Tag: FAIL

What Duncan Said

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But this isn’t like putting a sign in front of a cliff which says, “please don’t step right up to the edge of the cliff,” and then blaming the student who plunged to his death for failing to obey the sign. Though that’s the story university administrators want to tell.

The student who steps up to the edge of the cliff, idiot as he may be, is tethered to 5 more students, who are tethered to 5 more students, who are tethered to 5 more students…

That some number of students are dipsh%$s was known by the responsible adults making these plans. That each student dipsh%$ is going to infect some number of other “blameless” students is regularly ignored. 

—Atrios, aka Duncan Black

(%$# mine)

He is completely right.  In the context of a residential educational institution, it is impossible to make ALL the students behave responsibly.

Administrators know this, and so the outbreaks are a direct result of their callously disregard for the safety of their students, because they wanted the tuition and fee money.

Only in America

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I came across two stories within minutes of each other, the first reported that FHA mortgage delinquencies have hit record levels, and the second story reveals that home builder confidence in the US has hit a record high. 

This is a recipe for disaster:

Federal Housing Administration mortgages — the affordable path to homeownership for many first-time buyers, minorities and low-income Americans — now have the highest delinquency rate in at least four decades.

The share of late FHA loans rose to almost 16% in the second quarter, up from about 9.7% in the previous three months and the highest level in records dating back to 1979, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Monday. The delinquency rate for conventional loans, by comparison, was 6.7%.

Millions of Americans stopped paying their mortgages after losing jobs in the coronavirus crisis. Those on the lower end of the income scale are most likely to have FHA loans, which allow borrowers with shaky credit to buy homes with small down payments.

For now, most of them are protected from foreclosure by the federal forbearance program, in which borrowers with pandemic-related hardships can delay payments for as much as a year without penalty. As of Aug. 9, about 3.6 million homeowners were in forbearance, representing 7.2% of loans, the MBA said in a separate report. The share has decreased for nine straight weeks.

Note that even though interest rates are low, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have implemented a
0.5-percentage-point “adverse market” fee to account for the increase risk of default, but home builders are confident.

My guess is that they are expecting a taxpayer bailout of some sort:

U.S. home builder confidence rose for a third straight month in August to match its highest level ever as record-low interest rates spur buyer traffic, data released on Monday showed in the latest indication the housing market is a rare bright spot in the economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s Always the Hot Work that Gets You

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It turns out that welding (hot work) to secure a door to prevent theft of the ammonium nitrate was what set off the massive blast at the port of Beirut.

This is no surprise.  Hot work has always been a leading cause of fires in industrial settings:

Multiple sources have reported that the disastrous explosion at Port of Beirut was sparked by hot work at a warehouse where officials had stored 2,750 tonnes of confiscated ammonium nitrate and a cache of fireworks. In a new report, senior officials provided Reuters with additional details: early this year they had learned that one of the warehouse’s doors was broken, raising the risk that a malicious actor could steal dangerous explosives. The port’s welding contractors set off the cache while trying to repair the door to protect the cache.

According to the report, the security investigation that set this chain in motion began in January after the broken door and a large hole in the warehouse’s wall were discovered. On June 4 – six months later – state security forces ordered the port to guard the warehouse and make appropriate repairs. On August 4 – two months after the order – the port sent a team of Syrian workers to fix the warehouse. Sparks from their welding work ignited a supply of fireworks, which had been stored next to the ammonium nitrate cache.

As an interesting aside, it appears that we still have no information as to who actually owned the ammonium nitrate which languished for years in a warehouse:

In the murky story of how a cache of highly explosive ammonium nitrate ended up on the Beirut waterfront, one thing is clear — no one has ever publicly come forward to claim it.

There are many unanswered questions surrounding last week’s huge, deadly blast in the Lebanese capital, but ownership should be among the easiest to resolve.

………

But Reuters interviews and trawls for documents across 10 countries in search of the original ownership of this 2,750-tonne consignment instead revealed an intricate tale of missing documentation, secrecy and a web of small, obscure companies that span the globe.

At this point, I’m pretty sure that there are 3 or 4 oligarchs crapping their pants over the possibility that they are tied to this disaster.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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If good data is collected and made public, then Trump cannot declare victory, and DHS has been politicized by Trump’s Evil Minions™, and mismanaging a dire situation is really their only skill set.

The purpose of the switch was to give the Donald Trump to :

Public release of hospital data about the coronavirus pandemic has slowed to a crawl, one month after the federal government ordered states to report it directly to the Department of Health and Human Services and bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Key indicators, such as estimates of the portion of inpatient beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, are lagging by a week or more, making it harder for citizens and local officials to get a handle on how the pandemic is progressing and for agencies to allocate supplies of antiviral drugs and personal protective equipment, public-health experts say.

The decision to switch data reporting in the middle of a public-health crisis was reckless, researchers and former public-health officials say.

“The transition has been a disaster,” as hospitals typically take time to adjust to new data systems, said Jeffrey Engel, senior adviser to the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, an association that represents state public-health officials. “What HHS said was that the CDC was not nimble enough and couldn’t handle new data elements, and that’s simply not true.”

Chaos is job won.

バカにつける薬はない

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The above is a Japanese proverb which states, “There is no medicine for stupidity.”

I am referring to North Paulding High School, which I wrote about a few days ago when they suspended students for revealing the complete unpreparedness of the school for dealing with coronavirus transmission.

Well today, North Paulding High is gong online for at least 2 days following a spike in infections:

The Paulding County high school that became infamous for hallways crowded with unmasked students will retreat online for at least a couple days this week after revealing that a half-dozen students and three staffers were diagnosed with COVID-19.

The district said it needs time to disinfect the North Paulding High School building and look for other potentially infected individuals.

“On Monday and Tuesday, the school will be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, and the district will consult with the Department of Public Health to assess the environment and determine if there (are) any additional close contacts for confirmed cases who have not already been identified,” Paulding Superintendent Brian Otott wrote in a letter to parents Sunday.

Otott said parents will be notified Tuesday evening about whether North Paulding High School will reopen Wednesday.

Parents whose children go to the school might want to get a doctor’s note to keep them out of school for, “Unspecified health issues.”

This goes for members of the sports team in spades.

The only thing that the administration is interested in is passing the buck.

Today in Evil

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In an attempt coverup reckless disregard for the safety of their students and their staff, administrators at North Paulding High School in Dallas, GA have suspended students who have reported unsafe and dangerous conditions:

At least two North Paulding High School students have been suspended after sharing images of a school hallway jammed with their mostly maskless peers, and the principal has warned other students against doing the same.

North Paulding High School in Dallas, Ga., about an hour’s drive from Atlanta, was thrust into the national spotlight this week when pictures and videos surfaced of its crowded interior on the first and second days of its first week back in session. The images, which showed a sea of teens clustered together with no face coverings, raised concerns among online commenters and parents over how the district is handling reopening schools during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Facing a fierce online backlash, Paulding County Schools Superintendent Brian Otott told parents and guardians in a letter that the images “didn’t look good.” But he argued that they lacked context about the 2,000-plus student school, where masks are a “personal choice.”

Certainly, posting to social media from school is a no-no, but listen to this message from the principal where he explicitly states that any criticism will be punished:

#Exclusive recording from North #Paulding High telling kids they will be punished for sharing to social media about conditions. Plus new #COVID19 cases in Cherokee County Schools and a football player in Henry County tests positive… details @cbs46 #Atlanta #backtoschool pic.twitter.com/3o9GFGxlIg

— Jamie S Kennedy (@Jamie_S_Kennedy) August 6, 2020

This is illegal retaliation, and the administrators should be frog-marched out of the school in hand cuffs.

Headline of the Day

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Great Touring Bike Deals Coming To An Estate Sale Near You, Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Hopes To Welcome 250,000

—Jalopnik

There are going to be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Covid-19 infections directly from this get-together, and then everyone will drive home, carrying it back to their communities.

If you are looking for a cheap Harley, you may want to wait a few weeks.

H/t DC at the Steller Parthenon BBS.

Exceeding My Already Low Expectation

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Vanity Fair has an article about the Trump administration’s initial plans for dealing with the Covid-19, and it was even more nihilistic, corrupt. and venal than I could previously have imagined:

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

Unsurprisingly, Jared Kushner was leaving this effort.

If these people are allowed to leave the White House and simply return to private life, this be deeply corrosive to society.

They need to be put in the dock.

Data Point of the Day

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Donald Trump has made warnings about the threat of antifa and “far-left fascism” a central part of his re-election campaign. But in reality leftwing attacks have left far fewer people dead than violence by rightwing extremists, new research indicates, and antifa activists have not been linked to a single murder in decades.

A new database of nearly 900 politically motivated attacks and plots in the United States since 1994 includes just one attack staged by an anti-fascist that led to fatalities. In that case, the single person killed was the perpetrator.

Over the same time period, American white supremacists and other rightwing extremists have carried out attacks that left at least 329 victims dead, according to the database.

More broadly, the database lists 21 victims killed in leftwing attacks since 2010 , and 117 victims of rightwing attacks in that same period – nearly six times as much. Attacks inspired by the Islamic State and similar jihadist groups, in contrast, killed 95 people since 2010, slightly fewer than rightwing extremists, according to the data set. More than half of these victims died in a a single attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016.

………

While researchers sometimes disagree on how to categorize the ideology of specific attacks, multiple databases that track extremist violence, including data maintained by the Anti-Defamation League, and from journalists at the Center for Investigative Reporting, have found the same trend: It’s violent rightwing attacks, not “far-left” violence, that presents the greater deadly threat to Americans today.

If the right wing were treated as the threat that they actually are, we’d have hundreds of co-conspirators in prison serving sentences or awaiting trial right now.

I’ve Heard of Truck Nuts, but Not Valve-Stem Cover Penises

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Parked next to me


Wait ……… Is that what I think it is?


Yes, it is, and it is circumcised

I picked up Nat from camp this morning, the counselors had a camping night together, and she wanted to pick up a bite at the local convenience store, Wally’s Country Store.

So, I parked while she masked up and went in.

I looked to my left, and noticed something odd about the car next to me:  The valve stem covers appeared to be penises.

This, much like truck nutz, it appears to be a metaphor for American society today.

They are almost Trumpian in their crassness, though I am aware that truck nutz predate Donald Trump’s political aspirations by decades.

How is this a thing?

Another Civil Society Group Fail

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I’m not a big fan of civil society groups. Their history of letting their camps in (then) Zaire to be used as staging areas for the former members of the genocidal regime in Rawanda, along with their enthusiastic embrace delivering aid Serbian concentration camps in Kosovo. (Can’t find a link, sorry)

Particularly when juxtaposed with studies that show that the entire foreign aid establishment would do better by just giving people money, I am inclined to believe that there is way too much careerism in among the NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), and that it takes priority over results.

Case in point, it appears that NGO anti-corruption campaigns increase the level of corruption, because they reduce the confidence in the government of make both the citizens and the bureaucrats.

Of course, for the NGOs, and more importantly the donors, it is more important to appear to be fighting corruption than it it is to actually fight corruption:

Donors and civil society groups spend tens of millions of dollars every year trying to combat corruption. They do it because corruption has been shown to increase poverty and inequality while undermining trust in the government. Reducing corruption is essential to improve public services and strengthen the social contract between citizens and the state.

But what if anti-corruption efforts actually make the situation worse?

Our research in Lagos, Nigeria, found that anti-corruption messages often have an unintended effect. Instead of building public resolve to reject corrupt acts, the messages we tested either had no effect or actually made people more likely to offer a bribe.

The reason may be that the messages reinforce popular perceptions that corruption is pervasive and insurmountable. In doing so, they encourage apathy and acceptance rather than inspire activism.

The NGOs, and more importantly the donors, will likely be impervious to data showing that what they do does not work.

This is because for the NGOs, accepting this would require a change in tactics which would involve working with more local input and local agents, which means that there would be fewer jobs for the professionals staff of these groups.

As Upton Sinclair so pithily observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

As for the donors, it’s an easy sell, because it is, as H.L. Menken so pithily observed, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Welcome to the Brotherhood of Sh%$-Hole Nations

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Much of the Caribbean is rolling up the welcome mat to American tourists because of our bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic:

As Caribbean beaches and resorts begin welcoming back international tourists, there’s one group that’s increasingly being left out: Americans.

 Tropical vacation spots across the region are giving U.S. citizens the cold shoulder amid fears they might spread the coronavirus, cutting Americans off from one of the few regions that was still accessible to them.

 This week, the Bahamas will begin barring commercial flights and passenger ships from the U.S., even as it invites Canadian and European tourists to visit. The Dutch countries of St. Maarten and Curacao have also reopened to almost everyone but U.S. travelers.

So much winning.

Common Sense Rule of Foreign Policy: Don’t Ally Yourselves with Nazis

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A Ukrainian lobbying group located in Washington, DC has invited a Neo-Nazi convicted of hate crimes to speak at on of their events:

The influential Washington-based U.S.-Ukraine Foundation (USUF) hosted a webinar on July 15 about a documentary about Vasyl Slipak, a famed Ukrainian opera singer who died in 2016 fighting alongside the ultranationalist Right Sector’s “Volunteer Ukrainian Corps” (DUK) in eastern Ukraine.

 The webinar featured an appearance by Diana Vynohradova (Kamlyuk), a sieg-heiling neo-Nazi decorated with white supremacist tattoos. Vynohradova was convicted of participating in a notorious racist murder and has incited hatred against Jews, denigrating them as “kikes.”

………

Zaborona reported that Vynohradova was convicted in the early 2000s for her participation in the racist murder of a Nigerian citizen. “I don’t like Negroes,” her friend replied when asked why he stabbed the Nigerian to death.

While in prison, Vynohradova wrote poems for the notorious neo-Nazi band Sokyra Peruna. During the 2013-14 “Revolution of Dignity,” she advised protesters from the main stage on Kyiv’s Independence Square “not to give in to supplications from the kikes.”

In the past, Vynohradova wore a neo-Nazi “1488” tattoo on her right arm, but she has since covered it up. She has not bothered to hide the white supremacist Celtic Cross above it, however, and continues to sport a kolovrat necklace — a Slavic pagan symbol that resembles a swastika.

I get that foreign policy ain’t beanbag, but experience shows that appeasing Nazi movements is not a good long term strategy.

Oh, Snap!

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It looks like Donald Trump won’t get his massive convention in Jacksonville.

The event has been cancelled, which means that the convention will be conducted in a far more sparsely attended manner in ……… I dunno ……… Maybe back to Charlotte, NC?

In a stunning reversal, President Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he was canceling the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville next month, abruptly calling off an event he’d pushed only weeks earlier to relocate from North Carolina to his home state.

Trump announced the decision during a White House news conference, saying “the timing of the event is not right” amid the surging coronavirus outbreak in Florida, where earlier in the day officials announced a state record of 173 COVID-19 deaths.

“I told my team it’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Florida, component of the GOP convention,” Trump said, adding that his campaign would still hold “tele-rallies” and online events. “I’ll still do a convention speech in a different form, but we won’t do a big crowded convention per se. It’s just not the right time for that.”

Trump’s announcement — which caught some of his closest allies off guard after he pushed the event out of Charlotte, N.C., in the hope that he could give his nomination acceptance speech in a packed arena in Florida — signals a shift in position on the novel coronavirus pandemic, which he’d attempted to write off for months as a minimal threat.

The decision also avoids a potentially embarrassing clash with Jacksonville city and law enforcement officials, who warned early this week that attempts to gather thousands of law enforcement officers to police the event had fallen short. A workshop with the city council was scheduled Friday to go over make-or-break legislation that some council members had said they might not support.

“We appreciate President Donald Trump considering our public health and safety concerns in making this incredibly difficult decision,” Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams and Mayor Lenny Curry said in a joint statement.

This is a complete cluster-f%$#, which I find intensely amusing.

Major props to Atrios for calling it, “Trumpstock.”

I wish that I came come up with that.

Donald Trump Must Have Lost His Mind

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Clearly, Nigerian princes were involved

Twitter’s verified accounts were compromised, resulting in all of these accounts (Blue Checkmark) being suspended for about an hour.

This means that Donald Trump could not Tweet during this time.

I rather imagine that his was exploding over this.

Twitter suffered a major security breach on Wednesday that saw hackers take control of the accounts of major public figures and corporations, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Apple.

The company confirmed the breach Wednesday evening, more than six hours after the hack began, and attributed it to a “coordinated social engineering attack” on its own employees that enabled the hackers to access “internal systems and tools”. Twitter said it was “looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed” in addition to using the compromised accounts to send tweets.
………

The company subsequently warned that some users would be unable to tweet or change their passwords as it worked to address the issue. Verified users, whose accounts feature a blue checkmark to denote that Twitter has confirmed their identities, were blocked from tweeting for about an hour.

Oh the humanity.

Florida, Man ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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On a day with record numbers of Covid-19 diagnoses, Disney World is reopening.

Seriously, Florida must be proof of Weisshaupt’s dictum, “I firmly believe that if you can’t fool all of the people all of the time you should start breeding them for stupidity.”

The Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, a Magic Kingdom hair salon where little girls get styled like Disney princesses, remained closed this weekend. Buzz Lightyear was only able to wave from a distance. Parades and fireworks? Scratched.

And the coronavirus continued its rampage through Florida, with officials reporting more than 15,000 new infections on Sunday, a daily record for any state, including New York.

None of which stopped Sonya Little and thousands of other theme park fans from turning out — in masks in the scorching Florida heat — for the reopening of Walt Disney World. After closing in March because of the pandemic, the mega-resort near Orlando began tossing confetti again at 9 a.m. on Saturday. Two of its four major parks, the Magic Kingdom and the Animal Kingdom, welcomed back a limited number of temperature-checked visitors, with some attractions and character interactions unavailable as safety precautions. Epcot and Disney’s Hollywood Studios were set to reopen on Wednesday.

………

To safely reopen, however, the Magic Kingdom had to allow some of the grimness of pandemic life to puncture the utopian fantasy. To ward off germs, Disney now leaves rows of seats empty on rides like Pirates of the Caribbean. Employees constantly disinfect ride vehicles and lap bars. Face masks are mandatory, and, for some visitors, the coverings quickly grew wet with sweat.

Am I the only one to think that the is completely bat-sh%$ insane?

Gee, You Think?

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The director of the Tulsa health department is saying that Donald Trump’s damp squib of a rally probably led to a surge in Covid-19 cases.

Well, color me completely not surprised:

President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa that drew thousands of people in late June, along with large protests that accompanied it, “likely contributed” to a dramatic surge in new coronavirus cases, Tulsa City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said Wednesday.

 Tulsa County reported 261 confirmed new cases on Monday, a one-day record high, and another 206 cases on Tuesday.

 Although the Health Department’s policy is to not publicly identify individual settings where people may have contracted the virus, Dart said those large gatherings “more than likely” contributed to the spike.

 “In the past few days, we’ve seen almost 500 new cases, and we had several large events just over two weeks ago, so I guess we just connect the dots,” Dart said.

As the saying goes, “バカにつける薬はない”.*

*Pronounced in Japanese,”baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.

One Candidate Won’t Win, and One Candidate Shouldn’t Win

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The Kentucky primary has now been called, as has the Colorado primary, and Amy McGrath has been declared the victor in Kentucky and John Hickenlooper the victor in Colorado.

McGrath is a hot mess, her performance during the debates, her paralysis over policing protests, and her statements on policy had her almost losing the primary despite raising over $40 million.

Her performance has one longing for the inept Alison Lundergan Grimes who was trounced the last time that McConnell was up for reelection.

Still, with lots of money, I’m sure that the consultants will make bank on this, even if Moscow Mitch remains a cancer on the US Senate.

As to Hickenlooper, this is a man who equated climate change activism and Medicare for All to Stalinism, and demonstrated his fealty to the fossil fuel industry by literally drinking a glass of fracking fluid.

And then there are his ethical and rhetorical lapses.  (He was fined by the state ethics commission)

Colorado has become fairly reliably blue on a statewide level, so Hickenlooper is likely to win, particularly since Corey Gardner is seriously wing-nutty, but, should he win, he will be an impediment to any and all progress on the major issues of the day.

Nature Cannot Be Fooled

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The good little Neoliberals in Chile decided to increase forestation and offset carbon emissions by paying loggers to plant forests.

This program achieved none of its goals:

A multi-decade state program to subsidize tree planting in one of South America’s wealthiest nations led to a loss of biodiversity and did little to increase the forests’ capacity to capture greenhouse gases.

Chile’s plantation forests more than doubled between 1986 and 2011, while native forests shrunk by 13%, according to a new report by U.S. and Chilean academics. The country subsidized tree planting while its forestry sector boomed over that period.

Yet the environmental benefits are not as clear. Subsidies accelerated biodiversity losses in Chile as plantations often focus on one or two profitable tree species, the report said. While forest area expanded by more than 100% between 1986 and 2011, the carbon stored in vegetation increased by just 1.98% during that period.

“Our simulations indicate that plantation subsidies accelerated biodiversity losses in Chile by encouraging the expansion of plantations into more biodiverse forests,” researchers said in the paper published inNature Susainability on Monday. Chile’s case “provides several cautionary lessons,” according to Robert Heilmayr at the University of California Santa Barbara, Cristian Echeverria at Universidad de Concepcion in Chile and Eric F. Lambin at Stanford University.

This has happened time and time again:  Attempts to enlist the profit motives to achieve a public good generate profits, but little in the way of public good.

The title is taken from Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman’s comment in the appendix that he authored for the report on the space shuttle Challenger destruction:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.