Month: January 2015

Thank You Lassana Bathily

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He was an employee at the Hyper Cacher supermarket who managed to get about 15 people into hiding during the hostage taking and subsequent siege:

As the authorities in France worked on Saturday to piece together the sequence of events at a kosher supermarket in Paris where a gunman and four hostages were killed on Friday, there was an outpouring of praise online for a young employee credited with saving the lives of some customers by hiding them in a cold-storage room.

The employee, Lassana Bathily, 24, was identified in the French news as a Muslim from Mali who worked at the supermarket, Hyper Cacher, near the Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris.

………

When the people he had hidden came out at the end of the siege, Mr. Bathily said, “they congratulated me.”

“They said, ‘Really, thanks for thinking of all these ideas.’ I said, ‘It’s nothing, it’s life.’ ”

It ain’t nothing.

You kept your head, and helped a lot of people.

It is a big deal.

Your Good News of the Day

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A new President has been selected by The Discovery Channel, and he has announced that the channel will no longer be doing shows about fake sh%$:

New Discovery Channel chief Rich Ross (no relation to Rick) has vowed to stop airing pseudoscientific bullshit on what is ostensibly an educational channel. Ross made this promise at the Television Critic’s Association press tour earlier today, telling the skeptical crowd, “I don’t think [fake documentaries are] right for Discovery Channel, and think it’s something that has run its course.” 

So, no more mermaids, no more men eaten by anacondas, no more assertions that long extinct giant sharks are still swimming out there,  and (of course) Amish gangstas.

They just unjumped the C. megaladon.

Why are People are Missing the Old The New Republic?

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I really don’t get it.

It was reflexively, and stupidly, counter-intuitive in all the time that I was aware of it, it hasn’t broken a major story in decades, and it has appeared to see its mission as a way for country-club liberals to excuse their own privilige and entitlement. (It’s also been affirmative action for white Ivy Leaguers with degrees in English)

One of the things that its supporters have pointed to is the dense literary writings of the magazine’s now former literary editor Leon Wieseltier.

I never read his stuff.  While I read some (not enough) literature, I have no urge to read people who write about literature.

It just seems to be an exercise in solipsism to me.

But Atrios pointed me to this bit of Graphorrhea that Mr. Wieseltier wrote for the New York Times:

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

And I thought that reading a ponderous translation of Immanuel Kant in high schoolwas a tough row to hoe.

It gets worse as it goes on. ……… and on. ……… and on. ……… and on. ……… and on.

I think that if translated to Frankenstein-speak, it translates to, “Paper publications good!  Internet Bad!”, but I can only give a confidence that I actually understood that bit of purple prose with about 27.3%.

Why anyone ever bought a copy of The New Republic in the past 40 years is beyond me.

Seriously.  If this weren’t Leon Wieseltier, I would think that this was a parody of academic writing.

H/T Atrios

This is an Epic Take-Down

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Kirby Delauter, a member of the Frederick County Council, does not like being challenged by the press.

It appears that he particularly dislikes The Frederick News Post, which is why he demanded that they not mention his name.

Hilarity ensued:

Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter

 Frederick News-Post Editorial Board | Posted: Tuesday, January 6, 2015 12:30 am

Knowing Councilman Kirby Delauter as we do, we weren’t surprised that he threatened The Frederick News-Post with a lawsuit because we had, he says — and we’re not making this up — been putting Kirby Delauter’s name in the paper without Kirby Delauter’s authorization. Attorneys would be called, Kirby Delauter said.

 In fact, we spent quite some time laughing about it. Kirby Delauter, an elected official; Kirby Delauter, a public figure? Surely, Kirby Delauter can’t be serious? Kirby Delauter’s making a joke, right?

 Round about then, we wondered, if it’s not a joke, how should we now refer to Kirby Delauter if we can’t use his name (Kirby Delauter)? Could we get away with an entire editorial of nothing but “Kirby Delauter” repeated over and over again — Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter? OK, imagine we agreed because of temporary madness or something funny in the water that week, how would we reference “Kirby Delauter” and do our job as journalists without running afoul of our lack of authorization?

 Blanks? Sure, we sometimes use hyphens in the case of expletives. Perhaps we could do that: “K—- D——-.” Or, perhaps, “Councilman [Unauthorized].” We giggled a bit more than we should have when we came up with “the Councilman Formerly Known as Commissioner Kirby Delauter,” which doesn’t seem as funny written down in black and white and includes his name, which defeats the point. Maybe we should just put his initials, “KD,” with an asterisk to a footnote (KD*), or refer to him as GLAT, the acronym for his campaign: “Govern Like A Taxpayer.” We could even make it sound a little hip-hop with a well-placed hyphen: G-Lat. Speaking of, could we get away with “K-Del”? Or we could simply go with the Harry Potter-esque “He Who Shall Not be Named.” (Cue the lightning strike and peal of thunder.)

 Yet we could take the low road down even further and childishly mangle “Kirby Delauter” into references you, the reader, would still understand. “Sherbert Deluder,” say. Or “Derby Kelauter.” “Shirley Delaughter” (and don’t call me Shirley). We found a great automatic online anagrammer that generated all kinds of alternatives and could make it a challenge for our readers to decode each time we have to reference the councilman: “Rebuked artily.” That was a good one. “Bakery diluter” is just silly but does have a ring about it. “Keyed rural bit” was another that caught our eye as somewhat telling, because Kirby Delauter’s pretty keyed up. We’re sure there’s a joke in “Brutelike Yard” somewhere.

………

Actually, the irony here is that when they speak of calling him GLAT or KD, they are (likely inadvertently) making a Jewish joke:  GlatT is a level of Kosher status, and KD means Kosher Dairy, but I’m not sure that anyone got that on the editorial board.

A Classic Case of Trotskyite Thinking

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My experience with Trotskyites, and I’ve had more than I would have preferred, having a liberal Jewish mom who grew up in New York,* is that their beliefs are impervious to facts.

When the facts don’t cooperate, you change the facts.

Well, an interesting fact is that pretty much everyone among the founders of Neoconservatism, except William F. Buckley, started off as Trotskyites.

While their beliefs had changed, their way of thinking remains in a similar form, and has infested conservatism more generally.

Case in point, the Republicans are about to introduce funny math at the Congressional Budget Office: (CBO)

After the drama of electing a new speaker of the House and the changing of control in the Senate, the House on Tuesday approved an obscure but significant rule change requiring the economic effects of legislation to be included in a bill’s official cost to the Treasury.

The change on “dynamic scoring” — ardently sought since the 1990s by Republicans — could ease passage of major tax cuts by showing that their impact on economic growth would substantially reduce their cost to the Treasury. The move is widely seen as a way for Republican leaders to set ground rules for an ambitious overhaul of the entire United States tax code.

Democrats blasted the change as “voodoo economics,” a “gamble” and “tax fraud.” Opponents said the rule change would invite politicized scorekeeping, further tilt policy to benefit the rich, and expand the budget deficit. Shaun Donovan, the White House budget director, implored the House not to “upend the level playing field that has existed for decades” and “call into question the accuracy, consistency and fairness” of congressional budget estimates.

“The basic problem remains that macroeconomic work is useful in the laboratory but not in the field,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a longtime chief of staff at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, which officially tallies the cost of tax proposals. “The models are too simplistic and the range of the possible outcomes so great that it opens the process to too much in the way of political intuitions.”

Also, I would note that we had a 12 year experiment with the Laughable (Laffer) Curve, under Reagan and Bush, where the deficit exploded, and where average GDP growth was less than under Carter or Clinton. (Link)

And then there is the disaster that is Sam Brownback’s Kansas.

But like any good Trotskyite, the Republicans are not going to allow facts to get in the way of their theories.

*In fact, my older brother, AKA Bear who Swims, had a teddy bear named Bronny bear, named after Lev Davidovich Bronshtein.†
†Don’t ask him about it. The loss of the bear in the Juneau Alaska airport is one of the great traumas of his life.‡
‡FWIW, no, Stephen is not a Trotskyite. If anything he is more disdainful of those idiots than I am.

It’s all Just Weather, Longhair

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A recent dendrochronology study has shown that California’s drought is the worst in at least 1200 years:

Scientists studying the severe drought that has beleaguered California for the past three years estimate that this drought is the worst one in the past 1,200 years. The new estimate comes from data they compiled on tree ring growth and soil moisture. Low (but not unprecedented) precipitation and record high temperatures are the main factors driving this drought, the scientists say. An online edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters published this work on December 3, 2014.

It should be noted that the study primarily used the Blue Oak (Quercus douglasii) which are particularly good at showing rainfall, though, 1200 years is a lot longer than the typical life span of this tree.

My guess would be that they used other (probably less accurate) trees, and perhaps some other indicators.

It is not clear from the abstract whether there was a worse drought 1200 years ago, or if it’s just the worst in the 1200 years, and perhaps more.

If it is the former, that drought corresponds to the Mayan collapse, which many (though by no means all) archaeologists attribute (at least in part) to an extended drought.  (The Mayan collapse is a matter of some dispute in academe.)

In either case, the fact that this drought is worse than 300 year long drought that destroyed Anasazi civilization between 1150 and 1450. 

What is going on here is, to use the technical term, seriously weird climate sh%$, and it requires willful ignorance not to consider anthropogenic climate change as a primary factor.

The Fix Was In All Along

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Three weeks ago, Vermont Governor, Peter Shumlin, having failed to secure an absolute majority in the election, throwing the results to the state house, announced that he was scrapping his plans for single payer.

While he claimed that politics had nothing to do with it, a subsequent analysis appears to indicate that he deliberately cast the numbers for single payer in the worst possible light:

Gov. Peter Shumlin could have proposed a financing plan for single payer health care that cost $1 billion less than the one he presented to the public Dec. 17.

Instead, demoralized after a stunning near defeat in the General Election, Shumlin scrapped his long awaited, universal, publicly financed health care plan because he said it would shock Vermont’s fragile economy.

………

But critics say now Vermonters won’t know if single payer could have succeeded in 2015, because after Shumlin decided it wasn’t feasible, he found a way to mitigate the inevitable wave of political backlash and appease his main constituencies: liberal advocates, business leaders, providers, and teacher and state employee unions.

Shumlin had said he would present a menu of options to the Vermont Legislature in the two year run up to the announcement, but instead he presented one plan that Vermonters could not afford.

One of the alternative plans proposed by his health care reform team that was not considered in the final analysis was a much less expensive, $1.6 billion option, that would have offered a universal, publicly financed insurance plan with benefit levels on par with what is available to most Vermonters in the commercial insurance market today, according to documents provided by the Shumlin administration.

“I don’t know exactly when he made that decision, but once it was made, there is no question in my mind that Shumlin pivoted to his roots and his instincts, which are purely political,” said Hamilton Davis, a journalist and longtime observer of Vermont health reform.

“He hung everything he could on it and walked away.”

John Franco, a prominent Burlington attorney who has been involved health care reform for two decades, says that Shumlin purposely chose a plan that covered 94 percent of individuals’ health care costs. Proposing an overly expensive option, Franco says, was a political calculation.

“If you build an airplane out of lead, it’s not going to fly,” Franco said.

………

But buried on the 260th page of the appendices to his report released just before New Year’s Day, is a financing plan that might have been a reasonable starting point for going forward.

This plan would have offered insurance at a level that is equal to the average employer plan now on the market and would have cost $1 billion less than the Cadillac level plan Shumlin rejected.

It appears that he overstated the costs by about $1 billion, which is over $3000 per resident of the state, over $5000 per worker, and that is not including the fact that he, “The Shumlin administration assumed there would be zero administrative savings to the program in year one.”

Why did this happen?

Perhaps because the legislature is voting on who gets the next term of Governor tomorrow, and some of the business and medical interests in the state cut a deal not to lobby for his opponent?

There is a part of me that is hoping that the legislature elects the Republican, because Shumlin has been a portrait in cowardice.

We Have a New Definition of Chutzpah

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Obviously, the classic definition, the story of a boy who killed his parents, and then asked for mercy as an orphan remains the front runner, but the fact that Freedom Industries is asking for prosecutors to recuse themselves because they were among the 300,000 people whose water they poisoned:

A federal judge will take up whether the U.S. Attorney’s office can prosecute cases against former Freedom Industries executives or if a conflict of interest exists.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston is scheduled to hear disqualification requests from former Freedom President Gary Southern and former company executive Dennis Farrell in a 1:30 p.m. hearing today.

Both Southern and Farrell have asked the federal judge to disqualify U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin’s office from the case, saying there is a conflict of interest because the prosecutor’s employees were affected by last January’s chemical leak, which affected 300,000 people in nine counties.

Farrell’s motion only took issue with Goodwin’s office but Southern’s motion also sought to disqualify “agents and investigators” working with the office.

“The conflict of interest is real: the U.S. Attorney, his assistants, investigators and office staff were actual victims of the crimes charged against Mr. Farrell,” Farrell’s motion said. “Of equal or perhaps greater gravity, husbands, wives and children of the prosecutors and staff of the (U.S. Attorney’s office) also were, and allegedly may continue to be, actual victims of the crimes charged.”

In a previous filing, Goodwin said no one in his office has a personal or financial stake in the outcome of this case. He said no one on the prosecution team is an “actual victim” because the general public is the victim in Clean Water Act violations. He also said no one on his staff is a claimant in the class action lawsuits or in the Freedom bankruptcy case.

Seriously?

Because they are arguing that because they contaminated the water for half the f%$#ing state of West Virginia, no one should be allowed to prosecute them?

Seriously?

I guess that it is proof of the old adage, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”

Shorter FBI: It was da Norks, Trust Us

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Yeah.

I haven’t bought that since J. Edgar Hoover bought his first slip:

The director of the FBI has defended his bureau’s claim that the hacking attack against Sony Pictures was the work of the North Korean government – saying skeptics “don’t have the facts that I have.”

Speaking at a cybersecurity conference at Fordham University in New York City on Wednesday, FBI boss James Comey said he has “very high confidence” that Pyongyang was responsible for the comprehensive ransacking of the movie studio’s servers.

When asked why security experts favor a different explanation – that the attack was probably the work of disgruntled insiders or former employees – Comey said, “They don’t have the facts that I have, don’t see what I see.”

That’s true, because the FBI has remained tight-lipped as to the exact evidence that it believes links the Sony incident to North Korea. But on Wednesday, Comey offered the most detailed explanation yet of the government’s reasoning.

When the group calling itself Guardians of Peace sent threatening emails and made other online statements, Comey said, it mostly used proxy servers to disguise the messages’ origins. “But several times, they got sloppy,” he claimed.

On those occasions, he said, the group sent messages from servers with IP addresses “that were exclusively used by the North Koreans,” giving law enforcement a “very clear indication of who was doing this.”

This makes no sense at all.

It’s a pain in the ass to set up this kind of stuff, but once you do, you would have to actively decide to screw this up.

As the article notes:

Public IP network addresses, by themselves, are a poor indicator of the true origin of internet attacks, due to the ease with which traffic can be spoofed or routed through multiple networks. For this reason, infosec professionals remain skeptical the Kim government is responsible for the Sony Pictures hack.

How much do you want to guess that the hackers “got sloppy” only after the DPRK got fingered?

I ain’t buying it.

Given the history of stove-piping by the US state security apparatus, I need something beyond, “If you knew what I do.”

And in Domestic Terrorism Today………

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Someone set off a pipe bomb near the offices of the Colorado Springs:

An improvised explosive device was detonated against the exterior wall of a building housing the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP on Tuesday, officials said.

The explosion knocked items off the office walls but no one was injured.

Agents from the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives went to the scene after the blast to gather evidence and place markers.

The FBI said that a gasoline can was placed next to the device but the contents did not ignite.

According to the the FBI, officials are seeking a “potential person of interest,” described as a balding white male, about 40 years old.

“He may be driving a 2000 or older model dirty, white pick-up truck with paneling, a dark colored bed liner, open tailgate, and a missing or covered license plate,” the FBI said in a statement said.

Seeing as how Colorado Springs is a Mecca* for right wing bigots, the first conclusion that I jumped to was that this was somehow or other this is tied to the Talibaptist presence in that town.

I may be wrong, but I’d give some serious odds that I’m right.

*Yes, I know that the whole “Mecca” thing is an unfortunate metaphor.

We Need to Recognize the Fact That the Right to Blaspheme is an Essential Right

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I do not think that there is really much more to say about the religiously motivated shooting of staff at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris:

The police organized an enormous manhunt across Paris on Wednesday for three suspects they said were involved in a brazen and methodical slaughter at a satirical newspaper that had lampooned Islam.

The terrorist attack by masked gunmen on the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, left 12 people dead — including the top editor, prominent cartoonists and police officers — and was among the deadliest in postwar France. The killers escaped, traumatizing the city and sending shock waves through Europe and beyond.

Officials said late Wednesday that the suspects had been identified and that two were brothers. They were identified as Said and Cherif Kouachi, 32 and 34, and Hamyd Mourad, 18. French news reports said the brothers had been born in Paris, raising the prospect that homegrown Muslim extremists were responsible.

Religion has been one of the most powerful, and most violent, forces in human history.

To degree that we as a species have any rights at all, we must protect the right to mock and insult religion.

Yeah, Nothing Suspicious Here

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A grand juror for the Michael Brown shooting investigation is suing St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch so that he can talk about the grand jury proceedings.

The juror claims the the prosecutor lied about what happened in the grand jury, and wants to be allowed to refute his statements:

A grand juror is suing St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch in an effort to speak out on what happened in the Darren Wilson case. Under typical circumstances, grand jurors are prohibited by law from discussing cases they were involved in.

 The grand juror, referred to only as “Grand Juror Doe” in the lawsuit, takes issue with how McCulloch characterized the case. McCulloch released evidence presented to the grand jury and publicly discussed the case after the grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, then a Ferguson police officer, in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American.

 “In [the grand juror]’s view, the current information available about the grand jurors’ views is not entirely accurate — especially the implication that all grand jurors believed that there was no support for any charges,” the lawsuit says. (A grand jury’s decision does not have to be unanimous.)

 “Moreover, the public characterization of the grand jurors’ view of witnesses and evidence does not accord with [Doe]’s own,” the lawsuit continued. “From [the grand juror]’s perspective, the investigation of Wilson had a stronger focus on the victim than in other cases presented to the grand jury.” Doe also believes the legal standards were conveyed in a “muddled” and “untimely” manner to the grand jury.

 In the lawsuit filed Monday in federal court, the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri argues that this case is unique and that the usual reasons for requiring the jurors to maintain secrecy should not apply.

This is a special case.

The juror is arguing  that there was deliberate prosecutorial misconduct, and that they should be allowed to publicly air these concerns.

I agree.

It is clear that McCulloch deliberately threw the case, and if this evidence is becomes, perhaps it might lead to the appointment of a special prosecutor, or the DoJ looking at the shenanigans at the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s office.

Naaah ……… I’m just kidding.

Silly rabbit, black lives do not matter.

Snow Day Today

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This deserves to be on my moribund bad hair web page

So the kids did not go to school.

We cut a deal, they shoveled the walks, and I (insert ominous music) cleaned the cat boxes.

Natalie, as you can clearly see, had a very bad hair day, which she posted to her Facebook page.

BTW, the best comment to her post was:

OMG YOU LOOK LIKE YOU COULD WORK IN A 60’S DINER WEARING ROLLER SKATES

It’s nice to have a daughter who does not take herself too seriously. (she loved the comment)

I Don’t Expect Major Changes in Doctrine Under Pope Francis

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It’s clear, however, that, in addition to making changes in tone, he is making very serious efforts to reform the Vatican as an institution.

Case in point, Ex-Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski has been arrested by Papal authorities on pedophilia charges:

The Vatican on Tuesday arrested a former archbishop accused of paying for sex with children while he was a papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic, the first-ever arrest inside the city state on charges of paedophilia. Jozef Wesolowski, a Pole who was defrocked by a Vatican tribunal in June, has been placed under house arrest awaiting a criminal trial, the Vatican said in a statement.

The 66-year-old Wesolowski is the most prominent church figure to be arrested since Paolo Gabriele, a former papal butler convicted in 2012 of stealing and leaking private papers of former Pope Benedict XVI. Unlike Gabriele, Wesolowski has not been detained in the Vatican prison, a couple of rooms attached to a courthouse, but was granted house arrest in a Vatican apartment for medical reasons.

Wesolowski was recalled to Rome by the Vatican last year when he was still a diplomat in Santo Domingo and relieved of his duties after Dominican media accused him of paedophilia.

He had been living freely in Rome, and victims of sexual abuse had called for his arrest, expressing concern he might flee. The former archbishop could face up to 12 years in jail in what will be the first trial for sexual abuse to be held inside the Vatican City.

Cleaning out corruption at the Vatican is a Herculean task (see Stables, Augean), but this is a good start.

Cuomo and Christie Find a New Way to F%$# the Poor

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As a part of the phony Port Authority plan to the proposed by Cuomo and Christie, they are looking to end overnight PATH service Irks Riders, which would have toe effect of making commuting to work for the night shift in “The City that Never Sleeps” less convenient and more expensive:

………

As if Mr. Parada’s commute were not grueling enough, he and thousands of his fellow riders found out there could be no commute whatsoever in the future. At the end of December, their Legislatures already adjourned, Governors Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey, vetoed a sweeping bill that would have reformed the agency. The governors, who jointly control the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, then unveiled a report of their own calling for changes.

Buried among the proposals was one considering the elimination of service between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. on the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, known as PATH, the train linking Manhattan with nearby cities in New Jersey.

During this time, ridership plummets, with roughly 2,000 crossing the Hudson on weeknights. They account for just under 1 percent of daily passengers, and eliminating service would save the authority $10 million from its $330 million budget, according to the governors’ report.

The idea was universally rejected by those lonely souls crisscrossing the Hudson River in the early morning hours, including the bartenders and clubgoers, the swing-shift construction and postal workers, and the foreign-exchange traders heading in on Frankfurt time.

To them, the overnight PATH is a lifeline, the only one into or out of New York City when all other trains and buses have stopped and taxis, at $50 to $100, are too costly.

I guess that they need to free up some money for do nothing jobs for their political allies.

Ratf%$#s.

This is a Meaningful Description of What is Wrong with Washington, DC Professional Football Franchise

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Sally Jenkins makes a very good point about what is wrong with Washington’s Football team, all while avoiding the use of the clearly racist franchise moniker, though whoever wrote the headline f%$#@ed that up.

The short form of her thesis is that a fish rots from the head, and given the truly pitiful performance of the team since his acquiring the team seems to confirm this thesis.

I will leave you with her last paragraph:

For too long, no one has trusted the basic setup of the organization. So many flatterers and yes men survive while the truth tellers get offed or ignored, and every three or four years everyone gets fired and the club starts from scratch again. Step one for Snyder is to identify some real leaders, not just enablers. And to convince them he’s not out to waste their best efforts and earning years.

She further suggests that, “Snyder would have to listen, really listen, to his staffers and his players. Not to his pets and his stars and top jersey sellers, either, but to those who he has often disregarded and disrespected, the rank and file who show up for work every day and manage to do a professional job in an unprofessional environment.”

I simply do not think that this is in Dan Snyder’s DNA. When he first bought the team, he fired everyone, including secretaries and the like.

Sh%$#ing on the little people who might actually know what is going on has been an essential part of his modus operandi since he took over the team.

He cannot solve the problem, because he is the problem.

If DC fans could stay away from games, not buy merchandise, and decrease his revenue to the point where the debt service would be greater than revenue, which Jenkins suggests as “Plan B”, it might get rid of him, and we might find some resolution regarding the teams ineptitude on and off the field.

Full disclosure: I am a fan of the team, and I have been since 1976.

There is Stupid, Wicked Stupid, and US Army Stupid

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And in the annals of stupid things said by Generals, it appears that the US Army is considering exempting cyber warfare recruits from combat training:

New US Army cyber warriors could be spared the rigours of combat training to help the Pentagon attract badly needed recruits from the ponytail wearing Google generation, a top American general has suggested.

Lt Gen Robert Brown said the US Army had to recruit people who were not typical candidates for a military career if it was to attract the right skills to wage cyber war.

This is a naked attempt to gbrab cyber security budget dollars.

Some of the proposals listed later in the article, such as not mindlessly rotating soldiers through different responsibilities and allowing them to accumulate technical expertise, make some sense, but if they are not combat trained, they are Pentagon employees, not soldiers.

The Battle over Tax Avoidance in the EU Begins

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The EU is instituting major changes in the taxation of digital items in EU.

It makes changes in the Value Added Tax (VAT), both in rates and how it is assessed:

Europe’s tax showdown could be headed straight to people’s wallets.

With the new year, a change in fiscal rules in the European Union is increasing the tax on many purchases of digital content like e-books and smartphone applications.

Under the new rules, first approved in 2008, the tax rate on digital services like cloud storage and movie streaming will be determined by where consumers live, and not where the company selling the product has its European headquarters. Tax experts say Europe’s revamped rules could add up to an extra $1 billion in annual tax revenue for European governments.

The bit about having the VAT assessed based on the location of the purchaser (technically it works this way in the US, but this rule is rarely followed).

This this is all about the predatory tax policies of places like Luxemburg and Ireland:

The changes to Europe’s so-called value-added tax — a tax on goods and services similar to sales taxes in the United States — are part of a continuing push by lawmakers to tax the region’s digital economy more heavily. Companies like Apple and Amazon have been roundly criticized for housing their European operations in low-tax countries like Ireland and Luxembourg. The companies say they operate there legally.

Many of the world’s largest tech companies selling digital products, like Amazon and Microsoft, now house their European digital businesses in Luxembourg, where the V.A.T. rate is as low as 3 percent for e-book purchases. In contrast, countries like Britain charge companies a 20 percent sales tax for selling e-books. Analysts say the current rules provide an advantage to global companies that have the financial muscle to shop around for the lowest tax rate.

………

One of the European countries most affected by the tax change will be Luxembourg. The small country’s low value-added tax rates have enticed Apple to set up its international iTunes business there, and Microsoft’s digital download operation is also based there.

Luxembourg’s corporate tax system is being challenged by several European investigations into whether politicians gave preferential treatment to the likes of Amazon and a financing unit of Fiat, the Italian carmaker. And Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s former prime minister, who now runs the executive arm of the European Union responsible for the continuing investigations, has been criticized for his role in promoting the country’s low-tax policies.

For the longest time, the EU thought that the status of tax haven EU members was considered a feature, and not a bug, but with the current fetish for austerity, this attitude appears to changed.

In any case, it is about to really suck for Luxemburg and Ireland, whose economies are largely built on being tax evasion.