Category: Evil

Our Private Little War is Going so F%$#ing Well

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With a ceasefire coming into effect on Sunday, the Ukrainian rebels have seized the strategically significant town of Debaltseve:

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called Wednesday for an international peacekeeping mission in his nation’s war-torn east, a stark admission that his nation can no longer fend off pro-Russian rebels after a major battlefield defeat.

 Any international force on the ground would harden the battle lines after 10 months of fighting, forcing Ukraine to give up for now its attempts to reunify the nation. But it would also halt Russian-backed rebels from pushing onward toward Kiev.

 The suggestion came hours after thousands of Ukrainian troops fled the encircled railway hub of Debaltseve, where fighting only intensified after a cease-fire ostensibly took effect Sunday. Nearly a year after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, the fresh loss threatened tough political consequences for Ukraine’s pro-Western president amid questions of how the troops became surrounded in recent weeks.

 Soldiers described a chaotic nighttime retreat over eastern Ukraine’s frozen steppe, with shells raining down on them from two sides.

It’s gotten to the point that even the German press are starting to condemn Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland and her role in creating this conflict.  (Google translate link)

The Europeans have begun to realize that following the reckless and bellicose US policies has created nothing but headaches for them.

It also appears that it’s creating headaches at the Brookings Institution as well:

A new report co-produced by the Brookings Institution is not going over well within the think tank. The report calls for an escalation in tensions between the United States and Russia with a recommendation for the US to supply the government in Kiev with $3 billion worth of weapons. The report also had contributions from the Atlantic Council and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. One of the authors of the report, Michele Flournoy, is expected to be selected as defense secretary should Hillary Clinton win the White House and operates a think tank underwritten by defense contractors.

Brookings Institution fellow and former US State Department official Jeremy Shapiro took direct aim at the report in a piece titled “Why Arming the Ukrainians is a Bad Idea.” While acknowledging it was difficult to write the rebuttal given that his boss, Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott, had co-authored the report, Shapiro nonetheless took apart the report’s bellicose and reckless recommendations:

The Ukrainian calculus is one of immediate desperation. But the United States needs to think for the longer-term. And if U.S.-provided weapons fail to induce a Russian retreat in Ukraine and instead cause an escalation of the war, the net result will not be peace and compromise. There has recently been much escalation in Ukraine, but it could go much further. As horrible as it is, the Ukrainian civil war still looks rather tame by the standards of Bosnia, Chechnya or Syria. Further escalation will mean much more violence, suffering and death in Ukraine.
The report authors counter that if the United States does not stand up to Russia in Ukraine, the Putin regime will be emboldened to make similar mischief all over Europe and beyond. This is the familiar credibility argument that gave us the war in Vietnam, among other misadventures. In fact, U.S. credibility is not enhanced by making bluffs that we will not ultimately fulfill or by embarking on wasting wars that we do not need.

Ouch. That would be a brutal critique from a rival let alone a colleague. Apparently the war party has not secured its own base and the eagerness to play chicken with a fellow nuclear power has limited support even among DC’s deep state intellectuals.

The Neocon and Liberal Interventionist belief in the “unipolar world”, and in the necessity take action to preserve the illusion of this state is harming both our own foreign policy interests as well as the rest of the world.

First Measels, and now Mumps, Thanks Jenny

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A mumps outbreak in Idaho has spread to Washington state:

An outbreak of mumps that started at an Idaho university and infected 21 people across the state has now spread to neighboring Washington state, health officials said on Monday.

The spread of mumps, a highly contagious virus that leads to painful swelling of the salivary glands, comes as a wider measles outbreak has infected more than 100 people in California and over a dozen more in 19 other U.S. states and Mexico since December.

The mumps outbreak began in September at the University of Idaho campus in Moscow, near the border with Washington state, and later spread to the capital, Boise, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare said.

Mumps, which leads to painful swelling of the salivary glands, spreads easily from sharing saliva through kissing, shared eating utensils or water bottles, public health officials said.

So far, there have been 21 confirmed and probable cases, including six around Boise, the state’s most populous city, a statement said. Then on Friday, two infections were reported in Washington state, the statement added.

Public health officials were urging students on the Moscow campus and anyone who might have come into close contact with an infected person to ensure their vaccinations are up to date. Mumps and measles can be prevented through a single vaccine, the MMR vaccine that also covers rubella, health officials said.

I would note that mumps can also cause sterility in adults and adolescents, as well as meningitis, pancreatitis,  encephalitis, deafness, and the occasional death.

It’s less lethal than measles, but it’s still dangerous and avoidable.

Let me send a big f%$# you to Jenny McCarthy, Andrew Wakefield, and the fraudsters, liars and stupid people who are endangering the rest of society.

It’s the Record Distributors who are Impoverishing Musicians, not the Internet

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With all the complaints from various rock and rollers about there over Spotify and similar services, but the numbers show that it is still the record companies that are hoovering up most of the revenue in the music business:

………
In the 1960s, Motown Records had a reputation for depriving artists of well-earned royalties, most egregiously in the case of Barrett Strong whose name was removed as a songwriter of the 1960 hit “Money (That’s What I Want)” because of a so-called “clerical error.” Chamberlin’s point was, despite the groundswell of criticism from artists against Pandora and Spotify, it’s labels, not technology platforms, that are most responsible for low royalty checks. The reason artists feel the pain so acutely in today’s digital era is that there are more performers than ever before with access to wide distribution platforms like YouTube and far less money to go around: Music industry revenue has been cut in half since 2000.

Referring to the heyday of the overpriced CD in the 90s, [former Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy] Chamberlin said, “I just think when money’s swollen like that there’s this ‘high tide rises all boats’ type of mentality.” But the truth is, labels have always withheld massive shares of royalties, with or without Spotify.

The problem is, these contracts between artists and labels — and labels and Spotify — are proprietary and opaque, so it’s been difficult to identify precisely how much artists are getting screwed on a macro level, beyond looking at the sad earnings statements musicians occasionally publish on their blogs.

Until now.

A new report from audit firm Ernst & Young and the French record label trade group SNEP reveals better estimates than we’ve ever seen on the payout distribution of music streaming services.

And who do you suppose takes the biggest cut? You guessed it, labels.

According to the report, labels net 45.6 percent of the streaming revenue created by Spotify and Deezer, the two platforms included in the study. The streaming platforms themselves — most of which have yet to achieve profitability despite fielding frequent attacks for their supposed greed — take home 20.8 percent. An additional 16.7 percent is paid in taxes before songwriters and performing artists finally see their shares — which amount to 10 percent and 6.8 percent, respectively.

When you disregard taxes and the platforms’ share, labels keep a full 73.1 percent of the net revenue streaming services transferr to the music industry.

So how do the labels justify leaving such a slim piece of the pie to artists? “Well,” a record executive might argue, as he picks a piece of stale taco meat from his teeth, examines it, and decides to eat it, “Putting out an album is expensive.”

That may have been true fifteen years ago. But now that the world is digital, manufacturing costs are fast approaching zero. Recording software has gotten so good and so (comparatively) cheap that a kid with enough talent can make a record that sounds just as good as the new Taylor Swift album from her basement using ProTools, which costs $900 (or nothing, if one is willing to employ the five-finger Pirate Bay discount).

Furthermore, labels no longer need to launch an expensive world tour or bribe radio stations for an artist to receive international exposure. Sure, having a label marketing team behind your work certainly helps, but social media still possesses some vestige of its open, democratic roots — enough for savvy artists to build a following and attract attention to their work organically without a giant advertising budget.

My favorite example of an artist casting off major label overlords is hip-hop/R&B artist Ryan Leslie. He told me that his first album released on Motown in 2008 sold 180,000 copies. But the royalties Leslie received from those sales did not cover the $100,000 label advance he received to produce and market it. His new self-distributed album, however, has only sold 12,000 copies — less than one-tenth the sales of his Motown debut — and yet Leslie took home around $160,000 in revenue off album sales alone. When merchandise sales and concert tickets are included, Leslie has made over $400,000 since going independent, all of which he got to keep and distribute among his own small, lean team. (Of course it helped that Leslie already had a significant fan-base from his work on Motown).

Labels are withholding royalties as greedily as ever, and yet their value to artists has diminished greatly in the digital age. This demands a dramatic rethinking and restructuring of label-artist arrangements, a process that has barely begun to take shape.

If pop music artists have a problem with how they get revenue, they need to start with the record distributors, who are doing less and less for the musician, but still try to sit athwart the market and extract what are largely undeserved rents.

Streaming, Spotify and its ilk, much like iTunes and other digital music stores, are merely a channel.

Getting access to these services does not require the services of the record labels.

If you are getting boned by a contract with record labels, the problem is the contract with the record labels, not streaming.

It Appears that the Only People Surprised with the House of Saud’s Ties to Terrorists is US Anti-Terrorism Agencies

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It appears that members of the US state security apparatus has literally described as “inconceivable” allegations that the Saudis gave support to terrorists:

Former top-level US intelligence officials have lined up to discredit explosive allegations by a convicted al-Qaida operative that senior members of the Saudi royal family supported the extremist network, and that a Saudi diplomat discussed plans to shoot down the US presidential plane Air Force One.

 Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker”, made the accusations in testimony filed in Manhattan federal court on Monday by lawyers for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks who accuse Saudi Arabia of providing material support to al-Qaida.

 Robert Grenier, the CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief, said Mousaoui’s allegations were “inconceivable”. A former top navy terrorism investigator, Robert McFadden, likened claims of official Saudi backing for the devastating attack to “a unicorn”.

 But the allegations – which came just a week after the US government made an ostentatious reaffirmation of US friendship following the death of Saudi King Abdullah – have once again focussed attention on the wisdom of Washington’s oil-fueled alliance with a leading exporter of Islamic extremism.

 Moussaoui, whose trial for his involvement in the 9/11 plot exposed a history of mental illness, echoed longstanding allegations that members of the Saudi royal family helped bankroll al-Qaida ahead of the attack.

 But he also made a dramatic new claim, alleging that he discussed a missile attack on Air Force One with a diplomat from the Saudi embassy in Washington.

It is telling that Mr. Grenier uses the term, “Inconceivable.”

He didn’t use the term, “fanciful,”, or “ludicrous,” or “ridiculous,”he used the term “Inconceivable.”

This choice of words is telling.

The House of Saud has a very long history of supporting Islamic extremism, both financially and through its policy of aggressively exporting local religious extremists in order to get them out of the country, but this “expert” cannot even conceive that they might have been providing aid to various flavors of Salafi (Wahhabi) fundamentalists who are tied to terrorism.

These are the words of a person who is fully immersed in denial, like the elements of FBI who arranged for charter flights out of the US for prominent Saudis immediately following the 911 attacks.

Saudi support for extremism is the elephant in the room among the US state security apparatus, and ignoring this fact is both required for career advancement, and cripples the anti-terrorism activities of those who do this.

It is clear that the House of Saud has bankrolled violent extremist groups, including ISIS, and it is even clearer that they use their money to promote religious schools and mosques that are the underlying infrastructure of Islamic terrorist groups.

I don’t care how much oil they pump, we need to stop looking the other way when they do this.

They are not our ally in this matter.

MADD Issues a Bogus Report on Uber and Drunk Driving, and Now We Discover that Uber Paid them Off

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Last week, MADD and Uber co-released a report that strongly suggested that car sharing service reduces the incidence of drunk driving.

Pro Publica took a look at the report, and found that there was no “there” there:

………

What is Uber’s evidence that they “likely prevented” so many crashes?

Not much.

Indeed, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which co-authored the report, cautioned us against connecting the rise of Uber to a drop in drunk driving. “Nobody is saying that there is a causation relationship here, this is a correlation relationship. Purely correlational,” said Amy George, senior vice president of marketing and communications for MADD. (MADD took a less cautious stance in a press release last week: New Report from MADD, Uber Reveals Ridesharing Services Important Innovation to Reduce Drunk Driving.)

Uber’s report has two key graphics: The first shows alcohol-involved crashes in California markets where Uber operates. The second shows the same, but in cities where there is no Uber service. Each graph compares accidents between under-30 and 30-and-over drivers. The charts actually show, in general, a downward trend of drunk driving accidents in both Uber and non-Uber markets.

But Uber and Plouffe are hanging their assertion on another facet of the analysis: drunk driving crashes for those under 30 have dropped more in cities that have Uber versus those that don’t.

“We believe there is a direct relationship between the presence of uberX (Uber’s lowest-cost option) in a city and the amount of drunk driving crashes involving younger populations,” the report says.
That could be. But we don’t really know, and neither does Uber.”We believe there is a direct relationship between the presence of uberX (Uber’s lowest-cost option) in a city and the amount of drunk driving crashes involving younger populations,” the report says.

That could be. But we don’t really know, and neither does Uber.

And now we know that 6 months ago, Uber dropped a load of cash in MADD’s lap:

Uber and Mothers Against Drunk Driving last week put out a report suggesting Uber helped reduced drunk-driving accidents. However, the claim gets a little wobbly when you take a closer look at the numbers, as ProPublica just did. Now MADD is backing away from the assertion, claiming the relationship is “purely correlational.” Meanwhile, it turns out Uber started donating money to MADD last summer. Surely that is unrelated, right?
 ………

Now MADD is backpedaling: “Nobody is saying that there is a causation relationship here, this is a correlation relationship. Purely correlational,” Amy George, senior vice president of marketing and communications at MADD, tells ProPublica.

Funny, but last week in a press release MADD seemed to feel differently:

Released today, the study demonstrates that not only is Uber a convenient transportation option but that it can also be a powerful tool in the fight to reduce the number of drunk-driving crashes.

There’s another twist, which is that Uber has been contributing financially to MADD. Last summer, Uber and MADD announced a partnership in which Uber would donate $1 to MADD for every ride taken and $10 for every new customer who used the service in a 24-hour period around the 4th of July, as long as customers used a promo code, UberMADD.This past weekend Uber ran a similar promotion, donating a buck for every ride from 3 p.m. to midnight on Super Bowl Sunday when riders used the promo code ThinkandRide.

Uber: Using lies about drunk driving deaths to promote its own agenda since 2014.

Nice work guys.

Full disclosure: My mother was killed by a drunk driver.

That being said, I’m not a fan of the various non-profits who work in this issue. I find them overly punitive in their approach, and there seems to be a lot of corruption around them: Candy Lightner, the founder of MADD, ended up working as a lobbyist for the American Beverage Institute, and SADD was forced to settle with the commonwealth of Massachusetts over the outsize golden parachute given its founder, Robert Anastas.  (The case was actually used as an example of self-dealing in the Massachusetts non-profit application form instruction book in the 1990s)

Another Day, Another Uber Related Assault

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In this case, the Uber driver was off duty, and poached a fare from an on duty driver, and raped her:

When your business involves connecting real people in the offline world, there’s a lot more opportunity for things to get messy than in an online-only business. It’s a painful lesson that sharing (or on-demand) economy companies like Uber, AirBnB, and others have been forced to learn repeatedly in recent months and years.

Thanks to the sheer size, ubiquity, and frequency of usage of its platform, Uber has emerged as the poster boy for such atoms-versus-bits reality checks. In what is becoming a recurring theme for the company, yet another of its driver-partners has been accused of sexual assault.

This time, a Los Angeles driver, who was off duty at the time of the incident, is accused of picking up a female passenger in her 20s who was waiting for another of the company’s drivers in LA’s Mar Vista neighborhood late on Saturday night and assaulting her before dropping her off at her destination.

“He said, ‘I’m actually not working as an Uber driver right now, but I am an Uber driver,’” LAPD Det. Kimberly Porter tells ABC7. “She got in the front seat. He then took her to a location where he did sexually assault her.”

Police have identified the suspect, who they describe as cooperating, but have not yet made any arrests. An Uber spokesperson said in a statement, “The driver in question has been removed from the platform while we gather the facts.”

There remain far more questions than answers when it comes to Uber’s culpability in this situation. For example, did the suspect have a history of this type of behavior or other criminal activity that should have precluded him from passing Uber’s (often-suspect) background checks? If so, then the company has some explaining to do, but if not, then there’s seemingly little the company could have done to prevent such an attack. Also, did the visibility of passengers on the company’s in-app map play a role in the suspect targeting the alleged victim, or was this an unfortunate coincidence of a roving driver offering a waiting pedestrian a ride? We’ve seen the company’s maps used in the past by police and auto-thieves to locate and target drivers; could it be that in this case they were used to target a waiting passenger? It’s too early to say, but the possibility is troubling.

Uber’s business model is not about improving the cab hailing experience.

It is about creating a platform, and structuring the business such that all of the liability and risk fall on someone else.

It’s a fundamentally abusive model. It abuses the drivers, and it abuses the passengers, and it is meticulously structured so that the millionaire founders of the firm can wash their hands of any and a liability.

For conventional cab companies, at the very least, they know if they employ criminals, their insurance will become unaffordable, but for Uber, it’s all on the induhividual drivers.

Nice racket there.

Alan Grayson Was Right! They Want You To ‘Die Quickly’*

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Michael R. “Andromeda” Strain. a resident “scholar” for the American Enterprise Institute, penned an OP/ED, and the moral pygmy that is Washington Post editorial editor Fred Hiatt, published a work titled, “End Obamacare, and people could die. That’s okay.”

He wants the death penalty for poverty.

What’s more, he tacitly admits that Obamacare saves lives.

 Seriously, the Washington Post has the 2nd worst opinion pages in the nation.

*This is not my bon mot, it is courtesy of Crooks and Liars.

If It’s a Blizzard, Uber will be Price Gouging

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Here in New York City and other parts of the Northeast, the snow has begun to fall and it likely won’t stop for the next 24 hours or longer. Some estimate the city will be buried in up to 30 inches of snow by late tomorrow.

For customers of Uber and Lyft, that should bring up nightmares of blizzards past when Uber’s surge prices hit seven to eight times the normal rates — or upwards of $30 a mile.

With that in mind, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio said in a press conference, “Price gouging in the context of an emergency is illegal.” In response, Uber and Lyft have capped their surge prices at 280% and 200% respectively.

The cap is a welcome gesture, but doesn’t that still constitute “price gouging in the context of an emergency”? Under New York State law, price gouging is defined as an “unconscionably excessive price” during an “abnormal disruption of the market.” Like many laws, there’s a bit of vagueness written into that language, and I’ve reached out to the Attorney General’s office to ask whether Uber’s and Lyft’s capped surge rates qualify as “unconscionably excessive” and will update the post if I hear back.

Seriously.  This is a company whose business model is, “We’re contemptible greed-head ratf%$#s.”

Why do people use this, and why do their massively underpaid drivers stay with them?

I Think I’m Going to be Sick

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I’m watching TV, and an ad for Jackson Hewett comes on, talking about all their offices, including about a thousand in Wal-Marts.

The background music is, I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, and it’s sung by Pete Seeger.

Seriously, Pete Seeger, who would never do this, and must be spinning on his grave over this.

I confirmed this via a Google search, and it appears that his family licensed this use.

It’s not some sort of bullsh%$ record label stealing for the artist bullsh%$.

Stop the world.  I want to get off.

I am so angry that I could chew iron and spit nails.

Republican Family Values in Action

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The Teabagger is the one on the Left

Teabagger heroine, and terrorist wannabe, Holly Fisher has been exposed exposed cheating on her military veteran husband:

In July, liberals were delighted by the moronic antics of a woman who quickly became known as “Holly Hobby Lobby.” Shortly following the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court ruling that allowed companies to inject their religion into female employees’ healthcare, Holly Fisher decided to poorly “troll” liberals a bit.

Our heroine bravely stood in front of a Hobby Lobby store wearing a “PRO-LIFE” t-shirt and holding a Chick-Fil-A cup. She captioned her photo “HOW TO MAKE A LIBERAL’S HEAD EXPLODE,” and set it loose on Twitter.

………

This photo gained Holly the admiration of the conservative world. Quickly, she became a hero to all who have trouble figuring out how to work a microwave. [I love that turn of phrase MGS] Unfortunately, her new photo — the one conservatives adored — bore a striking resemblance to “the White Widow,” a jihadist suicide bomber who blew herself and four other people up in 2004.

………

“The conservative woman behind several viral photos cheated on her combat veteran husband repeatedly & then lied about it, Gotnews.com has learned,” [The world’s worst undeserving claimant of the term “Journalist”, and member of the class Myxogastria, Charles C.] Johnson wrote.

According to Johnson, multiple sources within the Tea Party confirmed that Fisher had a prolonged affair with Joel Frewa, a now-former video editor for the Tea Party News Network. Johnson says Frewa resigned after word of the affair began to leak out.

“The affair took place at a “Restoring the Dream” event, a Faith & Freedom conference, and on Election night 2014,” Johnson said.

The irony here is delicious, but it is far from surprising.

H/t Blade at the Stellar Parthenon.

Hello? It’s Time for the FBI to Visit and Start Breaking Heads!

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Last week, I noted that the County DA had charged police with murder for shooting a homeless man.

Well, now the City Attorney and the Police are conspiring to exclude prosecutors from police involved shootings:

This week, Bernalillo County (N.M.) District Attorney Kari Brandenburg charged two Albuquerque police officers with murder in the killing of homeless man James Boyd. The shooting was captured on video and widely covered in the national media. Brandenburg’s decision comes on the heels of the controversial non-indictments in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, which sparked protests around the country. It didn’t take long for Albuquerque police and their supporters to react.

 A top prosecutor for District Attorney Kari Brandenburg’s office was shut out of a briefing after a fatal police shooting near San Mateo and Constitution NE on Tuesday evening, Brandenburg told KRQE News 13.

Police officials and others were gathering to discuss the most recent developments in the investigation a few hours after the shooting, Brandenburg said. Chief Deputy DA Sylvia Martinez attempted to join the briefing, but Deputy City Attorney Kathryn Levy would not let Martinez attend.

What Brandenburg said happened Tuesday evening would be an unprecedented move by city of Albuquerque officials, and it comes a day after Brandenburg charged two APD officers with murder in the March shooting death of homeless camper James Boyd.

Levy invoked the charges in barring Martinez from the briefing, according to Brandenburg.

“Sylvia was told that our office has a conflict of interest because we charged the officers,” she said.

Reached by telephone for comment Tuesday evening, Levy, who has for years worked as APD’s attorney, refused to answer questions . . .

………

Prosecutors’ presence at the scenes of police shootings and inside the investigatory briefings has been ubiquitous for decades here. In fact, the DA’s participation in the investigations is memorialized in a written agreement with APD and other agencies signed in 2004.If true, this is really reprehensible behavior and an abdication of office on the part of both police and the deputy city attorney. It’s also just the latest example of law enforcement officers and their supporters demonstrating incredible petulance in retaliation for public scrutiny or the rare attempt to hold rogue cops accountable for their actions.

(Emphasis mine)

This is deeply corrupt.

What’s more it’s deeply evil.

It is an attempt to create an absolute impunity for bad cops.

The Feds need to be involved, and they need to kick some major league ass.

It Couldn’t Happen to a More Deserving Genocidal Monster

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The attempted genocide suit against Scott Lively, one of the architects of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, will be allowed to go forward:

Most of us go our entire lives without ever standing trial for crimes against humanity. Then again, most of us aren’t notorious bigot Pastor Scott Lively, whose life work seems to be to ask the question: “How can I make gay people miserable across the world?”

In the United States Lively’s homophobic messages are largely ignored, and in recent years he has had to endure various setbacks at the state and federal level as equality makes historic gains. Undeterred, Lively has sought out foreign lands where his particular brand of ruthless anti-gay ideas are more accepted. In Uganda, he found a home away from home. During a Christian “workshop” in the African nation he managed to become one of the principal architects behind some of the most retrograde anti-gay legislation on the planet.

………

Unfortunately for Lively, orchestrating genocide in another country is kind of frowned upon, and in 2012 a lawsuit was filed against Lively in federal court in Massachusetts for crimes against humanity. This week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals denied Lively’s final request to have it dismissed because, well, the whole genocide thing.

Lets be clear:  This is not criminal charges.  This is a civil suit under the Alien Tort Statute, but the judge has allowed discovery to proceed, and this should detail the full extent of Mr. Lively’s perfidy.

He has been protesting that he actually recommended against jailing (and in earlier versions executing) the LGBT community in Uganda, but I am certain that discovery will show that he was actively advocating for genocide.

Here’s hoping that he is left bankrupt and broken by this.

Let the Looting Begin

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The Gray Lady has noticed that Silicon Valley is looking to education as a new profit center.

The article itself is rather adulatory of such efforts, rather unsurprising given the New York Times‘ predilection for the financialization of pretty much everything, but I am not so sanguine:

The education technology business is chock-full of fledgling companies whose innovative ideas have not yet proved effective — or profitable. But that is not slowing investors, who are pouring money into ventures as diverse as free classroom-management apps for teachers and foreign language lessons for adult learners.

Venture and equity financing for ed tech companies soared to nearly $1.87 billion last year, up 55 percent from the year before, according to a new report from CB Insights, a venture capital database. The figures are the highest since CB Insights began covering the industry in 2009.

………

“Education is one of the last industries to be touched by Internet technology, and we’re seeing a lot of catch-up going on,” said Betsy Corcoran, the chief executive of EdSurge, an industry news service and research company. “We’re starting to see more classical investors — the Kleiner Perkinses, the Andreessen Horowitzes, the Sequoias — pay more attention to the marketplace than before.”

Translation: There’s public taxpayer money in them there hills.

And then we have this pearl:

“I think there are businesses that won’t be able to cross that bridge,” said Michael Moe, chief executive of GSV Capital, a venture capital firm. “But if you monetize 2 to 20 percent of the network, there’s no reason it can’t work in education.”

Yes, let’s all of us f%$# our children so that you can buy a vacation house in the Hamptons.

Not enough bullets.

American Healthcare in a Nutshell

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Author, and Canadian, Douglas Coupland describes his experience with the American healthcare system.

The short version is that he had a cold that became bronchitis, and he went to a clinic, and got a prescription for an antibiotics and oxycodone(!) as a cough suppressant.

I do understand that opiods are effective cough suppressants, codeine used to be in half the cough syrups out there, but it does seem to me like hunting for an elephant with a microscope.

But here is the kicker, and it shows just how corrupting the profit motive is:

………

 My doctor vanished for a few minutes and I looked around. The clinic was pleasant enough, as were both the staff and my doctor, who returned a few minutes later with some filled-out prescription forms. “I’m going to give you a course of antibiotics. Take one a day in the morning with food. Just one.” [emphasis mine]

“OK.”

 “And here’s a prescription for oxycodone. Take two a day.”

 “Oxycodone?” It felt weirdly glamorous to be getting some oxy for the first time.

 “Yes. It’s a terrific cough suppressant.”

 “OK.” In my head I was thinking, “Oxy — woohoo!” . . . but in my body I was thinking, “But I also really would like to stop coughing up jelly-like deep-sea creatures into my dinner napkins.” So I walked three minutes to the pharmacist and picked up my antibiotics, and then my oxy. My pharmacist looked at me gravely: “You know, you’re very lucky your doctor gave me this discount coupon on your oxycodone prescription.”

 “Oh — why’s that?”

 “This drug [use drug name; get sued] is $900 a pop.”

 “What?!”

 “Yes, but for you, with a coupon this first time, it’s $90.”

 “For a cough suppressant?”

 “Not just any cough suppressant. This is oxycodone.”

 “I suppose so.”

 “And there’s a bit of decongestant added to it as well.”

 “Hard to argue with that.”

Well, the bronchitis does not clear up, and it turns into pneumonia, and our fearless protagonist finds that he has developed a physiological dependence on the Oxy.

He then gets back to his doctor in Canada:

So I stopped. [the Oxy] And I returned to Canada, where my doctor looked at my prescriptions, puzzled. First, my antibiotic: “Your Florida doctor prescribed you this? [Name drug; get lawsuit.] We used to give this to two-year-olds and, even then, for your body weight, this ought to have been at least three times a day at quadruple strength.” [emphasis mine]

 “OK, but what about oxycodone? You have to admit, it did stop me from coughing.”

 “Yes, but you also almost became addicted to a $900-a-pop drug.”

 “True.”

 “And just to be clear, you were deliberately underprescribed antibiotics to keep you from getting well so as to ensure that you’d keep going back for more visits and repeat oxy prescriptions. And your doctor was obviously in on some kind of racket with the pharmacist — all that coupon nonsense.” [emphasis mine]

 “All true.”

 Within 48 hours, my pneumonia essentially vanished thanks to two azithromycin tablets. But it took almost a week for The Hand to permanently unclasp itself from my skull. [Oxycodone dependency] Now that the experience is over, I feel as if I’d driven through a speed trap in a small Ozark town and had been at the mercy of the local Boss Hogg. All of this because of bronchitis. What if I’d had something bigger than mere bronchitis? What bigger and scarier speed traps would await me or you or anyone else down the US medical road?

The system does not just prey on Canadians, you know, it preys on all of us.

What’s more, my guess is that there was no (illegal) kickback arrangement, but rather that the pharmacy was either owned in whole or part by the doctor, or operating as a part of the clinic (my money is on the latter), so there were no illegal payments per se, just business.

To paraphrase Sal Tessio, “It’s nothing personal it’s only business.”

This Psychopath is Going to Commit a 2nd Murder Before he Gets Put Away

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I am speaking, of course of George Zimmerman, who, this time around,  is accused of domestic aggravated assault:

George Zimmerman, the man who was acquitted in 2013 of murdering an unarmed black Florida teenager, was arrested Friday night in a domestic violence case, according to news reports.

Police said the 31-year-old was arrested around 10 p.m. in Lake Mary, just outside Orlando, on a charge of domestic aggravated assault, according to the Associated Press.

On Saturday morning, Zimmerman appeared in court and was given a $5,000 bond and ordered to stay out of Volusia County, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Judge John Galluzzo told Zimmerman that he has until Tuesday to surrender firearms in his possession, according to the Sentinel.

This is Zimmerman’s 6th arrest, 3 were before he shot Trayvon Martin, and somehow or other, the kid with no arrests on his record was the “thug”.

Welcome to race blind America

We Have a New Definition of Chutzpah

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Obviously, the classic definition, the story of a boy who killed his parents, and then asked for mercy as an orphan remains the front runner, but the fact that Freedom Industries is asking for prosecutors to recuse themselves because they were among the 300,000 people whose water they poisoned:

A federal judge will take up whether the U.S. Attorney’s office can prosecute cases against former Freedom Industries executives or if a conflict of interest exists.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston is scheduled to hear disqualification requests from former Freedom President Gary Southern and former company executive Dennis Farrell in a 1:30 p.m. hearing today.

Both Southern and Farrell have asked the federal judge to disqualify U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin’s office from the case, saying there is a conflict of interest because the prosecutor’s employees were affected by last January’s chemical leak, which affected 300,000 people in nine counties.

Farrell’s motion only took issue with Goodwin’s office but Southern’s motion also sought to disqualify “agents and investigators” working with the office.

“The conflict of interest is real: the U.S. Attorney, his assistants, investigators and office staff were actual victims of the crimes charged against Mr. Farrell,” Farrell’s motion said. “Of equal or perhaps greater gravity, husbands, wives and children of the prosecutors and staff of the (U.S. Attorney’s office) also were, and allegedly may continue to be, actual victims of the crimes charged.”

In a previous filing, Goodwin said no one in his office has a personal or financial stake in the outcome of this case. He said no one on the prosecution team is an “actual victim” because the general public is the victim in Clean Water Act violations. He also said no one on his staff is a claimant in the class action lawsuits or in the Freedom bankruptcy case.

Seriously?

Because they are arguing that because they contaminated the water for half the f%$#ing state of West Virginia, no one should be allowed to prosecute them?

Seriously?

I guess that it is proof of the old adage, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”

This is Repulsive

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In the 2nd World War, the perfidy of the Vichy government was in many ways unique unique, because it sent Jews to the death camps without the Nazis ever making such a request.

Well, they mayor of the town (commune) of Champlan has proven to be a worthy heir to this horrid bit of history:

A Roma baby girl has been denied a burial space by a French mayor, sparking outrage among activists.

The girl, who died on 26 December, reportedly of sudden infant death syndrome, was refused burial in Champlan, south of Paris.

The mayor said priority had to be given to taxpayers.

The mayor of nearby Wissous, Richard Trinquier, described that decision as “incomprehensible” and said that he would offer a grave.

The girl’s family lived in a camp in Champlan.

The mayor of Champlan, Christian Leclerc, was quoted by Le Parisien newspaper as justifying the decision by saying that his town was running out of burial space and that “priority is given to those who pay local taxes”.

This is repulsive on so many levels.

Rather unsurprisingly, the mayor is a member of the right-wing Divers Droite (DVD) party, a rather motley assortment of otherwise unaffiliated conservatives.

Sounds rather like a French Tea Party.

Also, I have to say that the echos of the rise of Fascism in Europe are profoundly disturbing.

Another Statement of Obama’s that is “Inoperative”*

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Cliff Stone, who worked with the State Department finding places to send innocent Guantánamo detainees once they were cleared for released, has resigned in the slow pace of releases:

The State Department envoy who negotiates detainee transfers from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is resigning, dealing another blow to President Obama’s efforts to close a facility that top administration officials say is a blight on the country’s international standing.

The resignation of Cliff Sloan, a close confidant of Secretary of State John Kerry, comes as officials at the State Department and the White House have increasingly expressed frustration with the Defense Department’s slow pace of transferring approved prisoners.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Sloan denied that he was leaving because he was frustrated by foot-dragging at the Pentagon. He said he had always intended to stay a maximum of 18 months, noting that he was right on schedule.

“Frustration with the Defense Department’s slow pace of transferring approved prisoners,” my ass.

The military is not a democracy. Barack Obama is commander-in-chief.

If someone is dragging their feet, Obama can fire them.

What’s more, I would argue that he has a moral obligation to fire them.

Guantánamo is more than a moral cancer on America. It is a source of outrage in the Arab world, and is one of the most power recruiting tools that Jihadis have.

*Yes, I am invoking the memory of former Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler.