Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Magnets How do They F%$#ing Work?

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Once again, it’s time to roll the Insane Clown Posse video Miracles, (Completely NSFW) because the Talibaptists are going full ICP Here

One of the joys of Neil deGrasse Tyson and his science show Cosmos, is the way that it makes the heads of the primordial wing of the Christian right explode.

Case in point, they have now come out opposing electromagnetism:

If there is one topic in each week’s Cosmos that sends the Christian fundamentalists into a frenzy, it is evolution.

 You see, scientists understand that most sciences cannot be done correctly if you ignore the scientific fact of evolution. Yet, week in and week out, creationists critique the job Tyson and his team of writers are doing, calling them speculative and misleading.

 Creationists would have you believe that Tyson and his crew are force-feeding viewers a story of evolution dreamed up in the minds of those who simply want to refute God and spread atheism.

 Calling evolutionary biologists names such as “evolutionists”—a word not used outside of the creationists sphere—is an attempt to demean the science as nothing more than a religion; ironically, the very thing they are trying to sell you on.

 This week’s episode, titled, “The Electric Boy” was about scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday’s study of electricity led to some of the biggest discoveries and inventions in the history of mankind, ranging from the electric motor to the discovery of electromagnetic waves that surround just about everything.

 How on earth could creationists be upset with electricity? Well, Tyson had the audacity to mention that Faraday’s discoveries helped us explain how birds navigate the globe using the earth’s electromagnetic waves, and that their brains are evolutionarily wired for such a task.

Seriously. What is wrong with these people, and why do we allow them to breed?

Big Ag Will Kill Us Now

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The good folks at I F%$#ing Love Science point us to a study that strongly indicates that neonicotinoid pesticides cause colony collapse disorder in bees:

A new study claims to have pegged neonicotinoids as the definitive cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. But does the data really justify the conclusions?

European honey bees are incredibly important pollinators. Unfortunately, they’re disappearing at a rapid rate due to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). What actually causes CCD isn’t completely understood. CCD has confused scientists since it was first described, or had its name changed, in 2006. It is likely caused by a number of different factors, working together – however, there has been a large focus on a certain group of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. In December of 2013, in an attempt to mitigate their involvement, the EU implemented a two-year memorandum on three commonly used insecticides in the neonicotinoid family. Many, including their own government, criticized the science behind the moratorium.

There is a desperate need for new studies to accurately test the different variables involved in CCD. New research from Dr. Alex Lu attempts to peg neonicotinoid insecticides as the underlying cause of CCD. The study set up 18 hives to test the effects of two neonicotinoids, clothianidin and imidacloprid, from 2012-2013. Six colonies were selected from three different sites in central Massachusetts, and sublethal doses of each insecticide were given orally to treatment hives via a syrup solution. Six of twelve treated colonies abandoned their hives while only one of the six control hives abandoned theirs. Neonicotinoids obviously do not help bees, but whether this study has found them to be the ‘smoking gun’ isn’t exactly as clear as many are making it out to be. Only 18 hives were used in this study which is too small of a sample size to control for other variables and definitely too small to form a definitive conclusion as to the affects of neonicotinoids. The way he tests for CCD-like symptoms is not a definitive indication that is occurring. Hive abandonment is not automatically CCD. Honey bees may abandon their hives for any number of different reasons, and this study doesn’t control for any of them.

This is why things like pesticides should be proved safe before use, and not allowed until proved they are unsafe, as is the USDA’s policy in the United States.

This is a small study, and as such, it should not be the sole basis of regulatory policy, but I do think that this is a good justification to throwing a few million dollars at a larger study, before we lose our almond, avocado, apples, peaches, pears, etc.

Our Friends in the Ukraine are Hiring Blackwater

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Guess what? In addition to advising the current government in Kiev, it appears that we have lent them mercenaries from the firm formerly known as Blackwater:

Soldiers from a private US security company with a record of alleged atrocities in Iraq are supporting Ukraine‘s security forces in the volatile east of the country, the German newspaper Bild reported Sunday.

The report, citing Germany‘s federal intelligence agency BND, said 400 of the heavily-armed men employed by the group formerly known as Blackwater were deployed in the vicinity of Lugansk where pro-Russian separatists are seeking self-rule.

The BND declined to comment on the report, while the security company – now known as Academi – dismissed similar reports in March.

Bild reported that according to a BND assessment, US intelligence services had knowledge of the covert involvement of the private soldiers in Ukraine. BND representatives relayed the information to Germany‘s federal chancellory on April 29, Bild said.

Academi was known as Blackwater during its time as key security services contractor to the US government in the war it led to oust Iraq‘s president Saddam Hussein in 2003.

It was later implicated in the killing of unarmed civilians and arms smuggling in Iraq.

This is nucking futs.

I can think of no more inflammatory news than having the most notorious mercenary organization in the real world providing “security consultants” for a government that is already being viewed with suspicion by much of the eastern half of the country.

I think that we have learned that the EU and US don’t care about the Ukraine as much as they want to just f%$# with Russia.

This is not going to end well.

H/t R1 at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeal F%$#s Up Again

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In Oracle vs. Google, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal, aka the “Patent Court”, has once again taken a delusionally extremist position on IP, and ruled that software APIs are subject to copyright. As Timothy B. Lee observes, “The court that created the patent troll mess is screwing up copyright too.”

A few years ago, the database company Oracle sued Google, arguing that Google’s Android operating system infringed the copyright of Oracle’s Java technology. On Friday, a federal appeals court sided with Oracle in the long-running dispute.
The decision seems to reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of how software works. And it could create serious headaches for companies that want to make their software compatible with that of competitors.

Why did Oracle sue Google?

The lawsuit focuses on technical decisions Google made when it created the Android operating system.

 Google wanted people who wrote programs in the popular programming language Java to be able to re-use their code in Android apps. To do that, Google had to ensure that Java code written for other purposes ran exactly the same on Android. But negotiations with the company behind Java, Sun Microsystems (which was later acquired by Oracle), broke down, so Google decided to create its own version of Java from scratch.

 ………

 The trial court judge, William Alsup, sided with Google. Copyright only protects the creative aspects of a work, not its functional characteristics. Judge Alsup ruled that because the names of Java functions was essential to achieving interoperability, they were a functional characteristic rather than a creative aspect of Java, and using them wasn’t copyright infringement.

 But on Friday, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The court was unimpressed with Google’s argument that function names were functional characteristics not protected by copyright. In the Federal Circuit’s view, the list of Java functions was just another kind of “code” that couldn’t be copied without its creator’s permission.

 The court’s reasoning didn’t impress James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at the University of Maryland. “Not only do they not understand how computers work, they can’t even read,” he says.

 ………

 The Federal Circuit is the court that hears appeals in all patent cases. Over the last three decades, it has shown a consistent bias in favor of patent holders, setting legal precedents that made the current patent troll problem possible.

 Ordinarily, copyright cases in California would be heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But because Oracle’s fight with Google also includes some patent issues, the Federal Circuit gets jurisdiction.

 And evidently, the Federal Circuit has a bias toward copyright holders to go with its pro-patent bias.

Needless to say, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals is completely insane, and should be abolished, and the judges on that court should be told to take up knitting.

It Sucks to be Tom Wheeler

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It turns out that the Telco Lobbyist turned FCC Chairman is experiencing a lot of push-back regarding his proposal to gut net neutrality, not individuals, but also from internet giants like Google and other Democratic FCC commissioners:

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal to let ISPs charge Web services for an Internet fast lane drew condemnation from many net neutrality advocates, and now two members of the commission have expressed doubts about the plan as well.

Jessica Rosenworcel and Mignon Clyburn, the two Democratic members of the commission other than Wheeler, spoke about the chairman’s proposal yesterday. In a speech at a gathering of state library agencies, Rosenworcel called for delaying a vote on the proposal:

Network neutrality is the principle that consumers can go where they want and do what they want on the Internet, without interference from their broadband provider. The American Library Association and the library community have long been champions of network neutrality and an open Internet. Libraries, of course, know that an open Internet is important for free speech, access to information, and economic growth. I also support an open Internet. So I have real concerns about FCC Chairman Wheeler’s proposal on network neutrality—which is before the agency right now.

To his credit, he has acknowledged that all options are on the table. This includes discussion about what a “commercially reasonable” Internet fast lane looks like. While I do not know now where this conversation will head on a substantive basis, I can tell you right now I have real concerns about process.

His proposal has unleashed a torrent of public response. Tens of thousands of e-mails, hundreds of calls, commentary all across the Internet. We need to respect that input and we need time for that input. So while I recognize the urgency to move ahead and develop rules with dispatch, I think the greater urgency comes in giving the American public opportunity to speak right now, before we head down this road.

For this reason, I think we should delay our consideration of his rules by a least a month. I believe that rushing headlong into a rulemaking next week fails to respect the public response to his proposal.

The FCC is scheduled to vote on a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on May 15. This would open a new public comment process, but Rosenworcel explained that it would also end the so-called “Sunshine Period,” another good opportunity for debate.

………

Also yesterday, dozens of tech companies including Amazon, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Yahoo sent a letter to the FCC (PDF) asking the commission to halt any plan allowing payments from Web services to ISPs in exchange for speeding up traffic.

“Instead of permitting individualized bargaining and discrimination, the Commission’s rules should protect users and Internet companies on both fixed and mobile platforms against blocking, discrimination, and paid prioritization, and should make the market for Internet services more transparent,” the letter said. “The rules should provide certainty to all market participants and keep the costs of regulation low.”

It’s still on the agenda for May 15, but I think that it likely that it will be delayed.

There is a groundswell of opposition to this, and if they delay this, I don’t think that it will go forward, much in the way that the SOPA/PIPA protests first delayed, then shut down those bills. (For that year anyway)

I do think that this will come back though.

I will say that Wheeler may be the point man, but the only way that this happened is with approval from the White House.

The Cossacks work for the Czar.

Remember the that Miracle Hepatitis B Cure?

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You knwo, the one that costs $1,000.00 a pill, Solvaldi?

Well, it turns out that, in addition to being priced at larcenous expensive, the evidence of its efficacy is simply not there:

The German agency performed this assessment based on a dossier submitted by the drug manufacturer (presumably Gilead).  The assessment found some reason to think the drug beneficial, but that the evidence was sparse, left many questions unanswered, and was inadequate to assess the drug for some important patient populations.  At this point, only a summary is available in English.  It includes links to further information in German.

………

Thus the assessment concluded that the drug company dossier included at best irrelevant data that it tried to pass off as important, and inexplicably left out other data that might have been relevant.

………

Summary

It is even bloodier money if the assumption that the drug is a “well-tolerated and effective cure,” which  Dr Huyler held, proves not to be true.  It is clear that most of the money that Gilead is now scooping up in the US is not to pay retrospectively for research and development or drug production. Instead, it seems likely to be supporting marketing, public relations, some investors’ profits, and huge executive compensation.  When the public realizes that the money may not be buying miracles, the outrage should increase.  


 The Sovaldi case is a signal example of how our health care system is awash in marketing hype and public relations buzz that has swamped rational skeptical thinking about logic and evidence.  That marketing and PR is ever enriching managers while it will send the rest of us, health care professionals included, to the poor house.  And all the money we spend will not buy us the promised miracles and triumphs.

 True health care reform would revisit the pact society once made with drug, biotechnology and device companies meant to promote reasonably priced innovation, but now promoting oligarchy; support transparency and honesty in clinical research; and challenge how health care managers can make millions or billions from unproven, and sometimes worthless or dangerous products.

It also turns out that the study was not double blind.

So the wonder drug may not be any more effective than existing drugs, and it costs a lot more.

So Not Shocked

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The claims by people like Art Laffer, and organizations like ALEC, that “pro business” policies produce an improving economy are not only wrong, but actually counter to the data which shows that the tax-cutting, rich fellating policies that they endorse actually make economic performance worse:

Conservative economic pundits just love to justify “business-friendly” policies to state governments as keys to job growth, which after all is the whole ballgame in economic policy-making.

As Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin has now shown, the problem is that pro-business policies don’t really contribute to economic growth. They just make the rich richer, which is not the same thing at all.

The index measures 15 state policy “variables,” such as top marginal income tax rates, property taxes, public employees per capita, state minimum wage, right-to-work law, and whether there’s an estate tax. You can guess what a state has to do to rank high in all these factors and therefore shine in the index–low taxes, small government, anti-union policies, no estate tax are virtual requirements.

But does a high ALEC ranking translate into high growth? That’s the question Chinn asked. He started by measuring private nonfarm job growth in four states–California, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Minnesota–dating to January 2011, when all four got new governors. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Sam Brownback of Kansas were extremely ALEC-friendly, Jerry Brown of California and Mark Dayton of Minnesota were not.

………

Indeed, when Chinn mapped the ALEC rankings for all 50 states against their economic growth, he found that, if anything, a higher index score correlates with a worse economic performance. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the ALEC follies over time: The Iowa Policy Project found the same negative correlation in 2012.

Of course, much like Trotskyites, conservative Chicago School-type economists, and rich parasites, are impervious to the facts, so it is unlikely that this will translate into actual policy.

H/t Kevin Drum.

Linkage

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The most comprehensive model of the Big Bang yet:

I Have Mixed Emotions About This

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In response to American sanctions, the Russian Duma passed legislation, ostensibly to secure the actions of foreign bankers.

The result is that the Russian government is now demanding that Visa and Mastercard make a security deposit equivalent to 2 days worth of transactions, $3.8 billion, to continue to operate in the country:

International credit card companies face a “severe impact” on their operations in Russia following a strict new law Moscow has adopted in response to Visa and Mastercard freezing service to banks under US sanctions.

Visa described the regulations as “unprecedented” and Mastercard said it could experience difficulties, the Russian magazine Snob reported, after Vladimir Putin signed a law on Monday to create a rival national payment system.

The law stipulates the creation of a homegrown system to facilitate cashless transactions by 1 July, but also imposes stiff new requirements on international payment systems operating in Russia.

The legislation was spurred on by Visa and Mastercard’s decision on 21 March to stop servicing payments for clients of Rossiya Bank, as well as its daughter company Sobinbank. Rossiya Bank was included in the first round of US sanctions over the Ukraine crisis because it is owned by Putin associate Yury Kovalchuk and is the “personal bank for senior officials of the Russian Federation,” the US Treasury said when announcing the sanctions.

Visa and Mastercard also blocked operations for cards issued by SMP Bank, which is owned by the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who are old judo buddies of Putin’s.

The new law forbids international payment systems from cutting off services to Russian clients and obliges them to base their processing centre in Russia. To ensure their good behaviour, international operators will have to place a security deposit in Russia’s central bank equal to the average value of two days’ worth of transactions.

Visa and Mastercard together processed $1.9bn (£1.12bn) in transactions per day last year – 90% of all cashless payments in Russia – equal to a $3.8bn security deposit, the Moscow Times reported.

The security deposit will be due in eight quarterly payments starting on 1 July. The law states that if a payment system unilaterally freezes operations for a Russian client, it is liable for a fee totalling 10% of its security deposit for each day without service.

The credit cards are caught between a rock and a hard place, they have to deal with both US and Russian law, which sucks for them, but they are credit card companies, which means that they spend their time giving people sh%$ sandwichs, so the fact that they are dining on excrement between two slices of white bread, it amuses me no end..

Like I said, mixed emotions.

I’m Not Sure What it Means, but It Sounds Promising

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Vladimir Putin has suggested that any referendum on autonomy/secession for the eastern Ukraine be delayed:

The Kremlin beat a tactical retreat over a regional referendum following days of soaring tension that have left dozens dead and fed fears of a civil war in Ukraine.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said the referendum being staged by pro-Russia separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine on Sunday should be postponed. If the referendum goes ahead, it will provide an argument for the region joining Russia as happened in Crimea in March.

Overt Russian support for the plebiscite could have triggered more substantive EU and US sanctions against Russia. Putin’s statement, following talks with the president of Switzerland in Moscow, looked likely to delay the imposition of a harsher round of economic penalties.

While Moscow has also opposed the holding of presidential elections in Ukraine on 25 May – a ballot strongly supported by the west – Putin sounded more conciliatory, saying that the poll could be a step in the right direction.

The Russian leader insisted, however, that a presidential election should be preceded by constitutional changes in Ukraine aimed at federalising the country and handing greater powers to the regions, steps that would favour greater Russian influence over eastern Ukraine after the Kremlin annexed Crimea.

I don’t know what it means, but it is rather telling the first time that I’ve seen a statement, from either side that seems to be the slightest bit directed toward a deescalation.

With Obama sounding intensely bellicose, and John Kerry channeling General Jack Ripper from the movie Dr. Strangelove, it appears that Putin is the adult in the room.

We live in Bizarro World.

Is Scalia Phoning it in, Senile, or Maybe Being Gaslighted?*

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In a recent dissent on an environmental regulation case, EPA v. EME Homer City Generation, L. P., Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia completely mischaracterized a precedent from the last decade, Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc. in 2001.

It is even more bizarre, because Scalia wrote the unanimous decision that he so grossly mischaracterized:

………

Legal experts say Justice Antonin Scalia erred in his dissent in the 6-2 decision Tuesday to uphold the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate coal pollution that moves across state lines. The Reagan-appointed jurist argued that the majority’s decision was inconsistent with a unanimous 2001 ruling which he mistakenly said shot down EPA efforts to consider costs when setting regulations.

“This is not the first time EPA has sought to convert the Clean Air Act into a mandate for cost-effective regulation. Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457 (2001), confronted EPA’s contention that it could consider costs in setting [National Ambient Air Quality Standards],” Scalia wrote in his dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

The problem: the EPA’s position in the 2001 case was exactly the opposite. The agency was defending its refusal to consider cost as a counter-weight to health benefits when setting certain air quality standards. It was the trucking industry that wanted the EPA to factor in cost. The 9-0 ruling sided with the EPA. The author of the ruling that Scalia mischaracterized? Scalia himself.

The conservative justice’s error was noted by University of California-Berkeley law professor Dan Farber, who called it “embarrassing” and a “cringeworthy blunder.”

“Scalia’s dissent also contains a hugely embarrassing mistake. He refers to the Court’s earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that’s exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted,” Farber wrote on the environmental law and policy blog Legal Planet. “This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder.”

Doug Kendall, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal legal advocacy group, said the error was mystifying and very unusual for a Supreme Court justice.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and seeing that I do not have much in the way of legal chops,† I didn’t really have much to add, until I read Salon‘s followup on this snafu, and this line, from noted Attorney Dan Farber jumped out:

Scalia’s dissent also contains a hugely embarrassing mistake. He refers to the Court’s earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that’s exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted. This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder.

[NOTE: After this was posted, the opinion on the Court’s website was revised to eliminate Scalia’s error. Of course, as corrected, the case no longer fits Scalia’s overall thesis of the “unelected officials” trying to override Congressional policy.]

(emphasis original)

Think about the sentence, “Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder.“

I can see a clerk, either one of his own, or that of another justice, experiencing Scalia up close, and deciding that he’s lost it, and then giving Tony a little shove out the door.

It’s not much, but you can bet that people in the legal world are wondering if Scalia suffered a small stroke or something, and this will adversely affect reputation.

I think that some of his friends might start suggesting that it is time for him to retire.  After all, he’ll never be Chief Justice.

Certainly, I believe that his brain has been damaged by overexposure to bile for years.

*A way of subtly psychologically torturing someone to make them doubt their sanity.
†I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!‡
‡I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

Here is Something to Fill You With Dread………

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The Obama administration is proposing adding “papers, please” to the web:

A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. The New York Times described it at the time as a “driver’s license for the internet.”

Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.

Next month, a pilot program of the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” will begin in government agencies in two US states, to test out whether the pros of a federally verified cyber ID outweigh the cons.

………

To start, there’s the privacy issue. Unsurprisingly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately pointed out the red flags, arguing that the right to anonymous speech in the digital realm is protected under the First Amendment. It called the program “radical,” “concerning,” and pointed out that the plan “makes scant mention of the unprecedented threat such a scheme would pose to privacy and free speech online.”

And the keepers of the identity credentials wouldn’t be the government itself, but a third party organization. When the program was introduced in 2011, banks, technology companies or cellphone service providers were suggested for the role, so theoretically Google or Verizon could have access to a comprehensive profile of who you are that’s shared with every site you visit, as mandated by the government.

Post-NSA revelations, we have a good sense for the dystopian Big Brother society the EFF is worried about. As the organization told the Times, at the least “we would need new privacy laws or regulations to prohibit identity verifiers from selling user data or sharing it with law enforcement officials without a warrant.”

First, we need to be clear that the NSA would use this to track users whether or not they can get the rubber stamp FISA court to approve.

We know that they will, because that is what they do.

Second, to paraphrase Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith, PhD, any technology that the government can create will be duplicated by criminals, or the Chinese, or the Russians, or the Koch brothers.

The depressing thing is that I don’t think that Republicans have enough outrage left after, Bengazi! Bengazi! Bengazi!, and the Democratic establishment won’t challenge the US state security apparatus, at east not while one of their own is running it.

I hope that this goes the way of the Clipper chip, but I would not bet on this.

Not Dredd Scott Bad, but Maybe Plessy v. Ferguson Bad

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In a 5-4 vote the Supreme Court just ratified sectarian prayer at government meetings:

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that legislative bodies such as city councils can begin their meetings with prayer, even if it plainly favors a specific religion.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Christian prayers said before meetings of an Upstate New York town council did not violate the constitutional prohibition against government establishment of religion; the justices cited history and tradition.

“Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this Nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond the authority of government,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court’s conservative majority.

The ruling reflected a Supreme Court that has become more lenient on how government may accommodate religion in civic life without crossing the line into an endorsement of a particular faith. All nine justices endorsed the concept of legislative prayer, with the four dissenters agreeing that the public forum “need not become a religion-free zone,” in the words of Justice Elena Kagan.

But there was sharp disagreement after that, and the majority ruling could encourage public bodies to give more leeway to religious expression in their ceremonial prayers and less deference to the objections of religious minorities.

The court’s five conservatives said legislative prayers need not be stripped of references to a specific religion — the prayers at issue often invoked Jesus Christ and the resurrection — and said those given the opportunity to pray before legislative meetings should be “unfettered” by what government officials find appropriate.

It is stupid, petty, small minded, and bigoted ruling.

I’m disappointed, but not particularly surprised.

I will say the fact that the bigotry-deaf Kennedy is now the “moderate vote” on the court.

The Definition of a Good Journalist………

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When I muse on the difference between a journalist and a stenographer, I can think of no better example than Jason Mojica’s paean to Mohammed Fahmy, Jailed Al Jazeera Journalist Is Actually Kind of a Dick:

This may surprise you, but Mohammed Fahmy, the imprisoned Al Jazeera English journalist who on Friday was awarded the World Press Freedom Award, is actually kind of a dick.

And I’m sure he feels the same way about me.

A couple of years before he and his colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed were arrested in Cairo and accused of running a terrorist cell from their rooms at the Marriott, I worked with Fahmy on a story I produced for VICE News. It was July 2011 and the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak earlier in the year hadn’t brought the sea change that Egyptians were hoping for. Protesters were expected to return to Tahrir Square in what was being dubbed, “Egypt’s Second Revolution.” The very short version of this story is that we were having trouble getting all of the elements of the story we were after when we met Fahmy who offered his services as a fixer. Now, we already had a fixer in Cairo, but I was willing to try anything at that point, so I hired Fahmy for a day to see what he could do. He delivered, but he didn’t gel with me and my crew. At the end of a very long day of shooting, we were happy to part ways.

………

He ran the story, names and all, which pissed me off. We traded shitty BBMs [Blackberry Messenger] back and forth, and I came away thinking of him as a pushy, bull-headed bastard who cared more about getting a story out than for the people who that story was about.

In other words, a damn good journalist.

Journalists are people whose jobs it is to find out things that people don’t necessarily want them to find out. That often requires a type of aggression and self-righteous determination that rubs people the wrong way. And that’s one of the reasons we need to change the way we talk about press freedom.

While we like to lionize journalists as noble truth seekers serving the public good, for those on the other side of their aggressive reporting, they are a f%$#ing nightmare. So when journalists get detained, our knee-jerk moral indignation means f%$#-all to the people who see those journalists as a threat. Wagging our finger at them in the hope that they’ll suddenly come around to our way of thinking is naïve.

(%$# mine)

Reporters are supposed to be a pain in the ass.

When reporters become accepted members of polite society, they become eunuchs in the court of the Sultan.  (See Woodward, Robert)

They are supposed to be unsuited for polite society.

Chaos is Job Won!*

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What a surprise. After a decades long assault from the right wing, and an increasingly hostile judiciary, the bigots have managed to re-segregate our public schools:

For decades, federal desegregation orders were the potent tool that broke the back of Jim Crow education in the South, helping transform the region’s educational systems into the most integrated in the country.

 Federal judges, often facing down death threats and violence, blanketed Southern states with hundreds of court orders that set out specific plans and timetables to ensure the elimination of racial segregation. Federal agencies then aggressively used the authority of the courts to monitor hostile school systems, wielding the power of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to strip federal dollars from districts that refused to desegregate.

 The pace of the change wrought by the federal courts was breathtaking. In 1963, about 1 percent of black children in the South attended school with white children. By the early 1970s, the South had been remade — fully 90 percent of black children attended desegregated schools. Court orders proved most successful in the South, but were also used in an attempt to combat de facto segregation in schools across the country, from New York to Michigan to Arizona.

 Today, this once-powerful force is in considerable disarray.

 A ProPublica examination shows that officials in scores of school districts do not know the status of their desegregation orders, have never read them, or erroneously believe that orders have been ended. In many cases, orders have gone unmonitored, sometimes for decades, by the federal agencies charged with enforcing them.

 At the height of the country’s integration efforts, there were some 750 school districts across the country known to be under desegregation orders.

 Today, court orders remain active in more than 300 districts. In some cases, that’s because judges have determined that schools have not met their mandate to eliminate all vestiges of segregation.

 But some federal courts don’t even know how many desegregation orders still exist on their dockets. With increasing frequency, federal judges are releasing districts from court oversight even where segregation prevails, at times taking the lack of action in cases as evidence that the problems have been resolved.

 ………

 Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has sharply curtailed the power of parents to challenge racial inequities in schools. Districts not under court orders are largely prohibited from considering race to balance schools. And parents in these districts must show that school officials are intentionally discriminating when they make decisions that adversely affect black and Latino students.

 And so, as desegregation orders are ignored, forgotten or lifted, black parents are losing the ability to effectively challenge school inequality.

 Over the course of months, ProPublica has compiled the nation’s most comprehensive and accurate data on active desegregation orders. We used legal databases, academic studies and contacted more than 160 school districts across the country.

This is not an accident.

Between the Republican Party’s embrace of segregation for political success, and the Democratic Party’s cowardly unwillingness to enforce the law to placate people who will never for then, we are back to separate and unequal.

*H/T Trit on the Stellar Parthenon BBS for that quote.

Welcome to the 3rd World America.

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The rate of maternal deaths in the United States has neary doubled since 1990:

Maternal deaths related to childbirth in the United States are nearly at the highest rate in a quarter century, and a woman giving birth in America is now more likely to die than a woman giving birth in China, according to a new study.

The United States is one of just eight countries to see a rise in maternal mortality over the past decade, said researchers for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in a study published in The Lancet, a weekly medical journal. The others are Afghanistan, Greece, and several countries in Africa and Central America.

The researchers estimated that 18.5 mothers died for every 100,000 births in the U.S. in 2013, a total of almost 800 deaths. That is more than double the maternal mortality rate in Saudi Arabia and Canada, and more than triple the rate in the United Kingdom.

The study was the latest to underscore a steep rise in pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. since at least 1987, when the mortality rate was 7.2 per 100,000 births. The U.S. experienced a sharp spike in 2009 that the Centers for Disease Control attributed to the H1N1 influenza pandemic. The rate has dipped slightly since then, said Nicholas Kassebaum, the lead physician in the University of Washington study, but it remains stubbornly high.

The increase is in stark contrast to most other countries that have had notable decreases, including many in east Asia and Latin America, the report said. The United States now ranks 60 for maternal deaths on a list of 180 countries, down markedly from its rank of 22 in 1990. China, by contrast, is up to number 57.

The reasons for the rise in the maternal deaths in the U.S. are not entirely clear, but several factors seem to be in play.

The article to go on about diabetes, obesity, etc., but makes not a single mention of the rise in equality and the increasing incidence of extreme poverty.

Note that this sort of decline in wellness and life expectancy for the population was presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We are in the process of destroying ourselves.