Stephen Fry Blasphemy Probe Dropped after Gardaí Fail to Find ‘Substantial Number of Outraged People’
There is something profoundly amusing about the phrase, “Substantial number of outraged people.”
Month: May 2017
Finally
A federal court has ruled that the air quality rules for raising livestock are too lenient:
……… Most livestock farming in industrialized countries takes place on large enclosed farms, known in the United States as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), that house hundreds or thousands of animals. Many environmental and public health groups say CAFOs are major air and water polluters and should be regulated more stringently. Farmers and trade organizations typically respond that CAFOS already are adequately regulated and do not threaten nearby communities or the environment.
On April 11, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down a rule, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008, that exempted livestock farms from reporting hazardous air emissions from animal waste. Unless EPA appeals to the Supreme Court, these farms will have to report releases of substances such as ammonia and hydrogen sulfide starting later this year.
Agriculture, particularly Big Ag, has been skating for way too long on environmental regulations.
The Seinfeld Candidate
The Seinfeld show was famously a show about nothing.
Look at John Ossoff’s latest ad.
This is the most vapid and content free ad that I’ve seen since ……… Well ……… Since Hillary’s ads during the Presidential campaign.
It appears that the Democratic Party has not learned its lesson, even a bad something beats nothing:
Linkage
- Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Towards Totalitarianism (International Business Times) Cory Doctorow in a well justified rant.
- Digital Economy Act: UK Police could soon disable phones, even if users don’t commit a crime (The Independent) Live in obedient fear, citizen!
- Lawyer: Cops “deliberately misled” judge who seemingly signed off on stingray (Ars Technica) Live in ……… Well, you know.
- Questions for US military after doubt cast on efficiency of Afghan bombing (The Guardian) As the Patriot is Gulf War I showed, the military lies about the efficacy of its weapons.
- U.S. Economy Can’t Even Match the “Sclerotic Statism” of France (The Center for Economic and Policy Research) Dean Baker notes that Frances “Sclerotic” economy has a higher employment-population ratio than the US.
The SNL cold open re: Joe and Mika’s recently announced engagement:
The Republicans May Not Have toRepeal Obamacare
Obamacare is good only in comparison to the status quo.
The best part of it, of course, is Medicaid expansion, which is basically single payer.
One of the claims made by Republicans is that Obamacare has reduced the quality of healthcare.
This is not true.
Another claim is that it is in the process of collapsing under its own weight.
This is (IMNSHO) untrue as well, but it appears that the ACA is at risk of collapsing its own insubstantiality:
Karen Slessor’s health insurance is hanging by a thread.
Slessor, a Reinbeck widow who has diabetes and arthritis, is one of nearly 72,000 Iowans who are on the brink of losing coverage as Congress tries to overhaul the country’s health care system. The at-risk Iowans buy their own health insurance policies, usually because they don’t work for employers that offer coverage and they don’t qualify for government insurance programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare.
Iowa is the first state where consumers face the likelihood of losing all access to individual health insurance policies, but experts say other states could soon follow.
The two largest health insurers offering individual coverage in Iowa, Aetna and Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield, announced last month that they would stop selling such policies for next year because of heavy financial losses and uncertainty in the market. In most of the state, that left just one relatively small carrier, Medica. The situation became critical on Wednesday, when Medica leaders said they probably also will pull out of Iowa.
If you know your Streetcar, you know that Blanche DuBois depended on the, “Kindness of strangers,” and Obamacare depends upon the, “Kindness of insurance companies.”
Of course, insurance companies have no kindness, and this problem with a lack of providers is not limited to Iowa, Tennessee has s similar (though less dire) situation, and huge swaths of the country have only one provider on the exchanges, meaning that Obama’s neoliberal* vision for healthcare reform would have been in trouble if Hillary hadn’t lost the election.
Barack Obama’s merry band of free market mousketeers may have created a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.
*At Naked Capitalism, in the aptly named post, “Neo-liberalism Expressed as Simple Rules,” gives two basic rules:
1. Because markets.
2. Go die!
How Can You Govern a Country Which Has Two Hundred and Forty-Six Varieties of Cheese?*
Emnanuel Macron defeated Marine le Pen in the French Presidential elections, and it wasn’t even close:
The pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron has won the French presidency in a decisive victory over the far-right Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, and vowed to unite a divided and fractured France.
Macron, 39, a former economy minister who ran as a “neither left nor right” independent promising to shake up the French political system, took 65.1% to Le Pen’s 34.9%, according to initial projections from early counts.
………
Despite the wide margin of the final result, Le Pen’s score nonetheless marked a historic high for the French far right. Even after a lacklustre campaign that ended with a calamitous performance in the final TV debate, she was projected to have taken almost 11m votes, double that of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, when he reached the presidential run-off in 2002. The anti-immigration, anti-EU Front National’s supporters asserted that the party had a central place as an opposition force in France.
Turnout was the lowest in more than 40 years. Almost one-third of voters chose neither Macron nor Le Pen, with 12 million abstaining and 4.2 million spoiling ballot papers.
In 2002, le Pen pere got 17.8% of the vote, so this is an improvement, but still a blow-out.
It’s a loss, but it is a major improvement, and she picked up 15% from what she got in the first round, as versus a roughly 1% that Jean le Pen gained in the 2002 2nd round.
I do not think that this trend has reached its high water mark, this will continue until the EU fixes some very serious problem:
- The EU remains an anti-democratic institution, and creating meaningful representative democratic functions.
- It remains in the thrall of neoliberal economics.
- German hegemony, with the associated faulty German economics, and German punitive morality, is a petri dish for xenophobic nationalism among the rest of the EU.
If these flaws are not addressed, I expect to see the end of the Euro, and possibly the end of the EU.
As I’ve noted before, many of the deep problems in the EU come from Germany’s preeminent position in it.
*It’s a quote from Charles de Gaulle. He was talking about France.
It’s Bank Failure Friday!!! (On Sunday)
We have the 5th commercial bank failure of the year, Guaranty Bank, (d/b/a BestBank in Georgia & Michigan), in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
This means that bank failures have caught up with credit union failures, and the current pace is about 14 a year, which is a faster pace than both 2015 and 2016.
Here is the Full FDIC list.
So, here is the graph pr0n with last few years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):
Headline of the Day
David Axelrod on Hillary Clinton: “It takes a lot of work to lose to Donald Trump”
This is something that needs to be repeated.
Ireland is a 3rd World Nation in Europe
Any country which has working blasphemy statutes on the books cannot be considered a modern nation state:
Police in the Republic of Ireland have launched an investigation after a viewer claimed comments made by Stephen Fry on a TV show were blasphemous.
Officers are understood to be examining whether the British comedian committed a criminal offence under the Defamation Act when he appeared on RTE [Ireland’s National Television and Radio Broadcaster] in 2015.
Fry had asked why he should “respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world…. full of injustice”.
………
Appearing on The Meaning of Life, hosted by Gay Byrne, in February 2015, Fry had been asked what he might say to God at the gates of heaven.
Fry said: “How dare you create a world in which there is such misery? It’s not our fault? It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”
He went on to say that Greek gods “didn’t present themselves as being all seeing, all wise, all beneficent”, adding “the god who created this universe, if it was created by god, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish”.
The Irish Independent reported a member of the public made a complaint to police in Ennis in the same month the programme was broadcast. He was recently contacted by a detective to say they were looking into his complaint.
The viewer was not said to be offended himself but believed Fry’s comments qualified as blasphemy under the law, which carries a maximum penalty of a fine of 25,000 euros (£22,000).
The law prohibits people from publishing or uttering “matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion”.
If you think that your God has such a thin skin, I kind of think that either you do not understand your God, or you are worshiping a very small and petty being.
This Would Never Happen Without the Video
Roy Oliver, former of the Balch Springs Police Department, who gunned down Jordan Edwards has been charged with murder:
Roy Oliver, the fired Balch Springs police officer who shot and killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards as he was driving away from a party, was arrested on a murder charge Friday night.
Oliver, 37, turned himself in at the Parker County Jail. Bond was set at $300,000. If convicted of murder, he faces up to life in prison. His attorney could not be reached for comment.
Oliver, who lives in Combine, fired a rifle into a car of teenagers as they drove away from a party Saturday night, striking Jordan, a passenger, in the head, police said. The six-year veteran of the department was fired Tuesday.
He was the second of two officers who responded to a report of underage drinking. After gunfire was heard in the area, Jordan and four other teenagers got in their car to leave.
Police originally said Oliver fired on the car because it was backing up aggressively toward the officers. But the department revised its account after reviewing body-cam footage, saying the car was driving away when Jordan was shot.
It wasn’t a cell phone video this time, it was a body cam, but it reveals a truth: Cops lie, a lot, and without video evidence, they almost never get caught.
Every body cam, and every cell phone camera, is a tool to keep law enforcement honest.
Without the video, Oliver would probably have gotten a commendation.
Deep Thought
This is a picture of house Republicans after passing Trumpcare.*
I think that they are the ones on the bottom.
*No, not really, the photo is at least 4 months old.
Linkage
- Welfare Reform Horror in Mississippi (Angry Bear) An acceptance rate of 1.47%. Bill Clinton’s welfare reform bears bitter fruit.
- Woman Arrested and Charged for Laughing During Jeff Sessions’ Confirmation Hearing (Esquire) She laughed when Jeff Sessions said that he supported civil rights. She was actually convicted of disturbing the peace for laughing.
- Scientists Just Discovered a New Aurora and They’re Calling It Steve (Esquire) Astronomers, huh? A new poorly understood phenomena, and they decide, “Let’s call it Steve”.
- American Air cuts 2 inches of legroom on some seats in new jets (CNBC) Where is your God now seating.
- I’m an ex-Facebook exec: don’t believe what they tell you about ads (The Guardian) A commentary on Facebook preying on depressed teens for ads. Money quote, “The hard reality is that Facebook will never try to limit such use of their data unless the public uproar reaches such a crescendo as to be un-mutable.”
- EFF’s Stupid Patent of the month: Dispatch a taxi (on a computer) (Ars Technica) The patents were filed for in the early 1990s, when computers had been used to dispatch taxis for over a decade.
- LCBO recalls Bombay Sapphire gin with almost double alcohol content (Daily Hive Toronto) Around 78% instead of 40% by volume. Guessing that there won’t be a whole bunch of returns, but I didn’t see any on eBay.
Trump Voter Feels Betrayed By President After Reading 800 Pages Of Queer Feminist Theory:
The Balloon Has Gone Up
The House of Representatives just passed the latest version of Trumpcare:
The House on Thursday narrowly approved legislation to repeal and replace major parts of the Affordable Care Act, as Republicans recovered from their earlier failures and moved a step closer to delivering on their promise to reshape American health care without mandated insurance coverage.
The vote, 217 to 213, held on President Trump’s 105th day in office, is a significant step on what could be a long legislative road. Twenty Republicans bolted from their leadership to vote no. But the win keeps alive the party’s dream of unwinding President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement.
The House measure faces profound uncertainty in the Senate, where a handful of Republican senators immediately rejected it, signaling that they would start work on a new version of the bill virtually from scratch.
This is going to be a complete clusterf%$#.
The only question is whether the Democrats have sufficient solidarity to make political hay from it.
Headline of the Day
‘Jesus’ Invaded Home, Prayed with Man, Stole Golf Cart, Asked to Fornicate with Police: This May Be Greatest Criminal Narrative of All Time
I have never partied that hard.
I probably never will.
There Are Two People Who Make Donald Trump Look Good, Hillary Clinton, and ………
Facebook is disputing a former employee’s analysis that female engineers have their code rejected 35% more than male engineers, telling employees internally that leaking such information damages its “recruiting brand” and makes it harder for the company to hire women.
The original analysis, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and independently confirmed by the Guardian, was conducted by a longtime Facebook software engineer last year. The engineer studied the company’s code review process, looking at the number of times code was rejected, commented upon, or updated; how long it took for code to be accepted; and demographic data about the coder, such as gender and length of employment.
Female coders received 35% more “rejects” and 8.2% more comments on their code, the engineer found. The engineer also found that the disparity in rejections for male and female coders was “consistent across time at company”.
(emphasis mine)
We don’t care, we don’t have to … we’re Facebook.
“Damages its recruiting brand?” Seriously?
If Facebook thinks that this is the worst part of their being another outpost of “Bro Culture,” is that it damages their brand, then their moral compass is spinning fast enough to power all of Bayonne, New Jersey.
It’s no wonder that another publication described Facebook’s response as, “Incredibly tone-deaf.”
They are Facebook, they don’t care, they don’t have to.
Linkage
- 5 Times Charter School Founders Used Shady Real Estate Deals to Shamelessly Enrich Themselves (naked capitalism) More evidence that much of the charter school movement is looting.
- Inside the Academic Journal That Corporations Love (Pacific Standard) It’s Elsevier, of course, the Borg of the for-profit academic journal world.
- Look: Oregon police respond to report of cat armed with gun-shaped stick (UPI) Cat terrorists.
- Report: Facebook helped advertisers target teens who feel “worthless” (Ars Technica) So, Zuckerberg and Co. determine when children are feeling “worthless, insecure, defeated, anxious, silly, useless, stupid, overwhelmed, stressed, and a failure,” they allow advertisers to prey on them. And Zuckerberg is mulling a Presidential run.
- A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA (Nature) Humans in the Americas about 100,000 years earlier than previously thought.
- How Vestager took a bite out of Apple (Politico) A nice blow by blow of how the EU went after Irish subsidies via tax evasion with Apple. When do they go after Luxemberg?
- the three hot trends in Silicon Valley horsesh%$ (Medium) Freddie deBoer notes that much of what is “Hot” in the valley is basically snake oil.
- A Modest Proposal To Fix The World (Ian Welsh) It’s not meant to be taken seriously, but taxing the hyper-rich back to merely very well off is a great idea.
I am so going to see the Kingsman Sequel:
Schadenfreude, Sweet Schadenfreude
Jim DeMint was just fired by the Heritage foundation:
The board of the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday ousted president Jim DeMint after days of turmoil and internal debate, blaming him for management and communication problems that have roiled the venerable conservative think tank.
Thomas A. Saunders III, chairman of the Heritage Foundation’s Board of Trustees, said in a statement that the 22-member board unanimously requested and received the resignation of DeMint, the firebrand former senator from South Carolina. Heritage founder Ed Feulner will serve in his place until a permanent successor is chosen.
“After a comprehensive and independent review of the entire Heritage organization, the board determined there were significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation,” Saunders said. “While the organization has seen many successes, Jim DeMint and a handful of his closest advisers failed to resolve these problems.”
In his own statement, DeMint called the critique “puzzling,” saying the board had praised his work for the past four years and approved annual performance bonuses for the entire management team.
He said he was proud of his work at Heritage, citing accomplishments such as the think tank’s role in helping lead President Trump’s transition team.………
But board trustee Bill Walton said the issue was not “Needham versus DeMint.”
“It’s boring old management stuff,” said Walton, saying that excessive bureaucracy prevented papers from getting approved rapidly and scholars from getting permission to attend meetings. “We think we can make it leaner and more effective.”
I wish that there was a way for both of them to lose.
A friend of mine was fired by Heritage because she got cancer, so I am even less disposed to give them the benefit of the doubt than I would be otherwise.
I am sure that personalities were a part of this, but I think that a lot of this is that DeMint and his minions had no interest in managing a facsimile of a serious academic institution, since Conservatism of DeMint’s ilk is generally opposed to ideas, and thinking, in general.
Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen
In today’s United States, a judge could sentence you to jail based on a software generated risk report which the defendant has no right to review.
There is already anecdotal evidence that these programs will show higher risk for non-white defendants:
When Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last month, he was asked a startling question, one with overtones of science fiction.
“Can you foresee a day,” asked Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the college in upstate New York, “when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact-finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision-making?”
The chief justice’s answer was more surprising than the question. “It’s a day that’s here,” he said, “and it’s putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things.”
He may have been thinking about the case of a Wisconsin man, Eric L. Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison based in part on a private company’s proprietary software. Mr. Loomis says his right to due process was violated by a judge’s consideration of a report generated by the software’s secret algorithm, one Mr. Loomis was unable to inspect or challenge.
Continue reading the main story
In March, in a signal that the justices were intrigued by Mr. Loomis’s case, they asked the federal government to file a friend-of-the-court brief offering its views on whether the court should hear his appeal.
The report in Mr. Loomis’s case was produced by a product called Compas, sold by Northpointe Inc. It included a series of bar charts that assessed the risk that Mr. Loomis would commit more crimes.
The Compas report, a prosecutor told the trial judge, showed “a high risk of violence, high risk of recidivism, high pretrial risk.” The judge agreed, telling Mr. Loomis that “you’re identified, through the Compas assessment, as an individual who is a high risk to the community.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Loomis. The report added valuable information, it said, and Mr. Loomis would have gotten the same sentence based solely on the usual factors, including his crime — fleeing the police in a car — and his criminal history.
At the same time, the court seemed uneasy with using a secret algorithm to send a man to prison. Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, writing for the court, discussed, for instance, a report from ProPublica about Compas that concluded that black defendants in Broward County, Fla., “were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher rate of recidivism.”
………
In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that a Florida man could not be condemned to die based on a sentencing report that contained confidential passages he was not allowed to see. The Supreme Court’s decision was fractured, and the controlling opinion appeared to say that the principle applied only in capital cases.
Mr. Schimel echoed that point and added that Mr. Loomis knew everything the court knew. Judges do not have access to the algorithm, either, he wrote.
There are good reasons to use data to ensure uniformity in sentencing. It is less clear that uniformity must come at the price of secrecy, particularly when the justification for secrecy is the protection of a private company’s profits. The government can surely develop its own algorithms and allow defense lawyers to evaluate them.
This is why the privatization of an essential state function is a bad thing.
This is as about a perfect example of a Kafkaesque situation as is possible: Condemned with a secret report using a secret method.
Yeah, This Makes Me Give to the DNC
I know that some people are suing the DNC (Democratic National Committee) for being biased during the primaries.
Even if the case that has merit, and I don’t think that it does, but I am an engineer, not a doctor, dammit,* I feel that this is firmly in the philosophical category of things that should not be adjudicated in a court of law.†
Additionally, I do not think that DNC donors are “consumers”.
Reducing politics to the status of a consumer transaction seems to me to cheapen politics. (As much as this concepts buggers the mind)
That being said, the statement from the DNC’s counsel are rather revelatory:
Last Monday, Senior U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch heard oral arguments regarding a Motion to Dismiss filed by attorneys representing the Democratic National Committee and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in the class-action lawsuit filed against them. The lawsuit seeks damages on behalf of Democratic Party donors who made financial contributions to Bernie Sanders and the Party under the presumption the primary would be conducted fairly per the DNC’s charter. The lawsuit was filed in June 2016 following the release of leaked emails showing behind-the-scenes collusion between the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and other entities to ensure Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee prior to Americans casting votes in the party’s primary contests.
………
The crux of the Motion to Dismiss asserts the Judge is not in a position to determine how the Democratic Party conducts its nominating process.
The DNC asserts the following:
- The DNC is under no obligation to obey its own by-laws which guarantee neutrality. (Notwithstanding the fact that by-laws are legally binding,)‡
- That impartiality is undefinable and unenforceable.
- There is no legal meaning to being a DNC member.
- DNC counsel is unaware of how the DNC is involved in state primaries and caucuses.
- That the DNC actually conducted a fair primary, even though they did not have to.
- Counsel was unwilling to answer the question as to whether the DNC has a legal responsibility to tell the truth.
I understand that this is a motion to dismiss, and lawyers tend to make the broadest possible arguments at this stage, but even in the context of this, this is NOT something that should leave anyone favorably disposed to the Democratic Party establishment.
*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
†But I’m an engineer, not a philosopher, dammit.*
‡Yes, I know, legal talk, but I have actually founded a not-for profit, so this sh%$ that I know, and I have done, so no Dr. McCoy moment.
Gorka Out
Sebastian Gorka, who was brought into the Trump Administration as a terrorism expert, is leaving the administration.
It appears that this was not because his PhD was basically fraudulent, no because he was a member of a Hungarian Neo-Nazi Group, but because the so-called terrorism expert could not get a security clearance:
Sebastian Gorka, an adviser to Donald Trump who has been under pressure over his links to Hungarian far-right groups, is leaving the White House.
A senior official said Gorka, a former counterterrorism analyst for Fox News who joined the administration as an adviser, will be leaving the White House in the coming days.
Trump aide drew plan on napkin to partition Libya into three
Read more
The official said that Gorka had initially been hired to sit on the strategic initiatives group, an advisory panel created by Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon to run parallel to the national security council.
But that group fizzled out in the early months of the administration. Gorka was unable to get clearance for the national security council after he was charged last year with carrying a weapon at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport.………
In recent weeks, one White House source told the Washington Examiner that Gorka’s role had diminished to the point where he was appearing on television, “giving White House tours and peeling out in his Mustang.”
How the hell do you get a position in the White House, particularly working national security, when you cannot get a security clearance, particularly when 15 years earlier, he also could not get a security clearance in Hungary. (It appears that his CV is a bit dodgy.)
Seriously, this is a guy who should be asking, “Do you want fries with that?”