Category: Bureaucracy

Hackers: 1 — Maryland MTA:0

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People have been asking for the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) to make data available to allow accurate real-time actual schedules for some time, but MTA has said that it is too technically difficult and too expensive to make a mobile app, or to make the data available to 3rd parties.

It took a self described “civic hacker” less than a week to do this on their spare time:

Despite promises of transparency and efforts to create “open data” in the hopes of latching onto the “app economy”—words frequently used in government agency press releases—much of the data that would be of the greatest value to citizens often ends up out of reach. For example, if you want to plan a trip on public transportation in many cities (or even just find out when your bus will show up), you often have to turn to Google Maps or another transit-tracking application on your mobile device. In Baltimore, however, that data has been locked behind the firewalls of the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA).

 But now a civic hacker has made that data available to app developers by doing what the MTA claimed would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete—simply tapping into websites that the agency has already built. And the hacker did it without spending a dime of taxpayer money. The work took just a few man-days’ worth of spare time and a commercial app development team’s afternoon.

 ………
The reason the MTA gave for not doing a mobile app—or opening the data to third parties—was cost. “The data received from the bus [Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL)] system to operate My Tracker is not sent in a format that can be easily used to create an application—called General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). We know in many cases, the information needed to create an application is made public so private firms can attempt to develop an application at their own expense. However, it would cost approximately $600,000 more to be able to format the data from our 25-yr-old CAD/AVL system into GTFS for use by outside developers,” the MTA said.

However, within days of the MTA’s Web app going live, geo-data developer and open government data advocate Chris Whong had already done what the MTA refused to do. Whong took a look at the bus tracker Web app and found that its AJAX interface was polling the site every 10 seconds to get new location data. As it turns out, the app was retrieving JSON-formatted data from the MTA’s servers, encoded in a format called the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). The MTA had already published the GTFS metadata describing bus routes. Whong wrote in a blog post that it took a few hours of trial and error to confirm the data feed format, but in the end he and a small team of “civic hackers” were able to construct a framework that would allow applications to pull, for free, the very data the MTA said would cost $600,000 to publish. The team also produced a live tracking site on the Heroku application hosting platform to demonstrate the framework and then posted the whole thing on Github to allow others to use it.

And use it they did. The Montreal-based developer Transit App was one team that grabbed onto Whong’s project. “With Chris’ help, we were able to pull the real-time vehicle positions from the MTA system ourselves,” the Transit App team said in a blog post. “Using that data, we generated approximate bus arrival times with our in-house prediction engine. We then compared those predictions with the MTA’s tracker to verify our accuracy. And—with just an afternoon of work—Baltimore finally has the real-time tracking app it deserves. $600,000 under budget.”

My guess as to why the MTA thought that they needed more than ½ a million dollars to do what took one guy a few days is tied in with that whole “Reinventing Government” thing that Clinton started in the 1990s.

Basically, it involved taking a lot of core competencies in government agencies, and outsourcing them to private contractors.

The MTA probably does not possess the internal knowledge base to understand just how trivial doing this was.

I Made a Jive Ass Newbie Mistake on “Ball-Gate”

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Last week, I looked at deflate-gate (the Patriots ball inflation “scandal”), and ran some numbers.

I used °F, and figured that if the balls were filled up to 12.7 psi at 70°F, and they cooled to 20°F, you would get a pressure drop of 1.38°F.

Boyle’s law is PV=nRT, where P=pressure, V=Volume, n=the amount of the gas in moles, R=the ideal gas constant, at T=temperature.

Since in the football, volume, amount of gas, and the ideal gas constant remains the same, so we can reduce this to:

P1/T1=P2/T2

Then we can solve for P2: P2=(P1/T1)T2

So, the math looks good, where is the “Jive Ass Newbie Mistake?

Because the pressure in the football isn’t 12.5 psi it’s 27.2 (12.5+14.7) psi.

Boyle’s law is based on absolute pressure, not gauge pressure. Gauge pressure is the difference between the absolute pressure of what you are measuring and the atmospheric pressure.

I am a complete tool for screwing this up.

It turns out that using absolute pressure, a 31 degree ball will be 2.076 psi under-inflated.

So, “Ball-Gate” is largely just an effort by Roger Goodell to make people forget that he is an incompetent and corrupt liar.  (Ray Rice and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, two name just 2)

Full disclosure: My wife is a Patriots fan, though I’m not.

I’ll be watching the Superbowl for the ads.

(On edit)
There also might be water vapor in the air used to inflate the ball that would further exacerbate the pressure drop as it condenses.

(2nd edit)
I just realized that I had not posted this on my blog before, the screw up was on a comment I made on Facebook.

Still, I will apologize here.

Not Enough………

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The SEC has fined Standard & Poor’s ratings agency and banned them from rating mortgage backed (MBS) securities for a year:

Financial companies are still paying the price for the crisis of 2009, as Standard & Poor’s showed when it agreed on Wednesday to pay the US government and two states more than $77m to settle charges that it inflated its ratings of mortgage-backed securities.

In its first enforcement action against a major rating agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused S&P of fraudulent misconduct, saying the company loosened standards on its ratings to drum up business in recent years.

The agreement requires S&P to pay more than $58m to the SEC, $12m to New York and $7m to Massachusetts.

As part of its agreement with the SEC, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, a division of McGraw Hill Financial, will take a “timeout” from rating certain types of mortgage-backed securities for a year.

“These settlements involve findings of intentional fraud in 2011 and 2012, well after the financial crisis,” said Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC’s enforcement division, on a call with reporters. “The financial crisis may be behind us, but these cases are an important reminder that the race-to-the-bottom behavior exists even though the financial crisis has ended.”

S&P said in a statement that it did not admit or deny any of the charges.

It’s likely the first in a line of settlements between S&P and government agencies. In 2013, the Justice Department and attorneys general from other states filed civil lawsuits against the company for misrepresenting risks in the years leading up to the financial crisis.

“This is the first time a major credit rating agency has been subject to a timeout,” Ceresney said. “It’s unprecedented.”

It is only unprecedented because the Obama administration has been so deferential to the banksters.

It’s chump change for them, and they are a (relatively) small player in the MBS ratings game, so they will be crying to the bank.

What should have happened is a criminal indictment, which would have been immediately followed by an Arthur Andersen style implosion.

That would make the banksters sit up and notice.

Rahm Emanuel Takes Chicago Corruption to a New Level

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I’m not particularly surprised.

You see hizzoner Rahm Emanuel is declaring that the Chicago pension funds are not a part of city government so that he can ignore pay to play rules:

On its face, Chicago’s municipal pension system is an integral part of the Chicago city government. The system is included in the city’s budget, it is directly funded by the city, and its various boards of trustees include city officials and mayoral appointees. Yet, when it comes to enforcing the city’s anti-corruption laws in advance of the Chicago’s closely watched 2015 municipal election, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is suddenly arguing that the pension funds are not part of the city government at all.

The counterintuitive declaration came last month from the mayor-appointed ethics commission, responding to Chicago aldermen’s request for an investigation of campaign contributions to Emanuel from the financial industry. The request followed disclosures that executives at firms managing Chicago pension money have made more than $600,000 worth of donations to Emanuel. The contributions flowed to the mayor despite a city ordinance — and an executive order by Emanuel himself — restricting mayoral campaign contributions from city contractors.

Brushing off the lawmakers’ complaint about Emanuel’s donations from the financial industry, the mayor’s ethics commission issued a nonbinding legal opinion arguing that Chicago’s pension systems are “not agencies or departments of the city, and thus firms that contract with them are not doing or seeking to do business with the city.” The commission’s interpretation means financial firms’ business with Chicago pension funds should be considered exempt from city ethics laws.

Seriously?

You can take pay to play campaign donations for the pension fund because it isn’t really goverment?

This is pretty damn corrupt.

Technically, the SEC could rule on this:

With the mayor attempting to exempt the pension system from the city’s ethics rules, [Alderman Scott] Waguespack says the lawmakers are counting on the federal government to enforce a 2011 Securities and Exchange Commission rule aiming to restrict contributions to public officials from executives at financial firms that manage public pension money. To that end, Waguespack and two other lawmakers have filed a formal complaint with the SEC, which responded with a letter saying the agency will review their complaint “in connection with our statutory and regulatory responsibilities.”

Yeah, like that is going to happen.

Emanuel is a FOB (Friend of Barack), so nothing is going to happen to him, at least until after 2016.

First Woman Appointed Halakhic Decisor in Israel

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About bloody time.

Dr. Jennie Rosenfeld has been appointed the chief religious authority West Bank settlement of Efrat:

The moderate West Bank settlement of Efrat has appointed a woman to serve as a religious leader, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Efrat’s Chief Rabbi Shlomo Riskin appointed Dr. Jennie Rosenfeld to the position, which includes the responsibility to answer questions on halakha (Jewish law).

Rosenfeld is a student in the Susi Bradfield Women’s Institute of Halakhic Leadership (WIHL ), which is part of Midreshet Lindenbaum, a liberal Modern Orthodox women’s seminary. The five-year program ordains women, allowing them to issue halakhic rulings and give spiritual advice. The ordination is similar to what Orthodox rabbis have, but the graduates are not called rabbi.

Rosenfeld’s appointment is the first time a woman has been appointed to an official position of Orthodox communal leadership in Israel, Rabbi Shmuel Klitsner, director of the WIHL, told the Post.

Even so, Efrat’s state religious council, which would normally pay the salary of a community’s religious leader, is not paying Rosenfeld. Instead, Riskin is paying her salary privately through charitable donations.

So, she’s not getting paid by the community.

Well, it’s a start.

(On Edit)

My preferred status would be that there is no government funding of religion, but I am very American that way.

What the F%$#ing F%$#?

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Police Detained, and Child Protective Services opened an investigation on the family, because the parents allowed their children to walk home from the park:

It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, they say authorities viewed much differently.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv say they are being investigated for neglect for the Dec. 20 trek — in a case they say reflects a clash of ideas about how safe the world is and whether parents are free to make their own choices about raising their children.

“We wouldn’t have let them do it if we didn’t think they were ready for it,” Danielle said.

………

On Dec. 20, Alexander agreed to let the children, Rafi and Dvora, walk from Woodside Park to their home, a mile south, in an area the family says the children know well.

The children made it about halfway.

Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them.

………

The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services, he said, which showed up a couple of hours after the police left.

Mary Anderson, a spokeswoman for CPS, said she could not comment on cases but that neglect investigations typically focus on questions of whether there has been a failure to provide proper care and supervision.

In such investigations, she said, CPS may look for guidance to a state law about leaving children unattended, which says children younger than 8 must be left with a reliable person who is at least 13 years old. The law covers dwellings, enclosures and vehicles.

This is nuts.

Notwithstanding the , “It bleeds, it leads,” standards of local news coverage, children have literally never been safer from stranger abduction, and crime rates are at a decades long low, but the ginned up child abduction mythology of the early 1980s keeps the general public, as well as law enforcement and the social services bureaucracy, in a state of acute paranoia.

I Don’t Expect Major Changes in Doctrine Under Pope Francis

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It’s clear, however, that, in addition to making changes in tone, he is making very serious efforts to reform the Vatican as an institution.

Case in point, Ex-Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski has been arrested by Papal authorities on pedophilia charges:

The Vatican on Tuesday arrested a former archbishop accused of paying for sex with children while he was a papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic, the first-ever arrest inside the city state on charges of paedophilia. Jozef Wesolowski, a Pole who was defrocked by a Vatican tribunal in June, has been placed under house arrest awaiting a criminal trial, the Vatican said in a statement.

The 66-year-old Wesolowski is the most prominent church figure to be arrested since Paolo Gabriele, a former papal butler convicted in 2012 of stealing and leaking private papers of former Pope Benedict XVI. Unlike Gabriele, Wesolowski has not been detained in the Vatican prison, a couple of rooms attached to a courthouse, but was granted house arrest in a Vatican apartment for medical reasons.

Wesolowski was recalled to Rome by the Vatican last year when he was still a diplomat in Santo Domingo and relieved of his duties after Dominican media accused him of paedophilia.

He had been living freely in Rome, and victims of sexual abuse had called for his arrest, expressing concern he might flee. The former archbishop could face up to 12 years in jail in what will be the first trial for sexual abuse to be held inside the Vatican City.

Cleaning out corruption at the Vatican is a Herculean task (see Stables, Augean), but this is a good start.

Merry Christmas from the NSA

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You know how people drop bad news on Friday evenings in Government?

Well, the NSA just dropped some sh%$ so heavy that they waited until Christmas Eve:

The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients.

While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,” is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.

The reports, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, offer few revelations, but contain accounts of internal behavior embarrassing to the agency. In one instance an NSA employee “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting”, a practice which previous reports have indicated was common enough to warrant the name “LOVEINT”.

Many of the reports appear to deal with instances of human error rather than malicious misuse of agency resources. Nonetheless, many of these errors are potentially serious, including entries suggesting that unminimized U.S. telephone numbers were mistakenly disseminated to unauthorized parties and that military personnel were given unauthorized access to raw traffic databases collected under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act.

Yeah, and the people who did this are still on the job:

For the most part, the reports don’t appear to contain anything especially new, but I was struck by this particular violation:

………The OIG’s Office of Investigation initiated an investigation of an allegation than an NSA analyst had conducted an unauthorized intelligence activity. In an interview conducted by the NSA/CSS Office of Security and Counterintelligence, the analyst reported that, during the past two or three years, she had searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting….Although the investigation is ongoing, the analyst has been advised to cease her activities.

If the NSA gave even half a f%$# about this sort of abuse, this analyst would be fired, and her security clearance would be pulled.

Instead, she was “advised to cease her activities.”

This is why super-secret organizations need real independent oversight, because their first priority is preserving their own prerogatives, using whatever means necessary.

Full report here. (PDF)

Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, the Torture Loving, Incompetent, and Always Wrong Poster Child for CIA Lack of Accountability and Misuse of Secrecy

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She appears to be the Forrest Gump of CIA.

She refused to share data with the FBI about the 911 hijackers, she was instrumental in setting up the torture progam and lobbied for its excesses, and she lied repeatedly to Congress:

A top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA was a key architect of the agency’s defense of its detention and “enhanced interrogation” program for suspected terrorists, developing oft-repeated talking points that misrepresented and overstated its effectiveness, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report released last week.

The report singles out the female expert as a key apologist for the program, stating that she repeatedly told her superiors and others — including members of Congress — that the “torture” was working and producing useful intelligence, when it was not. She wrote the “template on which future justifications for the CIA program and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were based,” it said.

The expert also participated in “enhanced interrogations” of self-professed 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.

The expert is no stranger to controversy. She was criticized after 9/11 terrorist attacks for countenancing a subordinate’s refusal to share the names of two of the hijackers with the FBI prior to the terror attacks.

But instead of being sanctioned, she was promoted.

The expert was not identified by name in the unclassified 528-page summary of the report, but U.S. officials who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity confirmed that her name was redacted at least three dozen times in an effort to avoid publicly identifying her. In fact, much of the four-month battle between Senate Democrats and the CIA about redactions centered on protecting the identity of the woman, an analyst and later “deputy chief” of the unit devoted to catching or killing Osama bin Laden, according to U.S. officials familiar with the negotiations.

NBC News is withholding her name at the request of the CIA, which cited a climate of fear and retaliation in the wake of the release of the committee’s report in asking that her anonymity be protected.

Yeah, well, her identity is already a matter of public record, so f%$# that last bit:

NBC News yesterday called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” and in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’” Yet in both articles she was anonymous.

The person described by both NBC and The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted — even by some within the agency.

The Intercept is naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee). Moreover, Bikowsky has already been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts.

The executive summary of the torture report released by the Senate last week provides abundant documentation that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately misled Congress about multiple aspects of its interrogation program. Yesterday, NBC News reported that one senior CIA officer in particular was responsible for many of those false claims, describing her as “a top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA.”

It turns out that it’s not just people like Glenn Greenwald who condemn her, so do a number of her colleagues at the CIA

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.

Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”

(emphasis mine)

She also has a f%$#ing wiki page, which makes her about as out as Valerie Plame.

Or as John Cook notes, “It should come as no surprise that a secret organization with no accountability promotes incompetents—but the CIA is actively encouraging the careers of the most aggressively error-prone employees it has.”

Note that she also authorized the kidnapping and torture of an innocent man, and tortured the completely bogus story about Al Qaeda cells involving black Muslims in Montana.  (No, this is not The Onion, she actually tortured this fairy tale out of KSM, and believed it).

Excessive secrecy and lack of accountability within our state security apparatus is a threat to our security.

More of This

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At a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, the senior Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts cut Mel Watt, the Chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a well deserved new asshole:

What started as a dry, lame-duck session hearing on the Federal Housing Finance Agency in the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday, got heated when U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., went guns blazing after the FHFA director.

Warren, an outspoken progressive and a likely candidate for the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination, went on the attack during FHFA Director Melvin Watt’s first hearing before the committee, saying that he’s never done anything to help homeowners who are underwater and facing foreclosure.

The hearing started benignly enough, with Watt’s prepared remarks delivered in a measured tone. That soon ended, when Warren took the mic.

Warren is known for aggressively grilling witnesses, but this was an unusual case of a “blue on blue” attack, as Watt is a former congressional Democrat and Obama appointee, and considered a strong advocate for affordable housing and homeowner assistance.

It does not matter what Watt was.

If you are working on housing in the Obama administration, your role is to coddle the criminals working for Wall Street at the expense of the ordinary American citizen, even if it costs the taxpayer money:

Five million families lost their homes during the financial crisis and millions more are still struggling,” Warren said, prefacing her questions to Watt. “According to the latest data from CoreLogic…another 5.3 million homeowners remain underwater on their homes. And people are continuing to lose their homes every day in foreclosure.

“We talk a little bit about the law here, now one of your duties under the law. One of your duties is to conserve the assets of Fannie and Freddie, but another duty given equal importance by Congress … is to implement a plan that seeks to maximize assistance for homeowners and take advantage of available programs to minimize foreclosures,” Warren said.

She went on to recite that Congress explicitly included reduction of loan principal as an option for the FHFA to use.

“Principal reduction is often a win-win that both helps Fannie and Freddie and helps a family,” she said.

She cited a 2013 Congressional Budget Office study found that even a modest principal reduction plan for Fannie and Freddie mortgages could help 1.2 million underwater homeowners, prevent 43,000 defaults and save Fannie and Freddie about $2.8 billion.

………

Watt appeared a little shaken by the line of attack.

“It’s probably an overstatement to say it’s not been a priority,” Watt stammered. “It’s just a very difficult issue. The reason it is difficult is because we are looking for exactly what you said – a win-win situation. We have to do this in a way that is responsible, otherwise we just reduce principal for everybody across the board…is not what anybody I think is advocating for, so then we have to decide what is a responsible way to do that—”

Warren cut him off.

“Chairman Watt, you have had a year to do that, you have known for five years before that what the problem was, we have two studies coming out showing that Fannie and Freddie could make money by doing this,” she said. “In the meantime you have done the reps and warranties, the buyback policy, private mortgage insurance rules, a whole list of tough technical things, and I applaud you for doing that, but people have lost their homes in the last year and every day that you delay more families lose their homes. There are 5.4 million families out there underwater so I want to know when are you going to have an answer on this?”

See my earlier comment about Obama’s priorities.

For all the flak that I have thrown at exiting Attorney General Eric “Place” Holder, the buck stops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the reason that nothing has been done to fix the cesspools of corruption is because Barack Obama does not want the swamps drained.

This is Kind of a Big Deal

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The National Institute of Mental Health has withdrawn its support for the DSM-5, the 5th edition Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the massive update of the American Psychological Association’s encyclopedic, and controversial, diagnostic manual:

Just two weeks before DSM-5 is due to appear, the National Institute of Mental Health, the world’s largest funding agency for research into mental health, has indicated that it is withdrawing support for the manual.

In a humiliating blow to the American Psychiatric Association, Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the NIMH, made clear the agency would no longer fund research projects that rely exclusively on DSM criteria. Henceforth, the NIMH, which had thrown its weight and funding behind earlier editions of the manual, would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” “The weakness” of the manual, he explained in a sharply worded statement, “is its lack of validity.” “Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.”

That consensus is now clearly missing. Whether it ever really existed remains in doubt. As one consultant for DSM-III conceded to the New Yorker magazine about the amount of horsetrading that drove that supposedly “evidenced-based” edition from 1980: “There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge—scattered, inconsistent, ambiguous.”

According to Insel, too much of that problem remains. As he cautioned of a manual whose precision and reliability has been overstated for decades, “While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each.” And not even a particularly good dictionary, apparently. Of the decision to steer research in mental health away from the manual and its parameters, Insel states: “Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”

I’m wondering how much of this is a generational thing.

The people who have been in charge of the DSM since at least the late 1970s are all roughly of the same age, being in their 40s back then, and being in their ate 1970s now, and as such, advances in genetics, neurochemistry, and imaging allow for a far more quantitative approach to the discipline.

Way to Go, Francis

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Pope Francis has demoted right wing Cardinal Raymond Burke yet again:

In a move that reflects the loosening posture of the Vatican on major social issues, conservative U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke was removed by Pope Francis from yet another top post.

Burke, who has long been vocal about denying communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion, was dismissed as head of the Holy See’s highest court and given the post of Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a largely ceremonial job overseeing charity to seniors.

At 66, Burke is considered young by church hierarchy standards. The dismissal is a set-back to his Vatican career as well as a clear message from Pope Francis to those not hewing to his progressive view of the Catholic Church.

The move was expected by Vatican-watchers given that Burke, the former archbishop of St. Louis, had openly criticized Francis’ less doctrinaire approach to the faith. Last year, Francis had removed Burke from the Congregation for Bishops, a group tasked with the appointment of new bishops worldwide.

In addition that Burke was playing partisan politics in the United States, which created a long term risk for what is arguably the richest community in Catholicism, Burke was also ignoring the basic structure of the Church.

I may not know the finer points of canon law, and quite honestly I have no desire to, being a Jew, but I do the middle ages on weekends as a hobby, and so I do have a decent understanding of a feudal system of government.

Basically, a Bishop is like a Count, a Cardinal is more like a Duke (Technically called. “Princes of the Church”), and the Pope is the Monarch in charge.

The important bit about this is that Bishops and Cardinals are in fealty to the Pope, and calling out the guy in charge in public is frowned upon in such a system.

Raymond Burke should consider himself lucky.

A few hundred years ago, (or in any case, certainly before the Magna Carta was signed) if a Count or a Duke acted this way, it would keep the headsman gainfully employed.

This is Not The Onion

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The head of Naval intelligence has unable to do his job because his clearance has been suspended:

The head of naval intelligence has not been able to view classified information for an entire year.

 Vice Adm. Ted Branch, the director of naval intelligence, had his security clearance suspended in November 2013 after being investigated for possible misconduct. In the year since, no charges have been filed and there is no sense of when they might be, leaving the Navy in an untenable situation.

 If classified information is being discussed at a meeting, the director of naval intelligence has to leave the room.

 If Branch drops by a subordinate’s office, the space must be sanitized of any secrets before he enters.

 Branch can’t attend morning intelligence briefs, or sit with the other services’ intel chiefs when they meet with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, said a naval intelligence source, who spoke on background because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

 This festering situation has sown resentment among some in naval intelligence, who feel they don’t have the pull in national security circles that comes with having a three-star at the table. Meanwhile, the Navy brass is hamstrung — with no idea when or if Branch will be charged or cleared.

Yes, the biggest concern is that they don’t have a 3-star to engage in dick swinging at the annual Intelligence Community Sock Hop.

You have a f%$#ing 3-Star who has had his security clearance pulled because concerns about his possibly being bribed with Lion King tickets: (seriously, not joking here)

Branch’s clearance was suspended along with that of a deputy, Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, the director of intelligence operations, for possible connections to Glenn Defense Marine Asia — the husbanding firm at the center of one of the Navy’s biggest bribery scandals in decades. Their clearances were pulled while the Justice Department investigated their connections to GDMA and its larger than life CEO, Leonard Glenn Francis, who is accused of bribing Navy officers to steer ships to ports where he allegedly overcharged the Navy in exchange for junkets, prostitutes, even “Lion King” tickets.

Why the f%$# is this guy still in charge there?

He clearly cannot do his f%$#ing Job, so either Naval Intelligence isn’t functioning, or it is completely redundant.

It appears that the Admiral’s 3-star status is linked to his current assignment, and he would revert to a 2-star and I guess that the General Officer coffee klatch is working full time here.

That’s Mighty White of Them………

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A top National Security Agency official will no longer be moonlighting part-time with a private consulting firm run by former NSA chief Keith Alexander. The end of that arrangement comes days after the NSA said this particular work situation was “under internal review” due to potential conflicts of interest.

The private company at issue— IronNet Cybersecurity—was founded by Alexander, who ran the spy agency from August 2005 until March 2014. IronNet Cybersecurity offers protection services to banks for up to $1 million per month. Patrick Dowd, the NSA’s current chief technology officer, had been working with Alexander’s private venture for up to 20 hours per week.

20 hours a week?  For the chief f%$#ing technology officer for the f%$#ing National f%$#ing Security Agency?

Tell me that this isn’t about using his connections to benefit his new firm.

And then there is the fact that while still heading the NSA, Keith Alexander, the NSA white washed his wide ranging, and highly suspicious tech investments:

New financial disclosure documents released this month by the National Security Agency (NSA) show that Keith Alexander, who served as its director from August 2005 until March 2014, had thousands of dollars of investments during his tenure in a handful of technology firms.

Each year disclosed has a checked box next to this statement: “Reported financial interests or affiliations are unrelated to assigned or prospective duties, and no conflicts appear to exist.”

Alexander repeatedly made the public case that the American public is at “greater risk” from a terrorist attack in the wake of the Snowden disclosures. Statements such as those could have a positive impact on the companies he was invested in, which could have eventually helped his personal bottom line.

The NSA did not immediately respond to Ars’ requests for further comment.

The documents were obtained and published Friday by Vice News as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request and subsequent lawsuit against the NSA brought by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold.

BTW, here is the money quote from the Vice article:

That said, Alexander’s interest in surveillance was not limited to his tenure as NSA director. He also invested in firms that are on the cutting edge of surveillance technology.

For example, Alexander invested as much as $15,000 in: Pericom Semiconductor, a company that has designed technology for the closed-circuit television and video surveillance markets; RF Micro Devices designs, which manufactures high-performance radio frequency technology that is also used for surveillance; and as much as $50,000 in Synchronoss Technologies, a cloud storage firm that provides a cloud platform to mobile phone carriers (the NSA has been accused of hacking into cloud storage providers).

Like I said, mighty white of the NSA to give the good General a pass on all of this.

And did I forget to mention this last bit? Since leaving the NSA earlier this year, Alexander has filed at least 9 patents on computer security, that is a something north of 1 patent a month, and the NSA has dutifully signed off of their being unrelated to his work at the NSA:

In an interview Monday with former National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander, Foreign Policy‘s Shane Harris learned that Alexander plans to file “at least” nine patent applications—“and possibly more”—pertaining to technology for detecting network intruders.

Alexander left his government post in early 2014 and went on to co-found a private company, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., with unnamed business partners. Alexander said that these business partners helped him create the “unique” method for detecting hackers that he plans to patent. Of course, Alexander himself had unparalleled access to classified security operations from 2005, when he took charge of the NSA, to 2014, when he retired.

Since starting IronNet, Alexander has been peddling his consulting services to major corporations, especially those in the financial industry, and has quoted fees of up to $1 million per month. That astronomical number drew at least one federal representative to suggest that Alexander might be disclosing or misusing classified information.

Presumably, Alexander’s expensive consulting will include access to IronNet’s future patented technology, which will cover “a system to detect so-called advanced persistent threats, or hackers who clandestinely burrow into a computer network in order to steal secrets or damage the network itself,” Foreign Policy reported. Alexander specified to the magazine that IronNet’s technology is unique because it uses “behavioral models” to anticipate a hacker’s next moves.

You know, if I didn’t know better, I would swear that this whole dysfunctional security-industrial complex thing would sound like an awful like like our dysfunctional military-industrial complex, where increasingly large sums of money seem to result in nothing more than massive remuneration for retired generals.

Police Achieve Success by Looking at Failures

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In this case, it happened in Richmond, California, where the police department has reduced policed involved shootings in what is one of the more violent cities in the Bay Area:

……….
A spate of high-profile police shootings nationwide, most notably the killing of a black teen in Ferguson, Missouri, has stoked intense scrutiny of deadly force by officers and driven a series of demonstrations across the nation and the Bay Area. But in Richmond, historically one of the most violent cities in the Bay Area, the Police Department has averaged fewer than one officer-involved shooting per year since 2008, and no one has been killed by a cop since 2007.

That track record stands in sharp contrast to many other law enforcement agencies in the region, according to a review of data compiled from individual departments.

Many observers and police officials attribute Richmond’s relatively low rate of deadly force to reforms initiated under Chief Chris Magnus, who took over a troubled department in this city of 106,000 in 2006. Magnus implemented a variety of programs to reduce the use of lethal force, including special training courses, improved staffing deployments to crisis situations, thorough reviews of all uses of force and equipping officers with nonlethal weapons such as Tasers and pepper spray.

………

More important than luck, said law enforcement expert Tom Nolan, is the culture within a department. If a chief has sent a clear message that instances of deadly force will be scrutinized, you can expect more officers to think twice before firing a weapon, or employ less-lethal means when apprehending a suspect, he said.

“The chief is key in setting policy and tone,” said Nolan, who worked for 27 years as a cop in Boston and now directs graduate programs in criminology at Merrimack College in Massachusetts. “If they haven’t had an officer-involved shooting that’s resulted in death in a city like that, it’s commendable.”

Here is the important bit:

Magnus has done something in Richmond that he believes is not done enough in other departments: He’s been willing to second-guess the deadly force used by other cops.

“We use a case study approach to different incidents that happen in different places. When there is a questionable use-of-force incident somewhere else, we study it and have a lot of dialogue,” Magnus said. “It’s a model that is used in a range of other professions, but in some police circles, it’s seen as judging in hindsight and frowned on. In my mind, that attitude is counterproductive.”

The culture of police tends to mitigate against their examining their own failures.

Instead they circle the wagons, and protect their own, which produces an environment where dysfunction is nurtured, rather than corrected.

H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

OK, the EU and ECB are in the Banksters” Pockets

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I’ve always wondered why, when Irish banks failed at the beginning of the financial crisis, Ireland decided to make the bond holders whole.

I figured that it was some sort of delusion about being “business friendly.”

Basically, Ireland’s economic strategy at the time was to be an amazingly accommodating 3rd world nation that through an accident of history had access to the European financial system, and that they could not thing beyond this.

I was wrong. The Irish government was blackmailed into accepting a bailout deal that got bond holders 100¢ on the dollar:

Senior European and European Central Bank (ECB) officials agreed to threaten Ireland with national bankruptcy if the government made any attempt to burn bondholders, the Sunday Independent can reveal.

 The threat was made at a high-level teleconference meeting, details of which have been revealed for the first time by the Central Bank governor, Dr Patrick Honohan.

 Mr Honohan, who famously told the nation Ireland would be entering the Troika bailout programme live on radio as government ministers were publicly denying it, also revealed he was kept out of loop about the meeting.

 In a new book about the late Brian Lenihan, Mr Honohan said he only found out about the meeting after the Troika delivered the ultimatum to Mr Lenihan on November 26, 2010.

 “The Troika staff told Brian in categorical terms that burning the bondholders would mean no programme and, accordingly, could not be countenanced,” Dr Honohan writes. “For whatever reason, they waited until after this showdown to inform me of this decision, which had apparently been taken at a very high-level teleconference to which no Irish representative was invited.”

I think that it is time for the Irish to push back on this, and declare that the debts from their bailout to be odious debt, and repudiate it:

In international law, odious debt, also known as illegitimate debt, is a legal theory that holds that the national debt incurred by a regime for purposes that do not serve the best interests of the nation, should not be enforceable. Such debts are, thus, considered by this doctrine to be personal debts of the regime that incurred them and not debts of the state. In some respects, the concept is analogous to the invalidity of contracts signed under coercion.

The Irish government had an obligation to make the depositors whole, up to whatever limit their bank insurance is set, but the bond holders are covered by no such obligation.

When a bank goes under, its bond holders are not supposed to be at the front of the line.

The EU & IMF extorted a bailout to the commercial and investment banks that were born by the Irish citizenry.

This should be repudiated.

Someone in the Bowels of Bureaucracy has a Sick Sense of Humor

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The new headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security used to be an insane asylum:

Washington D.C. is often used as a backdrop for tales of idiosyncratic power (Veep, House of Cards, Homeland, 24, Newsroom, The West Wing, just to name a few) and why not? The architecture’s symbolism and ideology can be matched only by the cynicism and suspicion these structures inspire. So therefore it seems somehow fitting that DC’s next major addition, the Headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will be perched on a hilltop just across the Anacostia River, physically and gesturally overseeing all before it.

 Yet beyond maintaining constant visuals on the terrain, this headquarters represents a change in the city’s views on temporality, functionality and even irony. Because this is a space with a past, one it both embraces and fears.

 The Ghost Across the River
In 2007, the announcement came that a long abandoned former mental institution was to be renovated in order to create a headquarters for the DHS (the agency which oversees immigration, customs, border control and the secret service, along with several other federal functions). Aside from sounding like the plot to a bad action/horror movie, the site was a bit of an odd-duck: an enormous campus, fifteen minutes drive from the White House and full of old buildings barely anyone had ever heard of. For its own part, St. Elizabeths Hospital was founded in the 1850s as “The Government Hospital for the Insane”, hosting generations of doctors, nurses and patients. Some of which having been infamously linked to the powerful of DC, including: Ezra Pound, brought there on charges of treason in 1945; John Hinckley Jr., for shooting President Reagan in bizarre attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster in 1981; Richard Lawrence, who attempted to shoot President Andrew Jackson in 1835, failed, and was then beaten mercilessly by the President himself and Charles Guiteau, after killing President Garfield in 1881.

I am amused, but not particularly surprised.

Republicans Aren’t Even Trying to Appear Non Corrupt Anymore

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Last night, Democratic Senate Candidate Chad Taylor withdrew from the race for US Senate:

Kansas voters have lost a chance to vote for a Democratic senator this fall — and Republicans could pay the price.

 Chad Taylor’s stunning decision Wednesday to withdraw from the U.S. Senate race forced partisans and analysts to recalculate the potential outcome of the Kansas contest.

 The consensus: Longtime incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts is in serious trouble, and the GOP’s chances of controlling the Senate could suffer as a result.

 “It’s extraordinary. It’s stunning. It’s shocking,” said Stu Rothenberg, a nationally known political analyst. Roberts “is still going to be the favorite, but the fact that those of us in Washington who look at races actually have Kansas on our radar is a significant development.”

 After surviving a brutal GOP primary in August, Roberts — and other Republicans — were counting on a four-way election to split his opposition, giving the veteran a chance to win in November with less than a majority of votes.

 The likelihood of that outcome tumbled dramatically Wednesday when Taylor quit.

 A recent poll found remaining independent candidate Greg Orman leading Roberts by 10 points in a one-on-one matchup. The Olathe businessman enjoyed the same margin in a different mid-August poll.

Chad Taylor was in 3rd place, and Dems in Kansas are focused on the governor’s race, so it makes sense to do this.

Senator Roberts nearly lost the primary to a doctor whose hobby was posting gunshot victims’ X-Rays on Facebook, and so his going from 2 opponents to one is a very big deal, as the poll numbers show.

In going from a 3 person to a 2 person race, Pat Roberts gains just 1% against Greg Orman, while he picked up 10% and Taylor was still behind in the polling, so from a tactical perspective (Orman would likely caucus with the Dems) it makes sense for everyone involved.

Of course, this story is not complete.  After contacting the Secretary of State’s office, and getting explicit instruction on withdrawing from the race, but Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach is trying to invoke the heretofore not used in a Senate race no backsie rule:

Chad Taylor doesn’t want to be in the race for U.S. Senate, but he’s going to remain on the ballot at least for now.

 Taylor, the Democratic nominee for Senate and district attorney of Shawnee County, submitted a formal letter to the Secretary of State’s Office to withdraw his candidacy on Wednesday, the deadline to drop out of the race.

 Political analysts said his withdrawal would give a boost to independent candidate Greg Orman against U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts in November. But Secretary of State Kris Kobach announced Thursday afternoon that Taylor must remain on the ballot.

 A few hours later, Taylor announced plans to challenge that decision, saying that Assistant Secretary of State Brad Bryant had assured him he met all the requirements to withdraw.

 “I specifically asked Mr. Bryant if the letter contained all the information necessary to remove my name from the ballot. Mr. Bryant said, ‘Yes,’ affirming to me, and my campaign manager, that the letter was sufficient to withdraw my name from the ballot,” Taylor said in a statement

Kris Kobach has been at the forefront of the Republican efforts to keep Blacks and Hispanics to vote, and he’s on Senator Roberts’ steering committee, but it appears that the words “ethics” and “recusal” are not in his vocabulary.

This ratf%$# makes Katherine Harris look like a responsible public servant.

But having a completely corrupt partisan in charge of the election is not enough for the national Republican party, so they have brought in national political operatives to run the Roberts campaign:

National Republicans on Thursday moved to take control of the campaign of Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas by sending a longtime party strategist to the state to advise him, a day after his hopes for re-election and those of his party for taking control of the Senate were threatened by the attempted withdrawal of the Democrat in the race.

………

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is sending Chris LaCivita, who has served as a political troubleshooter in past Republican campaigns, to counsel Mr. Roberts and help oversee his campaign. The committee will also seek to hire a local lawyer in any legal challenge against Mr. Taylor, who had tried to drop off the ballot on the last day candidates were allowed to do so.

Just when I think that Republican politics can’t get any more repulsive, they exceed my own low expectations.

How Barack Obama Made People Stop Believing in Government

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Do you remember the history HARP?

Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner, said that they had a program to help distressed homeowners, when it was actually a program that consistently screwed homeowners in order to “foam the runway” for the banksters by allowing them to puff up their balance sheets.

Well, people remember this, and now that Obama is (allegedly) trying to provide real aid to homeowners, they are finding that have no takers because the homeowners in question do not trust the government to help them any more:

We all remember the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. The moral of the story: Lie one too many times and nobody will believe you, even when you’re telling the truth. Now we have a case of The Government Who Cried Wolf, showing how the failure of the Obama administration’s foreclosure mitigation programs haunt them to this day.

 The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, wants to help around 676,000 homeowners it has identified as eligible for refinancing under the government’s Home Affordable Refinancing Program (HARP).

 ………

 But these remaining homeowners appear to have no interest in the program, and Watt explained why in Chicago. “We have written to them. We have called them, and they’re saying this is too good to be true,” he said.

 Why would homeowners exhibit so much skepticism in a government program that they feel inclined to turn down thousands of dollars in free money? You can track it back to all the promises made over the past five years to help homeowners, and the unfortunately sorry results.

 In 2009, when the foreclosure crisis was most acute, President Obama promised to save 4 million homes through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Today, only around 900,000 hold active permanent HAMP modifications, while millions of others either re-defaulted or were rejected by the program. Mortgage servicing companies, which had a greater financial incentive to foreclose over modifying home loans, quickly figured out how to game the system, using it to pile more bad debt on borrowers for their own reward.

The process devolved into a horror show for homeowners. Servicers prolonged trial modifications well past the three-month period set out in HAMP guidelines so that they could rack up late fees. They deliberately lost borrower’s income documents to extend the default period, even shredding documents and purging records to do so. They pursued foreclosure while negotiating the modification, against HAMP rules. They granted modifications that folded servicer fees into the principal of the loan, increasing the unpaid principal balance — and thus their profit — while pushing the borrower further underwater. And they trapped borrowers after denying modifications, demanding back payments, missed interest and late fees, with the threat of foreclosure as a hammer.

This sometimes forced borrowers into “private” modifications with the servicer, usually on worse terms than the status quo. Or it led to many of the 5.6 million foreclosures we’ve seen since the collapse of the housing bubble. One set of employees at Bank of America testified that they were given bonuses like Target gift cards for pushing homeowners into foreclosure.

 Subsequent government programs, like the “Hardest Hit Fund” directed at states with the most nagging foreclosure crises, similarly failed to deliver. The failure to restructure mortgages and avert foreclosures is seen as the biggest policy mistake of the Great Recession.

It’s easy to prove to people that government cannot work, you just have to do things like HAMP, and lie to people and design programs to fail when view through the lens of their professed goals.

On the far side, however, when you actually want to help people, they no longer trust you, forever and ever.

Note that Obama and His Evil Minions™ had a completely free hand in designing these programs, so they own the fallou, or as Atrios notes:

Plenty of things are genuinely beyond Obama’s control, but we have an example of something which was 100% in his control. And it was horrible.

I Think that the Worm is Turning on IP

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Ten years ago, 90% of the population did not know what a patent troll was, and now popular effort sinks the nomination of a patent troll supporter to run the USPTO:

The Obama Administration has changed its mind over a plan to name pharmaceutical executive Phil Johnson as head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, according to multiple sources. The reversal is a victory for the technology industry and other proponents of patent reform.

The plan to appoint Johnson surfaced in late June, and was met with outrage on social media, where critics claimed the choice reflected hypocrisy on the part of President Obama, who had called for fixes to the patent system in his January State of the Union address.

Johnson, a longtime attorney for Johnson & Johnson, was a controversial nominee in part because he helped lead opposition to a bipartisan bill, which died in May, that would have made it easier for companies to challenge bad patents and to seek legal fees from so-called “patent trolls.” He has also publicly scorned previous attempts to reform the patent system.

News of the White House’s decision to backtrack on the appointment came via a person close to the Administration, and was confirmed by several industry sources. The final decision to pull the plug may have occurred after Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vocally declared his opposition to Johnson. Schumer, who was one of the authors of the failed reform bill, has regularly blasted the harm the current patent system is inflicting on start-ups and young companies.

It would have literally inconceivable that someone like Johnson would have been shot down by a bunch of people objecting to the legal fine points of the purpose of IP.

While IP protections have their place, are a form of rent seeking, and for a just and prosperous society, it behooves us to minimize the level of rent seeking to the absolute minimum level to encourage artistic and technological production (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution).

This is baby steps, but if it is the start of a trend, it constitute a seismic shift from the (completely ahistorical, United States industry was built on IP appropriation) view that ever more expansive protections to IP are essential to economic well being.

Now if only we can convince the US Trade Rep to chill out.