Charlie is in Open Space Arts‘ production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which is opening tonight.
The curtain is at 7:30, so I will be missing the debates.
My liver is relieved.
Month: February 2020
Of Course They Did
Ajit Pai’s FCC has ignored over 21 MILLION people without broadband to justify their give aways to incumbent telcos:
The Federal Communications Commission’s broadband data dramatically underestimates the number of Americans without access to home Internet service, a new study has found. The actual number of people lacking home-broadband access is about twice as high as the FCC estimate, the study found.
The FCC has said that 21.3 million Americans live in areas without access to fixed broadband with 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds. But FCC data is widely known to be flawed, because it counts an entire census block as served even if only one home in the census block can get service. Census blocks have an average of 4,000 residents.
The real number of Americans without access to wired or fixed wireless broadband is 42.8 million, slightly more than double the FCC estimate, according to the study released yesterday. The study was conducted by BroadbandNow, a company that provides an online tool for checking broadband availability.
The free market mousketeers at the FCC are desperate to show that their policy of subsidies without accountability to the likes of Verizon, Comcast/Xfinity, Frontier, CenturyLink, AT&T, and Satan* will create a broadband utopia.
It’s bullsh%$, of course, which is why the US has the poorest performing and the most expensive internet service in the world, but this is an ideological position, not a fact based one.
The Good People of California Need to End Xavier Becerra’s Career
The California state Attorney General has continued to flout the law making law enforcement disciplinary records public.
This is simple: You either follow the law, and work for the public, or you are a corrupt coward who should not be dog catcher:
A California appeals court has just handed Attorney General Xavier Becerra a second defeat in his quest to keep police misconduct records out of the public’s hands.
Becerra first stepped up to defend bad cops from transparency and accountability shortly after a new law went live, giving Californians access to police misconduct and use of force records for the first time ever. Becerra claimed (without legal support) the law was not retroactive, an assertion contradicted by the crafter of the bill.
No courts agreed with this contention, even when it was made by police unions and department public records reps. The law applies to all misconduct records, not just those created after the law’s enactment. Some departments saw this coming and purged older records prior to enactment. Others complied quietly. A few sued to block enforcement of the law.
Xavier Becerra made the dubious legal assertion the state’s Department of Justice didn’t need to turn over records because it wasn’t the original source. He made this assertion despite the DOJ being the agency that routinely investigates misconduct and use of force complaints, which means the DOJ should have plenty of responsive records on hand.
The First Amendment Coalition and public media outlet KQED sued after Becerra refused to turn over records. Becerra asked the appeals court to tell him he was right to refuse to comply with the law. The appeals court says that’s not the way the law works. The state DOJ holds records on police misconduct and the public can directly approach the DOJ for these records, rather than filing requests with numerous different agencies. (via Courthouse News)
Becerra is lawless Attorney General who is likely kowtowing to corrupt cops because he wants to run for Governor one day.
Bad cops are one of the most corrosive actors in society, and ignoring the law is beyond contempt.
Breaking News from the Gulf of Tonkin
My bad, it’s not the Gulf of Tonkin, it’s the Persian Gulf, but given that it looks like we are dealing with yet another false report that could lead to war, the similarities are uncanny.
The rocket attack on the military base that eventually led to the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was probably executed by Daesh, not an Iranian backed militia:
The white Kia pickup turned off the desert road and rumbled onto a dirt track, stopping near a marsh. Soon there was a flash and a ripping sound as the first of the rockets fired from the truck soared toward Iraq’s K-1 military base.
The rockets wounded six people and killed an American contractor, setting off a chain of events that brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war.
The United States blamed an Iraqi militia with close ties to Iran and bombed five of the group’s bases. Angry Iraqis then stormed the American Embassy. The United States then killed Iran’s top general. Iran then fired missiles at American forces and mistakenly shot down a passenger jet, killing 176 people.
But Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started the spiral of events, saying they believe it is unlikely that the militia the United States blamed for the attack, Khataib Hezbollah, carried it out.
………
American officials insist that they have solid evidence that Khataib Hezbollah carried out the attack, though they have not made it public.
Bullsh%$.
If they had evidence, we would have heard it.
They wanted to get their war on, facts be damned.
………
The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.
Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.
The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces.
And the abandoned Kia pickup was found was less than 1,000 feet from the site of an ISIS execution in September of five Shiite buffalo herders.
These facts all point to the Islamic State, Iraqi officials say.
The repercussions for this bit of insanity will be playing out for decades, and they will not be good for us.
This May be the Stupidest Thing Ever
Seriously, posting your personal details on 4chan boards is not smart.
If you want to do a story on 4chan, or 8chan, take the following:
- Don’t piss them off.
Get a burner phone, a dumb one, bought with cash that ties to none of financial information.- Get a burner email account, and read it only at the library.
- Use an assumed name or code name.
- Don’t piss them off.
You might also want to don CBW protective gear.
Finally, and I mean this with sincere respect, and no small amount of fear, do NOT f%$# with the chan.
Posting personal details on chan boards was a bad idea BEFORE everyone on them turned into literal Nazis. It is an even worse idea now.— Sara Luterman (@slooterman) February 6, 2020
Thank-You Mitt Romney
Now there is a phrase that I NEVER though I would say, but given that the distinguished gentleman from Utah is the first Senator ever to vote to convict a president of their own party, and there will likely be significant negative consequences that will likely arise from this act, I feel compelled to give credit where credit is due.
Romney has spioled Trump’s “Perfect Acquittal.” and has probably signed execution order for the perfidious Susan Collins’s political career as well:
After five months of hearings, investigations and revelations about President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, a divided United States Senate acquitted him on Wednesday of charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress to aid his own re-election, bringing an acrimonious impeachment trial to its expected end.
In a pair of votes whose outcome was never in doubt, the Senate fell well short of the two-thirds margin that would have been needed to remove the 45th president. The verdicts came down — after three weeks of debate — almost entirely along party lines, with every Democrat voting “guilty” on both charges and Republicans uniformly voting “not guilty” on the obstruction of Congress charge.
Only one Republican, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, broke with his party to judge Mr. Trump guilty of abuse of power.………
But in a stinging rebuke of the country’s leader aimed at history, Mr. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said that Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine was “the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.” Though he voted against the second article, Mr. Romney became emotional on the Senate floor in the hours before the verdict on Wednesday as he described why he deemed Mr. Trump guilty of abuse of power, calling it a matter of conscience. He was the first senator ever to vote to remove a president of his own party.
“I am sure to hear abuse from the president and his supporters,” Mr. Romney said. “Does anyone seriously believe I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?”
(emphasis mine)
It’s one more vote for conviction I had expected.
R.I.P. Issur Danielovitch Demsky
“All children are natural actors, and I’m still a kid. If you grow up completely, you can never be an actor.”
Kirk Douglas, the son of a rag man and an iconic actor, has died at 103:
Kirk Douglas, one of the last surviving movie stars from Hollywood’s golden age, whose rugged good looks and muscular intensity made him a commanding presence in celebrated films like “Lust for Life,” “Spartacus” and “Paths of Glory,” died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 103.
His son the actor Michael Douglas announced the death in a statement on his Facebook page.
Mr. Douglas had made a long and difficult recovery from the effects of a severe stroke he suffered in 1996. In 2011, cane in hand, he came onstage at the Academy Awards ceremony, good-naturedly flirted with the co-host Anne Hathaway and jokingly stretched out his presentation of the Oscar for best supporting actress.
By then, and even more so as he approached 100 and largely dropped out of sight, he was one of the last flickering stars in a Hollywood firmament that few in Hollywood’s Kodak Theater on that Oscars evening could have known except through viewings of old movies now called classics. A vast number filling the hall had not even been born when he was at his screen-star peak, the 1950s and ’60s.
We will not see his like again.
Adventures in Crap Advertising
Once again, Google™ Adsense™ has completely screwed the pooch on an ad that they are serving to my blog.
This time, they are trying to get me, and my reader(s) to click through to the National Rifle Association.
Seriously, putting an NRA here, particularly one with a picture of that odious little grifter Wayne LaPierre on it, is not a piece of well targeted marketing.
Why the f%$# does Google on the online advertising market.
Seriously, F%## the NRA, f%$# Wayne LaPierre, and f%$# Google.
And that goes for your little dog too.
My standard disclaimer on any post about the aforementioned service applies:
Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.
The Missing Story of the Iowa Clusterf%$#
Dave Dayen makes what should be the leading story of the Iowa vote count clusterf%$#, that this is a manifestation of what he calls the. “Bullsh%$ Economy,” where economic decisions are on the basis of connections, and not competence or value.
This is important.
The failure of the ACRONYM subsidiary SHADOW is not an issue of the inherent problems with software, it is an issue of corruption and self-dealing:
In one sense, the Iowa caucus debacle will last just a couple news cycles. We have the data on paper, tabulated in front of tens of thousands of witnesses, and it merely needs to be collated. Eventually it will, and though the damage to the news cycle is irreparable—Joe Biden’s disappointing outcome has been diluted in particular—the process will go on with an accurate count. Caucuses are horrible and probably a dead letter, but for different reasons than the delayed count; the real problems arise from the electoral college-style distortions between the initial percentages and the final delegates, and the tacit vote suppression from forcing people to attend a two-hour meeting on a weeknight when they might be working.
But the spectacle has highlighted a much more consequential problem in America, something I have coined the bullsh%$ economy. We’ve seen elements of it all over the place. When MoviePass offered unlimited screenings for ten bucks a month, when Uber gets an $82 billion valuation for a low-margin taxi business it has never made a dime on, when WeWork implodes after the slightest scrutiny into its numbers, that’s the bullsh%$ economy at work. We have seen the farcical bullsh%$ of Juicero and the consequential bullsh%$ of Theranos.
………
The story of Shadow, makers of the app that utterly failed to deliver in Iowa, is a perfect example of the bullsh%$ economy. It starts by being a tech solution to a non-existent problem. Iowa counties are compact; the largest one has a landmass of 973 square miles, and it’s close to twice the size of the average county in the state. Even there, no major city is more than a 30-minute drive from the county seat, Algona. Even with that ancient technology of the car, you could have each of the 99 counties report final results within a couple hours of the end of the caucuses.
………
Shadow is a subsidiary of ACRONYM, a non-profit with lots of connections to the Democratic consultancy, including veterans of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager who sits on the ACRONYM board. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked Plouffe on a late-night panel about his participation, and as he swiveled in his chair uncomfortably he disclaimed any knowledge of Shadow or the app.
Similarly, ACRONYM issued a statement positioning themselves as a mere investor in Shadow, without knowledge of their inner workings. But last year, ACRONYM announced they were “launching” Shadow, as part of an effort to help Democrats “win” the Internet and run better campaigns. The head of ACRONYM, Tara McGowan, is married to a Pete Buttigieg strategist.
All this doublespeak is a hallmark of the bullsh%$ economy. Your mind doesn’t have to travel to the nether regions of conspiracy, but you can hardly blame people for doing so. This is reflective of the rolling incompetence covered by confidence within the modern economy, especially when you sprinkle on the labor-saving promise of techtopia. When the bullsh%$ economy fails, it robs people’s belief in the basic bargain of commerce, the idea that you get what you pay for, that companies operate in good faith to provide quality service. But when placed in contact with politics, it just demolishes faith in the system. The bullsh%$ economy spurs distrust.
So there we have it: an unnecessary app that narrows the supply chain of votes to the central tabulator, and when the supply chain fails it creates chaos. We see this all over our economy; useless services, narrow supply chains, magnified fiascos. As long as confidence men lie to the right people, they can gain entry and take on enormous responsibility, until it all falls apart. We live in a country where you can spout New Age consultant speak, charm a large foreign investor, and make off to your guitar-shaped living room with over a billion dollars, paid effectively to go away. That’s WeWork guru Adam Neumann’s story, and increasingly it’s our story.
(%$ mine)
Our economy, and our society, is deeply, and possibly ineluctably, corrupt.
It needs to be fixed, which means that many of these people need to be aggressively prosecuted.
Closing the Barn Door Before the Cow Leaves
Nevada is is dropping the vote tabulation system that failed so ignominiously in Iowa.
All things considered, I’d go after Shadow, Inc. for a refund:
The Nevada Democratic Party said Tuesday that it will not use the app at the center of the technical difficulties causing delayed results in Iowa’s caucuses.
“NV Dems can confidently say that what happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada on February 22nd,” the state party’s chairman, William McCurdy II, said in a statement. “We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus.”The app was developed by Shadow, a software company in Denver. Representatives for the firm didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Whoever at the DNC decided to push these guys on various state parties should be fired ……… Out of a cannon ……… and into the sun.
Instacart Workers Form Union
Good news everyone!
I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!
Instacart workers have voted to unionize.
About f%$#ing time:
A group of Instacart employees in the Chicago suburb Skokie voted to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1546 on Saturday—a historic win for the grocery delivery platform. The vote was 10-to-4 in favor of the union, according to workers.
“The overwhelming majority of the employees made history by becoming the first Instacart employees to win a certified union election in the United States,” UFCW Local 1546 wrote in a press statement.
………
In the days leading up to the election, Instacart enlisted high-level managers to visit the Mariano’s grocery store where the unionizing workers pick and pack groceries for delivery. The managers distributed anti-union literature warning employees that a union would drain paychecks and “exercise a great deal of control” over workers. “I encourage you to look at all of the FACTS and vote “NO” on February 1st,” a senior operations manager for Instacart wrote in one of the memos obtained by Motherboard, dated January 22.
I expect Instacart to attempt to delay, litigate, and eventually try to shut down operations in this location, because treating employees right is simply incompatible with the gig economy.
Iowa Caucuses Tonight
The vote count has not budged from 1.9% reporting for something like 2 hours.
In 2016, they were at over 90% reporting at this time, but since it appears that they employed the geniuses from the Clinton campaign who f%$#ed up their political models completely, the app is not working well, so the state party is holding results back for, “quality control”.
In reality, they aren’t holding back results for, “quality control.”
In the best case they are holding back for, “Employing blithering idiots to handle critical infrastructure,” and in the worst case, they are holding back results for, “Electoral fraud.”
I guess that we will find out in the morning.
Standings with 1.9% reporting, which means that it’s still a crap shoot are:
- Sanders (27.7%)
- Warren (25.1%)
- Buttigieg (23.8%)
- Klobuchar (11.8%)
- Biden (11.1%)
No analysis, because the numbers are to preliminary, and too dodgy, reports are that state party officials are verifying by hand, to make any analysis beyond this xkcd cartoon:
There Are Worse Hypocrites Than Republican Senators
It appears that THIS person is an anti-abortion activist as long as it is not HER ox that is gored:
This is real. This is a real-life post by an anti-abortion activist. You can’t make this shit up. pic.twitter.com/wDjmU2ZHyh— Hayley Farless (@hayleyfarless) February 3, 2020
Note that this woman, who claims to be dedicated to the sanctity of life, is turning her back on her own sister.
Time to Organize a Telethon for Overprivileged Youth
Seriously, the whining over the small bonuses that Wall Street bankers are getting this year is not, and should not be, viewed as a catastrophe.
In fact, in a just world, it should be seen as a good start:
Most Wall Street banks announced their fourth quarter profits beat industry expectations last week. But by the end of this week, bank sources and compensation experts told Reuters, most of their staff will be underwhelmed by their bonuses.
Many dealmakers, traders and even one big bank CEO are getting flat-to-down bonuses and total compensation for their performance in 2019 even though overall profits grew, the sources and experts said.
Morgan Stanley reduced incentive compensation for staff and cut Chief Executive Officer James Gorman’s total compensation by 7% for last year compared to 2018, as the bank worked to reduce expenses, which climbed in the fourth quarter.
………
While some are disappointed by their bonuses, many admit they are still richly rewarded. Morgan Stanley’s CEO Gorman’s total pay for 2019 was $27 million, compared to $29 million in 2018.
Mt heart bleeds for the contemptible greed-head motherf%$#ers.
Missing the Point
A number of publications have reported with much fanfare that Bernie Sanders is leading the field in donations from active duty military personnel by a large margin.
This misses the point, which is that we as a society should not give a flying f%$# in a rolling doughnut about this.
The fact that it is a major story, and cast as a major victory for the Sanders campaign, is a reflection of a hyper militarized, and hence highly dysfunctional, society.
I Could Make an Insincere Offer of Thoughts and Prayers………
But I am not a Republican, and this is not a report of a mass shooting incident.
So I won’t be offering any thoughts and prayers in response to the news that Rush Limbaugh has late stage lung cancer.
Linkage
- Jobs for All: A job guarantee puts workers in the driver’s seat (nonsite.org) If people don’t have the threat of penury and starvation, employers will lose leverage.
- How five members of Joe Biden’s family got rich through his connections (New York Post) This is completely legal, which is the real problem.
- Did a 1912 Newspaper Article Predict Global Warming? (Snopes) Yes.
- Operation Encore and the Saudi Connection: A Secret History of the 9/11 Investigation (ProPublica) The House of Saud is not our friend.
- Hillary Clinton is still trying to sell herself as a feminist icon. Don’t buy it (The Guardian) “The real issue of ‘representation’ isn’t that there aren’t enough powerful women. It’s that what is represented as feminism is actually corporatism.”
- Ultrafast Trading Costs Stock Investors Nearly $5 Billion a Year, Study Says (Wall Street Journal) This is theft by guys in bespoke suits.
- Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Not shocked.
- Dean Baker – Technology, Patents, and Inequality: An Explanation that Even Economists Can Understand (Brave New Europe) Patents are a tax on the rest of us.
A Knifemaker Talks Knives:
The Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight Buys the Plane That Can’t Shoot Straight
I am referring, of course, to the trillion dollar F-25 mistake jet, whose cannon is wildly inaccurate, and puts cracks in the airframe:
Add a gun that can’t shoot straight to the problems that dog Lockheed Martin Corp.’s $428 billion F-35 program, including more than 800 software flaws.
The 25mm gun on Air Force models of the Joint Strike Fighter has “unacceptable” accuracy in hitting ground targets and is mounted in housing that’s cracking, the Pentagon’s test office said in its latest assessment of the costliest U.S. weapons system.
………
The number of software deficiencies totaled 873 as of November, according to the report obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its release as soon as Friday. That’s down from 917 in September 2018, when the jet entered the intense combat testing required before full production, including 15 Category 1 items. What was to be a year of testing has now been extended another year until at least October.
“Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number” and leaving “many significant‘’ ones to address, the assessment said.
This procurement program really is a complete cluster-f%$#.
The Pentagon Spends Too Much on Acronyns
Case in point, a digital autopilot based gunnery enhancer that the USAF has named Digitally Enhanced Aiming Through Control Law (Death Claw).
The concept is simple, using the flight control system to aid gunnery accuracy, but someone spent weeks coming up with this name:
A 40-year-old idea to improve strafing accuracy by transferring flight control of a manned fighter to the autopilot to aim the gun is being revived as the U.S. Air Force looks internally for innovations that can be demonstrated and delivered quickly.
An operational version of the Digitally Enhanced Aiming Through Control Law (Death Claw) system is in development less than two years after the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School conceived and performed an eight-month demonstration.
The concept is sound technically, but the name is beyond silly.
Also, I recall a similar system being tested on an F-15 in the late 1980s.
This is the most PUMA Thing Ever
For those of you who don’t know what the initials mean, there was a PAC formed, People United Means Action (PUMA), to demand that, despite Barack Obama winning the primaries, Hillary Clinton should be the nominee.
The movement, such as it was, was an exercise in upper middle class white women privilege.
It has not changed:
the replies to this tweet are full of white women outraged and disgusted by the ostensible misogyny of Tlaib booing Clinton, none of whom have any comments about the misogyny & racism of calling four women of colour Bernie’s “Concubines”. pic.twitter.com/IR98wf2zic— Alexander (@purplechrain) February 2, 2020
The level of oblivious narcissism is stunning.