Month: July 2019

This Is the Rule, Not the Exception for Charter Schools

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Who could have imagined that shoveling taxpayer money to opaque institutions would result in an explosion of fraud and self-dealing:

A state investigator’s search warrant filed in court Tuesday seeks evidence of alleged embezzlement of state funds and obtaining money under false pretenses at Epic Charter Schools, including through the use of “ghost students” who receive no actual instruction at the school.

Epic and and its two co-founders, David Chaney and Ben Harris, are the subject of a state law enforcement investigation, according to the seven-page affidavit and warrant filed in Oklahoma County District Court.

The agent reviewed bank statements and found Chaney and Harris split school profits of at least $10 million between 2013 and 2018, the affidavit states. Epic is a publicly funded charter school that is managed by a for-profit company, Epic Youth Services, which is owned by Chaney and Harris. The filing of the warrant was first reported by The Oklahoman.

………

Epic is accused of receiving state funding for “ghost students” as early as 2014. Those students were homeschooled and attended private and sectarian schools and enrolled in Epic to receive an $800 “learning fund” without receiving instruction from Epic, the affidavit states. Epic teachers dubbed those students “members of the $800.00 club.” The learning fund is provided to all Epic students and can be spent on curriculum, technology and extracurricular activities.

………

When asked whether the allegations would affect the handling of Epic’s 2019-20 funding, Education Department spokeswoman Steffie Corcoran said they will consult with law enforcement to determine the next appropriate steps. Epic’s state funding for next year is estimated at $120 million.

So basically, they were paying parents to engage in phony registrations.

Charter schools’ records are private, their finances are not available for public review, and financial entanglements are secret.

It is a recipe for fraud.

Finally Reversing the F-22 Crippling of the F-35

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The F-35 has a very limited air to air weapons loadout.

My theory for this is that it was a crippled in an attempt a futile effort to protect the F-22 purchase.

Well, it now appears that the weapons bay is being modify to fix this shortcoming: (It still is an over priced and under performing platform though)

Lockheed Martin will modify the F-35 weapons bay to accommodate a very long-range, anti-radiation missile and support a potential future upgrade to carry up to six air-to-air missiles internally, a source close to the program says.

………

The contract announcement released by the Pentagon specifically calls for altering the portion of the Station 425 bulkhead inside the weapons to carry “aft heavy weaponry.”

A source close to the program says the weapon involved in the modification program is the Navy’s Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range (AARGM-ER).

………

The modification to Station 425 also will allow the F-35 to carry six AIM-120 missiles internally, the source says.

Lockheed has proposed the so-called “Sidekick” modification to increase the F-35’s internal load-out from four to six air-to-air missiles.

Still a misbegotten waste of resources though.

Not Enough Bullets………

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After making a complete dogs breakfast of his time at Equifax, Former CEO Richard Smith has secured a $20+ million payout to leave:

For a majority of workers, failure at the workplace is deeply frowned upon and frequently incurs the ultimate penalty—dismissal, usually accompanied with a pittance for severance pay. Yet, in many ways, corporate executives remain above the rigmarole of a pay-for-performance model. A blue-chip executive can run a company to the ground and still be guaranteed a big payday in the form of a multi-million dollar golden sendoff. A few days ago, Equifax Inc., one of the largest consumer credit reporting agencies on the land, made headlines after agreeing to pay a total of $700 million to the U.S. government for claims tied to a massive data breach two years ago.

The data breach will go down as one of the largest ever after private information including social security data from 150 million consumers–about 56 percent of America’s population–was compromised.

………

Former CEO Richard Smith, on the other hand, is set to collect ~$19.6 million in stock bonuses that cover part of his performance in the year the hack took place, not to mention a generous offer to cover his medical bills for life; a $24-million pension and $50,000 in tax and financial planning services.

That’s roughly 1,000x the maximum payout to affected customers.

Seriously, I am sick to death of the heads I win, tails you lose bullsh%$ corrupt business management in America.

By all rights, this guy should be asking, “Do you want fries with that?”

Linkage

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The Movie version of Penguins and sushi:

Sadistic Psychopaths

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In Luzern County, Pennsylvania, where magistrates were found to have taken bribes, the Wyoming Valley West school district has threatened to put children in foster care over unpaid lunch bills.

It now appears that they have doubled down, and the school board has refused to take donations to clear the debt, because, “Capitalism,” or somesuch:

The president of a Pennsylvania school board whose district had warned parents behind on lunch bills that their children could end up in foster care has rejected a CEO’s offer to cover the cost, the businessman said Tuesday.

Todd Carmichael, chief executive and co-founder of Philadelphia-based La Colombe Coffee, said he offered to give Wyoming Valley West School District $22,000 to wipe out bills that generated the recent warning letter to parents.

But school board President Joseph Mazur rejected the offer during a phone conversation Monday, Carmichael spokesman Aren Platt said Tuesday. Mazur argued that money is owed by parents who can afford to pay, Platt said.

“The position of Mr. Carmichael is, irrespective of affluence, irrespective of need, he just wants to wipe away this debt,” Platt said.

………

The letters from the school district warned parents that they “can be sent to dependency court for neglecting your child’s right to food,” and that the children could be removed and placed in foster care.

Child welfare authorities have told the district that Luzerne County does not run its foster system that way.

Luzerne County’s manager and child welfare agency director wrote to Superintendent Irvin DeRemer, demanding the district stop making what it called false claims. DeRemer has not returned messages in recent days.

In an editorial Tuesday, the Times-Tribune of Scranton called the threats shameful and an act of hubris. The paper urged lawmakers and the state Department of Education to “outlaw such outlandish conduct by law and regulation covering lunch debt collection.”

Carmichael said he was struggling to understand why district officials would not welcome his help.

I understand Mr. Carmichael’s confusion, but it’s actually pretty simple: Joseph Mazur and the rest of ilk, are sadistic psychopaths who think that they are teaching people a useful lesson.

Some people like to use their power to inflict cruelty on others.

They are deeply evil people without a shred of decency or empathy.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

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In response to a spate of officers caught posting bigoted and what can only be called terrorist threats to social media, the Phoenix Police Malovelent Association is offering a service to scrub officers accounts, because accountability and responsibility are anti-police, I guess:

An investigation called the “Plain View Project” has uncovered a truly disturbing amount of bigoted, violent social media posts by police officers located all over the United States. The entire database of posts is located here. Anyone wanting to see what their public servants truly think about the people they serve can click through and be horrified.

It would be horrifying enough if officers just kept their thoughts to themselves and let those thoughts guide their actions. But these are public posts able to be viewed by anyone and these officers apparently had no qualms about displaying the content of their character. This is just a small sampling:

……… (you really don’t want to read that crap)

Lovely. That’s the mindset of far too many cops. The people they interact with daily are viewed as subhuman garbage only worthy of a beating or a bullet. The good news is that since the publication of this database, the hammer is starting to fall.

A whopping 21 Dallas police officers are under investigation for “racist or violent” Facebook posts, which were uncovered by the Plainview Project. Four others have been placed on administrative leave, the Dallas police chief announced Friday.

Things have gone even further in Philadelphia, where officers are actually losing their jobs over their Facebook posts. 

………

These are all rational responses to the public outing of law enforcement officers as not-so-closeted bigots and homophobes. Then there are the clearly irrational responses, emanating almost exclusively from police unions.
In Philadelphia, the Fraternal Order of Police has expressed its “disappointment” that the PD would actually punish officers for their hate-filled social media posts. Of course, unions like this also express their disappointment when cops are punished for literally any act, including unjustifiable homicide.
But the prize for most idiotic response (so far!) goes to the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association. PLEA doesn’t seem to believe the bigoted posts by police officers are problematic. No, the real issue here — according to PLEA — is that the posts were seen by outside eyes. PLEA doesn’t want better officers. It only wants less accountable officers.

After dozens of Phoenix police officers were caught posting racist memes and praising violence on Facebook, Phoenix police union president Michael London said the union plans on purchasing a service that will “scrub” police officers’ information from the Internet.

“The Facebook investigation is still going on,” London said Thursday in a video shared on the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association’s Facebook page. “We had our monthly board meeting this past Tuesday, and Franklin Marino has contacted a service that will scrub your name from the internet. It’s more of a security and privacy type thing. There’s some more information about it on the members-only Facebook.”

“We think right now with the numbers we have, it would cost you about $3 a month, but we’re still trying to contact the provider of this and see if we can work out a deal,” London said.

That’s the solution. Just pay and make it all go away. The union head is so secure in his delusion he actually claimed this wasn’t about making stuff vanish, but rather to “protect” officers from people attacking them online. Yep, it’s the bigoted cops who are the real victims here.

I understand the need for labor unions to zealously defend their members, but this is being a co-conspirator in a coverup.

Where is the damn RICO lawsuit, anyway?

I Guess I Have to Say Something About Mueller’s Testimony

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Like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity

I did not expect much, an from the reports, I was not disappointed.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party leadership, particularly Speaker Pelosi, have decided that there will be no movement toward impeachment until something is revealed that can get most of the Congressional Republicans to call for Trump’s removal, and even if Mueller were to stand on the desk screaming, “Impeach the mother-f%$#er!” (Spoiler, he didn’t)

One can only hope that the Democrats, particularly House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, decide to initiate an impeachment investigation in defiance of the Speaker, but do not see that happening.

My guess?  Democrats will ironically clap their way into a 2nd Trump term.

Mark Madoff Zuckerberg

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Given Facebook’s culture, and Zuckerberg’s complete lack of ethics, I am inclined to believe that this is an accurate characterization of how the social media giant hits its numbers:

Facebook now has a market capitalization approaching $600 billion, making it nominally one of the most valuable companies on earth. It’s a true business miracle: a company that was out of users in 2012 managed to find a wellspring of nearly infinite and sustained growth that has lasted it, so far, half of the way through 2019.

So what is that magical ingredient, that secret sauce, that “genius” trade secret, that turned an over-funded money-losing startup into one of America’s greatest business success stories? It’s one that Bernie Madoff would recognize instantly: fraud, in the form of fake accounts.

Old money goes out, and new money comes in to replace it. That’s how a traditional Ponzi scheme works. Madoff kept his going for decades, managing to attain the rank of Chairman of the NASDAQ while he was at it.

Zuckerberg’s version is slightly different, but only slightly: old users leave after getting bored, disgusted and distrustful, and new users come in to replace them. Except that as Mark’s friend and lieutenant, Sam Lessin told us, the “new users” part of the equation was already getting to be a problem in 2012. On October 26, Lessin, wrote, “we are running out of humans (and have run-out of valuable humans from an advertiser perspective).” At the time, it was far from clear that Facebook even had a viable business model, and according to Frontline, Sheryl Sandberg was panicking due to the company’s poor revenue numbers.

To balance it out and keep “growth” on the rise, all Facebook had to do was turn a blind eye. And did it ever.

In Singer v. Facebook, Inc.—a lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California alleging that Facebook has been telling advertisers that it can “reach” more people than actually exist in basically every major metropolitan area—the plaintiffs quote former Facebook employees, understandably identified only as Confidential Witnesses, as stating that Facebook’s “Potential Reach” statistic was a “made-up PR number” and “fluff.” Also, that “those who were responsible for ensuring the accuracy ‘did not give a shit.’” Another individual, “a former Operations Contractor with Facebook, stated that Facebook was not concerned with stopping duplicate or fake accounts.”

………

Yet signs that Mark’s fake account problem is no different than Madoff’s fake account statement problem are everywhere. Google Trends shows worldwide “Facebook” queries down 80% from their November 2012 peak. (Instagram doesn’t even come close to making up for the loss.) Mobile metrics measuring use of the Facebook mobile app are down.

And the company’s own disclosures about fake accounts stand out mostly for their internal inconsistency—one set of numbers, measured in percentages, is disclosed to the SEC, while another, with absolute figures, appears on its “transparency portal.” While they reveal a problem escalating at an alarming rate and are constantly being revised upward—Facebook claims that false accounts are at 5% and duplicate accounts at 11%, up from 1% and 6% respectively in Q2 2017—they don’t measure quite the same things, and are impossible to reconcile. At the end of 2017, Facebook decided to stop releasing those percentages on a quarterly basis, opting for an annual basis instead. Out of sight, out of mind.

………

What Facebook does say is this: its measurements, the ones subject to “significant judgment,” are taken from an undisclosed “limited sample of accounts.” How limited? That doesn’t matter, because “[w]e believe fake accounts are measured correctly within the limitations to our measurement systems” and “reporting fake accounts…may be a bad way to look at things.”

And how many fake accounts did Facebook report being created in Q2 2019? Only 2.2 billion, with a “B,” which is approximately the same as the number of active users Facebook would like us to believe that it has.

A comprehensive look back at Facebook’s disclosures suggests that of the company’s 12 billion total accounts ever created, about 10 billion are fake. And as many as 1 billion are probably active, if not more. (Facebook says that this estimate is “not based on any facts,” but much like the false statistics it provided to advertisers on video viewership, that too is a lie.)

So, fake accounts may be a bad way to look at things, as Facebook suggests—or they may be the key to the largest corporate fraud in history.

Advertisers pay Facebook on the assumption that the people viewing and clicking their ads are real. But that’s often not the case. Facebook has absolutely no incentive to solve the problem, it’s already in court over it, and its former employees are talking. From Mark’s vantage point, it’s raining free money. All he has to do to get advertisers to spend is convince the world that Facebook is huge and it’s only getting huger.

………

But I’m not wrong. Facebook is a real product, but like Enron, it’s also a scam, now the largest corporate scandal ever. It won’t release its data about the 2016 election, about fake accounts, or about anything material—and because Mark knows it’s a scam, he won’t agree to testify before the British parliament in a way that could require him to actually answer any substantive questions, as I did in June. And because Facebook is also a component of the S&P 500, countless people have an incentive to maintain the status quo.

So should we break up the tech companies and Facebook in particular? It’s already a campaign issue for the next presidential election. Elizabeth Warren says yes. Beto O’Rourke wants “stronger regulations.” Kamala Harris would rather talk about privacy. Everyone else—even Donald Trump—generally agrees that something needs to be done. Yet the unspoken issue at the center of it all remains: Mark is running a Ponzi scheme, but Wall Street, Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, the think tanks, and their associates haven’t figured it out.

………

The biggest problem with treating Facebook as a monopoly, as opposed to the byproduct of what Jesse Eisenger calls “The Chickensh%$ Club,” is that it wrongly affirms Mark’s infallibility and fails to see through him and his scheme, let alone the reality that he’s not even in control anymore because no one is.

Would it have helped to separate Madoff Securities LLC into one company per floor, or split up Enron by division? Probably not, but talking about it is Facebook’s dream come true. Because the question we should really be discussing is “How many years should Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg ultimately serve in prison?”

If this is true, and I do find the argument compelling, I would pay money to watch his being frog marched out of his Menlo Park headquarters in handcuffs.

There Hasn’t Been a Tory Political Figure Who Has Failed Upward so Spectacularly since ……… Checks Notes ……… Winston Churchill

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So, Boris Johnson is the new Conservative Party leader, and so he will be the next Prime Minister of Great Britain.

While it is patently obvious that he will be an unmitigated disaster, in the States we would call him a hot mess, but the Brits prefer the term, “Shambolic,” it is almost certain that he will be better than Theresa May.

Theresa May was inflexible, deeply stupid,convinced of her own brilliance, and unwilling to admit her own errors. (She was also cruel for its own sake, just ask the Windrush immigrants, or the recipients of public aid, or people trying to get healthcare at the NHS)

Apart from the trait of stupidity, Boris is a classic upper class twit who would not be out of place in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, he shares none of the above shortcomings.

Boris has no integrity, and he has made a career out of screwing up, and then using his considerable personal charm to get things fixed, and he is gleefully ignorant.

It is inevitable that Boris Johnson will be a complete disaster as Prime Minister, but it is likely that he could still do a better job than Theresa May.

At the very least, I expect him to adapt, and get people planning for a hard Brexit.

Additionally, I think that BoJo’s antics will likely foam the runway for Jeremy Corbyn.

As to my title mention of Churchill, read your history, this was a man who had a legacy of uninterrupted failure: Gallipoli, the return to the gold standard, calling for the use of poison gas on Iraqi civilians, and his disastrous Norway campaign, whose failure led to the resignation of Neville Chamberlain and Churchill’s ascension to Prime Minister.

Walking Dead Man

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Someone has come up with a list of Jeffrey Epstein associates among the Davos set, and upon perusing the list, I can only conclude that he is never going to survive trial, because they do not want their secrets to come out:

Perhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice, more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won’t change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity. For decades, important, influential, “serious” people attended Epstein’s dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: They got something in exchange from him, whether it was a free ride on that airborne “Lolita Express,” some other form of monetary largesse, entrée into the extravagant celebrity soirées he hosted at his townhouse, or, possibly and harrowingly, a pound or two of female flesh.

If you watch Fox News, you will believe Bill Clinton was Epstein’s No. 1 pal and enabler. If you watch MSNBC, this scandal is usually all about Donald Trump. In fact, both presidents are guilty (at the very least) of giving Epstein cover and credibility. There are so many unanswered questions about Epstein, but one that looms over all of them is whether the bipartisan crowd who cleared a path for him will cover its tracks before we can get answers — not just Clinton and Trump and all those who drank at Epstein’s trough but also (among others) institutions like Harvard, Dalton, and the Council on Foreign Relations, or lawyers like the New York prosecutor Cy Vance Jr., whose office tried to downgrade Epstein’s sex-offender status; Kenneth Starr, who tried to pressure Republican Justice Department officials to keep the Epstein case from ever being prosecuted; and Alan Dershowitz, who tried to pressure the Pulitzer Prizes to shut out the Miami Herald for its epic investigative reporting that cracked open the case anew.

………

This project is meant to catalogue how Epstein’s secure footing in elite spheres helped hide his crimes. It includes influential names listed in his black book, people he flew, funded, and schmoozed, along with others whose connections to him have drawn renewed attention. Certainly, not everyone cited here knew of everything he was up to; Malcolm Gladwell told New York, “I don’t remember much except being baffled as to who this Epstein guy was and why we were all on his plane.” Some said they never met Epstein at all, or knew of him only through his ex-girlfriend and alleged accomplice, the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. Others backed away from him after the scandal. But all of the influential people listed here were attached in some way to Epstein’s world. The sum of their names constitutes a more concrete accounting of Epstein’s power than could any accounting of his disputed wealth. Consider this a pointillist portrait of enablement that all too chillingly overlaps with a significant slice of the Establishment.

The list of names, with descriptions, is jaw dropping, and almost endless.

It goes from Trump, to the Clintons, to Andrew Cuomo, to Woody Allen, to the Sultan of Brunei, to Malcolm Gladwell, to Stephen Hawking, to Stephen Banning ………

There is no way that someone among this very long list is arranging an unfortunate accident or suicide for Mr. Epstein as I type this.

H/t Eschaton. 

I Felt a Little Bit Sickened When I Heard This

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I played Dungeons and Dragons in my teen years until my late 20s.

I remain kind of a purist: I tend to think that the pre-packaged adventures are somehow cheating.

So, when I found out that people are making a living selling their services as Dungeon Masters, I felt like throwing my radio out the window:

Dungeons & Dragons is not the same game it was 40 years ago. And not just because rule updates have made the game less fussy and easier to play. The game, which kicked off the role-playing genre in the 1970s, is actually popular.

Role-playing games like D&D are different from traditional board games. Instead of a fixed set of objectives, D&D is modular. It lets players create their own adventurers and solve quests created by another player — the dungeon master. That person is responsible for coming up with the story, acting out nonplayer characters and running behind-the-scenes mechanics. 

And with 40 million D&D players, there’s a growing need for dungeon masters, or DMs. Some voice actors and playwrights are turning to D&D as a source of income. High-end DMs charge up to $500 per session, according to Mary Pilon, who wrote about professional dungeon masters for Bloomberg Businessweek.

My childhood (OK, adolescence) is destroyed.

This is Literally the Least We Can Do as a Society

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You know, when people make their fortunes off the misery of the rest of society, we should be able to do more than just make it difficult for these malefactors to green-wash their names.

The fact that the Louvre has removed the Sackler family name from its Oriental Antiquities wing, and artists are withdrawing from the Whitney Art Museum’s biennial art show over a board member’s business supplying tear gas used on asylum seekers.

I am not enough of an optimist to think that this is the start of something.

Instead, I see this as a marker of our impotence as a society to deal with the immorality and misdeeds of our billionaire class. 

It’s their world, and we just live in in at their sufferance.

This is What Pay-Go is Supposed to Do

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Remember when Dems put PAYGO in the rules package and people like me (who raised hell) were told not to worry because it would be waived off as necessary to pass important legislation? https://t.co/Pd97gv8sqq

— Stephanie Kelton (@StephanieKelton) July 18, 2019

I’m always that Pelosi’s insistence on Pay-Go rules was profoundly self destructive.

I used to believe that this was a short-sighted policy driven by a need to appeal to the inside the Beltway pundits for whom deficits are important whenever Democrats take power.

I increasingly believe the affection of Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic Party establishment for Pay-Go is more about having an excuse for not doing the right thing, because they don’t want to do the right thing.

Case in point, Democrats using Pay-Go to gut funding on community health centers:

Several Democratic lawmakers are accusing members of their own party of advancing a plan that would have the effect of cutting health care services for millions of Americans in poor and rural parts of the country — a charge fiercely denied by the package’s supporters.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is pushing a bipartisan plan that would provide flat levels of federal funding for hundreds of community health centers nationwide, at about $4 billion for the next four years. A similar plan is advancing in the Senate with the support of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.

Lawmakers face a September deadline for the community health centers, after which their funding would begin to expire, likely leading to steep cuts.

Pallone said the plan would provide the security of the longest guaranteed funding commitment ever secured by the clinics, averting the September cliff. But flat funding would not keep pace with medical inflation, likely forcing the community health centers to serve about 4 million fewer people annually by 2023 than they do now, said Leighton Ku, professor of health policy at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.

There is always money for a free for the next bloated defense program, but when you want to provide poor people with basic healthcare, we must be fiscally responsible.

The neoliberal consensus of the Democratic Party leadership is bad politics and bad policy.

This is China Paying for It

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Notwithstanding the claims of the free market mousketeers, China has always had more to lose in the event of a trade war.

Now, we are seeing the Chinese consequences of a trade war, where US firms are moving their supply chains from China.

It is neither trivial nor cheap to move a supply change, and once moved, it is neither trivial nor cheap to move a supply chain back, so any changes resulting from Trump’s tariffs are likely to be long term:

U.S. manufacturers are shifting production to countries outside of China as trade tensions between the world’s two biggest economies stretch into a second year.

Companies that make Crocs shoes, Yeti beer coolers, Roomba vacuums and GoPro cameras are producing goods in other countries to avoid U.S. tariffs of as much as 25% on some $250 billion of imports from China. Apple Inc. also is considering shifting final assembly of some of its devices out of China to avoid U.S. tariffs.

Furniture-maker Lovesac Co. is making about 60% of its furniture in China, down from 75% at the start of the year. “We have been shifting production to Vietnam very aggressively,” said Shawn Nelson, chief executive of the Stamford, Conn., company. Mr. Nelson said he plans to have no production in China by the end of next year.

………

“Once you move, you don’t go back,” Mr. Nelson said.

This is something that people miss:  China is far more dependent on existing supply chains than the US does.

Recognizing Reality

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The Code of Conduct for Federal Judges has been changed, and it appears that it will prohibit sitting judges from attending Federalist Society events:

………

For anyone concerned about the unseemly mingling of politics and the judiciary, a little-noticed formal ethics opinion issued in February by the committee responsible for the Code of Conduct for United States Judges may offer hope.

Judges are bound by the Code of Conduct, which comprises five canons and associated formal opinions issued by the committee, which provide ethical guidance. Substantial speech and associational restrictions are imposed on active judges to preserve the judiciary’s independence and integrity.

………

For many years, the Code of Conduct committee ducked the issue of judicial participation in the Federalist Society, in part, it seemed, because many powerful judges (see above) either have been or are associated with the organization.

The committee now appears to have drawn a line with its issuance of advisory opinion No. 116 expanding the scope of prohibited political activity. The Federalist Society is not mentioned by name, but the opinion is directed to the propriety of participation by judges in programs or membership in groups engaged in public-policy debates.

The prohibited political activities include those involving “hot-button issues in current political campaigns” or that are “politically-oriented” or have “political overtones.” Public perception also plays a vital role, as the opinion bars judges from participation that would “give rise to an appearance of engaging in political activity” or “would otherwise give the appearance of impropriety.”

The committee also warned judges that they should stay away from groups “where the funding sources are unknown or likely to be from sources engaged in litigation or political advocacy.” The New York Times noted of the Federalist Society’s 2015 annual report, the organization “discloses who contributes most of its money. But it also takes anonymous contributions, from players including the Mercer family, which was a major backer of Donald Trump.” The annual report listed 14 anonymous donors on the “platinum” level — those giving $100,000 or more.

………

The expanded definition of prohibited political activity does not endanger the Federalist Society , nor its ability to function as a conduit of conservative ideology for lawyers and academia. It simply makes the continued participation of judges in the organization indefensible.

Sitting judge’s hobnobbing with a partisan group like the Federalist Society has always been indefensible and corrupt.

Now it’s just official.

Airbus and Boeing Juxtaposed

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It turns out that much like its 737 MAX counterpart, the Airbus A321 NEO also has a pitch up issue.

There is an important difference though, Airbus actually spent the money to make sure that was well tested and thoroughly redundant, while Boeing did it on the cheap:

The European Aviation Safety Agency EASA has issued an Air Worthiness Directive (AD) to instruct operators of the Airbus A321neo of a Pitch instability issue.

EASA writes “excessive pitch attitude can occur in certain conditions and during specific manoeuvres. This condition, if not corrected, could result in reduced control of the aeroplane.”

We analyze how this is similar or different to the Boeing 737 MAX pitch instability issues.

………

As the AD does not apply to the in-service A320neo, the issue must not be connected to the pitch instability which comes as a natural consequence of mounting the larger neo engines on the A320 series. It can be restricted to how the A321neo version of the ELACs handles the aircraft’s controls in an excessive pitch up condition.

Since publishing the article Airbus has provided us the following information:

The issue is an A321neo landing configuration at extreme aft CG conditions and below 100ft only issue, discovered by Airbus and reported to AESA. Violent maneuvers in for instance a go-around in these conditions can cause a pitch up which the pilots can counteract using their side-sticks. No FBW nose downs or similar is commanded, it’s just the FBW doesn’t neutralize the pitch-up (like FBW using the Airbus style flight laws are supposed to do), the pilots have to do it. Airbus has assisted AESA in issuing the AD which restricts the aft CG used in operational landings until the ELAC software is updated.

Our comment: The Airbus information explains why the issue is limited to the A321neo. The A321 has a different flap configuration than the A320/A319, giving a more nose-down approach angle (a lift curve with a transposed AoA vs. lift range). It seems this difference can set the condition for the pitch-up which the FBW at this point does not compensate for. The Pilots have to do it. The FBW will take away this pitch-up in a FBW software release available 3Q2020.

………

Like the 737 MAX, the A319/320/321neos are affected by the mounting of larger engines with their larger nacelles ahead of the center of gravity, Figure 1.


Figure 1. A321 shown on top of A321neo. The larger engine nacelles are marked with a violet color. Source: Airbus and Leeham Co.

………

There are several takeaways from the above:

  • As we have written in the MAX articles, pitch instabilities in certain parts of an airliner’s wide flight envelope are common.
  • It comes down to how these are addressed to produce a safe aircraft. In the case of the MAX and A320, software-based control logic is used, controlling the movements of the horizontal stabilizer and elevator.
  • The key is how these controls are designed, tested and implemented.
  • The original MAX implementation was inacceptably badly done. It relied on a single sensor, commanded unnecessary repeated nose-down trim commands and didn’t have any global limitation on its authority.
  • The Airbus version for the A321neo has a solid implementation based on adequate hardware/software redundancy and relevant limitations on its authority. But it can be improved (see our Airbus update on cause and fix).

Similar problems, and in one case they aren’t killing people, because they aren’t letting finance and marketing drive basic engineering decisions.

This Is the Saddest Thing That I Have Read in a Very Long Time

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A Philadelphia man walked out of a would-be robbery after telling the cashier that the money in the till wouldn’t be enough to fund his daughter’s kidney transplant operation, according to police.

………

The store owner told police that the man waved his gun in the air and demanded cash, according to CBS 3. But after getting at least a couple hundred dollars, he changed his mind and gave the money back.

Clearly, our healthcare system is the best one in the world.