Year: 2016

Your Brexit Update

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It’s been close all night, but the trend has been clear


The geographic divide is pretty clear


The history of EU elections mitigates against this coming to fruition

I’ve been following EU Referendum Results.

There were 46,501,241 votes cast, with 15,203,370 leave votes and 14,157,273 stay votes counted at this point, which means that Brexit leads by 51.8% to 48.2% and the stay votes will need to get 56.1% of the remaining vote to win.

So, my prediction appears to have been wrong, and Britain will vote for a Brexit.

Rather unsurprisingly, there was a significant geographic divide, with England and Wales going Brexit, and Scotland going stay. (middle pic)

The question, of course, is what it all means.  I’m inclined to believe, as Moon of Alabama posits, that neither Cameron, nor the EU, nor the City of London will meekly accede to this vote as the bottom pic clearly shows.

I rather expect that we will be talking about “When the Brexit finally happens” 10 years from now.

The pics will pop up if you click on them.

Marilyn Mosby, Your ADA is Trying to Lose These Cases

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The officer most responsible for the death of Freddie Gray, Caesar Goodson has been acquitted after a mindbogglingly inept attempt at prosecution:

A Baltimore judge acquitted the police officer facing the most serious charges in the death of Freddie Gray on Thursday, delivering a broad rebuke of a case that he said lacked evidence.

Officer Caesar Goodson Jr., 46, drove the transport van in which Gray sustained fatal injuries. He is the second officer cleared in the high-profile case. Four other officers could still face trial.

After an eight-day bench trial, Circuit Judge Barry Williams found Goodson not guilty on charges that included second-degree depraved-heart murder and three counts of manslaughter.

The acquittal cast doubt on the remaining criminal cases in which the other officers face similar but lesser charges. Legal observers said Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who drew widespread praise and also condemnation after charging the officers in May 2015, must now re-evaluate the remaining cases.

My guess is that this guy was looking at getting a PBA endorsement when he runs against Mosby for DA.

This is disgraceful.

Jimmy McMillan for President

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Yet more evidence that the rent is too damn high:

A popular narrative of the U.S. housing market has been that big city prices are locking out young buyers, feeding a cycle in which a growing number of people are forced to rent at ever higher rates as demand overwhelms supply. Throw in the fact that wages haven’t kept pace, and you have a world where a wide swath of Americans can’t save enough to ever buy that first home.

The reality may be a bit more complicated. It’s true that, when combined with a lack of government support for affordable housing, this situation has pushed the number of cash-poor renters to a new high. Some 26 percent of U.S. renters paid at least half their income to landlords in 2014, up from 20 percent in 2001, according to the State of the Nation’s Housing report, published on Wednesday by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Unfortunately much of our economic policy has conflated price increases in real estate prices with economic prosperity, which has led to shelter become increasingly difficult for ordinary people to obtain.

We need to stop viewing housing and real estate as a way to generate returns that exceed inflation, and we need to discourage unproductive speculation in real estate.  (Full disclosure, I am speaking against my own interest as a homeowner with a 30 year fixed rate mortgage)

OK, so Now the Brexit Polls Have Closed

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My money is still on a close race, where the not-England parts of the UK have the Brexit rejected.

That being said, I think that there are some in this election, and when taken in juxtaposition:

  1. When ignoring the political opportunists (Hi, Boris), I think that the pro-Brexit campaigners have overwhelmingly relied on nativism, bigotry, and anti-immigrant sentiment in their campaign.
  2. The substantive complaints made about the EU by the pro-Brexit forces are essentially correct.
  3. Because of items 1, item 2 has simply not been a meaningful part of the campaign.

Personally, I believe that if the EU continues as it does, (An undemocratic font of German political hegemony and German economic mythologyz) it will lead to another war in Europe.

We can see the tensions deriving from the EU inflicting pain and suffering on the ordinary citizenry in order to protect the elites, and this (along with there being no meaningful leftwing opposition to the EU) has led to the rise of reactionary and bigoted parties across Europe.

The UK pulling out of the EU could be the dick punch that it needs to realign itself from an unelected (the European Parliament is a glorified debating society) imperial bureaucracy unto a real democratic institution.

As an aside, there are some secondary benefits to a Brexit:

  • It should reduce the incidence of foreigners using London real estate for “in case of popular uprising” bolt holes, which would make the city more affordable for ordinary Brits.
  • It should reduce the size, and hopefully influence, or Britain’s bloated and corrupt financial sector.

Linkage

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Who amongst us does not like to listen to Richard Feynman:

Thanks, Hillary

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What a surprise, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton aggressively supported the right wing coup in Honduras.

Now we discover that the government’s US trained military has been assassinating indigenous environmental activists:

Berta Cáceres, the murdered environmental campaigner, appeared on a hitlist distributed to US-trained special forces units of the Honduran military months before her death, a former soldier has claimed.

 Lists featuring the names and photographs of dozens of social and environmental activists were given to two elite units, with orders to eliminate each target, according to First Sergeant Rodrigo Cruz, 20.

 Cruz’s unit commander, a 24-year-old lieutenant, deserted rather than comply with the order. Cruz – who asked to be identified by a pseudonym for fear of reprisal – followed suit, and fled to a neighbouring country. Several other members of the unit have disappeared and are feared dead.

 “If I went home, they’d kill me. Ten of my former colleagues are missing. I’m 100% certain that Berta Cáceres was killed by the army,” Cruz told the Guardian.

 Cáceres, an indigenous Lenca leader who won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for a campaign against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, was shot dead in her home in March. Before her murder, she had reported 33 death threats linked to the campaign and had warned international human rights delegates that her name was on a hitlist.

According to Cruz, Cáceres’s name appeared on a list given to a military police unit in the Inter-institutional Security Force (Fusina), which last summer received training from 300 US marines and FBI agents.

………

Cáceres’s daughter, Bertita Zúñiga, said Cruz’s testimony strengthened the family’s calls for an independent international investigation to find the intellectual authors.

“This shows us that death squads are operating in the armed forces, which are being used to get rid of people opposing government plans. It shows us that human rights violations are state policy in Honduras.”

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy cred is a myth.

She has been wrong, and continues to be wrong, on Everything.

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We’ll Be Lucky to Live through It

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And we have the first attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate of the season, by one Michael Steven Sandford, a British National:

A Briton who tried to grab a police officer’s gun at a Donald Trump rally in Las Vegas said he wanted to shoot the US candidate, court papers say.

 Michael Steven Sandford, 20, did not enter a plea when he appeared before a judge in Nevada and was remanded in custody until a hearing on 5 July.

 He is charged with an act of violence in a restricted area.

 He had reportedly tried to seize the gun after saying he wanted Mr Trump’s autograph at Saturday’s rally.

 He said he had been planning to try to shoot Mr Trump for about a year but had decided to act now because he finally felt confident enough to do so, court papers say.

I’m sure that the bloke from Dorking (Seriously, he is from Dorking, Surrey) won’t be the last one this campaign season.

This is nuts.

F%$# the Teabaggers

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I understand how the Teabagger wing of Republican Party gave us Donald Trump.

I also understand how Trump has done the nearly impossible, which is to make what is arguably the least electable candidate for President since Michael Dukakis the front runner, which must seriously roast Teabagger chestnuts:

………

This, then, is the ultimate outcome from the tea party takeover of the Republican Party by people like Wendy Day. She contributed to Trump’s ascent by blowing up the party and is now upset that it’s not her own candidate Ted Cruz who was the victor.

Cry me a river, Ms. Day.

And welcome to your worst nightmare: President Hillary Clinton.

I under the that is a schadenfreude moment, but what about the rest of us?

The rest of use are going to have to live with the consequences of this:  More war, more sucking up to Wall Street, more neoliberal economics, more privatization of essential government services, and more job destroying trade deals.

Thanks, Teabaggers.

This Reminds Me of the Railroad Industry

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I worked at GE Transportation System in the early 1990s aas a locomotive systems engineer.

After years of contraction and decay, they were recapitalizing.

Standard line was that they had gotten to the point where they had to recapitalize, but it was something more basic: The Wall Street types who believed that railroads were dying had finally looted all they could, and they had been replaced by management that actually believed in railroads.

Freight rail in the Us has been on a generally upward path since.

Well, we are seeing the same thing in the newspaper business these days, with the jargon of the official launch of Tronc, formerly Tribune Publishing being a particularly egregious example.

As Allison Hantschel observes, “Media Companies Hate News, the Internet, Employees and their Own Customers:

Or, as the Hip Happening Kids Today call it, #Tronc:

CasSelle: We produce tons of great content every single day. We’re really focused on how we we deliver it to people in a way they want to consume it more and more. 


Vasquez: One of the key ways we’re going to harness the power of our journalism is to have an optimization group. This Tronc team, will work with all of the local markets, to harness the power of our local journalism, feed it into a funnel, and then optimize it so we reach the biggest global audience possible.
Yes, Tronc shall take the corn feed of journalism and funnel it into the optimization-group goose, to make delicious foie gras that will be consumed by the digital natives.

It arguably gets worse from there. And what’s genuinely sad is that people who talk like this typically don’t understand how the internet actually works—that’s why they lean on buzzwords—or have any notion of how to communicate with journalists, who tend to bristle at this stuff.

These are internal employee videos designed to PUMP YOU UP about your newfound place not at Tribune Publishing, a recognizable name that at least still sounded impressive, but at Tronc, which sounds like you stepped on a duck.

I understand that conventional journalism in general, and the newspaper business in particular, faces challenges, but the bigger problem is that upper management does not believe in the product: Journalism.  (Of course, there is also the fact that Sam Zell ran the company into the ground).

Our MBA/Wall Street/Private Equity management “Culture” does nothing but loot.

What a Surprise, the Swiss are Running away from the EU

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After have been in process to join the EU for 24 years, Switzerland has withdrawn its application:

The upper house of the Swiss parliament on Wednesday voted to invalidate its 1992 application to join the European Union, backing an earlier decision by the lower house. The vote comes just a week before Britain decides whether to leave the EU in a referendum.

Twenty-seven members of the upper house, the Council of States, voted to cancel Switzerland’s longstanding EU application, versus just 13 senators against. Two abstained.

In the aftermath of the vote, Switzerland will give formal notice to the EU to consider its application withdrawn, the country’s foreign minister, Didier Burkhalter, was quoted as saying by Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

So not a surprise.

Not Your Call

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Well, after a freakout from the right wing, the DOJ has agreed to release the full transcripts from the Orlando shooter during his rampage:

The Orlando killer pledged allegiance to the Islamic State while in the midst of murdering 49 people at a gay nightclub last weekend. But for a few hours Monday, we couldn’t read that part of Omar Mateen’s phone conversations with dispatchers and police because the FBI took it out of transcripts of 911 calls it released.

To Republicans, the redacted transcripts were yet another example of how the Obama administration is mishandling this whole war on terror by ducking every opportunity to avoid talking about the real issues behind it — and specifically, Islam.

………

The pressure worked. The FBI reversed course Monday afternoon and released the redacted parts of the transcript in which Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, saying the political debate over the redaction had become a distraction.

It’s more than that, it’s public records, and the Department of Justice wanted to suppress these records because they did not approve of that message:

[FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ron] Hopper Hopper said authorities also did not want to “give credence to individuals who have done terrorist acts in the past.”

“We’re not going to propagate their violent rhetoric,” he said.

Mr. Hopper, that decision is is not your call, nor should it be.

Your job is not to determine what news is available to the general public.

Linkage

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Here is an interesting technique for choopping up an onion. I will have to try this at Trial By Fire on July 4th weekend, when I will be making Cornish Pasties, because it looks a lot easier than what I have been doing.

Full disclosure: I know, and have discussed medieval cooking with Milton Friedman’s son, David.

This Wouldn’t Have Happened If the Original Story Hadn’t Gotten a Lot of Ink

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The USAF inspector general lost over a decade of corruption and mismanagement files back, and now, following surprisingly extensive coverage of this mishap, they appeared to have rectified the error. I thought that the loss was suspicious, and I don’t think that the recovery efforts were as herculean as the article implies.

My guess is that no one wanted to try to recover the data, but it got too hot not to try:

The U.S. Air Force says it has recovered files from 100,000 inspector general investigations dating back to 2004.

In a short, four-sentence statement released midday on Wednesday, service officials said the Air Force continues to investigate the embarrassing incident in which the files and their backups were corrupted.

“Through extensive data recovery efforts over the weekend and this week, the Air Force has been able to regain access to the data in the Air Force Inspector General Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS),” the statement reads.

………

The inspector general’s office investigates claims of waste, fraud, and abuse within the Air Force.

It may be innocent, but it smells like a 3 dead dead gopher in august.

This May Be the Most Decorated Cat in History

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Pooli, AKA Princess Papule, was a ship’s cat born in 1944 who served on the attack transport USS Fremont, earning three service ribbons and four battle stars:

A World War II veteran cat today celebrates her 15th birthday.

And she can still get into her old uniform with its three service ribbons and four battle stars.

The cat, Pooli, short for Princess Papule, was born July 4, 1944, in the Navy yard at Pearl Harbor, her present owner, Benjamin H. Kirk, said.

Kirk explained that Pooli was taken aboard the attack transport USS Fremont that day by his nephew, James I. Lynch, now a specialist in administrative services for the Board of Education.

Pooli saw action at the Marianas, the Palau group, the Philippines and Iwo Jima. And she became a shellback when the ship crossed the equator.

Kirk revealed that when battle stations rang, Pooli would head for the mail room and curl up in a mail sack.

Now this is a life well lived.

Finally a Small Reason to Buy Windows 10

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Microsoft has added a (still Beta) feature to Windows 10, which will allow users to do a clean install of the OS to remove crapware that manufacturers install in their PC’s:

Windows 10 already includes ways to clear out applications and data to repair misbehaving systems or prepare them to be sold, courtesy of the Refresh and Reset features added in Windows 8. Microsoft is now adding a third option: a new refresh tool.

Currently available only for Windows Insiders, the new tool fetches a copy of Windows online and performs a clean installation. The only option is whether or not you want to preserve your personal data. Any other software that’s installed will be blown away, including the various applications and utilities that OEMs continue to bundle with their systems.

This is an upgrade from Microsoft that actually is an improvement, as opposed to, for example, the abomination that is ribbon.