Month: May 2019

Unparalleled Self Owning, Or Masterful Trolling

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On Reddit, user u/Strikeactionemployer completely owns himself, blithely suggesting that he listened to his accountant, and not his lawyer (Solicitor, it’s the UK).

It’s a director for a firm who tried to screw his employees, and then fired them when they went on strike, which, shockingly enough, is illegal in the UK, and then he tried to loot the company, declare insolvency, and then restart the corporation with its old asset.

It’s really too long to summarize, but this comment explains why you should read this:

I just want to say that if you’re for real about this, this is absolutely hilarious. On the flipside, if this is a very elaborate exercise in trolling, I’m even more impressed, since you’ve put in time and effort over a year to set this up which is much further than the overwhelmingly vast majority of trolls will go, and you’ve also captured the exact tone of greedy bewilderment that most company directors have in real life.

Read in chronological order, including the completely unsympathetic comments.

It is a thing of beauty.

So much ownership in so little space.

H/t Charles Saroff for the tip.

Being Evil

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What a surprise, Google has been giving free advertising to one of those phony anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers.

To paraphrase the late Abe Vigoda, “It wasn’t only business,” it’s the deliberate promotion of deceptive advertising ti promulgate some sort of nefarious corporate agenda:

Google has given tens of thousands of dollars in free advertising to an anti-abortion group that runs ads suggesting it provides abortion services at its medical clinics, but actually seeks to deter “abortion-minded women” from terminating their pregnancies.

The Obria Group, which runs a network of clinics funded by Catholic organisations, received a $120,000 Google advertising grant in 2015, according to a public filing. In 2011, it received nearly $32,000. Such grants are designed to support and expand the reach of non-profits around the world.

Obria was awarded the 2015 grant despite the fact Google had faced intense criticism a year earlier, after a pro-choice group found the platform was running deceptive ads for clinics that appeared to offer abortions and other medical services, but instead focused on counseling and information on alternatives to abortion.

In some cases, such clinics, known as crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), are located close to Planned Parenthood clinics and provide some medical treatment, such as pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and prenatal counseling. But they also seek to deter women who enter from seeking abortions and do not offer referrals for alternative treatment.

Obria runs a network of clinics across the US, many of which suggest on their websites that they offer abortion. The clinics are actually opposed to abortion and all forms of contraception.

………

Obria did not return a request for comment.

The group recently faced scrutiny after it was awarded $1.7m in federal funds – known as Title X funding – meant to support healthcare providers that offer family planning services. Obria does not offer birth control, including condoms, in its clinics, offering “natural family planning” methods instead.

………

Google continues to feature ads for the clinics that appear to violate its policies. In one such case, an ad for a Texas clinic called the Grapevine Women’s Clinic pops up if a user does a local search for “abortion clinic”.

I don’t know what there game is, nor do I care.

I just know that they have aligned themselves with the folks who read The Handmaiden’s Tale, and said, “I want me some of that.”

Anti-trust enforcement anyone?

Matt Taibbi at the Top of His Form

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I think that John Hickenlooper, among other, have just stunned Taibbi with his stupidity than Thomas “The Mustache of Idiocy” Friedman ever did.

It appears that the former Colorado Governor, and avid supporter of the fracking industry, is now implying that the Vermont Senator will invoke Stalin type purges and another Holodomor.

In any case, the result has seen Tabbi at his best:

Bernie Sanders has accomplished something no one in American politics has managed for decades: He’s uniting Democrats and Republicans.

It’s early yet, but talking points for the 2020 campaign season are emerging on both sides of the aisle. Republicans and Democrats both have been trying to sell the rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others as stalking horses for the overthrow of capitalism.

………

This is absurd to the point of being funny: First of all, the press has been dumping on Sanders almost recreationally for years now. Meanwhile, fear of litigation has kept the press away from business exposés for decades. Whole genres of corruption go uncovered, from child labor that makes your consumer goods (enjoy that child-mined cobalt ore in your cellphone!) to war profiteering to pollution to industrial accidents. Few news organizations have even one labor reporter anymore. The last collective bargaining session that made a front page probably involved the NFL.

………

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Colorado-governor-turned-presidential-candidate John Hickenlooper — who sells himself as a “pragmatic progressive” — went after Sanders in New Hampshire, though not by name.

“You have to hand it to the GOP for achieving the near-impossible,” Hickenlooper said in early May. “Just years after the collapse of the Soviet Union…who would have imagined the Koch brothers and Donald Trump could help resuscitate the discredited ideas of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin?”

Of course, Hickenlooper went on to say, he wasn’t trying to cast aspersions on Sanders as a human being by comparing him to Stalin, who murdered 20 million people. “Do I respect him?” Hickenlooper said. “Absolutely. Do I respect his supporters? Absolutely.” However, he said, he thinks Sanders is wrongly “demonizing the private sector” with ideas that will “hurt working people.”

………

The irony of all of this is that Sanders, who is painted as a sort of extremist menace and El Coco-style monster from whom we should hide the children, would have been considered a tepid Republican back in the Fifties, when the original red scare was at its peak.

………

Bernie Sanders may not be the answer, but he isn’t Stalin, and voter attitudes aren’t changing because people are romanticizing the Great Terror. We’ve just had awful leadership for so long that demanding fairness and competence from politicians has started to seem like a radical idea. It isn’t, but get used to being told it is, until the next election at least.

Read the whole thing.

It is a truly trenchant indictment of the whole “Socialism” hysteria that the pundits are trying to convince the rest of us means something.

In the Annals of Stupidity

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The idea that we should reconfigure cities to accommodate the limitations of robot cars is stupid.

It’s History Schmistory stupid:

Special report Behind the mostly fake “battle” about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the city: will a city be built around machines or people? How much will pedestrians have to sacrifice for the driverless car to succeed?

………

But the driverless car has to deal with pedestrians, as Christian Wolmar discussed at The Register last week: “The open spaces that cities like to encourage would end as the barricades go up. And foot movement would need to be enforced with Singapore-style authoritarianism.”

………

“The randomness of the environment such as children or wildlife cannot be dealt with by today’s technology,” admits Volvo’s director of autonomous driving, Markus Rothoff. The driverless car can’t hear you scream. Tests are not being conducted in real pedestrian-congested conditions.

The cheat is: just get rid of the people around cars, so you don’t need to solve these problems.

When people talk about the future of self-driving cars in the foreseeable future,  this is what they mean.

If this sounds far fetched, I will remind you that there is a recent historical precedent:  In the early 20th century, they restructured the city, and criminalized what had been ordinary walking:  They called it “Jaywalking”.

Do not underestimate the willingness of people who profit from driverless cars to restrict the rest of us, and to place the costs on society as a whole.

They have done it before.

Something Is Very Wrong

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It looks like Boeing altered changed the operation of trim and autopilot switches in the 737 MAX for no discernible reason.

This makes no sense, which leads me to believe that, somehow or other, this was driven by some sort of bizarre business case:

In the middle of Boeing 737 cockpits, sitting between the pilot seats, are two toggle switches that can immediately shut off power to the systems that control the angle of the plane’s horizontal tail.

Those switches are critical in the event a malfunction causes movements that the pilots don’t want. And Boeing sees the toggles as a vital backstop to a new safety system on the 737 MAX – the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) – which is suspected of repeatedly moving the horizontal tails on the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights that crashed and killed a total of 346 people.

 But as Boeing was transitioning from its 737 NG model to the 737 MAX, the company altered the labeling and the purpose of those two switches. The functionality of the switches became more restrictive on the MAX than on previous models, closing out an option that could conceivably have helped the pilots in the Ethiopian Airlines flight regain control.

 Boeing declined to detail the specific functionality of the two switches. But after obtaining and reviewing flight manual documents, The Seattle Times found that the left switch on the 737 NG model is capable of deactivating the buttons on the yoke that pilots regularly press with their thumb to control the horizontal stabilizer. The right switch on the 737 NG was labeled “AUTO PILOT” and is capable of deactivating just the automated controls of the stabilizer.

 On the newer 737 MAX, according to documents reviewed by The Times, those two switches were changed to perform the same function – flipping either one of them would turn off all electric controls of the stabilizer. That means there is no longer an option to turn off automated functions – such as MCAS – without also turning off the thumb buttons the pilots would normally use to control the stabilizer.

 Peter Lemme, a former Boeing flight-controls engineer who has been closely scrutinizing the MAX design and first raised questions about the switches on his blog, said he doesn’t understand why Boeing abandoned the old setup. He said if the company had maintained the switch design from the 737 NG, Boeing could have instructed pilots after the Lion Air crash last year to simply flip the “AUTO PILOT” switch to deactivate MCAS and continue flying with the normal trim buttons on the control wheel. He said that would have saved the Ethiopian Airlines plane and the 157 people on board.

………

Lemme said he’s surprised that Boeing made the change to take away the functionality that could have allowed the pilots to shut off MCAS without shutting off the electric switches at their thumbs.

“I don’t get it at all,” Lemme said. “I don’t see what the benefit was for making that change. It was like change for change’s sake.”

Seriously, what the F%$# were they thinking?

Let the Looting Begin

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At the core of the failure of the California High speed rail project is costly and largely incompetent consultants:

When California shifted its bullet train plan into high gear in 2008, it had just 10 employees to manage and oversee design of the largest public construction project in state history.

Consultants assured the state there was little reason to hire hundreds or thousands of in-house engineers and rail experts, because the consultants could handle the heavy work themselves and save California money. It would take them only 12 years to bore under mountains, bridge rivers and build 520 miles of rail bed — all at a cost of just $33 billion.

State officials followed that advice, and for the next several years, development of the nation’s first high-speed rail line was overseen by a minuscule government staff.

Now, more than a decade later, that decision has proved to be a foundational error in the project’s execution — a miscalculation that has resulted in the California High-Speed Rail Authority being overly reliant on a network of high-cost consultants who have consistently underestimated the difficulty of the task.

………

But significant portions of this work have been flawed or mismanaged, according to records reviewed by The Times and interviews with dozens of people involved in the project. Despite repeated warnings since 2010 about weaknesses in its staffing, the rail authority believed it could reduce overall costs by relying on consultants and avoiding a large permanent workforce. But that strategy has failed to keep project costs from soaring. Ten years after voters approved it, the project is $44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule.

A reckoning may be coming very soon, however.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently told The Times that he would be taking aim at the consultants when the rail authority sends a major project update to the Legislature on May 1, including a detailed plan on building a partial operating system from Bakersfield to Merced for $16 billion to $18 billion.

“I’m getting rid of a lot of consultants,” Newsom said. “How did we get away with this?”

But actually reducing the role of consultants will be problematic because they have become cemented into place.

………

The rail authority’s consultants are hardly household names, but they are politically powerful and made major contributions to support the 2008 political campaign for the bullet train bond. They have staffed their ranks with former high-level bureaucrats, and their former executives have occupied key government posts.

………

To be sure, consultants are a routine part of many state construction projects. In California, however, high-speed rail is in a league of its own when it comes to reliance on outside staffing.

………

“If you depend on consultants to know what you are doing, then you are in real trouble,” said Bent Flyvbjerg, an Oxford University professor who has studied high-speed rail projects around the world. “A good balance is where the owner is not outsourcing all the knowledge. A bad balance guarantees a bad outcome.”

Brian Kelly, chief executive of the rail authority, acknowledges that “the balance needs to be remedied.”

Gee, you think?

It turns out that corruption is why we cannot make things in the United States anymore.

I Wonder How Much He Got from the House of Saud

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Rep. Ed Royce, a senior Republican who, at the time, chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee, gave a speech on the House floor in November 2017 imploring his fellow lawmakers to maintain support for the Saudi Arabian-led war in Yemen. Royce warned that foreign adversaries — namely, Iran — could gain a foothold in Yemen through the Houthi rebels.

“Part of the problem here is the leaders of the Houthi militia were indoctrinated in Qom, in Iran, as part of an Iranian attempt to construct a Hezbollah-like proxy in Yemen,” warned Royce, suggesting that the rebels in Yemen were merely Iranian cutouts, something experts dispute.

The inflammatory line had been scripted by a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia — like much of Royce’s impassioned speech. “During the 1990s, the leaders of the Houthi militia were indoctrinated in the Iranian city of Qom as part of an Iranian attempt to construct a Hezbollah-like proxy in Yemen,” says a set of lobbyist talking points obtained by The Intercept.

Royce had received talking points earlier that day from a lobbyist retained by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, according to federal disclosure forms, in order to undermine congressional opposition to the Yemen war.

………

The talking points provided to Royce are among the many hidden ways in which Saudi money has quietly influenced the debate.

“The fact that Rep. Royce is repeating word for word talking points from wealthy law firm Hogan Lovells, not his own unique thought and hearing what his constituents have to say, speaks to the very stifling our democracy suffers from,” said Heather Purcell, a spokesperson for Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who introduced the bill Royce was speaking against.

Our “Friends” in Riyadh, huh?

The sooner that the House of Saud falls from power the better.

Nope. No Attempt to Overturn the Will of the Voters Here

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Turkey’s election board announced Monday that it was invalidating the results of Istanbul’s mayoral race, which had dealt President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party a stinging defeat. A new election will be held late next month, the board said.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, had appealed for the cancellation of the March 31 vote over what it deemed irregularities. The election board ruled Monday that some polling officials overseeing that race were not civil servants, in violation of the law, according to Turkey’s state-run news ­agency.

Results last month showed that an opposition challenger, Ekrem Imamoglu, had narrowly defeated Binali Yildirim, the AKP mayoral candidate, in the Istanbul race. Erdogan’s party also suffered rare losses in local elections in several other cities, including Ankara, Turkey’s capital.

The AKP’s extraordinary appeal to redo the Istanbul election immediately drew criticism that Erdogan and his party were willing to undermine confidence in Turkey’s democracy to serve a narrow goal: retaining control of Turkey’s largest city, along with the financial and patronage networks that have benefited the AKP over decades.

Let’s be clear here:  We are going to see all the powers of the state trying to tilt this election in favor of the AKP candidate.

They cannot afford to lose the patronage in Istanbul city government.

A Good Start

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Germany’s health minister has proposed a €2500.00 fee for people who refuse to vaccinate their children:

Germany, like the US, is facing a resurgence of measles. But the country’s health minister isn’t taking things lightly.

Health minister Jens Spahn is proposing a blanket fine for any parents of unvaccinated children. The fine runs up to €2,500 ($2,790). He also suggests banning unvaccinated children from all kindergarten and daycare facilities to protect those who are too young to vaccinate and those with medical conditions that prevent them from being vaccinated.

In an interview published over the weekend, Spahn explained that immunization is a “social responsibility,” adding that “measles vaccinations save human suffering. We protect ourselves and others.”

Fining anti-vaccine and vaccine-hesitant parents isn’t new. Officials in New York levied $1,000 fines on parents of some unvaccinated children amid ongoing measles outbreaks last month. However, the fines only applied to children in specific areas at the epicenter of the outbreak. Spahn’s proposal, on the other hand, would see fines handed down regardless of an outbreak—and the fine is even heftier.

Good.

Nope, No Racism Here

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The Mayor of Hoschton, GA excluded a candidate for city administrator from consideration because he was black, and then claimed that racism wasn’t an issue:

The mayor of Hoschton, a nearly all-white community 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, allegedly withheld a job candidate from consideration for city administrator because he was black, an AJC investigation has found.

According to documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and interviews with city officials, Mayor Theresa Kenerly told a member of the City Council she pulled the resume of Keith Henry from a packet of four finalists “because he is black, and the city isn’t ready for this.”

The AJC’s investigation into the controversy revealed not only a deeply flawed hiring process, but also hard racial attitudes inside Hoschton’s government. All of this occurs as the city of fewer than 2,000 people just outside Gwinnett County is poised for dramatic growth with the construction of thousands of new homes.

………

The mayor reportedly made her comments to a member of the council in an overheard whisper during a closed-door session of the council March 4. Councilwoman Hope Weeks said she repeated them to her in the parking lot after the meeting, according to a document released by the city in response to an open records request from the AJC.

“She proceeded to tell me that the candidate was real good, but he was black and we don’t have a big black population and she just didn’t think Hoschton was ready for that,” Weeks wrote in an account dated March 4.

Weeks confided with Councilwoman Susan Powers, and both women agreed to take the matter to city attorney Thomas Mitchell.

………

Councilman Jim Cleveland defended the mayor, while confirming many aspects of the story, including that she made a tearful apology in another executive session on March 12. According to accounts from council members, Kenerly said she was “looking out” for Henry because the city does not have a lot of minority residents.

“I was there for that,” Cleveland said. “She cried. She had tears in her eyes. It was in my opinion a very sincere apology.”

Powers said she was unimpressed with the apology. “It was, ‘I’m sorry if I caused you guys trouble,’” she said. “She was apologizing to the council. To me, she shouldn’t be apologizing to us, but to the person she harmed and to the city.”

………

Councilman Cleveland said he did not think Kenerly was necessarily wrong.

“I understood where she was coming from,” he said. “I understand Theresa saying that, simply because we’re not Atlanta. Things are different here than they are 50 miles down the road.”

Cleveland described Hoschton as “a predominantly white community” not in accord with urban sensibilities about race.

“I don’t know how they would take it if we selected a black administrator. She might have been right,” he said.

………

While Cleveland said it was not an issue in his decision on whom to hire, he did share his beliefs about race.

“I’m a Christian and my Christian beliefs are you don’t do interracial marriage. That’s the way I was brought up and that’s the way I believe,” he said. “I have black friends, I hired black people. But when it comes to all this stuff you see on TV, when you see blacks and whites together, it makes my blood boil because that’s just not the way a Christian is supposed to live.”

Nope, no racism here, you inbred, racist, stupid Deliverance rejects.

Don’t Leak to the Intercept

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Federal prosecutors in Virginia charged a former United States intelligence analyst with providing classified information to a reporter, according to unsealed court documents.

Daniel Everette Hale, 31, of Nashville was arrested Thursday morning and was expected to make an initial appearance in federal court in Nashville. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. The Espionage Act is a World War I-era law that criminalizes the disclosure of potentially damaging national security secrets to someone not authorized to receive them.

One of the interesting things is that over the past few years, all the whistle blowers charged in recent years have been working with The Intercept.

I know that in the Reality Winner case, her jailing was a direct consequence of profoundly incompetent OpSec, and also I know that that the owner of the site, Pierre Omidyar has had close ties to the US state security apparatus for years.

I don’t know whether this is an artifact of either incompetence or deliberate malice, but in either case, if you want to whistle-blow, it’s best to choose some other organization.

As If You Needed a Reason not to Fly Delta

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Very disappointed in @Delta here. I assume they will change their attitude towards unions soon, or I’ll do my flights through (international) airlines that do not ridicule worker rights and respect workers’ voices. pic.twitter.com/W2OGKWD2qA

— Cas Mudde 🗣️ (@CasMudde) May 9, 2019

Delta’s contemptible anti-union posters

— Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallStNYC) May 10, 2019

The thoroughly appropriate response

Delta has been virulently anti-union throughout its history, but its latest anti-union poster has engendered a particularly trenchant response:

Two posters made by Delta as part of an effort to dissuade thousands of its workers from joining a union drew a torrent of criticism after they were posted on social media Thursday.

The posters included messages targeting the price of the dues that company workers would be paying if the union formed.

“Union dues cost around $700 a year,” one noted. “A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union.”

The other, with a picture of a football, was framed similarly.

………

In the charged world of social media, in which talk about socialism and the evils of unfettered capitalism percolates in the conversations of an invigorated left, the posters fell with a thud.

………

James Carlson, a coordinator with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers, the union which has been working to organize the workers, said he did not know where the poster was distributed but said an employee had sent it to him earlier. He said that Delta has been papering its employee break rooms with anti-union fliers.

“Some are like what you saw today — a stupid, insulting message to spend your money on a video game system instead of union dues,” he said. “They try to interfere with the employees’ exercise of freedom of association. And that’s not allowed.”

I happen to agree with Occupy Wallstreet’s response, extolling the cost benefit ratio of guillotines, to be wonderfully cheeky.

On the Fast Track

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Pass the Popcorn

Federal Judge Judge Amit Mehta has set this upcoming Monday for any additional arguments, and narrowed the scope of the lawsuit challenging the subpoena for Trump’s financial records:

A federal judge will fast-track a decision on President Trump’s bid to quash a House subpoena for financial records from his accounting firm, saying he will decide the full case, not just whether to temporarily block the subpoena while the case proceeds, after a hearing Tuesday.

 U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta made his announcement Thursday in a brief notice to both sides after receiving a first round of written arguments in the case. The lawsuit was brought April 22 by Trump and several of his businesses against House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and Trump’s accounting firm.

 “The sole question before the court — Is the House Oversight Committee’s issuance of a subpoena to Mazars USA LLP for financial records of President Donald Trump and various associated entities a valid exercise of legislative power? — is fully briefed, and the court can discern no benefit from an additional round of legal arguments,” Mehta said.

 ………

 Cummings’s panel last month subpoenaed Mazars seeking documents to corroborate testimony of the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who said at a congressional hearing that Trump intentionally misreported the value of his assets for personal gain.

 Other House panels have requested Trump’s banking records and tax returns, while his company also faces inquiries from New York state regulators and is defending itself against plaintiffs in two lawsuits alleging that his company violates the Constitution by doing business with foreign governments.

 In suing the House as well as his banks and accounting firm, Trump’s lawyers argued the president’s past personal dealings are irrelevant to the legislative branch’s fundamental duty of writing bills. They accuse Democrats of “assuming the powers of the Department of Justice, investigating (dubious and partisan) allegations of illegal conduct by private individuals.”

It’s pretty obvious how this decision will go:  There have been numerous cases, going back to (at least) Teapot Dome saying that oversight is a valid exercise of legislative power.

I expect this to be appealed, but I cannot see Trump winning this one unless the Supreme Court wants to overturn decades of precedent.

Linkage

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Here is Maddow calling for regime change in Venezuela

Do Not Share the Pix With Me

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It turns out that Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen did similar work for other people.

It turns out that Cohen helped Jerry Falwell, Jr. acquire and destroy “embarrassing” photographs.

I am not surprised that such photographs exist, but I am studiously avoiding any descriptions of said evidence.

That which is seen cannot be unseen:

Months before evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr.’s game-changing presidential endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016, Falwell asked Trump fixer Michael Cohen for a personal favor, Cohen said in a recorded conversation reviewed by Reuters.

 Falwell, president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian universities, said someone had come into possession of what Cohen described as racy “personal” photographs — the sort that would typically be kept “between husband and wife,” Cohen said in the taped conversation.

 According to a source familiar with Cohen’s thinking, the person who possessed the photos destroyed them after Cohen intervened on the Falwells’ behalf.

 The Falwells, through a lawyer, declined to comment for this article.

………

The Falwells wanted to keep “a bunch of photographs, personal photographs” from becoming public, Cohen told [Comedian Tom] Arnold. “I actually have one of the photos,” he said, without going into specifics. “It’s terrible.”

Cohen would later prove successful in another matter involving Falwell, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Cohen helped persuade Falwell to issue his endorsement of Trump’s presidential candidacy at a critical moment, they said: just before the Iowa caucuses. Falwell subsequently barnstormed with Trump and vouched for the candidate’s Christian virtues.

Why I am Short on Google

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Because they have literally the worst technical support on the planet earth.

21 years in, the only way to get effective support from Google is to have friends who work there.  Going in without personal connections is like trying to get a liquor license from the Ottoman Empire. https://t.co/T1KvCR14cY

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) May 3, 2019

Without knowing someone, or sending a letter from a lawyer, it is effectively impossible to get help if you have a problem with their services.

If you are going to rely on a company for mission critical applications, and you are not only unable to reach someone competent, but you are completely unable to reach anyone, period.

Beyond self dealing, extracting monopoly rent, and behaviors that would be called stalking if it were not coming from Silicon Valley, they have nothing to offer.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

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In what I find some of the least surprising news of the day, the right wing Evangelical National Christian Foundation, which claims to be the largest Christian charity in the US is helping people launder donations to hate groups.

Shelby Spong has asked, “Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?”

The answer is, of course:  Fomenting hate is all the Talibaptists have left:

The nation’s eighth-largest public charity is pouring tens of millions of dollars each year into a number of mostly anti-LGBT hate groups, a Sludge investigation shows.

According to the three most recent available tax filings—which cover 2015-17—it has donated $56.1 million on behalf of its clients to 23 nonprofits identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.

“I certainly don’t know of any public disclosures of funds to hate groups at levels anywhere near this,” Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Sludge. “It’s pretty astounding and certainly concerning.”

The far-right evangelical National Christian Foundation (NCF), which offers Christian donors “expert guidance and creative giving solutions,” is the fourth-largest donor-advised fund by 2017 revenue in the U.S., having raised over $1.5 billion that year. Such funds offer individual accounts to their clients, allowing clients to get immediate tax breaks on donations to these accounts and to direct NCF to disperse the money to the nonprofits of their choice, mostly churches and other Christian nonprofits, at their own pace. Clients donate through donor-advised funds anonymously, so even the Internal Revenue Service won’t know their identities.

According to a 2017 Inside Philanthropy article, NCF “is probably the single biggest source of money fueling the pro-life and anti-LGBT movements over the past 15 years.” In 2017, NCF’s donation to anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant hate groups rose to over $19 million.

By far the biggest recipient of NCF donations is Alliance Defending Freedom, a large network of Christian extremist lawyers who have supported criminalizing homosexuality, sterilizing transgender people, and claimed that gay men are pedophiles. The group recently came out against congressional Democrats’ Equality Act, which would ban discrimination against LGBTQ Americans.

………

Anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council, which has attempted to tie gay men to pedophilia for many years, accepted over $5.3 million from NCF from 2015-17.

As Lisa Gilbert at Public Citizen notes, “It’s interesting to me that big donors have a mechanism to give money to causes that would be unpopular, like going after gay rights ……… It’s not always so much about the total amount as it is about the mechanisms for funneling money into politics ……… This is like a shell-game funnel of corporate money. So it might be an organization that has an innocent name, that sounds like a good, upstanding, innocent group” but is being backed by wealthy donors.”

It really is remarkable just how much hate trumps any other considerations with the Christofascists.