Heritage Foundation: It sucks.
FreedomWorks: It sucks.
Club for Growth: It sucks.
Democrats: Needs some tweaking! https://t.co/ezpXEskarD— Bodega Fats (@GarbageApe) March 8, 2017
This is, of course the comments on Paul Ryan’s Obamacare repeal plan.
I’m beginning to think that if you took every member of the DNC and examined them, you would not find enough testicles to match those of the eunuchs corps at Topkapı Palace.
This is truly pathetic.
H/t Ny Mag
Have some classic George Carlin:
The Department of Health and Human Services decided to tie reimbursement rates to hospitals to patient satisfaction.
The result was happier but sicker and deader patients:
When Department of Health and Human Services administrators decided to base 30 percent of hospitals’ Medicare reimbursement on patient satisfaction survey scores, they likely figured that transparency and accountability would improve healthcare. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) officials wrote, rather reasonably, “Delivery of high-quality, patient-centered care requires us to carefully consider the patient’s experience in the hospital inpatient setting.” They probably had no idea that their methods could end up indirectly harming patients.
Beginning in October 2012, the Affordable Care Act implemented a policy withholding 1 percent of total Medicare reimbursements—approximately $850 million—from hospitals (that percentage will double in 2017). Each year, only hospitals with high patient-satisfaction scores and a measure of certain basic care standards will earn that money back, and the top performers will receive bonus money from the pool.
………
In fact, a national study revealed that patients who reported being most satisfied with their doctors actually had higher healthcare and prescription costs and were more likely to be hospitalized than patients who were not as satisfied. Worse, the most satisfied patients were significantly more likely to die in the next four years.
………
As a Missouri clinical instructor told me, “Patients can be very satisfied and dead an hour later. Sometimes hearing bad news is not going to result in a satisfied patient, yet the patient could be a well-informed, prepared patient.”
We don’t need to market incentivize healthcare, we need to take the market out of healthcare.
California is seeing the rise of for fee luxury jails:
………
Instead, Wurtzel, who also had been convicted of sexual battery in a previous case, found a better option: For $100 a night, he was permitted by the court to avoid county jail entirely. He did his time in the small jail in the nearby city of Seal Beach, with amenities that included flat-screen TVs, a computer room and new beds. He served six months, at a cost of $18,250, according to jail records.
Markin learned about Wurtzel’s upgraded jail stay only recently, from a reporter. “I feel like, ‘Why did I go through this?’” she said.
In what is commonly called “pay-to-stay” or “private jail,” a constellation of small city jails — at least 26 of them in Los Angeles and Orange counties — open their doors to defendants who can afford the option. But what started out as an antidote to overcrowding has evolved into a two-tiered justice system that allows people convicted of serious crimes to buy their way into safer and more comfortable jail stays.
Madam la guillotine needs to come back.
To be fair, and to be scientific about it, we should choose another subpopulation for equal focus, so we can measure the effects of our added attention. I suggest starting with politicians.
She is noting that the Trump administration is engaging in an effort to find more crime committee by immigrants, and she notes that when you look for this, you will generally find it.
It’s what I call a self-licking ice cream cone, and her suggestion to focus on politicians as a statistical control is both methodologically reasonable and delicious snark.
It appears that Wikileaks is exercising a bit more due diligence in its releases, as it is making the CIA hacks leaked to it available to the tech firms that were targeted before making them available to the general public:
Technology firms will get “exclusive access” to details of the CIA’s cyber-warfare programme, Wikileaks has said.
The anti-secrecy website has published thousands of the US spy agency’s secret documents, including what it says are the CIA’s hacking tools.
Founder Julian Assange said that, after some thought, he had decided to give the tech community further leaks first.
“Once the material is effectively disarmed, we will publish additional details,” Mr Assange said.
………
Mr Assange said that his organisation had “a lot more information on the cyber-weapons programme”.
He added that while Wikileaks maintained a neutral position on most of its leaks, in this case it did take a strong stance.
“We want to secure communications technology because, without it, journalists aren’t able to hold the state to account,” he said.
Mr Assange also claimed that the intelligence service had known for weeks that Wikileaks had access to the material and done nothing about it.
He also spoke more about the Umbrage programme, revealed in the first leaked documents.
He said that a whole section of the CIA is working on Umbrage, a system that attempts to trick people into thinking that they had been hacked by other groups or countries by collecting malware from other nation states, such as Russia.
“The technology is designed to be unaccountable,” he said.
He claimed that an anti-virus expert, who was not named, had come forward to say that he believed sophisticated malware that he had previously attributed to Iran, Russia and China, now looked like something that the CIA had developed.
This is why cyber security needs to be completely separate from any intelligence agency.
Otherwise, there is too much pressure to cover up the bugs so that the folks on the other side of the office spy on the rest of us.
Any hole which the CIA, NSA, DIA, or other TLA* can exploit can also be exploited by criminals, the Chinese, the Russians, terrorists, or the New England Patriots.
*Three letter acronym.
Obamacare vs GOP replacement pic.twitter.com/QVbtap4JYM— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) March 7, 2017
We’re only arguing about the relative level of suckage. 
H/t naked capitalism
I would argue that this was the best video of the 1980s:
In what appears to be the largest leak of C.I.A documents in history, WikiLeaks released on Tuesday thousands of pages describing sophisticated software tools and techniques used by the agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions.
The documents amount to a detailed, highly technical catalog of tools. They include instructions for compromising a wide range of common computer tools for use in spying: the online calling service Skype; Wi-Fi networks; documents in PDF format; and even commercial antivirus programs of the kind used by millions of people to protect their computers.
A program called Wrecking Crew explains how to crash a targeted computer, and another tells how to steal passwords using the autocomplete function on Internet Explorer. Other programs were called CrunchyLimeSkies, ElderPiggy, AngerQuake and McNugget.
The document dump was the latest coup for the antisecrecy organization and a serious blow to the C.I.A., which uses its hacking abilities to carry out espionage against foreign targets.
The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first installment in a larger collection of secret C.I.A. material, included 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments, many of them partly redacted by WikiLeaks editors to avoid disclosing the actual code for cyberweapons. The entire archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code, the group claimed.
In one revelation that may especially trouble the tech world if confirmed, WikiLeaks said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services have managed to compromise both Apple and Android smartphones, allowing their officers to bypass the encryption on popular services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate smartphones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”
If you are wondering why you are constantly hearing of some large organization being hacked, one reason is that our state security apparatus refuses to patch holes, because they use them to spy on the rest of us:
………
Some of the attacks are what are known as “zero days” — exploitation paths hackers can use that vendors are completely unaware of, giving the vendors no time — zero days — to fix their products. WikiLeaks said the documents indicate the CIA has violated commitments made by the Obama administration to disclose serious software vulnerabilities to vendors to improve the security of their products. The administration developed a system called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process to allow various government entities to help determine when it’s better for national security to disclose unpatched vulnerabilities and when it’s better to take advantage of them to hunt targets.
At least some civil liberties advocates agree with the WikiLeaks assessment. “Access Now condemns the stockpiling of vulnerabilities, calls for limits on government hacking and protections for human rights, and urges immediate reforms to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process,” Nathan White, senior legislative manager for digital rights group Access Now, wrote in response to the new leak in a press release.
Iterestingly enough, it appears that the hacking tools were not actually classified:
………
But Wikileaks also suggests that, because the CIA doesn’t classify its attack tools, it leaves them more vulnerable to theft.
In what is surely one of the most astounding intelligence own goals in living memory, the CIA structured its classification regime such that for the most market valuable part of “Vault 7” — the CIA’s weaponized malware (implants + zero days), Listening Posts (LP), and Command and Control (C2) systems — the agency has little legal recourse.
The CIA made these systems unclassified.
Why the CIA chose to make its cyberarsenal unclassified reveals how concepts developed for military use do not easily crossover to the ‘battlefield’ of cyber ‘war’.
To attack its targets, the CIA usually requires that its implants communicate with their control programs over the internet. If CIA implants, Command & Control and Listening Post software were classified, then CIA officers could be prosecuted or dismissed for violating rules that prohibit placing classified information onto the Internet. Consequently the CIA has secretly made most of its cyber spying/war code unclassified. The U.S. government is not able to assert copyright either, due to restrictions in the U.S. Constitution. This means that cyber ‘arms’ manufactures and computer hackers can freely “pirate” these ‘weapons’ if they are obtained. The CIA has primarily had to rely on obfuscation to protect its malware secrets.
This is why offensive cyber war is something to be avoided, because any weapon you devise becomes immediately available to the enemy to be deployed against you.
If you find a bug, it should get fixed, because if you can use, so can anyone else.
This information was promptly classified to prevent public disclosure:
The Pentagon office that reviews information to determine whether it’s classified has blocked publication of potentially embarrassing data on cost overruns for the first two vessels bought under the Navy’s primary Littoral Combat Ship contracts, according to a new congressional audit.
In a report examining Navy shipbuilding contracts, the U.S. Government Accountability Office deleted overrun information on two of the Littoral Combat Ships launched in late 2014 — the USS Milwaukee built by Lockheed Martin Corp. and the USS Jackson built by Austal Ltd. — at the request of the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review.
The GAO said the Defense Department “deemed the cost growth” on both vessels “to be sensitive but unclassified information, which is excluded from this public report. However, the percent difference” in cost for each ship “was above target cost.” Other types of ships were listed with specific data on cost increases that ranged from 4 percent to 45 percent.
“This seems to be an overly broad reading of competition-sensitive information,” said Mandy Smithberger, a director for the Project On Government Oversight’s military reform initiative. “Taxpayers are footing the bill for these overruns. They deserve to know the costs.”
We desperately need to get the military out of the business of defense acquisition, as the Swedes have with FMV.
The latest financial data is out, and it appears that banks are pulling back, which would indicate that a recession may be on the horizon:
Starting to look seriously ominous:
When delinquencies start going up, banks tend to start tightening up lending standards a bit to keep them in check, which tends to slow down lending, which causes the economy to soften, resulting in a downward spiral that doesn’t end until public sector deficit spending increases sufficiently:
It looks like banks might be retrenching and delinquencies are rising.
You can click the images for larger popups.
It appears that everyone’s second least favorite bureaucracy (Comcast is worse) is warning local police that its new pat down procedures may produce allegations of sexual assault:
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has declined to say exactly where—and how—employees will be touching air travelers as part of the more invasive physical pat-down procedure it recently ordered.
But the agency does expect some passengers to consider the examination unusual. In fact, the TSA decided to inform local police in case anyone calls to report an “abnormal” federal frisking, according to a memo from an airport trade association obtained by Bloomberg News. The physical search, for those selected to have one, is what the agency described as a more “comprehensive” screening, replacing five separate kinds of pat-downs it previously used.
The decision to alert local and airport police raises a question of just how intimate the agency’s employees may get. On its website, the TSA says employees “use the back of the hands for pat-downs over sensitive areas of the body. In limited cases, additional screening involving a sensitive area pat-down with the front of the hand may be needed to determine that a threat does not exist.”
Now security screeners will use the front of their hands on a passenger in a private screening area if one of the prior screening methods indicates the presence of explosives, according to a “security notice” that the Airports Council International-North America (ACI-NA) sent its U.S. members following a March 1 conference call with TSA officials. “Due to this change, TSA asked FSDs [field security directors] to contact airport law enforcement and brief them on the procedures in case they are notified that a passenger believes a [TSA employee] has subjected them to an abnormal screening practice,” ACI wrote.
So basically, the TSA is asking local law enforcement for pre-approval to sexually assault you.
If I want to see the Mona Lisa, I am swimming to Europe.
Over at The Intercept, they have an article on how to run an anonymous twitter account with as much security as possible.
This is important if you are, for example, a disloyal bureaucrat serving under your Trumpian overlords
The basic steps are as follows: (with my comments indented with lower case letters)
Read the rest of the article, and then leak away.
BTW, all of part 1 should also apply to giving a burner phone to a reporter to leak. Only use it at a specific place, and have it off, or better yet, the battery out, when not in use.
You don’t want someone using traffic analysis to figure out who your are.
This has been a public service announcement of Matthew’s Saroff’s Beer (and Laptop) Fund and Tip Jar.
Please give generously.
The Supreme Court just ruled, with Alito, Roberts, and Thomas dissenting, that a juror making racist comments in during deliberations is misconduct:
A Colorado man who was required to register as a sex offender after being convicted of unlawful sexual contact with two teenage girls will get a shot at a new trial, a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled today. Miguel Peña-Rodriguez had asked a state trial court for a new trial after two jurors told his lawyers that a third juror had made racially biased remarks about Peña-Rodriguez and his main witness, who are both Hispanic. But the state trial court rejected Peña-Rodriguez’s request, citing a state evidentiary rule that generally bars jurors from testifying about statements made during deliberations that might call the verdict into question. In a major ruling on juror bias and fair trials, the Supreme Court reversed that holding by a vote of 5-3 and sent Peña-Rodriguez’s case back to the lower courts for them to consider the two jurors’ testimony for the first time.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court, in a decision joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayo, and Elena Kagan. The court began by acknowledging that Colorado’s “no impeachment” rule – which mirrors similar rules in the federal system and around the country – serves important purposes: It allows “full and vigorous discussions” among jurors, who do not need to worry about later efforts to pry into those deliberations, and it “gives stability and finality to verdicts.”
But those considerations, the court determined, must yield when there is evidence that a juror has relied on racial stereotypes or prejudice to convict a defendant. Racial bias, the court explained, is different and more serious than the concerns that led the court to reject proposed exceptions to the “no impeachment” rule in its earlier cases. Although the prior cases involved behavior that was “troubling and unacceptable,” the court continued, the conduct in those cases was “anomalous,” resulting from “a single jury—or juror—gone off course.” In contrast, racial bias in jury deliberations threatens not only the proceeding in which it occurs but also the administration of justice more broadly.
………
The court took pains to emphasize that defendants who allege that a juror was racially biased must meet a high bar. “Not every offhand comment indicating racial bias or hostility will justify setting aside the no-impeachment bar to allow further judicial inquiry,” the court stressed. Instead, the defendant must show “that one or more jurors made statements exhibiting overt racial bias that cast serious doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the jury’s deliberations and resulting verdict. To qualify,” the court continued, “the statement must tend to show that racial animus was a significant motivating factor in the juror’s vote to convict.”
Although the court made clear that, as a general rule, trial courts have significant discretion in deciding whether the jurors’ statements are sufficiently serious to warrant further examination, it also left little doubt that Peña-Rodriguez had satisfied the stringent standard it established today. The juror’s statements – which included saying that, in his experience, “nine times out of ten Mexican men were guilty of being aggressive toward women and young girls,” and that “Mexican men had a bravado that caused them to believe they could do whatever they wanted with women” – were, the court noted, “egregious and unmistakable in their reliance on racial bias.” The juror had not only used “a dangerous racial stereotype to conclude” that Peña-Rodriguez “was guilty and his alibi witness should not be believed, but he also encouraged other jurors to join him in convicting on that basis.” “When jurors disclose an instance of racial bias as serious as the one involved in this case,” the court concluded, “the law must not wholly disregard its occurrence.”
I’m not surprised by the dissents, and I’m sure that Gorsuch, if confirmed to the court, would be on their side as well.
One of the sacraments of the modern conservative movement is that there is no racism anymore, because Obama was elected President, so they are free to ignore civil rights and voting rights for heavily pigmented people.
Khizr Khan, the parent of a soldier killed in Iraq who was killed in Iraq, has canceled a speech in Toronto because he has been told that limitations have or will be placed on his travel:
The father of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq has cancelled a speech planned for Toronto on Tuesday, with the event organizer suggesting Khizr Khan was concerned about travelling outside the United States.
In an email to ticket holders on Monday, organizer Bob Ramsay said Khan was “notified that his travel privilege (sic) are being reviewed” Sunday evening.
“This turn of events is not just of deep concern to me, but to all my fellow Americans who cherish our freedom to travel abroad,” Khan said, according to Ramsay’s statement.
“I have not been given any reason as to why.”
It’s not clear what “review” Khan was referring to. While the Trump administration continues to try to implement a travel ban for citizens from six Muslim-majority countries and deport illegal immigrants, neither initiative would apply to Khan, who became a U.S. citizen in 1986.
Actually, US citizens were forbidden from entering the US under Barack Obama, so this is not only something that could be done, it is something that has been done by the FBI in an attempt to coerce testimony or service as an informant.
This was done by putting people on the no-fly list, but given the complete embrace of bigotry and lawlessness recently demonstrated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (it used to be called the INS), Mr. Khan would likely encounter extreme harassment if he were to attempt to re-enter on a land crossing.
I think that the INS is the only federal bureaucracy that is ecstatic about Trump being in the White House, and I’m thinking that it’s 50-50 that this was the brain child of some minor functionary in la migra, rather than someone in the Trump administration.
The past few weeks have indicated that it is an organization that is rotten to the core, so I hope that someone is keeping notes for the next administration.
In the Telegraph, they had a headline that is uniquely British:
More Than 600 Health QUANGO Chiefs on Six-Figure Salaries amid NHS Cash Crisis
The translation is as follows:
Now that the Conservatives have privatized much of the British National Health Service, not only is there no money, but much of what there is is being wasted on overpaid executives.
QUANGO stands for, “Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization”.
Basically, it’s where you screw the taxpayers, and make your friends rich(er) by privatizing essential government services, creating private profits and poorer services: (1£= about $1.22)
More than 600 NHS quango chiefs are now on six-figure salaries, with a doubling in the number earning more than the Prime Minister in just three years, new figures show.
Many of the highest earners have made repeated demands on the Government to increase NHS funding as it battles against its worst financial deficit in history.
But figures uncovered by the Telegraph, show that the nine main health quangos are now employing 628 officials on salaries of at least £100,000.
They include 93 taking home more than Theresa May’s £149,440 salary – up from 48 at their predecessor bodies three years earlier.
Among the highest paid is the NHS deputy medical director, earning around £225,000 a year.
Dr Jonathan Fielden is currently suspended from work and banned from contact with patients, after being arrested on suspicion of voyeurism.
The findings come as the NHS attempts to make £22 billion in savings. On Friday Simon Stevens, who earns around £195,000, said the NHS needed more money. He told an audience: “We do need capital; we’ve said that from the get go.”His plea came the day after the Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Prof Sir Mike Richards, who is paid around £240,000, said the health service was standing on a “burning platform”.
And last year Jim Mackey, who earns between £215,000 and £220,000 as head of another watchdog, NHS Improvement, spoke of how he believed there was “a door open” at the Treasury , saying the NHS needed to “get our case together” to get more funds.
Patients groups said the scale of the spending on salaries was “truly shocking” and “eyewatering”.
While this is going on, medical professionals are increasingly underpaid, and so are fleeting the system, but the top 1% has got to get their vig.
The Tories are trying to run the NHS like a business: Burn it down for the insurance money.
Working for the public good has been replaced by looting, and we see this in the United States as well.
I didn’t realize it, but Patrick Kennedy and Newt Gingrich have a lobbying firm together and they have been hired by a pharmaceutical firm to push their product:
A company that sells a new opioid-addiction medication is a secret funder of an advocacy group fronted by Newt Gingrich and Patrick Kennedy that is pushing for more government funding and insurance coverage of such treatments.
Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker and a Trump confidant, and Kennedy, a former congressman and son of former US Senator Edward Kennedy, are paid advisors to Advocates for Opioid Recovery. They have generated a flurry of media attention in those roles, including joint interviews with outlets ranging from Fox News to the New Yorker.
Gingrich told STAT this week he didn’t know who was funding Advocates for Opioid Recovery, and the nonprofit group’s officials refused to disclose its financial backers.The answer, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is Braeburn Pharmaceuticals Inc. The private company, based in Princeton, N.J., won approval last year to market an implant that continuously dispenses the opioid addiction medicine buprenorphine.
In a prospectus filed with the SEC in late January as part of a now-postponed effort to take the company public, Braeburn disclosed it entered into an agreement to make a $900,000 charitable donation to Advocates for Opioid Recovery. The filing indicates the company had paid $675,000 to the nonprofit group as of Sept. 30. It did not specify when the remaining funds would be paid.
………
Kennedy declined to be interviewed this week, as did Van Jones, the CNN commentator and former Obama aide who is another paid adviser. Earlier this week, Woodbury and a spokesman for the nonprofit refused to say who was funding it, adding that the donors wanted to remain anonymous.
Yeah, they would want to remain anonymous.
Patrick Kennedy needs to get an honest job.
As to Van Jones, I just find it kind it kind of depressing: Everyone in DC eventually sells out.
Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been banned.
The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials who were trying to clamp down on the ride-hailing service. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities like Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China and South Korea.
Greyball was part of a program called VTOS, short for “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The program, including Greyball, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team.
Greyball and the VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees, who also provided documents. The four spoke on the condition of anonymity because the tools and their use are confidential and because of fear of retaliation by Uber.
Uber’s use of Greyball was recorded on video in late 2014, when Erich England, a code enforcement inspector in Portland, Ore., tried to hail an Uber car downtown in a sting operation against the company.
At the time, Uber had just started its ride-hailing service in Portland without seeking permission from the city, which later declared the service illegal. To build a case against the company, officers like Mr. England posed as riders, opening the Uber app to hail a car and watching as miniature vehicles on the screen made their way toward the potential fares.
But unknown to Mr. England and other authorities, some of the digital cars they saw in the app did not represent actual vehicles. And the Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues — essentially Greyballing them as city officials — based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app, populated with ghost cars, to evade capture.………
This is where the VTOS program and the use of the Greyball tool came in. When Uber moved into a new city, it appointed a general manager to lead the charge. This person, using various technologies and techniques, would try to spot enforcement officers.
I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit,* but it appears to me that a this strategy has 4 letters written all over it, R.I.C.O.
I’d love to see someone get seriously medieval on their ass.
*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
Trump has suspended the accelerated review program for the H1B program.
Short version of this is that for an additional $1,225.00, you can have your application reviewed in a guaranteed 15 days or less, rather than the could be as long as 6 months normal review.
The people who are most likely to use this are the Indian body shops who provide temps to tech firms:
The Trump administration’s decision to halt expedited processing of H-1B visas could abruptly disrupt the plans of thousands of immigrant workers in a range of businesses from technology to health care, immigration experts say.
H-1B visas allow employers to bring in skilled foreign workers; about 85,000 will be given out this year. The visas are in high demand and given out by lottery. It can take six months or longer for an application to be reviewed.
But the government announced Friday that, as of April 3, it will suspend the “premium processing” option, which ensures an application will be reviewed within 15 days. It costs $1,225.
………
Neil Ruiz, executive director of the Center for Law, Economics and Finance at George Washington University, said the Trump administration’s decision to stop expedited processing could be the first step away from the lottery system.“I think that removing premium processing may allow the administration to pick who to prioritize in the wait times for H-1B visas,” Ruiz told CNNMoney.
Watson called the move a “big deal” because certain “employers and individuals require premium processing in certain situations.”
If the employees are truly essential and have a skill set unavailable in the United States, you can wait.
If you are looking for cheap labor, time is money, and you look elsewhere .
Good moments are going to be few and far between for the next few years, so I’ll take pleasure in small wins.
