"Every Woman I Know Crazy 'Bout An Automobile"

You may be more familiar with the Ry Cooder cover:

Do As I Say . . .

Not as I do: Greenpeace executive flies 250 miles to work

One of Greenpeace’s most senior executives commutes 250 miles to work by plane, despite the environmental group’s campaign to curb air travel, it has emerged.

Pascal Husting, Greenpeace International’s international programme director, said he began "commuting between Luxembourg and Amsterdam" when he took the job in 2012 and currently made the round trip about twice a month.

The flights, at 250 euros for a round trip, are funded by Greenpeace, despite its campaign to curb "the growth in aviation", which it says "is ruining our chances of stopping dangerous climate change”.
. . .
Each round-trip commute Mr Husting makes would generate 142kg of carbon dioxide emissions, according to airline KLM.

That implies that over the past two years his commuting have been responsible for 7.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions - the equivalent of consuming 17 barrels of oil, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

But Mr Husting defended the arrangement, telling the Telegraph that while he would "rather not take" the journey it was necessary as it would otherwise be "a twelve hour round trip by train".

Or he could do like lots of other eco-hippies and live within walking or bicycling distance of work.

But he regards his own creature comforts too important to sacrifice to Gaea.

American Stuck in Giant German Vagina

US student is rescued from giant vagina sculpture in Germany

On Friday afternoon, a young American in Tübingen had to be rescued by 22 firefighters after getting trapped inside a giant sculpture of a vagina. The Chacán-Pi (Making Love) artwork by the Peruvian artist Fernando de la Jara has been outside Tübingen University's institute for microbiology and virology since 2001 and had previously mainly attracted juvenile sniggers rather than adventurous explorers.

According to De la Jara, the 32-ton sculpture made out of red Veronese marble is meant to signify "the gateway to the world".

Police confirmed that the firefighters turned midwives delivered the student "by hand and without the application of tools"

That's almost the very definition of an "attractive nuisance." 

Backups? What Backups?

IRS cancelled email archive service shortly after Lois Lerner et als, computer crashes

The coincidences just keep on a-rolling in the IRS targeting scandal. It turns out that the IRS didn’t just pay some low-level schlep to recycle backup server tapes on a six-month basis to maintain their e-mail records. They paid an outside firm, Sonasoft, to archive that data for long-term retrieval — or at least they did. That contract got canceled just weeks after Lois Lerner’s hard-drive failure, the Daily Caller learned:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.
The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”
Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.
But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

Oddly, this doesn’t appear to have come up in testimony from officials at the IRS. John Koskinen’s opening statement at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing of how hard the IRS worked to retrieve that data didn’t include any effort to restore a Sonasoft backup from the servers, or mention any outside contractor at all. The existence of this contract appears to have been a better-kept secret than NSA snooping through Internet service providers.

As usual, there are two ways to look at this.  You can take the conspiratorial point of view that the IRS cancelled the Sonasoft contract to help hide the evidence of the incipient scandal that they saw on the horizon.  The second, and more likely explanation  IMHO is that the Sonasoft was not performing as promised (and maybe Lerners et al computer crashed demonstrated that), and the IRS was on the verge of replacing them with their own massive IT expansion.  It's hard for me to credit the IRS folk with the foresight to cancel the contract due to a scandal well before it blew up in their faces.

On the other hand, maybe the emails in question are still saved somewhere on a reel of tape, or a stack of CDs, when Sonasaoft handed back its IRS archives.  I really haven't heard that anyone has looked.

How to Drink Vodka Like a Russian

Probably a bad idea, but good company.



which brings us to:



And I finally get around to acknowledging Wombat-socho's "Rule 5 Monday: Air-Cooled" several days late.

I Think it Has Something to do With Soccer

Stingray!

I took off from Flag Harbor this afternoon with the express purpose of burning some gas, since I have to make sure my oil line is completely purged of air after having to clean the oil tank it due to the water logging of two weeks ago.  But hey, as long as I'm out, I might as well fish, right?

The fish du jour was the stingray; more specifically, the Cownose Ray (Rhinoptera bonasus), who are cavorting (and having sex) in large numbers in the waters of Chesapeake Bay this time of year.  I hooked three of them while jigging for Striped Bass or Croaker.

One I brought to the boat and managed to release before landing, one I broke off deliberately, and the final one I landed by grabbing the jighead and flopping him (or her, I didn't check) over the side, carefully avoiding the stinger, visible at the base of the tail.

They're incredibly strong, and possess the fighting style of a run away freight train, using their "wings" to swim away in a straight line with awesome power.  Bringing one, let alone 2 to the boat on light tackle, is enough to put a burn in your arm.

Once aboard, a small, striped fish detached itself and began flopping around on the deck.  A Remora, also known as a shark sucker (although this one was clearly a ray sucker).  It even tried to suck on me before I threw it back over, followed by its host.  I wonder if they met back up?

I also managed a 19 inch Striped Bass and 3 medium sized Atlantic Croaker, which we just had for dinner.

Maryland Poacher Gets Life . . .

. . . time ban on fishing

A Talbot County Circuit judge has upheld a lifetime fishing ban on a former waterman with a record of multiple poaching convictions.

“The court’s decision affirms the wisdom of the General Assembly, which recognized the significance of crimes against the public trust and the severity of their impact on our natural world,” said DNR Secretary Joe Gill. “Stealing from our public fishery is an offense against all of us, and especially the State’s honest, hardworking watermen.”

Joseph Bruce Janda Jr., 28, of Wittman, had his commercial license permanently revoked a year ago by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Over a decade, Janda has been charged more than 60 times and been found guilty on numerous occasions for poaching oysters, illegal striped bass fishing and harvesting undersized crabs. In addition, he has been convicted of fishing without a license and fishing on a suspended license. In 2011, Janda was cited for two crabbing violations within a two-year period worth 35 points on his licenses, which triggered a revocation hearing by an administrative law judge.

In writing last Friday, Judge J. Owen Wise rejected Janda’s appeal, calling him a “chronic offender” who had accumulated 415 days of suspensions.

“A license is a privilege and therefore something which can be taken away, or not granted at all (as with hunting and driver’s licenses) so petitioner does not have a lifelong right to take resources from bays, rivers and creeks,” Wise ruled. “The law does not say that a person has to violate all laws pertaining to each marine resource before his/her license can be suspended or revoked.”

In addition to revoking Janda’s license, Wise also ruled he is permanently banned from being on any boat harvesting oysters and cannot be involved in any activity associated with oyster harvesting. Further, Janda is barred from engaging in commercial fishing activities, even ones supervised by a license holder.

Wow!  As far as I know this is a first. It takes a lot to get a judge riled up enough to slap a hard working waterman with even a small fine.  This is understandable.  By and large, commercial fishermen are just working guys trying to get by, and judges seem reluctant to censure them for working when they are dealing daily with violent felons, drug dealers and the like.

However, 60 violation over 10 years, continued fishing despite revoked licences, seem to indicate that the offender is not taking the threats of sanctions particularly seriously.  How soon will it be before Janda is arrested for violating his lifetime ban?

CNN Coached Crowd to Cheer Hillary

But they're unbiased right?

When CNN rolled out the red carpet for Hillary Clinton’s town-hall interview with Christiane Amanpour, they did more than just build a set and invite an audience to participate. According to the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, who attended the event, CNN warmed up the crowd for Hillary and even coached them on how to cheer and make noise to demonstrate enthusiasm for the former Secretary of State. Note the whoops at the beginning of the broadcast, and near the end of this clip when Amanpour asks about her decision on running for President — cheers that were part of the coaching Wemple reports:

To add “energy” to its show (attended by the Erik Wemple Blog), CNN deployed an enthusiastic stage director who coached the audience to applaud at various points throughout the broadcast — not in a partisan manner for Clinton, but for the sake of the town hall’s television optics. Approximately 15 minutes before the show, the producer ran the audience through a practice round of applause and noise-making. The results of the audience-prodding turn up in the show’s video.

Just how difficult was it for CNN to find a naturally enthusiastic audience, anyway? The event was staged in Washington DC, which as Wemple notes isn’t exactly a hotbed of conservative politics. . .

And I finally get around to acknowledging Wombat-socho's "Rule 5 Monday: Air-Cooled" several days late.

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

According to Auric Goldfinger in "Goldfinger", before he had James Bond tied up to the table to be cut into pieces by a laser. Six is well beyond the point of coincidence.

So how do you explain six crashed hard drives containing emails sought by Congress in the IRS scandal?

It shouldn't have happened. During the period in question, the IRS was paying a contractor to preserve its email:

It’s a cover-up — obstruction of justice — and everybody knows it, because the subpoenaed e-mails simply cannot be “lost”:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said it can’t provide emails sent between 2009 and 2011 that were requested by congressional investigators because of hard drive crashes.

The agency said that emails stored on dead drives were lost forever because its email backup tapes were recycled every six months, and employees were responsible for keeping their own long-term archives.
The IRS had a contract with email backup service vendor Sonasoft starting in 2005, according to FedSpending.org, which lists the contract as being for “automatic data processing services.” Sonasoft’s motto is “email archiving done right,”and the company lists the IRS as a customer.
In 2009, Sonasoft even sent out a Tweet advertising its work for the IRS.

We therefore know for a fact that the e-mails could not have been accidentally “lost.” We also know for a fact that Lois Lerner’s hard-drive was erased within 10 days of a letter being sent from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp inquiring about the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS. We furthermore know for a fact that Nikole Flax — the former chief of staff to the IRS director, whose e-mails were also supposedly “lost” — visited the White House 35 times after Flax talked to Lerner about targeting conservative groups.

Two new pieces of news in this dump since I last wrote, and sort of gave the IRS of the benefit of the doubt, based on my own experience.

First, the IRS had a contractor in place to archive email 5 years prior to time the emails went missing. Has anyone looked in Sonasoft's archives for the missing emails? Or was this a "make work" contract where no actual results were expected?

Second, Lois Lerner reported her hard drive crash exactly 10 days after the House Republicans started asking about the targeting of conservative groups.  Did that hard drive crash, or was is driven into the wall

It's Colossal!

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup." And I finally get around to acknowledging Wombat-socho's "Rule 5 Monday: Air-Cooled" several days late.

Oops!

I hate it when that happens.

Welcome to Summer at the Beach

According to the intertubes, Summer of 2014 starts with the summer solstice, at 6:51 EDT, so I'm jumping the gun just a hair.

After some rain overnight, we had a cool (73 F), cloudy day for the opening day of our hot season. I'll take it!

Otherwise, it was a pretty unremarkable walk. The Bay was stirred up and dirty from an east wind, and teeth were hard to find, although we managed 13, mostly in one spot where a stream created a nice flat area with a sprinkling of shell hash (and teeth).

Also, a new (for the year) butterfly in the sand dunes, this Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia). I think it's one of our most attractive butterflies, although subtler than some.

VA Tilts at Windmills as Veterans Wait

Strange priorities at the VA

The administrators at the Veterans Administration have apparently been busy while old soldiers waited to see a doctor, after all. Serving those who served is not necessarily a priority, but saving the planet is Job 1. Solar panels and windmills can be more important than the touch of a healing hand.
. . .
In the department’s words, it adopted a far more important mission to “become more energy efficient and sustainable, focusing primarily on renewable energy, energy and water efficiency, [carbon-dioxide] emissions reduction, and sustainable buildings.”

The green office isn’t merely a desk and telephone tucked away in the dark corner of a nondescript government building. It’s a substantial undertaking, with all the luxury, bells and whistles of a bureaucracy that means business. Eric K. Shinseki, who resigned as secretary in the wake of the VA scandal of the sin of omission, traveled the country to boast of the green initiative. In one instance, he traveled to Massachusetts to flick the switch at a half-million-dollar windmill project at the Massachusetts National Cemetery. “Nationally,” he said, “VA continues to expand its investment in renewable sources of energy to promote our nation’s energy independence, save taxpayer dollars, and improve care for our veterans and their families.

VA facilities have become littered with every scheme to banish carbon dioxide short of requiring visitors to hold their breath. Calverton National Cemetery spent $742,034 on solar panels. Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery spent $787,308. Not to be out-greened, the Riverside National Cemetery spent $1.3 million on its solar system.

The VA scandal did not happen for lack of money:

The  VA's problems are misplaced priorities; upper level administrators who wrote their own annual evaluations (a common phenomenon in government) with an eye to "earning" their expected annual bonuses by hiding the waiting lines rather than admitting to them, and fixing them.  80% of upper echelon VA executive "earned" bonuses in 2013. Now we're told that those bonuses, once awarded, cannot be revoked.  However, they can still fire all the administrators who had anything to do with the waiting lists. Oh wait, federal job retention rate is 99.45% annually.  "Civil" servants are more likely to die on the job than be fired.

The focus on "green" programs is a problem throughout the government.  Rather than focus on the job at hand (in this case treating veterans), administrators become engaged, and their interests diverted into the "green building" programs. This serves two functions. First, it gives administrators the sense of building something "lasting", a legacy, and not just handling the mundane administration of a large institution. Second, since much of the "green program" is contracted out to friends of the administration, it is a way of seeking approval from the capos.

While it might be nice to have "green energy" for the VA, they should be forcibly reminded that their first responsibility is to the veterans.

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup." Thanks, Teach!

Rule 5 Saturday - A is Also for Angie Everhart

 . . .and accident prone. From her Wiki page:

As a teen, Everhart became a cover model for such fashion magazines as Elle and Glamour. Following a riding accident in which she broke her back at the age of 19, Everhart eventually recovered through physical therapy. She appeared in several issues of the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, starting in 1995

She has also appeared on a few game and reality shows. In 2004, she appeared in Celebrity Mole: Yucatan, in which she was the 'mole', the rogue agent sabotaging the group. She was one of the "Gingers" on the second season of The Real Gilligan's Island (the other was Erika Eleniak), but left the show when she accidentally cut her finger severely enough to sever tendons and require surgery.

Once a sky-diving enthusiast, Everhart gave up the activity following an accident in which she was injured badly enough to require back surgery. Everhart was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had a surgery on May 14, 2013. A representative of hers said, "[Angie] wants to set the record straight by letting everyone know that it is true that she has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, however, the prognosis is very good."

Concert Review: Sheryl Crow

Tonight was the opening of concert season at the St. Leonard Volunteer Fire Department.  The first of four benefit concerts was Sheryl Crow. Georgia and I parked down the road a piece and walked up for an easy exit later, and arrived ah hour early to get dinner (pit beef and a beer for me).

The sun was still high when the opening band started. A group called "Wild Feathers" from Nashville, they were young, enthusiastic, loud, and kind of fun. Kind of like the "Wyld Stallyns."

Although photography of the acts was nominally prohibited, there were more cell phones and cameras in the air than bugs, and there were a fair share of those. So I offer these pictures in that same spirit of civil disobedience.

After a set and the mandatory re-setup period, Sheryl and her band came on just about sunset.  It was a pretty tight band.  They did a mixture of her old hits and some new material.

 The crowd, which seemed to consist of about 3/4 tipsy women, was highly appreciative and sang (sort of) and danced (sort of) along to most of the old standards.

All in all, not a bad way to spend an evening and fund the local fire department.

Wombat-socho has a generic "Rule 5 Monday" compendium up at The Other McCain.

Believe It or Not?

Do you believe that someone at the IRS deliberately destroyed Lois Lerner's email?



That's one side.  Here's a slightly more moderate view from Megan McArdle in which she lays out in many points why it probably isn't: An IRS Conspiracy? Not Likely ... Yet

• I have heard from a number of federal employees who lost data in exactly the way Lois Lerner did.
• I have also heard from a federal employee who says all of her e-mails have to be archived, on a server. The agency that the latter person works for is, let’s just say, not known as a leading light of federal competence.

These are both consistent with my experience at the Smithsonian.  A few years ago, we were forced to archive email on our desktops, and prune the emails heavily because of limited server space.  Later, they got a big server system that archives it all, whether you want it or not. But that's not the IRS.

• I am inherently suspicious of any suggestion of a conspiracy, particularly one involving civil-service employees. Not because I think especially highly of civil servants, but because conspiracies are hard to get together, and hard to keep together -- someone is likely to blab. Civil servants have a lot to lose by helping political appointees pursue their partisan agendas and no particular reason to be helpful. If it turns out that the IRS engaged in wrongful conduct, I will be inclined to credit complex sociology-of-organizations explanations (where everyone at the IRS shares an unspoken and perhaps unrecognized belief that people who campaign against taxation are clearly political ideologues, while people who campaign for more environmental spending are just swell, public-spirited folks trying to save the planet). It will take a lot to convince me that career employees at the IRS sat down and deliberately and knowingly engaged in illegal targeting of conservative groups for the purpose of helping Democrats win elections. It will take even more to convince me that they blatantly coordinated with the White House, which would obviously be a ticket to loss of job, pension and benefits, plus maybe a side trip to the pokey.

This is a pretty good description of government, and indeed, most grant funded scientists as I know them, and the most common view by "civil servants" that I'm acquainted with. While they might act in a passive aggressive manner to demands by conservatives, they would rarely knowingly break a (serious) law to further their point of view. The Hatch Act?  Maybe.

However, she did have a ". . . Yet."

• Groups do manage to get themselves together to do crazy dangerous things, even though this seems, well, crazy and dangerous. The fact that Watergate happened at all is, in retrospect, completely amazing: How did all these guys agree to commit felonies for such a trivial potential payoff? But they did. The tech guys at Bernie Madoff’s firm did decide to help him cover up his Ponzi scheme. Groups of civil servants have gotten together for massive embezzlement schemes. So the fact that a conspiracy is really unlikely doesn’t actually make it impossible.

I expect them to obstruct the investigation to the limit of their ability without making themselves liable for a felony charge. Given that Eric Holder is  Attorney General, that is quite a long ways.

Update: A poem from commenter ken in sc at Althouse:

Lois Lerner took an ax,

gave her hard drive 40 whacks,

when they saw what she had done,

six others too joined in the fun.

The Monsters Among Us

From Stacy McCain, news that one of the "teen fiction" authors I read in junior high school was apparently a monster: ‘The First Time She Molested Me, I Was Three. The Last Time, I Was Twelve’

Moira Greyland is the daughter of famed novelist Marion Zimmer Bradley, who died in 1999. Greyland’s father — Bradley’s second husband, Walter Breen — was accused of sexually molesting a 12-year-old boy in 1989, ten years after he separated from Bradley, who wasaccused of covering up her for husband’s pedophile activities. Bradley’s own tendencies toward lesbianism have been noted, but now Moira Greyland has claimed that she was molested by her mother:

The first time she molested me, I was three. The last time, I was twelve, and able to walk away. I put Walter in jail for molesting one boy. I had tried to intervene when I was 13 by telling Mother and Lisa [Waters, Bradley's personal secretary and reputed lesbian lover], and they just moved him into his own apartment. I had been living partially on couches since I was ten years old because of the out of control drugs, orgies, and constant flow of people in and out of our family ‘home.’ None of this should be news. Walter was a serial rapist with many, many, many victims (I named 22 to the cops) but Marion was far, far worse. She was cruel and violent, as well as completely out of her mind sexually. I am not her only victim, nor were her only victims girls.

Paul St. John Mackintosh discusses the case at TeleRead. Greyland was born in the mid-1960s and, if her parents were part of an “out of control” scene that included drugs and orgies in the 1970s, this would have made them part of the radical counterculture. And what do we know about the content of Bradley’s fiction?

An undercurrent of feminism runs throughout the Darkover series. Bradley frequently examines sex roles and the limitations they place on the individual. . . . Critics have praised Bradley’s ability to incorporate feminist and utopian ideals into the harsh realism of Darkover without diminishing the credibility of the characters or their society.
Bradley’s feminist interests are also evident in . . . The Mists of Avalon (1982). This novel, which retells the Arthurian legend from the viewpoint of the women involved, has received considerable critical attention.

Furthermore, we know that Bradley wrote lesbian pulp fiction under pseudonyms, including I Am a Lesbian (as Lee Chapman, 1962) and The Strange Women (as Miriam Gardner, 1967). . .

Back in junior high, it was my habit to check a book out of the library, read it surreptitiously all day in class (well, maybe it was surreptitious) and return it by the end of the day.  I recall running through a fair number of the Darkover novels, in addition to the Heinlein classics.  I remember the Heinlein books, and have essentially zero memory of the Darkover books, except a general feeling that they didn't hang together very well.

Which, of course, says nothing about Bradley as a person, except that her works were not of great impact on a introverted male teenager.

It is to be expected that some of the literary elite will throw off of the bonds of morality in their existential search for meaning.  In fact, you can expect it in some fraction of the population as a whole, although I expect the proportion is greater in the literary and artsy-fartsy community.

A Quick Shower of Obamacare Schadenfreude

Last night, a brief storm and the accompanying tornado warning passed with nothing more than a quick shower, much like Obamacare Schadenfreude, which, after the end of the enrollment period has entered the "let's see how much bad news we can hide under the rug" phase.

The legally dubious underpinnings of the Insurance company bailout, aka "risk corridors"

The Obama administration is seriously struggling to come up with legal justifications for the risk-corridor program, even though ObamaCare didn’t include language appropriating any funds for the program? …So, what else is new?

The Department of Health and Human Services this week responded to a recent letter from House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Sessions (R-AL) regarding the department’s legal authority to issue payments under the president’s health care law’s risk corridor program. Now, HHS argues that the risk corridor program would be considered a user fee in order to justify its authority to make payments under the program, but risk corridors were not listed as a user fee in President Obama’s own FY 2015 budget, released just a few months ago.
“Chalk up another executive fiat for this imperial presidency,” commented Upton. “This reversal underscores the administration’s disregard toward the law and Congress, and reveals its ‘whatever it takes’ and ‘whatever it costs’ effort to prop up this broken law.”. . .

The very basic premise of the risk-corridor program is that insurers who ended up with a healthier, more profitable mix of insurees would then siphon some of those profits over to insurers who gleaned too many expensive enrollees to stay in the black, just for the first few years of the law until things stabilize — but if hardly any insurers are turning profits and the market doesn’t stabilize, the source of those breezily promised risk-corridor funds remains a murky legal mystery. Imagine that.

Another satisfied Obamacare customer: Distraught mom: Obamacare ‘takes away all of my baby’s heart doctors’

But the good news is that the Gitmo detainees have more doctors than they know what to do with.

Russians Promote European Fracking Opposition

Russia 'secretly working with environmentalists to oppose fracking'

The head of one of the world’s leading groups of democratic nations has accused Russia of undermining projects using hydraulic fracturing technology in Europe.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), and former premier of Denmark, told the Chatham House thinktank in London on Thursday that Vladimir Putin’s government was behind attempts to discredit fracking, according to reports.

Rasmussen said: “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”

I doubt that the Russians waste any effort opposing fracking in the US, however; our own EPA and media do the job for them.

But if they do, I suspect that they're at least getting competent help: