Bernie Sanders was on The Daily Show, and I thought that he slayed.
My son was in paroxysms of political bliss.
Both were intensely amusing.
Year: 2019
But Cat’s Don’t Give a Sh%$
Researchers have determined that cats actually know their names, but they just don’t care:
More than 3,000 years ago in Egypt, a tabby called Nedjem is thought to have roamed the royal household of Thutmose III. History doesn’t record whether Nedjem — whose name means ‘sweet’ or ‘pleasant’ — learnt to respond when called. But a study published on 4 April in Scientific Reports1 suggests that at least some modern housecats can distinguish their names from similar-sounding words, although they register recognition with the merest twitch of the head or ear.
“Cats are just as good as dogs at learning — they’re just not as keen to show their owners what they’ve learnt,” says John Bradshaw, a biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who specializes in human–animal interactions.
The study took advantage of a technique known as ‘habituation–dishabituation’, commonly used in animal-behaviour studies. Atsuko Saito, a cognitive biologist at the University of Tokyo, and her colleagues visited 11 households with pet cats (Felis catus) and asked the owner to read a list of four nouns to their pet. These words were of the same length and rhythm as the cat’s name.
Most cats showed subtle signs that they were paying attention at first, by moving their head or ears. But by the fourth word, many had essentially stopped listening and their physical response was less pronounced. When their owners uttered a fifth word — the cat’s name — Saito’s team watched closely to see whether the pet displayed a stronger physical response than it had to the previous word.
The team found that 9 of the 11 cats showed a statistically significant (albeit subtle) heightening of their response when they heard their names. That alone does not prove that the felines recognized their monikers: a cat might have shown a stronger response to its name because that word was more familiar than others used in the test.
I am so not surprised.
Yemen War Powers Resolution Passes House
Trump has strongly opposed this, so a veto is likely, but the War Powers Act resolution requiring a US withdrawal from Yemen is the proverbial big f%$#ing deal:
The effort was a top priority for House Democrats after they took control in January amid a worsening humanitarian crisis on the ground in Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels have sought to overthrow the country’s government, prompting a Saudi bombing campaign that has lasted nearly four years.
It also reflects broad dissatisfaction on Capitol Hill with Trump’s foreign policy — in particular, his posture toward Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“The president will have to face the reality that Congress is no longer going to ignore its constitutional obligations when it comes to foreign policy,” said Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The situation in Yemen is appalling, and the actions, politics, and ideology of our erstwhile ally, the House of Saud, is even more appalling.
Our continued support for the maniacs in Riyadh serves no one but a handful of psychopathic royals.
A Feature, Not a Bug
A study has shown that Facebook’s advertising algorithms are a bigotry machine.
While a part of this is the inherent bias of the programmers, and a blithe attitude about the tech industry in general, and Facebook in particular, but a bigger part is because pandering to people basest inclinations is profitable.
You wave a wand, and call it tech, and suddenly not renting to black people (Air BnB), not giving rides to black people, and Facebook’s ads as shown below, but (because it’s all “science” and computers) it’s all good:
How exactly Facebook decides who sees what is one of the great pieces of forbidden knowledge in the information age, hidden away behind nondisclosure agreements, trade secrecy law, and a general culture of opacity. New research from experts at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the public-interest advocacy group Upturn doesn’t reveal how Facebook’s targeting algorithms work, but does show an alarming outcome: They appear to deliver certain ads, including for housing and employment, in a way that aligns with race and gender stereotypes — even when advertisers ask for the ads to be exposed a broad, inclusive audience.
………
The new research focuses on the second step of advertising on Facebook, [what they do after the customer fills out their ad preferences] the process of ad delivery, rather than on ad targeting. Essentially, the researchers created ads without any demographic target at all and watched where Facebook placed them. The results, said the researchers, were disturbing:
Critically, we observe significant skew in delivery along gender and racial lines for “real” ads for employment and housing opportunities despite neutral targeting parameters. Our results demonstrate previously unknown mechanisms that can lead to potentially discriminatory ad delivery, even when advertisers set their targeting parameters to be highly inclusive. [emphasis mine]
Rather than targeting a demographic niche, the researchers requested only that their ads reach Facebook users in the United States, leaving matters of ethnicity and gender entirely up to Facebook’s black box. As Facebook itself tells potential advertisers, “We try to show people the ads that are most pertinent to them.” What exactly does the company’s ad-targeting black box, left to its own devices, consider pertinent? Are Facebook’s ad-serving algorithms as prone to bias like so many others? The answer will not surprise you.
For one portion of the study, researchers ran ads for a wide variety of job listings in North Carolina, from janitors to nurses to lawyers, without any further demographic targeting options. With all other things being equal, the study found that “Facebook delivered our ads for jobs in the lumber industry to an audience that was 72% white and 90% men, supermarket cashier positions to an audience of 85% women, and jobs with taxi companies to a 75% black audience even though the target audience we specified was identical for all ads.” Ad displays for “artificial intelligence developer” listings also skewed white, while listings for secretarial work overwhelmingly found their way to female Facebook users.
………
In the case of housing ads — an area Facebook has already shown in the past has potential for discriminatory abuse — the results were also heavily skewed along racial lines. “In our experiments,” the researchers wrote, “Facebook delivered our broadly targeted ads for houses for sale to audiences of 75% white users, when ads for rentals were shown to a more demographically balanced audience.” In other cases, the study found that “Facebook delivered some of our housing ads to audiences of over 85% white users while they delivered other ads to over 65% Black users (depending on the content of the ad) even though the ads were targeted identically.”
Facebook appeared to algorithmically reinforce stereotypes even in the case of simple, rather boring stock photos, indicating that not only does Facebook automatically scan and classify images on the site as being more “relevant” to men or women, but changes who sees the ad based on whether it includes a picture of, say, a football or a flower. The research took a selection of stereotypically gendered images — a military scene and an MMA fight on the stereotypically male side, a rose as stereotypically female — and altered them so that they would be invisible to the human eye (marking the images as transparent “alpha” channels, in technical terms). They then used these invisible pictures in ads run without any gender-based targeting, yet found Facebook, presumably after analyzing the images with software, made retrograde, gender-based decisions on how to deliver them: Ads with stereotypical macho images were shown mostly to men, even though the men had no idea what they were looking at. The study concluded that “Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population.” In other words, the bias was on Facebook’s end, not in the eye of the beholder.
So, not only does Facebook allow advertisers to discriminate, bigotry is baked in their whole “Social Graph”.
This is not surprise.
Even if Facebook weren’t evil, and they are very evil, this is a part and parcel of the whole techno-utopian delusion that permeates the whole misbegotten industry.
I’m Not Sure that Boeing Can Make Aircraft Anymore
It now appears that the Ethiopian Air pilots followed Boeing’s protocols for dealing with a runaway trim and that the system still drove the aircraft into the ground:
The pilots of Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 apparently followed the proper steps to shut down an errant flight control system as they struggled to regain control of the 737 MAX aircraft shortly after takeoff. But according to multiple reports, data from the ill-fated aircraft’s flight recorder revealed that the anti-stall feature of the aircraft’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) was triggered at least three times—and at least one time after the pilots followed the correct steps to shut it down.
Both Reuters and The Wall Street Journal report that the air crew followed procedures laid out by Boeing following the crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX in October, according to officials briefed on the initial findings of the investigation. But the pilots failed to regain control of the system, and the MCAS was reactivated again—triggering yet another automated correction of the aircraft’s stabilizers that would have pushed the nose of the plane down.
………
To prevent the MCAS from continually pushing the nose down in the event of bad sensor data or some other software failure, Boeing instructed pilots to deactivate the system using procedures already in place for dealing with runaway stabilizer control systems in other 737 aircraft—flipping two stabilizer trim “cutout” switches to the “cutout” position. Failure to do so could result in the system pushing the stabilizers to their movement limit—putting the aircraft into a steep dive. The pilots of the Ethiopian Airlines flight did flip the cutout switches, and they cranked the controls to attempt to regain positive stabilizer control. But they continued to have difficulty controlling the aircraft.
It is not clear at this point whether the pilots purposely reactivated the MCAS’ stabilizer control or if the software reactivated on its own after shutdown. While a Wall Street Journal source said that it appeared the pilots turned the system back on in hopes of regaining control over the stabilizers, Reuters reports that the software may have reactivated without human intervention, and further investigations of that possibility are ongoing.
………
If the air crew did follow Boeing’s instructions on recovering from an MCAS system failure, the information emerging from the Ethiopian Airlines crash investigation raises more questions about Boeing’s response to the Lion Air crash five months earlier and the Federal Aviation Administration’s review of that response.
Every time we get more information on MCAS and the crashes, it just gets worse and worse, and now it seems that there are some very basic problems on their factory floor, as the Air Force has paused deliveries of the KC-46 tanker because of problems with foreign objects being found in delivered aircraft.
Seriously, that is aircraft building 101: Don’t leave sh%$ in a plane when it rolls off the production line:
The Air Force has stopped accepting deliveries of Boeing Co.’s new refueling tanker aircraft for the second time in a month because of debris found in closed compartments, according to Secretary Heather Wilson.
The halt in deliveries of the KC-46A Pegasus is the latest issue to plague the $44 billion effort to create the first U.S.-built flying gas station for the Pentagon’s fleet since the KC-10A Extender in 1981.
“We actually stopped again,” Wilson said Tuesday at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. Wilson told lawmakers that the Air Force found “foreign object debris” in closed compartments of the aircraft.
Elaborating on the trash left behind by workers, Wilson told the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee later in the day that it was a “manufacturing discipline” issue on the assembly line where “we saw a breakdown.”
“If you drop a wrench you have to find a wrench,” she said. “You have to wipe down surfaces so you don’t have pieces of aluminum that over time get in the midst of things and cause serious problems.”
Boeing has lost its way.
It has been relentlessly chasing MBA-think and over-inflated executive compensation, and making aircraft has become secondary.
I so hope that I am flying Airbus to Portland in June.
Shocks the Conscience*
A judge has reinstated Michigan Governor Snyder as a defendant te Flint water lawsuit, and it appears that said judge is unamused:
A federal judge on Monday allowed a major class-action lawsuit over the Flint water contamination crisis to move forward and reinstated claims against former Gov. Rick Snyder.
The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Judith Levy authorizes new evidence in the case that plaintiff attorneys argue shows Snyder was aware of significant risks posed by Flint River water as early as April 2015 but did not inform residents until five months later, when the crisis could no longer be denied.
Levy had dropped Snyder from the case in the fall 2018. But new allegations, if proven true, would show Snyder was “deliberately indifferent” and showed “callous disregard” for the health and safety of Flint residents, she wrote in a 128-page decision reinstating Snyder as a defendant and addressing other claims.
The consolidated class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of Flint residents claiming personal injury and/or property damage as a result of the city’s water contamination crisis, including those exposed to lead and at least one person who died due to possible Legionnaires’ disease.
………
Levy on Monday also rejected motions to dismiss “bodily integrity” claims against former Michigan Treasurer Andy Dillon, several other state officials and former Flint emergency managers Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose.
………The amended complaint allowed under Monday’s decision alleges that Snyder did not do enough to intervene in the lead contamination crisis or warn the public about outbreaks of deadly Legionnaire’s disease.
………
The complaint targets the former governor for alleged “injuries he caused to plaintiffs resulting from his deliberately indifferent deprivation of plaintiffs’ constitutional and civil rights.”
In her decision, Levy called the plaintiffs’ claims against Snyder “plausible” and worthy of additional consideration in court.
………
Furthermore, Levy said, plaintiffs “plausibly state” that Snyder showed a “callous disregard” for the plaintiffs right to bodily integrity. Viewed as a whole, the allegations plausibly describe ‘conscience shocking’ conduct,” she wrote.
………
The class includes about 25,000 individuals but could grow if plaintiffs’ attorneys and the state reach a settlement in the case, Pitt said.
There is a possibility that with that many clients, that Rick Snyder will exhaust his whole fortune in lawyers and penalties.
I hope that this rat-f%$# has his own Eddie Ray Valentine moment.
*Yes this is actually a legal term.
Well, That’s Very White of You
I just came across an article suggesting that the Jewish practice of Shmita could save sustainable architecture.
For those not up on obscure biblical laws, it is the requirement for a field to lie fallow once every 7 years.
When all is said and done, allowing fields to lie fallow, and thus allowing the soil to rest is a good idea.
My problem is not that it’s a just a Jewish idea.
It has been practiced almost universally around the world since the introduction of agriculture by almost every farming society until the advent of modern fertilizer technology.
The idea that this is some sort of uniquely Jewish (and by implication “white”) secret is bullsh%$.
Tweet of the Day
During the 90s, the influencers said millions of lost jobs for the sake of free trade and globalization were worth it. Now, they tell us the loss of several hundred thousand jobs in the insurance industry for the sake of Medicare For All is intolerable. pic.twitter.com/krGH9kdHgC
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) March 24, 2019
The reality of the situation here is that their objection is not to the loss of jobs, but the losses of the idle rich shareholders.
H/t Naked Capitalism
Things I Won’t Discuss in 2019
Until 2020, I will no longer discuss the fundraising hauls of various candidates. (the link is about Bernie crushing it)
I understand that campaign donations numbers are a fixture in political coverage, but that is bad and lazy journalism.
This sort of coverage is more than bad, it is damaging.
It replaces the discussion of real issues with meaningful horse race coverage.
I fear that the press coverage this cycle will make 2016 coverage look like Edward R. Murrow.
Listen to Admiral Ackbar
This is not a good faith offer. May is incompetent, and her only governing principle is her repeated attempts to appeal to racists for political advantage. (See the Windrush scandal)
She has lost all credibility, and most of her influence with, her own party.
She literally has nothing to offer, and the only reason to do this is as part of an attempt to somehow paint Labour in the most vile and racist manner.
Listen to Admiral Ackbar.
Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday broke with her own party, appealing to the opposition to work with her on a plan in a move that could keep Britain closely tied to the European Union after the country leaves the bloc.
Mrs. May made the announcement after her cabinet had met for seven hours, amid a growing sense of crisis. With only 10 days left until Britain is due to leave the European Union, she also said she would ask leaders of the bloc for an extension.
A seven hour cabinet meeting? That doesn’t sound good.
………
Her overture to the Labour Party could mark a turning point in Brexit, as Britain’s exit from the European Union is known, ending months of stalemate between Mrs. May and Conservative hard-liners, who have adamantly refused to support the deal she negotiated with the European Union.
……….
The prime minister said the withdrawal agreement must stand, even though Parliament has rejected it three times already. European leaders have insisted upon this.
Under the withdrawal agreement, Britain would remain in the European Union customs and trading system until at least the end of 2020.
………
Mrs. May’s plan had envisioned eventually severing ties with the bloc’s customs and trading system, and taking control over immigration from continental Europe.
Until now, she has refused to consider softening any of these so-called red lines.
She’s trying to make Corbyn her patsy.
Linkage
- Barack Obama represents the old Democratic party (The Guardian) Money quote, “The former president says he’s worried about ‘purity’ tests in the Democratic party. What he’s really worried about is his surrogates losing control of the party”
- Why does the Left sneer at the traditional working class? (UnHerd) The UK, addressing the all to common trope that addressing issues of the working class is just pandering to white people.
- Buy Yourself a F*^king Latte (The Big Picture) Barry Ritholtz runs the numbers, and Suze Orman’s numbers on this, noting that Orman’s numbers assume a return of 12% AFTER inflation, more than double of the market’s rate of return. Wage increases of 2% a year do a lot more.
- That mental health app might share your data without telling you (The Verge) We don’t just need regulation, we need executives behind bars.
- Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? (The Atlantic) The so-called, “Silurian Hypothesis.” The authors of the peer reviewed paper don’t believe it, but present it as a mental exercise on how evidence of such things are fleeting.
- Nancy Pelosi shows no restraint on disparaging young progressive women (The Guardian) Pelosi really needs to go.
- Pete Buttigieg Trivializes the Impact of Trade on US Job Losses (Truthout) As a matter of settled law, we have been subsidizing jobs moving overseas for decades, and automation is an excuse to do nothing to call capital, and the body politic, to account.
- The Kushner Family Passover Haggadah, 2019 Edition (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency) Read this. it is brilliant.
A tour of an old machine shop. I love this sh%$:
How Bad do You Have to F%$# Up in Order for Ben F%$#ing Carson to Call You Out for Discrimination?
I am not sure where that line is, but Zuckerberg’s Monster, aka Facebook has crossed this line.
Truth be told, when you sell advertising with the level of granularity that Facebook offers, it is clear that a significant portion of your customers will use it to indulge in their own bigotries.
In fact, this problem appears to be endemic to internet businesses, which raises the question, “Is this a bug, or a feature?”
The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced Thursday it is suing Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act by allowing advertisers to limit housing ads based on race, gender and other characteristics.
The agency also said Facebook’s ad system discriminates against users even when advertisers did not choose to do so.
ProPublica first reported in 2016 that Facebook allowed housing advertisers to exclude users by race. Then in 2017, ProPublica found that — despite Facebook’s promised changes — the company was still letting advertisers exclude users by race, gender, ethnicity, family status, ability and other characteristics.
“Facebook is discriminating against people based upon who they are and where they live,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said in a statement. “Using a computer to limit a person’s housing choices can be just as discriminatory as slamming a door in someone’s face.”
………
HUD’s suit comes a week after Facebook announced sweeping changes to its advertising portal, preventing landlords, employers and lenders from discriminating in housing, employment or credit ads.
Facebook also disputed HUD’s conclusion that the system itself discriminates beyond advertisers’ choices: “HUD had no evidence and finding that our AI systems discriminate against people.”
A Facebook spokesperson told ProPublica that the company declined to give HUD data about who is actually seeing ads because of privacy concerns.
………
Facebook’s previous response to HUD contended that advertisers — not the company — were responsible for targeting ads. In March 2018, Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said at the time: “There is absolutely no place for discrimination on Facebook. We believe this lawsuit is without merit, and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? (Mandy Rice-Davies applies)
There Were Elections in (Sort of) Europe………
It looks like corruption of political elites on both sides of the aisle are a major issue in European elections.
In Slovakia, a neophyte environmental activist defeated a European Commission Vice President in an election that was largely about corruption among the existing elites.
The assassination of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak brought festering discontent out into the open, resulting in protests that forced the PM’s resignation a year ago.
In related news, massive discontent in the Ukraine over elite corruption has had a comedian who plays an accidental President on TV won the first round of Presidential elections, and will face the incumbent President, Petro Poroshenko, in a runoff in 3 weeks.
Are you noticing a pattern yet?
In the last election, corruption was less of a factor, though, to be fair, 95% of the country is not in Europe, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist AKP suffered major defeats in local elections, with his party losing the Mayoral races in both Ankara and Istanbul, which is significant not only because it provides opportunities for political party building, and political patronage, for his opponents, but also because Istanbul has been his political base for his entire political career.
If the opposition can keep fratricidal idiocy to minimum, and that is a very big if, it looks like he may face a meaningful challenge at the next national elections.
This May be the Most Epic Exchange on Twitter
Jim Carey, comedian and anti-vaxxer, made what any sensible person would be a fairly anodyne statement about the wages of fascism:
If you’re wondering what fascism leads to, just ask Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta. pic.twitter.com/uc2wZl0YBu— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 30, 2019
Alessandra Mussolini, honest to God fascist and grand daughter of il Duce, took umbrage:
You are a bastard
— Alessandra Mussolini (@Ale_Mussolini_) March 31, 2019
Again, a fairly anodyne, and typical, response, at least for a fascist daughter of Mussolini.
But Twitter user, and Italian cartoonist, Sted (@zerorisposte) has a response that knocks it out of the park:
— sted (@zerorisposte) March 31, 2019
This is just beautiful.
I did Nazi This Coming
This is Jacob Rees Mogg.
He does not have a mustache, but this is not Photoshop, just the work of a tremendously skilled lighting artisan.
Telling a story with light and shadow is a particular shill, and whoever did this is a giant in the field.
Linkage
- Rachel Maddow, the left’s powerhouse on cable, won’t let the Mueller probe go. (Washington Post) I am not the only one to notice.
- Stupid Patent Of The Month: Veripath Patents Following Privacy Laws (Techdirt) We really need to fix our broken IP system.
- Shining a light on presidential libraries — the unrenowned pay-to-play scandal (Opensecrets.org) Yet another form of back-loaded bribery.
- JAB Holdings: Reimann family, who own stake in Krispy Kreme and Panera Bread, admits Nazi past (Washington Post) The wages of sin, huh?
- BofA, Wells Fargo sour on blockchain (American Banker) Not surprising. I’ve yet to see a meaningful real world application beyond crypto currencies, even among the Slashdot crowd.
- Trump’s Financial Statements Are So Full Of Lies That His Accountants Put a Warning Label on Them (Vanity Fair) But instead of covering this, we got phony pee tapes.
- Trump administration awards $1.7 million family planning grant to anti-abortion clinics (The Hill) Some policy consequences of Trump.
- The good old days? In many ways, yes (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis) Note the source. “Less-educated Americans born in the 1960s fare much worse than those born 20 years earlier due to wage changes, shorter life expectancy, and higher medical costs.”
A mashup from just 1 Maddow show of all the Russia references:
Clearly, Market Forces Work in Public Education
It turns out that small education systems in California are balancing their books by approving any Charter school that comes to them, and then charging them fees for non-existent “oversight”.
I’m not sure if this is charter schools bribing boards of education, or if it is boards of ed extorting charter schools, but it is indicative of the corruption inherent in the system:
The superintendent’s plan was born of necessity.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, as tax revenue plummeted, small school districts across California quickly felt the pain. Many were already lean, where administrators did the work of two or three, and students were counted in tens, not thousands. The economic collapse threatened their very existence.
In Superintendent Brent Woodard’s rural district, which covered the towns of Acton and Agua Dulce about 45 miles north of Los Angeles, enrollment in 2013 had fallen by more than a quarter over five years. The area’s population had aged, the birthrate declined and some students were choosing to attend schools outside the district. Without increasing revenue or making harmful cuts, the district was facing insolvency and the threat of a state takeover.
In California’s charter school law, Woodard saw financial salvation.
………
Court records detail how — methodically and rapidly — the Acton-Agua Dulce Unified School District began approving new charter schools. The first year, there were two. The next: 11. By 2017, the district, which operates only three schools of its own, had authorized 17 charter schools.
Some were located outside the district’s geographical boundaries, in places like L.A., Santa Clarita and Pasadena. Some were based entirely online.
Each charter brought the district something it badly needed: money.
………
Across California, other small districts hatched similar plans as word spread that they could fix their financial problems by approving certain types of charters and then charging them for a range of services.
This sort of corruption is the rule, rather than the exception, and it is a feature, not a bug.
Looting, and busting teachers’ unions, are the real goals of the charter school movement, and so these activities should come as no surprise.
My Heart Bleeds Borscht for These Delicate Snowflakes
It appears tha former staffers of the Worst Presidential Campaign Ever™ are feeling unappreciated after Pete Buttigieg called out their, and her, incompetence:
An aide to Hillary Clinton on Saturday slammed comments made in January by South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg that were critical of how Clinton ran her 2016 presidential campaign.
“This is indefensible,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill wrote on Twitter Saturday. “@HillaryClinton ran on a belief in this country & the most progressive platform in modern political history. Trump ran on pessimism, racism, false promises, & vitriol. Interpret that how you want, but there are 66,000,000 people who disagree. Good luck.”
Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy,” he told the outlet in the interview. “At least he didn’t go around saying that America was already great, like Hillary did.”
The self importance, incompetence, and complete cluelessness of these idiots is completely stunning.
Seriously, Reality Outstrips My Wildest Hallucinations
At the confirmation hearing for David Bernhardt, Trump’s nominee to replace the fabulously corrupt Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior, a protester donned a “Creature from the Black Lagoon” mask:
A protester dressed as a “swamp creature” was escorted out of a confirmation hearing for Interior Secretary nominee David Bernhardt Thursday morning.
The protester remained seated for two hours before being escorted out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.
A protester dressed as a “swamp creature” was escorted out of a confirmation hearing for Interior Secretary nominee David Bernhardt Thursday morning. The protester remained seated for two hours before being escorted out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.
Bernhardt, a former oil and gas industry lobbyist, reportedly helped block the release of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study outlining the effects of pesticides on endangered species while working as a deputy Interior secretary under Ryan Zinke, according to The New York Times.
An Interior Department spokesman told the Times that Bernhardt’s actions had been “governed solely by legitimate concerns regarding the legal sufficiency and policy.”
Seriously weird:
It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!
And we have the first savings institution closing of the of the year, CBS Employees Federal Credit Union, of Studio City, CA.
And yes, it IS that CBS, “CBS Employees Federal Credit Union provided financial services to employees of CBS, Inc., Mary Tyler Moore Productions, and CBS/MTM who work in Studio City, California.
Here is the Full NCUA list. of failures so far this year.