Month: August 2018

Millenials Get it Right

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It appears that the young generation has had a much needed epiphany over US foreign policy.

Since the fall of the USSR, the goal of US foreign policy has been the maintenance of a unipolar world which sustains US military and economic hegemony, and the results have not been good for the United States or the world:

Millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996, see America’s role in the 21st century world in ways that, as a recently released study shows, are an intriguing mix of continuity and change compared to prior generations.

For over 40 years the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which conducted the study, has asked the American public whether the United States should “take an active part” or “stay out” of world affairs.

This year, an average of all respondents – people born between 1928 and 1996 – showed that 64 percent believe the U.S. should take an active part in world affairs, but interesting differences could be seen when the numbers are broken down by generation.

The money quote is, “In a related response, only one-quarter of millenials saw the need for the U.S. to be the dominant world leader.”

It gives me a little hope for the future of this country.

Yes, We All Need to Apologize to Sinead O’Connor

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I actually saw this live, and was completely clueless

When she tore up a picture of John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in protest of church abuse, some of which she was the personal target of, she got a LOT of grief.

Now, people are recognizing that she was right and justified, Even in her native Ireland:

Her declaration back in 1992 that the Catholic Church was rotten to its core and pedophile priests and their enablers were the real enemy was true.

It caused a massive worldwide reaction when she tore up a picture of the then Pope on Saturday Night Live in October 1992 and declared, “Fight the real enemy.”

We now know that the pedophile scandals were rampant during the era of Pope John Paul, who chose to turn a blind eye. O’Connor was calling out the right person.

Before Spotlight, before the worst of the American and Irish church scandals, O’Connor called it right and only got abuse in return.

The enemy has become very obvious since then. The revelation that a Pennsylvania grand jury found that more than 1,000 children in six dioceses there had been molested by 300 Catholic priests over the past 70 years while successive church officials covered it up is truly shocking.

The scandal, which has been going on for decades, and the coverup, which was particularly ferocious under John Paul II, has proven her right.

NYT Endorses Zephyr Teachout for AG

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Given the generally pro-corporate bent of the Gray Lady, their endorsement is a surprise:

The most important choice facing New York voters this fall is whom they will pick as their next state attorney general. The office could be the last line of defense against an antidemocratic president, a federal government indifferent to environmental and consumer protection and a state government in which ethics can seem a mere inconvenience.

Even in the best of times the office plays a critical role, policing fraud on Wall Street and ensuring enforcement of state and federal laws, from regulating the financial system to preventing employment discrimination. Its influence is felt across the nation.

These are not the best of times. With the right leadership, the office could serve as a firewall if President Trump pardons senior aides, dismisses the special counsel, Robert Mueller, or attacks the foundations of state power. Only a handful of American institutions are equipped to resist such assaults on constitutional authority, and the New York attorney general’s office, with 650 lawyers and a history of muscular law enforcement, is one of them.

The next attorney general will have a full docket in New York as well. Albany has long been a chamber of ethical horrors. In March, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s former senior aide Joseph Percoco was convicted on corruption charges. In May, former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, was also convicted of corruption. In July, the former Republican Senate majority leader, Dean Skelos, was convicted of bribery, extortion and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he used his office to pressure businesses to pay his son $300,000 for no-show jobs. The same month, Alain Kaloyeros, a key figure behind Mr. Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion” economic initiative, was convicted in a bid-rigging scheme.

 ………

 From a refreshingly strong field competing in the Democratic primary, to be held on Sept. 13, the best candidate is Zephyr Teachout, an independent-minded lawyer unusually well prepared to curb abuses of power and restore integrity and pride to this office. Ms. Teachout waged a strong primary challenge against Mr. Cuomo four years ago, lending her additional credibility and distance from a governor who remains all too cozy with the donors, contractors, union leaders and influence peddlers who dominate Albany and beyond.

 ………

 New York needs a great lawyer. We believe that Democrats who are seeking a means of standing up to the Trump presidency and graft in Albany can find in Ms. Teachout their most effective champion for democracy and civil rights, good government and the environment, workers’ rights, fair housing and gender equality.

(emphasis mine)

I think that part of the reason for this endorsement is the above not-so-subtle diss of Cuomo as well.

I think that if Teachout ends up AG, she will have a remarkably hostile relationship with the Governor, and that’s a good thing.

Linkage

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Have you ever wondered how automatic weapons work?

The Difference Between a Conservative and a Disloyal Democrat

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Matt Taibbi observes that in an attempt to boost his numbers on what is a slam dunk of his reelection as Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo may cost the Democrats control of the House of Representatives:

It’s an open secret: New York governor Andrew Cuomo is on the shortest of short lists of likely 2020 presidential candidates.

He’s acting like it, too. The Empire State’s political favorite son has positioned himself as a leading anti-Trump voice, the tip of the Democratic spear. The president this week even publicly dared Cuomo to run in 2020, bleating: “Please do it. Please.”

But if Cuomo is angling to be the next Democratic nominee, why is he appearing to help Republicans in their effort to keep control of the House?

Cuomo’s little-publicized decision last year to accept the nomination of the obscure Independence Party is now shaping up, potentially, to be a disaster of national dimensions.

“It could decide two or three races,” says Dan Cantor, chair of the Working Families Party national committee. “And that could decide who controls the House.”

The reason: In accepting the nomination of the Independence Party, an obscure group run by ideologically eccentric radio and TV host Frank MacKay, Cuomo is ticketing with a slew of infamous Republican congressional candidates.

His ticket-mates include upstate reactionaries like John Faso and John Katko, both of whom Cuomo has personally sparred with in the past. Faso even once said Cuomo wasn’t “a man of principle and honor” like his father, former governor Mario Cuomo.

Cuomo doesn’t need the votes. He has a substantial lead in recent polls and is a virtual lock to be re-elected.

But his Independence Party cohorts aren’t all so lucky. Many are Republicans like Faso, currently engaged in tight races against Democrats in key swing districts. And being ticketed with Cuomo might net them slight but difference-making bumps this fall.

………

Still, it seems like counterintuitive politics. This bizarre situation is in play because the state of New York has an unusual electoral system, employing a thing called “fusion voting.” Used in only eight states, fusion voting is actually an interesting idea, America’s closest approximation to a proportional representation system.

The system allows one candidate to receive votes from multiple parties. New York’s is the most prominent and has some of the country’s highest-profile minor parties, with Nixon’s Working Families Party being the latest to break through.

This is the problem with folks like Cuomo, and Manchin, and Heitkamp:  They will throw over the party for the equivalent of a half-eaten cheeseburger.

Clearly, Self Driving Cars are Just Around the Corner

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It appears that the latest break-through for self driving cars is a proposal to outlaw pedestrians:

You’re crossing the street wrong.

That is essentially the argument some self-driving car boosters have fallen back on in the months after the first pedestrian death attributed to an autonomous vehicle and amid growing concerns that artificial intelligence capable of real-world driving is further away than many predicted just a few years ago.

In a line reminiscent of Steve Jobs’s famous defense of the iPhone 4’s flawed antennae—“Don’t hold it like that”—these technologists say the problem isn’t that self-driving cars don’t work, it’s that people act unpredictably.

“What we tell people is, ‘Please be lawful and please be considerate,’” says Andrew Ng, a well-known machine learning researcher who runs a venture fund that invests in AI-enabled companies, including self-driving startup Drive.AI. In other words: no jaywalking.

Whether self-driving cars can correctly identify and avoid pedestrians crossing streets has become a burning issue since March after an Uber self-driving car killed a woman in Arizona who was walking a bicycle across the street at night outside a designated crosswalk. The incident is still under investigation, but a preliminary report from federal safety regulators said the car’s sensors had detected the woman but its decision-making software discounted the sensor data, concluding it was likely a false positive.

………

With these timelines slipping, driverless proponents like Ng say there’s one surefire shortcut to getting self-driving cars on the streets sooner: persuade pedestrians to behave less erratically. If they use crosswalks, where there are contextual clues—pavement markings and stop lights—the software is more likely to identify them.

But to others the very fact that Ng is suggesting such a thing is a sign that today’s technology simply can’t deliver self-driving cars as originally envisioned. “The AI we would really need hasn’t yet arrived,” says Gary Marcus, a New York University professor of psychology who researches both human and artificial intelligence. He says Ng is “just redefining the goalposts to make the job easier,” and that if the only way we can achieve safe self-driving cars is to completely segregate them from human drivers and pedestrians, we already had such technology: trains.

Rodney Brooks, a well-known robotics researcher and an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a blog post critical of Ng’s sentiments that “the great promise of self-driving cars has been that they will eliminate traffic deaths. Now [Ng] is saying that they will eliminate traffic deaths as long as all humans are trained to change their behavior? What just happened?”

We can now add hypocrisy to the other short comings of self driving car advocates.

The Ukraine is Being the Ukraine Again

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In news that will surprise no one who knows the history, the Ukrainian army has adapted the salute used by Nazi collaborators as its official greeting:

August 24th, Ukrainian Independence Day, will see a ceremony introducing the country’s new official army salute, as prescribed by Ukraine’s Presidential decree: Glory to Ukraine! – Glory to the Heroes!

“We have consulted with the Minister of Defense, National Security and Defense Council, Government and I have decided that starting from August 24 these words will be heard for the first time as part of the official military parade ceremony on the Independence Day of Ukraine,” Petro Poroshenko was quoted saying on the Ukraine President’s official site.

Glory to Ukraine! – Glory to the Heroes! is a slogan of the UPA, the Ukraine Rebel Army who fought on the side of the Nazis. The slogans, their origin, and history are well known in Ukraine, although the President’s website does not make mention of these. Present neo-Nazi Ukrainian military formations established by order of the Ukrainian authorities appropriated the slogan from the end of 2013 onward. Now, the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator’s greeting will become the official salute in that country’s army.

………

“If a country adopts pro-Nazi slogans of criminal forces, murderers who committed numerous crimes of genocide, that country is doomed,” said co-founder and President of the Rogatchi Foundation Dr. Inna Rogatchi. “But the world shouldn’t turn a blind eye to this, as it repeatedly does with regard to Ukraine.”

This is not a surprise, particularly given the nature of the coup that put the current government in power.

The US State Department actively supported and cultivated right wing nationalists, and this is the foreseeable result.

More #MeToo

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Only this time, the accused is a female feminist academic who is widely acclaimed in her community, and people who have previously espoused zero tolerance are calling for restraint and further investigation.

As the saying goes, where you stand depends upon where you sit:

The case seems like a familiar story turned on its head: Avital Ronell, a world-renowned female professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University, was found responsible for sexually harassing a male former graduate student, Nimrod Reitman.

An 11-month Title IX investigation found Professor Ronell, described by a colleague as “one of the very few philosopher-stars of this world,” responsible for sexual harassment, both physical and verbal, to the extent that her behavior was “sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of Mr. Reitman’s learning environment.” The university has suspended Professor Ronell for the coming academic year.

In the Title IX final report, excerpts of which were obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Reitman said that she had sexually harassed him for three years, and shared dozens of emails in which she referred to him as “my most adored one,” “Sweet cuddly Baby,” “cock-er spaniel,” and “my astounding and beautiful Nimrod.”

Coming in the middle of the #MeToo movement’s reckoning over sexual misconduct, it raised a challenge for feminists — how to respond when one of their own behaved badly. And the response has roiled a corner of academia.

Soon after the university made its final, confidential determination this spring, a group of scholars from around the world, including prominent feminists, sent a letter to N.Y.U. in defense of Professor Ronell. Judith Butler, the author of the book “Gender Trouble” and one of the most influential feminist scholars today, was first on the list.

“Although we have no access to the confidential dossier, we have all worked for many years in close proximity to Professor Ronell,” the professors wrote in a draft letter posted on a philosophy blog in June. “We have all seen her relationship with students, and some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her.”

Critics saw the letter, with its focus on the potential damage to Professor Ronell’s reputation and the force of her personality, as echoing past defenses of powerful men.

“We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation,” the professors wrote.

And Harvey Weinstein produced some critically acclaimed movies.

Skepticism by friends and colleagues upon hearing the news is to be expected, but this response is literally the response to every episode of harassment from a top performer basically ever.

It’s the same thing.

Let me repeat that, It’s ……… the ……… Same ……… Thing.

Also the response from her peers, who dismiss the alleged victim as, “The individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her,” is a classic circling of the wagons.

They are basically saying, “Bitches be crazy.”

It’s not acceptable.

It is never acceptable.

Shame on them.

Linkage

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The Dead Kennedys have the song for the season:

Baseball is Magic

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If you don’t follow baseball, you might not understand, but the Mets just beat the Phillies by 24-4.

The kicker? This score includes Eleven unearned runs:

The New York Mets are the greatest baseball team of the past two days. Following up on a 16-5 drubbing of the Orioles on Wednesday night, one of the biggest laughingstocks in baseball took down the Phillies this afternoon by a staggeringly competent score of 24-4. Those 24 runs today are a Mets franchise record.

The Phillies, meanwhile, paid tribute to the slapstick Mets we all remember from, uh, last week, by running down some of their greatest hits. Were there throwing errors? Reader, there were throwing errors, part of four total miscues by the Phillies that led to eleven(!) unearned runs.

The kicker is that this was a double header, and the Phillies won the 2nd game.

This is remarkable

Break Up Facebook: Reason LVLMMXCII

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Facebook’s “Head of news partnerships”, the contemptible Campbell Brown (Charter School shenanigans) has threatened media organizations that choose not to partner with the social media company:

A senior Facebook executive told Australian media companies that if they didn’t cooperate with the social network, their businesses would die.

According to a report by The Australian, Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, told a group of more than 20 broadcasters and publishers that she wanted to help media companies develop sustainable business models through the platform.

“We will help you revitalise journalism … in a few years the ­reverse looks like I’ll be holding your hands with your dying ­business like in a hospice,” she said, in comments corroborated by five people who attended the meeting in Sydney on Tuesday.

The Australian also reported that Brown said that Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, “doesn’t care about publishers but is giving me a lot of leeway and concessions to make these changes”, although both Facebook and Brown vehemently deny this comment was made, referring to a transcript they have from the meeting.

Facebook would not release the transcript from the meeting.

Yes, this is a reason to break up the company.  This is way too much power for a private actor to have.

Also, I will note something that Yves Smith has said frequently, “If your business depends on a platform, your business is already dead.”  (The media graveyard is littered with the remnants of companies that have come to depend on a 3rd party platform.)

A Shande Far Di Goyim

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There is an investigation in New York state over allegations that Orthodox Yeshivas (Jewish religious schools) are not providing an adequate education.

Specifically, there are allegations that these schools are not providing an adequate education on required secular subjects like math, science, history, English, etc.

About half of the Yeshivas have refused entry to inspectors:

Three years after the city launched an investigation into whether certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools were providing an adequate education in secular subjects, it revealed on Thursday that it had made little progress. In a letter to the state’s Education Department seeking guidance, Richard A. Carranza, New York City schools chancellor, acknowledged that investigators had managed to visit only half the schools involved.

The inquiry began in the summer of 2015, when a group of parents, former students and former teachers at yeshivas told the city that 39 schools were not sufficiently teaching subjects, like math, science, and English, leaving students ill-prepared for adulthood. The Education Department then launched an investigation of 30 of the schools, after determining the others were either no longer operating or did not fall under its jurisdiction.

As part of its investigation, the Education Department interviewed some of the parents and students who brought the complaint, who had experience at 11 schools. Most of those interviewed said the boys schools taught math and English for at most 90 minutes a day until boys turned 13, at which point secular instruction stopped. Some said attendance during secular instruction was voluntary. And while occasional science experiments might be done in class, they said there was no science curriculum. New York state law requires that nonpublic schools provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to that of public schools.

Education officials also made announced visits to the schools, but, they said, 15 yeshivas did not allow them inside. “The D.O.E. has made repeated attempts to gain access to the schools,” Mr. Carranza said in the letter. “The long delay in scheduling visits to this group of 15 schools is a serious concern.”

Naftuli Moster, founder of Young Advocates for Fair Education, a vocal critic of secular education at the yeshivas, said in a statement, “It is disappointing, but not surprising, that nearly half of the schools to be investigated refused entry to the Department of Education. Reading between the lines, it’s hard not to conclude there is both a lack of secular instruction going on in these schools and that these schools believe they are above the law.”

………

Fifteen of the schools, he [NY Mayor Bill de Blasio] said, “welcomed us in, participated in an ongoing dialogue, made a number of changes, and according to our educational leaders, are doing well, and/or are making additional changes to do better. There’s another 15 that would not allow D.O.E. officials in the door and that, to me, is not an acceptable state of affairs.”

Let me leave you with Pirkei Avot 4:7, “Rabbi Tzadok used to say: Do not make the Torah a crown with which to aggrandize yourself, nor use it as a spade with which to dig.”

I Just Had a Minor Epiphany

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We were having a discussion of politics at the Stellar Parthenon BBS, and JR noted that his wife was a big fan of Corey Booker until he voted against drug re-importation from Canada, and now he is politically dead to her.

This developed into a discussion of what I call the, “political event horizon,” that point where a politician you are vaguely positive towards does something so hacktacular that that you wash your hands of them.

In the course of discussion, I realized that my two major downgrades of major Democratic Party figures from vaguely promising to weasels, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were both about the same thing:  Throwing the LGBT community under the bus.

In Clinton’s case, it was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and in the case of Barack Obama, it was his embrace of homophobe Donny McClurkin in late 2007 to appeal to socially conservative South Carolina primary voters.

LGBT rights are a moral stance, and when people throw them over for ephemeral political benefit, it says something profound about their profound lack of ethics.

Trump Revokes Ex-C.I.A. Director John Brennan’s Security Clearance – The New York Times

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For the record, as someone who completely agrees with this critique of Brennan, I am deeply offended that the White House deceitfully used it as an excuse to punish a critic. pic.twitter.com/GhyevzmDy7

— Dan Froomkin (@froomkin) August 15, 2018

Trumps stated justifications for this are valid, but that’s not why he did this

Donald Trump has pulled John Brennan’s Security Clearance.

To be sure, after Brennan spied on a Senate investigation of the CIA, and lied about it, he should have been fired and jailed by Barack Obama, but this is not why his clearance was revoked happened 3 weeks ago (it was revealed today).  This was political retribution.

It’s kind of like seeing your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your brand new car though, and the same would apply to former DNI James Clapper, who committed perjury before Congress, and former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden whose trail of illegal domestic surveillance is legion.

If all of them hat their tickets pulled, it would be a good thing, but not this way:

In a remarkable attack on a political opponent, President Trump on Wednesday revoked the security clearance of John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director under President Barack Obama, citing what he called Mr. Brennan’s “erratic” behavior.

The White House had threatened last month to strip Mr. Brennan and other Obama administration officials — including Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser; and James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence — of their security clearances. At the time, Ms. Sanders said that Mr. Trump was considering doing it because “they politicized, and in some cases monetized, their public service and security clearances.”

Mr. Trump has questioned the loyalties of national security and law enforcement officials and dismissed some of their findings — particularly the conclusion that Moscow intervened in the 2016 election — as attacks against him.

Mr. Brennan has become a frequent critic of Mr. Trump since the 2016 presidential election, often taking to Twitter to question the president’s ability to serve in the Oval Office.