Month: October 2020

And the Award for Most Ludicrous Reason Not to Prosecute a Cop Goes To………

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A special prosecutor investing the cesspool of corruption that is the Orange County Sheriff’s office has declined to prosecute deputies who filed false official reports, because, and as As Anna Russel would say, “I’m not making this up, you know,” they did not know that it was illegal to falsify official documents.

This is the most reprehensible excuse a prosecutor has ever given for letting corrupt cops walk:

Orange County (CA) sheriff’s deputies are the worst at law stuff. If the goal was to hire the stupidest, most plausibly-deniable candidates, the OCSD has hit the mark.

Deputies for this department have managed to achieve the impossible: turn local prosecutors against them by continuously mishandling evidence. Evidence must be managed carefully since it’s the thing prosecutors use to secure convictions. In the hands of deputies, evidence is just something that must be handled, however haphazardly, at whatever point they get around to it.

Since they can’t handle the job of correctly booking evidence, deputies have been faking reports, claiming evidence is booked in when it actually isn’t to avoid getting reprimanded for taking too long to process seized property. One deputy, Bryce Simpson, never did the job correctly. In 74 cases audited, 56 had no evidence booked at all and the other 18 only had some of the evidence booked.

Now, Deputy Bryce Simpson — along with Deputy Joseph Atkinson Jr. — are being given a pass by the special prosecutor presiding over the grand jury convened to decide whether these two slackers/liars should face criminal charges. According to the prosecutor, the deputies did nothing wrong because — wait for it — they didn’t know falsifying official documents was wrong.

………

You have got to be f%$#ing kidding me. Even if we believe the deputies — and there’s no reason we should — there has never been a case ever in any situation where falsifying official documents has been considered the right thing to do. That the deputies may have been unaware these actions could result in criminal charges is beside the point. The mens rea is the knowing falsification of documents, which has never been considered OK under any circumstances. And that’s even when the threat of criminal prosecution isn’t readily apparent.

And their testimony contradicts the Sheriff’s Department spokesperson, who says both deputies received training on the filing of evidence — training that presumably included the warning that faking these documents could result in criminal charges. If they didn’t pay attention to the criminal charge part of the training, that’s hardly an excuse. Ignorance of the law doesn’t help civilians. It shouldn’t aid and abet criminal actions committed by law enforcement officers.

This entire rotten edifice needs to be torn down root and branch.

Him I Want to Die in Poverty and Struggling to Breath

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He’s killed dozens, if not hundreds of minors with out a second thought, so I’m hoping that he gets turned down:

Robert E. Murray, the former CEO and president of the now-bankrupt Murray Energy, has filed an application with the U.S. Department of Labor for black lung benefits. For years, Murray and his company fought against federal mine safety regulations aimed at reducing the debilitating disease.

“I founded the company and created 8,000 jobs there until the move to end coal use. I am still chairman of the board,” he wrote on a Labor Department form that initiated his claim obtained by the Ohio Valley ReSource. “We’re in bankruptcy, and due to my health could not handle the president and CEO job any longer.”

According to sources, Murray’s claim is still in the initial stages and is being evaluated to determine the party potentially responsible for paying out the associated benefits. The Labor Department is required to determine a liable party before an initial ruling can be made on entitlement to benefits. If Murray’s claim were to go before an administrative law judge, some aspects of the claim would become a matter of public record.

………

Reached by phone, Murray declined an on-the-record interview for this story. Murray said he has black lung from working in underground mines and is entitled to benefits. Additionally, he disputed that he ever fought against regulations to quell the disease or fought miners from receiving benefits.

Murray also threatened to file a lawsuit if a story was published that indicated he had fought federal regulations and benefits.

Of course he threatened a lawsuit.  It’s what the Dr. Evil wannabee does, and it’s what led John Oliver to go after him hammer and tongs.

But Murray told NPR in October 2019 that he had a lung disease that was not caused by working underground in mines.

“It’s idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. IPF, and it is not related to my work in the industry. They’ve checked for that,” Murray told NPR. “And it’s not — has anything to do with working in the coal mines, which I did for 17 years underground every day. And until I was 76, I went underground twice a week.”

I’m thinking of starting a Gofundme to pay for a guy in a squirrel suit to follow Bob Murray around telling him to eat sh%$.

Quote of the Day

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It’s really not complicated. Most hedge funds are brilliant vehicles designed to make their managers rich. That doesn’t mean they’re doing anything illegal, or maybe even unethical. It’s capitalism. It just means they’re generally a terrible investment, like a new car or a $30,000 handbag. Only with hedge funds, you don’t even get the car or the bag.

—Brett Arends at Marketwatch

This has been in plain sight for decades.  The only mystery us why so many people, and particularly nominally savvy investors, continue to throw their money away.

My theory is that there is corruption involved.

US unemployment rate falls to 7.9% in last look at jobs market before elections | Business | The Guardian

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Scariest jobs chart ever, H/T Calculated Risk

The monthly jobs numbers came out, and it missed expectations.

This is not surprising. The stimulus ended 2 months ago, and there is not a lot to move the economy along:

Hiring gains slowed sharply heading into the fall as more layoffs turned permanent, adding to signs that the U.S. economy faces a long slog to fully recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Employers added 661,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said Friday. The increase in payrolls showed the labor market continued to dig out of the hole created by the pandemic, but at a much slower pace than over the summer.

The U.S. has replaced 11.4 million of the 22 million jobs lost in March and April, at the beginning of the pandemic. Job growth, though, is cooling, and last month marked the first time since April that net hiring was below one million.

………

Other signs of a slowing U.S. recovery include a drop in household income at the end of the summer and smaller gains in consumer spending, the economy’s main driver.

The unemployment rate fell to 7.9% in September from 8.4% the prior month. Though the jobless rate is down sharply from a pandemic high of near 15% in April, last month’s drop partially reflected an increase in permanent layoffs and more people leaving the labor force. That could stem from more workers quitting their job searches due to weak employment prospects or child-care responsibilities.

………

Large corporate layoffs are sweeping across the U.S. Walt Disney Co. earlier this week announced permanent layoffs for 28,000 theme park workers who were previously on temporary furlough. American Airlines Group Inc. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. will proceed for now with a total of more than 32,000 job cuts after lawmakers were unable to agree on a broad coronavirus-relief package.

The recent layoff announcements aren’t reflected in the September jobs report, which includes data gathered in the first half of the month.

………

The number of unemployed individuals saying their layoffs were temporary declined in September, which could reflect more people returning to work. Meanwhile, the number of workers who saw their layoffs as permanent rose for the month, a sign workers may be in for long spells of unemployment.

One of the reasons that the unemployment rate is down is that the denominator is shrinking, as people become discouraged, or leave the market because of the unavailability of child care.

To my mind, the employment-population ratio shows a better picture, and the picture is less rosy.

This is the last monthly jobs report before the elections, and I’m pretty sure that both sides will claim that the numbers support them.

Looks like I Picked the Wrong Week to Quit Sniffing Glue

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President* Trump has been helicoptered to Walter Reed after testing positive for the Corona virus.

They are claiming that it’s moderate symptoms, but it’s only been about 24 hours since he started to showing signs of the infection, so it’s likely to get worse.

What’s more, it appears that there was a super-spreading event at the roll-out of his Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett, with numerous reporters, staffers, and a few Senators testing positive.

There seems to be a plethora of folks who are offering insincere. “Thoughts and prayers,” for Trump.

I will not be one of them.

Today in IP Law Abuse

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The posted a video of their new “Truck” driving down the road, but it turned out that there was no propulsion system.

They just let it roll down hill and made it look like it was powered with camera angles:

Nikola has issued copyright-takedown notices targeting critics on YouTube who used clips of the promotional video in which a Nikola prototype truck was seen rolling down a hill.

Nikola last month admitted that the promotional video of a supposedly functional Nikola One electric truck moving along a highway actually consisted of the company’s vehicle rolling downhill. This week, Nikola “forced the removal of several critical videos from YouTube, saying they infringed its copyright by using footage from the company,” including the truck-rolling-downhill video, the Financial Times reported yesterday.

Sam Alexander is one of at least two financial commentators who had videos removed by Google subsidiary YouTube at Nikola’s request. He says that four of his videos were taken down.

“The claim is from when I showed 30 seconds of their Nikola One in Motion footage, which is what they put on Twitter and it’s of their Nikola One rolling down the hill,” Alexander said in a YouTube video he posted Wednesday.

………

“Right now my main concern is that Nikola is using copyright strikes to silence their critics,” Alexander told the Financial Times. Another YouTuber named Tom Nash “was required to take down three videos that featured criticism of Nikola,” including one that used footage of the moving truck, and has appealed YouTube’s decision, the Financial Times article said.

Meanwhile, both Nikola and Youtube are pointing fingers at each other, but my money is on Nikola

………

A Nikola statement sent to Ars and other media outlets tries to portray YouTube as the party that initiated the video-removal process. “YouTube regularly identifies copyright violations of Nikola content and shares the lists of videos with us,” a Nikola spokesperson told Ars. “Based on YouTube’s information, our initial action was to submit takedown requests to remove the content that was used without our permission. We will continue to evaluate flagged videos on a case-by-case basis.”

YouTube offered a different description, saying that Nikola simply took advantage of the Copyright Match Tool that’s available to people in the YouTube Partner Program.

“Nikola has access to our copyright match tool, which does not automatically remove any videos,” YouTube told the FT. “Users must fill out a copyright removal request form, and when doing so we remind them to consider exceptions to copyright law. Anyone who believes their reuse of a video or segment is protected by fair use can file a counter-notice.”

This is why there should be real, and severe, penalties for misuse of the take-down process in law.

The Root of Currency is “Current”, and Cryptocurrency Isn’t

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That’s why a court has ruled that a $100 million initial crypto coin offering (ICO) by Kin was an illegal unregistered securities sale.

When all is said and done, currency is supposed to allow one to spend a store of value on goods and services essentially instantly.

Even the most established crypto-currency, Bitcoin, takes hours, if not days, to process a transaction.
It is not a meaningful medium of exchange for even the most basic commercial activities:

The 2017 launch of the Kin cryptocurrency broke federal securities laws, a federal judge has ruled. Federal law requires anyone who offers a new security to the general public to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The messaging app maker Kik didn’t do that when it sold $100 million worth of Kin in 2017.

The company argued that Kin was legally a new virtual currency, not a security. In a Wednesday ruling, Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected that claim. The ruling could have big consequences for the cryptocurrency world.

Since 2016, hundreds of cryptocurrency projects have held Kin-like “initial coin offerings” that raised millions—in a few cases, hundreds of millions—of dollars. Few of these offerings went through the traditional steps required to register a securities offering with the SEC. So Wednesday’s ruling could create legal headaches for existing blockchain projects launched via an ICO. It also limits the options for launching cryptocurrencies in the future.

Judge Hellerstein gave Kik and the SEC three weeks to come up with a joint recommendation on appropriate remedies. Kik says it is considering appealing the ruling.
How a cryptocurrency offering is like an orange grove

A security is an asset that investors purchase in hopes of making a profit. It includes traditional investment vehicles like stocks and bonds, but it also includes a catch-all category called an investment contract. The Supreme Court laid out the legal criteria for investment contracts in a landmark 1946 ruling.

………

In his Wednesday ruling, Hellerstein concluded that similar logic applies to the Kin tokens Kik sold in 2017. Officially, Kin owners are not entitled to any profits generated by the Kin ecosystem. But practically speaking, people bought Kin because they hoped a thriving Kin ecosystem would push up Kin’s value the same way that bitcoins and ether had become more valuable over time.

Hellerstein notes that Kik CEO Ted Livingston repeatedly touted Kin’s potential as an investment opportunity. “If you could grow the demand for it, then the price—the value of that cryptocurrency would go up, such that if you set some aside for yourself at the beginning, you could make a lot of money,” Livingston said.

………

This was a common way to bootstrap a new cryptocurrency during the 2017 ICO boom, and the Kik ruling could slam the door shut on this method for getting a new blockchain project off the ground. Registering as a security comes with a lot of regulations. Complying with those regulations will, at a minimum, require a lot of legal work. And some cryptocurrency projects might not fit into existing SEC rules at all.

This is a good thing.

ICO’s are a recipe for fraud.

Boy, This is Turning into a Sh%$ Show

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First, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale creates the most convincing shirtless suspect audition tape for an episode of Cops ever, and now serial securities fraudster Jacob Wohl, and his partner in crime Jack Burkman, have been charged with election fraud and face the prospect of decades in prison.

The wheels really do seem to be coming off of Trump’s Evil Minions™ right now:

Conservative operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were charged on Thursday for allegedly orchestrating a series of robocalls aimed at suppressing the vote in the November presidential election, Michigan authorities said.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a slew of charges against Burkman, 54, and Wohl, 22, including conspiracy to commit an election law violation and using a computer to commit the crime of election law – intimidating voters. Prosecutors allege the two political operatives were using a robocall system aimed at scaring Detroit voters away from using mail-in voting ballots. The calls, which were made in August, went out to nearly 12,000 Detroit residents.

Both Wohl and Burkman face four felony counts and a maximum sentence of 7 years in prison.

The voice on the call attributed to Wohl and Burkman attempts to trick listeners into not sending in mail-in ballots, falsely warning that the information would be used to track fugitives, collect on credit card debts, and enforce “mandatory vaccines.” The calls also told residents to “beware of vote by mail.”

………

Wohl and Burkman didn’t respond to immediate requests for comment. In August, Burkman denied being behind the robocall, claiming it was suspicious that it was connected to his personal cell phone number.

“No one in their right mind would put their own cell on a robocall,” Burkman told The Daily Beast.

Ummmm ………We’ve seen your other frauds and scams (also here, here, and here) 

You areally ARE that f%$#ing stupid.

………

The attorney general’s office added that during the investigation into the robocalls, investigators communicated with officials in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois—all of whom reported similar robocalls being made to residents in their states. All the calls, they said, were made to residents in “urban areas with significant minority populations,” the Michigan attorney general’s office said.

………

The Michigan charges aren’t the only legal charges facing the pair. Wohl has been charged with two felonies over alleged violations of California securities law. On Saturday, The Daily Beast reported on a secret FBI investigation into Wohl and Burkman over the leak of confidential juror questionnaires and grand jury testimony in the trial of Trump associate Roger Stone.

Wohl and Burkman became notorious online in 2018, after a failed attempt to manufacture a sexual assault allegation against Robert Mueller collapsed in spectacular fashion. Since then, they have tried to create hoaxes against other Trump opponents, but the schemes always fail almost immediately, often due to Wohl and Burkman’s own errors.

Seriously, these folks are flipping out. 

My deepest wish is that the inevitable shrapnel that results from their flying to pieces so spectacularly only injures their fellow travelers.

Another Thursday, More Bad Economic News

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Unemployment claims remained largely unchanged in the last week, which is to say that it’s still about 30% more than any other report that was not in 2020:

New applications for unemployment benefits in the U.S. fell slightly last week but remained between 800,000 and 900,000 for the fifth straight week, reflecting a labor-market recovery that is losing momentum.

Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits fell by 36,000 to a seasonally adjusted 837,000 in the week ended Sept. 26, the Labor Department said Thursday. In a positive sign, the number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover most workers, decreased by 980,000 to about 11.8 million for the week ended Sept. 19. That was the lowest level since March.

The totals for unemployment applications and payments remain well above pre-pandemic peaks but are down significantly from this spring, when the coronavirus pandemic and related shutdowns caused both measures to rise to the highest levels on record back to the 1960s.

………

Thursday’s data was complicated by California pausing the processing of new claims for two weeks. State officials said last month they needed to clear a backlog of nearly 600,000 Californians who have applied for benefits more than 3 weeks earlier, and about 1 million cases where individuals received payments but subsequently modified their claim and are awaiting resolution.

The U.S. Labor Department said Thursday that this week’s national report reflects California’s level during the last week before the pause. Data will be revised at a later date, the government said.

Of more significance, it appears that household income is cratering, which means that the reason that the drop in unemployment claims are flattening out might be that the much touted “recovery” is running out of steam:

A drop in household income and persistently high layoffs are threatening to further slow the U.S. economic recovery, which already appears to be losing momentum as the pandemic continues.

Personal income—what households received from salaries, investments and government aid—fell 2.7% in August as enhanced unemployment checks shrank, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Meanwhile, another 837,000 workers filed for unemployment compensation last week after being recently laid off, the Labor Department said. In total, nearly 12 million workers are receiving unemployment compensation through regular state programs.

The level of weekly jobless claims shows layoffs remain persistent in some industries, and more companies announced cuts this week. American Airlines Group Inc. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. told employees they will go forward with more than 32,000 job cuts Thursday, after lawmakers were unable to agree on a broad coronavirus-relief package. Insurer Allstate Corp. on Wednesday said it planned to lay off 3,800 employees. Walt Disney Co. on Wednesday announced permanent layoffs for 28,000 theme-park workers who were previously on temporary furlough.

The economy up to now has rebounded more quickly than many economists thought. But with federal aid fading and job growth slowing, consumer spending—the key driver of economic activity in the U.S.—could weaken. Economists believe the recovery is entering into a modest and more grinding phase.

We are coasting on the now expired stimulus and supplemental unemployment payments.

Friday’s jobless rate will be interesting, as will the next few weeks of economic data.