Year: 2014

Happy 9th of Av*

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Not a day to get breaking news.

Case in point, a guy who had recently been in West Africa just walked into a New York City Hospital and there are concerns that he is throwing symptoms of Ebola:

Heightened concern about the Ebola virus has led to alarms being raised at three hospitals in New York City. But so far, no Ebola cases have turned up.

The latest episode involved a man who had recently been to West Africa, and who went to the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan late Sunday with a high fever and gastrointestinal problems, the hospital reported on Monday.

He is being kept in isolation at the hospital while tests are being done for Ebola, a deadly disease, but also for other illnesses that could have caused his symptoms.

Yeah, it would be the 9th of Av.

Remind me not to eat any bat soup.

*It is Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month Av, and a small subset of the nasty bits of Jewish history follows:

  1. The report of the spies from Canaan, resulting in the people of Israel spending 40 Years in the Desert.
  2. The destruction of the 1st Temple.
  3. The destruction of the 2nd Temple.
  4. The Romans razed Betar, killing 100,000 Jews.
  5. The Romans plowed the temple mount.
  6. The start of the 1st Crusade.  (You see it as a coming together of Christendom.  I see it as a pogrom with years of murder and rape.)
  7. The expulsion of Jews from England.
  8. The expulsion of Jews from France.
  9. The expulsion of Jews from Spain.
  10. Germany entered the WW I. (Can be legitimately claimed to have directly led to the Shoah)
  11. Formal approval of the “Final Solution” by the Nazis in 1941.
  12. Deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto begin in 1942.

Excuse me while I find something sturdy to cover my head with.

    This is Too Awesome for Words

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    Some cops in the UK were on their way to a fancy dress party (in the US we call them a costume party), and they encounter, and apprehended a man threatening people’s lives at a super market while dressed as a zebra and a monkey:

    A pair of off-duty police officers who made an arrest while dressed as a zebra and a monkey have been commended for their bravery.

    PCs Tracy Griffin and Terri Cave were on their way to a fancy dress party when they came across a man yelling threatening abuse in a supermarket in Coventry in March 2014.

    The pair, dressed in zebra and monkey onesies, wrestled the man to the ground as he left the Co-op store and told one of the staff to ring 999.

    The man was arrested and taken into police custody on suspicion of public order offences, said West Midlands police. The PCs, who are based in Solihull, spent the rest of their evening filing reports at the police station rather than heading to the party.

    On hearing the news of the arrest, colleagues tweeted from @SolihullPolice: “Man threatening to kill people didn’t expect to be wrestled to the ground by our off-duty officer in a zebra onesie. We go that extra mile.”

    This is so awesome on so many levels.

    H/t the PBS news/comedy show Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.

    Something is Wrong on the Internet

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    As you are no doubt aware, the film Guardians of the Galaxy opened this weekend.

    As the archetypal summer blockbuster, it got a lot of reviews, and one, at the Village Voice, Stephanie Zacharek, was less than charitable, which resulted in a torrent of sexist abuse directed her way:

    “She’s just pissed because she lives in the Village full of gay men and no one wants any of her old, dried out pie.”

    ………

     “We live in a world where 1000s of people are being beheaded and murdered throughout the world each and every day and this harlot has the nerve to knock it because it’s too fun?”

    Harlot? Seriously?

    “She should stick to reviewing chick flicks only.”

    What is wrong with these people?

    You can castigate a movie critic, or for that matter any critic for being unfair.

    In fact the (sometimes delightfully and sometimes tediously) bitchy Rex Reed has made a career out of being this.

    But simply posting misogynist rants sucks wet farts from dead pigeons, or, as Guardians of the Galaxy writer* Brian Michael Bendis observes, ” You love Captain America? Well, you know what Captain America would never do? Go online anonymously and sh$# on a girl for having an opinion.” (%$ mine)

    H/t xkcd for the top comic.

    *To be clear, Bendis writes for the comic book, he did not do the screenplay.†
    †Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

    Of Course Obama Expresses Confidence in John Brennan

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    Because Barack Obama has made it quite clear that spying on Congress and shilling for torturers is no big deal:

    President Obama said on Friday that he has “full confidence” in John Brennan, the director of the C.I.A., despite Mr. Brennan’s admission this week that his agency improperly searched the computers of the congressional committee that is preparing to release a report on the use of torture in the fight against terror.

    ………

    Asked about the upcoming release of a report that documents American interrogation techniques, Mr. Obama said the C.I.A. exercised “very poor judgment” in its handling of the report. But he said that Mr. Brennan had apologized for the incident to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

    “I have full confidence in John Brennan,” Mr. Obama said, noting an inspector general’s conclusions about the C.I.A. spying on the committee. “It’s clear from the I.G. report that some very poor judgment was shown in how that was handled. Keep in mind that John Brennan was the one who called for the I.G. report.”

    Let us be clear: The CIA did not exercise, “poor judgement,” people exercised poor judgement.

    People spied on Congress.

    People broke cyber crime laws.

    People showed contempt for the Constitutional separation of powers.

    People, in this case John Brennan specifically, went on the Sunday shows and explicitly lied about this.

    People were responsible, and people should be fired, prosecuted, etc. over all of this.

    Barack Obama Just Admitting to Covering Up Crimes Against Humanity, Which is a Crime Against Humanity

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    Barack Obama has blithely stated that, “We tortured some folks,” but continues to insist that there will not be any sort of accountability for this:

    In startlingly blunt phrasing, President Obama on Friday acknowledged the CIA’s use of brutal interrogation tactics in the years after the Sept. 11 attack, even as he defended the agency’s top spy, who is a veteran of the era.

     “We tortured some folks,” Obama said to reporters during a news conference Friday. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”

     ………

     He sought to put the interrogation program in context, recalling Americans’ fear after the Sept. 11 attacks and the “enormous pressure” on law enforcement to prevent more attacks.

     “You know, it is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had,” Obama said. “And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.”

    No, they weren’t patriots, they were “Good Germans”.

    He also further makes it clear that not only will there be no prosecution of torturers, there won’t even be a real investigation of who gave the orders.

    As Richard Nixon’s head in a jar might attest to, sometimes it’s the cover up that constitutes a crime, and Obama has thrown his lot in with the coverup.

    Whoever performed, authorized, or ordered torture, at a very minimum, should be stripped of their security clearances and fired.  (I would argue that the same should apply to those who did not report torture through the chain of command)

    He was forced to make this statement, since the Senate report on this reveals that the torture was more common and more brutal than was reported to Congress of the public, as well as the fact that it never produced meaningful actionable intelligence.

    It is also important to note that many of the people tortured were guilty of nothing, and had just been swept up in a panic driven dragnet and bounty program.

    Finally, it should be noted that torture comes home.  National guardsman who observe or participate in torture, and then come home to work in civilian law enforcement, are more likely to engage in torture themselves.

    Prosecution, and public shaming, are essential to stopping this.

    India Stands Firm, and the Rest of Us Benefit

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    The latest round of WTO talks have collapsed over the issue of allowing Wall Street to loot food supplies:

    The World Trade Organization failed Thursday to ratify an agreement designed to streamline the global trade system, frustrating a late push by U.S. officials to convince India to reach a compromise that would have secured a deal.

    “I do not have the necessary elements that would lead to me to conclude that a breakthrough is possible,” WTO Director General Roberto Azevedo said. “We got closer—significantly closer—but not quite there.”

    The WTO reached an agreement in December on the Indonesian resort island of Bali to streamline customs procedures. The deadline to ratify that agreement was Thursday, but India declined to do so without a parallel agreement allowing developing countries more freedom to subsidize and stockpile food.

    Some economists have estimated that the Bali agreement, which seeks to standardize customs practices and remove red tape, could save WTO members more than $1 trillion eventually.

    Failure to achieve a consensus before the WTO’s own deadline deals a severe blow to the Geneva-based body’s credibility, already tenuous after years of stalled talks on tariff reductions. The trade-easing deal was viewed as a way to create some momentum.

    As a raft of regional trade deals moves ahead, the WTO’s ability to act as a catalyst for global trade liberalization is in doubt.

    India had insisted for weeks that it wouldn’t sign off on the Bali pact unless the group comes to a faster accord on exempting food-subsidy and stockpiling programs like India’s from current WTO rules that limit them.

    Remember when international food prices spiked a few years ago because of aggressive market manipulation by Wall Street in the US and the City in London?

    The “subsidies” in question are providing sub-market price food to poor people in those countries, and stockpiles to mitigate market manipulation by the banksters.

    India wants a permanent solution to this, they (correctly) consider it a matter of national security, but what they got was non-binding language that would render any attempt to protect their citizens from the vicissitudes of the market inoperative by 2017.

    I approve.

    Fabulous!

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    The Uganda constitutional court has ruled their Kill the Gays (lite) bill unconstitutional:

    Gay rights campaigners in Uganda and around the world are celebrating a decision by the country’s constitutional court to strike down a widely condemned anti-gay law on a legal technicality.

    Activists in the courtroom cheered after a panel of five judges ruled on Friday that the speaker of parliament acted illegally when she allowed a vote on the measure despite at least three objections that not enough MPs were in attendance.

    “The speaker was obliged to ensure that there was quorum,” the court said in its ruling. “We come to the conclusion that she acted illegally.”

    While celebrating the ruling, activists warned that homosexuality remained a criminal offence in the east African country under colonial-era laws.

    While much of the blame for this rests on the politicians of Uganda, who are, after all, human beings with their own capability of agency, but I really do think that we should be investigating members of “The Family” in the United States for conspiracy to commit genocide.  (Click the link, the Family is a scary bunch of people)

    It’s nice that Uganda cannot throw people convicted of “aggravated homosexuality” into jail for life, but it would be nicer still if they were to repeal the colonial-era laws.

    Burning Political Question of the Day

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    Why can’t we Nickelback Sarah Palin?

    Seriously, why do pop bands seem to have a sell-by date, where they go from beloved to loathed (I was unaware of Nickelback until people started hating in them, because I am, well, square), but figures in the political media complex don’t.   (See also, “Blowfish, Hootie and the”)

    I burn for the day that I can place the beast from Wasilla  on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named. 

    If We Can’t Jail John Brennan, Can We Please Fire Him?

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    Remember when Congressional staffers accused the CIA?

    Remember when John Brennan went on the Sunday shows and categorically denied it?

    Rather unsurprisingly, John Brennan was lying through his teeth:

    I don’t want to understate how seriously wrong it is that the CIA searched Senate computers. Our constitutional order is seriously out of whack when the executive branch acts with that kind of impunity — to its overseers, no less.

    But given everything else that’s been going on lately, the single biggest — and arguably most constructive — thing to focus on is how outrageously CIA Director John Brennan lied to everyone about it.

    “As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth,” Brennan told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell in March. “We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.”

    Earlier, he had castigated “some members of the Senate” for making “spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.” He called for an end to “outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and Congressional overseers.”

    And what compelled Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein to make a dramatic floor speech in the first place, bringing everything out in the open, was that Brennan had responded to her initial concerns not by acknowledging the CIA’s misconduct — but by firing back with an allegation of criminal activity by her own staff.

    Not coincidentally, the document the CIA was hunting for, that Senate staffers were accused of purloining, and that Brennan was now lying about, was a big deal precisely because it exposed more lies.

    Senator Mark UDall has called for Brennan’s resignation, but seeing as how DNI James Clapper lied under oath to Congress without consequence, I believe that Brennan’s current gig is secure.

    As I have noted before, “The Cossacks work for the Czar.”

    The fish rots from the head.

    The Republicans Have Completely Screwed the Pooch

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    Here’s a Blast from the Past

    Because John Boehner could not put an child refugees bill that a single Democrat could vote for, and because cannot count Republican votes, he had to pull the bill from the floor, and delay the Congressional recess:

    House Republicans are poised to delay their August recess by one day, as they frantically scramble to pass a border security bill.

    After a chaotic afternoon, which saw the GOP leadership suddenly pull their legislation from the House floor because of flagging support, lawmakers planned a Friday morning meeting at 9 a.m. to try to plot a path forward. Plans are in flux, and subject to change at any minute, aides and lawmakers warned.

    In a Thursday afternoon meeting, Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) heard from a number of Republicans who did not want to leave Washington until a package passed the House — a sentiment reflected by nearly every lawmaker who emerged after the meeting ended.

    Last time a Republican politician shortened a vacation, it was W coming back early from vacation to sign the Terry Sciavo bill, (see Vid) and we all know how the politics on all of that played out.

    Needless to say, this clusterf%$# does not bode well for the Republicans.

    To paraphrase Napoleon, never stop your enemy when is busy stepping on his own dick.

    I am still worried a bit  about the collateral damage to the rest of us though.

    A Bad Ruling for McDonalds, a Great Ruing for the Rest of Us

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    The National Labor Relation’s board has ruled that the McDonalds corporation bears some of the responsibility for its franchisees working conditions:

    The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Tuesday that McDonald’s could be held jointly liable for labor and wage violations by its franchise operators — a decision that, if upheld, would disrupt longtime practices in the fast-food industry and ease the way for unionizing nationwide.

    Business groups called the decision outrageous. Some legal experts described it as a far-reaching move that could signal the labor board’s willingness to hold many other companies to the same standard of “joint employer,” making businesses that use subcontractors or temp agencies at least partly liable in cases of overtime, wage or union-organizing violations.

    The ruling comes after the labor board’s legal team investigated myriad complaints that fast-food workers brought in the last 20 months, accusing McDonald’s and its franchisees of unfair labor practices.

    Richard F. Griffin Jr., the labor board’s general counsel, said he found merit in 43 of the 181 claims, accusing McDonald’s restaurants of illegally firing, threatening or otherwise penalizing workers for their pro-labor activities.

    ………

    The fast-food workers who filed cases asserted that McDonald’s was a joint employer on the grounds that it orders its franchise owners to strictly follow its rules on food, cleanliness and employment practices and that McDonald’s often owns the restaurants that franchisees use.

    I am not sure how wide the application of this ruling will be.

    McDonald’s exerts far more control over the operation of its franchisees than most other companies operating in this manner. Not only, as noted above, does McDonald’s have physical ownership of many of the restaurants that its franchisees operate, but:

    In the current cases, the fast-food workers, backed by the Service Employees International Union, said that McDonald’s had significant control over its franchisees’ employment practices, noting that it supplies many with software telling them how many employees to use at any given hour. The workers pointed to an instance in which McDonald’s even told a franchise owner that it was paying its employees too much. The average fast-food wage is about $8.90 an hour.

    While it is conceivable that a company might want to prevent its franchisees from underpaying its workers to preserve the reputation of the brand, there is no such justification for warnings about overpaying its worker.

    This is pretty much a prima facie case that McDonald’s is an active co manager of those restaurants.

    It appears to me that this level of direction is rare among the various franchise businesses, and I think that, as a result of this decision, it will become ever rarer, so this will likely only have minor impact.

    Dear Morning Edition, the Problem is Not the Taliban it is the CIA

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    Over at NPR, they had a story about how hostility to vaccination efforts in Pakistan is hobbling the Polio eradication program.

    The problem is that they finger the Pakistani Taliban as the source of the problem, while soft pedaling the fact that the whole country of Pakistan has been made hostile by the CIA’s use of vaccinations in the operation to hund down Osama bin Laden:

    The edict by the Islamic militants to ban immunization was in response to the CIA’s setting up a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Pakistan. The covert operation was part of an attempt by the U.S. spy agency to verify whether Osama bin Laden was holed up in the city of Abbottabad.
    A polio vaccination booth in Rawalpindi.

    The polio problem in Pakistan right now is a result of the CIA’s actions in the country, says , a prominent and moderate cleric in Pakistan. He personally accepts the polio vaccine. He encourages people at his mosque to get their kids vaccinated.

    “But there are certain areas in Pakistan where the people resist [the polio vaccine] because the CIA used the polio campaign for intelligence purposes,” he says.

    Like many Pakistanis, Ur Rehman erroneously says the CIA operation against bin Laden used a polio campaign for cover, even though it actually used a fake hepatitis B campaign. “The one who can use hepatitis for intelligence,” he says, “they can use polio for intelligence.”

    When (and I do mean when) Polio returns to the United States, and kids end up in iron lungs, it will be largely because of this operation.

    Yet another reason why the US state security apparatus needs adult supervision.

    Fascism is Back in Europe

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    In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of Fascism had as its philosophical basis the idea that liberal democracy had failed.

    Well, the current President of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is making exactly same argument:

    Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he wants to abandon liberal democracy in favor of an “illiberal state,” citing Russia and Turkey as examples.

    The global financial crisis in 2008 showed that “liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” Orban said on July 26 at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Baile Tusnad, Romania.

    “I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”

    Orban, who was re-elected in April for a second consecutive four-year term, has clashed with the EU as he amassed more power than any of his predecessors since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, replacing the heads of independent institutions including the courts with allies, tightening control over media and changing election rules to help him retain a constitutional majority in Parliament.

    ………

    Orban, who has fueled employment with public works projects, said this weekend that he wants to replace welfare societies with a “workfare” state. He has earlier said more centralized control was needed to confront multinational companies such as banks and energy firms, to escape from “debt slavery,” and to protect Hungarians from becoming a “colony” of the EU.

    Orban said his “illiberal democracy” won’t deny the “fundamental values” of liberalism, such as “freedom.”

    Am I the only one who think that Hungary in 2014 is looking a lot like Italy in 1924.

    Not good.

    When juxtaposed with the ECB working too hard at fighting imaginary inflation, though not to the extremes taken the German central bank in the 1930s, it’s not tough to imagine Europe at war again before I die.

    GDP Up in 2nd Quarter

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    GDP grew at a 4% annual rate in the 2nd quarter:

    The United States economy rebounded strongly in the second quarter of the year, shaking off the negative effects of an unusually harsh winter and stirring hopes that it might finally be establishing a solid enough footing to put the lingering effects of the recession squarely in the past.

    The Commerce Department, in its initial estimate for April, May and June, reported on Wednesday that the economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4 percent, surpassing expectations.

    During the first quarter, output shrank at a rate of 2.1 percent, less than had been reported. The department had earlier said that first-quarter output fell 2.9 percent.

    A lot of the growth is increases in inventory, and averaging the two, we are still looking at about an anemic 2% annual growth rate.

    Meh.

    Anyone Remember the Free PVTA Buses in the 1980s?

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    For those of you did not go to UMass, Amherst, Hampshire, Smith, or Mount Holyoke, or did not live in the 5 College area at that time, may be unaware that the local bus service, the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA), specifically, the UMass Transit System, had free buses.

    The free fares are a bit more limited now, probably because of the increasing tight budgets at UMass, but it continues.

    There were a lot of students who didn’t own cars, and some of those students didn’t die, because of this service.

    I started to think of the PVTA buses, when I read this essay suggesting that we should make mass transit free:

    In March, when a cloud of particle pollution settled across Western Europe, Paris took a radical approach. The Ile-de-France region introduced alternate driving days (odd-number plates one day; evens the next) and eliminated fares on local trams, buses, trains and subways.

    Traffic dropped by nearly 20 percent in Paris; congestion on the Périphérique ring road fell by 30 percent at rush hour; large-particle pollution fell by 6 percent. Measured by the impact on the roadways, the emergency measures worked as intended.

    And on the rails? Unfortunately, the open-gate policy meant that the transportation authority didn’t count how many travelers boarded trains, subways, buses and trams during the fare-free days. The city performed a huge experiment in transportation policy, and nobody bothered to watch.

    It doesn’t matter much in context. We can’t expect the traffic-choked French capital to make a habit of such initiatives. Alternate driving days are an intolerable hassle for car-dependent commuters; lost fares and the provision of supplementary service to the tune of 600,000 seats on the Métro, the tramway and suburban rail system cost the region nearly $3.5 million per day. Fares cover nearly half the operating costs of the RATP, the state-owned transit operator, so eliminating them would put a tremendous hole in the annual budget.

    And yet, Paris would have been a valuable case study. The consequences of eliminating transit fares remain surprisingly obscure. Can a fare-free policy transform a regional transportation picture? Can it pay for itself? Or is it merely a publicity gimmick that inflicts needless financial woes on local transit agencies?

    Many people reject the idea out of hand, saying free rides are a problem, not a solution. But “free” transit, of course, is only as free as public libraries, parks and highways, which is to say that the financial burden is merely transferred from individual riders to a municipal general fund, a sales tax or local businesses and property owners. A free ride policy represents the culmination of a long shift from thinking of transit as a business sector — one that was quite profitable in its heyday — to considering it an indispensable public service.

    ………

    For bigger cities, the principal motivation for scrapping fares is not to save money but to increase ridership, and harvest the associated positive externalities: less traffic and pollution, more parking and mobility. In the handful of American cities where such programs have been tried on a short-term basis, the ridership surges have been huge. When Topeka made transit free for May of 1988, ridership rose 98 percent. When Austin made transit free for the fall of 1990, ridership increased by 75 percent. A similar experiment in Asheville, in 2006, recorded a passenger surge of 60 percent.

    I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of free fares, but I am kind of surprised that UMass Transit wasn’t mentioned.  It’s been going on for somewhere around 40 years.