Month: May 2018

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Tell Lies

No Comments
Westmoreland did it in Vietnam in the 19602, and the Pentagon is doing it in Afghanistan today:

It is challenging enough that the war in Afghanistan has gone on for almost 17 years. But now the Trump administration is raising hackles in Congress by cloaking in official secrecy an unusual amount of data about the longest armed conflict in American history, including, until very recently, the dwindling size of the beleaguered Afghan military.

Information contained in a recently issued government report provides a window into what the Pentagon has been keeping secret since last year: The Afghan army has shrunk by 11 percent and insurgents have gained territory, raising questions about whether the Pentagon has been concealing a strategy gone awry.

………

But just as the Pentagon began sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan, it also began classifying key war metrics it had previously made public. That included ways of measuring the success or failure of America’s mission: training and funding the Afghan military so it can beat back the Taliban and other insurgents.

The latest report by John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction — who objected strongly to the new program of secrecy and pried some of the data out of US military leaders in Afghanistan — contained some worrisome figures.

There has been a long history of the US military lying to Congress, and in come cases lying to the President to continue with their wars, whether it be Vietnam, or Iraq, Lebanon, or (to a slightly smaller degree) Korea, we know that the military will attempt to restrict information given to the civilian leadership so that they can continue fighting.

To quote Georges Clemenceau, “War is too important to be left to the generals.”

Spelunking Helmet, the Official Hat of Congressional Democrats

No Comments

It turns out there is low level of moral depravity that conservative Democrats will affirm out of abject cowardice.

It is also a losing proposition in the long run, when Democrats refuse to stand up for the basic standards, their voters know that they will refuse to stand up for them:

The Senate appears to be moving full speed ahead on confirming Gina Haspel as director of the CIA.

The Intelligence Committee is expected to vote to advance her nomination to the floor during a closed business meeting scheduled for Wednesday morning, and a Saturday morning announcement by Indiana Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly further reduced the suspense.

“I believe that she has learned from the past, and that the CIA under her leadership can help our country confront serious international threats and challenges,” Donnelly said in a statement. “Importantly, Ms. Haspel expressed to me her commitment to be responsive to congressional oversight and to provide her unvarnished assessment — both to members of Congress and the president.”

Donnelly’s office said the Indiana Democrat met Thursday with Haspel, the current acting director of the CIA.

The same night, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Penceappeared together Indiana at a rally in support of Donnelly’s Republican challenger Mike Braun.

During the event, Trump and Pence criticized Donnelly for his voting record, while also pushing him to support the CIA nominee. In his statement, the senator said the support Haspel has received from the intelligence community was an important factor in his decision.

The people in the intelligence community who are supporting her are covering their own asses.

Either they were complicit in torture, or they are interested in sucking up to a woman who they see as being the next head of the CIA, and either their boss, or their client.

The ultimate fault lies with Barack Obama, who should have prosecuted torturers, but instead retained and promoted them.

Social Engineering 101

No Comments

A man in Chicago had a novel way to make some money, he used a US Post office change of address form to redirect mail to UPS headquarters, and then he cashed the checks that came in the mail:

As federal crimes go, this one seems to have been ridiculously easy to pull off.

Dushaun Henderson-Spruce submitted a U.S. Postal Service change of address form on Oct. 26, 2017, according to court documents. He requested changing a corporation’s mailing address from an address in Atlanta to the address of his apartment on Chicago’s North Side.

The post office duly updated the address, and Henderson-Spruce allegedly began receiving the company’s mail — including checks. It went on for months. Prosecutors say he deposited some $58,000 in checks improperly forwarded to his address.

The corporation isn’t named in the court documents, but the Chicago Tribune reports that it’s the shipping company UPS.

Note to self:  Check and see if there is a way to place a lock on my forwarding addresses.

They Have Made this Error Before

No Comments

Repeating the short-sighted decisions made by US auto makers the last time gas prices were Ford has decided the future is trucks and SUVs, and so will be abandoning conventional passenger cars.

Sounds like the, “Small cars equal small profits,” mentality that nearly destroyed auto makers in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, after oil prices spiked:

Ford Motor Co. said Wednesday it will stop investing in sedans in North America, bowing to U.S. drivers’ seemingly never-ending zest for crossovers and pickup trucks.

 Ford  shifted focus on “building a winning portfolio” of vehicles, by which it meant no more of its slow-selling sedans at least for North America.

 U.S. drivers have gravitated to SUVs and pickup trucks for years, thanks in part to these vehicles’ relative fuel economy improvements and price drops. Many car buyers also report enjoying the high-riding seating position of an SUV or pickup truck.

 “Ford realized it can’t be everything to everyone, and in today’s market that could be OK,” said Jessica Caldwell, an analyst with Edmunds. “The key to success is focusing on where your customers are and where your strengths lie, and for Ford doubling down on trucks and SUVs could be just what the brand needs.”

 The move isn’t without risk, however. Ford is willingly alienating some of its car owners and conceding market share in segments that, while declining, are still relevant to some buyers, she said.

When, and it’s always when, gasoline prices spike again, those people trading in Ford trucks and SUVs for more efficient vehicles will not be able to find those new vehicles at their Ford dealer, and so loyal customers will go somewhere else.

They are repeat their historical mistakes, over, and over, and over, and over again.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us!

No Comments

Who could have known that the police union, the PBA, and its “Blue Lives Matter” campaign were Putin’s stooges?

Of course, this is sarcasm. The Police Benevolent Association does not support the efforts of a Russian authoritarian with no respect for human rights, it supports the efforts of a number of American authoritarians with no respect for human rights:

The most-viewed Facebook message secretly created by a St. Petersburg-based Russian troll farm was one that allegedly backed American cops.

“Back The Badge” appeared to be an authentically American community on Facebook rallying support for police officers. In fact it was Russian, a creation of the Internet Research Agency, an online propaganda mill that special counsel Robert Mueller indicted in February on conspiracy charges.

The ad itself was nondescript, a simple portal to Back The Badge’s Facebook page. It showed the group’s logo, an officer’s shield, over a background image of a cop car’s flashing blue and red lights. “Community of people who support our brave police officers,” the ad read.

That ad, released on Thursday by Democrats on the House intelligence committee, ran on Oct. 19, 2016, less than a month before the election. According to material turned over to the committee by Facebook, it appears to be the most influential single ad the troll farm is ever know to have concocted.

There is no way to decisively determine the impact of any particular advertisement or other piece of propaganda. But more people saw the Back The Badge ad than any other inauthentic account, page, or advertisement that the Internet Research Agency concocted. Facebook’s data tools, in the hands of the Internet Research Agency, ensured that it appeared in the Facebook feeds of over 1.3 million users, a fact first noted by NBC. Over 73,000 people clicked on it.

This this has always seemed more like trolling for clicks and revenue than it does a sophisticated covert intelligence operation.

Tweet of the Day

No Comments
Unveiling slogans of #RealDemocrats for 2018 pic.twitter.com/OAhjtWkHVn

— 🌐IPM 💯🏧💍🌈🚀🚩 (@IPM_Prime) May 9, 2018

It’s actually a tweet storm, and here are the a few more images.

The basic thesis is that the Democratic Party electoral motto, at least as put forward by the DNC, DCCC and DSCC, of, “Vote for us, we are marginally less contemptible,” is not a way to win hearts and minds.

Capitalizing on the weak points of one’s opponent is good tactics, but if you don’t go beyond this, you have no strategy

Even by the Standards of Trump, This is Unbelievably Stupid

No Comments
Donald Trump has a plan to lower drug prices in the United State.

Basically, he wants to force other countries to pay more, and then big pharma, out of the goodness of its heart, will lower prices in the USA, because the drug companies will only take as much money as they need, and won’t waste it on excessive executive compensation or stock buybacks.

I’m not sure if they are being stupid, or if they think that we are this stupid, but in either case, the level of idiocy buggers the mind:

President Trump, poised on Friday to unveil his strategy to lower prescription drug prices, has an idea that may not be so popular abroad: Bring down costs at home by forcing higher prices in foreign countries that use their national health systems to make drugs more affordable.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump rebuffed his European allies by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. Threatened tariffs on steel and aluminum have strained relations with other developed nations. And now the administration is suggesting policies that could hit the pocketbooks of some of America’s strongest allies.

“We’re going to be ending global freeloading,” Mr. Trump declared at a meeting with drug company executives in his first month in office. Foreign price controls, he said, reduce the resources that American drug companies have to finance research and develop new cures.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers fleshed out the idea three months ago in a report that deplored the “underpricing of drugs in foreign countries.”

The council said that profit margins on brand-name drugs in the United States were four times as high as those in the more regulated markets of major European countries and Japan. The United States, it said, needs to “address the root of the problem: foreign, developed nations, that can afford to pay for novel drugs, free-ride by setting drug prices at unfairly low levels, leaving American patients to pay for the innovation that foreign patients enjoy.”

Most of pharma research funding already comes from the governmet and big pharma spends more on advertising and marketing than they do on research, but, according to Trump and his Evil Minions™, the problem is that they can’t rape consumers hard enough.

Great googly moogly.

There is Bad, Really Bad, and ………

No Comments

It’s Gina Haspel wot done it. Between her torture, her aggressive support of torture, and her oleaginous performance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was too much for the WaPo editorial board.

I would note that Fred Hiatt’s merry band of psychopaths, cheered the invasion of Iraq, destroying Libya, the Whitewater investigation, Bush’s purge of US attorneys, privatizing social security, supporting Trump’s border wall even as they called it stupid, privatizing education, and letting Richard Cohen near a typewriter.

I had though that there was no limit to their stupid, but Gina Haspel is just a bridge too far for them:

Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, faced a clear test when she appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday. After a 33-year career at the agency, she may be, in many respects, the most qualified person ever nominated to the post, as one Republican senator contended. But she has a dark chapter in her past: her supervision of a secret prison in Thailand where al-Qaeda suspects were tortured, and her subsequent involvement in the destruction of videotapes of that shameful episode.

As Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, made clear from the outset, Ms. Haspel needs to clearly repudiate that record. She must confirm that techniques such as waterboarding — now banned by law — were and are unacceptable, and she must make clear that she will never again accept orders to carry out acts that so clearly violate American moral standards, even if they are ordered by the president and certified by administration lawyers as legal.

Ms. Haspel did not meet that test. She volunteered that the CIA would not on her watch engage in enhanced interrogations; she said she supported the “stricter moral standard” the country had adopted after debating the interrogation program. Pressed by Mr. Warner and several other senators, she eventually said she “would not allow CIA to undertake activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal.” What she would not say was that the torture she oversaw was immoral, or that it should not have been done, or that she regretted her own role in it — which, according to senators, included advocating for the program internally.

That ambiguity matters at a time when the United States is led by a president who has cheered for torture, who lacks respect for the rule of law and who demands absolute loyalty from his aides. Unfortunately, it makes it impossible for us, and others for whom the repudiation of torture is a priority, to support Ms. Haspel’s nomination.

The Post‘s editorial page is the 2nd most likely to be contradicted on the facts (a close race that the bat sh%$ insane Wall Street Journal editorial board won), but Gina Haspel is too much for them.

Honestly, I did not think that this was possible.

Once Again Proving that High Finance Can Destroy Everything

No Comments

In this case, it’s Univision that they have run into the ground:

This is the story of how corporate raiding, complacency, excess, and incompetence are gutting a media company that matters to tens of millions of people. It’s not a novel story, and perhaps not even scandalous by the standards of corporate opulence: A shark-obsessed boss, millions wasted on consultants, and an executive who insisted on publishing softcore porn are more embarrassing buffoonery than insidious greed. The main problem—the billions in debt the company ran up in the process of its owners buying it and weighing it down—is practically routine in media and beyond; that doesn’t make it any less infuriating.

This company is Univision, which until recently obligingly filled the role of absentee stepfather to Gizmodo Media Group, our employer. Now, Univision’s business is struggling, and GMG has suddenly found itself under a very watchful eye.

Once upon a time, Univision, an American broadcasting operation aimed primarily at Spanish speakers in the United States, was a tremendous golden goose laying tremendous golden eggs: It made incredible amounts of money and had to do essentially nothing for it other than run programming produced by Televisa, a Mexican broadcasting operation. The fairy tale ended long ago. Univision has been in decline for years, thanks to a disastrous private equity buyout finalized in 2007; an aging audience; a burdensome program-licensing deal with Televisa; competition from Telemundo and Netflix; layers of overpaid and useless middle management; and a general failure to position itself for a digital future.

………

From routine human resources f%$#ups to vastly overselling the prospects of an IPO whose ultimate doom this March precipitated the company’s current cost-cutting spree, Univision has been deeply mismanaged and is in the midst of making huge cuts that have, among other things, already claimed vast swaths of Univision Noticias—the most vital newsgathering operation serving the Spanish-speaking community in the U.S.—and Fusion Media Group. Consultants from Boston Consulting Group, who have reportedly recommended budget cuts of up to 35 percent in some parts of the company, have been combing through the books for months, and more than 150 people have been laid off so far. Plenty more cuts are pending (Univision president of news Daniel Coronell reportedly described them as “catastrophic” to his newsroom), including at GMG, the staff of which fears the newsroom may be cut by up to a third by the end of June, perhaps as part of a broader pivot toward video and branded content. What is happening to the company is not ultimately a failure of editorial or even executive management, though: If Univision was a mammoth whose failure to adapt slowed it down, it was private equity investors, consumed by the thought of turning their riches into more riches, who brought it down and bled it dry.

(emphasis mine)
You’ll notice a pattern: Company has problems, or potential problems, takes said company private with other people’s money, bleeds it dry, and leaves bleached bones.

Rinse, lather, repeat:

In 2007, a consortium including Texas Pacific Group, Thomas H. Lee, Madison Dearborn, Providence Equity, and Saban Capital took Univision private for $13.7 billion. These firms—executives of which still shape Univision’s board—borrowed heavily to finance the deal, saddling their new prize with more than $10 billion of debt. According to an FCC filing, each firm holds between 20.6 and 7.1 percent of Univision’s equity, and between 27.3 and zero percent of the voting interests. Thomas H. Lee, the only firm with no voting rights, has no official members on Univision’s board, but two of THL’s employees, James Carlisle and Laura Grattan, are listed as Univision board observers in their company bios; Univision would not say if the firm had appointed members to the board or who they were. Univision, for its part, declined to answer questions about the board, while all the involved firms either declined to comment or did not respond to questions about their involvement with Univision.

Leveraged buyouts such as the ones by which these companies acquired control of Univision were common in the years leading up to the financial crisis: Investors borrow a huge amount of money to purchase a company and then make that company responsible for paying back the debt. The amount of borrowing required is often large relative to a company’s earnings. This relationship—known as leverage—is used to gauge whether a company is likely to be able to pay back its lenders. The financial world commonly measures this through the ratio of “debt to EBITDA,” or earnings before interest, taxes, and depreciation and amortization of various assets. (The finance industry’s inscrutable jargon is a feature, not a bug. Just think of this ratio as a company’s debt compared to how much money it makes each year.)
Univision’s ratio, estimated at 12.5-to-1, made it highly leveraged even by the standards of the pre-crisis boom period. (In 2013, Obama administration regulators would urge banks to limit companies’ leverage to roughly half this level to reduce the risk of default.) Still, in 2007—when the company maintained a tight grip on the then-swelling U.S. market for Spanish-language media, and before media enterprises came to be viewed as dead investments—Univision found itself in a position of relative strength.

One of the reasons that we see this is because our regulatory and tax regimes subsidize such behavior.

As to a fix, on the mild side are things like changing the bankruptcy code to allow for private equity management fees, and all paid received by executives in excess of $1 million a year to be clawed back.

On the more severe side, and I think that this might be necessary, completely eliminating the deductability of interest payments would be a good thing.

I am sure that there is a middle ground, but I want to fiddle while Wall Street burns.

I am Not Surprised

No Comments
The US military officer corps has increasingly been exhibited religious bigotry, as its chaplain corps has becomem more and more dominated by the Talibaptist wing of Evangelical Christianity.

Well, now that chaplains at Fort Campbell have banned Jewish Lay leaders from holding services on campus.

Yet another case of the Talibanization of the US military:  (It’s even worse in the US Air Force)

Chaplains in the 101st Airborne Division have fired the longstanding Jewish lay leaders at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, allegedly without providing any reason, effectively ending Friday night Shabbat services for Jewish soldiers and their families.

The two ranking chaplains also refused to support the Jews’ attempts to celebrate Passover on March 30, the first night of the eight-day long religious celebration, allegedly because it conflicted with Christians’ Good Friday observances and would save money during the installation’s four-day holiday.

Jeanette Mize, her husband, Curt, and son, Lawrence, served as lay leaders for Jewish worship on the installation for nearly two decades. On Feb. 28, the three were allegedly fired without cause under the direction of the division chaplain, Col. John Murphy, and his deputy chaplain, Lt. Col. Sean Wead.

“There was no explanation why I was fired,” Jeanette Mize told Army Times.

She added that her family has “faithfully provided weekly Shabbat and yearly religious worship events since 1999,” and they have worshiped at Fort Campbell since 1984.

Mize contacted Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who lodged a complaint with base officials. Weinstein subsequently spoke by phone with Col. Brett Sylvia, the division’s chief of staff, who is currently deployed with the headquarters to Afghanistan.

………

But Weinstein said he was informed on Friday morning that the inquiry had become a 15-6 investigation. That type of inquiry hints at the severity of the allegations and how seriously the Army is taking them, according to Weinstein.

“About 10 percent of the cases I file with the Army become 15-6 investigations,” he said.

Mize and her family have never been paid for the services they provide for the roughly 80 members of the Jewish community on Fort Campbell.

The nearest synagogue is about 50 miles away, and it appears that the chaplains were attempting to force Mize out for some time.

The term for the chaplain’s behavior is, “Contrary to good order and discipline.”

At Least They Wiill Be On Record

No Comments

Democrats have managed to force a motion of disapproval of the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality.

I do not expect it to pass, but forcing the Republicans to line up in favor of Comcast and AT&T is horrible politics for the ‘Phants:

The Democratic push to restore net neutrality took another step today with the official filing of a petition, under the Congressional Review Act, to force a vote on whether to repeal the FCC’s unpopular new rules. The effort may be doomed in the end, but it’s still extremely important.

The CRA is a way of reversing rules recently instated by federal agencies; it’s simple and effective, though, until this administration, rarely used (but they made up for lost time, all right). Its expedited process and low bar to entry — only 30 senators are needed to bring a vote, and the vote generally happens quite quickly — have made it an ideal tool for Congress to undo Obama-era regulations, but the shoe is on the other foot now.

Democrats in the Senate are using the CRA as a potential method of removing the rules the FCC voted for in December and returning to 2015’s Open Internet Order and strong net neutrality rules. Today they filed the actual petition to force the vote.

………

Right now there are 50 senators supporting the measure, including one Republican. The Democrats are hoping to make this issue extremely visible in order to put pressure on other, perhaps undecided, Republicans who might cross the aisle with enough prodding from their constituency.

As I’ve written before, and as Senators themselves have admitted, the chance of this actually rolling back the rules is low, since it would have to also pass through the House, where Democrats are at a more serious disadvantage, then be signed by the president, which is unlikely, to say the least.

But by forcing a vote, they force everyone in the Senate to take a position for or against the rules, including those who have attempted to stay “neutral” through silence.

This is actually something that Democrats can run on, that is both good policy and good politics.  (Net neutrality is favored by Republicans by something like 2 to 1.)

More of this.

Conservative Butthurt

1 Comment

John McCain is planning his funeral, which is probably sensible, given that the prognosis for glioblastoma is NOT good.

McCain has made it clear that he does not want Donald Trump at his funeral, and  the right wing twittersphere has erupted into major butthurt.

I’m not a fan of John McCain.  I think that he’s one of the most overrated politicians in America.

That being said, it’s literally his funeral.  These delicate snowflakes need to shut the f%$# up.

Liven In Obedient Fear, Blokes

No Comments
As you may know, the UK has more CCTV cameras per capita than any other country in the world.

One would figure that they would be at the forefront of facial recognition technology, but you would be wrong.

Law enforcement heavily uses facial recognition, even though their systems are only 8% accurate.

This is not world class technology. Hell, this ain’t even economy class technology:

A British police agency is defending (this link is inoperable for the moment) its use of facial recognition technology at the June 2017 Champions League soccer final in Cardiff, Wales—among several other instances—saying that despite the system having a 92-percent false positive rate, “no one” has ever been arrested due to such an error.

New data about the South Wales Police’s use of the technology obtained by Wired UK and The Guardian through a public records request shows that of the 2,470 alerts from the facial recognition system, 2,297 were false positives. In other words, nine out of 10 times, the system erroneously flagged someone as being suspicious or worthy of arrest.

This is not just a privacy concern.  This is stupid and wasteful policing.

I Don’t Often Express Admiration for the Indian Justice System, But………

No Comments

The recent ruling by the Indian Supreme Court saying that seeds cannot be patented is good for the Indian people, and not just because it is bad for Monsanto:

In an another legal blow to Monsanto, India’s Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the Delhi High Court’s ruling that the seed giant cannot claim patents for Bollgard and Bollgard II, its genetically modified cotton seeds, in the country.

Monsanto’s chief technology officer Robert Fraley, who just announced that he and other top executives are stepping down from the company after Bayer AG‘s multi-billion dollar takeover closes, lamented the news.

………

Monsanto first introduced its GM-technology in India in 1995. Today, more than 90 percent of the country’s cotton crop is genetically modified. These crops have been inserted with a pest-resistant toxin called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt.

Citing India’s Patents Act of 1970, the Delhi High Court ruled last month that plant varieties and seeds cannot be patented, thereby rejecting Monsanto’s attempt to block its Indian licensee, Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd., from selling the seeds.

Because of the ruling, Monsanto’s claims against Nuziveedu for unpaid royalties have been waived, as its patents are now invalid under Indian law. Royalties will now be decided by the government.

Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, who is known for her fierce activism against corporate patents on seeds, called the top court’s move a “major victory” that opens the door “to make Monsanto pay for trapping farmers in debt by extracting illegal royalties on BT cotton.”

Of the various extensions of IP, none is more concerning, and more unethical, than the expansion of patents to abrogate the rights for farmers to replant their own seeds.

You make Little Orphan Annie Look Like Niccolò Machiavelli

No Comments

The Washington Post just had a story about an anomaly in Trump’s real estate business.

Specifically, in 2006, after anumber of bankruptcies and cash flow crises, Trump began buying properties with cash:

In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties — including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks — during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.”

 Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window into the president’s private company, which discloses few details about its finances.

 It shows that Trump had access to far more cash than previously known, despite his string of commercial bankruptcies and the Great Recession’s hammering of the real estate industry.

Why did the “King of Debt,” as he has called himself in interviews, turn away from that strategy, defying the real estate wisdom that it’s unwise to risk so much of one’s own money in a few projects?

………

 Eric Trump, a son of the president who helps manage the company, told The Washington Post that none of the cash used to purchase the 14 properties came from outside investors or from selling off major Trump Organization assets.

Instead, Eric Trump said, the firm’s existing businesses — commercial buildings in New York, licensing deals for Trump-branded hotels and clothes — produced so much cash that the Trumps could tap that flow for spending money.

Yeah. There is so much money in Trump brand steaks, and Trump brand wine, and Trump brand tortilla chips, and Trump brand condoms.

“When Trump invests in a real estate project, he typically puts up less of his own money than you might think,” Ross wrote, explaining how Trump followed this rule. “Typically, his investors in the project will put up 85 percent while Trump puts up 15 percent.”

Then in 2006, the same year Ross’s book was published, Trump changed his approach.

He began buying up land near Aberdeen, on Scotland’s North Sea coast. Trump ultimately paid $12.6 million for the property. He’s spent at least $50 million more to build a golf course there, which was wrapped up in land-use fights and didn’t open until 2012.

 “Even his closest senior advisers in NYC were surprised” that Trump paid cash, recounted Neil Hobday, a British developer who worked on the Aberdeen project with Trump.

Professional real estate developers avoid spending their own money: There are simply too many subsidies out there for excessive leverage.

The obvious conclusion is that someone wanted to launder money through real-estate, my guess would be Russian Oligarchs, because Trump is likely too racist to take money from non-white 3rd world despots.

This is what one of the authors of this story, David Farenthold, alluded to in a tweet:

Q1: Why did @realDonaldTrump make this change at that moment? @erictrump says it was an aversion to debt itself. But real estate is a debt business. Borrowing spreads out risk, lets you diversify investments, has tax benefits. As true in ’06 as in ’86.

— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) May 7, 2018

He’s suggesting, that Trump is mobbed up and laundering money, something that I described as pretty damn obvious about a year ago.

It’s an innocuous tweet, until Eric Lipton, who is not just a New York Times reporter, but one who just won a f%$# Pulitzer for stories on Russian political meddling, tweeting what might bet the stupidest tweet this side of Kanye West:

My take on this, is it reflects the rise of Eric and Don Jr as executives at the company, who were more debt averse, having watched their dad go bankrupt by overextended himself. They shifted to a more cash-based business. https://t.co/c0nKhcGiv2

— Eric Lipton (@EricLiptonNYT) May 7, 2018

Seriously, you are writing money on Russian criminals creating influence around the world, and you are suggesting that Donald Trump “just Decided” to start spending cash?

Dude, this is your f%$#ing beat, and you are THIS f%$#ing clueless?

I hope that someone cuts your meat for you, because you should not be allowed around sharp objects.

Hell, we should keep you away from spoons.

H/t Duncan Black.

Well, this is Profoundly NOT Reassuring

No Comments

It appears that the robot Uber than ran down and killed a pedestrian saw the woman, but ignored her, because it had been programmed to.

Basically, Uber’s self-driving software is so crappy and has so many false positives that it was programmed to ignore actual human beings.

Uber is still Uber:

Uber has concluded the likely reason why one of its self-driving cars fatally struck a pedestrian earlier this year, according to tech outlet The Information. The car’s software recognized the victim, Elaine Herzberg, standing in the middle of the road, but decided it didn’t need to react right away, the outlet reported, citing two unnamed people briefed on the matter.

The reason, according to the publication, was how the car’s software was “tuned.” 

Here’s more from The Information:

Like other autonomous vehicle systems, Uber’s software has the ability to ignore “false positives,” or objects in its path that wouldn’t actually be a problem for the vehicle, such as a plastic bag floating over a road. In this case, Uber executives believe the company’s system was tuned so that it reacted less to such objects. But the tuning went too far, and the car didn’t react fast enough, one of these people said.

Let me translate this into English:  Uber put a 4000 pound death machine on the road with software that was incapable of determining the difference between a plastic bag and a human being.

This is not just reprehensible, it might very well be criminal.

Going Long on Fallout Shelters

No Comments

As expected, the human Trump has abrogated the Iran nuclear deal.

Our allies are wring their hands, Iran is irate, and the rest of the world is waiting for Iran to restart its nuclear program.

About the only bright side to this is the very real possibility that a spike in gasoline prices just before the mid-term elections might save Democrats from their own cowardice and incompetence..

It Only Took 33 Years………

No Comments

Compared to peace in the Middle East, I would figure that fixing Windows Notepad to properly handle text files from other operating systems does not seem a heavy lift, but it appears that small startup software company Microsoft simply could not manage to marshal the resources to fix this for over three decades:

Windows Notepad users, rejoice! Microsoft’s text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices.

“This has been a major annoyance for developers, IT Pros, administrators, and end users throughout the community,” Microsoft acknowledged in a blog post today, without touching on why the issue was allowed to fester for more than three decades.

………Nonetheless, the app is widely used and does elicit some passion. News of the change at Microsoft’s Build developer conference on Tuesday prompted the loudest cheer of any of the announcements.

“We fixed Notepad,” declared Kevin Gallo, head of Windows developer platform.

Notepad previously recognized only the Windows End of Line (EOL) characters, specifically Carriage Return (CR, r, 0x0d) and Line Feed (LF, n, 0x0a) together.

To paraphrase the great Lily Tomlin, “We don’t care, we don’t have to, we’re Microsoft.”

Holy Crap!!!!

No Comments

Following the publication of allegations of assaults against women, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has resigned.

I’m surprised by the allegations, and I am surprised by the speed of his resignation, but I am not unhappy to see him go, as he was the one who put the state AG stamp of approval of the corrupt mortgage settlement which was the Obama administrations 2nd bailout of the banks:

Schneiderman was singularly responsible for the Obama Administration’ success in executing what has not been sufficiently well recognized as a second bailout to banks, in the form of the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement in which 49 states also participated. We called the “get out of liability for almost free card” for banks otherwise known as the National Mortgage Settlement. Federal and state officials had massive leverage over bank servicers to force them to do mortgage modifications for borrowers who still had some level of income. It would not only have been better for homeowners and communities, but it would have greatly reduced investor losses.

As Attorney General, at least, he was always more about posing than actual results.

Feet of Clay

No Comments

It appears that Warren Buffett’s mortgage companies aggressively redline, steering affordable mortgages away from black borrowers:

Trident Mortgage Co. helps more families buy homes in Philadelphia and neighboring Camden, New Jersey, than any other company, but it primarily serves one demographic: white people.

That is no coincidence: Trident employs a nearly all-white team of mortgage consultants, and all of Trident’s offices are in white neighborhoods, where it makes the overwhelming majority of its loans to white homebuyers.

It’s a division of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the giant holding company led by Warren Buffett, which has dramatically expanded its mortgage brokerage portfolio in recent years, reporting nearly 28,000 loans worth $7.3 billion last year.

“I originally paid little attention to HomeServices,” Buffett wrote in his most recent shareholder letter, referring to Berkshire Hathaway’s real estate brokerage operation, HomeServices of America Inc., which controls Trident and two other mortgage companies. Then, he said, its “growth exploded.”

………

But as they’ve become major players in cities across America, Berkshire Hathaway’s affiliated mortgage companies have followed a consistent pattern. Government lending data reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows the companies direct their lending toward white borrowers and white neighborhoods, even in population centers such as Philadelphia where a majority of residents are people of color.

The analysis is part of Reveal’s ongoing coverage of modern-day redlining in America, which found 61 metro areas, from Jacksonville, Florida, to Tacoma, Washington, where people of color were significantly more likely to be denied a conventional home loan than their white counterparts. This was true even when people of color earned the same amount of money as white loan applicants, wanted to take on the same size loan or buy in the same neighborhood.

Reveal’s analysis found people of color were far more likely to be turned down for a loan in many of Berkshire Hathaway’s largest markets, including Philadelphia, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. It makes loans through three firms, Trident Mortgage, HomeServices Lending LLC and Prosperity Home Mortgage LLC. Here’s a breakdown:

  • In Philadelphia, Trident Mortgage made 1,721 conventional home purchase loans in 2015 and 2016, 47 of them to African Americans and 42 to Latinos.
  • In Atlanta, HomeServices Lending made 1,358 conventional home purchase loans, 63 to African Americans and 46 to Latinos.
  • In Washington, Prosperity Home Mortgage made 2,650 conventional home purchase loans, including 167 to African Americans and 144 to Latinos.


Legal experts said Berkshire Hathaway’s mortgage companies were carrying out the very practices outlawed by the Fair Housing Act, a 50-year-old law that banned racial discrimination in lending, by locating their branches in white neighborhoods, employing mortgage consultants who – from their websites – appear to be overwhelmingly white and lending mostly to white borrowers.

“It sounds to me like they are intentionally avoiding doing business with people of color,” said Allison Bethel, director of the fair housing clinic at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago.

………

The analysis compared the racial breakdown of mortgage lending for every lender in every city in America. It showed Berkshire Hathaway’s mortgage companies took in a far greater proportion of their conventional loan applications from white homebuyers than their competitors in its largest markets in 2015 and 2016.

The figures were especially stark for Trident, which placed all of its 55 loan centers across Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in majority-white neighborhoods, Reveal’s analysis found. The analysis also showed 92 percent of the company’s conventional home loan applications came from borrowers in majority-white neighborhoods. When Trident did lend in neighborhoods where the majority of residents were people of color, most of the loans still went to whites.

Berkshire Hathaway’s mortgage business has the hallmarks of one that could be prosecuted for “failure to serve” under the Fair Housing Act, according to Eric Halperin, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw fair lending cases during President Barack Obama’s first term.

………

The government lending data analyzed by Reveal also showed Trident served a much smaller and whiter section of the Philadelphia area than the region’s No. 2 lender, Wells Fargo, which overall took in a slightly smaller number of conventional home purchase applications. Trident made 26 times as many conventional loans to white homebuyers as black homebuyers in Philadelphia in 2015 and 2016, the data shows. For Wells Fargo, that ratio was 7 to 1.

It seems to me that Oracle of Omaha might have a blond blind spot when it comes to issues of people of color.