Year: 2015

Read This………

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A transportation expert takes Pando to task regarding their analysis of Uber, and Pando sees fit to publish his letter.

Basically, Pando has gone after Uber as being a bunch of Silicon Valley snake oil, and Hubert Horan believes that this is not true.

Specifically, notwithstanding their somewhat horrifying business practices, Amazon and eBay actually innovate, reducing the costs and increase the selection relative to brick and mortar alternatives, while Uber provides the exact same service as any taxi or limo service, while adding the “benefits” of price gouging and drivers who have not passed a background check:

The letter is fascinating, insightful, and critical. I don’t agree with his characterizations of some of my arguments; but I do agree with his own arguments and explanations in this letter, and more than that, I appreciate the time and serious effort Horan put into this letter to educate all of us. Few people in America have his decades-long industry perspective and his unique political insights on the politics of transportation, antitrust, markets, and tech. Here’s the letter in full.

-Mark Ames

………

I agree that Convoy, which appears to be closely mimicking the Uber playbook, raises major issues that fully warrant the attention you’ve given it, and I am grateful for the effort and critical thinking that you and Pando have brought to these unicorn issues over the last several years. Apologies in advance if the tone of what follows seems excessively critical, but I have four major concerns based on my background in transport and regulatory economics: (A) I think the Convoy piece (as well as most previous Pando reporting on Uber) misses the critical point that neither company has an underlying business model linked to any rational evidence of sustainable competitive advantage, and you’ve misled readers by equating the Uber/Convoy models with companies like Amazon, and EBay, which did have plans based on solid economics; (B) You correctly noted that the investors behind Convoy (and Uber) are seeking quasi-monopolistic dominance (trying to build a rent-extractive “narrow in the stream”) but you failed to lay out for your readers the critical difference between driving thousands of less-efficient existing suppliers out of business because you’ve built an overwhelmingly better mousetrap, versus driving more efficient suppliers out of business using artificial market power; (C) You correctly note the already lean conditions in trucking, and it is quite reasonable to discuss Uber-type companies in a broader historical/political context. But I think you’ve improperly equated the politics and economic thinking behind Ford/Carter transportation deregulation with much more radical finance-driven changes 20-30 years later, and I think the 1970s points you raise aren’t critical to your readers’ understanding of Uber/Convoy; (D) I imagine that Pando doesn’t get many letters attacking its failure to fully appreciate the problem of Uber and Uber-type companies, but if one fails to focus on the complete lack of competitive economics, and the huge dependence on (eventually) exploiting artificial market power, then I think you end up seriously understating the damage these companies could impose on the rest of society.

………

  1. You’ve improperly equated the Uber/Convoy and Amazon/EBay business models—one is based on legitimate /competitive economics; the other isn’t. Your post said that even if it’s not Convoy, “it’s safe to assume that sometime soon, tech will transform and restructure the $749 billion trucking sector” in a similar way to Uber and taxis, Amazon and booksellers, and EBay and newspaper classifieds. This totally misses a critical distinction– Amazon/EBay type business models were based on powerful competitive advantages over the businesses they were seeking to supplant while the Uber (and apparently Convoy) models seek to “disrupt” an industry with economics that are actually worse than existing competitors. Despite other issues, Amazon could offer consumers much wider choices than they ever had before, eliminated all of the costs of retailing, achieved huge warehousing and distribution efficiencies and clearly had scale economies that no traditional competitor could match. On the other hand, the Uber business model (software/brand company plus its “independent” contractors) fails each of these efficiency/competitive/technological tests. Uber isn’t transforming the consumer product—it offers the exact same service as traditional taxi/limo operators. Uber—even a future, more mature Uber– will have much higher driver, insurance, training, ownership and maintenance costs. The massive subsidies that create the appearance that Uber offers better/cheaper service are not sustainable. Since the mature Uber won’t be able to produce urban car service at significantly lower cost, there are no welfare gains from increased service or lower prices. There is no evidence that a reasonably well run taxi/limo company has bloated costs that cry out for new market entrants, and there’s ample evidence (dirty cars, horribly paid drivers) that industry costs are already extremely lean. Even Uber’s vaunted app is irrelevant to competitive economics. The ordering/pricing aspects of the app are a tiny piece of total costs, they don’t drive any big network economies, and apps can easily be copied. The app actually illustrates a serious Uber structural disadvantage. The economic key to any transportation company is the ability to balance supply (i.e. assets) against volatile demand in the medium/longer term. Thus profits depend on managers with long experience dealing with complex markets, and with sophisticated tools for capital planning and shorter-term price/supply adjustments. Airlines, railroads and shipping companies use some of the most advanced management systems anywhere in the private sector. Yellow Cab isn’t in the same league, but has managers with serious fleet management capabilities, and dispatchers who understand all the idiosyncrasies of local demand patterns (factory night shifts, conventions, bar/restaurant patterns). Uber has an app that ignores the both vehicle management, and market demand forecasting, has no local market knowledge and simply reacts to short-term car requests. Any urban transport operator faces much tougher economics than freight or intercity passenger operators, because there’s no way to reduce costs by smoothing demand peaks. Airline revenue management can massively reduce capital costs by getting price sensitive people to not fly on Friday afternoon. The Long Island Railroad has had peak/off-peak pricing for a hundred years, but rush hour is still rush hour, and the LIRR suffers with the cost of hundreds of cars that only get used ten hours a week. Surge pricing will not get anyone to shift their Saturday night out to fill empty cabs midday Tuesday, and there’s nothing else in the Uber model that addresses any of these fundamental problems with the economics of urban transport. Given the vastly greater complexity of trucking, the idea that a company with a software app could produce new efficiencies great enough to drive most existing trucking companies out of business seems too ludicrous to take seriously. As you clearly point out, there is lots of historical evidence that the last few decades of competition have already made existing operators pretty efficient. Unlike urban car services, trucking includes lots of companies (UPS, JB Hunt) with incredibly advanced industrial engineering capabilities. Anyone who thinks that there are tens of billions worth of trucking efficiencies out there—efficiencies that absolutely no one anywhere in the trucking industry could see—and that these billions can be generated by a scheduling app, but will be so huge that they’ll totally disrupt a$749 billion industry—is either delusional or willfully dishonest.

Uber-type companies need to be understood as a radical departure from Amazon/EBay type models. Instead of displacing competitors through actual efficiencies, or by creating entirely new markets, its model is entirely based on getting the world to believe that it will inevitably dominate the entire industry. This requires aggressively suppressing any discussion of empirical economic evidence (which would undermine its case) and emphasizing the factors driving inevitability–the brilliance of its early stage investors, the ruthlessness of management, and the raw political power of the company’s wealthy supporters. PR is a component of every start-up; at Amazon/EBay it played a supporting role and relied heavily on economic evidence of competitive strengths, but at Uber PR is the heart of the plan, and replaces the need to figure out how to provide much better service at much lower cost. As with 97% of Uber’s media coverage, the Fortune and Bloomberg pieces you cited totally avoided any discussion of competitive economics and tried to pass off its faithful repetition of Convoy’s “industry disruption is inevitable” PR theme as “news reporting”. But by equating the Amazon and Uber approaches you’ve fallen into the same trap. You’ve failed to tell your readers that there are no competitive economics behind the “inevitability” claim, and you’ve helped spread their “our valuation is legitimate because we’ll produce huge economic value just like Amazon and EBay” PR claim.

Read the rest.

While my (and Mark Ames’) point have made the point that Uber is designed to succeed by fobbing off many of its costs onto its employees and society, in doing so, we had ceded that Uber had in some way a built a better mousetrap.

He argues that it’s all an exercise in PR where the real business is to create a monopoly, or oligopoly, model where they sit astride the market extracting rents.

No wonder Wall Street loves Uber.

This is the Least Surprising News of the Day

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Russia accused Turkey of buying ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever oil. Turkish President Erdogan called this a false slander.

But guess what? Putin is ready to give the world pictures:

Russia’s defense ministry said on Wednesday it had proof that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and his family were benefiting from the illegal smuggling of oil from Islamic State-held territory in Syria and Iraq.

Moscow and Ankara have been locked in a war of words since last week when a Turkish air force jet shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian-Turkish border, the most serious incident between Russia and a NATO state in half a century.

Erdogan responded by saying no one had the right to “slander” Turkey by accusing it of buying oil from Islamic State, and that he would stand down if such allegations were proven to be true. But speaking during a visit to Qatar, he also said he did not want relations with Moscow to worsen further.

At a briefing in Moscow, defense ministry officials displayed satellite images which they said showed columns of tanker trucks loading with oil at installations controlled by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and then crossing the border into neighboring Turkey.

The officials did not specify what direct evidence they had of the involvement of Erdogan and his family, an allegation that the Turkish president has vehemently denied.

“Turkey is the main consumer of the oil stolen from its rightful owners, Syria and Iraq. According to information we’ve received, the senior political leadership of the country – President Erdogan and his family – are involved in this criminal business,” said Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov.

“Maybe I’m being too blunt, but one can only entrust control over this thieving business to one’s closest associates.”

“In the West, no one has asked questions about the fact that the Turkish president’s son heads one of the biggest energy companies, or that his son-in-law has been appointed energy minister. What a marvelous family business!”

………

The Russian defense ministry also alleged that the same criminal networks which were smuggling oil into Turkey were also supplying weapons, equipment and training to Islamic State and other Islamist groups.

“According to our reliable intelligence data, Turkey has been carrying out such operations for a long period and on a regular basis. And most importantly, it does not plan to stop them,” Sergei Rudskoy, deputy head of the Russian military’s General Staff, told reporters.

The defense ministry said its surveillance revealed hundreds of tanker trucks gathering at Islamic State-controlled sites in Iraq and Syria to load up with oil, and it questioned why the U.S.-led coalition was not launching more air strikes on them.

“It’s hard not to notice them,” Rudskoy said of the lines of trucks shown on satellite images.

Russian officials said their country’s bombing campaign had made a significant dent in Islamic State’s ability to produce, refine and sell oil.

Oh, snap!

I’ve Had It with These Motherf%$#Ing Shooters On ……… I’ve Just Had It!

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Some bunch of lunatics just shot up a Christmas party at a center for the disabled in San Bernadino, California:

At least 14 people were killed and 14 others injured in a shooting at a San Bernardino, Calif., center for people with developmental disabilities, Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. (Reuters)

At least two attackers opened fire at a holiday party for county employees in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and injuring 17 others in what the city’s police chief described as an act of domestic terrorism.

Five hours after the shooting, law enforcement officials swarmed a residential neighborhood not far from the complex where the shooting occurred after police “located what appeared to be the suspects’ vehicle,” Sgt. Vicki Cervantes, a San Bernardino police spokeswoman, said during a news conference.

Officials exchanged gunfire with the suspects, she said, after finding a dark SUV that appears to match a description given by police earlier in the day. Two suspects — a man and a woman — were killed during this shootout, Jarrod Burguan, chief of the San Bernardino Police Department, said during an evening news conference.

A third person was seen running away, and it is unclear if that person was involved in the shooting today, Burguan said. That person was in custody late Wednesday afternoon, he said. Authorities were still working on seeing if there was a third person involved in the shooting or possibly any other people, he said.

F%$# the NRA.

F%$# Wayne LaPierre.

F%$# US culture of violence.

Just F%$#.

Martin Shkreli Has Just Made Express Scripts® a Hero

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This is a bigger shock than Darth Vader being Luke Skywalker’s father.

Deeply and ineluctiblky evil pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts®, in partnership with the compounding pharmacy Imprimis®, will offer a $1.00 clone of Turing Pharmaceutical’s Dataprim anti-parasite drug:

Express Scripts, the largest pharmacy benefits manager in the U.S., said on Tuesday it will partner with Imprimis Pharmaceuticals to provide a $1 alternative to Daraprim, the 62-year-old drug for a rare parasitic infection. In September, the company that owned the drug stoked outrage when it hiked the drug’s price by more than 5,000 percent overnight.

 Imprimis, a California compounding pharmaceutical company, said in October it would make the alternative—a compounded formulation of the active ingredient in Daraprim, pyrimethamine, and another drug, leucovorin—available for $99 for a 100-count bottle, or less than $1 per pill.

 That compares with a price of $750 per pill for the drug provided by Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company that acquired Daraprim earlier this year and dramatically raised its price from $13.50 a tablet to $750.

Express Scripts® is so evil and incompetent that it stuns Richard Bruce Cheney, but Martin Shkreli has just allowed them to be heroes.

This is a mindf%$# on a level I would heretofore think impossible.

If Only the Ruling Included a Kick to the ‘Nads

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The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals just issued a permanent injunction against the Cook County Sheriff enjoining them from contacting credit card companies to threaten them into dropping n adult web site:

Nov 30 A federal appeals court on Monday ordered an injunction blocking the Cook County, Illinois, sheriff from pursuing any effort to stop credit card companies from handling transactions for Backpage.com, a classified ad website that the sheriff said promotes sex trafficking.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said Sheriff Thomas Dart, whose jurisdiction includes Chicago, violated Backpage’s First Amendment free speech rights by demanding that companies such as MasterCard Inc and Visa Inc ban the use of their cards to buy ads on the website.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Richard Posner said Dart’s “official bullying” and “campaign of suffocation” amounted to censorship, preventing even transactions for ads touting “indisputably legal” activities from being processed.

“As a citizen or father, or in any other private capacity, Sheriff Dart can denounce Backpage to his heart’s content. He is in good company; many people are disturbed or revolted by the kind of sex ads found on Backpage’s website,” Posner wrote.

But as sheriff of a county with more than 5.2 million people, Dart cannot make “dire threats,” including of possible prosecution, in a campaign “to crush Backpage’s adult section – crush Backpage, period, it seems,” the judge added.

………

The injunction bars Dart from coercing or threatening sanctions against card companies, processors and financial companies that do business with Backpage.com, while the company pursues its lawsuit to stop his campaign.

In August, U.S. District Judge John Tharp had rejected Backpage.com’s bid for a preliminary injunction.

Posner said that was a mistake because Backpage.com would probably succeed on the merits, and suffered “irreparable injury” from its loss of First Amendment freedoms.

Dart’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. His office has said it has made more than 800 arrests since 2009 connected to Backpage.com ads.

800 arrests from lurking on an internet web site looking for sex workers.

How about policing those gun shops in Cook County, just over the border from Chicago who are selling to any sort of skeevy straw buyers with two nickels to rub together instead of pursuing some masseuses giving tug jobs?

I hope that Backpage.com takes him to the cleaners in a civil suit.

I also would like to see the Department of Justice go after Sheriff Dart for criminal conspiracy to deprive Backpage.com of its civil rights, but I don’t expect to see that happen.

It should happen, but it won’t.

Russian Shootdown Update

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First, it appears that Erdogan’s Son Bilal owned the oil trucks that were bombed by Russia on the day before the shootdown. Funny how that works:

The prime source of money feeding ISIS these days is sale of Iraqi oil from the Mosul region oilfields where they maintain a stronghold. The son of Erdoğan it seems is the man who makes the export sales of ISIS-controlled oil possible.

 Bilal Erdoğan owns several maritime companies. He has allegedly signed contracts with European operating companies to carry Iraqi stolen oil to different Asian countries. The Turkish government buys Iraqi plundered oil which is being produced from the Iraqi seized oil wells. Bilal Erdoğan’s maritime companies own special wharfs in Beirut and Ceyhan ports that are transporting ISIS’ smuggled crude oil in Japan-bound oil tankers.

 Gürsel Tekin vice-president of the Turkish Republican Peoples’ Party, CHP, declared in a recent Turkish media interview, “President Erdoğan claims that according to international transportation conventions there is no legal infraction concerning Bilal’s illicit activities and his son is doing an ordinary business with the registered Japanese companies, but in fact Bilal Erdoğan is up to his neck in complicity with terrorism, but as long as his father holds office he will be immune from any judicial prosecution.” Tekin adds that Bilal’s maritime company doing the oil trades for ISIS, BMZ Ltd, is “a family business and president Erdoğan’s close relatives hold shares in BMZ and they misused public funds and took illicit loans from Turkish banks.

BTW, it now appears that between the Russians deploying a guided missile cruiser and S-400 long range SAMs, has created a no-fly zone in Syria, for the Turks:

The Turkish army has suspended flights over Syria as part of an ongoing joint military campaign with the United States against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) after it shot down a Russian jetfighter, sparking an unprecedented crisis between Ankara and Moscow.

The decision was taken following the eruption of the crisis with Russia in which a Turkish F-16 downed a Russian warplane early Nov. 24 after it allegedly violated Turkish airspace, according to diplomatic sources.

Sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, stressed that the suspension of the Turkish jetfighters’ participation in the U.S.-led military operations against ISIL was in fact a mutual decision taken with Russia, which also halted its aerial campaigns near the Turkish border. Both parties will continue to be as careful as possible in a bid to avoid a repetition of such incidents until they re-establish dialogue channels to reduce the tension.

Turkish and Russian military officials held initial talks on the incident on Nov. 25 as the office of the Chief of General Staff invited defense and military attachés from the Russian Embassy to military headquarters to inform them about how the incident took place. However, there is still a need for high-level political meetings to let the two parties reconcile and reduce the tension.

I would take the bit about Russia standing down, because we have numerous report of continued airstrikes by Russia against targets across Syria.

The important part of Turkey standing down in Syria is probably that the Kurds, who are now supported by both the Russians and the US are likely to have far greater freedom of operation, as they will not have to worry about Turkey bombing them.

Rather unsurprisingly, we now have a timeline, with the Russian jet in Turkish airspace for less than 18 seconds according to Turkish claims (how you warn an aircraft 10 times in 18 seconds is an activity I will leave as an exercise to the reader), which implies that this was not a timely response to a Russian provocation, but a predetermined and preplanned shootdown, which indicates that the (absurd) Turkish assertions that they did not know the plane was Russian are lies.

Meanwhile, the Russians have implemented a series of sanctions against Turkey.

Most significantly, it appears that this will involve the shutting down the tourist trade to Turkey, which is something like a quarter of Turkey’s tourism business, though it will also likely involve agricultural products and textiles.

Russia is not doing anything involving natural gas exports at this time.

I think that sanctions involving natural gas are highly unlikely:  Turkey actually pays for its gas, and were they to do so, it would spur alternate pipelines to Turkey, and perhaps to through Turkey to Europe.

It’s a mess, but in the short term, it appears, in the short term at least, that Turkey is coming out the worse on this, because they will be less able to prosecute their policies in Syria.

Cui Bono?

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As Bear who Swims observes, it turns out that the latest “bipartisan” efforts to reform criminal justice have been hijacked by a Koch brothers attempt to make it next to impossible to prosecute white colar crimes:

For more than a year, a rare coalition of liberal groups and libertarian-minded conservatives has joined the Obama administration in pushing for the most significant liberalization of America’s criminal justice laws since the beginning of the drug war. That effort has had perhaps no ally more important than Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by a pair of brothers who are well-known conservative billionaires. Now, as Congress works to turn those goals into legislation, that joint effort is facing its most significant test — over a House bill that Koch Industries says would make the criminal justice system fairer, but that the Justice Department says would make it significantly harder to prosecute corporate polluters, producers of tainted food and other white-collar criminals. The tension among the unlikely allies emerged over the last week as the House Judiciary Committee, with bipartisan support, approved a package of bills intended to simplify the criminal code and reduce unnecessarily severe sentences.

………

One of those bills — which has been supported by Koch Industries, libertarians and business groups — would make wholesale changes to certain federal criminal laws, requiring prosecutors to prove that suspects “knew, or had reason to believe, the conduct was unlawful,” and did not simply unknowingly violate the law.

Many laws already carry such a requirement — known as “mens rea” — but Congress left it out of many others, and libertarian groups say that has made it too easy to unknowingly violate obscure laws. Some environmentalists argue, however, that the real motive of Charles Koch, the philanthropist and the company chairman, in supporting the legislation is to block federal regulators from pursuing potential criminal actions against his family’s network of industrial and energy companies, a charge the company denies.

………


The proposed standard, Justice Department officials said, might have prevented guilty pleas in a variety of cases, such as the charges filed in 2013 against Jensen Farms of Colorado for failing to adequately clean cantaloupe, resulting in an outbreak of food-borne illness that was cited as a factor in at least 33 deaths. It also might have prevented the plea in the 2012 charges against the owner of a pharmacy who sold mislabeled, super-potent painkillers blamed in three deaths.

The same powers, officials said, have allowed the government to pursue charges against major corporations, like the 2011 conviction of Guidant, the giant medical device company, for failing to report safety problems with defibrillators, used to restart heartbeats.

………

Mark V. Holden, general counsel and senior vice president at Koch Industries, acknowledged in an interview this week that the company’s efforts to pursue revisions in federal criminal law were inspired in part by a criminal case filed 15 years ago against Koch Industries claiming that it covered up releases of hazardous air pollution at a Texas oil refinery. Those charges resulted in a guilty plea by the company and a $20 million penalty.

That case, Mr. Holden said, demonstrated that the Justice Department too often pursues criminal cases even when the accused had no criminal intent. The company itself discovered the problems and notified the authorities, he said, meaning the company did not knowingly violate the law.

Yeah, right.

Koch industries did nothing wrong.

If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida for you.

I was wondering when the other shoe would drop.

I kind of figured that there would be a Republican turd in the punch bowl.

This is a Feature, not a Bug

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What a surprise. Obama’s Jihad on whistle-blowers, and openness has led to a situation where there is no accountability in government programs:

Justice Department watchdogs ran into an unexpected roadblock last year when they began examining the role of federal drug agents in the fatal shootings of unarmed civilians during raids in Honduras.

The Drug Enforcement Administration balked at turning over emails from senior officials tied to the raids, according to the department’s inspector general. It took nearly a year of wrangling before the D.E.A. was willing to turn over all its records in a case that the inspector general said raised “serious questions” about agents’ use of deadly force.

The continuing Honduran inquiry is one of at least 20 investigations across the government that have been slowed, stymied or sometimes closed because of a long-simmering dispute between the Obama administration and its own watchdogs over the shrinking access of inspectors general to confidential records, according to records and interviews.

The impasse has hampered investigations into an array of programs and abuse reports — from allegations of sexual assaults in the Peace Corps to the F.B.I.’s terrorism powers, officials said. And it has threatened to roll back more than three decades of policy giving the watchdogs unfettered access to “all records” in their investigations.

“The bottom line is that we’re no longer independent,” Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, said in an interview.

The restrictions reflect a broader effort by the Obama administration to prevent unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information — at the expense, some watchdogs insist, of government oversight.

………

n a rare show of bipartisanship, the administration has drawn scorn from Democrats and Republicans. The Obama administration’s stance has “blocked what was once a free flow of information” to the watchdogs, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said at a hearing.

They have it wrong.

Obama simply does not believe in accountability for his administration, because he believes that they, and he, are honorable men, so we have the war on all forms of public accountability.

This is counter to both common sense, and to the intentions of the founders when they created the Constitution, who understood that a balance of powers, for which regulatory authorities need knowledge of what is going, is crucial to that idea.

Why I say that Barack Obama is the Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever™.

Our NATO “Ally”

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Journalists in Turkey uncovered arms shipments from the Turkish Military to ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever.

Of course, the response of Ankara was to charge those journalists with espionage and treason:

A court in Istanbul has charged two journalists from the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper with spying after they alleged Turkey’s secret services had sent arms to Islamist rebels in Syria.

Can Dundar, the editor-in-chief, and Erdem Gul, the paper’s Ankara bureau chief, are accused of spying and “divulging state secrets”, Turkish media reported. Both men were placed in pre-trial detention.

According to Cumhuriyet, Turkish security forces in January 2014 intercepted a convoy of trucks near the Syrian border and discovered boxes of what the daily described as weapons and ammunition to be sent to rebels fighting against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

It linked the seized trucks to the Turkish national intelligence organisation (MIT).

The revelations, published in May, caused a political storm in Turkey, and enraged president Recep Tayyip Erdogan who vowed Dundar would pay a “heavy price”.

He personally filed a criminal complaint against Dundar, 54, demanding he serve multiple life sentences.

Turkey has vehemently denied aiding Islamist rebels in Syria, such as the Islamic State group, although it wants to see Assad toppled.

“Don’t worry, this ruling is nothing but a badge of honour to us,” Dundar told reporters and civil society representatives at the court before he was taken into custody.

Understand, the very fact that they were charged with, “divulging state secrets” means constitutes an admission on the part of the Turks that they did sent arms to ISIS.

This is not a surprise.

Erdogan is looking to establish an Islamic state in Turkey, so it’s no surprise that he is supporting the Islamic state in Syria.

It does put that shoot-down of the Russian in perspective, though.

Germany Finally Does Something Useful for Greece

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It appears that Germany had combed through the data that it has managed to obtain from various tax havens, and has turned over to Greece the names of over 10,000 tax cheats:

Germany has handed Athens the names of more than 10,000 of its citizens suspected of dodging taxes with holdings in Swiss banks.

The inventory, which details bank accounts worth €3.6bn – almost twice the last instalment of aid Athens secured from creditors earlier this week – was given to the Greek finance ministry in an effort to help the country raise tax revenues.

They could have done this at the beginning of the whole crisis, and done a lot more to help both the Greek people and the Euro Zone.

The Germans wanted their pound of flesh, though, so it’s taken 3 years for them to turn over this data.

And of Course, the Media is Avoiding All Use of the Word Terrorist

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In (where else) Colorado Springs, Colorado, Home of Focus on the Family and the epicenter of the Christofascist movement in the United States, a gunman opened fired at a Planned Parenthood clinic:

A gun battle erupted inside a Planned Parenthood center here on Friday when a man armed with an assault-style rifle opened fire and began shooting at officers as they rushed to the scene. The authorities reported that three people were killed, a police officer and two civilians, and nine were wounded before the suspect finally surrendered more than five hours after the first shots were fired.

A police official in Colorado Springs, who was not authorized to speak, identified the man in custody as Robert Lewis Dear, 59. No other information about him was available.

The police did not describe the gunman’s motives. For hours on Friday, officers traded gunfire with him inside the clinic before they were able to shout to the man and persuade him to give up, according to Lt. Catherine Buckley, a police spokeswoman.

………

And only time that the “T-word” is used in the story is in a direct quote from a representative of Planned Parenthood:

In a statement, Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said the group had strong safety measures and worked closely with local law enforcement.

“We don’t yet know the full circumstances and motives behind this criminal action, and we don’t yet know if Planned Parenthood was in fact the target of this attack,” she said. “We share the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country. We will never back away from providing care in a safe, supportive environment that millions of people rely on and trust.”

This is an act of domestic terrorism, and should be treated as such and called such by the government, the press, and the public.

The Stupid, It Burns!

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In Canada, a Yoga class has been canceled because of accusations of cultural appropriation:

In studios across the nation, as many as 20 million Americans practice yoga every day. Few worry that their downward dogs or warrior poses disrespect other cultures.

But yoga comes from India, once a British colony. And now, at one Canadian university, a yoga class designed to include disabled students has been canceled after concerns the practice was taken from a culture that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy,” according to the group that once sponsored it.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Jennifer Scharf, who taught the class for up to 60 people at the University of Ottawa, said she was unhappy about the decision, but accepted it.

“This particular class was intro to beginners’ yoga because I’m very sensitive to this issue,” she said. “I would never want anyone to think I was making some sort of spiritual claim other than the pure joy of being human that belongs to everyone free of religion.”

Oh, you poor delicate flowers.

On a related note, I am starting a charity, the Association of Cranial Rectal Inversion Disease, (ACRID) for people with their heads chronically up their asses.

H/T Stephen Saroff      o o  The Bear who Swims      
                        (_)_____o      
                     ~~~~(______)~~~~~~~~~~
                         oo    oo

The New York Times Uses the “L” Word

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By the “L” word, I mean that the Times is calling Donald Trump a liar, and they are actually using that word:

America has just lived through another presidential campaign week dominated by Donald Trump’s racist lies. Here’s a partial list of false statements: The United States is about to take in 250,000 Syrian refugees; African-Americans are responsible for most white homicides; and during the 9/11 attacks, “thousands and thousands” of people in an unnamed “Arab” community in New Jersey “were cheering as that building was coming down.”

In the Republican field, Mr. Trump has distinguished himself as fastest to dive to the bottom. If it’s a lie too vile to utter aloud, count on Mr. Trump to say it, often. It wins him airtime, and retweets through the roof.

It’s nice that they are calling a lie a lie, but there are a lot of other cases where the word, “lie”is completely justified.

It be a real public service if they were to call other liars out in no uncertain terms.

And this is Mild Compared to the Trans-Pacific Partnership

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The WTO has just ruled that requiring the labeling of dolphin safe tuna is an unacceptable restraint of trade:

International trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) need to be carefully examined piece by piece because they can take precedence over a country’s own laws.

Case in point: the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Friday ruled that dolphin-safe tuna labeling rules — required by U.S. law, in an effort to protect intelligent mammals from slaughter — violate the rights of Mexican fishers.

As a result, the U.S. will have to either alter the law or face sanctions from Mexico.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how the “investor-state dispute settlement system” baked into trade agreements can force countries to compensate corporations when regulations cut into their profits.

The long-running quarrel over tuna reveals another way that domestic laws can be overturned by trade agreements: when countries can file trade challenges on behalf of domestic industries.

“This should serve as a warning against expansive trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would replicate rules that undermine safeguards for wildlife, clean air, and clean water,” said the Sierra Club’s Ilana Solomon in a statement.

This short of crap is a feature of trade deals, not a bug.

He’s Back!

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Remember Martin Shkreli?

The parasite who (ironically) bought the anti-parasite, and then raised the price by over 5,000%.

After the media sh%$ storm, he promised to lower the price.

He lied:

Turing Pharmaceuticals AG will not reverse its decision to raise the price of a decades-old drug, Daraprim, by more than 5,000 percent, backing out of previous statements that it would cut the cost by the end of the year.

In an announcement on Tuesday, the company said that the list price of Daraprim, which jumped from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill earlier this year, will not change. Instead, the company will offer hospitals up to 50 percent discounts and will make other adjustments to help patients afford Daraprim, a drug used to treat a parasitic infection and often given to HIV patients.

Out of the goodness of their hearts though, they will be selling a smaller bottle to make it a bit easier for hospitals to stock the drug.

We need villagers, torches, and pitchforks.