Category: Wake Up Call

Monday Wake Up Call – July 27, 2015

The Connecticut Democratic Party has decided to change the name of its “Jefferson-Jackson Dinner”. Apparently prompted by the national controversy over the Confederate flag, the state’s Democratic Party last week voted unanimously to change the name of its annual fundraising dinner and remove the names of two slave-owning American presidents.

The clear implication is that there’s something wrong with Thomas Jefferson which puts him in the same category as the Confederate Flag. The Hartford Courant reported this quote from the state Democrats’ resolution:

As members of the Democratic Party, we are proud of our history as the party of inclusion. Democrats have led the way on civil rights, LGBT equality and equal rights for women…It is only fitting that the name of the party’s most visible annual event reflects our dedication to diversity and forward-looking vision.

Wrongo doesn’t care if the Democratic Party stops naming their fundraisers after Jefferson and Jackson.

What is bothersome is the implication that Jefferson is a pariah. Andrew Jackson is another matter, despite the fact that the symbol of the party is the donkey, or jackass. “Jackass,” stood for Andrew Jackson. It came from an 1837 political cartoon referring to Jackson as a “Jack-ass.” Jackson thought it was funny, and used it to his advantage. Democrats embraced the symbol, and it has stuck for nearly 180 years.

What message does the CT Dems public disowning of Jefferson send? Do CT Dems understand history? We owe a debt to Jefferson. It’s easy to say that Jefferson did things that were wrong, but he wrote the Declaration of Independence, managed our relationships with France during the Revolutionary War, and was a highly successful president. It is a huge mistake to invalidate his accomplishments because of his personal foibles. He was a man of his time, and did what he did. But, without him, our revolution would have been different.

Making perfection the enemy of great is wrong-headed. It places the CT Dems in a similar intellectual place as Donald Trump, who says McCain isn’t a war hero because he was captured, or that John Kerry wasn’t a good negotiator because he fell off his bike.

Maybe we could all be adults? The effort at political correctness by the modern Democratic Party is fine, but we should remember that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a perfect man. African-Americans know that, but Dr. King is still revered by almost all Americans.

And the fact that today’s GOP embraces Abraham Lincoln does not make the modern GOP a racism-free party, regardless of how often the GOP invokes Lincoln’s name to claim credit for his greatness. Judging our founders, or our heroes by today’s standards, would condemn almost everyone past and present. Maybe, Democrats in Washington, CT, named after George, will want to change its name, since George Washington owned slaves.

Yes, there are egalitarian threads in both the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian traditions that resonate with Democrats today—but both men based the equality of some men upon the subordination of others.

Since CT Democrats are determined to replace Jefferson and Jackson as patrons of these events, and are holding a meeting to decide the new name of the event in September, without question, FDR-JFK could serve pretty well, despite each man’s foibles. Or maybe, Joe Lieberman?

Are you the one American without personal foibles?

So, wake up Connecticut Democrats. To help with their wake-up, here is #4 in our songs of summer series, “Summertime Blues”, the great Eddie Cochran tune done here by Brian Setzer on MTV, recorded live for the ‘La Bamba’ concert. It reminds that there was a time when MTV was watchable:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:
Foreign Policy reports that back in 2000, the NSA intercepted a call to Bin Laden’s operations center in Yemen from a 9/11 hijacker in San Diego. They failed to follow-up, which should set off warning bells. Now 16 years later, the NSA denies they knew where the calls originated. That’s bullshit two ways: In 2000, the telephone network’s technology automatically provided a digital equivalent of caller ID to every phone switch, including NSA’s. And former NSA people like Tom Drake and William Binney say there’s no way the NSA wouldn’t have tapped this line.

Dark matter is the stuff that cosmologists think makes up some 85% of all the matter in the universe. A new theory says dark matter might be a known particle. If true, that would open up a window onto an invisible, dark matter version of physics.

Turkey launches war on Islamic State’s worst enemies – The Kurds. This blog site, Moon of Alabama, can be decidedly anti-American, but this is a must read article.

Gun deaths will surpass automobile deaths in the US this year, says The Atlantic. Car crashes killed 33,561 people in 2012, the most recent year for which data are available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Firearms killed 32,251 people in the US in 2011, the most recent year for which the CDC has data. The young are most at risk: CDC data show guns will kill more Americans under 25 than cars in 2015. Surely, a small price to pay for our Second Amendment freedoms?

Marilyn Tavenner, who served as the chief administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services from 2013 until February, is now in charge of an insurance industry lobby. This tells us all we need to know about where insurance companies see their next pot of gold. It is the Medicare Advantage program, which over the past several years, has become an increasingly important revenue stream for the country’s insurers. Revolving door much?

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Monday Wake Up Call – April 27, 2015

Last week saw the sentencing of David Petraeus, former CIA director and the highest-profile general from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to two years’ probation for providing classified information to his mistress. Mr. Petraeus was also fined $100,000.

Petraeus remains a four-star US Army general. His retired pay is $220,000/year, plus the perks of shopping at the PX and the commissary store, full medical benefits, free travel on government aircraft, free legal advice; the list goes on.

A US officer convicted in a US civilian court of a felony is subject to dismissal from the service, at the discretion of the service secretary. A dismissal is the equivalent of a dishonorable discharge for an enlisted soldier. It strips the former member of all the perks, everything.

What Petraeus was convicted of would normally be a felony in a civil court. But he was charged by the Obama Administration with a misdemeanor so he wasn’t vulnerable to an administrative dismissal. This misdemeanor conviction will have about the same impact on his life as a conviction for littering. From the New York Times:

As part of the plea agreement, Mr. Petraeus admitted that he gave his lover, Paula Broadwell, who was writing a biography about him, black notebooks that contained sensitive information about official meetings, war strategy and intelligence capabilities, as well as the names of covert officers.

War strategy. That would be the strategy written by the guy giving it to Broadwell, along with the names of covert officers? Compare that to the crimes for which Jeffrey Sterling and 8 others are facing hard time in prison. Sterling was convicted on 9 counts of violations of the Espionage Act for providing much lesser information to a guy writing a book, James Risen. Manning got 35 years, John Kiriakou gets 2, Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for 3 years and counting, Snowden is on the run, and no military brass is doing time for Abu Ghraib.

Petraeus gave Broadwell that information for personal profit. It helped him in his amorous adventure and, most likely, helped the sales of her book. He has since moved on to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P., a New York investment firm where he is a partner.

That makes Petraeus just another example of too big to fail.

The Justice Department and the Obama administration need today’s wake-up, for not pursuing Mr. Petraeus to the fullest extent of the law.

So here is your Monday wake-up, the White-Throated Sparrow. These guys are all over our property right now:

If you read the Wrongologist via email, you can view the video here.

Your Monday Hot Links:
Everyone wants to appear smart when in a meeting. Here are a few tricks:

Kochs were defeated in Montana after spending a bundle to defeat Medicaid expansion. What? Medicare expansion passed in a Red state?

How much water is in your food? See this graphic. Everyone should look at this, not just Californians.

Wall Street Journal says more people are out of the stock market than are in it. About 52% of Americans are not investing in the stock market, and 53% of them say they don’t have the funds to invest. A different study from the National Institute on Retirement Security found that 45% of working-age households had no retirement savings at all; among the 55-64 age group, the average was only $12,000.

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Monday Wake Up Call – March 2, 2015

The lands surrounding the Mansion of Wrong remain deeply snow-covered, and we picked up another 6” of snow last night. Where is Spring? In other weather-related news, February 2015 was officially the coldest February on record here in the Nutmeg State. So, let’s turn to Pete Seeger for a lovely Wake Up song about snow, with a gentle political message buried inside. Here is “Snow, Snow”:

Sample Lyrics:
Snow, snow, falling down;
Covering up my dirty old town.

Covers the garbage dump, covers the holes,
Covers the rich homes, and the poor souls,
Covers the station, covers the tracks,
Covers the footsteps of those who’ll not be back.

In news of the stupid, a branch of the Republican Party in Idaho voted to take up a measure to declare the state is Christian. The Idea was to bolster what supporters called the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of the US. The proposal was that Idaho be “formally and specifically declared a Christian state,” guided by a Judeo-Christian faith as reflected in the US Declaration of Independence. Jeff Tyler, a member of the committee and backer of the draft resolution, said:

We’re a Christian community in a Christian state and the Republican Party is a Christian Party.

It’s possible that the county Republicans had never heard of the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution, which says…”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”…Oh, and that applies to the states as well.

Well, when the news got out of Kootenai County, the county’s Republican Central Committee decided to shelve the measure, Now, Republicans will tell you it was just a small splinter group, and the resolution was going nowhere, so the US Constitution was never in danger from Republican religious extremists. Perhaps the more realistic way to look at it is that the Constitution is safe for the moment, until another, larger Republican extremist group comes along.

Here are your Monday hot links:

A study of frozen ice cores from the Tibetan Himalayas shows that international agreements on phasing out the use of toxic organic pollutants are working. It’s cheaper to take an ice core sample than it is to place air quality sensors everywhere and monitor them.

In the US, just three out of ten workers produce and deliver all of the goods we consume. Everything we extract, grow, design, build, make, engineer, and transport – down to brewing a cup of coffee in a restaurant kitchen – is done by roughly 30% of the country’s workforce. Another 30% of us spend our time planning what to make, deciding where to install the things we have made, performing personal services, talking to each other, and keeping track of what is being done, so that we can figure out what needs to be done next. The rest are kids, elderly and out of work. Which 30% are you in?

Last week, the Muslim World League, a Saudi-backed alliance of Islamic NGOs, held a three-day conference in Mecca on “Islam and Counterterrorism.” The conference’s organizers cast their mission as developing a coordinated campaign to promote a moderate, peaceful vision of Islam that disavows the violence and apostasy that ISIS thrives on. They also think only Muslims can solve the ISIS problem.

You Tube makes no money. The Wall Street Journal reports that while YouTube accounted for about 6% of Google’s overall sales last year ($4 billion), it didn’t contribute to earnings. After paying for content, and the equipment to deliver speedy videos, YouTube’s bottom line is “roughly break-even”. You Tube has 1 billion users per month. By comparison, Facebook generated more than $12 billion in revenue, and nearly $3 billion in profit, from its 1.3 billion users per year.

An abandoned Walmart is America’s largest 1-floor library. This is an old story, but worth checking out if you missed it. The architect firm of Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States:

Library

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Monday Wake Up Call – January 5, 2015

Let’s start the first Monday of the New Year with this photo of a hermaphrodite Northern Cardinal:

Cardinal

The half-red, half-white plumage of this northern cardinal is caused by its sex chromosomes not segregating properly after fertilization, so the bird is half-male, half-female. You can read more in New Scientist magazine here.

Last night, Wrongo watched Martin Scorsese’s film, The Last Waltz, which documents the last concert by the roots-rock group, The Band. Late in the movie, Robbie Robertson recounts jamming with the great harmonica player, Sonny Boy Williamson in the early 1960s, and making (never-realized) plans to work together. Obviously, Robertson, Helm, et al. went on to be the band that backed Bob Dylan in the 1970s.

Here is your Monday musical wake-up: Sonny Boy Williamson playing and singing “99”, in which he can’t come up with that last dollar to make the $100 his girlfriend wants:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP668KiaY7E

Here are links that you may have missed:

Drone etiquette is one of several issues covered in the WSJ’s “21 Tech Do’s and Don’ts for 2015.” Really, drone etiquette is gonna be a thing in 2015?

Dynamic scoring is not about succeeding in the bar scene, it’s a new Republican way of using the Congressional Budget Office to make tax cuts look good. The Wrongologist wrote about this in December.

Georgia police chief shoots wife (twice) while “moving” his Glock pistol in their bed. Yea, well, more for the “good guy with a gun” file. BTW, Glocks don’t accidentally fire, they have a unique safety mechanism, so you have to pull the trigger to fire it.

California colleges see surge in efforts to unionize adjunct faculty. At nearly a dozen private colleges in California, adjunct professors are holding first-time contract negotiations, or are campaigning to win the right to do so.

Almost one-fifth of the nation’s enclosed malls have vacancy rates considered troubling by real estate experts (10% or greater). Over 3% of malls are considered to be dying, with 40% vacancies or higher. That is up from less than 1% in 2006. Another impact of income inequality: High-end malls are thriving, while malls with anchor stores like Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney falter.

Don’t try this at home: In 2015, the European Union is increasing taxes on purchases of digital content like e-books and smartphone applications. The taxes are part of a continuing push to tax the region’s digital economy more heavily. It will raise over $1 billion.

The latest ISIS offensive in Iraq’s Anbar Province may have reversed weeks of progress by Iraq’s government forces. And it only took a few hours. No airstrikes were launched by US coalition forces in time to support the ground troops.

“From 07:00 until 11:00, we lost territory that had taken us two weeks to gain. In a few hours, it was gone,” said a senior officer from the Iraqi Army’s 7th Division.

 

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Monday Wake Up Call – December 8, 2014

We wake up this morning remembering that it is 34 years to the day since John Lennon was killed outside the Dakota in NYC.

The Wrongologist and Ms. Oh So Right lived in a loft in the Wall Street area in 1980 when Lennon was killed. That night, December 8, 1980, we were listening to Vin Scelsa on the (at the time) free-form radio station, WNEW-FM, when Vinny announced that Lennon had been shot. He later announced that John had died.

Why kill Lennon? Certainly he was not everyone’s cup of Earl Gray. The common view of The Beatles was that Paul was cute, Ringo was funny and George was cerebral. John was the thinker and renegade, clearly too edgy for some. Here is a Lennon song that was sung at our wedding just the year before:

John did more than write and sing music. He was an advocate against the Vietnam War and marched with people in protest on the streets of New York. Nixon tried to get him deported. But that didn’t work, although Mark David Chapman had a different plan for sending John away.

Your Monday Links:

How did that Arab Spring work out for Egyptians? Maybe not well at all.

Newborns in India are now dying at alarming rates from infections that used to be curable. We may have reached the apocalyptic scenario with antibiotics.

Here is a handy map that shows the geography that ISIS controls today.

Eight Los Angeles police officers who shot at two women over 100 times will not lose their jobs. They won’t even be suspended. They’ll just get some additional training.

Is “pay for performance” medical care helping or hurting patients?

Everything you think you know about Clausewitz is wrong.

Confirming just what you thought: Southern states have the lowest economic mobility in the country. Red states run by white Republicans, filled with people who have the blues.

Here is a thought for the day of Lennon’s death:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner, from Requiem for a Nun

 

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Monday Wake Up Call – November 3, 2014

Are you tired because you got an extra hour’s sleep last night? Let’s get your brain started with a question: Who benefits it the government funds the development of new technology?

Answer: Private corporations.

Economist Mariana Mazzucato’s book about the role of the State in innovation, The Entrepreneurial State says that the image of a useless State at odds with a dynamic private sector is a myth. Mazzucato reveals in multiple case studies that the opposite is true; the private sector is only willing to invest after someone in a garage has a good idea that must be commercialized, or after the State makes a seed investment.

She describes how it worked with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s search engine. In both cases their popular consumer products benefited from state financing of basic research. For the iPhone, some of the technologies that make it “smart” were funded by the US government, such as the global positioning system (GPS), the touchscreen display, and the forerunner of the voice-activated personal assistant, Siri.

As for Google, development of its fundamental search algorithm was funded by the National Science Foundation. Plus, of course, there’s that thing called the Internet, another government funded venture, which makes the iPhone “smart”, and makes Google searches useful and valuable.

The right-wing myth is that the government needs to be completely out of the way of business, except for providing tax and regulatory incentives for private companies, to make them “want” to create the products they sell.

But, in the real world, many successful companies harvest the work of others and repackage proven technologies into successful products. In the 21st Century, companies often just mine the surface of their technology estate. When “innovative” companies are hugely profitable, often they buy back their shares and/or raise dividends, but do not invest that much in their long-term futures.

Finally, despite the fact that some companies directly benefit from taxpayer-funded technologies, they “underfund” (via tax breaks and holding profits offshore) the government that helped develop technologies that led to their success.

The obvious way for the public to ‘profit’ from socialized risk is to retain some ownership of the technologies that underlie those successes.

Another myth that needs to be exploded is that companies will not introduce new products if they can’t own 100% the intellectual property behind the products. Not true. Today, they often share their technology ownership with other firms. And it is inconceivable that a growing public estate of licensable technical know-how would sit under-exploited, if it could be licensed by corporate America.

Monday’s breakfast buffet of linkage:

Heard of the 27 Club? The idea is that pop stars are more likely than the general population to die at age 27. Not true, but they do tend to die much younger than the rest of us.

Of course milk is good for you! Well, maybe not as much as the milk-industrial complex wants you to believe. Swedish researchers took two groups, one with 61,000 women and the other with 45,000 men, and followed them for 20 years to see if milk intake was related to fractures or to death. Apparently, not so much. Maybe you should give Almond milk a try.

Using CDC data, a study finds that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated directly with state laws that penalize schools financially when students fail. An ADHD diagnosis can take a student out of the statistics. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses — Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina — are all over 10% of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed — Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California — are all under 5%.

The US has changed its H-1B record retention policy. The US Department of Labor said that records “are temporary records and subject to destruction” after five years, under a new policy. But, the H-1B visa lasts 6 years. The total database is about 1GB, so what’s the issue?

The Air Force doesn’t have enough mechanics for its new F35 fighter: The reason is political. The Air Force was counting on training A-10 mechanics, but Congress is blocking the Air Force’s plan to retire the A-10 aircraft. It could take 12 months longer than proposed to get the F-35 in the air, if the A-10 stays online.

International News:

Japanese journalists didn’t do independent reporting about the Fukushima melt-down, they simply reported the press releases of Tokyo Power and the government. Now some are speaking out. Sound familiar?

The war between the banks and phone companies over mobile banking in Kenya heats up. After the huge success of mobile banking in Kenya, commercial banks began to invest in mobile phone-based banking, including selling their own SIM cards instead of using those issued by mobile phone providers. Now, the mobile phone operators are crying foul.

When the TuNur project in the Tunisian Sahara comes online in by late 2018, it will provide clean and reliable power to more than 2.5 million UK homes. The project will be connected to the European electricity grid via a dedicated cable from Tunisia to Italy. The UK participated in funding the project.

Your wake-up song is from Trigger Hippy, a new roots super-group founded by Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman, and singer Joan Osborne. It is an amalgam of country, blues, soul and rock. Here is “Rise up Singing”, so time to rise up:

 

Let this thought guide your week:

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. – Muhammad Ali

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Monday Wake Up Call – October 27, 2014

Welcome to the working week. This week brings Halloween and the end of daylight savings time. Next Sunday, time “falls back”, and sadly, so will Democrats on the 4th of November.

But right now, it is time to get up and get going. Remember Disco? Get down with “Stomp” by the Brothers Johnson from their 1980 Platinum album, “Light up the Night”:

Quincy Jones worked with the Brothers Johnson on several of their albums for A&M. Michael Jackson does background vocals on another song on this album, “This Had to Be”. “Stomp” went to #1 on the R&B charts, #1 on the Dance singles chart and #7 on Billboard in 1980.

Here are a few hot links for your Monday breakfast buffet:

The Federal government’s 2014 fiscal year ended on September 30th. Here are 10 facts you may not know about the federal budget.

The Sunshine Act, a provision of the Affordable Care Act, requires doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers to disclose their financial relationships. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the first set of data. It includes $3.5 billion paid by Big Pharma to over half a million doctors and teaching hospitals in the last five months of 2013.

For 18 years, thousands of students at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill had “no show” classes with no assigned readings, and no responsible faculty member. These classes had just one requirement: a final paper that no one ever read. In the most crucial finding, no player was paid for an autograph, so it’s just a minor scandal.

More about the Dallas Ebola screening fail and likely cover up. It appears that the hospital and the software firm retrofitted the data to the story. Once again, we may never know the truth about what happened in Dallas.

My Terrifying Night with Afghanistan’s Only Female Warlord. Commander Pigeon is a woman who kills men, and is known to everyone in Kabul, but we are just hearing about her.

Al-Qaeda has a new English magazine called “Resurgence.” It is 117 pages of glossy graphics and articles about jihad and the war against America, all in understandable English.

The Social Security office that hears appeals for disability benefits is 990,399 cases behind. This Washington backlog is bigger even than the backups at Veterans Affairs, where 526,000 people are waiting in line, and the patent office, where 606,000 applications are pending.

Politics never change. Here is a 1796 editorial by Alexander Hamilton that accuses Thomas Jefferson of an affair with a slave.

Bonus Monday Music: You probably have heard that Jack Bruce died on the 25th. As Bob Lefsetz says:

Clapton might be God, but there was no Cream without Jack Bruce. He was the one who sang most of the songs.

He wrote the riff that we all know from “Sunshine of Your Love”. Here is Cream doing “I Feel Free”. That’s Jack Bruce on the left, Ginger Baker on drums and Eric Clapton on the right:

Feel free all week, my friends.

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