It’s a good thing last night was funny because tonight we’re going to be talking about Ferguson and that’s not very funny at all.

Continuity

In the category of bad news I spoke too soon about, as it turns out Sam Bee will not be staying with The Daily Show and will instead be joining her husband Jason Jones at TBS.

Variety reports that Comedy Central is looking for a new host in their 30s with a distinct take on culture, news and politics.  They mention Amy Schumer or Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of Broad City as being candidates.

Censoring Doctors

Next Week’s Guests-

• Monday 3/9: John Lewis
• Tuesday 3/10: Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer
• Wednesday 3/11: Common
• Thursday 3/12: Rob Corddry

Gerald Posner will be on to talk about God’s Bankers, the history of the Vatican Bank.  He has a rather checkered past having been involved in several plagiarism scandals and a law suit by Harper Lee over the publication rights of To Kill A Mocking Bird.  Since Lee has been in the news recently and Miami Babylon (one of the allegedly plagiarized works) has been optioned for TV it’s possible those subjects will come up, but knowing Jon I somehow doubt it.

Viacheslav Fetisov’s web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

Bonus Video

Iceland’s Supreme Court Upholds Jail Sentences of Four Banking Executives, February 23, 2015

An Irish-Style Banking Inquiry into the 2008 Financial Crisis, February 27, 2015

HSBC Offshore Tax-Evading Scandal Widening, March 1, 2015

Well, I had hoped for a nice quiet discussion of wave/particle duality again because there are new developments that are worthy of note or perhaps a good chuckle at Homer Simpson predicting the GeV of the Higgs Boson to within experimental error because I’m just a sucker for the intricacies of Quantum Physics, BUT…

The big news of the day is on the technology front and particularly NSA v. Encryption.

Now I’ll take it as a given that you know thanks to Ed Snowden and Thomas Drake and subsequent public testimony that the NSA is obsessed as an organization by collecting every communication you have.  What you may not know is how far back that goal goes and why it compromises all of our security.

Way back in the days of the Big Dog when all we had to worry our pretty little heads about was blowjobs and blue dresses the Internet started gaining steam as a place to buy things.  People were rightly concerned about personal information and credit card numbers falling into the hands of thieves (though I’ll tell you quite frankly that you’re in much more danger from your food server if you’re a bad tipper because they have plenty of time alone with your card to write down all your imprint numbers as well as the ones that are just printed which is sufficient for ruining your credit by telephone, let alone computer).

Anyhow the major Internet Retailers and the companies that served them started demanding an encryption scheme to bolster public confidence that it was safe to buy things.  Thus Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

Even this paltry (and believe me it is, though I recommend the study of The Reichenbach Fall because not everything is complicated and mysterious) level of security was deemed by the NSA “too dangerous for export” so they made an even weaker one with 40 bits of encryption instead of 128 (too hard, my brain hurts) for use overseas.

Well, Moore’s Law and all, and today even 128 bit encryption is somewhat passe and 40 bit can be cracked in 7 hours using Amazon Cloud computers.

The reason this is important is because websites, in order to be compatable globally, are designed to accept ‘export’ keys as valid along with ‘domestic’ keys.  A switch in the site software allows them to be forced into ‘export’ key mode via a third party who is not a valid client and once that is done it’s easy to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks that compromise the connection by appearing as the host site to the client and a valid client to the host.

Now I’ve been very careful to try and make it clear that this is not a bug or a flaw.  The NSA deliberately influenced the design of the standard to make this possible.

Since then there have been new standards adopted that are not subject to this type of spoofing, but adoption inertia being what it is over a third of websites worldwide are vulnerable including the NSA’s.

So what is the solution?  For a user nothing much, browsers are rightly designed to be compatible with as many sites as possible.  If you are paranoid enough you can get software plugins that ‘protect’ you from vulnerable sites, but ‘protect’ in this case means you can’t use them.  Secure browsers like Tor already do this and as I’ve said before what’s notable about them in action is how many things you used to do that you can’t anymore.

For sites there is a minor code fix that won’t allow a third party to force ‘export’ mode and we will see a rush of them implementing it.

What makes it interesting politically is context.  In recent months tech companies have been forced by public demand to implement more secure encryption schemes.  The NSA in turn has been petulantly stamping its feet and holding its breath in a tantrum insisting that these be designed with backdoors that can be accessed by State Spy Services.  They claim that this can be done so that only ‘responsible’ parties acting under the rule of law will have these abilities.

There are at least 2 problems with this.  First, a backdoor is a backdoor and anyone can use it.  It doesn’t care if you’re a White or a Black Hat, it’s just a door.  Second, other governments are demanding the same thing.  Governments like China.  If you’re the NSA it’s pretty hard to make the case that our computer communications should be less secure so that China can spy on them.

In the long run either our Representatives will put a stop to this or Engineers will make it technically impossible.  Mr. Market will be served.  In a positive sign this will happen the NSA was forced to give up crypto restrictions in 2000 because it was ruining the export business of the tech titans.  Given what we are aware of today I don’t think it will be nearly that long before the blowback begins.

FREAK: Another day, another serious SSL security hole

by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ZDNet

March 3, 2015 — 22:19 GMT

It seemed like such a good idea in the early 90s. Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) encryption was brand new and the National Security Agency (NSA) wanted to make sure that they could read “secured” web traffic by foreign nationals. So, the NSA got Netscape to agree to deploy 40-bit cryptography in its International Edition while saving the more secure 128-bit version for the US version. By 2000, the rules changed and any browser could use higher security SSL. But that old insecure code was still being used and, fifteen years later, it’s come back to bite us.

The Washington Post reported today that cryptographers from IMDEA, a European Union research group; INRIA, a French research company; and Microsoft Research have found out that “They could force browsers to use the old export-grade encryption then crack it over the course of just a few hours. Once cracked, hackers could steal passwords and other personal information and potentially launch a broader attack on the Websites themselves by taking over elements on a page, such as a Facebook ‘Like’ button.”

…

Nadia Heninger, a University of Pennsylvania cryptographer, told the Post, “This is basically a zombie from the ’90s… I don’t think anybody really realized anybody was still supporting these export suites.”

Heninger, who has been working on cracking the obsolete 40 to 512-bit RSA encryption keys, found that “she could crack the export-grade encryption key in about seven hours, using computers on Amazon Web services.” Once done, this enables hackers to easily make “man-in-the-middle” attacks on the cracked websites.

Guess what? Over a third of “encrypted” websites, according to tests made by University of Michigan researchers J. Alex Halderman and Zakir Durumeric, are open to FREAK attacks. Specifically, OpenSSL and Apple TLS/SSL clients such as the Safari Web browser are vulnerable to FREAK. When using these programs, it’s relatively simple to downgrade their “secure” connections from “strong” RSA to the easy-to-break “export-grade” RSA.

All of this has happened because as Matthew Green, a cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, succinctly put it, the NSA made sure that the early “SSL protocol itself was deliberately designed to be broken.”

And, now, it has been. It’s just that it’s now open to being broken by anyone with basic code-breaking smarts and easily available computer resources. The key problem is that OpenSSL and Safari both contain bugs that cause them to accept “RSA export-grade keys even when the client didn’t ask for export-grade RSA.”

Websites, generally speaking only create a single export-grade RSA key per session. They, like Apache with mod_ssl, will then re-use that key until the web server is rebooted. Thus, if you break a site once, chances are you’ve broken into it for days, weeks, even months.

Many of the websites that are “FREAKable” seem to be on Content Delivery Networks (CDN)s such as Akamai. That’s the reason why, for example, the NSA site is vulnerable. Akamai is working on fixing its web servers.

Encryption Backdoors Will Always Turn Around And Bite You In The Ass

by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Wed, Mar 4th 2015 10:50am

As you may have heard, the law enforcement and intelligence communities have been pushing strongly for backdoors in encryption. They talk about ridiculous things like “golden keys,” pretending that it’s somehow possible to create something that only the good guys can use. Many in the security community have been pointing out that this is flat-out impossible. The second you introduce a backdoor, there is no way to say that only “the good guys” can use it.

As if to prove that, an old “golden key” from the 90s came back to bite a whole bunch of the internet this week… including the NSA. Some researchers discovered a problem which is being called FREAK for “Factoring RSA Export Keys.” The background story is fairly involved and complex, but here’s a short version (that leaves out a lot of details): back during the first “cryptowars” when Netscape was creating SSL (mainly to protect the early e-commerce market), the US still considered exporting strong crypto to be a crime. To deal with this, RSA offered “export grade encryption” that was deliberately weak (very, very weak) that could be used abroad. As security researcher Matthew Green explains, in order to deal with the fact that SSL-enabled websites had to deal with both strong crypto and weak “export grade” crypto, — the “golden key” — there was a system that would try to determine which type of encryption to use on each connection. If you were in the US, it should go to strong encryption. Outside the US? Downgrade to “export grade.”

…

(T)he lesson of the story: backdoors, golden keys, magic surveillance leprechauns, whatever you want to call it create vulnerabilities that will be exploited and not just by the good guys.

…

Whether it’s creating vulnerabilities that come back to undermine security on the internet decades later, or merely giving cover to foreign nations to undermine strong encryption, backdoors are a terrible idea which should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

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)

Science News and Blogs

• In Net Neutrality Fight, Both Sides Gear Up for Long Haul, by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams
• Why McDonald’s Announcement on Chicken Is Important for Everyone’s Health, by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams
• Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree, by Jamie Shreeve, National Geographic
• Computing without a Computer, by Joey Bernard, Linux Journal
• History Repeats Itself: Ancient Cities Grew Much Like Modern Ones, by Megan Gannon, Live Science
• 8 possible explanations for those bright spots on dwarf planet Ceres, by Eric Mack, CNet
• Comet-orbiting spaceship glimpses its own shadow (+video), by Paul Sutherland, Christian Science Monitor
• Astronomers Find a Dusty Galaxy That Shouldn’t Exist, by Michael D. Lemonick, National Geographic
• Exclusive: Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest, by Douglas Preston, National Geographic
• Could This Alien Cell Thrive on Titan?, by Ian O’Neill, Discovery News
• Arctic Sea Ice ‘Thinning Dramatically,’ Study Finds, by Laura Geggel, Live Science
• International scientists question rush to build Nicaragua canal, by Justin Beach, National Monitor
• The Keurig K-Cup’s inventor says he feels bad that he made it – here’s why, by Drake Baer, Business Insider
• Fireworks at Chile’s Villarrica Volcano Light Up Night Sky, by Becky Oskin, Live Science

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Shooting Hitler would have done no good and might just have prolonged WW II or (worst case) led to a bad outcome.

One of the defining features of the Third Reich was Hitler’s poor Generalship and the inefficiency of his Administration which were responsible for things like the failure of the initial Soviet invasion (at least arguable, Russia BIG and not particularly wedded to Moscow as a capital so maybe inconclusive even if it is captured), Stalingrad (no arguing on that one), delays in the development and deployment of Jet propulsion, flaws in the allocation of Naval resources to strategic goals (Doenitz never had enough subs in the Battle of the Atlantic), etc.  I mean his Military tried to put together a couple of coups he was so bad.

We’d be living in a different world today if Hitler had been competent.

What’s not arguable is that given the punitive sanctions of the Versailles Treaty and collapse of the economy in the Depression, Germany was a failed state and likely to have fallen under the sway of one Dictator or another, so Hitler didn’t really matter that much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Virulent anti-Semitism.  Look, virulent anti-Semitism was popular and pervasive throughout Europe so I’m not sure many Jews would have been saved.

Shoot, shiv, or shout?  I’d have shouted a little louder and not at Hitler who was already a hopeless psychotic by 1920, but at the Allied governments about the potential threat of Germany and their own stupid economic and moral (did I mention pervasive anti-Semitism?) policies.

Now, if you’d have shot him after 1942 when the war was clearly lost…

Tonight we talk about marijuana legalization, but probably not about the racism and tobacco and alcohol monopolism that led to its prohibition.  Most likely it will be a bunch of sophomoric stoner jokes.

Continuity

Admiral Zhao

This Week’s Guests-

• Wednesday 3/4: Viacheslav Fetisov
• Thursday 3/5: Gerald Posner

Viacheslav Fetisov is one of Russia’s most recognized Hockey players and did several years with the New Jersey Devils and the Detroit Red Wings, returning to the Devils as an Assistant Coach.  He’s one of 4 people to win the “Grand Slam” of Hockey (Stanley Cup, World Ice Hockey Championship, Winter Olympics, World Ice Hockey Junior Championship, and Canada/World Cup Championship).  He was head of the Russian organizing committee for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and currently serves in the Russian Parliament as a Representative from the Vladivostock area.  In 2009 he became president of HC CSKA Moscow and after injuries to many key defensive players took the ice himself at the age of 51 after an 11 year layoff.

The real news below.

Chicago’s black voters key as Garcia battles to defeat Emanuel in mayoral race

By Mary Wisniewski and Tracy Rucinski, Reuters

Mon Mar 2, 2015 7:08am EST

(I)n 2011 majority African-American wards gave overwhelming backing to Emanuel, who was previously President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, some disillusionment has set in since. A persistently high crime rate, the decision to close 50 schools in mostly poor areas, and a sense that Emanuel is out of touch with the community and its problems has hurt him among black voters, some political activists say.

After spending more than $7 million on television ads alone, Emanuel won 45.5 percent of the vote in the first round last Tuesday – the largest tally of the five contenders but short of the 50 percent plus one vote needed to avoid an April 7 run-off.

…

Emanuel’s backing in predominantly black wards slipped to just 42 percent, from about 59 percent in 2011, according to the Illinois Election Data web site, while Garcia had 26 percent of the votes. The other 32 percent in those wards went to the three other candidates – two blacks and one white – who have now been eliminated from the race, leaving those votes up for grabs.

“Dead even”: New polls show Rahm Emanuel in danger of losing Chicago runoff

by Luke Brinker, Salon

Monday, Mar 2, 2015 12:50 PM EST

One week after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel failed to clear the 50 percent threshold required to avoid an April runoff, new polls find a deadlocked race between Emanuel and progressive challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

…

Capitalizing on progressive discontent with the mayor’s school closures, privatization schemes, and hostile relationship with organized labor, Garcia has campaigned in the mold of such progressive populists as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. He captured 34 percent of the vote last week. Emanuel won just 45 percent, despite a massive campaign war chest and the support of much of the political establishment.

While 55 percent of voters supported candidates other than the first-term incumbent, some analysts have speculated that many cast votes against Emanuel to simply to register a first-round protest. Presented with a choice between Emanuel and Garcia – and after another month of being deluged with Emanuel’s campaign ads – many of those voters will come home for the mayor, the thinking goes. But the latest numbers underscore that an Emanuel victory is far from assured.

The People of Chicago Stun Obama’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Now It’s Round 2

by Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report

Wed, 02/25/2015

“Turnout was near an all time low, but it didn’t matter,” one campaign associate told Black Agenda Report. “The voters who did come out were really motivated,.they know Rahm is an absolute pig.”

“There were also two advisory referenda our forces helped place on the ballot, which brought out the anti-Rahm vote. The first was a citywide vote on taking the big money out of elections, which carried 80%. The second referendum was for Chicago getting an elected school board instead of the mayoral dictatorship the President, privatizers and corporations love so much, that we’ve had since the Daley era. The mayor’s people would not allow a school board vote on the ballot citywide, so the Chicago Teachers Union and their allies in the communities across the city hit the streets and did a ward by ward petition drive, which got it on the ballot in 37 of the city’s 50 wards. This measure got 270,000 to 34,000, almost 9 to 1.”

…

Rahm Emanuel, called by some “Mayor One Percent” had every conceivable advantage. President Obama cut multiple campaign commercials for him, and made well publicized visits to his campaign offices. Besides millions in cash to spend, he had most of the city’s black and Latino political leaders, including congressmen Bobby Rush and Luis Gutierrez in his kennel. His Hollywood pals did an 8 part CNN mini-series for him by the same folks who did the “Brick City” series to boost the political fortunes of Newark’s Corey Booker. The CNN series broadcast fake stats about Rahm and his top cop bringing down the city’s murder rate, debunked almost immediately by news reports while the series was still being broadcast. And under Rahm and the Daleys, Chicago has expelled roughly as many poor and black residents in the last 20 years as New Orleans after Katrina. The city that elected Harold Washington in 1983 was over 40% black. Today’s Chicago is about 27% African American.

The established neoliberal candidate playbook on winning big city elections is to discourage poorer and left leaning voters from coming out, while spending heavily on media. Thanks to the long term mobilization of the teachers union and many forces across the city, it didn’t work this time.

Rahm Emanuel is also vulnerable for the many, many privatizations, sweetheart deals, and grand thefts he’s helped perpetrate while on the fifth floor. He pretended to “reform” the Daley era deal which gave all the city’s parking spaces to a consortium that appears to include J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi for the next 75 years. If a parking meter breaks or the city decides there’s no need for meters on a particular street, the contract obligates Chicago taxpayers to pay the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi and the other shadowy investors what those meters would have produced for the remainder of the 75year contract. Rahm secretly had the yellow light interval shortened a couple tenths of a second to produce more revenue for the city and the contractors who manage its red light cameras.

Yes, yes that was a boot to the ‘nads.  Now if only his interviews were more like that.

I didn’t mention it last night, but as it develops Jason Jones, the longest serving correspondent at the moment, will also be leaving The Daily Show (Sam Bee, his wife, will be staying with the program).  Jessica Williams has announced she is not a host candidate at this time though I understand Brian Williams is shopping his resume.

I don’t expect he’ll get it, the show would lose credibility.

Over on The Nightly Show side I felt the interveiw with DiBlasio went well enough but it wasn’t particularly funny, about the level you’d get from David Letterman.  The monologue went pretty well-

Tonight we’ll have Joy Reid, Bonnie McFarlane, Megan Powers, and Emma Ianinni talking about sexual assault on college campuses.

If you happen to be assaulted on campus Atrios gives us a warning not to use School Counciling or Medical Services as the records are not protected from the school should you decide to sue them or they you.

Continuity

The Turtle and The Carrot

This Week’s Guests-

• Tuesday 3/3: Sigourney Weaver
• Wednesday 3/4: Viacheslav Fetisov
• Thursday 3/5: Gerald Posner

I don’t know what Sigourney Weaver will be on to talk about, but I do know what I want to hear about and that’s her new Aliens project which ditches the last two movies (which were horrible because Ripley dies) and all the vs. Predator crap as non-canon.

Robert Smigel’s web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

Now don’t get me wrong.  There are lots of reasons to not like the Clintons, Bill or Hil, including Bill’s disastrous economic policy and pandering to Republicans and Hillary’s war hawk foreign policy and her Billionaire bootlicking.  They are conservative, Blue Dog, DLC, Third Way Democrats hardly deserving of the party moniker.

But of all the things to get riled about why do the Villagers choose the most petty and technical.  You know, it’s not illegal to get a blowjob, even from someone who is not your wife.  Yeah, it’s pretty skeevy and reprehensible especially given the power relationship between a boss and an intern, but not illegal.

Benghazi?  There is simply no there there.  If someone picked up the phone and called the very second things started going pear shaped there is simply no way the cavalry could have arrived in time to make any difference at all in how dead those people were without breaking the laws of physics which as Scottie points out, “Ya canna do Captain.”

And just so the e-mail scandal.

You see, it’s not even a technical violation of the policy at the time.

Hillary’s emails ‘not technically illegal’

By Julian Hattem, The Hill

03/03/15 04:16 PM EST

Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a personal email account to conduct official business as secretary of State caused seems to have stayed within the law, experts say.

“What she did was not technically illegal,” said Patrice McDermott, a former National Archives staffer and the head of the Open The Government coalition, a transparency group.

…

A Clinton spokesman defended the practice as routine and said that the former first lady obeyed “both the letter and spirit of the rules.”

“Like secretaries of State before her, she used her own email account when engaging with any department officials,” spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement. “For government business, she emailed them on their department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained.”

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that the Obama administration had given “very specific guidance” telling all agencies that staffers should use their official email accounts when conducting official business, and that any business conducted through personal email accounts be “preserved consistent with the Federal Records Act.”

Last November, Obama signed into law a bill requiring government emails dealing with an official matter sent from a personal account to be forwarded to an official email account within 20 days. That law and previous guidance issued by the National Archives have attempted to clarify the rules, but it was never expressly mandated that top-level officials use government-issued accounts.

“There was no prohibition on using a non-State.gov account for official business as long as it was preserved,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on Tuesday.

You have no idea how much it bugs me to go on the record supporting Hillary, but it is what it is.

I think I’ll have a nice long shower.

Larry continues to feel his way forward with his format and tonight could actually be a big leap forward if his bookers can keep coming up with high profile guests.

Tonight we’ll spend the whole half hour with Bill DiBlasio and I’ll be interested to see how it works out.

After a month or so now of some hits and some misses (hey, if you put it in play 50% of the time in Baseball you’re generally considered a pretty good bat) I’m kind of hoping that this format kind of works for him.

You see, the problems are first that we are not getting a set up each night.  The opening monologue is where you introduce the players and frame the debate, kind of like putting your leadoff men on base.  Secondly 4 people is too many for the panel, especially when so many of them are lightly known.  They don’t get enough face time with the audience to demonstrate their expertise (if they are serious) or be funny (if they are) and frankly it’s hard to keep them straight.

What I think could actually work is an old fashioned kind of Meet The Press style- 1 to 4 minutes of monologue (why are we watching this, who will we talking to) and then a short segment with just Larry and the guest developing the guest’s point of view.

After that we can bring in the panel (and I’d recommend no more than 2 to allow the audience time to familiarize themselves with them) and put the guest on the grill for about 10 – 12 minutes.

I do think the whole ‘Keeping it 100’ thing works and I would keep that part of it, but Larry and his writers need to be able to step in and pick it up because the questions so far are lame.  I don’t know if that’s just because they aren’t getting many good ones or they’re picking bad ones.

Finally, Lary can’t be allowed to slide off the hook with ‘Weak Tea’ like this-

What the heck is that???  All 4 of the ladies on his panel?  If I was his wife it would have been a long, cold weekend on the couch after that one.  And it may have been gallant but it was a stone cold weasel.

You know, I had another clip in mind (opening panel segment), but frankly last Thursday’s whole show was nothing special and the clip (though the highlight) was no better than the rest of it.

Continuity

Well, we’ll see if Jon survived his taping of Monday Night Raw (or maybe not until tomorrow if they did it after The Daily Show.  These Rock and Wrestling mashups rarely work though ever since Cyndi Lauper teamed up with Captain Lou Albano they keep trying it.

The lowly, average, regular rich

This Week’s Guests-

• Monday 3/2: Robert Smigel
• Tuesday 3/3: Sigourney Weaver
• Wednesday 3/4: Viacheslav Fetisov
• Thursday 3/5: Gerald Posner

I do hope Robert Smigel talks about some of his SNL work like ‘The Ambiguously Gay Duo’ but I suspect he’ll be talking about the return of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in Friday’s The Jack and Triumph Show on Adult Swim.  It’s a funny bit…

For me to poop on.

The real news below.

What is instructive about this is the factual denialism.  Just as fresh water Hayek inspired rattle shaking Shamen dispute the proven reality of Keynes in the macro world (and similar to the problem classical Physics has with Quantum equations appalling record of being predictively correct despite being counter-intuitive) so it is in the micro manipulated world of Mr. Market which has the galling indecency not to realize that the sky is falling despite the urgent claims of Rupert Murdoch Henny Penny.

Wall Street Journal Upset That Wall Street Isn’t Upset About Net Neutrality

by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Fri, Feb 27th 2015 10:34am

A few weeks ago, after it was more or less confirmed that the FCC was going forward with full Title II reclassification of broadband, we noted that the stocks of the big broadband companies actually went up suggesting that Wall Street actually knows that reclassification won’t really impact broadband companies, despite what they’ve been saying publicly. Perhaps this is partly because those same companies have been telling Wall Street that the rule change won’t have an impact.

However, for the Wall Street Journal — which has become weirdly, obsessively, anti-net neutrality — this is an abomination. The newspaper has spent months trying to whip everyone into a frenzy about how evil net neutrality is, using some of the most blatantly wrong arguments around. Just a few days ago, the WSJ turned to its former publisher, now columnist, L. Gordon Crovitz to spread as much misinformation as possible. This is the same L. Gordon Crovitz who a few years ago wrote such a ridiculously wrong article on the history of the internet that basically everyone shoved each other aside to detail how he mangled the history. He, bizarrely, insisted that the government had no role in the creation of the internet. Crovitz also has a history of being wrong (and woefully uninformed) about surveillance and encryption. It’s difficult to understand why the WSJ allows him to continue writing pieces that are so frequently factually challenged.

Actually, it’s not difficult at all.

In this latest piece, Crovitz suggests that Ted Cruz didn’t go far enough in comparing Obamacare to net neutrality, arguing that net neutrality is even “worse.”

…

The paper of record for Wall Street, which normally likes to suggest that markets are “right” about everything, is absolutely positive that the markets are wrong about this. And it’s furious. It has an article demanding that broadband investors need to “wake up” to what’s happening with net neutrality.

…

At the end of the article, the WSJ pretends that maybe the reason why stocks are up is because investors expect that the broadband players will win an eventual court battle, but that seems like wishful thinking on multiple levels. Let’s go with Occam’s Razor on this one. The market is up because everyone knows that Title II won’t make a huge difference at all for the prospects of broadband companies. Multiple Wall St. analysts have been saying this for months, as have the big broadband companies to the analysts themselves.

La, la, la, la, la.

Be vewwy quiet.

Though I don’t know why, because it was considered a failure the copyright wasn’t renewed and it’s in the public domain.