Category: Wanker

Straight from Seditious Conspiracy to Bad Parody

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It appears that the Y’all Qaeda folks out in Oregon have been raising some cash from their fellow travellers.

One of the guys appears to have drunk most of the proceeds:

………

Can we all just calm down? Can we all stipulate that there is a difference between an “ISIS-inspired” crime and an actual terror plot? Can we accept the possibility that a crook might seek to aggrandize his banal crimes with some geopolitical, religious filigree? Can we look for relief in the fact that the seditious claque out in Oregon is coming apart in the most hilarious ways?

Joe Oshaugnessy, an Arizona militiaman, has been actively seeking volunteers through social media to join the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge…Jon Ritzheimer, the Arizona militiaman known for organizing anti-Muslim rallies and fundraising through his “Rogue Infidel” site, went to see Oshaugnessy at the motel and found him drinking there, according to Maureen Peltier, a disabled National Guard woman who claims to be the group’s official spokeswoman. Peltier said Ritzheimer had confirmed that Oshaugnessy had kept the money he had raised through social media for himself and had spent at least some of it on a drinking binge.

It really is the Whiskey Rebellion!

This level of schadenfreude may have deleterious health effects, kind of like how hypotonic overhydration (excess water consumption) can.

So be careful.

TransCanada, Calm Down and Have a Piping Hot Cup of Shut the F%$# Up

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Everyone’s favorite oil spill pipeline company is suing the United States for stopping the pipeline:

TransCanada said on Wednesday that it would seek $15 billion in damages over the Obama administration’s decision to cancel the company’s Keystone XL pipeline project.

The company is taking the unusual step of suing through the North American Free Trade Agreement, calling the decision “arbitrary and unjustified.” The Canadian business also filed a lawsuit in Houston asking that the decision be overturned.

“TransCanada has been unjustly deprived of the value of its multibillion-dollar investment by the U.S. administration’s action,” the company said in a statement. “Rather, the denial was a symbolic gesture based on speculation about the (false) perceptions of the international community regarding the administration’s leadership on climate change.”

Seriously, just stop whining.

What a Complete Prat

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It appears that the head of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schults, is casting about for the a scapegoat to excuse her lack of success.

Her latest choice is to blame those millennial and generation X women for being too “complacent”:

Q: Do you notice a difference between young women and women our age in their excitement about Hillary Clinton? Is there a generational divide?
DWS: Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.

Needless to say, she has pissed a lot of activists who the Democrats are going to need this November.

I would also note that in this same interview, she doubled down on opposing medical marijuana, and repeated the canard that it is a gateway drug, while denying the actual role of pharmaceutical opiates, further demonstrating her complete cluelessness on the issues.

In any case, We’ve also had repeated calls for her to be fired. (See here, here, and here)

Given her history, particularly when she refused to support Democratic candidates when they were opposing Cuban American Republicans, and was at best tepid at supporting the Walker recall in Wisconsin, I’m not sure why she ended up in charge of the DCCC.

She is and remains a useless careerist who leaves a trail of carnage wherever she goes.

She shouldn’t be dog catcher.

Excessive Schadenfreude May Cause Dizziness, Euphoria, and a Sense of Smug Satisfaction

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So now both Donald Trump and Ann Coulter have gone birther on Ted Cruz.

First, the Donald:

Donald Trump cast doubt on Republican candidate Ted Cruz’s eligibility for the presidency on Tuesday, on the basis that he may not be a natural-born US citizen.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump said the fact that Cruz was born in Canada was a “very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head.”

The Republican frontrunner went on to claim a “lot of people are talking about … the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”

Cruz, whose campaign declined to comment, was born in Calgary in 1971. Although his father Rafael was not an American citizen at the time, his Delaware-born mother, Eleanor, was. Article II of the US constitution requires that “no person except a natural born Citizen … shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

And from the Dennis Rodman of Republican spokesbimbos, we have:

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who once dismissed birthers as “cranks,” suggested Wednesday that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) may be ineligible for the presidency because he is not a “natural born citizen.”

In a series of tweets, Coulter, an ardent anti-immigration advocate, suggested that Cruz was not a “natural born citizen,” a requirement to run for President outlined in the Constitution:

I’m amused.

Good Riddance, Reptile*

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Steve Israel, former Blue Dog who became the head of the Democratic Campaign Congressional campaign committee, and used his position to avoid challenging vulnerable Republicans when he wasn’t trying to rebuild the Blue Dog Caucus, is retiring:

Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington) won’t seek re-election to a ninth term in November in order to spend more time writing his second book, he said Tuesday.

The Democrat, who has held the seat since 2000, said in a statement, “It is time for me to pursue new passions and develop new interests, mainly spend more time writing my second novel.”

He said he is “looking forward to spending more time home and frequenting my beloved New York diners. Simply put, it’s time to pass on the torch.” He will complete his term and retire at the end of the year.

Any guesses on how long before he gets a lobbying gig with a seven figure salary for dictators, polluters, or despots?

I’ll take the under on 2 months after he leaves office.

*FWIW, Nancy Pelosi, when she made him of the DCCC, she admiringly noted his “Reptilian Tendencies.”

We’re Apple, We Don’t Care. We Don’t Have To.

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We don’t care, we don’t have to … we’re Apple.

Apple is being sued by Apple 4S users because the pushed an upgrade that rendered their phones about as useful as a third tit:

Lawyers in New York have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, saying that the iOS 9 operating system upgrade slowed their older iPhone 4S handsets into uselessness.

 “Plaintiff and other class members were faced with a difficult decision: use a buggy, slow device that disrupts everyday life or spend hundreds of dollars to buy another smartphone,” reads the lawsuit spotted by Apple Insider.

 When iOS 9 was released in September, the operating system was supposed to fix many of the faults of its predecessors. But the owners of more than 100 iPhone 4S handsets claim Apple knew the new OS would be virtually unusable on the older hardware but released it anyway to force people to upgrade.

 To add insult to injury, Apple won’t allow the aggrieved users to uninstall iOS 9 and go back to simpler times. So 4S owners are left stuck with sluggish screens, hanging apps, and lousy touch use, the lawsuit claims.

 Apple’s internal testing must have shown these effects while the operating system was being developed, but Cook & Co nevertheless advertised the new operating system’s benefits without warning of obsolescent hardware, the plaintiff’s lawyers argue.

 ………

 One suspects Apple’s response will be “well what did you expect?” The iPhone 4S runs a 32-bit A5 processor and packs 512MB of DDR2 RAM, compared to the iPhone 6S’s A9 64-bit core with the M9 coprocessor and 2GB of DDR4 memory. Expecting similar performance ignores certain technical realities.

Actually, the scenario here is pretty straightforward.

Apple pushed an upgrade to inadequate hardware that could not handle it.

Either they did not do appropriate testing, or they did the testing, but decided that they could force users of old phones to upgrade.

In either case, Apple could have provided a downgrade option, or warned of the issues before the release, but they don’t give a sh%$.

Class action lawsuits are the corporate ecosystem’s way of making you give a sh%$.

How Did This Company Get Any Backers?

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Looks Like VC Pump and Dump Bullsh%$to Me

In the continuing revelations regarding the Silicon Valley-eaque medical startup, I have come to the conclusion that it’s investors, and its market cap, are more a product of its founder is an earnest attractive blond who dropped out of Stanford.

First it was repeated reports that their technology failed to work even in highly scripted dog and pony shows for potential investors, now we discover that the company was doing of this while using regulatory loopholes to avoid FDA oversight:

This suggests one of two possibilities: either Theranos’ customers received test results generated by equipment that no federal official checked for accuracy, or Theranos wasn’t using the proprietary technology behind its $9 billion valuation to return results to patients. A recent report from The Wall Street Journal pointed toward an extreme version of option number one: that Theranos actively hid its proprietary technology from lab inspectors, which would explain why the inventions were never checked. And Theranos has publicly proclaimed it used its technology on patients, which means either that the company’s lying or patients received tests that had not been validated by any federal authorities.

“CMS did not inspect the Theranos proprietary technology.”Theranos first came under scrutiny after a report in the Journal in October, which said that Theranos’ inventions were only used on a small number of tests sold to patients. On Sunday, the paper reported that during an inspection by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services auditors, employees who worked in the “Normandy” section of the Theranos lab were told not to enter or exit the lab; the inspectors toured the section of the lab that housed traditional lab instruments Theranos bought from other companies but never saw the Edison machines — Theranos’ highly publicized blood analyzers. This account fits with lab inspection documents that The Verge obtained from CMS, which do not mention Theranos’ proprietary technology at all. There’s a reason for that: “CMS did not inspect the Theranos proprietary technology,” a spokesperson for CMS told The Verge in an email. Consequently, at no point between Theranos opening its first wellness center in 2013 and a surprise inspection by the FDA in August did any federal official examine the company’s proprietary technology — either its Edison machine, which reads samples, or its “Nanotainer” device, which stores blood from pinprick testing.

The lack of inspection was possible in part because Theranos registered its technology in categories that have minimal oversight. Theranos sold its tests under a designation that even the US Food and Drug Administration calls a regulatory loophole: the “lab-developed test.” Under this designation, no pre-market FDA approval is required for the company’s blood tests — as it typically is for most drugs and devices. The category was meant for research hospitals, which sometimes adapt commercial tests to suit patients’ needs, and Theranos is one of several companies using the loophole to sell its tests to the public. Instead of the FDA, regulation of Theranos’ labs fell to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Theranos also registered its blood containers as FDA Class I medical devices in 2013, according to the FDA. That category of medical device doesn’t require an FDA inspection. No FDA inspectors entered a Theranos facility until August of this year, during a round of surprise inspections. In the FDA’s inspection report, it referred to Theranos’ Nanotainer as an “uncleared medical device” and altered its registration to a Class II medical device, which requires greater oversight.

CMS declined to provide us with additional information about Theranos. The FDA provided some information about Theranos’ regulatory status — including the fact that Theranos registered its containers as Class I in 2013 — but declined to reveal anything further about the company.

I’m beginning to think that the whole startup culture is a code word for some sort of charity for overpriviliged white boys.

Asshole of the Week

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No, he’s not an asshole, an asshole asshole actually serves an essential function.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is just a parasite:

Everybody hates Comcast. The cable giant consistently ranks last or near last among all companies on consumer satisfaction surveys. Hurling insults at Comcast — its prices, its speeds, its customer service — has risen nearly to the level of a national pastime.

But what if there’s nothing the company can do to change its customers’ minds? What if most of what people hate about Comcast has its roots in the structure of America’s cable market?

That’s what the company’s CEO, Brian Roberts, suggested last weekend when asked about the company’s poor record in an interview with Business Insider founder Henry Blodget.

………

The problem isn’t Comcast’s service, Roberts is saying; it’s that people have to pay for it. Comcast operates by striking deals with content creators and publishers — ABC, CBS, FOX, ESPN, HBO, and the rest — for the right to broadcast their shows, movies, football, baseball, and basketball games. And as Roberts said, it doesn’t come cheap.

………

One problem with Robert’s argument is that Comcast makes money too — a lot of it.

In 2014, it brought in nearly $69 billion in revenue, with $14.9 billion of that being operating income, a.k.a. profits.

So, yes, Comcast has to charge its customers, but it could charge them less if it wanted to. It could also invest more heavily in more and better-trained customer service workers. It could boost those data caps that customers are always complaining about.

………

But he seems to believe that it may just never be enough. No matter how hard Comcast tries to make its customers happy, they still wind up disgruntled. Customers just can’t stand paying for things, and the only way Comcast could really earn their love is by giving away its product, as Google and Facebook do.

The problem with this argument is that most companies do charge for their products, and few if any are as hated as Comcast. Indeed, the cable TV industry’s upstart rivals — Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime — charge their customers as well.

And customers don’t hate Netflix the way they hate Comcast. In 2014, Comcast scored a 54 out of 100 on the American Customer Satisfaction survey — down from 64 in 2001. On the same survey, Netflix came in at 81. In eight years of measurement, it’s never dropped below a 74.

Comcast’s business model is predicated on monopoly rents.

To paraphrase Lily Tomlin from a long time ago, “We’re the Cable Company, we don’t care, we don’t have to.”

They treat their customers, and their employees with complete contempt, and the customers, return the favor.

Another Glorious Saudi Foreign Policy Triumph

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The House of Saud has announced a new Muslim coalition to fight terror.

One small problem though, 2 of the more important members of the coalition, Pakistan and Lebanon, have denied being members of the coalition, while Indonesia and Malaysia have indicated that their roles would be far more circumscribed than announced:

Earlier this week Saudi Arabia announced a new 34-country coalition of Muslim nations to fight terrorism, but two of the key countries have said they had no idea they were involved.

The countries from Asia, Africa and the Arab world were combining their efforts to combat extremism, according to the Saudis, who have faced mounting pressure to step up efforts in addressing the threat of extremism.

………

But following the statement at least two governments have claimed they were not aware of their own involvement. Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary, Aizaz Chaudhry, has been quoted as saying he only learnt of his country’s inclusion in the alliance from news reports.

He is said to have phoned the country’s ambassador in Saudi capital Riyadh – where a joint operations centre is planned – for clarification. Senior officials claimed they were not consulted beforehand.

………

Lebanon was also equally baffled country following the announcement, according to Lebanese media outlet Naharnet. The Prime Minister Tammam Salam reportedly welcomed the news, saying: “Lebanon is at the forefront of the confrontation with terrorism.”

In contrast the Foreign Ministry was adamant they had no “memo or phone call mentioning this coalition.” They added they had :”No knowledge whatsoever of the issue of forming an Islamic anti-terror coalition.”

The office also questioned whether the move encroached on their ‘constitutional jurisdiction on foreign affairs’.

Indonesia was also said to be still deciding whether to join, while Malaysia ruled out any military intervention.

This is not surprising.

The non-Arab Muslim nations have very little interest in being part of an endeavor directed by the House of Saud, and majority Shia Lebanon would not be a big supporter of this initiative, since it would likely involve efforts to extend Sunni hegemony in the region.

Sanders Campaign Gets Data Access Back

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It sounds like the DNC blinked, notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary:

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign overnight Friday night reached an agreement on voter data access, after a day of acrimony between the sides.

Even in the wake of a deal, the DNC and Sanders’ team have differing stories on how it was settled.

In a statement shortly after midnight, the Sanders campaign said the DNC “capitulated and agreed to reinstate Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign’s access to a critically-important voter database.”

The statement said that the campaign’s filing of a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Washington brought about the change.

“We are extremely pleased that the DNC has reversed its outrageous decision to take Sen. Sanders’ data. The information we provided tonight is essentially the same information we already sent them by email on Thursday,” said Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver.

In a statement released at about the same time, DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz explained the resolution differently, saying it came after the Sanders camp “complied with the DNC’s request to provide the information that we have requested of them.”

“The Sanders campaign has agreed to fully cooperate with the continuing DNC investigation of this breach,” she added.

“The fact that data was accessed inappropriately is completely unacceptable, and the DNC expects each campaign to operate with integrity going forward with respect to the voter file.”

I don’t think that anyone with a Glasgow Coma Scale score above 3 believes DWS on this one.

Once the lawsuit was filed, and it was clear that the DNC was violating the terms of the contract, there was a 10 day waiting period required before taking action, and that the optics were rebounding to Sanders’ benefit, they had no choice.

Could someone please fire the frowzy headed albatross around the Democratic Party’s neck that is Debbie Wasserman Schultz?

The Bernie Sanders Campaign Just Sued the DNC

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After repeated failures by the DNC’s politically connected vendor to properly secure candidate databases, a techie at the Sanders campaign did something wicked stupid, and the DNC cut off the campaign form their own data:

A fight between the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders and the Democratic leadership went public on Friday as the party punished the campaign over a data breach and the Sanders camp sued the party and accused it of actively trying to help Hillary Clinton.

The dispute came after members of Mr. Sanders’ data team were found to have gotten access to, searched and stored proprietary information from Hillary Clinton’s team during a software glitch with an important voter database. The Democratic National Committee acted swiftly to deny the Sanders campaign future access to the party’s 50-state voter file, which contains information about millions of Democrats and is invaluable to campaigns on a daily basis.

Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, accused the party committee of stacking the scales to help Mrs. Clinton, claiming that it was being unfairly penalized for the data breach. At a news conference, Mr. Weaver insisted that the campaign had dealt with the situation by firing its national data director. Later Friday, the campaign filed a federal lawsuit seeking to have its access to the file restored.

The Democratic committee is “actively” working to “undermine” the Sanders campaign, Mr. Weaver said, reflecting its longstanding frustration that the party apparatus, which is supposed to be neutral, is lining up behind Mrs. Clinton.

………

At issue is a database of voter information, with millions of records, that the party makes available to campaigns for a fee, and is “heart and soul” of modern presidential campaigns, as the Sanders campaign put it. State parties feed the list with information including names, addresses, ethnicity if available, and voting history. Usually, public election records show which elections a person has voted in, though who they voted for is secret.

The Democratic Party then adds data from commercially available lists that track such information as television habits and magazine subscriptions. They match voter names to donor lists created by both political and nonpolitical organizations.

Each campaign then inputs data gathered by its own staff, gleaned from door knocks, phone calls, emails and other sources. With the data, they can assign each voter their own “score” signifying how likely they are to vote for a candidate. The scores advise everything from decisions about whose doors to knock on to which voters might donate.

It is this use of the massive combination of data that drives modern campaigns, mastered by the Obama operations in 2008 and 2012, which had a team of more than 50 people poring over the information to best target their fund-raising, persuasion and voter turnout efforts.

The breach occurred Wednesday when the firm that handles the list, NGP VAN, was making a tweak to its system and inadvertently dropped the firewall between the campaigns for approximately four hours, according to the court filing by the Sanders campaign. That meant that the campaigns could see each other’s information. But only the Sanders campaign gained access to data that was proprietary.

………

In its lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, the Sanders campaign argued that the party had no right to terminate the licensing agreement that allowed the campaign access to the voter file. The campaign estimated that the loss of access would cost it $600,000 in contributions, a serious blow because it has “been financed primarily with contributions from individual donors rather than Political Action Committees.”

“However, the damage to the campaign’s political viability, as a result of being unable to communicate with constituents and voters, is far more severe, and incapable of measurement,” the suit said. Party representatives said they had not seen the suit and thus could not comment.

One show of support for Mr. Sanders’s case came from David Axelrod, a senior adviser for President Obama’s campaigns. He called the penalty “harsh,” saying on Twitter that, without evidence that the campaign hierarchy knew about data poaching, it appear that the “DNC is putting finger on scale.”

Josh Uretsky, the fired national data director from the Sanders campaign, also called the punishment “an overreaction” and insisted that he had merely been trying to verify the data breach, adding: “We did so in a way that we know would create a record that the D.N.C. and NGP VAN would have access to. We deliberately did not download or take custodianship of the records.” Mr. Utresky and Mr. Sanders’ aides did not address why multiple users from the campaign searched the Clinton data.

Mr. Uretsky acknowledged that Clinton data was being looked at, but said his intent was to see whether the Sanders campaign’s data might also be vulnerable.

Utretsky did something classically stupid, and he deserved to be fired.

This is kind of the problematic “IT Bro” bullsh%$ that plagues the computer professions.

The fact that this is all over the news, when repeated failures by this vendor, NGP VAN, over the past few months got buried and ignored does seem to indicate that the always thuggish and incompetent Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is seizing on this incident to once again to put her thumb on the scales in favor of Hillary Clinton.

After all, the stupid sh%$ that the Sanders hapless IT dweeb pulled over a short time, “Over a period of more than 40 minutes,” so the action taken appears to be excessive.

The fact the DNC aggressively leaked of the whole affair to the press, further reinforces the perception that DWS is deliberately f%$#ing the Sanders campaign.

So we have a lawsuit against the DNC to the tune of $600,000.00 a day.

Can we please fire Debbie Wasserman-Schultz now?  She is hopeless and hapless.

The official statement by the Sanders campaign comes after the break:

Statement by Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders 2016 Campaign Manager
December 18, 2015

 Two months ago, shortly after our digital vendor who conducts modeling for our campaign told us that there was failure in the firewall that prevents campaigns from seeing one another’s data, we contacted the DNC and told them about the failure. We were concerned that our data could be compromised and we were assured at the time the firewall would be restored.

 Instead, we found out two days ago that once again, this sensitive and important data was compromised because the DNC and its vendor failed to protect it.

 We have invested enormous campaign resources in acquiring the rights to use this proprietary information. But the DNC, in an inappropriate overreaction, has denied us access to our own data.

 Let me briefly discuss the three issues involved here.

 First, this is not the first time that the vendor hired by the DNC to run the voter file program, NGP VAN, has allowed serious failures to occur. On more than one occasion, they have dropped the firewall between the data of competing Democratic campaigns. That is dangerous incompetence. It was our campaign months ago that alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns. At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor that the problem would be resolved. Unfortunately, the other day, the vendor once again dropped the firewall between the campaigns for some data.

 Secondly, after discussion with the DNC it became clear that some of our staffers irresponsibly accessed some of the data from another campaign. That behavior is unacceptable to the Sanders campaign and we fired the staffer immediately and made certain that any information obtained was not utilized. We are now speaking to other staffers who might have been involved and further disciplinary action may be taken. Clearly, while that information was made available to our campaign because of the incompetence of the vendor, it should not have been looked at. Period.

 Thirdly, rather incredibly, the leadership of the DNC has used this incident to shut down our ability to access our own information, information which is the lifeblood of any campaign. This is the information about our supporters, our volunteers, the lists of people we intend to contact in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere. This is information that we have worked hard to obtain. It is our information, not the DNCs.

 In other words, by their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.

 We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction.

 What is required here is a full and independent audit of the DNC’s handling of this data and its security from the beginning of this campaign to the present, including the incident in October that we alerted them to.

It Appears That Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia Thinks That Blacks Are Too Stupid for College

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Yes, he actually said that during an affirmative action argument before the Supreme Court:

In the oral arguments Wednesday for a Supreme Court affirmative action case, Justice Antonin Scalia—a well known critic of affirmative action—suggested that the policy was hurting minority students by sending them to schools too academically challenging for them.

Referencing an unidentified amicus brief, Scalia said that there were people who would contend that “it does not benefit African-Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.”

He argued that “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas.”

“They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re — that they’re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them,” Scalia said.

Remember when I said that I was ready for Scalia to choke on his own bile?

It’s not gonna happen.

If it could, he would have been taken to hospital in an ambulance today.

In fact, half the court would have had to be treated for bile suffocation just from the amount that he spewed.

I See that You Have Jumped C. Megalodon*

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C. Megalodon. One Big Shark

While there are some very valid reasons for students to make protests, but the protesters of Lebanon Valley College have lost their f%$#ing minds:

Lebanon Valley College administrators were presented a “list of demands” Friday, after a heated week of equality-driven student demonstrations and calls to action that gripped the predominantly white institution.

 It was against this backdrop that a standing room-only crowd gathered inside a lecture hall in the school’s Miller Chapel Friday, and organizers delivered demands meant to bring about greater diversity in faculty and student ranks, as well as a greater sense of inclusiveness on campus.

 The demands — announced at the end of Friday’s meeting and promptly handed to the university’s president, Dr. Lewis Thayne — include calls for a more diverse curriculum; removing or altering the name “Lynch” in the college’s “Lynch Memorial Hall” due to the word’s racial connotations; more sensitivity training for staff; diversity workshops; regular surveys of the racial climate on campus; facilities recognizing varied gender identities and disabilities; and clearer protocols for officials in responding to allegations and acts of bias.

As an FYI, the hall is not named after the practice of extrajudicial murders by hanging or burning, it’s named after a former president of Lebanon Valley College, Clyde A. Lynch, who among other things, kept the college going during the depression.

I guess we should fire the current Attorney General of the United States, a black woman named Loretta Lynch, because these delicate little flowers feel vaguely uncomfortable.

You know, there are statues to actual racists, and defenders of racism, all over the couintry, see Lee, Robert E. and Forest, Nathan B., and you are going after this?

Here is a counter proposal:  Get your head out of your collective asses.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Fox News Has Its Limits ……… Who Knew?

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It turns out that if you call the President a “Pussy” on the air, or if you saying that Obama, “Doesn’t give a sh%$,” is a bridge too far for the performance art troupe known as Fox News:

Fox News has suspended two contributors, Ralph Peters and Stacey Dash, who described President Obama as a “p**sy” who doesn’t “give a s**t” on air today, reports CNN.

Peters’ and Dash’s comments “were completely inappropriate and unacceptable for our air,” Fox News senior executive vice president Bill Shine said in a statement announcing the suspensions this afternoon.

Peters, who Fox describes as its “strategic analyst,” called the president a “total pu—” who “doesn’t want to hurt our enemies” during an apperance on Fox Business Channel on Monday. “This guy, [he] is such a total p**sy, it’s stunning,” Peters told host Stuart Varney, reacting to the president’s recent address on terrorism.

On her regular turn on the “Outnumbered” couch on Fox News Monday afternoon, former Clueless star Stacey Dash just couldn’t contain her anger at President Obama’s Sunday evening Oval Office address on terror, saying that “I felt like he could give a shit — excuse me, like he could care less.”

“Fox Business Network and Fox News Channel do not condone the use of such language, and have suspended both Peters and Dash for two weeks,” Shine said. Both Peters and Dash have been suspended for two weeks.

It’s only 2 weeks, but I wouldn’t have expected 2 minutes from Emperor Ailes.

Rule Number 1: Mark Zuckerberg Leaves a Trail of People Who Feel that he Cheated Them in His Wake

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Rule Number 2:  See rule number 1.

As such, I am dubious of Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to donate 99% of his Facebook fortune to charity:

In a public post on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced Tuesday that they will donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during their lives”—an amount currently worth $45 billion—to their new charity, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

 The organization, which seems to be modeled on the Gates Foundation, states its laudable albeit vague goal to “join people across the world to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation.”

 The announcement came in the form of a public letter to their newly born daughter Max. It addresses important long-term goals that are often stymied in the public sector, things like “advancing human potential and promoting equality.”

But when one dives into the details, it gets seriously hinky on closer examination:

When Mark Zuckerberg announced he would give away 99% of his Facebook shares — currently worth around $45 billion — the initial impulse from many was to assume the money would all go to charity. Indeed, very many news organizations described the donation as either going to charity, or a charitable trust.

 Not so, a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed in an email to BuzzFeed News. The spokeswoman further confirmed the initiative is structured as an LLC, and not as a charitable trust.

 While charity will certainly be one of the money’s destinations, it will be far from the only one.

It’s beginning to look more and more like a way to avoid income and inheritance taxes than anything else.

I would also argue that relying on the altruism of today’s robber barons is misguided, and  notes, so does German billionaire Peter Krämer:

SPIEGEL: Forty super wealthy Americans have just announced that they would donate half of their assets, at the very latest after their deaths. As a person who often likes to say that rich people should be asked to contribute more to society, what were your first thoughts?

Krämer: I find the US initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That’s unacceptable.

SPIEGEL: But doesn’t the money that is donated serve the common good?

Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it’s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That’s a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

SPIEGEL: It is their money at the end of the day.

Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.

 Your mouth to God’s ear, Herr Krämer.

The Stupid, It Burns!

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In Canada, a Yoga class has been canceled because of accusations of cultural appropriation:

In studios across the nation, as many as 20 million Americans practice yoga every day. Few worry that their downward dogs or warrior poses disrespect other cultures.

But yoga comes from India, once a British colony. And now, at one Canadian university, a yoga class designed to include disabled students has been canceled after concerns the practice was taken from a culture that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy,” according to the group that once sponsored it.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Jennifer Scharf, who taught the class for up to 60 people at the University of Ottawa, said she was unhappy about the decision, but accepted it.

“This particular class was intro to beginners’ yoga because I’m very sensitive to this issue,” she said. “I would never want anyone to think I was making some sort of spiritual claim other than the pure joy of being human that belongs to everyone free of religion.”

Oh, you poor delicate flowers.

On a related note, I am starting a charity, the Association of Cranial Rectal Inversion Disease, (ACRID) for people with their heads chronically up their asses.

H/T Stephen Saroff      o o  The Bear who Swims      
                        (_)_____o      
                     ~~~~(______)~~~~~~~~~~
                         oo    oo

There is No Evidence that Mass Surveillance Makes Us Safe

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This is not an exaggeration/

Pro Publica examined almost a decade of mass surveillance, and could not any meaningful benefit derived from drinking from the data fire hose:

Current and former government officials have been pointing to the terror attacks in Paris as justification for mass surveillance programs. CIA Director John Brennan accused privacy advocates of “hand-wringing” that has made “our ability collectively internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.” Former National Security Agency and CIA director Michael Hayden said, “In the wake of Paris, a big stack of metadata doesn’t seem to be the scariest thing in the room.”

Ultimately, it’s impossible to know just how successful sweeping surveillance has been, since much of the work is secret. But what has been disclosed so far suggests the programs have been of limited value. Here’s a roundup of what we know.

An internal review of the Bush administration’s warrantless program – called Stellarwind – found it resulted in few useful leads from 2001–2004, and none after that. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage obtained the findings through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and published them in his new book, Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post–9/11 Presidency:

[The FBI general counsel] defined as useful those [leads] that made a substantive contribution to identifying a terrorist, or identifying a potential confidential informant. Just 1.2 percent of them fit that category. In 2006, she conducted a comprehensive study of all the leads generated from the content basket of Stellarwind between March 2004 and January 2006 and discovered that zero of those had been useful.

In an endnote, Savage then added:

The program was generating numerous tips to the FBI about suspicious phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and it was the job of the FBI field offices to pursue those leads and scrutinize the people behind them. (The tips were so frequent and such a waste of time that the field offices reported back, in frustration, “You’re sending us garbage.”)

This isn’t security, it’s security theater, and the victories it achieves are in battles between for budget money from Congress. 

I Would Call Chuck Schumer a Schmuck, but a Schmuck has a Head

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The distinguished gentleman from New York just came out publicly against allowing Syrian refugees into the United States.

I’m sure that if he had been alive in 1939, he would have been comfortably playing Mahjong with friends while the passengers on the MS St. Louis were sent back to die at the hands of the Nazis:

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, on Tuesday said it may be necessary to halt the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States.

Republicans immediately seized on Schumer’s comment, which breaks with other Democrats who have argued against halting the program.

Schumer, however, declined to take the option off the table ahead of a special briefing scheduled for Wednesday afternoon on the process that is now used to vet refugees entering the United States.

“We’re waiting for the briefing tomorrow, a pause may be necessary. We’re going to look at it,” he said.

Schumer is widely expected to become leader of Senate Democrats in the next Congress, after Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) retires.

A spokeswoman for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) highlighted Schumer’s statement as an example of “bipartisan concern” over refugees.

Centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) signed a letter to President Obama Monday calling on him not to allow another Syrian refugee into the country unless federal authorities can guarantee with 100-percent assurance they are not connected to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Other Democrats have rejected freezing Obama’s plan to resettle at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the current fiscal year.

What a toxic combination of stupidity, cowardice, and evil.

His position is deeply wrong, and will be seized on by Islamist terrorists as a recruiting tool.

I wish that I was registered to vote in New York so that I could vote against him.