Month: February 2020

Pull Their Not-For-Profit Status

No Comments
The greatest danger to the state of Israel in the United States, AIPAC, has been revealed to be offering perks to people who make donations to an anti-Bernie Sanders PAC, which violates a sh%$-load of campaign finance and non-profit regulations.

The degree to which taxpayers are effectively funding fraudulent non-profit activities buggers the mind:

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is helping to fund a Super PAC launching attack ads against Sen. Bernie Sanders in Nevada on Saturday, according to two sources with knowledge of the arrangement. The ads are being run by a group called Democratic Majority for Israel, founded by longtime AIPAC strategist Mark Mellman.

The Nevada attack ads, which will air in media markets in Reno and Las Vegas, follow a similar spending blitz by DMFI ahead of the Iowa caucuses. Like the ads that aired in Iowa, the Nevada ads will attack Sanders on the idea that he’s not electable, Mediaite reported.

DMFI spent $800,000 on the Iowa ads, while the spending on the Nevada ads remains private. AIPAC is helping bankroll the anti-Sanders project by allowing donations to DMFI to count as contributions to AIPAC, the sources said. As is typical with most big-money giving programs, the more a donor gives to AIPAC, the higher tier they can claim — $100,000 level, $1 million level, and so on — and the more benefits accrue to them. A $100,000 donor gets more access to members of Congress at private functions, for instance, than someone who merely pays AIPAC’s conference fee. A $1 million donor gets still more, which means that it is important to donors to have their contributions tallied. There is also status within social networks attached to one’s tier of giving. The arrangement allows donors to give directly to DMFI, which is required to file disclosures naming its donors, without AIPAC’s fingerprints.

Rachel Rosen, a spokesperson for DMFI, said she was unaware of any AIPAC encouragement to donate to the organization. “As far as we know, what you are suggesting is completely untrue,” she said. “But because we are a separate organization, we can’t know exactly what other organizations are doing. Therefore, we are the wrong address for the the specific questions you ask — they need to [be] directed to AIPAC.”

AIPAC denied the arrangement. “AIPAC is not and has not been involved in the ad campaigns of any political action committee,” spokesperson Marshall Wittmann wrote in an email. “The accusation that AIPAC is providing benefits to members for donating to fund these political ads or this political action committee is completely false and has no basis in fact.”

If you believe AIPAC’s denials, I have some prime swamp land in Tel Hazor to sell you.

This is a Feature, not a Bug

No Comments
The Bloomberg campaign is spending so much money so quickly that it is sucking up basically all of the experienced campaign staff, hobbling other campaigns.

This is likely to harm Democratic candidates who are running for offices other than President:

While I am generally supportive of businesses bidding up the salaries of their employees, Bloomberg is strip mining the political operations of Democratic oice seekers from top to bottom, and it is the Republicans who will benefit from this:

………

The former New York City mayor, who has committed to directing his money in support of whoever the eventual Democratic nominee is, claims that his billions of dollars will save the party. Neither Leeper nor her campaign managers responded to requests for comment, but hers is a story that is unfolding in local, state, and federal races across the country. The promise of Bloomberg’s campaign — “Mike Will Get it Done” — is meant to assure anxious Democrats that he and his money will rescue a moribund party. For staffers, working for Bloomberg means guaranteed employment through November, something campaigns that are competing in primaries can’t promise to their employees. The billionaire is now opening an office in New Hampshire, just as other presidential campaigns are packing up and leaving after Tuesday’s primary. For a swath of voters, there’s something comforting about the money he’s willing to spend. But for candidates across the country — the type needed to hold majorities in Congress and in state legislatures, and to boost turnout for the presidential election — the billions in spending means quite the opposite.

Progressive groups, local campaigns, and presidential operations are either losing staff to the Bloomberg campaign, or are struggling to hire people because the former mayor has picked so many political operatives and canvassers up, according to interviews, emails, and messages from dozens of people involved in hiring. Several of them spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, either not to offend the biggest spender in political history, or not to expose publicly that they are having a hard time finding staff, which the public could perceive as suggestive of weakness.

………

The Bloomberg campaign is offering field organizers, or FOs) $6,000 per month and guaranteed pay through November, and many have realized that if they demand more, they will likely get it, according to hiring managers. A typical salary for that position at the state or federal level might be $3,000 to $4,000, and multiple operatives in charge of hiring FOs say they’ve never had a harder time recruiting, and applicants are making extreme demands. Regional organizing directors are being offered $8,000 a month to start, significantly more than typical campaigns.

………

Bloomberg’s network is even trying to recruit the children of big donors. As one donor messaged a friend: “Saw Nancy Pelosi yesterday at a fundraiser. Very inspiring. Lots of folks are starting to agree with [us] about Bloomberg. I know [your daughter] is a progressive but we have to win this time. One of the sons of our group is now on Bloomberg’s staff and he said they’re hiring young people with no experience at $8k a month. Any way we can talk [your daughter] into getting paid for real on the campaign?” (A Sanders supporter, the daughter declined and forwarded the message to The Intercept. It is edited to conceal identifying information, so as to avoid an unpleasant conversation with mom.)

Rob Quan, a political operative in Los Angeles, is currently consulting for a local city council candidate. “This is hands down the toughest time I’ve ever had finding field staff,” he said. He’s posting jobs for canvassers, paying $18 an hour, and is “getting crickets.”

Interestingly enough, I think that this will benefit Sanders, since his campaign apparatus uses unpaid non-professionals than any of his opponents.

Bye Felicia Troy

No Comments

Following the clusterf%$# that used to be known as the Iowa caucuses, Troy Price, the head of the state Democratic Party has resigned:

Troy Price, the beleaguered chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, resigned on Wednesday, a week after overseeing the chaotic Iowa caucuses that embarrassed the state and national party and left Democrats open to accusations of incompetence by President Trump’s re-election campaign.

The Iowa Democratic Party failed to report any results from its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses on Feb. 3 until the next afternoon. When it did report results, they were filled with errors. Even once the Iowa Democratic Party released what it said were full results, errors remained in the tabulations, and the campaigns of the two victors, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Senator Bernie Sanders, have both asked for a partial recanvass of the results.

Mr. Price, 39, has been the public face of the Iowa caucus debacle, as he has struggled to offer reassuring explanations about the integrity of the caucus reporting process and final results.

“While it is my desire to stay in this role and see this process through to completion, I do believe it is time for the Iowa Democratic Party to begin looking forward, and my presence in my current role makes that more difficult,” Mr. Price wrote in a letter to party officials. “Therefore, I will resign as chair of the Iowa Democratic Party effective upon the election of my replacement.” The party said its State Central Committee would elect an interim chair on Saturday.

How could one human being screw this up so badly?

The answer is that it takes a village:

In a conference call with his central committee two days after the caucuses, Mr. Price was pressed by two members over the appearance of cronyism because of his friendships, dating to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, with a senior adviser to Mr. Buttigieg who is married to the founder of the company that developed the caucus app. (The New York Times was provided with a call-in number for the call.)

 “We have seen the pictures of you, Troy, with app developers and people with the Buttigieg campaign, and that’s concerning,” said Holly Brown, a committee member. She told Mr. Price he should not be involved in a planned post-mortem of what went wrong. “We’d like to have you removed from this,” she said.

………

Sean Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Polk County, which includes Des Moines, said the coziness between state party leaders, vendors and candidates did not originate under Mr. Price. “I think it’s been this way for quite some time,” he said. “It’s kind of like the little families that control petroleum countries. You’ve got access to resources that everybody wants, and you kind of become your own little kingdom of consultants and advisers.”

It ain’t just Iowa.

This is Not Surprised Face

No Comments

I’m not:

Popular e-cigarette maker Juul intentionally and egregiously tailored its marketing to appeal to underage youth, according to a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey on February 12. The company’s early marketing in 2015 and 2016 purposefully used young, “cool” models in its launch campaign, recruited teen “influencers” on social media, and bought banner and video advertisements on numerous websites aimed at teens and children, including Cartoon Network’s cartoonnetwork.com and Nickelodeon’s sites Nick.com and NickJr.com. Juul even went so far as to give advice to underage consumers over email on how to get around age restrictions to make online purchases of the company’s e-cigarettes.

The lawsuit lands as public health officials across the nation are still grappling with an explosion in e-cigarette use by youth, which the Food and Drug Administration has referred to as an “epidemic.” Between 2011 and 2019, recent use of e-cigarettes by middle schoolers increased from 0.6 percent to 10.5 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For high schoolers, use increased from 1.5 percent to 27.5 percent in that timeframe. That means that by 2019, more than 1 in every 4 high school students said they had used e-cigarettes within the last 30-days from the time of the survey.

I really hope that there are criminal prosecutions int he future, but I doubt it.

They will just pay some fines, and it will be considered a cost of doing business.

Tweet of the Day

No Comments

This is unbelievably true:

I’ve been thinking about the movie Johnny Mnemonic lately, and how it turns out that that the most unrealistic thing about that movie is corporations giving a damp shit about data security.

— “Observing A Whole Lot of Anti-Chinese Racism” Cat (@No_X_in_Nixon) February 13, 2020

Whenever you hear of a computer hack, know that it is far more likely the result of shortsighted and parsimonious policies from companies than it is a super hacker.

Until there is personal jeopardy for executives who are reckless without data, this will continue.

Well, This Might Justify Tesla’s Stock Price

No Comments

Even if you think that Tesla will be a tremendously successful, the auto business is relatively low margin and highly competitive, and there is no reason for their stock price to to be more than ford and GM combined.

Unless, of course, Tesla can find a way to extract more money from its customers by forcing them to pay over, and over, and over again, because nothing says automobile ownership like, “You don’t own this, you just have a license, until we change out minds.”

Specifically, Tesla is disabling premium features on resold cars, which means that they are going to charge people for features that have already been paid for.

Somehow, I do not think that going the route of Oracle corporation is not going to be a good look for them:

One of the less-considered side effects of car features moving from hardware to software is that important features and abilities of a car can now be removed without any actual contact with a given car. Where once de-contenting involved at least a screwdriver (or, if you were in a hurry, a hammer), now thousands of dollars of options can vanish with the click of a mouse somewhere. And that’s exactly what happened to one Tesla owner, and, it seems many others.

Alec (I’ll withhold his last name for privacy reasons) bought a 2017 Tesla Model S on December 20 of last year, from a third-party dealer who bought the car directly from Tesla via auction on November 15, 2019. The car was sold at auction as a result of a California Lemon Law buyback, as the car suffered from a well-known issue where the center-stack screen developed a noticeable yellow border.

When the dealer bought the car at auction from Tesla on November 15, it was optioned with both Enhanced Autopilot and Tesla’s confusingly-named Full Self Driving Capability; together, these options totaled $8,000. You can see them right on the Monroney sticker for the car:

………

Tesla officially sold the car to the dealership on November 15, a date I’ve confirmed by seeing the car’s title. On November 18, Tesla seems to have conducted an “audit” of the car remotely. The result of that audit was that when the car’s software was updated to the latest version in December, the Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self Driving Capability (FSD) were removed from the car.

This sort of crap is why I am not bullish on Tesla.

They, and by that I mean Elon Musk, simply do not understand the auto market.

Bloomberg Should Just Drop the N-Word and Be Done with It

No Comments
�� New Podcast! “Episode 807 | Bloomberg’s Racist, Classist Past | What Happened To Pete? | Moderates for Bernie” on @Spreaker #biden_ad #bloomberg #notmeus #wallstreetpete https://t.co/FSNJj87h1s

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 10, 2020

Because the NY Times NEVER Links to the folks who break the stories

Michal Bloomberg has now disavowed the stop and frisk policies that he evangelized for when he was Mayor of New York.

I am inclined to believe that his change of heart was not sincere, particularly since we now have him tape saying that most of the crime in a city comes from young black men.

Unbelievably racist, though still better than Pete Buttigieg:

A recording of Michael R. Bloomberg in 2015 offering an unflinching defense of stop-and-frisk policing circulated widely on social media Tuesday, signaling that the former New York City mayor is about to face more intensive scrutiny as he rises in the polls as a Democratic presidential candidate.

While Mr. Bloomberg apologized for his administration’s law-enforcement tactics in November just before he entered the race, he had previously spent years insisting that the policy was justified and effective, showing no indication that he had developed serious misgivings about stop and frisk. The policing tactic was used disproportionately against black and Latino people across New York City for years.

He offered a particularly blunt defense at the Aspen Institute in 2015: The Aspen Times reported then that Mr. Bloomberg said that crimes were committed overwhelmingly by young, male minorities, and that it made sense to deploy police in minority neighborhoods to “throw them up against the wall and frisk them” as a deterrent against carrying firearms.

An audio clip of those comments was posted on Twitter Monday by Benjamin Dixon, a progressive podcaster, who highlighted it with the hashtag #BloombergIsARacist.

“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Mr. Bloomberg said in the recording. “You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city.”

If the Democratic Party Presidential nominee is a racist, it will depress the minority vote at all levels.

Any political official who thinks that the Democrats can win the Presidency and pick up seats when the top of the ticket is a racist needs to change his career to the food service industry.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

No Comments
A teen had an excused absence from high school to go to his orthodontist, but the school cop didn’t believe him, so he threatened to shoot the child.

The Teen was suspended, and then expelled, but the cop is still on the job:

As William Miller tried to drive out of the high school parking lot, two adults stopped him, blocking the exit lane with a golf cart.

A school resource officer employed by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office and a school discipline assistant told him he couldn’t leave the campus in New Port Richey, Fla., on the morning of Dec. 17 or he’d be classified as truant and suspended. William, 17, had just dropped off a friend at River Ridge High School before heading to a morning orthodontist appointment. The boy told the adults he had an excused absence and would return later in the day with a note. After arguing for several minutes, he tried to pull his gray Ford F-150 around the golf cart to leave.

“You’re going to get shot, you come another f—— foot closer to me,” the deputy said. “You run into me, you’ll get f—— shot.”

The tense interaction played out on a body camera video that William’s mother, Nedra Miller, shared on Facebook last month. Miller told the Tampa Bay Times on Friday that she had called the school to excuse her son’s absence in advance and that he didn’t want to interrupt her at work.

The school suspended William from Dec. 17 to Jan. 9, his mother said. Then, River Ridge High School expelled him permanently.

Despite the dire consequences for William, the two adults involved in the interaction have faced few repercussions. A school district spokesman told The Washington Post in a statement that it is not investigating the incident. The sheriff’s office opened an internal review to determine whether the deputy, who has not been named, violated any policies. However, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office told the Post the deputy has not been suspended and continues to work at the high school.

And cops wonder why so many people call them pigs.

Bye Felecia Andrew

No Comments

Cue Queen

Andrew Yang has suspended his presidential campaign:

Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur with no previous political experience who evangelized a universal basic income and warned of the perils of automation, ended his longer-than-long-shot bid for president on Tuesday night after a yearslong campaign that endured even as those of members of Congress and governors dropped out.

Speaking to supporters inside a ballroom as New Hampshire’s primary results were coming in, Mr. Yang said “endings are hard” and that he had intended to stay in the race until the end.

“I am the math guy, and it’s clear from the numbers we’re not going to win this campaign,” he said. “So tonight I’m announcing that I am suspending my campaign.”

His campaign never cought fire, and I thought that has attempts at breaking through were clownish in a game-show sort of way, but he did have his fans, and unlike some **cough** Bloomberg and Buttigieg **cough** he did not appear to be particularly evil.

New Hampshire

No Comments

We have the results now, with Bernie Sanders finishing first, with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar close behind.

They all should qualify for deleg for some delegates.

Neither Elizabeth Warren (4th) and Biden (5th) qualified for any delegates.

I think that both Warren and Biden are done.

Warren had much the same sort of advantages that Sanders did in New Hampshire, and finished very poorly, and Biden’s excitability argument has been left with more holes than Donald Trump’s cerebral cortex.

This leaves Bernie and 3 potential challengers, Klobuchar Buttigieg, and Bloomberg, who has not participated in the early primaries, because he is trying to buy the nomination.

I’m not sure if Klobuchar will have staying power, she was boosted by the New York Times half endorsement and the full endorsement of the Manchester Union-Leader, but the contests are moving to states that are less lily white, and both Buttigieg and Bloomberg have pretty egregious records of hostility to minorities.

South Carolina should be interesting.

Schadenfreude Much?

No Comments
The food delivery firm DoorDash requires its employees to sign an arbitration agreement, which among other things, prevents class action suits, largely so that it can pretend that they are independent contractors.

A lawyer has taken about 5,000 of of these employees as clients, and filed about 5,000 arbitration claims, which will cost DoorDash about $12,000,000 in arbitration costs.

So, DoorDash attempted to get a judge to move this to a class action suit to save money, and Federal Judge William Alsup called bullsh%$ on this:

Rejecting claims that the legal process it forced on workers is unfair, a federal judge Monday ordered food-delivery service DoorDash to pay $9.5 million in arbitration fees for 5,010 delivery drivers’ labor demands against the company.

“You’re going to pay that money,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup said in court. “You don’t want to pay millions of dollars, but that’s what you bargained to do and you’re going to do it.”

Barred from filing labor suits in court under the terms of a required arbitration contract, 6,250 DoorDash drivers brought their claims to an arbitrator. Last fall, the American Arbitration Association found each worker met the minimum requirements for filing a claim and ordered DoorDash to pay $12 million in fees. The workers paid $1.2 million in filing fees, or $300 per case.

DoorDash refused to pay its share of fees, arguing the workers failed to specify how much money they were seeking or prove they had a valid arbitration deal with the company.

In response, the delivery drivers filed two motions to compel arbitration, which landed in Alsup’s court. DoorDash told Alsup the company shouldn’t have to pay those fees because the petitioners’ law firm, Chicago-based Keller Lenkner, failed to properly vet its clients’ claims or prove it had an attorney-client relationship with each worker.

………

Despite those problems, Alsup said he would not deny relief to the majority of petitioners on that basis.

“Out of those 6,000 there probably are a few people where you pulled the wool over my eyes, but I think the vast majority of these are legit,” the judge said. “I’m not going to hold up that relief just because there are going to be a few glitches.”

………

In total, Keller Lenkner sought to compel arbitration for 5,879 workers. Alsup said he would grant the motion for 5,010 workers who submitted valid declarations affirming that they worked for DoorDash and signed a valid arbitration contract with the company. At $1,900 per case, DoorDash must pay $9.5 million.

In May 2019, the company was valued at $12.6 billion.

Attorney Warren Postman, of Keller Lenkner, described Alsup’s decision as a major victory for gig economy workers misclassified as independent contractors and fighting for minimum wage.

“They’ve been shut out of every forum for months, and in some cases years,” Postman said. “I’m glad our clients will have their day to have their claims heard.”

Late last year, Alsup allowed the petitioners to investigate claims that DoorDash worked with a new arbitrator to concoct rules that would benefit DoorDash while disadvantaging workers.

DoorDash introduced new arbitration terms on Nov. 9, which workers must agree to before they can log onto the DoorDash app to work and get paid. The new terms require workers arbitrate disputes through the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR). Under the CPR rules, only 10 arbitration cases can proceed at once when more than 30 cases are filed. The rules also mandate 90-day mediation sessions and other conditions, which the petitioners say could delay their cases for years.

DoorDash and CPR both maintain the new rules were created in response to mass arbitration demands, but they say multiple stakeholders were involved in the development of a “fair and neutral process” that expedites a small number of “test” or bellwether cases followed by a mediation process that encourages resolution of all claims.

On Monday, Alsup said he would deny motions to seal communications between DoorDash’s law firm, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, and CPR, adding he will give DoorDash 14 days to appeal his decision.

“There’s a public interest in the world at large knowing that someone like CPR that holds itself out to be an impartial agency is actually being guided by the employer side,” Alsup said.

So, it is highly likely that the plaintiffs will get access to communications between DoorDash and the arbitration firm, and this will almost certainly reveal that the arbitration firm is working for DoorDash, and not a neutral actor, which would open up both to damages under things like RICO which mandate large punitive damages.

Hopefully, this tactic will spread to the other “Gig Economy” fraudsters.

No.

No Comments

Of course they can’t.

They were the ones who spent tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks instead of investing in new aircraft as a part of a systematic plan to allow upper management to loot the company through stock options:

In December, when Boeing’s board of directors fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg, some corporate governance experts and investment analysts wondered what took so long.

………

Investigations, lawsuits and news stories revealing festering internal problems had piled up. Muilenburg faced public grillings and calls for his resignation during Congressional hearings. Revenues and stock values plummeted. Worst of all, Boeing’s once sterling reputation for quality and safety was badly tarnished.

The prolonged hesitance to fire Muilenberg in the face of spiraling crises underscores concerns about the board’s oversight of the company, even as it faced the most troubling period of its 103-year history. It also raises questions about the board’s culpability in the tragedies and its ability to reestablish confidence in the company among regulators, Wall Street and the flying public.

“Nine months is a long time — it’s a forever in business for a crisis like this,” said Charles Elson, a professor of finance and head of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “So, the question is, where was the board during that time? If they only came around ‘late in the game,’ well why is that?”

Because the board of directors are largely a creature of corrupt upper management whose goal is get their vigorish before the whole house of cards collapses.

Cue Alanis Morissette

No Comments

Or maybe not, because unlike her song, the news that hackers took over Facebook’s Twitter account is actually ironic:

An otherwise slow Friday afternoon has been spiced up by a hacker crew that managed to temporarily take control of Facebook’s official Twitter account. OurMine did not say how it got into the Social Network’s Twitter account, but it did take the opportunity to blast Zuck and Co.’s security practices:

This is certainly one way to ruin a Friday afternoon for someone in Menlo Park

Facebook's Twitter feed was hijacked. pic.twitter.com/Ioh58NibIZ

— The Register (@TheRegister) February 7, 2020

It should be noted that these are the people who have collected massive amounts of data on you in the hope of selling your soul to advertisers.

OK, He’s Completely Lost It

No Comments

When pressed by a woman at a campaign about his poor showing in Iowa, Biden called her a, “Lying dog-faced pony soldier.”

It appears to have been meant as a joke from a John Wayne movie (it’s probably from a Tyrone Power movie*), this sort of behavior is insane:

Madison Moore warned Joe Biden that the question she was about to ask was going to be a bit mean.

 Then the 21-year-old student at Mercer University in Georgia launched into a version of what’s been asked of the former vice president since his disappointing fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses:

 “How do you explain the performance in Iowa, and why should voters believe that you can win the national election?”

 What happened next left her a little shaken, Moore said.

 Biden said it was legitimate question, but then turned the spotlight back on her, asking: “Iowa’s a caucus. Have you ever been to a caucus?”

 When she indicated yes, he rebuked her “No, you haven’t. You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”

 The phrase was an allusion to a line in a John Wayne movie that Biden had used before. But Moore said she was flummoxed at his reaction to what she thought was a legitimate question.

Yes, this would tend to flummox one.

Biden has always been an odd duck, but I think that he’s crossed the line into bat-sh%$ insane.

*Specifically the 1952 film Pony Soldier, where Tyrone Power plays a Mountie.

Mixed Emotions

1 Comment
These Are All Hideous Dehumanizing Crap


Boston City Hall


Royal Ontario Museum


Vitra Design Museum


J.Edgar Hoover Building

Donald Trump has issued new architectural guidelines for government buildings, specifically calling for new buildings to be designed in a “Classical” style.

I have mixed emotions about this.

The first, and most obvious area of concern is that this should not be a decision made by the President.   Standards on buildings and the like should be driven at the staff level by technical issues.

Additionally this decision has clear echoes to Adolph Hitler’s (and Albert Speer’s) edicts on buildings during Germany’s Nazi era.

On the other side, every single, “Innovative,” public building that I have seen has been complete sh%$ from an aesthetic perspective, and the functionality has frequently been complete pants as well.

Ever since improvements in architectural materials have removed many constraints from buildings, high end architecture has increasingly been an exercise in mental masturbation:

In 1962, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary at the Labor Department, prepared a memo on the use of federal office space for President John F. Kennedy. Into this document he tucked a succinct yet deeply considered set of recommendations for the design of U.S. government buildings. These “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” were adopted as official policy shortly thereafter and are seen as axiomatic by American architects and planners.

Moynihan wrote that federal buildings must testify to “the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American government.” But he was silent about which styles would best express those qualities—deliberately so. “An official style must be avoided,” he cautioned. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government and not vice versa.”

That flow may soon be reversed. As first reported by Architectural Record and confirmed by The New York Times, the Trump administration is considering an executive order that will direct that U.S. government buildings with budgets greater than $50 million be designed in classical and other traditional styles. A draft document retains Moynihan’s ringing phrase about “dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability,” but stipulates that “the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style.” All federal courthouses and federal buildings in and around Washington, D.C., would have to follow the work of Greek and Roman architects and their emulators in subsequent centuries. The late-20th-century Brutalist and Deconstructivist styles, meanwhile, would essentially be banned from the federal projects covered by the order. The restriction would apply to renovation and expansion projects as well as new buildings.

Brutalism’s monumental concrete forms and the fractured geometries of Deconstructivism have attracted many other detractors, of course. But for the federal government to categorically discourage any architectural style is startling—and an utter misunderstanding of how architecture works.

The American Institute of Architects issued a statement saying it “strongly opposes” the move. Most architects today support using a range of styles for new buildings, as Moynihan did. But the AIA doesn’t speak for the cadre of die-hard classicists with whom the document originated. The National Civic Art Society (NCAS), a small Washington nonprofit, prioritizes the classical tradition in design and argues that contemporary architecture “has created a built environment that is degraded and dehumanizing.”

Contemporary architecture is crap, and even when it works functionally, it is corrosive to the very soul.

Gonna Leave a Mark

No Comments

When the Columbia Journalism Review writes an article about your paper, it can frequently be uncomfortable.

When the CJR title is, The Post’s Masthead Will Have to Accept That It Is Not God, you know it is going to be an unpleasant read for the WaPo editorial staff.

The problem here is not one of technology. It is one of politics. The attempt of prestige newspapers like the Post to cast themselves as perfect sentinels of objectivity standing outside the tawdry world of political judgment is, as honest journalists have long realized, absurd. And impossible. The Post’s current social media policy forbids posting anything “that could objectively be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism.” 

Consider the assumptions inherent in such a standard. It posits, first, the existence of someone capable of telling hundreds of journalists with hundreds of different sets of life experiences covering a complex nation of 330 million citizens what “objectively” is political or racial bias. (Maybe God is up to that job, but Marty Baron is not.) We see in practice that what is ruled to violate this standard is a reporter noting a history of sexual assault in a recently deceased celebrity, or a reporter saying that the Tea Party was motivated by racism. Are these observations “objectively” evidence of some sort of “bias?” No. They are, instead, evidence that it is a fool’s errand for the management of the Post to act as though they alone have insight into objective truth.

Oh, snap!