This Takes Guts

Silvia Foti set about writing a biography of her grandfather, Jonas Noreika, a hero of the resistance in Lithuania, and she discovered that her father was a Nazi collaborator who directed the extermination of Jews in a number of cities, and she has written about this:

Eighteen years ago, my dying mother asked me to continue working on a book about her father, Jonas Noreika, a famous Lithuanian World War II hero who fought the Communists. Once an opera singer, my mother had passionately devoted herself to this mission and had even gotten a PhD in literature to improve her literary skills. As a journalist, I agreed. I had no idea I was embarking on a project that would lead to a personal crisis, Holocaust denial and an official cover-up by the Lithuanian government.

 ………

 That is the book I started to write. My mother had collected a trove of material that included 3,000 pages of KGB transcripts; 77 letters to my grandmother; a fairytale to my mother written from the Stutthof concentration camp; letters from family members about his childhood; and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. A few months into the project, I visited my dying grandmother, who lived a few blocks away. She asked me not to write the book about her husband. “Just let history lay,” she whispered. I was stunned. “But I promised Mom,” I said. She rolled over to face the wall. I didn’t take her request seriously; I thought she was simply giving me a pass because she knew how taxing the project was for my mother.

 ………

 From Vilnius, Ray and I traveled as honorary guests to Šukoniai, the northern town where our grandfather was born, to see the grammar school named after him. We were shown the modest building of white bricks and oak trim. The school director, a roly-poly man with disheveled white hair, enthusiastically grabbed our hands, telling us how pleased he was that we had come to host the ceremony in homage to our grandfather. He had heard I was writing a book. I asked him, “How did you decide to name the school after our grandfather?” Stroking his chin, he answered, “It was during a meeting of the County Board. We wanted to pick a new name instead of the Russian one we had. Your grandfather’s surfaced immediately.” Then he pulled Ray and me aside so the others couldn’t hear. “I got a lot of grief at first when we picked his name. He was accused of being a Jew-killer.”

 Ray and I were aghast. Accused of being a Jew-killer? I looked around the room, at the teachers and the principal. Who were these people? Who was my mother? My grandmother? Who was I? My mind whirled: There must be some mistake. The director stroked my arm in reassurance. “I’m getting more support than ever over choosing your grandfather’s name. All of that is in the past.”

 ………

 In 2013 I spent seven weeks in Lithuania. I hired a Holocaust guide, Simon Dovidavičius, director of Sugihara House, a museum honoring Chiune Sugihara, who helped 6,000 Jews escape to Japan during WWII. We became an unlikely pair, investigating the life of my grandfather. I showed him all the monuments on my grandfather; he showed me pits of where Jews were buried because of my grandfather. I gave him the book published by the Genocide Museum stating my grandfather was a hero; he gave me Holocaust books stating my grandfather was a villain.

 Dovidavičius was the first to suggest that my grandfather conducted the initial akcija (action) during World War II before the Germans arrived. It coincided with Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, the same day Lithuania began its uprising with the Germans against the Soviets, marking the start of a Holocaust there, where 95 percent of its 200,000 Jews were murdered, the highest percentage of any country in Europe. (About 3,000 Jews remain in Lithuania today.)

 Within three weeks, 2,000 Jews had been killed in Plungė, half the town’s population, and where my grandfather led the uprising. This preceded the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, when Nazi Germany decided to make mass-murder its state policy. Put in more chilling terms, Dovidavičius claimed that my grandfather, as captain, taught his Lithuanian soldiers how to exterminate Jews efficiently: how to sequester them, march them into the woods, force them to dig their own graves and shove them into pits after shooting them. My grandfather was a master educator.

 I resumed the investigation. I sought out Damijonas Riaukia, a colleague of my grandfather during the five-day uprising. He was a 17-year-old in 1941. “Didn’t my grandfather have anything to do with the killing of the Jews?” “He wasn’t here,” he answered. “He had nothing to do with it. It was the Germans.” By this point I suspected a cover-up, but I needed proof.

 ………

 By the end of the trip I came to believe that my grandfather must have sanctioned the murders of 2,000 Jews in Plungė, 5,500 Jews in Šiauliai and 7,000 in Telšiai.

 ………

 Gochin has identified more than 100 relatives killed in the Lithuanian Holocaust. Our independent research has shown that my grandfather murdered Gochin’s relatives. We decided to join forces.

 While I had been focused exclusively on my grandfather over the past two decades, Gochin had launched a movement in Lithuania to expose multiple men lauded as heroes by the Genocide Museum who played a role in the Holocaust. Three years ago, he launched a campaign to remove my grandfather’s plaque from the Vilnius Library of the Academy of Science building. Despite wide media coverage and a petition signed by 19 prominent Lithuanian politicians, writers, and historians, the government refused to remove the plaque. This month, Gochin presented a 69-page exposé on my grandfather, charging the government with a cover-up of the Holocaust. I’m trying to play my small part in Gochin’s movement by offering an affidavit of support describing my research on my grandfather.

 In the face of tremendous resistance by the Lithuanian government, the effort to convince it to acknowledge its role in the Holocaust will be long and hard. The souls of 200,000 Jews buried in Lithuanian soil demand such a reckoning.

It’s one thing look into family history and find some skeletons, most families do, it’s another to face it head on and tell people that you have genocidal monsters in your family tree.

This could not have been easy.

Pass the Popcorn

I have been arguing for 9 years that there is an anti-corruption principle embedded in the Constitution. Today, Judge Peter J. Messitte adopted that principle writing “As Professor Teachout has noted, ‘corruption, in the American tradition, does not just include blatant bribes..”

— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) July 25, 2018

This is a happy constitutional scholar

A judge has ruled that the emoluments lawsuit against Donald Trump can proceed:

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected President Trump’s latest effort to stop a lawsuit that alleges Trump is violating the Constitution by continuing to do business with foreign governments.

The ruling, from U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte in Greenbelt, Md., will allow the plaintiffs — the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia — to proceed with their case, which says Trump has violated little-used anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution known as emoluments clauses.

This ruling appeared to mark the first time a federal judge had interpreted those constitutional provisions and applied their restrictions to a sitting president.

If the ruling stands, it could bring unprecedented scrutiny to Trump’s businesses — which have sought to keep their transactions with foreign states private, even as their owner sits in the Oval Office.

Messitte’s 52-page opinion said that, in the modern context, the Constitution’s ban on emoluments could apply to Trump — and that it could cover any business transactions with foreign governments where Trump derived a “profit, gain or advantage.”

“This includes profits from private transactions, even those involving services given at fair market value,” Messitte wrote.

I am intensely amused by this, though I am not as over the moon about this as Zephyr Teachout,who has maintained that anti-corruption is actually a prominent foundation of the US Constitution.

It will be fun to watch Donald Trump squirm over this.

Finance Ruins Everything

The New York Daily News has has just fired half of its reporters:

This past spring, Michael Ferro resigned as chairman of publicly traded media-looting hell-company Tronc, Inc., just ahead of the publication of sexual harassment allegations against him. As a parting gift, Tronc paid him $15 million, voluntarily bundling up the total value of a three-year consulting contract into one lump payment expensed against the company’s earnings and putting itself $14.8 million in the red for the first quarter. Today, Tronc gutted the New York Daily News, laying off at least half of its editorial staff to cut costs. In a society not crippled and driven completely insane by capitalism, motherf%$#ers would go to prison for this.

When people talk pejoratively about “class warfare,” they almost never are referring to things like the above sequence of events. But what happened to the Daily News at the hands of Tronc is class f%$#ing warfare, a massive redistribution of wealth from the paper’s working people to a disgusting handsy sh%$bag multimillionaire, in a decision made far above those working people’s heads by a small handful of executive- and investor-class vampires. The journalists who lost their livelihoods today in effect had their salaries and benefits re-routed to Michael Ferro’s bank accounts. Against their wills, they were made to pay him for being a f%$#ing pig.

Versions of this are happening all across the media industry: Ownership parasites writing checks to themselves and each other that must be cashed out of the livelihoods of real people with no say in the matter. Deadspin’s parent company, Univision, recently bought out dozens of people across our network of sister sites—originally they’d intended layoffs, before negotiating with our union—not because we’re doing unprofitable work, but simply as a means of passing along the outrageous debt the company’s owners took on when they purchased Gizmodo Media Group in the first place. Next they’ll sell us off—altogether or piecemeal, as best suits their wallets and nothing else. It is, pretty much exactly, the F%$# you, pay me! sequence from Goodfellas, playing out in real time.

I really do think that there needs to major changes to corporate bankruptcy codes to make this sort of behavior a bit less remunerative.

Something is Profoundly Odd Here

On Business Insider, I came across a story about Silicon Valley venture capitalist Masha Drokova.

There were a number of things that did not seem right, she is a 28 year old woman who wants founders of her unicorns to have a rewarding life and romance.

First, she is 28, second, she is a woman, third, she did not go to Stanford, and fourth, she wants her founders to find stable romantic relationships:

“Everyone is more productive when they fall in love,” says Masha Drokova.

 Drokova is the founder of Day One Ventures, a San Francisco-based firm focused on early-stage investments. The 28-year-old runs her firm differently than that of the average Silicon Valley venture capitalist: She considers investing in companies to be a deeply holistic undertaking, often forming close, personal relationships with her portfolio companies’ founders.

“If I don’t have a human connection with someone, I won’t do business with them,” says Drokova. “For me, it’s never just about the money. I’m going to know most of my founders for the next five or 10 years. If you don’t have a personal connection with a person, it’s likely that your business relationship will fall apart.”

Often, Drokova’s close-knit business relationships evolve beyond a purely professional context. “I’m friends with the founders of my portfolio companies,” she says. “I enjoy spending time with them and learning about them.”

………

“It’s often very simple things that help,” says Drokova. “Meditating, eating healthy food, taking care of their physical health.”

For some stressed-out founders, Drokova recommends mediation classes, podcasts, and self-developmental courses like Vipassana and sexual energy retreats.

………

“My founders are much more grounded when they’re in relationships,” says Drokova. “They take on this new energy. They’re more focused.”

To aid her founders along in the pursuit of romance, Drokova has played the part of matchmaker to a number of her portfolio company entrepreneurs.

“It’s not necessarily matchmaking,” says Drokova. “I just introduce them to my friends.”

My sense, confirmed by a friend in the tech biz is that this is highly unusual. He rather pityily noted that this was, “Horsesh%$,” and that, “The one thing SV venture firms don’t want is founders having a life.”

The hedge fund is rather small, around $30 million, but even at that level, I cannot see it having any meaningful support from the Silicon Valley crowd, who are not what one would call pro-social.

Perhaps Russian exiles, Drokova has had a falling out with Putin (at only 28, precocious!), and there is a lot of Russian emigre money out there, so that could be the source.

It does not seem to me to be smart money, but then again, neither were the titans of industry who invested in Theranos, and separating investors people from their money is a viable business plan.  Ask Goldman Sachs, who have been doing just that for 148 years.

Hunter S. Thompson is Smiling Somewhere

It’s a review of OZY Fest 2018 from Rolling Stone magazine by  Matt Christman and Will Menaker of very left Chapo Trap House podcast, who referred to it as a, “Neoliberal Nightmare.”.

It is a thing of beauty, and my favorite bit was reading about Rose McGowan throwing serious shade at guest of honor Hillary Clinton:

After taking a time out in the advertorial screening room/safe space presented by Volvo, I caught some of Rose McGowan’s talk on #MeToo. What her analysis of sexual harassment and assault was lacking in materialism, she more than made up for in purity of hate. I like to think she was throwing some subtle shade on the queen when she referred to the Weinsteins of the world as “superpredators.” Maybe it’s just my love of Jawbreaker talking, but Comrade McGowan might join the revolution yet.

It WAS shade, and it WASN’T subtle.

This is Intriguing

Harold Feld, Sr. VP and lawyer at Public Knowledge, has an interesting way to measure excessive market power for anti-trust purposes, that one can measure the the cost of exclusion:

In my last blog post, I explained my working definition for what constitutes a “digital platform.” Today, I focus on another concept that gets thrown around a lot: “dominant.” While many regulations promoting consumer protection and competition apply throughout a sector, some economic regulations apply to “dominant” firms or firms with “market power.” Behavior that is harmless, or potentially even positive when done by smaller companies or in a more competitive marketplace, can be anticompetitive or harmful to consumers when done by dominant firms — regardless of the firm’s actual intent.

For reasons discussed in my previous blog posts, defining what constitutes “dominant” (or even identifying a single market in which to make such a determination), presents many challenges using the traditional tools of analysis favored by antitrust enforcers and regulators. I therefore propose that we use the cost of exclusion (“COE,” because nothing in policy is taken seriously unless it has its own acronym) as the means of determining when we need to apply regulation to “dominant” firms. That is to say, the greater the cost to individuals and firms (whether as consumers or producers or any of the other roles they may play simultaneously on digital platforms), the greater the need for regulations to protect platform users from harm. If a firm is “too big to lose access to,” then we should treat that firm as dominant.

It’s not the only potential standard for antitrust, but, particularly in the context of large digital platforms, it provides an additional tool to justify regulating large dominant firms.

Now if only antitrust can put the ahistorical and dishonest writings of  Robert Bork behind it.

Some Fact Checking Please

For once, the title, “This Porcelain Is Tougher Than It Looks,” is correct, but the article gets the basics wrong:

Wallace Chan, the Hong Kong jeweler behind some of the world’s most exclusive gems, sat in a sunny Manhattan hotel room a few weeks ago, talking about his latest creations.

He displayed one, a large blue ring topped with a diamond — and began whacking it aggressively against the wooden coffee table.

Bang! Mr. Chan, 62, just smiled. Then he rapped it again.

The ring was primarily made of porcelain, a ceramic normally used for rose-strewn tea sets and figurines of pouting milkmaids, and such treatment should have reduced it to a handful of shards on the hotel room carpet.

But this wasn’t just any old porcelain. It was a porcelain seven years in the making, which Mr. Chan invented and which he says is five times harder than steel.

The material — called for the time being, a little unimaginatively, Wallace Chan Porcelain — is made of specially chosen ingredients that Mr. Chan treats like the equivalent of a state secret out of fear of industrial espionage (the jewelry world is, apparently, a paranoid place). But the ingredients are, he said, almost devoid of impurities.

All high fire (vitrified) clays, like porcelain, and most of the low fire clays, are MUCH harder than steel.

Ordinary glass is harder than steel, which you can demonstrate if you (very) carefully try to drill window glass.

On the Mohs Scale, steel is typically in the 4-4½ range, and porcelain is around 7. (Talc is 1 & diamond 10 on the Mohs Scale)

What Mr. Chan has done is create a TOUGHER ceramic, which is important, but VERY different from a HARDER ceramic.

 He does this, as the article reveals, by making small (but important) changes in the formulation of porcelain, and firing it at a higher temperature, which further reduces voids in the resulting fired ceramic.

 It’s pretty much the same process used by people trying to put ceramics in things like jet turbines, though he seems to have come up with a technique that does not require the elaborate tooling used for those applications.

My guess his recipe is that, “Almost devoid of impurities,” is the most important bit.  

Ceramics yield very little, which means that stresses at any crack tips are very high because there is little local yielding, so the elimination of inclusions are critical to toughness and tensile strength.

 Good for Mr. Chan, but someone needs to give the reporter a class in material science 101.

Linkage

It appears that Trevor Noah really pissed off much of France in his World Cup Comments:

Shades of the B-70 Bomber


The prototype today


The XB-70 in 1960


Have a video


A slightly clearer view

Nasa is investigating wings that fold down in flight to reduce drag and increase stability: (paid subscription required)

Folding the tips of a wing in flight can increase stability and reduce drag, NASA flight tests have shown. Now researchers plan additional flights to test control laws that actively adjust wing fold in flight to minimize drag. They are also proposing a project to test wing folding in supersonic flight.

 The Spanwise Adaptive Wing (SAW) project, a rapid feasibility assessment under NASA’s Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) program, showed folding the outer sections of the wing in flight improved directional stability and control. In a new aircraft design, this would allow tail size and drag to be reduced.

One of the interesting bit of tech here is the actuator for wing folding.

As opposed to the rather large and heavy hydraulic actuators used by the Valkyrie, they are using memory metals and heating:

The tests involved NASA’s subscale unmanned prototype-technology evaluation and research aircraft (PTERA), essentially an 11%-scale Boeing 737, with the outer 15 in. on either side of its 176-in.-span wing hinged to fold up or down by up to 75 deg. The sections were folded in flight using shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators built into the hinge lines.

………

SAW is built around torsion actuators made of an alloy that, when heated electrically, “remembers” and returns to its original twisted shaped, and in doing so moves the wingtip. The PTERA uses an actuator with a single SMA tube that produces 500 in.-lb. of torque. NASA Glenn has ground-tested a 5,000 in.-lb. actuator with nested SMA tubes. This was used to fold the outer wingbox of the F/A-18 wing.

………

NASA Glenn has developed the nickel-titanium-hafnium shape-memory alloy and is working to scale up the tubes to sizes never before produced. “Glenn is working with the material supplier, pouring melts and breaking records,” says Moholt. “They are working to make sure it scales, with the right crystalline structure.”

The raw SMA stock is provided to Boeing, which gun-drills the tubes and assembles them into an actuator. The 20,000 in.-lb. SAW actuator has 12 0.5-in.-dia. tubes, each with a gear at the end driving a ring gear that moves the wing. Boeing is also “training” the SMA actuators, a process that requires thousands of thermal cycles.

The SAW project ends in September. The team is proposing a follow-on project that would demonstrate SMA wing folding on a supersonic aircraft. Folding the wingtips down in supersonic flight generates compression lift from shockwaves under the wing and can dramatically reduce induced drag, says Moholt. This was used in the North American XB-70 bomber. Folding the tips down also increases lateral stability and control in supersonic flight, allowing a smaller tail.

Also, at supersonic speeds, the drooped wingtips capture the shock-wave from the bottom of the aircraft, and can increase lift.

It’s a neat piece of kit.

I Agree with a WaPo OP/ED

In a guest editorial, an assistant professor at my alma mater makes what should be an obvious point, that jokes about a gay relationship between Trump and Putin is neither funny nor appropriate.

I agree wholeheartedly:

Trump is astonishingly ill informed about foreign affairs. He undermines the U.S. intelligence community at the peril of our safety and institutional integrity. He is ineffectual, and even dangerous, in his foreign policy. Gay romance metaphors do not convey this reality — they obscure it. We should indict the conditions giving rise to these narratives and seriously consider the costs of linking gay sexuality with failure, security risk and shame.

The Return of Indentured Servitude

Colleges are looking at the future, and the future is eternal peonage of their students:

As more students balk at the debt loads they face after graduation, some colleges are offering an alternative: We’ll pay your tuition if you offer us a percentage of your future salary.

Norwich University announced Tuesday that it will become the latest school to offer this type of contract, known as an income share agreement. Norwich’s program is starting out on a small scale, mainly for students who do not have access to other types of loans or those who are taking longer than the traditional eight semesters to finish their degree.

“Norwich University is committed to offering this new way to help pay for college in a way that aligns incentives and helps reduce financial barriers to degree completion,” said Lauren Wobby, the school’s chief financial officer and treasurer.

The word here is, “Dystopian.”

The Only Crime Is to Get Caught

A federal judge just unloaded a can of whup-ass on FBI agents for gross misconduct in obtaining warrants.

The misconduct is not a surprise. It is the nature of law enforcement to ignore the rules unless there is a real and immediate consequence for their misdeeds:

A federal judge in San Francisco recently excoriated the government over its improper methods in searching one suspect’s cell phone and in the use of a stingray to find an alleged co-conspirator.

Prosecutors say the two men, Donnell Artis and Chanta Hopkins, were engaged in credit card fraud and also illegally possessed firearms, among other pending charges that also involve four other people. The crux of the issue is that, in April 2016, an FBI agent sought and obtained two warrants from an Alameda County Superior Court judge: one to search Artis’ phone and another to deploy a stingray to locate Hopkins.

………

However, California law does not allow state judges to sign off on warrants for federal agents, something that this particular FBI agent, Stonie Carlson, apparently did not know.

“But the two warrants were plagued by numerous errors, reflecting a pattern of systematic recklessness by law enforcement that militates in favor of suppressing the evidence (and against applying the ‘good-faith exception’ to the exclusionary rule),” US District Judge Vince Chhabria wrote in a July 3 order. “This ruling is published separately to put the relevant actors in the criminal justice system on notice that California law prevents state judges from issuing search warrants to federal law enforcement officers, which means that federal law enforcement officers are not permitted to execute such warrants.”

………

“The good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule does not apply in this case,” Judge Chhabria wrote in the second July 3 order. “Perhaps any one of the above-referenced errors, viewed in isolation, could be excused under the good-faith exception. But the whole string of errors embodied in these warrant applications militates against applying the good-faith exception. Indeed, although the above-described errors are the most egregious ones, they are not the only instances of sloppy, inappropriate law enforcement work.

What the judge doesn’t explicitly say, but which is strongly implied by the rest of the article, is that the FBI agents were lying through their teeth.

This is not a surprise.  The product that law enforcement produces is case clearances, and the downside of occasionally suppressed is not considered to be a major issue career-wise for those officers.

Short version:  Police lie and break the law because they are rewarded for lying and breaking the law.

Today is the Worst Day Ever

I don’t mean this personally, but rather on a far broader level.

It’s the 9th of Av (Tisha B’Av) on the Jewish calendar.

It’s kind of the Spinal Tap drummer of Jewish history.

Here is a sample of its greatest “hits”:

  • The report of the spies from Canaan, resulting in the people of Israel spending 40 Years in the Desert.
  • The destruction of the 1st Temple.
  • The destruction of the 2nd Temple.
  • The Romans razed Betar, killing 100,000 Jews.
  • The Romans plowed the temple mount.
  • The start of the 1st Crusade. (You see it as a coming together of Christendom. I see it as a pogrom with years of murder and rape.)
  • The expulsion of Jews from England.
  • The expulsion of Jews from France.
  • The expulsion of Jews from Spain.
  • Germany entered the WW I. (Can be legitimately claimed to have directly led to the Shoah)
  • Formal approval of the “Final Solution” by the Nazis in 1941.
  • Deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto begin in 1942.

I had Forgotten How Good This Was

My daughter’s rehearsal went long, so I watched the first episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker on my phone in the parking lot. (She has a thing about us being in one of her plays, she is the stage manager, when the rehearsal is going. She also has a problem with people saying the name of the Scottish Play. Whatever.)

Nowadays, it’s primarily remembered as being the inspiration for shows like The X-Files, but it was very well done television.

I remembered enjoying it as a kid, but it’s a lot more sophisticated and polished than I noticed back then.

Darren McGavin was engaging, the relationship between him and Simon Oakland, who played his ever-annoyed editor Tony Vincenzo showed a lot more depth than I recalled. (you get a sense of mutual the respect that they have for each other)

The supporting actors Jack Grinnage, as Kolchak’s uptight and barely competent cow-orker Ron Updyke, and the guest appearance of Beatrice Colen as the gore and food obsessed competitor Jane Plumm was spot on. (I did not like all the fat jokes about her: It was the one thing that rankles now.)

The action sequences/SFX are amazing in that there really are no special effects, the show was done on a shoe string, but, because of good directing and camera work, you really don’t notice this.

Through inspired use of camera angles, light, and darkness, you believe that there is a superhuman maniac tossing policemen around like they were puppies.

I would also note that its representation of reporting has shaped my view of the trade.  It was an entertaining depiction of old fashioned shoe leather journalism.

This show is one reason why I tend to disdain the sort of access journalism favored these days.

The following video is the “Ripper”, the first episode of the series: (run time 51:44)