I just had a checkup from the opthamologist, and my pupils are still dilated.
Thankfully, I have this whole touch-typing thing totally dwon.
Month: November 2019
Bill Russell is a Stand Up Guy
The great Boston Celtics center Bill Russell has refused to acknowledge his induction into the basketball Hall of Fame for decades.
He’s always kept his reasons private, until now.
Ask anyone who is the greatest basketball player of all time, and you’ll surely get a diversity of opinions—including Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Magic Johnson and that dude who played for your cousin’s high school in 1987 whose jump shot was wet but he got shot in his layup leg running from the police his senior year in high school after he stole a black-and-white television from Radio Shack, so he never made it to the NBA. But if you ask who was the greatest man who played in the NBA, you’ll only get one name:
William Felton Russell.
The eleven-time NBA champion (no, that’s not a typo) is known as much for his willingness to stand up for what is right as he is for his five NBA MVP awards (no, that’s not a typo). Bill Russell counseled Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown; fought for civil rights his entire career, and financially supported the movement as one of the NBA’s biggest stars. He held Boston Celtic fans accountable for their racism and once convinced his entire organization to forfeit a game because a restaurant wouldn’t serve black customers. Only one other human being (Buddy Jeanette) has won an NBA title as a player while he was the team’s head coach.
Bill Russell did it twice.
But, despite being inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975, Russell never acknowledged the honor or accepted his Hall of Fame ring. When asked why he essentially boycotted the ceremony, Russell would only reply that he had his “own personal reasons.” Throughout his post-NBA career, he refrained from referring to himself as a “Hall-of-Famer” and never explained why.
On Thursday, Bill Russell finally accepted his Hall of Fame ring in a private ceremony at his home, but only after he confirmed that Chuck Cooper had been inducted into the Hall of Fame:In a private ceremony w/my wife & close friends A.Mourning @AnnMeyers @billwalton & others I accepted my #HOF ring. In ‘75 I refused being the 1st black player to go into the @Hoophall I felt others before me should have that honor. Good to see progress; ChuckCooperHOF19 @NBA pic.twitter.com/2FI5U7ThTg— TheBillRussell (@RealBillRussell) November 15, 2019
So who the hell is Chuck Cooper?
No one would ever argue that Chuck Cooper was one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He only averaged 6.7 points per game throughout his career. So, why would Bill Russell boycott the most prestigious honor in his sport because of this unknown guy?
Because Charles “Chuck” Cooper was the first black man drafted into the NBA.
A mensch.
Who Lives in a Politburo Under the Sea?
Patrick Starfish, it appears:
A Soviet-era star on the tower in the city of Voronezh has been given ‘Patrick’ styling, adding a touch of Bikini Bottom to the place. Would the overweight pink starfish ever have thought of traveling so far?
While social media users were quite amused with the stunt that surfaced online Thursday evening, Voronezh police were not so entertained. Now the fans of the US animated series – if found – could face 15 days in detention.
………
A poll under the photo in one of Voronezh online communities showed that most people – around 60 percent – found the stunt funny, while 39 percent say that it was an act of vandalism that shouldn’t go unpunished.
This is a beautiful prank.
About F%$#ing Time
I have offered some criticism over the impeachment investigations because I find them too narrowly focused.
In addition to being mobbed up and egregious self dealing, it’s also clear that Donald Trump obstructed justice in his attempts to sabotage the Mueller investigation.
Well, now investigators for the House of Representatives have told a judge that they are investigating possible obstruction of justice in addition to rat-f%$#ery in the Ukraine:
House investigators are examining whether President Trump lied to former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the House general counsel told a federal appeals court Monday in Washington.
The statement came during arguments over Congress’s demand for the urgent release of secret grand jury evidence from Mueller’s probe of Russia’s 2016 election interference, with House lawyers detailing fresh concerns about Trump’s truthfulness that could become part of the impeachment inquiry.
The hearing followed Friday’s conviction of longtime Trump friend Roger Stone for lying to Congress. Testimony and evidence at his trial appeared to cast doubt on Trump’s written answers to Mueller’s questions, specifically about whether the president was aware of his campaign’s attempts to learn about the release of hacked Democratic emails by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
“Did the president lie? Was the president not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation?” General Counsel Douglas N. Letter said in court.
“The House is now trying to determine whether the current president should remain in office,” Letter added. “This is something that is unbelievably serious and it’s happening right now, very fast.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is reviewing a lower court’s ruling that orders the Justice Department to disclose evidence the House says it needs as it holds public hearings about Trump’s alleged effort to pressure his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a potential 2020 political rival, former vice president Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.
Last month, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell for the District of Columbia found that the House was legally engaged in a judicial process that exempts Congress from the secrecy rules that shield grand jury materials.
I understand that Nancy Pelosi wants the impeachment investigation narrowly focused and quick.
She is wrong.
Impeachment is an inherently political process, and showing that the criminality is pervasive, and flows directly from the Oval Office is a necessary part of the process.
What’s with the “†” in the Times Best Seller List
You may have noticed that Donald Trump’s idiot son ……… Does not narrow it down enough, I mean Don, Jr., not Eric, this time ……… has written a book on the New York Times bestseller list.
You may have also noted that there is a “†” next to the notation.
It’s there for a reason for this tag. It indicates that the listing is the likely result of fraud by the author or publisher, specifically, the author, the publisher, or some other entity, in this case the Republican Party, has generated the numbers through mass purchases.
So it’s a fraud.
Don, Jr. is really a chip off the old block.
There is a Good Kind of Republican
But it’s with a lower case “R”.
It refers to people who want to eliminate the monarchy, particularly in the UK:
I'm think about blogging on this, and I just wanted to confirm that my sense of you as a "small r" republican (wanting to abolish the monarchy) is accurate.
— Jack Dorsey Is Objectively Pro-Nazi (M.G. Saroff) (@40_Years) November 18, 2019
Indeed I do
— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) November 18, 2019
Craig Murray is a republican, not a Republican.
Seriously?
In a week where “Centrist” candidates for the Democratic nomination for President have embarrassed themselves, Pete Buttigieg takes it to a new leve when he suggests that the United States should invade Mexico:
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said at a Latino forum in Los Angeles on Sunday that he’d be willing to send U.S. troops into Mexico to combat gang and drug violence.
“There is a scenario where we could have security cooperation,” Buttigieg said.
Even so, he added a caveat: “I’d only order American troops into conflict if American lives were on the line and if it was necessary to meet treaty obligations.”
His campaign later clarified that Buttigieg would only be open to military use as a “last resort” in response to Mexican cartel violence or an outside threat that endangers the country’s security.
Buttigieg’s comments came in response to a question at an event hosted by ABC7 Eyewitness News, where he added he would work to “make drug trafficking less profitable by walking away from the failed war on drugs here in the United States.”
He was the only candidate asked directly about moving troops to Mexico.
On Saturday, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro said he disagreed with President Donald Trump’s call to help Mexico “wage war” on cartels following the massacre of nine U.S. women and children in northern Mexico earlier this month.
“I don’t think the United States should send its military down to Mexico. Mexico is a sovereign nation,” he said.
It appears that Mayor Pete has learned absolutely nothing from his experience in Afghanistan.
Deploying US troops is one of the most important actions a President can take, and this sort of blithe and facile response is profoundly troubling.
Not a Single Occurrence of the Word “Genocide”
The New York Times has a blockbuster using leaked documents showing that China is using mass detentions in an attempt to eradicate the culture of its citizens in western China, most notably the Uighurs. (Long read)
Acting on this scale, there are somewhere around a million people in detention, one can only conclude that that this is a deliberate attempt to eliminate the ethnic character of the population that they are likening to a disease.
Why not a single quote from someone who would describe it as a “genocide”?
The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.
Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.
The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.
The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?
The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.………
The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. The key disclosures in the documents include:
- President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”
………
- The crackdown encountered doubts and resistance from local officials who feared it would exacerbate ethnic tensions and stifle economic growth. Mr. Chen responded by purging officials suspected of standing in his way, including one county leader who was jailed after quietly releasing thousands of inmates from the camps.
The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.
………
Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.
………
The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.
“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”
I would note that the CCP already has a policy of aggressive immigration of Han Chinese into non-Han regions, so this is actually stage 2 of a policy that fits the UN definition of Genocide.
At the very least, the reporters could have brought in an export to bring up the genocidal aspects of what Beijing is doing.
In the Annals of Least Sincere Apologies………
Michael Bloomberg’s apology for his aggressive support for stop and frisk of black and Hispanic men in New York is arguably the least sincere apology that I have heard this year:
Ahead of a potential Democratic presidential run, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York on Sunday reversed his longstanding support of the aggressive “stop-and-frisk” policing strategy that he pursued for a decade and that led to the disproportionate stopping of black and Latino people across the city.
“I was wrong,” Mr. Bloomberg declared. “And I am sorry.”
The speech, Mr. Bloomberg’s first since he re-emerged as a possible presidential candidate, was a remarkable concession by a 77-year-old billionaire not known for self-doubt: that a pillar of his 12-year mayoralty was a mistake that he now regrets. It was also, in some ways, a last word on an era of aggressive policing in New York City that began a generation ago under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — though the fallout on neighborhoods is still felt to this day.
Speaking before the congregation at the Christian Cultural Center, a black megachurch in Brooklyn, Mr. Bloomberg delivered his apology in the heart of one of the communities most affected by his policing policies, and at a location that nodded to the fact that should he decide to run for president, African-American voters would be a crucial Democratic constituency that he would need to win over.
Seriously, how stupid does Bloomberg think that the average Democratic primary voter, of any skin color, is?
This is not a heartfelt apology, this is a transparent ploy.
Trump Went to Hospital Today
Trump made an unscheduled trip to Walter Reed Hospital today.
The claim is that he was getting a jump on his annual physical, but I kind of doubt it.
President Trump underwent a two-hour doctor’s examination on Saturday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which the White House said was part of a routine annual physical and included lab work.
The appointment was not on the president’s schedule, in contrast to a previous physical that Mr. Trump had in February, also at Walter Reed outside Washington.
In a statement, Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump, 73, was taking advantage of a free weekend to begin portions of his annual physical, and was anticipating a busy schedule in 2020. She did not specify what types of tests Mr. Trump had.
Yeah, sure.
This is what happened, because the White House is always completely honest about health issues with Presidents.
I Thought That Mike Bloomberg Was a Horror Show, but Deval Patrick………
How is Deval Patrick a horrible candidate? Let me count the ways.
He is aggressively embracing super-PAC money in his campaign:
Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said he isn’t “crazy” about accepting support from super PACs, but he will as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.
Asked Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by host Chuck Todd if he would swear off accepting super PAC money, Patrick said, “We need to do some catch-up, so I think we’ve got to follow and find all sorts of above-board strategies.”
Additionally, Patrick made his fortune flacking for a rogues gallery of finance and industry industry, foreclosure mills, Bain private equity, big oil, and laundering anti-labor union death squads in Latin America:
In a Democratic presidential field rich with both centrist pragmatists and progressive warriors alike, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick stands as the answer to a question no one has thought to ask: What does a former oil company executive and venture capitalist think?
………
But in a campaign cycle where presidential candidates from every lane have denounced the outsized role of money in politics, the oil and natural gas industry, and “vulture capitalism,” Patrick’s résumé—marked by lucrative stints at Texaco, Bain Capital and subprime mortgage abattoir ACC Holdings—risks making him a foil for both progressive and centrist rivals for the nomination. Well-placed Democrats told The Daily Beast that the distance between the current mood of the Democratic presidential field and the controversial private sector industries where Patrick has made his living may be too vast to cover—and could make him little more than a punching bag for better-funded candidates.
Finally, after his then brother-in-law was convicted of rape in California, he fired the heads of the Massachusetts sex offender registry when they demanded that he register, because it was marital rape, and his sister had a reconciliation with him. The kicker is that he has been convicted a 2nd time of rape:
I agree with Matt Taibbi’s assessment that Deval Patrick’s Candidacy Is yet another example of how the party establishment is creating a complete sh%$ show of the primaries. (Just read the whole thing)
The Democratic party establishment is desperately trying to find their next “Great White Hope”, and this will not work out well.
Little Bobby Droptables Lives!
It looks like someone has been reading the “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language, xkcd, and had developed, and has developed an SQL injection attack to wipe traffic cameras.I am not sure if would actually work, but I am profoundly impressed about how life mirrors one of the most popular web-comics on the web:
Typical speed camera traps have built-in OCR software that is used to recognize license plates. A clever hacker decided to see if he could defeat the system by using SQL Injection…
The basic premise of this hack is that the hacker has created a simple SQL statement which will hopefully cause the database to delete any record of his license plate. Or so he (she?) hopes. Talk about getting off scot-free!
I do not know if it will work, but I am profoundly amused.
Not a Surprise
One of the selling points of the F-35 is that it supposed to be significantly more reliable than legacy aircraft.
The Pentagon’s chief weapons tester said the next-generation F-35 jet continues to fall short of full combat readiness targets and, despite some progress on reliability issues, all three versions of the fighter are breaking down “more often than planned.”
None of the Air Force, Marines and Navy variants of the Lockheed Martin Corp. fighter are meeting their five key “reliability or maintainability metrics,” Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s director of operational testing, said in prepared remarks Wednesday before two House Armed Services Committee panels.
………
“The operational suitability of the F-35 fleet remains at a level below service expectations,” Behler said in the prepared remarks. “In short, for all variants, aircraft are breaking down more often than planned and taking longer to fix.”
………
Even with that 2020 target approaching, analysis to date shows that neither the Marine Corps nor Navy F-35 models are currently “on track” to meet their reliability metrics even as they log more hours, according to the latest assessment.
Among the key lagging metrics cited by Behler are “mean flight hours between critical failure” — a data point that refers to the time between failures that result in the loss of capability to perform a mission-critical task, or mean time between part removals for replacement from the supply chain.
Significantly, while the F-35 fleet demonstrated, over short periods, “high mission capability” rates reflecting the percentage of time jets are safe to fly and able to perform at least one specific mission, the jets “lagged” by “a large margin” the more complete measure of “Full Mission Capable” status, he wrote.
That indicates “low readiness” for combat missions “that require operationally capable aircraft,” Behler said.
Something is seriously wrong with our whole weapons procurement and development process.
Abolish the Patent Court
Since its founding in 1982, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, aka “The Patent Court” has been a morass of sloppy patent maximalist jurisprudence.
This is why the Supreme Court has been routinely overturning their rulings over the past few years.
Whenever the Supreme Court agrees to review a case from the patent court, there is some sort of reversal in the works, and likely a significant amount of shade thrown at back at the court.
Now SCOTUS will review one of the worst opinions of the Patent Court, Google v. Oracle, where it was determined that programming interfaces (APIs) were subject to copyright, which has the effect of making program interoperability unlawful:
Some big news out of the Supreme Court this morning, as it has agreed to hear the appeal in the never-ending Oracle v. Google lawsuit regarding whether or not copyright applies to APIs (the case is now captioned as Google v. Oracle, since it was Google asking the Supreme Court to hear the appeal). We’ve been covering the case and all its permutations for many years now, and it’s notable that the Supreme Court is going to consider both of the questions that Google petitioned over. Specifically:
- Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface.
- Whether, as the jury found, petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use.
………
To me, as I always point out in this case, the key element will be getting the Supreme Court to recognize that an API is not software. Oracle and its supporters keep trying to insist that an API and executable code are one and the same, and I worry that the Supreme Court will not fully understand the differences, though I am sure that there will be compelling amici briefs trying to explain this point to them.
It’s clear that SCOTUS is looking to slap down the patent court again.
If you are not sure what a API is, it is a set of specifications that describe how programs talk with each other.
For example, if you wanted the square route of a number, you might do it by sqrt(#) or [#]squareroute.
They both mean exactly the same thing, but one will work with a program, and the other won’t.
Essentially, Oracle is claiming copyright of program compatibility, and the patent court swallowed it hook line and sinker.
It’s an Old Story
Journalists get a list of police officers who have been convicted of serious crimes, the state Attorney General threatens jail for possession of the list, and so the journalists publish the list online in a searchable format:
The list of convicted cops the California Attorney General tried to keep secret has just been made searchable by the Sacramento Bee. It contains hundreds of current and former police officers who’ve been convicted of criminal acts over the last ten years.
This collaboration of multiple newsrooms and journalism advocates began with an unforced error by a state agency. Taking advantage of a new state law allowing the public to access police misconduct records, journalists asked the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training for relevant documents. The agency handed over a list of 12,000 former and current officers — a list that apparently was never supposed to be made public.
The state’s Attorney General claimed the journalists had broken the law simply by possessing a document the Commission never should have given them. This couldn’t be further from the truth, but AG Xavier Becerra continued to make this claim, as though it were possible to codify something just by saying it out loud often enough.
I can see why AG Becerra wants this list buried. There’s nothing on it that makes cops or their oversight (which includes Becerra) look good. While the 12,000 officers in the database are a small percentage of the total number of California law enforcement officers employed over the past ten years, this small portion includes a number of cops who were never fired from their agencies despite committing criminal acts that would have put regular people out of a job.
Good.
Good Political Strategy
One of the concerns about Brexit is the future of both the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) as well as their price controls on drugs.
Jeremy Corbyn is now explicitly promising that neither the NHS nor drug price controls will even be brought up in trade negotiations with the US.
In fact, he his proposing legislation to explicitly prohibit any such negotiations:
UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn said the Labour Party will exclude Britain’s National Health Service and medicines from trade deals with the United States, as he accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson of covering up “secret talks” on the NHS.
………
“Our public services are not bargaining chips to be traded in secret deals. I pledge a Labour government will exclude the NHS, medicines and public services from any trade deals – and make that binding in law”, he added.
It’s good policy and good politics.
You Don’t Do Good by Doing Bad
In what has been an increasingly common story, both Amnesty International and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been found to violate their employees labor organizing rights:
The U.S. arm of Amnesty International, the global human rights group, broke the law by threatening its own employees, a National Labor Relations Board judge has ruled.
Managers at Amnesty International USA violated the law that protects employees’ right to organize for improved working conditions, Administrative Law Judge Michael Rosas wrote in a decision issued Tuesday.
According to the ruling, last year a group of unpaid interns, with support from some of Amnesty’s unionized permanent employees, drafted a petition to their supervisor asking to be paid. “Amnesty International’s commitment to human rights should be proven from within first,” they wrote, according to the ruling.
In response, Amnesty’s executive director held meetings in which she made implied threats; told employees to make workplace complaints verbally before putting them in writing; equated their organizing with disloyalty; and asked staff to report co-workers’ activism to management.
All of those actions violated the National Labor Relations Act, the judge concluded.
and for the SPLC:
Southern Poverty Law Center management said Tuesday they would not voluntarily recognize a union organized by employees at the civil rights nonprofit and have hired a Virginia law firm whose website boasts about victories over labor organization attempts.
………
The SPLC Union said in a statement Tuesday it was “disappointed” in the decision but that it would go through an election, if necessary.
“Management’s refusal to voluntarily recognize the union and decision to hire a law firm that specializes in ‘union avoidance strategies’ are counter to SPLC’s values,” the statement said. “The Center cannot truly claim to support workers’ rights, while also hiring a ‘union avoidance’ law firm to prevent its own workers from exercising our right to collective bargaining.”
It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.
Another Uber Setback
Now that governments are no longer terrified of Uber, much of the regulatory forbearance that has been essential to the success of their business is ending.
Case in point, New Jersey is now demanding back taxes and fines in the amount of $650,000,000.00:
Uber Technologies Inc. has been hit with an almost $650 million bill in unpaid employment taxes and fines from New Jersey, marking another setback for the ride-sharing firm as it struggles to prevent its drivers from being classified as employees.
Earlier this week, the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development demanded Uber and a subsidiary, Rasier LLC, hand over the amount for failing to pay employment taxes by, the state argues, misclassifying drivers as independent contractors.
The Labor Department said in letters sent to the firms that they owe $523 million in unemployment and disability insurance taxes for 2014 through 2018. The state added $119 million in penalties and interest.
………
New Jersey officials say that misclassifying employees isn’t fair to workers. They also estimate that misclassification across the workforce costs the state’s almost 250,000 employers an additional $300 per employee because of insufficient funding of the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund.
This is a company whose business plan was dependent on impunity for law breaking for their success, and now that regulators are no longer looking the other way, they are in a world of well-deserved hurt.
So, It’s Down to One Guy
It turns out that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is responsible for most of the anti-vax ads on Facebook.
I always knew that he was a nut-job about this, but I underestimated the depth of his influence:
Just two organizations were responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine advertisements on Facebook before the social media giant restricted such content in March of this year, according to a November 13 study in the journal Vaccine.
Of 145 anti-vaccine Facebook advertisements that ran between May 31, 2017 and February 22, 2019, the World Mercury Project and a group called Stop Mandatory Vaccination together ran 54% of them.The World Mercury Project, which ran the most ads of any single source, is an organization closely aligned with the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. Both are spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer turned prolific peddler of dangerous anti-vaccine misinformation. He and his organizations promote conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, including the roundly debunked claim that safe, life-saving immunizations are linked to autism. More recently, Kennedy has become a prominent opponent of laws aimed at increasing vaccination rates among school children.
Stop Mandatory Vaccination is a for-profit venture run by a man named Larry Cook. He, too, trumpets vaccine misinformation and fear-mongers. On Facebook and other platforms, Cook runs advertisements and campaigns making dubious links between the vaccines and tragic baby deaths. One such ad was banned by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority last year. The regulator determined the ad to be “misleading,” “unsubstantiated,” and “likely to cause undue distress.” In other instances, he has claimed that the pro-vaccine medical community is covering up the “slaughter” of children.
These folks need to be shunned by all people of good conscience, and a fraud investigation or three might be good too.
Took Long Enough
After a half century of rat-f%$#ery and malice, Roger Stone has finally been convicted of lying to Congress.Given the volume and intensity of his lies over the years, there is a certain symmetry to this:
For decades, Roger J. Stone Jr. played politics as a kind of performance art, starring himself as a professional lord of mischief, as a friend once called him. He tossed bombs and spun tales from the political periphery with no real reckoning, burnishing a reputation as a dirty trickster.
On Friday morning, a reckoning arrived, the consequence of his efforts to sabotage a congressional investigation that threatened his longtime friend President Trump.
Mr. Stone, 67, was convicted in federal court of seven felonies for obstructing the congressional inquiry, lying to investigators under oath and trying to block the testimony of a witness whose account would have exposed his lies. Jurors deliberated for a little over seven hours before convicting him on all counts. Together, the charges carry a maximum prison term of 50 years.
In a last-minute bid for salvation, prosecutors said, Mr. Stone appealed to Mr. Trump for a pardon on Thursday, using a right-wing conspiracy theorist who runs the website Infowars as his proxy. Mr. Trump attacked the guilty verdict against Mr. Stone in a tweet on Friday but made no mention of a pardon.
………
Mr. Stone joins a notable list of former Trump aides who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes in cases stemming from Mr. Mueller’s work. It includes Mr. Gates; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; Michael D. Cohen, the president’s longtime fixer; George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide; and Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman and Mr. Stone’s onetime partner in a political consulting firm.
This is a guy who literally has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, and now he is going to suffer the fate of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell.