Year: 2014

F%$# Andrew Cuomo

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Remember when I wrote that Bloomberg approved charter school plans would have disabled kids getting therapy in the hallway?

You should, it was only 5 days ago.

I noted that New York mayor Bill DiBlasio rejected a few charter co-location applications because of these issues.

Well, Governor Andrew Cuomo hates disabled kids:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has mapped out an ambitious agenda for education in New York City. He wants to reinvigorate schools on the verge of shuttering, open 100 schools with health clinics and therapists at their core, and train more students for careers in science and technology.

But the budget deal announced by state leaders on Saturday, which would require the city to find space for charter schools, may cut into Mr. de Blasio’s priorities.

………

With classroom seats in short supply across the city, Mr. de Blasio may find it difficult to accommodate charter schools and find space for some of his own programs.

Mr. de Blasio has said he is willing to work with charter schools, so long as they do not disrupt programs run by traditional public schools. He named a committee of district officials and charter school leaders last week to help mediate disputes over space and overcrowding.

………

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Republicans in the State Senate seized on the momentum, and on Saturday they announced an agreement that would provide charter schools in New York City some of the most generous protections in the country.

Under the deal, the city would be required to find space in public buildings for charter schools, which operate independently of the school district but receive public funds. If the city could not, it would have to cover the cost of renting private space, up to $40 million. Charter schools could challenge the city’s selection of space through an arbitration process.

You know that warehouse that they used to hold all those protesters in the 2004 Republican National Convention?

I would suggest locating them there

As Diane Ravitch notes, “The bottom line is that when billionaires talk, the New York legislature and Governor Cuomo listen. Actually, they sit up, bark, and roll over.”

The political reality in New York state is that a primary challenge to Cuomo is practically impossible, so it’s time to see if he is banging a hooker.

I really hope he is.

If there is anyone out there willing to take one for the team, it would be appreciated.

We are All Koch Suckers Today

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The court ruled in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance reform:

Back in October, when the Court heard oral argument in a challenge to the overall caps – known as “aggregate limits” – on how much an individual can contribute to candidates for federal office, political parties, and political action committees, there wasn’t a whole lot of suspense.  Given the Court’s recent campaign finance rulings, it seemed clear that a majority of the Justices would vote to strike down at least some of the caps; the only real question was whether they would strike down them all.

Today we got our answer from the Court, and it was a decisive “yes”:  all of the aggregate limits must go.  Let’s talk about today’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission in Plain English.

As I explained in my preview of the case in October, there are (at least until today) two kinds of limits on campaign contributions.  The first is what is known as the “base limits” – the maximum that you can contribute to a candidate, political party, or political action committee in an election.  The aggregate limits are the second kind:  in a two-year period known as an “election cycle,” you can donate no more than $48,600 to all candidates combined and no more than $74,600 to political parties and political action committees.

An Alabama businessman named Shaun McCutcheon went to court to challenge the aggregate limits.  He didn’t ask for the right to give more money than the base limits to any particular candidate; instead, he wanted to give money to many more candidates, but the aggregate limits prohibit him from doing so.  That, he argued, violates his free speech rights under the First Amendment.

Although a lower court disagreed with McCutcheon, he found a more receptive audience in the Roberts Court, which has consistently voted to overturn campaign finance regulations.  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the Court, which was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel A. Alito.  (Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own opinion saying the Court should go even further, but the Chief Justice’s opinion is the controlling one.)

………

Breyer’s dissent lamented that the Court’s decision “eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.” In his view, “corruption” is not limited to scenarios involving a quid pro quo, which he described as “an act akin to bribery.” Instead, it includes exactly the kind of efforts to use money to obtain influence and access to elected officials that the Chief Justice’s opinion characterized as “a central feature of democracy.” This is so, Breyer explained, because if people believe that elected officials only pay attention to big-money donors, they may lose faith in the political process altogether.

Breyer next contended that the Court is just wrong when it asserts that, even if the aggregate limits are removed, there is still no way to get around the base limits. Here the dissent painted a very different picture from the rest of the Court, predicting that “donors can and likely will find ways to channel millions of dollars to parties and to individual candidates.”

Whose vision of the future of campaign finance will prevail – the dissent’s apocalyptic one or the Chief Justice’s more optimistic one? You can be sure that journalists and election law experts will be paying close attention over the next few years. We can also be confident that the decision today will spawn new campaign finance challenges – including, in all likelihood, to the “base limits” themselves. Stay tuned . . . .

And if this is not bad enough, it looks like SCOTUS will overturn bans on corporate donations to candidates:

The Supreme Court, fresh from its new ruling expanding the political donation options of private individuals, faces a choice this week about its current view on campaign contributions to candidates by corporations.  For weeks, the Court has been sitting on a case that would test a state’s flat ban on corporate donations, and is now set to look at that case in the wake of Wednesday’s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.

The Court, according to its electronic docket, is scheduled to consider at its private Conference on Friday the case of Iowa Right to Life Committee v. Tooker.  That case has been ready for the Court, technically, since November, but so far no action has been taken.

If the Court’s usual practice is followed, it will have at least three options: agree to hear the case to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s ban on corporate donations, deny review and thus leave intact a federal appeals court ruling upholding that ban, or tell the lower courts to reconsider based on the McCutcheon ruling.

In 2003, in the case of FEC v. Beaumont, the Court upheld the long-standing federal ban on corporations, at least so far as that provision applied to non-profit corporations.  In the new case, the Iowa Right to Life Committee urged the Court to overrule the Beaumont decision, arguing that it cannot be squared with the Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

Needless to say, we can expect another 5-4 decision allowing rich people to double down on their influence.

We ……… are ……… f%$#ed.

I Love this Wifi ID Ever

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LuLu’s Anal Bleaching:

CITIZEN’S ARREST! A person who controls a wifi near the “combination hair salon and toy store on the increasingly stylish Fifth Avenue strip of Park Slope” called LuLu’s has given his or her network a positively vulgar name. It is a name that threatens to sully the posh and sophisticated reputation of a shop that charges $26 to give your child a new lease on life via his or her tresses ($10 for just a bangs job). It is a name that is not good for kids.

On the Google Group bergenbtwn4and5, LuLu’s owner Brigitte Prat (or someone posing as her using the handle brigittelpratt) shares the story of how her brand is being attacked (probably by a high person who thought it would be funny to satirize the presumed bourgieness of the children’s salon): ………

That is f%$#ing brilliant!!!!

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Why the USAF Should Be Folded Back into the US Army, Part CLXIX

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A current active duty colonel in the USAF is deploying F-22s to the Ukraine is all that is needed to protect them from a potential Russian incursion:

On March 31, U.S. Air Force Col. Robert Spalding III argued in The National Interest that a “purely defensive deployment” of Air Force F-22 stealth fighters “is just one possible solution” to the Ukraine crisis, which has seen Vladimir Putin’s Russia annex the strategic Crimean peninsula and threaten the rest of Ukraine.

Spalding is wrong—F-22s are not the answer. The colonel’s assertion is yet another example of air power hubris, which has come to define the Air Force. “Without firing a shot, such a deployment [of F-22s] would immediately change Putin’s invasion calculus,” Spalding insists.

Russian aircraft wouldn’t survive a confrontation with American stealth fighters and thus couldn’t support a Russian ground invasion, in Spalding reasoning. Ukrainians would feel more confident about their ability to defend their country, since any Russian invasion would be subject to attack by Ukrainian aircraft protected by F-22s.

This essay does not evaluate the wisdom of Washington extending a security guarantee to Ukraine, an issue that remains fundamentally political in nature. Rather, it challenges the argument that the fielding of F-22s could decisively tip the military balance in favor of the Ukrainian military.

First, F-22s could only destroy the Russian air force if the latter engaged, which of course it would not. The Russians know that the F-22 can defeat any fighter flown by their air force. The Kremlin would respond to a “purely defensive” deployment of F-22s by only operating their own aircraft in conditions of overwhelming superiority.

At best, the F-22s could deter Russia from using its air force to support advancing Russian army spearheads.

But what about using Ukrainian aircraft to attack Russian army formations? Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system, pictured above, can identify, track and fire on targets at ranges of up to 250 miles.

Even if we assume that the F-22 can evade multiple, overlapping S-400 batteries—a deadly proposition we have never tested—Ukraine’s Su-25 attack aircraft cannot.

Moscow can deploy the S-400 such that it provides cover over advancing Russian troops everywhere in eastern or central Ukraine. The Russian army possesses additional, mobile SAM systems that can render any Ukrainian air attacks suicidal.

An F-22 deployment would be similarly problematic, because, as I noted a number of years ago, stealthy is not invisible, and the basic laws of physics, which dictate detection range as a factor of the 4th root of the radar cross section, which gives us this table for the S-400 (SA-21):

Range
RCS
     Type
400 km
10m2
B-1, F-15
336 km
5m2
F-16
225 km
1m2
F-18E, Rafale
189 km
0.5 m2
Typhoon
48 km
0.00200m2
F-117 (WAG)
40 km
0.00100 m2
F-35
23 km
0.00010 m2
F-22, B2

Note that the distance at which the targeting radar might reasonably be expected to lock on to the target, but SA-21 also has a very low frequency search radar which should be more effective in determining the general location of a stealthy target.  (To say nothing of targeting AWACS, tankers, etc., for which the limiting factor of the system would be the aerodynamic performance of the missile)

The F-22s would by no means be clay pigeons, but it is also likely that they would not be able to operate with the sort of impunity that has been the norm for recent US campaigns.

So Not Surprised: Hedge Funds as Slumlords

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Hedge funds have gone big time into small and single family rentals, and in turn, they have illegally ignored their responsibilities as landlords:

The yawning gap between private equity landlord sales talk and what they are delivering is finally being exposed.

One of the reasons many investors have been skeptical of the way private equity firms have gone full bore into buying distressed single family homes is that property management is a hands-on business even when it’s done it the most favorable possible setting, an apartment building. Individuals who have invested in single family home rentals almost without exception report that even when they found it to be an economically attractive proposition, it was still oversight-intensive. Admittedly, there are some private equity firms who have bought rental properties who actually do seem to be targeting markets and renters in such a way that they might be able to do a decent job of property management, for instance, by buying homes where they can rehab the kitchen and bath plumbing using the same fixtures, screening tenants in person, and then inspecting the properties monthly and giving the tenants points for passing that they can convert into credits against a purchase or take in cash.

But the biggest fish in this ocean, Blackstone, is clearly taking the opposite approach, of doing as little as they can to maintain the houses and trying to fob off the responsibility onto the tenant, even when local regulations clearly prohibit it. So managing dispersed homes is no problem if you never planned to do the job in the first place.

Blackstone tries to evade this duty formally, through lease terms, and informally, by making themselves inaccessible. And because Blackstone is the largest and highest profile player in this space, they may be hoping that if enough PE landlords follow their lead, communities will accept the new finance-dictate bad standards, just as they have with foreclosure abuses.

But the difference here is while stressed borrowers were the ones that were hurt in foreclosures, and foreclosures and bankruptcies are seen as shameful event, there’s no reason for a victim of a bad landlord to be seen as unsympathetic. Moreover, deliberately negligent PE landlords like Blackstone traditionally have hurt the value of neighboring properties. If this trend continues, abused tenants and their neighbors face a common threat.

Notice that contracts that violate local law are almost certain to fail a legal challenge. In New York, which has more extensive tenant protections than other cities, landlords sometimes try to include provisions that are impermissible, like prohibiting a tenant from having a roommate. Housing court judges exhibit a bit of zeal in smacking down landlords when challenges to those leases come before them.

………

Now to the update on Blackstone’s latest escapades, via some original reporting at In These Times. The article, Game of Homes, makes for good one-stop shopping if you want to get friends and colleagues up to speed on this topic. For NC readers, the first two-thirds of the article covers familiar terrain. Here are the sections that discuss how Blackstone, which is using “Invitation Homes” as its brand for its single-family rentals, is trying to evade its duties as landlord:  ………

If you thought Wall Street was bad as a lender, just imagine how badly they can f%$# you up as a landlord.

As an FYI, I was in a dispute with a landlord and property management company in Texas, one of the less tenant friendly jurisdictions, we lawyered up and won, because even the professional property management firm did not grasp the actual rights of tenants.

Here’s hoping that we will see some major court losses for the hedge fund pukes.

Why the Catholic Church Should Be Out of the Hospital Business

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A Catholic hospital in (where else) Oklahoma has forbade its doctors from prescribing birth control:

Doctors affiliated with a small Catholic hospital in Bartlesville, Okla., are no longer allowed to prescribe contraception for the purposes of birth control, according to a report from the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise.

Administrators at Jane Phillips Medical Center are reported to have held a meeting last week to inform doctors of the new directive barring them from prescribing contraceptives as birth control; according to the Examiner-Enterprise, doctors are allowed to prescribe contraceptives for non-birth control purposes, such as cramps, menstrual pain or endometriosis.

“I have spoken to my doctor about my birth control options,” one patient impacted by the directive told the Examiner-Enterprise. “I was told that my physician has been instructed that they can no longer write prescriptions for birth control as birth control. This effects me because I take birth control as birth control. There are other ways to receive birth control, for example headaches, cramps, excessive bleeding — but I have none of those symptoms.

Note that this is not just employees, or on the hospital premises, this is a directive given to any doctor with admitting privileges.

The Catholic Church has been engaging in a massive hospital buying binge, and they are using it to make not just abortion, but birth control, unavailable across the nation.

Nope, no Fascists Here

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The Ukrainian parliament is rushing to pass anti-gay legislation:

Kiev is getting back to normal. Downtown streets that just one month ago looked like battlefields are now full of busy crowds and tourists. In one of the newly revitalized city squares, I met Olena Shevchenko, an LGBT-activist-turned-revolutionary. I had heard a lot of about her—an openly gay woman who managed to form a female-only military unit. Some call them the “Maidan Amazons.”

Olena joined the revolution in its very first days, but the idea to form a women-only “sotnya” (a Cossack term for a group of one hundred fighters) came a bit later, as a response to rising sexism within Maidan (Independence) Square. The women in Maidan Square were being asked to make sandwiches; meanwhile, they had been building the barricades.

At the start, Olena had only eight women in her military unit (mostly human rights activists from feminist or LGBT groups). But thanks to social media, the number rose to 500 people in Independence Square and more than 1,500 at other locations. (For comparison, the right-wing Right Sector, had around 2,500 fighters in downtown Kiev on a regular basis.) “It was amazing, because ‘feminism’ is still a dirty word in Ukraine,” she says, “the same as ‘gay.’”

………

First, many open homophobes are still among the country’s top-officials. Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov (also a Baptist preacher) famously said, back in 2007, “If a man has normal views, then you label him a conservative, but those who use drugs or promote sodomy—you label them a progressive person. All of these are perversions.” Several leaders from the far-right Ukrainian nationalist party, Svoboda, have been given ministerial posts in the post-revolution government, including the vice-prime minister position. In fairness, Svoboda has toned down its anti-gay rhetoric in recent months. One of the party’s MPs, Yuriy Syrotyuk, called the first gay pride parade in Kiev “an act of aggression” against Ukraine in 2012, but now presents a more moderate, if still limited, position. “We respect rights of all minorities, but LGBT legalization will blow up this country,” he stated in an interview. “If we take this discussion to the parliament, not only Crimea will secede, but Ukrainian provinces will also start to leave the country.”

The new government is also actively trying to block an anti-discrimination law that would protect LGBT people in workplaces. This piece of legislation, pushed as part of integration talks with EU is, frankly, the only progressive thing to happen for the local gay community since 1991, when Ukraine became the first post-Soviet country to decriminalize homosexuality. (Some opponents of the law argue that support for it would give Russia a cart-blanche; in the past, the Kremlin has showed amazing capabilities to organize quickly and effectively against any kind of gay movement inside Ukraine.) Now, a law similar to the Russian’s “gay propaganda” law—which criminalizes even discussion of gay rights—is pending in the Ukrainian parliament.

(emphasis mine)

These are the folks that our foreign policy and intelligence allied with to drive out Yanukovych.

This is the Wrong Way to Do this

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We now have a report that the US is having discussions with Israel about having Jonathan Pollard released as a way to move along the Middle East peace process:

The United States is talking with Israel about the possibility of releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard early from his life sentence as an incentive in the troubled Mideast peace negotiations, a person familiar with the situation said Monday. Such an extraordinary step would show the urgency of U.S. efforts to keep negotiations alive.

The person cautioned that a Pollard release — which would be a dramatic turnaround from previous refusals — was far from certain and that discussions with Israel on the matter were continuing. The person spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the negotiations on the record.

In return for such a release, Israel would have to undertake significant concessions to the Palestinians. Such concessions could include some kind of freeze on Israeli settlements in disputed territory, the release of Palestinian prisoners beyond those Israel has already agreed to and a guarantee that Israel would stay at the negotiating table beyond an end-of-April deadline.

First, this is stupid on the part of the US.

Netanyahu really does not care about Pollard beyond the political benefits he can derive from securing his releases.

More importantly, there is a protocol to such things.

Even among those most opposed to his release, there is acceptance of his release as a part of a spy swap, as this is the socially acceptable way to do this within the intelligence community.

Maybe Because They do not Want to be Revealed as Sociopathic Sadists?

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This would explain why the CIA has consistently lied about both the effectiveness and the extent of its torture program:

A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.

“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”

Current and former U.S. officials who described the report spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue and because the document remains classified. The 6,300-page report includes what officials described as damning new disclosures about a sprawling network of secret detention facilities, or “black sites,” that was dismantled by President Obama in 2009.

Classified files reviewed by committee investigators reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, officials said, including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there. The report also cites cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give.

(emphasis mine)

Also, the techniques used were far worse than previously revealed.

We now understand why the CIA has bee pushing back against the Senate Intelligence Committee. 

It’s one thing to argue that it was a necessary evil that yielded results, it’s another that the policies were prosecuted out of nothing more than a sadistic need to prove how macho they are.

Truth be told, I am not surprised.  This sort of narcissistic cruelty is something that I would expect to have originated from the mind of one Richard Bruce Cheney.

The problem is that for the entire Bush-Cheney years, being a sadistic torturer, or at least pretending to be one, was the only way for advancement in the CIA, and Obama has done nothing to clean house since then.

This means that the upper echelons of the CIA need to cover up this at all cost, or they will be sidelined.

Torture comes home, nu?

The Stupidest Political Scandal of the Season (So Far)

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Seriously, why the hell does anyone care if a candidate for the US Congress in Florida does vampire LARP?

An attorney challenging first-term Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) moonlights as a live-action vampire role-player, according to a Florida political news site.

 SaintPetersBlog on Tuesday detailed Jake Rush’s involvement in the Mind’s Eye Society, a national community of live-action role-players. Rush played a host of supernatural characters — “Chazz Darling” and “Staas van der Winst” were just two of his alter-egos — and kept up an active presence on the Camarilla Wiki Project, a Wikipedia-like website that allowed role-players to share content.

 Business Insider also reported that Rush appears to have held a prominent position with a Florida-based group called the “Covenant of the Poisoned Absinthe,” which stages “an assortment of games from White Wolf’s selection, including Vampire: The Masquerade, Changeling: The Lost, and Mage: The Awakening.” White Wolf publishes live-action role-playing games for the Mind’s Eye community.

Seriously.

Why does anyone give a f%$# about this?

Linkage

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Hugh Jackman can sing?

Shave the Whales

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The International Court of Justice in The Hague has just made formal the blatantly obvious and ruled that Japan’s so-called “research” whaling has nothing to do with research, and so is illegal:

The decision to ban Japan’s annual whaling drive off Antarctica, handed down by the United Nations’ highest court on Monday, was a hard-won victory for conservationists who long argued that Tokyo’s whaling research was a cover for commercial whaling.

The ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague halts a Japanese program that has captured more than 10,000 minke and other whales in the Southern Ocean each year since 1988 in the name of biological research.

Japan may not be ready to lay down its harpoons entirely. Though the ruling is final, it allows the Japanese to continue to hunt whales under a redesigned program, said Nanami Kurasawa, who heads a marine conservation group in Tokyo.

And the court’s decision does not affect smaller hunts that Japan carries out in the northern Pacific, or coastal whaling carried out on a smaller scale by local fishermen.

“It’s an important decision, but it also leaves the Japanese government a lot of leeway,” Ms. Kurasawa said. “The Japanese government could start research whaling again but under a different name, and it would be out of the ruling’s purview.”

In a 12-to-4 judgment, the court found that Japan was in breach of its international obligations by catching and killing minke whales and issuing permits for hunting humpback and fin whales within the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, established by the International Whaling Commission.

Reading a summary of the judgment, the presiding judge, Peter Tomka of Slovakia, said that the latest Japanese program, which was expanded in 2005, had involved the killing of thousands of minke whales and a number of fin whales, but that its “scientific output to date appears limited.” The ruling suggested that Japan’s whaling hunt was based on politics and logistics, rather than science.

The driving force behind Japanese whaling is stupid, brutal, and mindlessly destructive nationalism, something which the residents of Nanking may recall.

And they will continue to butcher porpoises in local waters.

But it is a start.

Obama Does Zen: He Learns the Sound of One Hand Clapping

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And even that guy sounds profoundly unenthusiastic

Barack Obama had a joint news conference with the Dutch PM, and when he talked about American support for human rights, the audience response was profoundly underwhelming:

Responding to a question at The Hague’s for the Nuclear Security Summit, President Obama concluded the event with an anti-climactic few moments in which he looks to Prime Minister Rutte, seemingly expectant of some way to wrap-up the event without applause.

“The good news is that I’m very confident that it can be achieved, and I’m also confident that the core values that America has always believed in, in terms of privacy, rule of law, individual rights; that has guided the United States for many years and will continue to guide us into the future,” Obama concluded, before nodding and looking to Prime Minister Rutte.

Obama is seen nodding at Prime Minister Rutte again, seeking confirmation that the conference has ended he says, “okay.”

Despite only the rustling sounds of people standing to exit, a single person can be heard slowly – but steadily – patting out a few claps to conclude the event.

“Thank you very much everybody, thank you again,” says the president, as he walks off stage with Prime Minister Rutte.

Trust me, the when you slice the bullsh%$ that thick, people notice.

I do not think that people in the current establishment in DC realize just how compromised our image is world wide, and how much damage this will do to future attempts to prosecute our agenda in a multilateral manner.

The biggest threat to the United States these days are our state security and foreign policy apparatuses.

My Hunch Seems to Have Been Vindicated

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I have always felt that the Black Death in Europe was from something significantly different from the Bubonic Plague as we know it now, if just because the speed of the spread was astonishingly fast (something more than 20 miles a day in Britain).

Well, a study now indicates that it was likely a variant of Yersinia pestis that was genetically predisposed to go pneumonic, meaning that the transmission would have been far faster than the flea borne variants that we see today:

It was already known as perhaps the bleakest episode in British history.

Now, new research suggests the Black Death was even more lethal than was previously thought.

The findings go further to exonerate rats as being responsible for the outbreak, which swept the country in the middle of the fourteenth century, killing vast swathes of the population.

Instead, the study claims the disease was passed directly from human to human and was, in fact, pneumonic plague – a more virulent and infectious form than bubonic plague, which has historically been blamed.

………

The same bacteria – which is almost identical to the strain still found on four continents – is responsible for both bubonic and pneumonic plague, but the experts taking part in the show concluded that the latter, which is spread by the fleas of infected rats, would not have been able to have the devastating impact caused by the Black Death.

Dr Tim Brooks, an expert in infectious diseases from Public Health England who is based at Porton Down – the Wiltshire site used by the government for dealing with biological threats – said: “As an explanation, for the Black Death in its own right, it is simply not good enough. It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next, to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics.”

Instead, he identified what he considers was a mutation from the bubonic plague, borne on rats, to the pneumonic variant, whereby it spread to the lungs of sufferers, who then passed it on to others, by coughing.

This makes sense, though there are alternate ways for it to spread so quickly, such as it being carried by bird borne parasites.

It is almost certain that it was Y. pestis though.

I Do Not Know Whether to be Impressed or Horrified

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Scientists at the University of Michigan have developed a night vision contact lens:

The University of Michigan has developed a prototype contact lens that enhances night vision by placing a thin strip of graphene between layers of glass. The graphene — a form of carbon — reacts to photons, which makes dark images look brighter.

 The development of the lens still has quite a ways to go before soldiers can scrap those heavy goggles. Right now the graphene only absorbs 2.3 percent of the light. Those percentages have to rise before true night vision can be achieved.

It’s kind of neat, but wicked creepy.

When Someone Defines Tolerance as Accepting His Own Bigotry, He is a Hypocrite and a Fool

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Case in point, the self-immolation of Mozilla because they chose to hire an homophobic bigot as CEO:

Mozilla named a new chief executive this week to lead the non-profit Web organization as it tries to keep its Firefox browser relevant in the mobile age. The appointment has proved controversial in more ways than one.

 Three Mozilla board members resigned over the choice of Brendan Eich, a Mozilla co-founder, as the new CEO. Gary Kovacs, a former Mozilla CEO who runs online security company AVG Technologies; John Lilly, another former Mozilla CEO now a partner at venture-capital firm Greylock Partners; and Ellen Siminoff, CEO of online education startup Shmoop, left the board last week.

 The departures leave three people on the Mozilla board: co-founder Mitchell Baker; Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Katharina Borchert, chief executive of German news site Spiegel Online.

 The three board members who resigned sought a CEO from outside Mozilla with experience in the mobile industry who could help expand the organization’s Firefox OS mobile-operating system and balance the skills of co-founders Eich and Baker, the people familiar with the situation said. They did not want to be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

 Mozilla spokesman Mike Manning confirmed the three remaining board members, but he declined to comment further on Friday. He did not immediately respond to a request to speak to Eich and Baker.

 ………

 The board departures are not the only source of early pressure on the new Mozilla CEO. Some employees of the organization are calling for Eich to step down because he donated $1,000 to the campaign in support of Proposition 8, a 2008 California ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in the state.

 “I do not support the Board’s appointment of @BrendanEich as CEO,” Kat Braybrooke, a curation and co-design lead at the organization, wrote on Twitter on Thursday:

The problem is that Brendan Eich have $1000 to the H8 amendment, aka Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative in California, and when this was revealed, his response was to suggest that people should be more tolerant about this.

That is complete bullsh%$.

While I agree with 1st amendment argument  protecting his right to engage in this sort of speech, it is wrong to suggest that his opponents should accept him to, “make Mozilla a place of equality and welcome for all.”

Social, opprobrium is precisely the sort of response that comes from an open marketplace of ideas.

Here is a Bit of Neat Tiny Aviation Tech

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AugustaWestland is looking at variable geometry rotors using a miniscule (1-2% of chord) trailing edge flap which can be extended of retracted under different conditions:

Dan Gurney, American racing car driver and constructor, is providing inspiration to European helicopter manufacturers, with AgustaWestland planning in 2015 to fly an active rotor incorporating the aerodynamic device that carries his name.

 The Gurney flap (see diagram) is a small tab set perpendicular to the flow at the trailing edge of a wing. It has the effect of increasing lift with minimal impact on drag. In the early 1970s, he first used the eponymous device on the rear wing of a racing car to increase downforce.

In the interest of accuracy, the Gurney flap, also known as a wickerbill, was actually independently invented by a number of people as far back as 1931

Fixed Gurney flaps are used extensively on helicopters to increase the effectiveness of horizontal and vertical stabilizers over a wide angle-of-attack range. Now, with funding from Europe’s Clean Sky research program, AgustaWestland is to use active Gurney flaps to increase the performance of helicopter rotor blades.

 Rotor design is a compromise between hover and forward-flight requirements, and the ability to squeeze more performance from conventional blades is reaching its limits. “In the 1980s and ’90s we saw big gains. Now they are smaller. We have more powerful computational tools, but are only getting incremental gains,” says Simon Spurway, AgustaWestland principal engineer. “The next step is active rotors.”

 Under Clean Sky’s Green Rotorcraft program, Airbus Helicopters is leading work to see how much further a conventional blade can be passively optimized. The manufacturer also is heading a project to develop active blade twist, which Spurway says poses fail-safe design challenges. AgustaWestland, meanwhile, is in charge of the active Gurney flap project.

 Projecting from the lower surface close to the trailing edge, and just 1-2% of blade chord in height, the flap produces counter-rotating vortices that increase pressure on the lower, pressure side of the airfoil and decrease pressure on the upper, suction side. The vortices help the boundary stay attached to the trailing edge and increase the maximum lift coefficient for only a small penalty in drag coefficient.

In forward flight, rotor blades experience different conditions as they rotate. On the advancing side, forward speed adds to rotational speed and increases lift. On the retreating side, forward speed subtracts from rotational speed, and blade pitch must be increased to maintain lift. As airspeed rises, the retreating blade begins to stall and the pilot must add power to overcome the rising drag.

 Retracted on the advancing side, the active Gurney flap is deployed on the retreating side to delay the stall. Covering the middle section of the blade, the flap locally improves lift and allows the outer section of the retreating blade to be offloaded. This reduces the power required to maintain airspeed and lowers fuel consumption and emissions, an overall goal of Clean Sky.

Flaps on rotors are not new. Kaman’s helos have been using servo flaps as alternative to hub based actuators for years, but the application of Gurney flaps, along with their use to handle issues of the different lift modes and retreating blade stall, is new.