Month: May 2018

So Not a Surprise

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If there is one safe US Senate seat for the Democrats this election cycle, it’s California.

But this time around, the not only did the California Democratic Party not endorse Dianne Feinstein,* she actually lost to her challenger by a significant margin, though not enough to actually get the endorsement. (Kevin De León beat her 54% to 37%, and he needed 60% for the endorsement)

So, now that she has a viable primary challenge, and the top two finishers will almost certain Feinstein and De León, which given California’s jungle primary means that they will face off in the general.

Once again proving that Republicans fear their base, and Democrats hate their base, so given that Feinstein is far more conservative than the state, and De León is not, the establishment has pulled out the stops for Dianne, including an endorsement from Barack Obama.

Not a surprise. Barack Obama has always hadd nicer things to say about conservatives than he ever did about progressives:

Former President Obama is endorsing Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) as she faces a prominent Democratic challenger.
Obama said in a Friday statement that he was giving his “strong endorsement” and calling Feinstein “one of America’s most effective champions for progress to the Senate.”

“She’s always been an indispensable leader for California, and we became dear friends and partners in the fight to guarantee affordable healthcare and economic opportunity for everybody; to protect our planet from climate change, and our kids from gun violence,” he added.

Feinstein’s reelection campaign blasted out the announcement on Friday, noting the two had worked on “shared priorities” when Obama was a senator and during his administration.

Feinstein, 84, has held her the seat since 1992 but is facing frustration from liberals who believe her old-school Senate collegiality is out of touch in the era of President Trump.

The problem is not her , “old-school Senate collegiality,” it’s her support for the surveillance state, Wall Street, Iraq, the Death Penalty, the Flag Burning Amendment, Internet Censorship, expansion of the H1B program, and her opposition to marijuana legalization that puts her out of step with California voters.

It isn’t her “Senate collegiality” that people have a problem with, it’s her policies.

*Full disclosure, I’ve never met her, but she is my 2nd cousin once removed.

Definitely Bond Villain

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We’ve just gotten news that Elon Musk has decided to lock out contractors unless a direct employee of Tesla vouches for them.

This in and of itself, is kind of crappy, but it might be necessary, as a rapid ramp up in contract employees without proper planning can cause a problem.

What takes this into Jeff Bezos (who makes Ernst Stavro Blofeld look like Florence Nightingale) territory is referring to the folks you want to fire as, “Barnicles.”

He’s got to be holding an open call audition for a white Persian cat:

Elon Musk is apparently planning to purge Tesla factories of contractors in the strangest way possible. The company CEO is planning to cut off access to the company to any contractor who doesn’t have a Tesla employee to vouch for the quality of their work.
In a recent email sent to Tesla employees and obtained by Electrek, Musk warned that outside workers will be denied entry into the factory come Monday morning. The only way to keep those extra laborers around is if a Tesla employee is willing to place their own livelihood on the line in order to attest to the contractor’s skills.
Here’s the full email from Musk, via Electrek:

Please note my comment below about contractor companies and consultants. I extended the performance evaluation deadline to provide more opportunity to demonstrate excellence, but now time is up.

Please send a note to HR before Monday justifying the excellence, necessity and trustworthiness by individual (not just the contractor company as a whole) of every non-Tesla person who has badge access to our buildings or network access to our systems.

By default, anyone who does not have a Tesla employee putting their reputation on the line for them will be denied access to our facilities and networks on Monday morning. This applies worldwide.

Time to scrub off the barnacles.

Thanks, Elon

Musk’s habit of referring to contract workers as “barnacles” also came up in the company’s first-quarter earnings call. In addition to throwing a mini-temper tantrum over questions from analysts, Musk also told investors:

The number of third-party contracting companies that we’re using has really gotten out of control, so we’re going to scrub the barnacles on that front. It’s pretty crazy. We’ve got barnacles on barnacles. So there’s going to be a lot of barnacle removal.

Seriously, I’d do up a Downfall rant and upload it to Youtube, but his actual communications are pretty much a Downfall rant in and of themselves.

I don’t shop Amazon or Walmart, and I’m not going to buy a Tesla.

This is some seriously f%$#ed up sh%$.

Linkage

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Anyone remember transparent aluminum from Star Trek 4? (It’s actually a ceramic in which aluminum figures prominently)

I’m With NASA on This

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NASA has said that it is profoundly uncomfortable with man rating the SpaceX booster, because one of its core technologies, super-cooled propellants, would require that fuel be loaded when the astronauts are already in the capsule.

I agree.  Cooling LOX and kerosine well below their boiling point prior to loading does increase the total mass of fuel in the tank, but, because of thermal issues, this requires very fast loading immediately before launch, and as such is a menace:

When Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX were looking to make their Falcon 9 rocket even more powerful, they came up with a creative idea — keep the propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size, allowing them to pack more of it into the tanks.

But the approach comes with a major risk, according to some safety experts. At those extreme temperatures, the propellant would need to be loaded just before takeoff — while astronauts are aboard. An accident, or a spark, during this maneuver, known as “load-and-go,” could set off an explosion.

The proposal has raised alarms for members of Congress and NASA safety advisers as the agency and SpaceX prepare to launch humans into orbit as early as this year. One watchdog group labeled load-and-go a “potential safety risk.” A NASA advisory group warned in a letter that the method was “contrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years.”

Concerns at NASA over the astronauts’ safety hit a high point when, in September 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. No one was hurt, but the payload, a multimillion-dollar satellite, was lost. The question on many people’s minds at NASA instantly became: What if astronauts were on board?

The fueling issue is emerging as a point of tension between the safety-obsessed space agency and the maverick company run by Musk, a tech entrepreneur who is well known for his flair for the dramatic and for pushing boundaries of rocket science.

he concerns from some at NASA are shared by others. John Mulholland, who oversees Boeing’s contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station and once worked on the space shuttle, said load-and-go fueling was rejected by NASA in the past because “we never could get comfortable with the safety risks that you would take with that approach. When you’re loading densified propellants, it is not an inherently stable situation.”

(emphasis mine)

Think about Autopilot.

Also notice the next bit:

SpaceX supporters say tradition and old ways of thinking can be the enemy of innovation and thwart efforts to open the frontier of space.

 Greg Autry, a business professor at the University of Southern California, said the load-and-go procedures were a heated issue when he served on Trump’s NASA transition team.

Note that Musk, and the rest of the “eBay Mafia”, made their fortunes by exploiting an area of regulatory forbearance, which allowed them to operate without the (expensive) consumer protections that banks were required.

And note that Greg Autry, is a f%$#ing Business Professor talking about literal rocket science.

Launching unmanned payloads is not as much of an issue, because if Musk attempts to launch something unreliable, the insurance industry will price it into their premiums.

This is not possible with a life on the line.

I would note that even with the NASA safety standard of 1 in every 270 flights with a death, it means that you have a 50% chance of death after 186 flights, and this is what the dotcom and the business types find to be an insufficiently risk-taking culture.

Seriously, this is not ordering shoes online.

Someone Else Noticed

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A few days ago, I noted that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. was less than stellar on prosecuting the rich and powerful.

It appears that someone at New York Magazine noticed his habit of kissing up and punching down as well:

To hear the media tell it, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is soft on white-collar crime. First came the news that an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had arranged a fund-raiser for Vance after he refused to prosecute them for fraud. Then there was Vance’s decision not to file sexual-assault charges against Harvey Weinstein, even though police had caught the Hollywood mogul on tape confessing to the crime. Last month, spurred by a story in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered the state attorney general to investigate Vance’s handling of the case. The incidents have cost the DA: During his uncontested election for a third term in November, 10 percent of voters were so fed up with him that they went to the trouble of writing in someone whose name wasn’t Cy Vance.

But all the attention on Vance’s treatment of the rich and powerful has obscured a more surprising aspect of his record: The DA, who styles himself a progressive reformer, is actually far more punitive toward poor and minority defendants than his counterparts in other boroughs. According to a report issued last year by a special commission on Rikers Island, Vance’s office was responsible for almost 38 percent of the city’s jail population in 2016, even though it handled just 29 percent of all criminal cases in New York. “No other borough comes close,” the report concluded. Brooklyn — despite having a million more residents than Manhattan — accounted for only 22 percent of those behind bars.

………

That parade of imprisonment is compounded by Vance’s onerous demands for bail. In 2016, the DA’s own statistics show, his office detained 17 percent of those it charged with misdemeanors or minor infractions — anything from smoking a joint to jumping a turnstile. Only Staten Island, with one-seventh as many petty crimes as Manhattan, matched that level of incarceration.

Then there’s Vance’s notoriously stingy approach to providing defense attorneys with the police reports and witness statements they need to defend their clients. While most of the city’s other DAs have moved toward the practice of “open file discovery,” releasing crucial records shortly after arraignment, Vance pursues what defense attorneys call “trial by ambush,” using the narrow requirements in the state’s law on pretrial disclosure — considered one of the most restrictive in the nation — to withhold vital evidence from indigent defendants until the last possible moment. As a result, public defenders say, poor clients in Brooklyn can easily obtain evidence that is denied to those accused of similar crimes in Manhattan. “It’s two boroughs divided by a river,” says Bill Gibney, a veteran of the Legal Aid Society, the city’s oldest and largest public defense organization. “Different policies, different results.”

The fact that Vance ran unopposed is a disgrace.  Someone should run against him in the primary as well as the general, whether it be a Republican, the Working Families Party, the DSA, or Raving Monster Looney party.

The DA’s office under Vance is a horror show.

Epic Troll

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In celebration of the 200th anniversary of his birth, the Peoples Republic of China sent a statue of Karl Marx to his home town:

With Germany unsure about how to mark 200 years since Karl Marx was born, a giant bronze statue of the philosopher given by China to the town of his birth is adding to the unease.

The small town of Trier near Luxembourg in western Germany eventually decided to accept the 4.5m (15ft) statue created by China’s most famous sculptor – but only after years of wrangling over whether taking it would appear to condone rights abuses in China.

Marx co-wrote the Communist Manifesto, which said that all of human history had been based on class struggle. China’s capitalist government presents his work as central to its way of governing.

But Marx also remains a controversial figure among Germans, many of whom lived under the Soviet Union’s communist government his work inspired.

Somewhere in Beijing, a mid-level bureaucrat is having a laugh at this whole thing.

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It looks like Gina Haspel is looking to drop out from her nomination as head of the CIA, because she finds it embarrassing that she is a torturer:

Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to become the next CIA director, sought to withdraw her nomination Friday after some White House officials worried that her role in the interrogation of terrorist suspects could prevent her confirmation by the Senate, according to four senior U.S. officials.

Haspel told the White House she was interested in stepping aside if it avoided the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing on Wednesday and potential damage to the CIA’s reputation and her own, the officials said. She was summoned to the White House on Friday for a meeting on her history in the CIA’s controversial interrogation program — which employed techniques such as waterboarding that are widely seen as torture — and signaled that she was going to withdraw her nomination. She then returned to CIA headquarters, the officials said.

Taken aback at her stance, senior White House aides, including legislative affairs head Marc Short and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, rushed to Langley, Va., to meet with Haspel at her office late Friday afternoon. Discussions stretched several hours, officials said, and the White House was not entirely sure she would stick with her nomination until Saturday afternoon, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

My guess is that someone on the Senate Intelligence Committee is requesting some highly more documents from the CIA about her record, and she is freaking out.

I’m not sure if I want to see her withdraw, or I want to see her crucified at a confirmation hearing, but both are a positive outcome.

One Setback from Being a Bond Villain

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You may recall that roughly a month ago, Tesla was kicked off the NTSB investigation of its fatal “autopilot” crash for issuing self serving pres releases, which the NTSB frowns upon.

Well, it can now be revealed that when the NTSB called Elon Musk, he hung up on them.

I am a firm believer that a leader needs to be receptive to criticism and differences of opinion.

William Durant, founder of General Motors, famously would defer major decisions if there was no opposition, on the theory that the lack of dissent meant that there had not been enough consideration of the downside.

Elon Musk clearly has some problems:

On April 11, Robert Sumwalt, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, called Tesla CEO Elon Musk to tell him that the federal agency was taking the unusual step of removing the company from its investigation into a fatal March 2018 Tesla X crash in California.

Now, as Bloomberg reports, Sumwalt says that Musk abruptly ended the call, according to remarks that the safety official gave before the Society of Air Safety Investigators’ Mid-Atlantic Regional Chapter dinner on Thursday.

“Best I remember, he hung up on us,” Sumwalt said.

In a short email sent to Ars, Christopher T. O’Neil, the NTSB’s chief of media relations, confirmed Bloomberg‘s description of the call.

“The account of the Chairman’s remarks is accurate,” O’Neil wrote.

 ………

 On April 12, the NTSB formally removed Tesla as a party to the investigation into the crash.

“The NTSB took this action because Tesla violated the party agreement by releasing investigative information before it was vetted and confirmed by the NTSB,” the agency wrote. “Such releases of incomplete information often lead to speculation and incorrect assumptions about the probable cause of a crash, which does a disservice to the investigative process and the traveling public.”

For its part, Tesla said, in fact, that it withdrew before being booted out of the investigation.

A spokesperson even said that the NTSB was “more concerned with press headlines than actually promoting safety.”


No Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Die

I am not explicitly stating that Elon Musk has a screw loose, but I am saying that we should be very concerned if he buys a white Persian cat.

My Childhood Is a Lie

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Someone just did a quantitative analysis of Captain James T. Kirk, going through all the episodes of the original Star Trek, and rather than being the promiscuous and reckless character parodied in Futurama‘s Zapp Branigan, he turns out to be a lower key and far more cautious figure:

………

We reach the point of no return when the omnijerk (really I suspect there’s just one vast eldritch horror sitting in another dimension that extrudes its thousand tentacles into our own, and that each one of This Guy is merely an insignificant manifestation of the beast: they couldn’t all be so boring in precisely the same way by chance, surely) decides to voice some Dinner Party Opinions on original-series Star Trek. God knows why. It’s not five seconds before he’s on ‘Kirk and the green women’. He’s mocking the retrosexist trope, but smiling a little weirdly while doing it. His own insufficiently private enjoyment is peeking out, like a semi-erection on his face. A sort of Mad Men effect: saying, “isn’t it awful” and going for the low-hanging critical fruit while simultaneously rolling around in that aesthetic and idea of masculinity. Camp, but no homo!

“You’re thinking of Pike,” I say. “The captain in the unaired pilot. Some of that footage got reused for a later story, which made Pike into a previous captain of the Enterprise. And it never actually happened—it was a hallucination sequence designed by aliens who didn’t know what they were doing in order to tempt Pike. He rejected it.”
………

 His [the loudmouthed boyfriend of a girl invited to the party] was a common enough error, and he can claim neither the credit nor the blame for the invention. The pop culture idea of Kirk, Captain of the Enterprise for the first Star Trek series (ST:TOS) and the original run of films, has become almost synonymous with Zapp Brannigan from Futurama. To quote Wikipedia,

[t]hough famed for his bravery and strategic genius, it soon becomes very apparent that [Brannigan] is sexist, vain, and often very cowardly and inept. […] Brannigan is also completely indifferent to military casualties. […] He is arrogant, completely incompetent, chauvinistic, and stupid.

Brannigan is supposed to be part comic exaggeration of the “real” Kirk, part reflective take-down of the source character [1] . Per wiki, in some ways the ultimate aggregator of the vox populi, “Kirk has been noted for ‘his sexual exploits with gorgeous females of every size, shape and type’ [11]; he has been called ‘promiscuous’ [66] and labeled a ‘womanizer’ [67] [68].” (Note all those still-working footnotes for fan-publications and major papers and entertainment news sites.) The article “Captain Kirk’s 8 Most Impressive Love Conquests” gives us such bon mots as these:

For three glorious seasons, Star Trek‘s Captain James T. Kirk boldly seduced and explored women no Earth-man had been with before. Well, okay, some of them were from Earth, but Starfleet’s greatest discovery was that no women anywhere in the cosmos could resist the intense gaze and oft-exposed, tanned pecs of the Enterprise’s head honcho. Who can blame them, really? Of the many, many seduction [sic] committed by James T. Kirk, here are the 8 most impressive (not most exotic, which would totally include the green Orion Slave Girl, but this doesn’t, because Kirk had no problems getting under her Orion’s belt), which deserve to be recorded in the Captain’s Log for all eternity.

What follows is an inventory of Kirk’s actual behavior, which is far milder, particularly by the standard of 1960’s television, than I recall:

Let’s start, as people so often do, with those infamous Green Women.

Yes: one existed in ST:TOS. Sort of. It was a vision. On a planet Kirk wasn’t even on. A captain was there: it wasn’t Kirk. Captain Pike and this green, Orion woman [2] could literally never have done the deed [3].

 (ADDENDUM: I should also mention here the first and only actual Orion woman we see in TOS, Marta: an inmate of an asylum who attempts to seduce a suspicious, wounded Kirk, who is himself interested in escaping dangerous captivity. She then immediately tries to murder him. Ah, l’amour.)

 Over the course of three seasons and six films (though I hesitate to mention the films in the same breath as the series, because even the initial run of films represents a significant, reflexive re-working of the original material), we do meet some women Kirk has had romantic relations with. These previous relationships mostly seem of a type.

  • Ruth (“Shore Leave”) was a college girlfriend of Kirk’s while he was at Starfleet Academy. The script implies she was also in Starfleet. We see only a facsimile of her.
  • Dr. Janet Wallace (“The Deadly Years”) was a biologist, and she and Kirk broke up in favour of their respective careers.
  • Janice Lester (“Turnabout Intruder”) was a Starfleet-trained scientist. Their relationship lasted at least a year, and was strained and broken by Janice’s violent resentment of Kirk’s ability to benefit from institutional sexism (check the tapes, I’m not exaggerating, that’s what she says).
  • Areel Shaw (“Court Martial”) was a dedicated JAG attorney.
  • Carol Marcus (The Wrath of Khan), retconned into the history of Kirk’s life by the films, was a brilliant, ground-breaking scientist. In one draft of the script, this character literally was the aforementioned Janet Wallace [4]

At some point during his time at the Academy, Kirk “almost married” a blonde lab technician (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”). It seems probable that she was one of the aforementioned women (all of whom but Lester were blonde, though dye exists, and all of whom but Shaw were scientists, though majors can change—I know an attorney with a biology degree myself).

 With the exception of Lester, all Kirk’s relationships that we’re aware of seem to have ended amicably. He and the women involved have often kept up communication to some extent, despite the impediments caused by interstellar travel (Wallace, Marcus). The relationships all seem to have been of some duration, and characterised by fairly serious involvement on both parts. They were distinctly emotional affairs, and no one accuses Kirk of having “womanised” during them. They all involved competent people drawn to demanding, intellectually stimulating fields—usually science—and the service of something greater than themselves—almost universally Starfleet.

 Kirk’s storied history of womanising seemingly consists of his having seriously dated a fairly small number of clever women in Uni. We’re even told Kirk had to be manipulated into paying attention to matters of the heart and/or loins during that period (and that Kirk’s into “longhair stuff” like 17th-century philosophy):

 ………

 A tumblr fan essay [6] puts it well:

Nearly every instance of Captain James T. Kirk seducing an alien woman was not because he’s some randy alien shagger extraordinaire, but because he needed to distract the enemy of the given episode in order to save the Enterprise. In the same way we wouldn’t say a woman who uses her sexuality as a weapon (flirting with the villains to distract them and ultimately defeat them) is just some intergalactic bed hopper, neither is Kirk.

………

 Masculinity is not a fixed construction: it evolves over time. When we view Kirk as Zapp Brannigan, actually we’re retconning a more current understanding of the male action hero and superimposing it over an era where it doesn’t have all that much business being.

So, Kirk is not the compulsive womanizer that we recall him to be.

You should read the rest, it is a long and well worth the read essay, but it makes clear, with extensive citations, that our image of Kirk is not a reflection of the character in the original series, but rather a reflection of the overtones that we have assigned, and his risk taking occurs only when there is no alternative.

Read it, and expect to lose a bit of your childhood in the process.

It’s worth it.

The Stupid, it Burns Us!!!!

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In 2016, @Tim_Canova mounted a primary challenge against Debbie Wasserman Schultz. This year, he’s running against her again, this time as an independent. You’ll never guess which foreign country they’re attempting to link him to. Do Dems have any other tactic at this point? https://t.co/NtOh3s6rcY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2018

Seriously, this, “A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin,” crap has to end.

It loses elections, and demoralizes potential supporters who want to see issues addressed.

The ony people helped by this are the usual incompetent consultants who rake in the campaign money from political candidates.

Like Lord of the Flies, on Acid

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In appears that in response to the widening miasma of corruption surrounding EPA chief Scott Pruitt, he has directed his staff to start leaking damaging information on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke:

As Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt faces a seemingly endless stream of scandal, his team is scrambling to divert the spotlight to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. And the White House isn’t happy about it.

In the last week, a member of Pruitt’s press team, Michael Abboud, has been shopping negative stories about Zinke to multiple outlets, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the efforts, as well as correspondence reviewed by The Atlantic.

“This did not happen, and it’s categorically false,” EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said.

The stories were shopped with the intention of “taking the heat off of Pruitt,” the sources said, in the aftermath of the EPA chief’s punishing congressional hearing last week. They both added, however, that most reporters felt the story was not solid enough to run. On Thursday, Patrick Howley of Big League Politics published a piece on the allegations; he did not respond to request for comment as to his sources.

Abboud alleged to reporters that an Interior staffer conspired with former EPA deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski to leak damaging information about the EPA, as part of a rivalry between Zinke and Pruitt. The collaboration, Abboud claimed, allowed the Interior staffer to prop up Zinke at the expense of Pruitt, and Chmielewski to “get back” at his former boss.

Not a surprise.  Both Pruitt and Zinke have little interest in the underlying purpose of their jobs, or their agencies, and as such, it’s all about that old career ladder.

If You Believe that the Market is Everything, then Everything is for Sale

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Case in point, the the academic integrity of the economics program at George Mason University, more specifically its Mercatus “Think Tank”, which, rather unsurprisingly, turns out to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers.

Not a surprise. Bribery and undeserved adulation of the rich is pretty much what the Mercatus Center is all about:

In defending its financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation — some $50 million worth, as of 2016 — George Mason University has cited its academic independence from donors.

Yet George Mason is less independent than it has let on, according to documents released last week via an open-records request, and amid an ongoing suit about donor transparency brought by student activists.

Angel Cabrera, university president since 2012, shared the news with faculty members in an email, saying, “I was made aware of a number of gift agreements that were accepted by the university between 2003 and 2011 and raise questions concerning donor influence in academic matters.”

The gifts, in support of faculty positions in economics, “granted donors some participation in faculty selection and evaluation,” Cabrera said, noting that one such agreement is still active (the rest have expired).

All 10 of the now-public agreements relate to the university’s Mercatus Center for free market research, a locus of Koch-funded activity. Three of the agreements involve Koch. The two most recent, from 2007 and 2009, stipulate the creation of a five-member selection committee to select a professor, with two of those committee members chosen by donors. The other Koch agreement, from 1990, also afforded Koch a role in naming a professor to fund.

George Mason also allowed Koch a role in evaluating professors’ performance via advisory boards. And while the agreements assert that final say in faculty appointments will be based on normal university procedures, the 2009 agreement says that funds will be returned to the donor if the provost and the selection committee can’t agree on a candidate.

It is of course common for donors who support professorships to specify the academic field or subfield. So while the Koch family’s extensive giving to antiregulatory causes in politics is controversial, it is not necessarily controversial that they fund professorships in economics and even free-market economics. But academic values have long held that donors don’t get to pick who holds chairs, or evaluate them.

Such details are similar to those in a now-defunct agreement with Florida State University, from 2008, that defenders of Koch have said was a one-off. It was previously revealed that Utah State University’s grant agreement with Koch from around the same time had similar language, however.

………

Student activists are currently in court in Virginia, arguing for their right to view agreements made between donors and the university’s foundation, saying they, too, should be subject to state open-records laws for public institutions. In particular, the students — and many faculty observers — have questions about the identity of an anonymous donor who agreed to give $20 million dollars to rename George Mason’s law school after the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2016.

The university has consistently said that the foundation is a private entity and that compromising the confidential nature of donations through that avenue by releasing such documents could chill giving. Koch was a joint, $10 million donor on the law school deal.

The new documents were released as part of an open-records request by Samantha Parsons, a former student at George Mason who is now involved in the lawsuit through her organization, UnKoch My Campus. In addition to the approval-based agreements, emails released name Leonard Leo, executive director of the Federalist Society, as a representative of the anonymous donor to the law school.

John Hardin, Koch’s director of university relations, said in a statement that “while our grant agreements have evolved over time, we have always been committed to the highest standards of academic integrity and freedom.”

Bullsh%$.

They have done this before, repeatedly, and each time they have given the same tired line.

The Brothers Koch, and their supporters, are a truly pernicious and toxic influence in our society.

They poison everything they touch, sometimes morally, as with their attempts to secretly buy academic programs, and sometimes literally, as with their petcoke play.

In any case, people of good conscience and good reputation should wash their hands of the Kochs.

Not Stupid, Evil

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Normally, when someone makes a gaffe like this, I assume stupidity, not malice, but this is John Bolton, and in Bolton’s case, never attribute something to incompetence that can be attributed to malice:

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, said on Sunday that the United States is using the “Libya model” as it seeks to denuclearize the Korean peninsula—a process that eventually led to the destabilization of that country and the death of its dictator, and one that has drawn North Korea’s ire in the past.

“We have very much in mind the Libya model from 2003, 2004,” Bolton said on Fox News Sunday, referring to the African country’s decision to get rid of its nuclear weapons after negotiating with American officials. Seven years later, Libya found itself in a civil war that led to the death of its dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, after an intervention by the U.S. and its allies.

It’s unclear how Bolton’s message will be received by Kim Jong Un’s regime, which has already taken some steps—though none of them concrete or verifiable—toward denuclearization. Pyongyang has long cited U.S. interventions in countries such as Libya as a reason why it needs nuclear weapons.

As the civil war was intensifying there in 2011, North Korea said it was a mistake for Libya to agree to dismantle its nuclear program. A North Korea Foreign Ministry official described it at the time as “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.”

Boulton brought up the “L-word” because he wants to sabotage negotiations, period, full stop.

More of This

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A group of “Techno Anarchists” in New York City have set up a mesh network to allow for broadly available low cost broadband:

It’s a promise that seems almost too good to be true: super-fast internet that’s cheap, and free of the contracts and hassles that come with major service providers.

 That’s not a pipe dream for Brian Hall, it’s his goal.

 The lead volunteer behind the community group NYC Mesh aims to bring affordable internet with lightning-quick downloads to everyone in New York, one building at a time.

 “Our typical speeds are 80 to 110 megabits a second,” Hall says, pointing out that streaming something like Netflix only requires about 5 Mbps.

 CBC News joined him one afternoon on a roof in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Greenpoint. Hall was installing the latest addition to the mesh network that will deliver his vision.

 The worksite is one of the group’s latest customers, a converted warehouse that houses a video production company. The regular commercial internet providers were going to charge tens of thousands of dollars to get them online.

 NYC Mesh took on the job for a small installation fee of a few hundred dollars and a monthly donation.

Mesh networks explained

So what is a mesh network?

 Picture a spiderweb of wireless connections. The main signal originates from what’s called the Supernode. It’s a direct plugin to the internet, via an internet exchange point — the same place Internet Service Providers get their connection.

 The signal from the supernode, sent out wirelessly via an antenna, covers an area of several kilometres.

 From there, a mesh of smaller antennas spread out on rooftops or balconies receive that signal. They’re connected to Wi-Fi access points that allow people to use the internet.

 Each supernode can connect thousands of users.

 And the access points talk to the others around them, so if one goes down for some reason the rest still work.

 “Mesh networks are an alternative to standard ISP hookups. You’re not provided with an internet connection through their cable, but through — in our case —Wi-Fi networks,” says Jason Howard, a programmer and actor who’s helping with the latest installation.

 NYC Mesh bought an industrial-strength connection to the internet right at an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), in this case a futuristic-looking tower in downtown Manhattan. It’s the same place that internet service providers (ISPs) like Verizon and Spectrum connect to the internet, accessing massive amounts of wired bandwidth.

 NYC Mesh then installed an antenna on the roof of the IXP. That became the supernode, the heart of its mesh network.

 From there it beams out and receives Wi-Fi signals, connecting to receivers on rooftops spread through the East Village and Chinatown, and across the river into parts of Brooklyn.

I am generally dubious of techno-libertarian solutions to problems, I tend to favor regulation and public ownership, but this seems to be doing pretty well, though one does have to wonder about how well it might scale as its popularity increases.  (New York City is a perfect laboratory for investigating these issues)

I would think that the use of directional antennas would allow broader usage, if just by providing geographical separation between the data streams when frequency separation is no longer available.

In any case, anything that discommodes the incumbent telco and cable providers is to my mine an independent good.

I Sure Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

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In the past 24 yours, Trump, and his new lawyer, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani have admitted to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford) after months of denying everything.

It appears that they are under the misapprehension that the investigation is being run by New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr.,* and so have forgotten basic rules of behavior when one is under criminal investigation:

  1. Shut the f%$# up!
  2. See rule 1.
  3. Seriously, see rule 1!

In any case, path the popcorn:

President Trump on Thursday directly contradicted his earlier statements that he knew of no payment to Stormy Daniels, the pornographic film actress who says she had an affair with him.

Mr. Trump said he paid a monthly retainer to his former lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, and suggested that the payment by Mr. Cohen to the actress could not be considered a campaign contribution.

The president’s comments reiterated an explosive announcement late Wednesday by one of his recently-hired attorneys, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who said on Fox News that the president reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payment to the actress Stephanie Clifford, who performs as Stormy Daniels. Though Mr. Giuliani described his interview as part of a strategy, the disclosure caught several Trump advisers by surprise, sending some scrambling on Thursday morning to determine how to confront the situation.

In three Twitter posts Thursday morning, the president repeated some of what Mr. Giuliani said a day earlier, specifically that Mr. Trump repaid a $130,000 payment Mr. Cohen made to Ms. Clifford just days before the presidential election in 2016.

Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump said this removed the question of whether it was a campaign finance violation. Mr. Trump also continued to deny the affair.

Seriously, when you combine Trump and Giuliani there must have been some sort of idiot bully event horizon.

*See Cyrus Vance, Jr.’s history with Harvey Weinstein & the Trump SoHo investigation. This guy really does not want to investigate rich people.

How the Sharing Economy Makes Our Lives Better

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A study by the New York City Comptroller has shown that Airbnb led to significant rent increases in New York City:

Airbnb’s growing influence caused rents to increase significantly in tourist areas and gentrifying neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where the majority of the company’s rentals are concentrated, according to a report released on Thursday by the city comptroller’s office.

In Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea neighborhoods and the Midtown Business District, which accounted for about 11 percent of all Airbnb listings in New York City in 2016, average monthly rents increased by $398 between 2009 and 2016, of which $86, or 21.6 percent, was a result of Airbnb’s presence, the report said. In Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, the study said, rents went up 18.6 percent in those years because of Airbnb listings.

Airbnb makes it easy to rent apartments to tourists, taking units off the market for full-time residents, the report said.

“For years, New Yorkers have felt the burden of rents that go nowhere but up, and Airbnb is one reason why,” the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, said in an interview. “It’s just simply supply and demand. Fewer apartments to rent means higher prices, and that’s the Airbnb effect.”

The report said that Airbnb’s influence cost New Yorkers $616 million in additional rent in 2016 as a result of price pressures.

The term for this is negative externality, the imposition of a cost on a third party not directly involved in the transaction.

It’s the same as the trucker polluting your air, or the dry cleaner who dumps his chemicals down the drain.

In this case, Airbnb and its “Hosts” make money, and everyone else pays for it, to the tune of about $1000.00 a year in added rent. 

Gina Haspel Will Fit Right In

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You hear about the CIA’s “MK Ultra” program around the fever swamps of conspiracy theorists, but it actually did exist, and it turns out that it was worse than I could have imagined.

The CIA tortured mental patients in the 1960s under this program:

In the 1950s and 60s, a Montreal hospital subjected psychiatric patients to electroshocks, drug-induced sleep and huge doses of LSD. Families are still grappling with the effects

Sarah Anne Johnson had always known the broad strokes of her maternal grandmother’s story. In 1956, Velma Orlikow checked herself into a renowned Canadian psychiatric hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, hoping for help with postpartum depression.

She was in and out of the clinic for three years, but instead of improving, her condition deteriorated – and her personality underwent jarring changes.

More than two decades passed before Johnson and her family had an explanation, and it was much stranger than any of them could imagine: in 1977 it emerged that the CIA had been funding experiments in mind-control brainwashing at the institute as part of a North America-wide project known as MK Ultra.

At the time, the US agency was scrambling to deepen its understanding of brainwashing, after a handful of Americans captured during the Korean war had publicly praised communism and denounced the US.

In 1957, this interest brought the agency north of the border, where a Scottish-born psychiatrist, Ewen Cameron, was trying to discover whether doctors could erase a person’s mind and instill new patterns of behaviour.

Orlikow was one of several hundred patients who became unwitting subjects of these experiments in Montreal in the late 1950s and early 60s.

if you are not truly horrified by this, miy might have a future at Langley.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Would You Please Go Now?

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Failed presidential candidates tend to talk about things. Jimmy Carter did a lot of talking about fair voting in other countries, among other things, Al Gore talked about anthropogenic climate change (and had a rather funny turn on Saturday Night Live), and John Kerry talked about Senate stuff, because he was still a Senator.

What they didn’t do was continually re-litigate the election that they lost

Not so Hillary Clinton, who has been making the rounds talking about how it’s not her fault, and it wasn’t fair.

Truth be told, she owns this, and she has owned this ever since hiring the total mook, ironically enough said mook was actually named Mook, to mismanage her campaign.

Now she is claiming that it is all the fault of those anti-capitalist socialists:

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton says identifying as a capitalist hurt her in the 2016 campaign.

Clinton, who beat out democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for the party’s nomination, said in a Wednesday interview with Time Inc. Brands executive Alan Murray that her economic policies were “probably” a hard sell for many Democratic primary voters, as reported by the Daily Beast.

“It’s hard to know, but I mean if you’re in the Iowa caucuses and 41 percent of Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists, and I’m asked ‘Are you a capitalist?’ and I say, ‘Yes, but with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability.’ You know, that probably gets lost in the ‘Oh my gosh, she’s a capitalist!’ ” Clinton said.

Clinton just barely edged out Sanders in Iowa’s first presidential caucus of the cycle.

………

The Daily Beast reported that Republicans quickly seized on the comments, posting them on multiple social media channels. 

(emphasis mine)

If I were a cynic,* I would think that Hillary is attempting to sabotage the Democratic Party so that they will run back to her in 2020, or because she’s just spiteful.

Seriously, this is the sort of sh%$ that you should be doing over drinks with friends, not at the f%$#ing Shared Value Leadership Summit on camera.

To quote Samuel L. Jackson, I’m sock of these motherf%$#ing stakes on this motherf%$#ing plane!

*Oh, that’s right, I am a cynic, and she IS being a spiteful narcissist who still has delusions another bite at the apple in 2020.

Poem, apologies to Theodore Geisel, after the break:

Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don’t care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!
I don’t care.
You can go
By bike.
You can go
On a Zike-Bike
If you like.
If you like
You can go
In an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!
Please do, do, do, DO!
Hillary Rodham Clinton
I don’t care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
If you wish.
If you wish
You may go
By lion’s tale.
Or stamp yourself
And go by mail.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Don’t you know
The time has come
To go, go, GO!
Get on your way!
Please Hillary C.!
You might like going in a Zumble-Zay.
You can go by balloon . . .
Or broomstick.
Or
You can go by camel
In a bureau drawer.
You can go by bumble-boat
. . . or jet.
I don’t care how you go.
Just get!
Hillary Rodham Clinton!
I don’t care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
I said
GO
And
GO
I meant . . .
The time had come
So . . .
Hillary WENT. 

Cuck Fomcast

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There is a reason why Comcast is consistently one of the most despised businesses in the United States.

Case in point, the cable giant is refusing to upgrade lines for customers fho don’t shell out big bucks for cable TV in addition to internet service:

As we’ve often noted, Comcast has been shielded from the cord cutting trend somewhat thanks to its growing monopoly over broadband. As users on slow DSL lines flee telcos that are unwilling to upgrade their damn networks, they’re increasingly flocking to cable operators for faster speeds. When they get there, they often bundle TV services; not necessarily because they want it, but because it’s intentionally cheaper than buying broadband standalone.

And while Comcast’s broadband monopoly has protected it from TV cord cutting somewhat, the rise in streaming competition has slowly eroded that advantage, and Comcast is expected to see see double its usual rate of cord cutting this year according to Wall Street analysts.

Comcast being Comcast, the company has a semi-nefarious plan B. Part of that plan is to abuse its monopoly over broadband to deploy arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees. These restrictions are glorified rate hikes applied to non competitive markets, with the added advantage of making streaming video more expensive. It’s a punishment for choosing to leave Comcast’s walled garden.

But Comcast appears to have discovered another handy trick that involves using its broadband monopoly to hamstring cord cutters. Reports emerged this week that the company is upgrading the speeds of customers in Houston and parts of the Pacific Northwest, but only if they continue to subscribe to traditional cable television. The company’s press release casually floats over the fact that only Comcast video customers will see these upgrades for now:

“Speed increases will vary based on the Xfinity Internet customers’ current speed subscriptions. Those receiving the speed boost will benefit from an increase of 30 to 40 percent in their download speeds. Existing Xfinity Internet and X1 video customers subscribing to certain packages can expect to experience enhanced speeds this month.”


As is usually the case, Comcast simply acted as if this was all just routine promotional experimentation (an argument that only works if you’re unfamiliar with Comcast’s other efforts to constrain emerging video competition):

Comcast is, using the immortal words of Douglas Adams, are, “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”