Watching the Presidential campaign, I have come to the conclusion that Jeb Bush is the stupid Bush brother, not GW.
I am as stunned as you are about this.
Month: August 2015
I Have Never Heard of Something like This in Academe Before
One of the bigger clusterF%$#s in academe recently has been the hiring, and subsequent “un-hiring” of Steven Salaita, a professor of literature with a focus on American Studies at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
During Operation Cast Lead, he was rather “emphatic” on the Twitter machine regarding military operations in Gaza, and as a result of pressure from the legislature and the alumni, his offer was rescinded.
It was a done deal, and Salaita had already resigned his prior (tenured) position when the offer was revoked.
In the ensuing kerfuffle, it was discovered, it was discovered that the Chancellor, who was the bag man for this sordid affair, was conducting business over her personal email with the specific goal of evading Illinois open record laws.
After all this came out, a new president came in, and started cleaning house.
The Chancellor, Phyllis Wise, offered her resignation, but the trustees rejected her resignation, and instead fired her, which cost her a significant retention bonus and a paid sabbatical year:
University of Illinois trustees Wednesday rejected a $400,000 bonus payment for outgoing Chancellor Phyllis Wise, backpedaling on a resignation deal made last week and instead choosing to begin dismissal proceedings against her.
The unanimous decision to reject Wise’s resignation came six days after she announced she would step aside just ahead of the revelation that she had been using a personal email account to hide discussions of sensitive and controversial issues from the public. The deal had been recommended by new U. of I. President Timothy Killeen.
But the terms of her resignation, including the bonus intended to acknowledge four years in the job, were roundly criticized by Gov. Bruce Rauner and others, and the board’s three-member executive committee decided Wednesday to take the more contentious — and legally risky — path of firing Wise for cause instead.
The board will next provide Wise with “a statement of the reasons” for firing her and will hold a dismissal hearing, according to a letter U. of I. board Chair Edward McMillan sent Wise after Wednesday’s meeting. Until then, Wise will be assigned as an adviser to the U. of I. president on biomedical affairs and continue to draw her salary of $549,069. She will retain her tenured faculty appointment, as the dismissal applies only to her administrative role. The board Wednesday appointed Dean Barbara Wilson as the acting interim chancellor.
………
Killeen said discussions about Wise’s resignation began early last week when she was presented with the findings of an investigation into her deliberate use of a personal email account to hide information. Killeen said he did not “directly” ask Wise to resign and that she “indicated interest or willingness” to do so. She publicly cited “external issues” as the reason after a tumultuous year at the state’s flagship public campus.
………
U. of I. on Friday released about 1,100 pages of emails that showed Wise and other campus administrators used personal email accounts in an attempt to circumvent state public records laws, a violation of university policy. The emails were related to three of the university’s most significant and controversial decisions from the past year: the decision to withdraw a job offer to professor Steven Salaita, the hiring of felon James Kilgore and the proposal to open an engineering-based medical school on the Urbana-Champaign campus.
………
Rosenstein said he had disagreed with how Wise handled the situation with Salaita, whose job offer was withdrawn last year after he wrote dozens of critical and sometimes profane comments on Twitter about Israel and its military policies. And Rosenstein said he was further disturbed by the content of some of the emails that Wise tried to keep private.
First, let me say that I think that Wise deserved to be fired, if just for the aggressive evasion of open record acts. (The James Kilgore thing is a typical bullsh%$ tempest in a teapot. He’s an adjunct who has done his time)
On the Salaita matter, it is clear that just everything was handled badly, but I get the sense that she was less the boss on this than she was the bag-man, and she was also the sacrificial lamb.
As Atrios so pithly put it, “I hate the phrase “Thrown Under A Bus, but it certainly applies here. Thanks for doing our dirty work, no thanks for making us look bad, piss off.”
District Attorneys in California Have One Fewer Way to Let Killer Cops Walk
California has just passed a law that forbids the use of secret grand juries to investigate police involved shootings:
Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday making California the first state in the nation to ban the use of grand juries to decide whether police officers should face criminal charges when they kill people in the line of duty.
The ban, which will go into effect next year, comes after grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, made controversial decisions in secret hearings last year not to bring charges against officers who killed unarmed black men, sparking protests across the country. Calls for transparency also have come amid national concerns about disparate treatment of blacks and other racial minorities when encounters with cops turned deadly in Baltimore, Cincinnati and South Carolina.
“What the governor’s decision says is, he gets it — the people don’t want secrecy when it comes to officer-involved shootings,” said retired judge and former San Jose independent police auditor LaDoris Cordell, the first African-American appointed as a judge in Northern California and a key supporter of the bill. “We’re not trying to get more officers indicted. We’re saying, ‘Whatever you decide, do it in the open.'”
What we have seen recently is that there are a lot of DA’s out there who use grand juries to justify not pursuing bad cops.
Now those DA’s will no longer have plausible deniability.
Now it will go to a preliminary hearing, with a judge, and where defense counsel can contest the facts and the law, in public.
It’s not creating a state level prosecutor who’s only job is investigating and prosecuting police shootings, but it’s better than the status quo.
Belay that Upgrade to Windows 10
No verification yet, but there has been a semi credible report that Microsoft’s new operating system is literally sending everything you do to the Redmond Borg:
Note: Some readers have commented that the original source for the article is of questionably validity. If anyone can confirm or refute the original author’s finding with actual data, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll update this post accordingly.
Some Czech guy did a traffic analysis of data produced by Windows 10, and released his findings the other day. His primary thesis was that Windows 10 acts more like a terminal than an operating system — because of the extent of the “cloud” integration, a large portion of the OS functions are almost dependent on remote (Microsoft’s) servers. The amount of collected information, even with strict privacy settings, is quite alarming.Information transmitted
All text typed on the keyboard is stored in temporary files, and sent (once per 30 mins) to:
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.comThere isn’t a clear purpose for this, considering
there there’s no autocorrect/prediction anywhere in the OS(There is autocorrect in certain text fields, but the supposed purpose for transmitting these keystrokes is to improve autocorrect across devices. Whether a full keylog is necessary for this (as opposed to just corrections) is questionable. Furthermore, this appears to still occur even if the user is not signed in to a Microsoft account, eliminating the “across devices” benefit. Perhaps there is a global autocorrect dictionary that benefits all users, but the privacy implications of an un-disableable always-on keylogger outweigh these potential benefits.). The implications of this are significant: because this is an OS-level keylogger, all the data you’re trying to transmit securely is now sitting on some MS server. This includes passwords and encrypted chats. This also includes the on-screen keyboard, so there is no way to authenticate to a website without MS also getting your password.
………
………In another example, typing the name of any popular movie into your local file search starts a telemetry process that indexes all media files on your computer and transmits them to: ………
………
It’s hard to imagine any purpose for this other than the obvious piracy crackdown possibilities.
When a webcam is first enabled, ~35mb of data gets immediately transmitted to:………
Everything that is said into an enabled microphone is immediately transmitted to:
………If this weren’t bad enough, this behaviour still occurs after Cortana is fully disabled/uninstalled. It’s speculated that the purpose of this function to build up a massive voice database, then tie those voices to identities, and eventually be able to identify anyone simply by picking up their voice, whether it be a microphone in a public place or a wiretap on a payphone.
………
While the inital reflex may be to block all of the above servers via HOSTS, it turns out this won’t work: Microsoft has taken the care to hardcode certain IPs, meaning that there is no DNS lookup and no HOSTS consultation. However, if the above servers are blocked via HOSTS, Windows will pretend to be crippled by continuously throwing errors, while still maintaining data collection in the background. Other than an increase in errors, HOSTS blocking did not affect the volume, frequency, or rate of data being transmitted.
So it appears that Microsoft does key-logging under Win 10, which means that they have your password, they phone home with your media files, meaning that the RIAA and MPAA can go after you for your bootlegs, and they have created a voice profile, so that the NSA can listen to you when they recognize your voice..
Again, this is preliminary, but if half of this is true, my next computer will be a Linux box.
Jon Stewart Just Hurt Me
He is, of course, in reruns now, but he was doing his monologue, and I had had not heard it before.
And then he said:
Sure, Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds in the thousands, but for some reason the ‘media’ has decided you can’t be a serious candidate if your hair looks like your dick got caught in an electrical socket.
I started laughing, and I just had to share this with Sharon.*
So, laughing hysterically, I started up the stairs, but I could not catch my breath I was laughing so hard, and ended up falling down the stairs.
Thankfully, nothing but some bruising minor bruising, and a majorly freaked out wife.
Actually, it freaked out my cats too.
As I lay at the bottom of the stairs, giggling, Destructo was staring at me with obvious concern.
I’m OK, just a bruise on my left radius and wrist.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Props to Bernie
On Face the Nation, Bernie Sanders said that much of the criticism of Hillary Clinton is motivated by sexism:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on Sunday that some of the criticism directed at his Democratic primary rival Hillary Clinton is motivated by sexism.
“I can’t think of many personalities who have been attacked for more reasons than Hillary Clinton,” Sanders told John Dickerson on “Face the Nation.”
“And by the way, let me be frank – and I’m running against her – some of it is sexist. I don’t know that a man would be treated the same way that Hillary is,” Sanders added.
Sanders remarks came in response to a question about whether Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state has hurt her trustworthiness in the eyes of some Americans. Sanders refused to comment on the scandal or Clinton’s honesty, and went on to emphasize that his concerns with her as the Democratic nominee are about her policies, not personality.
That’s actually pretty classy, particularly in the context of the 2016 campaign.
TPP: the Fat Lady Ain’t Singing, but She Is Warming Up
At the end of last month, the negotiations that were supposed to put the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) ended without an agreement.
What’s more, there wasn’t even a date set for a followup summit:
Trade negotiators from the United States and 11 other Pacific nations failed to reach final agreement on Friday, with difficult talks on the largest regional trade agreement ever deadlocking over protections for drug companies and access to agriculture markets on both sides of the Pacific.
Trade ministers, in a joint statement, said late Friday they had made “significant progress” and will return to their home countries to obtain high-level signoffs for a small number of final sticking points on the agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with bilateral talks reconvening soon.
“There are an enormous number of issues that one works through at these talks, narrowing differences, finding landing zones,” said Michael B. Froman, the United States trade representative. “I am very impressed with the work that has been done. I am gratified by the progress that has been made.”
Still, the breakdown is a setback for the Obama administration, which had promoted the talks here as the final round ahead of an accord that would bind 40 percent of the world’s economy under a new set of rules for commerce.
This is a failure, and a big one.
In a normally unproductive summit, the Japanese would oblique.
When a Japanese diplomat says, “It would be difficult,” it should be read “No!” with the explanation point, and when a Japanese diplomat says that, “It would be very difficult, it’s the equivalent of “F%$# You White Man.”
This time, the Japanese Economy Minister, who is their lead on this deal, just explicitly stated that the US were too wimpy:
Japan has expressed concern about a loss of momentum in talks on a pan-Pacific trade pact after participants failed to agree to meet again this month to try to clinch a deal that would cover 40 percent of the global economy.
Ministers from the 12 nations negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would stretch from Japan to Chile, fell short of a deal at talks last month on the Hawaiian island of Maui, despite early optimism.
Japanese Economy Minister Akira Amari, in a blog circulated on Tuesday, also questioned why the United States appeared to have lacked its usual “stubborn persistence” at those talks, despite a willingness of some countries to stay to try to reach an agreement.
If this were translated into standard American discourse, it would use language that would make George Carlin uncomfortable.
And from Australia, a country whose foreign policy is defined by a desperate need to be “In the Club”, the Trade Minister is saying that a deal is unlikely:
Australia’s trade minister, Andrew Robb, has appeared at the National Press Club in Canberra today, where he admitted that concluding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal is looking increasingly unlikely.
According to AAP, Rob said that sugar and dairy access remained key sticking points, along with motor vehicle assess between Mexico, the US, Canada and Japan. He also noted that “the closer we get to a US presidential election, the more prospect (there is) of it falling over”.
There is also the upcoming Canadian elections later this year.
Seeing as how this deal sucks, it’s a good thing that it appears to be comatose.
Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!
It turns out that the DHS no fly list is basically based on hunches with a pseudo-scientific gloss:
The Obama administration’s no-fly lists and broader watchlisting system is based on predicting crimes rather than relying on records of demonstrated offenses, the government has been forced to admit in court.
In a little-noticed filing before an Oregon federal judge, the US Justice Department and the FBI conceded that stopping US and other citizens from travelling on airplanes is a matter of “predictive assessments about potential threats”, the government asserted in May.
“By its very nature, identifying individuals who ‘may be a threat to civil aviation or national security’ is a predictive judgment intended to prevent future acts of terrorism in an uncertain context,” Justice Department officials Benjamin C Mizer and Anthony J Coppolino told the court on 28 May.
“Judgments concerning such potential threats to aviation and national security call upon the unique prerogatives of the Executive in assessing such threats.”
It is believed to be the government’s most direct acknowledgement to date that people are not allowed to fly because of what the government believes they might do and not what they have already done.
………
On Friday, the ACLU asked Judge Anna Brown to conduct her own review of the error rate in the government’s predictions modeling – a process the ACLU likens to the “pre-crime” of Philip K Dick’s science fiction.
“I believe this is the first case in which a court is being asked to review the basis for the government’s predictive model for blacklisting people who have never even been charged, let alone convicted, of a violent crime,” said ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi.
In March, as a result of the lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security began informing people of their inclusion on a flight blacklist and permitting them to file a “redress inquiry”. The resulting non-adversarial process has the government perform “careful consideration” of its reasons for blacklisting, with the Transportation Security Agency director as final arbiter. The ACLU considers the new process insufficient.
But the Obama administration is seeking to block the release of further information about how the predictions are made, for the same reason it opposes providing greater information for challenging watchlist inclusion: damage to national security.
………
In April 2014, five people, all of whom are Muslim, claimed that they were suddenly forbidden from flying after declining FBI pressure to become informants or in order to place pressure upon them to do so. Informants, along with social media postings, have become a driving factor in the FBI’s uptick in arrests of people suspected of ties to al-Qaida and the Islamic State.
In July 2014, the Intercept published an internal watchlisting guidance indicating that nominations to government watchlists were growing, with few rejections. Social media posts were among acceptable criteria, and acquittals in court did not necessarily lead to removals from the list, the Intercept’s document showed.
We are living in an era where the state security apparatus, and the executive that is supposed to ensure that they work in accordance with our interests and our values are thoroughly corrupted by power and fear.
Obama’s message is to tell us not to worry, because he is a good and trustworthy man.
The whole point of our system, with its separation of powers, is that we are not supposed to rely on the the good nature of our leaders.
Obama has taken the worst excesses of the Bush administration, and normalized them.
This will Obama’s most important legacy, and it is not a positive one.
Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever!™
Another Climate Change Denial Talking Point Bites the Dust………
It turns out that the evidence that we are in a period of some sort of freakishly high sunspot activity is just an artifact of how counting was modernized in 1947, which means that suggesting that it’s all sunspots is a load of bunk:
A bunch of boffins has completed the first-ever revision of the world’s most important sunspot data repository, along the way challenging the theory that climate change is substantially attributable to the prevalence of sunspots.
It turns out, in fact, that the pro-sunspots argument relies on a statistical artefact introduced in 1947 and not corrected until this year.
While the change officially took place in July, rendering obsolete the data that climate deniers use to “prove” that it’s sunspots driving global warming rather than CO2, it came to prominence at the end of last week in a presentation to the International Astronomical Union’s current general assembly in Hawaii.
The most important correction to come out of the new data, the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations (SILSO) project says, is “a lowering by about 18% of all numbers after 1947, to remove the bias produced by a new counting method started in 1947 in Zürich”.
………
As SILSO explains, the sunspot data set (which, courtesy of Galileo (the man, not the spacecraft), stretches back 400 years) was first collected into an index by Rudolph Wolf in 1849. Startlingly, SILSO says, “this series was left unchanged since its creation … without any backward verification”.
………
The adoption of the new Sunspot Number doesn’t change our understanding of the Maunder Minimum, the low sunspot activity period between 1645 and 1715 that coincided with the “Little Ice Age”.
However, the recalibration does overturn a previous consensus that the data set showed a 300-year upward trend in sunspot activity, culminating in a “grand maximum” in the 20th century.
As Physicsworld says, the dataset “nullifies the claim that there has been a modern grand maximum”.
In response, I expect some right wing nut-job state Attorney General to subpoena scientists private communications.
This Is All F%$#Ed up and Sh%$
After many years of complaints by the US that China should let its currency float according to market forces, the Bank of China has broadened the range that it will allow the Yuan to float, having the effect of devaluing the currency:
As China contends with an economic slowdown and a stock market slump, the authorities on Tuesday sharply devalued the country’s currency, the renminbi, a move that could raise geopolitical tensions and weigh on growth elsewhere.
The central bank set the official value of the renminbi nearly 2 percent weaker against the dollar. The devaluation is the largest since China’s modern exchange-rate system was introduced at the start of 1994.
………
China’s devaluation represents a difficult dilemma for the Obama administration. The United States Treasury has tried to use quiet diplomacy in recent years to encourage China to free up its currency policies, while blocking efforts in Congress to punish China for major intervention in currency markets over the past decade to slow the rise of the renminbi. Many in Congress have long accused China of unfairly building up its manufacturing sector at the expense of American jobs by undervaluing the renminbi, and the Chinese devaluation could fan those criticisms.
In a seeming nod to such concerns, the central bank said that it would begin to use the market closing, not the previous morning’s official setting, to calculate the renminbi’s official daily fixing against the dollar. But China’s economic weakness now means that further opening up of the currency to market forces could mean a weaker renminbi, not a stronger one. That, in turn, would make Chinese goods even more competitive in the United States and Europe.
China’s central bank “has finally thrown in the towel on supporting the renminbi,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University. At the same time, he added, easing its grip on the currency’s value “has blunted criticism by combining the currency devaluation with a more market-determined exchange rate.” The United States and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund have called on China to be more hands-off in managing the renminbi.
Obviously there is irony here, but this is real news.
To quote Joe Biden, “This is a big F%$#ing deal.”
This is the last best effort by Chinese economists to try to keep the economy moving.
I don’t know where this is going, but it is not going to be pretty.
Can We Please Given Texas Back to Mexico?
Some cracker judge in the Lone Star State just sentenced a man to marry his girlfriend and write down bible verses:
A Texas man was sentenced to marry his 19-year-old girlfriend, write down Bible verses and attend counseling by a judge as punishment for punching another man in the jaw, according to local television station KLTV.
The court case stemmed from a February altercation between Josten Bundy, 20, and the ex-partner of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Jaynes. He told the TV station he hit the man twice.
During his sentencing, Judge Randall Rogers told Bundy he would have to marry his girlfriend within 30 days as a condition of his probation. Bundy said that Rogers gave him the option to sit behind bars for 15 days.
Bundy asked if he could call his employers to tell them he was going to jail, but the judge declined. Bundy and Jaynes said they feared Bundy would lose his job, so they applied for their marriage license and scheduled a date with the justice of the peace.
In a state where the body politic was not congenitally insane, this judge would be suspended pending a judicial review, a state bar review, and a 24-hour psychological evaluation.
I Cannot Believe that I am Saying This………
But I was wrong when I suggested a few days back that the disruption of a Bernie Sanders speech by Black Lives Matter was likely an exercise in Nixonian rat-f%$#ing by the Clinton campaign.
It turns out now that the best evidence now is that at least one of the protesteris a bit of a nut, who was in the not too distant past a Teabagger supporter of Sarah Palin.
IMNSHO, you cannot manufacture this kind of lunacy, so I’m going with a small group of nuts:
An interesting development has occurred within the Black Lives Matter movement and it has caused many outside and from within the movement to question the wisdom in the most recent interruption of Bernie Sanders campaign. While no one can deny its effectiveness, especially considering Senator Sanders newest addition to his team is a Black Lives Matter activist, this interruption happened after Bernie had already begun shifting his campaign towards publicizing his stance on racial issues.
When individuals place themselves in the public eye they become scrutinized at every level. While looking into these activists for the Black Lives Matter movement, it became readily apparent that either they were not officially a part of the BLM movement, or they were not organized until just around the time of the incident.
………
Then more startling information came out concerning Marissa Johnson, the main agitator who berated Bernie for being a racist. According to her own Facebook profile she was a huge Tea Party supporter and had supported Sarah Palin in her 2008 Vice Presidential candidacy.
………
While none of that necessarily qualifies her as being a troll, or as some on the internet have accused an operative who is just trying to delegitimize the Sanders campaign. It is very possible that Johnson was a staunch Tea Party supporter in 2008 and has now changed her political persuasion to more closely mirror that of Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley. Eight years are a long time for an individual to reflect upon politics and their effects in the real world.
Although it is quite disquieting when you dig deeper into the facts. The Facebook page and social media presence of Johnson’s faction BLM Seattle did not exist until the day of the rally. Two hours after the interruption her Facebook page had been live for less than 24 hours and had garnered less than 50 followers. Again, this may all relate back to poor planning and nothing nefarious, but it is certainly not indicative of someone attempting to achieve legitimacy within the political spectrum. Johnson is also a member of a group called Outside Agitators 206, a movement within the larger Black Lives Matter movement, based out of Seattle. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to hold the same goals as the larger movement and actually made a public statement declaring their intent was to “declare war on the Democratic Party“. ………
I would note that there has been no formal comment by BLM on this protest, and I would argue that there can’t be one, because, much like the Occupy movement, there is no head, there is no tail, and there is no way to determine if someone is official, a nut, or an agent provocateur.
On the other hand, I think that the preponderance of the evidence here is that this specific protest is the product of the bat-sh%$ insane wing of BLM, so I apologize to the Clinton campaign.
BTW, read what the Bear who Swims has said about Occupy and its ilk about the tendency of groups like Occupy, and BLM to function as “Useful Idiots”.
Here is a particularly good bit:
Say what you like about the reactionaries, they have spent the last 30 years do these things. They have
- Used mass media to explain their theories, and why they are better.
- Popularized goals and objects and made them part of the political discussion through poltical organizing and outreach.
- Created a cadre of individuals who are willing to take on public office at all levels of govenment to implement their policies.
- Created a core group of constituencies who are loyal to their cause — even against their own interested.
Let us put that another way, they have play practical electoral politics effectively. In the course of this they have created a separate reactionary nationalism, which while at odds with the views of many, has no counter balance.
Go read what the Bear, AKA my brother, AKA the hairiest Saroff, AKA Stephen wrote.
He has been involved in politics for a long time, and has little patience for folks who think that it is noble to rearrange deck chairs on a certain White Star Line ocean liner as an alternative to identifying and avoiding icebergs.
Deep Thought
For the past 3 weeks, the escalators at Lexington Market station have been set up with the one that you use on the right.
Today this had been reversed, so now one is supposed take the one on the left.
I’m beginning to think that the Maryland MTA is just screwing with us.
Posted via mobile.
This is About to Go All Pear Shaped
Because their indiscriminate bombing of civilians has failed to secure “hearts and minds”, the Saudi led coalition is sending in ground troops:
An Arab coalition source confirmed to Defense News that 2,800 troops landed in Yemen on Aug. 2 and are targeting the country’s largest military base.
The coalition source stated that the forces — comprised mostly of Saudi special operations, intelligence and logistics personnel — are placed to secure Aden and take over Al-Anad military base north of Aden.
“The units are also supported by personnel and equipment from the United Arab Emirates and trained Yemeni fighters,” the source said.
Images of LeClerc main battle tanks, which are operated by the UAE land forces and Presidential Guard strike force, BMP armored vehicles, and M-ATVs being offloaded at a port in the southern city of Aden appeared on social media Sunday.
In what I am sure is a completely unrelated development, a suicide bomber struck a mosque inside Saudi Arabia near the Yemenese border:
A suicide bomber struck Thursday at a Saudi mosque used by security forces near the border with war-
battered Yemen, officials said, killing more than a dozen people.
The Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online activities of militant groups. The blast follows a spate of suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia claimed by the Islamic State.
It also comes as Saudi Arabia and its allies have escalated their four-month-old war against rebel forces in Yemen.
The official Saudi Press Agency said that at least 10 security personnel and three workers were killed in the mosque blast, which occurred in the southern Asir region.
The House of Saud, concerned about nothing beyond their eternal war against the Shia, are actively aiding ISIS and al Qaeda by bombing their most determined opponents and completely unsurprisingly, ISIS uses this fact to further their campaign against the Saudis.
This has fail written all over it.
So Not Surprised………
It turns out that drug sniffing dogs are little better than a coin flip, so they are yet another way that law enforcement manufactures probable cause for a search:
Police are now speaking out about a decision from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that drug dogs signal for drugs nearly every time they are sent to sniff a vehicle or home. This decision shows that police dog searches are not legitimate and that they are just used as a pretense for officers to violate the rights of innocent people.
The case stemmed from a 2010 traffic stop in which 20 kilograms of cocaine were found in a vehicle after a search from a police dog named “Lex.”
The suspect ended up taking the case to court, and while his sentence was upheld, some very interesting points were uncovered during the investigation.
It was revealed that Lex, the drug dog in question, signaled for drugs 93% of the time, even when there were no drugs present. These findings show that dog sniffs are not accurate and are simply used as a tool to justify a full police search. The findings also indicated that Lex was incorrect roughly 40% of the time.
“Lex’s overall accuracy rate … is not much better than a coin flip,” the ruling stated.
………
Last year, we reported on the high-profile case of Timothy Young. Young was pulled over for failure to use his turn signal when a police K-9 was said to have alerted to his vehicle. After police found no evidence of drugs in his car or on his person, he was then handcuffed and driven to a hospital an hour away. During this forced visit to the hospital, Young was x-rayed and sodomized in search of non-existent substances.Still think if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear? Ask Mr. Young that question…..
Live in obedient fear, citizen.
It’s a Good Start
This is kind down in the weeds finance, but the fact that the EU is requiring a central facility for clearing all derivatives:
The European Commission adopted new rules Thursday mandating central clearing of certain over-the-counter interest rate derivatives contracts. Phased in over three years, the mandate, which can begin in April of next year at the earliest, covers interest rate swaps with certain features denominated in euros, pounds sterling, Japanese yen or U.S. dollars.
Central clearing of derivatives was first agreed to by world leaders at the G-20 Pittsburgh Summit in 2009. It began in the US in 2013, followed by a requirement in 2014 that certain swaps begin trading on swaps execution facilities (SEFs).
The lack of coordination in the way derivatives markets reforms have been implemented in different jurisdictions has long led to complaints about cross-border fragmentation. As far back as January 2014, when the US has implemented central clearing but before US mandates for trading on SEFs had kicked in, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) had already published a research note titled “Cross-Border Fragmentation of Global OTC Derivatives: An Empirical Analysis.”
In September of last year, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Commissioner J. Christopher Giancarlo sounded alarms that uncoordinated cross-border regulations in the swaps market had the potential to degenerate into a regulatory “trade war” that could further fragment cross-border swaps trading.
“Rather than controlling systemic risk, the fragmentation of global swaps markets into regional ones is increasing risk by Balkanizing pools of trading liquidity and market pricing,” he said at the time.
This is important for a number of reasons:
- It means that we are closer to get meaningful data as to the volume of what Warren Buffet called, “Financial weapons of mass destruction.”
- It will allow for irregular trades to be flagged more easily, because they will stand out in comparison to the rest of the market.
- It will allow for effective taxation of these instruments.
It is some rare good news in the financial regulation front.
Has Black Lives Matter Been Hijacked by the Hillary Clinton Campaign?
So, for the second time in as many months, Black Lives Matter has disrupted a Bernie Sanders speech:
Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally in Dallas in July. (Mike Stone/Reuters)
Bernie Sanders came to Seattle on Saturday with plans to give two speeches.
The first didn’t happen. An appearance by the senator from Vermont at an event celebrating the anniversary of Social Security and Medicare was scuttled after protesters from a local Black Lives Matter chapter took over the stage.
Hours later, Sanders, who has been drawing bigger crowds than any other presidential contender, drew his largest yet: about 15,000 at the college basketball arena where the Washington Huskies play.
Aides said Sanders, who has emerged as the leading alternative to Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, spoke to a full house of 12,000 inside the arena and to what police estimated to be an overflow of 3,000 people outside of it.
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Sanders was the final speaker on a long program held at a city park. Shortly after he took stage, a small group of protesters from a Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter took the microphone and demanded that the crowd hold Sanders “accountable” for not doing enough, in their view, to address police brutality and other issues on the group’s agenda.
The question that I am asking is why we aren’t seeing this at any of Hillary Clinton’s events?
I am not alone in this. Over at B.A.R., Bruce Dixon is wondering the same thing, though he extends his net to Obama and the “Black political class”, and he makes this trenchant observation:
There are ominous signs. Last month folks whom Alicia Garza described as “part of our team” disrupted two minor white male candidates at NetRootsNation, the annual networking event for paid and wannabe paid Democratic party activists, embarrassing them with demands over structural racism and “say her name”. If they were positioning themselves for careers inside the far-flung Democratic party apparatus, it was a smart move, because Hillary wasn’t there. Hence they got noticed in that crowd of Democrat operatives without antagonizing the people with the real money and connections.
When Hard Knock Radio’s Davey D interviewed Garza on July 21, just before the Cleveland #BlackLivesMatter conference, Garza dropped several more indications that seem to point toward an eventual affiliation with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
The fact that Black Lives Matter appears to be studiously avoiding a confrontation with Hillary Clinton is telling.
I do not have quite the cynicism of Mr. Dixon, but I do find the pattern here to be extremely suspect.
Au Revoir, Mr. Stewart
I just saw his final show as host as The Daily Show.
I think that it did a decent job of balancing between acknowledging the history, and memories, and not being a downer.
Spoiler: Springsteen played at the end.
It is the end of an era.
I’m sure that I’ll get used to Trevor Noah in a few months.
If You Cannot Make Charter Schools in Sweden, You Cannot Make Them Work at All
It turns out that when you take well funded and competently run public schools, and decide to sh%$ can that and throw public monies at privately run schools, it all turns into crap:
Sweden’s education system has often been cited by Michael Gove as a role model, especially for its policy of state-sponsored free schools providing increased choice for parents. In 2008 Gove told the Conservative party conference that Sweden’s school reforms would be introduced if he was in government – and in 2010 promptly did so, with the advent of free schools.
A few years later and Sweden’s star has dimmed. The 2012 Pisa results show Sweden’s exam results falling abruptly across all three measures of reading, maths and science – with the country recording the largest drop in maths performance over 10 years. Anna Ekström, head of Sweden’s National Education Agency, said in response: “The bleak picture has become bleaker with the Pisa review that was presented today.”
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In recent months a number of for-profit companies running free schools in Sweden have been in financial difficulties, while a recent TV exposé revealed that the state-funded privately-run schools were prepared to bend selection rules to admit bright pupils.
Sweden’s education minister, Jan Björklund, said the Pisa results were “the final nail in the coffin for the old school reform,” and speculated that the central government could take over running schools from Sweden’s municipalities.
This is not a surprise.
The way to fix public schools is to actually fix public schools.
The charter school movement is based on the twin goals of destroying teachers’ unions and transferring public funds to the parasites on Wall Street.
Charters have not, nor has they ever been about our kids learning.
H/T Angry Bear.
So, It Appears That It Wasn’t Aliens
We now have confirmation that the debris from the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370:
A piece of debris found washed ashore on a beach in the Indian Ocean came from missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, the Malaysian prime minister has announced, confirming the first trace of the plane since it vanished last year with 239 people on board.
“Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts has conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris … is indeed MH370,” Najib Razak said on Wednesday.
Razak said he hoped the positive identification of the two-metre fragment, which was found last week on the French island of Réunion, would “lift the fog of uncertainty” for grieving relatives.
This is not a surprise.
The conspiracy theories were bullsh%$.