Category: Hypocrisy

Mozilla Cuts Its Losses

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Brendan Eich is out as Mozilla Corporation CEO:

Less than two weeks after drawing controversy over his appointment as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, Brendan Eich has resigned from the position.

In a post at Mozilla’s official blog, executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker confirmed the news with an unequivocal apology on the company’s behalf. “Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it,” Baker wrote. “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.”

The action comes days after dating site OKCupid became the most vocal opponent of Eich’s hiring. Mozilla offered repeated statements about LGBT inclusivity within the company over the past two weeks, but those never came with a specific response from Eich about his thousands of dollars of donations in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that sought to ban gay marriage in the state.

Eich’s bigotry has been an issue before, and for some reason known only to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they decided to make him the face of the organization.

It was further compounded when Eich refused to offer anything vaguely resembling a sincere apology, and instead offered platitudes about how tolerant people needed to validate his bigotry.

Don’t let this door hit your ass on the way out.

We are All Koch Suckers Today

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The court ruled in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance reform:

Back in October, when the Court heard oral argument in a challenge to the overall caps – known as “aggregate limits” – on how much an individual can contribute to candidates for federal office, political parties, and political action committees, there wasn’t a whole lot of suspense.  Given the Court’s recent campaign finance rulings, it seemed clear that a majority of the Justices would vote to strike down at least some of the caps; the only real question was whether they would strike down them all.

Today we got our answer from the Court, and it was a decisive “yes”:  all of the aggregate limits must go.  Let’s talk about today’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission in Plain English.

As I explained in my preview of the case in October, there are (at least until today) two kinds of limits on campaign contributions.  The first is what is known as the “base limits” – the maximum that you can contribute to a candidate, political party, or political action committee in an election.  The aggregate limits are the second kind:  in a two-year period known as an “election cycle,” you can donate no more than $48,600 to all candidates combined and no more than $74,600 to political parties and political action committees.

An Alabama businessman named Shaun McCutcheon went to court to challenge the aggregate limits.  He didn’t ask for the right to give more money than the base limits to any particular candidate; instead, he wanted to give money to many more candidates, but the aggregate limits prohibit him from doing so.  That, he argued, violates his free speech rights under the First Amendment.

Although a lower court disagreed with McCutcheon, he found a more receptive audience in the Roberts Court, which has consistently voted to overturn campaign finance regulations.  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the Court, which was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel A. Alito.  (Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own opinion saying the Court should go even further, but the Chief Justice’s opinion is the controlling one.)

………

Breyer’s dissent lamented that the Court’s decision “eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.” In his view, “corruption” is not limited to scenarios involving a quid pro quo, which he described as “an act akin to bribery.” Instead, it includes exactly the kind of efforts to use money to obtain influence and access to elected officials that the Chief Justice’s opinion characterized as “a central feature of democracy.” This is so, Breyer explained, because if people believe that elected officials only pay attention to big-money donors, they may lose faith in the political process altogether.

Breyer next contended that the Court is just wrong when it asserts that, even if the aggregate limits are removed, there is still no way to get around the base limits. Here the dissent painted a very different picture from the rest of the Court, predicting that “donors can and likely will find ways to channel millions of dollars to parties and to individual candidates.”

Whose vision of the future of campaign finance will prevail – the dissent’s apocalyptic one or the Chief Justice’s more optimistic one? You can be sure that journalists and election law experts will be paying close attention over the next few years. We can also be confident that the decision today will spawn new campaign finance challenges – including, in all likelihood, to the “base limits” themselves. Stay tuned . . . .

And if this is not bad enough, it looks like SCOTUS will overturn bans on corporate donations to candidates:

The Supreme Court, fresh from its new ruling expanding the political donation options of private individuals, faces a choice this week about its current view on campaign contributions to candidates by corporations.  For weeks, the Court has been sitting on a case that would test a state’s flat ban on corporate donations, and is now set to look at that case in the wake of Wednesday’s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.

The Court, according to its electronic docket, is scheduled to consider at its private Conference on Friday the case of Iowa Right to Life Committee v. Tooker.  That case has been ready for the Court, technically, since November, but so far no action has been taken.

If the Court’s usual practice is followed, it will have at least three options: agree to hear the case to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s ban on corporate donations, deny review and thus leave intact a federal appeals court ruling upholding that ban, or tell the lower courts to reconsider based on the McCutcheon ruling.

In 2003, in the case of FEC v. Beaumont, the Court upheld the long-standing federal ban on corporations, at least so far as that provision applied to non-profit corporations.  In the new case, the Iowa Right to Life Committee urged the Court to overrule the Beaumont decision, arguing that it cannot be squared with the Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

Needless to say, we can expect another 5-4 decision allowing rich people to double down on their influence.

We ……… are ……… f%$#ed.

When Someone Defines Tolerance as Accepting His Own Bigotry, He is a Hypocrite and a Fool

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Case in point, the self-immolation of Mozilla because they chose to hire an homophobic bigot as CEO:

Mozilla named a new chief executive this week to lead the non-profit Web organization as it tries to keep its Firefox browser relevant in the mobile age. The appointment has proved controversial in more ways than one.

 Three Mozilla board members resigned over the choice of Brendan Eich, a Mozilla co-founder, as the new CEO. Gary Kovacs, a former Mozilla CEO who runs online security company AVG Technologies; John Lilly, another former Mozilla CEO now a partner at venture-capital firm Greylock Partners; and Ellen Siminoff, CEO of online education startup Shmoop, left the board last week.

 The departures leave three people on the Mozilla board: co-founder Mitchell Baker; Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Katharina Borchert, chief executive of German news site Spiegel Online.

 The three board members who resigned sought a CEO from outside Mozilla with experience in the mobile industry who could help expand the organization’s Firefox OS mobile-operating system and balance the skills of co-founders Eich and Baker, the people familiar with the situation said. They did not want to be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

 Mozilla spokesman Mike Manning confirmed the three remaining board members, but he declined to comment further on Friday. He did not immediately respond to a request to speak to Eich and Baker.

 ………

 The board departures are not the only source of early pressure on the new Mozilla CEO. Some employees of the organization are calling for Eich to step down because he donated $1,000 to the campaign in support of Proposition 8, a 2008 California ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in the state.

 “I do not support the Board’s appointment of @BrendanEich as CEO,” Kat Braybrooke, a curation and co-design lead at the organization, wrote on Twitter on Thursday:

The problem is that Brendan Eich have $1000 to the H8 amendment, aka Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative in California, and when this was revealed, his response was to suggest that people should be more tolerant about this.

That is complete bullsh%$.

While I agree with 1st amendment argument  protecting his right to engage in this sort of speech, it is wrong to suggest that his opponents should accept him to, “make Mozilla a place of equality and welcome for all.”

Social, opprobrium is precisely the sort of response that comes from an open marketplace of ideas.

When People Say that Addressing Inequality is Just Class Warfare, They are Either Lying of Stupid

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As Paul Krugman notes, we know of specific policies (taxes, shareholder say on pay, etc.) to address inequality, but no one has cracked the secret to sustainable growth that raises all boats:

The usual answer to this is to point out that we don’t actually know much about how to produce rapid economic growth — conservatives may think they know (low taxes and all that), but there is no evidence to back up their certainty. And on the other hand, we know how to make a big difference to income distribution, especially how to reduce extreme poverty. So why not work on what we know, as at least part of our economic strategy?

He further notes that economic growth rates do not effect levels of child malnutrition, but inequality does:

But even this argument may be conceding too much. A new study finds that in poor and lower-middle-income countries, one of the most crucial aspects of well-being, child malnutrition, isn’t helped at all by faster growth:

………

Yes, rapid growth is good, but it doesn’t solve all problems even if you know how to make it happen, which you don’t.

We do know that the conservative prescriptions produce, inequality, speculation, bubbles, and panics.

The reason that we continue to hear these arguments is because it serves the rich and their lackeys, not because it has ever demonstrated that it has any relation to reality.

That’s Gonna Leave a Mark (Paul Ryan Edition)

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Paul Krugman serves a can of whup ass on Paul Ryan for his racist dog whistles:

There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.

 So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. [As an aside, when he was a senior in high school, Charles Murray burned a cross next to a police station, which sort of describes his whole career since then] Oh, wait.

 Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.

 Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.

Krugman makes a point that needs to be made.  Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater’s Southern Strategy, the Republican party has aggressively embraced racists and racism, so the the dialogue within the GOP is permeated with racism.

So he said something that makes perfect sense within a political party that is lacking in, “mindful human beings,” to quote what Ronald Reagan, Jr. said about Dick Cheney, but it was viewed with horror by much of the rest of humanity.

And then there is Timothy Egan, who observes that Ryan, who frequently makes hay of the fact that his great-great-grandfather fled the Irish potato famine, which was a product of near-genocidal British policies, which were driven from the Victorian concerns about fostering dependency, which is exactly the same point that he makes when assaulting the social safety net:

In advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.

 A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

 And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

 There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

 But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.

………

 On Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This, after he told a story of a boy who didn’t want his free school lunch because it left him with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” The story was garbage — almost completely untrue.

 “We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

 Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

Ouch.

The Cowardice and Hypocrisy of Some Haredim in One Sentence

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That sentence was, 50 Thousand Haredim March So Only Other Jews Die in War.

It was written by Yori Yanover who used to work for the Jewish Press, a New York based publication that caters to the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredim) community.

They canned him, and deleted the page, though it is still available in the Google cache.

This is similar to what goes on with the dole money allotted to Haredim so that they don’t have to work.

They are using Torah to derive personal benefit, and this is forbidden in normative Judaism, as it is said in Pirkei Avot 4:6, “Do not make the Torah into a crown with which to aggrandize yourself, and don’t use it as a spade with which to dig into them.”

Basically it means two things:

  • The study of Torah is not about self-aggrandizement or puffing up one’s own ego.
  • The study of Torah is not about deriving personal financial benefit. (Which also implies that draft dodging is out as well)

Those Haredim who are protesting are batting 0 for 2 on this.

H/t Mitch Gilbert (the first link) who has republished the article.

You can also find a copy at Failed Messiah.

H/t to my brother, aka “The Bear Who Swims,” for cluing me into this story.

Liar

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In a photo-op with Democratic members of Congress, Barack Obama was asked about the allegations that the CIA hacked into Senate Intelligence Committee computers and threaten the committee staff, Obama let loose with this one of the most blatant lies I’ve heard in a long time:

Since that time, we have worked with the Senate committee so that the report that they are putting forward is well-informed, and what I’ve said is that I am absolutely committed to declassifying that report as soon as the report is completed. In fact, I would urge them to go ahead and complete the report, send it to us. We will declassify those findings so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward.

Seems innocuous, but as Kevin Drum observes, “Last I heard, the report was completed in 2012. The CIA responded last June. Dianne Feinstein has been pushing for declassification of at least the report’s executive summary every since.”

Much like his statement that he welcomed the debate on spying on American citizens engendered by the Snowden leaks, this latest statement is a lie.

If Obama had any interest in releasing an unclassified version of the Senate report, it would be out now, but he does not want it released, because the details on torture in the report are allegedly even more grisly, and far less effective, than what has already been made public.

If these details come out will make it difficult for Obama to keep ignoring the moral and constitutional issues raised by the mindless and useless brutality that was done in our name.

That’s inconvenient, so Barack Obama wants it to go away.

A portrait in cynicism and cowardice.

Nothing is the Matter With Kansas

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Thomas Frank in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? he is flummoxed about why the so-called American heartland vote against their economic interests when they vote “God, Guns, and Gays” social issues.

Well, over at MoJo, Kevin Drum notes that any serious analysis, “Democrats have done virtually nothing for the middle class in 30 years.”

He’s right.  The  Democrat Party’s record on economic for the middle class, and the poor is amazingly weak tea when compared to anyone but the Republicans:

There are two problems with the Democratic approach. First, it’s too abstract to appeal to anyone. Second, it’s not true anyway. Democrats simply don’t consistently support concrete policies that help the broad working and middle classes. Half of them voted for the bankruptcy bill of 2005. They’ve done virtually nothing to stem the growth of monopolies and next to nothing to improve consumer protection in visible ways. They don’t do anything for labor. They’re soft on protecting Social Security. They bailed out the banks but refused to bail out underwater homeowners. Hell, they can’t even agree to kill the carried interest loophole, a populist favorite if ever there was one.

Sure, Democrats do plenty for the poor. They support increases in the EITC and the minimum wage. They support Medicaid expansion. They passed Obamacare. They support pre-K for vulnerable populations. They expanded CHIP. But virtually none of this really benefits the working or middle classes except at the margins.

Democrats have been unwilling to do any more than nibble around the edges for years.

It’s all about extracting large donations from rich people, which requires that you support policies that make them richer and richer, and this money is extracted from the rest of us.

And NPR, they Suck Too

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They put a holocaust revisionist who calls for genocide of the gays, and they neglect to mention these facts to their listeners:

National Public Radio’s Michel Martin did a segment on Uganda’s growing crackdown on its gay population, and decided to interview Holocaust-revisionist hate-group leader Scott Lively, who is truly one of the most horrific religious right extremists in America.

How did NPR’s Michel Martin describe Lively to her audience? Simply as “Evangelical leader Scott Lively.”

That’s it.

No mention of the fact that Lively was labeled a Holocaust revisionist by HateWatch for his “thoroughly-discredited” 1995 tome, “The Pink Swastika,” which tried to argue that gays were the really force behind the Holocaust.

No mention of Lively’s organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, that was officially-designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

He was extensively involved in Uganda’s proposed “Kill the Gays” bill, and the now just passed “Jail the Gays” bill.

You don’t just call him “Evangelical leader Scott Lively.” At the very least you call him a controversial anti-gay activist, unless you are so cowed by the Talibaptists that you should quit journalism and take up knitting.

I Don’t Think that I’ve Ever Seen Jon Stewart Angrier

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John Stewart and Larry Wilmore tear into professional bigot Fox News Legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for rolling out standard grossly KKK/Sons of the Confederacy lies.

Notice that they are both smiling.

They are f5$#ing outraged, and the smiles never leave their faces, and Wilmore draws blood when he compares Napolitano’s differing attitudes on the Civil War and the Revolutionary war, “You know, there’s something not right when you feel the only black thing worth fighting for is tea,” but he drives a much deserved stake through the anti-tax libertarianism espoused by Napolitano, and Fox, when he says, “You think it’s immoral for the government to reach into your pocket, rip your money away from its warm home and claim it as its own property, money that used to enjoy unfettered freedom is now conscripted to do whatever its new owner tells it to. Now, I know this is going to be a leap, but you know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? Well, that’s the way some of us feel about people.”

It’s frightening that such a contemptible human being as Napolitano was once a judge.

Just watch.

Our Religious Rights Makes the Saudi’s Look Like Feminists

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Two Evangelical Christian Schools have been revealed to have covered up rapes and sexual abuse on campus, and all evidence indicates that they did so because adminstrators thought that they deserved to be raped.

First, we have Bob Jones University:

For decades, students at Bob Jones University who sought counseling for sexual abuse were told not to report it because turning in an abuser from a fundamentalist Christian community would damage Jesus Christ. Administrators called victims liars and sinners.

 All of this happened until recently inside the confines of this insular university, according to former students and staff members who said they had high hopes that the Bob Jones brand of counseling would be exposed and reformed after the university hired a Christian consulting group in 2012 to investigate its handling of sexual assaults, many of which occurred long before the students arrived at the university.

 Last week, Bob Jones dealt a blow to those hopes, acknowledging that with the investigation more than a year old and nearing completion, the university had fired the consulting group, Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, or Grace, without warning or explanation. The dismissal has drawn intense criticism from some people with ties to Bob Jones, and prompted some victims and their allies — including many who were interviewed by Grace investigators — to tell their stories publicly for the first time, attracting more attention than ever to the university’s methods.

 On Friday, Stephen Jones, president of the university and great-grandson of its founder, addressed students and employees, saying, “We grew concerned that in the process, Grace had begun going beyond the originally outlined intentions,” but he would not elaborate. He said the university had not told Grace what its concerns were and wanted to discuss them with the consultant but could do so only face to face and felt compelled to fire the firm first.

Translation: They fired Grace (founded by Billy Graham’s grandson) because they found problems.

And we also see it at the newer, and somewhat more prestigious, Patrick Henry College a school that had a huge number of interns at the White House during the GW Bush administration.

Here, the allegations are more specific, and far more damning. They appear to have a policy of deliberately ascribing blame to the women in all cases, looking to blame them for their mode of dress, physical proximity, etc.

Claire was not the first female student to leave PHC disillusioned with the administration she had trusted to protect her. Other female students who say they reported sexual assault or harassment to the administration also left feeling that school officials blamed them instead of holding the accused male students accountable. The administration, they say, seemed much more concerned with protecting Patrick Henry’s pristine public image.

“Basically, my issue was swept under the rug, and the assaulter received little else but a reprimand,” says a young woman who attended Patrick Henry between 2004 and 2008. The student fell asleep at an off-campus party where there had been drinking and was awoken by a male PHC student assaulting her. She says she reported the incident to Patrick Henry. “The administration encouraged me to not go to the police and said that, because alcohol was involved and I was violating the rules there, they hinted that I could be expelled if I brought light to the incident,” the student says. “The focus was the alcohol. I drank. I sinned. I deserved to be assaulted in the middle of the night.”

There is more at the link if you can stomach it.

I would note that the problem of administrations wanting to cover up sexual assaults for reputational reasons is not unique to religious schools, but the philosophy that places all the “blame” for “sex” (rape ain’t sex, it is violence) on the women is.

Note that the administrator at Patrick Henry was a (self-hating) woman.

They hate women and their fear their power, and so the blame the women for violence done to them.

From the Department of Double Standards………

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

The big news in diplomacy recently is the leaking of a conversation between Victoria Nuland,the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and Geoff Pyatt, the Ambassador to the Ukraine, regarding the recent political upheavals in that former Soviet republic.

Diplomatic heads have been exploding over Neuland telling Pyatt, “F%$# the EU.

America’s new top diplomat for Europe seems to have been caught being decidedly undiplomatic about her EU allies in a phone call apparently intercepted and leaked by Russia.

 “F%$# the EU,” Victoria Nuland apparently says in a recent phone call with the US ambassador to Kiev, Geoff Pyatt, as they discuss the next moves to try to resolve the crisis in Ukraine amid weeks of pro-democracy protests which have rocked the country. The call appears to have been intercepted and released on YouTube, accompanied by Russian captions of the private and candid conversation.

 Although the US state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, White House spokesman Jay Carney alleged that because it had been “tweeted out by the Russian government, it says something about Russia’s role”.

 ………

 State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Nuland “has been in contact with her EU counterparts and of course has apologized for these reported comments”.

 She said that if the Russians were responsible for listening to, recording and posting a private diplomatic telephone conversation, it would be “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”

Well, first, I would argue that if a diplomat decides conduct a conversation over unsecured cell phones, they pretty much had it coming, and second, given the very recent history of the NSA targeting the sex lives of domestic political opponents of the Bush administration.

If intercepting an unencrypted call between two people discussing how to intervene in political instability on a nation state bordering your own is “a new low in Russian tradecraft,” then there are simply no words to describe what the NSA has been doing against domestic critics of our government.

Neither the EU’s outrage over the comments about the EU, which is a participant in the conflict, and therefore cannot be a good faith interlocutor on this issue, nor the US’s crocodile tears over being spied upon are justified.

They are simply exercises in self serving hypocrisy.

Barack Obama is Determined to Go to War Against Syria

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Because we need to find some little country to beat up every decade or so.

The US is now amping up complaints about the speed of Syrian chemical weapons destruction as a justification for military strikes:

The United States on Thursday accused Syria of deliberately delaying the surrender of its chemical weapons stockpiles and jeopardizing a tightly timed and costly international removal and destruction operation that narrowly averted U.S. airstrikes last year.

It was the first formal accusation that Syria was not cooperating with the terms of its disarmament after months in which international diplomats and chemical weapons experts marveled at the speed with which the process was being carried out. The public denunciation, however, closely tracked concerns that independent experts have expressed privately in recent weeks about the operation’s pace.

………

Most chemical weapons experts agree that Syria’s ability to manufacture and deploy the banned weapons was destroyed last year. ………

Pravda on the Potomac Blames Ukraine For Enacting U.S. Like Laws

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The Washington Post is criticizing the Yanukovych government in the Ukraine for laws that exist in their hometown without any comment:

The lunatics writing the Washington Post editorials want to blame the Ukraine (and the Russian president Putin) for its remarkable patient defense against the foreign supported, neo-nazi vandals of the Svoboda party who try to storm and take over government buildings in Kiev.
One paragraph especially shows their unmatched hypocrisy:

The repressive new restrictions, which criminalize such activity as wearing helmets and setting up tents in public spaces, look a lot like the strategy the Russian ruler used to crush mass demonstrations against his regime in 2011 and 2012. Mr. Yanukovych even adopted the regulation Russia imposed on nongovernment groups that receive foreign funding — a product of Mr. Putin’s paranoid conviction that pro-democracy movements in his country and elsewhere are the result of Western government plots.

Wearing helmets and masks at demonstrations has been unanimously criminalized by the D.C. Council in the Washington Post’s hometown. Tents set up in public spaces by the Occupy movement have been outlawed and cleared by force all over the United States. The Russian and Ukrainian laws that regulate foreign money to political organisations are copies of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act which is law of the land since 1938.

(emphasis original)

There is very little difference between how the Ukraine is using law as an instrument for crushing political protest, and how the United States s using law as an instrument for crushing political protest.

Not Enough Bullets………

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It appears that the hyper wealthy think that people not liking them or how they make money is just like the holocaust, “Seems like billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins is very, very afraid of progressives. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Perkins expressed his deep fear that fascist progressives were going to burn down the city.”

He actually invoked Kristallnacht:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is ludicrous.

BTW, San Francisco has a law against private vehicles blocking bus-stops, as the aforementioned Google buses do. It’s a $271 fine, and this means something north of $½ billion in fines have been ignored by the city by various tech firms, because big tech is above the law.

The idea that somehow or other, either criticism or legitimate law enforcement actions directed toward the extremely wealthy is somehow a fascist style persecution against the 0.01% is both pernicious and laughable.

Charlie Pierce Gets It

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Pierce notes that when you look at those who wish to criminalize abortion (and birth control), “There Is No Common Ground On Abortion.”

They want to punish women for their own sexuality.  They want to remove their autonomy, and they (Catholic Church excepted) don’t give a damn about children once they are born into poverty.

These people who are afraid by women, and the power that women possess, and want to minimize it, and there can be no compromise.

The idea of  “Common Ground” is that it provides a way for Democrats to weasel out of this.

Guess what, the only people who feel inspired to vote for members of the weasel family are other weasels, like skunks.

Go read the rest

Contemptible McCarthyite Behavior

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It appears that that the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Mike Rogers (R) and Dianne Feinstein(D),* have decided to imply that Edward Snowden was a Russian agent for a long time before he became a whistle blower:

The heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees suggested on Sunday that Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, might have been working for Russian spy services while he was employed at an agency facility in Hawaii last year and before he disclosed hundreds of thousands of classified government documents.

The lawmakers, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, offered no specific evidence that Mr. Snowden had cooperated with Moscow. Since Mr. Snowden’s disclosure first became public last spring, there has been much speculation that he was collaborating with a foreign spy service.

Nearly a year later, however, there has been no public indication that the F.B.I.’s investigation of Mr. Snowden’s actions, bolstered by separate “damage assessment” investigations at the N.S.A. and the Pentagon, has uncovered evidence that Mr. Snowden received help from a foreign intelligence service. A senior F.B.I. official said on Sunday that it was still the bureau’s conclusion that Mr. Snowden acted alone.

This is disgraceful, callous, and cowardly behavior, and it harkens back to the worst of Joe McCarthy.

Shame on Mike Rogers, and shame on Dianne Feinstein.

*Full disclosure, her grandfather, Sam Goldman, and my great-grandfather, Harry Goldman, were brothers.

Wanker of the Day: Yale University

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Before Plugin                                    After Plugin  

Yale has a course selection website, and a two students, Harry Yu and Peter Xu, came up with a personal website that aggregated the ratings so that students could look at ratings and workload when selecting a course.

Yale blocked the site, and threatened disciplinary action against them so another student, Sean Haufler,  wrote a Google Chrome shortcut that does this on the fly.

Basically, Yale does not want students to access this data in a coherent way, because, tenured professors who cannot or will not teach do not want students avoiding their courses:

In January 2012, two Yale students named Harry Yu and Peter Xu built a replacement to Yale’s official course selection website. They it called YBB+ (Yale Bluebook Plus), a “plus” version of the Yale-owned site, called Yale Bluebook. YBB+ offered different functionality from the official site, allowing students to sort courses by average rating and workload. The official Yale Bluebook, rather, showed a visual graph of the distribution of student ratings as well as a list of written student reviews. YBB+ offered a more lightweight user interface and facilitated easier comparison of course statistics. Students loved it. A significant portion of the student body started using it.

Fast-forward two years. Last Friday (1/10/14), Yale blocked YBB+’s IP address on the school network without warning. When contacted, Yale said that YBB+ infringed upon Yale’s trademark. Harry and Peter quickly removed the Yale name from the site, rebranded it as CourseTable and relaunched. Yale blocked the website again, declaring the website to be malicious activity.

Later that weekend, Yale’s administration told the student developers that the school didn’t approve of the use of its course evaluation data, saying that their website “let students see the averaged evaluations far too easily”. Harry and Peter were told to remove the feature from the CourseTable website or else they would be referred to the school’s punishment committee.

………

And then it hit the internet:

Finally, Mary Miller, the Dean of Yale College, wrote an open letter to Yale on Friday night. In this letter, she defended Yale’s decision to censor Harry and Peter’s website and course rating functionality, stating:

“[Yale’s course] evaluations… became available to students only in recent years and with the understanding that the information they made available to students would appear only as it currently appears on Yale’s sites — in its entirety.”


Worded less diplomatically, it appears the Dean of Yale College is expressing to students that, “You can use our course evaluation data, but only if you view the data as we tell you to view it”.

(emphasis original)

And there were the inevitable claims of copyright and trademark infringement, and Mr. Haufler came up with his solution:

The story does not end here, however, since there’s a way to distinguish the freedom of speech issue from the copyright claims. What if someone made a piece of software that displays Yale’s course evaluation data in a way that Yale disapproves of, while also (1) not infringing on Yale’s copyrights or trademarks, (2) not storing any sensitive data, (3) not scraping or collecting Yale’s data, and (4) not causing damages to Yale’s network or servers? If Yale censors this piece of software or punishes the software developer, it would clearly characterize Yale as an institution where having authority over students trumps freedom of speech.

Guess what? I made it last night.

I built a Chrome Extension called Banned Bluebook. It modifies the Chrome browser to add CourseTable’s functionality to Yale’s official course selection website, showing the course’s average rating and workload next to each search result. It also allows students to sort these courses by rating and workload. This is the original site, and this is the site with Banned Bluebook enabled (this demo uses randomly generated rating values).

Banned Bluebook never stores data on any servers. It never talks to any non-Yale servers. Moreover, since my software is smarter at caching data locally than the official Yale course website, I expect that students using this extension will consume less bandwidth over time than students without it. Don’t believe me? You can read the source code. No data ever leaves Yale’s control. Trademarks, copyright infringement, and data security are non-issues. It’s 100% kosher.

………

If Yale denies this right, I’ll see you at the punishment committee.

Here’s hoping that Yale backs down.  If not, I hope that you talk to the ACLU.

In my day, of course, we had to talk to each other, I recall a materials course, taught by a Professor Clapp, was called “Catching the Clapp,” but I only discovered that after I was half way through the class.

I appreciate the value of tenure, but this should not be a justification for erecting the, “The Great Firewall of Yale.”

It’s not like their jobs are at stake over this, just their egos.

What is Wrong with the TED Talks in One Person

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My call in is at 41:05

On Monday, I went to the Doctor, and on the way there, I was listening to the Midday talk show on WYPR, and they were interviewing Dan Pallotta, who gave a TED talk (no link, ever) about how we need to spend lots of money on high powered executives and self promotion, and not be so concerned about overhead costs.  (Link to this show)

I called into the show (you can hear me at 41:05), and made two points, both from experience:* That aggressive fundraising and growth as a strategy will take place at the expense of the core function of that organization, and that studies have shown that very high levels of compensation actually decrease performance.

Pallotta spouted banalities about the use of “appropriate metrics” when discussing how a high growth focus won’t distract , and for the studies showing that excessive pay decreases performance, he pulls out the straw man about whether we should stop paying real estate agents after their 3rd sale.

The reality is that his failed for-profit event promotion business died because it became excessive expensive, and the self aggrandizement of its CEO, Dan Pallotta.

In it’s own way, this is TED Talks in a microcosm, it is all about comforting the comfortable.

After all this, I Wiki the motherf%$#er and found this “clearly-written_by-his-publicist” article:

Pallotta TeamWorks
Pallotta built his for-profit company Pallotta TeamWorks. His company employed 400 full-time people in 16 U.S. offices and was raising $169 million annually by 2002. In total, the company raised $582 million from 1994 to 2002. The company charged a fixed production fee for its services. It did not do commission-based fundraising or get a “take” off of the top. One hundred percent of all donations went to lock boxes under the charities’ exclusive control. The charities then reimbursed the company for its expenses on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Pallotta TeamWorks fees, in a hindsight calculation, amounted to 4.01% of funds raised.

As is shown below, this is a bogus number. It refers only to direct fees, and not the expenses of putting on the increasingly lavish events.

Palotta was criticized for the large amounts of money Pallotta TeamWorks was making each year and the $394,500 salary he was receiving, described as “stratospheric” for the aid world.[ His annual salary ranged from $150,000 in 1994 to approximately $425,000 in 2002. Palotta commented that “We allow people to make huge profits doing any number of things that will hurt the poor, but we want to crucify anyone who wants to make money helping them”.

In 2002, the company moved into an innovative headquarters that it had outfitted, The Apostrophe. For years Pallotta TeamWorks was located in poor offices spaces in Hollywood. A new and completely empty 47,000 square-foot ’tilt-up’ warehouse was located in Atwater Village, Los Angeles. ………

Shut-down of Pallotta Teamworks

……… At the time the Breast Cancer 3-Day program was the company’s largest fundraising event series. For five years the Avon Products Foundation had been the beneficiary of the events, which netted $194 million in unrestricted funds for the Foundation in just five years. In 2002 Avon informed Pallotta TeamWorks that it would no longer be associated with the company’s events. Pallotta TeamWorks began negotiating with another charity to become the beneficiary of the events. During that period, Avon announced a nationwide series of multi-day breast cancer fundraising walks, each with a four-figure pledge minimum, in many of the same cities in which the 3-Days had been conducted and, in many cases, on very similar dates. As a result, the new charity with which Pallotta TeamWorks had been negotiating, fearing that the events would cannibalize one another, decided against partnering with Pallotta TeamWorks on the 3-Days. A few days after the news, on August 23, 2002, the company laid off its entire staff nationwide and closed the doors on its new headquarters.

So, they got dumped by their charities (more below), and they tried to set up competing events to keep their gravy train rolling.

But we can look at the Internet, where nothing goes away, and see what was being said of Pallotta Teamworks at the time:

Published on Tuesday, August 27, 2002 in the Washington Post

Expenses Eat Profits Of District AIDSRide

 by Carol Morello

Expenses ate up at least 86 percent of the $3.6 million raised in June for the annual D.C. AIDSRide organized by Pallotta TeamWorks, a rate that is expected to increase when the tally is complete, the benefiting charities said yesterday.

If the riders had not raised more money than required, the event might have lost money. Per-rider expenses averaged $400 more than the $2,400 each rider needed to raise to participate. But the event turned a $500,000 profit only because riders raised an average of more than $3,200, according to preliminary estimates made by the two charities that co-sponsored the ride.

“Disappointed doesn’t even begin to describe how we feel,” said Cornelius Baker, head of Whitman-Walker Clinic, one of two charities benefiting from the ride.

When the audit is completed in the fall, the return may be less than 14 cents on the dollar.

………

Critics of Pallotta events said the return on the D.C. ride was indicative of problems that have beset the company this summer.

“The returns are abysmal,” said Wayne Turner, an AIDS activist with the D.C. chapter of Act Up. “People are beginning to wake up to the fact these AIDS rides are not about raising money at all. They’re about building Dan Pallotta’s empire, which is now crumbling.”

This year, Pallotta TeamWorks was to have run 23 charitable events across the United States and in Africa and Europe. Pallotta’s fee for each AIDS ride runs from $225,000 — the amount for the District ride — to $450,000. Locally, it also has organized the Avon Breast Cancer walk, held in May, and a night walk this month from Fairfax County to the District to raise awareness of suicide prevention.

Pallotta had been one of the country’s most successful promoters of charitable events. But criticism grew as the company expanded and began aggressively promoting itself. Its events are characterized by emotional opening and closing ceremonies, slick marketing and creature comforts for participants, including cucumber eye masks and massages. Expenses run into the millions, though net proceeds are often high, too. But recently, many riders and walkers have complained that the events’ purity has been clouded by excessive promotion. At walks and rides attended by survivors and relatives of people with breast cancer and AIDS, vans were set up marketing the company’s other events and selling books by founder Dan Pallotta.

………
 Pallotta, though, has lost numerous clients this year.

This spring, Avon Products announced that it would no longer use the company to produce its three-day breast cancer walks and would launch its own walkathons. After seven years of collaboration, Food & Friends decided to hold its own bike event next year. The huge Heartland AIDSRide across the Midwest also is being dropped.

So he is a f%$#ing serial narcissist who put on lavish charity events for the purpose of his own self-aggrandizement, and so his business imploded.

His response is to go on TED and suggest that the way to improve our charities is to throw more money at those overpaid narcissistic sociopaths who are our looting class.

Just beautiful.

* My background:

  • I audited my university (UMass Amherst) as a part of a student government committee.

  • I founded a not-for-profit, and successfully took it thorugh the 501(c)3 process.

  • My experience was that a laser-like focus on aggressive growth and increased prestige is achieved at the expense of quality services.

  • That, as numerous behavioral economics studies have shown (Dan Ariely, for one), very high levels of compensation are associated with DECREASED performance.

Obama Presents Cosmetic Reforms to the US State Security Apparatus

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First, it must be noted that Obama’s definition of spying is the same as the one used by DNI James Clapper as an alibi for perjury, that you can collect everything, and it is not spying unless you actually call it up for a specific purpose, even if we have found that NSA employees tracking ex-giflfriends with that “not spying” data that they collected:

President Obama said Friday, in his first major speech on electronic surveillance, that “the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security.”

 Obama placed restrictions on access to domestic phone records collected by the National Security Agency, but the changes he announced will allow it to continue — or expand — the collection of personal data from billions of people around the world, Americans and foreign citizens alike.

 Obama squares that circle with an unusually narrow definition of “spying.” It does not include the ingestion of tens of trillions of records about the telephone calls, e-mails, locations and relationships of people for whom there is no suspicion of relevance to any threat.

 In his speech, and an accompanying policy directive, Obama described principles for “restricting the use of this information” — but not for gathering less of it.

 Alongside the invocation of privacy and restraint, Obama gave his plainest endorsement yet of “bulk collection,” a term he used more than once and authorized explicitly in Presidential Policy Directive 28. In a footnote, the directive defined the term to mean high-volume collection “without the use of discriminants.”

 That is perhaps the central feature of “the golden age of signals intelligence,” which the NSA celebrates in top-secret documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden. Obama for the first time put his own imprimatur on a collection philosophy that one of those documents summarized this way: “Order one of everything from the menu.”

 ………

 “It’s noteworthy that the president addressed only the bulk collection of call records, but not any of the other bulk collection programs revealed by the media,” said Alexander Abdo, an attorney with the ACLU’s national security project. “That is a glaring omission. The president needs to embrace structural reforms that will protect us from all forms of bulk collection and that will make future overreach less likely.”

Other bulk collection programs, like the NSA hoovering over 200 million text messages a day.

You could tell that this was entirely damage control, and an attempt to avoid any meaningful reform because of is bizarre and ahistorical invocation of silversmith and revolutionary Paul Revere:

In a speech that tried hard to defend the actions of the U.S. intelligence community while simultaneously admitting that some of those actions were unnecessary and egregious, President Obama on 17 January 2014 announced modest reforms of NSA spying practices that have been revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.

 President Obama began by comparing the National Security Agency to the Sons of Liberty, an American revolutionary group famous for the 1773 Boston Tea Party, and one of whose members, Paul Revere, famously warned of incoming British troops. Ironically, Revere’s legendary midnight ride would have most likely been stopped by the British if they had the NSA’s metadata collection capabilities. Even more ironically, the American Revolution was kicked off in part by overly broad general warrants that gave British troops nearly unlimited power to search for contraband. It’s all about intelligence.

I would also suggest that you read Marcy Wheeler’s list of secret police style techniques that Obama thinks is OK, because he has claimed that there have been no abuses:

  • The spying on the personal lives of political opponents who have nothing to do with terrorism.
  • Spying on Antiwar activists. 
  • Continued activities forbidden by the FISA Court 
  • Never developed minimization procedures as required by law
  • Etc. (Read the whole thing at the link)

It’s no wonder that Glen Greenwald has dismissed this as a PR gesture.

Obama stressed the importance of restoring trust in our state security apparatus, and this does very little to inspire trust.

The definitive word comes from public interest Telco Maven Harold Feld, “First step of oversight that regains my trust. Actually enforce the law.”

This does not do that, and it is clear that the “Worst Constitutional Law Professor ever™” has no interest in ever doing so.