Boeing has fired its CEO Dennis Muilenburg for the recent chain of disasters that have beset the company.
The problem is not Muilenberg though, it’s the whole company, which has moved to a finance driven clusterf%$#.
I’m wondering if Boeing will be facing a government bailout, like Lockheed did in the 1970s.
This is not a company that has had setbacks, this is a company that has completely lost its way.
It turns out that the the collision between the USS John S. McCain Alnic MC in the Straits of in August 2017 was largely an artifact of the new navigation that the Navy had installed to reduce crewing.
This is not a surprise. The US Navy has aggressively attempted to reduce crewing in an attempt to free up money for the latest and (not so much) greatest tech.
For example, the 16,000 ton Zumwalts have a crew of 175, (it was originally supposed to be less than 100), and the previous 9,000 ton Burke DDGs have a crew of 350.
The Zumwalts have nonfunctional guns, have suffered repeated breakdowns, and, given the parsimonious crewing, probably has a glass jaw.
And now, the Navy’s fetish has equipped the Arleigh Burke class destroyers, which work, albeit with a lot of sailors, are crippled by the automated steering system they have installed:
Dakota Bordeaux had rarely traveled outside his home state of Oklahoma before he joined the Navy in February 2017. He’d certainly never seen the ocean.
But only four months later, Bordeaux was standing at the helm of the USS John S. McCain, steering the 8,300-ton destroyer through the western Pacific. Part of the Navy’s famed 7th Fleet, the McCain was responsible for patrolling global hot spots, shadowing Chinese warships in the South China Sea and tracking North Korean missile launches.
It filled the high school graduate with pride.
“Not many people of my age can say, ‘Hey, I just drove a giant-ass battleship,’” said Bordeaux, 23.
………
To guide the McCain, Bordeaux relied upon a navigation system the Navy considered a triumph of technology and thrift. It featured slick black touch screens to operate the ship’s wheel and propellers. It knit together information from radars and digital maps. It would save money by requiring fewer sailors to safely steer the ship.
Bordeaux felt confident using the system to control the speed and heading of the ship. But there were many things he did not understand about the array of dials, arrows and data that filled the touch screen.
“There was actually a lot of functions on there that I had no clue what on earth they did,” Bordeaux said of the system.
………
A 19-year Navy veteran, Sanchez had watched as technicians replaced the ship’s traditional steering controls a year earlier with the new navigation system. Almost from the start, it caused him headaches. The system constantly indicated problems with steering. They were mostly false alarms, quickly fixed, but by March 2017, Sanchez’s engineers were calling the system “unstable,” with “multiple and cascading failures regularly.”
………
But a ProPublica examination shows that the Navy pursued prosecutions of the two men even as its investigators and those with the NTSB were learning that the navigation system, if it hadn’t technically malfunctioned, had played a critical role in the deadly outcome in the Pacific.
Its very design, investigators determined, left sailors dangerously vulnerable to making the kinds of operational mistakes that doomed the McCain. The Integrated Bridge and Navigation System, or IBNS, as it was known, was no technical marvel. It was a welter of buttons, gauges and software that, poorly understood and not surprisingly misused, helped guide 10 sailors to their deaths.
Despite its issues, the IBNS operated for years without major incident. Navy sailors did what they have always done: They found ways to make do with an imperfect technology.
The NTSB put it plainly: “The design of the John S McCain’s touch-screen steering and thrust control system,” the board found, “increased the likelihood of the operator errors that led to the collision.”
The Navy investigators, for their part, determined that the system’s “known vulnerabilities” and risks had not been “clearly communicated to the operators on ships with these systems.”
………
In the end, though, the Navy punished its own sailors for failing to master a flawed system that they had been inadequately trained on and that the Navy itself came to admit it did not fully understand.
………
The Navy has committed almost half a billion dollars to build the navigation system and install it on more than 60 destroyers by the end of the next decade — the entire fleet of the tough, stalwart warships that form the backbone of the modern Navy. Yet no one responsible for the development or deployment of the technology has faced any known consequences for the McCain disaster.
A number of current and former Navy officials remain convinced the navigation system should never have been put to use. And they worry about the Navy’s slow pace in installing a new, improved version.
“The IBNS has no place on the bridge of a U.S. destroyer,” said one former senior Navy officer with direct knowledge of the McCain accident. “It’s not designed to have the control that you need to navigate a warship.”
Seriously, our military is increasingly pursuing a path in which combat readiness is a distant second to procurement.
Also, as an aside, the article is a valuable story, but they have jammed it up with Javascript and HTML 5 animations and similar web-bling that it is difficult to read.
Whoever decided on the format needs a stern talking to.
It’s been pretty obvious for a while that Silicon Valley’s tech “Unicorns” have been based on a largely corrupt model, in which venture capitalists buy into a company, and then inflate the value of the initial investment through follow-up funding rounds.
The theory is twofold: That the large amounts of money will push competitors out of nascent markets, and that the mania will generate huge profits for the VCs when they go public, and gullible retail investors flood in.
It has been apparent for a while, Uber, Lyft, Peleton, Endeavor, Slack, and (of course) WeWork have all shown that they have no path to justify their valuations.
But inspector Cluseau, aka the Securities and Exchange Commission, is now on the case, and they are investigating the initial listings of these companies on the New York Stock Exchange.
I hope that it leads to something, if the string is aggressively pulled, it is VERY likely that the whole scarf will unravel, but at best at this point the investigation appears far too narrow.
At worst, this may be little more than an attempt to short circuit the direct listings that these companies used, which deprieved Wall Street investment banks of much of the normal fee revenues that come from a conventional IPO:
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the listings of Slack Technologies Inc. WORK 1.32% and other major companies on the New York Stock Exchange, in a probe looking at how trading was handled on the first day, people familiar with the situation said.
SEC enforcement staff have recently sent letters including one seeking information from electronic-trading firm Citadel Securities LLC related to how it opened Slack’s stock for trading on June 20 in the workplace-messaging app’s so-called direct listing, the people said. It also seeks information on other initial public offerings.
………
The SEC is probing IPOs over the past several years of other so-called unicorns, companies known for achieving high valuations while private, the people said.
………
More large companies have gone public in recent years following big capital infusions from venture capitalists that allowed them to stay private far longer than was common in the past. Companies that have gone public on the NYSE in recent years include Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , Snap Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc.
Slack’s debut represented a new breed of public offering. The workplace-messaging company went public via a direct listing, in which a company lets its shares float on an exchange without hiring banks as underwriters like in a standard IPO. Banks do play a more-limited role as advisers, helping guide buyers and sellers to an opening price. Spotify Technology SA also used the process to debut on NYSE last year.
Direct listings allow companies to save on underwriting fees and bypass some restrictions that come with IPOs, such as limits on promoting the stock to the public and avoiding some lockups that prevent insiders from selling for a certain period.
………
The day Slack went public, some floor brokers felt Citadel Securities’ initial indications were too low and didn’t reflect accurate supply and demand for the stock, according to people familiar with that day’s events.
NYSE floor brokers have complained for years that banks working on big IPOs push DMMs to issue indications that are too low while taking unnecessarily long to open the stocks. That could allow banks to poach clients from rivals over the course of the morning, because the banks may be able to privately give mutual funds and other investors a more accurate indication of the opening price, current and former floor brokers said.
Because while the movie has generally been reviewed as an unalloyed disaster, it has produced outraged reviews with lines like, “Cats always feels like it’s two seconds away from turning into a furry orgy in a dumpster.”
I enjoy reading outraged negative reviews, so it’s all good.
I wait with baited breath for Rex Reed’s review, because no one does a catty negative review like he does.
— Sword lesbian. (@TMSTSTFD) August 30, 2019
Who amongst us has not been tempted to bring home a fake “Boyfriend from hell” for the holidays just to jerk our parents around?
The Sackler family, are having major butt-hurt because Tufts University is pulling their names from their buildings.
Let’s see, you created a dangerous product, aggressively and dishonestly marketed it across the nation, when caught you looted your company in advance of your bankruptcy, and your non-bankrupt foreign company is STILL trying to hook people on your poison.
Why wouldn’t an institution best known for its medical program want to have anything with you?
The Sackler family is pushing back after Tufts University removed the family name from its buildings and programs due to the family’s link to the ongoing opioid epidemic, according to a report in The New York Times.
In a letter to Tufts’ president, a lawyer for the family wrote that the removal was “contrary to basic notions of fairness” and “a breach of the many binding commitments made by the University dating back to 1980 in order to secure the family’s support, including millions of dollars in donations for facilities and critical medical research.”
Tufts made the decision to remove the family name after getting the results of an independent review of the university’s relationship with the Sacklers and OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, which the Sacklers own. Both the family and the company have been accused of helping to spark the crisis by aggressively marketing the powerful painkiller and misleading doctors, patients, and regulators about its addictiveness.
………
The review found that Purdue did intend to use the relationship to advance its interests. And, according to the report, in some cases, it was successful in influencing the academic institution. “Moreover, we conclude that there was an appearance of too close a relationship between Purdue, the Sacklers, and Tufts,” the report said.
The letter from the Sackler family lawyer hinted at the possibility of legal action.
………
Although, not all of the Sackler family is involved with OxyContin. Of the original three Sackler brothers involved in Purdue, one of them—Arthur—died before the painkiller was introduced, and his brothers bought out his stake in the company. Arthur’s widow, Jillian Sackler, released a statement saying in part, “It deeply saddens me to witness Arthur being blamed for actions taken by his brothers and other OxySacklers.”
OxySacklers. Heh.
I broke one of my own rules, and at Sharon’s* insistence, I watched the debates stone cold sober.
Never again.
Between the passive-aggressive Klobuchar, the clueless Yang, the self-important Steyer, and smug Buttigieg, I REALLY need drink.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
I say, with no exaggeration, that Pete Buttigieg has the most racist record of any mainstream Democratic Presidential candidate since ……… Checks notes ……… George Wallace.
He took homes from black people to give to (largely white) developers in the name of “Redevelopment”, and he has studiously refused addressing the deep, entrenched, and extreme racism of the South Bend police force, such as when he fired a black police chief who uncovered incontrovertible evidence of racism in the ranks.
In the latest incident, his police force was literally quoting KKK quotes from the movie Django Unchained while they were busting down a black man’s door.
Pete Buttigieg may have inherited a racist police department, but he has chosen to do nothing to fix the problem:
While the South Bend Police Department arrested a black resident on Wednesday, officers gleefully quoted a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” in which hooded KKK members bicker amongst themselves while riding to kill Jamie Fox’s character, Django.
The individual being arrested, 21-year-old African American Marko Mosgrove, broadcasted his arrest to Facebook. Multiple officers with guns and shields over their faces rammed into the man’s home before they discovered his phone was livestreaming.
“Hey, that phone is recording,” an officer says, six minutes and 17 seconds into the livestream. The officers then turn the phone around, resulting in the screen going black.
But the audio continued broadcasting throughout the arrest as officers reenacted the film’s scene.
18 minutes and 23 seconds into the livestream, an unknown officer giggles while asking: “You know what’s a good idea for your kid? Is a skull mask in case you have to shoot a guy.”
“Dude, this is how you rob banks, alright?” another officer responds. A few seconds later, an unknown officer imitates a KKK member from the film struggling to see through his Klan hood.
“I can’t see fu**king sh*t out of this thing!,” the officer says while laughing, mimicking the scene from Tarantino’s Western bloodbath where KKK members argue with one another over their Klan hoods not fitting their faces.
An officer responds by asking if the quote was from the film “The Boondock Saints.”
“No, Django Unchained,” the other officer responds. An officer then continues to quote from the KKK scene, mimicking a Klan member who defended his wife who worked for hours making the hoods for the KKK members.
“My wife was up all…” the officer says before audio temporarily cuts out. Another officer responds by continuing the reenactment, quoting theKKK member from the scene who tried to diffuse the situation.
“I think we all agree that these were a nice idea,” the officer imitates.
I don’t care what is in Buttigieg’s heart, I care what he does, and it’s clear that he does not give a flying f%$# about the minority residents of his town.
Listening to Mitch McConnell talk about the decline of bipartisanship is like listening to Jeffrey Dahmer complain about the decline of dinner party etiquette.
— Al Franken (@alfranken) December 19, 2019
I wish that Al Franken was still in the Senate.
I do not expect Trump to be convicted though.
BTW, F%$# Tulsi Gabbard’s abstention on both motions.
Anyone reading this in Hawaii, vote against her and volunteer for her opponent.
End her political career.
This is what happens when you let Wall Street values run a business.
Nine months after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the 737 MAX, Boeing finally pulled the plug on the jet’s production Monday. The company announced it’s temporarily halting the assembly lines in Renton from January, with no specified timeline for a restart.
However, in a welcome surprise for the 12,000-strong Renton workforce, Boeing said there will be no layoffs.
“During this time, it is our plan that affected employees will continue 737-related work, or be temporarily assigned to other teams in Puget Sound,” Boeing said in a statement.
Boeing has faced an unprecedented crisis, with more than 700 MAX aircraft grounded worldwide, including nearly 400 built since the grounding. Many have been in storage so long they’ll need extensive maintenance before they fly. The production stoppage will stop the parked fleet from growing to unmanageable proportions, while retaining the workforce will allow a smoother restart of the assembly lines when that time comes.
If this shutdown runs longer than a month, their supply chain is going to take weeks to come back up to speed.
This is why you don’t let finance types run your business.
Boeing will be suffering as a result of Harry Stonesphincter for years to come.
Not often a European soccer game is stopped due to fans being *too anti-Nazi*.
Rayo Vallecano's anti-fascist fans already chased Ukrainian Nazi Roman Zozulya out of town once. Then he came back with a new team.https://t.co/cCjIhp9VEp
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) December 17, 2019
Anti-Nazi chants from rowdies at a soccer match in Europe.
There may be hope for the future of humanity yet.
Seriously, have they ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf?
Given Bernie Sanders’ endurance as a top-tier presidential contender, and his support for Palestinian rights, it was almost inevitable that conservatives would start labelling his campaign anti-Semitic. Last week’s election in Britain—and the alleged similarities between Sanders and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn—provided the pretext.
“Linda Sarsour Is Too Antisemitic For The Women’s March, But Not For Bernie Sanders,” declared a February 10 headline in The Federalist. Three days later, The Washington Examiner followed up with, “Bernie Sanders has an anti-Semitism Problem.” Commentary added, “Bernie Sanders Has a Big Jeremy Corbyn Problem.”
The effort to implicate the most successful Jewish presidential candidate in American history in Jew-hatred is now well underway.
………
It distinguishes Sanders even more dramatically from Donald Trump, who invokes anti-Semitic stereotypes more blatantly and more frequently than any American politician in modern memory. From Trump’s 2013 reference to “Jonathan Leibowitz – I mean Jon Stewart,” to his 2015 declaration to a Republican Jewish Coalition crowd that, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” to his closing 2016 campaign ad, which featured three Jews — George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein and Janet Yellin — alongside language about “global special interests” that “control the levers of power” to his suggestion that American Jews view Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister,” to his statement to a Jewish audience, just this month, that “You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me…You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax,” Trump is almost incapable of speaking about Jews without calling them either avaricious or disloyal.
The most contemptible ones here are Commentary, of course, because they know the damage that false accusations like this can do the Jewish community.
They truly are shanda fur die goyim,
*As in Kameradschaftpolizei, the notoriously brutal prisoner functionaries who aided the Germans in the concentration camps.
It’s a racket: Publishers throw a few bucks at a professor, who requires the book for his class, and ka-ching:
As the semester ends, instructors at universities and community colleges around the country will begin placing their orders for next year’s textbooks. But not all professors will pay enough attention to something that students complain about: the outlandish prices of the books we assign. Having grown at many times the rate of inflation, the cost of a leading economics book can be over $250; a law school casebook plus supplement can cost $277. Adding to such prices is the dubious trend of requiring students to obtain digital access codes, averaging $100, to complete homework assignments.
……….
The root problem is that it is just too easy for us, the professors, to spend other people’s money. Just like doctors who prescribe expensive medicine, we don’t feel the pain of buying a $211 book of uneven quality and no real use when the course is finished, or a digital access code that costs $100 and is designed at least in part to disable the used-book market. The fact that professors choose and students buy destroys whatever power a competitive market might have to keep prices lower. That, and a touch of greed — the author of one successful book has earned an estimated $42 million in royalties — is why textbook prices have increased over 1,000 percent since the 1970s.
………
Teaching is a profession with its own ethical duties; students are both our charges and a captive market. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with assigning an expensive book if it is really worth the money and the alternatives are inadequate. (It helps if there’s a good used or rental market). But we at least owe our students the time to make sure we aren’t just absent-mindedly ripping them off.
………
Across the economy, over the last few years, there’s been a backlash against exploitative pricing, headlined by the condemnation of figures like Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Textbook authors and publishers may not be selling necessary medicines, but the practice of exploiting market power to its fullest raises similar ethical questions. The old-fashioned phrase is “price gouging,” and we shouldn’t be a part of it.
I’ve felt this way since I was a college student.
After all the candidates who were to be in tomorrow’s debate said that they would not cross a picket line to be there, somehow or other the contractor that was hired by Loyola Marymont offered its employees a decent contract, which has tentatively been approved:
The union representing 150 cooks, dishwashers, cashiers, and servers at Southern California’s Loyola Marymount University has reached a, agreement with the multinational corporation that employs them, breaking a labor impasse that threatened to derail Thursday’s Democratic debate.
The three-year deal, which was ratified by the union members on Tuesday, includes a 25% increase in compensation, a 50% drop in health-care costs, and increased job security for workers, the union said. “I am thrilled that we were able to reach an agreement, and that the candidate debate can continue as scheduled,” Angela Fisher, a prep cook at LMU, said in a statement. “I want to thank the Democratic candidates who stood with us and the Democratic party that helped us win.”
………
The deal was the product of emergency negotiations on Monday among representatives from UNITE HERE Local 11, the food-service company Sodexo, the university president, and the chair of the Democratic National Committee. All seven Democratic candidates who qualified for Thursday’s debate had said they would not cross the picket line in solidarity with the workers, creating uncertainty around the party’s final debate of 2019.
My guess is that Loyola Marymont is going to be paying more for the services of Sodexo over the next years.
There will be a number of theories about what happened with the UK Parliamentary elections, but the thesis of Dr. Lee Jones, that, “Corbyn failed to see that Brexit wasn’t a distraction from anti-neoliberal revolt but the form it has taken in Britain,” is an idea that deserves to a thoughtful and deliberate examination.
It is posted on the website of an aggressively pro-Brexit organization, but it differs from most of these groups by coming from the left-wing, and anti-Neoliberal perspective:
………
This exposes Corbyn’s principal failure: he could not see that Brexit was not a distraction from a revolt against neoliberalism but the form that this revolt has taken in the British context.
From the beginning, most of the British left have only been able to understand the Leave vote as a reactionary, right-wing phenomenon, and its supporters as either wicked supporters of, or dupes of, the right or even far right. For left liberals to make this error is one thing, but for a lifelong left Eurosceptic to do so is inexcusable.
Brexit was not “sold as a blow to the system”; it was a blow to the system – evidenced by the hysterical response of that system to the vote, its desperate attempts to prevent the enactment of the referendum result ever since, and the challenges to every aspect of Britain’s political and constitutional order. Every political party, barring UKIP and fringe communist groups, campaigned to Remain, as did all the institutions of the business, cultural and educational establishment, backed by the International Monetary Fund and the US president. People rejected the European Union and opted to “take back control” because they could see that the political elite had retreated from them into the state and the interstate networks of the EU. They wanted an end to this post-political era, in which nothing ever changed and political parties had converged on the neoliberal “centre-ground”. They wanted politicians to start representing them again, to listen to and act upon their grievances. They wanted popular sovereignty (see Analysis #6 – Why Did Britain Vote to Leave the EU?).
Read the rest.
I’m still trying to digest this, but it deserves a read.
I’m not surprised. This seems to a be a classic example of self dealing, and the folks at ICANN and the Internet Society giving benefits to themselves and their friends, and they figured out that no one would know until it is too late. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for the rest of us it quickly blew up into a complete sh%$ storm, and now they are trying to put a gloss of due diligence on this:
ICANN is reviewing the pending sale of the .org domain manager from a nonprofit to a private equity firm and says it could try to block the transfer.
The .org domain is managed by the Public Internet Registry (PIR), which is a subsidiary of the Internet Society, a nonprofit. The Internet Society is trying to sell PIR to private equity firm Ethos Capital.
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) said last week that it sent requests for information to PIR in order to determine whether the transfer should be allowed. “ICANN will thoroughly evaluate the responses, and then ICANN has 30 additional days to provide or withhold its consent to the request,” the organization said.
ICANN, which is also a nonprofit, previously told the Financial Times that it “does not have authority over the proposed acquisition,” making it seem like the sale was practically a done deal. But even that earlier statement gave ICANN some wiggle room. ICANN “said its job was simply to ‘assure the continued operation of the .org domain’—implying that it could only stop the sale if the stability and security of the domain-name infrastructure were at risk,” the Financial Times wrote on November 28.
In its newer statement last week, ICANN noted that the .org registry agreement between PIR and ICANN requires PIR to “obtain ICANN’s prior approval before any transaction that would result in a change of control of the registry operator.”
The registry agreement lets ICANN request transaction details “including information about the party acquiring control, its ultimate parent entity, and whether they meet the ICANN-adopted registry operator criteria (as well as financial resources, and operational and technical capabilities),” ICANN noted. ICANN’s 30-day review period begins after PIR provides those details.
………
The pending sale comes a few months after ICANN approved a contract change that eliminates price caps on .org domain names. The sale has raised concerns that Ethos Capital could impose large price hikes.
Of course it can raise prices. It WILL raise prices. That’s why the offer waited until the price caps were repealed.
You can see my earlier post, and a summary of the corruption and self-dealing, here.
I’m still wondering why there is not a criminal RICO investigation going on over this.
His release of information omitted about 20 of his biggest dollar bundlers.
I’m sure it was an accident, what can you do? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign omitted more than 20 high-level fundraisers from a list of top bundlers it disclosed last week.
The public list of bundlers, featuring more than 100 people who have raised at least $25,000 for Buttigieg, was meant to bring a close to more than a week of feuding between Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren over campaign transparency. But the list left off a number of people the Buttigieg campaign had previously touted as top donors in an internal campaign fundraising report obtained by POLITICO.
They include uberwealthy supporters such as Boston power broker Jack Connors Jr. — who declared he was “all in for Pete Buttigieg” in a June fundraiser invite — and Hollywood producer Jordan Horowitz, whose films include “La La Land.” Buttigieg also omitted hedge fund investor John Petry; William Rahm, senior managing director at the private equity firm Centerbridge Partners; Nicole Avant, the former U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas; and former U.S. Ambassador to Italy John Phillips. The latter two were also major Obama donors.
Candidates voluntarily disclose bundlers to signal forthrightness and allay concerns about conflicts of interest, and lists of bundlers — people who are frequently rewarded with ambassadorships and nominations to other administration posts — offer important windows into the high-powered networks that support candidates like Buttigieg.
In a statement, the Buttigieg campaign said it had made an error and would update its public list of campaign bundlers “to include an accurate accounting.”
Don;’t blame him, it’s just the way that McKinsey & Company almuni count.
Tennessee sheriff’s deputy Daniel Wilkey has been accused of an unjustified shooting, coercing a detainee into an involuntary baptism, and stripped searching a minor.
He has now charged with 44 criminal acts, 25 of them felonies.
He is a very busy boy, he is only 26.
This raises two questions, first, why is he still being paid, albeit on leave, and second what about his partners and superiors who clearly knew that this guy was out of control:
Tennessee sheriff’s deputy Daniel Wilkey has racked up some amazing stats during his short law enforcement career. At the age of 26, Deputy Daniel Wilkey is at his second law enforcement agency, having left the Rhea County Sheriff’s Office for the Hamilton County in 2018.
During his time as a Rhea County deputy, Daniel Wilkey was named in one (1) federal lawsuit for fatally shooting a person. Since his arrival in Hamilton County in February 2018, Wilkey has been hit with five (5) civil rights lawsuits. Fortunately, none of these involve Wilkey killing anyone.
More unfortunately, about half of them break new ground in civil rights violation territory. One alleges an unlawful roadside anal search that injured the searchee. Another involves a super-weird forced baptism in a nearby lake, supposedly in exchange for leniency with a drug arrest. Both of those were filed on the same day.
Yet another two (2) lawsuits involve minors, roadside strip searches, and Wilkey’s bizarre personal blend of religious affirmations and verbal abuse.
………
Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Daniel Wilkey has been indicted on 44 criminal charges, including 25 felonies, “pertaining to incidents he was involved in while on duty in an official capacity,” according to the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office.
Here are the charges (with counts per), which can pretty much be read to the tune “Twelve Days of Christmas” [felonies in bold]:
10 Reckless Driving
9 Official oppression
7 Reckless endangerment
6 Sexual Battery
4 Stalking
3 Assault
2 False imprisonment
2 Rape
1 Extortion
All this from a deputy who’s only been with his current agency for ten (10) months. And in that short period of time, he managed to rack up eight (8) internal affairs investigations.………
As for Wilkey’s compadres — the three deputies who stood idly by while Wilkey violated rights in new and inventive ways? They’re just kind of hanging around, sucking up tax dollars. Bobby Brewer, who aided with the roadside anal search, is on clerical duty. Jacob Goforth, who hung around and watched Wilkey “baptise” an arrestee, is back on active duty. And Tyler McRae, who helped Wilkey proselytize while stripping a minor down to his boxer shorts, is still on patrol and has not been placed under investigation.
The fact that he is still being paid is an obscenity. The fact that his co-conspirators are still on the job is a clear and present danger to society.
The entire damn department needs to be shut down, because it is corrupt to its core.
I have been blogging for more than 12 years, and when I posted about the suspicious death of a Canadian cryptocurrency mogul, and subsequent efforts by shorted investors to exhume his body to confirm his death, I missed a most obvious and beautiful pun.
I have always claimed to be the worst writer on the internet, but today especially so, because I was not the one who came up with this:
Putting the Crypt in Crypto Currency
I am clearly unworthy.