What the F%$# is Wrong with the New York Times?

The New York Times, and by that I mean their editorial board, just published an editorial, which among other things, appeals to the conscience of the good Nazis and white supremacists out there.

This is unbelievably stupid.  There are no good Nazis, but they ask for their goodwill anyway:

Those who sympathize with the white nationalist ideology but who deplore the violence should work closely with law enforcement to see that fellow travelers who may be prone to violence do not have access to firearms like semiautomatic assault-style weapons that are massively destructive.

(emphasis mine)

There are no white supremacists who eschew violence.

Violence is inextricable from white supremacist and Nazi ideology.

You can enforce neither without violence and the threat of violence.

Think about it:  Without lynchings and shooting, Jim Crow would never have had any force.

Asking for a few good Nazis to do their civic duty is dangerously misguided.

H/t Atrios.

We Are Doomed

Welcome to your gerontocracy. pic.twitter.com/yTjdkfDHxQ

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) August 5, 2019

Un-F%$#ing-Believable

Both of the Septuagenarian front runners for the major Presidential nominations got the locations of this weekends mass shootings wrong:

President Donald Trump and Democratic 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden both got confused in regards to the locations of mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend, mentioning inaccurate cities when discussing the violence.

During a Monday address from the White House, Trump, 73, shared condolences for the victims “in Toledo,” apparently mixing up the Ohio city with Dayton, where nine people were killed and dozens more were wounded on Sunday morning.

“May God bless the memory of those who perished in Toledo,” the president said toward the end of his speech. “May God protect them.”

Biden, 76, who previously served as vice president under former President Barack Obama and is currently leading in the Democratic presidential primary polls, made a similar gaffe on Sunday evening while addressing attendants of a fundraiser in California. He referred to the mass shooting as “the tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan the day before.” Although the politician later corrected his mistake, he seemed to be confusing Houston, which is also in Texas, with El Paso and mixing up Ohio with its fellow midwestern state of Michigan.

It really is remarkable how dysfunctional and corrupt the two parties are.

My Thoughts Exactly

As hard as it may be for the relatives of the victims, we need to publicly broadcast the horrific images of the mass shooting victims, much like Emmet Till’s mother insisted that the brutality visited against him be made public:

Emmett Till’s mother was right. After the horrific murder of her 14-year-old son in Mississippi in 1955, she decided on an open-casket funeral. “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way,” she said. “And I wanted the world to see.” The graphic images of her son’s mutilated body, printed in The Chicago Defender and Jet magazine, contained vastly more raw power than any verbal description could possibly have had.

We sometimes say that “words fail us,” and it’s true. Nothing we can say can pack the emotional punch of what we can see with our own eyes. For those of us who support a level of gun control in the United States equivalent to that in other advanced countries, it ought to be clear by now that facts and logic are not enough to change public policy on the issue. We need ugly pictures. Not the pictures of the sweet faces of the children of Newtown, Conn., before they were slaughtered, but the awful sights that so shocked the first responders.

………

I think that gun control has now become as emotionally charged and intractable as civil rights and the Vietnam War once were. The American College of Physicians was joined in 2015 by nearly 60 other organizations, including the American Public Health Association and the American Bar Association, in a call to address gun violence as a public-health threat. Last month, in Annals of Internal Medicine, the physicians’ group issued a position paper with recommendations for reducing firearms-related injuries and deaths. The National Rifle Association responded with a tweet that read, “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control.”

………

News organizations, law-enforcement agencies and medical professionals are unlikely to publish the images of the bloody, mangled bodies that gun violence produces. But husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, can do what Emmett Till’s mother did. They can insist that we see the result of our weak, ineffective and poorly enforced gun policies. They can find ways to publish the pictures in all their gory detail.

Some might say this would disrespect the dead. I can think of no more respectful way to treat the dead than to allow the loved ones of those who have been slain to show what actually happened to them. If we think these images are too awful to see, then we should change the circumstances that create them.

Mamie Till-Mobley died in 2003 at the age of 81 and was buried near her son. Her monument reads, “Her pain united a nation.” May the pain felt today by the loved ones of the victims of gun violence do the same.

This is a big sacrifice to be asked of grieving parents, but it needs to be done.

Gee, That Was Quick

A few hours after I noted the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, we had yet another in Dayton, Ohio, and the victims included the gunman’s own sister:

Ned Peppers would not close for another hour, and the crowd inside the bar and on the outdoor patio early Sunday morning was lively. The line to get inside stretched around the block, and the revelers were black and white, men and women, spanning at least two generations. One was the mother of a newborn, another was a nutrition trainer. Within seconds, both would be dead, along with seven others.

Among the victims killed in the barrage of gunfire outside Ned Peppers, a popular spot in Dayton, Ohio, was the gunman’s sister, a 22-year-old college student described as “bubbly” and “outgoing.” Investigators had not determined on Sunday evening whether the gunman, armed with a military-style rifle and clad in protective armor, had specifically targeted his sister or anyone else in the crowd.

………

The massacre outside Ned Peppers came only about 13 hours after a gunman stormed into a Walmart store in El Paso and opened fire, killing 20 people and wounding at least 26 others as he stalked the aisles. The store is near the bicultural city’s border with Mexico, in an area heavily trafficked on weekends by El Paso residents and Mexican citizens alike.

There is something profoundly broken in the United States, but we already knew that.

I have no clue how to fix it, but we are destroying ourselves.

Another Day, Another White Supremacist Mass Shooting

Confirmed Photo of the shooter as he entered the Cielo Vista Walmart store. #EPShooting https://t.co/wfXkVy7a3y pic.twitter.com/TWVZwQXIyl

— KTSM 9 News (@KTSMtv) August 3, 2019

Roll Tape!

A white supremacist just killed 21 people and wounded at least 20 more at an El Paso Walmart:

A mass shooting at a Walmart in the Texas border city of El Paso that has left 20 people dead and 26 injured is being investigated as a possible hate crime, Texas officials said.

A 21-year-old white man is in custody after the mass shooting, one of the deadliest incidents in Texas history, El Paso’s police chief said. Local news outlets reported the name of the suspected shooter, but his name has not yet been officially released by law enforcement. A local TV station published what it said was a picture of the suspect from CCTV footage.

There was “little to minimum force” used when law enforcement took the suspect into custody, El Paso police spokesman Robert Gomez said at an earlier press conference. “No law enforcement personnel fired their weapon.”

“It happened without incident so I can assume that the person dropped his weapons,” Gomez added.

Law enforcement officials are investigating “a manifesto from this individual” that suggests the incident may be a hate crime, police chief Greg Allen said. He added that law enforcement still needed to “validate for certain” that the document under investigation was from the arrested suspect.

………

Investigators are “reasonably confident” that the Walmart shooting suspect posted the document on 8chan, an extremist online message board that often features racist content, senior law enforcement officials told NBC News.

If the manifesto is authentic, it would make it the third mass shooting announced in advance on 8chan in less than five months.

………

The 8chan document under investigation by Texas law enforcement described a gun attack that was intended to be “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”.

God bless America, huh?

Textbook Publisher Sees Brave New World of Screwing Students Even Harder

Kara Swisher of Recode has a remarkably credulous interview with textbook publisher CEO John Fallon, and swallows his line of crap without any challenge.

Fallon is claiming that somehow or other, the digital textbook will fix Pearson’s flagging textbook business (it probably will) and will make things better for students. (It certainly will not.)

The text books have gotten expensive enough that the resale market, and the 3rd party rental market, have been eating the publisher’s lunch.

Pearson’s solution is digital, not because it is more convenient, nor because it is better for students, but because it allows to lock down the market, preventing students selling their old books, and extend their monopoly rents.

This is just another way to f%$# their customers.

If You See Evil, You Will Find Private Equity

It turns out that the explosion in out of network balance billing, which results in horrific bills, is largely being driven by private equity.

It’s not a surprise. Private equity is morally indistinguishable from a Colombian drug cartel:

I have to confess to having missed how private equity is a central bad actor in the “surprise billing” scam that is being targeted by Federal and state legislation. This abuse takes place when hospital patients, even when using a hospital that is in their insurer’s network, are hit with charges for “out of network” services that are billed at inflated rack rates. Even patients who have done everything they can to avoid being snared, like insisting their hospital use only in-network doctors for a surgery and even getting their identities in advance to assure compliance, get caught. The hospital is in charge of scheduling and can and will swap in out-of-network practitioners at the last minute.

Private equity maven and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research Eileen Appelbaum explained in an editorial in The Hill in May how private equity firms have bought specialist physicians’ practices to exploit the opportunity to hit vulnerable patients with egregious charges:

Physicians’ groups, it turns out, can opt out of a contract with insurers even if the hospital has such a contract. The doctors are then free to charge patients, who desperately need care, however much they want.

This has made physicians’ practices in specialties such as emergency care, neonatal intensive care and anesthesiology attractive takeover targets for private equity firms….

Emergency rooms, neonatal intensive care units and anesthesiologists’ practices do not operate like an ordinary marketplace. Physicians’ practices in these specialties do not need to worry that they will lose patients because their prices are too high.

Patients can go to a hospital in their network, but if they have an emergency, have a baby in the neonatal intensive care unit or have surgery scheduled with an in-network surgeon, they are stuck with the out-of-network doctors the hospital has outsourced these services to….

It’s not only patients that are victimized by unscrupulous physicians’ groups. These doctors’ groups are able to coerce health insurance companies into agreeing to pay them very high fees in order to have them in their networks.

They do this by threatening to charge high out-of-network bills to the insurers’ covered patients if they don’t go along with these demands. High payments to these unethical doctors raise hospitals’ costs and everyone’s insurance premiums.

Balance billing is a huge problem.

A bigger problem is private equity and the rest of the looting schemes favored by Wall Street.

We need changes in laws pertaining to things like derivatives, bankruptcy, and corporate looting to stop this bullsh%$.

A Monument to His Ego


This is an Architectural Atrocity

I am referring of course to Barack Obama’s proposed Presidential library.

I think that his presidential complex would rip the heart out of one of Fredrick Law Olmstead’s most significant works, and the Federal Highway Administration’s review of the project has determined that it would diminish the integrity of the park.

Here’s hoping that this, along with the fact that Obama crony Rahm Emanuel is no longer mayor, will result in some much need accountability on this project.

There is also the matter that the Obama Foundation has refused to even consider a community benefits agreement, which would provide guarantees for the local residents regarding jobs and affordable housing:

Construction of the $500 million Obama Presidential Center will have an “adverse impact” on historic Jackson Park that must be mitigated, a federal review has concluded.

In a report triggered by Jackson Park’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the Federal Highway Administration homed in on the negative impact the four-building complex would have on the majestic Midway Plaisance and the Jackson Park Historic Landscape District.

The project would diminish the “the historic property’s overall integrity by altering historic, internal spatial divisions that were designed as a single entity” by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the FHA concluded.

It also concludes the “size and scale of new buildings” would “diminish the intended prominence of the Museum of Science and Industry building and alter the overall composition and design intent of balancing park scenery with specific built areas.”

………

The finding puts pressure on the Obama Foundation to find a way to “resolve adverse effects” and turns up the heat on Mayor Lori Lightfoot to order the foundation to make those changes.

“The Obama Foundation has yet to show any interest in compromising on any of this. It may take [Lightfoot] to bring them to the table,” said Margaret Schmid, co-president of Jackson Park Watch.

“It means there are lots of new obstacles facing this proposal. A big question is, does Chicago want to go on record as having allowed a project that has major adverse impacts on this important historic park or can the project be redesigned to be compatible with this historic landscape?”

It’s not a surprise that the Obama Foundation is refusing to do anything for the poor and minority residents of the neighborhood, that was pretty much the Obama administration’s policy for or the poor and minority residents of the country.

They were too busy, “Foaming the runway,” for the big banks.

Live in Obedient Fear. Citizen!

It appears that people are taking to dumping water on police officers in New York as a way of showing their disrespect for the local constabulary, much in the same way that dumping a milk shake on a Tory politician is in the UK indicates a lack of approval.

Obviously, this is a crime, assault, and if you do the crime, you should do the crime.

However, some wannabee fascists in the New York State Assembly decided that a simple assault charge isn’t enough, and so have drafted a bill making “disrespecting the police” a felony.

That sound you hear is Eric Arthur Blair spinning in his grave at relativistic velocities:

New video surfaced Tuesday evening of more NYPD officers being doused with water.

The most recent incident in Queens has compelled lawmakers to announce a new bill that cracks down on anyone who disrespects the badge, CBS2’s Natalie Duddridge reported.

………

“We will not wait until these attacks spread like wildfire,” said Assemblyman Mike LiPetri, R-Long Island. “This time, it’s water. What’s next? Gasoline? Acid?”

At a rally on the steps of City Hall on Wednesday morning, LiPetri and Assemblyman Michael Reilly, R-Staten Island, proposed a new law to stop what some call a disgusting trend.

“What we are witnessing in New York City is disgraceful. A culture of blatant disrespect for law enforcement has been fostered and encouraged simply for political gain which has resulted in such despicable acts of hate becoming acceptable in our communities,” LiPetri said. “New York State must send a message that this will not be tolerated and I am confident that this bill provides law enforcement the tools they need to properly react.”

According to LiPetri and Reilly, the new bill would make it a Class E felony to throw or spray water, or any other substance, against an on-duty police or peace officer. The charge would be punishable by up to 1 to 4 years in prison. 

Because clearly disrespect of cop is worse than, I don’t know, stock fraud.

Here’s an idea, do something about the culture of impunity that has people so fed up with cops that they are dumping water on them.

Also, fire Pantaleo.

Linkage

And then their instruments caught fire:

Kamala, Yuo Been Memed

In response to Kamala Harris’s absurd proposal for college loan forgiveness, which provided for (only) $20,000.00 in loan forgiveness and required:

  • That you be a Pell grant recipient.
  • Start a business in a disadvantaged community.
  • Run it for 3 years.

There might be 3 people in the United States who would actually qualify for this grant.

It might be 6 if you count the well-off parents who are pulling the guardian scam to snag undeserved financial aid for their kids.

In response, someone has written the Oddly Specific Kamala Harris Policy Generator, where you press a button, and get a randomly generated policy, like the following:

Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I’ll establish a basic income program for Atheists who open a spy agency that operates for 12 weeks in Comet Ping-Pong.
………
Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I’ll establish a high speed rail program for African-Americans who open a fire dept. that operates for 8 days in communities of color.
………
Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I’ll establish a military expansion program for firefighters who open a bungee jump that operates for 19 weeks in the Google App Store.
………
Yesterday, I announced that, as president, I’ll establish a tort reform program for Tea Party voters who open a buffet that operates for 10 days in their local tourist trap.

I am amused.

Everyone at the Pentagon Needs to Read Superiority, by Arthur C. Clark

The newest carrier in the US Navy, and the lead ship in the class, the USS Gerald Ford, has experiences many problems related to new technologies implemented on the ship.

First, it was the electromagnetic catapults, which are still missing performance and reliability goals, then it was the advanced arrester gear, and now it appears that the munitions elevators cannot deliver ordinance to the flight deck, meaning that the Ford is not even close to combat ready:

Only two of 11 elevators needed to lift munitions to the deck of the U.S. Navy’s new $13 billion aircraft carrier have been fully installed, according to a Navy veteran who serves on a key House committee.

“I don’t see an end in sight right now” to getting all the elevators working on the USS Gerald R. Ford, the costliest warship ever, Democratic Representative Elaine Luria of Virginia said in an interview. The ship was supposed to be delivered with the Advanced Weapons Elevators, which are moved by magnets rather than cables, working in May 2017.

It’s another setback for contractor Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. — and for the Navy, which had said in December it planned to complete installation and testing of all 11 elevators before the Ford completed its post-delivery shakedown phase this month, with at least half certified for operation.

Instead, the shakedown phase has been extended to October and the vessel won’t have all the elevators fully installed — much less functioning — by then, according to Luria, a 20-year Navy surface warfare officer whose served on two aircraft carriers and as shore maintenance coordinator for a third.

“Essentially, the ship can’t deploy,” Luria said. “It can’t carry ammunition.” She said the Navy and Huntington Ingalls are trying to solve new problems with doors and hatches lining elevators shafts that don’t meet specifications.

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said in January that he told President Donald Trump to fire him if the service couldn’t fix the weapons elevators by July. Instead, Trump praised the Ford as “phenomenal” on July 22.

The Ford’s Advanced Weapons Elevators are designed for the carrier’s crew to move as much as 24,000 pounds of ordnance at 150 feet-per-minute, up from the 10,500 pounds at 100 feet-per-minute on the older Nimitz-class carrier. That would increase by more than 30% the number of combat sorties that could launch from the carrier over 24 hours, according to the Navy.

The elevators aren’t the only issue plaguing the ship, which has had problems with two other core systems — the electromagnetic system to launch planes and the arresting gear to catch them when they land.

What can I say, but, “But I cannot be held responsible for my future actions if I am compelled any longer to share my cell with Professor Norden, late Chief of the Research Staff of my armed forces.”*

The Pentagon is going to innovate itself into oblivion.

*Seriously, just read the story, you can find it online.

Clearly, Reagan Would Have Supported Trump

In a conversation with Richard Nixon in 1971, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, described African UN representatives from as, “Those monkeys from those African countries, damn them.

I always knew that the Gipper was an enthusiastic supporter of racist and racism, launching the 1980 Presidential campaign with a speech about states rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights activists Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were assassinated.

His entire career was about dog whistling to racists.

Now we know that he was a bigot and a racist.

Rot in hell Ronnie, rot in hell.

CNN, and Jake Tapper, Suck

That’s my take on the debate.

Right wing framing, a phobia of substantive answers, and general wankertude.

Bernie was good, if you like him combative, and I do, but Elizabeth Warren had the quote or the evening, directed at the hapless John Delaney:

I Don’t Understand Why Anybody Goes to All the Trouble of Running for President of the United States Just to Talk about What We Really Can’t Do and Shouldn’t Fight For

She just won the internet.

Burying the Lede

I love reading Taibbi, but in his article on the craziness in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, he buries the lede.

More than ⅔ down in the article is the money quote, “Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector.”

This primary season is about how the Democratic Party consultant class, the leeches, is fighting for its power at the expense of both the party and the country.

5G May be Undone by Physics


In 2017, members of the mobile telephony industry group 3GPP were bickering over whether to speed the development of 5G standards. One proposal, originally put forward by Vodafone and ultimately agreed to by the rest of the group, promised to deliver 5G networks sooner by developing more aspects of 5G technology simultaneously.

Adopting that proposal may have also meant pushing some decisions down the road. One such decision concerned how 5G networks should encode wireless signals. 3GPP’s Release 15, which laid the foundation for 5G, ultimately selected orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), a holdover from 4G, as the encoding option.

But Release 16, expected by year’s end, will include the findings of a study group assigned to explore alternatives. Wireless standards are frequently updated, and in the next 5G release, the industry could address concerns that OFDM may draw too much power in 5G devices and base stations. That’s a problem, because 5G is expected to require far more base stations to deliver service and connect billions of mobile and IoT devices.

“I don’t think the carriers really understood the impact on the mobile phone, and what it’s going to do to battery life,” says James Kimery, the director of marketing for RF and software-defined radio research at National Instruments Corp. “5G is going to come with a price, and that price is battery consumption.”

And Kimery notes that these concerns apply beyond 5G handsets. China Mobile has “been vocal about the power consumption of their base stations,” he says. A 5G base station is generally expected to consume roughly three times as much power as a 4G base station. And more 5G base stations are needed to cover the same area.

So how did 5G get into a potentially power-guzzling mess? OFDM plays a large part. Data is transmitted using OFDM by chopping the data into portions and sending the portions simultaneously and at different frequencies so that the portions are “orthogonal” (meaning they do not interfere with each other).

The trade-off is that OFDM has a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Generally speaking, the orthogonal portions of an OFDM signal deliver energy constructively—that is, the very quality that prevents the signals from canceling each other out also prevents each portion’s energy from canceling out the energy of other portions. That means any receiver needs to be able to take in a lot of energy at once, and any transmitter needs to be able to put out a lot of energy at once. Those high-energy instances cause OFDM’s high PAPR and make the method less energy efficient than other encoding schemes.

Short range, poor building penetration, and high battery consumption.

Heady brew.