When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth-unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them.

— John Maynard Keynes
Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930)

H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

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.

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

the best part about bitcoins is that you get to watch libertarians slowly discover why financial regulations exist to begin with

— Pocius Pocius (@The_Pocius) February 18, 2014

Sing it Brother!

Not only did she do this, she bragged about this when she was DC Schools Chancellor:

Rhee had poor class management skills, she said, recalling that her class “was very well known in the school because you could hear them traveling anywhere because they were so out of control.” On one particularly rowdy day, she said she decided to place little pieces of masking tape on their lips for the trip to the school cafeteria for lunch.

“OK kids, we’re going to do something special today!” she said she told them.

Rhee said it worked well until they actually arrived at the cafeteria. “I was like, ‘OK, take the tape off. I realized I had not told the kids to lick their lips beforehand…The skin is coming off their lips and they’re bleeding. Thirty-five kids were crying.”

Now Ms. Rhee claimed later that she said this to “encourage” the first year teachers that she was talking to.

Yeah sure. You were “encouraging” them by admitting to child abuse.

She also fired a principal on camera.

I am so not surprised that she is married to Kevin Johnson, whose record on education, and his behavior towards students, is the subject of significant dispute:

Sexual assault and harassment allegations

During the summer of 1995, a sixteen-year-old girl living in his home alleged that Johnson had molested her. Johnson apologized to the girl when he was confronted by her with the accusation during a phone conversation recorded by Phoenix police. However, he also stated that “what you’re saying happened, I’m not entirely agreeing happened.”^[62] The Sacramento Bee stated that they had received a copy of a proposed settlement agreement, under which Johnson would have paid the girl’s family $230,000.^[63] After conducting an investigation, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute, on the grounds that there was not a reasonable likelihood of conviction.^[64]

High School investigation

On April 16, 2008, rival mayoral candidate Leonard Padilla distributed a 2007 report of similar allegations made against Johnson at St. HOPE Sacramento High School. The allegations were investigated by local police, but no charges were filed. On April 29, 2008, a group of female civic leaders including former Sacramento Mayor Ann Rudin, Sacramento Municipal Utility District board member Genevieve Shiroma, and former State Senator Deborah Ortiz demanded the release of the police report on the matter.^[65] The teacher to whom the student initially brought the complaint subsequently resigned over the incident, claiming, “St. HOPE sought to intimidate the student through an illegal interrogation and even had the audacity to ask me to change my story.”^[66] Sacramento Police Chief Rick Braziel responded, saying, “I think the allegations at the school were handled in the way that you would want them handled. Immediately they followed all the normal protocols that they were supposed to follow. I think it was pretty clear there was nothing there… We did ask the young lady whether anyone had influenced her – her answer was no.”^[67] The Sacramento County Sheriff John McGinness said on May 30, 2008, that Johnson’s actions, though ill-advised, were not illegal.^[68]

St. HOPE Academy’s alleged misuse of AmeriCorps funds

On April 9, 2009, Acting U.S. Attorney Lawrence G. Brown announced that St. HOPE Academy had agreed to pay $423,836.50 over ten years in settlement of allegations that it did not appropriately spend AmeriCorps grants and education awards and did not adequately document spending of grants.^[69] The settlement amount represented one-half of the $847,673 in AmeriCorps funds received by St. HOPE Academy over three years from 2004 to 2007.^[69] Johnson, St. HOPE Academy’s founder and former CEO, agreed to pay $72,836.50 of St. HOPE Academy’s $73,836.50 initial payment.^[69] In settlement, St. HOPE Academy acknowledged not adequately documenting a portion of its AmeriCorps grant expenditures, and the Corporation for National and Community Service terminated its September 24, 2008 suspension of St. HOPE Academy and Johnson from receiving federal funds, ending questions about Sacramento’s eligibility to receive federal stimulus funds.^[69]

BTW, at the time of these allegations, Rhee was on the board of the St. HOPE school, and was informed of the allegations. 

Her response?  **crickets**

Why we would allow either of these people to get anywhere near children is beyond me.

Then again, anyone whose livelihood involves figuring out a way to allow for the Banksters to make money off of our children has pretty much offered a formal resignation from the society of “Mindful Human Beings.”

The special master for the the Apple/Amazon e-book is claiming that Apple is obstructing his investigation:

A feud between Apple Inc. and a lawyer appointed by a federal court judge to monitor the company’s e-book pricing reform became even more acrimonious Monday.

Michael Bromwich, the lawyer picked as Apple’s monitor, said in court documents filed Monday that Apple’s characterization of his team’s activities as a “roving investigation” in fact “bear no relation whatsoever to the activities we have attempted to conduct.”

In an 11-page document accompanied by hundreds of pages of emails, Mr. Bromwich described repeated alleged efforts by Apple to block interviews between him and senior executives, as well as the company’s failure to turn over relevant documents.

………

In December, Apple asked Manhattan U.S. District Judge Denise Cote to halt Mr. Bromwich’s oversight of the company pending the company’s appeal of Judge Cote’s antitrust judgment against the company. Judge Cote ruled in July that Apple colluded with five major U.S. publishers to drive up the prices of e-books, a verdict Apple has said it planned to appeal.

The Justice Department, which reviewed Mr. Bromwich’s proposal for the monitoring position, said in court papers filed in December that halting Mr. Bromwich’s work would go against the “public’s interested in preventing further antitrust violations by Apple.”

On Monday, Mr. Bromwich said he routinely met with top management at the three organizations he previously monitored and had “never before had a request for a meeting or interview in a monitoring assignment rejected or even deferred.”

“This is far less access than I have ever received during a comparable period of time in the three other monitorships I have conducted,” Mr. Bromwich said.

Considering Apple’s heritage of psychopathic arrogance, (OK, Steve Jobs’ heritage of psychopathic arrogance) it is unsurprising that they would feel put upon for having to actually change their behavior for their behavior.

Hoocoodanode?

Hippo	Gnu	Yarrr!!!!

Happy new year, everyone.

Following the ruling by District Judge Richard Leon in Washington stating that the NSA domestic spying program was illegal, in the New York District, District Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that the program was legal:

A federal judge in New York ruled Friday that the massive collection of domestic telephone data brought to light by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is lawful, rejecting a challenge to the program by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The decision marked a victory for the government less than two weeks after a District Court judge ruled against it, finding that the NSA’s program was almost certainly unconstitutional. If the split in rulings continues through the appeals process, it is likely the Supreme Court will have to decide the issue.

In a 53-page opinion, U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III said Friday that the program, which collects virtually all Americans’ phone records, represents the U.S. government’s “counter-punch” to eliminate the al-Qaeda terrorist network and does not violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure.

Pauley endorsed the assertion made by government officials that if the United States had the phone data collection program before 2001, they might have had a better chance at preventing the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the world,” Pauley wrote. “It launched a number of counter-measures, including a bulk telephony metadata collection program — a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data.”

He added: “This blunt tool only works because it collects everything.”

Yes, this ruling is as cowardly and delusional as it sounds. As Charlie Pierce observes, “It cannot be easy issuing an important ruling while hiding under your bed.”

I would also note that this ruling does not appear to address any real constitutional issues, and it relies on facts not in evidence.  (The judge implies that the program has produced intelligence successes, when it has not.)

The Washington Post‘s technology reporter has called the ruling, “Kafkaesque.”

It should also be noted that some of the claims made by the government are flat out wrong.  For instance, the NSA has real time data as to the countries of both callers.

What’s more there are increasing indications that the NSA’s “drinking from a fire hose” strategy is actually harming its intelligence capabilities:

William Binney, creator of some of the computer code used by the National Security Agency to snoop on Internet traffic around the world, delivered an unusual message here in September to an audience worried that the spy agency knows too much.

It knows so much, he said, that it can’t understand what it has.

“What they are doing is making themselves dysfunctional by taking all this data,” Mr. Binney said at a privacy conference here.

The agency is drowning in useless data, which harms its ability to conduct legitimate surveillance, claims Mr. Binney, who rose to the civilian equivalent of a general during more than 30 years at the NSA before retiring in 2001. Analysts are swamped with so much information that they can’t do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse.

This is not about safety.

Rather it emerges from a miasma of political expedience, cowardice, and the increasingly for-profit nature of our state security apparatus.

We acutally have one each failing this week, here is the bank:

24. Texas Community Bank, National Association, The Woodlands, TX

Full FDIC list

And here is the credit union closing:

13. Bagumbayan Credit Union, Chicago, IL

Full NCUA list

So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

Not a bad year for bank failures.

While the committee who makes the decision in Oklahoma could (but shouldn’t) argue that Satanism is not a “real” religion, or too
on the “fringe”, neither of these arguments would apply to Hindus, who have somewhere around 1 Billion adherents world wide, and so the request by the Universal Society of Hinduism place a statue of Lord Hanuman: (shown)

A week after the Satanic Temple said they wanted to put up a monument outside the Oklahoma Capitol building (in response to a Ten Commandments monument already on the grounds), a Hindu group is following in their footsteps.

Activist Rajan Zed put out a press release today saying that his group, the Universal Society of Hinduism, would be applying for a monument of their own outside the Capitol building, this one honoring Lord Hanuman:

One depiction of Lord Hanuman

[Zed] said that if the Oklahoma State Capitol was open to different monuments, we would love to have a statue of Lord Hanuman, who was greatly revered and worshipped and known for incredible strength and was perfect grammarian.

…

Rajan Zed stated that he had written to Oklahoma State Capitol Preservation Commission Chair Trait Thompson and others for detailed procedure, required forms, conditions to be met for approval, size and dimensions of the statue, etc., for permission to erect the Lord Hanuman statue, which they planned to make big and weather-proof.

If the Commission votes yes on the proposal, conservatives will flip out.

If they vote no, they’re just inviting a lawsuit.

I have no sympathies for the Talibaptist Neanderthals in Oklahoma who wanted to inflict their religion on the society at large.

They made their bed, let them lie in it.

As an aside, I think that the various American Indian tribes in Oklahoma should apply as well.  They are very much a part of Oklahoma’s heritage.

Basically it comes down to the fact that the Clintons policy on the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, & Real Estate) has always been driven by Bob Rubin and his proteges, so now Elizabeth Warren’s drive to limit the reach of big finance is being viewed in the context of the 2016 Presidential race:

You can frame this conventionally: supporting regulators, punishing rules violators, mopping up 2008-style disasters to limit the damage and attempting to prevent such chaos from happening again. But by “tougher rules,” maybe Americans are really signaling a vague but persistent dissatisfaction with an economy that has become dominated by the financial sector. And you can see within that how transforming banking back to its traditional purpose — as a conduit for putting capital in the hands of worthwhile business ventures and driving shared prosperity — would be one antidote to an unequal society full of financial titan gatekeepers, who confiscate a giant share of the money flowing through the system.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren — in many ways the avatar of a new populist insurgency within the Democratic Party that seeks to combine financial reform and economic restoration — will speak later today in Washington at the launch of a new report that marks a key new phase in this movement. Released by Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute – and called “An Unfinished Mission: Making Wall Street Work for Us” — the report is a revelation, because it finally invites fundamental discussions about these issues. Its 11 chapters from some of the leading thinkers on financial reform do look back at the successes and failures of the signal financial reform law of this generation, the Dodd-Frank Act. But the report also weaves in a story about how we can reorient finance as a complement to the real economy, rather than its overriding force. Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the co-editor of the report, tells Salon, “The financial sector is still eating up a lot of GDP [gross domestic product], and it’s not clear what we’re getting out of it. We want to get the conversation at that level.”

While Dave Dayen (above) is rather circumspect about the potential impact  on the Presidential Campaign, Noam Scheiber is not in his analysis in TNR, “Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren.”

I get the sense that Warren is about as interested in running for president as I am interested in the sport of curling, but I do think that she wants to make sure that the next Democratic nominee will be free of the thrall of the Rubenites.

Ummmm…..Ewwwwwww!

Yes, you can actually buy this on Kindle at Amazon.

He got three personal bests, though on one of them, he missed the cut-off by ⁸/₁₀₀ of a second.

I taped^* all of his solves, 3×3, 4×4, 5×5, and one-handed 3×3, but these are the ones he put on his Youtube channel, because he thought that these were the most upload worthy.

I mostly acted as a camera man, and stayed out of his way while he hung out with his peeps.

No need to embarrass him by making his old fart dad to prominent.

^*Not really taped, it was a digital video camera, but it’s a decent way to describe it.

What can I say, he has finished morphing into George W. Bush with a tan.^™

Now Mr. “I am against stupid wars,” is arguing for a stupid war, and invoking the possibility that Syria will give WMDS to terrorists.

I am not surprised.

This war is about dick swinging over his “Red Line” comment.

(on edit)

Well, it looks like John Kerry is seriously in the running as the worst Secretary of State of the 2000s, and since this includes Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, this is a considerable accomplishment:

Secretary of State John Kerry told House Democrats during a Monday conference call that they face a “Munich moment” as they weigh whether to approve striking Syria to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons, two sources with knowledge of the call told NBC News.

The phrase is a reference to the 1938 Munich Pact that ceded control of part of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany — a moment that history has harshly judged as an appeasement of Adolf Hitler that preceded World War II.

Seriously, invoking Hitler and Munich?  This from the man who once asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

This is absolutely loathsome, and typifies the attitude of the Obama administration, which has abandoned any sense of perspective and history on this subject.

That being said, it might be the most loathsome thing said over the weekend about this, because we have John McCain on the political scene:

Greg tweets:

On CNN just now, McCain says Congress overruling Prez on a national security matter would set dangerous precedent

This is total, complete, nonsense, and betrays a deep lack of understanding — or perhaps a lack of support — for the U.S. political system.

To remind Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) of the basics of the Constitution: Congress and the president are co-equal. That’s true in general, and it’s true of “national security matters” in particular. The president is commander-in-chief, but Congress not only has the power to declare war, but also the responsibility for funding the armed forces, the diplomats and, well, everything else in the government.

It appears that John McCain cannot be bothered to read the Constitution, which vests the power to declare war exclusively in the hands of the legislative branch.

Additionally, the Obama administration, or at least the increasingly unhinged John Kerry has declared that, “Obama ‘has the right’ to strike regardless of vote.”

I am appalled. This is a position which is simply lawless, and makes a joke of both the Constitution and any Congressional vote.

I’m not sure what the vote is for, unless it’s just politics. (see pic)

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.^™

H/t Living Blue in a Red State for the pic.

H/t Jill on Facebook .

It appears that John Boehner is too drunk to do the most basic job of Speaker of the House, which is count the f%$#ing votes:

The surprise defeat of the farm bill in the House on Thursday underscored the ideological divide between the more conservative, antispending Republican lawmakers and their leadership, who failed to garner sufficient votes from their caucus as well as from Democrats.

The vote against the bill, 234 to 195, comes a year after House leaders pulled the measure off the calendar because conservative lawmakers demanded deeper cuts in the food stamp program and Democrats objected. This year’s measure called for more significant cuts than the Senate bill, but it still did not go far enough to get a majority in the House to support an overhaul of the nation’s food and farm programs. Sixty-two Republicans, or more than a quarter of the caucus, voted with Democrats to defeat the bill.

The failure was a stinging defeat for Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, who continues to have trouble marshaling the Republican support he needs to pass major legislation. Without the solid backing of his party, Mr. Boehner has to rely on some Democratic support, which deserted him Thursday.

Mr. Boehner was unable to secure the votes of a number of recently elected and strongly conservative lawmakers who were averse to cutting deals on legislation like the farm bill. Traditionally, the farm bill has passed easily with support from urban lawmakers concerned with nutrition spending and rural members focused on farm programs. But conservatives said they were more driven by a desire to shrink the size of government through spending cuts, not expand it though crop insurance subsides to rich farmers.

The conventional wisdom was that 40 Dem votes would allow it to pass (there were only 24), but they would needed have to get 44 Dem votes for it to pass.

Boehner caved to the Teabaggers add gutted food stamps, and then hew did not get the Teabagger votes, and THEN he failed to count the votes.

Even if you like his politics, it is clear that John Boehner is completely incompetent.

I agree with Nancy Pelosi’s characterization of this cluster f%$# as, “Major Amateur Hour.”

I used my phone to take some pictures at work yesterday afternoon.

I needed to share the packing arrangement for a kit with the rest of my team.

So I downloaded the pix from my phone, and sent them around.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that after I took those pictures, I took some pictures of our cats having a cute-gasm.

When I sent the photos around, I inadvertently sent the cat photos as well.

D’oh!!!!!

Senator Jeff Merkley, who has been doing everything but blinking his eyes in Morse code to, is now criticizing Barack Obama for being WAY too flip about spying on everyone in the United States:

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) on Friday criticized President Barack Obama’s response to the recently publicized National Security Agency phone and Internet data surveillance programs.

“There are several parts to this that the president glossed over,” Merkley told MSNBC after Obama spoke.

The Oregon senator said Obama took the data collection “very lightly.” In response to the president’s claims that the appropriate Senate Intelligence Committees were briefed on the NSA programs, Merkley said he had to seek out “special permission” to learn about the intelligence initiatives because that information was not freely available.

Merkley is unwilling to admit it, but the core of this problem is that Barack Obama does not care about the 4^th amendment or the right to privacy of the American people.

It is a calculus that is based on hypocrisy, cowardice, and venality. He is unwilling to support our rights if there is an off chance that something bad will happen.

Supporting civil rights, and the Constitution, matters most when its difficult., not when it’s convenient.

Worst ……… Constitutional ……… law ……… professor ……… ever.

He’s a good friend of hers, and so she decided to sing him a birthday song.

Actually, she left him a voice mail, and said that she would leave him a dozen more, and I suggested that she do a song for him instead.

Sometimes, her old man has a decent idea.

ROTFLMAO.

(on edit)

Issues with the Facebook embed, so here is a Youtube.

Specifically, among other whiz bang, they are using cell phone camera technology in order to make cheaper missile sensors: (paid subscription required)

One program singled out for praise is wavefront coding, envisaged as a way of potentially reducing weight and complexity of the seeker optics in the front of a weapon. The idea—which has been developed to keep cell phone cameras inexpensive—is being examined by experts from MBDA, Selex ES and two universities in Scotland. In current missiles, heavy optics are necessary because the seekers have to operate in a wide range of temperatures, requiring correcting lenses and complex surfaces in order to maintain acceptable performance.

Wavefront coding introduces a simpler seeker layout and software processing, eliminating the need for the correcting optics. Designers place a cubic phase mask in one of the optics , which disrupts and aberrates the normal image. But knowledge of the characteristics of the phase mask means that software processing can be applied to allow sharp images to be recovered, even for objects well outside of the conventional depth-of-field of the original optical arrangement. Engineers point out that this could help reduce weight of current missiles by as much as 10%.

I always wondered how cell phones managed to “focus”.

I always figured that they weren’t using conventional moving lenses, there is not a whole bunch of space for that, and mechanical actuators at that size could drive up the price.