‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
………
At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”
Seriously, what the f%$# is wrong with us?
They just got a bill passed in Ohio ending their renewable power initiative:
As renewable energy production has surged in recent years, opponents of government policies that have helped spur its growth have pushed to roll back those incentives and mandates in state after state.
On Wednesday, they claimed their first victory, when Ohio lawmakers voted to freeze the phasing-in of power that utilities must buy from renewable energy sources.
The bill, which passed the Ohio House of Representatives, 54 to 38, was expected to be signed into law by Gov. John R. Kasich, who helped negotiate its final draft.
It stands in marked contrast to the broad consensus behind the original law in 2008, when it was approved with virtually no opposition, and comes after considerable disagreement among lawmakers, energy executives and public interest groups.
………
Eli Miller, Americans for Prosperity’s Ohio state director, backed by the billionaire industrialists David H. and Charles G. Koch, called the proposed law “a prudent step” to re-examine standards that could be a “potential impediment to job creation and job growth here in the Buckeye State.”
Seriously, the Kochs are a cancer on American society in general, and American politics in particular.
Have a medley of Lewis Black:
There are a whole host of issues of regulation, liability, etc., but the Objectivist Randroids at Uber are the sort of people who should be kept out of the business, because they are corrupt to the core:
It’s been pretty widely publicized here in San Francisco that Uber has just moved into fancy new office space at 1455 Market.
………
In any case, what has attracted slightly less publicity is the fact — mentioned only in passing by Re/Code — that on the same day, Uber opened a second office, on Vermont Street in Potrero. According to Uber’s blog…We’ve heard a lot from our Uber SF partners about wanting easier ways to reach our team including parking and streamlined access to the office. With a new dedicated driver center in Potrero Hill, we are aiming to better connect with our partners and help make getting started with Uber, attending office hours and safety education processes more seamless.
Euphemistically called a “driver center,” one Uber driver told us the second office is actually more of a decoy: allowing the company to fulfill its promise to be more accessible to drivers without, you know, actually having them make Uber’s real office look untidy.
So the way of dealing with issues with drivers, things like insurance, liability, and complaints, is to hide from them.
The way to deal with customers is price gouging, and explicitly violating the law.
The founder of Uber is big into Ayn Rand, a woman who wrote that the philosophy of a serial killer who strangled and dismembered a little girl, was an inspiration to her.
If a company founder demonstrates compete contempt for the very concept of business ethics, and the company is in a consumer centered business, regulatory easements are simply not justified.
An indy band needed to raise money for their tour, and the payments received from Spotify weren’t cutting it.
They came up with a remarkably innovative way to monetize the streaming service:
Last month, indie band Vulfpeck wanted to go on tour. Like most indie bands, though, they didn’t have the money. With streaming dominating the industry and music streaming giant Spotify paying a grand $0.007 per stream (Vulfpeck sights it at $0.005), it didn’t look like they’d be making money anytime soon. Spotify had been promising they’ll start paying more — just as soon as they grow their Premium user base from 6 million to 40 million. In short: never.
So scrappy soul band Vulfpeck came up with a plan of their own.
They uploaded 10 tracks of silence to Spotify under the name Sleepify. Then, they put out this video, urging fans to stream the album on repeat while they slept. The band pledged to use the royalty revenue they racked up to fund a tour, where all shows would have free admission. And it worked.
Short version, the netted over $20K before Spotify sent a C&D for violating their TOS,* but they have the folding green to tour.
I will note that while musicians compare about the rates for streaming, they typically compare it to selling an album, which a user can listen to many times, to a single streamed song listened to once.
Of course, bands have been f%$#ed by the middlemen since ……… forever ……… And the real question is how a model that disintermediates between them and the fans.
*E-I-E-I-O
I was thinking that Obama (About Geithner, I know) was captured by the banksters.
Well, Bob Kuttner thinks that is an artifact of Obama trying to distance himself from his skin color:
I’ve been very critical of Obama and I think his administration’s handling of mortgage relief was a disgrace, but I will offer a more charitable interpretation of why the administration turned its back on the victims of the mortgage bust. Race is still such a divisive issue that America’s first black president did not dare to look as if he was extending special help to blacks.
I disagree with the thesis.
I think that Obama is not so much Black as he is Crimson (Harvard) as are the banksters, and nothing binds like those old school ties.
I generally embargo anything that happens at work, on the theory that it’s my employer’s business, and with a few exceptions, blogging about is just not a good idea.
However, what happened today breaks this embargo:
John at work came in limping today.
He had a Brown Recluse bite on his leg, and he said that the doctor had prescribed steroid and Sulfa drugs (probably Dapsone).
I told him that he should drink lots of water, because Sulfa drugs tend to accumulate in the kidneys.
Then as I was walking away, I turned and said:
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
You know where this is going, don’t you…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
I’m an Engineer, not a Doctor, Dammit!!!!!!
I haz a happy!
I don’t know why I wasn’t invited, I’m great at weddings… @KimKardashian @kanyewest
— George RR Martin (@GeorgeRRMartin_) May 25, 2014
I think that I pulled something laughing.
H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
But I do agree with the response of Richard Martinez, the the father of one of the victims, Christopher Michaels-Martinez, makes a powerful and heartfelt statement
He’s asking members of Congress to stop calling him to offer condolences but nothing more for the death of his only child, Christopher Michaels-Martinez, who was killed in the rampage Friday in Santa Barbara, Calif.
“I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s— that you feel sorry for me,” Richard Martinez said during an extensive interview, his face flushed as tears rolled down. “Get to work and do something. I’ll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me.”
Saying that “we are all to blame” for the death of his 20-year-old son, Martinez urged the public to join him in demanding “immediate action” from members of Congress and President Obama to curb gun violence by passing stricter gun-
control laws.
“Today, I’m going to ask every person I can find to send a postcard to every politician they can think of with three words on it: ‘Not one more,’ ” he said Tuesday. “People are looking for something to do. I’m asking people to stand up for something. Enough is enough.”
Of course the small number of people who possess a lethal juxtaposition of small penisises and revenge fantasies have immediately jumped on the grieving father, because they are deeply evil ratf%$#s.
Rahter unsurprisingly, Joe the Plumber led the hit parade:
I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. But:
As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.
I am not particularly surprised that this is not the worst thing said so far, but the worst thing said so far actually stunned me:
F%$# him. He is a piece of shit. His tragedy sucks, but he blamed me for it and wants to take away my rights. The guy is trying to take away my rights to protect my family. F%$# him every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
(%$# mine)
This is Todd Kincannon, who is perhaps the perfect demonstration about how the people who have been drawn to the NRA’s increasing insanity are a priori (in a Kantian sense) unsuited to possess anything more dangerous than a plastic spoon,
I know that there are responsible firearm owners out there, but the folks that the NRA speaks to are not in that group.
I would add that it appears that the shooter was closely tied into the pick-up artist/mens rights community, which is a group of people who make furries seem sane.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, is due to speak at Harvard.
Harvard is also landlord at Hilton DoubleTree Suites, where management is engaged in an aggressive anti-union drive.
The union asked Sandberg to host a “Lean In”, she turned them down:
With Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg coming to town next week, a group of housekeepers, nightclub servers, and other employees of a Boston hotel are trying to turn her now-famous campaign for empowering women in their favor as they move toward forming a union.
Unite Here Local 26, which is organizing workers at the Hilton DoubleTree Suites hotel near the Charles River, said it wanted to enlist Sandberg’s help after facing resistance from Hilton and receiving no encouragement from Harvard University, which owns the property where the hotel is located.
So, the union decided, why not appeal to the author of the bestseller “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead”?
Organizers asked Sandberg to meet with the hotel’s female workers. They started an online petition calling for her to become involved in their cause. And they created leaflets depicting the book’s cover, with faces of housekeepers replacing Sandberg’s, and a message that reads, “Sheryl Sandberg, will you lean in with the women of Harvard’s hotel?”
The Facebook chief operating officer, who is scheduled to deliver a Class Day address at Harvard Wednesday, has sent word she does not have time to host a “Lean In circle” with the hotel employees. Undeterred, the workers are planning to hand out the leaflets during Sandberg’s speech in Harvard Yard.
(Emphasis Mine)
Note that a “Lean In Circle” would probably take less time than the inevitable parties and meetups that are a part of her speaking gig.
I guess that “leaning in” means being born to well to do parents, going to Harvard, becoming an acolyte of Lawrence Summers, etc.
When a commitment to “equality” is juxtaposed with an indifference to labor organizing rights, there is no commitment to equality, which is why, “Sandberg has been criticized for creating a movement aimed at financially well-off women.”
We came back from the SCA event yesterday, an we were concerned about whether the chicken we brought there, but did not cook, was good.
We (actually Sharon) looked at it and adjudged it not lethal, but as a precaution, I marinated it, because the high acidity will kill anything lurking there.
So, last night, I made a marinade of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, soy sauce, mustard, cayenne pepper, some unsweetened cocoa, brown sugar, molasses, garlic, ginger, and some other herbs and spices I can not recall as I write this.
I let it all marinade over night, and then I put the chicken in the bullet smoker (the one pictured is much higher end than what I use) and used the marinade in the water pan to add some flavor.
Once the chicken was done, I took the contents of the water pan, now marinade and drippings, and reduced it to sauce consistency.
I then put the sauce on the chicken, and caramelized it under the broiler.
It got fairly good reviews from the family.
Natalie, our daughter, received an award the Hippocampus (Sea Horses, not the region of the brain associated with memory), an award given to children for service.
It was well deserved, but out was too much driving to get down there.
I think that I need ass transplant.
Posted via mobile.
Winslow Wheeler at War is Boring makes an interesting point about the sequestration games that the Department of Defense is engaging in: Iit is systematically cutting cheaper and more effective programs in favor of expensive systems:
There has been a short-sighted eagerness in some news articles and commentaries to disparage two actions by the House Armed Services Committee in the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act.
The HASC seeks to retain in the military force structure the Air Force’s A-10 Warthog close support aircraft and the Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington. The Air Force and the Navy want to retire these systems prematurely, thereby seeming to save money.
But the longer-term game being played is to smooth the way for far more expensive, truly unaffordable, replacements the Air Force and Navy have cued up. And in the case of the A-10, the older, cheaper alternative is the inestimably more effective one.
Like, I said, it’s not about defending our nation, it’s about our Generals getting lucrative post retirement consulting gigs.
That old Iron Triangle.
Another bank failure, the first time we have had two in a week in a while.
So, here is the graph pr0n with last few years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):
In a New York Times review of Glenn Greenwald’s latest book, Kinsley declares that it must be the government, and not the journalist, who determines when a sensitive information can be published:
The trouble is this: Greenwald says that Snowden told him to “use your journalistic judgment to only publish those documents that the public should see and that can be revealed without harm to any innocent people.” Once again, this testimony proves the opposite of what Greenwald and Snowden seem to think. Snowden may be willing to trust Greenwald to make this judgment correctly — but are you? And even if you do trust Greenwald’s judgment, which on the evidence might be unwise, how can we be sure the next leaker will be so scrupulous?
The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.
This is not a problem, this is a free press, and one of the consequences of this is that stuff that the government does not want to be pubic knowledge will be public knowledge.
Shorter Michael Kinsley, “Journalism, Schmournalism, we need better stenographers.”
H/t Gawker.
If there is anything more Orwellian than the Pentagon refusing to reveal who we are at war with.
Note that this was in a hearing about extending the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) where the Pentagon refused to say with whom we are fighting.
So they are asking for an authorization to make war while refusing say who they are making war with, and why we are making war with them.
This is a miasma of the most profoundly disturbing visions of both Orwell, and Kafka.
(Mother Jones) Not a surprise, they are the phone company, they don’t care, they don’t have to, but they basically admitted in regulatory filing over the DirectTV merger. What if The Matrix ran on Windows XP:
H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ryan Devereaux take another dive in lake Snowden, and discover that the NSA intercepts every single mobile phone call made in the Bahamas:
The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.
According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.
SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.
………
In addition, the program is a serious – and perhaps illegal – abuse of the access to international phone networks that other countries willingly grant the United States for legitimate law-enforcement surveillance. If the NSA is using the Drug Enforcement Administration’s relationship to the Bahamas as a cover for secretly recording the entire country’s mobile phone calls, it could imperil the longstanding tradition of international law enforcement cooperation that the United States enjoys with its allies.
“It’s surprising, the short-sightedness of the government,” says Michael German, a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years as an FBI agent conducting undercover investigations. “That they couldn’t see how exploiting a lawful mechanism to such a degree that you might lose that justifiable access – that’s where the intelligence community is acting in a way that harms its long-term interests, and clearly the long-term national security interests of the United States.”
Once again, we see why intelligence agencies, particularly those in SIGINT, can never do decide woh to target, because they will take it all, damn the consequences.
When you let them run their own agendas, they are a clear and present danger to our national security interests.
One critique though, they buried the f%$#ing lede:
But the NSA documents don’t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions – including numerous Western banks – that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who “arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments” through the U.S. Postal Service.
They captured every cell phone call in a jurisdiction known for money laundering by tax evaders, organized criminals, arms dealers, and other illegal activity, and they are only going after people who are mailing pot to people who are mailing baggies of pot back home.
Think about it for a moment.
Spend billions on these capabilities, and then choose not to go after transnational criminals and tax dodgers .
Your tax dollars at work.
As opposed to buying into the Republican meme that has us throwing momma from the train, the distinguished gentleman from Ohio is suggesting that Democrats should be running on increases in the social safety net:
Word has it that Democrats are set to take a shellacking in the 2014 elections, in part because midterm electorates tend to be older and whiter. So what if Dems campaigned on expanding Social Security, rather than allowing themselves to get drawn into another debate over how much to cut the program?
There’s a hook for this looming: The coming battle over disability insurance, which is a part of Social Security.
Dem Senator Sherrod Brown, a member of the Finance Committee, tells me that GOP Senators have requested hearings into Social Security Disability Insurance this summer. Dems expect Republicans to attack the program as wasteful and fraudulent, in part because conservative media have already done so, and in part because at least one GOP proposal in recent days took aim at the program.
Brown says Dems should seize this occasion to get behind a proposal that would lift or change the payroll tax cap, meaning higher earners would pay more, while adopting a new measure for inflation that would increase benefits for all seniors. Instead of getting drawn into debates about “Chained CPI” and other entitlement cuts, Brown says, Dems should make the case that stagnating wages and declining pensions and savings demand an expansion of social insurance.
Good politics, and good politics.
Needless to say, the “Very Serious People,” in the Democratic Party will hate this idea, because, they are afraid that it might piss off the rich donors who pay their salaries.
It’s the Iron Law of Institutions, “The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” (Emphasis original)