NYPD Says It Was ‘Stabbed in the Back’ Because Voters Won’t Let Them Lie and Kill With Impunity
The New York Police Union is losing its sh%$ because the review board will now have the power to investigate whether or not police officers lie to it.
This is proof positive that civilian review boards need more more power.
The private sector is to the efficient administration of healthcare what Ebola is to French kissing:
The average cost of insuring an Iowan on Medicaid has climbed nearly three times as fast since the state hired private companies to manage the program, when compared to the previous six years, new state figures show.
Since fiscal 2017, the first full year of privatization, the per-member cost of Iowa’s Medicaid program has risen an average of 4.4 percent per year, according to the non-partisan Legislative Services Agency. In the previous six years, the per-member cost rose an average of 1.5 percent per year, the agency said.
The new cost figures come amid continuing controversy over whether Iowa should have hired private companies to run the $5 billion program. The shift’s supporters said it would slow growth in health care spending on the more than 600,000 poor or disabled Iowans covered by Medicaid.
The Legislative Services Agency compiled the new cost increase figures from past budget reports published by the Department of Human Services, which oversees Medicaid.
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The Medicaid cost increases for this fiscal year are partly driven by an 8.4 percent raise the Iowa Department of Human Services agreed last month to give the two managed-care companies running the program. That raise, which includes state and federal tax dollars, will send $344 million more to Amerigroup and United Healthcare this fiscal year, which runs through June 2019.
So, spending millions of dollars on private management don’t end up saving money.
Hoocoodanode?
Even if you don’t have a problem with the morality of using prison labor, and I do, the reckless stupidity of doing so in the Democratic Party primary, were even the most squishy Democrats want to signal virtue, positively buggers the mind.
From a non political perspective, giving prisoners a list of people with enough money, and the profound lack of common sense required to donate to Mike Bloomberg, seems to be problematic as well:
Former New York City mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg used prison labor to make campaign calls. Through a third-party vendor, the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign contracted New Jersey-based call center company ProCom, which runs calls centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma. Two of the call centers in Oklahoma are operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign.
According to a source, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, people incarcerated at the Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a minimum-security women’s prison with a capacity of more than 900, were making calls to California on behalf of Bloomberg. The people were required to end their calls by disclosing that the calls were paid for by the Bloomberg campaign. They did not disclose, however, that they were calling from behind bars.
This is the most Mike Bloomberg thing ever.
A cache of ancient Jewish recipes dating back to the inquisition has been found in Miami.
It has been published, and I want a copy:
A few years ago, Genie Milgrom came across a treasure trove of old recipes stashed away in her elderly mother’s kitchen drawers. There were hundreds of them — some in tattered notebooks, others scribbled on crumbling scraps of paper.
Upon closer examination, it became apparent to Milgrom that these were the handwritten notations of generations of women in her family. The recipes had traveled as an intact, ever-growing collection from Spain to Portugal to Cuba to the United States, reflecting not only the lives of Milgrom’s ancestors, but also the hidden heritage they had for the most part unknowingly safeguarded since the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
Milgrom, who grew up devoutly Roman Catholic in Havana and Miami, has Crypto-Jewish roots. Her ancestors were Jews who practiced Judaism in secret while outwardly living as Christians to avoid being expelled, tortured, or killed by the Church. They were Crypto-Jews until the late 17th century, and lived as Catholics from then on. Through a decade-long, intense genealogical search, Milgrom discovered that she has an unbroken Jewish maternal lineage going back 22 generations to 1405 pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal.
Her new kosher cookbook, “Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers: Unique Recipes and Stories from the Times of the Crypto-Jews during the Spanish Inquisition,” is a tribute to those female relatives who repressed or forgot their Jewish identity over hundreds of years, but managed to preserve vestiges of it through their food.
This is is awesome.
Archeologist have unearthed a remarkable Mycenaean royal tomb:
Archaeologists recently discovered two magnificent 3,500-year-old royal tombs in the shadow of the palace of the legendary King Nestor of Pylos. It’s not clear exactly who the tombs’ owners were, but their contents—gold and bronze, amber from the Baltic, amethyst from Egypt, and carnelian from the Arabian Peninsula and India—suggest wealth, power, and far-flung trade connections in the Bronze Age world. And the images engraved on many of those artifacts may eventually help us better understand the Mycenaean culture that preceded classical Greece.
Tombs fit for royalty
The larger tomb is 12m (36 feet) wide and 4.5 meters (15 feet) deep, and stone walls would once have stood that height again above ground. Domes once covered the underground chambers, but the roofs and upper walls have long since collapsed, burying the tombs beneath thousands of melon-sized stones and a tangle of grape vines. University of Cincinnati archaeologists Jack Davis, Sharon Stocker, and their colleagues had to clear away vegetation and then remove the stones by hand.
“It was like going back to the Mycenaean period,” Stocker said. “They had placed them by hand in the walls of the tomb, and we were taking them out by hand. It was a lot of work.”
Beneath the rubble, gold leaf litters the burial pits’ floors in gleaming flakes; once, it lined the walls and floors of the chambers. The tombs don’t appear to have contained the remains of the their occupants (there’s some evidence that the tombs were disturbed in the distant past), but they were interred with jewelry and other opulent artifacts of gold, bronze, and gemstones, as well as a commanding view of the Mediterranean Sea.
Kewl!
Round up the usual suspectsBecause the recent convictions in the Jamal Kashoggi murder is literally a round up the usual suspects moment.
This is the most an egregious scapegoating that I’ve seen in a very long time:
Saudi Arabia on Monday sentenced five people to death and three to jail over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but a U.N. investigator accused it of making a “mockery” of justice by allowing the masterminds of last year’s killing to go free.
A Saudi court rejected the findings of a U.N. inquiry by ruling that the killing was not premeditated, but carried out “at the spur of the moment”. Saudi Deputy Public Prosecutor and spokesman Shalaan al-Shalaan said the court dismissed charges against three of the 11 people tried, finding them not guilty.
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The source said the five men condemned to death were essentially foot soldiers in the killing, while two senior security officials acquitted played a more significant role.
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Agnes Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur for extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions, said the trial verdict was a “mockery” of justice.
“The hit-men are guilty, sentenced to death. The masterminds not only walk free, they have barely been touched by the investigation and the trial,” she said on Twitter.
Yeah, but no one cares, because the Saudis have all that oil.
Boeing has fired its CEO Dennis Muilenburg for the recent chain of disasters that have beset the company.
The problem is not Muilenberg though, it’s the whole company, which has moved to a finance driven clusterf%$#.
I’m wondering if Boeing will be facing a government bailout, like Lockheed did in the 1970s.
This is not a company that has had setbacks, this is a company that has completely lost its way.
It turns out that the the collision between the USS John S. McCain Alnic MC in the Straits of in August 2017 was largely an artifact of the new navigation that the Navy had installed to reduce crewing.
This is not a surprise. The US Navy has aggressively attempted to reduce crewing in an attempt to free up money for the latest and (not so much) greatest tech.
For example, the 16,000 ton Zumwalts have a crew of 175, (it was originally supposed to be less than 100), and the previous 9,000 ton Burke DDGs have a crew of 350.
The Zumwalts have nonfunctional guns, have suffered repeated breakdowns, and, given the parsimonious crewing, probably has a glass jaw.
And now, the Navy’s fetish has equipped the Arleigh Burke class destroyers, which work, albeit with a lot of sailors, are crippled by the automated steering system they have installed:
Dakota Bordeaux had rarely traveled outside his home state of Oklahoma before he joined the Navy in February 2017. He’d certainly never seen the ocean.
But only four months later, Bordeaux was standing at the helm of the USS John S. McCain, steering the 8,300-ton destroyer through the western Pacific. Part of the Navy’s famed 7th Fleet, the McCain was responsible for patrolling global hot spots, shadowing Chinese warships in the South China Sea and tracking North Korean missile launches.
It filled the high school graduate with pride.
“Not many people of my age can say, ‘Hey, I just drove a giant-ass battleship,’” said Bordeaux, 23.
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To guide the McCain, Bordeaux relied upon a navigation system the Navy considered a triumph of technology and thrift. It featured slick black touch screens to operate the ship’s wheel and propellers. It knit together information from radars and digital maps. It would save money by requiring fewer sailors to safely steer the ship.
Bordeaux felt confident using the system to control the speed and heading of the ship. But there were many things he did not understand about the array of dials, arrows and data that filled the touch screen.
“There was actually a lot of functions on there that I had no clue what on earth they did,” Bordeaux said of the system.
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A 19-year Navy veteran, Sanchez had watched as technicians replaced the ship’s traditional steering controls a year earlier with the new navigation system. Almost from the start, it caused him headaches. The system constantly indicated problems with steering. They were mostly false alarms, quickly fixed, but by March 2017, Sanchez’s engineers were calling the system “unstable,” with “multiple and cascading failures regularly.”
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But a ProPublica examination shows that the Navy pursued prosecutions of the two men even as its investigators and those with the NTSB were learning that the navigation system, if it hadn’t technically malfunctioned, had played a critical role in the deadly outcome in the Pacific.
Its very design, investigators determined, left sailors dangerously vulnerable to making the kinds of operational mistakes that doomed the McCain. The Integrated Bridge and Navigation System, or IBNS, as it was known, was no technical marvel. It was a welter of buttons, gauges and software that, poorly understood and not surprisingly misused, helped guide 10 sailors to their deaths.
Despite its issues, the IBNS operated for years without major incident. Navy sailors did what they have always done: They found ways to make do with an imperfect technology.
The NTSB put it plainly: “The design of the John S McCain’s touch-screen steering and thrust control system,” the board found, “increased the likelihood of the operator errors that led to the collision.”
The Navy investigators, for their part, determined that the system’s “known vulnerabilities” and risks had not been “clearly communicated to the operators on ships with these systems.”
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In the end, though, the Navy punished its own sailors for failing to master a flawed system that they had been inadequately trained on and that the Navy itself came to admit it did not fully understand.
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The Navy has committed almost half a billion dollars to build the navigation system and install it on more than 60 destroyers by the end of the next decade — the entire fleet of the tough, stalwart warships that form the backbone of the modern Navy. Yet no one responsible for the development or deployment of the technology has faced any known consequences for the McCain disaster.
A number of current and former Navy officials remain convinced the navigation system should never have been put to use. And they worry about the Navy’s slow pace in installing a new, improved version.
“The IBNS has no place on the bridge of a U.S. destroyer,” said one former senior Navy officer with direct knowledge of the McCain accident. “It’s not designed to have the control that you need to navigate a warship.”
Seriously, our military is increasingly pursuing a path in which combat readiness is a distant second to procurement.
Also, as an aside, the article is a valuable story, but they have jammed it up with Javascript and HTML 5 animations and similar web-bling that it is difficult to read.
Whoever decided on the format needs a stern talking to.
It’s been pretty obvious for a while that Silicon Valley’s tech “Unicorns” have been based on a largely corrupt model, in which venture capitalists buy into a company, and then inflate the value of the initial investment through follow-up funding rounds.
The theory is twofold: That the large amounts of money will push competitors out of nascent markets, and that the mania will generate huge profits for the VCs when they go public, and gullible retail investors flood in.
It has been apparent for a while, Uber, Lyft, Peleton, Endeavor, Slack, and (of course) WeWork have all shown that they have no path to justify their valuations.
But inspector Cluseau, aka the Securities and Exchange Commission, is now on the case, and they are investigating the initial listings of these companies on the New York Stock Exchange.
I hope that it leads to something, if the string is aggressively pulled, it is VERY likely that the whole scarf will unravel, but at best at this point the investigation appears far too narrow.
At worst, this may be little more than an attempt to short circuit the direct listings that these companies used, which deprieved Wall Street investment banks of much of the normal fee revenues that come from a conventional IPO:
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the listings of Slack Technologies Inc. WORK 1.32% and other major companies on the New York Stock Exchange, in a probe looking at how trading was handled on the first day, people familiar with the situation said.
SEC enforcement staff have recently sent letters including one seeking information from electronic-trading firm Citadel Securities LLC related to how it opened Slack’s stock for trading on June 20 in the workplace-messaging app’s so-called direct listing, the people said. It also seeks information on other initial public offerings.
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The SEC is probing IPOs over the past several years of other so-called unicorns, companies known for achieving high valuations while private, the people said.
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More large companies have gone public in recent years following big capital infusions from venture capitalists that allowed them to stay private far longer than was common in the past. Companies that have gone public on the NYSE in recent years include Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , Snap Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc.
Slack’s debut represented a new breed of public offering. The workplace-messaging company went public via a direct listing, in which a company lets its shares float on an exchange without hiring banks as underwriters like in a standard IPO. Banks do play a more-limited role as advisers, helping guide buyers and sellers to an opening price. Spotify Technology SA also used the process to debut on NYSE last year.
Direct listings allow companies to save on underwriting fees and bypass some restrictions that come with IPOs, such as limits on promoting the stock to the public and avoiding some lockups that prevent insiders from selling for a certain period.
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The day Slack went public, some floor brokers felt Citadel Securities’ initial indications were too low and didn’t reflect accurate supply and demand for the stock, according to people familiar with that day’s events.
NYSE floor brokers have complained for years that banks working on big IPOs push DMMs to issue indications that are too low while taking unnecessarily long to open the stocks. That could allow banks to poach clients from rivals over the course of the morning, because the banks may be able to privately give mutual funds and other investors a more accurate indication of the opening price, current and former floor brokers said.
Because while the movie has generally been reviewed as an unalloyed disaster, it has produced outraged reviews with lines like, “Cats always feels like it’s two seconds away from turning into a furry orgy in a dumpster.”
I enjoy reading outraged negative reviews, so it’s all good.
I wait with baited breath for Rex Reed’s review, because no one does a catty negative review like he does.
— Sword lesbian. (@TMSTSTFD) August 30, 2019
Who amongst us has not been tempted to bring home a fake “Boyfriend from hell” for the holidays just to jerk our parents around?
The Sackler family, are having major butt-hurt because Tufts University is pulling their names from their buildings.
Let’s see, you created a dangerous product, aggressively and dishonestly marketed it across the nation, when caught you looted your company in advance of your bankruptcy, and your non-bankrupt foreign company is STILL trying to hook people on your poison.
Why wouldn’t an institution best known for its medical program want to have anything with you?
The Sackler family is pushing back after Tufts University removed the family name from its buildings and programs due to the family’s link to the ongoing opioid epidemic, according to a report in The New York Times.
In a letter to Tufts’ president, a lawyer for the family wrote that the removal was “contrary to basic notions of fairness” and “a breach of the many binding commitments made by the University dating back to 1980 in order to secure the family’s support, including millions of dollars in donations for facilities and critical medical research.”
Tufts made the decision to remove the family name after getting the results of an independent review of the university’s relationship with the Sacklers and OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, which the Sacklers own. Both the family and the company have been accused of helping to spark the crisis by aggressively marketing the powerful painkiller and misleading doctors, patients, and regulators about its addictiveness.
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The review found that Purdue did intend to use the relationship to advance its interests. And, according to the report, in some cases, it was successful in influencing the academic institution. “Moreover, we conclude that there was an appearance of too close a relationship between Purdue, the Sacklers, and Tufts,” the report said.
The letter from the Sackler family lawyer hinted at the possibility of legal action.
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Although, not all of the Sackler family is involved with OxyContin. Of the original three Sackler brothers involved in Purdue, one of them—Arthur—died before the painkiller was introduced, and his brothers bought out his stake in the company. Arthur’s widow, Jillian Sackler, released a statement saying in part, “It deeply saddens me to witness Arthur being blamed for actions taken by his brothers and other OxySacklers.”
OxySacklers. Heh.
I broke one of my own rules, and at Sharon’s* insistence, I watched the debates stone cold sober.
Never again.
Between the passive-aggressive Klobuchar, the clueless Yang, the self-important Steyer, and smug Buttigieg, I REALLY need drink.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
I say, with no exaggeration, that Pete Buttigieg has the most racist record of any mainstream Democratic Presidential candidate since ……… Checks notes ……… George Wallace.
He took homes from black people to give to (largely white) developers in the name of “Redevelopment”, and he has studiously refused addressing the deep, entrenched, and extreme racism of the South Bend police force, such as when he fired a black police chief who uncovered incontrovertible evidence of racism in the ranks.
In the latest incident, his police force was literally quoting KKK quotes from the movie Django Unchained while they were busting down a black man’s door.
Pete Buttigieg may have inherited a racist police department, but he has chosen to do nothing to fix the problem:
While the South Bend Police Department arrested a black resident on Wednesday, officers gleefully quoted a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” in which hooded KKK members bicker amongst themselves while riding to kill Jamie Fox’s character, Django.
The individual being arrested, 21-year-old African American Marko Mosgrove, broadcasted his arrest to Facebook. Multiple officers with guns and shields over their faces rammed into the man’s home before they discovered his phone was livestreaming.
“Hey, that phone is recording,” an officer says, six minutes and 17 seconds into the livestream. The officers then turn the phone around, resulting in the screen going black.
But the audio continued broadcasting throughout the arrest as officers reenacted the film’s scene.
18 minutes and 23 seconds into the livestream, an unknown officer giggles while asking: “You know what’s a good idea for your kid? Is a skull mask in case you have to shoot a guy.”
“Dude, this is how you rob banks, alright?” another officer responds. A few seconds later, an unknown officer imitates a KKK member from the film struggling to see through his Klan hood.
“I can’t see fu**king sh*t out of this thing!,” the officer says while laughing, mimicking the scene from Tarantino’s Western bloodbath where KKK members argue with one another over their Klan hoods not fitting their faces.
An officer responds by asking if the quote was from the film “The Boondock Saints.”
“No, Django Unchained,” the other officer responds. An officer then continues to quote from the KKK scene, mimicking a Klan member who defended his wife who worked for hours making the hoods for the KKK members.
“My wife was up all…” the officer says before audio temporarily cuts out. Another officer responds by continuing the reenactment, quoting theKKK member from the scene who tried to diffuse the situation.
“I think we all agree that these were a nice idea,” the officer imitates.
I don’t care what is in Buttigieg’s heart, I care what he does, and it’s clear that he does not give a flying f%$# about the minority residents of his town.
Listening to Mitch McConnell talk about the decline of bipartisanship is like listening to Jeffrey Dahmer complain about the decline of dinner party etiquette.
— Al Franken (@alfranken) December 19, 2019
I wish that Al Franken was still in the Senate.
I do not expect Trump to be convicted though.
BTW, F%$# Tulsi Gabbard’s abstention on both motions.
Anyone reading this in Hawaii, vote against her and volunteer for her opponent.
End her political career.
This is what happens when you let Wall Street values run a business.
Nine months after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the 737 MAX, Boeing finally pulled the plug on the jet’s production Monday. The company announced it’s temporarily halting the assembly lines in Renton from January, with no specified timeline for a restart.
However, in a welcome surprise for the 12,000-strong Renton workforce, Boeing said there will be no layoffs.
“During this time, it is our plan that affected employees will continue 737-related work, or be temporarily assigned to other teams in Puget Sound,” Boeing said in a statement.
Boeing has faced an unprecedented crisis, with more than 700 MAX aircraft grounded worldwide, including nearly 400 built since the grounding. Many have been in storage so long they’ll need extensive maintenance before they fly. The production stoppage will stop the parked fleet from growing to unmanageable proportions, while retaining the workforce will allow a smoother restart of the assembly lines when that time comes.
If this shutdown runs longer than a month, their supply chain is going to take weeks to come back up to speed.
This is why you don’t let finance types run your business.
Boeing will be suffering as a result of Harry Stonesphincter for years to come.
Not often a European soccer game is stopped due to fans being *too anti-Nazi*.
Rayo Vallecano's anti-fascist fans already chased Ukrainian Nazi Roman Zozulya out of town once. Then he came back with a new team.https://t.co/cCjIhp9VEp
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) December 17, 2019
Anti-Nazi chants from rowdies at a soccer match in Europe.
There may be hope for the future of humanity yet.
Seriously, have they ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf?
Given Bernie Sanders’ endurance as a top-tier presidential contender, and his support for Palestinian rights, it was almost inevitable that conservatives would start labelling his campaign anti-Semitic. Last week’s election in Britain—and the alleged similarities between Sanders and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn—provided the pretext.
“Linda Sarsour Is Too Antisemitic For The Women’s March, But Not For Bernie Sanders,” declared a February 10 headline in The Federalist. Three days later, The Washington Examiner followed up with, “Bernie Sanders has an anti-Semitism Problem.” Commentary added, “Bernie Sanders Has a Big Jeremy Corbyn Problem.”
The effort to implicate the most successful Jewish presidential candidate in American history in Jew-hatred is now well underway.
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It distinguishes Sanders even more dramatically from Donald Trump, who invokes anti-Semitic stereotypes more blatantly and more frequently than any American politician in modern memory. From Trump’s 2013 reference to “Jonathan Leibowitz – I mean Jon Stewart,” to his 2015 declaration to a Republican Jewish Coalition crowd that, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” to his closing 2016 campaign ad, which featured three Jews — George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein and Janet Yellin — alongside language about “global special interests” that “control the levers of power” to his suggestion that American Jews view Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister,” to his statement to a Jewish audience, just this month, that “You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me…You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax,” Trump is almost incapable of speaking about Jews without calling them either avaricious or disloyal.
The most contemptible ones here are Commentary, of course, because they know the damage that false accusations like this can do the Jewish community.
They truly are shanda fur die goyim,
*As in Kameradschaftpolizei, the notoriously brutal prisoner functionaries who aided the Germans in the concentration camps.
It’s a racket: Publishers throw a few bucks at a professor, who requires the book for his class, and ka-ching:
As the semester ends, instructors at universities and community colleges around the country will begin placing their orders for next year’s textbooks. But not all professors will pay enough attention to something that students complain about: the outlandish prices of the books we assign. Having grown at many times the rate of inflation, the cost of a leading economics book can be over $250; a law school casebook plus supplement can cost $277. Adding to such prices is the dubious trend of requiring students to obtain digital access codes, averaging $100, to complete homework assignments.
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The root problem is that it is just too easy for us, the professors, to spend other people’s money. Just like doctors who prescribe expensive medicine, we don’t feel the pain of buying a $211 book of uneven quality and no real use when the course is finished, or a digital access code that costs $100 and is designed at least in part to disable the used-book market. The fact that professors choose and students buy destroys whatever power a competitive market might have to keep prices lower. That, and a touch of greed — the author of one successful book has earned an estimated $42 million in royalties — is why textbook prices have increased over 1,000 percent since the 1970s.
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Teaching is a profession with its own ethical duties; students are both our charges and a captive market. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with assigning an expensive book if it is really worth the money and the alternatives are inadequate. (It helps if there’s a good used or rental market). But we at least owe our students the time to make sure we aren’t just absent-mindedly ripping them off.
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Across the economy, over the last few years, there’s been a backlash against exploitative pricing, headlined by the condemnation of figures like Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Textbook authors and publishers may not be selling necessary medicines, but the practice of exploiting market power to its fullest raises similar ethical questions. The old-fashioned phrase is “price gouging,” and we shouldn’t be a part of it.
I’ve felt this way since I was a college student.