Month: September 2020

Justice for Me, but Not for Thee, Vegan Meat Edition

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The rather ironically named No Evil Foods has embarked on a policy of targeting and firing pro-union employees:

No Evil Foods describes its mission as to “put more good into the world.” The North Carolina company started in 2014 when its owners and founders Mike Woliansky and Sadrah Schadel sold plant-based meat products out of a cooler at Asheville farmers markets. Since then, the company sells products with left-wing names like Comrade Cluck (a mock chicken product), the Pardon (a Thanksgiving-season turkey substitute), and El Zapatista, a vegan chorizo whose name is a nod to the revolutionary indigenous movement in southern Mexico.

………

But earlier this year, the company fought back a drive by employees to unionize its production facility in Weaverville under the United Food and Commercial Workers International union (UFCW).

The union lost handily in a February vote. Over a half dozen current and former employees who spoke with The Appeal described a hostile union-busting campaign, complete with frequent “captive audience” meetings—required meetings billed as “educational” sessions in which management effectively tries to kill organizing drives. Workers who spoke with The Appeal requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation from their bosses.

………

But a month after production worker Cortne Roche posted the petition online, several pro-union workers and others who had signed it were fired in rapid succession, workers say. Roche, who had been pro-union and helped organize the petition, was fired on April 30, the day after she was suspended for a dress code violation.

Roche and two other workers who’ve been fired in recent weeks told the Appeal that they believe their terminations were retaliatory. “I was told I was terminated immediately and there was no conversation about that,” Roche said. “I’m not stupid.” Roche said she’s filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board; the company currently has two open charges against it for alleged violations of the National Labor Relations Act, both of which were filed earlier this month.

No Evil refused to answer specific questions about the firings, including the alleged use of “shadow write-ups”—writing employees up for violations without telling them, and then citing the violations in their firings.

………

But although No Evil Foods is a much smaller company than some of the meat-producing behemoths it hopes to turn people away from, workers and former workers whom The Appeal spoke with say it has betrayed its progressive branding in the times where it mattered most.

“It’s not in the interest of a company that exploits workers to give those workers any say in the company,” Roche said. “Even a vegan company called No Evil.”

What’s more, when the mandatory anti-union talks were leaked online, the company used bogus copyright challenges to suppress news reporting:

Earlier this year, the vegan-meat company No Evil Foods, which sells socialist-themed products at 5,500 grocery stores across the United States, including Whole Foods, fought a union drive at its Weaverville, North Carolina-plant.

The anti-union campaign led by No Evil Foods management featured a series of compulsory meetings, some of which were recorded by workers on their personal phones, portions of which were published in May by Motherboard and several other outlets, including In These Times, Industrial Worker, and the podcast Dixieland of the Proletariat.

Someone claiming to represent the company now appears to be trying to scrub the internet of these recordings by filing takedown requests on copyright and privacy grounds with the sites on which they’re hosted. Audio of the meeting has been deleted from YouTube, SoundCloud, and the podcast hosting platform LibSyn in recent days. A freelance journalist, Andrew Miller, who published the audio, had his personal website shut down by his web host HostGator on August 27. The takedown requests, several of which were viewed by Motherboard, claim that the speeches the company wrote are copyrighted. One video and four audio recordings—including two full-length podcast episodes that incorporate recordings of the meeting—have been flagged and removed from the internet.

No Evil Foods did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment, and the company blocked me on their official Twitter account. Emailed requests for comment sent to “rachel@noevilfoods.com,” the address that filed the complaints, were not returned. On Friday, LibSyn determined that one of the takedown requests was “fraudulent,” meaning that the person who filed it did not have a legitimate copyright claim, according to an email obtained by Motherboard. The episode of Dixieland of the Proletariat was restored because No Evil Foods did not respond to an inquiry about fraud from the podcast platform.

Motherboard spoke to copyright experts who said that under fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law, news outlets likely did not violate No Evil Foods’ copyright by publishing the audio recordings. In the United States, fair use allows the limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder specifically for the uses of news reporting and criticism.

………

In meetings recorded by workers and published by Motherboard and other outlets, which have since been taken off the internet, the company’s founders Mike Woliansky and Sadrah Schadel utilize standard anti-union talking points, warning their employees that a union would scare away investors, take away their rights, and drain their wages like a “sh%$ty gym membership that you just want to get out of.”

………

In early August, Motherboard received a notification from YouTube that a video of one of the speeches had received a privacy complaint. The video was subsequently removed; YouTube denied an appeal to leave it up. In recent weeks, SoundCloud has also removed audio of the speeches published by Motherboard and Industrial Worker, citing supposed copyright violations.

Each of the recordings was taken on workers’ personal devices in North Carolina, which requires the consent of only one present person in order to record audio.

In an email complaint to the podcast platform Libsyn about a version of the audio that appeared on In These Times’s Working People podcast on August 24, someone using the email address “rachel@noevilfoods.com” claimed that the recording was “Unauthorized” because it included contents “authored” by the two No Evil Foods founders and a hired consultant. The name on the email account is “Rachel Woliansky,” and Soundcloud told Industrial Worker that the inquiry came from “Rachel Woliansky.” (No Evil Foods’ CEO Mike Woliansky has a relative with the same name, according to a public database.) The email address Rachel@noevilfoods.com did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

“Each clip was authored by Mark McPeak, Sadrah Schadel, & Michael Woliansky of No Evil Foods, respectively,” the person in control of rachel@noevilfoods.com wrote. “I hereby state that I have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”

………

Cory Doctorow, a prominent internet rights expert, activist, and science fiction author, said that companies and other actors have a strong interest in presenting unfavorable coverage as a copyright infringement.

“What if Harvey Weinstein had taken copious notes on his crimes, and then said he had a copyright right on them, and that you couldn’t publish them? This is news reportage and it’s in the public interest to know about it,” Doctorow said. “But there’s a strong interest in presenting this as copyright infringement.”

Indeed.

If you fancy yourself progressive, but that only applies when it does not cost you anything, you are not a progressive.  You are a hypocrite.

Linkage

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F%$# You, Pay Me: How to get paid as a consultant.

Finest Journalist in the United States is a Brit

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I am referring, of course, to John Oliver.

He masterfully juxtaposes the lie fest at the RNC with the events in Kenosha.

It’s sad that a comedian is pretty much the only person in the main-stream-media providing good context and analysis.

As an aside, I think that John Oliver is much better than Jon Stewart ever was.

Stewart subscribed to the “View from nowhere”, and Oliver does not hide his opinions.

This is a Big Deal

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A federal judge has issued an injunction preventing the Census Bureau from terminating operations while a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s attempt to sabotage the decennial count.

This is not a victory, it’s just a hold until the suit can progress, but it does imply that there is a reasonable chance of their prevailing:

A federal judge has ordered the US Census Bureau for the time being to stop following a plan that would have had it winding down operations in order to finish the 2020 census at the end of September.

The federal judge in San Jose issued a temporary restraining order on Saturday against the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency.

The order stops the Census Bureau from winding down operations until a court hearing is held on 17 September. The once-a-decade head count of every US resident helps determine how $1.5tn in federal funding is distributed and how many congressional seats each state gets in a process known as apportionment.

The temporary restraining order was requested by a coalition of cities, counties and civil rights groups that had sued the Census Bureau, demanding it restore its previous plan for finishing the census at the end of October, instead of using a revised plan to end operations at the end of September. The coalition had argued the earlier deadline would cause the Census Bureau to overlook minority communities in the census, leading to an inaccurate count.

The September hearing should be interesting.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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I cannot believe that I am writing this, but Delta Airlines has done the right thing.


John Mulaney on Delta

Delta took the side of a Black passenger after a Karen in the seat next to her picked a fight with her, and Delta upgraded her seat on the return flight.

Delta did the right thing, and I still cannot believe that I wrote that:

A Black woman harassed by a white passenger on her Delta flight to Washington, D.C., last week is singing the airline’s praises after it upgraded her flight in response.

Demetria Poe, 25, was flying from Minneapolis to D.C. on Thursday to attend the Commitment March, held last Friday on the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. Poe, who spoke to USA Today after her Facebook post detailing the experience went viral, says she was already seated when a white passenger, who realized her seat assignment was next to Poe, swapped out the American flag face mask she had been wearing for a Blue Lives Matter one.

“That woman was trying to entice me into an argument because there was no need for her to flip that mask in my presence,” Poe told the news outlet. “She didn’t do it for anyone else. It was as if she was making a statement and wanted me to know.”

Poe did not react to the mask, but after takeoff, the white woman began to goad Poe into conversation, telling her, “I support blue lives because I support our officers.”

………

Poe noted to USA Today that she remained “very calm” throughout the conversation because she suspected her seat mate wanted to provoke her. White passengers around her also intervened and “snapped on this lady” in Poe’s defense. Delta flight attendants also checked on her and offered to move Blue Lives Karen. Once the plane landed in D.C., Delta attendants relayed to her that the white woman would no longer be flying with the airline because they do not “personally or as a company stand for racism and discrimination,” Poe wrote on her Facebook.

“I felt the genuine and sincere concern the flight attendants had for me and the people around me,” Poe told USA Today. “I was shocked. I was happy, but I was still fearful. Living in Minnesota, I have seen how things get blown up. I just really wanted to get off the flight.”

But the story didn’t end there for Poe. On her return flight to Minneapolis, her seat was upgraded, and she received a small bag full of gifts, including a “Black Lives Matter” Delta pin. Poe was moved to tears by the gift and was heartened by the airline choosing to stand in solidarity with her.

“This is a major corporation saying that Black lives matter,” Poe said, adding that she “will only fly Delta” from now on.

After Poe’s Facebook post detailing the incident went viral, the airline dropped a response to her: “When we say Black lives matter, we mean it. You matter to us, Demetria.”

We are living in strange times.

This is Not a Surprise

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It turns out that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy pressured his employees to make campaign donations to Republicans, and then used bonuses to reimburse them, which is a criminal violation of campaign finance law. (Just ask Dinesh D’Souza)

If Trump loses in November, I expect a flurry of pardons in January:

Louis DeJoy’s prolific campaign fundraising, which helped position him as a top Republican power broker in North Carolina and ultimately as head of the U.S. Postal Service, was bolstered for more than a decade by a practice that left many employees feeling pressured to make political contributions to GOP candidates — money DeJoy later reimbursed through bonuses, former employees say.

Five people who worked for DeJoy’s former business, New Breed Logistics, say they were urged by DeJoy’s aides or by the chief executive himself to write checks and attend fundraisers at his 15,000-square-foot gated mansion beside a Greensboro, N.C., country club. There, events for Republicans running for the White House and Congress routinely fetched $100,000 or more apiece.

Two other employees familiar with New Breed’s financial and payroll systems said DeJoy would instruct that bonus payments to staffers be boosted to help defray the cost of their contributions, an arrangement that would be unlawful.

“Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” said David Young, DeJoy’s longtime director of human resources, who had access to payroll records at New Breed from the late 1990s to 2013 and is now retired. “When we got our bonuses, let’s just say they were bigger, they exceeded expectations — and that covered the tax and everything else.”

Another former employee with knowledge of the process described a similar series of events, saying DeJoy orchestrated additional compensation for employees who had made political contributions, instructing managers to award bonuses to specific individuals.

………

Hagler said DeJoy “sought and received legal advice” from a former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission “to ensure that he, New Breed Logistics and any person affiliated with New Breed fully complied with any and all laws. Mr. DeJoy believes that all campaign fundraising laws and regulations should be complied with in all respects.”

………

A Washington Post analysis of federal and state campaign finance records found a pattern of extensive donations by New Breed employees to Republican candidates, with the same amount often given by multiple people on the same day. Between 2000 and 2014, 124 individuals who worked for the company together gave more than $1 million to federal and state GOP candidates. Many had not previously made political donations, and have not made any since leaving the company, public records show. During the same period, nine employees gave a combined $700 to Democrats.

………

Although it can be permissible to encourage employees to make donations, reimbursing them for those contributions is a violation of North Carolina and federal election laws. Known as a straw-donor scheme, the practice allows donors to evade individual contribution limits and obscures the true source of money used to influence elections.

Such federal violations carry a five-year statute of limitations. There is no statute of limitations in North Carolina for felonies, including campaign finance violations.

This is clearly criminal.

The only question is whether or not the next Democratic administration has the balls to enforce the laws.

American oligarchs thrive on impunity, and the impunity has to end.

Quote of the Day

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Because I’ve lived most of my life either on the near periphery or within academia, I’ve had nearly four decades of experience with the creepy essentialist language of “racial authenticity” that lives and thrives in more than one corner of putatively liberal academia. As a result, I learned a long time ago that some white liberals expect black and brown people to “perform” in ways that comport with their well-meaning, usually underclass-informed, and fundamentally racist expectations of black people.

—Touré F. Reed in Jacobin on the spectacle of Professor Jessica Krug masquerading as a Black Hispanic woman throughout her career

The entire sordid affair is raises an important question, one which will be studiously ignored in the halls of academe, “What are the (probably racist) preconceptions that allowed for this fraud to be perpetrated?”

Tweet of the Day

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If modern Democrats were around in the 1800s their solution to slavery would be Black slave owners.

— Albert Lee for the People 🌹 (@AlbertLee2020) August 10, 2020

The reality of the situation is that much of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is allergic to any sort of move toward social justice, and so try to do nothing about the carceral state, predatory finance, and inequality.

Instead, they rely on Republican Party racism to define themselves as a party.

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

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If the Greenland ice field were to melt, it would raise sea levels about 7 meters (23 feet).

New evidence indicates that the melting of Greenland has reach the point of no return.

This will devastate most of the coastal cities across the world:

Annual snowfall can no longer replenish the melted ice that flows into the ocean from Greenland’s glaciers. That is the conclusion of a new analysis of almost 40 years’ satellite data by researchers at Ohio State University. The ice loss, they think, is now so great that it has triggered an irreversible feedback loop: the sheet will keep melting, even if all climate-warming emissions are miraculously curtailed. This is bad news for coastal cities, given that Greenland boasts the largest ice sheet on the planet after Antarctica. Since 2000 its melting ice has contributed about a millimetre a year to rising sea levels. The loss of the entire ice sheet would raise them by more than seven metres, enough to reconfigure the majority of the world’s coastlines.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Greenland’s ice maintained a rough equilibrium. Each year the sheet lost some 400bn tonnes of ice in the summer—both by ice and snow melting on the surface, and the “discharge” of ice by glaciers losing chunks as they push out into the sea. This was replenished by a similar amount of fresh snow in the winter. But after 2000 the ice sheet began losing mass permanently. The amount that has disappeared is so huge that it has caused a noticeable change in the gravitational field over the island. It has also caused the glaciers to retreat by about 3km since 1985, exposing more of them to warmer ocean water. This has increased the rate of melting to the point where, even if the climate stopped getting hotter, more ice would be discharged each year than could be replaced, the scientists reckon. “The ice sheet is now in this new dynamic state, where even if we went back to a climate that was more like what we had 20 or 30 years ago, we would still be pretty quickly losing mass,” explains Ian Howar, one of the study’s authors.

Over the past three decades, the Arctic has warmed at least twice as fast as the rest of the world. This is because of a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification, in which higher concentrations of greenhouse gases produce larger increases in temperature at high latitudes. It also means that changes in the Arctic region are an important indicator of the progression and impacts of climate change. The decline of the Greenland ice sheet is a harbinger of things to come. “Greenland is going to be the canary in the coal mine,” says Mr Howar. “And the canary is pretty much dead at this point.”

Clearly people operating in their own enlightened self-interest, as the religion of the free-market mousketeers, is not working.

Broadening the Definition Of, “Blue Screen of Death”

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I just discovered that Bill Gates is funding a nuclear power startup.

The “Secret Sauce” is that it uses a molten salt for thermal storage, so that it can respond quickly to shifts in demand.

This from the guy Microsoft®, so if your alarm bells are going off over the thought of the inevitable system crash, it gets even better.

The reactor in question is a fast fission breeder reactor using using liquid sodium as a coolant, so it produces large quantities of Pu239 and uses a coolant that ignites upon contact with air, and cannot be extinguished with water.

All this from the mind that gave us “Blue Screen of Death”.

Delightful:

Nuclear power is the Immovable Object of generation sources. It can take days just to bring a nuclear plant completely online, rendering it useless as a tool to manage the fluctuations in the supply and demand on a modern energy grid.

Now a firm launched by Bill Gates in 2006, TerraPower, in partnership with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, believes it has found a way to make the infamously unwieldy energy source a great deal nimbler — and for an affordable price.

The new design, announced by TerraPower on August 27th, is a combination of a “sodium-cooled fast reactor” — a type of small reactor in which liquid sodium is used as a coolant — and an energy storage system. While the reactor could pump out 345 megawatts of electrical power indefinitely, the attached storage system would retain heat in the form of molten salt and could discharge the heat when needed, increasing the plant’s overall power output to 500 megawatts for more than 5.5 hours.

………

The use of molten salt, which retains heat at extremely high temperatures, as a storage technology is not new. Concentrated solar power plants also collect energy in the form of molten salt, although such plants have largely been abandoned in the U.S. The technology could enjoy new life alongside nuclear plants: TerraPower and GE Hitachi Nuclear are only two of several private firms working to develop reactor designs that incorporate molten salt storage units, including U.K.- and Canada-based developer Moltex Energy.

………

Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, suggested on Twitter that the nuclear designs used by TerraPower and GE Hitachi had fallen short of a major innovation. “Oh brother. The last thing the world needs is a fleet of sodium-cooled fast reactors,” he wrote.

Yeah, this makes me feel safe an secure.

Could Someone Help Me with a Metaphor?

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Sometimes, I’m not good with metaphors.

I can recognize that certain situations evoke a metaphor just as well as the average Joe, but sometimes, the metaphorical possibilities are so broad that I am paralyzed by the range of choices.

Case in point, the sinking of multiple boats at the pro-Trump rally on Lake Travis outside of Austin, TX.

Is this the time for a metaphor about choppy waters, or a metaphor about the wakes of large boats swamping small boats, or just a snarky comment about how maritime navigation charts having a,”Well known liberal bias?”

I am at a loss, reader(s), so I need your help:

A parade of boats in Texas celebrating their support for Donald Trump ended in disarray when multiple vessels got into trouble on apparently choppy waters leading to several sinking and a slew of distress calls being made to rescue officials.

Multiple media reports described a chaotic scene on Lake Travis, near the state capital of Austin, when a procession of boats waving Trump flags and banners motored over the waters but then got into potentially serious trouble.

Videos of the event circulating on social media showed several boats being swamped by waves and sinking as frantic passengers jumped into the water.

I’m Calling Political Ploy

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Nameless bureaucrats in the Pentagon announce plans to shutter the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, and Trump reverses the decision with a tweet.

Call me a cynic, but I think that this was the plan all along.

In the middle of a minor sh%$-storm about Trump dissing dead soldiers, he gets to play hero:

Update: Following blowback, President Trump announced on Twitter that the publication will not be shuttered after all.

The United States of America will NOT be cutting funding to @starsandstripes magazine under my watch. It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2020

The Trump administration has decided to shutter Stars and Stripes, the award-winning independent military newspaper that began during the Civil War and has continuously published since World War II. The publication has broken many important stories, including highlighting predatory or unethical practices by military brass.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have been trying to prevent this move for months. “Stars and Stripes is an essential part of our nation’s freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom,” fifteen senators said in a letter sent to Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

Even Trump sycophant Lindsay Graham has attempted to save the paper, writing to Esper, “as a veteran who has served overseas, I know the value that the Stars and Stripes brings to its readers.”

But the administration announced it is going ahead with closing the publication as part of cost-cutting measures, ordering it to stop publishing by September 30th and setting a deadline at the end of January to dissolve it completely.

If you think that this is a sincere effort, or has resulted from the storm blowing up over this, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Also, I cannot believe that I am f%$#ing reposting a f%$#ing a f%$#ing Donald f%$#ing Trump Tweet.

Today in Prosecutorial Cluelessness

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In response to stories noting irregularities at the now shuttered German credit card transaction firm Wirecard, regulators went to Prosecutors initiated an investigation ……… of the journalists.

Now that the firm has collapsed in an orgy of fraud, prosecutors are calling backsies:

The Munich prosecutor has dropped its investigation into two Financial Times journalists, who were accused by the German financial watchdog of potential market manipulation over their reports about accounting irregularities at payments processor Wirecard.

The criminal prosecution office in Munich said on Thursday it had “suspended the investigative proceedings” against the two FT journalists after they “did not reveal sufficient evidence to support the suspicious facts” raised by BaFin, the German watchdog.

BaFin said on Thursday that it had “no objection” to the prosecutor dropping its investigation into the FT journalists. It added that its parallel criminal complaint against short-sellers alleging market manipulation on Wirecard shares was still ongoing.

The move comes 10 weeks after Wirecard declared insolvency, having admitted that about €1.9bn in cash was missing from its accounts. Its collapse, which has turned into one of Germany’s biggest financial scandals, followed years of reports by the FT that Wirecard’s accounts were misleading.

The Munich prosecutor said its investigations found that the FT’s reports “are basically correct and at least from the point of view of the information available at the time, it was neither false nor misleading. There were no direct, concrete contacts with short-sellers.”

The criminal complaint against Dan McCrum and Stefania Palma was filed by BaFin in April 2019 after the FT published articles by the two earlier that year alleging that Wirecard had been inflating its revenues by using forged and backdated contracts that raised questions over the company’s accounting.

In case your are wondering, bank fraud, and regulatory capture are not exclusive to the “Anglo-Saxon” nations.

A Feature Not a Bug

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The Baltimore post office sat on 65,000 pieces of political mail for at least 5 days before the primary.

Not ballots, mind you, but this is just the dress rehearsal.

It’s a great way to depress turnout at the (overwhelmingly Democratic) Baltimore City:

An audit of U.S. Postal Service performance during this year’s primary election season has found 68,000 pieces of political mail sat untouched at a Baltimore mail processing facility for five days ahead of the June 2 primary.

The audit published Monday says the mail, sent May 12, “sat unprocessed” for five days before being discovered by management at the facility.

Baltimore was in the midst of several contentious political races at the time, including those for mayor, comptroller and City Council president. Numerous candidates for those offices spent thousands of dollars on campaign mailers in an attempt to sway voters in close primaries.

Ballots destined for those voters also were in the mail stream during the window when the political mail sat at the facility, but the audit specifically stated the delayed pieces were not ballots. “This was First-Class campaign mail from a political candidate,” according to a footnote in the report.

 I’m going to drop off my ballot this year.

A Microcosm of What is Wrong with the Narcissistic Left

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Brooklyn friends school in New York is a Quaker institution which posits as its central value, its “brand” if you will, is creating students who will fight for social justice.

However, it appears that when it is their ox that is gored, they will go above and beyond to screw their own workers.

They are trying to decertify their union because it is “Incompatible” with their Quaker faith.

Just in case you are wondering, Quakers have a long history of pro organized labor activism.

It’s just that this this school rat-f%$# administrator does a not want to be inconvenienced:

Everyone knew there would be layoffs at Brooklyn Friends School. Not even a school where tuition is the cost of a new car is safe from a major recession. The letters, though, were a shock. A couple weeks into severance negotiations with the staff union, head of school Crissy Cáceres made an announcement. The school had filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board asking it to decertify, or disband, its union. The presence of a union violated the school’s Quaker character, she wrote in two August 14 notes to teachers and families. “If we are to fully practice our Quaker values of respecting others and celebrating every individual’s inner light while compassionately responding to existing needs,” she said, “we must be legally free to do so.”

 In this intimate school community, the news was an earthquake. It “came out of the blue,” remembers Sarah Gordon, who teaches third grade at Brooklyn Friends and belongs to the union’s negotiation committee. Nobody knew the school was even considering such an extreme decision. “It was like ‘wait, this is what you were doing?’ We had no idea,” echoes Laura Hulbert, a learning specialist.

 At a different institution, that sense of surprise might be less profound. Employers usually don’t welcome unions, and they can adopt ugly tactics to prevent workers from organizing. But Brooklyn Friends isn’t the average workplace. The school is famously progressive. Parents hear of its commitment to social justice on orientation tours. Second-graders study the lives of labor leaders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez as part of a curriculum on “change-makers.” The school’s union — which includes about 200 teachers, maintenance staff, and office workers, and is represented by United Auto Workers Local 2110 — seemed like a natural extension of its left-wing ethos. At least to staff.………

………

But look deeper, and a question presents itself: Is this spiritual warfare, or something more profane?

Spolier, Cáceres isn’t a member of the Quaker meeting, and she is making sweeping generalization that unionization runs counter to the religion.

This corrupt, profane, narcissistic, and sociopathic.

This is not William Penn, this is William Edward Hickman,* “What is good for me is right.”

………

Conservative Christians and right-to-work groups hailed the Bethany decision, [Which said that a religious school was not covered by the NLRB] which means that liberal Brooklyn Friends could soon have some uncomfortable company. It may also find itself at odds with other Quaker institutions. The Friends Council on Education told Intelligencer in an email that it has no formal position on unionization at its member schools, including Brooklyn Friends. But other Quaker organizations have unionized without incident. Teachers at Friends Seminary in Manhattan have a union. So do the employees of the American Friends Service Committee, which a source described as being “like the Peace Corps for Quakers.” A 2016 statement on the Committee’s website praises Walter Reuther — a storied leader of the United Auto Workers — in effusive terms. Brooklyn Friends itself has acknowledged Quakerism’s links to labor in the past. A blog post on its website celebrates Bayard Rustin, who in addition to being a Quaker and a civil-rights activist also co-founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute of the AFL-CIO.

………

“This school is incredibly diverse on so many levels, and I think that they care a lot about diversity and social justice. They can talk about that quite a bit,” McMackin said. “But the one thing that’s really lacking is economic diversity, and that contributes to the culture of the school.” She and Roddick receive financial aid to send their son to Brooklyn Friends, as do many other families. But overall, she added, “there is a very affluent culture there,” populated by “art dealers and finance bros” and other pillars of Brooklyn high culture. That influences the school’s rhetoric, she concluded: “When they talk about diversity, when they talk about social justice, they’re really talking about every other type besides economics.”

There is no social justice without economics.

Everything else is just virtue signaling.

It is also amazingly self-destructive and stupid:

………

“Brooklyn Friends is never going to have the tradition and gravitas of Packer. It’s never going to have the toniness of St. Ann’s, or the campus and athletic spirit of Poly Prep. But what Brooklyn Friends does have is social justice,” the former faculty member said. “When the board makes decisions like currying the favor of the Trump-dominated NLRB to try to decertify a union, in addition to feeling dishonest it seems like one of the stupidest things the school could do.”

If someone asks you why “The Left” hates comfortable liberals, it’s hypocrisy, and this is about as good an example of that as you could hope to find.

*Hickman is a serial killer much admired by Ayn Rand who kidnapped and dismembered a 12 year old girl.

Unemployment Rate Falls

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The Scariest Job Chart Ever

The official U-3 unemployment rate fell by 1.8% to 8.4% and the number of unemployed fell by 2.8 million to 13.6 million.

It’s undeniably good numbers, particularly since the employment/population ratio, which is hard to rat-f%$#, has risen as well.

Note that the numbers are from 2 weeks ago though, just 2 weeks after the $600 unemployment supplement ended.

From a political perspective, both sides are going to try to make political hay over this, and the media, being what it is, will absolutely represent it as a “Both Sides” thing.

Artificial Stupidity

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Students have been given online short essay exams, and the kids have discovered that they are graded by artificial intelligence, and you can ace the test with two sentences and a word salad.

The problem here is not AI. The problem here is the tech bros trying to sell crap AI as gold:

On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He’d completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He’d received a 50 out of 100. That wasn’t on a practice test — it was his real grade.

………

At first, Simmons tried to console her son. “I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning,” said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he’d received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers. A teacher couldn’t have read his response in that time, Simmons knew — her son was being graded by an algorithm.

Simmons watched Lazare complete more assignments. She looked at the correct answers, which Edgenuity revealed at the end. She surmised that Edgenuity’s AI was scanning for specific keywords that it expected to see in students’ answers. And she decided to game it.



Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords — anything that seems relevant to the question. “The questions are things like… ‘What was the advantage of Constantinople’s location for the power of the Byzantine empire,’” Simmons says. “So you go through, okay, what are the possible keywords that are associated with this? Wealth, caravan, ship, India, China, Middle East, he just threw all of those words in.”

………

Apparently, that “word salad” is enough to get a perfect grade on any short-answer question in an Edgenuity test.

Algorithm update. He cracked it: Two full sentences, followed by a word salad of all possibly applicable keywords. 100% on every assignment. Students on @EdgenuityInc, there's your ticket. He went from an F to an A+ without learning a thing.

— Dana Simmons (@DanaJSimmons) September 2, 2020

This is typical of what we are getting from tech these days.

It seems that it’s all the late David Graeber’s “Bullsh%$ Jobs.”

New Initial Claims Today

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Unemployment claims fell to below 1 million again, but the actual adjusted number rose by 8000.

The fall is because the DOL changed its seasonal adjustment formula for this report.

Also note that Pandemic Unemployment Assistance(PUA) initial claims for self-employed and gig workers, rose by over 150,000 to 759K.

I know that people dismiss the possibility that eh “Professionals” at the Department of Labor are bending to the political winds blowing from 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, but every one of these adjustments seems to favor the Trump administration:

Note: The DOL has changed their seasonal adjustment method, so to compare to the previous week, we need to use the NSA data.  See Technical Note on Weekly Unemployment Claims

The Not Seasonally Adjusted (NSA) claims increased to 833,352 from 825,761 the previous week. These are directly comparable since the Seasonal Adjustment Factor was identical for both weeks.

The DOL reported:

In the week ending August 29, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 881,000, a decrease of 130,000 from the previous week’s revised level. The previous week’s level was revised up by 5,000 from 1,006,000 to 1,011,000. The 4-week moving average was 991,750, a decrease of 77,500 from the previous week’s revised average.
The previous week’s average was revised up by 1,250 from 1,068,000 to 1,069,250.


emphasis added

The previous week was revised up.

This does not include the 759,482 initial claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) that was up from 607,808 the previous week.

I’m not saying that the DOL is juicing the numbers, the seasonal adjustment needed to be  ……… well ……… adjusted, but it does seem that the DOL is spinning the numbers.

This is Contemptible

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Authorities in Kentucky have still not arrested the police officers who murdered Breonna Taylor on March 13. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is now in charge of the case, had time to speak at the Republican National Convention last week, but he has not found the time to bring to justice the three cops who shot Taylor in her own apartment.

What have the authorities been doing for the past five and a half months?

Earlier this week, we learned the answer: The authorities have been busy harassing the Black men who knew Taylor, while trying to name Taylor, posthumously, as a criminal defendant. Instead of building a case against the police officers who killed her, it would appear that Kentucky prosecutors have been doing everything they can to build a case against Taylor, in a desperate yet classic attempt to blame a Black person for “forcing” the cops to kill them.

………

Now the two men who have been hounded by the authorities while Taylor’s killers march around free are starting to speak out through their attorneys and legal action. On Tuesday, attorneys filed a civil lawsuit on behalf of Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, against Louisville police, the city, and other officials. The suit is comprehensive: It alleges serious police misconduct and intimidation, gives new details on Taylor’s murder, and seeks to protect Walker from future harassment through a novel use of Kentucky’s “stand your ground” law.

………

But Walker’s case doesn’t stop there. In addition to the delicious legal jujitsu of using this white supremacist law against the forces of white supremacy, Walker’s complaint also focuses on the behavior of the cops once the shooting stopped. I am drawn to the allegations of police intimidation that Walker has suffered from the moment cops finished murdering his girlfriend. In his lawsuit, Walker claims that cops on the scene expressed disappointment when they found that Walker had not been shot. He claims the cops threatened to sic their dogs on him while they were marching him out of the apartment. And prosecutors charged Walker initially with murder of a police officer, a factual impossibility (because Jon Mattingly, the one officer who was wounded, was very much alive the whole time) that prosecutors must have been well aware of.

All of those tactics are part of a very big problem. They represent attempts by the police to make innocent people accept responsibility for things they did not do or implicate other innocent people in crimes. Killing a cop can get you a death sentence in Kentucky. A person might falsely plead to all sorts of things to avoid such a charge, especially when the police have already established that they are sorry they didn’t kill you during the initial confrontation and have threatened to let their dogs maul you like they’re a bunch of Ramsay Boltons with badges.

Unfortunately, Walker isn’t the only acquaintance of Breonna Taylor who has been subjected to this kind of witness intimidation after her death. Jamarcus Glover, Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who is ostensibly the person the police were actually going after on the night they murdered Taylor, missed a court appearance this week. As that began to make news, his lawyers released documents showing the lengths to which prosecutors have gone to get Glover to implicate Taylor in crimes she did not commit.

………

The local prosecutor, Tom Wine, denies that such a plea deal was “offered” to Glover, but he admits that the concession was part of a “draft” plea sheet ahead of plea negotiations. Wine also said that Taylor’s name was removed “out of respect for Ms. Taylor.” Notice the wording there: Wine isn’t saying that the allegations about Taylor aren’t true; he’s saying he didn’t include them in the official plea negotiation “out of respect.”

Everything that is happening to the men who knew Taylor is happening because prosecutors do not want to hold Taylor’s murderers accountable. This is what the system does when it does not want to secure a conviction. Prosecutors themselves try to poison the jury pool against their own case, creating avenues of doubt before any trial process gets going. They try to impugn the character of people who will have to be witnesses for the prosecution. They try to avoid doing forensic research so that they have no “hard” evidence to present to the jury, should it come to that. And they try, desperately, to get anybody to speak out against the victim so the defense can use those statements against the prosecution at trial.

The cops shot Taylor under the cover of darkness, but prosecutors are trying to lose the case in broad daylight.

This is aggressively and brazenly corrupt, and everyone in the various prosecutors’ offices who are a part of this should prosecuted and disbarred.