Clinton either narrowly won or it was a draw — against a guy who has gone as far off the grid as Col. Kurtz. Even I find that remarkable.— Billmon (@billmon1) October 20, 2016
I didn’t watch the whole debate, and what I did watch was influenced by copious quantities of alcohol, but my impression was rather similar.
Harry Shearer has launched a $125 million fraud and contract-breach lawsuit against Vivendi and StudioCanal over the 1984 rockumentary classic This Is Spinal Tap. The complaint, filed Monday in California federal court, is packed with enough nuggets to instantly make this a must-watch “Hollywood accounting” case. Through the lawsuit, Shearer also reveals he is attempting to claw back rights to the film and its continually popular soundtrack.
Shearer, perhaps best known for the 23 characters he voices on The Simpsons, co-created the semi-fake band Spinal Tap in the 1970s with Christopher Guest and Michael McKean. The film, directed by Rob Reiner and featuring Shearer as bassist Derek Smalls, was produced and released by Embassy Pictures. After a series of transactions, rights to Spinal Tap landed in the hands of Vivendi, the French conglomerate that once had the ambitious goal of becoming one of the largest studios in the industry.
Despite the film’s legacy and Spinal Tap’s enduring success as an actual band able to sell out arenas, Shearer’s company Century of Progress Productions alleges that the four lead creatives have received just $81 in merchandising income and $98 in musical sales income in the past three decades from the franchise.
According to the complaint, the original 1982 production agreement called for Shearer, McKean, Guest and Reiner to get 40 percent of net receipts. In Hollywood, though, calculating contingent profit participation often triggers disputes that go up to 11. This one certainly did.
………
“Particularly given that Vivendi has offset fraudulent accounting for revenues from music copyrights against equally dubious revenue streams for film and merchandising rights also controlled by Vivendi subsidiaries, Shearer is concurrently filing notices of copyright termination for publishing and recording rights in Spinal Tap songs he co-wrote and co-recorded, as well as in the film itself,” states the complaint.
$179 after more than 30 years?
Clearly people downloading from the internet are responsible for this.
Anyone who believes the United States is not fighting enough wars in the Middle East can be happy this week. We have just plunged into another one. Twice in recent days, cruise missiles fired from an American destroyer have rained down on Yemen. The Pentagon, a practiced master of Orwellian language, calls this bombing “limited self-defense.”
Remember those satirical naked statues of Donald Trump?
Someone has done this for Hillary Clinton:
A statue of a cloven-hoofed and naked Hillary Clinton barely lasted an hour in lower Manhattan Tuesday before a furious supporter pounced on it and called cops — a lifetime compared to the mock Donald Trump that drew laughing crowds to Union Square in August.
I want to go live in a cave.
One of the subtexts of the charter school movement is that it has the destruction of the public teachers’ unions as a goal.They have created a no-accountability zone to do this, and many of the charter schools have used it as an excuse to be abusive employers.
What can charter school teachers do? Join a union?
Actually, yes they can, and they can go on strike too:
When the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck in 2012, then-CEO of the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) Juan Rangel took the opportunity to sing the praises of the city’s charter schools, which remained open as CTU members walked the picket lines.
“I think parents are going to be frustrated when they see 50,000 kids (charter students) having an education, going to school without interruption and their kids” are not, Rangel told the Chicago Tribune.
Four years later, the tables have turned. An eleventh-hour agreement between the CTU and the school district headed off a second strike in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) last week. But there’s another teacher walkout still brewing—this time, at the UNO Charter School Network (UCSN), a group of 15 publicly-funded, privately-managed schools established by Rangel’s organization, from which he resigned in 2013. For the past seven months, UCSN teachers have been in a tough contract fight with management. If no agreement is reached this week, teachers plan to strike starting this Wednesday.
Oh, snap!
The ISDS for the TPP explicitly excludes tobacco from the ISDS.
This raises an interesting point: Why is this OK, but mining companies who poison the surrounding people, or Chiquita spraying its workers with toxic pesticides deserves protection.
Now, people are beginning to notice the moral inconsistency:
One of the last pieces of horse-trading that went on in order to conclude the TPP deal involved corporate sovereignty, aka investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), and tobacco. As we reported a year ago, a “carve-out” for tobacco was agreed, which was designed to assuage fears that tobacco companies would use TPP’s ISDS mechanism to challenge health measures like plain packs — something that Philip Morris attempted against both Australia and Uruguay. Now, it looks like the idea is spreading, as Simon Lester points out on the International Economic Law and Policy Blog:
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More generally, the appearance of this carve-out for tobacco raises a question Mike asked a year ago: if corporate sovereignty is such a bad idea for this industry, why not for others that can cause harm — like the extractive industries, for example? And once people start asking these kinds of questions, it’s not long before they realize that putting companies above national laws, and letting them sue governments in supranational tribunals, makes no sense at all for any sector. Calls to drop the entire ISDS system have been growing for a while; the latest move by Australia and Singapore is likely to make them louder.
True dat.
Not the good stuff, this ain’t a celebration, I’ve found a very cheap and inoffensive Scotch, Inver House Green Plaid.
Not bad for a plastic bottle.
9:19 pm: 19 minutes in, and none of the words.
I’m taking a drink anyway.
This debate seems far more substantive than the other too.
9:28 pm: Clinton ignored Wallace for about 30 seconds. Take a sip.
9:31 pm:“You’re a puppet.” This is a drink thing. Adding to the list.
9:32 pm: Clinton red baits. Take a drink. Adding to the list.
9:34 pm: Trump says that Clinton and Obama have been played by Putin. I count this as “loser” one of the words. I drink.
9:36 pm: How could I have forgotten Trump saying, “I never said that.” He said it, I am drinking. (Sip, not whole shot)
9:40 pm: My son said, “It’s a good thing that you didn’t put Trump saying, “A lot of things,” on your list. You would be dead by now.
9:41 pm: I should have included Trump bringing up “NAFTA”. Taking a sip.
9:44pm: Hillary said “Obama”. Take a sip.
9:47 pm:Trump mentions Nafta, and says “She totally lied,” two sips.
9:49 pm:Now we are getting hostile, Charlie quoted an internet meme, “Trump and Clinton are like the divorced parents fighting over custody. I wanna live with Grandpa Bernie!”
9:51 pm:Hillary dropped the bin Laden bomb. Oh snap!!!
9:52 pm: Trump says, “Yuge.” Full shot.
9:55 pm: Trump: “I did not say that.” Finish off shot glass.
9:58 pm: Trump says “Wrong” meaning “I didn’t say that”, drink. Hillary brought up Khan, drink.
10:04 pm: Tax returns. I should have had it on the list. Taking a drink.
10:08 pm: My son is worried that I will kill myself if I keep going. Putting away the alcohol and changing the channel when I can still type.
I am doing the debate drinking game. It is the only way that I can tolerate listening to either of them.
Here is what I have for phrases or actions that would lead to a drink.
There is a non-zero risk of alcohol poisoning:
My live blogging will be mostly about drinking.
Investigative reporter Murray Waas has, discovered a coverup of Donald Trump’s sexual misconduct orchestrated by the publisher of the National Enquirer.
This was done, at least in part, to boost his campaign for President:
Story summary: Only two weeks after Donald Trump began his presidential campaign, a former hedge fund manager informed the Trump Organization that he might publish sexually suggestive photographs of Trump online—which would have early on raised the issue of Trump’s misogyny and treatment of women that has only belatedly come into focus. To suppress the photographs, Trump and his attorney turned to a close friend and political supporter, David Pecker, the CEO of the National Enquirer. Over a period of weeks, the hedge fund manager, Jeremy Frommer, sought out contracts with the National Enquirer worth hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars, and lesser favors from Trump personally, according to contemporaneous records, including emails, text messages, and internal company documents. Some National Enquirer executives privately worried that had they followed through, they would be using corporate funds to pay hush money to assist Trump’s presidential campaign, a potential violation of federal campaign finance laws.
I would note that John Edwards beat the wrap, because Edwards, unlike most politicians, practiced law in a court, and he declined to cut a deal because he (correctly) believe that a jury would not convict.
Still, from a political perspective, it is a rather fascinating story, if just because one of the principals in this affair had a similar role in the revelation of Arnold Schwartzenegger’s extramarital activities.
Keith Olbermann relates how the vast right wing conspiracy attempted to recruit him during Penisgate, and explains how that motley crew is now running the Trump campaign.
Olbermann is rather kind to Trump, and suggests that they are using Trump as a means to an end: “Getting the band back together,” to launch another anti-Clinton jihad.
I’m not sure if I agree, but it is fun as hell to watch him:
Spoiler: Keith dated Laura Ingram, which I find kind of incongruous.
In what is clearly a response to US pressure Ecuador cut off Assange’s internet access:The Ecuadorian government confirmed Tuesday that it cut off WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s internet connection because of his anti-secrecy platform’s publication of emails allegedly stolen from Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.
“The Government of Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate,” Ecuador said in a statement.
“Accordingly, Ecuador has exercised its sovereign right to temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications network within its Embassy in the United Kingdom.”
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Despite Tuesday’s development, Ecuador will continue to provide asylum to Assange, according to the statement.
The Australian activist has been living in the embassy in London since 2012. He is avoiding a rape charge in Sweden that he claims is political and will lead to his extradition to the U.S. over previous leaks.
Assange’s internet was disconnected on Saturday, according to WikiLeaks. The organization has continued to publish daily batches of emails from Podesta’s account.
Ecuador has not confirmed that US pressure led to this, though Wikileaks has asserted that this is the case, and I’m inclined to agree.
The juxtaposition of ham-handedness, cluelessness, and incompetence is a classic hallmark of the US foreign policy and intelligence apparatus.
Assange was prepared for this, how could he NOT be prepared for this, and so the emails continue to come out, but someone in the US state security apparatus decided to lean on Ecuador, and generated more attention while influencing the flow of information not one whit.
*Using a Pringles can, you can make a directional Wi-Fi antenna with a much higher gain, getting a point to point range of over a mile.
A bunch of sentient lightbulbs and refrigerators uniting to destroy a major infrastructure is cyberpunk as hell. https://t.co/ZjRJM7Rb3T— Søren Ragsdale (@sorenrags) September 27, 2016
This is awesome.
Monty Python
Over the past few years, the denizen of the Stygian moral darkness known as Walmart, facing problems with improperly stocked shelves, filthy stores, employee pilfering, and declining same store sales, has discovered that not treating your employees like crap can improve their performance:
A couple of years ago, Walmart, which once built its entire branding around a big yellow smiley face, was creating more than its share of frowns.
Shoppers were fed up. They complained of dirty bathrooms, empty shelves, endless checkout lines and impossible-to-find employees. Only 16 percent of stores were meeting the company’s customer service goals.
The dissatisfaction showed up where it counts. Sales at stores open at least a year fell for five straight quarters; the company’s revenue fell for the first time in Walmart’s 45-year run as a public company in 2015 (currency fluctuations were a big factor, too).
To fix it, executives came up with what, for Walmart, counted as a revolutionary idea. This is, after all, a company famous for squeezing pennies so successfully that labor groups accuse it of depressing wages across the American economy. As an efficient, multinational selling machine, the company had a reputation for treating employee pay as a cost to be minimized.
But in early 2015, Walmart announced it would actually pay its workers more.
I don’t know from personal experience, I don’t set foot in Walmart, but the reporting is that the stores are better stocked, cleaner, and better run now, and same store sales are up.
Part of that could be that its own employees can afford to buy more.
In response to poorly paid cafeteria workers going on strike at the university, Harvard is recruiting scabs:
Harvard is hiring. Applicants must be willing to work for free in the dining halls.
On Monday, the Ivy League school entered the sixth day of its standoff with dining hall workers, who have gone on strike for the first time in over 30 years. The cafeteria staff are demanding affordable health care and base pay of $35,000 for year-round workers. But workers and Harvard negotiators can’t come to an agreement. And while dining hall workers strike for better wages, Harvard is hiring scabs.
After nearly six months of bargaining with the university, cafeteria staff walked out on Wednesday. In anticipation of a strike, Harvard allegedly stockpiled three days’ worth of frozen foods. But now on the strike’s sixth day, students say they’re living on undercooked chicken prepared by untrained strikebreakers while administrators scour the faculty for any employees willing to serve breakfast.
The university is “actively seeking for volunteers all across campus,” an email from Harvard’s Campus Services implored. The email, obtained by the Harvard Crimson clarified that only employees who were not paid hourly and did not qualify for overtime would be allowed to work for free in the dining halls.
………
“Dining hall workers feel like they have really modest demands,” Tiffany Ten Eyck, a spokesperson for Local 26, the Boston-based union that represents Harvard dining hall workers told The Daily Beast. “Especially because Harvard has the resources that it does.”
The dining hall staff is asking Harvard to roll back a proposal that would hike health care costs for employees. The workers also want a guaranteed salary of $35,000 for year-round staffers.
Harvard has an endowment of nearly $40 billion, and it enjoys an annual operating surplus of over $60,000,000.00.
Harvard is balking at a $5000 a year raise for 750 employees, and it wants them to pay more in medical premiums and copays.
To quote Otto from Repo Man, “F%$# that.”
How Wells Fargo Exemplifies the Drivers of Big Corporate Fraud:
You should read the whole thing, but here are the bullet points from the article:
Go read the rest, and pay particular attention to the SEC under the Reagan administration legalizing stock buybacks in 1982. Prior to that they were considered illegal stock manipulation.
In 1996, an evolutionary biologist attempted to create an improved chicken by separating out the hens that outperformed their fellow hens.
It was an unmitigated disaster, and it bears notice in companies which use a similar process, “Stack Ranking”, to manage their employees.
Amazon is the most notable, and most aggressive adherent of this philosophy:
Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, recently took some heat when the New York Times exposed working conditions and the corporate culture at his firm. ‘Ruthless’ and ‘demanding’ are two descriptors of the working environment, sink or swim. Amazon is not alone. Some of the leading recent startups have competitive employment requirements, a survival of the fittest approach. They want the best and push out the rest. It’s a simple notion to strengthening your company and the most efficient way to assemble optimally performing groups, organizations, and sports teams. Or at least that has been the dominant rhetoric behind models of group productivity within both the business and sporting industries. Stack-ranking and other business practices of individual selection have been widespread, from General Electric to Microsoft, and is a standard modus operandi in sports teams including the focus of this piece, the European soccer team, Real Madrid. However, the wisdom behind the application of these models, both in business and sport, is under scrutiny. To begin to see why, we turn to evolutionary biology.
In 1996, evolutionary biologist William Muir conducted a series of unusual experiments at Purdue University. Muir was looking to explore the various methods of group productivity with regards to egg production. He wanted to create a group of ‘Super-Chickens’ who would produce more eggs than any other coop. He followed the logic that many employers today tout: take the best individuals, put them in a group together, and then let the magic happen. Muir selected the most productive hens from each cage and bred the next generation from them. Muir also identified the cages that collectively were more productive at laying eggs in comparison to other cages. He then continued to selectively breed using these two separate groups and observed the levels of production.The outcome of this study was striking; selecting the best group cages produced hens that thoroughly outperformed the line of individually more productive ‘Super-Chickens’. For the cage-selected line, after just five generations, the number of eggs per hen catapulted from 91 to 237, the mortality rate of the group crashed from 68% to 9%, and the hens also displayed improved wellbeing as a function of the reductions of pecking and negative social interactions.
The Super-Chicken group did not fare so well. In fact, this line of hens had some other, rather less desirable qualities. They presented signs of aggression, violence, dysfunction and waste. There was an extremely high prevalence of fatal cannibalistic pecking within the group and general agonistic behaviors. Those in the cage who did not die from these cannibalistic attacks (there was an 89% mortality rate) were left with severe feather loss, life-threatening abrasions and other serious physical injuries. The hens were more intent on fighting amongst each other than doing anything productive! Hopefully that doesn’t sound like any workplaces you know…
So what happened? Why did the best egg-layers from the first generation yield something akin to the Gremlins of the eponymously named 80s movie? What Muir realized was that instead of identifying the most efficient hens, he had identified the hens that successfully conveyed the appearance of being the most productive. Those hens that individually produced the most did so by being adept at aggressively suppressing the other hens from laying eggs
. Taking the more productive individuals meant taking the more aggressive hens. Breeding repeatedly from those which were most productive actually favored those which were most aggressive. Placing these hens together in cages led to extreme violence (only three of these psychotic hens actually survived!). Muir ended up running out of the Super-Chickens and had no choice but to end monitoring them and only continue with the other group. Ultimately, the process of selecting at the individual level took to an extreme the challenge of cooperation arising from individuals selected for selfishness.The behaviour of the psychotic hens fits rather well with the normative assumptions of classical economic and game theory, which suggest that individuals will act selfishly in situations that afford them the opportunity. In group situations, individuals are consistently expected to identify, and act on, the dominant Nash strategy—the strategy that cannot be beaten. Just think of the classic ‘tragedy of the commons’, where people are predicted to free-ride on and exploit the contributions of others to a shared resource. Furthermore, the selfish actions of the Super-Chickens also support the theme of much evolutionary psychology from the 1960’s, which was based on the principle that individual interests will always outweigh the interests of the group.Given an opportunity to benefit from the efforts of others, selection will favor those which seize the day.
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Some companies have begun to pay heed. Recently, Microsoft abandoned its longstanding stack-ranking approach. It recognized that stack-ranking was undermining team cooperation, employees withheld information to avoid damaging their own rank, sought teams where they could rank better, and ensured new team members failed. As an outcome to stack-ranking, it seems obvious. Yet many companies pursued it, just as breeders choose super-chickens. For Jeff Bezos, he may not agree. Amazon is a hugely successful company, at least in sales and turnover. It is not a particularly profitable company. When Microsoft was the behemoth of its domain, its aggressive policies eventually led it into trouble, barely avoiding being broken apart. Enron thought it had the smartest guys in the room. It’s endemic corruption ultimately crumbled the company. A company led by super-chickens may not be the best long-term strategy.
Much of the American management class, and Jeff Bezos in particular, seem to see Lord of the Flies as a model for how to manage employees.
They are selecting for narcissistic sociopaths in their organization, and in the long run that is not a good thing.
3 hours working to root Charlie’s new phone (Samsung J3), and Samsung has made it difficult.
3 F%$#ing hours later, and one system option that everyone assumed was set, and it works, and now he can use Titanium Backup to restore all his apps plus his data.
Still, Gaah!
The Walloonian Parliament just put a stake through the heart of the Canada/EU trade pact:
The EU’s once-mighty trade negotiators never dreamed that their powers would be stripped from them so unceremoniously — and possibly for good.
The Francophone parliament of the Federation of Wallonia-Brussels — only 10 minutes’ walk from EU headquarters — stands to win a place in history for sinking the EU’s landmark trade deal with Canada and potentially for scuppering the European Commission’s ability to lead the world’s biggest trade bloc for many years.
Failure to conclude the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) by this month’s deadline would be a devastating blow to the EU, which has spent seven years working on the tariff-slicing agreement with Ottawa.
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The Federation of Wallonia-Brussels parliament, which focuses on the cultural and educational concerns of 4.5 million French speakers in Belgium, voted Wednesday evening to reject CETA because of worries about public services and agriculture. Laetitia Naklicki, a spokesperson for Minister-President Rudy Demotte, said this vote meant that the government of the French-speaking community “would not issue its full power for signing CETA to the federal government.”
Unless the Belgian central government can find an imaginative compromise quickly, the EU will be unable to corral the signatures of all 28 EU countries before an EU-Canada summit on October 27. The pressure on Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel is only likely to increase Friday, when another regional assembly, Wallonia, also voted against CETA.
Under Belgium’s complex constitution, all five regional governments must approve the trade deal before the federal government can give consent.
The fact that these deals have become increasingly more difficult to pass, and as such will become far more limited in scope.
This is a good thing.
I really do hope that this is the start of a trend.
The increasing investment of authority in anti-democratic institutions has been a disaster for everyone but the elites staff, and directly benefit from, those institustions.
Facebook was accused of having a liberal bias in its trending news by the flying monkey right wing.
This might be true, but as Stephen Colbert noted, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Facebook’s response was to replace them with an algorythm, and this algorythm has been repeatedly punked:
The Megyn Kelly incident was supposed to be an anomaly. An unfortunate one-off. A bit of (very public, embarrassing) bad luck. But in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system — and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended — the site has repeatedly promoted “news” stories that are actually works of fiction.
As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate. On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record.
“I’m not at all surprised how many fake stories have trended,” one former member of the team that used to oversee Trending told the Post. “It was beyond predictable by anyone who spent time with the actual functionality of the product, not just the code.” (The team member, who had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Facebook, spoke on the condition of anonymity.)
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There was the thinly-sourced story, on Aug. 31, of a Clemson University administrator who kicked a praying man off campus. (The sordid tale, aggregated by a right-wing outlet, has been soundly debunked by the school.)
The next week, on Sept. 8, Facebook promoted a breathless account of the iPhone’s new and literally magical features, sourced from the real news site Firstpost’s satirical Faking News page. The day after, Facebook trended a news release from the “Association of American Physicians and Surgeons” — a discredited libertarian medical organization — as well as a tabloid story claiming that the Sept. 11 attacks were a “controlled demolition.”
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Last May, however, Facebook faced a torrent of high-profile accusations about political bias on the Trending editorial team — so much so that, in the aftermath, the company decided to tweak the role humans play in approving Trending topics. On Aug. 26, Facebook laid off its editorial team and gave the engineers who replaced them a much different mandate when it came to vetting news. Where editors were told to independently verify trending topics surfaced by the algorithm, even by cross-referencing “Google News and other news sources,” engineers were told to accept every trending topic linked to three or more recent articles, from any source, or linked to any article with at least five related posts..
The previous editorial team could also influence which specific news stories were displayed with each topic, rejecting the story selected by the algorithm if it was “biased,” “clickbait” or irrelevant. Trending’s current quality review team does not vet URLs.
The lessons learned here are two fold: