And it’s only 2020:
uhhhmmmmmm. https://t.co/e1tn5yLEQG
— Monica Lewinsky (@MonicaLewinsky) July 8, 2020
It’s nice that Monica Lewinski has a sense of humor about what was probably a horrible time in her life.
Tag: History
Yes
Is the Staggeringly Profitable Business of Scientific Publishing Bad for Science?
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
The story is, of course, about ferociously corrupt scientific journal publisher Elsevier, which interestingly enough was founded by the ferociously corrupt media baron Robert Maxwell, who is ironically enough the father of Ghislane Maxwell, who is alleged to have some serious ethical issues as well.
The reveal here is that monster that is Elsevier was nurtured by British intelligence.
Happy Independence Day
Protesters in Baltimore have dumped the statue of Christopher Columbus in Little Italy brought down into the Inner Harbor.
I’ll call it the Baltimore Tea Party:
A crowd of shouting protesters yanked down the Christopher Columbus statue near Little Italy, dragged it to the edge of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and rolled it with a splash into the water as fireworks went off around the city on the night of the Fourth of July.
Dedicated in 1984, the statue is the latest monument in the U.S. to fall this year during the national reckoning over racism and police violence that also has toppled statues of Confederate figures and enslavers around the country.
If there is a day best suited for such an impromptu reevaluation of statuary, July 4 is it.
Tweet of the Day
cheerily walking into the HOA meeting with this handy guide pic.twitter.com/wHXYx4xVtb— womanfredo tafuri (@mcmansionhell) July 1, 2020
As an FYI, the section reproduced by the tweeter is from a World War II vintage OSS manual on sabotage, specifically, sections 11 and 12 of the OSS’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
Using this at a HOA meeting is the most appropriate use of the dark arts ever. 
A Giant has Left Us
Carl Reiner, whose creative genius is beyond my capability to summarize, has died at the age of 98.
A some of his accomplishments:
- The Dick Van Dyke Show.
- The 2000 Year Old Man with Mel Brooks.
- Directing The Jerk and 4 other Steve Martin movies.
- The funniest straight man ever.
- Fathering the second funniest Reiner, Rob.
About F%$#ing Time
It looks like Mississippi will be the final state to remove the Confederate emblem from its flag.
It reinforces stereotypes that Mississippi is the last to do this:
Mississippi legislators have voted to replace the state flag, the last in the nation to feature the Confederate battle emblem, which has been condemned as racist.
The state House and the Senate voted to remove the current flag on Sunday and create a commission that will design a new flag that cannot include the Confederate symbol and that must have the words “In God We Trust”. Mississippi governor Tate Reeves has signalled he will sign the measure in the coming days.
The flag’s supporters have resisted efforts to change it for decades, but rapid developments in recent weeks have changed dynamics on this issue in the state, which has a long history of systemic racism and saw more lynchings of African Americans than any other state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Pandemic Neurosis Strikes Yours Truly
What’s more, I’m not alone I am one of roughly 50,000 people who have signed a petition to rename Columbus, Ohio, to “Flavortown,” as an homage to celebrity chef Guy Fieri.
I am NOT a fan of Fieri’s TV shows, but, you know, pandemic, bored, slowly going crazy, and he has been doing good work when he’s not doing his job on TV, which appears to be portraying a bleach blond hedgehog:
A petition seeking to rename Columbus, Ohio, “Flavortown” to honor native Guy Fieri has attracted thousands of signatures.
“Columbus is an amazing city, but one whose name is tarnished by the very name itself. Its namesake, Christopher Columbus, is in The Bad Place because of all his raping, slave trading, and genocide. That’s not exactly a proud legacy,” the petition states, referencing both a line from the NBC series “The Good Place” and passages in the explorer’s own diary describing atrocities committed on the island of Hispaniola.
“Why not rename the city Flavortown? The new name is twofold. For one, it honors Central Ohio’s proud heritage as a culinary crossroads and one of the nation’s largest test markets for the food industry,” it goes on to state. “Secondly, cheflebrity Guy Fieri was born in Columbus, so naming the city in honor of him (he’s such a good dude, really) would be superior to its current nomenclature.”
“Even though it’s my favorite city, I was always a bit ashamed of the name,” Tyler Woodbridge, who started the petition, told CNN.
Woodbridge added that Fieri’s charitable work on behalf of restaurant workers, raising more than $20 million for those who lost work or wages during the coronavirus pandemic, made him a worthier namesake for the city.
Go, sign, and if you live in “Flavortown”, talk to your elected officials.
OK, Not an Accident
It has now been revealed from a number of sources that Trump’s now banned “Red Triangle” ad had 14 words in the first sentence and was purchased 88 times. (See also here, here, and here.)
While I do not generally favor the use of Gamatria* in politics, there is a significance to these numbers. 1488 is a commonly used argot of Neo-Nazis, referring to both Hitler and the “protection” of the “white race”.
As the good folks at Psychology Today observe, “Once is a coincidence; twice is a tendency; three times is a rule.”
As Richard Dreyfuss noted in Jaws, “This is not a boat accident.”
On Thursday, June 18th, Facebook removed ads that the Trump re-election campaign began running the day earlier, citing the company’s policy against promoting organized hate. At the center of the ads and of the controversy was an inverted red triangle. The same symbol was used by Nazis to mark political prisoners–Communists, Freemasons, people who had helped Jews–in concentration camps.
If your reaction is, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” consider also that the first sentence of the ads contained 14 words, and a total of 88 ads were purchased by the campaign to be run on Facebook.
Fourteen words, 14, symbolizes a popular alt-right slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Eighty-eight, 88, stands for Heil Hitler—H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. Together, 14-88 are often used to signal allegiance to an alt-right group and the ideas of White Supremacy.
A mentor used to say, “once is a coincidence; twice is a tendency; three times is a rule.” So it would seem that in this case, the red triangle may not just be a red triangle, that it may stand for something else.
………
A White Power symbol posted by the U.S. president’s re-election campaign, “Team Trump,” helps to legitimize the alt-right movement. When the symbol is shared by the U.S. president himself and by Vice President Pence, observers might wonder if many people actually condone the alt-right movement’s goals and values.
This signaling may be far more sophisticated, and far more malicious, than I had previously thought.
*In Hebrew, every letter is also a number, and Gematria is a sort of mysticism where the numerical characteristics of sentences and word connote a greater meaning.
Happy Juneteenth
255 155 years ago today, General Gordon Granger announced the end of slavery in Texas after landing at Galveston.
Trump is Less Subtle Than I Had Understood
The Donald Trump campaign just had Facebook pull some of their political ads because they used Nazi iconography.
I still can’t believe that I am saying this, but Trump’s lack of subtlety on race baiting has stunned me.
Facebook on Thursday removed advertisements posted on its platform by the Trump campaign that prominently featured a symbol used by Nazis to classify political prisoners during World War II, saying the imagery violated company policy.
The Trump campaign had used the ads, with a picture of a large red triangle, to inveigh against antifa, a loose collective of anti-fascist protesters that President Trump has blamed for violence and vandalism during the nationwide protests against racial injustice. There is scant evidence that antifa has been involved in any coordinated campaigns during the demonstrations.
………
It was not clear if the Trump campaign was familiar with the origin of the symbol, which was reclaimed after World War II by some anti-fascists in Britain and Germany, in the same way that various political groups over the years have reclaimed words and symbols used to oppress them.
“We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate,” Facebook said in a statement. “Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”
I’m even more stunned that Facebook actually took action and yanked the ads.
This is a Sick Burn, If You Know Russian
Британский парламентарий призывает громить еврейские могилы.
🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️ https://t.co/lY5ymjJDGh— Ruslana Boshirova Альянс пианистов (@ValLisitsa) June 11, 2020
In case you are wondering, “Британский парламентарий призывает громить еврейские могилы,” translates to, “British MP calls for smashing Jewish graves.”
It’s not a statue that he wants destroyed, it’s Karl Marx’s grave stone.
The Power of Egyptology
I find this Twitter thread by an Egyptologist on how to pull down an obelisk to be very important, particularly in the case, as she notes, where the “Obelisk might be masquerading as a racist monument.
This is beautiful, man.
Good
They just tore down the statue of corrupt mayor and police chief Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia.
That man was one of the worst plagues on law enforcement in the 20th century.
In the predawn hours Wednesday, the city unceremoniously removed the controversial statue of former Mayor and Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, who was known for his aggressive tactics policing the black and gay communities of Philadelphia.
Some TV news stations were on the scene to capture the massive artwork being rigged with straps and then wobbled back and forth before being yanked from its base in front of the Municipal Services Building across the street from City Hall.
“The statue is a deplorable monument to racism, bigotry, and police brutality for members of the Black community, the LGBTQ community, and many others. The treatment of these communities under Mr. Rizzo’s leadership was among the worst periods in Philadelphia’s history,” Mayor Jim Kenney said in a written statement.
Speaking of plagues on law enforcement, when are they getting J. Edgar Hoover’s name off of the FBI headquarters?
Nothing of Value was Lost
The morning after in Richmond, Virginia – where they burned the Daughters of the Confederacy building and hung a noose around Jefferson Davis’ neck. pic.twitter.com/BdYWGAf6re— Mallory Noe-Payne (@MalloryNoePayne) May 31, 2020
Not sure how I feel about the noose
During protests over the police murder of George Floyd, protestors set fire to the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters.
Given the reality of the situation in the United States, perhaps they should share a building with the Benedict Arnold memorial.
What, there is no Benedict Arnold memorial building?
Well, there shouldn’t be a United Daughters of the Confederacy building either.
You and your treasonous ancestors can go f%$# themselves.
Prehistoric Percussion Proficiency
Archaeologist Dr. Jean-Loup Ringot specializes in prehistoric music, here he demonstrates a Lithophone. 🔊 pic.twitter.com/xqaov8Q8LZ
— Daniel Holland (@DannyDutch) May 16, 2020
A stone vibrophone. My percussionist son was impressed.
Arthur
We now have an early start to the named storm seasion, with Arthur reaching tropical storm status, which makes a named storm before the normalstart of hurricane season for the 6th time in 6 years.
Nope. No anthropogenic climate change driven weirdness here:
The Atlantic hurricane season’s first named storm formed late Saturday night off the eastern coast of Florida, when its sustained winds reached 40mph.
Named Tropical Storm Arthur, the system should move north-northeast for the next couple of days. Although there is a fair amount of uncertainty about this motion, Arthur should come near, or just over, coastal North Carolina, where tropical storm warnings have been raised. After this Arthur is likely to bend due eastward, away from the mainland United States and out to sea.
Because of low wind shear and moderately warm waters, Arthur may remain a tropical storm and even strengthen a little before succumbing to cooler waters later this week. The National Hurricane Center forecasts the system to reach maximum sustained winds of 50mph on Monday.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially begins two weeks from now, on June 1, and runs through November 30. Historically, it is not all that unusual for a tropical or subtropical storm to form before June 1 and become named after reaching sustained winds of 40mph. This happens, on average, about every two to three years.
However, this is now the sixth year in a row that a named storm has developed prior to the June 1 date. And according to data compiled by University of Miami hurricane scientist Brian McNoldy, the average date of the first named storm is steadily moving earlier. In 1970, it typically came in early July, but now the average date of the first storm is about one month earlier. There has been some discussion in the hurricane community about moving the start of the Atlantic season up to May 15 to match the beginning of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season.
We are in a world of hurt if we do not act.
Here We Go Again
Pro Publica has a story about Wall Street has been engaged in systematic fraud to pump up mortgage backed securities.
This is what took down the markets in 2008-09, and it’s not surprising that they are doing this again, since Barack Obama and Eric “Place” Holder, steadfastly refused to prosecute.
No consequences, so they went back to ripping of the rest of us:
Among the toxic contributors to the financial crisis of 2008, few caused as much havoc as mortgages with dodgy numbers and inflated values. Huge quantities of them were assembled into securities that crashed and burned, damaging homeowners and investors alike. Afterward, reforms were promised. Never again, regulators vowed, would real estate financiers be able to fudge numbers and threaten the entire economy.
Twelve years later, there’s evidence something similar is happening again.
Some of the world’s biggest banks — including Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank — as well as other lenders have engaged in a systematic fraud that allowed them to award borrowers bigger loans than were supported by their true financials, according to a previously unreported whistleblower complaint submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission last year.
Whereas the fraud during the last crisis was in residential mortgages, the complaint claims this time it’s happening in commercial properties like office buildings, apartment complexes and retail centers. The complaint focuses on the loans that are gathered into pools whose worth can exceed $1 billion and turned into bonds sold to investors, known as CMBS (for commercial mortgage-backed securities).
Lenders and securities issuers have regularly altered financial data for commercial properties “without justification,” the complaint asserts, in ways that make the properties appear more valuable, and borrowers more creditworthy, than they actually are. As a result, it alleges, borrowers have qualified for commercial loans they normally would not have, with the investors who bought securities birthed from those loans none the wiser.
ProPublica closely examined six loans that were part of CMBS in recent years to see if their data resembles the pattern described by the whistleblower. What we found matched the allegations: The historical profits reported for some buildings were listed as much as 30% higher than the profits previously reported for the same buildings and same years when the property was part of an earlier CMBS. As a rough analogy, imagine a homeowner having stated in a mortgage application that his 2017 income was $100,000 only to claim during a later refinancing that his 2017 income was $130,000 — without acknowledging or explaining the change.
It’s “highly questionable” to alter past profits with no apparent explanation, said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School and an expert in securities regulation. “I don’t understand why you can do that.”
………
The complaint suggests widespread efforts to make adjustments. Some expenses were erased from the ledger, for example, when a new loan was issued. Most changes were small; but a minor increase in profits can lead to approval for a significantly higher mortgage.
The result: Many properties may have borrowed more than they could afford to pay back — even before the pandemic rocked their businesses — making a CMBS crash both more likely and more damaging. “It’s a higher cliff from which they are falling,” Flynn said. “So the loss severity is going to be greater and the probability of default is going to be greater.”
………
After lobbying by commercial real estate organizations and advocacy by real estate investor and Trump ally Tom Barrack — who warned of a looming commercial mortgage crash — the Federal Reserve pledged in early April to prop up CMBS by loaning money to investors and letting them use their CMBS as collateral. The goal is to stabilize the market at a time when investors may be tempted to dump their securities, and also to support banks in issuing new bonds. (Barrack’s company, Colony Capital, has since defaulted on $3.2 billion in debt backed by hotel and health care properties, according to the Financial Times.)
………
The notion that profit figures for some buildings are pumped up is surprising, said Kevin Riordan, a finance professor at Montclair State University. It raises questions about whether the proper disclosures are being made.
Investors don’t comb through financial statements, added Riordan, who used to manage the CMBS portfolio for retirement fund giant TIAA-CREF. Instead, he said, they rely on summaries from investment banks and the credit ratings agencies that analyze the securities. To make wise decisions, investors’ information “out of the gate has to be pretty close to being right,” he said. “Otherwise you’re dealing with garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.”
Once again, they are robbing us blind, and the response of the powers that be will be to bail them out.
To quote the late Paul Volker, “The only useful thing banks have invented in the last 20 years is the ATM.”
May the 4th be With You
Psyche!!!!
44 years ago, Star Wars opened in theaters.
In honor of this day, and the plethora of changes foisted on us by George Lucas, each worse than the last, have some Star Trek related trolling trolling.
The William Shatner narration makes this trolling perfect.
OK, This is Important
I am not an epidemiologist, but the fact that the first Covid-19 death occurred 3 weeks earlier and about 800 miles south of the Seattle nursing home that was supposed to be where this started in the US is a significant development.
This particularly true given that these cases almost certainly had to be community transmission:
Officials in Santa Clara County, Calif., announced late Tuesday that two residents there died of the coronavirus in early and mid-February, making them the earliest known victims of the pandemic in the United States.
The new information may shift the timeline of the virus’s spread through the country weeks earlier than previously believed.
The first report of a coronavirus-related death in the United States came on Feb. 29 in the Seattle area, although officials there later discovered that two people who had died Feb. 26 also had the virus.
But Santa Clara County officials said that autopsies of two people who died at their homes on Feb. 6 and Feb. 17 showed that the individuals were infected with the virus. The presence of the disease Covid-19 was determined by tissue samples and was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, county health officials said in a statement.
………
Dr. Cody said the individuals who died in February did not have any known travel histories that would have exposed them to the virus, which first appeared in China. They are presumed to have contracted the virus in the community, she said.
I don’t know what this means, but I’m pretty sure that this means a lot.
Your Mouth to God’s Ears
I will believe it when I see it, but I hope that this prediction that the United States will see a period or strikes and labor actions unseen since 1945-1946 is true:
In September 1945, a little-remembered frenzy erupted in the United States. Japan had surrendered, ending World War II, but American meat packers, steelworkers, telephone installers, telegraph operators, and auto assemblers had something different from partying in mind. In rolling actions, they went on strike. After years of patriotic silence on the home front, these workers, along with unhappy roughnecks, lumberjacks, railroad engineers, and elevator operators—some 6 million workers in all—shut down their industries and some entire cities. Mainly, they were seeking higher pay—and they got it, averaging 18% increases.
The era of raucous labor is long past, and worker chutzpah along with it. That is, it was—until now. Desperately needed to staff the basic economy while the rest of us remain secluded from COVID-19, ordinarily little-noticed workers are wielding unusual leverage. Across the country, cashiers, truckers, nurses, burger flippers, stock replenishers, meat plant workers, and warehouse hands are suddenly seen as heroic, and they are successfully protesting. For the previous generation of labor, the goal post was the 40-hour week. New labor’s immediate aims are much more prosaic: a sensible face mask, a bottle of sanitizer, and some sick days.
The question is what happens next. Are we watching a startling but fleeting moment for newly muscular labor? Or, once the coronavirus is beaten, do companies face a future of vocal workers aiming to rebuild lost decades of wage increases and regained influence in boardrooms and the halls of power? For now, at least, some of the country’s most powerful CEOs are clearly nervous. Late last month, Apple, faced with reporters asking about a company decision to furlough hundreds of contract workers without pay, did a quick about-face. Those employees, Apple now said, would receive their hourly wages. A few weeks earlier, after Amazon warehouse workers demanded better benefits during the virus pandemic, that company also reversed course, offering paid sick days and unlimited unpaid time off.
………
But if companies are responding to those who are protesting, they might also think ahead and preempt festering trouble down the road. “I like to believe people will say, ‘We treat these people as disposable, but they are pretty indispensable. Maybe we should do what we can to recognize their contribution,’” says David Autor, a labor economist at MIT and co-director of the school’s Work of the Future Task Force.
………
But in 1981, President Ronald Reagan changed all that. Some 12,000 air traffic controllers went on strike, demanding higher pay and a shorter workweek. In a breathtaking decision, Reagan fired all but a few hundred of them. The Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified the controllers’ union entirely. The era of strong labor was over.
In the subsequent age of the no-excuses layoff, the number of major strikes has plunged. Starting in 1947, when the government began keeping such data, there were almost always anywhere from 200 to more than 400 big strikes every year. But in 1982, the year after the air traffic controllers debacle, the number for the first time fell below 100. In 2017, there were just seven. “There was damage to self-esteem every time there was a layoff. It took the militancy out of organized labor, and I don’t think it ever recovered,” Uchitelle says.
………
The current revival of worker activism precedes COVID-19 in the unlikeliest of places. In 2018, West Virginia teachers, among the lowest paid in the nation and four years without a raise, went on strike for nine days in a demand for higher pay. That they won a 5% increase was one astonishing thing. But the walkout itself was stunning, specifically because of the state where it occurred—a former bedrock of ultra-militant coal miners who had repeatedly gone to actual war for better pay and safety but more recently were a bastion of worker passivity.
I hope that this is true, but if labor keeps supporting politicians who offer their full throated support for destructive labor arbitrage policies, (“Free Trade” deals) then we are going to continue competing with people who work for a dollar an hour in Bangladesh.