The Suppression Of Black Lives Matter Abuse At Meta/Facebook

 I've previously written about the obvious scam that is Black Lives Matter; as a basic matter, there is no national organization per se, and as a consequence, money donated to that cause merely awaits the right scammer to pick up the tab, particularly as much of it passes through the sticky and opaque fingers of ActBlue, a fundraising siphon where accountability goes to die.

Sean Campbell's extensive update to the story at New York magazine discovered that Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah had purchased a home with

… more than 6,500 square feet, more than half a dozen bedrooms and bathrooms, several fireplaces, a soundstage, a pool and bungalow, and parking for more than 20 cars, according to real-estate listings. The California property was purchased for nearly $6 million in cash in October 2020 with money that had been donated to BLMGNF [Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation].

Of course, this meant that the BLMGNF immediately started playing defense, changing ownership of their clubhouse (known as "the campus") "to an LLC established in Delaware by the law firm Perkins Coie … [ensuring] that the ultimate identity of the property’s new owner was not disclosed to the public." It also meant 

…monitor[ing] social media for negative mentions of BLMGNF, with members using their influence with the platforms to have such remarks removed. It’s currently not possible to share the Post’s article on Cullors’s home purchases on Facebook because the site’s parent company, Meta, has labeled the content “abusive.” At other points, Bowers and his associates direct a private investigator to look into BLMGNF detractors and journalists, including me.

(Emboldening mine.) The ban appears to be over, thankfully, but it's pretty clear they fully expect the cooperation of social media companies to prevent unseemly details from leaking out. To their credit, as far as I can tell, Twitter never did play along with this game.

Black Lives Matters: The Lid Comes Off The Con

 I have said now for at least a couple years that Black Lives Matter is a label, not a proper organization. Jen Monroe at her Substack has recently detailed the painful unraveling of whatever shambles existed of that organization, and particularly, what happened to $60 million in donations now that "[b]oth Andrew Kerr of the Washington Examiner and Sean Campbell of New York magazine reported on the lack of leadership and transparency within the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation."

To recap –- the nation’s premier social justice organization does not have a functioning board of directors, nor an office, and $60 million that nobody is willing to say who is in control of. According to BLMGNF’s bylaws, the executive director has control of all funds related to the corporation but it seems it has not had anyone in that role since Cullors left.

It turns out the most visible arm of BLM has murky finances, former officers buying themselves real estate in multiple tony addresses, and no visible leadership — none of which is a surprise. This is a more extreme form of the general problem of "awareness" in charities, which always amounts to an excuse for self-referential fundraising. Given the state of racial hucksterism, I fully expect that even this brazen cash grab will result in a shrug among their corporate donors, whose major interest is in shooing away bad press.

The Trouble With Labels And Facebook's Censorship

 The New York Post has a story about BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors buying four million-dollar-plus homes in the New York area, scoping out property in the Bahamas, and last month buying a $1.4M home in Malibu. This is in addition to homes in the Atlanta and Los Angeles areas.

 BLM, of course, is a label, which means anyone can use it. There really is no unified formal organization, which has led to grifters capitalizing on the brand's goodwill. BLM Global Network Foundation, Khan-Cullors' particular instance, is one among many:

Founded by Khan-Cullors and another activist, Kailee Scales, the nonprofit Oakland, Calif.-based BLM Global Network Foundation was incorporated in 2017 and claims to have chapters throughout the US, the UK and Canada, and a mission “to eradicate White supremacy and build power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities.” The group does not have a federal tax exemption and donations are filtered through ActBlue Charities and Thousand Currents, two nonprofits that manage the cash.

This, of course, sounds awfully familiar; the whole point of ActBlue is to hide the operations of political scam artists. What makes this worse is Facebook censoring attempts to share the story, something mainly reported by News Corp. outlets. (Twitter has not, so far, attempted to step on this.) What good can come from this? The fact that the BLM name is being openly used by grifters is bad enough; that Big Tech covers for them is appalling.

The Hunt Is This Season's Blair Witch

So, revenge fantasy The Hunt apparently got pulled by its studio Universal, with people clucking their tongues as to why (somehow, Donald Trump subtweeted something or other), possibly due to recent gun violence in the news. But given the paltry $15M budget and the overall contraction of first-release movies to streaming services, what seems more likely is that audiences are being played, and Universal never intended to do a theatrical release at all. This was always going straight to streaming; as with The Blair Witch Project, where the marketing was the smartest thing about the movie, this bears the field marks of a clever promotion, a "banned" movie that will resurface one day on Netflix.

Update: I guess I should say NBCUniversal's not-quite-ready-for-prime-time streaming service, whatever it ends up being called.

The USPTO Enabled The Theranos Scam

Ars Technica today reports on the USPTO's role in Theranos' con job. Enabled in very large part by Elizabeth Holmes' never-reduced-to-practice patent of a "microfluidic patch that could test blood for infectious organisms and could deliver antibiotics through the same microfluidic channels", the thing metastasized:

 The provisional application, filed in September 2003 when Holmes was just 19 years old, describes “medical devices and methods capable of real-time detection of biological activity and the controlled and localized release of appropriate therapeutic agents.” This provisional application would mature into many issued patents. In fact, there are patent applications still being prosecuted that claim priority back to Holmes’ 2003 submission.

...

...[M]ore than a decade after Holmes’ first patent application, Theranos had still not managed to build a reliable blood-testing device. By then the USPTO had granted it hundreds of patents. Holmes had been constructing a fantasy world from the minute she started writing her first application, and the agency was perfectly happy to play along.

An appalling story.

How Black Lives Matters Entryism Shut Down The Toronto Pride Parade

Walter Olsen, whose Overlawyered blog is on my sidebar, today comes to us with a Storify link to his tweets of Sunday's takeover by Black Lives Matter protesters. The most disturbing part is Black Lives Matters was asked to lead the parade:

"BLM said they did not tell organizers about their plan to hijack the parade, an act that has since been called a “win” by the group, but widely criticized by many others.

Pride president Mathieu Chantelois called BLM's hijacking of the event the mere opening of negotiations:

“Yesterday, we agreed to have a conversation about this. We agreed that we will bring this to the community and to the membership, but at the end of the day, if my membership says no way, we want to have police floats, they decide.”

 Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a flood of hate mail aimed at BLM, whose behavior is simply inexcusable and childish. BLM went on to complain about this as "pink-washing":

Charges of "pinkwashing" are invariably some mixture of eyewash, brainwash, and hogwash. #PrideTO https://t.co/90V9Y8su0k

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) July 6, 2016

Relations between the petulant BLM protesters and city hall appear to be still surprisingly good, as the city planned on giving them a race relations award, part of a pattern of collapse in the face of organized protest, no matter how childish.

The short history of Black Lives Matter in Toronto proves that so long as you’re the victim group du jour, bullying and intimidation can win you obeisance from officials, to say nothing of reverential coverage in the media. When they staged a sit-in outside police headquarters to protest police racism, the Toronto Star depicted them as freedom fighters. After they demonstrated outside the home of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, she met them on the steps of Queen’s Park and declared, “I believe we still have systemic racism in our society.” When they accused the city of racism for shortening the schedule of an African music festival (the neighbours had complained about the noise), the city hurriedly restored it. In response to their demands, both the city and the province have called for investigations into the racist practices of the police – despite the obvious fact that Toronto is one of the most racially peaceable cities in all of North America.

As much as I'd like to think the Pride organizers will win this one over time, I'm not entirely convinced.

The Ouroboros: Black Lives Matter Shakes Down Toronto Pride

The Toronto Pride festival yesterday ground to a halt for half an hour for a Black Lives Matter protest. "The parade didn't re-start until after Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois signed a document agreeing to the group's demands." Those demands are interesting to read:

Among the nine, three explicitly cite funding, while the rest (save #8) are implicit funding demands, either through hiring/staffing demands or expenditures (as for "community spaces", "community full control over hiring", "increase community stages/spaces", etc.). It is hard to see how this can possibly stick; Chantelois signed an agreement under duress, i.e. the Black Lives Matter leaders forced him to submit or else they would not allow the parade to continue. So if this gets to court, it's very hard to imagine how this would be enforceable. Moreover, kicking police out of Pride activities sends a terrible message: it really is Us vs. Them, with no dialogue possible.

Already, Pride has backed off the idea that the police ban will remain in force in future events, saying,

"Pride Toronto never agreed to exclude police services from the Pride parade... We have had, and will continue to have, discussions with the police about the nature of their involvement as parade participants," the organization said in a statement.

"Frankly, Black Lives Matter isn't going to tell us there's no more floats in the parade," Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois told CP24 earlier in the day.

One wonders just how much longer they will adhere to the other, less visible but still significant terms inflicted on them. While the tantrum's outcome drew praise from many quarters, it appears from this vantage that it was nothing short of a commercial shakedown of the sort American race hucksters have engaged in for decades. Intersectionalism means there's always someone more privileged than you, if you just try hard enough; converting that to money and power is always the goal.

The Greatest Swindle

I was at the Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, a couple weeks back, and encountered a piece by Thomas Hart Benton entitled "Plowing It Under". In it, a sharecropper tills a field with the aim of making it fallow to qualify for a stipend under FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Act. Or at least, to make it possible for the landowner to receive such a stipend:

Sharecroppers, of course, received little if any of such subsidies, and in fact were forced further into penury, as Jim Powell wrote in 2003 at Cato:

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) aimed to help farmers by cutting farm production and forcing up food prices. Less production meant less work for thousands of poor black sharecroppers. In addition, blacks were among the 100 million consumers forced to pay higher food prices because of the AAA.

Powell also cites other New Deal legislation as having racist effects if not outright intent:

• The Wagner Act, which allowed closed shops that were de facto discriminatory in many instances.
• The Tennessee Valley Authority, which flooded lands worked by sharecroppers but gave them no compensation.
• The Works Project Administration, which channeled money predominantly into states with comparatively few blacks; blacks could be counted on to vote for FDR anyway. Consequently, their votes were unimportant.

Democratic indifference to the consequences of their policies on blacks (viz. Eric Garner, and a long line of others besides) is as common now as it was then, yet blacks continue to side overwhelmingly with Team Blue. It reminds me how much of politics is invested in the party system, in culture, and in historical us-vs-them pissing contests.

The Arrogance Of Windows 10

Microsoft's Windows product has stumbled a great deal in the post-Bill Gates era, most notably with the disastrous rollout of Windows Vista (and its reputation for poor performance). Forcing people to upgrade to Windows 10 may eclipse everything that's ever happened before:

Microsoft has been trying to lure computer users into its new operating system for months, bombarding them with unending pop-up screens. But many users are comfortable with the systems they have, have no interest in learning new operations and have simply clicked the “X” to get rid of the unwanted solicitation.

You can’t do that anymore.

Microsoft changed the coding on the “X” so that clicking it now instructs MS to “upgrade” your computer to Windows 10. Yes, really.

In fact, the two options on the page, “OK” and “Upgrade Now,” do the same thing as the “X.”

To avoid the forced “upgrade,” a user has to go into the fine print.

Inside a logo box in the ad is a scheduled date for a mandatory upgrade. The user must look in the tiny type just below that line and find where it says “here” and click on that to avoid the upgrade.

In addition to engaging in clickbait-style user interface changes, this is deeply deceptive and wholly unacceptable by large users. I can't imagine an institutional Windows customer would stand still for this kind of forced upgrade. 

College Trade Group President Rejects Accountability To Students

There's no shortage of people who feel their work should not be graded; this is particularly true when the subject runs to large bureaucracies, which often serve to diffuse responsibility. A particularly fine example came to me today in Hunter Rawlings' article at the Washington Post in which he demands we stop treating college like a "commodity". What does he mean by this? He apparently is quite offended that people have started looking at the obscene tuitions charged by universities, and their ceaseless upward march, with some deciding that perhaps college isn't really worth it for everyone:

First, most everyone now evaluates college in purely economic terms, thus reducing it to a commodity like a car or a house. How much does the average English major at college X earn 18 months after graduation? What is the average debt of college Y’s alumni? How much does it cost to attend college Z, and is it worth it? How much more does the “average” college grad earn over a lifetime than someone with only a high school degree? (The current number appears to be about $1 million.)  There is now a cottage industry built around such data.

The rest of his essay is given to homilies about students getting out what effort they apply into it; he does make some valid points there, as in

If colleges are responsible for outcomes, then students can feel entitled to classes that do not push them too hard, to high grades and to material that does not challenge their assumptions or make them uncomfortable. Hence colleges too often cater to student demands for trigger warnings, “safe rooms,” and canceled commencement speakers. When rating colleges, as everyone from the president to weekly magazines insist on doing nowadays, people use performance measures such as graduation rates and time to degree as though those figures depended entirely upon the colleges and not at all upon the students.

The insane costs of college certainly would seem to push for a cosseted demographic; trigger warnings and all the other panic-stricken nonsense of modern academia are nothing if not an extreme example of demands the world bend to the individual rather than the individual develop resilience. Yet at the same time, he never really bothers trying to answer critics' charges head-on that the costs of college have become untethered from their economic benefits. It is simply a question we're not allowed to ask.  

Bankruptcy, The Key To Solving The Student Loan Debt Crisis

Yesterday's piece on Lee Siegel's narcissistic views about money was by no means unique, as Bre Payton at The Federalist rightly had similarly contemptuous things to say about Siegel's behavior. But I wanted to take a moment and address a remark I see frequently repeated: "popularizing student loan fraud certainly won’t bring about the change he says he’s hoping for", and a section header that reads, "Refusing to Pay Won't Improve Higher Education". I think this is wrong for some very basic reasons.

First, it is largely impossible to discharge student loan debt through normal bankruptcy. This has several unfortunate side effects:

1. It makes such loans especially attractive to banks, who are all but guaranteed repayment.
2. It means banks need to do far less due diligence on the loans than other forms of debt.
3. It adds to the tsunami of money entering universities, providing no incentives to reduce actual costs.

 The straightforward way to deal with college costs is to restore student loans as ordinary debt for bankruptcy purposes. This will have three salutary effects:

1. It will allow those under crippling levels of debt to escape through established legal means.
2. It will force banks to perform due diligence on institutions, degree programs, and students prior to writing loans based on prior loss experience. Want to go into six figures of debt to get a degree in puppetry or gender studies? Maybe you need to ask your rich aunt about that.
3. Finally, as banks turn off the money spigot holding up the college-industrial complex, universities will need to rationalize their degree programs and overhead to fit with the new market realities.

And the last point is the most important one. For all the money roaring into colleges these days, it's unclear what students receive in exchange for exponentially increasing tuition. But we have a pretty good idea about what universities are doing with it, and it's not adding new instructors: mostly, it appears they're engaged in bureaucratic empire building, with administrative staff positions growing more than twice as fast as student populations.

But critics say the unrelenting addition of administrators and professional staffs can’t help but to have driven this steep increase.

At the very least, they say, the continued hiring of nonacademic employees belies university presidents’ insistence that they are doing everything they can to improve efficiency and hold down costs.

“It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie,” said Richard Vedder, an economist and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

“I wouldn’t buy a used car from a university president,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’re making moves to cut costs,’ and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired.”

This is exactly the sort of  thinking that drives never-ending tuition hikes: with no need to think about costs, colleges don't. Absent people walking away from their product (my second point above), there can be no rationalization; hitting them where it hurts, in their wallet, is the only way this will change.

Please note I am in no way advocating bankruptcy as a desirable end; the sanctity of contracted debt is important. Siegel, particularly, stands out as an entitled mooch. But many young people have amassed huge debts in service to universities that cavalierly ignore the burdens they inflict. For them, and for future generations, it's time to restore some sanity.

Update: Scott Alexander has a fun metaphor for the current situation, likening it to Dutch tulip mania with the added twist of subsidy. He also goes in to review what medical school looks like in Ireland vs. the US; in the US, you have to get through an undergraduate degree of some sort prior to going to medical school, but in Ireland it's treated as a sort of trade school, which anyone may enter upon graduation from high school. The US approach has some awful side effects:

Americans take eight years to become doctors. Irishmen can do it in four, and achieve the same result. Each year of higher education at a good school – let’s say an Ivy, doctors don’t study at Podunk Community College – costs about $50,000. So American medical students are paying an extra $200,000 for…what?

Remember, a modest amount of the current health care crisis is caused by doctors’ crippling level of debt. Socially responsible doctors often consider less lucrative careers helping the needy, right up until the bill comes due from their education and they realize they have to make a lot of money right now. We took one look at that problem and said “You know, let’s make doctors pay an extra $200,000 for no reason.”

Ellen Pao To Appeal Kleiner Perkins Verdict

And she may have a bit of a case here, largely on the grounds that her suit was not "frivolous or malicious". (She is appealing to prevent Kleiner Perkins from recovering their considerable legal costs.) I will be interested to see Kleiner Perkins' response (and who knows what those terms of legal art might actually mean in practice).

The Campfire Of Hate: #GiveYourMoneyToWomen And Target Assessment

Every movement needs its enemies, and something as obviously lazy and venal as #GiveYourMoneyToWomen provides an easy target. (Liz Finnegan's introductory piece at Everyjoe is a pretty good primer.) But, my problems with it are that

1. No traction from anyone of real name. (Who the hell is @ChiefElk?)
2. Almost all the tweets with this hashtag are from conservatives decrying the state of modern feminism.

Which is to say, it's something of a manufactured controversy arising from one entitled princess's delusional fantasies.

Aside: I really liked David Frum's tweet on this:

Worldwide, women earn $18 trillion and spend $28 trillion. https://t.co/ZHSnC2h3wO The #GiveYourMoneyToWomen hashtag worked!

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 31, 2015

Dan Pallotta, Con Artist

For some reason, the subject of Dan Pallotta came up again on Twitter. You may have seen his very popular TED talk, or read his remarks on the subject of charity at Huffington Post, which largely echo his TED talk. The bottom line seems to be that Pallotta thinks charities should be more like corporate America in their drive, pay for employees (particularly executives), and willingness to expand. That is to say, he represents virtually everything I have railed against when it comes to large charities, converting vices into virtues by mere rhetorical dodges. As Charity Navigator executives Ken Berger and Robert M. Penna wrote (also in HuffPo),

No one can dispute the fact that Dan Pallotta is a good pitch man, is certainly effective at selling himself, and can convey his message quite convincingly. We believe his message has gained tremendous popularity for one simple reason -- he ultimately is arguing that charities should be held to virtually no accountability standards. Yes, we know Dan says people should look at results rather than overhead; but if you look under the hood for details, there is little in his argument on exactly how to go about measuring those results. For example, he speaks of vague notions such as "Charity is in the business of inspiration, so it is particularly problematic for charity that the value of inspiration is not measured;" and "it is not a matter so much of what we must do as what we must stop doing," yet at the same time he implicitly -- and sometimes explicitly -- justifies doing away with most clear standards of accountability. Unfortunately, it is evident that this is music to the ears of many leaders in the charitable sector. Indeed, many of them seem drawn to the notion that if they follow the Pied Piper of Zero Accountability, they can basically do whatever they want and get paid millions while waving the flag of Pallotta's books and TEDTalk.

Jennifer Amanda Jones in Nonprofit Quarterly penned a point-by-point takedown of Pallotta's arguments a couple years ago, from which I excerpt her last and strongest point:

Pallotta’s argument: The percentage of an organization’s total budget spent on overhead is not a good measure of effectiveness.

Buchanan’s response: Buchanan agrees that overhead expenses are not necessarily a good measure of overall effectiveness. But, at the same time, argues that overhead is an important measure to pay attention to. “Donors have a legitimate interest in understanding what proportion of their dollars ends up in the hands of for-profit fundraising professionals. A recent, widely discussed investigative report by The Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) identifies “America’s Worst Charities” on the basis of the proportion of funds raised that were paid to for-profit solicitors. (Topping the list is the “Kid’s Wish Network” which raised nearly $128 million over the past 10 years—$110 million of which went straight to the solicitors they hired to raise money!)”

Pallotta demands donors close their eyes to potential problems, should cease to care about who is helped and how many, and his airy assertions about "inspiration" will make up for it all. That's hardly comforting. If he wants charity to be run more like business, he also needs to recognize that businesses are obliged to satisfy their customers or fail; with charities, no equivalent feedback loop exists in the absence of oversight.

The Pink Ribbon Effect, Or, The Commidification Of Charity

A friend about to have a double mastectomy let me know about this long-form rant on the state of breast cancer charities. I don't agree with all of it, and in particular, I haven't read up enough on some of her recommended charities at the end to know whether they're legit, but they generally go against my own recommendations of eschewing big charities, Nonetheless, the author talks about her own personal and very painful experiences with cancer and surgery, and how these have resulted in her own clarifying moment about the kinds of cheap symbolism sprouting around breast cancer particularly (emboldening mine, as always):

While I am beyond thrilled that breast cancer is no longer a taboo issue and that people are talking about it, the commercialism has gotten out of hand. There is nothing pink and rosy about breast cancer, yet it has been pink-washed to death. It is a serious disease that kills.

And while I do think we need more awareness and education (about metastatic disease, about how young women can develop breast cancer, about how women (young and old) DO die from this disease, about the importance of research, etc.), I don't think we need the kind of awareness that buying a jar of salsa with a pink ribbon on it brings. While I hardly ever see "awareness" products addressing the topics above, I can't go anywhere without seeing pink products. Heck, I just have to look out of my front window to see giant pink garbage totes. The stores are filled with pink as companies try to make a buck off breast cancer. If you look carefully at these products, you'll find that some of them don't even donate a cent to breast cancer awareness, support, research, etc. And oftentimes those that do make a very minimal donation -- and not always to organizations/programs where the money is well spent.

What is most unfortunate is that well-meaning people are willing to buy pink products, even pay a little extra, because they think they are helping to do something to "cure" breast cancer or to provide "hope" to breast cancer patients. Why is this sad? Because those dollars spent on pink flowers, pink shirts, or a pink box of crackers or spaghetti sauce could be going to research, our only real "hope" of beating this horrible disease.

 Which is, I think, the most important point: buy a t-shirt, and maybe the seller will eventually kick back some small fraction of the purchase price. Send money to a group that's actually doing research, and hopefully most of that goes to paying scientists to find cures. And never, ever forget that "awareness" is a self-licking lollipop: you're just paying for ad campaigns, at best. It's really not hard.

Deadspin's Perfect Sermon On The NFL's Fake Charity

If there is a better one-paragraph summary of everything wrong with the NFL's fake, mass-market, superficial "charity" — and a zillion others besides — than this graf from Deadspin I simply don't know where it is.

What No More sets out to do is good. Still, this is the beginning of a story we've all seen before with Pinktober, LIVESTRONG, and even the incredibly important but eventually coopted AIDS ribbon. What begins as a push for change becomes an invisible force telling us that we must buy specific items and wear certain logos so we can feel better about ourselves, and if we go along, we do so not because we care but because we don't want to feel left out. What good this does for people in need of help isn't always clear, but it's great for the brands, because all they have to do is slap logos on a few products and/or advertisements and throw a few pennies to charity to make themselves seem socially conscious. These logos are an embodiment of magical thinking, promising that you can do good without having to actually do anything. They're shams, basically. Now, we've got another one.

Good grief, yes. It's hard work finding good charities, researching them, trying to determine whether their beliefs and operations are in tune with yours, or whether they aren't just scams separating lazy but well-meaning people from their money. There are people who will think that by buying a t-shirt they are somehow helping the victims of domestic violence, but the far end of that cash flow goes through many hands taking a cut along the way. And always, always, always be skeptical of anything whose principle goal is "to raise awareness". It's a self-licking lollipop.