story.

Canada’s experience offers another answer. Canada has gone through many of the same economic and social changes as the U.S. since the middle of the 20th century, yet it hasn’t seen the same precipitous decline in unionization. The unionization rate in the U.S. and Canada followed fairly similar paths from 1920 to the mid-1960s, at which point they began to diverge drastically.

Differences in labor law and public policy are at the root of this disparity.

No so-called “right to work” laws in Canada, card check, or elections that are conducted in 1-3 weeks, instead of months, or possibly years, the right to first contract arbitration, so that employers cannot simply stonewall negotiations to a new union for years.

I want us to be more like Canada.

Meh

No Comments

The labor force grew by 157000 jobs in January:

American employers added 157,000 jobs in January compared with a revised 196,000 jobs the previous month, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The unemployment rate was little changed at 7.9 percent, about where it has been stuck since September.

On the bright side, revised government data showed that the economy added 335,000 more jobs than originally estimated during all of 2012, including an additional 150,000 in the last quarter of the year. That was on top of the previously reported fourth-quarter job growth of 603,000 and 2012 growth of 2.2 million.

The higher revisions, in particular, encouraged traders on Wall Street, sending the Dow Jones industrial average over the 14,000-point mark for the first time since 2007.

Still, job growth has been modest compared with previous recoveries, and economists saw little in January’s report to suggest that hiring would pick up soon.

Look at the graph.

The current rate has jobs remaining below trend for over a decade, the best realistic case we see is still a lost decade.

Like I said, “Meh”.

These employment numbers Kung Fu is weak.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

1 Comment

In Brooklyn, Mafiaesque “Modesty Patrols” are terrorizing the Ultra Orthodox community:

The Brooklyn shopkeeper was already home for the night when her phone rang: a man who said he was from a neighborhood “modesty committee” was concerned that the mannequins in her store’s window, used to display women’s clothing, might inadvertently arouse passing men and boys.

“The man said, ‘Do the neighborhood a favor and take it out of the window,’ ” the store’s manager recalled. “ ‘We’re trying to safeguard our community.’ ”

In many neighborhoods, a store owner might shrug off such a call. But on Lee Avenue, the commercial spine of Hasidic Williamsburg, the warning carried an implied threat — comply with community standards or be shunned. It is a potent threat in a neighborhood where shadowy, sometimes self-appointed modesty squads use social and economic leverage to enforce conformity.

The owner wrestled with the request for a day or two, but decided to follow it. “We can sell it without mannequins, so we might as well do what the public wants,” the owner told the manager, who asked not to be identified because of fear of reprisals for talking.

………

The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, who prosecuted the Weberman case, has now received allegations that members of a modesty committee forced their way into a home in the borough, confiscating an iPad and computer equipment deemed inappropriate for Orthodox children, officials say. Allegations have also surfaced that a modesty committee threatened to publicly shame a married man who was having an affair unless he paid the members money for what they described as therapy.

“They operate like the Mafia,” said Rabbi Allan Nadler, director of the Jewish studies program at Drew University in Madison, N.J.

Rabbi Nadler, who testified at Mr. Weberman’s trial, said that modesty committees did not have addresses, stationery or business cards, and that few people seemed to know where their authority originated, though it was doubtful, he said, that they could continue operating without the tacit blessings of rabbinical leaders.

Jeebus.

Another  Shanda before the Goyim,.

There Will Be a Primary in the Democratic Senate Race in Massachusetts

No Comments

We already knew that Ed Markey was in the race, but now Stephen Lynch has announced that he will run as well.

Lynch is a right wing ratf%$# who voted to intervene in the Terri Sciavo affair, where the Republicans in Congress decided to intervene in the medical affairs of a brain dead woman, one of only 30 Democrats who did this, and the only Dem from New England to do so.

He’s an opponent of abortion rights, and was a big booster of the war as well.

Here’s hoping that Lynch gets destroyed in the primary, and that it leads to him being unseated in the 2014 9th district elections as a result.

As to how the primary will effect the special election, where Scott Brown is almost certain to be the  Republican candidate, I generally favor primaries.

The Opposite of Noblesse Oblige

1 Comment

In the Guardian, George Monboit talks about his experience as a student in a British public (private) school, and notes that this sort of background creates people who are completely disassociated from the wants and needs of the rest of society.  I can’t really do justice through excerpts, but here are two paragraphs to give you a sense of this:

Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”

………

So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its frontbench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.

He draws his net a bit narrower than I would, he ascribes these characteristics pretty much exclusively to conservatives, while I would apply it more generally to our ruling class.

It explains why we see so many cases of, to quote Pete Townshend, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.”

As you ascend the political pyramid, your world increasingly becomes that of the rich elites, and increasingly, their needs become your needs.

Go read this.

Oh Snap!

No Comments

4th quarter GDP fell by an 0.1% rate:

The federal government helped bring the economic recovery to a virtual halt late last year as cuts in military spending and other factors overwhelmed the Federal Reserve’s expanded campaign to stimulate growth.

Disappointing data released Wednesday underscore how tighter fiscal policy may continue to weigh on growth in the future as government spending, which increased steadily in recent decades and expanded hugely during the recession, plays a diminished role in the United States economy.

Significant federal spending cuts are scheduled to take effect March 1, and most Americans are also now paying higher payroll taxes with the expiration of a temporary cut in early January.

The economy contracted at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the last three months of 2012, the worst quarter since the economy crawled out of the last recession, hampered by the lower military spending, fewer exports and smaller business stockpiles, preliminary government figures indicated on Wednesday. The Fed, in a separate appraisal, said economic activity “paused in recent months.”

The private sector is recovering, but cuts in federal spending more than offset this.

This is not as bad as what the Germans are doing with the Euro Zone.  We are experiencing a sort of “austerity lite”, and it is doing real damage to our economy.

Some Good News

No Comments

It looks like Europe will be implementing a financial transaction song with teeth:

The details of Europe’s new financial transactions tax won’t be made public for a few weeks, but the FT’s Alex Barker has seen a draft, and it looks impressively robust. The tax is being implemented by 11 countries, including most importantly Germany and France, and it’s going to be levied at two levels: 0.1% on securities trades, and 0.01% on derivatives trades. It’s also going to be very difficult to dodge: any trader whose institutional headquarters is in one of the 11 countries will have to pay the tax, as will all transactions taking place in those countries, and all transactions involving securities issued in those countries.

The tax will have two main purposes. The first is to raise substantial tax revenues on the order of $45 billion per year; the second is to discourage financial speculation. I’m hopeful on the former, but less so on the latter.

As Robert Peston and Avinash Persaud pointed out back in 2011, financial transactions taxes work pretty well: even the UK, which is implacably opposed to the European tax and which won’t ever join such a scheme, levies a surprisingly large 0.5% tax whenever anybody — anywhere in the world — trades a UK stock. And yet, somehow, London remains the first choice for international companies looking for a place to list their shares.

I aggee with Felix Salmon’s closing:

So let’s hope that this tax gets introduced; that it works; and that the rest of the world, seeing the costs and the benefits, starts to follow suit and sign on too. The area covered by the initial 11 countries is big enough that the tax will work well at inception, but as more and more countries join the scheme, the tax will become increasingly efficient and effective. Maybe, eventually, it could even incorporate the U.S.

Personally, I would like to see the tax on securities should be a bit hither (about 0.3%) derivatives should be much higher (at least .1%, and better yet something north of ½%), but I really want to see this camel’s nose to get under the tent.

Two, Cats, Both Wrong

No Comments

We’ve been trying to use a “have a heart” trap to catch Hummus (shown).

Today, we caught two cats at the same time, but they were just some feral cats from the neighborhood.

One looked a bit like Hummus, but  wasn’t her.

Unfortunately, in the process of checking it out, I got a bit scratched up.

Hind claws, so it smarts a lot.

Least Surprising News of the Day

No Comments

Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department ignored guidelines and allowed bailed out banksters to write their own paychecks:

The Treasury Department ignored its own guidelines on executive pay at firms that received taxpayer bailouts and last year approved compensation packages of more than $3 million for the senior ranks at General Motors, Ally Financial and American International Group, according to a watchdog report released Monday.

 The report from the special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program said the government’s pay czar signed off on $6.2 million in raises for 18 employees at the three companies. The chief executive of a division of AIG received a $1 million raise, while an executive at GM’s troubled European unit was given a $100,000 raise. In one instance, an employee of Ally’s Residential Capital was awarded a $200,000 pay increase weeks before the subsidiary filed for bankruptcy.

 ………

 Monday’s report evaluates Treasury’s actions since then, with stinging allegations of lax oversight and supervision. Romero said Geoghegan deferred to the pay proposals provided by the companies, approving raises above pay limits and failing to link compensation to performance.

 “Treasury made no meaningful reform to its processes,” the special inspector said in the latest report. “Lacking criteria and an effective decision-making process, Treasury risks continuing to award executives of bailed-out companies excessive cash compensation without good cause.”

This is so not shocking.