BMBS

The U.S. Department of Justice last month served a search warrant on DreamHost, the company that hosts a website used to coordinate inauguration-day protests, asking for the IP addresses of the 1.3 million people who visited the site.  DreamHost‘s general counsel, who publicly revealed the action yesterday, has called it “pure prosecutorial overreach … that anyone should be targeted simply for visiting a website.” He said the company gave the government “limited customer information about the owner of the website” [sic] back in January, but DOJ demanded the broader information in July.  Various groups committed to protecting privacy and First Amendment rights have rallied behind DreamHost.  DOJ has declined to comment.

An IP address doesn’t confirm a user’s identity, but it is an invaluable investigative tool.  If DOJ has a legitimate reason to have that information on persons checking out the website — even if just out of curiosity — it hasn’t said so.

A Fairfax County jury has imposed an $8.4 penalty on an amateur blogger who claimed that an Army officer up for promotion to General had raped her when they were cadets at West Point about 30 years ago.   The claim (made in 2013) caught the Pentagon’s attention when the promotion was under consideration (also in 2013), and the officer’s promotion was eventually dropped.  The officer sued the woman for defamation.  The jury found that her statements were false and ordered her to pay $3.4 million in compensatory damages for injury to his reputation and lost wages, and $5 million in punitive damages.  (Court records show he claimed a “consensual” sexual encounter, and that she initially denied any sexual assault to West Point officials at the time.)  The Washington Post quoted one juror (sex not reported) as saying the $5 million was “to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again.”

The merits of the conflicting versions of events — consensual vs not — aside, the juror’s reported remarks suggest something went very wrong in this case.

Our current stock market bubble is sort of scary.

Articles trying to assess the impact of the six-month-long string of political crises plaguing us under President Trump have included reports of the ongoing surge in the U.S. stock market.  The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 22,000 yesterday — a record high and yet another landmark in one of the longest bull markets in history.   Some of these articles have cited it as evidence that President Trump’s tenure has been good, or at least that it’s not been bad.  Indeed, Trump yesterday took credit for the boom.

The problem, however, is that it looks like a massive bubble inflated by unknown factors.  In 2009, the Dow was around 7,000 — one-third of today’s level — and it’s risen 23 percent just since Trump’s inauguration, based on his many promises of reduced regulation and other business-friendly policies.  The weakening dollar appears to be a factor.  Corporate profits are up, and the rich continue getting richer and more eager to buy stocks, but the economic fundamentals just don’t explain the bubble.

Another bursting bubble could make the political chaos we’ve been experiencing look like a party.

Prisoners in Alabama have shown, yet again, the importance of having peanut butter within reach.

Inmates in Walker County Jail saved peanut butter from their sandwiches and used it like modeling clay to alter the number above a door that led outside their building.  They tricked a rookie guard taking a prisoner back to his cell into thinking the door was his cell.  The prisoner thanked the guard, stepped outside, and waited a few moments before opening it for his friends.  A dozen inmates walked right out of the facility, climbed over a razor-wire fence (a couple cut their hands), and presumably got something a little better than peanut butter for dinner on Sunday night.  But … alas. … they’d all been recaptured within 48 hours,

The Sheriff said their scheme “may sound crazy, but these people are crazy like a fox.”

A “surrogate” for Donald Trump on talkshows — a kind of spokesman — named Scottie Nell Hughes made an astoundingly honest statement on the The Diane Rehm Show the other day.  It explains, for example, why her man can utter total fabrications, such as his allegation that millions of undocumented migrants cast votes for Hillary Clinton on November 8, and get them to stick.  (Senior Republicans have echoed the lie.)  Ms. Hughes said:

“One thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts; they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way, it’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. …  There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.”

Facts simply don’t matter.

It’s been a long three weeks since Donald Trump won the electoral college count to become President.  A lot of people are still trying to figure out how it happened.  Among the fact-driven articles are several compelling analyses — which, of course, will require further analysis — explaining the underlying reasons:

• The Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, ignored the anger of middle-aged and older white Americans (especially males) who think (for various reasons) that globalization — which our two main parties’ fervently embraced — has screwed them out of jobs, prestige, honor, and the American dream.  They also like to blame their situation on undocumented immigrants and foreign countries.
• Disinformation molded the campaign more than information or facts.  The so-called “social media” circulated many millions of messages with false information about Clinton.  Since many Americans get ALL of their “news” from these channels, and since studies have shown that they have very little ability to sort fact from fiction in them, it’s no wonder that real facts don’t explain what happened.
• The corporatist media, particularly the TV networks, shunned reporting on policies.  According to one trustworthy estimate, the Big Three commercial news programs devoted 35 minutes to policy issues and 125 minutes to Clinton’s e-mail “scandal” over the course of the entire campaign.

In the absence of clear facts and analysis, it’s only natural that people are still defending their impulses and emotions — and the “social media” will do their best to prolong that.

Contemporary American culture is full of characters who, often for a silly reason, get 15 minutes of fame — and then crash.  A man sitting in the front row during last week’s presidential debate/town-meeting, distinguished by his red sweater (which he wore because he split his suit pants earlier in the day), was cast in the corporatist media as the embodiment of the undecided U.S. voter.  His name is Ken Bone.  Eagerness to cash in on any fame is now an established American value, so  Mr. Bone set out to sell his own line of “Bone Zone” t-shirts and seek sponsorships, including something from Uber.  But in the closet of most flash-in-the-pan heroes is a catalogue of things from a less glamorous  past — and Bone is no exception.  Under a pseudonym, he has boasted on-line about his affection for nude photos of famous actresses and … ummm … pregnant women (he called the latter “beautiful human submarines” on a site called PreggoPorn).  He’s also admitted on-line to forging car insurance documents and to supporting a Florida vigilante’s murder of an African-American kid as “justified.”

The next step for every fallen one-day wonder is to apologize, and Bone did just that and — showing symptomatic tone-deafness — said he wished he “could do so directly” to one of the actresses he lusted over.  Typical.

The Japanese Transportation Ministry’s coveted “Japan Toilet Award” encourages major highway managers to be creative and generous in providing facilities to the traveling public.  The New York Times last week had a feature about what the Nexco Central Nippon Expressway, which runs 200 rest stops, has done to win the award.  One stop near Mount Fiji, which gets about 25,000 visitors on a busy weekend, has 72 stalls in the ladies’ room, and the men’s room has 14 stalls and 32 urinals.  Each stall has a sensor, like parking spaces at some malls, that registers whether it’s in use — and flashes that info on an electronic board at the entrance.  They even differentiate whether the stalls have western-style sitting toilets or traditional-style squatting style.

The ratio of women’s to men’s facilities, for a society still saddled with a sexist image, is amazing.

The New York Times “Insider” column has uncovered another example of government being penny-wise and pound-foolish — as long as it’s what “the people” want.  It costs 1.43 cents to make a penny.  The federal government spent $39 million more than their face value to make pennies last year.  Except to use cents to trick us into thinking something is cheaper than it is — that is, that $4.99 is significantly less than $5 — people don’t use the coin any more.  But a poll in 2014 showed that 71 percent of respondents pick up pennies they see on the sidewalk, and 43 percent would be “disappointed” or “angry” if the government stopped making them.

You can do a lot with $39 million a year.  Would it help debate on this important issue if everyone knew that Canada and the EU stopped using their penny coins years ago.

Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, published an article last weekend debunking the debunkers who say that the five-second rule is bunk.  The opponents of this time-tested rule claim that food that falls on the floor is dangerous no matter how fast you pick it up.  They claim, essentially, that bacteria don’t wait around for five seconds before jumping onto the food and digging in.  Carroll says, however, that his kitchen floor isn’t that dirty — or at least not as dirty as many other surfaces that we don’t consider dangerous.  He cites the research of Charles Gerba, a professor at the University of Arizona, that kitchen floors are likely to harbor, on average, about 2.75 colonies per square inch of coliform bacteria, but the refrigerator handle and kitchen counter have, respectively, 5.37 and 5.75 colonies per square inch.  (FYI, toilet seats have 0.68 and flush handles have 34.65.)

If you’d ever eat food with your hands after touching a kitchen sponge, which can easily have up to 20 million colonies per square inch, you might have a seat (on the floor) and chow down.