Month: October 2014

I am a Cynic

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I think that the Supreme Court issuing an injunction against the most egregious parts of the Texas anti-abortion laws is just a ploy to push the political effects until after the midterms:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed more than a dozen Texas abortion clinics to reopen, blocking a state law that had imposed strict requirements on abortion providers. Had the law been allowed to stand, it would have caused all but eight of the state’s abortion clinics to close and would have required many women to travel more than 150 miles to the nearest abortion provider.

The Supreme Court’s order — five sentences long and with no explanation of the justices’ reasoning — represents an interim step in a legal fight that is far from over. But abortion rights advocates welcomed what they said was the enormous practical impact of the move. Had the clinics been forced to remain closed while appeals went forward, they said, they might never have reopened.

State officials said the law’s requirements were needed to protect women’s health. Abortion providers said the regulations were expensive, unnecessary and a ruse meant to put many of them out of business.

This is just a temporary injunction, and I’m thinking that either Roberts or Kennedy (Scalia, Alito, and Thomas voted against) will flip once it is sufficiently removed from the midterm elections.

Nope, No Voter Suppression Here ……… Move Along ………

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In Georgia, the New Georgia Project registered 80,000 new voters.

After many months, 40,000 legal registrations have remained unprocessed by the Republican Secretary of State:

Over the last few months, the group submitted some 80,000 voter registration forms to the Georgia secretary of state’s office — but as of last week, about half those new registrants, more than 40,000 Georgians, were still not listed on preliminary voter rolls. And there is no public record of those 40,000-plus applications, according to State Representative Stacey Adams, a Democrat.

Oh, yeah, did we mention: Georgia’s Secretary of State Brain Kemp is a Republican.

The secretary’s office says they are not doing anything different than usual in processing the voter applications. These things take time, they say. (Apparently months and months of time — as that is how long some of those forms have been sitting with the state without being processed.)

That’s Kemp’s story, and he’s sticking to it … except this is also Kemp’s story:

In closing I just wanted to tell you real quick, after we get through this runoff, you know the Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November. But we’ve got to do the exact same thing. I would encourage all of you, if you have an Android or an Apple device, to download that app, and maybe your goal is to register one new Republican voter.

Kemp said that in July, and in September, Kemp announced he was launching a fraud investigation into the registration drive, though the secretary’s office has not produced a reason as to why the state suspects fraud.

………

Monday marked the beginning of early voting in a number of Georgia counties, making the case of the 40,000 missing voters all the more urgent.

To that end, Third Sector Development announced yesterday that, after weeks of fruitless negotiations with the state, they were going to court to find out the status of the missing registrations — or, more to the point, the eligibility of more than 40,000 potential voters.

And there was also the Republican State Senator who complained that Decalb County was making it too easy for people to register.

I really hope that Georgia gigged like a frog in court, and possibly end up back under a DoJ pre-clearnace regime under what remains of the Voting Rights Act.

Silly Rabbit, Stand Your Ground is for White Men!

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I’m, not a fan of “Stand Your Ground”, or as I like to call them, “Make My Day” laws, but the determination of prosecutors to ensure that it only applies to white males is unseemly:

Whitlee Jones screamed for help as her boyfriend pulled her down the street by her hair. Her weave fell from her head and onto the pavement.

A neighbor heard Jones’ cries and dialed 911 on that night in November 2012.

But the scuffle ended before a North Charleston policeman arrived and asked Jones’ boyfriend what happened. Eric Lee, 29, said their argument over a cellphone had never turned physical. The officer left.

A short time later, Jones went back to the home where she lived with Lee. She planned to pack up and leave for good.

But after Jones gathered her things, Lee stepped in front of her. Though authorities later contended that Lee didn’t attack her, Jones said he shook her and blocked her way out, so she pulled a knife and stabbed him once. Lee died, and Jones was arrested for murder.

Nearly two years later, a judge found earlier this month that Jones, now 25, had a right to kill Lee under the S.C. Protection of Persons and Property Act, which allows people in certain situations to use force when faced with serious injury. But to the 9th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, Jones is not the kind of person legislators had in mind when they passed the “stand your ground” law in 2006. It does not apply to housemates in episodes of domestic violence, the prosecutors argued.

Because, of course, a woman cannot be in fear for her life from an abusive partner.

I’m thinking that the prosecutors would need to worry about getting whacked by their wives if they stopped beating them.

The Handmaiden”s Tale is Alive and Well in Tennessee

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Does being pregnant when you commit a crime make you guiltier than someone who is not pregnant? Vice reports that a group of reproductive rights organizations, led by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, wrote to the Department of Justice recently to protest the sentence of Lacey Weld of Dandridge, Tennessee. Weld was picked up in an undercover sting at a methamphetamine manufacturing plant. As Kristen Gwynne of Vice writes, “despite her cooperation in the case and testimony against co-defendants, Weld (who pleaded guilty) was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison and five years of supervised release for her involvement in meth manufacturing.” Because of “enhanced sentencing” guidelines, six of those years were tacked on simply because Weld was pregnant at the time.

As the NAPW’s letter states, giving a person an extra-long sentence because of her pregnancy status constitutes “separate and unequal treatment of pregnant women.” The justification offered by the judge in Weld’s case is that Weld is extra guilty because she put her “unborn” child at a “a substantial risk of harm.” But Weld was not convicted of smoking meth. “According to the press release, the DOJ justifies the enhanced penalty in part because Ms. Weld apparently used methamphetamine while pregnant,” writes NAPW in its letter. “Drug use (rather than possession), however, is not a crime under either Tennessee or federal law—and as the press release admits, Ms. Weld was convicted of manufacturing, not possession of, methamphetamine.” Tennessee law allows enhanced sentencing if the victim is especially vulnerable, but Weld was not convicted of victimizing her son. Those six extra years were for a crime that isn’t a crime in Tennessee at all.

This is contemptible.

Scott Walker is Betting that the People of Wisconsin are Unbelievably Stupid

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The goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, as the inestimable Charlie Pierce calls him, is trying to sell himself as a pro choice candidate:

How do you know Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is in serious re-election trouble? He just tried to declare himself pro-choice.

Of course, he didn’t use those words specifically. What the Republican governor did do, however, is attempt to repaint himself as someone who is not an extremist when it comes to abortion and birth control, despite a decade in politics that shows otherwise.

It is impossible to deny Walker has an extensive political career promoted on blocking the right to abortion and birth control access. Walker’s legacy on women has been clear: He proposed cuts to Badgercare, the health care insurance program for low-income Wisconsinites; defunding Well Women programs, which provide free preventative health care screenings to women; limiting birth control access to teens; signing anti-abortion legislation that was so restrictive that it ended all medication abortion in the state (before a court overturned it) and later attempted to closed nearly every abortion clinic. He has been a one-man war on women. Signing bills on holidays to hide his actions doesn’t change that.

Now, in the waning days of his re-election campaign, all of these moves are coming back to haunt him. Walker and his Democratic challenger, Mary Burke, continue to be tied in the polls, and, when it comes to women voters, Burke is leading him by a whopping 14 points.

………

Walker, too, has been on a personal crusade against reproductive autonomy since he stepped into office, and yes, that means birth control, too. In the most recent example he attempted to use the Hobby Lobby decision to ban birth control coverage in Wisconsin’s own insurance plans, which is mandatory under the state’s contraceptive equity law. Pile that on top of the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, quest that has shut down a number of clinics across the state that did not offer any abortion services, and it’s clear that contraception is just as big of a target to him as abortion is.

The question here is a simple one:  Whether or not the people of Wisconsin are so stupid that they cannot be trusted to cut their own meat, or not.

Anyone who buys Walker’s line of baloney about his seeing abortion and contraception as an issue between a woman and her doctor should really be kept away from pointy objects.

So Not Feeling the Hope and Change Here

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The US Government leaned on James Risen’s publisher to spike his latest book on the US intelligence services:

James Risen’s new book on war-on-terror abuses comes out tomorrow, and if you want to find a copy it shouldn’t be hard to obtain. As natural as that seems, it almost wasn’t the case with the Risen’s last book, “State of War,” published in 2006. Not only did U.S. government officials object to the publication of the book on national security grounds, it turns out they pressured Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, to have it killed.

The campaign to stifle Risen’s national security reporting at the Times is already well-documented, but a 60 Minutes story last night provided a glimpse into how deeply these efforts extended into the publishing world, as well. After being blocked from reporting on the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program for the paper of record, Risen looked into getting these revelations out through a book he was already under contract to write for Simon & Schuster, a book that would look at a wide range of intelligence missteps in the war on terror.

In response, it seems, the government once again went straight to the top in order to thwart him. As 60 Minutes reports:

The administration [reached] out to Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, whose Simon & Schuster division was the publisher of Risen’s book, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop its publication.”

In an interview with The Intercept, Risen said he had been told the same story by Simon & Schuster a day or two before his book was published. He added he remembers feeling “very happy” that Moonves stood up for him.

Yes, this is the right time to invoke Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell).

Not also that the Obama administration is looking to jail Mr. Risen for not revealing his sources.

You I think that this whole, “Most transparent administration in history,” promise is, in the words of Ron Ziegler, “Inoperative.”

I miss the openness and transparency of Richard Nixon.

A Triumphant Fist Pump for Stephen Hawking, Because He Cannot for Himself

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We now have some experimental verification of the existance of Hawking radiation:

Scientists have come closer than ever before to creating a laboratory-scale imitation of a black hole that emits Hawking radiation, the particles predicted to escape black holes due to quantum mechanical effects.

The black hole analogue, reported in Nature Physics1, was created by trapping sound waves using an ultra cold fluid. Such objects could one day help resolve the so-called black hole ‘information paradox’ – the question of whether information that falls into a black hole disappears forever.

The physicist Stephen Hawking stunned cosmologists 40 years ago when he announced that black holes are not totally black, calculating that a tiny amount of radiation would be able to escape the pull of a black hole2. This raised the tantalising question of whether information might escape too, encoded within the radiation.

………

Hawking radiation, the result of attempts to combine quantum theory with general relativity, comprises these escaping particles, but physicists have yet to detect it being emitted from an astrophysical black hole. Another way to test Hawking’s theory would be to simulate an event horizon in the laboratory.

To this end, Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, used a collection of rubidium atoms chilled to less than 1-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. At such temperatures, the atoms are tightly packed and behave as a single, fluid quantum object and so can be easily manipulated. The cold temperature also ensures that the fluid, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, provides a silent medium for the passage of sound waves that arise from quantum fluctuations.

Using laser light, Steinhauer manipulated the fluid to flow faster than the speed of sound. Like a swimmer battling a strong current, sound waves travelling against the direction of the fluid become ‘trapped’. The condensate thus becomes a stand-in for the gravitational event horizon.

Pairs of sound waves pop in and out of existence in a laboratory vacuum, mimicking particle-antiparticle pairs in the vacuum of space. Those that form astride this sonic event horizon become the equivalent of Hawking radiation. To amplify these sound waves enough for his detectors to pick them up, Steinhauer established a second sonic event horizon inside the first, adjusting the fluid so that sound waves could not pass this second event horizon, and are bounced back. As the soundwaves repeatedly strike the outer horizon, they create more pairs of soundwaves, amplifying the Hawking radiation to detectable levels.

I would also note that this is a wicked cool experiment.

Using a moving fluid and sound as an analogue for an event horizon is completely sick.  (In a good way)

Science, Bitches!

Sarah Palin Can See Fabulosity Visible From her House

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Another day, another ruling striking down a gay marriage ban:

A federal judge ruled Sunday that Alaska’s ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional, paving the way for same-sex couples to begin marrying in the state for the first time. The state quickly said it would appeal the decision by U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess, despite recent higher court rulings striking down similar bans around the country.

“The court finds that Alaska’s ban on same-sex marriage and refusal to recognize same sex marriages lawfully entered in other states is unconstitutional as a deprivation of basic due process and equal protection principles under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Burgess wrote in a order in the case Hamby v. Parnell, released Sunday.

The Hamby suit was filed in May by five same-sex couples. It challenged the state’s constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman, approved by voters in 1998. Both parties in the Hamby case made oral arguments [3] in the case on Friday.

In an email, the state said it will appeal Burgess’ ruling.

“As Alaska’s governor, I have a duty to defend and uphold the law and the Alaska Constitution,” Gov. Sean Parnell said in a press release. “Although the district court today may have been bound by the recent Ninth Circuit panel opinion, the status of that opinion and the law in general in this area is in flux. I will defend our constitution.”

Parnell was referring to a ruling last week from a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled to overturn similar marriage bans in Idaho and Nevada [4]. Same-sex marriage advocates said the 9th Circuit ruling would likely lead to the quick overturn of Alaska’s ban on gay marriage because the bans were similar and Alaska also falls under the jurisdiction of that court.

Even as the state vowed to appeal the decision, officials with the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics said they would begin accepting applications for same-sex marriage licenses at 8 a.m. on Monday.

“The license application begins the three-day waiting period before the license can be issued. All marriages in Alaska must have the marriage license issued before the ceremony is performed,” wrote Phillip Mitchell, head of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. “We expect our office will be busy tomorrow but we will make every effort to help customers as quickly as possible.”

This is not unalloyed good news, because of the comments of Phillip Mitchell, “We will make every effort to help CUSTOMERS as quickly as possible.”

They aren’t customers, they are CITIZENS.

The notion of the citizenry being nothing more than “customers” is an anathema to good governance.

It casts those citizens, and the government, as nothing more than economic actors whose obligation is to pursue their own personal best interests, with no obligations to one another.

While this might appeal to psychopaths like Ayn Rand, this is not the model for a just society.

This is Just Plain Weird

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One of the passengers on doomed Malaysian Airlines was found wearing an oxygen mask:

Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans has said that one of the 298 people killed in the downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane over eastern Ukraine was found wearing an oxygen mask.

He indicated that not everybody on board had died instantly when the plane was hit by a missile.

An initial report said flight MH17 broke up in mid-air after being pierced by objects at high velocity.

………
The Dutch public prosecutor has confirmed that an oxygen mask was found, although a spokesman said it was around the passenger’s neck rather than their mouth. It had been secured with elastic and has been tested for DNA and fingerprints.

The plane had been flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on 17 July when it went down over rebel-held territory. Pro-Russian separatist leaders deny shooting it down with a missile.

Although 196 of the passengers were Dutch, the passenger with the oxygen mask was not, the prosecutor said on Thursday. Dutch media said the victim in question was an Australian and the family had been informed about the development.

Needless to say, the tinfoil hat crowd is going crazy over this.

I’m not sure if this means anything beyond some of the oxygen masks deploying before the plane broke up in mid air (confirmed from radar readings).

Still, this is f%$#ing weird.

What Salman Rushdie Said

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He makes a very interesting point, that whether a person’s ideology stems from the Bible, the Christian Bible, the Koran, Mai’s Little Red Book, Das Kapital, or Mein Kampf, no one’s idea should be free from criticism:

Salman Rushdie has attacked the “hate-filled religious rhetoric” that “persuades hundreds, perhaps thousands of British Muslims to join the decapitating barbarians of Isis”, describing it as “the most dangerous new weapon in the world today”.

Speaking at the award of the PEN/Pinter prize, Rushdie said he dislikes the word Islamophobia “greatly”. But it is right, the author argued, to “feel phobia” towards the oppression of the people of Afghanistan by the Taliban, towards the oppression of Iranians by the ayatollahs, and towards the death of people in Iraq today. “What is being killed in Iraq is not just human beings, but a whole culture. To feel aversion towards such a force is not bigotry. It is the only possible response to the horror of events.

“If I don’t like your ideas,” Rushdie continued, “it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don’t like mine. Ideas cannot be ringfenced just because they claim to have this or that fictional sky god on their side.”

………

The language of religion, said Rushdie, “has been horribly mangled in our time”, by Christian extremists in America and by Hindu extremists in India, “but the overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam, and much of it has its roots in the ideological language of blood and war emanating from the Salafist movement within Islam, globally backed by Saudi Arabia”.

In a world where we have all “became too frightened of religion in general, and one particular religion in particular – religion redefined as the capacity of religionists to commit earthly violence in the name of their unearthly sky god” – religious extremists are the enemy of modernity, said Rushdie.

“Modernity with its language of liberty, for women as well as men, with its insistence on legitimacy in government rather than tyranny, and with its strong inclination towards secularism and away from religion” is being targeted “by the deformed medievalist language of fanaticism, backed up by modern weaponry”.

It’s nice that he is calling out the House of Saud too.

Interesting Development in Ion Drives

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Iodine looks promising as a replacement for Xenon for the propellant in ion drives: (paid subscription required)

A high-efficiency radio-frequency (RF) ion microthruster in development could give engineers another approach to solar-electric propulsion (SEP) technology for deep-space exploration, particularly for the tiny CubeSat-based probes just coming into their own.

While large-scale SEP is considered necessary to preposition supplies on Mars for human explorers, work is underway at NASA and in universities on CubeSat-class missions to the Moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations as well. Of particular interest is SEP technology that uses iodine as a propellant instead of xenon.

Iodine is easier to integrate into spacecraft and costs much less than the xenon typically used today. Although they sit next to each other in the periodic table, iodine is a solid that sublimates into a useful gas at relatively low temperature, while xenon in its ambient state is a gas that must be contained in a pressure vessel.

Busek Co., a privately held 50-person space-propulsion business in Natick, Massachusetts, has just demonstrated an RF gridded-ion thruster that uses iodine as a propellant and measures only 3 cm across. With iodine, the “BIT-3” thruster demonstrated a specific impulse of 3,500 sec. and a thrust measured at more than 1.4 mN. Designed to propel advanced CubeSats from geostationary to lunar orbits, using 60 watts of power it can generate a Delta-v (velocity change) of 2.5 km/sec. (1.5 mi./sec) with 1.5 kg (3.3 lb.) of fuel in a 13-kg spacecraft, the company says.

“Iodine is a substance that is stored as a solid on a spacecraft, because it has very high density,” says Vlad Hruby, founder and president of Busek. “It also stores in small volume, in a zero-pressure tank. That means the tank can be conformal. You can stick it anywhere in the spacecraft, wherever you have space, and then you heat it up a little bit and it generates enough available pressure to feed [the propulsion system].”

Busek also has used iodine as a fuel in Hall-effect thrusters, and holds NASA small-business contracts for advanced technology development work aimed at deep-space smallsat SEP. The BIT-3 approach uses an RF coil to ionize the sublimated iodine gas, and electrically charged grids to accelerate the ions to the high velocity needed.

While the Hall thrusters are good for “Earth-centric” missions, the efficiency of the gridded-ion thruster makes it more attractive for deep-space applications.

“They have different niches, really,” says Michael Tsay, chief scientist on the BIT-3 project at Busek. “The Hall thruster has very high thrust to power, so you can get higher thrust, but with slightly lower Isp [specific impulse]. The RF ion can give you very high Isp, but you get lower thrust. So it’s mission-dependent.”

For either application, iodine has another advantage over xenon that makes it more attractive as a secondary payload. Since it doesn’t require a high-pressure tank, iodine is safer and less likely to damage a high-priced primary payload if something goes wrong.

………

“It eliminates the need for a high-pressure tank, and it stores more compactly, so it takes up less volume,” says Andrew Petro, NASA program executive for the Small Spacecraft Technology Program within the STMD. “Those two features are especially important because of the small size of the small satellites we are trying to develop.”

………

Iodine has advantages for small satellites, including much lower cost as industry finds new uses for xenon in fields as disparate as photography flashes and surgical anesthesia. But it may not be as scalable as xenon for the large-scale, multi-kilowatt applications NASA’s human-spaceflight engineers are pushing as a way to move habitats, cargo carriers and other large payloads toward Mars (AW&ST June 23, p. 44).

“The challenge with iodine is feeding the propellant,” says Petro. “With the xenon gas it is very simple; it’s a pressurized gas, It will come out through a valve if you open it. The iodine has to sublime into a gas and be fed, and the larger amount of it you have, the more challenging it might be to engineer a tank that will feed that propellant in a consistent and reliable way. It certainly is possible, but it will probably take some more engineering to work that out. I haven’t really seen much. I think the real attraction of the iodine is in the smaller spacecraft, because they already have the problem of limited volume. It is not as much of an issue for the bigger spacecraft.”

Iodine sublimates at 113.7° C, and being a halogen, it is rather corrosive, but I don’t see these as particularly daunting engineering issues in implementing an iodine based system.

Police Achieve Success by Looking at Failures

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In this case, it happened in Richmond, California, where the police department has reduced policed involved shootings in what is one of the more violent cities in the Bay Area:

……….
A spate of high-profile police shootings nationwide, most notably the killing of a black teen in Ferguson, Missouri, has stoked intense scrutiny of deadly force by officers and driven a series of demonstrations across the nation and the Bay Area. But in Richmond, historically one of the most violent cities in the Bay Area, the Police Department has averaged fewer than one officer-involved shooting per year since 2008, and no one has been killed by a cop since 2007.

That track record stands in sharp contrast to many other law enforcement agencies in the region, according to a review of data compiled from individual departments.

Many observers and police officials attribute Richmond’s relatively low rate of deadly force to reforms initiated under Chief Chris Magnus, who took over a troubled department in this city of 106,000 in 2006. Magnus implemented a variety of programs to reduce the use of lethal force, including special training courses, improved staffing deployments to crisis situations, thorough reviews of all uses of force and equipping officers with nonlethal weapons such as Tasers and pepper spray.

………

More important than luck, said law enforcement expert Tom Nolan, is the culture within a department. If a chief has sent a clear message that instances of deadly force will be scrutinized, you can expect more officers to think twice before firing a weapon, or employ less-lethal means when apprehending a suspect, he said.

“The chief is key in setting policy and tone,” said Nolan, who worked for 27 years as a cop in Boston and now directs graduate programs in criminology at Merrimack College in Massachusetts. “If they haven’t had an officer-involved shooting that’s resulted in death in a city like that, it’s commendable.”

Here is the important bit:

Magnus has done something in Richmond that he believes is not done enough in other departments: He’s been willing to second-guess the deadly force used by other cops.

“We use a case study approach to different incidents that happen in different places. When there is a questionable use-of-force incident somewhere else, we study it and have a lot of dialogue,” Magnus said. “It’s a model that is used in a range of other professions, but in some police circles, it’s seen as judging in hindsight and frowned on. In my mind, that attitude is counterproductive.”

The culture of police tends to mitigate against their examining their own failures.

Instead they circle the wagons, and protect their own, which produces an environment where dysfunction is nurtured, rather than corrected.

H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Mission Accomplished, Frau Merkel*

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It looks like Germany is finally running out the string on its beggar thy neighbor economy:

Germany’s exports are falling at the fastest rate since the global crisis in 2009, raising fears of a triple-dip recession and a disastrous relapse for the rest of the eurozone.

The country’s five economic institutes – or “Wise Men” – slashed their growth forecast for Germany from 2pc to 1.2pc next year, warning that the latest measures unveiled by the European Central Bank will add “hardly any” extra stimulus to the real economy and may be unworkable.

Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, warned that the eurozone is at “serious risk” of falling back into recession if nothing is done, and is in danger of suffering a lost decade. “If the right policies are decided, if both surplus and deficit countries do what they have to do, it is avoidable,” she said. The wording is a clear call to Germany for an immediate shift in policy.

German exports slumped by 5.8pc in August as the crisis in Ukraine and Russia took its toll. “We’re no longer in a recovery,” said Volker Treier, head of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK). He said geopolitical upsets may have pushed the economy over the edge into a “technical recession”, but added that Germany itself is also to blame for failure to break out of a slow-growth trap. “We have too little investment. That’s been the case for years,” he said.

The Wise Men said in a joint report that the German economy is now in “stagnation”, with unemployment likely to rise next year. “There are no signs of the long-awaited recovery yet. Corporate investment fell in the second quarter and there is hardly any evidence to suggest that this cautious approach to investment will change in the near future,” they said.

Germany has been running its economy by suppressing worker wages and domestic demand, and focusing on exports and trade surpluses.

Of course, that is also what they are suggesting for everyone else in the Euro zone, which of course does not works, because for every trade surplus, there has to be a corresponding trade deficit.

It’s a zero sum game, and they have managed to sufficiently impoverish their Euro Zone “partners” to the degree that they no longer can import German products, and now the Germans have no one to export to.

It should result in some policy changes in Germany, but it won’t while Merkel is Chancellor, because she has staked her political career on depicting the other members of the EU as lazy and profligate to her constituents.

*Horses whinnying.

The AIG Lawsuit: Snark too Good not to Share

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First is Chris Arnade says that, “Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chairman of AIG, has that kind of fart-in-the-elevator audacity:

The senior managing director – a top-ranking banker – walked onto the crowded elevator, focus fixed on her Blackberry, pressed the elevator button and farted loudly. As the smell filled the elevator, as others nervously coughed, some covering up giggles, her focus stayed on the Blackberry. Four floors later she left, commenting to a colleague, “The elevators are vile. The janitors are always on some break.”

 Another MD turned to me: “That’s why she earns the big bucks.”

 “Being able to fart?” I asked.

 “No, you idiot. Audacity. Audacity so great that you can fart on the elevator and blame it on someone else.”

And then, of course, there is John Stewart commenting on the AIG Lawsuit:

I wish that I could write like either of them.

People I Never Expected to Cite, Better Business Bureau Edition

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Generally, I find the BBB to be kind of useless.

There is an inherent conflict because the organization rates its dues paying members, and there have been repeated instances where being a dues paying members have been cut slack by virtue of this status.

Still, I have to note that the BBB just gave the Uber car service an “F”:

Uber, the smartphone-based hail-a-ride service, often claims it is cheaper than a ride in a taxi. It looks as if some Uber customers do not agree.

The company received an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau on Thursday, the lowest possible rating given by the organization.

The grade is based on, among other criteria, more than 90 Uber customer complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau over the last three years, most of them centering on Uber’s so-called surge pricing.

Customers still feel misinformed about how they are charged for their rides, according to complaints at the bureau’s website, and say they are not able to receive adequate customer service when they try to complain about their fares.

With its surge pricing, Uber’s temporarily increases fare prices anywhere from one and a half to 10 times the normal cost of taking an Uber ride, based on the demand for drivers. When many people in a particular area request Uber at the same time, for example, the price of rides in that area goes up.

“I never knew about surcharges until after the fact and was unaware, confused and uninformed,” one customer wrote on the bureau’s site.

Uber has a long, tricky history of its surge pricing. When Manhattan was hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, for example, many people complained that Uber was using a natural disaster to price gouge its customers.

Yes, it is price gouging, and yes, Uber’s structure and behavior, as well as the Objectivist statements of it founder, indicates that it has a contempt for both its employees contractors and its customers.

Not surprising.  Much of the philosophical underpinning of Objectivism blaming the victim.

It’s Already Happened

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Howie Klein at Down with Tyranny observes that the Democratic Party establishment is targeting liberals, with both the DCCC and the DSCC systematically supporting conservative Dems over liberal ones, even when the numbers point toward the liberals being a more competitive candidates.

It’s clear, for example, that DCCC chairman Steve Israel feels that is more important to rebuild the Blue Dog Caucus than it is to win control of the Congress.

He then wonders the establishment would target a liberal presidential candidate and support a less electable corporate Democrat:

Which suggests an interesting thought. If a truly hard-core progressive — an Elizabeth Warren or Zephyr Teachout, say — were the party’s strongest presidential candidate, would corporate Democrats choose a lesser candidate anyway, one with a greater chance of losing, just to keep the White House in the hands of someone’s One-Percent candidate? Again, your call, but we may see that tested fairly soon.

 He’s actually wrong about this.  It already happened ……… In 1973, and not only did the party establishment not support the Liberal nominee, George McGovern, and they actively sabotaged his campaign, and tacitly supported Richard “The Human Stain” Nixon.

The corporatist wing of the Democratic Party will fight for its power within the party even at the expense of the power of the party.

Not this Sh%$ Again!

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The so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels are complaining that actions against ISIS are aiding the Assad regime:

But the Syrian president’s ability to continue to attack his enemies without interference is fuelling anger amongst mainstream opposition supporters. “Syrian warplanes used to shell us two or three times a week but now they target us every day thanks to the coalition forces,” Faris Samir, from Harm in the northern Idlib region, complained on Thursday.

 “We are losing martyrs and many get injured but no one pays any attention. Now the Syrian army is taking areas bombed by the coalition forces after the Islamic factions withdraw. I have to say that the coalition military campaign is in the interest of the Syrian regime and against the Syrian people.”

I offer the “mainstream opposition”* a hearty f%$# you.

Get your war on if you want, but the actions against ISIS have nothing to do with your goal of overthrowing Assad.

I would argue that the gross incompetence of the “mainstream opposition”, which created an opening for sectarian governments to ship foreign Jihadis to Syria aid was a major contributing factor in the creation of ISIS.

Seriously.  Go f%$# yourself.

While we are at it, let us remember the advice of Machiavelli:

A prince should therefore be slow in undertaking any enterprise upon the representations of exiles, for he will generally gain nothing by it but shame and serious injury.

The Free Syrian Army should be viewed through this lens.

*Not sure how moderate these folks are. That whole martyr quote sounds like a dog whistle to religious extremists.

The New York Times Calls Out Erdogan on ISIS

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Not only do they criticize his inaction, the editorial board specifically calls out Turkey’s actions to support Jihadists and Islamic extremists which eventually led to the formation of ISIS:

This is an indictment of Mr. Erdogan and his cynical political calculations. By keeping his forces on the sidelines and refusing to help in other ways — like allowing Kurdish fighters to pass through Turkey — he seeks not only to weaken the Kurds, but also, in a test of will with President Obama, to force the United States to help him oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom he detests.

 ………

 But all sides — the Americans, Mr. Erdogan and the Kurds — agree that ground forces are necessary to capitalize on the air power. No dice, says Mr. Erdogan, unless the United States provides more support to rebels trying to overthrow Mr. Assad and creates a no-fly zone to deter the Syrian Air Force as well as a buffer zone along the Turkish border to shelter thousands of Syrian refugees who have fled the fighting.

 ………

 Mr. Erdogan’s behavior is hardly worthy of a NATO ally. He was so eager to oust Mr. Assad that he enabled ISIS and other militants by allowing fighters, weapons and revenues to flow through Turkey. If Mr. Erdogan refuses to defend Kobani and seriously join the fight against the Islamic State, he will further enable a savage terrorist group and ensure a poisonous long-term instability on his border.

(emphasis mine)

This is not the sort of truth telling that I expect from the “Paper of Record,” and I hope that they extend it to the House of Saud (specifically Prince Bandar, who was aggressively supporting ISIS until they were well into invading Iraq).

That won’t happen though.

As an aside, Erdogan actions in the matter have set back Turkey’s bid to join the EU by many years, because the Europeans already looked at intervening in Syria, and wanted no part of the Erdogan and the Gulf princes’ efforts to replace yet another secular Arab regime with a Sunni government.

Not not even the French, who still think of Syria as a colony in some ways, were unwilling to go on that adventure.

Given that there is no meaningful opposition to Erdogan and his AKP party for the foreseeable future, I’m pretty sure that any number of EU functionaries, as well as many governments, are now feeling a sense of relief that they have been slow walking Turkey’s application.

Wisconsin and Texas Voter Suppression Laws Blocked

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These are only short term injunctions though:

The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked Wisconsin from enforcing its strict voter identification law in this year’s election.

 By a 6-3 vote, the justices granted an emergency appeal from civil rights lawyers who argued it was too late to put the rule into effect.

 Lawyers for the ACLU had noted the state had already sent out thousands of absentee ballots without mentioning the need for voters to return a copy of the photo identification.

 It would be “chaos,” they said, for the state now to have to decide whether or not to count such ballots because the voters failed to comply with the new law.

 Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. The six justices in the majority did not issue a written opinion to accompany the decision to lift an order by a lower court that would have allowed the law to take effect.

So not surprised that the three most right wing justices decided that keeping the n*****s from voting is more important than preventing chaos in the already started balloting.

At nearly the same time, a federal judge in Texas struck down that state’s new voter ID law on the grounds that it violated the constitutional right to vote and discriminated against racial minorities.

 Texas Atty. Gen. Gregg Abbott said the state would appeal the ruling.

 The Wisconsin and Texas cases were the two most closely watched tests of new voter rules this year. In both states, the Republican-led legislatures sought to tighten the rules for voting and to require all registered voters who did not have driver’s license to obtain a photo ID card at a state motor vehicles office.

In Texas, a gun license was acceptable too, but not a college ID, even a college ID issued by a state college.

Funny that.