Over at the reliably amusing Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal web comic, they just put up a new cartoon titled, “Dadbucks.”
It details the results of creating a household currency to encourage the performance of chores.
I think that this is a wonderful metaphor for Bitcoin, and I think that someone should hire him as a financial regulator because he gets it.
Cartoon after the break.
Development testing of the Lockheed Martin F-35 could be delayed by 12 months and cost another $1.7 billion, the US Government Accountability Office (GA0) warns in a new report published on 24 April.
In a report submitted to the US Congress, the GAO says that the F-35’s government managers at the joint programme office (JPO) have adopted an “optimistic” estimate for a five-month delay and $532 million cost overrun to complete Block 3F software, the fifth and final software release to support the 15-year-long system development and demonstration phase of the family of stealth fighters.
GAO’s analysis based on historical data suggests Block 3F testing won’t be complete until May 2018, or 12 months later than currently scheduled. The GAO’s anticipated or cost growth of $1.7 billion would raise overall development programme costs to $56.8 billion, $22.4 billion higher than the original budget at contract award in October 2001.
This sort of clusterf%$# has become so common for the F-35 that I’m not sure if it even qualifies as news these days.
For more than a century, Turkey has denied any role in organizing the killing of Armenians in what historians have long accepted as a genocide that started in 1915, as World War I spread across continents. The Turkish narrative of denial has hinged on the argument that the original documents from postwar military tribunals that convicted the genocide’s planners were nowhere to be found.
Now, Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades by piecing together documents from around the world to establish state complicity in the killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram from the trials, in an archive held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
“Until recently, the smoking gun was missing,” Mr. Akcam said. “This is the smoking gun.” He called his find “an earthquake in our field,” and said he hoped it would remove “the last brick in the denialist wall.”
The story begins in 1915 in an office in the Turkish city of Erzurum, when a high-level official of the Ottoman Empire punched out a telegram in secret code to a colleague in the field, asking for details about the deportations and killings of Armenians in eastern Anatolia, the easternmost part of contemporary Turkey.
Later, a deciphered copy of the telegram helped convict the official, Behaeddin Shakir, for planning what scholars have long acknowledged and Turkey has long denied: the organized killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by the leaders of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, an atrocity widely recognized as the 20th century’s first genocide.
And then, just like that, most of the original documents and sworn testimony from the trials vanished, leaving researchers to rely mostly on summaries from the official Ottoman newspaper.
………
Instead, he found a photographic record of the Jerusalem archive in New York, held by the nephew of a Armenian monk, now dead, who was a survivor of the genocide.
While researching the genocide in Cairo in the 1940s, the monk, Krikor Guerguerian, met a former Ottoman judge who had presided over the postwar trials. The judge told him that many of the boxes of case files had wound up in Jerusalem, so Mr. Guerguerian went there and took pictures of everything.
The telegram was written under Ottoman letterhead and coded in Arabic lettering; four-digit numbers denoted words. When Mr. Akcam compared it with the known Ottoman Interior Ministry codes from the time, found in an official archive in Istanbul, he found a match, raising the likelihood that many other telegrams used in the postwar trials could one day be verified in the same way.
………
The genocide is commemorated each year on April 24, the day in 1915 that a group of Armenian notables from Istanbul were rounded up and deported.
It was the start of the enormous killing operation, which involved forced marches into the Syrian desert, summary executions and rapes.
Two years ago, Pope Francis referred to the killings as a genocide and faced a storm of criticism from within Turkey. Many countries, including France, Germany and Greece, have recognized the genocide, each time provoking diplomatic showdowns with Turkey.
It is well past time for the US to recognize the genocide.
In fact, I think that if anything, we need to be even more aggressive about this than we are about Holocaust deniers, because they are (thankfully) a relatively small fringe group, while the Turkish state continues to continue this crap in their mandatory education curriculum, polluting the minds of the next generation.
Simon’s Cat on Boxes
*In any discussion of Charles Murray, it should be noted that he Burned a Cross on a hill next to the local police station. He claims not to know the significance ……… In 1960 ……… With both the civil rights movement and Klan terrorism in full swing. Bullsh%$. He’s a man who has made a career out of being a professional racist.
I didn’t expect Jean-Luc Mélenchon to make it too the runoff, but I am still bummed that it’s going to be Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in the runoff:
In France’s most consequential election in recent history, voters on Sunday chose Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen to go to a runoff to determine the next president, official returns showed. One is a political novice, the other a far-right firebrand — both outsiders, but with starkly different visions for the country.
The result was a full-throated rebuke of France’s traditional mainstream parties, setting the country on an uncertain path in an election that could also decide the future of the European Union.
It is the first time in the nearly 59-year history of France’s Fifth Republic that both of the final candidates are from outside the traditional left-right party structure. Together, they drew less than half the total votes cast in a highly fractured election.
Even before the official tallies were announced, the political establishment was rallying behind Mr. Macron, warning of the dangers of a victory by Ms. Le Pen’s far-right National Front, though few analysts give her much of a chance of winning the May 7 runoff.
I am surprised that the scandal plagued Fillon got as many votes as he did.
Some things to note:
If I were a Frenchman, I would walk into the ballot box, and urinate in it during the runoff.
As an aside, I think that the French system with its imperial Presidency is showing itself to be somewhat problematic.
Perhaps moving back to a parliamentary system with a relatively high election threshold (10+ percent) or a first past the post constituency system would better serve the citizens of L’hexagone.
The article is long, but a read reveals something very basic: That James Comey was a rather clueless narcissist who ignored standard procedures because he wanted to ingratiate himself to Republicans:
The day before he upended the 2016 election, James B. Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, summoned agents and lawyers to his conference room. They had been debating all day, and it was time for a decision.
Mr. Comey’s plan was to tell Congress that the F.B.I. had received new evidence and was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton, the presidential front-runner. The move would violate the policies of an agency that does not reveal its investigations or do anything that may influence an election. But Mr. Comey had declared the case closed, and he believed he was obligated to tell Congress that had changed.
………
What he did not say was that the F.B.I. was also investigating the campaign of Donald J. Trump. Just weeks before, Mr. Comey had declined to answer a question from Congress about whether there was such an investigation. Only in March, long after the election, did Mr. Comey confirm that there was one.
………
An examination by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than 30 current and former law enforcement, congressional and other government officials, found that while partisanship was not a factor in Mr. Comey’s approach to the two investigations, he handled them in starkly different ways. In the case of Mrs. Clinton, he rewrote the script, partly based on the F.B.I.’s expectation that she would win and fearing the bureau would be accused of helping her. In the case of Mr. Trump, he conducted the investigation by the book, with the F.B.I.’s traditional secrecy. Many of the officials discussed the investigations on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
Mr. Comey made those decisions with the supreme self-confidence of a former prosecutor who, in a distinguished career, has cultivated a reputation for what supporters see as fierce independence, and detractors view as media-savvy arrogance.
………
Mr. Comey’s defenders regard this as one of the untold stories of the Clinton investigation, one they say helps explain his decision-making. But former Justice Department officials say the F.B.I. never uncovered evidence tying Ms. Lynch to the document’s author, and are convinced that Mr. Comey wanted an excuse to put himself in the spotlight.
………
Mr. Comey’s criticism — his description of her carelessness — was the most controversial part of the speech. Agents and prosecutors have been reprimanded for injecting their legal conclusions with personal opinions. But those close to Mr. Comey say he has no regrets.
By scolding Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey was speaking not only to voters but to his own agents. While they agreed that Mrs. Clinton should not face charges, many viewed her conduct as inexcusable. Mr. Comey’s remarks made clear that the F.B.I. did not approve.
Former agents and others close to Mr. Comey acknowledge that his reproach was also intended to insulate the F.B.I. from Republican criticism that it was too lenient toward a Democrat.
At the Justice Department, frustrated prosecutors said Mr. Comey should have consulted with them first. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said that Mr. Comey’s condemnations seemed to make an oblique case for charging her, undermining the effect of his decision.
“He came up with a Rube Goldberg-type solution that caused him more problems than if he had just played it straight,” said Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign press secretary and a former Justice Department spokesman.
It is really a pretty sad picture, and it reveals how a political operative can manipulate him fairly easily.
This is profoundly disturbing, though if Democrats take a similar tack against him with Trump as the Republicans did with Clinton my outrage would be muted, but it’s not gonna happen with the red scare bullsh%$ being passed around.
They really have to target the ongoing corruption and lawlessness in the Trump administration, particularly with regard to the AG Jeff Sessions.
This is the sort of thing that will jam up Comey, and force him to investigate and hold uncomfortable press conferences.
Correlation does not imply causation, but lack of correlation does imply lack of causation.
As such the /complete lack of causation between minimum wage levels and employment puts a stake through the heart of the trope that minimum wages kill jobs:
Since the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, business interests and conservative politicians have warned that raising the minimum wage would be ruinous. Even modest increases, they’ve asserted, will cause the U.S. economy to hemorrhage jobs, shutter businesses, reduce labor hours, and disproportionately cast young people, so-called low-skilled workers, and workers of color to the bread lines. As recently as this year, the same claims have been repeated, nearly verbatim.
Raise wages, lose jobs, the refrain seems to go.
If the claims of minimum-wage opponents are akin to saying “the sky is falling,” this report is an effort to check whether the sky did indeed fall. In this report, we examine the historical data relating to the 22 increases in the federal minimum wage between 1938 and 2009 to determine whether or not these claims—that if you raise wages, you will lose jobs—can be substantiated. We examine employment trends before and after minimum-wage increases, looking both at the overall labor market and at key indicator sectors that are most affected by minimum-wage increases. Rather than an academic study that seeks to measure causal effects using techniques such as regression analysis, this report assesses opponents’ claims about raising the minimum wage on their own terms by examining simple indicators and job trends.
The results were clear: these basic economic indicators show no correlation between federal minimum-wage increases and lower employment levels, even in the industries that are most impacted by higher minimum wages. To the contrary, in the substantial majority of instances (68 percent) overall employment increased after a federal minimum-wage increase. In the most substantially affected industries, the rates were even higher: in the leisure and hospitality sector employment rose 82 percent of the time following a federal wage increase, and in the retail sector it was 73 percent of the time. Moreover, the small minority of instances in which employment—either overall or in the indicator sectors—declined following a federal minimum-wage increase all occurred during periods of recession or near recession. That pattern strongly suggests that the few instances of such declines in employment are better explained by the overall national business cycle than by the minimum wage.
These employment trends after federal minimum-wage increases are not surprising, as they are in line with the findings of the substantial majority of modern minimum-wage research. As Goldman Sachs analysts recently noted, citing a state-of-the-art 2010 study by University of California economists that examined job-growth patterns across every border in the U.S. where one county had a higher wage than a neighboring county, “the economic literature has typically found no effect on employment” from recent U.S. minimum-wage increases. This report’s findings mirror decades of more sophisticated academic research, providing simple confirmation that opponents’ perennial predictions of job losses when minimum-wage increases are proposed are rooted in ideology, not evidence.
Of course, this runs counter to the two rules of neoliberalism:
But neoliberalism has never lived up to its promise of a rising tide lifting all boats.
It’s widespread adoption have correlated to reduced growth and falling wages, though, of course, we know that correlation does not imply causation.
H/t The Big Picture.
With a feral cat in our house, the infamous RP the Cat, our decidedly non-feral cats, Meatball/Mousetrap and Destructo have suffered from fleas.
This has particularly been hard on Destructo, as he is a long hair.
I have tried the normal treatments, Frontline® and Advantage®, but they have been of limited effectiveness, I think that the fleas have developed resistance, and they are rather pricey, and Destructo must have the back of his head shaved (he hates this) for this to work, because otherwise it never makes contact with his skin.
I had heard that brewers yeast ameliorates flea infestations, so twice a week, we take a can of wet cat food, mix in two heaping teaspoons of brewers yeast.
The cats love the wet food, and it works like a dream.
Destructo is now almost completely free of flea sores, and their fur is thicker and more luxurious.
It’s easy, cheap, and it involves no cat induced blood loss.
I am of course referring to the scathing tell all Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign
I’ve read the reviews, Matt Taibbi has my favorite review, and what stands out is how everyone involved with campaign knew that Hillary Clinton had no reason to tun for president beyond her sense of personal entitlement:
“All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it,” they wrote. “Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”
As Taibbi notes:
Shattered is sourced almost entirely to figures inside the Clinton campaign who were and are deeply loyal to Clinton. Yet those sources tell of a campaign that spent nearly two years paralyzed by simple existential questions: Why are we running? What do we stand for?
………
The real protagonist of this book is a Washington political establishment that has lost the ability to explain itself or its motives to people outside the Beltway.
In fact, it shines through in the book that the voters’ need to understand why this or that person is running for office is viewed in Washington as little more than an annoying problem.
This should make for a fascinating read.
It also appears to prove that old adage, “You can’t beat something with nothing.”
I missed a credit union last week, and there was one this week as well:
The credit union closings:
Here is the Full NCUA list.
Once again, we are looking at a year where credit union failures out pace commercial bank failures.
I’m not sure why, but it is odd.
Acting New York State Supreme Court Justice John Galasso, who never read the Constitution through completely: He stopped before the first amendment.
A note of reassurance here: The New York Supreme court is just what they call the trial court there, a rather different application of the term than the common usage.
In an unprecedented and dangerous move that threatens the press freedom rights of all journalists, the US Justice Department has indicated it is preparing to charge WikiLeaks with a crime and may attempt to arrest its founder Julian Assange. The charges may stem from the publication of US State Department cables in 2010 and their more recent of disclosure of CIA hacking tools.
Whether you like or dislike WikiLeaks – especially if you dislike them – it’s important to understand just how dangerous this potential prosecution is to the future of journalism in the United States. Newspapers publish classified information all the time, and any prosecution of WikiLeaks puts journalists of all stripes at risk of a similar fate. Even WikiLeaks’ harshest critics need to denounce this potential move as a grave threat to the first amendment.
People may not realize it, but not a week goes by without classified information on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Without the right to publish secret information, as New York Times reporter Max Frankel put it more than 40 years ago in the landmark Pentagon Papers case: “There could be no adequate diplomatic, military and political reporting of the kind our people take for granted, either abroad or in Washington and there could be no mature system of communication between the government and the people.”
This is a profoundly chilling prospect. As Marcy “Emptywheel” Wheeler notes, “Jeff Sessions’ DOJ could pick and choose which publishers’ speech gets curtailed.”
This is a natural outgrowth of Barack Obama’s jihad against leakers, and it was a foreseeable development, but because he saw himself as a good person, he thought that everything was Ok.
Worst Constitutional law professor ever.™
GWAR Covers Kansas’ Carry On My Wayward Don. A Hardcore-Metal cover is different, but in a good way:
Song starts at about 1:25
Apologies to Karen Williams.
Andrew Cuomo wrote a very poorly selling memoir. His publisher paid him $245 for a gook that had a suggested retail price of $29.99:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s low-selling 2014 memoir netted him another $218,100 last year, pushing his total book payments to $783,000 over the past four years, according to his tax returns.
Cuomo’s 2016 tax records, which his office made available for review Tuesday, showed the latest round of payments from HarperCollins, the major publisher that gave him a lucrative book deal in 2013.
The governor’s memoir — “All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics in Life“ — did not perform well: Just 3,200 copies sold since its release, including just 100 copies over the past two years, according to NPD Books, which tracks book sales nationwide.
It was a money-loser for HarperCollins, which ultimately paid Cuomo about $245 per book sold. It retailed at $29.99.
His Presidential aspirations are the subject of frequent speculation, which would be a f%$#ing disaster.
He needs not to be the Democrats 2020 nominee.
Heck: He needs not to be the Governor New York State.
He needs to be fired ……… Out of a cannon ……… Into the sun.
More than 20,000 drug cases tied to a disgraced former state chemist appear headed for dismissal, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and public defenders said Tuesday as they combed through legal filings from local prosecutors in Massachusetts.
“We’re all overjoyed today at having what is, we think, the largest dismissal of criminal cases as a result of one case in the history of the United States of America,” said Carl Williams, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts, which has pressed for the dismissal of tainted cases.
It was the latest development in the yearslong story of Annie Dookhan, a chemist whose co-workers called her Superwoman because she worked so fast. But she was found to have mishandled drug samples, forged signatures and returned positive results on drugs she never bothered to test, and in 2013, she pleaded guilty to 27 counts, including obstruction of justice, perjury and tampering with evidence.
By then, the damage was done. Prosecutors and defenders around the state had already begun the imposing task of figuring out which convictions had been tainted by the failings. Early estimates rose above 40,000. Hundreds of people were released from prison.
In January, the state’s highest court ordered district attorneys to produce the lists of people they believe they could reprosecute, were a new trial permitted, and those whose cases they will dismiss. Those decisions were due on Tuesday.
On Tuesday afternoon, lawyers combed through spreadsheets inside an ornate courthouse here, and counted 21,587 likely dismissals. They had estimated that prosecutors would not vacate the convictions of 500 to 700 people.
Of course, people like racist Attorney General Jeff Session think that this is some sort of technicality that demoralizes law enforcement.
This is corruption, and the people around her knew that something was wrong, but because it favored prosecutors, law enforcement never paid attention.
This is why we need things like the exclusionary rule and meaningful and independent investigations of law enforcement misconduct.
I am once more horrified in the latest Republican adventure in blatant corruption:
Congressional Republicans are baldly enticing donors with the promise of meetings with senior legislative staff, effectively placing access to congressional employees up for sale to professional influence peddlers and other well-heeled interests.
Documents obtained by The Intercept and the Center for Media and Democracy show that the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee are both telling donors that in exchange for campaign contributions, they will receive invitations to special events to meet with congressional staff including chiefs of staff, leadership staffers, and committee staffers.
While selling donors access to senators and representatives and their campaign staff is nothing new, the open effort to sell access to their legislative staff — the taxpayer-funded government employees who work behind the scenes to write legislation, handle investigations, and organize committee hearings — appears to be in violation of ethics rules that prohibit campaigns from using House and Senate resources in any way.
Congressional ethics rules flatly forbid Capitol Hill employees from engaging in fundraising activities as part of their official duties. Any explicit fundraising work must be done strictly as a volunteer, and there must be a clear firewall separating government work from campaign work.………
But a document obtained by The Intercept and the Center for Media and Democracy from the NRSC, the Senate GOP campaign arm, lists the benefits of “D.C. Personal Giving Memberships,” which costs as little as $1,500 a year. Among them: “Invitation to attend events with Republican Chiefs of Staff, Leadership Staff, and Committee Staff.”
………
It’s not the first time a major Capitol Hill funding outfit has raised campaign cash using congressional employees. In 2013, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee advertised a “Women on the Hill Dinner” with chiefs of staff to Democratic senators. The event was asked for a suggested donation of $1,000.
But the new Republican effort is more structured, making the exchange of money for meetings with a variety of congressional staffers an official element of the party’s fundraising apparatus, with regular events and tiered levels of access.
This makes Newt Gingrich’s peccadilloes seem almost quaint.
Tonight! Late Show host Stephen Colbert reacts to #BillOReilly‘s dismissal from Fox News. #LSSC pic.twitter.com/4pAIBJ9aGJ— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) April 20, 2017
As I have noted many times, Colbert is on my list of, “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.” for a very good reason.
Yesterday, I wrote a lengthy post explaining the profoundly dysfunctional Presidential campaign in France.
Today, I came across John Oliver’s summary of the campaign on his show, and I am feeling profoundly inadequate.
It covers the issue and entertains at the same time, though I think that there could be a little less focus on the laughs and more on the humor.
The only thing that I object to is his characterization of Le Pen’s position on the wearing of religious regalia in public.
It’s not outrageous by the standards of France: French republics have been thoroughly and militantly secular since Charles de Gaulle was a teen,* to the degree that religious wedding ceremonies are not recognized by the state, and couples have to be married in a civil ceremony to have their union recognized.
The policy is called Laïcité, and while Le Pen’s absolutism regarding this policy is a minority position, it is well within the bounds of what is considered mainstream French political thought.
Still, I feel really inadequate right now.
*Specifically, since the passage of the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State, though secularism was a significant portion of French political discourse since at least the French revolution.
Katie Halper looks at Susan Bordo’s paean to Hillary Clinton, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, and her related OP/ED in the Guardian, and observes that she gets the facts wrong, contradicts herself, and removes any agency from women who disagree with her:
……… Your piece sets out to blame millennial feminists and show us what we did wrong in supporting Sanders, but it winds up illuminating your own failings, sadly not uncommon among certain Clinton supporters, especially those who chose to blame everyone and everything but Clinton for her loss:
An over-identification with Clinton and her biography that eclipses appreciation of young women’s lives and hardships and the political differences
Basing an argument solely on personal impressions, vague remembrances, mental and emotional associations
A condescending tone with occasional unconvincing gestures of respect and understanding for your younger sisters
Misleading statements, omissions, falsehoods or indisputable error, here related to Clinton’s statements on superpredators and warranting an immediate editorial correction
This is just a brief excerpt of what is a point by point “Fisking” of what is a self-absorbed, incoherent, and deeply dishonest screed.
It is well worth the read.
Bill O’Reilly’s reign as the top-rated host in cable news came to an abrupt and embarrassing end on Wednesday as Fox News forced him out after the disclosure of a series of sexual harassment allegations against him and an internal investigation that turned up even more.
Mr. O’Reilly and his employers came under intense pressure after an article by The New York Times on April 1 revealed how Fox News and its parent company, 21st Century Fox, had repeatedly stood by him even as he and the company reached settlements with five women who had complained about sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by him. The agreements totaled about $13 million.
Since then, more than 50 advertisers had abandoned his show, and women’s rights groups had called for him to be fired. Inside the company, women expressed outrage and questioned whether top executives were serious about maintaining a culture based on “trust and respect,” as they had promised last summer when another sexual harassment scandal led to the ouster of Roger E. Ailes as chairman of Fox News.
