Twitter Says 130 Accounts Compromised In Wednesday’s Hack, Vows “Aggressive” Security Measures

Twitter Says 130 Accounts Compromised In Wednesday’s Hack, Vows “Aggressive” Security Measures

Tyler Durden

Fri, 07/17/2020 – 09:45

Twitter has now said about 130 accounts were compromised by the hack that took the platform by storm roughly 48 hours ago. The company said on Thursday that it was taking “aggressive” security measures.

“Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident,” Twitter’s support team said.

Then, in a non-committal follow up, it said: “We have also been taking aggressive steps to secure our systems while our investigations are ongoing.”

We don’t know about you but that certainly makes us feel better… 

Recall, yesterday, we noted that the FBI had launched an official inquiry into Wednesday night’s massive security breach, according to Reuters.

The FBI said on Thursday:  “We are aware of today’s security incident involving several Twitter accounts belonging to high profile individuals. The accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud.”

Also on Thursday, Twitter had previously commented that there is “no evidence that attackers accessed the passwords of its users,” according to Bloomberg. Regardless, the company said it’s locking any accounts that have attempted to change its password during the past 30 days anyway. 

And while they may not have gotten passwords – the real question is whether or not they got the DMs…

Recall, there was a massive hack on Wednesday that allegedly originated from a Twitter employee with access to its user management panel. The hack affected hundreds of billionaires and politicians, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Wiz Khalifa, Apple, Uber, Jeff Bezos and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Tweets urged people to send money to a Bitcoin address; over $113,000 has been sent so far that we know about. 

Twitter investigated at the time of the hack and now appears to have resolved most of the issue after taking down the offending Tweets and restoring access to the site for those with blue checkmarks, all of whom were previously shut down from the site.

For the full details on the hack, you can read our report on it here. In addition to the hack, a subplot emerged on Wednesday night when we reported that sources “close to or inside” the underground hacking community leaked a screenshot of what is allegedly an internal software panel used by Twitter to interact with user accounts. 

Source: Vice

The tool is said to be used to help change ownership of popular accounts and, in the case of the hack, was said to play a role in usurping the high profile accounts involved. Screenshots of the supposed internal software are being aggressively pursued and deleted from Twitter by Twitter itself, with the company claiming that they violate the platform’s rules.

Of particular interest are the buttons labeled “SEARCH BLACKLIST” and “TRENDS BLACKLIST”.

We asked last night: Could these be tools actively used by Twitter to censor what Tweets and topics appear during searches and on its trends page? Maybe the FBI will find some answers. 

We look forward to their findings…

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32sIFaY Tyler Durden

Justin Amash’s Tenure as the Libertarian Party’s First Member in Congress Will Be Shortlived

rollcallpix119787

Amash isn’t running—for anything. After Rep. Justin Amash’s brief foray into seeking the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, many thought that Amash—a Tea Party Republican turned Trump-era independent and, now, Congress’ first and only Libertarian member—might try to hold his seat representing Michigan in the House of Representatives. That’s not to be.

Following a Detroit News report Thursday night that Amash’s congressional campaign was inactive, Amash tweeted:

I love representing our community in Congress. I always will. This is my choice, but I’m still going to miss it. Thank you for your trust.

Amash adviser Poppy Nelson had told The Detroit News earlier that Amash “hasn’t been campaigning for any office and doesn’t plan to seek the nomination for any office.”

The paper notes that Amash’s campaign “raised only $24,200 for the quarter ending June 30—another indication he’s not running for federal office. He previously raised over $1.1 million toward re-election.”

Amash was first elected to Congress in 2010 and has served five terms.

Nicholas Sarwark, former chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, told The Detroit News that with Amash “as our first Libertarian congressman—I would like to keep that seat. But I understand if he thinks there’s a better way for him to advance the Libertarian Party and improve the conditions of this country—that he has to do what he thinks is right.”


FOLLOWUP

More horrifying scenes out of Portland. Earlier this week, it was federal agents shooting impact munitions at protesters in Portland, Oregon—hitting one man directly in the head, knocking him over and putting him in the hospital. At the time, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) accused the feds of acting like an “occupying army.” Now, unidentified federal agents wearing camouflage have been driving around Portland, snatching people off the streets, and taking them away in unmarked vehicles.

“Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14,” Oregon Public Broadcasting reports.

Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.

The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to “quell” nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks.


FREE MINDS

Another good reason to wear a mask. A May 22 memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explores the agency’s fears that widespread mask wearing will thwart federal facial recognition programs. The memo was “drafted by the DHS Intelligence Enterprise Counterterrorism Mission Center in conjunction with a variety of other agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” and brought to the public’s attention by The Intercept.

In its own words, the intelligence memo discusses “the potential impacts that widespread use of protective masks could have on security operations that incorporate face recognition systems—such as video cameras, image processing hardware and software, and image recognition algorithms.”

“Violent extremists and other criminals who have historically maintained an interest in avoiding face recognition” may “opportunistically seize upon public safety measures recommending the wearing of face masks to hinder the effectiveness of face recognition systems in public spaces by security partners,” the feds fret, while noting that they have “no specific information” about this actually happening.

The Homeland Security memo also “cites as cause for concern tactics used in recent pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong,” notes The Intercept.


FREE MARKETS

D.C. efforts to decriminalize psilocybin draw interference. Yesterday members of Congress—which still has veto power over local D.C. laws—debated a proposal to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms in the District. “We certainly…don’t want to be known as the drug capital of the world,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R–Md.), who had introduced an amendment to forbid D.C. from putting the issue up for a vote this fall.

“We all can agree that policies that increase the availability of psychedelic drugs in the nation’s capital—that’s dangerous,” Rep. Tom Graves (R–Ga.) said at the House Appropriations Committee hearing.

Not all of the committee agreed.

“If the district’s residents want to make mushrooms a lower priority and focus limited law enforcement resources on other issues, that is their prerogative,” said Rep. Mike Quigley (D–Ill.).

Harris ultimately withdrew his amendment—for now. “This is a new issue to the committee,” he said in a statement. “Between now and the meeting of the conference committee this fall, the issue of whether this will be on the ballot will be resolved. Fortunately, in that time, members will also have time to learn more about this complicated medical issue.”


ELECTION 2020

America is seeing a dramatic shift in party affiliation. Since the start of the year, “what had been a two-percentage-point Republican advantage in U.S. party identification and leaning has become an 11-point Democratic advantage, with more of that movement reflecting a loss in Republican identification and leaning (down eight points) than a gain in Democratic identification and leaning (up five points),” notes Gallup:

Currently, half of U.S. adults identify as Democrats (32%) or are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (18%). Meanwhile, 39% identify as Republicans (26%) or are Republican leaners (13%).

These results are based on monthly averages of Gallup U.S. telephone surveys in 2020.


QUICK HITS

• Another federal execution took place yesterday:

It’s impossible to reform policing without taking on police unions.

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Boulder Officials Told Campaigns They Had Until August to Qualify for the City Ballot. Now They Say the Deadline Was Actually in June.

reason-house

For months, activists in Boulder, Colorado, have been trying to place an initiative on the ballot overturning their city’s restrictions on unrelated people living in the same house. The city initially told them they had until August to qualify for the ballot. But last Friday, officials announced that the deadline for submitting signatures was actually back in June.

These activists’ last hope is for the Boulder City Council to place their initiative on the ballot itself. But they believe this body is hostile to their reform. Indeed, the ballot initiative process was designed to bypass it.

“The City Attorney’s office and the City Clerk’s office has in so many ways given us bad information. They’ve done it on their website. They’ve done it in email. They’ve done it over the phone, on Zoom calls, in public council meetings,” says Chelsea Castellano, an organizer for the Bedrooms Are For People campaign. “There are so many instances where they’ve given us the date of August 5 to submit our signatures. A rational person would presume that it would be accurate.”

The city’s admittedly inaccurate advice jeopardizes a reform that could immediately expand Boulder’s supply of rental housing in the middle of a pandemic-induced recession when millions of Americans are struggling to afford shelter.

On Sunday, Gov. Jared Polis issued an executive order asking cities to suspend or repeal their occupancy limits for unrelated people as part of a broader effort to prevent evictions during COVID-19.

“It’s important now because if somebody isn’t living in that kind of situation they might be homeless,” said the Democratic governor, according to the Denver Post. “The same type of people who complain about extra cars in the street or too many people living in a nearby house also generally complain about the homeless.”

As in many cities, Boulder’s zoning code limits residential housing to family members plus a certain number of unrelated roomers. How many unrelated individuals are allowed to live in a home is determined by how a property is zoned, with most of the city’s residential housing capped at either three or four unrelated people.

The city manager can impose fines of up to $1,000 for violating Boulder’s land use code, including its occupancy limits. The city attorney can also purse fines of up to $2,000 per violation of the land use code. Municipal courts are allowed to impose additional fines that would deprive a landlord of any profits earned by opening rooms to excess renters.

“These current laws are discriminatory because they regulate people based on who they are, and not what they do,” says Nick Grossman, another Bedrooms Are For People activist. “They are regulating a class of people that are unrelated by blood or marriage and preventing them from having equal access and [housing] options.”

Grossman and Castellano tell Reason that tenants are often evicted by fine-fearing landlords for violating the city’s occupancy cap. The law often forces property owners to leave rooms vacant, they add.

Occupancy limits for unrelated people “should raise constitutional issues, but they’ve been broadly blessed by the Supreme Court,” says Anthony Sanders, an attorney at the Institute for Justice. A 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, upheld such laws as a valid use of local government’s powers to regulate land use.

Some state courts have struck down some of these laws, Sanders adds, but they remain common in college towns such as Boulder, where neighbors often worry about their street being overrun by young partiers.

Sanders says courts should reconsider this precedent, arguing that restrictions on property rights should be tightly focused on preventing actual harms. Blanket bans or caps on unrelated people living in the same house don’t meet that standard, he says.

But without a new precedent, activists are left to work within the democratic process to change these laws. Hence the Bedrooms Are For People campaign.

Their initiative, if passed, would amend the city’s charter to repeal Boulder’s limits on unrelated people living together. It would instead impose an occupancy limit of one person per bedroom, plus one additional person. Homes with fewer than four bedrooms would be allowed a maximum number of four occupants.

In March they submitted their petition to the city, and later that month they received permission to start collecting signatures. Bizarrely, no one seemed to know when exactly these signatures had to be turned to the City Clerk’s office, which is responsible for verifying them.

Boulder’s charter gives campaigns a maximum of 180 days to collect signatures. It also requires that signatures be submitted to the city within 150 calendar days of the November election, which would have been June 5 this year.

Meanwhile, the state rules governing municipal elections are both more forgiving and more restrictive. Campaigns have up until 90 days before an election to submit signatures, which this year would mean August 5. State law, however, gives campaigns only 90 days to collect signatures.

The question befuddling everybody was whether state or local law should decide how long the Bedrooms Are For People campaign had to collect signatures, and when they had to turn them in.

To resolve these conflicting deadlines and give campaigns as much time as possible to collect signatures, the city published election guidelines stating that charter amendment petitions—including the Bedrooms Are For People petition—had 180 days to collect signatures, in compliance with the more permissive city deadline. They also didn’t have to submit these signatures until August 5, in compliance with state law.

A breakdown of approved petitions published by the city also listed August 5 as the date that Bedrooms are for People had to submit signatures.

That decision wasn’t without controversy, with opponents of the Bedrooms Are For People initiative threatening a lawsuit if the reformers were given until August to get their signatures in.

In late May, Boulder Beat reports, City Attorney Thomas Carr advised the campaign that the only way to completely avoid a lawsuit would be collect all the signatures they need within the 90 days allotted by state law, meaning signatures would have been due in late June. That deadline, Castellano argued at the time, was impossible for their campaign to meet, given the limits the pandemic had placed on the activists’ ability to collect signatures.

Carr nevertheless concluded that Boulder’s charter should take precedence, and that any lawsuit trying to toss out signatures for not meeting the earlier state deadline wouldn’t succeed. He also advised the Bedrooms Are For People campaign to seek independent legal advice.

This apparently did little to clarify things.

So last Friday, Carr sent an email to the Boulder City Council’s “hotline” mailing list stating that the city’s charter had the final say over when signatures had to be submitted.

That meant petitioners had 180 days to collect signatures, as opposed to the 90 days allowed by state law. Unfortunately for the Bedrooms Are For People campaign, it also meant those signatures were due back on June 5, as the city’s charter demands, not the state’s deadline of August 5.

Carr acknowledges that the city gave inaccurate guidance to the Bedrooms Are For People campaign, as well as to a campaign to enact ranked-choice voting for mayoral elections.

In the interest of fairness, Carr issued nonbinding recommendations that the City Clerk review all signatures submitted before August 5, and that, if the campaigns meet their signature goals, the city council vote to place their initiatives on the ballot.

“These are not small mistakes. This is over 50 people collecting signatures since the day the stay-at-home order lifted,” says Castellano, saying city staff has resigned for far less in the past. The idea of leaving it to the city council to decide what to decide whether their ballot initiative will go to voters this November is totally unacceptable, she argues. The “whole point of this process is to circumvent the city council,” Castellano says. “Because we wouldn’t need to do this if we felt like our elected representatives were representing this issue properly.”

According to Castellano, the campaign has collected almost 6,000 signatures so far, putting it well on its way to meeting that now-defunct August 5 deadline.

Bedrooms Are For People is now evaluating its legal options, hoping to find a way to get the initiative on the ballot without having to go through City Council.

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Justin Amash’s Tenure as the Libertarian Party’s First Member in Congress Will Be Shortlived

rollcallpix119787

Amash isn’t running—for anything. After Rep. Justin Amash’s brief foray into seeking the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, many thought that Amash—a Tea Party Republican turned Trump-era independent and, now, Congress’ first and only Libertarian member—might try to hold his seat representing Michigan in the House of Representatives. That’s not to be.

Following a Detroit News report Thursday night that Amash’s congressional campaign was inactive, Amash tweeted:

I love representing our community in Congress. I always will. This is my choice, but I’m still going to miss it. Thank you for your trust.

Amash adviser Poppy Nelson had told The Detroit News earlier that Amash “hasn’t been campaigning for any office and doesn’t plan to seek the nomination for any office.”

The paper notes that Amash’s campaign “raised only $24,200 for the quarter ending June 30—another indication he’s not running for federal office. He previously raised over $1.1 million toward re-election.”

Amash was first elected to Congress in 2010 and has served five terms.

Nicholas Sarwark, former chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, told The Detroit News that with Amash “as our first Libertarian congressman—I would like to keep that seat. But I understand if he thinks there’s a better way for him to advance the Libertarian Party and improve the conditions of this country—that he has to do what he thinks is right.”


FOLLOWUP

More horrifying scenes out of Portland. Earlier this week, it was federal agents shooting impact munitions at protesters in Portland, Oregon—hitting one man directly in the head, knocking him over and putting him in the hospital. At the time, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) accused the feds of acting like an “occupying army.” Now, unidentified federal agents wearing camouflage have been driving around Portland, snatching people off the streets, and taking them away in unmarked vehicles.

“Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14,” Oregon Public Broadcasting reports.

Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.

The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to “quell” nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks.


FREE MINDS

Another good reason to wear a mask. A May 22 memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explores the agency’s fears that widespread mask wearing will thwart federal facial recognition programs. The memo was “drafted by the DHS Intelligence Enterprise Counterterrorism Mission Center in conjunction with a variety of other agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” and brought to the public’s attention by The Intercept.

In its own words, the intelligence memo discusses “the potential impacts that widespread use of protective masks could have on security operations that incorporate face recognition systems—such as video cameras, image processing hardware and software, and image recognition algorithms.”

“Violent extremists and other criminals who have historically maintained an interest in avoiding face recognition” may “opportunistically seize upon public safety measures recommending the wearing of face masks to hinder the effectiveness of face recognition systems in public spaces by security partners,” the feds fret, while noting that they have “no specific information” about this actually happening.

The Homeland Security memo also “cites as cause for concern tactics used in recent pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong,” notes The Intercept.


FREE MARKETS

D.C. efforts to decriminalize psilocybin draw interference. Yesterday members of Congress—which still has veto power over local D.C. laws—debated a proposal to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms in the District. “We certainly…don’t want to be known as the drug capital of the world,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R–Md.), who had introduced an amendment to forbid D.C. from putting the issue up for a vote this fall.

“We all can agree that policies that increase the availability of psychedelic drugs in the nation’s capital—that’s dangerous,” Rep. Tom Graves (R–Ga.) said at the House Appropriations Committee hearing.

Not all of the committee agreed.

“If the district’s residents want to make mushrooms a lower priority and focus limited law enforcement resources on other issues, that is their prerogative,” said Rep. Mike Quigley (D–Ill.).

Harris ultimately withdrew his amendment—for now. “This is a new issue to the committee,” he said in a statement. “Between now and the meeting of the conference committee this fall, the issue of whether this will be on the ballot will be resolved. Fortunately, in that time, members will also have time to learn more about this complicated medical issue.”


ELECTION 2020

America is seeing a dramatic shift in party affiliation. Since the start of the year, “what had been a two-percentage-point Republican advantage in U.S. party identification and leaning has become an 11-point Democratic advantage, with more of that movement reflecting a loss in Republican identification and leaning (down eight points) than a gain in Democratic identification and leaning (up five points),” notes Gallup:

Currently, half of U.S. adults identify as Democrats (32%) or are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (18%). Meanwhile, 39% identify as Republicans (26%) or are Republican leaners (13%).

These results are based on monthly averages of Gallup U.S. telephone surveys in 2020.


QUICK HITS

• Another federal execution took place yesterday:

It’s impossible to reform policing without taking on police unions.

• Florida man does a few things right.

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Boulder Officials Told Campaigns They Had Until August to Qualify for the City Ballot. Now They Say the Deadline Was Actually in June.

reason-house

For months, activists in Boulder, Colorado, have been trying to place an initiative on the ballot overturning their city’s restrictions on unrelated people living in the same house. The city initially told them they had until August to qualify for the ballot. But last Friday, officials announced that the deadline for submitting signatures was actually back in June.

These activists’ last hope is for the Boulder City Council to place their initiative on the ballot itself. But they believe this body is hostile to their reform. Indeed, the ballot initiative process was designed to bypass it.

“The City Attorney’s office and the City Clerk’s office has in so many ways given us bad information. They’ve done it on their website. They’ve done it in email. They’ve done it over the phone, on Zoom calls, in public council meetings,” says Chelsea Castellano, an organizer for the Bedrooms Are For People campaign. “There are so many instances where they’ve given us the date of August 5 to submit our signatures. A rational person would presume that it would be accurate.”

The city’s admittedly inaccurate advice jeopardizes a reform that could immediately expand Boulder’s supply of rental housing in the middle of a pandemic-induced recession when millions of Americans are struggling to afford shelter.

On Sunday, Gov. Jared Polis issued an executive order asking cities to suspend or repeal their occupancy limits for unrelated people as part of a broader effort to prevent evictions during COVID-19.

“It’s important now because if somebody isn’t living in that kind of situation they might be homeless,” said the Democratic governor, according to the Denver Post. “The same type of people who complain about extra cars in the street or too many people living in a nearby house also generally complain about the homeless.”

As in many cities, Boulder’s zoning code limits residential housing to family members plus a certain number of unrelated roomers. How many unrelated individuals are allowed to live in a home is determined by how a property is zoned, with most of the city’s residential housing capped at either three or four unrelated people.

The city manager can impose fines of up to $1,000 for violating Boulder’s land use code, including its occupancy limits. The city attorney can also purse fines of up to $2,000 per violation of the land use code. Municipal courts are allowed to impose additional fines that would deprive a landlord of any profits earned by opening rooms to excess renters.

“These current laws are discriminatory because they regulate people based on who they are, and not what they do,” says Nick Grossman, another Bedrooms Are For People activist. “They are regulating a class of people that are unrelated by blood or marriage and preventing them from having equal access and [housing] options.”

Grossman and Castellano tell Reason that tenants are often evicted by fine-fearing landlords for violating the city’s occupancy cap. The law often forces property owners to leave rooms vacant, they add.

Occupancy limits for unrelated people “should raise constitutional issues, but they’ve been broadly blessed by the Supreme Court,” says Anthony Sanders, an attorney at the Institute for Justice. A 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, upheld such laws as a valid use of local government’s powers to regulate land use.

Some state courts have struck down some of these laws, Sanders adds, but they remain common in college towns such as Boulder, where neighbors often worry about their street being overrun by young partiers.

Sanders says courts should reconsider this precedent, arguing that restrictions on property rights should be tightly focused on preventing actual harms. Blanket bans or caps on unrelated people living in the same house don’t meet that standard, he says.

But without a new precedent, activists are left to work within the democratic process to change these laws. Hence the Bedrooms Are For People campaign.

Their initiative, if passed, would amend the city’s charter to repeal Boulder’s limits on unrelated people living together. It would instead impose an occupancy limit of one person per bedroom, plus one additional person. Homes with fewer than four bedrooms would be allowed a maximum number of four occupants.

In March they submitted their petition to the city, and later that month they received permission to start collecting signatures. Bizarrely, no one seemed to know when exactly these signatures had to be turned to the City Clerk’s office, which is responsible for verifying them.

Boulder’s charter gives campaigns a maximum of 180 days to collect signatures. It also requires that signatures be submitted to the city within 150 calendar days of the November election, which would have been June 5 this year.

Meanwhile, the state rules governing municipal elections are both more forgiving and more restrictive. Campaigns have up until 90 days before an election to submit signatures, which this year would mean August 5. State law, however, gives campaigns only 90 days to collect signatures.

The question befuddling everybody was whether state or local law should decide how long the Bedrooms Are For People campaign had to collect signatures, and when they had to turn them in.

To resolve these conflicting deadlines and give campaigns as much time as possible to collect signatures, the city published election guidelines stating that charter amendment petitions—including the Bedrooms Are For People petition—had 180 days to collect signatures, in compliance with the more permissive city deadline. They also didn’t have to submit these signatures until August 5, in compliance with state law.

A breakdown of approved petitions published by the city also listed August 5 as the date that Bedrooms are for People had to submit signatures.

That decision wasn’t without controversy, with opponents of the Bedrooms Are For People initiative threatening a lawsuit if the reformers were given until August to get their signatures in.

In late May, Boulder Beat reports, City Attorney Thomas Carr advised the campaign that the only way to completely avoid a lawsuit would be collect all the signatures they need within the 90 days allotted by state law, meaning signatures would have been due in late June. That deadline, Castellano argued at the time, was impossible for their campaign to meet, given the limits the pandemic had placed on the activists’ ability to collect signatures.

Carr nevertheless concluded that Boulder’s charter should take precedence, and that any lawsuit trying to toss out signatures for not meeting the earlier state deadline wouldn’t succeed. He also advised the Bedrooms Are For People campaign to seek independent legal advice.

This apparently did little to clarify things.

So last Friday, Carr sent an email to the Boulder City Council’s “hotline” mailing list stating that the city’s charter had the final say over when signatures had to be submitted.

That meant petitioners had 180 days to collect signatures, as opposed to the 90 days allowed by state law. Unfortunately for the Bedrooms Are For People campaign, it also meant those signatures were due back on June 5, as the city’s charter demands, not the state’s deadline of August 5.

Carr acknowledges that the city gave inaccurate guidance to the Bedrooms Are For People campaign, as well as to a campaign to enact ranked-choice voting for mayoral elections.

In the interest of fairness, Carr issued nonbinding recommendations that the City Clerk review all signatures submitted before August 5, and that, if the campaigns meet their signature goals, the city council vote to place their initiatives on the ballot.

“These are not small mistakes. This is over 50 people collecting signatures since the day the stay-at-home order lifted,” says Castellano, saying city staff has resigned for far less in the past. The idea of leaving it to the city council to decide what to decide whether their ballot initiative will go to voters this November is totally unacceptable, she argues. The “whole point of this process is to circumvent the city council,” Castellano says. “Because we wouldn’t need to do this if we felt like our elected representatives were representing this issue properly.”

According to Castellano, the campaign has collected almost 6,000 signatures so far, putting it well on its way to meeting that now-defunct August 5 deadline.

Bedrooms Are For People is now evaluating its legal options, hoping to find a way to get the initiative on the ballot without having to go through City Council.

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The Invisible Dystopia

godard

“Our mass culture is driven by screened entertainment,” the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson told The Wall Street Journal last week, “so there’s a tendency to tell stories in a way that looks good on screens. I think there is an overreliance on dystopia that is fundamentally driven by art direction and production design.”

The result, Stephenson argued, is that we’ve

gotten used to a particular way of thinking about dystopia—and that’s not what we’ve got, right? We’ve ended up with something that is very non-cinematic. With few exceptions, anywhere in the world affected by Covid-19, you can go out and walk down the street, drive around, look at stuff. And aside from the fact that there aren’t as many people out and a lot of people are wearing masks, nothing looks different. There are no collapsed buildings or crashed trains or any of the other visual markers that you would see in a movie to tell you that a disaster has happened here.

Is it possible to make a cinematic take on a non-cinematic disaster? I can think of one movie that tried: The New World, Jean-Luc Godard’s 20-minute contribution to the otherwise forgettable 1963 anthology film Ro.Go.Pa.G.

I’m not a huge Godard fan, but I like some of his ’60s movies, and this short is probably the best of those. It imagines a post-apocalyptic Paris that looks almost exactly like the pre-apocalyptic city; the differences are in how people behave. The results are eerie and odd, playing like a subtly surreal episode of The Twilight Zone. Here’s the first half…

…and here’s the rest:

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here. For another installment with a French New Wave connection, go here.)

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It’s Easier To Pretend Our Economic System Works And Just Blow Endless Asset Bubbles

It’s Easier To Pretend Our Economic System Works And Just Blow Endless Asset Bubbles

Tyler Durden

Fri, 07/17/2020 – 09:25

Authored by Michael Every of Rabobank

Yesterday saw the US comprehensively beat China. Not in any sporting sense, and certainly not in any dimension of the current Cold War: and for those who still like to think the latter isn’t happening, just listen to what US Attorney General Barr said yesterday. He attacked China for “economic blitzkrieg – an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government (indeed, whole-of-society) campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s pre-eminent superpower.” He also called out Hollywood and US firms for kowtowing to Beijing, alleging corporate officials “display hammer-and-sickle insignia at their desks and attend party lectures during business hours,” before concluding “If Disney and other American corporations continue to bow to Beijing, they risk undermining both their own future competitiveness and prosperity, as well as the classical liberal order that has allowed them to thrive.”

So just where did the US win? In the field that matters most to markets, in fact the only thing that matters to markets – spending. While Chinese retail sales for June fell 1.8% y/y, US retail sales leaped 7.5% m/m vs. 5.0% expected. Yes, it’s apples and oranges, and the US are still down marginally y/y, but considering the States are at least a quarter behind China in the recovery process, it’s a genuinely dynamic retail rebound. USA! USA! USA!

So what is driving this latest round of the US consumer miracle? The $600 a week in special virus-related unemployment benefits. In many instances this is worth more than people’s pre-crisis salary.

The problem here is that these benefits run out at the end of July, and there is as yet no sign whatsoever that they will be extended. Indeed, key Republicans are making noises that doing so would be dangerous. Certainly, it would be in a laissez-faire sense. Then again, in the face of a war against a virus, so is laissez-faire – which is why nobody ever adopts it during wartime. Indeed, the larger message here is desperately simple, and perhaps just desperate.

We seem to think we live in an ‘economic puzzle’: Central banks have failed to hit their inflation targets, and keep introducing more and more distorting measures that also don’t work; governments are spending vastly more only because of the virus, but clearly through gritted teeth, and with the threat of new austerity as soon as possible; and market experts either bewail that nothing works, or call for more to be done, and preferably before Western society falls apart. Yet the US retail data show that if you want a strong, domestic-led upturn all you need to do is put more money in the pockets of poorer people – and they will spend most of it ASAP.

Imagine if the low-income workers to whom a $600 a week income was a major pay rise had actually got that pay rise endogenously, or if government benefits in kind, like health or childcare, provided the same real income lift. Imagine how strong the US –or any—economic recovery would be. (Once we can all shop safely, of course.)

Naturally, this isn’t going to happen. Not in the US, and not anywhere else. Why? Because, as has been pointed out here for many years, once you begin there –with what works— and work backwards, you have to unravel too many ‘untouchable’ threads:

  • You can’t raise pay because of cheaper import competition? So impose tariffs.
  • You can’t raise pay because of weak labor power? Make the government tip the balance away from capital and back towards labor.
  • You can’t raise pay because then inflation will go up and we have too much debt to service? So use financial repression and impose negative real income on investors for once, not on workers.

So looking at that, isn’t it easier to pretend our economic system works and just blow an endless stream of asset bubbles that repeat like the worst kind of Hollywood movie series (The Fast and the Furious Markets)? If so, one would expect to see rates lower forever as a result: and guess what – the US 30-year mortgage is below 3% for the first time ever. If only more people had the money to buy them. Not that this is solely a US issue. China can more than match it in a head-to-head over property obsession – but is again slipping when it comes to a smooth equity bull run: it’s always too much too soon and then a very nasty hangover in that asset space, it seems.

Back to the Cold War, however, because we can’t avoid it even if we wanted to. Mr Barr needs to understand that all markets, even for movies, are about spending. That is why Hollywood aims at a Chinese, not just US, audience, with all the consequent self-censorship and/or altering of posters. If the US Attorney General wants to see different US movies made then the framework in which movie money can be made must change – otherwise things won’t. (An argument being in a parallel manner by various social justice movements, of course.) If US audiences had the cash to see movies more often (or at all, given the virus), that might help swing things.

Or, looking outside Hollywood, if one can’t add money on one side of the balance sheet, perhaps one needs to subtract it on the other: that is happening in trade and tech already via tariffs and bans, first on Huawei and ZTE, and now possibly the Chinese app TikTok. Yet are we really going to see a law banning US cultural exports to certain markets? (“No Star Wars for you”?) That seems a stretch!

Meanwhile, the Cold War is still mainly a US, or ‘Five Eyes’, phenomenon. By contrast, Germany’s highest level officials continue to talk about “Wandel durch Handel” (“Change through trade”) when it comes to China. Which is convenient when you are a massive mercantilist net exporter who also does not want to pay poorer people more but wants to sell the excess production you consequently end up with. The US, for its part, is asking Germany, like Hollywood, which way that change through trade flows – and does not like what it sees in either. And “No Star Wars for you” has much more of a real-life connotation for Europe under a US defence umbrella.

But that’s a tale for the sequel, not this episode.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2OyaJ4D Tyler Durden

Canada’s First ‘Mask Murder’? Ontario Police Kill 73-Year-Old Man After He Refused To Comply With Local Mandate

Canada’s First ‘Mask Murder’? Ontario Police Kill 73-Year-Old Man After He Refused To Comply With Local Mandate

Tyler Durden

Fri, 07/17/2020 – 09:05

Is this Canada’s first “mask murder”?

Those who keep up with coronavirus-related news in the US probably remember an incident that transpired a few months ago where a security guard at a Family Dollar store in Michigan was shot and killed after asking a customer to put on a mask. But a similar incident that occurred more than a month later, where police shot and killed a man after he refused to wear his mask, got much less attention outside of the local press.

Well, this week, Canada one of its first samples of mask-related violence when police shot and killed a man in Ontario after he refused to put on a mask.

According to the CBC, Ontario’s police watchdog unit is investigating an incident where two officers shot and killed a 73-year-old man in Haliburton County on Wednesday morning. Right before the killing, the man had refused to wear a mask and allegedly assaulted a grocery store employee before driving off, according to a statement from the Ontario police that leaves out most of the details about how the shooting transpired.

Initially, police were called to a Valu-Mart in Minden, Ontario, just after 8am local time, according to OPP Sgt. Jason Folz, who spoke with the CBC.

When the suspect left the scene after officers arrived, police refrained from trying to stop him after he drove off “in the interest of public safety”. Instead, they took down his license plate, and showed up at his house later.

Two officers later visited the man at his home in Minden on Indian Point Road, the SIU said.

Outside the home, an unspecified “interaction” ensued, and two police officers fired their guns at the man. The Ontario Police SIU (the unit that handles press) said that after the shooting, the officers called in “additional resources”, which were brought to the area near Eagle Lake, by the village of Haliburton.

The shooting victim was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead a couple of hours later. Officers recovered a pistol and a semi-automatic rifle from the scene, but it’s not clear whether the man had brandished them at the police, or whether he was unarmed during the encounter.

As of Friday, investigators have thoroughly searched the scene, and an autopsy report is expected (though the findings aren’t really in doubt).

But if the man attacked the officers first, why didn’t they just say that?

While the authorities were – for whatever reason – reluctant to share a complete account of the incident with the press (presumably, their story will be routed through legal before being dished out to trusted reporters), a woman who works at the Valu-Mart spoke with the CBC, and apparently filled them in.

Tianna Frances, a worker at the Valu-Mart in Minden, said she arrived for her shift at the grocery store shortly after the incident. When she arrived, all her coworkers, and even the customers, were talking about what had just occurred.

“When I got here everyone was talking about it,” Frances said. “My coworkers were a little bit shaken up, yes.”

Frances was told that the man didn’t want to wear a mask and she and other employees had to explain politely to other customers that an incident had happened earlier when they asked why the police were there.

“I guess he just got angry and didn’t want to. We couldn’t really deal with that ourselves because it’s really against the rules. So we had to call the police and everything,” Frances said.

Frances added that workers at her store shouldn’t have to enforce the mandatory mask policy issued by the local health district. It adds too much responsibility to jobs where workers are already stretched pretty thin. The policy only just took effect this week.

“It’s causing chaos,” she said. “If we didn’t have to force him and … tell him that he couldn’t come into the store, nothing would have happened, really. He would have got his groceries and went along with his day.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2DVpCvP Tyler Durden

Seattle City Council Member Suggests Firing White Officers In Massive Reduction Of Police Department

Seattle City Council Member Suggests Firing White Officers In Massive Reduction Of Police Department

Tyler Durden

Fri, 07/17/2020 – 08:45

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

The Seattle City Council is facing something of a dilemma in its popular pledge of the Seattle City Council to cut the police budget by 50 percent. To do so would require firing a significant number of police officers, which is also popular. The problem is that the firing would be done by seniority and many of the less senior officers are black. 

The solution according to City Council member Lisa Herbold is simple: fire officers based on their race.  

While that would be the definition of racial discrimination, Herbold clearly believes that it is discrimination for a good cause. The federal courts are likely to disagree.  Most notably, Herbold’s call for racial discrimination against white officers would seek to undue the work of Justice Thurgood Marshall who insisted that racial discrimination unlawful and evil regardless of the race you want to disenfranchise or discriminate against.

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best released a video calling the plan of Herbold and others “completely reckless.” She also sent a letter to Mayor Jenny Durkan warning that dramatic cuts would require the layoff of hundreds of officers. The Police Department also warned that the firings would include many minority officers.

It was only the last risk that concerned Herbold who promptly suggested discriminating on the basis of race:

Herbold insists that this would be perfectly legal despite the prohibitions under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The EEOC amplifies this point on its website: “It is unlawful to discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race or color in regard to hiring, termination, promotion, compensation, job training, or any other term, condition, or privilege of employment.”

In taking this position, Herbold is opposing one of the best known opinions by Thurgood Marshall. In McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co. (1976), Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote opinions that called for the broad interpretation of Title VII to protect everyone. In McDonald, two white employees were fired after a theft in the business.  The two white employees were held jointly and severally liable with a black employee. However, only the white employees were fired.  After they sued under Title VII, Marshall wrote for the majority in denouncing such discrimination against white employees, insisted that “racial discrimination in private employment against whites [must be] on the same terms as racial discrimination against nonwhites.”  He denounced “the illogic in retaining guilty employees of one color while discharging those of another color.”

This of course would be even more egregious since Herbold wants to fire white officers due to their race alone.  They would not be accused of any wrongdoing or failure.  The problem is their race.

It is notable that is not an action that is part of or in furtherance of a valid affirmative action plans ordered by a court or approved by a federal agency. See United Steelworkers of America v. Weber (1979) and Johnson v. Transportation Agency (1987). In Ricci v. DeStefano (2009), the Supreme Court ruled against the city of New Haven after a group of white firefighters and a hispanic firefighter challenged the refusal to certify the results of promotion exams in order to promote black firefighters who performed less well.  The Court held that the City’s refusal to certify the test was unlawful discrimination under Title VII. If found that “race-based action like the City’s in this case is impermissible under Title VII unless the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute.”

Herbold would not only refuse to promote on the basis of race but would fire officers on that basis.  No test. Just a pure racially discriminatory program of terminations.  Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), Chief Justice John Roberts once declared “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  That is clearly not the plan of Herbold and any of her colleagues who want to fire officers based on their race.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32t8uaI Tyler Durden

Housing Starts/Permits Disappoint Amid Tumbling Demand For City-Living

Housing Starts/Permits Disappoint Amid Tumbling Demand For City-Living

Tyler Durden

Fri, 07/17/2020 – 08:37

After May’s big rebound in both starts and permits, June was expected to show further ‘recovery’ in the US housing market (with starts surging far more than permits) as mortgage rates plunged to record lows.

And while both Housing Starts (+17.3% MoM) and Building Permits (+2.1% MoM), rose notably, they both missed expectations by a mile (+22.2% and +6.3% respectively), though revisions impacted that spread notably.

Source: Bloomberg

The “V”-shaped recovery is already stalling out…

Source: Bloomberg

One of the big drivers of this disappointment was the clear evidence of an exodus from city-living or rentals – Single-Family Home permits were up 11.8%, Multi-family permits down 14.0%…

On the Housing starts side (less forward-looking than permits), single-family units rose 17.2% and multi-family rose 18.6%…

…as the northeast exploded 111.8% from 49K SAAR to 105K (with Single-family starts in the northeast jumping the most since 1990!)…

And Starts remain lower year-over-year…

And all this as homebuilder sentiment surges back towards record highs.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eBoYjx Tyler Durden