Stupid implies they were motivated by noble instincts and were merely misguided, ignorant, or incompetent.

Evil says they knew exactly what they were doing.

Unless you think everyone’s an idiot except you (which I do with ample justification but is not really relevant) I think you’ve got to come out somewhere on the evil side.  Does the rot go to the top?

Have you been asleep since Lehman?

Now the DOJ Admits They Got it Wrong

by William Black, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on September 11, 2015

It is now seven years after Lehman’s senior officers’ frauds destroyed it and triggered the financial crisis. The Bush and Obama administrations have not convicted a single senior bank officer for leading the fraud epidemics that triggered the crisis. The Department’s announced restoration of the rule of law for elite white-collar criminals, even if it becomes real, will come too late to prosecute the senior bankers for leading the fraud epidemics. The Justice Department has, effectively, let the statute of limitations run and allowed the most destructive white-collar criminal bankers in history to become wealthy through fraud with absolute impunity. This will go down as the Justice Department’s greatest strategic failure against elite white-collar crime.

The Obama administration and the Department have failed to take the most basic steps essential to prosecute elite bankers. They have not restored the “criminal referral coordinators” at the banking regulatory agencies and they have virtually ignored the whistleblowers who gave them cases against the top bankers on a platinum platter. The Department has not even trained its attorneys and the FBI to understand, detect, investigate, and prosecute the “accounting control frauds” that caused the financial crisis. The restoration of the rule of law that the new policy promises will not happen in more than a token number of cases against senior bankers until these basic steps are taken.

…

As a corporate executive once told a former Assistant Attorney General of ours: “[A]s long as you are only talking about money, the company can at the end of the day take care of me . . . but once you begin talking about taking away my liberty, there is nothing that the company can do for me.”(1) Executives often offer to pay higher fines to get a break on their jail time, but they never offer to spend more time in prison in order to get a discount on their fine.

We know that prison sentences are a deterrent to executives who would otherwise extend their cartel activity to the United States. In many cases, the Division has discovered cartelists who were colluding on products sold in other parts of the world and who sold product in the United States, but who did not extend their cartel activity to U.S. sales. In some of these cases, although the U.S. market was the cartelists’ largest market and potentially the most profitable, the collusion stopped at the border because of the risk of going to prison in the United States.”

As prosecutors, (real) financial regulators, and criminologists, we have known for decades that the only effective means to deter elite white-collar crimes is to imprison the elite officers that grew wealthy by leading those crimes (which include the largest “hard core cartels” in history – by three orders of magnitude). In the words of a Deutsche Bank senior officer, the bank’s participation in the Libor cartel produced a “mountain of money” for the bank (and the officers). Holder’s bank fines were useless – and the Department’s real prosecutors told him why they were useless from the beginning. No one, of course, thinks Holder went rogue in refusing to prosecute fraudulent bank officers. President Obama would have requested his resignation six years ago if he were upset at Holder’s grant of de facto immunity to our most destructive elite white-collar criminals.

…

The Department’s top criminal prosecutor, Lanny Breuer, publicly stated his paramount concern about the fraud epidemics that devastated our nation – he was “losing sleep at night over worrying about what a lawsuit might result in at a large financial institution.” That’s right – he was petrified of even bringing a civil “lawsuit” – much less a criminal prosecution – against “too big to prosecute” banks and banksters. I lose sleep over what fraud epidemics the banksters will lead against our Nation. The banksters have learned to optimize “accounting control fraud” schemes and learned that they can grow immensely wealthy by leading those fraud epidemics with complete impunity. None of them has a criminal record and even those that lost their jobs are overwhelmingly back in financial leadership positions. In the aftermath of the savings and loan debacle, because of the prosecutions and criminal records of the elites that led those frauds, no senior S&L fraudster who was prosecuted was able to become a leader of the fraud epidemics that caused our most recent financial crisis.

We have known for decades that repealing the rule of law for elite white-collar criminals and relying on corporate fines always produces abject failure and massive corporate fraud. We have known for millennia that allowing elites to commit crimes with impunity leads to endemic fraud and corruption. If the Department wants to restore the rule of law I am happy to help it do so. We have known for over 30 years the steps we need to take to succeed against elite white-collar criminals through vigorous regulators and prosecutors. We must not simply prosecute the current banksters, but also prevent and limit future fraud epidemics through regulatory and supervisory changes.

The Justice Department’s New Policy Is a Brutal Admission of Eric Holder’s Failures

By David Dayen, The Fiscal Times

September 11, 2015

This week, the Justice Department felt the need to write a memo to staff instructing them to indict individuals when they commit crimes, seemingly something implied by their job titles. It doesn’t say as much about the current Justice Department regime under Loretta Lynch as it does about the former one under Eric Holder.

No major Wall Street executive went to jail for the illegal actions that precipitated the financial crisis, despite a mountain of documentary evidence of fraud. Corporations and their employees got away with what amounted to slaps on the wrist. And Holder, after presiding over this, joined the head of his Justice Department criminal division and several top deputies at Covington & Burling, a white-collar defense firm that represents most major banks.

You can draw a direct line from this failure back to the “Holder memo,” written when he served as a deputy in the Clinton Justice Department. That memo created the “collateral consequences” policy, arguing that prosecutors who seek criminal cases against large companies should take into account innocent victims who may get hurt. It laid out a host of alternative remedies, such as fines and deferred prosecution agreements.

…

The Justice Department would not have attempted to make this change without full recognition of the loss of public trust its actions over the past several years have engendered. Relentless criticism of the lack of white-collar prosecutions had an impact, and those who participated in that conversation should be proud.

But at this point, guidelines won’t do the trick, only actions will – a genuine effort to make the concept of justice more than a punch line. This is the beginning of a real overhaul in mindset at the Department of Justice. Hopefully, the resources and training needed to undertake wide-ranging investigations will accompany the guidelines. Hopefully, U.S. Attorneys and FBI agents will be allowed to do their jobs. Hopefully, settlements with corporations no longer represent a dead end of accountability. Hopefully, the Justice Department will live up to its name.

The End of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement?

by David Dayen, Naked Capitalism

Posted on September 8, 2015

DPAs usually arise out of the company disclosing misconduct and convening an internal investigation with some Assistant AG, promising full cooperation. The company gets credit for remedial conduct prior to the settlement, essentially setting their own punishment. And typically, DPAs are not paired with prosecutions for individuals committing the crimes.

So let’s look at the DPA that could bring this cozy situation crashing down. DoJ headlined back in June 2014 that Fokker Services BV would forfeit $10.5 million for selling aircraft parts and services to customers in Iran, Burma and Sudan. There was a parallel civil settlement with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to pay an additional $10.5 million. If you go down the press release, you find that Fokker received $21 million in gross revenue for these 1,153 illegal transactions, so the penalty was simply to give back what they received. Now they’re out a bunch of aircraft parts, one assumes, and I don’t really know the markup here. But that doesn’t seem too taxing.

In fact, in the DPA itself, we learn that “at least $21 million” was involved in the transactions. So it’s not possible to know what, if any, financial penalty was imposed. And FWIW, the civil penalty for the crime FSBV committed could have been as high as $51 million, per corporate law firm Akin Gump.

FSBV had to “accept responsibility” for its actions and really do little else. They agreed to cooperate with any matters relating to this investigation, making documents and individual employees available. For what purpose I have no idea, since nobody at FSBV has been indicted for this, 4 years after the company disclosed everything. FSBV must also continue to apply what it has already implemented voluntarily, namely compliance programs to prevent it from continuing to break the law. And… that’s about it. Plus, “in consideration of FSBV’s remedial actions to date,” this “punishment” all goes away within 18 months.

So I can see why Judge Richard Leon rejected this deal back in February, calling it “grossly disproportionate” and that “it would undermine the public’s confidence in the administration of justice and promote disrespect for the law… to see a defendant prosecuted so anemically for engaging in such egregious conduct.”

Just as a sidebar, I have a problem with a Dutch company being prosecuted by the United States for trading with other countries. There are a series of “trading with the enemy” type of laws that put the U.S. in the position of world trading policeman, sometimes for inscrutable reasons. But as long as that law is on the books, sentencing an offender to give back (some? all?) of their profits and promise not to do it again does seem a bit thin.

…

DoJ and FSBV jointly appealed Judge Leon’s order, saying he exceeded his authority. When the law enforcement agency and the offending entity end up on the same side of a lawsuit, well, it certainly doesn’t look great.

So this week we’ll have arguments in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (h/t Abigail Field). And I don’t really know what DoJ will have to say for themselves. These are the kind of craptastic agreements they’ve been making with corporate offenders for the entire Holder era (Holder, last seen just hanging out at his awesome new office at Covington & Burling, was AG when this DPA was made). Presumably they’ll avoid the specifics and just claim that judges can’t have the temerity to reject contractual agreements made by two sides, and how this would damage the separation of powers, prosecutorial discretion, &c.

But judges have held up DPAs in the past, though they were eventually approved. And considering that DoJ can also file a non-prosecution agreement, which don’t require court approval, there’s obviously some role for judges to play here. If you want to get judicial approval, you can’t expect that approval to come automatically. And if the goal is to extract the proper consequences out of a corporate offender, a judge resisting settlements that are overly lenient can only enhance DoJ’s efforts.

Of course, that isn’t what DoJ is after. They would rather settle these matters quietly, write a press release, and then get a judge to bless it to get buy-in from another branch of government, so if anyone questions the slap on the wrist they can say “well a judge approved it.”

Legally this is a jump ball; DoJ could easily wriggle off the hook here. But if the 1st Circuit D.C. Circuit blows up this little charade, they will have to make their terrible deals without a patina of outside approval. Or maybe, horror of horrors, they’ll have to do their job properly.

So down 4.4 million for the 2nd episode and a .4 deficit in the demo (not insignificant, it’s like 30%) but ’twas ever thus destined to be.  Fallon labors under the handicap or advantage of a Thursday Night Throwball intro pairing the Patsies and the Steelers in the season opener.

Biden made ‘news?’ today in his interview with Stephen which was embargoed and then transcripts unembargoed while the tape remained embargoed.  I’m hard put to call it actual news because nothing new came out of it except his continued protestation that running for President takes your full commitment and he got all verklempt about his kid’s service in Iraq.

The reason Biden is being sucked up to by the Villagers is Good Old Senator Credit Card is their very own pod produced clone, a hollow empty husk of institutionalized graft and corruption that they hope can fool enough of the people when Hillary falls to their decades of Clinton hate.

He says himself he is no populist.  Do we really need another Democrat running to the right of Hillary?  That’s Jim Webb’s job.

I hope Stephen cleans him like a fish and drops him still flopping in a pan but I expect he’ll be much gentler than that.  His other guests are Travis Kalanick and Toby Keith.

So, do Natasha and Bruce ever get together?

The New Continuity

Welcome to Mars

Tonightly we will be talking about Tom Brady’s balls, concussions, and other things thrown with Tony Richards, Mike Yard and Rory Albanese.

Tomorrow will be all Amy Schumer all the time.

It’s that terribly British sense of humor you know.

Jeremy Corbyn confident Labour will unite around him if he wins

by Patrick Wintour, The Guardian

Thursday 10 September 2015 15.40 EDT

Jeremy Corbyn has predicted that his now-assumed election as Labour leader on Saturday will prompt a coming-together of the party, as he prepares to try to change politics by offering a collegiate and less confrontational leadership style.

With the polls finally closed and with his supporters confident that he has gone from being a 200-1 outsider to an astonishing winner, Corbyn plans to follow an acceptance speech by speaking to tens of thousands due to march in London on Saturday in support of refugees. He is determined to foster what he regards as a new social movement that has emerged this summer inside the wider labour movement.

Corbyn is to offer shadow cabinet posts to all wings of the party. Speaking to ITV News, he said: “MPs are important but they are not the entirety of the Labour party.

“We have a big job to do in exposing the government’s austerity programme and what it’s doing to the poorest and most vulnerable in our society: their bill on welfare reform and their bill on trade union issues and the way they are actually systematically slicing up public services in Britain through massive cuts and local government grants.”

But Corbyn faced a wave of criticism from senior party figures, some of whom warned that his supporters were sinister and represented little more than a Trotskyist 80s throwback.

Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate, predicted that a Corbyn leadership would end in electoral failure and repeated her pledge that she would not serve on his frontbench since their political differences on the economy and foreign policy were too fundamental. Kendall said: “When the public are crying out for politicians to say what they mean, and mean what they say, I cannot serve on Labour’s frontbench if Jeremy Corbyn is leader.”

A wider group of senior shadow cabinet members have now collectively agreed to refuse to serve, saying they will accept the democratic result and give Corbyn the time and space to set out his own agenda. They argue that if a group of seven or so MPs were in the shadow cabinet while deeply opposed to his politics, it would be a recipe for instability and division and it would be better instead to have an honest disagreement outside the shadow cabinet.

…

On Friday, David Cameron will follow George Osborne in deriding Labour for vacating the centre ground, saying he watched the contest in bewilderment as Labour continued to debate whether the deficit needed to be cut.

“It’s as if the financial crash, or the election for that matter, never happened. The question is not ‘do we have money to spend?’; it’s ‘how do we spend the money that we have to achieve the outcomes we want?’

“It’s a question that requires you to think about the role and nature of the state, the reform of public services, the way in which government programmes are designed and delivered – all of which have been totally absent in this Labour leadership election.

“Whoever wins the Labour leadership tomorrow, this is now a party that has completely vacated the intellectual playing field and no longer represents working people. It is arguing at the extremes of the debate, simply wedded to more spending, more borrowing, and more taxes. They pose a clear threat to the financial security of every family in Britain.”

Kendall, in a reflective speech, conceded Corybn’s campaign had “mobilised and enthused vast numbers of people in a way we haven’t seen for decades. The debate that’s exploded during this contest has been simmering for many years.”

…

Kendall said: “The programme Jeremy Corbyn offers is not new. His policies and politics are the same now as they were in the 1980s – and will end up delivering the same result.

“Neither is he the sole keeper of Labour’s principles. No one has a monopoly on being led by their conscience. But modernisers must be honest with ourselves: many people who’ve joined our party in recent months do not believe we are offering change and some of them doubt our principles altogether. This is partly because too often in the past we’ve come across as technocratic and managerial.

“We’ve allowed ourselves to be defined as purely pragmatic – concerned with winning elections alone, rather than winning for a purpose – thereby ceding the mantle of principle to the far left.”

It was quite a year.  While there are other aspects I’d like to draw your attention to these.  After the strong second place showing of Eugene McCarthy, a conventionally economic liberal of the FDR/Keynes stripe, a reliable supporter of social justice, and a fervent believer in a technocratic neo liberal foreign policy (the multi-lateral democratic impulse that created the United Nations, the NATO Alliance, and the Common Market was not entirely without merit) that did not include Imperialism and Colonialism as a motivator (McCarthy was not much of a pacifist except by comparison) in New Hampshire, the sitting President Lyndon Baines Johnson (who was a revolutionary on social justice, a lying aggressive warrior of the Nuremberg type, and economically similar) decided that he was too divisive to bring victory to his party (mostly because of that social justice thing, but the war was pissing off people who could have been his allies).

So who to get now to save the McNamara achievers?

I hate to say it because I have a deep and abiding respect for him, his two brothers, and the rest of the family, but Robert Kennedy.

At the time he was the resurrection of all the momentum we thought we’d lost in ’63 and he might have fulfilled all our hopes and fantasies had he lived.  Even today, he’s the ‘good’ Kennedy.

It was a violent time to be alive in ways that I think have escaped people.  Boxcutters?  Try megatons.

When Hubert Humphrey took control during a police riot in the most thoroughly corrupt Democratic town in the country it was a victory for the status quo.

I present this cautionary tale in the context of the Joementum I can feel in the room.

Enough with the Joe Biden nonsense: The real reasons why the D.C. media loves him, but progressives should run away screaming

Paul Rosenberg, Salon

Thursday, Sep 10, 2015 12:00 PM EST

What Biden does have going for him is elite media fantasies. He’s their idea of what “the people” really want. He may have spent 30-some years representing credit-card companies in the U.S. Senate, but for the elite media, he’s a “regular Joe.” A more subtle way that Biden reflects D.C. insider fantasies of what the public wants is the way that he has moved significantly to the right over the years, without any in D.C. appearing to notice it.

…

Biden’s distorted sense of who should be listened and who shouldn’t was, in short, a reflection of the shifting power relations coming to dominate Washington at the time. Previously, Democrats had usually taken seriously what ordinary people had to say. Whatever the eventual outcome might be, they were willing to hear from those on the front lines who might have a very different view of things. But after eight years of Reagan and four more of Bush, Biden was at the forefront of those who thought it far more important to listen and respond to conservative activists inside the Beltway, as shown by his response to Hatch quoted above.

This, then, was the broader legislative record that Biden had built-and was still building-at the time he encountered Anita Hill and Lani Guinier. He was busy moving the Democratic Party to the right on criminal justice policy, and they appeared as very unwelcome reminders, not just of what he was leaving behind, but of the fact that there was also much more to the realm of justice than his narrow focus could encompass. Let’s consider each these women in turn, how they were mistreated by elite Washington, and the role Biden played in mistreating them.

…

The same Beltway press that approved of Biden back then will certainly not be bothered now. Anita Hill is very old news to them, and Lani Guinier? Most of them can’t even place the name. But the passage of time only makes Biden’s failures more glaring. Given the collision course between Black Lives Matter and Biden’s drug war record, there’s bound to be a much higher level of sensitivity to how Biden mistreated those two exemplary black women when he was the man in charge of the process that humiliated them.

Windows 10 is primarily spyware.  Chrome never pretended to be anything but.  Once virtuous Ubuntu is now as bad as any ‘commercial’ software (not the way things were supposed to devolve) with incomprehensible interfaces, swaths of proprietary code, and intrusive default monitoring.

This disqualifies a whole lot of derivatives including my favorite, Mint with Mate, that use the Ubuntu code base.

I’ve always liked the standard GNOME2 interface and think it’s highly similar, other than positioning, to your Windows Classic Desktop which has been basically the same in business IT since ’95.  If you learn it, and don’t screw it up by personalizing too much, the learning curve is not that steep.

The Gnome people didn’t think that was good enough and screwed it to the point of unusability.

So KDE right?

Sure, if you want to be wacky and customize your machine to look like IOSX or Windows 8.1 however why are you wasting that time?  But getting any kind of usable Desktop is a chore unless you favor the ‘why do you need more than a spreadsheet and a word processor peon’ approach to IT.  Besides you can just grab any program you like from the k library and install it.  Yup, point and click.  Free.

So my favored interface is now Mate which is a GNOME2 variant done by some South American programmers who liked GNOME2 a lot and thought that the Gnome people were certifiable idiots.  It works like I would expect.

Which brings us to distributions.

Almost everything is based on Debian.  There are 2 code bases, the development track and the stable track.  The stable track can stay stable for a really long time because the rules about what is acceptable are very strict.  While this is attractive on paper, in practice it means that many pieces of hardware either don’t function at all or only partially.

So your video and network cards don’t work very well, get new ones!  Easy on a desktop, not so much on your lap.

The development track is developmental.  The truth is that it deosn’t change very much either.  The rules are not as strict, but there are still rules.  What makes it look like things are changing all the time is that each piece of software is on its own schedule.

You should be able to safely install and operate either track directly from the source, what then adds value to a distribution?

They break some rules.  Most times they will install proprietary drivers for maximum performance.  Sometimes these are entirely written by the manufacturers, others simply comply with the published standards.  In neither case is the code usually public which breaks a rule.  Many times they will add their own code for features they think have been poorly implemented and hardly anyone can resist screwing with the wallpaper, icons, and taskbar.  Almost all add programs technically still in development.

I insist on 3 things from my environment- hardware control including drives and network, environment control of the look and feel, and software control of all the programs on my system.  It should operate off a menu.  I’ve gotten fairly good results with these distributions that are available in Mate.

Fedora is a non-Debian that has been separate since the late 90’s.

Sabayon is a Gentoo base.  Gentoo and Arch have the reputation of being the most difficult distributions to install, Saboyon, provided it supports your hardware, goes in like a champ.

Mageia is a non-commercial spin-off of Mandriva.

openSUSE gets a mention as another independent code base, but they don’t have a Mate interface.

Windows 10 – Spyware Disguised as an Operating System

by Gaius Publius, Hullabaloo

8/31/2015 07:30:00 AM

(I)t didn’t take long to discover that Windows 10 is not only worse than Windows 8, it is worse in a worse way. It’s one thing to install an application that spies on you. It’s another when that spyware application you just installed is the operating system, and controls the whole machine.

Is Windows 10 Worth Installing?

The answer is No, if you’re asking me. In fact, it’s worth never installing. I’d avoid it until the final minute you’re forced to change, and even then, you should hesitate to upgrade. Reason? Under its default settings, Windows 10 is widely reported to be spyware, an operating system that watches you work, even offline, and reports back to Microsoft anything it feels like reporting. If you approve the licensing agreement – and how can you use any software without clicking “I Agree”? – you’re giving Microsoft permission to collect any data they can get (based on your settings) and share it in any way they want.

Windows 10 is the ultimate privacy violator – an operating system that wants to watch everything you do and send back whatever it finds or figures out about you.

Microsoft slips user-tracking tools into Windows 7, 8 amidst Windows 10 privacy storm

by Brad Chacos, PCWorld

Aug 31, 2015 12:59 PM

No, the company’s not walking back its privacy-encroaching features. Instead, Microsoft’s quietly rolling out updates that bake new tracking tools into Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Yes, really.

The story behind the story: Privacy concerns have marred an otherwise sterling launch for Windows 10, which is already installed on 75 million PCs. Rolling out this Windows 7 and 8 updates amidst the controversy smacks of insensitivity-and it’s just plain poor timing, to boot.

Ghacks discovered four recent KB updates for Windows 7 and 8, all designed to send Microsoft regular reports on your machine’s activities.

KB3068708 – “This update introduces the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices. By applying this service, you can add benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet upgraded. The update also supports applications that are subscribed to Visual Studio Application Insights.” This update replaced KB3022345.

KB3075249 – “This update adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature to collect information on elevations that come from low integrity levels.”

KB3080149 – “This package updates the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices. This service provides benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet upgraded. The update also supports applications that are subscribed to Visual Studio Application Insights.”

The latter two updates are flagged as Optional, but KB3068708 holds Recommended status, which means it would be downloaded and installed if you have Windows Updates set to automatic. It’s only functional in PCs that participate in Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program, which already sends Microsoft information on how you use your computer.

…

If you don’t want these new tracking tools on your PC, the best thing to do seems to be simply uninstalling the offending updates, then blocking them from being reinstalled.

To do so, head to Control Panel > Programs > Uninstall or change a program. Here, click View installed updates in the left-hand navigation pane. In the search box in the upper-right corner, search for the KB3068708, KB3022345, KB3075249, and KB3080149 updates by name. If they’re installed, they’ll pop right up. If you find one, right-click on it and select Uninstall to wipe it from your system.

To block the updates from being downloaded again, dive back into the Control Panel and head to System and Security > Windows Update > Check for updates. The system will look for updates, then say you have a certain number of updates available, separated by status (Optional, Recommended, Critical). Simply click the recommended updates link, find the KB3068708 and KB3022345 updates, then right-click them and select Hide update. Boom! Done.

Now dive into the optional updates and hide KB3075249 and KB3080149 as well.

Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10’s Privacy-Invading ‘Features’

by Karl Bode, Tech Dirt

Wed, Sep 2nd 2015

Microsoft now seems intent on retro-fitting its older operating systems (specifically Windows 7 and Windows 8.1) with many of the annoying, chatty aspects of Windows 10. GHacks has noticed that four updates to the older operating systems, described as an “update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry,” connect to vortex-win.data.microsoft.com and settings-win.data.microsoft.com. These addresses are hard-coded to bypass the hosts file, and ferry all manner of personal information back to Microsoft.

…

(I)t’s annoying that Microsoft continues to insist on expanding this kind of OS behavior, without making opting out simple and comprehensive. And it certainly doesn’t exactly deflate arguments by folks like Richard Stallman, who consistently argue that Windows is effectively malware. More than anything though, it’s a continued advertisement for Linux and operating systems that the end user actually has some degree of control over.

Science Oriented Video

Science and Technology News and Blogs

• How y’all doin’?, by Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo
• Russian artifact is estimated to be 11,000 years old, say scientists – 6,000 yrs older than Stonehenge, by David Ferguson, Raw Story
• Carbon dating suggests ‘world’s oldest’ Koran could be older than the Prophet Muhammad, by Travis Gettys, Raw Story
• The Really Big One, By Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker
• Thomas Edison Was Right About Solar Power, by Thom Hartmann, Truthout
• Wikipedia Editors Uncover Extortion Scam And Extensive Cybercrime Syndicate, by Lauren C. Williams, Think Progress
• New Species of Human Ancestor, Homo Naledi, Is Found in a South African Cave, By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times
• Homo naledi: New species of ancient human discovered, claim scientists, by Ian Sample, The Guardian
• ‘Archaeology on steroids’: huge ritual arena discovered near Stonehenge, by Ian Sample, The Guardian
• Could Physics’ Reigning Model Finally Be Dethroned?, by Tia Ghose, Live Science
• Hackers Can Trick Driverless Cars With A Handheld Laser, By Dave Gershgorn, Popular Science

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

So what did I think?  It will probably get better.

It doesn’t appear in many of the accounts but last night was kind of a production fiasco.  They had to do most of it twice which meant the taping was 2 hours for an hour and a bit long show.  I thought the production pieces were a little lengthy over funny and neither of the interview segments struck me as particularly compelling.

I’m not alone in that opinion.  As Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker put it-

Colbert’s more admirable skill-and the thing that one expects will be a highlight of the show in the future-is his ability to do energetic, probing interviews. Yet Colbert’s sit-down with Jeb Bush was a strange one. Mostly, Bush got to spout off talking points, branding himself as a benign presence, who was, unlike Trump, a small-government conservative interested in “fiscal restraint.” The two men joked about logos. It was aggressively collegial, a kick in the shins to anyone who worried that Colbert would be some liberal muckraker. Colbert did one gentle ambush, which involved a staged interaction with his own brother, designed to elicit a genuine answer from Jeb: Could he name a policy difference between himself and his brother George? In response, Jeb simply emphasized, once again, that, unlike George, he was a small-government conservative who favored “fiscal restraint.” No one brought up the war. Colbert is smart. But the toothlessness was unnerving. Jeb Bush was Sabra hummus, plugging itself.

The George Clooney segment was far more low-energy, with the two men satirizing the faux-chumminess of such interviews-a familiar shtick, post-Letterman. There was talk about Clooney’s work in Darfur, followed, somewhat abruptly, by gags about Clooney’s marriage having turned him into “arm candy” (“just be shiny and pretty”), and then a fake-clips routine. It doesn’t have to be this way, and I’m betting that it won’t be, in the near future. If there’s got to be another man sitting behind another desk that is carved from a whole desk, I’d certainly rather have it be a smart guy like Colbert.

He did deliver the numbers, 6.6 million in the overnight.  For comparison Letterman rolled up 15.2 in his debut.  As an indicator of the current state of play in the target demographic (18 – 49 year olds) Colbert scored 1.4 million while the Jimmys, Fallon and Kimmel had 900 and 400 K respectively.

If you haven’t already, now is the time to adjust your expectations of the impact of Broadcast Network Television.

I also find the special Rovian math that John Kolbin of The Times uses to insist that 1.4 million is somehow smaller than Fallon’s Olympics assisted 1.3 million somewhat speculative, but the Gray Lady is not what it once was either.

What I expect going forward is that the show will continue to improve and eventually settle at the #2 spot in late night.  CBS still has the same institutional problems that prevented David from crushing all comers like a bug despite the clear superiority of his product.

Some highlights-

Stephen’s guests tonight are Scarlett Johansson, Elon Musk, and Kendrick Lamar.

The New Continuity

Hillary Clinton Audio Email Theater

Let’s talk about white religious bigots instead

Tonightly Larry’s special guest is Buzz Aldrin, slightly wacky second man on the moon.  Those two points are probably unrelated.  His panel is Jordan Carlos, Natasha Rothwell, and Bill Gardell.

How the Makers of “Zero Dark Thirty” Seduced the CIA with Fake Earrings

Peter Maass, The Intercept

Sep. 9 2015, 2:56 p.m.

From the moment it premiered in 2012, the film by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal about the hunt for Osama bin Laden has been criticized as pro-torture propaganda. According to its many detractors, the film embraced the discredited notion that torture by CIA interrogators made Al Qaeda members talk about the whereabouts of their leader. It subsequently was revealed that Bigelow and Boal had received an unusual amount of access to CIA officials who had a keen interest in peddling the virtues of waterboarding, and this spawned a cottage industry of investigations and articles.

…

According to the documents, at least 10 CIA officers met Bigelow and Boal at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as at hotels and restaurants in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. In addition, the CIA director at the time, Leon Panetta, met Bigelow at a dinner in Washington and, soon after that, shared a table with her and Boal at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. It also turns out that Boal read his script over the phone to CIA public affairs officials on four separate days in the fall of 2011.

But the biggest takeaway from these documents is that even as the CIA turned Bigelow and Boal into its willing propagandists, the filmmakers were turning the CIA into star-gazing dupes; the seduction went both ways. Bigelow and Boal emerge in these documents as excellent co-opters of the nation’s toughest spies – and it didn’t take much for them to do that.

Bigelow and Boal visited CIA headquarters (an officer recalled having to cover up classified material on one occasion), but the meetings soon moved off campus to “avoid jealousy” about who was getting “face time” with the famous duo, according to the CIA documents obtained by Vice. For instance, one CIA officer met Boal at his suite in the luxury Jefferson Hotel in Washington D.C. and dined with him at the hotel as well as at a nearby restaurant, Citronelle, where a slab of ribeye cost $39. Not long afterwards, Bigelow met that same officer in her accommodations at the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown.

The seduction was bi-coastal. A CIA officer met Boal in Hollywood for a meal and then drove to a beach house in Malibu to talk with Bigelow. Boal gave the officer a bottle of Tequila and boasted it was worth “several hundred dollars” (although when someone at the CIA checked, the highest listed price was $169.99). The officer who had met Boal at the Jefferson Hotel also had dinner with him and Bigelow at the members-only Soho House in L.A. and later told investigators she had “developed a friendship” with the filmmakers. It had not been terribly expensive for Bigelow and Boal to develop these friendships, however – Bigelow had given the officer a set of what the director described as “black Tahitian pearl earrings” that, it turned out, were painted black and were so cheap they weren’t worth the cost of an appraisal.

The documents show that auditors at the CIA referred the matter to the Department of Justice for possible criminal action against Boal and Bigelow for bribing public officials. Prosecutors took no action.

I’m going to try and not put too many expectations on Stephen.  He’s just an entertainer after all and it’s not his job to save the Republic, though we could use some saving.

I don’t even think he’ll come out like Daaavid Letterman.  Dave had something to prove, that he was much, much better than Jay Leno, and I think he did that.

When Dave rolled out on stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater he had a fully developed show with a format, a staff, and an audience.  He was the righful heir of Johnny Carson with a New York Rolodex full of edgy talent on the make instead of the fake tanned celebrity of Burbank (is that even really a place or just a CGI wax museum?).

I followed every moment of the build up and was never unhappy with the result.  Leno’s only virtue is that he’s compliant for which the evidence is his dismal prime time expansion and the failed Conan hand off.

Jimmy Fallon is his proper heir, a vacuous vacant airhead with half the attention span of a tweet (I call them twits and they are incapable of expressing any thought that can not be formulated in 70 characters or less simply because it exceeds their reasoning ability).

Stephen asked Dave if he would have changed anything.  Dave said- “I’d have put my desk on the other side.”  You can expect to see Stephen on the left even though he says he wants Republicans to feel included in his audience.

Thus Jeb!

What even his detractors will admit is that Stephen is a pretty fair interviewer so you can expect that aspect of his talent to be featured.  Tonight in addition to Jeb! he has George! (not quite sure why except Clooney makes a habit of debuts and farewells).  His house band is Jonathan Batiste and Stay Human.

I think that the transition to Larry Wilmore’s Nightly Show has helped to psychologically prepare me.  Even about 5 months in it’s still striving to find its balance though it is much, much better than it was.  Likewise I think Trevor and Stephen get a suspension of disbelief for a time.  Material doesn’t necessarily translate.

Speaking of the new continuity-

Learn Something!

LEARN SOMETHING!

Tonightly our panelists are Mike Yard, Kerry Coddett, and Matteo Lane.

You know how it is when you go off for a while and when you come back none of your stuff really works though it seems to for a while because you have an unsecurity-concious neighbor with an open wireless connection and you’ve set your laptop to just accept any old garbage because who knows what sleazebag flea trap you’ll end up connecting through including the magic road trash triad of Starbucks, McDonalds, and Dunkin’ Donuts (DD is actually not so bad if you know what to order but it is pricy).

Yeah.  I hate it when that happens.

One morning with the tech guy later (“Pull the Plug and Re-Boot.”  Actually, I’m mostly pissed at myself.  That’s my line).

By: NY Brit Expat

Can I begin by saying how much I have enjoyed the Labour party leadership elections? I was set not to when I saw the original candidates for the post. It was downright dispiriting. Then Jeremy Corbyn declares his candidacy, we have the nail-biting nominations process, he gets through, the Unions start coming on board, the Constituency Labour parties supporting him hands down, the purges by Labour of those that “do not share its aims and values”, now Corbyn as the frontrunner of an election which will be declared next week. This has not only been exciting, it has been a breath of fresh air and it is a conversation that Labour has needed to have for quite a while. I have enjoyed it thoroughly, now we just need to hope that the grandees of the Labour party do not pull a fast one and he is expected to win. Yes, win!

In many senses, Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign has shaken the political landscape in Britain. There are a number of things that have led us to this place (among these are the Scottish referendum and the collapse of Scottish Labour, and the general election result which the Tories won), but I think the straw that broke the camel’s back actually was the decision of Labour’s grandees to abstain on the Welfare Bill enabling a vicious attack on women, the disabled and the working class to pass with opposition coming from the Scottish National Party, the Greens and Plaid Cymru. It became evident that while Labour claimed to be the opposition in Parliament that they had proved themselves to be enablers of the Tories rather than an opposition. Jeremy Corbyn is set to win the Labour leadership election; by August 24th he had moved into the front of the pack with odds of 3/10 of winning.

For those that haven’t heard of Jeremy Corbyn, let me introduce you to a left Social Democrat who is one of the few remaining in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). He is the Member of Parliament from the People’s Republic of Islington representing Islington North. He is a man of integrity and principles and has a long list of defying the Labour party whips more than 238 times  at least according to The Sun.  Normally, I would never quote The Sun, a right-wing Murdoch spread, but you do need to read this if only to get an idea of how Corbyn is being characterised.

Corbyn is a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the People’s Assembly, is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Amnesty International. He opposed the Iraq War, supports LGBT rights, supports a united Ireland, opposes tuition fees at Universities, opposes the creation of Academies and Free Schools, supports the introduction of a living wage voted against the horrific Welfare Bill (that Labour MPs were supposed to abstain on), has spoken at demonstrations of the People’s Assembly, against the Iraq war, against austerity among many others. He is also a vegetarian, supports animal rights, wears old jumpers and often wears a black cap (yes, it is similar to Lenin’s).

His candidacy differs from Bernie Sanders (and this is not only because he is further to the left of Sanders) as he is not an outsider seeking to be leader; he is a long-term member of the Labour party and a member of the Socialist Campaign Group.  He will probably win the Labour leadership contest despite opposition from the right, centre and centre-left of the Party and despite smears in the mainstream media from fellow party members and members and ideologues of the ruling class.  Moreover, the momentum behind him does not come as much as from within in the party itself as from those who left or are outside of the Labour party due to its transformation into New Labour which lost them the base of the party.