Initial claims are down for the first time in 4 weeks, to 319K, with the 4-week moving average rising, and continuing claims falling.
Not were what it means, with various holidays and spring break making the past few weeks kind of hard to draw a bead on.
Programming Sucks (Still Drinking) A good essay on why your software just crashed.The most comprehensive model of the Big Bang yet:
In response to American sanctions, the Russian Duma passed legislation, ostensibly to secure the actions of foreign bankers.
The result is that the Russian government is now demanding that Visa and Mastercard make a security deposit equivalent to 2 days worth of transactions, $3.8 billion, to continue to operate in the country:
International credit card companies face a “severe impact” on their operations in Russia following a strict new law Moscow has adopted in response to Visa and Mastercard freezing service to banks under US sanctions.
Visa described the regulations as “unprecedented” and Mastercard said it could experience difficulties, the Russian magazine Snob reported, after Vladimir Putin signed a law on Monday to create a rival national payment system.
The law stipulates the creation of a homegrown system to facilitate cashless transactions by 1 July, but also imposes stiff new requirements on international payment systems operating in Russia.
The legislation was spurred on by Visa and Mastercard’s decision on 21 March to stop servicing payments for clients of Rossiya Bank, as well as its daughter company Sobinbank. Rossiya Bank was included in the first round of US sanctions over the Ukraine crisis because it is owned by Putin associate Yury Kovalchuk and is the “personal bank for senior officials of the Russian Federation,” the US Treasury said when announcing the sanctions.
Visa and Mastercard also blocked operations for cards issued by SMP Bank, which is owned by the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who are old judo buddies of Putin’s.
The new law forbids international payment systems from cutting off services to Russian clients and obliges them to base their processing centre in Russia. To ensure their good behaviour, international operators will have to place a security deposit in Russia’s central bank equal to the average value of two days’ worth of transactions.
Visa and Mastercard together processed $1.9bn (£1.12bn) in transactions per day last year – 90% of all cashless payments in Russia – equal to a $3.8bn security deposit, the Moscow Times reported.
The security deposit will be due in eight quarterly payments starting on 1 July. The law states that if a payment system unilaterally freezes operations for a Russian client, it is liable for a fee totalling 10% of its security deposit for each day without service.
The credit cards are caught between a rock and a hard place, they have to deal with both US and Russian law, which sucks for them, but they are credit card companies, which means that they spend their time giving people sh%$ sandwichs, so the fact that they are dining on excrement between two slices of white bread, it amuses me no end..
Like I said, mixed emotions.
Vladimir Putin has suggested that any referendum on autonomy/secession for the eastern Ukraine be delayed:
The Kremlin beat a tactical retreat over a regional referendum following days of soaring tension that have left dozens dead and fed fears of a civil war in Ukraine.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said the referendum being staged by pro-Russia separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine on Sunday should be postponed. If the referendum goes ahead, it will provide an argument for the region joining Russia as happened in Crimea in March.
Overt Russian support for the plebiscite could have triggered more substantive EU and US sanctions against Russia. Putin’s statement, following talks with the president of Switzerland in Moscow, looked likely to delay the imposition of a harsher round of economic penalties.
While Moscow has also opposed the holding of presidential elections in Ukraine on 25 May – a ballot strongly supported by the west – Putin sounded more conciliatory, saying that the poll could be a step in the right direction.
The Russian leader insisted, however, that a presidential election should be preceded by constitutional changes in Ukraine aimed at federalising the country and handing greater powers to the regions, steps that would favour greater Russian influence over eastern Ukraine after the Kremlin annexed Crimea.
I don’t know what it means, but it is rather telling the first time that I’ve seen a statement, from either side that seems to be the slightest bit directed toward a deescalation.
With Obama sounding intensely bellicose, and John Kerry channeling General Jack Ripper from the movie Dr. Strangelove, it appears that Putin is the adult in the room.
We live in Bizarro World.
I could see RP the Cat doing this.
Crap. Monica Lewinsky is back, and Dick Cheney’s wife is suggesting that it’s some sort of Clinton plot.
Kill me.
Just kill me.
In a recent dissent on an environmental regulation case, EPA v. EME Homer City Generation, L. P., Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia completely mischaracterized a precedent from the last decade, Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc. in 2001.
It is even more bizarre, because Scalia wrote the unanimous decision that he so grossly mischaracterized:
………
Legal experts say Justice Antonin Scalia erred in his dissent in the 6-2 decision Tuesday to uphold the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate coal pollution that moves across state lines. The Reagan-appointed jurist argued that the majority’s decision was inconsistent with a unanimous 2001 ruling which he mistakenly said shot down EPA efforts to consider costs when setting regulations.
“This is not the first time EPA has sought to convert the Clean Air Act into a mandate for cost-effective regulation. Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457 (2001), confronted EPA’s contention that it could consider costs in setting [National Ambient Air Quality Standards],” Scalia wrote in his dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
The problem: the EPA’s position in the 2001 case was exactly the opposite. The agency was defending its refusal to consider cost as a counter-weight to health benefits when setting certain air quality standards. It was the trucking industry that wanted the EPA to factor in cost. The 9-0 ruling sided with the EPA. The author of the ruling that Scalia mischaracterized? Scalia himself.
The conservative justice’s error was noted by University of California-Berkeley law professor Dan Farber, who called it “embarrassing” and a “cringeworthy blunder.”
“Scalia’s dissent also contains a hugely embarrassing mistake. He refers to the Court’s earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that’s exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted,” Farber wrote on the environmental law and policy blog Legal Planet. “This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder.”
Doug Kendall, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal legal advocacy group, said the error was mystifying and very unusual for a Supreme Court justice.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and seeing that I do not have much in the way of legal chops,† I didn’t really have much to add, until I read Salon‘s followup on this snafu, and this line, from noted Attorney Dan Farber jumped out:
Scalia’s dissent also contains a hugely embarrassing mistake. He refers to the Court’s earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that’s exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted. This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder.
[NOTE: After this was posted, the opinion on the Court’s website was revised to eliminate Scalia’s error. Of course, as corrected, the case no longer fits Scalia’s overall thesis of the “unelected officials” trying to override Congressional policy.]
(emphasis original)
Think about the sentence, “Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder.“
I can see a clerk, either one of his own, or that of another justice, experiencing Scalia up close, and deciding that he’s lost it, and then giving Tony a little shove out the door.
It’s not much, but you can bet that people in the legal world are wondering if Scalia suffered a small stroke or something, and this will adversely affect reputation.
I think that some of his friends might start suggesting that it is time for him to retire. After all, he’ll never be Chief Justice.
Certainly, I believe that his brain has been damaged by overexposure to bile for years.
*A way of subtly psychologically torturing someone to make them doubt their sanity.
†I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!‡
‡I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
The Obama administration is proposing adding “papers, please” to the web:
A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. The New York Times described it at the time as a “driver’s license for the internet.”
Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.
Next month, a pilot program of the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” will begin in government agencies in two US states, to test out whether the pros of a federally verified cyber ID outweigh the cons.
………
To start, there’s the privacy issue. Unsurprisingly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately pointed out the red flags, arguing that the right to anonymous speech in the digital realm is protected under the First Amendment. It called the program “radical,” “concerning,” and pointed out that the plan “makes scant mention of the unprecedented threat such a scheme would pose to privacy and free speech online.”
And the keepers of the identity credentials wouldn’t be the government itself, but a third party organization. When the program was introduced in 2011, banks, technology companies or cellphone service providers were suggested for the role, so theoretically Google or Verizon could have access to a comprehensive profile of who you are that’s shared with every site you visit, as mandated by the government.
Post-NSA revelations, we have a good sense for the dystopian Big Brother society the EFF is worried about. As the organization told the Times, at the least “we would need new privacy laws or regulations to prohibit identity verifiers from selling user data or sharing it with law enforcement officials without a warrant.”
First, we need to be clear that the NSA would use this to track users whether or not they can get the rubber stamp FISA court to approve.
We know that they will, because that is what they do.
Second, to paraphrase Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith, PhD, any technology that the government can create will be duplicated by criminals, or the Chinese, or the Russians, or the Koch brothers.
The depressing thing is that I don’t think that Republicans have enough outrage left after, Bengazi! Bengazi! Bengazi!, and the Democratic establishment won’t challenge the US state security apparatus, at east not while one of their own is running it.
I hope that this goes the way of the Clipper chip, but I would not bet on this.
In a 5-4 vote the Supreme Court just ratified sectarian prayer at government meetings:
A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that legislative bodies such as city councils can begin their meetings with prayer, even if it plainly favors a specific religion.
The court ruled 5 to 4 that Christian prayers said before meetings of an Upstate New York town council did not violate the constitutional prohibition against government establishment of religion; the justices cited history and tradition.
“Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this Nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond the authority of government,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court’s conservative majority.
The ruling reflected a Supreme Court that has become more lenient on how government may accommodate religion in civic life without crossing the line into an endorsement of a particular faith. All nine justices endorsed the concept of legislative prayer, with the four dissenters agreeing that the public forum “need not become a religion-free zone,” in the words of Justice Elena Kagan.
But there was sharp disagreement after that, and the majority ruling could encourage public bodies to give more leeway to religious expression in their ceremonial prayers and less deference to the objections of religious minorities.
The court’s five conservatives said legislative prayers need not be stripped of references to a specific religion — the prayers at issue often invoked Jesus Christ and the resurrection — and said those given the opportunity to pray before legislative meetings should be “unfettered” by what government officials find appropriate.
It is stupid, petty, small minded, and bigoted ruling.
I’m disappointed, but not particularly surprised.
I will say the fact that the bigotry-deaf Kennedy is now the “moderate vote” on the court.
When I muse on the difference between a journalist and a stenographer, I can think of no better example than Jason Mojica’s paean to Mohammed Fahmy, Jailed Al Jazeera Journalist Is Actually Kind of a Dick:
This may surprise you, but Mohammed Fahmy, the imprisoned Al Jazeera English journalist who on Friday was awarded the World Press Freedom Award, is actually kind of a dick.
And I’m sure he feels the same way about me.
A couple of years before he and his colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed were arrested in Cairo and accused of running a terrorist cell from their rooms at the Marriott, I worked with Fahmy on a story I produced for VICE News. It was July 2011 and the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak earlier in the year hadn’t brought the sea change that Egyptians were hoping for. Protesters were expected to return to Tahrir Square in what was being dubbed, “Egypt’s Second Revolution.” The very short version of this story is that we were having trouble getting all of the elements of the story we were after when we met Fahmy who offered his services as a fixer. Now, we already had a fixer in Cairo, but I was willing to try anything at that point, so I hired Fahmy for a day to see what he could do. He delivered, but he didn’t gel with me and my crew. At the end of a very long day of shooting, we were happy to part ways.
………
He ran the story, names and all, which pissed me off. We traded shitty BBMs [Blackberry Messenger] back and forth, and I came away thinking of him as a pushy, bull-headed bastard who cared more about getting a story out than for the people who that story was about.
In other words, a damn good journalist.
Journalists are people whose jobs it is to find out things that people don’t necessarily want them to find out. That often requires a type of aggression and self-righteous determination that rubs people the wrong way. And that’s one of the reasons we need to change the way we talk about press freedom.
While we like to lionize journalists as noble truth seekers serving the public good, for those on the other side of their aggressive reporting, they are a f%$#ing nightmare. So when journalists get detained, our knee-jerk moral indignation means f%$#-all to the people who see those journalists as a threat. Wagging our finger at them in the hope that they’ll suddenly come around to our way of thinking is naïve.
(%$# mine)
Reporters are supposed to be a pain in the ass.
When reporters become accepted members of polite society, they become eunuchs in the court of the Sultan. (See Woodward, Robert)
They are supposed to be unsuited for polite society.
What a surprise. After a decades long assault from the right wing, and an increasingly hostile judiciary, the bigots have managed to re-segregate our public schools:
For decades, federal desegregation orders were the potent tool that broke the back of Jim Crow education in the South, helping transform the region’s educational systems into the most integrated in the country.
Federal judges, often facing down death threats and violence, blanketed Southern states with hundreds of court orders that set out specific plans and timetables to ensure the elimination of racial segregation. Federal agencies then aggressively used the authority of the courts to monitor hostile school systems, wielding the power of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to strip federal dollars from districts that refused to desegregate.
The pace of the change wrought by the federal courts was breathtaking. In 1963, about 1 percent of black children in the South attended school with white children. By the early 1970s, the South had been remade — fully 90 percent of black children attended desegregated schools. Court orders proved most successful in the South, but were also used in an attempt to combat de facto segregation in schools across the country, from New York to Michigan to Arizona.
Today, this once-powerful force is in considerable disarray.
A ProPublica examination shows that officials in scores of school districts do not know the status of their desegregation orders, have never read them, or erroneously believe that orders have been ended. In many cases, orders have gone unmonitored, sometimes for decades, by the federal agencies charged with enforcing them.
At the height of the country’s integration efforts, there were some 750 school districts across the country known to be under desegregation orders.
Today, court orders remain active in more than 300 districts. In some cases, that’s because judges have determined that schools have not met their mandate to eliminate all vestiges of segregation.
But some federal courts don’t even know how many desegregation orders still exist on their dockets. With increasing frequency, federal judges are releasing districts from court oversight even where segregation prevails, at times taking the lack of action in cases as evidence that the problems have been resolved.
………
Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has sharply curtailed the power of parents to challenge racial inequities in schools. Districts not under court orders are largely prohibited from considering race to balance schools. And parents in these districts must show that school officials are intentionally discriminating when they make decisions that adversely affect black and Latino students.
And so, as desegregation orders are ignored, forgotten or lifted, black parents are losing the ability to effectively challenge school inequality.
Over the course of months, ProPublica has compiled the nation’s most comprehensive and accurate data on active desegregation orders. We used legal databases, academic studies and contacted more than 160 school districts across the country.
This is not an accident.
Between the Republican Party’s embrace of segregation for political success, and the Democratic Party’s cowardly unwillingness to enforce the law to placate people who will never for then, we are back to separate and unequal.
*H/T Trit on the Stellar Parthenon BBS for that quote.
The rate of maternal deaths in the United States has neary doubled since 1990:
Maternal deaths related to childbirth in the United States are nearly at the highest rate in a quarter century, and a woman giving birth in America is now more likely to die than a woman giving birth in China, according to a new study.
The United States is one of just eight countries to see a rise in maternal mortality over the past decade, said researchers for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in a study published in The Lancet, a weekly medical journal. The others are Afghanistan, Greece, and several countries in Africa and Central America.
The researchers estimated that 18.5 mothers died for every 100,000 births in the U.S. in 2013, a total of almost 800 deaths. That is more than double the maternal mortality rate in Saudi Arabia and Canada, and more than triple the rate in the United Kingdom.
The study was the latest to underscore a steep rise in pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. since at least 1987, when the mortality rate was 7.2 per 100,000 births. The U.S. experienced a sharp spike in 2009 that the Centers for Disease Control attributed to the H1N1 influenza pandemic. The rate has dipped slightly since then, said Nicholas Kassebaum, the lead physician in the University of Washington study, but it remains stubbornly high.
The increase is in stark contrast to most other countries that have had notable decreases, including many in east Asia and Latin America, the report said. The United States now ranks 60 for maternal deaths on a list of 180 countries, down markedly from its rank of 22 in 1990. China, by contrast, is up to number 57.
The reasons for the rise in the maternal deaths in the U.S. are not entirely clear, but several factors seem to be in play.
The article to go on about diabetes, obesity, etc., but makes not a single mention of the rise in equality and the increasing incidence of extreme poverty.
Note that this sort of decline in wellness and life expectancy for the population was presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We are in the process of destroying ourselves.
Natalie and Charlie participated into the 2014 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race as members of the Lansdowne High School team.
Charlie and Natalie part of the support crew, and learned to ride a bike as a result (Natalie has still not mastered this skill).
It covers 14 miles over 8 hours, an obstacle course, and a short jaunt into Baltimore harbor.
The team won an award for most “epic” water entry (about 3:30 into the attached video, assuming that it is ever done processing on Youtube).
Much fun was had by all, though I think that Charlie might be a bit sore in the morning.
Apologies for the poor camera work, both on the vid, and the attached slide show.
I just spent the better part of three f#@&ing hours fixing an esoteric server problem with the Verizon SMTP servers that read bedeviling my wife’s email program (Eudora).
We are talking in the weeds bulsh#@ port numbers and authentication settings.
I knew that one would work, but the permutations are a mind f#@$.
My gears us that someone retaken the thing because of Heartbleed.
FWIW, it was an SMTP server of smtp.verizon.net, authentication on, SSL/TLS on, port 465.
Shoot me now.
Posted via mobile.
First, initial unemployment claims unexpectedly rose, and then the 1st quarter GDP growth number came in with an anemic 0.1% annual growth rate, though the Federal Reserve still saw fit to continue its taper of quantitative easing.
Seriously, with inflation at next to nothing, and long term unemployment a plague, and everyone is worried about non-existent inflation.
Bah.
Rob Ford is in yet another crack smoking video.
The writers for The Daily Show must be high fiving themsleves right now.
Also, it looks like Ford will be taking a leave from his position as Mayor of Toronto to do rehab.
The energy company Kinder Morgan is arguing for putting an oil pipeline through an environmentally sensitive area because oil spills can be good for the economy:
That’s according to a 15,000 page application Kinder Morgan has submitted to the National Energy Board for the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (a document so large that it “stands over two metres tall and fills 37 binders”).
In a section of the application dedicated to the risks and effects associated with oil tanker traffic and the possibility of oil spills, Kinder Morgan finds that “spills can have both positive and negative effects.” In particular, “spill response and clean-up creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and clean-up service providers.”
Great googly moogly!
As Charlie Pierce observed, this is on a par with a parent murderer asking for for mercy as an orphan.
When I wrote about evidence that Poland training Right Wing Paramilitaries from the Ukraine, I relied (and noted at the time) that the story came from a translation of a Polish weekly by a 911 truther.
Well, it appears that the original source, the Polish publication Nie is a news and PARODY publication, much along the lines of Le Canard Enchainé, which has both broken news, and done parody.
As Thierry Meyssan notes, “This article is based on information obtained by the Polish opposition. I erroneously cited as my source the satirical weekly Nie, which published a pastiche mixing truths and non-truths. The data it provides needs to be verified.”
Needless to say, 911 truthers are inherently unreliable sources, so without alternate credible sources, I will not publish.
Note also that Google translate is not adequate for many foreign sources for verification.
My apologies.
Clip Image for Slide Show
Normally, I would not write about this, but a city block of street in Baltimore just slid into a rivine:
A nearly 120-year-old retaining wall that has troubled Charles Village residents for decades collapsed Wednesday amid a month’s worth of rain, dumping street lights, sidewalks and half a dozen cars onto the CSX rail tracks below.
No injuries were reported. City officials evacuated 19 adjacent homes along East 26th Street and urged residents to avoid the area in case of lingering instability.
The landslide halted CSX rail traffic through what is a main artery to the port of Baltimore. The track carries cargo containers handled by rail at the state’s Seagirt Marine Terminal, a substantial economic engine for the region.
I think that I also saw animals pairing up 2 by 2.
This time at a Fedex in Kennesaw, Georgia:
A FedEx Corp package handler armed with a shotgun opened fire at a shipping facility in suburban Atlanta early on Tuesday, injuring six people before killing himself, apparently with his own weapon, police and hospital officials said.
Three people were in critical condition, two of them with life-threatening injuries, after being shot by the 19-year-old gunman just before 6 a.m. EDT at a FedEx warehouse near the airport in Kennesaw, Georgia, about 30 miles northwest of Atlanta, police and hospital officials said.
The shooter, identified as Geddy L. Kramer of Acworth, Georgia, drove up to the security guard shack at the warehouse and shot the guard before entering the warehouse where he shot the other five people, according to police.
FedEx employee Liza Aiken told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution she was correcting addresses on packages when she saw a colleague dressed in black and armed with a knife, gun and a cartridge belt strapped across this chest.
“He had bullets strapped to his chest like Rambo,” she told the newspaper. “He looked like he was heading into war.”
The kicker, Kennesaw, Georgia has a mandatory gun law, which requires heads of households to own a firearm and ammunition:
Gun law
The town is noted for its unusual gun legislation. In 1982 the city passed an ordinance [Sec 34-21][19]
(a) In order to provide for the emergency management of the city, and further in order to provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants, every head of household residing in the city limits is required to maintain a firearm, together with ammunition therefore.
(b) Exempt from the effect of this section are those heads of households who suffer a physical or mental disability which would prohibit them from using such a firearm. Further exempt from the effect of this section are those heads of households who are paupers or who conscientiously oppose maintaining firearms as a result of beliefs or religious doctrine, or persons convicted of a felony.Gun rights activist David Kopel stated that there is evidence that this gun law has reduced the incident rate of home burglaries citing that in the first year, home burglaries dropped from 65 before the ordinance, down to 26 in 1983, and to 11 in 1984.[20] The overall crime rate had decreased by more than 50% between 1982 and 2005.[21] Another report observed a noticeable reduction in burglary from 1981, the year before the ordinance was passed, to 1999. A 2001 media report stated that Kennesaw’s crime rates continued to decline and were well below the national average, making citizens feel safer and more secure.[22] The city’s website says that the city has the lowest crime rate in Cobb county.[23]
Remember what Wayne LaPierre said about the defense against a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun?
Not so much.
