It appears that Peter Thiel is considering moving to Southern California, because people in Silicon Valley do not recognize the depth of his Randian genius.
For someone who has made his money on regulatory arbitrage (PayPal) and government money (Palantir Technologies), he sure has a thin skin.
I guess Peter is just a, “Beautiful Cinnamon Roll Too Good For This World, Too Pure.”
17 dead, and as The Onion says, “Gorilla Sales Skyrocket After Latest Gorilla Attack.”
The new normal.
— Shill Silverstein (@corporatony) February 14, 2018
The truth hurts, doesn’t it. 
President Drones-a-lot in a very close 3 way competition for worst American recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize ever with Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter for a reason.
The two officers from the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force who did not plead out on the were convicted on corruption charges:
A federal jury convicted two Baltimore police detectives Monday for their roles in one of the biggest police corruption scandals in city history.
Detectives Daniel T. Hersl, 48, and Marcus R. Taylor, 31, were found guilty of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy and robbery. Prosecutors said they and their comrades on the Gun Trace Task Force had acted as “both cops and robbers,” using the power of their badges to steal large sums of money from residents under the guise of police work.
“Their business model was that the people that they were robbing had no recourse,” acting U.S. Attorney Stephen Schenning said after the verdict. “Who were they going to go to?”
Acting Police Commissioner Darryl De Sousa said the trial — in which several unindicted officers were also accused of wrongdoing — had uncovered “some of the most egregious and despicable acts ever perpetrated in law enforcement.”
Hersl and Taylor face up to 60 years in prison.
Of course, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the department who had at least an inkling of what was going on, but the blue wall of silence held on for years.
Support your local police, huh?
It’s taken a while, but Israeli police have finally recommended that Benjamin Netanyahu be indicted for corruption:
The Israeli police announced on Tuesday that there was sufficient evidence indicating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took bribes in two separate cases and acted “against public interests.”
The two cases are the so-called Case 1000 – in which Netanyahu is suspected of accepting lavish gifts from wealthy benefactors in return for advancing their interests – and Case 2000, which alleges that Netanyahu tried to strike a deal that would have provided him with positive coverage in Israel’s second largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, in exchange for hurting its free rival, Israel Hayom.
According to the police, in Case 1000, Netanyahu received champagne, cigars, jewelry and clothing, by demand and systematically, valued at over one million shekels (around $280,000). The gifts he received from the Israeli-American Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan increased significantly once Netanyahu was elected prime minister.
Seriously, after spending almost $3000.00 on “Ice Cream” in 2013, criminal profligacy should surprise no one.
As a supporter of Israel, I consider Netanyahu to be a bigger threat to the safety and security of the Jewish state than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, so I pleased at this news.
Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek:
The water main has been fixed, and so we now have running water again.
Donald Trump is proposing privatizing the international space station:
The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a kind of orbiting real estate venture run not by the government, but by private industry.
The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post.
I actually agree with move.
In scientific terms, the ISS is complete pants. It has consumed massive resources for next to no scientific value.
Of course, there really isn’t a commercial justification for this either: Anything that you want to set up tto take advantage of micro-gravity would be cheaper to do without people.
It’s basically a white elephant.
I am referring, of course, to Jared Kushner, who is being sued for an exceptional level of slum lord sliminess.
They have been trying to move the suit to Federal court, where the jury would be less sympathetic.
Unfortunately for him, being in Federal court would require his company to reveal all the investors, and a judge has ruled that this information would not be kept under seal, so going to stay in Maryland state court:
Jared Kushner’s family real estate company has backtracked on its effort to have a lawsuit filed against it by tenants of its Baltimore-area apartment complexes moved to federal court, after a judge ruled that this transfer would require it to reveal the identities of its investment partners.
The tenants’ class-action lawsuit was filed in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City in September, four months after a ProPublica article co-published with the New York Times Magazine described the highly aggressive tactics used by Kushner Companies to pursue tenants and former tenants over allegedly unpaid rent or broken leases. The lawsuit alleged that Kushner Companies, which owns 15 large apartment complexes in the Baltimore area, was improperly piling late fees and court fees onto tenants’ bills, often in excess of state limits, and using the threat of immediate eviction to force payment.
In early November, the various Kushner affiliates named in the lawsuit filed a request to have the case moved from the state court, where it would be heard by a Baltimore City jury, to the federal courts, where it would be heard by a jury drawn from a broader geographic swath of Maryland. To get approval for this request, Kushner Companies had to show that none of the investors it has brought in as partners on the complexes are based in Maryland.
The Kushner affiliates also filed a motion in federal court seeking to have the list of the investment partners shielded from public view, citing the high degree of media interest in Jared Kushner, who as Kushner Companies CEO presided over the purchase of the complexes before moving into the White House to serve as senior advisor to President Donald Trump, his father-in-law. “Given the tenor of the media’s reporting of this case, including politically-motivated innuendo no doubt intended to disparage the First Family, there is foreseeable risk of prejudice to the privacy rights and reputations of innocent private investors,” the Kushner lawyers wrote.
So, who do you think that his investors are?
For real estate in general, and the Kushners in particular, helping people launder money with real estate is a core operating principle.
My guess is that it would be mobsters, drug lords, with Saudis, Chinese, and Russian oligarchs thrown in as a garnish.
People are wondering why Perdue Pharmaceuticals, a company known of hard selling its signature drug OxyContin, is shutting down its marketing to doctors.
It’s pretty simple: They see the lawsuits coming, and the see the real possibility of criminal prosecutions, and they are trying to unwind the whole mess, and then cover it up.
Of course, this is America, so the Sackler family is at no risk of anything beyond a slap on the wrist, because billionaire criminals are above the law here.
One of the central tenets of the PPACA (Obamacare) was that the malefactors of healthcare, insurance companies, big pharma, corrupt medical coding, etc. needed a seat at the table.
The logical extension of this is the admission by Dr. Jay Ken Iinuma, former medical director for Aetna for Southern California, that he rejected claims without ever looking at medical records:
California’s insurance commissioner has launched an investigation into Aetna after learning a former medical director for the insurer admitted under oath he never looked at patients’ records when deciding whether to approve or deny care.
California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones expressed outrage after CNN showed him a transcript of the testimony and said his office is looking into how widespread the practice is within Aetna.
“If the health insurer is making decisions to deny coverage without a physician actually ever reviewing medical records, that’s of significant concern to me as insurance commissioner in California — and potentially a violation of law,” he said.
………
The California probe centers on a deposition by Dr. Jay Ken Iinuma, who served as medical director for Aetna for Southern California from March 2012 to February 2015, according to the insurer.
During the deposition, the doctor said he was following Aetna’s training, in which nurses reviewed records and made recommendations to him.
Jones said his expectation would be “that physicians would be reviewing treatment authorization requests,” and that it’s troubling that “during the entire course of time he was employed at Aetna, he never once looked at patients’ medical records himself.”
This is what happens when you fetishize the market, and decide that people need “Skin in the Game”.
This is the natural consequence of keeping predators in our healthcare system.
They are unsatisfied with what they are getting from internet advertising, though their statement about this mentions both what their products are paired with online, as well as the fact that the metrics are unreliable.
Though they soft pedal the latter in their statement, I think that this is their real agenda. Otherwise, why mention it all?
That’s my assessment, given that having an ad show up on Logan Paul’s YouTube stream is fleeting and easily corrected, but getting sold silicon snake oil is the sort of thing that gets the acounting types upset:
Unilever has threatened to withdraw its advertising from online platforms such as Facebook and Google if they fail to eradicate content which “create division in society and promote anger and hate”.
Keith Weed, chief marketing officer of the sprawling multinational, whose brands include Dove, Magnum, Persil and Marmite, said that online platforms were sometimes “little better than a swamp”. He told major advertising, media and tech firms gathered at a conference in California: “As one of the largest advertisers in the world, we cannot have an environment where our consumers don’t trust what they see online.”
He added: “We cannot continue to prop up a digital supply chain – one that delivers over a quarter of our advertising to our consumers – which at times is little better than a swamp in terms of its transparency.
“It is in the digital media industry’s interest to listen and act on this. Before viewers stop viewing, advertisers stop advertising and publishers stop publishing.” According to the analysts Pivotal, together Google and Facebook account for nearly three-quarters of all digital advertising in the US. In the UK the two have more than 60% of digital advertising and 90% of all new digital spending.
(emphasis mine)
That thing about swamp and transparency?
That is not about “fake news” or “hate speech”, it is about things like Chinese click farms that generate false click throughs and the like, which costs them money, and delivers no customers.
I’m wondering if this whole thing is a dog whistle to Google and Facebook, and that the whole, “Divisions in society,” thing is a smoke screen.
As always, note that this post should in no way be construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.
The Nomenklatura of Silicon have decided that when their children are education, they want a human touch with an absolute minimum of computers:
The Waldorf School of the Peninsula is small, exclusive and packed with the children of Silicon Valley executives who love the role that technology plays in the pupils’ education there. That is, it plays no role whatsoever.
Instead children at the $25,000-a-year elementary school in Los Altos, California, are learning to explore the world through physical experiences and tasks that are designed to nurture their imagination, problem-solving ability and collaborative skills.
Pencils, paper, blackboards and craft materials abound while tablets, smartphones and other personal electronic devices are banned from the classrooms until they are teenagers studying at the middle and high school campus nearby. Even then technology is only introduced slowly and used sparingly.
Alumni and present pupils include the children of Alan Eagle, a director of communications at Google, who helped to write the New York Times bestseller How Google Works, as well as those of a chief technology officer at eBay and senior executives at Apple and Yahoo. Their outlook is in line with some of the most powerful figures in the industry. Last month Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, said he did not want his nephew, who is about 12, to use social media. Last year Sean Parker, the billionaire and an early Facebook investor, admitted that he and the other creators of the publishing site had deliberately made it as addictive as possible. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said.
………
Ms [Beverly] Amico [Head of outreach at Waldorf Schools] sees no contradiction. “It’s a very attractive option for people in the tech world for their children,” she said. “All employers, tech world or not, are looking for graduates these days that can think independently, take initiative, are capable of collaborating, have curiosity and creativity.”
The approach contrasts starkly with the new classroom orthodoxy in most American schools where children are spending more and more time staring at screens in lessons. There too, however, a grassroots movement is beginning to build against the relentless march of technology, supported by research illuminating the harmful effects of smartphone use on young brains and new shareholder pressure on the IT giants that make them.
These folks know that at best, they are peddling digital crap, and at worst, they are peddling digital crack, and they want their children to have none of it.
Think about that the next time that you hear about your local school district, or charter school, going all “high tech”.
Here’s another thought though:The Treasury Department is part of the IC. Yet it never has to come testify to talk about the World Wide Threats that things like tax havens create. Why is that?
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 12, 2018
(IC=Intelligence Community)
“The fight against global terror is sacrosanct, but the ability of the rich to dodge taxes in offshore accounts is more sacrosanct,” he said paraphrasing Animal Farm.
For the past 24 hours, we have had no water at our house, because an 8 inch water main broke, shutting off water to 20-30 houses in my neighborhood.
Seeing as how we all were beginning to stink, we went to the JCC (Jewish Community Centers) to take showers, as they have a gym, locker room, and showers.
We were discussing the showers, and Sharon* mentioned that there were stalls with curtains in the women’s locker room.
I noted to Charlie that this was not the case in the men’s locker room, where it was an open floor plan. (It turns out that my recollections were wrong. They have added stalls and curtains)
Charlie was upset, as he is not enamored of the concept of taking a shower in front of other people, so he went to get his swim trunks.
So I asked him, “What is your problem with having a Zyklon B layout in the showers?“
He turned to me, and said that this was the worst thing that he had heard me say in his entire life.
I am a truly awful person.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Donald Trump decided not to release the Democratic answer to the Nunes memo:
Donald Trump is blocking the release of the Democrats’ rebuttal to a Republican memo that accused the FBI of a politically biased investigation into the president’s ties to Russia.
Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, released a letter Friday night arguing that disclosure of the Democrats’ memo would “create especially significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests” and claiming that Trump was “inclined to declassify” the document, but could not at this time due to “classified and especially sensitive passages”.
Democrats on the House intelligence committee, which is investigating Russian meddling into the US election, authored the new memo, which they said provided context for a four-page memo authored by Republican Devin Nunes, a close ally of Donald Trump.………
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned the White House’s decision to block the Democratic memo on Friday, saying in a statement: “The President’s double standard when it comes to transparency is appalling. The rationale for releasing the Nunes memo, transparency, vanishes when it could show information that’s harmful to him. Millions of Americans are asking one simple question: what is he hiding?”
Yeah, pretty much, Chuck.
You know that Trump would never release the memo without redacting it into uselessness.
In the old days of the internet, I quickly realized that I could not create a particularly useful web page, so I deliberately created a useless one, dedicated to bad hair.
Because of an incident as he boarded Air Force One, I have updated my Bad Hair Web Page.
It’s my first update since 2001, when I added Jim Trafficant.
This might be the lamest page on the web.
H/t Cthulhu at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
One of the things that seems to be constant in the United States is that when there is a potential conflict between Nazis and counter-protesters, the police will favor the Nazis, see the case of protests in Sacramento, California:
California police investigating a violent white nationalist event worked with white supremacists in an effort to identify counter-protesters and sought the prosecution of activists with “anti-racist” beliefs, court documents show.
The records, which also showed officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity, were included in a court briefing from three anti-fascist activists who were charged with felonies after protesting at a Sacramento rally. The defendants were urging a judge to dismiss their case and accused California police and prosecutors of a “cover-up and collusion with the fascists”.
Defense lawyers said the case at the state capital offers the latest example of US law enforcement appearing to align with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups while targeting anti-fascist activists and Donald Trump protesters after violent clashes.
“It is shocking and really angering to see the level of collusion and the amount to which the police covered up for the Nazis,” said Yvette Felarca, a Berkeley teacher and anti-fascist organizer charged with assault and rioting after participating in the June 2016 Sacramento rally, where she said she was stabbed and bludgeoned in the head. “The people who were victimized by the Nazis were then victimized by the police and the district attorneys.”
………
Some California highway patrol (CHP) investigation records, however, raise questions about the police’s investigative tactics and communication with the TWP.
Felarca’s attorneys obtained numerous examples of CHP officers working directly with the TWP, often treating the white nationalist group as victims and the anti-fascists as suspects.
………
In one phone call with Doug McCormack, identified by police as the TWP affiliate who acquired the permit for the Sacramento rally, CHP investigator Donovan Ayres warned him that police might have to release his name in response to a public records requests. The officer said he would try to protect McCormack.
………
The officer’s write-up about an African American anti-fascist activist included a photo of him at the hospital after the rally and noted that he had been stabbed in the abdomen, chest and hand.
Ayres, however, treated the protester like a suspect in the investigation. The police investigator recommended the man be charged with 11 offenses, including disturbing the peace, conspiracy, assault, unlawful assembly and wearing a mask to evade police.
As evidence, Ayres provided Facebook photos of the man holding up his fist. The officer wrote that the man’s “Black Power salute” and his “support for anti-racist activism” demonstrated his “intent and motivation to violate the civil rights” of the neo-Nazi group. He was ultimately not charged.
(emphasis mine)
Seriously, This is not a case of a few bad apples. The whole damn orchard is rotten.
The rise of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, disproves the most efficient market hypothesis, which is the basis of neoliberal economics and hence the basis of deregulation:
The spectacular increase and recent plunge in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have raised concerns that the bursting of the Bitcoin bubble will cause financial markets to crash. They probably won’t, but the Bitcoin bubble should finally destroy our faith in the efficiency of markets.
Since the 1970s, economic policy has been based on the idea that financial market prices reflect all the information relevant to the value of any asset. If this is true, market prices are the best estimates of the value of any investment and financial markets should be relied on to allocate capital investment.
This idea, referred to in the jargon of economics as the efficient market hypothesis (technically, the strong efficient market hypothesis), implicitly underlay the deregulation of financial markets that started in the 1970s. Although rarely stated now with as much confidence as it was during its heyday in the 1990s, the efficient market hypothesis remains a background assumption of much central-bank and economic policy.
The hypothesis survived the absurdities of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the meltdown in derivative markets that led to the global financial crisis in 2007 and 2008. Although the hypothesis should have been refuted by those disasters, it lived on, if only in zombie form.
But at least each of those earlier bubbles began with a plausible premise. The rise of the internet has transformed our lives and given rise to some very profitable companies, such as Amazon and Google. Even though it was obvious that most 1990s dot-coms would fail, it was easy to make a case for any of them individually.
As for the derivative assets that gave us the global financial crisis, they were viewed favorably in light of a widely held theory, known as the “great moderation,” that suggested that major economic crises were a thing of the past, thanks to certain systemic changes in the way developed nations ran their economies. The theory was backed by leading economists and central bankers. Asset-backed derivatives were, ultimately, a bet on the great moderation.
The contrast with Bitcoin is stark. The Bitcoin bubble rests on no plausible premise. When Bitcoin was created about a decade ago, the underlying idea was that it would displace existing currencies for transactions of all kinds. But by the time the Bitcoin bubble took off last year, it was obvious that this would not happen. Only a handful of legitimate merchants ever accepted Bitcoin. And as the Bitcoin bubble drove up transactions charges and waiting times, even this handful walked away.
………
But even if the claim is true, the idea that Bitcoin is valuable simply because people value it and because it is scarce should shake any remaining faith in the efficient market hypothesis.
………
Whatever happens to Bitcoin, we must not lose sight of a more fundamental — and more worrisome — development: A financial product with a purely arbitrary value has been successfully introduced in the world’s most sophisticated financial markets.
Bitcoin probably won’t bring financial markets crashing down. But it shows that regulators need to cut those markets down to size.
We need to regulate, and we need to throw the banksters in jail.
Cabinet office: Brexit is punching ourselves hard in the face.
Government spokesman: This account ignores the fact that we will be wearing bespoke gloves.— Rafael Behr (@rafaelbehr) January 30, 2018
Yep. That’s pretty much the Tory Brexit plan in a nut shell.