Year: 2015

To Honor the 70th Anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, the Ukraine has Commemorated Nazi Collaborators………

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No, this isn’t The Onion, it’s just the Ukraine being the Ukraine.

They have officially honored Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis:

The U.S.-backed Ukrainian government came up with a curious way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust being brought to an end. The parliament in Kiev voted to extend official recognition to Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis in killing Jews.

 Though Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. media continue to dutifully ignore the key role played by neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s February 2014 coup and in the post-coup regime’s subsequent military offensives against ethnic Russians in the east, Ukrainian politicians can’t stop their arms from snapping into Heil Hitler salutes like the fictional character Dr. Strangelove. They can’t hold back this reflex even as the world stopped this week to recall the Nazi barbarity that claimed the lives of some six million Jews as well as other minorities.

 On April 9, the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill making the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army eligible for official government recognition, a demand that has been pushed by Ukraine’s current neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist movements, the same forces that spearheaded the overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 and then the slaughter of thousands of ethnic Russians who resisted the new order.

 Ukraine’s honor-the-Nazi-collaborators vote came amid increased repression of opposition politicians and journalists who dare to criticize the U.S.-backed regime as it moves to repudiate the political settlement envisioned by February’s Minsk-2 agreement and instead prepares for a resumption of the war to crush the resistance in eastern Ukraine once and for all.

………

 During World War II, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, an offshoot of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, collaborated with the Nazis in their orgy of mass murder against Jews, Poles and other minority groups. The UIA also joined with the Nazis in fighting against the Soviet Union’s Red Army, although some UIA elements did ultimately turn against the Germans over their occupation of Ukraine.

 Ukraine was the site of several major Holocaust atrocities including the infamous massacre at Babi Yar in Kiev, where local Ukrainian fascists worked alongside the Nazi SS in funneling tens of thousands of Jews to a ravine where they were slaughtered and buried.

 According to the Jerusalem Post, the Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned Ukraine’s recognition of the UIA as well as a second bill that equated Communist and Nazi crimes.

 “The passage of a ban on Nazism and Communism equates the most genocidal regime in human history with the regime which liberated Auschwitz and helped end the reign of terror of the Third Reich,” said Wiesenthal Center director for Eastern European Affairs Dr. Efraim Zuroff, adding:

“In the same spirit the decision to honor local Nazi collaborators and grant them special benefits turns Hitler’s henchmen into heroes despite their active and zealous participation in the mass murder of innocent Jews. These attempts to rewrite history, which are prevalent throughout post-Communist Eastern Europe, can never erase the crimes committed by Nazi collaborators in these countries, and only proves that they clearly lack the Western values which they claim to have embraced upon their transition to democracy.”

You’ve seen a lot of this in the Baltic states, Poland, and the Ukraine.

This is not surprising, as they are ……… the Baltic states, Poland, and the Ukraine.

Note that the US has been aggressively supporting the people who successfully fought for this, the Svoboda party the Pravy Sektor militia, taking it so far as to vote against a measure condemning those who glorify Naziism in the UN.

I do not know if there are any good guys in this conflict, but they ain’t it.

Snark of the Day

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In response to a Michigan auto mechanic saying that he would refuse to serve gays, a lawyer has offered his services.

The kicker is that he is a bankruptcy attorney:

In a mocking open-letter to a Michigan auto repair shop owner following his anti-gay Facebook rant, a Grand Rapids bankruptcy attorney has offered his services to deal with the economic consequences of the business owner’s “inane, incoherent and just plain dumb comments.”

On Tuesday, Grandville auto shop owner Brian Klawiter posted a rambling attack on gays on Facebook, saying he would not service their cars, adding, “Homosexuality is wrong, period. If you want to argue this fact with me then I will put your vehicle together with all bolts and no nuts and you can see how that works.”

………

Sensing a business opportunity, Grand Rapids bankruptcy attorney Jeffrey Mapes, posted an open letter on Michigan Live, saying he too is “white, male, Christian, a business owner, and a gun owner,” and is willing to handle Klawiter’s future needs despite his “inane, incoherent and just plain dumb comments” on Facebook.

………

He then offered words of inspiration in the wake of the Facebook post that has caused Klawiter grief , quoting from the Adam Sandler film, “Billy Madison.”

“What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

Heh.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizens………

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A private bill collector and police conspired to use the threat of immediate arrest to extort cash from poor defendants:

Minutes after a court sentenced Adel Edwards to pay a $500 fine for burning leaves in his yard without a permit, the private probation company tasked with supervising his monthly payments told him he actually owed more than $1,000 and demanded $250 up front. Because Edwards couldn’t pay the full amount on the spot, the company had him thrown in jail for several days until a friend came up with the money, according to a new federal lawsuit.

The suit, filed by the Southern Center for Human Rights, charges that Red Hills Community Probation conspired with local police in two small Georgia towns to jail poor people without any court approval or legal authority, effectively holding them for ransom.

The plaintiffs, who live in Bainbridge and Pelham, GA, were ordered by the court to pay exorbitant fees for misdemeanor offenses. Edwards pleaded guilty to burning leaves, while others were told they needed to pay hundreds of dollars for speeding, failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, and driving with a suspended registration.

At this point, these stories are reminiscent of reports coming out of Ferguson and the surrounding area, where municipalities exploit a murky labyrinth of court fees and traffic tickets to make money off poor defendants. But private probation companies like Red Hills, which are used by more than 1,000 court systems in ten states, further feed on these moneymaking schemes by tacking on their own share of fees. In Pelham and Bainbridge, the suit alleges, the probation firm went even further, committing false imprisonment and fraud, among other charges.

Like Edwards, the other plaintiffs met with Red Hills probation officers, who told each of them they could not leave the courthouse until they paid a certain amount of money that same day. Even though they weren’t legally required to pay the company the same day as their sentencing, the lawsuit states that police officers were stationed at the doors to keep them from leaving. One woman says she was detained in the courthouse while her fiance pawned her engagement ring to come up with the funds the company demanded.

Why am I not surprised that this is going on in what was once a part of the Confederacy?

Silly black folks, justice is for whites.

I Think that Jon Stewart just Accused Dick Cheney of Being an Iranian Agent

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Stewart actually makes a remarkably cogent argument for the case that Dick Cheney has been giving more aid and comfort to the Mullahs in Iran than any other American official:

He goes through Cheney’s history, including his disastrous tenure as the CEO of Halliburton (Dresser Industries acquisition and asbestos), and shows how almost every action and statement that Cheney has made in any official capacity with regard to Iran has provided aid and comfort to that theocracy.

Man, this is f%$#ing brutal.

New Jersey Lawmaker Proposes Upping Penalties for Swatting ……… Is Promptly Swatted

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This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.

No, I am not kidding here.

It just happened to State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty:

A New Jersey lawmaker who is pushing legislation to combat the trend of swatting — a prank in which anonymous callers phone-in false emergency reports to provoke a large police response — was a victim of the practice himself this weekend.

 State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty (D-Gloucester) said he was watching the Masters golf tournament and doing his taxes at home on Saturday afternoon in Washington Township when he got a call from the police.

 “The person on the phone says they were calling from police dispatch and wanted to know if everything is OK at my house,” Moriarty said. “I said ‘Yeah, why? They said ‘we have a report of a shooting at your home.'”

 The dispatcher then asked Moriarty to describe what he was wearing and step outside.

 “I look out my front door. There’s six cop cars. They have the street closed off. They have helmets, flak jackets and rifles,” Moriarty said. “I walk out and walk towards them. They motion me to keep walking towards them. The minute I walked out the door, I was still on the phone with the dispatch person, I said ‘I think I’ve just been swatted.’ It just then occurred to me what happened.”

 ………

 Swatting has its roots in online video game culture. Callers anonymously phone in emergencies to authorities to send them to an unsuspecting gamer’s house — often while the gamer is streaming video of himself playing online.

………

 Moriarty’s bill (A3877), introduced in November, would increase penalties for “false public alarm,” upgrading the crime from third degree to second degree, punishable by five to ten year in prison and a fine of up to $150,000.

 “I’m thinking someone read about the bill and some sick, evil person thought it would be funny to send the police to my house on one of these false reports,” Moriarty said.

 Moriarty is the former mayor of Washington Township and said he knew most of the police at the scene, including the chief. It turned out the department had dealt with at least one similar call in the previous 24 hours, Moriarty said.

 “If this is a practical joke, it’s not funny because someone is going to get seriously hurt or perhaps killed in one of these engagements that can go very, very wrong,” Moriarty said. “It’s never fun to walk out your front door and have shotguns aimed at your house.”

 Moriarty said it could have gone a lot worse because while doing his taxes he “wasn’t in a good mood to begin with.”

 “If the phone wasn’t ringing next to me, I might not have answered it. … And had I not, they probably would have beat down the front door,” he said.

I will note that what Moriarty has proposed is a half measure.

The real problem here is that local law enforcement has become increasingly militarized, and so they tend to respond to this excessively.

Additionally, if “false alarm” gets upgraded, you can be sure that prosecutors will go Aaron Swartz on defendants with this law, in an attempt to extort guilty pleas.

Any time you ad a tool like this to a DA’s arsenal, you can be sure that it will be abused in ways that were never intended.

Things are Getting Very Interesting in New York State Politics

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As you may recall, the Speaker of the New York Assembly, Sheldon “Shelly” Silver was indicted for corruption, and it looks like the prosecutors have a pretty good case. (See here)

Basically, Sheldon Silver has been one of the “3 Guys in a Room,” (Governor, the State Assembly speaker and the State Senate majority leader) who have made pretty much all the decisions in Albany for a very long time, over 20 years, and it is pretty clear that he knows where the bodies are buried.

What’s more, it appears that the prosecutor, US Attorney Preet Bharara, is upping the pressure, specifically by indicting his son-in-law for financial fraud:

A son-in-law of the former State Assembly speaker was arrested on Monday and accused of defrauding investors out of $7 million, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court.

The defendant, Marcello Trebitsch, 37, of Brooklyn, told investors that he would use their money to trade in securities through his investment fund, and promised them double-digit returns with very low risk, according to a statement from the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Mr. Trebitsch’s wife, Michelle Trebitsch, is the daughter of Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, the former speaker who has been indicted on corruption charges.

Agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Mr. Trebitsch, and he appeared before a federal magistrate judge in Manhattan. He was charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of securities fraud.

The complaint said that Ms. Trebitsch, a certified public accountant, was a co-owner and managing partner of the investment fund, Allese Capital. She has not been charged.

They don’t need to charge her. (Yet)

The US Attorney can seize Silver’s daughter’s family assets under RICO, and that would have the effect of impoverishing his daughter and his grandchildren.

Also note that Michelle Trebitsch was not just the “Co-Owner” of the firm, she is a CPA, and she did the books, so you can be sure that Shelly is under a lot of pressure to roll over right now.

If Silver rolls on someone to protect himself, his daughter, and his grandchildren, it has to be someone big, i.e. one of the two other “Gusy in a room”, the Senate Majority Leader or the Governor.

We are now getting reports that evidence against Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos is being presented to a federal grand jury.

What’s more, it appears that Skelos’ son is being targeted as well.

So, it appears that the Feds are trying to turn Skelos into a cooperating witness as well.

This would imply that they are after Cuomo as well, and that he may be their ultimate goal.

This is what makes the reports that Andrew Cuomo made a tidy $180 for every copy of his memoir that was sold, interesting:

In the first week after its release in October, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s memoir, “All Things Possible,” sold almost impossibly poorly. According to Nielsen Bookscan, fewer than 1,000 people picked up a copy that week. And as of last month, the grand total of all sales was at 3,008. (Plus 13 audiobooks.)

But before you go complaining that being a writer is unrewarding work, know that Cuomo’s time and effort was worth it — financially, at least.

According to his tax release, made public on Wednesday, Cuomo reported earning $377,000 in income on the book in 2014. That’s apparently on top of the $188,333 he got as an advance that was reported in his 2013 filing, meaning that Cuomo seems to have made north of $565,000 for his book though last month.

Or: Nearly $188 per hardcover book.

While I have no doubt that reporter Philip Bump did his homework on the above story, I have a feeling that someone pointed him in the general direction.

I strongly suspect that whoever it was, they had a close relationship to US Attorney Preet Bharara.

If Cuomo gets indicted, it would amuse me no end.

If You are the Subject of the Sentence, “Some Moron in an Autogyro………,” It Will not End Well

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He says that, “No sane person would do what he is doing.”
The insanity defense might be a good idea.


And here is the landing, and the inevitable freakout.

Case in point:

U.S. Capitol Police said that a small gyrocopter with one occupant landed on the West Lawn of the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon.

 One person has been detained, Capitol Police spokeswoman Kimberly Schneider said in an e-mail.

 Eyewitnesses in Capitol offices reported seeing police run toward the aircraft and take the pilot away. The small craft landed in the middle of the West Front Lawn, where the annual Christmas tree and Fourth of July concert stage are set up.

 All was calm as of about 1:45 p.m., but police blocked access to the lawn. Schneider, at about 3:13 p.m., sent out an e-mail saying bomb squad had cleared the craft and was preparing to move it to a secure location.

………

The Tampa Bay Times wrote about Doug Hughes, a 61-year-old mailman from Florida, who planned to fly to the Capitol.

 From their report:

His stated intent: to buzz through the air at 45 miles per hour at about 300 feet up in an ultralight gyrocopter toward Washington, D.C., toward protected airspace, where, if his plan works, he’ll land on the lawn of the United States Capitol building and deliver the mail.

Of course, Doug Hughes might be shot out of the sky. He knows this. He has thought about it day and night for more than two years, wrestling with the tiniest details of his insane plan.

“No sane person,” he said, “would do what I’m doing.”

Rather unsurprisingly, he is currently in custody.

I don’t expect a long jail sentence, but I would expect that he is likely to be fired by the US Post Office, and his pension might be at risk, and he is going to be in for a world of petty harassment by the authorities.

The Many Fauceted Scarlet Emerald Exists!

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I was looking at Wikipedia, and trying to figure out why rubies are called rubies, and not called red sapphires, even though they are the same gem stones, only with slightly different trace impurities. (Sapphires can be blue, pink, yellow, salmon/padparadscha, purple/lavender, green, orange, or brown.)

I did not find the reason for the different names, it appears to be an accident of history, but as Wikipedia searches often do, the led me down a tangent, where I was looking up emeralds, and found out that there is such a thing as a scarlet emerald:

In geology, beryl is a mineral composed of beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate with the chemical formula Be3Al2Si6O18. The hexagonal crystals of beryl may be very small or range to several meters in size. Terminated crystals are relatively rare. Pure beryl is colorless, but it is frequently tinted by impurities; possible colors are green, blue, yellow, red, and white.

 ………

 Emerald is green beryl, colored by trace amounts of chromium and sometimes vanadium. The word “emerald” comes (via Middle English: Emeraude, imported from Old French: Ésmeraude and Medieval Latin: Esmaraldus) from Latin smaragdus from Greek smaragdos – σμάραγδος (“green gem”), its original source being a Semitic word izmargad () or the Sanskrit word, marakata (मरकत), meaning “green”. Most emeralds are highly included, so their brittleness (resistance to breakage) is classified as generally poor.

 ………

 Red beryl (also known as “red emerald” or “scarlet emerald“) is a red variety of beryl. It was first described in 1904 for an occurrence, its type locality, at Maynard’s Claim (Pismire Knolls), Thomas Range, Juab County, Utah. The old synonym “bixbite” is deprecated from the CIBJO, because of the risk of confusion with the mineral bixbyite (also named after the mineralogist Maynard Bixby). The dark red color is attributed to Mn3+ ions.

(emphasis mine)

As some of you are no doubt aware, the phrase “”scarlet emerald” figures prominently in what is arguably the worst piece of fantasy ever written, The Eye of Argon:

Glaring directly down towards her was the stoney, cycloptic face of the bloated diety. Gaping from its single obling socket was scintillating, many fauceted scarlet emerald, a brilliant gem seeming to possess a life all of its own. A priceless gleaming stone, capable of domineering the wealth of conquering empires…the eye of Argon.

(emphasis mine)

Yeah, it ain’t what one would call “deathless prose,” but the fact that there is such a thing as a “Scarlet Emerald” is amusing.

I once competed in an Eye of Argon reading, you lose if you laugh or misread the text, (including its many typographical errors), and I laughed so hard I had to sit down, and the knife handle in my back nearly broke a rib. (I was wearing the official Klingon retired officer uniform)

A Bonza Idea from the Aussies

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Parents who are “conscientious objectors” to childhood vaccination will have their childcare and family tax payments stopped from 1 January next year as the federal government attempts to crack down on the anti-vaccination movement.

 Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced on Sunday a loophole would be closed to stop payments to parents worth up to $15,000 per child.

 “Parents who vaccinate their children should have confidence that they can take their children to childcare without the fear that their children will be at risk of contracting a serious or potentially life-threatening illness because of the conscientious objections of others,” Mr Abbott said.

 Although Australia’s overall childhood vaccination rates remain high – about 97 per cent – the numbers of people who are registered conscientious objectors has risen in the past 10 years.

 There are now 39,000 children aged under seven who are not vaccinated because their parents are registered, according to the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register.

This is an increase of more than 24,000 children over the past 10 years.

This is a very good idea.

First, having unvaccinated children in childcare facilities is like smoking exploding cigars at an oil refinery.

Second, the science has thoroughly debunked Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s vaccination-autism link.

Third, much of the anti-vaxx movement is about relying on herd immunity from the rest of society, and so they are moochers.

Forth, it puts those with compromised immune systems, who are medically unable to be vaccinated, at risk.

Finally, children should not  be held hostage to their parents’ idiocy:

Writing on The ScentificParent blog, a chagrined Canadian mom announced that she is leaving the anti-vaxx movement after all of her seven children — four of them completely unvaccinated — have come down with whooping cough.

Writing from quarantine, and surrounded by sick kids, Tara Hills wrote she is “emotionally, a bit raw. Mentally a bit taxed. Physically I’m fine,” before admitting that not only are her own kids sick, but they may have exposed her five-month-old niece who is too young to be fully vaccinated.

What began with a cold brought into her home by her brother-in-law, turned into coughing by her kids leading to full-blown whooping cough in all seven children.

“My youngest three children were coughing so hard they would gag or vomit. I’d never seen anything like this before,” she wrote. ” Watching our youngest struggle with this choking cough, bringing up clear, stringy mucus – I had heard of this before somewhere. My mom said I had it when I was a kid. I snapped into ‘something is WRONG’ mode.”

Jumping onto her computer, she discovered her children’s symptoms matched — almost perfectly — all the symptoms of whooping cough in a household that was woefully under-vaccinated.

“We had vaccinated our first three children on an alternative schedule and our youngest four weren’t vaccinated at all. We stopped because we were scared and didn’t know who to trust,” she explained. ” Was the medical community just paid off puppets of a Big Pharma-Government-Media conspiracy? Were these vaccines even necessary in this day and age? Were we unwittingly doing greater harm than help to our beloved children? So much smoke must mean a fire so we defaulted to the ‘do nothing and hope nothing bad happens’ position.”

Hills explained that she had a hard time overcoming her biases and mistrust of “Big Pharma,” asking herself, “Could all the in-house, independent, peer-reviewed clinical trials, research papers and studies across the globe ALL be flawed, corrupt and untrustworthy?”

Now Hills says that years spent “frozen” out of fear of vaccinating her kids has the whole family frozen: confined to their home by a quarantine.

She said she hopes her mea culpa will make other families who have held back from getting their children vaccinated rethink what they are doing.

“Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk. I want them to know that we tried our best to protect our kids when we were afraid of vaccination and we are doing our best now, for everyone’s sake, by getting them up to date. We can’t take it back … but we can learn from this and help others the same way we have been helped.”

Preach it, sister.

Call Your Congresscritter

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It looks like the Obama administration is planning to submit a fast track bill next week.

If this passes, expect the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and (TTIP) Trans-atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership to follow soon after, and it both deals will pass under fast track, because there will be no meaningful public discussion:

Senators will introduce trade promotion authority legislation next week, a top Obama administration official said Thursday.

 Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker expects a “fast-track” bill to be introduced early next week in the Senate and said in a call with reporters that she is “anxiously awaiting to see the language.”

 Pritzker is the first administration official to suggest a firm timeline for legislation that would grant President Obama “fast-track” powers for negotiating trade deals.

 Speculation has been swirling about when the Senate Finance Committee would start moving on a bill.

 Senate aides have said negotiations between Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) are making progress but that no deal had been struck.

The TPP and the TTIP suck.

They favor big big banks, big pharma, and big content over ordinary people, labor rights, environmental protection, and democracy.

As a bonus, it also appears that it would make state owned banks like the Bank of North Dakota, which has saved taxpayers millions, illegal. (It would probably make a US Post Office bank, which would serve to rescue poor Americans from predatory check cashing operations, illegal as well).

Background here.

Call, and tell them to vote no, and tell them that if they vote yes, you will not vote for them ever, in any election, primary or general.

This is particularly important if your Congressmen are Democrats, because there will be a full court press from the Obama administration, which supports fast track, and has negotiated the TPP and TTIP on this. They will argue that the credibility of the President depends on this.

If your Congressmen are Republicans, call and sound like a wingnut who will never forgive them for supporting that Kenyan Muslim Marxist Atheist Tyrant.  (The more unhinged you sound, the better)

You can make email contact from here, but a phone call (The Congressional switchboard number is (202) 224-3121), or a letter sent through the mail probably have more impact.

Someone Finally Found a Way to Beat the Lottery

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Las Vegas makes billions in its casinos with the house have a house edge of 3% to 5%.

State lotteries typically have a house edge of 40% to 50%, so it is a sucker bet, and, as I have told Sharon*, only a fool plays the lottery.†

Well my hats off to Eddie Ray Tipton, who has devised a winning strategy for the lottery:


Prosecutors say they have evidence indicating the former head of computer security for a state lottery association tampered with lottery computers prior to him buying a ticket that won a $14.3 million jackpot, according to a media report.

Eddie Raymond Tipton, 51, may have inserted a thumbdrive into a highly locked-down computer that’s supposed to generate the random numbers used to determine lottery winners, The Des Moines Register reported, citing court documents filed by prosecutors. At the time, Tipton was the information security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, and he was later videotaped purchasing a Hot Lotto ticket that went on to fetch the winning $14.3 million payout.

In court documents filed last week, prosecutors said there is evidence to support the theory Tipton used his privileged position inside the lottery association to enter a locked room that housed the random number generating computers and infect them with software that allowed him to control the winning numbers. The room was enclosed in glass, could only be entered by two people at a time, and was monitored by a video camera. To prevent outside attacks, the computers aren’t connected to the Internet. Prosecutors said Tipton entered the so-called draw room on November 20, 2010, ostensibly to change the time on the computers. The cameras on that date recorded only one second per minute rather than running continuously like normal.

“Four of the five individuals who have access to control the camera’s settings will testify they did not change the cameras’ recording instructions,” prosecutors wrote. “The fifth person is defendant. It is a reasonable deduction to infer that defendant tampered with the camera equipment to have an opportunity to insert a thumbdrive into the RNG tower without detection.”

Tipton has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his attorney has said the theory about computer tampering isn’t “factually viable.”

On December 23, a little more than a month after Tipton allegedly tampered with the computers, a man at a convenience store was video taped buying a Hot Lotto ticket that later won the $14.3 million payout. Authorities identified the man as Tipton, but as an employee of the association that administered the lottery, he was barred by law from buying lotto tickets or claiming lottery prizes. The winning ticket went unclaimed for almost a year. Hours before it was scheduled to expire, a company incorporated in Belize tried to claim the prize through a New York attorney. In January, Tipton was charged with two counts of fraud. The allegations that he used his insider access to tamper with the RNG were first made in the court documents filed last week.

Seriously, absent a TARDIS, this is about the only way to beat the lottery.

Like I said, it is a sucker bet.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
†To paraphrase Bret Maverick, I do not approve of gambling, I prefer poker.

FCC Publishes Net Neutrality Rules, Lawsuit Filed Immediately

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This is not a surprise.

The two most common types of broadband providers in the United States, telcos and cable companies, have predicated their business models on monopoly power and the extraction of rents.

Net neutrality closes off a potential sources of rent, hence the lawsuit:

While the Federal Communications Commission passed its net neutrality rules on February 26, they weren’t published in the Federal Register until today.

The publication means a couple of things: the rules go into effect 60 days from today, and parties that oppose the rules have 10 days to file lawsuits against the FCC. Almost immediately after publication, a trade group representing ISPs called USTelecom filed suit in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

USTelecom’s petition said the FCC’s ruling is “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion” and “violates federal law, including, but not limited to, the Constitution, the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, and FCC regulations promulgated thereunder.”

You may recall that this same group sued the FCC over the net neutrality rules last month. That was done just in case the 10-day deadline could be applied after the rules were posted to the FCC’s website, which happened before publication to the Federal Register. In either case, the initial challenge is mostly a procedural matter; detailed briefs laying out a legal argument against the FCC’s rules will probably come this summer.

Thankfully, the DC Court of Appeals, (technically the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit), the most likely venue for a suit, has become significantly less right wing with recent judicial appointments.

I expect this to end up at the Supreme Court though.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Have a Nice, Big Cup of STFU!

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The Armenian Genocide is a fact.  It has been documented extensively.

So it is no surprise that Pope Francis noted this on the 100th anniversary of this atrocity.

Of course the predictable Turkish butt-hurt is also no surprise.

………

When Pope Francis used the term “genocide” on Sunday to describe the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks 100 years ago, he was not breaking new ground. Pope John Paul II had written the same in 2001, and Francis had made similar references before.

 But the timing and setting of the pope’s remarks — a Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica marking the centenary of the killings, with top Armenian religious and political leaders in attendance — drew a strong international response. Armenians worldwide expressed deep gratitude to Francis, while Turkey reacted in anger.

 ………

 The Turkish government responded to the pope’s comments by recalling its ambassador to the Vatican, and summoned the Vatican’s ambassador in Ankara to express its “great disappointment and sadness.”

 Turkey claims that just half a million Armenians died in fighting when they rose up against their Ottoman rulers during World War I, and denies that their deaths constitute an act of genocide.

 That position conflicts with the views of most historians of the period, who agree that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were victims of genocide at the hands of the Turks.

 ………

 Francis said it was “necessary, and indeed a duty,” to remember the Armenians killed, “for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester. Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it!”

 Among those listening at St. Peter’s were Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and the leadership of the Armenian Apostolic Church, including Karekin II and Aram I, the two Catholicoi at the top of the church’s hierarchy.

 ………

 Turkey said Francis’ comments “contradicted his message of peace, reconciliation and dialogue” made during his visit to the country in November.

 “The pope’s statement, which is far from the legal and historical reality, cannot be accepted,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu tweeted on Sunday.

 “Religious authorities are not the places to incite resentment and hatred with baseless allegations,” he added.

 Francis now risks losing Turkey’s support as he seeks to defend Christian communities being persecuted by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Many Christians have sought refuge in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, as they have fled the Islamist militants.

Does anyone hear this statement, and interpret it as saying, “Nice Christians, you have there, it would be a shame if anything happened to them.”

I do understand that the Turks have made a habit of denying the Armenian Genocide, which has never made much sense to me, since the government that did it, the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist almost a century ago.

I do understand why Erdoğan’s government is determined to whitewash this though.  It is very clear that his AKP party is trying to relegate the reforms of tye Young Turks and Ataturk to the dust-bin of history. 

That is why the plans to redevelop Taksim square included the rebuilding of the Taksim Military Barracks, which was a central symbol of the attempted Ottoman counter coup in 1909.

Inbreeding in Economics

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Over at Fortune magazine, Steve Keen makes a very interesting observation about the state of discourse about the discourse at the higher level of economics.

Specifically, not only did these guys go to the same school, they literally took the same course with the same professor:

Ben Bernanke has recently started blogging (and tweeting), and his opening topics were why interest rates are so low around the world, and a critique of Larry Summers’ “secular stagnation” explanation for this phenomenon, and for persistent low growth since the financial crisis. Summers then replied to Bernanke’s argument, and a debate was on.

So who is right: Bernanke who argues that the cause is a “global savings glut”, or Summers who argues that the cause is a slowdown in population growth, combined with a dearth of profitable investment opportunities, not only now but for the foreseeable future?

I’d argue both of them, and neither simultaneously—both, because they can both point to empirical data that support their case; neither, because they are only putting forward explanations that are consistent with their largely shared view of how the economy works.

And the extent to which they are the product of a single way of thinking about the world simply cannot be exaggerated. It goes well beyond merely belonging to the same school of thought within economics (the “Neoclassical School” as opposed to the “Austrian”, “Post Keynesian”, “Marxist” etc.), or even the same sect within this school (“New Keynesian” as opposed to “New Classical”). Far beyond.

They did their graduate training in the same economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They attended the same macroeconomics class: Stanley Fisher’s course in monetary economics at MIT for graduate students (was it the same year—does anybody know?) Some of their fellow Fisher alumni included Ken Rogoff and Olivier Blanchard.

………

If I were describing a group of thoroughbred horses, alarm bells would already be ringing about a dangerous level of in-breeding. Sensible advice would be proffered about the need to inject new blood into this dangerously limited breeding pool. But the issue would only be of importance to the horseracing community.

Instead I am talking about a set of individuals whose ideas have had enormous influence upon both the development of economic thought and the formation of economic policy around the globe for the last four decades. The fact that so much of the dominant approach to thinking about the economy emanates, not merely from such a limited perspective, but from such a limited and interconnected pool of people, should be serious cause for alarm—especially given how the world has fared under the influence of this thoroughbred group.

This has me thinking that I should take a serious look at Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Hyman Minsky’s theories.