Month: July 2019

I Want to Live in France

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It’s not for the food, and it’s not for the theater, and it’s not for the existentialism.

It’s for the work environment.

In the US bullied workers shoot their coworkers, while in france bosses are facing criminal charges over conditions that led to employee suicides:

In their blue blazers and tight haircuts, the aging men look uncomfortable in the courtroom dock. And for good reason: they are accused of harassing employees so relentlessly that workers ended up killing themselves.

The men — all former top executives at France’s giant telecom company — wanted to downsize the business by thousands of workers a decade ago. But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected.

So the executives resolved to make life so unbearable that the workers would leave, prosecutors say. Instead, at least 35 employees — workers’ advocates say nearly double that number — committed suicide, feeling trapped, betrayed and despairing of ever finding new work in France’s immobile labor market.

Today the former top executives of France Télécom — once the national phone company, and now one of the nation’s biggest private enterprises, Orange — are on trial for “moral harassment.” It is the first time that French bosses, caught in the vise of France’s strict labor protections, have been prosecuted for systemic harassment that led to worker deaths.

………


“The company was going under and it didn’t even know it,” Mr. Lombard, the ex-chief executive, testified. “We could have gone about it much more gently if we hadn’t had the competition banging on our door.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Lombard, he was recorded saying in 2007 that he would reach the quota of layoffs “one way or another, by the window or by the door.” The window is what a number of the employees chose.

“This isn’t going to be lacework here,” Mr. Barberot said in 2007. “We’re going to put people in front of life’s realities.”

To the mounting signs of distress management turned a deaf ear, testimony at the trial suggested.

In the United States, those executives would have gotten a glowing profile in Entrepreneur magazine, and the workers would have ended up going postal.

Here is hoping that those bastards burn.

A Medical Myth Busted

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A study in the BMJ shows that capping interns hours at 80 per week does not adversely effect quality of care later in their careers.

Seeing as how working interns 100+ hours a week is killing patients today, and does not produce better outcomes tomorrow, it’s a good thing that accreditation authority has banned this:

When new rules by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education capped medical residents’ training hours at 80 hours per week in 2003, critics worried that the change would leave physicians-in-training unprepared for the challenges of independent practice.

Now, new research published July 11 in the journal BMJ and led by scientists in the Department of Health Care Policy in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School (HMS) says that their warnings appear largely unjustified. The team’s analysis found no evidence that reduced training hours had any impact on the quality of care delivered by new physicians.

The push to scale back residents’ hours and change other aspects of training was sparked by a series of high-profile patient injuries and deaths believed to stem from clinical errors caused by fatigue.
………

The researchers found no significant differences in 30-day mortality, 30-day readmissions, or inpatient spending between physicians who completed their residencies before and after the hour reforms.

………

The study analyzed 485,685 hospitalizations of Medicare patients before and after the reform.

The training-hour reforms were not associated with statistically significant differences in patient outcomes after the physicians left training.

I always figured that the brutal hours of medical residency were primarily about ritual scarring as a coming of age ritual, and it appears that I was right.

You Remember That Racist Group that the Border Patrol Management Just “Discovered?

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Yet again the old proverb, “A fish rots from the head,” is spot on:

When news broke that thousands of current and former Border Patrol agents were members of a secret Facebook group filled with racist, vulgar, and sexist content, Carla Provost, chief of the agency, was quick to respond. “These posts are completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see — and expect — from our agents day in and day out,” Provost said in a statement. “Any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.”

For Provost, a veteran of the Border Patrol who was named head of the agency in August 2018, the group’s existence and content should have come as no surprise. Three months after her appointment to chief, Provost herself had posted in the group, then known as “I’m 10-15,” now archived as “America First X 2.” Provost’s comment was innocuous — a friendly clapback against a group member who questioned her rise to the top of the Border Patrol — but her participation in the group, which she has since left, raises serious questions.

Provost is one of several Border Patrol supervisors The Intercept has identified as current or former participants in the secret Facebook group, including chief patrol agents overseeing whole Border Patrol sectors; multiple patrol agents in charge of individual stations; and ranking officials in the Border Patrol’s union, who have enjoyed direct access to President Donald Trump. (It is technically possible that someone else posted in the group using the individuals’ accounts.) The group’s existence has already generated at least two investigations from lawmakers and internal Department of Homeland Security oversight bodies.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to the DHS Inspector General’s office last week specifically requesting that investigators examine whether Provost and Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan knew about or had previously addressed the problem of government personnel posting “violent, racist, misogynistic comments and pictures” in the “I’m 10-15” group. 

CBP needs a thorough cleaning, from top to bottom, or, to paraphrase Aliens, “Nuke the entire agency from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.”

Who Says that Irony is Dead?

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Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s resignation Friday amid the mushrooming Jeffrey Epstein investigation made him the latest in a growing list of President Trump’s Cabinet members to depart under a cloud of scandal, plunging an administration that has struggled with record turnover into further upheaval.

Trump announced the departure in a morning appearance with Acosta on the South Lawn of the White House, telling reporters that his labor secretary had chosen to step down a day after defending himself in a contentious news conference over his role as a U.S. attorney a decade ago in a deal with Epstein that allowed the financier to plead guilty to lesser offenses in a sex-crimes case involving underage girls.

 Of course there is a replacement in the wings, and he worked closely with corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramhoff to protect the use of slave labor in the Marianas, which might make him even worse than the guy who let a pedophile off with a slap of the wrist:

Incoming acting Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella will take the helm of the department following the resignation Friday of Alex Acosta, who faced scrutiny over his role in prosecuting alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein more than a decade ago.

But Pizzella, currently deputy Labor secretary, has his own controversial past that will likely come to the fore. Democratic senators and civil rights groups have expressed concern about Pizzella’s prior work with disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff in the late 1990s and early 2000s to hamper worker protections in the Northern Mariana Islands.

When Pizzella worked on Abramoff’s team at Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, the lobbying firm was pushing to prevent Congress from imposing minimum wage laws on the Northern Mariana Islands. At the time, there were “maximum” wage restrictions on the islands of $3.05 per hour for foreign workers, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

“Foreign workers pay up to $7,000 to employers or middlemen for the right to a job in the CNMI. When they finally reach the Commonwealth, they are assigned to tedious, low paying work for long hours with little or no time off. At night they are locked in prison-like barracks,” one government report found.

Is it just me, but does it seem that each time a member of the Trump administration is leaves, they are replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.

Trump Caves

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He declared defeat in his effort to put a citizenship question on the censue, though he has promised to use government records to terrorize brown people:

President Trump on Thursday abandoned his quest to place a question about citizenship on the 2020 census, and instructed the government to compile citizenship data from existing federal records instead, ending a bitterly fought legal battle that turned the nonpartisan census into an object of political warfare.

Mr. Trump announced in the Rose Garden that he was giving up on modifying the census two weeks after the Supreme Court rebuked his administration over its effort to do so. Just last week, Mr. Trump had insisted that his administration “must” pursue that goal.

“We are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population,” Mr. Trump said. But rather than carry on the fight over the census, he said he was issuing an executive order instructing federal departments and agencies to provide the Census Bureau with citizenship data from their “vast” databases immediately.

Even that order appears to merely reiterate plans the Commerce Department announced last year, making it less a new policy than a means of covering Mr. Trump’s retreat from the composition of the 2020 census form.

This is definitely a cave by Trump, though he is trying to cast it as another stalwart attempt to promulgate his war against minorities.

Maybe California Rate Payers Should Burn Them to the Ground

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The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Pacific Gas and Electric has systematically short changed its maintenance and infrastructure obligations for years, and the federal judge tasked with overseeing the utility is less than amused.

So are everyone else in the Golden State:

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a major story based on extensive Freedom of Information Act disclosures, providing evidence of PG&E’s systematic, willful neglect not just of maintenance but even of inspections of its transmission lines, despite knowing full well that their decrepit state constituted a serious fire risk. At least some officials appear to have labored under the misapprehension that making a point of not knowing about the condition of many of their assets would somehow absolve them of responsibility.

The raw facts are appalling and led a judge tasked to monitor PG&E after past safety violations to demand answers, pronto. From a Wall Street Journal story mere hours after it broke its account about the PG&E’s willful negligence:

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered PG&E Corp. to respond, “on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis,” to a Wall Street Journal article that said the company has failed to upgrade hundreds of miles of high-voltage power lines despite knowing they could fail and spark wildfires.

William Alsup, a U.S. district court judge in Northern California, is overseeing PG&E’s probation after the company was convicted of safety-related violations following a natural-gas explosion that killed eight people in 2010. After an online version of the article was published Wednesday, he gave the company until July 31 to file a “fresh, forthright statement owning up to the true extent of the Wall Street Journal report” not to exceed 40 double-spaced pages.

“In the past, the offender has responded to some of the Court’s questions by filing thousands of records and leaving it to the judge to find the needles in the haystacks,” the judge wrote.

Now to the account that got Judge Alsup so riled up. From the Journal:

The failure last year of a century-old transmission line that sparked a wildfire, killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise wasn’t an aberration, the documents show. A year earlier, PG&E executives conceded to a state lawyer that the company needed to process many projects, all at once, to prevent system failures—a problem they said could be likened to a “pig in the python.”

Even before November’s deadly fire, the documents show, the company knew that 49 of the steel towers that carry the electrical line that failed needed to be replaced entirely.

In a 2017 internal presentation, the large San Francisco-based utility estimated that its transmission towers were an average of 68 years old. Their mean life expectancy was 65 years. The oldest steel towers were 108 years old.

Even as fire risks increased starting in 2013 due to sustained droughts, it kept putting off upgrading its oldest transmission lines. But at least as bad is that PG&E was grossly, one might even say deliberately, ignorant of the state of its network. How can you be in the business of operating a network and not have basic information about its historical and current condition?

You know, this might be a good time for people to start collecting signatures to repeal the bill that the utilities pushed through making it harder for municipal and state takeovers more difficult.

Kafkaesque and Orwellian are Inadequate Words to Describe This

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The CIA is arguing for an extension and broadening of The Intelligence Identities Protection Act because they need to conceal their role in torture and other crimes against humanity.

I’m serious about this. The state security apparatus is actually using their role in torture to call for greater legal jeopardy for reporting the misdeeds of the state security apparatus:

The C.I.A. is quietly pushing Congress to significantly expand the scope of a law that makes it a crime to disclose the identities of undercover intelligence agents, raising alarms among advocates of press freedoms.

The agency has proposed extending a 1982 law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime to identify covert officers who have served abroad in the past five years. Under the C.I.A.’s plan, the law would instead apply perpetually to people whose relationships with the intelligence community are classified — even if they live and operate exclusively on domestic soil.

………

The C.I.A.’s proposal “seriously expands the felony criminal penalties that could be used against journalists, against whistle-blowers and against public-interest organizations,” said Emily Manna, a policy analyst for Open the Government, a group promoting accountability. “It opens the door to a ton of abuses and secrecy to a much greater extent,” she said.

The proposal would also outlaw the identification of American citizens who serve as classified agents or informants for intelligence agencies, or otherwise help them. Currently, the identities law covers only classified informants who reside and act abroad.

The push was aimed at protecting clandestine officers, said Timothy Barrett, the C.I.A. press secretary. In the past five years, he said, “hundreds of covert officers have had their identity and covert affiliation disclosed without authorization,” and under current law, the identities of officers who are based on domestic soil but travel frequently overseas are not protected.

………

The C.I.A. also argued that lawmakers’ original rationale for only protecting agents abroad — that they faced special physical danger — was “no longer valid” because “organizations such as WikiLeaks” are willing to go to great lengths to publish government secrets, and because of the fallout from revelations about the C.I.A.’s defunct torture program, according to a copy of the agency’s written justification for the proposal obtained by The New York Times.

Still, critics said that the agency’s proposed language is too broad, covering people who have not been in harm’s way abroad for years.

The proposal also comes at a time when defense lawyers at the military commissions system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are trying to identify eyewitnesses from the C.I.A. black sites whom they could potentially call to testify about their clients’ treatment, including in the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other detainees accused of aiding the Sept. 11 attacks.

Last month, when the Senate Intelligence Committee unveiled its annual intelligence bill, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, flagged his concern that the C.I.A. provision would allow the protections for undercover identities to apply indefinitely.

“I am not yet convinced this expansion is necessary and am concerned that it will be employed to avoid accountability,” he wrote.

The C.I.A.’s push comes against the backdrop of a sharp increase in the prosecution of current and former officials accused of providing government secrets to the news media in recent years. It also comes against the unprecedented Justice Department decision in May to expand the criminal case against the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, to include Espionage Act charges for soliciting, obtaining and publishing classified information — including files that identified people in dangerous countries who had helped Americans.

Congress enacted the identities law after Richard S. Welch, the C.I.A.’s station chief in Athens, was murdered in 1975 and Philip Agee, a former C.I.A. officer who had grown to oppose American foreign policy, revealed numerous covert officers’ identities.

The identities law supplemented the Espionage Act, which more broadly makes it a crime to disclose potentially harmful defense-related information to someone not authorized to receive it. The identities act is narrower but easier to use in some respects: Prosecutors need only prove that the disclosed identity met the definition for “covert.”

Prosecutors have only rarely used the law, but they won a conviction under it in a 1985 case involving a C.I.A. clerk in Ghana and in the 2012 case of John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who pleaded guilty to telling a reporter the name of a covert officer involved in the agency’s interrogations.

Another part of the identities law, which prosecutors have not used, might apply to journalists under some circumstances. It covers outsiders who do not have authorized access to classified information but learn about and disclose covert identities anyway, “in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents.”

………

In a House committee report accompanying the 1982 bill, lawmakers stressed that they intended to limit its coverage to clandestine agents abroad, or agents who may be “temporarily in the United States for rest, training, or reassignment” before returning abroad, because they face special dangers.

The 1982 report also said that the public should be able to discuss intelligence informants living in the United States, saying they “may be employees of colleges, churches, the media, or political organizations. The degree of involvement of these groups with intelligence agencies is a legitimate subject of national debate.”

(emphasis mine)

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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The headline in American Conservative, :Americans Shocked to Find their Rights Literally Vanish at U.S. Airports,” pretty much says it all.

The article is about how the Department of Homeland Security, CBP, and ICE have asserted that they have the right to search your digital devices without a warrant, probable cause, or access to an attorney.

I seriously need to consider an app that allows people to encrypt their devices and put the decryption key in escrow with your attorney.

It’s a Start

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Maryland just passed a law requiring that the state pension fund publicly report all fees charged to it by Wall Street.

While this is not my preferred solution, I would prefer the Banksters be kicked out of public pensions completely, but I think that this is a step to that path:

A new Maryland law requires greater transparency in disclosing millions of dollars in fees paid by the state’s pension system to Wall Street investment firms.

 The Maryland State Retirement and Pension System has reported paying about $370 million annually in fees to the firms that invest its $51 billion in assets.

 But the real amount of fees paid is anywhere from $460 million to $570 million. That’s because so-called “carried interest fees” — a cut of the Maryland fund’s profits that goes to the outside investment managers — have not been not disclosed publicly.

 That’s about to change.

 ………
 At one point, the legislation sought to cap the amount of fees the firms could charge the pension system, but it was amended to become a bill requiring greater disclosure. Both chambers of the General Assembly passed the revised bipartisan legislation unanimously and Republican Gov. Larry Hogan signed it into law.

 The pension system now must publicly disclose the amount it pays in carried interest fees by the end of each calendar year. The first report, due Dec. 31, will include the fees from fiscal years 2015 through 2019.

It’s a start.

Monetizing the Public Commons

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If you look at Uber, or Lyft, or Airbnb,* onc cannot help but wonder if the source of these organizations business prospects is an attempt to make money from taking something of value from the rest of us.

For Uber and Lyft, it is increased congestion in cities, along with not paying drivers a living wage, while with Airbnb, it is skyrocketing rents as non-resident investors bid up the prices of homes.

The same is true of scooters, which The Independent properly describes as a plague.

With all of them, you have private entities making sidewalks less usable because of the people using the sidewalks, and for dockless scooters, you further have them strewn randomly around sidewalks, creating a falling hazard and blocking access for the disabled.

This is not high tech entrepreneurship, this is tech bros with more venture capital money than ethics taking the public pathways that we already paid for from us.

The technical term for this is, “Negative Externalities,” but I will call it a theft of the commons:

In cities all over Europe, in every cafe, people are talking about the same thing. No, not Brexit: it’s those damn electric scooters.

The plague started last year and has spread like wildfire: Brussels to Lisbon, Paris to Wroclaw. Silicon Valley start-ups showed up one day with vans full of them – an oversized, motorised version of the children’s toy everyone knows. They dumped them on pavements; you can find and rent them with a smartphone app and ride them around town.

If this sounds pretty cool, it actually isn’t. On the surface they look like a futuristic, green transport solution: but the problems have quickly become obvious everywhere they spring up.

They need little advertising because people start literally tripping over them as soon as they appear. The scooters, which are surprisingly large and heavy, litter public places by design, blocking pavements and making life particularly difficult for people with reduced mobility. In most larger cities there are also something like six competing systems – blocking about six times as much pavement as necessary. Their loud alarms, triggered by drunk people trying to ride them without paying, are a familiar drone in the early hours of the morning. And a string of deaths of people riding them – and collisions with people who were just walking along minding their own business – have spurred city authorities into action. It’s the free market at its best.

Britain, almost alone, has managed to stay mostly scooter free: saved by its strict road regulations. One law dating from 1853 bans the riding of a “carriage of any description” on the pavement – while licensing rules mean that they would have to be insured and number plated to be ridden on the roads. Thus the dockless schemes are de facto banned. The UK has got this absolutely spot on: they are neither appropriate to ride on the pavement, nor any different from any other motorised vehicle.

………

Could they be tamed and become a useful part of cities’ transport mix? A docking scheme – similar to the one used by Boris Bikes – would solve the biggest issue: the blocking of pavements. But of course, the tech firms pushing them haven’t bothered with that – they would have to apply for planning permission, and buying land in prime city centres would probably render the whole thing unprofitable. Better just to fly-tip their product wherever they fancy: I have seen it in Brussels, at 3am: men silently unloading scooters out of an unmarked van and leaving them on the pavement, like a reverse burglary.

There’s also no reason in principle why individuals couldn’t simply buy and own an electric scooter like they own a bike or car. Most of the problems come from the dockless rental system which encourages user to leave them strewn around the place.

Also, why, when you can get a ticket for riding a bicycle without a helmet, are the helmet laws not being enforced.

With docked scooters, at least, there is a requirement that the businesses pay for their own storage infrastructure, as opposed to obstructing the sidewalks, but, of course, that won’t attract the VC bucks.

*Full disclosure, I use Airbnb.

In the Annals of Unserious Aircraft Carrier Design………

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

The Nevskoye Design Bureau has revealed a design for a nuclear powered Russian supercarrier, but it is seriously weird:

The Nevskoye Design Bureau (part of Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation) unveiled the newest Project 11430E ‘Lamantin’ nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Its mockup was shown on the design bureau’s display stand at the St. Petersburg international maritime defense show.

………

According to the materials presented on the Nevskoye Design Bureau’s display stand, the aircraft carrier that will get a nuclear-powered propulsion unit will displace 80,000-90,000 tonnes, feature a maximum length of 350 meters, have sea endurance of about 120 days and will be capable of developing a speed of about 30 knots. The aircraft carrier will have a crew of 2,800 and its air task force will comprise 800 personnel. The carrier will have a service life of over 50 years.

All I have to work from is the picture, but this is not a half baked design.

First, and most tellingly, is the inclusion of both catapults and a ramp.

It makes no sense, once you have accommodations for the first catapult, the impact on the design, and the cost, for subsequent catapults is far less.

What’s more, ramp launched aircraft can carry less fuel and weapons.

The second oddity is what appears to be a sonar installation in the bow of the model (the white spot on the bulbous bow), which is rarely (if ever) put on an aircraft carrier, if just because when launching and recovering aircraft it will be operating at very high speeds, which means that ambient noise would obscure any information from the system.

Finally, the island appears to be designed with little regard for managing deck operations,.

The last two items are admittedly minor nitpicks, and would probably be modified in a back and forth between design bureau and customer, but the ramp and the cat is just weird.

Linkage

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Have some Llamas with Hats:

Is This Like a Money Market Fund Breaking the Buck

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A major equity fund in the UK has suspended redemptions, meaning that investors cannot access their funds, which are normally supposed to be available within 24 hours.

This sounds a lot like what happened to institutional money market funds during the financial crash in 2008, when you could not redeem from funds that were supposed to be a safe as cash:

There’s still no sign of relief for the hundreds of thousands of investors whose money is trapped in one of the UK’s biggest equity funds, the Woodford Equity Income Fund. The fund is supposed to offer its shareholders daily liquidity, meaning they can take part or all of their money out any day of the week. But that was before a slow-motion (but accelerating) run on the fund forced its manager, hedge-fund legend Neil Woodford, into taking the last-gasp decision, on June 3, to place a ban on redemptions. Since then, investors have been unable to access their money. And it’s not clear how much longer this could go on.

The problems at Woodford have raised serious questions about just how liquid other equity funds in the UK may be. In the past few days, UK’s biggest broker, Hargreaves Lansdown announced that it plans to remove the Lindsell Train UK Equity Fund, the largest managed UK shares fund, and the Lindsell Train Global Equity Fund, from its Wealth 50 Best List due to liquidity concerns, which prompted shares in Lindsell Train Investment Trust to tumble 22% on Friday.

………

The Woodford Equity Income fund has performed terribly for the past two years. Bad bets were made, often on unlisted assets, resulting in big losses, which in turn triggered a cascade of redemptions as the sharpest investors began yanking out their money. The total amount under management at Woodford has steadily shrunk by almost two thirds since 2015, from £10.2 billion to £3.7 billion.

At the very least, Woodford’s investors will have to hang on for another three agonizing weeks, when the decision to gate the fund is scheduled to be revisited. When the last 28-day review period came up, around a week ago, Woodford told the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority that the fund was still not ready to reopen its doors.

………

Most of Woodford’s liquid assets are already gone having been sold off when the giant flood of redemptions began. By this spring, only three of the fund’s 105 holdings were FTSE 100 companies, and only 26 paid out dividends, which is highly unusual for a fund that is supposed to be almost exclusively devoted to equity-income.

In recent weeks Woodford has reduced his holdings in Raven Property and Horizon Discovery, two long-term investments, as well as other listed companies, including BCA Marketplace, New River Reit and Oakley Capital Investments. But most of the remaining assets are highly illiquid, which means selling them will be a lot more difficult, unless at a very heavy discount.

By EU law, equity funds like Woodford’s are allowed to hold a maximum of 10% of their portfolio in transferable securities that are not dealt in an “eligible market” such as the FTSE 250. To get around this rule, Woodford reportedly bundled up his fund’s illiquid unlisted assets and listed them on the minuscule Guernsey-headquartered International Stock Exchange, which despite its impressive-sounding name has barely any trading activity at all.

This was enough to lend his most illiquid assets the appearance, albeit flimsy, of liquidity. The move was within the letter — though not the spirit — of the law, according to the FCA chief executive Andrew Bailey. Mr Bailey told the Commons Treasury select committee that Woodford Equity Income fund was “sailing close to the wind,” adding that “listing something on an exchange where trading does not actually happen, as far as I can see, does not actually count as liquidity.”


So, they engaged in dodgy bookkeeping combined with a run on the fund.

Yet another dodgy player at the big casino.

They have learned nothing.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Well, I Guess That We Can All Clap Ironically

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Seriously, the Trump administration isn’t even trying to create the flimsiest facade of ethics.

Case in point, Bob Bill Barr, who is refusing to recuse himself from the Jeffrey Epstein case, despite the fact that his father hired Epstein at one point, and Barr’s law firm once had him as a client, and defended him from the same charges.

Seeing as how Trump was a close associate of Epstein, we know where THIS is going.

Absolutely shameless:

U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr does not plan to recuse himself from the current investigation into multi-millionaire and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to sources who spoke to CNN and Fox News.

A Department of Justice official told CNN on Tuesday that “Bill Barr has consulted with career ethics officials at DOJ and he will not recuse from current Epstein case.”

Barr, however, has recused himself “from any review of the earlier case in Florida,” in which Epstein received a controversial plea deal.

………

CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said Barr’s decision not to recuse himself from the current case was “trouble.”

“I have zero confidence Barr will let this case play out in its natural course if it should start to implicate or do collateral damage to powerful, politically-connected people,” he tweeted.

Un-dirty-word-believable.

Eat the Rich

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Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was just arrested for trafficking in minors, as in raping underage teens.

He’s already done times for this, where his high-power lawyers got him off with a slap on the wrist.

As a result of a series of Miami Herald exposes about how prosecutors cut him a sweetheart deal, he was rearrested as he stepped off of his private jet, named (I sh%$ you not) the Lolita Express, at Teterboro, NJ.

The FBI executed a search warrant, and they found sexually explicit videos of underage girls on disks found in a safe in his home:

A trove of lewd photographs of girls, discovered in a safe inside the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion the same day he was arrested, is deepening questions about why federal prosecutors in Miami had cut a deal that shielded him from federal prosecution in 2008.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Mr. Epstein on Monday with sex trafficking, dealing an implicit rebuke to that plea agreement, which was overseen by Alexander Acosta, then the United States attorney in Miami and now President Trump’s labor secretary.

The indictment in Manhattan could prompt a moment of reckoning for the Justice Department, which for years has wrestled with accusations that it mishandled the earlier case and has faced a barrage of litigation from Mr. Epstein’s accusers. In February, the Justice Department opened its own internal review into the matter.

………

Mr. Epstein, a hedge fund manager, avoided the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence, largely because of a secret agreement his lawyers struck with federal prosecutors in 2008. His social circle is filled with the rich and famous, including former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew of Britain.

Yeah, also this guy hung out with Epstein:

Epstein is the guy with the gray hair 3rd from the left.

The guy on the left is (of course) Donald John Trump.

Mr. Clinton’s office said in a statement on Monday that he knows nothing about “the terrible crimes” connected to Mr. Epstein.

In 2002, Mr. Trump described Mr. Epstein as “a terrific guy,” telling New York Magazine, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Clinton knew, and Trump Knew, and so did everyone else in his circle, and they looked the other way, because he was one of them.

Our so-called elites are rotten to the core.

Several of Mr. Epstein’s accusers said they were relieved that authorities seemed to be taking their complaints seriously after many years.

Yeah, it only took 10 years, and a dogged reporter, Julie Brown, for his victims to have their day in court.

I really hope that the prosecutors, including Trump’s current Secretary of Labor, get keel hauled over this.

Mixed Emotions

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I am heartened that some of the regime change mousketeers are finally turning their eyes toward the House of Saud, and seeing it, and particular its young scion Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as a threat to peace and stability.

On the other hand, I am terrifed that they are comparing him to Saddam Hussein, because this implies an eventual invasion, and invading Saudi Arabia, which would involve the “Infidel” in Medina and Mecca, would create a clusterf%$# that would make our little adventure in Iraq look like a game of Parcheesi.

We need to stop our incompetent meddling.

Remind Me, Is Checker Motors Still a Going Concern?

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This does not look futuristic

Well, it appears that Elon Musk has finally come up with a sustainable business model for Tesla.

Unfortunately for him, his business model is to sell only commercial self driving cars for hundreds of thousands of dollars, because self driving is such a value enhancer, because you can rent out your car as a hack while you are not driving.

Checker Motors made a dedicated taxi and failed almost 40 years ago, and while the car was specifically made to the needs of the taxi industry, it could not compete with the volume advantages of major car manufacturers.

Seriously, the idea that Tesla self-driving, which I expect to remain a decade away into the 2030s, is not going to be an exclusive feature of Tesla Motors, and (if cost trends continue) the marginal cost of the system will be under $10,000.

But still, Elon Musk has declared that it won’t sell private automobiles once its “Autopilot” is ready for unsupervised road use.

This dude is one lab accident, and one platypus, away from becoming Heinz Doofenschmirtz:

The company believes its vehicles will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over their useful lifetime.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has warned that the company’s car pricing will potentially multiply after the company launches its ride-hailing service.

The executive recently claimed Tesla’s vehicles will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over their useful life when operated as part of a fully autonomous robotaxi fleet. The presentation did not answer the obvious question at the time: why would Tesla sell any cars to consumers if they become worth so much more for a taxi service?

Musk yesterday confirmed the likely price increase when asked on Twitter if consumers have limited time left to buy a Tesla car before prices “go up severalfold to balance supply and demand” once the company solves full self-driving.

“To be clear, consumers will still be able to buy a Tesla, but the clearing price will rise significantly, as a fully autonomous car that can function as a robotaxi is several times more valuable than a non-autonomous car,” he added in a later post.

Seriously:  This business model is delusional.

Unlike Oracle, or Peoplesoft, or SAP, any car can operate on any road.

There is no vendor lock-in.

I am not surprised that Elon Musk became rich through regulatory arbitrage and luck, but I am puzzled as to why people see him as a visionary, as opposed to a purveyor of Silicon snake oil.