Month: December 2017

Linkage

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Too Cute:

Yeah, About that iPhone Conspiracy Theory

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Now that Apple has been forced to reveal that it was actually slowing down old phones with software updates, the lawsuits have begun to pop up.

It appears that hiding this fact from customers, who felt compelled to spend 10 times as much on a new phone as they would on a battery replacement, has made some people angry:

Since news broke that Apple deliberately slows down the processor speed of iPhones as they age, the company has now been sued three times in various federal courts nationwide.

These proposed class-action lawsuits allege largely the same thing: that over time certain iPhones exhibited lower performance and that Apple fraudulently concealed this fact from owners. If those customers went to an Apple Store to investigate, they were encouraged to simply buy a new iPhone.

“Had Plaintiffs been informed by Apple or its technical/customer service support staff that a battery replacement would have improved the performance of the above devices, they would have opted to replace the batteries instead of purchasing new phones,” one of the lawsuits, Abdulla et al v. Apple, which was filed Thursday in federal court in Chicago, alleges.

This is a not particularly surprising consequence of living in Cupertino’s walled garden.

Well, That Was Fast

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After running a campaign for Virginia Governor in which campaign finance prominently featured, Virginia Governor-elect Ralph Northam is taking corporate money for the inauguration:

After calling for sweeping campaign finance reforms during last year’s Democratic primary, Gov.-elect Ralph Northam is accepting five-figure checks from some of Virginia’s biggest corporate donors to fund his inauguration.

Dominion Energy, the state’s top public service corporation whose bankrolling of Virginia politics has made some lawmakers increasingly uneasy, contributed $50,000 to Northam’s inaugural committee earlier this month, the same amount the company has given to help celebrate the last four incoming governors.

Northam’s committee received an additional $50,000 from the tobacco giant Altria, and took in $25,000 each from Anthem, Capital One, Hunton & Williams and Aetna Life & Casualty, well-known players in the health care, banking, legal and insurance fields.

Combined, the inaugural committee has taken in more than $250,000 from corporate or business donors, according to data on large donations compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project. The committee has reported raising almost $650,000 so far, including a $67,795 transfer from Northam’s PAC and several big checks from Democratic donors.

And they wonder why the electorate is cynical.

Here Is Hoping That This Ruling Sticks

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About 4 months ago, a US citizen was detained in Syria, and has been held incommunicado for months, and now a federal judge has granted ACLU lawyers access to him:

A federal judge has taken a major step toward rejecting the Trump administration’s campaign to prevent an American citizen detained indefinitely as an enemy combatant from challenging his captivity in court.

Not only did Judge Tanya Chutkan of the District of Columbia district court order the Pentagon to permit access to the anonymous man for his would-be attorneys, she also barred the administration from making an end run around the U.S. legal system that it has long been considering – as a tactic to avoid precisely the defeat in court that Chutkan has now delivered.

Whether and how the Trump administration complies with Chutkan’s order is the latest drama in an extraordinary case that has seen the resurrection of sweeping government claims of detentions power. The last time the government argued it could hold an American citizen in military detention without access to the courts was the early years of George W. Bush’s administration, and the Supreme Court in 2004 rejected the contention in landmark 2004 case.

Late on Saturday night, the 103rd day of the man’s captivity, Chutkan instructed the Pentagon to provide the American Civil Liberties Union with “temporary, immediate and unmonitored access” to the man, whom the military is holding somewhere in Iraq without ever releasing his name – another aspect of the government’s efforts to prevent legal intervention in the case.

The behavior of the Trump administration, and the Pentagon, have been truly contemptible in this this matter, even by the standards of the past sixteen years.

Yeah, Completely Innocent Behavior

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When is the last time that you heard of a publicly owned utility with a good balance sheet suspending dividends?

Well, Pacific Gas & Electric just did to build up cash reserve, and despite the claims to the contrary, it appears that PG&E expects to see some significant liability for causing the Northern California fires earlier this year:

Wednesday evening, two sleepy trading days before the long Christmas weekend, when no one was supposed to pay attention, Pacific Gas and Electric, the Northern California utility that is being investigated and sued for allegedly having triggered the wildfires in the Bay Area, “the most destructive and deadliest in our state’s history,” as the Department of Insurance had put it, announced that it would suspend its dividend.

PG&E shares [PCG] plunged 10% in after-hours trading. Thursday morning, shares plummeted 16.5% to $42.75. They’re now down 38% in total since the beginning of the wildfires that killed 43 people and caused still untold property and environmental damage, including $9 billion in insurance claims so far, with the tally likely to rise further. About three dozen lawsuits have been filed against PG&E.

PG&E’s announcement was terse:

On December 20, 2017, the Boards of Directors of PG&E Corporation (the “Corporation”) and its subsidiary, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (the “Utility”), determined to suspend quarterly cash dividends on both the Corporation’s common stock, beginning with the fourth quarter of 2017, and the Utility’s preferred stock, beginning with the three-month period ending January 31, 2018, due to uncertainty related to causes and potential liabilities associated with the extraordinary October 2017 Northern California wildfires.


………

The primary suspect is PG&E’s infrastructure and its maintenance. On October 8, when the wildfires started, heavy winds toppled power poles, transformers, and power lines. And there it gets complicated. On October 23, The Mercury News reported:

For the better part of a decade, California’s utilities have helped to stall the state’s effort to map where their power lines present the highest risk for wildfires, an initiative that critics say could have forced PG&E to strengthen power poles and bolster maintenance efforts before this month’s deadly North Bay fires.

A review of the mapping project by the Bay Area News Group shows that utilities have repeatedly asked to slow down the effort and argued as recently as July that, as PG&E put it, certain proposed regulations would “add unnecessary costs to construction and maintenance projects in rural areas.”

There is some strong circumstantial evidence that the fires were triggered from poorly maintained lines and transformers.

PG&E has been fighting regulators to avoid spending money on things like trimming trees back from the lines for years, and now it looks like it has come back to bite them in the butt.

Corrupt Much?

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Corker’s Net Worth Since Becoming Senator

The indispensable Matt Taibbi has run down Tennessee Sentor Bob Corker’s long history of insider trading and corruption:

So Tennessee Senator Bob Corker is in trouble now, because he flip-flopped to vote for Donald Trump’s tax bill after a provision was included that reportedly helps him personally.

 Color me not shocked. I spent most of this past summer investigating Corker, whose personal finances have been an open scandal for years. Everything you need to know about the Senator can be discerned from this chart.

Click on that link and you’ll see: Corker went from having an estimate net worth of zero in 2006, before entered the Senate in 2007 (when he was estimated at having $54,682,000) to now, currently, being the fourth wealthiest man in the upper chamber, worth $69 million as of 2015.

How do you increase your net worth by 69 million dollars while you’re working full-time as a Senator? That is not an easy story to explain.

………

It wasn’t until Corker took office and filled out disclosure forms that his finances became public – sort of. Few in the media seem ever to have read the “liabilities” section of Corker’s first disclosure, where the former mayor and construction magnate listed a series of massive outstanding loans. At the low end, Corker appeared to owe a hair-raising $24.2 million. At the high end, $120.5 million.

He took office in debt to some of the nation’s biggest lenders – including somewhere between $12 million and $60 million in debt to GE Capital alone.

………

It has always been Corker’s contention that when he sold his business, his debts were also sold, meaning he was not technically in debt when he went to Washington. Still, he continued to list the loans as liabilities.

………

Ten years before reporters would swarm over Trump for (among other things) raising fees at his Mar-a-Lago resorts before making a series of taxpayer-funded visits, Corker tested the limits of the profiteering possibilities in the legislative branch, essentially becoming a full-time day-trader who did a little Senator-ing in his spare time.

In the first nine months of 2007, Corker made an incredible 1,200 trades, over four per day, including 332 over a two-day period.

………

By 2014, when Corker sat on the Senate Banking Committee, a position that gave him regular access to prime information about the future direction of the markets, the Tennessee Senator still had his foot on the gas. He made 930 stock trades that year.

Of his colleagues on the committee, Rhode Island’s Jack Reed made 39 trades, Pennsylvania’s Patrick Toomey 26, and nobody else made any – meaning Corker made 93.5% of all trades made by the legislators most plugged-in to the country’s finances.

When I asked about that extraordinary volume of trading in 2014, when Corker sat on the Banking Committee, Johnson answered thusly: “In 2014, Senator Corker entered a separately managed account (SMA), which is a portfolio managed by a professional asset management firm. Since he had not previously been in a SMA, he asked the Senate Ethics Committee for a ruling on how they should be reported,” he said.

He went on: “The Senate Ethics Committee studied the issue for several weeks, and out of an abundance of caution, advised us to report all underlying positions of the account, even though the senator was making no investment decisions.”

A Separately Managed Account is not the same thing as a blind trust. That the Senate Ethics Committee advised Corker to continue reporting his positions even if the senator was making “no investment decisions” was noteworthy. And no matter what, it continued to be true that Corker was making a dizzying number of financial moves while sitting on the Senate Banking Committee.

Corker’s activities didn’t go completely unnoticed. A few ethics groups cried foul over the years.

Anne Weismann, director of the Campaign for Accountability, which filed a complaint against Corker in 2015, described Corker’s trading history in damning terms.

“Senator Corker’s trades followed a consistent pattern,” she said. “He bought low and sold high. It beggars belief to suggest these trades – netting the senator and his family millions – were mere coincidences.”

One financial analyst I know said Corker’s trading patterns looked more like the work of “an office of multiple analysts all grinding at least 60 hours a week” than like the work of “one guy moonlighting as a Senator.”

………

When Corker took on Trump this fall – saying the White House was “an adult day care center” and that Trump’s behavior threatened “World War III” – he suddenly became a darling of sorts in the liberal media.

Now he’s a bad guy again, for reportedly doing what he’s always done, acting in his own financial interest while earning a paycheck as a U.S. Senator.

The Corker story to me is a classic example of why it’s always dangerous to overlook a politician’s failings because he happens to be on the right side of some partisan debate at a given moment in time. The reason is obvious: these types eventually revert to form, and soon enough, a politician’s flaws will be working against you again, rather than for you.

(Emphasis mine)

This is not a surprise.

If you believe government is inherently evil, or, as Margaret Thatcher so famously said, that there is, “No such thing as society,” then the only reasons for public service are personal enrichment and a lust for power.

Jamie Dimon Has Boldly Gone Where No Man Has Gone Before

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Seriously, the Swiss be like, “We thought that we were hard core, but dayyyymmnnnn!”

Last month, we learned that JPMorgan Chase had managed the near-impossible and run afoul of Swiss banking laws, specifically Switzerland’s not-historically-robust anti-money-laundering rules. How bad was Dimon & co.’s transgression? The Swiss were initially awfully Swiss about things, simply letting the bank know it had “seriously infringed” upon their financial hospitality.

Yesterday, that prognosis was upgraded to “seriously breached.” So seriously that a traditional slap on the wrist will not do. No: The Swiss are gonna get all American up in here and install a monitor to make sure it doesn’t happen again, “it” being the gentle washing of “hundreds of millions of dollars” on behalf of the prime minister of Malaysia, who was in the process of allegedly draining that country’s sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB, of several billion dollars.

It buggers the mind.

Not a One Vote Margin

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After a protest from the Republican, the election in Virginia’s 94th House of Delegates District is a tie that will be settled by a coin flip:

An apparent one-vote Democratic victory in a Newport News-area House of Delegates race turned into a tie Wednesday, creating an unprecedented scenario in which control of the House will be decided by state officials essentially drawing a name out of a hat.

Under state law, the State Board of Elections now has to break the tie in the 94th House District through “determination by lot,” the wildest turn yet after a roller-coaster week in Virginia politics.

Republican Del. David E. Yancey entered Tuesday’s recount with a 10-vote lead over Democrat Shelly Simonds. At the end of the recount, Simonds appeared to have a one-vote lead over Yancey, which would have created a 50-50 split in the House after Democrats flipped 15 other GOP-held seats in a wave election last month.

Republicans indicated Tuesday evening that they wouldn’t challenge the outcome when it went before a three-judge panel for final approval.

But on Wednesday morning, Yancey’s campaign asked the court to accept a ballot that had been tossed aside. The voter had filled in bubbles for both Yancey and Simonds, but had put a slash through the Simonds bubble, which the court interpreted as intent to vote for Yancey. On the same ballot, the voter had made an X on the filled-in bubble beside the name of Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie. The ballot included clear votes for Republicans in the races for attorney general and lieutenant governor.

The additional vote for Yancey meant each candidate finished with 11,608 votes.

There may be more litigation to follow.

Bummer.

Chaos is Job Won

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Catalonia had snap elections as a result of the previous government being deposed by Madrid.

The pro-independence Catalonian parties have increased their majority with very high voter turnout.

I don’t think that this is really a referendum on independence, but it might be one on on the heavy handed response of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, which sent in riot police to beat little old ladies. (Rajoy’s Peoples Party lost 8 of its 11 seats in this election)

Over-reaction has never been an effective response to secessionist movements.

I Thought That We Shot Redcoats to Stop This

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It appears that prosecutors in Washington D.C. were determined to revive the worst aspects of British treason law, which the founding fathers explicitly repudiated in Article III, Section 3, of the United States Constitution. (British treason law included, “

British treason law could involve, among other things, “Some association with rioting.”

That whole “Association with Rioting” thing?

Federal prosecutors were attempting to use that against inauguration day protestors, and today, all 6 defendants (over 100 others remain charged) were acquitted of all charges:

The first six people to face trial in Inauguration Day protests that turned destructive in the nation’s capital were acquitted of all charges, a victory not only for the defendants but also for advocates who argued the government overreached in its effort to prosecute more than 200 people arrested as they marched through the city.

Following a nearly four-week trial and two full days of deliberations, a D.C. Superior Court jury delivered not-guilty verdicts Thursday on multiple charges of rioting and destruction of property.

The defendants — including a nurse for cancer patients, a freelance photographer and a college student — joined throngs of protesters who took to the streets Jan. 20 to protest Donald Trump’s election. Prosecutors said the six were among a group that cut a violent swath through 16 blocks of the city, smashing businesses’ windows, tossing newspaper boxes into the street and damaging a limousine. Authorities tallied the damage at more than $100,000.

………

Jennifer Armento, 38, a Philadelphia woman who was among the six, said the verdict “shows the country that the jury was unwilling to do what the government wanted them to do, which was criminalize dissent.”

………

From the start, defense attorneys said their clients and most others in the group of about 500 were peacefully protesting, while only a handful peeled off and became violent. They criticized police for failing to identify those people and said officers unfairly herded a group of about 200 and charged them with rioting.

During his closing argument last week, attorney Steven J. McCool, who represented one of the men on trial, appealed to jurors to protect the “rights of free speech.”

………

Prosecutors told jurors there was no evidence the six people on trial were personally involved in the vandalism but argued that they chose to remain with the group, essentially providing cover for those who caused the damage.

In his closing argument, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rizwan Qureshi told jurors the group “tore up your city, putting people in danger.”

He presented the jury with the analogy of a bank robbery, likening the defendants to a getaway driver while comparing those who smashed windows to the robber in the bank.

Seriously, the prosecutor’s argument is literally unAmerican.

This prosecution was a contemptible attempt to criminalize legal protest.

Just ……… Go ……… Away ………

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Hillary Clinton is, “Mulling her role in the 2018 midterms.”

How can we miss you if you never leave?

Apologies to Dr. Seuss and Art Buchwald:

“Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don’t care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!
I don’t care.
You can go
By bike.
You can go
On a Zike-Bike
If you like.
If you like
You can go
In an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!
Please do, do, do, DO!
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton
I don’t care how.
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
If you wish.
If you wish
You may go
By lion’s tale.
Or stamp yourself
And go by mail.
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton
Don’t you know
The time has come
To go, go, GO!
Get on your way!
Please Tony B.!
You might like going in a Zumble-Zay.
You can go by balloon . . .
Or broomstick.
Or
You can go by camel
In a bureau drawer.
You can go by bumble-boat
. . . or jet.
I don’t care how you go.
Just get!
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton!
I don’t care how.
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
I said
GO
And
GO
I meant . . .
The time had come
So . . .
Hillary WENT.”

Confederate Statues in Memphis Are Removed After City Council Vote – The New York Times

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There is a law in Tennessee that prevents the removal of monuments on public land.

The intent is to prevent the removal of Confederate monuments.

The Memphis city council sold two of its parks to a non-profit, and last night, Confederate monuments were removed:

The City Council here voted Wednesday to sell two city parks with Confederate monuments, clearing the way for two statues to be removed before the city commemorates the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Mayor Jim Strickland first announced the sales of Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park on Twitter.

“History is being made in Memphis tonight,” he said at a news conference later in the evening.

Health Sciences Park had a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early member of the Ku Klux Klan, which was removed around 9 p.m. local time.

By 10:30 p.m., cranes had maneuvered into Memphis Park and around a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. About 15 minutes later, a crane hoisted the statue onto a truck as a crowd cheered and struck up songs, including “Hit the road Jack.”

The removal of the statues came not only as Memphis prepares for the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. King, who was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while visiting the city, but also amid a sweeping national debate about the significance of Confederate monuments and whether their removal would be an erasure of history or a righting of past wrongs.

………

Bruce McMullen, the chief legal officer for the city, said in an interview on Wednesday night that the parks had been sold to Memphis Greenspace, a nonprofit led by Van D. Turner Jr., a Shelby County commissioner.

The nonprofit seems to have been created expressly for the purpose of buying the parks: It filed its incorporation papers in October, Mr. Strickland said. Mr. Turner did not immediately return a request for comment.

The city sold Health Sciences Park in its entirety, Mr. McMullen said, and it sold its interest in an easement in Memphis Park. Each was sold for $1,000, he said.

The transfer of the parks to private ownership effectively allowed the city to skirt the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, a state law that prohibits the removal, relocation or renaming of memorials on public property.

A well deserved f%$# you to the lost causer racists.

Facebook, Twitter, and Jewish Passover Songs

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Someone on Facebook post complained about a Tweet calling Obama a Neoliberal tool.

I observed that many of his behaviors served the neoliberal playbook, and they replied, “You’re wildly wrong on the powers of POTUS if you think Obama was able to singlehandedly do quite a lot of that list,” and I replied:

He had a literal blank check or mortgage relief, and he “Foamed the Runways” (Geithner said that) for insolvent banks, it’s on him.

 His decisions on target assassinations and his embrace of torturers and torture enablers were his decisions as CinC, it’s on him.

 His decision not prosecute banksters was his AG’s decision, and he supported it, it’s on him.

 He tried to push through TPP, it’s on him.

 He did not lift a finger to support card check, it’s on him.

 Sing to the tune of “Chad Gadya.”

I am feeling very smug about my bon mot right now.

Sad I Missed This

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It appears that Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates explored their differences of opinions over Twitter, with West asserting that Coates that the latter’s, “narrow racial tribalism and myopic political neoliberalism has no place for keeping track of Wall Street greed, US imperial crimes or black elite indifference to poverty”.

I have not personally seen this exchange, but Coates deleted his Twitter account after their exchange:

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates has deleted his Twitter account after a dispute with philosopher and social critic Cornel West.

“Peace, y’all. I’m out,” Coates wrote Tuesday on his now-defunct account, according to the AP. “I didn’t get in it for this.”

West recently criticized Coates in an essay published in The Guardian, slamming him for not being critical enough of former President Obama and writing that he “fetishizes white supremacy.”

In the piece, West accuses Coates, who has emerged as one of the country’s leading black intellectuals, of having a “preoccupation with white acceptance” and an “allegiance to Obama.”

I don’t know what happened, but I am sad to have missed this.

I also have no clue as to who “won”, though like most Twitter fights, my guess is that they they both “lost”.

That is just the nature of Twitter.

Still, these are two talented writers, and neither of them are slouches intellectually, so it was probably epic truly epic.

Can I Have This Translated from English to American?

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On this Reuters report about Uber’s appeal of the decision by Transport for London to ban the service, I came across a rather interesting quote which, to American eyes at least, appears to rather oblique:

At Tuesday’s hearing, TfL also said it had “one or two” issues regarding the accuracy of details provided by Uber.“The decision letter says, well, there are one or two issues about the extent to which the information given to TfL was correct,” TfL lawyer Martin Chamberlain told the court. “That is one of the points that the decision is based on.”

(emphasis mine)

I believe that translating from Etonian speak to an earthier London vernacular would give us something to the effect of, “You are a bunch of lying wankers, so sod off!”

Am I correct in understanding the underlying intent here?

Quote of the Day

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Instead of piling algorithms on top of algorithms on top of algorithms to fix the problems of your algorithms, how about let people choose which friend and brands and businesses or whatever to like or follow or whatever we call it this week and run the posts in reverse chronological order. If I see stupid sh%$ I can block it myself.

—Atrios on Facebooks constant changes to algorithms to fight click-bait and its ilk.

(%$ mine)

I understand his point, and if he, or I, were customers of Facebook, but we aren’t. We are what Facebook is selling.

If we just saw what we wanted, Facebook wouldn’t be able to sell ¼ the ads that they do now.

Facebook algorithmic changes are about making delivery of the product (You, and Me, and Uncle Dave) more efficient.

To quote Sal Tessio from The Godfather, “It was only business.”

Lame Politician of the Day, The Death of Hashtag Metoo Edition

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It appears that Susan Collins’ response to the fact that her so-called deal over the tax plan is a fraud is to accuse reporters of sexism:

Quite a moment just now. We asked Susan Collins about House Republicans vowing not to pass the provisions McConnell promised her to win her tax vote. She stared for several seconds and said she thought the press's coverage of the tax bill has been extremely sexist.

— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) December 19, 2017

Oh, you delicate snowflake………