That’s probably me

-from

I live two blocks east of I-95, I never know which way it’ll go. Snow? It was 71 here yesterday:

Roads north and west of I-95 will likely be blanketed by snow Wednesday night, and the National Weather Service says the New York area could see 6-10 inches of snow. Travelers should expect clogged roads and airport delays up and down the east coast into Thursday

Hate to break it to you, but if you are traveling anywhere on the East Coast this Thanksgiving, you may have a tough road ahead of you. Snow and ice is expected from New England to Georgia on Wednesday, which promises to snarl traffic on one of the busiest travel days of the year.

According to the Weather Channel, roads north and west of I-95 are likely to be blanketed by snow Wednesday night, and the National Weather Service says the New York area could see 6-10 inches of snow. Travelers should expect clogged roads and airport delays all up and down the eastern seaboard from Wednesday into Thursday morning.

Oh. you’re having a bad day?

Cesspool 10-18-14

Read this, you’ll feel better:

A cesspool filled with excrement has exploded in central China, injuring 15 people and knocking down a building, state-run media reported.

The blast was apparently sparked by a local man burning waste close to the cesspool, igniting methane gas which was emanating from the pit, the Xinhua news agency said late on Sunday.

The incident in Zhangjiajie city, in the central province of Hunan, caused a residential building to collapse and three of the injured had to be hospitalised, Xinhua said.

China’s urban infrastructure has often been hastily built with little regard for safety as hundreds of millions of people have moved from the countryside to cities in recent decades.

The table of public trust

table

This is really insane. I mean, really, really, insane:

It costs more than $44,000 in tuition to attend Kean University for four years, and many of the school’s students struggle to pay the bill.

But the taxpayer-supported school in the township of Union spent $219,000 so far and has authorized up to $270,000 — about the average price of a house in the nearby working-class neighborhood — for a custom-made, circular conference table that seats 23 and features data ports, microphones and an illuminated map of the world in a glass panel at its center.

The table was bought without competitive bidding, which is normally required under New Jersey law for purchases at state colleges and universities. Instead, Kean hired a company in China to manufacture the table. The school recently established a branch campus there and wants to strengthen ties with the Chinese government.

The price tag is as much as 10 times what has been spent by other schools for similar tables, records show.

Kean President Dawood Farahi, who has grand ambitions for the university, including expansion of the China campus, said the school saved money by going to China and that the table would have cost half a million dollars if made in the United States.

“It is small-minded to focus on the university buying a $200,000 table,” Farahi said in a recent interview on campus.

“Why not?” he responded when asked about the purchase. “Why not? Why not?”

Motherfuckers

http://youtu.be/6fy49SyK95E

That whole Ferguson grand jury charade last night was utter and illegal bullshit. You know why? Because the only purpose of a grand jury is to see if there’s a prima facie case — that is, does enough evidence on its face exist to bring charges? Of course it did.

What the corrupt, smug and arrogant St. Louis prosecutor did was appoint himself judge and held an illegal trial in the grand jury room. This was a public relations event to add a veneer of legality to letting Darren Wilson off the hook.

And what he did was present the “facts” of the case to a captive audience last night on national television. Oh, you see, it was the physical evidence! Blah blah blah.

But it wasn’t the physical evidence. You know why? Because in a real trial (which is what would have happened if the grand jury did its job and indicted Darren Wilson), the adversarial judicial system would have allowed for rebuttals of every single piece of physical evidence — hell, all the evidence.

So Bob McCulloch artfully created the illusion of a fair trial — while doing exactly the opposite. Because there was no indictment, and no adversarial process. He stage-managed the whole fucking farce.

And he’s done it before:

Nasheed cited McCulloch’s investigation into the actions of two undercover drug detectives who killed a suspect and his passenger in a car on the parking lot of the Jack in the Box restaurant in Berkeley in 2000.

Grand jury proceedings are secret. McCulloch, in telling the public what the grand jury had found, repeatedly insisted that “every witness” had testified that the two detectives fired to defend themselves after the suspect tried to run them over with his car.

The Post-Dispatch reviewed the previously secret grand jury tapes and found that McCulloch’s public statements were untrue.

Only three of the 13 detectives who testified said the suspect’s car had moved forward, in the direction of the two officers who shot him and his passenger. Two of those were the shooters themselves. The third was a detective who McCulloch later said he considered charging with perjury because his account was so at odds with the facts.

Contrary to McCulloch’s public statements, the grand jury tapes showed that four other detectives testified that they never saw the suspect’s car travel toward the officers.

McCulloch never brought independent evidence before the grand jury to sort out who was right.

Nor did he request the testimony of a nationally noted collision expert who investigated the case for the Justice Department. He determined that the suspect’s car had always been in reverse — added proof that it did not move toward the detectives.

He’s a fucking liar, the media as usual seems to be too incompetent to figure out what’s going on, and cops got the green light to keep killing people. Black people, especially.

But all they’ll talk about today is people rioting and setting fire. Well, when the people who are supposed to be stewards of law and order make their own rules, what do you expect? Because not only did they fix the case, they did it in such an obvious way that it was one big “fuck you” to the people of Ferguson.

If you’re rotten to your employees, the internet will find you

Rosebud on Rush Street

So sick of these businesses who can’t even extend human kindness to the people who help them make their money:

Last week, a delivery driver for a restaurant in Napierville, Illinois made what he thought was a reasonable request–he needed time off to have cancer surgery. He says that his manager responded in about the worst way possible–by firing him.

Jonathan Larson worked as a delivery driver at Rosebud Italian Specialties and Pizzeria in Napierville. It’s part of Rosebud Restaurants, a popular family-owned chain of Italian restaurants in the Chicago area. He is also suffering from brain and spine cancer. When Natalie Martinez of WMAQ-TV in Chicago interviewed Larson, he was in obvious pain made even worse from several rounds of chemotherapy. At one point, the pain got so severe that Martinez had to help him go to a bench and sit down.

Larson recently found out that he needed surgery to remove some of the cancer from his back and would need to be off work for six weeks. However, he says that when asked the manager for six weeks off, the manager crassly asked him, “So you’re just gonna leave me high and dry like that, huh?” When Larson promised to come back, he claims the manager told him that by that time, he’d already have a replacement. To add insult to injury, the manager reportedly added, “Just leave. I have to make some phone calls.” Larson was gobsmacked. He couldn’t believe anyone would react this way, considering this “wasn’t something I could really help.” In a colossal understatement, he said that he felt “really disrespected and demeaned.” A spokeswoman for Rosebud said that while company policy forbade commenting on specific personnel matters, Rosebud was “thoroughly investigating the matter” to determine if its procedures were followed.

Larson says that the least Rosebud can do is apologize. It looks like he may get that, and probably more. After getting slammed up and down in the hours after the story ran on Saturday night, Rosebud announced on its Facebook page that after “acting swiftly” to get a better read on the situation, it has reached out to Larson and hopes to “discuss his employment following his medical treatment” very soon. One can hope that when all is said and done, the manager who was so callous to Larson gets his walking papers.

That manager might not be the only one who needs to be out of a job for this. On Saturday night, a man named Ron Gibori posted an account of how Rosebud fell all over itself to comfort his mother after she was diagnosed with cancer. However, a quick Google check revealed that Gibori worked for Rosebud’s public relations firm. Rosebud admitted that Gibori failed to disclose his relationship with Rosebud, and deleted his Facebook post.

IKEA is a tax shelter

IKEA

No, really. They’re not even Swedish! They’re a “charity” that’s based in the Netherlands, allegedly to promote design and architecture. But they don’t spend much of their money – they seem to be a big old tax shelter:

Ikea’s association with Swedishness and Swedish values is so ironic that one would be hard pressed to know where to begin. One obvious place to start would be to note that the Swedish government is using taxpayer money to give free advertising to a corporation that left Sweden to avoid paying taxes. Ikea contributes next to nothing to Sweden in the form of corporate tax, all while making billions off of its Swedish image. In fact, the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid giving anything back to the national budgets of their host nations.

Ikea’s corporate structure is complicated, but the key point is that Ikea is a Netherlands-based “charity.” For many years, the vast majority of its outlets have been controlled by the Dutch company Ingka Holding, which in turn is owned by the not-for-profit Stichting Ingka Foundation, which was created in 1982 by the founder of Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad, for the purpose of ”furthering the advancement of architecture and interior design.” The Stichting Ingka Foundation is often listed as the wealthiest charitable foundation in the world, with assets in excess of $35 billion. As a result, Ikea pays a minuscule 3.5 percent nonprofit tax rate, far lower than its for-profit counterparts. In addition, recent revelations from LuxLeaks, an investigative project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, show the company has made deals with the government of Luxembourg in order to pay as little tax as possible to anyone, anywhere.

Via Forbes:

This nonprofit is dedicated to “innovation in the field of architectural and interior design.” Indeed, the Foundation donated a few million to some Swedish universities, but the money is the singular, conventional nonprofit donation.

The Foundation’s cash is transferred to Stichting IKEA Foundation, another Dutch-registered charity, which can use the money for “for investing long-term in order to build a reserve for securing the IKEA group, in case of any future capital requirements.” Nice charity, if you can get it.

This is not the end of IKEA’s legal structure, however. Inter IKEA Systems, another private Dutch company but not part of the Ingka Holding group, holds the intellectual property rights to its “trademark” and “concept.” The owner of this Dutch entity is Inter IKEA Holding, registered in Luxembourg. A separate company in the Netherlands Antilles owns it, which in turn is run by a trust registered in Curaçao.

IKEA ends up paying roughly 3% in corporate taxes!

H/T Christian Christensen.

Of course it was a policy

jump-you-fuckers

Real shocker, right? We might be out of this mess by now if they’d thrown these people in jail:

U.S. government protection of big banks is a policy the Obama administration has adamantly denied, but during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Friday, William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, candidly admitted to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, that the policy was indeed a reality.

Under the Obama administration, despite overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, large financial organizations have avoided criminal prosecution for the following: laundering money for suspected terrorists and drug cartels, manipulating interest rate benchmarks, rigging various commodities markets, misleading investors in mortgage-linked securities, tricking homeowners into taking out expensive mortgages, manipulating municipal debt markets, and breaking state and federal rules when seizing homes from borrowers who were behind on their payments, according to the Huffington Post.

“We were not willing to find those firms guilty before, because we were worried that if we found them guilty, that could somehow potentially destabilize the financial system,” Dudley said during the hearing. “We’ve gotten past that and I think it’s really important that we got past that.”

It’s the first admission from a federal official acknowledging the explicit policy of protecting big banks from prosecution, despite lawmakers having long suspected such an arrangement.

‘We will need writers who can remember freedom’: Ursula Le Guin at the National Book Awards

Artists and writers these days are forging new territory, because not only are they trying to create something meaningful during a depression, they have additional factors that make it even harder: school loans, terrible jobs, and lack of the government WPA program they kept artists alive during the Great Depression. It’s always the artist who speaks up and says, no, this is art, you can’t turn life into commerce. And they’re right, although they’re usually derided for saying so. That’s why this is so inspiring:

After accepting the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at last night’s National Book Awards, Portland writer Ursula K. Le Guin deployed a speech that lanced Amazon, her own publisher, and other “commodity profiteers” who “sell us like deodorant.” It went off like a bomb, bringing the entire room to its feet.

“The speech started out as a smattering of applause, but by the end she got a standing ovation,” said Theo Downes-Le Guin, Le Guin’s son who also runs contemporary art gallery Upfor on NW Flanders. We caught up with him this morning by phone as he assisted his mother through New York airport security on their way home (he also escorted her onstage last night). “I was incredibly proud of her. She made me cry.”

But those moved by Le Guin’s speech went far beyond attendees at the black-tie Manhattan event.

Overnight, Le Guin blew up web editions of the Los Angeles Times, Guardian, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and more. National Public Radio ran Le Guin’s anti-capitalist critique as breaking news last night and again for morning commuters. The hashtag #nbawards is almost entirely devoted to frothy Le Guin tweets (including one from fantasy titan Neil Gaiman, who introduced Le Guin prior to awarding her medal).

What prompted the adoration? Statements like those below from the 85-year-old author (read the full transcript here).

On the commodification of art:

Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers.

On Amazon’s recent attempt to undercut the imprint Hachette:

We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this.

On power:

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

On her fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction:

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.