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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

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Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

Let there be snark.

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

Call the National Guard if your insurrection lasts more than four hours.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Peak wingnut was a lie.

The willow is too close to the house.

What fresh hell is this?

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

Everybody saw this coming.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

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This is a big f—–g deal.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

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Jump! You Fuckers!

You are here: Home / Archives for Jump! You Fuckers!

Republicanism Kills…Corporations Can Definitely Regulate Themselves Edition

by Tom Levenson|  November 15, 20196:29 pm| 38 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, All Too Normal, Decline and Fall, Jump! You Fuckers!, Our Awesome Meritocracy

So, I guess I should take the new site out for a spin!

Here’s what’s been enraging me lately.  The first incident comes from a little while back.

You may have heard that the giant California utility company PG&E — whose faulty infrastructure started the devastating fire that last year engulfed Paradise, CA — has been shutting off power anytime it thinks its crappily maintained equipment might set off another disaster.

On one hand, good for them: pro-active safety is better than another firestorm.

On the other: this is PG&E we’re talking about, so over the summer, this happened:

A 67-year-old man with health issues died 12 minutes after Pacific Gas & Electric cut the power to his Pollock Pines neighborhood in Northern California late Wednesday, and his daughter believes the outage was a contributing factor.

The coroner quickly ruled PG&E was not at fault, but his family has, shall we say, some questions:

Robert Mardis Sr. was using a continuous positive airway pressure machine that helps keep airways open when sleeping, but it stopped working when the electricity was cut by PG&E around 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, said Marie Aldea, his daughter. She said her father collapsed and died 12 minutes after the power went out at her home, where her father was staying.

“The power had just gone off, so he was going to his portable oxygen machine,” Aldea said. “We weren’t even able to get to the generator it happened so quick.”

File this one away under “Not Proven”, I guess — or “Smells Bad” if you prefer. But the thought of Mr. Mardis suffocating in the dark hasn’t left me…

 

So, that’s the retail version of corporate pursuit of profit with reckless disregard for the costs it imposes on others.

Republicanism Kills...California Electricity Edition

Here’s a wholesale case, which will, I guarantee, enrage you.  Alec MacGillis’s piece in the New Yorker and Pro Publica digs into Boeing and the people its decisions killed in the 737 Max.  There I learned stuff like this:

2005, embracing the deregulatory agenda promoted by the Bush Administration and the Republicans in Congress, the F.A.A. changed to a model called Organization Designation Authorization. Manufacturers would now select and supervise the safety monitors. If the monitors saw something amiss, they would raise the issue with their managers rather than with the F.A.A. By sparing manufacturers the necessity of awaiting word from the F.A.A., proponents of the change argued, the aviation industry could save twenty-five billion dollars in the next decade.

At a meeting on the new process, Sorscher said, “This is just designed for undue influence,” he recalled. “ ‘No, no, no,’ they said. ‘This will work.’ ‘How will this work?’ I said. ‘We have good people,’ they said. I said, ‘Good people in a bad system is still a bad system.’ ”

Exactly right:

In 2009, the F.A.A. created the Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office, a forty-person bureau in Seattle dedicated to serving Boeing, led by an employee named Ali Bahrami. Four years later, Bahrami left the F.A.A. to take a job with the Aerospace Industries Association, which lobbies for Boeing and other manufacturers.

The article goes on to describe the boost-the-stock-price obsession that overrode the traditional engineering culture at Boeing, and that led directly to the design disasters in the 737 Max that have now killed hundreds — and may yet wreck Boeing itself.

 

I thought about both of these stories in the context of the current spray of headlines about Trump’s grotesque corruption. The takeaway, for me, is that Trump as foul and dangerous as he is, remains a symptom of a pathology that runs much deeper.  The Reagan revolution was a coup: corporate interests seizing the levers of power, and then, inevitably, using them for short term gain and then, much earlier than long term, disastrous outcomes for ordinary people — and then themselves.  Here’s MacGillis again, picking up his story after reminding his readers of Reagan’s famous, deadly quote “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

By the early nineties, it was plain to Nader that the government was failing to regulate air safety. In “Collision Course,” a book that he co-wrote with Wesley J. Smith, they warned, “It is an unfortunate fact that government oversight and enforcement is so underfunded and understaffed that regulators and inspectors must rely upon the integrity and good faith of those they regulate to obey the rules.” They continued, “If a company is determined to cut corners, there is every likelihood that it will succeed, at least for a while.”

The book was published in 1993. A decade later, Boeing lobbyists began pushing for a wholesale shift in regulatory oversight.

Trump is the end point: decades of Republican misrule — and its slow-rolling assault on the courts — have produced a “kill folks now, apologize later” pattern of corporate behavior. Trump’s wrecking of the executive is not a new development; its just a logical conclusion to a process in which the federal government has been rendered less and less able to confront large scale private capital.

This is yet one more reason why the next election is existential. We’ve had forty years now of the Reagan Republican experiment. It’s killing us, and will do so in faster, and in greater numbers, until we end it.

My old tagline applies:

Factio Grandaeva Delenda Est.

 

Oh!  And I really like our new digs!

You?

Image: J. W. M. Turner, Wreckers, Coast of Northumberland, c. 1836

Republicanism Kills…Corporations Can Definitely Regulate Themselves EditionPost + Comments (38)

(Breaking) Open Thread: Rep. Pete ‘The Mucker’ King Announces He Will Not Seek Re-election

by Anne Laurie|  November 11, 20197:11 am| 109 Comments

This post is in: Impeachment Inquiry, Open Threads, Repubs in Disarray!, Assholes, Decline and Fall, Jump! You Fuckers!

In his announcement, King says he intends to vote against Trump’s impeachment. pic.twitter.com/VexQZ5cl2k

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) November 11, 2019

If LunGUYlin’s proudest IRA supporter is dropping out already… even the fights aren’t as much fun any more.

Good.

This guy has been stanning for the worst of the GOP since the late 1970s — the best you could say about him was that while he was always mean, he’s not the dumbest Rep. King of his tenure.

I said this back in March 2011:

The thing is, even his fellow terrorists revolutionary-supporters never fully trust a mucker — he’s the guy who’s going to end up in the centre of the cabal as long as it’s “winning”, but when the Us-vs-Them noose tightens, his former comrades get jettisoned as necessary.

… One can but hope, she added.

(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
.

(Breaking) Open Thread: Rep. Pete ‘The Mucker’ King Announces He Will Not Seek Re-electionPost + Comments (109)

Well played!

by Betty Cracker|  September 10, 20195:53 pm| 156 Comments

This post is in: I'm With Her, Open Threads, Warren for President 2020, Jump! You Fuckers!

Just Senator Warren letting the panicky fat cats create her campaign ads for free:

I'm Elizabeth Warren and I approve this message. https://t.co/2Ewkbm0ZwA

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 10, 2019

Have they ever been this afraid of Senator Shouty McWaggyfinger?

Well played!Post + Comments (156)

Another One Bites The Dust: Joi Ito, MIT, and Jeffrey Epstein

by Tom Levenson|  September 7, 20196:09 pm| 66 Comments

This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, C.R.E.A.M., Assholes, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Jump! You Fuckers!, Sociopaths

I haven’t said anything here about events at my home institution, MIT around the news that Joi Ito, the director of the ‘tute’s Media Lab had taken donations for the lab and cash for investments under his control from Jeffrey Epstein — after his conviction for various forms of the sexual predation of girls and very young women.

That’s for two reasons: for one, a sprint through the first week of the semester and a simultaneous dash through the second submission draft of a book manuscript (completed just this afternoon), and for the other a desire to pursue my concerns with MIT faculty officers and the administration before saying anything in public.

I haven’t done that yet, but Ronan Farrow’s devastating report for The New Yorker, published last night, has made the conversations I thought I might have moot, while opening up new questions to be pursued going forward.

Here’s a sample of Farrow’s reporting:

The financial entanglement revealed in the documents goes well beyond what has been described in public statements by M.I.T. and by Ito…

The documents and sources suggest that there was more to the story. They show that the lab was aware of Epstein’s history—in 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution—and of his disqualified status as a donor. They also show that Ito and other lab employees took numerous steps to keep Epstein’s name from being associated with the donations he made or solicited. On Ito’s calendar, which typically listed the full names of participants in meetings, Epstein was identified only by his initials. Epstein’s direct contributions to the lab were recorded as anonymous. In September, 2014, Ito wrote to Epstein soliciting a cash infusion to fund a certain researcher, asking, “Could you re-up/top-off with another $100K so we can extend his contract another year?” Epstein replied, “yes.” Forwarding the response to a member of his staff, Ito wrote, “Make sure this gets accounted for as anonymous.” Peter Cohen, the M.I.T. Media Lab’s Director of Development and Strategy at the time, reiterated, “Jeffrey money, needs to be anonymous. Thanks.”

In the wake of that story Ito has now resigned as director and professor of the practice at MIT. He has also quit the boards of the MacArthur Foundation and The New York Times, with, I’m sure, more to drop.

Much of Farrow’s reporting reveals a director and members of his staff gone rogue.  MIT’s central fund raising apparatus had already listed Epstein as a disqualified donor, meaning the Institute and its members weren’t supposed to seek or accept funds from him, and Ito and his team consciously worked to circumvent that restriction.

That’s good for MIT and its central leadership: it shows that the major donors people had already reached the right conclusion about reputation-washing for Epstein and had, they thought, shut it down. Still, though it looks like internal safeguards were in place, I’ve still got some questions.

For example:  how could a major center at MIT evade reporting on donors? What is the process for such reporting?  Was the policy subverted by Ito and the Media Lab? Was it ineffective, failing to ask the right questions? Was there any active failure on the part of the central administration office overseeing fund raising by the Media Lab (and other autonomous self-governing regions w/in MIT)?

Additionally, the fact that Ito raised funds both for the center he ran and his private business bugs me.  MIT has a pretty relaxed policy on outside professional activities by its faculty and other members, but there is both required disclosure (I and every faculty member has to file an OPA report every year) and an explicit conflict of interest policy that is supposed to be more rigorous for senior people like directors of centers and labs.  Did he report his business activities, including soliciting investments? Did any of his actions violate MIT’s COI policy? Were such violations included in whatever disclosures he did make? If so, how did they slip by? If not, what needs to happen, if anything, to prevent such COI?

We may get some answers.  After earlier announcing that the investigation into Ito’s relationship with Epstein would be internal, and intended to discover lessons for the future, the Institute’s president, Rafael Reif sent out an all-comers email that reads in part:

Because the accusations in the story are extremely serious, they demand an immediate, thorough and independent investigation. This morning, I asked MIT’s General Counsel to engage a prominent law firm to design and conduct this process. I expect the firm to conduct this review as swiftly as possible…

That’s good; I hope the investigators get as broad a brief as they need. It’s important to establish who knew and did what when, both inside the Media Lab and in the reporting chain within central administration. And when I say “important,” I don’t mean just in a retributive justice sense.

MIT has come a long way in the last fifty years, and the last twenty, to transform itself from an almost all-male institution to one in which women can flourish.  For the last several years, roughly half of MIT’s incoming undergraduate classes have been women.  Since 2000, MIT has put into place several affirmative policies to improve recruitment, retention and the opportunities open to women faculty.  And every year we welcome another five or six hundred female teenagers to campus.

The willing, eager association with a convicted sexual predator and the willingness of senior and very  high profile MIT figures to trade reputation-gilding for cash says something loud and clear to those newest young women at MIT, and to everyone else here as well.  That’s the message that has to be unwritten — more, it needs to be condemned by word and action.

Last…this has been something of an inside baseball kind of post, but as Anand Giridharadas (@anandwrites) has been aruing, it’s a crash course in the reality of a supra-national rich boys club that owes allegiance to no nation or institution.  Epstein was protected and rewarded by his ability to associate with high profile people and organizations — a protection purchased with cold cash, not any contribution of ideas or intellect.  He was a sexual criminal, so it’s easy to see how this charmed circle dynamic is malign.

But the same dynamic protects bad ideas, distortion of work, the exercise of unmerited power in all kinds of domains, as very rich individuals choose what they want to pay for (and what the polities they control or overwhelmingly influence should pursue). And, as Giridharadas has emphasized over and over again (and not just him, of course) those .01 percenters are loyal to the Republic of Wealth, and not the United States, or MIT or whatever.

It’s easy (as well as obviously right) to condemn Epstein and those he suborned.  But he’s far from the only problem.

Open thread.

Image: Anonymous, Kitchen Interior with the Parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus, c. 1610

Another One Bites The Dust: Joi Ito, MIT, and Jeffrey EpsteinPost + Comments (66)

Smart Money, Scared Money. Plus, Bonus Tikka

by Tom Levenson|  August 13, 20195:39 pm| 104 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads, The Party of Fiscal Responsibility, Decline and Fall, I Can't Believe We're Still Talking About Fucking Nazis, Jump! You Fuckers!

First the reward (no sing-for-your-supper spiritual joylessness here!).

Here’s one fat cat that is Warren-curious:

 

Tikka has views on the e-book vs. book-books debate. E-books…nah.

Yup. Books it is!

(I find myself more and more on the opposite side of this divide; I spend more than half of my reading time on my Kindle these days.  But Tikka’s most definitely old school.)

Now to money.  Got my email update from Krugthulu today (Paul and I are like that, I tell you!).  While he notes, in effect, that the bond market and its economist watchers have correctly predicted eleven of the last three recessions, there’s no way to construe what’s happening in with US debt in any comforting fashion:

So the slump in long-term yields since last fall, from a peak of 3.2 percent to just 1.63 percent this morning, says that investors have grown drastically less sanguine about the economy. Long-term rates are now notably lower than short-term rates — and this kind of “yield curve inversion” has in the past consistently been the precursor to recession…

Why the long faces?

Krugman offers a few reasons why bond folks might be running scared.

For one, the ginormous, “self-financing” tax cut has failed; it hasn’t come close to stimulating enough economic activity to avoid blowing a hole in the deficit.

Trade wars, so easy to win, turn out to be a predictable idiocy, not just costly in themselves, but as they foment uncertainty, a deterrent to capital investment.  And last, he notes, economic troubles elsewhere, especially Europe, are beginning to affect us.

What might all this mean? Well, maybe a recession, maybe not:

The truth is that nobody is very good at calling turning points in the economy, and calling a recession before it’s really obvious in the data is much more likely to get you declared a Chicken Little than hailed as a prophet. (Believe me, I know all about it.) But the bond market, which doesn’t worry about such things, is looking remarkably grim.

And if the smart money here is also the correct money then, as Krugman writes…

I leave the possible political implications as an exercise for all of you.

Bonus Krugman — four key paragraphs from today’s column “Useful Idiots and Trumpist Billionaires”:

More to the point, Trumpism is about much more than tax cuts: It’s an attempt to end the rule of law and impose an authoritarian, white nationalist regime. And even billionaires should be terrified about what their lives will be like if that attempt succeeds.

This is especially true if you’re a member of a minority, even if your skin happens to be white. Ross is Jewish — and anyone Jewish has to be completely ignorant of history not to know that when bigotry runs free, we’re always next in line for persecution.

In fact, the ingredients for an American pogrom are already in place. The El Paso shooting suspect, like many right-wing terrorists, is a believer in “replacement theory” — the claim that immigration is part of a vast conspiracy to replace whites with people of color. And who’s behind that conspiracy? You know who: “Jews will not replace us,” declared the torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville.

Is Trump a replacement theory guy? The replacement theorists think so. [link in original]

You know what Tikka thinks about Trump and his authoritarian, white nationalist base?

This:

Over to y’all.

Image: Marinus van Reymerswale, The Tax Collector,  1542.

Smart Money, Scared Money. Plus, Bonus TikkaPost + Comments (104)

Money Kills

by Tom Levenson|  June 19, 20195:27 pm| 72 Comments

This post is in: All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Fucked-up-edness, General Stupidity, Jump! You Fuckers!

I believe I hold anti-vaxxers in the same regard I do gun-worshippers.  It’s all ok until you put someone else at risk…which you do all the time.

What triggered this latest outburst of dismay and disdain? This Washington Post report on a new front in billionaire fuckery:

A wealthy Manhattan couple has emerged as significant financiers of the anti-vaccine movement, contributing more than $3 million in recent years to groups that stoke fears about immunizations online and at live events — including two forums this year at the epicenter of measles outbreaks in New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Of course the folks at the epicenter of this malicious nonsense are hedge fund MOTUs:

Hedge fund manager and philanthropist Bernard Selz and his wife, Lisa, have long donated to organizations focused on the arts, culture, education and the environment. But seven years ago, their private foundation embraced a very different cause: groups that question the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

I don’t know what it is about the thrill of ultra-successful rent seeking, but somehow that much money gained so incommensurately with effort or social utility seems to convince those dancing in its golden shower that they are absolutely suited and even obligated to set the terms of social life for all of us. Which means they get to kill folks with impunity.

And I do mean kill, as in blood on their hands; in this case, often that of children.

Nine At least two reportable vaccine preventable deaths in the US in 2017, the last year for which I could easily find CDC data. Add to that the suffering (and expense) of all the non-fatal cases of vaccine-preventable diseases, including the record-breaking number of cases of measles in 2019 – 1044 as of June 13, more than any year since 1992, and thus the most since measles was briefly and optimistically declared eradicated from the US in 2000.

Oh those halcyon and innocent days when we thought that folks would rejoice at being released from a once epidemic reaper of children!

Why are these reckless rich pukes doing this? No one seems to know:

How the Selzes came to support anti-vaccine ideas is unknown, but their financial impact has been enormous. Their money has gone to a handful of determined individuals who have played an outsize role in spreading doubt and misinformation about vaccines and the diseases they prevent. The groups’ false claims linking vaccines to autism and other ailments, while downplaying the risks of measles, have led growing numbers of parents to shun the shots.

There is an increasingly direct line between such funding and the actual harm produced by anti-vax propaganda:

The Selz Foundation provides roughly three-fourths of the funding for the Informed Consent Action Network, a three-year-old charity that describes its mission as promoting drug and vaccine safety and parental choice in vaccine decisions.

Lisa Selz serves as the group’s president, but its public face and chief executive is Del Bigtree, a former daytime television show producer who draws big crowds to public events. Bigtree has no medical credentials but holds himself out as an expert on vaccine safety and promotes the idea that government officials have colluded with the pharmaceutical industry to cover up grievous harms from the drugs. In recent weeks, Bigtree has headlined forums in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County, N.Y., both areas confronting large measles outbreaks.

And here’s the quote that made me think Sing Sing is too comfortable for such folks:

“They should be allowed to have the measles if they want the measles,” Bigtree told reporters outside the Brooklyn meeting on June 4. “It’s crazy that there’s this level of intensity around a trivial childhood illness.”

I used to think we needed confiscatory estate taxes so that, for example, the Koch brothers would have had to go out and actually earn some scratch before they got to buy the US judiciary.  I still think that’s a necessary corrective to wealth inequality, but I’m now wondering if a pre-mortem levy might be necessary if we’re ever going to recapture the public space from the depredations the wealth-makes-me-smart crowd.

Oh, and one more thing: adults need vaccines too.  I realize I haven’t asked my PCP if I’m up to date in my last couple of check ups, and plan to correct that omission STAT. Free advice, worth what you paid for it…

Image:  attr. to Philippe de Champaigne, Portrait of a Dead Child, c. 1650.

Money KillsPost + Comments (72)

Sunday Evening Hate-Read Open Thread: SALT in Our Wounds

by Anne Laurie|  May 12, 20195:58 pm| 165 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Open Threads, Assholes, Jump! You Fuckers!, Our Awesome Meritocracy

People still paid $6,600 to go to the Mooch’s Vegas Money Ball, in case anybody asks about Trump ruining careers today.

— Schooley (@Rschooley) May 11, 2019


 
“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” — George Carlin

In the Washington Post (which should know better by now), “Anthony Scaramucci was fired from the Trump White House after 11 days. Now, he’s convening A-listers for bipartisan healing”:

… Scaramucci, fired from the White House in 2017 after a disastrous 11-day tenure, convened a parade of other jettisoned Trump administration figures, including Chris Christie, Jeff Sessions, Corey Lewandowski and, most remarkably, Gen. John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff who axed him.

They mingled in the Bellagio meeting rooms with Obama-era figures such as Jarrett, former national security adviser Susan E. Rice, former CIA director David Petraeus and Adm. William McRaven, the former Special Operations chief who orchestrated the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Scaramucci appeared onstage with Kelly, in their first public appearance together since the firing, to talk about their newfound friendship. Then he sat beside Jarrett for another panel, in which they discussed topics including climate change and gun control and agreed as much as they disagreed.

“I think what they are trying to tell us is that it’s okay to be together,” said Robert Wolf, the Fox News commentator who moderated the discussion. “It’s okay to respectfully disagree. And it’s okay to agree on things we should agree on.”

Many in the crowd of nearly 2,000 investors, hedge fund managers and entrepreneurs applauded that kind of political diversity…

Discussions ranged from the future of private equity to business opportunities in the cannabis industry to how artificial intelligence is changing investing.

But permeating much of the conference was the lament that political dysfunction in Washington was bogging down economic opportunities in the real world…

The Daily Beast, which has a better nose for the difference between business and bullshit — “The Mooch’s Hedge-Fund Festival Where MAGA Has-Beens Are Great Again”:

… In the past, SALT has drawn big names on both political and cultural planes, counting Joe Biden, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, as well as Al Pacino, Kobe Bryant and will.i.am among its guests. One night over drinks, a 10-year SALT veteran whose chest hair burst from his Hawaiian shirt, boasted it had been “the greatest hedge fund conference in the country.”

But the line-up this year reflected the degree to which Donald Trump has become the center of the cultural solar system, around which everything and everyone else orbits. Instead of titans of finance and bigwigs of industry, the conference was dominated by former Trump officials—fired and resigned: #MAGA hangers-on like TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk and almost-Federal Reserve Board appointee Stephen Moore; and an assortment of other miscellaneous politicos, like former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele and Democratic presidential contender Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI). The whole thing was MC’d, of course, by the archetypal ex-Trump official: The Mooch…

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Sunday Evening Hate-Read Open Thread: SALT in Our WoundsPost + Comments (165)

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