Thanks to @beeragon for putting together this amazing short titled “Coming Out.” #HappyPride 🌈 pic.twitter.com/wG9OptRSZm— GODZILLA.OFFICIAL (@TOHO_GODZILLA) June 30, 2020
Godzilla, Jr. coming out as trans in this fan film is beautiful.
Even more beautiful is that Toho Studios retweeted this in support.
It’s more than twice the record from before the Covid-19 shutdown started, 16 weeks of initial claims over a million.
Until we are well below a million initial claims, it’s folly to claim that their is a recovery going on:
Initial unemployment claims fell by a seasonally adjusted 99,000 to 1.3 million for the week ended July 4, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That extends a trend of gradual declines from a peak of 6.9 million in mid-March, when the coronavirus pandemic and mandated business closures shut down swaths of the U.S. economy. Still, last week’s level was well above the highest week on record before this year, which was 695,000 in 1982.
The number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits fell by nearly 700,000 to 18.1 million for the week ended June 27, the lowest reading since the week ended April 18. Those so-called continuing claims are reported with a week lag. The modest easing of the number of unemployment rolls suggests new layoffs are being offset by hiring and recalling of workers.
Employers added a combined 7.5 million jobs in May and June after shedding 21 million jobs in March and April, separate Labor Department data showed.
Claims fell in most states last week, including California and Florida, on a non-seasonally-adjusted basis, the Labor Department said. Claims did rise by 20,000 in Texas, 18,700 in New Jersey and by nearly 10,000 in Louisiana.
FWIW, the claims drop for Florida is highly suspect, as their unemployment system was intentionally broken by Governor Rick “Bat Boy” Scott.
Even now, the Florida unemployment trust fund is earning millions in interest in delayed claims. (Also: Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.)
Given the corona virus explosion and the re-shutdown in Florida, it is simply inconceivable that that their claims fell.
In the first, the Supreme Court ruled that teachers at religious schools are “Ministers” and as such can never sue their employer for discrimination:
In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that a doctrine known as the “ministerial exception,” which bars ministers from suing churches and other religious institutions for employment discrimination, prohibited a lawsuit filed by a teacher at a Lutheran school who was also an ordained minister. Today, by a vote of 7-2, the court held in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru that the exception also forecloses lawsuits by two teachers at Catholic elementary schools in southern California. Although the teachers were not ordained ministers, the schools had argued that the exception nonetheless applied because they played a key role in teaching religion to their students, and the court – in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito – agreed.Today’s decision came in a pair of cases, both filed by fifth-grade teachers against parish schools in the Los Angeles area. Agnes Morrissey-Berru taught at Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Hermosa Beach for nearly two decades before she was told that her contract would not be renewed. Morrissey-Berru went to federal court, where she claimed that she had been the victim of age discrimination. The district court threw out the lawsuit, agreeing with the school that the ministerial exception applied.
The second plaintiff, Kristen Biel, sued St. James School in Torrance when – not long after she disclosed that she was being treated for breast cancer – the school failed to renew her contract. Biel claimed that the school had discriminated against her because she had cancer, but the district court agreed with the school that Biel’s lawsuit was barred by the ministerial exception.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reinstated both teachers’ lawsuits. It reasoned that the ministerial exception normally applies when an employee plays a “religious leadership” role, but that Biel and Morrissey-Berru played a more limited role, mostly “teaching religion from a book.” The schools went to the Supreme Court, which today reversed.
This is a horrible ruling, and when juxtaposed with the court’s recent ruling in in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue,it means that taxpayers are going to be forced to pay for discrimination.
I agree with Sotamayor’s dissent that this is a, “Simplistic approach has no basis in law and strips thousands of schoolteachers of their legal protection.”
I expect to see a return to the segregation academies of the bad old days, and I am inclined to believe that for at least some of the justices, this was an unstated goal.
The other opinion is that the Trump administration’s moves to make it possible for pretty much any employer to claim a religious exemption and not provide birth control coverage:
The Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate requires most employers to provide their female employees with health insurance that includes access to certain forms of contraceptives. In 2017, the Trump administration issued new rules that expanded an exemption from the mandate to allow private employers with religious or moral objections to opt out of providing coverage without any notice. Today, by a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania rejected a challenge from two states that had argued that the new rules violate both the ACA itself and the federal laws governing administrative agencies. The ruling was an important victory for the Trump administration, but the battle over the exemptions and the mandate is likely not over yet.
Margaret Atwood weeps.
And it’s only 2020:
uhhhmmmmmm. https://t.co/e1tn5yLEQG
— Monica Lewinsky (@MonicaLewinsky) July 8, 2020
It’s nice that Monica Lewinski has a sense of humor about what was probably a horrible time in her life.
The report is in, and the 89 page report can be boiled down to 2 words ,”YOU SUCK.
This is not a surprise. First, Facebook has always had an extremely self-serving attitude towards its most abusive users and posts, which is that if it generates engagement, they don’t care:
Auditors handpicked by Facebook to examine its policies said that the company had not done enough to protect people on the platform from discriminatory posts and ads and that its decisions to leave up President Trump’s inflammatory posts were “significant setbacks for civil rights.”
The 89-page audit put Facebook in an awkward position as the presidential campaign heats up. The report gave fuel to the company’s detractors, who said the site had allowed hate speech and misinformation to flourish. The audit also placed the social network in the spotlight for an issue it had worked hard to avoid since the 2016 election: That it may once again be negatively influencing American voters.
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“Many in the civil rights community have become disheartened, frustrated and angry after years of engagement where they implored the company to do more to advance equality and fight discrimination, while also safeguarding free expression,” wrote the auditors, Laura W. Murphy and Megan Cacace, who are civil rights experts and lawyers.
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But the report was especially devastating for Facebook, because its executives had pointed to it as a sign that the company was seriously grappling with the content of its site.
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The auditors pointed to extremist and white nationalist content, as well as to hate organizations, saying Facebook needed to do more to identify and remove them from its site. The company’s algorithms also continued to push people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers, they said, potentially deepening polarization.
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On Tuesday, civil rights leaders met with Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg with 10 demands, including appointing a civil rights executive. But attendees said the Facebook executives did not agree to many of their requests and instead spouted “spin.” Mr. Zuckerberg said that while the company would make some changes to its processes, it would not do so because of external pressure or threat of financial loss, said one person who attended the meeting.
There have been promises of improved behavior, but there are ALWAYS promises of improved behavior, and they go back to doing the same sh%$ over and over again.
Dutch broadcaster NPO turned off trackers on its online videos, and their revenue went up.
Obviously, more data is necessary, but it does appear that the core business model of both Google and Facebook, that engaging in systematic and extensive stalking of people across the internet makes advertising more effective, may not be true:
Johnny Ryan, chief policy officer at privacy-focused browser biz Brave, has reported on how ad revenue increased when Dutch national broadcaster NPO stopped running third-party trackers on its online video website.
From a marketing perspective, targeted advertising is supposedly a dream realised: why waste money showing ads to people who are not likely to become customers? The success of Facebook is based on the ability of advertisers to define an audience by location, age, sex, personal interests and more.
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Another idea is tracking the customer journey, from first seeing an ad to the final purchase. Great for marketing, but there are concerns about ad targeting based both on privacy and controversial matters like disinformation and manipulative political campaigns.
Ryan’s report questions the core assumption that targeted adverting is more effective. “In January 2020, when NPO switched from tracking-based targeting to contextual targeting, revenue increased 61 per cent more than January 2019. In February, revenue increased 76 per cent over the previous year,” he wrote.
Contextual targeting is the old-school approach of showing ads related to the content around them, such as displaying holiday advertising alongside travel features. Search engine DuckDuckGo relies on this, saying: “When you search on DuckDuckGo, we can show you an ad based on the keywords you type in. That’s it.”
The research is based on a report by STER (Stichting Ether Reclame), the company that manages advertising for NPO, which was presented at the Computer Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) 2020 conference held in Brussels in January. The big question: how is it that contextual advertising can bring in more revenue for the publisher?
The answer may be more to do with the nature of the adtech industry than the effectiveness of the ads themselves. STER says that non-personalised ads are “just as effective”, measured by number of clicks an ad attracts, though the click-through is not a complete analysis of effectiveness.
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How much is this cut? Ryan refers to a 2016 report in which The Guardian said that “a lot of the money that [advertisers] think they are giving to premium publishers is not actually getting to us.”
In the worst case, only 30 per cent of the money paid by the advertiser reaches the publisher, according to the report. This means contextual advertising is potentially much more profitable for publishers, even if the ads themselves are somewhat less effective. According to Ryan, RTB “is a cancer eating the heart of legitimate media, and a business model for the bottom of the web.” The suggestion, therefore, is not so much that targeted advertising never works, but rather that a greedy adtech industry, along with the impact of privacy concerns, is giving publishers an incentive to return to plain old contextual advertising.
This is potentially a very big deal if we can find more examples of this, because it strikes at the core of Facebook and Google’s business model.
On a broader level, the collection and analysis of data when there is no benefit to the final results is endemic in society.
It’s why we see the testing mania in public schools, and the explosion of administrative positions in secondary education, where there are armies of people being recruited to perform what are essentially Bullsh%$ Jobs.
— Mike Abernethy (@FLTDOC1) July 5, 2020
This convinces me that cats should have a much more prominent role in law enforcement.
If I were a good person, I would wish him a prompt recovery, but I am not a good person, so I’m hoping for a poor outcome, because a poor outcome would be good for the people of Brazil, the Amazon, the indigenous people of Brazil, and the world.
It would also be profoundly ironic:
President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who has railed against social distancing measures and repeatedly downplayed the threat of the coronavirus as the epidemic in his country became the second-worst in the world, said Tuesday that he, too, had been infected.
Critics at home and abroad have called Mr. Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic cavalier and reckless, allowing the virus to surge across Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation. At one point he dismissed it as “a measly cold,” and when asked in late April about the rising death toll, he replied: “So what? Sorry, but what do you want me to do?”
As the caseload has skyrocketed, Mr. Bolsonaro has shunned masks, attended mass rallies of his supporters, insisted that the virus poses no threat to healthy people, championed unproven remedies and shuffled through health ministers who disagreed with him.
Brazil now has more than 1.6 million confirmed cases and more than 65,000 deaths — more than any country except the United States.
Mr. Bolsonaro fell ill two days after he and a handful of his ministers attended a Fourth of July luncheon at the residence of Todd Chapman, the American ambassador in Brazil. Mr. Bolsonaro and other attendees sat shoulder-to-shoulder, embracing with no masks. The ambassador and his wife have since tested negative for the virus, but will remain at home, in quarantine, the embassy said.
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Mr. Bolsonaro did not express contrition for his handling of the pandemic, and doubled down on his assertion that the virus poses little risk to healthy people. He characterized the diagnosis as a predictable outcome of a leadership style that requires him to be among the people.
Well, here is another sign of the apocalypse, I am favorably impressed with a realtor. (It’s a family thing, realtors, and real estate developers, have always been the enemy)
This realtor is just a trifle upset that she is showing houses to people who refuse to wear masks or socially distance, and she lets loose with a real “Palmer Moment.” (You Gotta Be F%$#Ing Kidding………)
I’m thinking that we need to strap the never-maskers into a chair, use clips to hold their eyes, hook up the electrodes, and make them watch this over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.
Finally an aggressive, and somewhat profane, case for masks, gloves, and social distancing that doesn’t resort to fear mongering or moralizing.
I don’t know who this woman is, but if she ever runs for office, I am making a donation.
Also, she is wearing her f%$#ing seat-belt.
Always wear your f%$#ing seat-belt.
Why did it take so long for New York “Karen” Amy Cooper to be charged with filing a false report for her 911 call, where she clearly attempted to use the police as a deadly weapon against a Black bird watcher who told her that she needed to leash her dog.
Wypipo, huh?
If a black person had done something even vaguely similar they would been in standing before a judge the next day.
For F%$#’s sake, she was caught on video!
When Amy Cooper, a white woman, called 911 from an isolated patch in Central Park where she was standing with her unleashed dog on Memorial Day, she said an “African-American man” was threatening her life, emphasizing his race to the operator.
Moments before Ms. Cooper made the call, the man, Christian Cooper, an avid bird-watcher, had asked her to leash her dog, and she had refused.
On Monday, Ms. Cooper was charged with filing a false report, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, the latest fallout from an encounter that resonated across the country and provoked intense discussions about how Black people are harmed when sham reports to the police are made about them by white people.
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The pending criminal charge against Ms. Cooper appears to be among the first that a white person in the United States has faced for wrongfully calling the police to make a complaint about a Black person.
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Mr. Cooper, who has expressed deep ambivalence about the severity of the public response to Ms. Cooper’s actions, said on Monday that he “had zero involvement” in the district attorney’s case against her.
Asked to comment on the pending charge, he said, “I have no reaction.”
………
The confrontation between Ms. Cooper and Mr. Cooper, who are not related, occurred when she encountered him in the Ramble, a semi-wild area where dogs must be leashed and hers was not.
Mr. Cooper said he asked Ms. Cooper to leash her dog. When she refused, he said, he tried to lure the dog with treats in hopes of compelling her to restrain her pet.
The encounter turned ugly when Ms. Cooper told Mr. Cooper that she was calling the police and that she planned to tell them an African-American man was threatening her life.
They had her on tape admitting that she was calling in a false report.
Why was she not charged 4 weeks ago?
Case in point, Moscow Mitch wants to take away the rights of ordinary people to benefit big business in the next stimulus package:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) outlined new details Monday of what he wants to see in the next and potentially final coronavirus relief package, including a five-year liability shield for businesses and a possible new round of stimulus checks aimed at workers making $40,000 a year and less.
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“I can’t comfortably predict we’re going to come together and pass it unanimously like we did a few months ago — the atmosphere is becoming a bit more political than it was in March,” McConnell said. “But I think we will do something again. I think the country needs one last boost.”
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McConnell has consistently said the next bill will include liability protections for businesses, health-care providers, universities and schools. He offered a time period for these protections on Monday, saying he envisioned a “narrowly crafted liability protection” for activities related to the novel coronavirus that would kick in December 2019 and last through 2024.
“Unless you’re grossly negligent or intentionally engaged in harmful behavior, you shouldn’t have to be penalized by getting sued on top of everything else, so that’ll be in there, I guarantee it,” McConnell said.
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The new markers McConnell laid down will make the next round of negotiations even tougher than the last ones, especially as the election nears and partisan tensions rise. In addition to his comments on liability protections, McConnell has privately stressed to top administration officials that the price tag on the next bill should not exceed $1 trillion.
So basically, McConnell’s pet lobbyists want to take away the right to sue, and McConnell is doing back-flips for them.
This man is a cancer on the Body politic.
I did not see this coming.
The regulatory rollbacks of the Trump administration are subsidies, and it’s good that the courts are pushing back:
A number of recent legal defeats and business decisions have stymied three multibillion-dollar pipeline projects around the country, setting back President Trump’s 3½-year effort to expand oil and gas development in the United States.
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In a surprise decision Monday, a federal judge ruled that the Dakota Access pipeline — which Trump approved within a month of taking office — must be shut down by Aug. 5, saying federal officials failed to carry out a complete analysis of its environmental impacts. The day before, two energy companies behind the controversial, 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline abandoned their six-year bid to build it, saying the $8 billion project has become too expensive and faces an uncertain regulatory environment. And an April decision by a federal judge in Montana dealt a blow to the Keystone XL pipeline and raised questions about whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will have to conduct more extensive environmental reviews for other projects.
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American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers said in a statement Monday that his trade group was “deeply troubled by these setbacks for U.S. energy leadership.”
Their tears are sauce for my lamb chops.
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In several instances, long-standing statutes such as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess and disclose how their decisions might harm the environment, have tripped up the administration. In his ruling regarding the Dakota Access pipeline, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg wrote that the federal government had not met all the requirements of the 50-year-old-law, which the administration is seeking to rewrite.
………
Several tribes, including the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux, first challenged the pipeline in 2016. While the Obama administration slowed the pipeline’s development as it consulted with the tribes, Trump expedited its construction immediately after taking office.
“Today is a historic day for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many people who have supported us in the fight against the pipeline,” said the tribe’s chairman, Mike Faith, in a statement. “This pipeline should have never been built here. We told them that from the beginning.”
I am happy.
The Ayn Rand Foundation took about $½ million dollars in federal bailout money.
A lot of people criticize this but complaining about government spending while directly benefiting from it is the only true way to honor Ayn Rand’s legacy. https://t.co/TlUxiPAUX2— sean (@SeanMcElwee) July 6, 2020
When one considers that Ayn Rand collected Social Security and Medicare at the end of her life, this is entirely consistent.
As a Mississippi senator, John C. Stennis signed the infamous “Southern Manifesto” decrying integration. He fought black equality in the Navy and, as a prosecutor, sought execution for three black men who’d been tortured into confessing.
For several decades, his name has graced an aircraft carrier currently based in Norfolk — the only senator to have that honor.
Now, amid a national reckoning over America’s racist roots, some are pushing for that to change.
“Today’s sailors, Marines, and officers should not have to make the psychologically damaging choice of speaking up or serving in silence in a vessel named for an ardent segregationist and white supremacist, who condoned beating the skin off black people until they either confessed or died,” retired Lt. Cmdr. Reuben Keith Green wrote in a recent piece for the U.S. Naval Institute. “It is incompatible with American values and the recent directives from the Navy to expect for them to have to do so.”
This is why the military should be prohibited from naming anything after anyone until they have been dead for at least a decade.
Is the Staggeringly Profitable Business of Scientific Publishing Bad for Science?
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
The story is, of course, about ferociously corrupt scientific journal publisher Elsevier, which interestingly enough was founded by the ferociously corrupt media baron Robert Maxwell, who is ironically enough the father of Ghislane Maxwell, who is alleged to have some serious ethical issues as well.
The reveal here is that monster that is Elsevier was nurtured by British intelligence.
Well, duh:
One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest interview of his career. Across from him was Mark Zuckerberg. With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world.
Though Newton hadn’t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no members of the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg’s account of it. When his article was published, it reported that Aquila “was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.”
Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed that the flight hadn’t gone so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading to a crash landing.
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Newton is still in touch with executives at Facebook—some of them are subscribers to his newsletter—but he’s since focused his attention on the company’s abuses of low-level employees and third-party contractors. He no longer trusts Facebook like he once did.
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In conversations with more than fifteen journalists and industry observers, I tried to understand what it is like to cover Facebook. What I found was troublesome: operating with the secrecy of an intelligence agency and the authority of a state government, Facebook has arrogated to itself vast powers while enjoying, until recently, limited journalistic scrutiny. (Some journalists, like The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, have done important work linking Facebook data to political corruption in the UK and elsewhere.) Media organizations have stepped up their game, but they suffer from a lack of access, among other power asymmetries.
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The 2016 presidential election changed everything. After Donald Trump’s ascent, greased by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the embedding of Facebook staff in the Trump campaign’s digital operation, tech was seen as a political force unto itself. Journalists began digging into Facebook in a way few had before.
The company responded by closing itself off. “People have described it to me as a bunker mentality,” says Charlie Warzel, a New York Times opinion writer who covers technology, media, and politics. “The relationship is just naturally strained by the fact that they’re dealing with a crisis pretty much weekly, if not more frequently.”
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Michael Nuñez, a technology journalist who has worked at Forbes and Gizmodo and has broken several notable stories on Facebook, is more blunt in his assessment of Facebook’s comms operation. In his experience, he says, Facebook has been “willing to lie on the record.” Nuñez recalled reporting on an internal poll in which Facebook employees asked Zuckerberg whether the company should do something to try to stop Donald Trump from becoming president. When he asked a Facebook flack about it, they denied the poll existed. “I remember begging this person: ‘I’m not asking you to confirm the validity of this,’ ” Nuñez said. “ ‘I’m looking at [a screenshot of] it. I’m just here asking you for a comment.’ ”
In Nuñez’s eyes, Facebook is not a trustworthy interlocutor. “The company seems to be pretty comfortable with obfuscating the truth, and that’s why people don’t trust Facebook anymore,” he says. “They’ve had the chance to be honest and transparent plenty of times, and time and time again, you see that the company has been misleading either by choice or by willful ignorance.”
………
Warzel compares the company’s mentality to that of an intelligence agency. “I have former Facebook sources who will tell me an interesting tip and then lament that they don’t know a single person who could possibly confirm this, even though these people would like to confirm this, because they don’t own a single device that Facebook couldn’t forensically tap into to figure out the source of a leak.”
Zuckerberg has been a liar since the early days of Facebook, which is why, unlike people like the founders of Google and Amazon, there have been repeated lawsuits claiming that he cheated them.
It should be no surprise that that Zuck and Facebook lie to the press, they lie to everyone, and they always have.
A bipartisan group of US senators and representatives has introduced legislation in Congress that would significantly change the operation of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Proponents of the bill say that the proposal aims “to solidify the United States’ leadership in scientific and technological innovation through increased investments in the discovery, creation, and commercialization of technology fields of the future”. To do so, the so-called Endless Frontier Act would expand the NSF’s remit, rename the organization and provide more than $100bn in support. The proposal has gained approval from many, but some have objected that it may undercut the NSF’s main objective, which is to fund basic scientific research.
Those behind the bill – four prominent US congresspeople – say that its introduction stems from the perception that international competitors, and particularly China, threaten to overtake the US technologically. “To win the 21st century, we need to invest in technologies of the future,” says Ro Kahana, a Democratic congressperson from California. “That means increasing public funding into those sectors of our economy that will drive innovation and create new jobs.”
Chuck Schumer, a New Yorker who leads the Democratic minority in the Senate, says that the US “cannot afford” to continue to underinvest in science while still “lead[ing] the world” in advanced research. That view is backed by Republican senator Todd Young of Indiana. “By virtue of being the first to emerge on the other side of this pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party is working hard to use the crisis to its advantage by extending influence over the global economy,” he claims. The new act, adds Republican representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who is the fourth member of the group introducing the legislation, “is a down payment for future generations of American technological leadership”.
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Yet the proposal has drawn some criticism. Former NSF director Arden Bement told Science of his concern that the bill could indicate to Congress – which appropriates agencies’ funds – that investments in the bill’s innovative technologies override the importance of the NSF’s core mission of funding fundamental, curiosity-driven research. But Bement’s successor France Córdova, who completed her six-year term as NSF director in March, argues that current-day science involves more seamless integration between fundamental and applied research.
Gee, ya think?
One of the causes of inequality in our society are the extensive and intrusive subsidies provided by the government to private industry, things like this initiative, and the expansion of IP provisions.
This is bad for science and bad for the economy.
Protesters in Baltimore have dumped the statue of Christopher Columbus in Little Italy brought down into the Inner Harbor.
I’ll call it the Baltimore Tea Party:
A crowd of shouting protesters yanked down the Christopher Columbus statue near Little Italy, dragged it to the edge of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and rolled it with a splash into the water as fireworks went off around the city on the night of the Fourth of July.
Dedicated in 1984, the statue is the latest monument in the U.S. to fall this year during the national reckoning over racism and police violence that also has toppled statues of Confederate figures and enslavers around the country.
There are a large number of VERY powerful people who might be implicated, and strong circumstantial evidence that Epstein was an asset of US intelligence services, so I’m pretty sure that there a number of people who have a vested interest in Maxwell never telling her story:
Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite, has appeared via video in a US court after being arrested in relation to alleged sex crimes, conspiracy and perjury involving her late close friend and convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell, who was arrested at a luxury hideaway in a small town in New Hampshire early on Thursday, appeared at the state’s federal courthouse. Magistrate judge Andrea Johnstone, asked Maxwell questions about whether she understood her rights and she responded in the affirmative, using short phrases such as “I do.”
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The 17-page, six-count indictment filed by the Manhattan US attorney charges Maxwell with a host of crimes, including conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, enticement of a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and perjury.
The indictment described Maxwell’s relationship to Epstein as “personal and professional” – and that she was “in an intimate relationship” with him from about 1994 to 1997.
I would dearly love to see her testify, or talk to reporters.
Computer technologist and cyber-security expert Bruce Schneier makes a very good point, that extremely efficient systems are brittle, because maintaining reserves, or accounting for relatively rare events is inefficient, and unprofitable, and so will not be done by a rational actor, since it is a waste of resources.
Until it isn’t, which is when the rest of us are expected to bail them out:
For decades, we have prized efficiency in our economy. We strive for it. We reward it. In normal times, that’s a good thing. Running just at the margins is efficient. A single just-in-time global supply chain is efficient. Consolidation is efficient. And that’s all profitable. Inefficiency, on the other hand, is waste. Extra inventory is inefficient. Overcapacity is inefficient. Using many small suppliers is inefficient. Inefficiency is unprofitable.
But inefficiency is essential security, as the COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us. All of the overcapacity that has been squeezed out of our healthcare system; we now wish we had it. All of the redundancy in our food production that has been consolidated away; we want that, too. We need our old, local supply chains — not the single global ones that are so fragile in this crisis. And we want our local restaurants and businesses to survive, not just the national chains.
We have lost much inefficiency to the market in the past few decades. Investors have become very good at noticing any fat in every system and swooping down to monetize those redundant assets. The winner-take-all mentality that has permeated so many industries squeezes any inefficiencies out of the system.
This drive for efficiency leads to brittle systems that function properly when everything is normal but break under stress. And when they break, everyone suffers. The less fortunate suffer and die. The more fortunate are merely hurt, and perhaps lose their freedoms or their future. But even the extremely fortunate suffer — maybe not in the short term, but in the long term from the constriction of the rest of society.………
The market isn’t going to supply any of these things, least of all in a strategic capacity that will result in resilience. What’s necessary to make any of this work is regulation.
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The government is the entity that steps in and enforces a level playing field instead of a race to the bottom. Smart regulation addresses the long-term need for security, and ensures it’s not continuously sacrificed to short-term considerations.
We have largely been content to ignore the long term and let Wall Street run our economy as efficiently as it can. That’s no longer sustainable. We need inefficiency — the right kind in the right way — to ensure our security. No, it’s not free. But it’s worth the cost.
Our economy has been an embrace of the efficient over any other possible good for decades, and now we are reaping he whirlwind.