Year: 2018

Quote of the Day

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One of the reasons why Russia can credibly meet or beat the US in terms military-related technological superiority is that top mathematical and physics grads have been going into finance since the mid 1980s.

—Yves Smith

It’s interesting how, when people complain about crowding out from government deficits, it never seems to extend to how a parasitic financial industry is diverting intellectual capital to unproductive uses.

In fact, if you read trade magazines like Aviation Week, it becomes clear that a major hurdle for high tech operations is the fact that there is no one is stepping up to replace the current (near retirement)  cadre of technical employees.

These folks know how to count, and so are going to finance where it is more remunerative.

Linkage

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Stephen Colbert is Colberting Congress:

Holy Sh%$

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We now know why the Cole bombing lawyers at Guantánamo resigned, they found a microphone concealed in the room used for lawyer-client conferences, and the court has refused to discuss this. Under these conditions, now only would I have resigned, I’d have seriously considered defecting to Russia and revealing all the crap that they have pulled:

Lawyers for the alleged USS Cole bombing mastermind quit the capital case after discovering a microphone in their special client meeting room and were denied the opportunity to either talk about or investigate it, the Miami Herald has learned.

 The narrative, contained in a 15-page prosecution filing obtained by the Herald, is the first authoritative description of the episode that caused three civilian defense attorneys to resign from the death-penalty case of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri on ethical grounds: Rick Kammen, a seasoned death-penalty defender, and Rosa Eliades and Mary Spears. In fact, the prosecution says the listening device that lawyers discovered in an early August inspection of their special meeting room was a legacy of past interrogations — and, across 50 days of ostensibly confidential attorney-client meetings, was never turned on.

 The description, an eight-paragraph, declassified version of something the public was not allowed to know until this week, was contained in a prosecution filing at the U.S. Court of Military Commissions Review signed by the chief prosecutor for military commissions, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, and three appellate lawyers on his staff.

 It says that, after the three lawyers quit the case in October, prison workers “removed flooring, walls, and fixtures” in an attorney-client meeting site exclusively used by Nashiri and his lawyers and “confirmed that legacy microphones, which were not connected to any audio listening/recording device nor in an operable condition, were removed.”

I don’t believe them, and neither do the lawyers who quit:


Kammen, reached by the Herald, called the prosecution account “outrageous” and “really grotesque selective declassification” designed to permit “some portion of the truth to seep out, but only in ways that the government feels will help it.”

At the time of their resignations, Kammen said he was only allowed to say that something had occurred, which he could not describe; that he sought discovery from the judge in order to investigate the episode as well as a hearing, and the requests were denied it. The judge’s denial is classified.

“Our concerns were much greater than what they appear to admit was there,” he said. He added, however, that even the portion the prosecution now permits the public to know “demonstrates that either Colonel Spath was lied to by the government or in many of his statements he was lying to the public, the press and the victims in a way that was absolutely shameful and disgraceful — by casting it as fake news.”

………

War court watchers wondered why the discovery was considered a national security secret in the first place.

“If this really was an innocuous slip-up with unplugged microphones, why has the government apparently tried so hard to cover it up?” Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, told the Herald.

“What else is being kept secret?” Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said in a tweet.

These military commissions have always been a travesty, as this incident clearly shows.

One down, Nine Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine to Go

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Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison for fraud.

The obvious follow-up question is, “What about the other guys?”

People like Lloyd Blankfein, Tim Sloan, Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, etc.

A federal judge on Friday sentenced Martin Shkreli, the notorious former hedge fund manager, to seven years in prison for defrauding his investors of $10 million.

In imposing the sentence, U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto roughly split the difference between the 15 years prosecutors asked for and the up to 18 months sought by Shkreli’s defense team. Shkreli, 34, who delivered a tearful speech to Matsumoto apologizing for his conduct and pleading for leniency, did not react to the sentence.

A complicated picture of Shkreli emerged from the trial, said Matsumoto, who said the case had given her a case of insomnia. “It is more than clear that Mr. Shkreli is a gifted individual with a passion for science,” she said. But his crimes are serious and it is important to send a message that such fraud should be not tolerated, she said. “White collar offenders like Mr. Shkreli use their intelligence and acumen to elude detection,” she said.

Shkreli, best known for raising the price of an AIDS drug by 5,000 percent when he was chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, was convicted last August of defrauding the investors in his hedge funds, MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare. Shkreli lied to obtain investors’ money and then didn’t tell them when he made a bad stock bet that led to massive losses, prosecutors argued. Instead, they said, he raised more money to pay off other investors, or took money and stock from Retrophin, a drug company he founded.

We need to throw a whole bunch more people in jail, but it ain’t gonna happen.

Jeff Bezos Is Attempting to Upload His Consciousness to a Machine

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Let’s look at the checklist of scary sh%$ that Alexa does:

  • Listens to everything you say.
  • Doesn’t really care except to sell you more sh%$.
  • Doesn’t really understand the real you.
  • Doesn’t care that they don’t understand the real you.
  • Doesn’t give a sh%$ about people generally.

And here is the final bit, unexpected bursts of weird incongruous laughter.

I can only conclude that this is a result of Bezos attempting to upload his consciousness to the cloud:

Over the past few days, users with Alexa-enabled devices have reported hearing strange, unprompted laughter. Amazon responded to the creepiness today in a statement to The Verge, saying, “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.”

………

As noted in media reports and a trending Twitter moment, Alexa seemed to start laughing without being prompted to wake. People on Twitter and Reddit reported that they thought it was an actual person laughing near them, which is certainly scary if you’re home alone. Many responded to the cackling sounds by unplugging their Alexa-enabled devices.

I’m beginning to think that this whole Internet thing was a mistake.

And in the TX-7 Primary

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The Democratic side is going to a runoff, with Lizzie Fletcher getting the most votes  with the condemned by the DCCC Laura Moser close behind.

The Emily’s List endorsed Fletcher is a union buster lawyer, so even if the DCCC had not released an opposition research dump on Moser, she would have my support.

With the DCCC’s war on Moser though, I’m actually interested in what would otherwise be an obscure, Congressional race.

It’s highly unlikely that either can win the general:  7% more Republicans turned out than Democrats, and for them, the primary was meaningless, with the incumbent getting 76% of the vote.

Moser’s campaign website is here.

Send her money, and tell the Blue Dog loving DCCC to go cheney themselves.

Gee, You Think?

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Some days, it’s Republicans who stun me with their ability to exceed my lowest expectations.

Some days, it’s Donald Trump who stuns me with their ability to exceed my lowest expectations.

Some days, it’s Democrats who stun me with their ability to exceed my lowest expectations.

Some days, it’s Monsanto who stuns me with their ability to exceed my lowest expectations.

And then, there is Facebook:

Facebook has apologized for sending out a survey to find out how the social network should respond when adult men ask teenaged girls for sexually explicit images.

The survey, which went out to an undisclosed number of users of the social network over the weekend, posed this question:

In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14 year old girl for sexual pictures.

  • This content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it.
  • This content should be allowed on Facebook, but I don’t want to see it.
  • This content should not be allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it.
  • I have no preference on this topic.

Missing is any acknowledgement that soliciting sexual imagery from minors is a crime in many countries, including the US and the UK, to say nothing of facilitating the distribution of such content on your website.

How I long for the quiet competence and high moral standards that Microsoft showed (only by comparison) when it ruled the world.

Should I Start a GoFundMe?*

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Poster child for backpfeifengesicht, a face that needs to be punched

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli will have to forfeit $7.6 million, including his copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon A Time in Shaolin as a result.

My heart bleeds borscht:

The disgraced pharmaceutical executive and hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli must forfeit $7.36 million in assets (PDF) to the federal government following his fraud conviction, a judge ruled Monday. The assets set for forfeiture (PDF) include the single copy of the Wu-Tang album Once Upon A Time in Shaolin that Shkreli reportedly bought for $2 million, as well as a painting by Pablo Picasso.

 The forfeiture follows Shkreli’s conviction last October on three of eight counts of securities and wire fraud. The federal government had indicted Shkreli in December of 2015 for running a Ponzi-like scheme, alleging he defrauded investors in two hedge funds he managed and siphoned millions from his pharmaceutical company, Retrophin, to cover losses.

Oh, the horror.

*For the snark impaired, if I do actually start a GoFundMe, it will be done ironically.

Another Stopped Clock Moment

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Over at the 2nd worst OP/ED page in the nation, they are wringing their hands at the demise of the most transparent CIA front in history, the National Endowment for Democracy:

Speaking to the British Parliament in 1982, President Ronald Reagan called on the United States “to foster the infrastructure of democracy” to help ensure that people around the world were empowered to determine their own fates. Now, at this increasingly fraught moment for freedom around the world, the Trump administration wants to dismantle that infrastructure.

Buried in the State Department’s fiscal 2019 budget request is a proposal not only to slash the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy but also to disassemble its relationships with its core institutes, including the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. For the NED and those institutes, the proposal is an assault not only on their organizations but also on the pro-democracy mission they are dedicated to.

“If implemented, the proposal would gut the program, force crippling layoffs and the symbolic meaning would also be shattering, sending a signal far and wide that the United States is turning its back on supporting brave people who share our values,” said NED President Carl Gershman.

The Trump administration proposal would allow the NED to continue issuing small grants but move funding of its core institutes to the State Department, where the IRI and NDI would have to compete with private contractors. The organizations involved argue that keeping funding decisions at arm’s length from the State Department allows the NED network to do things on the edges of the pro-democracy movement that the U.S. government can’t or won’t, such as supporting Chinese dissidents in ways that upset Beijing.

The NED has been little more than a a front for regime change efforts for our state security apparatus since its founding.

It is a cover for, “A boot stamping on a human face – forever,” fomenting civil wars and civil unrest against regimes deemed insufficiently pliant.

This is why, for example, the NED has been largely silent regarding the excesses of the House of Saud.

Good riddance, even if its demise is for the wrong reason.  (We know that it’s the wrong reason because it’s Trump and his Evil Minions™ doing this.)

And, Once Again, United Airlines Says, “Here, Hold My Beer.”

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In the annals of poor management decisions, UAL’s decision to replace a performance based bonus program with a lottery takes the cake:

Employees of United Airlines used to get quarterly bonuses if they hit certain performance targets. Now, they’ll all be entered into a lottery, out of which one—and only one—lucky person will win $100,000.

United president Scott Kirby broke the news in a memo on March 2, calling the change “an exciting new rewards program.” He noted that, in addition to the $100,000 award, quarterly prizes would also include luxury vacations, smaller cash awards, and Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedans. Instead of getting individual bonuses each quarter, workers who achieve their performance goals will be all entered into the drawing, from which winners will be chosen at random.

The change is not sitting well with employees themselves. ………

Gee, the employees aren’t enthused at getting f%$#ed by the worst airline in the United States.

I think that United will be enjoying its time in the cellar.

This is the very apotheosis of American management culture.

Linkage

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From the ’80s:

Meanwhile in Italy

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It’s still unclear, but it appears that neither major coalition has managed to secure a majority, which means that Italian politics are (once again) highly fluid:

Based on votes counted by 0230 GMT, ex-PM Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition looks set to win the most seats in the lower house of parliament.

It is tipped to get 248-268 seats – below the 316 needed for a majority.

Forming a government may now take weeks of negotiation and coalition-building.

Alternatively, fresh elections could be held in a bid to produce a more decisive result – though there is no guarantee that would happen.

Vote projection figures put the anti-establishment Five Star Movement in second place. It has made significant gains and could emerge as the largest single party, with 216-236 lower house seats.

A centre-left coalition led by the governing Democratic Party stands in third place, with a projected 107-127 seats – its prospects battered by public anger over unemployment and immigration.

Final confirmed results are not expected for several hours.

The collapse of the center-left is not a surprise.

The core tenet of the center-left in the EU is support for the EU, and the EU is fundamentally a conservative neoliberal institution.

Unqualified support of the EU means that the center-left has already destroyed itself, and the voters are finally recognizing this.

About that Putin Speech

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The Russians believe that US hostilities with them never ended, as Putin’s recent speech eloquently illustrates:

Russia has developed a new array of nuclear weapons that are invincible, according to President Vladimir Putin.

Mr Putin made the claims as he laid out his key policies for a fourth presidential term, ahead of an election he is expected to win in 17 days’ time.

The weapons he boasted of included a cruise missile that he said could “reach anywhere in the world”.

He said of the West: “They need to take account of a new reality and understand … [this]… is not a bluff.”

Giving his annual state of the nation speech, Mr Putin used video presentations to showcase the development of two new nuclear delivery systems that he said could evade detection. One video graphic appeared to show missiles raining down on the US state of Florida.

This speech appears directed more toward the Russian electorate, the next Presidential election is about 2 weeks away, but it is a rather unwelcome development.

Most of the weapons shown are unlikely to reach full deployment.  I find the nuclear powered torpedo and drones to be rather fanciful.

On the other hand, I do believe that the R-28 Sarmat (NATO designation SS-X-30 Satan 2) will enter service, as well as the various hypersonic glide reentry vehicles, which should add significant complications to US missile defense systems.

It should be noted that the timing of these announcements does seem to be correspond to development being started when George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002.

It’s All about the Defense Contractors, Isn’t It?

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Iraq is looking at purchasing the S-400 surface to air missile system from Russia, and the US is threatening sanctions:

Having suffered two decades of US-led bombing campaigns, terrorist insurgency and sectarian violence, Iraq is now trying to protect its airspace. But the US threatens to slap it with sanctions if it buys Russian missile systems.

Baghdad has recently expressed interest in purchasing Russia’s advanced S-400 surface-to-air missile defense systems. However, if Iraq goes forward with the plan, it faces a dilemma: the US could potentially retaliate with sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017 (CAATSA).

“We want to purchase any weapons that will strengthen the security of Iraq and the country’s armed forces. At the same time, we respect regional and international commitments,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim Jaafari told RIA Novosti on Wednesday. “There are a number of obstacles on the path [of buying] S-400 systems. The Iraqi side is still negotiating, and when the final decision is made, it will be considered,” Jaafari added.

According to State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, Iraq has already been warned that purchasing S-400 systems could violate CAATSA, which imposes sanctions on countries which purchase weapons from Moscow.

As confirmed by this official State Department Briefing, it appears that the US foreign policy apparatus has been become little more than a lever to sell US weapons systems.

This Has Got Me Seriously Geeking Out

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First unit, with conventional controls


Fluidic controls illustrated

The University of Manchester is demonstrating fluidic controls on its Magma UAV.

Basically, it uses small puffs of air to interfere with the Coanda effect prove out-sized control effects:

A flight-test program this spring will attempt to prove supersonic air bled from an engine can provide directional control equivalent to conventional flying surfaces. The program also is aimed at investigating the potential of using exhaust vectoring to replace vertical tails. Possible applications run the gamut from enabling maneuvering with minimal impact on a radar cross-section, to increasing lift on heavy transport aircraft.

Magma, a project run by the University of Manchester, England, and supported by BAE Systems, attracted attention late in 2017 when its first flight was revealed. The September flights were with conventional control surfaces on the subscale unmanned aircraft, and mainly were concerned with establishing that a new airframe built to test fluidic-control technologies behaved as expected. Further flights, planned for late spring, are intended to demonstrate not just that these technologies work, but could in theory be inserted or removed from platforms quickly and easily.

………

The idea of using pressurized air from the engine to aid aircraft control has been around for some time. The Blackburn Buccaneer strike aircraft’s boundary-layer control system used air blown over the wings to assist carrier landings and increase control at low speeds, but Magma benefits from techniques and technologies that were unavailable during past programs.

………

“The air sticks to that rounded surface,” says Bill Crowther, a reader at the university and the Magma project’s academic lead, “but it also drags in the other air around it. So it acts like a virtual flap, without moving anything.”

Cool.

Poland, Meet Barbara Streisand

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Poland’s new law which forbids discussion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust has made discussion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust much more more likely.

Poland, meet the Streisand Effect:

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread it is increased.

It appears that the Polish parliament IS a Polish joke:

But an effort to refocus attention on to Polish suffering, and away from the Holocaust, through a change to Poland’s anti-defamation law — which now makes it a crime for anyone, in any part of the world, to accuse “the Polish Nation” of complicity in Nazi war crimes — has backfired spectacularly.

The new law, which took effect this week, prompted widespread criticism from Israeli officials and Jewish groups in the United States — as well as Polish historians, Germany’s foreign minister and the State Department. In an effort to defuse tensions, Poland’s far-right, nationalist government has promised that the law will not be enforced in the coming weeks, until it can be reviewed by the nation’s constitutional court.

But even if the law is never enforced, the debate over the text of the amendment has already profoundly damaged Poland’s past and present reputation.

The clearest impact of the legislation has been to draw fresh attention to recent historical research which makes it plain that Poles rarely opposed and were frequently complicit in the persecution of their Jewish neighbors by the Nazis following the annexation of western Poland to Germany.

D’oh!

This is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$

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The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were behind the leak of private text messages between the Senate panel’s top Democrat and a Russian-connected lawyer, according to two congressional officials briefed on the matter.

Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat, were so perturbed by the leak that they demanded a rare meeting with Speaker Paul D. Ryan last month to inform him of their findings. They used the meeting with Mr. Ryan to raise broader concerns about the direction of the House Intelligence Committee under its chairman, Representative Devin Nunes of California, the officials said.

To the senators, who are overseeing what is effectively the last bipartisan investigation on Capitol Hill into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the leak was a serious breach of protocol and a partisan attack by one intelligence committee against the other.

………

The messages between Mr. Warner and Adam Waldman, a Washington lawyer, show that the senator tried for weeks to arrange a meeting with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who assembled a dossier of salacious claims about connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and Russia. The Senate committee has had difficulty making contact with Mr. Steele, whom it views as a key witness. And Mr. Waldman, who knew Mr. Steele, presented himself as a willing partner.

………

Fox News published the texts, which were sent via a secure messaging application, in early February. President Trump and other Republicans loyal to him quickly jumped on the report to try to discredit Mr. Warner, suggesting that the senator was acting surreptitiously to try to talk to Mr. Steele.

………

Copies of the messages were originally submitted by Mr. Waldman to the Senate committee. In January, one of Mr. Nunes’s staff members requested that copies be shared with the House committee as well, according to a person familiar with the request who was not authorized to talk about it publicly. Days later, the messages were published by Fox News, the person said. Fox’s report said that it had obtained the documents from a Republican source it did not name.

The documents published by Fox News appear to back up the senators’ accusation. Though they were marked “CONFIDENTIAL: Produced to USSSCI on a Confidential Basis,” suggesting that they had come from the Senate panel, known as the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the person familiar with the congressional requests said that the stamp was misleading and that other markings gave away their actual origin.

Specifically, the copy of the messages shared with the Senate had page numbers, and the one submitted to the House — while preserving the reference to the Senate committee — did not.

A lawyer for Mr. Waldman independently concluded that the House committee had probably shared the document and sent a letter to Mr. Nunes complaining about the leak, according to a person familiar with the letter.

I have my suspicions about who leaked the texts **cough** Nunes **cough**, but regardless of who did, this sort of rat-f%$#ing between the House and Senate is really unprecedented.

About F%$#ing Time

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Baltimore City Solicitor Andre Davis said Wednesday that city officials do not plan to cover any costs or damages arising out of civil lawsuits filed against convicted police officers who were members of the Gun Trace Task Force.

 The corrupt officers, he said, are on their own.

 Dozens of state and federal lawsuits are expected against the eight task force members who were convicted of various federal crimes, including racketeering and robbery. Six pleaded guilty, while two were convicted at trial this week.

 In one of the first federal lawsuits, filed by Ivan Potts in 2016 against the city and three of the officers, city government lawyers are arguing that taxpayers should not be responsible for potential damages.

 “Each and every one of the wrongs … were committed outside of the scope of the officers’ employment as BPD law enforcement officers and in pursuit of said officers’ private and personal interests,” city government lawyers wrote in a filing last month.

 Davis said Wednesday that this is a strategy the city plans to use going forward with other actions, though he said officials would consider each suit to see if there should be an exception. And in some cases, a judge could order the city to pay.

………

While the move could save the city millions of dollars, plaintiffs lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union argued victims could be deprived of much-needed compensation.

“That is a travesty,” said David Rocah, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland. “The city bears significant responsibility for enabling these crimes by its failure to adequately supervise the officers. It can’t now simply wash its hands of the matter.”

Needless to say, the Baltimore police union is freaking out, placing them on the same side as the ACLU, which is a remarkably bizarre development.

As many as nine Baltimore police officers could have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in damages after juries found they acted with “actual malice” in the course of making arrests — a development that prompted a warning from the police union and, in turn, a fiery response from the city’s top lawyer.

The union asserted in a memo Tuesday that forcing officers to pay such damages themselves was a change in the city’s policy. But both City Solicitor Andre Davis and his predecessor said Wednesday the policy has not changed and officers have potentially been on the hook for decades in such cases.

Davis said what has changed is that he has been more transparent about the policy, noting it in materials submitted to the city’s spending board in December. Davis called the memo by a local Fraternal Order of Police leader an attempt to “stir something up.”

I’ve suggested before that personal liability for police officers, along with a requirement that they carry insurance, can serve as a deterrent to police misconduct, and this is a good first step.