Tardar Sauce, better known as “Grumpy Cat”, has died of a UTI at age 7.
In cat years, she was in the prime of life.
Here permanently peeved expression was due to feline dwarfism, so it could be argued that we are actually seeing is the world’s most extreme case of “resting bitch face” ever seen on a cat.
Over her short life, this cat may have earned as much as $100,000,000.00.
Capitalism is amazing, huh?
This is important, because excluding the disabled, and other students who need extra help, is the “Secret Sauce” of charter schools.
It allows them to create the appearance of exceptional performance on the cheap:
State law already requires that a charter school admit any student who applies. In his May budget revision, Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to tighten the language banning discrimination in charter school enrollment, particularly to protect students with disabilities and students with poor grades who want to attend charter schools.
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In return for receiving public funding, charter schools must have open admissions and hold a lottery when there are more applicants than spaces. School districts have complained that some of the state’s 1,300-plus charter schools have discouraged families with academically struggling students and special education students with high-cost needs from signing up. Others counsel students who are struggling academically to leave school mid-year to boost schoolwide test scores, districts say.
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Charges that charter schools deliberately select top student applicants have been largely anecdotal, which is why Newsom is proposing a uniform complaint policy that allows parents to file a grievance if they believe they were discriminated against. He also wants to explore using state Smarter Balanced testing and other data to identify enrollment disparities “that may warrant inquiry and intervention,” his budget stated.
Three years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the public interest law firm Public Advocates released a report that found that about a fifth of charter schools had admissions policies that improperly excluded students based on grades, pre-enrollment interviews, a parental participation requirement, or that required citizenship documentation and a minimum level of English language proficiency. The report was based on a review of charter schools’ websites and most charter schools responded by removing pages they said were outdated and didn’t reflect their current policies.
Newsom’s proposed statute would specify that charter schools cannot request or require parents to submit student records before enrolling. And it would require that charter schools post parental rights on their websites and make parents aware of them during enrollment and when students are expelled or leave during the year.
………The proposed statute implies there should be no allowances “for any reason” that might discourage any pupil from enrolling in a charter school.
It’s a good start.
The first Republican member of Congress has come out for impeaching Donald Trump:
Republican Congressman Justin Amash has broken with the Republican Party line to declare that President Trump has “engaged in impeachable conduct.” He also accuses Attorney General William Barr of attempting “to mislead the public about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s analysis and findings.” President Trump has responded calling Amash a “lightweight” and a “loser.”
Amash, who represents a Michigan district anchored by Grand Rapids, leans libertarian in his political orientation. He is the first prominent GOP officeholder to suggest that Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice and undermine the rule of law merit his removal from office. Indeed, Amash’s call for impeachment puts him out ahead of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
“President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash writes. The congressman used a Twitter thread Saturday to broadcast his views, “only after having read Mueller’s redacted report carefully and completely, having read or watched pertinent statements and testimony, and having discussed this matter with my staff.”
Here are my principal conclusions:
1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.
2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.
4. Few members of Congress have read the report.— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019
In his thread, Amash offered choice criticism for Barr in his execution of his duties as America’s top law enforcement officer.Barr’s misrepresentations are significant but often subtle, frequently taking the form of sleight-of-hand qualifications or logical fallacies, which he hopes people will not notice.— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019
Amash spends much of his thread warning America about adherence to party over our constitutional system of checks and balances, while making a subtle jab at fellow conservatives who sought to impeach Bill Clinton for obstruction of justice, but have remained silent in the face of Trump’s lawlessness:In fact, Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019
Trump’s response, by Twitter (of course) , is to call Amash a lightweight and a loser.
I do not think that this is pebbles before an avalanche, but it does provide a slight gloss of bipartisanship to the movement toward impeachment.
I just noticed that there is a lot of physical similarity between anti-alien bigot Ben Lockwood/Agent Liberty (played by actor Sam Witwer, right) on Supergirl, and Alt-Right bigot Ben Shapiro (played by useless sphincter Ben Shapiro, left).
The story arc of Supergirl, prominently features an anti-alien movement in the United States.
This arc is unequivocally an allegory for the anti-immigrant movement in general, and the Alt Right in particular, in the United States.
I am thinking that this was an deliberate decision by the producers, and I wholeheartedly approve.
I have been writing for some time about how Turkey’s purchase of the top of the line Russian S-400 surface to air missile (SAM) system has the US military industrial complex freaking out over the loss of sales.
The US claims that Turkey operating the system would allow the Russians unique insights into the characteristics of the F-35, but this is complete crap.
The Russians would be able to determing things like radar cross section from installations in Syria and Russia. (It is an extraordinarily long range system)
In response to threats to cancel F-35 sales to Turkey, Turkey is not in negotiations with Russia to set up a production line for the S-500, the even more capable system due to succeed the S-400:
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that the purchase of S-400 defense systems from Russia was a done deal, adding that Ankara would also jointly produce S-500 defense systems with Moscow.
U.S. officials have called Turkey’s planned purchase of the S-400 missile defense system “deeply problematic,” saying it would risk Ankara’s partnership in the joint strike fighter F-35 program because it would compromise the jets, made by Lockheed Martin Corp.
I don’t speak Turkish, but I’m pretty sure that this is an invitation for the Pentagon, and Lockheed Martin, to go Cheney themselves.
The “Democratic Party” right wing organization Third Way has admitted that they are bought and paid for by Wall Street:
If Third Way’s attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren make the group sound like a stalking horse for Wall Street executives, there might be a reason for that.
At a demonstration today outside the think tank’s downtown DC office, Third Way senior vice president Matt Bennett conceded to Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) co-founder Adam Green that “the majority” of Third Way’s donor support comes from the group’s board of trustees, most of whom are from the finance sector.
Well knock me over with a mackerel.
This has been patently obvious since the group has burst on the scene.
Taking Wall Streeter’s money to generate a comfortable life style for the associated lobbyists and political consultants has been it’s raison d’être since its founding.
Sanders is calling on a ban for for-profit charter schools and a halt to further charter school expansion.
I wholeheartedly approve.
Charters are unaccountable, and frequently corrupt, as well as being the darlings of Wall Street money:
As president, Bernie Sanders would support a ban on for-profit charter schools and a blanket moratorium on public funding for all new charters, the candidate announced in a speech on Saturday, throwing down a new gauntlet on the left in the Democratic debate over education reform.
The Vermont senator laid out a broad education agenda that seeks to address racial disparities on the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Sanders’s plan is quite ambitious, thought it lacks some important details.
He wants to triple federal Title I funding for schools that serve a large number of low-income students, set a national salary floor for teachers of $60,000, and provide universal school meals: breakfast, lunch, and snacks for every student year-round.
But his proposed prohibition on for-profit charter schools and temporary ban on government spending on new nonprofit charters is a foray into the most divisive piece of the education reform debate. Charter schools have been a source of debate for years between mainstream liberals who see charters as a promising alternative to the traditional public schools and the labor left that considers them an attack on teachers unions because charters are typically unorganized.
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For existing charter schools, Sanders would propose that they be subject to the same oversight requirements as regular schools, that half of a charter school’s board members be parents and teachers, and that charters be required to disclose certain student and funding data.
Charter schools do not in the whole outperform public schools, and we have seen repeated examples of corruption and self-dealing, so ending for-profit chains, and placing a hold on expansion until appropriate oversight can be implemented is just basic good governance.
I would prefer to see them shut down completely, I think that they are primarily an attempt to loot, with a side order of union busting, but this is a good start.
AH-56 Apache
Boeing is proposing a major update to its Apache attack helicopter, that the similarities between it and the 1960s vintage AH-56 apache are striking:
U.S. aerospace manufacturer Boeing has shown footage of high-speed version of Apache attack helicopter during the Vertical Flight Society’s 75th Annual Forum & Technology Display.
Graham Warwick posted images of the Apache gunship concept and photo of a scale model of a new helicopter that was unveiled by the Boeing on social media.
The concept, called the Advanced AH-64 Block 2 Compound, is developing to serve as a gap filler in a U.S. Army Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program.
Jane’s Defense Weekly early reported that the new gunship will feature an enlarged main wing, revised engine exhaust arrangement, large vertical tail fin, and a rear-mounted pusher propeller. The design may also feature a new, rigid rotor system, which is a standard feature on other compound helicopter designs.
Also the Rotor & Wing International said that Boeing already has conducted wind tunnel testing of a scale model of a high-speed Apache gunship.
The similarities between the two helicopters, both in appearance and concept, are striking.
There is an increasingl realization that the promised transformative nature of 5G mobile technology is a mirage.
The blistering speeds promised only occur with the higher frequencies, which only extend about a mile from a cell tower, and do not effectively penetrate building walls and the like:
Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That’s not to say that 5G won’t be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.
If you looked past press releases you’d notice that Verizon’s early launches required the use of $200 battery add on mod because we still haven’t really figured out the battery drain issues presented by 5G’s power demands. You’d also notice the growing awareness that the long-hyped millimeter wave spectrum being used for many deployments have notable distance and line of sight issues, meaning that rural and much of suburban America will not likely see the speeds you’ll frequently see bandied about in marketing issues, and many of the same coverage gap issues you see with current-gen broadband are likely to persist.
If you looked past the headlines you’d probably noticed that even Wall Street was concerned that 5G was being over-hyped and wasn’t yet ready for prime time. Those concerns continue to be expressed largely in industry trade magazines, where you’ll often find stock jocks noting that most of the purported promises of 5G remain well over the horizon:
“What of the other fancy features of 5G, like massive IoT and ultra low latency? Specifications for those technologies are scheduled for availability in — wait for it — 2020, when the 3GPP’s Release 16 is scheduled to be finished.
“We believe the current investment opportunity associated with 5G is limited and unlikely to drive meaningful incremental upside for companies involved considering the mature state of the smartphone market,” wrote the analysts at Wall Street research firm Cowen in a recent note to investors.”
What, you mean that out wireless companies are lying to us?
I’m shocked.
The Who, The Roots, Jimmy Fallon, and Elementary School musical instruments.
Pete Townshend smashes his ukulele at the end:
There is a story behind this, it’s the oldest credit union in New York State, and it appears that it may have been done in response to its former CEO’s embezzlement uncovered last year:
The New York State Department of Financial Services on Friday said it took possession of the $3 billion Municipal Credit Union, less than a year after its former President/CEO Kam Wong pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $10 million from one of New York’s largest financial cooperatives.
The state agency named the National Credit Union Administration as conservator.
In 2017, the New York DFS said it had uncovered deficiencies in board oversight that had facilitated the multi-million-dollar embezzlement by Wong. He was charged by the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan with embezzlement, and he was banned from the credit union industry by the NCUA in May 2018. He pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $10 million from MCU in November 2018.
DFS removed MCU’s supervisory committee in May 2018, and its board of directors in June 2018 due to what the regulators called severe deficiencies in their oversight of the overall management of the affairs of the credit union and designated an on-premises administrator, Mark Ricca, to oversee the general management of the credit union.
Based on ongoing supervision by DFS and the NCUA, the New York regulator made the decision Friday to appoint NCUA as conservator and terminate the administrator’s engagement.
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A review of the MCU’s financial performance reports filed with the NCUA, however, does not show that the credit union is in any financial distress, although its net worth has declined from 8.76% in 2014 to 7.59% at the end of the first quarter of this year.
What’s more, the credit union has shown no substantial declines in its total loans or loan income though its net income decline from $17.5 million in 2017 to $11.4 million at the end of last year. At the end of the first quarter of this year, MCU recorded a net income of $2.8 million, down from the net income of $4.6 million in March 2018.
The credit union allowance for loan and lease losses jumped from $18.8 million in 2017 to $22.5 million in 2018. At the end of first quarter, its ALLL was $22.6 million, according to NCUA financial performance reports.
Last year, the credit union’s membership increased by 37%.
Thousands of workers from the University of California waged a one-day strike Thursday and found some unexpected allies out on their picket lines.
In an unusual move for a presidential candidate, the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent out targeted text messages and emails to its supporters in California a day ahead of the strike, urging them to join workers as they rallied against the university system in a labor dispute.
“Tens of thousands of workers in the University of California system are standing up this Thursday to stop the outsourcing and privatization of union jobs,” the email said. “We are hoping you can join these workers tomorrow.”
The note included an RSVP link and an address for a local picket.
The move apparently worked, according to John de los Angeles, a spokesperson for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, one of the unions involved in the strike.
“I deployed a press team across the state and was in contact with them,” de los Angeles said. “They were sending me pictures of random supporters out on the line because they had received an email or text from the Bernie campaign. That happened all over the place.”
If you wonder why people are, to quote Steve Rogers, willing, “To make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you,” for Bernie Sanders, it is because he has been laying down on the wire for us for decades.
Yes, I do realize that juxtaposing Captain America and Steve Rogers is a bit bizarre, but I’m a bit bizarre.
Chelsea Manning was again behind bars on Thursday night after she was jailed for a second time for contempt of court, having refused to cooperate with a grand jury.
A defiant Manning told Judge Anthony Trenga in a federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, that she would “rather starve to death” than do what the state insisted and give testimony before the grand jury. Having already served 62 days in jail, 28 of which were spent in solitary confinement, she now faces up to 18 months more in custody.
To quote Anatole France, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
Donald Trump has pardoned Conrad Black, the former media mogul who owned the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator before being jailed for fraud, shortly after he wrote a book praising the US president.
Black, a Canadian-born British citizen, was once known for his extravagant lifestyle as he ran an international newspaper empire that included the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post. But he ended up serving three and a half years in prison after he was convicted in 2007 of siphoning off millions of dollars from the sale of newspapers owned by the company he controlled.
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Black was jailed after being found guilty of conspiring with fellow executives to siphon off funds from the sale of media businesses. Two of Black’s three fraud convictions were later voided, and his sentence was shortened. Black was released from a Florida prison in May 2012 and deported.
He said he thought it was a prank by British tabloid journalists when he received the call from the White House informing him that he was about to be pardoned.
This is so depressing on so many levels and in so many ways.
Generic drug makers conspired to raise the price of their drugs by over 1000%.
Capitalism, you gotta love it, huh?
Leading drug companies including Teva, Pfizer, Novartis and Mylan conspired to inflate the prices of generic drugs by as much as 1,000 percent, according to a far-reaching lawsuit filed on Friday by 44 states.
The industrywide scheme affected the prices of more than 100 generic drugs, according to the complaint, including lamivudine-zidovudine, which treats H.I.V.; budesonide, an asthma medication; fenofibrate, which treats high cholesterol; amphetamine-dextroamphetamine for A.D.H.D.; oral antibiotics; blood thinners; cancer drugs; contraceptives; and antidepressants.
“We all know that prescription drugs can be expensive,” Gurbir S. Grewal, the New Jersey attorney general, said in a statement. “Now we know that high drug prices have been driven in part by an illegal conspiracy among generic drug companies to inflate their prices.”
Can we PLEASE start jailing the executives who do this?
It’s a criminal conspiracy, and should be treated as the crime that it is.
Uber and Lyft approved alleged war criminal to driveHe’s accused of war crimes and torture, but he drove for more than 18 months, raising questions about the thoroughness of the background check process https://t.co/XDEa9eAvoI pic.twitter.com/y7zY17hAaq
— CNN (@CNN) May 14, 2019
Also, Yes
It looks like Uber’s IPO is turning into a complete cluster-f%$#:
Few things prove the ancient warning “Be careful what you wish for” like a Wall Street sure thing that blows itself to smithereens.
For example, the Uber initial public offering.
Investment and tech gurus spent five years hawking Uber as a world-changing business and Uber stock as a stairway to fortune. Contrary voices were heard in the marketplace, it is true, but they were few and far between and in any event drowned out by the drum-beating from the other side.
But now the public market — the defining arbiter of the value of an enterprise, at least as a snapshot — has spoken, and its judgment is harsh.
On Tuesday, Uber closed at $39.96 after trading as low as $36.85, well below its close Friday, its first post-IPO trading day. This is a very eloquent price: It speaks volumes about the judgment of venture investors, about the credibility of private-market valuations of companies, and about Wall Street underwriting.
Remember that Uber was viewed as the ultimate “unicorn,” a term for venture-funded companies with private valuations higher than $1 billion. Onlookers gathered, like gawkers at a shop window, to watch how this unicorn would be transformed into a bellwether in the public markets.
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Let’s examine Uber’s numbers. At $39.96, Uber is calculated to have a total market value of about $67 billion. That sounds like a lot for a company that has never made money and in fact lost more than $800 million in its last reported quarter, the fourth quarter of 2018.
But the market valuation is a sharp reduction from Uber’s putative value during its private-market era, which ended Friday. In that era, the company’s backers were talking about a valuation as high as $120 billion. That was the peak, but starting about five years ago the company’s putative value never fell below $68 billion.
The company has no path to profitability, there are very little in the way of barriers to entry, and every “disruptive innovation” that were used to justify its high private valuation was either abusive or outright illegal.
If it crashes and burns, it will be a well deserved end to a pox on transportation.
The investigation is complete, and Cal Fire has determined that PGE, and its poorly maintained infrastructure, are responsibe for the disastrous Camp fire:
Investigators with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection have concluded that Pacific Gas & Electric equipment caused the devastating Camp fire that destroyed nearly 14,000 homes and killed 85 people, most of them elderly, last year.
The conclusion of the Cal Fire probe marks a milestone in the recovery from the worst wildfire in modern California history.
“Cal Fire has determined that the Camp fire was caused by electrical transmission lines owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electric located in the Pulga area,” the agency said in a news release Wednesday.
PG&E filed for bankruptcy protection in part because of losses from the Nov. 8 fire, which scorched more than 153,000 acres and has put new pressure on utilities to improve the safety of their power distribution systems.
Scores of lawsuits have been filed against the state’s biggest utility on behalf of people who lost their homes, loved ones and pets. They accuse the utility of failing to properly maintain its equipment.
Why there are no criminal indictments against PGE executives, when it is clear that their neglect of their infrastructure was a deliberate business strategy, and it is equally clear that fires were the results, and that it was foreseeable that people would die as a result, and people DID die as a result.
This appears to me to be a reckless disregard for human life, and that appears to make it some sort of felony to me.
These guys need to be in the dock.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Olliver North was fired as head of the NRA, which is in dire financial straits.
Well, documents have leaked from the NRA, and they reveal what appears to be extensive looting of the organization by Wayne LaPierre, and that Oliver North was fired trying to raise these issues, so Oliver North was on the side of the proverbial angels, at least in the context of the NRA.
Oliver North is the good guy? In anything?
What the F%$#?????
We live in a topsy-turvey world.
Also, the level corruption in the NRA makes Somalia look like the epitome of good governance.
Still, lots of schadenfreude here at the troubles of the NRA is currently experiencing, the New York AG is investigating them as well.
They deserve any misery that the universe can inflict on them.
What the f%$#?
Longtime televangelist Pat Robertson decried Alabama’s new abortion ban as “extreme,” saying on his show on Wednesday that the state legislature has “gone too far.”
Alabama’s law, which has been passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, includes a penalty of up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform abortions and has no exceptions for rape or incest, Robertson noted on his show.
“They want to challenge Roe vs. Wade, but my humble view is I don’t think that’s the case I’d want to bring to the Supreme Court because I think this one will lose,” Robertson told viewers of CBN’s “The 700 Club” on Wednesday.
Let me repeat this: What ……… the ……… f%$#?
Remember when AT&T said that the Trump tax cuts would mean 7,000 new jobs and billions in new investment?
Well, the numbers are in, 23,000 job cuts and cut $1.4 billion in capital investments.
Well, I guess that senior executives want to cash in their stock options before tax rates go up again:
AT&T has cut more than 23,000 jobs since receiving a big tax cut at the end of 2017, despite lobbying heavily for the tax cut by claiming that it would create thousands of jobs.
AT&T in November 2017 pushed for the corporate tax cut by promising to invest an additional $1 billion in 2018, with CEO Randall Stephenson saying that “every billion dollars AT&T invests is 7,000 hard-hat jobs. These are not entry-level jobs. These are 7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year.
The corporate tax cut was subsequently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. The tax cut reportedly gave AT&T an extra $3 billion in cash in 2018.
But AT&T cut capital spending and kept laying people off after the tax cut. A union analysis of AT&T’s publicly available financial statements “shows the telecom company eliminated 23,328 jobs since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, including nearly 6,000 in the first quarter of 2019,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said yesterday.
………
“AT&T’s annual report also shows the company boosted executive pay and suggests that after refunds, it paid no cash income taxes in 2018 and slashed capital investments by $1.4 billion,” the CWA wrote.
AT&T reported $21.6 billion in capital expenses in 2017 and $21.3 billion in 2018, a cut of $300 million. CWA told Ars that the cut is $1.4 billion when “excluding federal government reimbursements for the construction of FirstNet,” AT&T’s government-funded public safety network.
AT&T capital spending is already down more than $900 million this year, as the telco reported Q1 2019 capital expenditures of $5.18 billion, down from $6.12 billion in Q2 2018.
This is not managing a business, this is looting.
We need to repeal SEC Rule 10b-18, which legalized stock buybacks. (Previously they were considered a form of insider trading)
The rule, adopted in 1982, has diverted trillions of dollars from investments in new plants and equipment to self dealing by senior management.
