Month: May 2021

This Will Not End Well

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Between sucking up to the Petty Persian Gulf Potentiates, outing a sexual harassment victim in her own organization, assaulting an employee, running a generally abusive workplace, having no experience with budgeting, and writing mean tweets about Republicans, Neera Tanden was deemed unacceptable by the Senate to head the White House Office of Management and Budget.  (Rather depressingly, it was the tweets that were the primary concern of the Senate)

But you know how it is with Washington, D.C. insiders: No matter how badly you f%$# up, and no matter how profoundly unsuited you are to a position of influence, you get another bite at the apple, so Neera Tanden gets a gig as Senior Advisor at the White House, a position that does not require Senate confirmation:

A contentious nomination process kept Neera Tanden out of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, but she still landed in the White House.

The White House confirmed on Friday that Biden had appointed Tanden to be a senior adviser. She will start on Monday. 

………

Tanden will hold various duties in the White House but her focus will be handling any potential fallout from Republican lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court. Tanden will also be tasked with reviewing the United States Digital Service, a program that aims to make government accessible online.

This from someone who has never worked as a lawyer (she does have a J.D. from Yale), was a model of opacity at CAP, and has no background in IT.

Lovely choice.

Except for her tweets excoriating Republicans, which I wholeheartedly approve, her entire career has been as a crass political hack and an awful human being.

More importantly, the people around her hate her enough that anywhere she works leaks like a sieve, which is rather a contrast to her mentor, Hillary Clinton.  (Say what you will about Hillary, but anyone reasonably close to her could have written a tell-all book for a 7 figure advance, and no one has.)

Much like Rahm Emanuel, we will now have another member of the Biden administration inside the tent pissing in.

New York Times Editors Come Out for State Owned Means of Production

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Not joking, they just wrote an editorial suggesting that not only should Covid-19 vaccine IP protections be suspended, but that the US government should set up its own state owned vaccine plants.

They have gone full Pinko:

The United States is well on its way to protecting Americans from the coronavirus. It’s time to help the rest of the world. By marshaling this nation’s vast resources to produce and distribute enough vaccines to meet global demand, the United States would act in keeping with the nation’s best traditions and highest aspirations while advancing its geopolitical and economic interests. It is a moment of both obligation and opportunity.

………

Covax, the World Health Organization’s initiative to pool vaccine resources, remains profoundly underfunded and has failed to meet even its modest target of vaccinating one-fifth of the population in the Global South. Without a major course correction, the rest of the world will have to wait until 2023 or later for large-scale vaccination initiatives like the one underway in the United States. The consequences of this disparity are expected to be severe. Hundreds of thousands more people will get sick and die from a disease that is now preventable with a vaccine. The global economy will contract by trillions of dollars, according to the International Chamber of Commerce, and tens of millions of people will plummet into extreme poverty as the virus continues to fester and evolve in the world’s more vulnerable reaches. 

………

President Biden can start by announcing that the United States intends to help and by appointing a vaccine czar to oversee the expansion of vaccine production. The federal government has ample legal power to compel the participation of the pharmaceutical companies, including the sharing of critical information and technologies. Congress has appropriated $16 billion to scale up production, most of which remains unspent.

Increasing manufacturing capacity has proved tricky. The global demand for vaccines may be high now, but once the coronavirus pandemic recedes, it will plummet back to normal levels. Increased public ownership, for its part, would ensure that vaccine-production capacity is ready for future pandemics, which are inevitable — potentially including new coronavirus variants for which routine boosters may be required.

To this end, the administration should consider taking a page from the Department of Energy playbook: Create publicly owned manufacturing facilities and contract with private companies to run them. (Several of the D.O.E.’s federally owned laboratories are run by private companies like General Electric and Bechtel.)

(emphasis mine)

I would note that the suggestion of federally owned manufacturing facilities is a good thing, and any future research or development contracts should require that these sites have a royalty free license.

But subcontracting to private companies to run them?  Too much of an opportunity for the sort of rat-f%$#ery that has pharma paying generic competitors not to produce.

Drugs factories are not like nuclear weapons factories:  Anyone can build one.

Have the government run these facilities.

I Slept Through This

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For about the 5th or 6th time since I started blogging in 2007, I did not blog.I was completely wiped than evening.

So I missed commenting on Thursday’s initial unemployment claims report, which hit another pandemic low.

Jobless claims continued a several-week slide to new pandemic lows, in a sign hiring is primed to strengthen as workers return to the labor market.

Worker applications for unemployment benefits fell to 473,000 last week from a revised 507,000 a week earlier, the Labor Department said Thursday. Claims remain above pre-pandemic levels but are now at the lowest point since mid-March 2020, when the pandemic shut down the economy and triggered widespread joblessness.

The four-week moving average, which smooths out volatility in the weekly numbers, also reached a new pandemic low of 534,000.

………

Higher vaccination rates, fiscal stimulus and easing business restrictions are converging to support stronger spending across the U.S. But job growth isn’t keeping pace. U.S. employers added a modest 266,000 jobs in April, far short of the one million that economists had forecast and the weakest monthly gain since January.

Many employers say they can’t find enough workers to meet surging demand, in turn limiting production. Economists cite several factors keeping workers on the sidelines, including individuals’ fear of contracting Covid-19, child-care burdens from school closures, and expanded unemployment benefits.

Though benefits applications are on a downward trend, the number of people claiming benefits each week through regular state programs remains elevated. So-called continuing claims have stagnated between 3.6 million and 4 million since March.

I think that a recovery is underway, the questions are whether it will involve the rest of us, as the 2009 recovery did not, whether we are opening up too soon, and whether new variants of Covid-19 will take us back to lock-down.

Roid Rage

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Marjorie Taylor Greene got in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s face to demand a debate.

Seriously, given her background as a Gym Rat, one has to wonder if she is abusing anabolic steroids: (As some folks noted in the comments)

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene aggressively confronted Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday and falsely accused her of supporting “terrorists,” leading the New York congresswoman’s office to call on leadership to ensure that Congress remains “a safe, civil place for all Members and staff.”

Two Washington Post reporters witnessed Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) exit the House chamber late Wednesday afternoon ahead of Greene (Ga.), who shouted “Hey Alexandria” twice in an effort to get her attention. When Ocasio-Cortez did not stop walking, Greene picked up her pace and began shouting at her and asking why she supports antifa, a loosely knit group of far-left activists, and Black Lives Matter, falsely labeling them “terrorist” groups. Greene also shouted that Ocasio-Cortez was failing to defend her “radical socialist” beliefs by declining to publicly debate the freshman from Georgia.

“You don’t care about the American people,” Greene shouted. “Why do you support terrorists and antifa?”

………

On Thursday morning, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) criticized Greene’s behavior.

“While I may not agree with @AOC on issues, I’ve never seen her confront a colleague like this,” he wrote on Twitter. “The house was created to debate emotional issues professionally, and it seems some just want attention or cannot handle their emotions.”

Greene is as nutty as a fruitcake.  I do not know whether it is because she is juicing, or if there are other underlying psychological problems, and honestly I do not care.

She is a clear and present danger to fellow members of Congress.

This is Contemptible

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It turns that cops and medical examiners are conspiring to use Sickle Cell Trait to excuse police misconduct.

Sickle Cell Trait is the heterozygous form of Sickle Cell Anemia, and it has a limited effect on people.  It is almost universally asymptomatic.

Nevertheless, because it is almost exclusively associated with Black people, cops and their enablers use it as an an excuse for beating people to death:

When they carried the body of a 32-year-old Black man named Lamont Perry out of the woods in Wadesboro, N.C., there were no protests over his sudden death in police custody.

No reporters camped at the scene. No lawyers filed suit.

Instead, the final mark in the ledger of Mr. Perry’s life was made by a state medical examiner who attributed his death in large part to sickle cell trait, a genetic characteristic that overwhelmingly occurs in Black people. The official word was that he had died by accident.

But the examiner’s determination belied certain facts about that night in October 2016, public records and interviews show. Accused of violating probation in a misdemeanor assault case, Mr. Perry was chased by parole and local police officers through the dark into a stand of trees, where only they could witness what happened next.

He had swelling of the brain, and a forensic investigator reported that he had an open fracture of his right leg. He was covered in dirt, and residents of a nearby housing complex told his family that when the officers emerged from the woods, their shoes and the bottoms of their pants were spattered in blood.

Yes, clearly this is a case of Sickle Cell Trait causing a broken leg, closed head trauma, and massive bleeding.

Mr. Perry’s case underscores how willing some American pathologists have been to rule in-custody deaths of Black people accidents or natural occurrences caused by sickle cell trait, which is carried by one in 13 Black Americans and is almost always benign. Those with the trait have only one of the two genes required for full-blown sickle cell disease, a painful and sometimes life-threatening condition that can deform red blood cells into crescent shapes that stick together and block blood flow.

………

The New York Times has found at least 46 other instances over the past 25 years in which medical examiners, law enforcement officials or defenders of accused officers pointed to the trait as a cause or major factor in deaths of Black people in custody. Fifteen such deaths have occurred since 2015.

In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the person who died had been forcefully restrained by the authorities, pepper-sprayed or shocked with stun guns. Scattered across 22 states and Puerto Rico, in big cities and small towns, the determinations on sickle cell trait often created enough doubt for officers to avert criminal or civil penalties, The Times found.

………

“You can’t put the blame on sickle cell trait when there is a knee on the neck or when there is a chokehold or the person is hogtied,” said Dr. Roger A. Mitchell Jr., the former chief medical examiner for the District of Columbia and now chairman of pathology at the Howard University College of Medicine. “You can’t say, ‘Well, he’s fragile.’ No, that becomes a homicide.”

I guess that we need to add, “Living while Black,” to, “Driving while Black,” to the list of offenses that the authorities find worthy of the death penalty.

Yeah, Subsidies, That Will Work

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The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has come to the conclusion that the Gypsy cab companies like Uber and Lyft are dysproportionally responsivle for greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and so they are looking to pass a rule mandating electric vehicle adoptions by those companies.

Uber and Lyft want public subsidies to follow the law.

The response of California should be to tell them to go Cheney themselves:

California clean-air regulators want nearly all trips on Uber and Lyft ride-hailing platforms to be in electric vehicles, mandating costly measures that the companies call unrealistic without more public subsidies for EVs.

………

And yet the firms are pushing back on the CARB effort to force the transition, arguing taxpayers should shoulder much of the burden.

………

Uber and Lyft say they can’t afford the EV transition either. Uber said in a December letter to CARB that, without “sufficient” subsidies, the rule would unduly burden the companies, along with their drivers and consumers.

Uber and Lyft have already proved that they are an enemy of good government (Proposition 22), let them pay their own way.

A Perfect Metaphor for American Startup Culture

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It should surprise no one that gypsy cab company Uber is less of a ride sharing company than it is an exercise in fraud. 

By this, I don’t mean that it has no path to profitability (though it doesn’t), I mean that Uber, and WeWork, DoorDash, and pretty much the entire investment portfolio of Softbank is an attempt to generate buzz through a massive infusion of capital, followed by an IPO that offloads the company to suckers.

It seems to me that in addition to those startups, the management of Softbank should be frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs when the reckoning comes.

It also turns out that Uber is an example of particularly extreme financial engineering:

Uber is not a business in the traditional sense. It’s a “bezzle” (“the magic interval when a confidence 

trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it”).

The only reason Uber was able to attain growth was because investors gave it billions to lose. First, it was the Saudi Royals, hoping to spend their way to a transportation monopoly.

When that didn’t work, the company’s investors suckered the public into taking their shares off their hands in an IPO premised on two things:

  1. Self-driving cars

  2. All buses and subways in the world being scrapped and replaced with Ubers.

Neither of those things have happened, of course. Uber actually had to pay someone else $400m to “buy” the self-driving car division it sank $2.5b into (the resulting cars could not travel for one mile without a serious accident).

………

Uber’s “innovation” wasn’t self-driving cars. It was cheating. Uber is really f%$#ing good at cheating.

How good? Well, last year, Uber managed to dodge tax on $6b in global revenues by laundering its income through fifty Dutch shell companies.

………

It’s quite a whirlwind of socially useless financial engineering, composed of obvious frauds like “selling” its IP to a Dutch subsidiary financed with a $16b “loan” from a Singaporean subsidiary, garnering 20 years‘ worth of $1b annual tax credits.

The Netherlands may be a bastion of progressive politics, but it’s also one of the world’s leading onshore-offshore tax havens, joining Cyprus, Luxembourg, Delaware, Wyoming and the City of London as a key player in the global money-laundry.

Our multinational financial system is one big case of, “If fraud can happen, it will already have happened.”

If we actually enforced the tax and fraud laws, there would be millions of people nationwide who would be in the dock right now.

Good Point

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It is in fact true that Republican arguments against expanded unemployment insurance are straight out of Karl Marx.

Republicans are arguing that they need the fear of starvation and destitution to get jobs filled, just as Marx argued that capitalists needed the fear of starvation to exploit the proletariat. 

There is symmetry:

Many Republican-controlled states are freaking out about the working class. Business owners, particularly of restaurants, are complaining they can’t find anyone to fill job openings, and conservative legislatures are leaping into action. At time of writing, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Utah have announced they will begin refusing the federal $300 supplement to unemployment benefits in the next few weeks, and more may follow. Utah has to “roll those back, to get more people into the workforce to get those jobs, to get back to employment,” said Governor Spencer Cox.

It is amusing to consider this development in light of the ongoing conservative panic attack over President Biden’s supposed “American Marxism” agenda, in the words of prominent right-wing radio host Mark Levin. Ironically, what Republicans are doing to the unemployed actually is explained by classic Marxism.

Let me explain. In his magnum opus Capital, Marx argued that a capitalist system will more-or-less automatically produce a population of surplus workers. Businesses become more productive through greater capital investment, which will require more workers in some areas but far fewer in others, and hence this process will always tend to to create an “industrial reserve army” of surplus labor — that is, the unemployed.

This reserve army is very important for classical capitalism. It “becomes … the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production.” The reason is that businesses are constantly changing the way they operate, and so always need a large supply of idle workers to fling into new projects on a moment’s notice:

The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. [Capital]

This really does not surprise me.  The entire Neoliberal movement grew from Trotskyites.

That Republican thinking mirrors that of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin does not surprise me not one whit.

What About Turtles Farting?

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A series of studies have revealed that mammals can breath through the butt-holes.

Brought a bit of family lore, about turtles farting, to my mind:

When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity, at least in a lab setting.

The team’s research is published today in the journal Med and describes the capacity for mice, rats, and pigs to survive longer and have more strength in low-oxygen circumstances when given oxygen gas or an oxygen-rich liquid through their rectums, in a process similar to an enema. While fish like loaches and catfish use a similar method to gain additional oxygen in the natural world, this doesn’t appear to be an evolutionary adaptation for mammals. In other words, mammalian bodies can’t naturally do this, but with a little push from modern science, it becomes possible. Previous research has seen oxygen injected directly into mammalian bloodstreams, prolonging the lives of rabbits, but the rectal approach to the low-oxygen problem is novel.

The experiment, while disturbing, was designed to find new ways to save the lives of people whose lungs are failing.

It’s a valuable study, but all I can think about turtles farting.

 

If It Makes You Nervous, Find a New Job

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Arguably the most popular policies of  Joe Biden with the general public is raising taxes on the rich.

Even a majority of Republicans support raising taxes on the rich.

Still, it appears that this fantastically popular policy prescription is giving moderate Democrats the vapors, because they have nothing to offer but the ability raise money from rich people.

Seriously, soaking the rich is good policy and good policy, but these guys are so afraid of offending the money bags types they are useless:

President Biden’s desire to offset more than $4 trillion in spending proposals with higher taxes is struggling to gain momentum in Congress.

Pockets of skepticism have emerged within Biden’s party over White House plans to raise the corporate tax rate, revamp the international tax system and double tax rates on wealthy investors, among other measures critical to the administration’s plans. The party faces regional divides over taxes as well, with farm-state Democrats skittish about taxes on heirs and coastal Democrats demanding the repeal of limits on state and local tax deductions, which would amount to an expensive tax cut that would require higher taxes elsewhere.

Yes, these tremulous Democrats are determined to save tax breaks for rich folks.

………

The open-ended nature of the discussions has led to a bevy of ideas from Democrats and little clear progress toward a resolution. Democrats said some donors are anxious about the political ramifications of raising taxes before the midterms, especially given the party’s tough odds to hold onto the House. Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee responsible for party fundraising, has privately warned the tax plans could hurt vulnerable House Democrats up for reelection in 2022, said two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

It won’t hurt anyway.

………

“The administration knows these taxes are very popular,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who advised Biden’s campaign. “But Democrats in Congress are nervous from decades about being attacked as tax and spenders.”

When Bill Clinton created budget surpluses, and destroyed welfare, Democrats were attacked as tax and spenders.  It is going to happen anyway.

Living in fear of your own shadow is not is not living/

For F%$#’s Sake, Why?

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Why the hell does Joe Biden want to appoint Rahm Emanuel ambassador to Japan?

Rahm has a serious claim to be the most overrated man in Politics, he does not speak Japanese, and he is a loud obnoxious bully, which does not play well with Japanese social norms.

Anyone this side of the “My Pillow” guy would have been a better selection.

The man is a cancer on the body politic:

Joe Biden has picked the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel to be his ambassador to Japan.

………

Some progressives view Emanuel as a major antagonist within the party. He is often criticized among liberals, for example, for his handling of a shooting of an African American teenager during his time in Chicago.

He covered up the shooting, and kept the shooter on the force until the courts forced the release of the video.

I get that political supporters get assignments like this, but why the f%$# do you have to appoint someone so completely ill-suited to the position.

Not this Sh%$ Again!

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The stupid people in economics have been bleating about inflation since, well, forever, and last month’s CIP numbers will only elicit more wankerhood from the pundits:

US consumer prices soared in April as post-lockdown demand and shortages drove up the cost of a wide range of goods, from used cars and home furnishings to airline tickets.

The news triggered a further slide in markets unsettled this week by the threat of rising prices, which could force central banks to abandon zero0-interest rate policies that have helped stoke share prices. The Dow Jones index fell 1.3% in early trading and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 2.5%.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) climbed 4.2% during the month from a year earlier, the labor department said, the biggest 12-month increase since September 2008, the height of the financial crisis. The figure was significantly higher than economists had predicted.

CPI measures the prices consumers pay for goods and services, including clothes, groceries, restaurant meals, recreational activities and vehicles. This month’s rise saw increases across the board and was driven by many factors.

The Biden administration’s economic stimulus package has pumped money into the economy just as it reopens from coronavirus lockdown measures. Fresh demand for goods and services has also outpaced supply, which is still recovering from the lockdowns at the start of the pandemic, leading to shortages for a broad range of goods from lumber and steel to ketchup.

Speaking of wankers, the Sultan of Schmuck, the Patron of Pissants, the Don of Dickheads, the ……… Never mind, enough alliteration, Lawrence “Larry” Summers has weighted in:

Others are more concerned. Former treasury secretary Larry Summers has warned the US could face a period of high inflation unseen since the 1970s. Talking to Bloomberg TV he said it was “plain wrong” to suggest that inflation cannot surge unexpectedly.

“It may be that a way will be found to bring it under control,” he said. “But as I look at $3tn of stimulus, $2tn of savings overhang, a major acceleration coming from Covid in the rear-view mirror, rates expected by the Federal Reserve to be at zero for three years even in a booming economy, record growth this year, major expansion of the Fed balance sheet, and much new fiscal stimulus to come – I’m worried.”

It’s nice that you are worried, Larry, but you have been wrong about everything since  ……… Well ……… Forever, so how about a nice hot cup of shut the f%$# up!

But now we will hear the wankers wanking about inflation for at least 18 months, and they will be on you teevee and your editorial pages.

I Feel Very Good About This

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Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill has ruled that Derek Chauvin is eligible for a sentence enhancement for up to 40 years in prison. 

He used the terms, “Particular cruelty,” and “Abused a position of trust and authority,” as a cop to justify taking a potential sentence for 2nd degree murder from about 12 years.

Good.  This psychopath is a menace to society:

Derek Chauvin abused his authority as a police officer when he pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck until he went limp and treated him with “particular cruelty,” qualifying him for a longer prison sentence, a judge said.

In a ruling made public Wednesday, Hennepin County District Judge Peter A. Cahill found state prosecutors had proved beyond a reasonable doubt four of five aggravating factors in Floyd’s killing that they argued should result in a tougher prison sentence for the former Minneapolis police officer.

Chauvin was convicted April 20 of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s May 25 killing. Floyd died when Chauvin placed his knees on Floyd’s neck and back for more than nine minutes while he was handcuffed, facedown, on a Minneapolis street. Chauvin, who is being held in solitary confinement at a Minnesota prison, is scheduled to be sentenced June 25.

Although a jury found Chauvin guilty on all three charges he was facing, Minnesota law dictates he will face sentencing only on the most serious charge: second-degree murder. State sentencing guidelines on that charge recommend 11 to 12 years in prison for someone with no criminal history.

But prosecutors last fall and again last month asked Cahill for what is known as an “upward sentencing departure,” citing several factors they argued should open Chauvin up to a maximum of 40 years in prison.

In his ruling, Cahill agreed with prosecutors that Chauvin had “abused a position of trust and authority” as a police officer and that Chauvin “knew from his training and experience” that his restraint was putting Floyd in “danger of positional asphyxia.”

The scary part is that without a video that had gone viral, Derek Chauvin would still be a cop, and he would still be brutalizing people.

“Phants Ditch Liz

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No sympathy for Elizabeth Cheney.  She is an odious person who, along with her whole family have made the Republican Party what it is today

I cannot feel sad at any misfortune she suffers, particularly, as is the case today when House Republicans removed her from the #3 spot in the house, that the whole party is shooting itself in the dick.

I expected it to be close, but I expected a secret ballot, and instead it was a voice vote:

House Republicans began Wednesday by quickly ousting Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) from her leadership post because she continues to challenge former president Donald Trump over his false claim that the presidential election was stolen.

Soon after, several GOP members spoke up to minimize the actions of pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6., an event that led to deadly clashes with police and threatened the orderly certification of President Biden’s electoral victory.

Taken together, the events Wednesday offered the clearest sign yet of how far Republicans are willing to go to support or tolerate Trump’s lies about the election as well the degree to which many members are trying to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 to erase the former president’s culpability.

………

There was no roll call vote Wednesday after McCarthy said he wanted a voice vote to show “unity.” Once the 18-minute meeting was over, Cheney walked up the middle aisle past her colleagues and left the room, according to a person familiar with the meeting who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private gathering.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has learned a lesson it seems, that behind the veil of a secret ballot, he cannot trust his caucus, because he feels, probably with no small justification, that a secret ballot would bring nothing but embarrassment.

Still, he gets embarrassment, because this is f%$#ing embarrassing.

How Badly Does Someone Have to F%$# Up for the DOD to Decide That They Won’t Hire Contractors to Do It?

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It appears that the Pentagon is looking at terminating its massive cloud computing project known as Jedi. 

Given that this massive contract has the potential for creating comfortable retirements for dozens of senior officers, I call it back-loaded bribery, something has to be seriously wrong.

It’s got to be worse than the F-35 clusterf%$#, and it doesn’t get much worse than that:

Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project, which has been mired in litigation from Amazon.com Inc. and faces continuing criticism from lawmakers.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract was awarded to Microsoft Corp. in 2019 over Amazon, which has contested the award in court ever since.

A federal judge last month refused the Pentagon’s motion to dismiss much of Amazon’s case. A few days later, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said the department would review the project.

………

“The prospect of such a lengthy litigation process might bring the future of the JEDI Cloud procurement into question,” the Jan. 28 report said.

………

Some lawmakers and government-contracting experts say JEDI should be scuttled because its single-vendor, winner-take-all approach is inappropriate and outmoded for mammoth enterprises like the Department of Defense.

These people say the Pentagon should move to an increasingly popular approach to enterprise cloud-computing that includes multiple companies as participants. Spreading out the work also reduces the risk of legal challenges from excluded companies, they say.

Oh, I see now:  They want to spread the dollars around to get some of the usual suspects into the room, as opposed to Microsoft and Amazon, who have been playing the game far longer than either of them, and they have LOTS if executive vice president positions. 

If you split this up between Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, etc., think about all the retired officers that you can hire.

………

A Pentagon inspector general report last year determined that the Pentagon adviser didn’t violate any ethical obligations or give preferential treatment to Amazon.

Steven Schooner, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in government contracting, said early questions about the Pentagon’s underlying procurement strategy for JEDI have grown over time.

“And all of that is before this case became one of the most jaw-dropping, head-scratching collections of conflicts of interest imaginable,” he said.

The US defense procurement system is beyond dysfunctional..

Suck it Up and Take It

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The White supremacist right has been aggressively infiltrating law enforcement across the United States for decades. 

The numerous police officers caught on tape invading the Capitol, it’s clear that this problem is far worse than was previously admitted.

Unfortunately, police are fighting these efforts tooth and nail: 

In the battle to stamp out extremism from the ranks of the police, lawmakers from California to Minnesota have proposed solutions they thought were straightforward.

Some laws would empower the police to do more robust background checks of recruits, letting them vet social media to make sure new officers were not members of hate groups. Other laws would make it easier for departments to fire officers with ties to extremists.

But legislators working to get these measures passed in recent months have found themselves confronting a thicket of obstacles and somewhat unexpected opposition, ranging from straight Republican vs. Democrat clashes to profound questions about protecting constitutional rights.

Last month, a police officer in Fresno, Calif., was fired after videos surfaced that showed him supporting the Proud Boys at a protest. “Such ideology, behavior and affiliations have no place in law enforcement and will not be tolerated within the ranks of the Fresno Police Department,” the police chief said.

Yet when lawmakers in the state recently proposed legislation to give police departments more power to weed out officers with extremist ties, they met resistance.

Brian Marvel, the president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, said in a statement that the organization supported the idea but not the legislation that was drafted. It would “infringe on a person’s individual rights,” he said, and possibly prevent someone from becoming an officer based on personal beliefs, religion or other interests.

………

Various such efforts have been simmering around the country for years, spurred by F.B.I. reports starting more than 15 years ago that document a concerted effort by white supremacist and other extremist organizations to infiltrate the police.

The events of Jan. 6 brought new momentum to those efforts, with more than 30 active or retired police officers coming under scrutiny for joining protests in Washington, and at least seven facing charges for storming the Capitol.

………

Racist gangs among Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies have been a problem for decades. In Virginia, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska and Louisiana, law enforcement officers have been dismissed in recent years for ties to the Ku Klux Klan. And various agencies have been shaken by revelations of police officers exchanging derogatory remarks about minorities on social media, with the Philadelphia Police Department dismissing 13 of the 72 officers it put on leave in 2019 because of such Facebook posts.

………

Police officers themselves, at least those who acknowledge that there is an issue, tend to welcome the idea that added scrutiny will drive bad officers away. Major unions in California have supported the general idea of scrutinizing applicants more closely, but they opposed the first draft in February of a law that would reject all candidates who had been members of hate groups, participated in their activities or publicly expressed sympathy for them.

(emphasis mine)

You can drive a truck through, “At least those who acknowledge that there is an issue.”

If you assume that just a few percent police are white supremacists, and add in those who know  and let it slide, you can very easily get to a majority of cops out there.

Given the fact that police have the authority to use lethal force on behalf of the state, and that police in the United States are so profligate with the use of lethal force on behalf of the state, aggressive action is essential to protect society.

Well, This is Horrifying

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Jeff Bezos is a psychopath who revels in hurting people.

His ethos permeates Amazon, and it’s why you hear so many stories about the inhumanity of its workplace, not just in its warehouses, but in its corporate offices.

It turns out that Amazon gives its a mangers a quote of people to fire each year, which has led to a practice called, “Hire to Fire,” where they hire people for the express purpose of firing them in a few months so that they can hit their numbers.

Why does this world embrace sadists?

Amazon has a goal to get rid of a certain percentage of employees every year, and three managers told Insider they felt so much pressure to meet the goal that they hired people to fire them.

“We might hire people that we know we’re going to fire, just to protect the rest of the team,” one manager told Insider.

The practice is informally called “hire to fire,” in which managers hire people, internally or externally, they intend to fire within a year, just to help meet their annual turnover target, called unregretted attrition (URA). A manager’s URA target is the percentage of employees the company wouldn’t regret seeing leave, one way or the other.

………

The most senior executives at Amazon, including incoming CEO Andy Jassy, closely track their URA goals, according to internal documents obtained by Insider. Jassy, for example, is expected to replace 6% of his division through “unregretted” departures on what appears to be an annual basis.

Something is deeply broken in our society.

I don’t know how to fix this.  My only advice is that if you go postal at work, go after senior executives first.