Year: 2020

No Endorsement, Uncle Joe

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Democratic Socialists of America, (DSA) has declined to endorse Joe Biden for President.

Given Biden’s long history of sucking up to banks, racists, and sexual harassers, and the carceral state, this should surprise no one.

Political organizations do not vote, and, “But Donald Trump,” is not a reason to contradict one’s stated values.

Of course, this non-endorsement will be used to blame the left, when Biden loses, because an honest account of the incompetence and corruption of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) would result in too many nepotism hires having to find honest work.

Following the withdrawal of Bernie Sanders from the presidential race, our country has lost the only viable Presidential candidate advocating the comprehensive reform we need to address this pandemic head-on. Sanders’s exit leaves Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. His differences with Sanders and the broader left could not be starker, as was recently made clear when he committed to vetoing Medicare for All, Sanders’s signature legislative priority. Biden’s recent, disgraceful embrace of anti-Chinese xenophobia in his general election campaign, and credible allegations against him, are dangerous examples of how corporate Democrats continue to fail at stopping the ugly advance of far-right politics, racism, and misogyny.

The Democratic Socialists of America will not be endorsing Biden. We fully agree with Senator Sanders that taking on the reactionary, racist, and nationalist right wing represented by Donald Trump is imperative for the survival of millions of working-class people across the country and the world. We believe that the only way to beat the radical right once and for all is through a socialist movement that draws millions of disillusioned working-class people, here and abroad, into the political arena. We will continue to welcome the millions of people who supported Bernie’s platform and are looking for a political home.

We also recognize this moment to strategically strengthen our movements and power.  We will fight like hell against the Trump agenda by running pressure campaigns, engaging in mutual aid, helping to build strong, democratic unions, building coalitions with those organizing against capitalism, acting in solidarity with immigrants and incarcerated people against deportation and detention, working to protect tenants and unhoused people, organizing to expand voting rights, locations, and the right to vote by mail. We will demand COVID relief that addresses inequality through a lens of reparations, push for an end to sanctions that are killing millions and fuel militarism in many parts of the world, and will back democratic socialist candidates at the grassroots level. That’s because we know that politics does not begin every four years with a national election: when we get organized, we become the agents of the change that will win the better world the working class desires and deserves.

Were the DSA to engage in obvious hypocrisy by endorsing Biden, it would damage the DSA, and Biden would get nothing from it.

“Vote for the slightly less awful rapist,” is a political strategy that would destroy DSA.

Some Art Director is a Troll

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I see the Pentagon, Angkor Wat, and a Delta Hub

To be fair, he is a damn good troll , though.

Popular Mechanics has an article about something called Racetrack memory, which has the promise to revolutionize memory storage.

It probably doesn’t, because we get one of these stories every few months, and it rarely pans out.

What the good folks at Naked Capitalism noticed was that the circuit board shown in the lead image has a number of relatively prominent landmarks.

You can find more if you go to the Flikr page and hover over the image.

I really hope that he doesn’t get in trouble over this.

The Ukraine is Being the Ukraine Again

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As part of an investigation into “Organized Crime”, a senior Ukrainian law enforcement official demanded a list names, addresses, and phone numbers of all Jews in the city of Kolomyya.

Yeah, there is noting at all suspicious or antisemitic about this:

A Ukrainian Jewish group accused the nation’s police force of “open anti-Semitism” after a high-ranking police official requested a list of all Jews in the western city of Kolomyya as part of an inquiry into organized crime.

The official request to the head of Kolomyya’s Jewish community is dated February 18, 2020, according to a photograph of the document that Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, shared on Twitter Sunday.

“Please provide us the following information regarding the Orthodox Jewish religious community of Kolomyya, namely: The organization’s charter; list of members of the Jewish religious community, with indication of data, mobile phones and their places of residence,” read the letter.

The letter was signed by Myhaylo Bank, a high-ranking officer in the national police force who handles organized crime. The letter did not explain his unit’s particular interest in Kolomyya’s Jews.

They just need this information so as to smoothly conduct the annual Stepan Bandera memorial march and pogrom.

Nothing to see here, move along.

OOPS!

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In a court filing, the FBI mistakenly revealed the name of the Saudi official who was (allegedly) providing support to the 911 hijackers.

A sharp-eyed reporter at Yahoo News (of all outlets) noticed that the name was not redacted on a now withdrawn court document.

It turns out to be one Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, who reported directly to the US Ambassador,  Bandar, aka Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, aka “Bandar Bush” for his closeness to the Bush family.

Did I mention that he was also at one point head of Saudi intelligence?

How convenient:

The FBI inadvertently revealed one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive secrets about the Sept. 11 terror attacks: the identity of a  mysterious Saudi Embassy official in Washington who agents suspected had directed crucial support to two of the al-Qaida hijackers.

The disclosure came in a new declaration filed in federal court by a senior FBI official in response to a lawsuit brought by families of 9/11 victims that accuses the Saudi government of complicity in the terrorist attacks.

The declaration was filed last month but unsealed late last week. According to a spokesman for the 9/11 victims’ families, it represents a major breakthrough in the long-running case, providing for the first time an apparent confirmation that FBI agents investigating the attacks believed they had uncovered a link between the hijackers and the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

………

“This shows there is a complete government cover-up of the Saudi involvement,” said Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the 9/11 families whose father was killed in the attacks. “It demonstrates there was a hierarchy of command that’s coming from the Saudi Embassy to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs [in Los Angeles] to the hijackers.”

………

After being contacted by Yahoo News on Monday, Justice Department officials notified the court and withdrew the FBI’s declaration from the public docket. “The document was incorrectly filed in this case,” the docket now reads.

………

Ironically, the declaration identifying the Saudi official in question was intended to support recent filings by Attorney General William Barr and acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell barring the public release of the Saudi official’s name and all related documents, concluding they are “state secrets” that, if disclosed, could cause “significant harm to the national security.”

Who says irony is dead?

………

A few lines from the bottom of page 7 is the unredacted statement, “(i.e., any and all records referring or relating to Jarrah);”.

Oops.

But while Sanborn’s 40-page declaration blacks out the Saudi official’s name in most instances, in one it failed to do so — a discrepancy first noted this week by a Yahoo News reporter.

………

A redacted copy of a three-and-a-half page October 2012 FBI “update” about the investigation stated that FBI agents had uncovered “evidence” that Thumairy and Bayoumi had been “tasked” to assist the hijackers by yet another individual whose name was blacked out, prompting lawyers for the families to refer to this person as “the third man” in what they argue is a Saudi-orchestrated conspiracy.

Describing the request by lawyers for the 9/11 families to depose that individual under oath, Sanborn’s declaration says in one instance that it involves “any and all records referring to or relating to Jarrah.”

The reference is to Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, a mid-level Saudi Foreign Ministry official who was assigned to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., in 1999 and 2000. His duties apparently included overseeing the activities of Ministry of Islamic Affairs employees at Saudi-funded mosques and Islamic centers within the United States.

Relatively little is known about Jarrah, but according to former embassy employees, he reported to the Saudi ambassador in the United States (at the time Prince Bandar), and that he was later reassigned to the Saudi missions in Malaysia and Morocco, where he is believed to have served as recently as last year.

Also, as to is his current whereabouts?

 ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Is that a bone saw I hear?

Jarrah “was responsible for the placement of Ministry of Islamic Affairs employees known as guides and propagators posted to the United States, including Fahad Al Thumairy,” according to a separate declaration by Catherine Hunt, a former FBI agent based in Los Angeles who has been assisting the families in the case.

Hunt conducted her own investigation into the support provided to the hijackers in Southern California. “The FBI believed that al-Jarrah was ‘supporting’ and ‘maintaining’ al-Thumairy during the 9/11 investigation,” she said in her declaration.

I’m shocked.

Linkage

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This will make you hate your old (new) toaster FOREVER, and there are models of this toaster from 1948 still working.

The Latest Right Wing Flying Monkey Panic

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Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell has achieved high rotational momentum

Almost a year ago, the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct announced that it was listing that the Federalist Society was explicitly an advocacy organization, (patently obvious) and so it was prohibited for sitting federal judges to attend their events.
Now, the right wingers dedicated to subverting fair trials and just in the United States are throwing a sh%$ fit over this:

The left doesn’t care about judges; the right does. If you want proof, look no further than a major campaign underway in conservative circles around a new ethics rule that could undercut the power of the Federalist Society. Haven’t heard of it? That’s the point.

The rule change, which was proposed by the ethical advisory arm of the federal judiciary and began circulating in January, would ban judges from being members of groups like the Federalist Society, the right-wing legal group that has been central to Trump’s transformation of the courts, and the American Constitution Society, a liberal legal group. It wouldn’t affect the ability to attend and participate in Federalist Society and American Constitution Society panels and events; the proposal simply says that active membership in these organizations is inconsistent with a judge’s ethical obligations. And conservatives are up in arms.

………

Twenty-nine Republican senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sent a letter to the chair of the Committee on Codes of Conduct in March, urging they “withdraw this flawed draft opinion.” Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., in a statement from his office, told National Review that it’s “wrong to target the Federalist Society,” calling the draft rule the “product of liberal smear campaign that will erode confidence in an independent and fair Judiciary.” Democratic senators, for the most part, have made no effort to publicly defend the rule or weigh in on the debate.

Shorter Ben Sasse, who is inadvertently channeling Groucho Marx, “Who ya gonna believe me or your own lying eyes?”

Needless to say, the rent-a-crowd is going insane over this.

In New York, Corporate Farms are Failing, Family Farms are Thriving

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It turns out that the Covid-19 food distribution disruptions in New York state are hammering large mono-culture farms, while family farms are thriving.

Once again, we see that financializing and corporatizing productive businesses ends up producing narrow and brittle business that cannot function during any significant disruption:

One Wednesday in early March, Abra Morawiec realized something seismic was happening at her farm stand. The month had been pretty quiet at the Feisty Acres table in the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan. But that day, at the very start of social distancing, she had sold out of everything by 2 p.m.

“I had to go home three hours early,” Ms. Morawiec said. After wondering whether her small farm on the North Fork of Long Island would survive the pandemic, this was good news.

But the boom for Feisty Acres has coincided with a virtual collapse at large-scale operations like Crescent Duck Farm, also based on Long Island. In operation for more than a century, Crescent produces a million ducks a year — about 4 percent of the industry total — and was the supplier of choice for fine-dining restaurants in New York, including Jean-Georges and the River Cafe. Those restaurants are closed now, and Crescent has been forced to lay off 80 percent of its workers.

When the lockdown came to the metropolitan area, the earth shifted under New York’s farm-to-table supply chain. All farms are reckoning with the disappearance of the restaurant market and the logistics of getting food directly to consumers. But the agricultural landscape has completely reversed.

Farms with a single crop meant for use in restaurants, like microgreens or edible flowers, face disaster, while those with diverse offerings (and especially root vegetables) have become bulwarks of the social order. After decades of struggle to prove they are sustainable businesses, small farms seem to be flourishing, while factory farms, in many cases, find themselves too big to pivot.

Our corporate just in time economy is never going to support us when things go pear shaped.

This is Terrorism and Racketeering

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In a concerted effort to intimidate and terrorize people reporting coronavirus violations, the far right is doxxing and threatening the life of people who report incidents to authorities.

Why anti-gang statutes are not being invoked against these motherf%$#ers is beyond me:

Aram Westergreen, a construction worker idled last month in the COVID-19 pandemic, filled out an online Washington state form recently to report a pawn shop open despite a ban on nonessential businesses.

Westergreen lives in Tacoma, Wash., less than an hour from the nursing home where the first COVID-19 death in the United States was reported in late February. With more than 900 deaths statewide since, and a stay-at-home order in place since March 23, Westergreen, like many of his neighbors, has suffered from lost income, but regards social distancing as critical to slow the spread of the pathogen.

To his alarm on Thursday, he opened his email to find a message entitled “Lowlife scumbag whistle-blower snitches.” It was sent from a stranger to about 100 people, informing them that their names, reports and identifying information had been released by the government and shared on social media.

………

The emailer was correct in one respect. The Washington Military Department, which is coordinating state response to the pandemic, had responded to public records requests by releasing spreadsheets containing more than 7,600 reports of suspected stay-home violations, including email addresses and phone numbers of those lodging complaints.

The use of terrorism and threats are a very deliberate act by right wing organizations, and local and state authorities should be pursuing them under anti-gang statutes, and federal law enforcement agencies should pursue them under anti-terrorism statutes.

It’s time to pry their guns from their cold, dead hands.

I Want to See Elon Musk Frog-Marched out of His Offices in Handcuffs

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Tesla Factory Parking Lot Today

Alameda county officials have been insisting on maintaining a lock-down, and everyone’s favorite sociopath* Elon Musk has opened the factory anyway, putting thousands of his employees, and tens of thousands or their family members at risk.

What’s more, he dared authorities to arrest him.

Simply put, Elon is throwing mama from the train because he wants his stock options to vest.

To quote some anonymous California pol, “F%$# Elon Musk.”

Arrest everyone in the factory, and put Elon at the back of the line for processing, so that he spends 2-3 days in the slam incommunicado.

2 days of jail food should beat a little bit of humility into him.

It will be a learning experience for him, and a warning for the rest of the law-breakers who claim to be noble “disrupters” when they are criminals:

The fight between Tesla and local officials regarding the reopening of a manufacturing plant escalated Monday after chief executive Elon Musk tweeted his plans and mentioned the potential for arrests.

“Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

It is one of the most prominent examples of a powerful business figure defying local health orders amid the response to the novel coronavirus. Tesla on Saturday filed suit against Alameda County, where its Fremont, Calif., factory is located, seeking an injunction against orders to stay closed. The suit alleged violations of the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

Neetu Balram, a spokeswoman for Alameda County, said in a statement that the county hoped to work with Tesla to avoid any further escalation of the issue.

F%$# that.  Lock him up, and make sure that when he is arraigned, he is photographed in a prison uniform.

Just because he got lucky (and broke some banking regulations) and became a billionaire is no reason for authorities to allow him to arrogantly and openly flout the law.

*But I’m an engineer, not a psychologist, dammit!†
†I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

What a Sh%$ Show

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The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was a failure, largely because it hot swappable mission module system created an underarmored and under performing frigate, though they were rather speedy.

Well, now the Navy is trying to replace their latest failure with the FFG(X), which would replace the long serving Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate.

The problem is that, because of the inevitable mission creep, the cost and weight are completely out of line with a frigate.

They will be replacing the 4100 ton displacement Perry frigate with a 7400 ton ship, which continuing to procure the 9,700 ton Arleigh Burke class, only it’s supposed to be half the price.

Ships, much like hamburger, and purchased by the pound, so the navy’s promise of a relatively inexpensive ship was always a fools errand, but even so the original estimate of $940 million, which is a ripoff to begin with, since the FREMM from which it is derived costs about €600M ($650M), but it now appears that it will cost about $1.4B a ship.

This is insane and unsustainable:

The Navy truncated orders for its ill-fated Littoral Combat Ship because the small vessels were vulnerable to attack and too lightly armed. Now, a new report suggests that the frigate intended to replace it may cost 56% more than projected partly because it’s bigger.

The service projects that 18 of 20 new frigates will cost an average of $940 million each in inflation-adjusted dollars. The first two are estimated at about $1 billion each because of one-time costs.
relates to Big Navy Frigate Risks Oversized $1.4 Billion Cost Per Ship

But the Congressional Research Service alerted lawmakers this week to “a potential issue” worth reviewing: the accuracy of Navy cost estimates considering that “ships of the same general type and complexity that are built under similar production conditions” tend to have similar — and substantially higher — costs per ton of displacement.

CRS raised a warning because, at 7,400 tons, the frigate to be built in Wisconsin by a unit of Italy’s Fincantieri SpA is about three-fourths the size of an Arleigh Burke destroyer and carries many of the same weapons systems. The latest of the destroyers are estimated to cost $1.9 billion apiece.

That could put the cost for most of the frigates at as much as $1.47 billion each, “an increase of about 56%,” based on comparing their tonnage to the destroyers’, the research service said.

CRS suggested lawmakers ask the Navy the basis for “its view that the frigate — a ship about three-quarters as large” as the destroyer, with installed capabilities that are “in many cases” similar — “can be procured for about one-half the cost.”

It can’t, and it’s over priced, and they are demanding too much from the platform, and they making the ship even larger than the model from which it is derived, (The FREMM is about 6,400 tons) so it’s likely to end up costing more than the Burkes.

Cancel this now, and procure a frigate, and not a destroyer with a slightly smaller gun.

I Hate Charcoal Briquettes

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I like to grill, and I like grilling with charcoal.

I think that gas is a crutch for weak, and when smoking, I throw in some wood for flavoring.

Do to Covid-19, I’m trying to keep my traveling to a minimum, and the nearest store only had Kingsford® briquettes.

Chunk charcoal is made by taking pieces of wood, and heating them in a low oxygen oven to drive off all the non-carbon compounds.

Briquettes, on the other hand, are made from sawdust cooked in low oxygen ovens, and then combined with a binders (Lime and Starch) and a release compound (Borax) and pressed into a pillow shape in a mold.

Since I use a chimney fire starter, (Yes, I know, Amazon is evil, but if you buy from this link, they pay me) where you place paper at the bottom of a tube, and charcoal at the top of the tube, and set the paper alight, which ignites the charcoal with no residue in about 10 minutes.

This compares favorably to lighter fluid, where you need to wait about 20-25 minutes, and produces a lot more air pollution.

Unfortunately, it has been my experience that when I use briquettes, there is about an additional 5-10 minutes of foul smelling smoke as the binders and release compounds burn off.

It does not effect the quality of the food, and when you add a few briquettes to an existing fire, the smoke is minimal, but startup is slower and nastier than chunk charcoal.

As an FYI, I grilled dinner for Sharon* for Mother’s Day.

I grilled steak for Sharon and myself, and burgers for the kids, who do not like steaks and roasts.

I also did up some zucchini with salt, pepper, garlic power, onion powder, and olive oil on the grill in foil pouches, and grilled some pineapple (add a small amount of kosher salt to draw out the liquid so that it can carmelize) for dessert.

And a good nosh was had by all.

*Love of my life, light of the  cosmos, she  who must be obeyed, my wife.

In a World of Contemptible People, Nancy Pelosi Shines

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While Nancy Pelosi is studiously avoiding progressive proposals to help everyone, she is planning to extend bailout money to lobbying organizations.

Nancy Pelosi is using the shutdown of Congress to promulgate her agenda without a nod to progressives, and now she is trying to throw federal money to the lobbyists.

Seeing as how Pelosi has the first Democratic Party opponent in the general election in years, as a result of California’s jungle primary, it would be a very good time to donate to Shadid Buttar’s campaign.

I get that she’s an effective Speaker of the House, she knows how to count to 218, but she is a disgrace to the party:

………

Meanwhile, Pelosi has been talking about what she’ll add to the next bill, and it’s relatively unconstrained by wish lists. One of the elements is changing the eligibility standards for PPP small business loans to include 501(c)(4) and (c)(6) nonprofit organizations. You might know (c)(6) organizations by another name: lobbyists. Unbelievably, K Street has asked for a bailout and is on the road to getting it. I mean lobbyists are good at lobbying, I guess.

As far as I can tell, lobbyists have not stopped lobbying amid the crisis. There’s been a “frenzy” of lobbying around Mitch McConnell’s desire for a corporate liability shield from coronavirus-related lawsuits, for example. Why do high-powered lobby shops need a free $10 million per firm, exactly? Also, PPP will be out of money by the time any bill passes. Does tweaking eligibility signal giving more to this program, in part to just shovel money at lobbying firms?

Meanwhile, Jayapal’s bill to guarantee payroll support from the government for the duration of the crisis was “very worthy of consideration,” said Pelosi. That’s code for “nice work but it’s not getting in the bill.”

The House Democratic slogan is “for the people.” And that’s selectively true. Pelosi listens to some people, powerful people. And she pays lip service to others. She does this because she knows she can get away with it. There’s been essentially no dissent from those on the losing end of that equation. The House still doesn’t even have remote voting in place, and caucuses are doing Zoom calls rather than official hearings. Hundreds of members of Congress representing hundreds of millions of people have been disenfranchised. If there’s state and local government aid in a future bill (if it ever happens), progressives are going to shrug and support something with a lobbyist bailout in it. You can see it now.

Seriously, the members of her district need to toss her geriatric ass out of Congress.

Her policy of waiting until the Republicans f%$# up so badly that she gets a majority is doing long term damage to the party and the nation.

Seriously, just donate to donate to Shadid Buttar’s campaign.

Amazon is Evil, Part MMMMDCCCXXXVII

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A fish, as the saying goes, rots from the head, and Amazon is rotten from head to tail:

Amazon workers in southern California’s industrial heartland say the company’s policies are forcing sick employees to work and that warehouses are refusing to comply with a state paid sick leave law meant to prevent Covid-19 outbreaks.

………

On 1 May, Amazon ended a policy allowing unlimited unpaid time off, a measure adopted at the start of the coronavirus crisis that allowed workers to take time off for any reason. They would forgo wages, but if they were concerned about their safety or had new childcare responsibilities due to lockdowns, they could stay home without losing their jobs.

Without the policy, workers say they could now be fired if they miss shifts. They worry the reversal will result in sick and vulnerable people showing up for shifts because they can’t risk termination. The health concerns are particularly serious in the Inland Empire, which has some of the worst air quality in the US and disproportionately high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

Employees also shared emails showing that Amazon has dismissed some paid sick leave requests by claiming a California law intended to provide supplemental sick leave during the pandemic does not apply to the warehouses.

………

A labor spokesperson for the state, however, told the Guardian that the law does apply to warehouses such as Amazon’s centers, noting that the order has a broad definition of “food facility”, which includes any operations that store or package food for human consumption.

………

On 16 April, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, passed an executive order providing food sector workers two weeks of supplemental paid sick leave if they have to isolate due to Covid-19 concerns. The law covers “workers at warehouses where food is stored” and is aimed at protecting consumers from the virus and offering additional support to essential workers whose jobs involve the food supply.

Amazon warehouses in the industrial neighborhoods of San Bernardino and Riverside counties handle a wide range of packages, including food items. But employees say that when they have asked about Newsom’s order in recent weeks, the human resources department has ignored their questions or responded that the facilities are not considered part of the food sector.

………

The company says in addition to the time off it provided before the coronavirus pandemic, it now gives two weeks of paid time off for infected employees and those presumed to have Covid-19. But in one recent case, a worker who tested positive only received his pay after a BuzzFeed reporter inquired about it, and employees across the country have reported difficulties getting any sick pay during the pandemic.

California’s law also appears to be broader than Amazon’s policy, requiring paid leave for workers who have to isolate due to health concerns, including if they live with someone sick or exposed, and it says they are entitled to “immediately” start leave upon request.

Seriously, if there is a company that needs aggressive and over the top antitrust enforcement more than Amazon, I have not heard of it.

Good Riddance

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Seriously, having Google running your life sounds even worse than George Orwell’s worst nightmares:

When Google sibling Sidewalk Labs announced in 2017 a $50 million investment into a project to redevelop a portion of Toronto’s waterfront, it seemed almost too good to be true. Someday soon, Sidewalk Labs promised, Torontonians would live and work in a 12-acre former industrial site in skyscrapers made from timber—a cheaper and more sustainable building material. Streets paved with a new sort of light-up paver would let the development change its design in seconds, able to play host to families on foot and to self-driving cars. Trash would travel through underground chutes. Sidewalks would heat themselves. Forty percent of the thousands of planned apartments would be set aside for low- and middle-income families. And the Google sister company founded to digitize and techify urban planning would collect data on all of it, in a quest to perfect city living.

………

But Sidewalk Labs’ vision was in trouble long before the pandemic. Since its inception, the project had been criticized by progressive activists concerned about how the Alphabet company would collect and protect data, and who would own that data. Conservative Ontario premier Doug Ford, meanwhile, wondered whether taxpayers would get enough bang from the project’s bucks. New York-based Sidewalk Labs wrestled with its local partner, the waterfront redevelopment agency, over ownership of the project’s intellectual property and, most critically, its financing. At times, its operators seemed confounded by the vagaries of Toronto politics. The project had missed deadline after deadline.

The partnership took a bigger hit last summer, when Sidewalk Labs released a splashy and even more ambitious 1,524-page master plan for the lot that went well beyond what the government had anticipated, and for which the company pledged to spend up to $1.3 billion to complete. The redevelopment group wondered whether some of Sidewalk Labs’ proposals related to data collection and governance were even “in compliance with applicable laws.” It balked at a suggestion that the government commit millions to extend public transit into the area, a commitment, the group reminded the company, that it could not make on its own.

Seriously, giving your city to a profit driven ghoulish mega-corporation seems to be hihg on the list of really stupid ideas.

Good that it is over.

Blaming Poor People, Just Because

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Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is blaming impoverished meat packing workers for their dying, saying that they are the ones who are causing the Covid-19 spread through the home and social aspects of their home lives.

Basically, he’s saying, “F%$# the poors, because they are evil. If they weren’t evil, they wouldn’t be poors.”

The country’s top health official downplayed concerns over the public health conditions inside meatpacking plants, suggesting on a call with lawmakers that workers were more likely to catch coronavirus based on their social interactions and group living situations, three participants said.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar told a bipartisan group that he believed infected employees were bringing the virus into processing plants where a rash of cases have killed at least 20 workers and forced nearly two-dozen plants to close, according to three people on the April 28 call.

Those infections, he said, were linked more to the “home and social” aspects of workers’ lives rather than the conditions inside the facilities, alarming some on the call who interpreted his remarks as faulting workers for the outbreaks, the people said.

“He was essentially turning it around, blaming the victim and implying that their lifestyle was the problem,” said Rep. Ann Kuster (D-N.H.), who told POLITICO that Azar’s comments left her deeply concerned about the administration’s priorities in fighting the pandemic. “Their theory of the case is that they are not becoming infected in the meat processing plant, they’re becoming infected because of the way they live in their home.”

………
Azar emphasized the need to keep the plants open, according to the three people on the call. He also theorized that workers were largely not becoming infected at the meatpacking plants, and were instead contracting the coronavirus from their communities.

Azar noted in particular that many meatpacking workers live in congregate housing, allowing that more testing at facilities would help but that the bigger issue was employees’ home environments. One possible solution was to send more law enforcement to those communities to better enforce social distancing rules, he added, according to two of the lawmakers on the call.

Basically, he wants to send the Pinkertons into to break the strikes by breaking heads.

“Law enforcement is not going to solve the problem,” Kuster said. “It was so far off base.”

An HHS spokesperson on Wednesday declined to offer any evidence supporting Azar’s assertions and said the department doesn’t comment on specifics of conversations with members of Congress, but contended that “this is an inaccurate representation of Secretary’s Azar’s comments during the discussion.”

What should be noted here is that this attitude is very much mainstream Republican dogma:  Poor people suffer because they deserve to, and they deserve it even more because of their dark complexions.

This has been the case as far back as when Gerald Ford was President, and called for people to be forced to sell their cars before getting unemployment compensation.

What a Whiny Baby

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In his continuing quest to maximize his convenience at the expense of the health and lives of his workers, Elon Musk has thrown a tantrum over Alameda County’s decision to maintain to its lock-down on the factory. 

He is threatening to move Tesla headquarters (maybe 50 people, big deal) and the factory (a multibillion dollar endeavor that would involve having to retrain an new workforce, and would take years, yeah right) to Texas or Nevada, because he isn’t getting what he wants precisely when he wants.

Why do people think that this wanker is a genius?

Elon Musk and local health officials in California clashed on Saturday over the timing of the reopening of Tesla’s factory in Fremont, with the company’s chief executive pushing for an immediate return and the county’s government seeking a delay of about a week.

In a series of tweets, Mr. Musk said he would move the company’s headquarters out of California to Texas or Nevada.

The tweets came a day after health officials from Alameda County told Tesla that it was not yet allowed to resume production of electric vehicles in Fremont because of fears that the coronavirus could spread among the company’s workers. Manufacturers have been allowed to restart work in other parts of the state that have had less severe outbreaks of the virus.

“Frankly, this is the final straw,” Mr. Musk said on Twitter. “Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will depend on how Tesla is treated in the future.”

In a separate tweet, Mr. Musk said Tesla would file a lawsuit against Alameda County.

………

Scott Haggerty, the county supervisor for the district in Alameda County where Tesla’s Fremont plant is located, said on Saturday that he had been confident that county health officials and Tesla executives were close to an agreement on reopening the plant on May 18. But, Mr. Haggerty said, that appeared to be unacceptable to Mr. Musk, who wanted to open the plant on May 8.

“We were working on a lot of policies and procedures to help operate that plant and quite frankly, I think Tesla did a pretty good job, and that’s why I had it to the point where on May 18, Tesla would have opened,” Mr. Haggerty said. “I know Elon knew that. But he wanted it this week.”

………

Things began to break down on Thursday, Mr. Haggerty said, when a Tesla executive called him and told him Mr. Musk was thinking about suing him.

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“He could have spent time enjoying his new baby and given me and my staff a couple more days and his plant would have been open on May 18,” Mr. Haggerty said. “Am I somewhat sympathetic with Tesla? Yes I am. Am I sympathetic to the way Musk is treating people? No.”

………

Over the last few months, Mr. Musk has issued several strident calls to reopen the Fremont plant. After local officials ordered the plant closed, he tried to keep the plant open but was forced by the officials to shut it down in late March. In a conference call this past week to report Tesla’s earnings, he called the order “fascist.”

Seriously, this guy is so far along the path to being a Bond villain, it’s buggers the mind.

A Feature, Not a Bug

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What a surprise. It turns out our political establishment with extensive and invasive meains testing is sabotaging providing aid to people who are suffering as a result of the Corona Virus shutdown.

There is a reason for this. Both the right and the left of the political elite are members of the Professional Managerial Class, (PMC) and want to ensure that there are jobs, even if they are fundamentally parasitic in nature, for them and theirs, and employing people to function as a barrier to the smooth functions of government means that they do not have to get honest work, something like restocking grocery shelves, that would actually be productive.

The fascination with “Fraud” and “Means Testing” is a charity for the overprivileged.

Sometimes a little fraud is perfectly OK.

Particularly if it means helping millions of Americans, whose lives have been upended by the pandemic, as quickly as possible.

For anyone who’s ever had to sign up for food stamps or jobless benefits in the U.S., the onerous enrollment procedures and frequent ID verification checks are a well-known, and often, disheartening reality. Ostensibly, the safeguards are meant to ensure only those who need help get it. But according to Georgetown University’s Pamela Herd, they often end up doing more harm than good.

“We need to be just as concerned about those not getting benefits as we are with fraud and abuse statistics,” said Herd, who’s written extensively on the concept of “administrative burden,” which describes the red tape we encounter when we need public assistance.

The insistence to pose an “Administrative Burden” is not about saving the taxpayer money.  It’s about helping a class of people, the PMC a gravy train.

In fact, it is the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) more than the Republicans who favor this.

This is why when someone offers a solution to a dire crisis that is easily and quickly implemented, people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer insist creating a massively complex process which makes a dog’s breakfast of the program.

The Supreme Court is Determined to Normalize Corruption

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The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, threw out the convictions of the New Jersey Pols behind Bridgegate.

Between this, and Bob McDonnell, it’s becoming next to impossible to prosecute corruption:

In 2013, officials with ties to Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, altered the traffic pattern on the George Washington Bridge in an effort to punish the mayor of nearby Fort Lee, New Jersey, for his failure to support Christie’s reelection bid. The change in the traffic pattern led to four days of gridlock on the streets surrounding the bridge before the original pattern was eventually restored. Two of the officials responsible for the change were found guilty of violating federal statutes prohibiting wire fraud and fraud from federally funded programs. But today the Supreme Court threw out those convictions. In a unanimous decision by Justice Elena Kagan, the court ruled that although the officials’ actions were an “abuse of power,” they did not violate the federal fraud laws because the “scheme here did not aim to obtain money or property.”

The defendants in the case were Bridget Kelly, Christie’s deputy chief of staff, and William Baroni, whom Christie had named as the deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the bridge. For many years, three of the 12 toll lanes on the upper deck of the bridge going from New Jersey into New York have been cordoned off with traffic cones during the morning rush hour, so that local traffic from Fort Lee can cross the bridge more easily. After Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee, declined to endorse Christie in 2013, Baroni and Kelly – along with David Wildstein, a Port Authority staffer – decided to retaliate against Sokolich by reducing the number of lanes reserved for Fort Lee drivers to one. They made the change on the first day of school in September 2013, without notifying Sokolich in advance. To explain the change to Port Authority employees, the trio concocted a fictitious traffic study.

………

Today the Supreme Court reversed. In a 13-page opinion, Kagan emphasized that the government needed to show “not only that Baroni and Kelly engaged in deception,” but that they did so to obtain property. The Supreme Court has made clear that unless bribes or kickbacks are involved (which, Kagan noted, are not at issue in this case), federal fraud laws cannot be used as a general tool to fight public corruption; they apply only when efforts to obtain money or property are involved.

The Supreme Court has consistently narrowed the scope of corruption statutes over the past few decades, even as our government and society has become increasingly corrupt.

Welcome to the 3rd world.

So Not a Surprise

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Gun advocacy and conservative groups are responsible for astroturfing the reopen America campaign that has swept the US in recent days, according to research from cybersecurity experts.

………

But according to new research from cybersecurity researchers, many of these protests are neither spontaneous nor organic. Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs and researchers at DomainTools have separately analysed web addresses including the word “reopen.” And interestingly, they’ve found that many of these can be linked to domains associated with gun advocacy groups, lobbyists, and other conservative organisations.

Published today, a report from DNS-focused cybersecurity firm DomainTools concludes that over 500 new domains related to the protests have been registered in the past month. Many of them are linked to only a few groups.

What, you mean that these protests, meticulously photographed by the media to create an artificial impression of large size and popular support are just an exercise in propaganda?

Well knock me over with a Chevy Chevelle SS 454 with a Holley four-barrel carb with a Turbo 400 automatic and Positraction.