Just witnessed @Uber driver literally peeing in a cup and flinging it out window in city streets. Ridiculous
— Maria Bartiromo (@MariaBartiromo) April 11, 2016
Pee in a cup flying out a window = Uber.
Works for me.
Month: April 2016
Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever
Barack Obama just admitted that mishandling of classified data is OK for his friends:
In an interview Sunday with Fox News, President Obama indicated he doesn’t think Hillary Clinton really truly shared top secret government information on a private email server while she was secretary of state. “There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” Obama said.
This is another version of Nixon’s comment to David Frost, “If the President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal.”
He has gone after critics that has led to more prosecutions than every single president since the creation of the Republic, but when Hillary mishandles information, or when Leon Panetta leaks classified infomation to Kathryn Bigelow, the CIA’s version of Leni Riefenstahl, it’s OK, because it is his Evil Minions™.
The terms corrupt and hypocritical come to mind, and this is just repulsive.
Tweet of the Day
Dennis Skinner is a legend. #ResignDavidCameron pic.twitter.com/bMV70aIDeU— Sean O’ Donovan (@henriksen1) April 9, 2016
Our IP Regime Has Gotten Out of Hand
An artist has now gotten an exclusive license to a color:
Anish Kapoor, the famed sculptor, who created the ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture for the 2012 Olympics, has provoked the fury of fellow artists this week by acquiring the exclusive rights to use the blackest shade of black in the world. Vantablack, as the hue is known, derives its name from the terms Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays. Created in 2014 by scientists at UK-based company, Surrey NanoSystems Limited, for the purpose of disguising satellites, it is the blackest substance known to man, absorbing a maximum of 99.965% of radiation in the visible spectrum. With its light-absorbing properties, it has also been used to hide Stealth fighter jets from enemy eyes.
While aerospace companies will continue to be able to use the shade, in the art world, its use will be limited to Anish, as confirmed by a NanoSystems spokesman on Tuesday. Sir Anish did not respond to requests for comment. He did, however, speak about Vantablack last year, saying: “The material is astonishing, so deeply black that your eyes can’t really see it at all. It is like staring into the kind of black hole found in outer space.” According to reports, it seems as though a license-type of relationship exists between Anish and NanoSystems. There has been no word, however, on how much Anish paid in exchange for the exclusive right to use the Vantablack substance.
Portraitist Christian Furr is one of the artists that has spoken out about the limited availability of the color, telling the Daily Mail: “We should be able to use it. It isn’t right that it belongs to one man.” Furr, who had planned to use Vantablack in a series of paintings called Animals, elaborated, saying: “I’ve never heard of an artist monopolizing a material. Using pure black in an artwork grounds it.”
This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.
It will Still Be #ASSoL or #ASSLaw
It appears that in response to the internet discovering the potential initials of the Antonin Scalia School of Law, George Mason is attempting a re-branding:
Days after George Mason University’s law school announced that it was renaming itself after Justice Antonin Scalia, the school is slightly adjusting what it’s calling itself — thanks to unforeseen and unfortunate wordplay.
The name, officially, remains “The Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University” in honor of the late justice who died in February. But on its website and marketing materials, the name now reads: “The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University”.
That’s no accident.
The first five words of the “School of Law” version form an acronym that has a phonetic resemblance to a vulgarity, a source of amusement for some bloggers and tweeters and a source of non-amusement for George Mason’s administration, which agreed to rename itself after Justice Scalia at the request of an anonymous donor who pledged $20 million.
It’s not going to work.
When Allegheny (aka “Agony”) Airlines changed its name to US Air, it got nicknamed “Useless Air” at the press conference announce the renaming.
You need to embrace this, not try to sweep it under the rug.
I would suggest changing the name the the Scalia Hieratic Institute of Tutalge in Higher Educational Excellence in the Law.*
*Yes, it took me longer to come up with the acronym than it did to write the rest of this.
Of Course DCIA Brennan’s Not Telling the Truth. His Lips are Moving.
Over at Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler observes that CIA Director John Brennan’s assurances that CIA officers would not torture people would not have ended any of the prior instances of torture:
………
But it’s funny, too, because Brennan’s assurances about waterboarding would hold true even for the period when CIA was waterboarding detainees. Because CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding.
As a reminder, at least four detainees were known to be waterboarded under the Gloves Come Off Memorandum of Notification. The first, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, was waterboarded by Egyptian intelligence, though with Americans present.
The others were waterboarded as part of torture led by Mitchell and Jessen, who were not CIA officers, but instead contractors. CIA officers were definitely involved in that torture (as they were present for our outsourced Egyptian torture). But the torture was technically done by contractors.
Don’t get me wrong: CIA officers did engage in a whole lot of torture directly.
But Brennan’s squirmy language should only emphasize the fact that even when CIA was in the business of waterboarding, CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding. So Brennan’s guarantees that CIA officers won’t do so in the future are pretty meaningless guarantees.
Not a surprise. Brennan has been objectively pro-torture for over a decade.
The control of our state security apparatus has been ceded to people who aggressively pursue evil, self-destructive, and ineffective policies and programs.
The down-slope of empire for your perusal.
How Convenient!
Chris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State, who has been the vociferous opponent of voting rights in the United States, just sent out a Spanish language voter guide with the wrong date for the registration deadline.
If you believe that this was a good faith mistake, I have some mountains in Kansas to sell to you:
The Spanish-language voter guides from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office include two errors about registering to vote in the state, while the English guides do not include the same errors.
The Spanish-language guides said that voters could register up to 15 days before the election, while the English version included the correct deadline, 21 days before the election, as the Daily Kos flagged last week. And while the English guides told voters they could use their passport as a photo ID, the guides in Spanish did not include a passport in the list.
Kobach is notorious for his push to enact strict voter ID laws in the state, impose other voting restrictions, and pursue criminal prosecutions of alleged voting fraud. Kansas faces several challenges to its law requiring proof of citizenship for residents to register to vote.
This was deliberate, and his office should be raided by, and treated as a crime scene by the Feds.
This guy is a bigger threat to America than Osama bin Laden ever was.
Linkage
- Millennials are being dot.conned by cult-like tech companies (New York Post) It’s the same as the 1990s dotcom boom.
- Yiddish Curses for Republican Jews (Ma Hamatzav?) Yiddish is a wonderful language for curses. My favorite is, “May you find yourself insisting to a roomful of skeptics that your great-grandmother was “legitimately” raped by Cossacks.”
- Head of Chilean chapter of Transparency.org resigns after he is found in Panama Papers (Transparency International) Who says that irony is dead?
- Oops! Bill Clinton Says He ACCIDENTALLY Took $500,000 From Algeria During Key Arms Negotiation With State Department (Downtrend) The depressing thing is that this is probably completely legal.
- Radioactive wild boars rampaging around Fukushima nuclear site (The Independent) No people means more area for them to grow, and larger predators that might keep their numbers down have been crowded out by people over the past 1000 years. They are still too radioactive for people to eat them, so mysuggestion is to airdrop a few packs native predators (the now extinct Hokkaido wolf is very similar to the Gray Wolf, or the also now extinct and smaller Honshu wolf come to mind) into the area.
- Second Russian intelligence report on Turkey’s current assistance to Daesh (Voltairenet) Short version: Our “Ally” Turkey is aggressively supporting ISIS.
Plaster of Paris Bagel and Cream Cheese Paperweight:
Scorcese’s most underrated movie/
Dynastic Politics at Its Finest
Duncan D. Hunter, the son of Duncan L. Hunter, has been caught spending campaign funds on personal expenses, a federal crime:
Rep. Duncan Hunter — whose spending of campaign funds on video games made national news this week — said on Thursday that he’s cutting short a trip to Israel to return to the United States and rectify that problem and several other mistakes.
“There was no taxpayer money involved, and I take full responsibility,” Hunter, R-Alpine, said by telephone from his trip. “That’s it. I’m going to pay everything back by tomorrow morning, with interest.”
Hunter said he and his wife were the only two holders of his campaign’s credit card, which incurred most of the expenses. As of Thursday morning, he said, he is now the only card-holder.
Hunter’s call came amid a review by The San Diego Union-Tribune of an unusual pattern of expenditures listed on his disclosure forms as personal expenses or mistaken charges “to be paid back.”
Campaign finance reports show $5,339 in such charges during 2015 alone: $1,128 in travel, $1,650 to Hunter’s children’s school in El Cajon, $1,424 for video games and $1,137 paid to an oral and facial surgeon.
The forms list only one personal expense that was actually paid back by Hunter — $169 on Oct. 21, with no indication of which personal expense was being reimbursed. None of the other outstanding charges were listed as repaid, or as an ongoing debt to the campaign for the year-end accounting.
The Union-Tribune was the first to report this week that more than 60 video game transactions totaling $1,302 were being questioned by the Federal Election Commission. News outlets from Esquire to Roll Call picked up the story.
I will note that dynastic politics has a long of enabling corrupt and unqualified, whether we are talking about the Hapsburgs, the any number of the Bush clan, Ron Paul’s idiot son, and **ahem** another prominent Presidential candidate.
Bill Clinton Tried for Another Sistah Soulja Moment
Yes Bernie, He Does Owe Us an Apology
I’m sure that all of you read about Bill Clinton’s confrontation with Black Lives Matter protestors:
Former President Bill Clinton on Thursday faced down protesters angry at the impact his 1994 crime reforms have had on black Americans and defended the record of his wife, Hillary Clinton, who is relying on the support of black voters in her quest for the presidency.
The former president spent more than 10 minutes confronting the protesters at a campaign rally in Philadelphia for his wife over criticisms that the crime bill he approved while president led to a surge in the imprisonment of black people.
The Democratic race for the Nov. 8 election has become increasingly heated as Hillary Clinton, stung by a string of losses in state contests, has traded barbs with her rival for the party’s nomination, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, over who is better prepared for the White House.
In Philadelphia, several protesters heckled the former president mid-speech and held up signs, including one that read: “CLINTON Crime Bill Destroyed Our Communities.”
………
Bill Clinton, 69, who was president from 1993 to 2001, defended her 1994 remarks, which protesters say were racially insensitive, and suggested the protesters’ anger was misplaced.
“I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,” he said, shaking his finger at a heckler as Clinton supporters cheered, according to video of the event. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She (Hillary Clinton) didn’t.”
“You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter,” he told a protester. “Tell the truth.”
The worst thing here is not that Bill Clinton has lost his sh%$. It’s that he hasn’t lost his sh%$.
It has been clear that the Clinton campaign has realized that their attempts to present themselves as being progressive are not working.
They have been tacking right for the past few weeks, and this is Bill Clinton trying for another Sistah Soulja moment, wherein he reinforces his position with rich and comfortable white people by sh%$#ing all over black people.
Much like his crime bill and his disastrous welfare reform, when the Clintons are politically threatened, they throw minorities under the bus.
I Had a Major Freakout Today
I picked up Natalie from visiting her boy friend Ryan.
He was wearing a tank top, and I noticed that, much like me, he was a seriously hairy dude.
I described him as, “A Wookie.”
He entered college majoring engineering, though he is switching to music production.
While we were driving home, we discussed his music, and I discovered that, for a while at least, he played the trombone.
Hairy, engineer, trombone player.
That describes her dad as well.
My mind was completely blown.
Natalie was unamused.
Charlie, who was in the car with us, laughed so hard he nearly wet himself.
Who Says that Irony is Dead
Police in Pittsburgh are fighting mandatory drug tests because they claim that it is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy:
In an unprecedented protest against the routine offenses against due process and bodily integrity carried out in the name of the “war on drugs,” the union representing Pittsburgh police officers has condemned workplace drug and alcohol testing as a violation of the Constitution. Their zeal for the right to privacy only applies to themselves, however, not to the public they supposedly serve.
NBC affiliate WPXI reports that the Pittsburgh Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police “has filed a civil rights grievance against the city, claiming officers have been order to undergo drug and alcohol testing that is in violation of their contract.” Union attorney Bryan Campbell describes the policy as “an illegal search and seizure.”
To which those not protected by Blue Privilege might respond: Welcome to our world, FOP.
………
Another blatantly obvious reason for police opposing public scrutiny of their urine is that it could reveal the usage of such things as anabolic steroids. Police officers are no stranger to ‘Vitamin S’ as many of them have not only been caught using the rage-inducing hormones, but selling them as well.
Gee, you think?
Hero of the Day
Bruce Springsteen announced earlier today via Twitter that he is canceling his performance in North Carolina this weekend because of the organized assault by the state legislature against human rights.
Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen
In Seattle, police raided the apartment of a privacy activist.
They got a warrant by noting that the IP address of the activist was tied to child porn, but they did not tell the judge that the activist was running a Tor node, which meant that he was not the origin point, and had no way to know the content of the material:
One week after Seattle police searched the home of two well-known privacy activists for child porn and found nothing, critics are questioning why the department failed to include a key piece of information in its application for a warrant—the fact that the activists operated a Tor node out of their apartment, in order to help internet users all over the world surf the web anonymously.
“You knew about the Tor node,” said Eric Rachner, a cybersecurity counsultant and co-founder of Seattle’s Center for Open Policing, addressing the police department on Twitter, “but didn’t mention it in warrant application. Y’all pulled a fast one on the judge… you knew the uploader could have been literally anyone in the world.”
At 6 a.m. on March 30, Seattle police showed up at the Queen Anne apartment of Jan Bultmann and David Robinson with a search warrant to look for child porn, based on a tip that traced an illicit video to their IP address. Six officers arrived with two vans and spent over an hour doing forensic searches on the computers in the home. One officer stood in the bedroom and watched as Robinson got dressed.
They didn’t find anything. Bultmann and Robinson, both board members of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, were released after being detained in a van, but they were left shaken and upset.
………
Bultmann and Robinson had publicly advertised that they operated a Tor exit relay node—a node in the global Tor network, whose purpose is to give users the ability to browse the web anonymously. They said they operated the node as a service to dissidents in repressive countries, knowing full well that criminals might use it as well, much like any other communication tool. Tor stands for “the onion router,” a mechanism by which information is encrypted in layers as it passes through multiple, randomized nodes in the network.
In the aftermath of the search, the question was whether Seattle police had done their technical due diligence: Did they recognize that Bultmann and David were operating a Tor node? If so, did they realize that a tip about child porn coming from that IP address, absent any other evidence, likely meant someone else in another part of the world had uploaded the material and it had been randomly routed through their node?
………
“It’s like raiding the mailman’s house for delivering an illegal letter with no return address,” said one commenter on the tech website YCombinator. “Sure, it could have been sent by the mailman, but it could have been sent by anyone. There isn’t any more reason to suspect the exit node operators than anyone else in the whole world who could also have used the exit node.”
The warrant application (PDF), signed by King County Superior Court Judge Bill Bowman, makes no mention of the Tor node, much less Bultmann and Robinson’s public roles as privacy activists. Nor does a warrant application dated February 24 to obtain subscriber records related to the address from Wave G, the Internet service provider. Both documents suggest that Bultmann and Robinson are ordinary web users with a private home connection.
………
SPD spokesperson Sean Whitcomb said the department understands how Tor works and that before executing the search, officers knew that Bultmann and Robinson operated the Tor node out of their apartment. “Knowing that, moving in, it doesn’t automatically preclude the idea that the people running Tor are not also involved in child porn,” Whitcomb told NPR. “It does offer a plausible alibi, but it’s still something that we need to check out.”
But in a statement today, the department said its detectives didn’t know about the Tor node when they filed the warrant application on March 28. If true, this means detectives took notice of the Tor node after the judge approved the warrant, then carried out the exhaustive early-morning search two days later anyway.
Robinson questions whether police deliberately delayed checking the IP address against the public list of Tor nodes in order to avoid sharing exculpatory information with the judge. He believes a sound investigation would have checked the IP address as soon as the tip came in. “Why spoil a perfectly good warrant with facts?” he asked.
Of course, there will be on consequences for the police who deceived the judge.
There never is.
Why Listening to your Generals is Overrated
In Europe the US general in charge of NATO seems hell bent on triggering a confrontation with Russia, while in the Asia-Pacific, an admiral is determined to lobby for similar dick swinging with regard to the Chinese.
I would remind Barack Obama that it was this sort of sh%$ that had Harry S Truman making his well justified decision to fire Douglas MacArthur:
The U.S. military’s top commander in the Pacific is arguing behind closed doors for a more confrontational approach to counter and reverse China’s strategic gains in the South China Sea, appeals that have met resistance from the White House at nearly every turn.
Adm. Harry Harris is proposing a muscular U.S. response to China’s island-building that may include launching aircraft and conducting military operations within 12 miles of these man-made islands, as part of an effort to stop what he has called the “Great Wall of Sand” before it extends within 140 miles from the Philippines’ capital, sources say.
Harris and his U.S. Pacific Command have been waging a persistent campaign in public and in private over the past several months to raise the profile of China’s land grab, accusing China outright in February of militarizing the South China Sea.
………
Harris and PACOM officials have been lobbying the National Security Council, Capitol Hill and Pentagon leaders to send a clear message that they won’t tolerate continued bullying of neighbors. Part of the approach includes more aggressive, frequent and close patrols of China’s artificial islands, Navy Times has learned.
These guys want to force humiliating back-down from the Chinese, which isn’t going to happen.
This is John Foster Dulles style brinksmanship, and in addition to being batsh%$ insane, it is not something that should be decided by the uniformed military.
How about reasserting civilian control of the military, Mr. Obama?
Kids These Days!
I was watching an oldies TV station, MeTV, and Star Trek came on, the original, 1st season, “Operation — Annihilate!”.
I realized that Charlie had never seen an episode, so I called him down to watch.
He went up to get his glasses during an ad break, and he never came back down.
16 year olds are tough to teach anything.
Asshole of the Day
The Columbia Broadcast System:
For “Star Trek” fans it was like finding a lost Shakespeare play — only to have it snatched away by the playwright’s heirs.
Last fall an unused script for the cult 1960s television show turned up after being forgotten for years. Its author, the science-fiction writer Norman Spinrad, announced that it would become an episode of a popular Web series, “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II,” which features amateur actors in the classic roles of Capt. James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and other crew members of the starship Enterprise.
But then another player stepped in: CBS, which said it owned the script and blocked a planned Web production of it. Trekkies were appalled. “These executives should be phasered on heavy stun,” said Harmon Fields of Manhattan, who called himself “a ‘Star Trek’ fan of galactic proportions.”
………
The story begins in 1967, after Mr. Spinrad wrote an acclaimed episode of the original series, “The Doomsday Machine.” “I did ‘The Doomsday Machine’ fast,” Mr. Spinrad, 71, said by phone from his home in Greenwich Village, “and then they said: ‘We’re in a hole. Can you write something in four days?’ ”
The result was “He Walked Among Us,” which the producers envisioned as a dramatic vehicle for the comedian Milton Berle. His character is a well-meaning but messianic sociologist whose conduct threatens to destroy the planet Jugal. The crew of the Enterprise must remove him without disrupting the normal development of the culture.
………
Mr. Spinrad soon donated his sole copy of “He Walked Among Us” and other papers to California State University, Fullerton. With several other drafts of the script, it lay in the archives for decades. Sharon Perry, the university’s archivist and special collections librarian, said she had received only one inquiry about “He Walked Among Us” in her 27 years there.
But in October, at the annual New York City Collectible Paperback and Pulp Fiction Expo, a man seeking Mr. Spinrad’s autograph showed up with a copy of the script, which he said he found at another convention. A few months later Mr. Spinrad began selling the script on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com, and the producers of “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II” learned of it.
Based in Ticonderoga, N.Y., “Phase II” is one of numerous fan-generated “Star Trek” Internet series, this one named for “Star Trek Phase II,” Mr. Roddenberry’s failed 1977 attempt to revive his creation for television. This Web series is distinguished by its fidelity to the original’s sets, costumes, props, music and other elements, as well as appearances by some original cast members and new stories by writers like Ms. Fontana.
Over the years CBS gained the television, online and merchandising rights to “Star Trek.” But because the “Phase II” cast and crew make no money from their work, the network usually allows them to indulge their hobby.
Around the time Mr. Spinrad offered “He Walked Among Us” online (confusingly he published an unrelated novel with the same title in 2010) he arranged with the “Phase II” senior executive producer, James Cawley, who also portrays Captain Kirk, to film it. The writer said he was “blown away” by the series and planned to direct the episode himself next fall.
But this month, Mr. Cawley said, CBS asked him in an e-mail to cease and desist. CBS also contacted Mr. Spinrad, who withdrew “He Walked Among Us” from the Internet.
The network said it was now “considering opportunities to offer licensed copies of the work.”
F%$# CBS.
Without lube.
What the Hairy Saroff Said
Heh
My hirsute brother observes that while Bernie supporters may see the invitation of Sanders to a talk at the Vatican, it is also wrong on a number of levels:
I have a feeling that the latest campaign news, Bernie Sanders plans short hiatus from New York campaign trail to speak at the Vatican, will make so people happy.
I am not one of them.
Whatever virtues the current Pope has, to my mind this is inappropriate.
The Pope is a foreign leader (Prince Bishop of the Vatican City State), so he (like Netanyahu) should have no role in American elections.
Go read the rest.
He’s right, even if it made the Clinton’s heads explode.
It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!
No bank failures, but I missed one last week:
- Veterans Health Administration Credit Union, Detroit, MI
And on Wednesday, the NCUA closed 6 credit unions in Pennsylvania:
- Triangle Interests % Service Center Federal Credit Union, Bensalem, PA
- Servco Federal Credit Union, Bensalem, PA
- O P S EMP Federal Credit Union, Bensalem, PA
- Electrical Inspectors Federal Credit Union, Bensalem, PA
- Chester Upland School Employees Federal Credit Union, Chester, PA
- Cardozo Lodge Federal Credit Union, Bensalem, PA
I gotta figure that these are all somehow tied together, and a quick Google reveals that they all had the same CEO.
Rather unsurprisingly, the FBI is looking into the circumstances of the failures.
Here is the Full NCUA list.
Ted Cruz Makes Geraldo Rivera Make Sense
Rivera has observed that Ted Cruz’ attack on “New York Values” is actually an anti-Semitic code:
Geraldo Rivera appeared on Fox & Friends this morning to defend his statement on The O’Reilly Factor Thursday night that Ted Cruz is an anti-Semite, and that his words to the voters of Iowa proved him to be such.
Steve Doocy began by asking, plainly, “Geraldo, why do you think Ted Cruz is antisemitic?”
“First of all, Steve, good morning,” Rivera replied. “In terms of this Ted Cruz situation and this ‘New York values’ situation, when you say ‘New York, money, and media,’ what do you need really before you get to the caricature — the dog-whistle — the code-word, of what this man is trying to say?”
“What do you need? A cartoon of someone with a big nose from another era?” he asked. “This was designed to bring to the heartland the negative impression of greedy New Yorkers trying to take money out of people’s pockets.”
“The association is indelible, and undeniable, and you can’t explain it [away],” Rivera continued. “There are a million ways to put down socialism and liberalism and excessive government spending and the welfare state — a million ways without suggesting that you’re talking about a particular group of people.”
When pressed about Cruz’s later appearances in Jewish community centers, River replied that “what you say in the matzah ball factory is different from what you say in Iowa.”
Of course, I noted this 4 months ago, but Geraldo is kind of slow.