Year: 2020

And Here We See the Apotheosis of My Prior Two Posts

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Breonna Taylor’s shooting was the result of a Louisville police department operation to clear out a block in western Louisville that was part of a major gentrification makeover, according to attorneys representing the slain 26-year-old’s family.

Lawyers for Taylor’s family allege in court documents filed in Jefferson Circuit Court Sunday that a police squad — named Place-Based Investigations — had “deliberately misled” narcotics detectives to target a home on Elliott Avenue, leading them to believe they were after some of the city’s largest violent crime and drug rings.

The complaint — which amends an earlier lawsuit filed by Taylor’s mother against the three Louisville officers who fired their weapons into Taylor’s home — claims Taylor was caught up in a case that was less about a drug house on Elliott Avenue and more about speeding up the city’s multi-million dollar Vision Russell development plan.

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Accusations contained in lawsuits do not constitute evidence in a court of law and represent only one side of the argument.

………

“Breonna’s home should never have had police there in the first place,” the attorneys wrote in the filing. “When the layers are peeled back, the origin of Breonna’s home being raided by police starts with a political need to clear out a street for a large real estate development project and finishes with a newly formed, rogue police unit violating all levels of policy, protocol and policing standards.

“Breonna’s death was the culmination of radical political and police conduct.”

It appears that the Mayor and the police were a part of a conspiracy to drive out black residents to created a gentrified neighborhood.

I think that the technical term is “Ethnic Cleansing.”

Speaking the Truth

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The former Mayor of Minneapolis reveals a dirty secret of wypipo, that police brutality against minorities is actually an unspoken desired outcome for most of the white community:

Democrats have largely led big and midsize cities for much of the past half-century. Yet the gaps in socioeconomic outcomes between white people and people of color are by several measures at their worst in the richest, bluest cities of the United States.

How could this be? Because high-profile cultural conservatives ask this question so disingenuously, white liberals have generally brushed aside this reality rather than grappled with its urgency. There’s now a danger that this sidestepping will continue, even after a national evaluation of racism since the brutal police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

As the mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018, as a Minneapolis City Council member from 2006 until 2014 and as a white Democrat, I can say this: White liberals, despite believing we are saying and doing the right things, have resisted the systemic changes our cities have needed for decades. We have mostly settled for illusions of change, like testing pilot programs and funding volunteer opportunities.

These efforts make us feel better about racism, but fundamentally change little for the communities of color whose disadvantages often come from the hoarding of advantage by mostly white neighborhoods.

In Minneapolis, the white liberals I represented as a Council member and mayor were very supportive of summer jobs programs that benefited young people of color. I also saw them fight every proposal to fundamentally change how we provide education to those same young people. They applauded restoring funding for the rental assistance hotline. They also signed petitions and brought lawsuits against sweeping reform to zoning laws that would promote housing affordability and integration.

Nowhere is this dynamic of preserving white comfort at the expense of others more visible than in policing. Whether we know it or not, white liberal people in blue cities implicitly ask police officers to politely stand guard in predominantly white parts of town (where the downside of bad policing is usually inconvenience) and to aggressively patrol the parts of town where people of color live — where the consequences of bad policing are fear, violent abuse, mass incarceration and, far too often, death.

Police brutality and racism is not a bug in much of America, it is a highly desired feature, as are disparities in education, the provision of public services, and segregated neighborhoods.

Leaked Surveys Reveal Problematic Culture in Law Enforcement Courses

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about Blueleaks, a massive collection of lawe enforcement documents that were released by DDoSecrets.

Well, we now have the first big reveal of this cache of documents, and it’s significant.

It appears that instructors at one of the largest law enforcement training programs are open and virulent bigots.

If anyone suggests to you that there are only a few “bad apples”, you need to remind them that the trainers,Derek Chauvin comes to mind, are among the most bigoted and most dismissive of civil rights and basic human decency:

In early September 2017, the Midwest Counterdrug Training Center (MCTC) hosted a course on “narcoterrorism.” By most accounts, it was a helpful few days of lessons on the drug trade and criminal organizations, led by an instructor with years of law enforcement experience.

In surveys, some later praised it as a “wake-up call,” a course with “virtually no room for improvement.”

………

And then, there was this: “I don’t know where to start – as someone who has worked full-time counter-terrorism for the past six years, this course was a complete disappointment. The instruction was long on rants and short on any actual substance. Any substantive material was outdated (some of it more than 20 years old). Much of the material taught is publicly available ‘conspiracy’ theory that has been disproved through investigation.”

The respondent continued, “While the instructor was open about his ‘anti-PC’ beliefs – this is the only time I have ever heard the [N-word] repeatedly used by instructors and students.”

The written review ended with a warning to the MCTC leadership.

“This is a time bomb – if anyone were to record [the teacher’s] rants and leak them to the media your whole program would go down in flames.”

While the “teacher’s rants” were not leaked, this response was, as part of the BlueLeaks hack in June. It’s one of the thousands of surveys filled out following MCTC law enforcement training offered throughout the past decade.

Funded by the Department of Defense and administered by the Iowa National Guard Counterdrug Task Force, the Center has trained “over 190,000 local, tribal, state, and federal law enforcement officers, military members, and prevention and treatment professionals,” according to its website.

………

While thousands responded favorably these courses over the past 10 years, the negative reviews call into question the culture of the organization, in which instructors saying racial slurs or homophobic jokes would still be rated highly by the majority of survey participants.

Some, including the instructor described above, continued to teach for years, despite being flagged repeatedly. According to additional surveys, the above teacher was still leading MCTC courses as recently as March 2020.

………

“Asking students if they ‘were the pitcher or catcher’ may be funny to some but is asking for a lawsuit in front of the wrong audience. Asking if they were going to ‘spit or swallow’ was a similar inappropriate question, as well as referring to the black male in the class as ‘brotha’ multiple times when it was obvious he was uncomfortable with it. Joking about sex assault cases is probably not the best idea considering someone may know a victim.”

………

“If a camera was placed in the room he would be on national news for his statements and views. This course was labeled for ‘drugs’ and just about every example referred to sex,” cautioned another reviewer.

Still, surveys from 2019 show that instructor was still brought back for additional courses.

………

The spread of biased, outdated, or debunked information was another leading concern. The majority of these complaints were leveled at the same instructors identified above for offensive language.

“Many media sources were slightly outdated and notoriously biased,” wrote one commenter in 2015. “Some of the sources used were blatant political rhetoric.”

………

Multiple responders—even those who otherwise ranked the courses favorably—noted a lack of sources outside of Fox News and a lack of examples or trends less than three decades old.

………

Others criticized the actual course material and practical law enforcement learnings offered. A 2013 student mentioned their instructor, “suggested [criminal] subjects not be given a break to get a drink and use the restroom after several hours, which may be considered a civil rights violation.”

………

Numerous comments in this vein referred back to the “reputation of MCTC,” and fears that instructors like these would “degrade” its status or that of other law enforcement departments.

“I found myself embarrassed to admit being part of the National Guard during this class due to instructor’s association with a National Guard affiliated course,” read one 2018 response.

………

“He flat out said in class that he lied all the time in court to cover his partner’s asses. He said multiple times a badge and being a cop means ‘you can do whatever the f%$# you want.’”

Why this is not a lede for every law enforcement section of every paper in the United States is beyond me.

Of Course He Did

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Donald Trump just commuted Roger Stone’s sentence.

While this is clearly within his power, this is a plenary power of the Presidency, it is also clear that this is an attempt to cover up Trump wrongdoing, so it is obstruction of justice by Trump, even if it would be almost impossible to prove.

I really want this motherf%$#er to spend the rest of his life in prison:

Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser who was to spend three years and four months in jail for crimes related to the Russia investigation.

 In a statement released on Friday evening, the White House denounced the prosecution of Stone on charges stemming from “the Russia Hoax” investigation. “Roger Stone has already suffered greatly,” the statement reads. “He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!”

………

The commutation does not erase Stone’s felony convictions the way a pardon would, but it allows Stone to avoid setting foot in prison for his crimes.

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While not unexpected, Trump’s move to spare Stone from prison will only increase alarm among critics concerned that the Trump administration has interfered with the justice system in order to shield the president and his friends.

Unfortunately, if Zombie-Obama Biden wins in November, he’s likely not to pursue any of the credible allegations of corruption from this administration, because of that whole, “Looking forward, not back,” bullsh%$.

Tweet of the Day

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In the future, definitions in @Dictionarycom are going to need to include what “essential worker” came to mean during the COVID crisis.

You were essential, but your health, your income, your life, your safety net, and your well being turns out are “not as essential.” 2/

— Andy Slavitt @ 🏡 (@ASlavitt) July 7, 2020

The whole Twitter thread is worth a read.

It tersely (Twitter, you know) documents how the weakest, poorest, and most vulnerable are being made to bear the burden of dealing with a pandemic than the rich, who have looted the sh%$ out of this crisis.

It’s why I want the Guillotine concession when the revolution comes.

A Win for Justice and Transparency

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The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that, notwithstanding a contract with the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, state law prohibits the destruction of police disciplinary records, so this contract provision is unenforceable.

In response, I expect the police to ignore the law and destroy the records anyway, because, for them, laws are only for other people:

Chicago police misconduct records that are more than five years old will remain available to the public, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Thursday, turning away an attempt by the city’s police union to have them destroyed as a matter of course.

The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police had sued, contending that such records should be eliminated after five years under the city’s police collective bargaining agreement. A court arbitrator had called for the city and the FOP to come to an agreement on the issue, but the city had successfully challenged that decision at the appellate level.

The state’s high court found 6-1 that the arbitration outcome violated clear public policy in the state’s Local Records Act, siding with City Hall.

“In sum, we find there is a ‘well-defined and dominant’ public policy rooted in state law concerning the procedures for the proper retention and destruction of government records,” the majority wrote.

………

FOP President John Catanzara on Thursday said he “couldn’t be more disappointed” with the court’s decision, and said he is instructing the union’s lawyers to see if there is a way to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It goes against every ounce of logic there is,” Catanzara said. “The contractual rights that were in our collective bargaining agreement for the better part of four decades were set in stone.”

And that provision was probably illegal that whole time, so Mr. Catanzara can go Cheney himself.

Provisions like this has allowed cops to literally get away with murder for years.

Gee, You Think?

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The director of the Tulsa health department is saying that Donald Trump’s damp squib of a rally probably led to a surge in Covid-19 cases.

Well, color me completely not surprised:

President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa that drew thousands of people in late June, along with large protests that accompanied it, “likely contributed” to a dramatic surge in new coronavirus cases, Tulsa City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said Wednesday.

 Tulsa County reported 261 confirmed new cases on Monday, a one-day record high, and another 206 cases on Tuesday.

 Although the Health Department’s policy is to not publicly identify individual settings where people may have contracted the virus, Dart said those large gatherings “more than likely” contributed to the spike.

 “In the past few days, we’ve seen almost 500 new cases, and we had several large events just over two weeks ago, so I guess we just connect the dots,” Dart said.

As the saying goes, “バカにつける薬はない”.*

*Pronounced in Japanese,”baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.

OK, This is Not What I Expected

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The Supreme Court just ruled that about ½ of Oklahoma remains an Indian reservation, and so sovereign land, at least to the degree that reservations are sovereign in the United States:

The first thing we learned this morning with the announcement of the decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma was that Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t manage to be in the majority in every single 5-4 decision this term. Today, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for a majority of five (joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan), with Roberts writing for the four dissenters and Justice Clarence Thomas appending a brief solo dissent to assert that the court lacked jurisdiction to hear this case at all.

The court held today that land in northeastern Oklahoma reserved for the Creek Nation since the 19th century remains a reservation for the purpose of a federal statute that gives the federal government exclusive jurisdiction to commit certain major crimes committed by “[a]ny Indian” in “the Indian country.” The court’s holding means that state courts in Oklahoma had no jurisdiction to convict petitioner Jimcy McGirt, who is an enrolled member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, of three serious sexual offenses that took place on the reservation.

The decision is a stunning reaffirmance of the nation’s obligations to Native Americans. It confirms the existence of the largest tract of reservation land in the country, about 19 million acres encompassing the entire eastern half of Oklahoma. The court took almost two full terms to decide this question. It first heard oral argument in a predecessor case, Sharp v Murphy (in which Gorsuch was recused), in the fall of 2018, before restoring Murphy to the calendar this term and then, instead of hearing re-argument, granting and hearing oral argument in May on the same question in McGirt (in which Gorsuch could participate). (In a one-sentence, unsigned opinion, the court today also disposed of Murphy, ruling in favor of inmate Patrick Murphy “for the reasons stated in” McGirt.) In substance, the court “hold[s] the government to its word,” reaffirming the continuing existence of the reservations that the federal government promised to the Five Civilized Tribes in the 1830s to persuade them to give up their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama and walk along the Trail of Tears to the lands at issue.

As Indian law cases go, the dispute in this one is easy to understand: whether the land once granted to the Creek Nation as a reservation retains that status. The majority of five says that it does, because Congress has not adopted any single statute that explicitly terminates that status; the dissenters say that it does not, reasoning that the total body of congressional intrusions in the area, culminating in the development of eastern Oklahoma as a predominantly non-Native American area, adequately illustrates Congress’ intent to disestablish the reservation.

Gee, what happened to strict constructionism there?  

Gorsuch begins by documenting the clarity of the historical record establishing the creation of the Creek reservation: a series of treaties and statutes that, among other things “solemnly guarantied” the land to the tribe, “forever set apart as a home for said Creek Nation,” “no portion [of which] shall ever be embraced or included within … any Territory or State.”

………

For Gorsuch, though, the allotment process sheds no light on the outcome of the case: “For years, States have sought to suggest that allotments automatically ended reservations, and for years courts have rejected the argument.” Rather, “this Court has explained repeatedly that Congress does not disestablish a reservation simply by allowing the transfer of individual plots.” Gorsuch acknowledges that the proponents of allotment hoped that, after the land was parceled out, the reservations eventually would be abolished, but he concludes that “to equate allotment with disestablishment would confuse the first step of a march with arrival at its destination.”

Finding allotment insufficient to show disestablishment, Gorsuch turns next to the many “other ways Congress intruded on the Creek’s promised right to self-governance.” He discusses those at some length, but, as with allotment, his overarching view is that the various “laws represented serious blows to the Creek … [b]ut, just as plainly, … left the Tribe with significant sovereign functions over the lands in question.”

………

There is a notable symmetry in the articulation of a strong voice in support of Native Americans by the only justice with roots in the western part of the nation. Observers of the court know that it frequently has given short shrift to the promises and obligations that Congress has undertaken for Native Americans, and that a decision so firmly vitalizing the nation’s obligations to Native Americans does not come along every year. It will be interesting to watch in the years to come to see whether Gorsuch continues to stake out an interest in the topic.

I do not know what this means from a functional perspective, except that members of the various tribes encompassed by the reservation will not have to be prosecuted in a federal court.

However, there might be significant changes in the regulatory and tax regimes as a result of this, as well as potential renegotiation of energy leases in the area.

Thursday Unemployment Numbers Still Suck

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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.

Handmaiden’s Tale, SCOTUS Edition

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Two rulings today.

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.

Well, That Went Well

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Two years ago, Facebook commissioned an independent audit of the civil rights impact of the platform.

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.

………

“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.

………

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.

………

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.

Yeah, Not Surprised

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Revenue Increased Even During the Covid Shutdown

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.

………

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.

………

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.

I Am Feeling Way Too Much Schadenfreude over This

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The most wack-doodle politician in Latin America, Jair Bolsonaro, has tested positive for Covid-19.

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.

………

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. 

Of course he expressed no contrition.  That would require a level of self-awareness that he lacks.

I’ll Have What She’s Having

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Preach It!

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 This Take Seven Weeks?

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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.

………

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.

………

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?

Ditch Mitch

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel, never does anything unless it presents an opportunity to screw ordinary people to favor his patrons.

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.

………

“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.”

………

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.

………

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 Am Legitimately Pleased by This News

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I had figured that the rat-bastards had won, but a Federal Judge has just shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline.

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.

………

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.