Ukraine state glorification of mass murderers of Jews is accelerating ahead of elections. https://t.co/eXsLwcQxM1
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) January 22, 2019
I don’t think that it is fair to blame the people of the Ukraine, or Poland, or Latvia, or Lithuania, or Estonia for what their grandparents, or great grandparents, did.
However, I do fault them for honoring genocidal Nazi collaborators from that time.
We now have a report that Iranian forces fired a rocket at Israel, and Israel responded with air-strikes:
Israeli forces bombed targets belonging to Iran inside Syria early Monday morning, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement, as tensions on the northern border continued to skyrocket.
The Israeli army said at 1:30 a.m. it was “now striking Iranian Quds targets in Syrian territory,” and warned Syrian forces not to intervene.
………
The attack came less than a day after Israel reportedly carried out a rare daylight strike on targets near Damascus, after which Iranian forces in Syria fired a retaliatory missile at Israel, according to the IDF. The exchanges ratcheted up concerns of a wider confrontation between Israel and Iran in Syria. The Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported Monday that the Iranian missile, intercepted en route to the Golan by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, carried a nearly half-ton warhead.
I do not think that this is unrelated to the fact that Knesset elections will be in less than 3 months.
Say what you will about Binyamin Netanyahu, but he has an almost preternatural knack for tapping into the Israeli electorate fears to further his own political career..
This is not a surprise.
It was, at it’s core a rich man’s hobby, and with Allen gone, I am sure that the company will be far more resource limited than before:
Air launch space company Stratolaunch has abandoned development of a family of dedicated launchers and PGA rocket engines destined for deployment from the company’s very large carrier aircraft currently poised for first flight at Mojave, California.
The shocking move comes just weeks after Stratolaunch achieved the first long duration runs on its ”PGA” rocket engine’s preburner in tests at NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi — and only three months after the death of Stratolaunch founder Paul Allen. Described by Stratolaunch leaders as “the world’s most efficient hydrogen engine”, the PGA was expected to begin full-scale testing in 2020 and was to power a family of launchers unveiled by the company.
Although Stratolaunch has given no explanation for the abrupt cancellation of the ambitious project, development costs are thought to have risen steeply as testing accelerated. The company says only that “we are streamlining operations, focusing on the aircraft and our ability to support a demonstration launch of the Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL air-launch vehicle. We are immensely proud of what we have accomplished and look forward to first flight in 2019.”
My prediction, and my record on predictions is crappy, is that there will be a few launches, but that it won’t manage to be a meaningful player in the commercial launch space.
Today, on the anniversary of his assassination, the FBI honors the life, work, & commitment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to justice. pic.twitter.com/WZInYKQx2g
— FBI (@FBI) April 4, 2017
You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
No. I am not.
I am not a historian, and I am not Black, and these days, everyone from David Brooks to Ann Coulter seems determined to show people that he was really one of them.
I was 6 years old when he died, and lived in a place which (I think) still required an operator assisted call to reach the “Lower 48,” so any recollections that I have are entirely from historical documents.
There is plenty of primary documentation of his life, his letters, his speeches, film and video, and I highly recommend that you check it out.
About the only thing that I can say with certainty from what I know of history history is that the FBI under J.Edgar Hoover was a profoundly pernicious organization that aggressively subverted the civil rights of its targets, and that there was never a proper reckoning for their behavior.
I’m inclined to believe that his legacy still permeates the Bureau, and current events would tend to bolster my opinion.
No, really, it’s f%$#ing cold outside.
Specifically, it is about 12° F (-11° C), which I am very much aware of, because I was outside looking at the lunar eclipse.
The weather was perfect for viewing the astronomical event, but it was hell for the person doing the viewing.
After a few minutes outside, a witch’s breasts looks invitingly warm.
Through the fall, traveler after traveler arrived in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities of New York from areas of Israel and Europe where measles was spreading. They then spent time in homes, schools and shops in communities where too many people were unvaccinated.
Within months, New York State was facing its most severe outbreak of the disease in decades, with 182 cases confirmed by Thursday, almost exclusively among ultra-Orthodox Jews. Health officials in New Jersey have reported 33 measles cases, mostly in Ocean County, driven by similar conditions.
In 2018, New York and New Jersey accounted for more than half the measles cases in the country.
Alarmed, health officials began a systematic effort to bring up vaccination rates and halt the disease’s spread.
But while there has been progress, the outbreak is not yet over. Health officials said part of the problem has been resistance among some people in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods to fully cooperate with health workers, get vaccinations and promptly report infections.
………
Dr. Ruppert said that health officials discovered that some religious schools, or yeshivas, in ultra-Orthodox communities in Rockland County had vaccination rates as low as 60 percent, far below the state average of 92.5 percent. Audits found that some schools were overreporting vaccination rates, she added.
Seriously. What the F%$# is wrong with these people.
This is a danger to their community, and a danger to the surrounding community.
Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the face of the earth, and all the rabbis would have to do is explain this to their congregants, and ten pick up the phone and get the state to set up some vaccination clinics
This has not happened..
Trump has blinked, making an offer to extend DACA status and TPS status for 3 years in exchange for wall funding.
Pelosi turned it down flat:
President Trump on Saturday offered Democrats three years of deportation protections for some immigrants in exchange for $5.7 billion in border wall funding, a proposal immediately rejected by Democrats and derided by conservatives as amnesty.
Aiming to end the 29-day partial government shutdown, Trump outlined his plan in a White House address in which he sought to revive negotiations with Democrats, who responded that they would not engage in immigration talks until he reopened the government.
Trump proposed offering a reprieve on his attempts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and temporary protected status (TPS) for immigrants from some Latin American and African nations, in exchange for building hundreds of miles of barriers on the southern U.S. border and hiring thousands of new law enforcement agents to be deployed there.
………
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) dismissed the proposal as a “non-starter” and vowed that Democrats would pass legislation in the coming week to reopen the government, putting the onus on the Republican-led Senate to follow suit.
“The president must sign these bills to reopen government immediately and stop holding the American people hostage with this senseless shutdown,” Pelosi said. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) also said he opposed the plan.
It’s pretty clear who is the tougher negotiator.
Pelosi knows the political dynamics of this situation, and she knows to count to 218, and Trump can do neither.
Go down on one knee, and sing the Star Spangled Banner.
F%$# the cowardly owners, and f%$# Trump.
Jeremy Corbyn has been opposed to a a 2nd referendum on Brexit ever since the process started.
There have been a few motivations ascribed to to this with Corbyn’s mild Euroskepticism (true) and the suggestion that that the EU is fundamentally a neoliberal institution that is structured to dismantle the modern social safety net (also true).
Well, now we have what seems to be a more likely explanation, that Jeremy Corbyn understands the political dynamics involved.
There are two very clear data points:
As Labour Party leader, these have to be a part of his considerations.
The marvelously profane Simon Pie on Brexit:
I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!
I thought that the EU’s disastrous article 13 copyright directive was a done deal.
It appears that I was too pessimistic, which is not something that I say too frequently.
It appears that between strong opposition from those who understand how insane that these proposals, and the looters from the content industries, who thought that they were not insane enough, it looks like the EU is backing off this proposal, for a while, at least:
So, this is certainly unexpected. Just hours after we pointed out that even all of the lobbyists who had written/pushed for Article 13 in the EU Copyright Directive were now abandoning their support for it (basically because the EU was considering making it just slightly less awful), it appears that Monday’s negotiations have been called off entirely:
BREAKING: Council has failed to find an agreement on its #copyright position today. This doesn’t mean that #Article11 and #Article13 are dead, but their adoption has just become a lot less likely. Let’s keep up the pressure now! https://t.co/DEYBhuRyGz #SaveYourInternet— Julia Reda (@Senficon) January 18, 2019
………As Reda notes, this does not mean that the Copyright Directive or Article 13 are dead. They could certainly be revived with new negotiations (and that could happen soon). But, it certainly makes the path forward a lot more difficult. Throughout all of this, as we’ve seen in the past, the legacy copyright players plowed forward, accepting no compromise and basically going for broke as fast as they could, in the hopes that no one would stop them. They’ve hit something of a stumbling block here. It won’t stop them from still trying, but for now this is good news. The next step is making sure Article 13 is truly dead and cannot come back. The EU has done a big thing badly in even letting things get this far. Now let’s hope they fix this mess by dumping Articles 11 and 13.
Tens to be disappointed as Windows 10 Mobile death date set: Doomed phone OS won’t see 2020
El Reg does seem to completely own the “snarky computer industry headline” space, doesn’t it?
This time, they are praying on children, and the judge has ruled that the documents proving this must be released:
A trove of hidden documents detailing how Facebook made money off children will be made public, a federal judge ruled late Monday in response to requests from Reveal.
A glimpse into the soon-to-be-released records shows Facebook’s own employees worried they were bamboozling children who racked up hundreds, and sometimes even thousands, of dollars in game charges. And the company failed to provide an effective way for unsuspecting parents to dispute the massive charges, according to internal Facebook records.
The documents are part of a 2012 class-action lawsuit against the social media giant that claimed it inappropriately profited from business transactions with children.
………
The court documents, which have remained hidden for years, came to light after Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting intervened last year to request the records be unsealed. There is increased public interest in Facebook’s business practices in the wake of high-profile scandals, including fake news published on the site and the leaking of user data. On Monday, the court agreed to unseal some of the records.
Facebook has 10 days to make the bulk of the documents – more than a hundred pages – available to the public, according to the order.
Seriously, Mark Zuckerberg is one facial scar from being a f%$#ing Bond Villain.
I like Elizabeth Warren, but I’m gonna go with Bernie Sanders, because he gets it.
Let’s compare the quotes of big Pharma price gouging:
Giant companies may hate my Affordable Drug Manufacturing bill – but I don’t work for them. The American people deserve competitive markets and fair prices. By fixing the broken generic drug market, we can bring the cost of prescriptions down.
If the pharmaceutical industry will not end its greed, which is literally killing Americans, then we will end it for them.
Most Democrats, even liberal ones, are unwilling to place this in moral terms, which leaves you with, “Not as bad as the other guy.”
They are prisoners of a system which is immoral, and they lack the ability to see it.
If you do not feel outrage, you a mindful human being, that’s probably the nicest way I can put it.
whenever i see the name kirsten gillibrand i automatically think of her lehman sisters quote pic.twitter.com/hXF5sl40xD— aída chávez (@aidachavez) January 16, 2019
So much wrong in one one short quote.
This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.
He died yesterday, aged 89:
John C. Bogle, who founded the Vanguard Group of Investment Companies in 1974 and built it into a giant mutual fund company, with $4.9 trillion in assets under management today, died on Wednesday at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 89.
His personal assistant, Michael Nolan, said the cause was esophageal cancer. Mr. Bogle, who had struggled with a congenital heart defect and had several heart attacks, received a heart transplant in 1996.
Mr. Bogle built Vanguard, which is based in Malvern, Pa., on a cornerstone belief that was anathema to most mutual fund companies: that over the long term, most investment managers cannot outperform the broad market averages. He popularized and became the leading proponent of indexing, the practice of structuring an investment portfolio to mirror the performance of a market yardstick, like the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index.
“Indexing was the purview of institutional investors, but Jack Bogle came up with the consumer version,” said Daniel P. Wiener, the editor of The Independent Adviser for Vanguard Investors, a newsletter and website that has tracked the company for decades. “He made people aware of expenses, and told them that costs come right out of the bottom line.”
But Mr. Bogle became a harsh critic of the mutual fund industry in later years. In the second half of the 1990s, he said, stock market investors were spoiled by average annual returns of more than 20 percent per year and, as a result, cared too little about the high expenses they were paying to mutual fund managers for those managers’ presumed expertise at picking stocks. Mutual fund companies, he said, were all but immoral for accepting such fees.
He was right.
No, I am not referring to the “Black Budget” that covers things like our spy satellites, I mean pretty much everything, up to and including the Department of Housing and Urban Development:
………
The only thing that did not make the news was an announcement by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board — FASAB — that essentially legalized secret national security spending. The new guidance, “SFFAS 56 – CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES” permits government agencies to “modify” public financial statements and move expenditures from one line item to another. It also expressly allows federal agencies to refrain from telling taxpayers if and when public financial statements have been altered.
To Michigan State professor Mark Skidmore, who’s been studying discrepancies in defense expenditures for years, the new ruling — and the lack of public response to it — was a shock.
“From this point forward,” he says, “the federal government will keep two sets of books, one modified book for the public and one true book that is hidden.”
Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy was one of the few people across the country to pay attention to the FASAB news release. He was alarmed.
“It diminishes the credibility of all public budget documents,” he says.
I spent weeks trying to find a more harmless explanation for SFFAS 56, or at least one that did not amount to a rule that allows federal officials to fake public financial reports.
………
In plain English, the new guidance allowed federal agencies to “modify” public financial statements, with essentially a two-book system. Public statements would at best be unreliable, while the real books would be audited in “classified environment[s]” by certain designated officials.
When I asked FASAB who would be doing the auditing in “classified environment[s],” they answered:
“Please contact the federal entity’s Office of the Inspector General for questions pertaining to who does the auditing in a classified environment.”
This new rule is not confined to a few spy agencies. It appears to allow a stunningly long list of federal agencies to make use of new authority to “modify” public financial statements.
The Treasury Department’s definition of a “component reporting entity” includes 154 different agencies and bodies, from the Smithsonian Foundation to the CIA to the SEC to the Farm Credit Administration to the Railroad Retirement Board. The notion that any of these agencies could now submit altered public financial reports under the rubric of national security is mind-boggling.
………
One thing is certain: the taxpayer who opens up a federal financial statement expecting to find correct numbers will no longer be sure of what he or she is reading. Bluntly put, line items in public federal financial statements may now legally be, for lack of a better word — wrong.
Moreover, the state is not required to include a disclaimer telling the reader that modifications have been made.
………
Reached by email, Austin Fitts was pessimistic about the meaning of the new rule.
“The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury,” she wrote, “and announced to every private army, mercenary and thug in the world that we are open for business.”
What the rule actually will mean in practice is not clear. But it’s not hard to imagine how it could be employed. A quick look in the historical rearview mirror offers more than a few hints.
The Iran-Contra affair was, at its core, an accounting issue. In it, a group of actors used proceeds of weapons sales to fund unauthorized support of Nicaraguan rebels. Money was moved from one place to another, with the public cut out of the loop.
This is in-f%$#ing-sane.
I am referring, of course to the Sacklers, who aggressively misled the American public about the risks of Oxycontin:
Members of the Sackler family, which owns the company that makes OxyContin, directed years of efforts to mislead doctors and patients about the dangers of the powerful opioid painkiller, a court filing citing previously undisclosed documents contends.
When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted.
“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”
That email and other internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of OxyContin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.
The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable.
This is a criminal enterprise.
Go RICO on their asses and get a forfeiture order, because, as Billy Ray Valentine noted, “You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.”
See also here .
Nancy Pelosi just just told Donald Trump that he can’t get his State of the Union Address while the government is shut down, claiming that the government shutdown raises significant security concerns:
As a federal shutdown lumbered through its fourth week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Wednesday sent a letter to President Trump urging him to postpone his Jan. 29 State of the Union address because of shutdown-related security reasons. Perhaps Trump could deliver his speech in writing that day, Pelosi suggested.
The letter was immediately described as a “power move” against Trump and as Pelosi “playing hardball” by threatening to deprive the president of both a stage and an audience. Meanwhile, the GOP decried it as “unprecedented” partisanship, with some (including Trump’s eldest son) accusing Pelosi of attempted censorship.
In retaliation, Trump canceled a trip by Pelosi and other members of Congress to visit troops overseas.
Nancy Pelosi has clearly one, because Trump just made himself look like a complete pissant:
The fight over the weeks-long government shutdown hit a bizarre new low as President Trump on Thursday canceled a planned trip to Afghanistan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a day after she angered Republicans by suggesting the president delay his State of the Union Address.
Hours before Pelosi and top Democrats were set to depart for a visit to military leaders in Brussels and to troops in Afghanistan, Trump released a letter canceling what he termed a “public relations event.”
“I also feel that, during this period, it would be better if you were in Washington negotiating with me and joining the Strong Border Security movement to end the Shutdown,” he wrote. “We will reschedule this seven-day excursion when the Shutdown is over.”
I am amused.
It turns out that the Orwellian-named Center for American Progress is in the pockets of the United Arab Emerates, and have gone hammer an tong after employees who are concerned about this:
The Center for American Progress fired two staffers suspected of being involved in leaking an email exchange that staffers thought reflected improper influence by the United Arab Emirates within the think tank, according to three sources with knowledge of the shake-up. Both staffers were investigated for leaking the contents of an internal email exchange to The Intercept, but neither of the former employees was The Intercept’s source.
………
A CAP spokesperson acknowledged two employees were fired as a result of the leak investigation, but said that the leak was not the reason they were fired: “We are not going to discuss internal personnel matters, but no one was fired at CAP for leaking or whistleblowing.” Internally, however, multiple members of CAP leadership have used the leak as the leading rationale for the firings in multiple settings, sources said. Gude did not return requests for comment.
At issue was an internal debate over how to frame CAP’s response to the murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered by Saudi Arabian officials inside the nation’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2.
The initial draft of the CAP’s statement condemned the killing and Saudi Arabia’s role in it, calling for specific consequences. Brian Katulis, a Gulf expert at CAP, objected to the specific consequences proposed in an email exchange with other national security staffers, according to sources who described the contents of the thread to The Intercept. At an impasse, the specifics were dropped, replaced merely with a call to “take additional steps to reassess” the U.S.-Saudi relationship, and the statement was released to the public on October 12.
I’m not surprised.
It’s a vipers nest of Clintonite grifters like Neera Tanden, Tom Daschle, John Podesta, and Larry Summers, so it’s no surprise that they are bought and paid for by the Saudi’s Persian Gulf war criminal (Yemen) buddies.