Month: August 2014

University of California Study Reveals the Obvious

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Rather unsurprisingly, when protests occur, police frequently provoke violence:

The violence that turns a small-town protest into a fiery national spectacle like the one that has played out this month in Missouri is often unwittingly provoked by police, according to researchers at UC Berkeley.

The research team, which studied clashes between police and activists during the Occupy movement three years ago, found that protests tend to turn violent when officers use aggressive tactics, such as approaching demonstrators in riot gear or lining up in military-like formations.

Recent events in Ferguson, Mo., are a good example, the study’s lead researcher said. For nearly two weeks, activists angered by a white police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager have ratcheted up their protests when confronted by heavily armed police forces.

“Everything starts to turn bad when you see a police officer come out of an SUV and he’s carrying an AR-15,” said Nick Adams, a sociologist and fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Data Science who leads the Deciding Force Project. “It just upsets the crowd.”

Adams said many law enforcement agencies aren’t aware that they set the tone of a protest and end up inflaming it.

I disagree with the last point.

I think that police are very aware that militarized responses encourage protests to turn violent, and that this violence gives a justification to engage in kinetic action to break up the protests.

This has been the norm for police-protest interactions ever since the mid 1800s, when police were used to crush organized labor.

Today’s Must Read

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Charlie Pierce notices something about the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, specifically the treatment of the body:

I keep coming back to what seems to me to be the most inhumane thing of all, the inhumane thing that happened before the rage began to rise, and before the backlash began to build, and before the cameras and television lights, and before the tear gas and the stun grenades and the chants and the prayers. I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed.

They left the body in the street.

Dictators leave bodies in the street.

Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street.

Warlords leave bodies in the street.

A police officer shot Michael Brown to death. And they left his body in the street. For four hours. Bodies do not lie in the street for four hours. Not in an advanced society. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in small countries where they have perpetual civil war. Bodies lie in the street for four hours on back roads where people fight over the bare necessities of simple living, where they fight over food and water and small, useless parcels of land. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in places in which poor people fight as proxies for rich people in distant places, where they fight as proxies for the men who dig out the diamonds, or who drill out the oil, or who set ancient tribal grudges aflame for modern imperial purposes that are as far from the original grudges as bullets are from bows. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street, as object lessons, or to make a point, or because there isn’t the money to take the bodies away and bury them, or because nobody gives a damn whether they are there or not. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street.

4 hours with his body lying in the street, with no effort to cover him.

This cannot be seen as anything but a demonstration of raw power to, and contempt of, the community, by which I mean the people of color in Ferguson, Missouri.

It may not say anything conclusive about what happened that day, but it does fairly clearly tell us that the police force of Ferguson do not see themselves as protectors of the poorer side of town. They see themselves as an occupying force.  (Of course, whole Mosul in Missouri thing that has been going has made this pretty clear anyway. )

That being said, read the rest of Charlie Pierce’s post. It is quite good.

I Think that Hamas is in the Process of Completely Losing their Sh%$

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It’s not been a good few days for Hamas.

Over the past few days, the Israelis have manage to kill 3 Hamas military leaders, and they almost took out Mohammed Deif, the head out of their military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades.

In response, Hamas has start executing people accused as collaborators on an industrial scale:

One day after three top Hamas commanders were killed in an Israeli airstrike, at least 18 Palestinians were executed Friday by firing squads in Gaza City, sentenced to death by a “resistance court” for collaborating with Israel during a time of war.

 ………

 A group calling itself the Palestinian Resistance announced on Hamas-affiliated Web sites that 11 alleged collaborators — nine men and two women — were executed by firing squad Friday morning in the courtyard of an abandoned police headquarters.

 Witnesses said seven more men were placed against walls with bags over their heads and shot by men in black Hamas uniforms in front of the Al-Umari mosque, according to local news media reports.

 Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Resistance named the alleged collaborators or offered details of the charges against them. They said they were withholding the names to spare their families shame.

 The Palestinian Maan news agency reported that some of the bodies were later dumped at al-Azhar University and the Shifa hospital.

 Palestinian militants said the informers were found guilty by local courts, supported by religious clerics, of providing information to Israel that led to the destruction of “resistance houses,” as well as revealing the location of tunnels and rocket launchers.

 The executions came a day after Israeli aircraft targeted and killed three senior Hamas commanders who had gathered in a building in Rafah in south Gaza.

 The targeted killings were celebrated as a major success in Israel and taken as a punishing blow in Gaza, where the Hamas commanders were well known.

 Two days earlier, Israel targeted a house where it believed Mohammed Deif, the top commander of the Hamas military wing, was staying. The Israeli bombardment killed Deif’s wife and two of his children. It is still unclear whether Deif survived the strike.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, one of the founders of the al-Qassam Brigade is now claiming that Hamas was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teens. Note that he did this from the relative safety of Turkey, where is in exile, and I would take this with a grain of salt:

A veteran Hamas official has said that the Islamist group was behind the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank – an incident that was a major trigger for the current brutal war in Gaza.

Saleh al-Arouri, one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing, made his comments at a conference in Istanbul, where he lives in exile. A tape of his comments was posted online by conference organisers.

“There was much speculation about this operation; some said it was a conspiracy,” al-Arouri said at a meeting of the International Union of Islamic Scholars on Wednesday.

“The popular will was exercised throughout our occupied land, and culminated in the heroic operation by [Hamas’s armed wing] the Qassam Brigades in imprisoning the three settlers in Hebron.”

His claim has not been supported by any other member of Hamas.

………

Hugh Lovatt, Israel and Palestine coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that while al-Arouri was a significant Hamas figure – serving as the group’s most prominent representative in Turkey – the former militant could have an ulterior motive for making his claim.

“Given the timing I would be very suspicious about his claim. I still don’t believe Hamas as an organisation and its upper echelons sanctioned the kidnappings – something that Israeli intelligence also believes,” he said.

I think that both of these actions are tied together by the recent reverses suffered by Hamas leadership.

Under such situations, there is an organizational imperative to show agency, and both the executions, and the claim or responsibility, are an attempt to demonstrate that Hamas is in control of the situation.

Both of the acts are counterproductive to Hamas’s goals, hence my comment on their losing their sh%$.

In the long run, I do not think that this make a difference though.

The Middle East:  SSDD.

The Twinkie Defense, The Chewbacca Defense, and now the Bitches be Crazy Defense

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Dan White got away with murdering George Moscone and Harvey Milk through the Twinkie Defense, Chef got put sentenced to jail, and sprung from jail with the Chewbacca defense, and in the Bob McDonnell bribery case, the defense has become even more ludicrous with the “Bitches be Crazy” defense.

That’s right, the former governor of Virginia’s defense team has become even more absurd than the minds of Tray Parker and Matt Stone.

His defense is that he didn’t take any bribes, it was all his wife, a technically private citizen is unbalanced, and had a crush on the man who bribed the governor, and that he had nothing to do with it. I guess the loan of a Ferrari, and the golf outing worth something in excess of $10,000.00, and thousands of dollars of loans from tobacco based “medicine” mogul Jonnie Williams, were just ……… “stuff”

As Eugene Robinson notes, the technical term for this is “throwing his his wife under the bus.”

How far would you go to stay out of jail? Would you publicly humiliate your wife of 38 years, portraying her as some kind of shrieking harridan? Would you put the innermost secrets of your marriage on display, inviting voyeurs to rummage at will?

 For Robert McDonnell, the former Virginia governor on trial for alleged corruption, the answers appear to be: “As far as necessary,” “Hey, why not?” and “Sounds like a plan.”

 McDonnell’s testimony this week in a federal courtroom in Richmond about his wife’s psychological turmoil has been both cringe-worthy and compelling. It has been clear for some time that McDonnell’s strategy for winning acquittal amounted to what could be called the “crazy wife” defense. But only when he took the stand did it become apparent how thoroughly he intended to humiliate the “soul mate” he still claims to love.

 McDonnell disclosed Thursday that he moved out of the family’s home shortly before the trial began. “I knew there was no way I could go home after a day in court and have to rehash the day’s events with my wife,” he testified.

 I guess not. Anyone who said such things in public about his or her spouse would be advised to clear out.

 McDonnell testified that Maureen McDonnell was so volatile that the entire staff at the governor’s mansion signed a petition threatening to quit if her behavior didn’t improve. “She would yell at me,” he told the court. “She would tell me I was taking staff’s side, that I didn’t know what was really going on over there.”

 He said he believed his wife needed professional counseling, though it was unclear whether he tried very hard to convince her to seek it. He spoke of the family’s severe financial problems, which included large credit card bills, and said that “it just seemed like there was too much stuff that she was buying.” Prior testimony has indicated, however, that unwise real estate investments caused most of the problem — and that Robert McDonnell, not Maureen, ran the family finances.

There are also tens of thousands of dollars of loans from the snake oil salesman, but hizonner the governor thought that nothing war wrong with that:

Testifying for the third day in his public corruption trial, former Gov. Bob McDonnell said today he saw nothing inappropriate about $70,000 in loans he negotiated with businessman Jonnie Williams in 2012.

The loans were extended by the diet supplement maker to a real estate company the governor operated with his sister to manage rental properties they owned in the Sandbridge area of Virginia Beach. Rents on the properties were falling short of covering expenses, and the McDonnells needed to make up the deficit.

 McDonnell said he saw nothing wrong with the loans because Williams hadn’t asked him to do anything on his behalf and his administration hadn’t done the businessman any favors.

 Williams testified earlier that he and the governor agreed the loans would be granted on a handshake and kept just between the two of them.

 McDonnell today denied that claim. “There was no such discussion with Mr. Williams,” he said.

 He said he tried to get the terms of the loans in writing, but that never occurred.

 He said he did not disclose the Williams loans on his annual financial disclosure statement because they were corporate loans for which he had no personal liability.

Yeah. Nothing shady here.

Seriously, I half expect the jury to take a page from the original version of the Mel Brooks film The Producers, and announce that, “We find the defendants incredibly guilty.”

Dude, you are going to jail.  The decision that you made is to go without a shred of dignity.

Canada Puts off Decision on F-35 Purchase

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I think that they will still buy it, PM Harper is determined to buy it, but it is significant that they are looking at doing a full up competition with other aircraft:

O, Canada, land of “peace, order and good government.” Land of compromise and polite politics. Land of turmoil over whether to buy the F-35.

As in the United States, the fighter plane has become a rancorous political issue. What once looked like a sure buy of 65 planes has been bogged down by infighting and un-Canadian vitriol, and the purchase is on hold while Canadian officials consider whether to buy another plane.

The decision effectively pushes the purchase decision past elections, and I don’t think that anyone beside Boeing will submit a bid, the idea that Canada would purchase a non-US airframe being ludicrous, particularly for Harper, who really buys into the whole “special relationship” thing with the US.

The F%$#ing Council on Foreign Relations Blames the West for the Ukraine Crisis

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If there is a boneheaded consensus on foreign policy inside the Beltway, it is the CFR, and they have just published an article in their house organ, Foreign Policy magazine, that blamed the US and NATO for creating the problem:

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine — beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 — were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president — which he rightly labeled a “coup” — was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

I differ a bit here.

In addition to the whole Kumbaya stuff that John Mearsheimer is talking about, there is also the whole international finance/IMF colonialism, where they slash the social safety net, privatize everything at pennies on the dollar, and strip the assets from the country.

It’s what Larry Summers protege Andrei Shleifer did after the fall of the USSR.

The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.” As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the biggest prize.” After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions.

California has a population of about 39 million, and in the ferociously expensive California Senate campaign in 2010, the two campaigns spent about $38 million dollars, or about a dollar per resident.

The Ukraine has a population of about 45 million so that $5 billion, which does not include the spending of other governments, nor the spending of private actors, is about $105 per resident.

It should be noted that the media markets in California are significantly more expensive than those of the Ukraine.

The West’s triple package of policies — NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion — added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. ………

Note that the Russian offer was FAR more generous than that of the EU/IMF, grants rather than rolling over loans, and not requiring that pensioners be thrown out in the street, nor requiring that the cost of home heating to skyrocket.

……… That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters. Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.

Unfortunately, no one in the US understands the history, a real weakness of our body politic:

Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.

I would add that the fact that this was done through a coup, and that the US continues to back neofascist and hyper nationalist elements in the Ukraine makes it even worse.

Mearsheimer ascribes the impetus on coming from things like Eastern European emigres, etc., but I think that the impetus for the US was far more mercenary: They knew that if the former Warsaw Pact members joined NATO, they would be replacing their military equipment with equipment primarily made by US defense firms.

The Clinton administration was desperate to preserve the defense industry’s industrial base, hence their subsidies for the aggressive merger activity in the sector in the 1990s, and in the time of the “Peace Dividend” selling our stuff to Eastern Europe.

The Europeans wanted integration with the East as well, but the cultural imperative there was that integration into the EU/Euro zone would make things better for everyone, prevent rain on picnic days, and keep their daughter from dating the guy with the tattoos and piercings. (Seriously, I can see no reason to admit Greece except for this. The country has been a complete basket case for its entire modern history)

George Kennan, Ambassador, Historian, and arguably the father of the Cold War strategy of containment, was prescient in his condemnation of NATO expansion:

In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that NATO expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of expansion would “say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.” As if on cue, most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was “in another world.” Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy.

I think that the author is overestimating Putin a bit.

I think that Putin’s real strength is that he separates the personal from foreign relations: He does not think that friendly relations between world leaders count for much, so he does not take disagreements personally, while many in the west, particularly in the US, seem to think that friendly personal relations trump national interest.

It does not, and it should not.

H/t Washington’s Blog.

How is that Euro Working for You?

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It appears that the Euro, and the associated austerity, has precipitated a depression that exceeds what was seen in Europe the 1930s:

As I was arguing last week, it’s time to call the eurozone what it really is: one of the biggest catastrophes in economic history.

There have been plenty of those lately. And it’s not just the Great Recession. It’s the way we’ve struggled to make up the ground we lost since. The United States, for one, has had its slowest postwar recovery. Britain has had its slowest one, period. But, six and a half years later, Europe has distinguished itself by not having much of a recovery at all. And, as you can see above, that’s about to make it worse than the worst of the 1930s.

‘ve taken the chart above from Nicholas Crafts, and extended it a bit to put Europe’s depression in, well, even more depressing perspective. Eurozone GDP still hasn’t gotten back to its 2007 level, and doesn’t look like it will anytime soon. Indeed, it already wasn’t clear if its last recession was even over before we found out the eurozone had stopped growing again in the second quarter. And not even Germany has been immune: its GDP just fell 0.2 percent from the previous quarter.

It’s a policy-induced disaster. Too much fiscal austerity and too little monetary stimulus have crippled growth like almost never before. Europe is doing worse than Japan during its “lost decade,” worse than the sterling bloc during the Great Depression, and barely better than the gold bloc then—though even that silver lining isn’t much of one. That’s because, at this rate, it’ll only be another year until the eurozone is well behind the gold bloc, too.

So how is Europe making the Great Depression look like the good old days of growth? Easy: by ignoring everything we learned from it.

The Euro is a paper gold standard, and much like the German overreaction to the hyperinflation of the early 1920s led them to on stay on the gold standard too long, which created misery and social unrest, we are now seeing the Germany’s current paranoia about inflation creating misery and social unrest.

The historical echoes to both world wars is deafening.

It Figures that Texas Would Go Further than the NRA Could Tolerate

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What could possibly go wrong with serving alcohol at gun shows?

The National Rifle Association sent out an alert to its members late Monday warning that an initiative in Texas to allow alcohol at gun shows could backfire and have a “devastating impact” on NRA events.

 The warning came after the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission proposed a new set of rules last week that would allow alcohol to be served at gun shows across the state. The catch was that organizers of the events had to disable all firearms on display, ban live ammunition, and prohibit buyers from taking possession of their weapons on site.

 The changes would override the current protocol, in which alcohol-serving venues are made to suspend the sale of alcohol throughout the preparation and duration of a gun show.

 But what might appear to be a relaxation of regulations on the gun show industry has not been well-received by the NRA. In an alert posted Monday by the organization’s lobbying arm, the NRA asked its members to take action because the changes “could actually end these events as we know them”.

If there was a place that was too deep in the crazy for the NRA, it would be Texas.

A Good Start

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The LA school district has decided to stop sending kids to juvie for minor infractions. This is a much better than the zero tolerance crap that has been pushed for the past few decades:

Students caught misbehaving in the nation’s second largest school district will be sent to the principal’s office rather than the courthouse as part of sweeping disciplinary reforms announced Tuesday by Los Angeles schools.

Under the new policy, police officers at Los Angeles Unified School District won’t arrest or cite students for low-level offenses like possessing alcohol or marijuana but will instead refer students to administrators or counselors — a shift that educators and justice officials say will prevent students from becoming mired in the criminal justice system.

The decriminalization of student discipline marks the latest rollback to “zero tolerance” policies that were instituted in the 1970s and 1980s and intensified in the wake of the Columbine school shooting. School districts from California to Florida have instituted so-called restorative justice measures, which aim to address the underlying reasons for misconduct rather than mete out harsh punishments. The Obama administration in January issued recommendations favoring conflict resolution over arrests and citations.

The school to prison pipeline is a deeply wrong, and it good that school districts are beginning to recognize this fact.

Well, I Would Prefer a Bounty on the Vulture’s Heads, but this Works Too

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Argentina is offering a voluntary bond swap to exit US jurisdiction:

Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández announced plans on Tuesday to launch a voluntary debt swap aimed at dodging a US court ruling that last month triggered the country’s second default in less than 13 years.

The government is seeking approval from congress for plans that would enable it to service debt in Argentina as well as allow bondholders to exchange their debt issued under foreign law for bonds of the same value governed by local law.

Ms Fernández said Argentina would stop using Bank of New York Mellon as a trustee and instead make payments on its bonds via an account at Banco de la Nación in Buenos Aires, after the default was caused by a US judge preventing BNY Mellon from transferring $539m to bondholders.

The US Supreme Court upheld the judge’s ruling that Argentina must pay its so-called holdout creditors in full at the same time as paying the rest of its bondholders, who accepted a 65 per cent haircut on their bonds after a 2001 default.

One wonders how many of the bond holders will take the deal.

My guess is most of the non-vultures will if Argentina sweetens the deal by a few more basis points on the bonds.

Of course, the alternative is that the court will prevent disbursements to the bond-holders who refuse the swap for a few years so I don’t think that the deal needs to be sweetened by all that much.

Still, I prefer sending bounty hunters after the vultures.

It’s a Gang Sign, He’s Black. QED

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It appears that both CNN and the right wing twitterverse think that any hand gesture by a black man is a gang symbol:

Today in Ferguson, Mo., news, The Washington Post takes on the assertion that Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson has been photographed flashing gang signs with members of the community.

He has not.

To reiterate: Capt. Johnson is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi, a black fraternity that was formed in 1911 at Indiana University in Bloomington, and the hand sign you see in the pictures below is a Kappa greeting. The Kappas are part of the Divine Nine or the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the nine historically black fraternities and sororities that include Delta Sigma Theta, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Alpha Phi Alpha, Omega Psi Phi, Phi Beta Sigma, Zeta Phi Beta, Sigma Gamma Rho and Iota Phi Theta, none of which are gangs.

(emphasis mine)

Yes, a back man is President, so there is no more racism in society.

Make the stupid stop. Please.

I Think that I Invoked George Orwell Prematurely

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Cartoon courtesy, XKCD

It appears that web based practice tests have license agreements that forbid you from remembering them: (all emphasis original)

Today’s copyright-induced stupidity is brought to you by… a whole host of regulatory institutions. An anonymous Techdirt reader sent in a pointer to this ridiculous warning that greets those accessing the National Association of Legal Assistants practice tests. (Press “Sign In” to view the legal threats pop-up.)

These online practice tests and all items contained herein are protected by federal copyright law. No part of this examination may be copied, reproduced or shared in any manner, in part or whole, by any means whatsoever, including memorization or electronic transmission.

While I realize there have been several attempts to broaden the coverage of copyright and extend its length towards the far end of perpetuity, I was unaware that federal copyright law now provides remedies for the creation of infringing memories.

This would be merely inane (but still noteworthy), if this stupidity began and ended with the NALA’s stern warning. But a search for that wording finds examples elsewhere.

Yeah, it ain’t just them. It’s the National Board of Chiropractic Examiners, the American Board of Perianesthesia Nursing Certification, the Texas Pharmacy Technician Certification Board, the American Association of Veterinary State Boards, the Oncology Nursing Certification Corporation, and the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing, Inc.

But the one that takes the cake is the Michigan State University, which actually forbids studying:

The examination and the items contained therein are protected by copyright law. No part of this examination may be copied or reproduced in part or whole by any means whatsoever, including memorization, note-taking, or electronic transmission.

Yep, a university has terms that ban studying.

Make the madness stop.

Your Daily Dose of Eric Arthur Blair

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Also known as George Orwell

The US military has banned its personnel from accessing The Intercept website. You know, the place where Glenn Greenwald continues to publish Edward Snowden revelations:

The U.S. military is banning and blocking employees from visiting The Intercept in an apparent effort to censor news reports that contain leaked government secrets.

 According to multiple military sources, a notice has been circulated to units within the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps warning staff that they are prohibited from reading stories published by The Intercept on the grounds that they may contain classified information. The ban appears to apply to all employees—including those with top-secret security clearance—and is aimed at preventing classified information from being viewed on unclassified computer networks, even if it is freely available on the internet. Similar military-wide bans have been directed against news outlets in the past after leaks of classified information.

 A directive issued to military staff at one location last week, obtained by The Intercept, threatens that any employees caught viewing classified material in the public domain will face “long term security issues.” It suggests that the call to prohibit employees from viewing the website was made by senior officials over concerns about a “potential new leaker” of secret documents.

 The directive states:

We have received information from our higher headquarters regarding a potential new leaker of classified information. Although no formal validation has occurred, we thought it prudent to warn all employees and subordinate commands. Please do not go to any website entitled “The Intercept” for it may very well contain classified material.

 As a reminder to all personnel who have ever signed a non-disclosure agreement, we have an ongoing responsibility to protect classified material in all of its various forms. Viewing potentially classified material (even material already wrongfully released in the public domain) from unclassified equipment will cause you long term security issues. This is considered a security violation.

A military insider subject to the ban said that several employees expressed concerns after being told by commanders that it was “illegal and a violation of national security” to read publicly available news reports on The Intercept.

This is bullsh%$, of course.

It’s not unexpected, but it is still bullsh%$ none the less.

Your tax dollars at work.

This is a Big Deal

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Standard Charter bank has just agreed to pay a $300 million fine for money laundering, which really is pocket change, but they have also had their dollar clearing rights suspended which is a very big deal:

British banking giant Standard Chartered is a repeat offender, at least in the eyes of New York’s top financial regulator, which fined the bank $300 million and suspended its ability to convert currency for violating a money laundering settlement.

 On Tuesday, the New York Department of Financial Service said Standard Chartered had not flagged a series of wire transfers from clients and locales at high risk for money laundering, running afoul of a 2012 agreement the bank inked with the regulator. Back then, the bank shelled out a total of $667 million to state and federal authorities for allegedly processing $250 billion in transactions for Iranian banks in violation of U.S. sanctions.

The suspension of dollar clearing privileges means that they can no longer transfer dollars into and out of the United States on their own, but have to use an intermediary who still has dollar clearing privileges, which adds cost and complexity, which serves to blow a huge hole in their business, since most transaction settle in dollars.

Benjamin Lawsky, head of the NY Department of Financial Service is arguably the most aggressive, and most effective, financial regulator in the US right now.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism believe that these actions have the potential to uncover the systemic rot in our banking system, but I am not as optimistic as she it.
In any case, more of this.

New York Times Calls out Cuomo on Campaign Challenges

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The Editorial Board are unamused by the Cuomo campaign’s efforts to keep Zephyr Teachout off the ballot:

New York State voters rarely have enough real choice on their ballots, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo seems determined to keep it that way. Ever since another Democratic candidate for governor, Zephyr Teachout, arose on his left, Mr. Cuomo has tried to throw her off the primary ballot on the shaky grounds that she hasn’t met the state’s five-year residency requirement.

On Monday, a Brooklyn judge tossed that argument out of court, ruling that Ms. Teachout is perfectly qualified to be on the Democratic primary ballot on Sept. 9. But Mr. Cuomo, true to form, won’t back down. His aides immediately promised an appeal of the ruling. That is political bullying, and the governor should back off and engage with Ms. Teachout as a serious candidate. Doing otherwise suggests he is more nervous about winning a second term than he would like to appear.

………

Although Mr. Cuomo is leagues ahead in the polls and has a $32.5 million bankroll, he should not dismiss Ms. Teachout and her growing number of followers as irritants. Her criticisms are mostly legitimate, and he should defend his first term in a series of robust debates with her in the weeks before the primary, rather than through the timidity of litigation.

Before the ruling from Judge Edgar Walker of the State Supreme Court, the governor’s campaign lawyers tried briefly to challenge Ms. Teachout’s nominating petitions, which required 15,000 voters to support placing her name on the ballot. After she turned in 45,000 names, they turned to the state’s absurdly rigid residency requirements to challenge her. (State law requires that candidates for governor be a legal resident of New York for five years before the election. By comparison, candidates for the United States Senate only have to be residents on Election Day.)

I still don’t think that she has the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell, but the fact that that the Times editorial board is calling out Cuomo’s politico cowardice is amusing.

Not The Onion*

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The Egyptian government is urging restraint by the police in Ferguson, Missouri:

Egypt on Tuesday urged U.S. authorities to exercise restraint in dealing with racially charged demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri – echoing language Washington used to caution Egypt as it cracked down on Islamist protesters last year. It is unusual for Egypt to criticize such a major donor. Ties between Washington and Cairo were strained after Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters following the army’s ousting of freely elected President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

To quote Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know.”

*But it should be.