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Paul Manafort "intentionally" lied to special counsel Robert Mueller's office, breaking the plea agreement that made him the star cooperator in the Russia probe, a federal judge found on Wednesday.

Manafort "made multiple false statements to the FBI, the OSC and the grand jury concerning matters that were material to the investigation," including his contacts with his Russian associate during the campaign and later, Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote on Wednesday.

Manafort was convicted of various financial crimes in August, and then cut the deal to plead guilty to two charges of conspiracy and witness tampering in September.
In all, Jackson determined Manafort intentionally lied about $125,000 he received for the legal bills, about another unnamed Justice Department criminal investigation and about his interactions with his longtime Russian associate Konstantin Kilimnik while he was campaign chairman and later.

Jackson noted twice in her order that two of the topics Paul Manafort lied about, Kilimnik and payments he received for his legal bills were "material to the investigation."

Judge voids Paul Manafort plea deal, says he 'intentionally' lied to the FBI, special counsel and grand jury

Boy, they sure do lie about Russia a lot!

Vox Media Attempts To Scrub Internet Of The Verge PC Build Video By Going After YouTubers

Many reuploads and analyses can be found.

From time to time, as events wend their merry way through the Courts, I'll submit an SN Story Submission that summarizes the plot that has transpired so far as well as links to my detailed chronicles, each such chronicle packed solid with wall-to-wall Civil Procedures that use all their holes. Our Story So Far:

• Standing to Complain, Or, C-TRAN Kicks a Cripple

tl;dr:

The C-TRAN Clark County Washington Rapid Transit System used a FIFTY-TWO MILLION DOLLAR local sales tax increase to retain a firm of uncommonly sadistic banshees to build these quite cool Avant-Garde Installation pieces that I remain flummoxed are denoted as "Bus Stop Shelters".

Flummoxed because The Vine's alleged "shelters" do not protect either the waiting passengers, nor the benches within in _any_ way.

Redoubling my sorrow, is that as each Vine Avant-Garge Installation piece was... installed... the old, quite pleasant, inclement weather-protective though rather prosaic True Shelters was destroyed.

In this evenings mail, I received a Tort Claims Form from a Mr. Cedric Adams, Claims Manager for the Washington State Transit Insurance Pool. My _polite_, _respectful_ as well as I'ma Gonna Tear Ya A New Asshole reply:

Mr. Adams,

Thank you for sending me C-TRAN's Claim Form.

Note that I've CCed my Legal Advisor Rod Schmidt; when you mail me yourself, please CC Rod as well.

While I will fill it out and submit it tomorrow (Wednesday), I really don't see a way for C-TRAN to remediate the ultimate cause of the cruelty C-TRAN's Vine Bus Operator other than to either redesign, or perhaps to replace _each_ of the bus stop shelters for The Vine route.

This because those "shelters" do not, in _any_ way, shelter the benches from the wind, rain and snow. Nor do the protect either those sitting on the bench or those standing from the cold, wet winds which are so common in Vancouver during the Fall, Winter or Spring.

What led me to be so profoundly overcome with grief was the great pain I experienced due to having been forced to stand during most of the forty-five minutes I awaited The Vine's arrival on this last Saturday morning, February 9th. That grief was compounded by the knowledge that I _voted_ for the local sales tax increase that at the time of the election was intended to raise fifty-two million dollars for the construction of the Fourth Plain Rapid Transit Corridor.

Despite C-TRAN quite admirably sparing no expense nor effort to provide - in the parlance of the Americans With Disabilities Act - "Reasonable Accommodation" for those who cannot walk and so require wheelchairs, no such Accommodation was provided for those who do not use wheelchairs, but for whom walking or standing are excruciatingly painful and difficult.

For that reason, my monetary claim on our form will be a largely arbitrary, quite large amount, with the expectation that my claim will be denied. I will then proceed with my Civil Complaint through the Clark County Superior Court.

I shall do so with the expectation that C-TRAN's attorney and I - with the assistance and advice of Mr. Rod Schmidt - will negotiate a settlement which stipulates that _each_ Vine Stop Shelter be protected from the elements.

Enclosed please find a photo of one of the two snow-covered benches at the 12th and Broadway Vine Stop. I shot that with my phone upon my arrival on the C-TRAN #60 Delta Park Regional Bus.

Warmest Regards,

Michael D. Crawford

Indeed I did request my 9-1-1 call's audio file, but it's going to take CRESA (not "CRESPA"), the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency, ten to fourteen days to get it to me.

I await my Emergency Call's arrival with bated breath, as I _begged_ CRESA's Dispatcher to deliver unto me a VPD Officer who would not arrest my Evil and Cruel Bus Driver, but _reason_ with him so that he would stop insisting I get off his bus. That would have condemned me to another forty-five minutes of standing, with _great_ pain, in the snow for the next bus.

The Mind Simply Reels

There Is a Taboo Against Criticizing AIPAC — and Ilhan Omar Just Destroyed It

American Israel Public Affairs Committee

But AYYPAC doesn't donate to candidates!

A recent news piece posted here ("India Man to Sue Parents for Giving Birth to Him") concluded the summary with a statement that while this man's case may seem odd, "there are philosophical grounds in support of anti-natalism." A link to an article by philosopher David Benatar was then provided.

But are there really "philosophical grounds" presented there? Benatar has been making this argument for well over a decade now, making occasional splashes in the media like a New York Times piece by Princeton philosopher Peter Singer in 2010 ("Should This Be the Last Generation?), a New Yorker piece in 2012 ("The Case Against Kids"), and then a sort of New Yorker profile in 2017 ("The Case for Not Being Born"). I say "sort of" profile, because David Benatar is so guarded about his privacy that you can't even find a photo of him online, and he basically only agreed to do the interview if he wouldn't be asked any personal questions. In the past, I suspected him of being a total troll who might have a wife and five kids and was making absurd arguments just for the publicity (and feared that personal information about him would undermine his arguments), but I no longer believe that. (I've seen statements online claiming he actually doesn't have kids.) Now I think he's just a bit nuts. Seriously -- if we don't believe him to be an idiot, I think the most rational conclusion is that he's clinically depressed and has an almost egomaniacal need to spread his illness to others.

So, to see a piece of his posted yet again here uncritically -- and even claiming it has "philosophical grounds" -- makes me a bit confused.

To be sure, there are philosophical arguments against having kids, especially for specific people. And perhaps there are philosophical arguments for reducing the overall population to decrease suffering. There might even be philosophical arguments from an environmental perspective that the earth would be "healthier" in some abstract sense without the species of humans on it. I don't think the latter would constitute moral arguments, since morality is a human creation for humans to judge, and if all humans were to die off, there would be no humans to judge the morality of that situation. Hence the future non-existence of humanity is at best morally neutral from that perspective.

Nevertheless, I can understand such arguments in an abstract case. However, "grounds" for antinatalism implies that Benatar presents at least a good foundation for the case that no one should have kids. Unfortunately, most of his arguments suffer from a curious illogic native to pessimists.

Let me repeat again that I think there are very good arguments for individual people to choose not to have kids, from personal preference or personal circumstances insufficient to provide for children to genetic predispositions for producing offspring who are likely to have serious medical problems. I'm even happy to allow for an individual making the personal choice not to have kids on similar grounds to Benatar's argument: an individual prospective parent may believe that there's too much suffering in the world and thus not want to have kids. (I'm particularly sensitive to the illogic in Benatar's antinatalist stance because I once held that personal belief myself, i.e., that I didn't want to have kids because of the state of the world. I no longer hold that belief, but I think it's a valid choice for any parent to make. It's quite a different thing for Benatar to try to argue for all humanity, however.)

I'll try to concisely summarize the key rationale behind Benatar's argument, because it's where the fundamental flaw lies. Benatar argues the following:

(1) For a human being to suffer is a moral wrong; for a human being to experience happiness/pleasure is a moral good.

(2) However, for potential future human beings not yet born, his calculus changes. For a not-yet-existent human being to potentially suffer in the future is a moral wrong, but for that same human being to experience future pleasure would be morally neutral.

Yes, that's the entirety of his argument. There's a lot of other smoke and mirrors around it, but really it comes down to the fact that he considers bringing a human being into the world with the knowledge it will suffer to be a moral wrong, while any amount of good the human experiences has no moral valence whatsoever. Thus, the moral wrong wins out: therefore, no one should have children. QED.

I'll get to his supposed justification for this rather illogical disparity in a moment, but note that the rest of the smoke and mirrors around his argument is not based in logic. It is just repeated appeals to a pessimist (if not depressed) mindset. To be clear, I'm a realist. I'd never consider myself an optimist. But Benatar gives philosophy a bad name by trying to pretend his arguments are based in rationality, rather than pessimist irrationality that stacks the deck. From the piece linked in the SN article, this is Benatar's position:

Considering matters carefully, it’s obvious that there must be more bad than good. This is because there are empirical asymmetries between the good and bad things. The worst pains, for instance, are worse than the best pleasures are good.

This isn't reason. It's opinion. Yes, Benatar makes valid points that our memories tend to be selective, and we tend to remember good things over the bad. (Hence the many "good ole days" arguments that often are based on a nostalgic past that never existed.) That is a human psychological bias, but weighing the good and the bad for an individual's suffering is up to an individual. Benatar wants to make the decision for everyone, though: whether you realize it or not, your suffering is worse for you than any positive things you have in your life. And if you don't believe that, you're just giving into a sort of delusion.

But this is all window dressing. To get back to Benatar's asymmetry: the crux of his argument that for anyone to have a child is morally wrong, you have to grant his assumption that knowingly having a child that may suffer is wrong, but knowingly having a child that will experience positive emotions is morally neutral. When pushed on this, Benatar falls back on some weird concept that the calculus should be different for non-existent beings compared to living humans. There's never any good justification for this.

The problem is that this differentiation rests on a confusion between reasoning about actualities and reasoning about probabilities. I agree with Benatar that if we know the possible outcomes of our actions, and if we know that a particular action will result in great suffering, perhaps we have a moral obligation to avoid that action. The problem is that we don't generally know all of the future. Do we let our children play outside? Well, if we do, perhaps a child experiences a particular photon of ultraviolet light that causes a mutation that will eventually result in malignant skin cancer and death in a few decades. But if we don't, perhaps the child is dissuaded that day against physical activity and ultimately will develop an obesity problem with no exercise and will die early. This is the Benatar way of looking at the world -- anything and everything will ultimately cause suffering. Forget enjoying the sun or playing with friends: you will all suffer, and that's all that matters.

But surely if it is a moral evil to do something that will cause suffering, it must be a more good to do something that will cause happiness. And Benatar grudgingly admits this, but only for real people who exist in the world. For non-existent possible babies, only the potential suffering matters.

To be clear, I am absolutely NOT arguing that anyone has a moral duty to procreate, nor would they incur a moral duty to do so even if they knew a child would experience great happiness in life. So it's illogical to then suggest for that no one should procreate simply because of the possibility of suffering. (Of course, to Benatar, it's not about any possibilities: he's stacked the deck to conclude that everyone is always suffering horribly on-balance in their lives, and they are merely delusional if they think otherwise.) Again, I'm happy to agree with Benatar in individual cases: maybe a couple who knows they will very likely have a child with a severe congenital defect that will lead to a life of great suffering has a good reason not to have kids. But there's no reason other than illogical pessimism to claim this must apply to all humans.

Furthermore, if we accept Benatar's premise, then we should argue that no one should ever take any action, because at some point it will produce suffering for someone. And that suffering can apparently never be negated by any potential good our actions might do.

Which is, of course, absurd. But this is Benatar's argument: we all are continuously contributing to future suffering of humans to various degrees. (He says that repeatedly in his writings.) If taken to its logical conclusion, Benatar should have committed suicide the moment he came to this conclusion to prevent the further suffering he is causing humans by existing. Anyone who agrees with him should also immediately commit suicide, if you were to follow logic and reason. One might even make an argument that we should painlessly murder all other humans who might be suffering (which is apparently everyone). Benatar does stop short of calling for that, on reasonable grounds that basically it would be interfering with other's rights to make decisions for their own lives. Apparently others are allowed to choose to live (even in deluded suffering), but they are not allowed to legitimately believe their happiness outweighs their suffering. To Benatar, they are merely deluded.

The only reason he offers for not committing suicide himself or advocating it for all others who buy his argument is because supposedly "death is bad." Seriously. That's it. Read the links I put up there, and you'll see no real fleshing out beyond that. He even goes to the absurd degree of arguing that humans shouldn't have any more children because it will result in a 100% death rate, and death is bad.

There seems to be no religious element in Benatar's reasoning, so it seems absurd to conclude that death is worse than nonexistence. Death is simply nonexistence, unless one believes in an afterlife or whatever. So once again Benatar wallows in illogic: we must accept that nonexistence is better than existence for all future humans, but the nonexistence of death is somehow "bad" and worse than that.

Huh?

Well, it's actually pretty clear why Benatar makes this piece of illogical argument. Because if he advocated suicide for everyone (let alone possible genocide of the poor and suffering), his arguments would be universally condemned and portrayed as a Jim Jones-style lunatic. So, he's forced into this weird netherworld of argumentation where nonexistence is morally neutral, except when it is caused by death, which is somehow "bad" in some nebulous way.

To conclude, I'll happily agree with Benatar that there's a lot of suffering in the world. I'll happily agree that some potential parents may make a personal decision not to have children for all sorts of reasons, including Benatar's position. But it's one thing to make a case that parents should seriously consider the potential downsides of having kids; it's quite another to argue that it would be a moral good for the human race to go extinct because for anyone to ever have a child is a moral evil.

And again, I'm not even saying the further existence of humanity is a moral good. I'm not arguing that anyone should be persuaded to have children. But Benatar seems to have gained the support of lots of people who apparently don't think logically about what his argument actually rests on. I truly do not understand why he is still alive, if he were rational and truly believed his argument. (His only justification is based on "death is bad" and some weird analogies -- he seriously says it's like going to a bad play... if you had known it would be bad, you might not have gone at all, but once you're there, are you really gonna stand up and leave in the middle?)

Life is not a play, though, though in this case it does sound like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. The only rational way to excuse his refusal to commit suicide in the face of the argument he presents is to conclude he suffers from a sort of megalomania that he must spread his pessimist ideas and convince others that his irrational arguments are true.

I am committed to reason, and therefore I can't stand for such ideas promoted here without challenge.

I’d have a mischevious grin and a sadistic chuckle?

“Mike, this is getting _really_ old. Don’t tell us you have The Good Guy’s Gal tied to the railroad tracks again?”

Not, not today any, but have Your People call My People that we may come together as a team to do that before End Of Business on Monday.

The Long Blinks just hit! I’ll continue in the comments after I chills to one or more torrents.

You'll be wanting to "$ wget --recursive http://www.girlshighdef.com/images/" or so as you read this here screed.

I want to shop professor Ian from Mary Worth onto a Playboy Magazine cover, one of the "Girls Of" (some college) line. This because he only just narrowly escaped infidelity.

When I do a Bing Image Search for "playboy 'girls of'" I'm not met with any covers, but with some top hits of generously - for a freesite - high-rez Playments from Girls High Res Dot Com.

So I click the thumbnail to get the link, click the link then...

a "download.gz" file downloads into my Downloads folder. TF?

Being on an almost but not quite current rev of macOS, I figure I'm immune from viruses, so I click the .gz to unpack it - try that, LUNIX! - then click the "download" file. It opens right up in TextEdit to reveal...

... the markup that _should_ have been - but was _not_ their web page.

I've had this happen to me before, so I know full well what their problem is:

Their server has that page's MIME-Type set wrong, I expect to binary/octet or some such, and not text/html.

So here THEY"RE THE TOP HIT AT BING IMAGE SEARCH!!!! but they're not getting any ad clicks nor are their referral links getting any clicks.

I'll try a "site:girlshighdef.com inurl:wp-content inurl:uploads"... no, while that commonly works, it does not here.

HOWEVER!!!! That webmaster shall be flayed alive, not merely fired: every last page's Site Description is "Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *. Comment"

Now, I readily admit that every last website I've ever published has been A Multitude Of - non-pr0n Sins, but I have _always_ been diligent as to fixing them.

Reducing drug costs feature prominently in Trump's State of the Union Address.

However, his much-touted NAFTA re-write would grant an additional ten years of patent protection to pharmaceutical patents. That means generic medications will take ten more years to come to market and allows pharmaceutical companies to charge monopoly prices for ten years longer.

That will not result in cheaper medications.

Stronger Drug Patents in New NAFTA To Cost U.S. Manufacturing Workers Jobs

Why some people are worried about drug patent protections in the new NAFTA

THIS time they gave me the medicine that gives me really severe withdrawals when I don’t take it.

But just a seven day supply.

While my natural inclination is to go to the ER every seven days until someone else figures out how to get my Medicaid back, I know full well the ethical thing to do would be to fix my Medicaid problem myself.

As I am now amply medicated and so chock full of vim and vigor, when I get home I’ll put on Queen’s A Night At The Opera, turn the volume all the way up to Eleven then set into my bookkeeping until as the dawn twilight just barely lightens the sky, I shall have in hand the Profit And Loss Statement that the Washington State Health Departments wants from me to prove my income eligibility.

Oscars 2019 ceremony to go without host after Kevin Hart row

This year's Oscars will be held without an official host - for the first time in 30 years. The head of ABC Entertainment, which airs the Academy Awards ceremony, said it would instead highlight celebrities presenting the trophies.

Reports had suggested the broadcaster was struggling to fill the role - one of the toughest in US show business.

In December, comedian Kevin Hart pulled out of hosting the ceremony following a controversy over old homophobic tweets. He said he did not want to be a distraction and that he was "sorry he had hurt people".

Bud Light gets earful from angry corn lobby after Super Bowl ad

Bud Light’s Super Bowl campaign is calling out competitors that use corn syrup — and the corn lobby is not happy about it.

In Anheuser-Busch InBev’s ads, a medieval crew delivers a cask of unwanted corn syrup to Miller Lite and Coors Light. Bud Light is using the “brewed with no corn syrup” on its ads for the night.

Following the spots, the National Corn Growers Association tweeted at Bud Light that “America’s corn farmers are disappointed in you. Our office is right down the road! We would love to discuss with you the many benefits of corn! Thanks @MillerLight and @CoorsLite for supporting our industry.”

Pope Francis Acknowledges, For First Time, Sexual Abuse Of Nuns By Priests

Pope Francis, for the first time, acknowledged the sexual abuse of nuns by priests and bishops, including a case in which some clergy used women as sex slaves. He said on Tuesday that he is committed to ending the problem in the Roman Catholic Church.

His comments came in response to a reporter's question on his flight returning to Rome from Abu Dhabi. The reporter asked the pope about a Vatican magazine article published last week detailing reports of sexual abuse by clerics resulting in nuns having abortions or giving birth to children fathered by priests.

It's a habit.