Rebane's Ruminations

About

November 2026
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  

ARCHIVES

OUR LINKS

YubaNet
White House Blog
Watts Up With That?
The Union
Sierra Thread
RL “Bob” Crabb
Barry Pruett Blog

  • Corporatism in America – An update

    George Rebane

    Corporatism is government supported assault on free market capitalism.

    Corporatism, according to what the Left has been telling people for generations, is free market capitalism.  Their support of corporatism, while pointing out both its obvious and surreptitious faults, is their main propaganda weapon to promote the collectivization of industry, and in the process growing Leviathan and its share of the nation’s subsequently declining GDP.  For the recent arrivals, corporatism is the conspiratorial collusion of special interest business sectors, consisting of (usually) big established corporations and their unions, with governments at all levels through corrupt politicians who will pass laws/regulations that summon the government gun to tilt the competitive markets in their favor.  In return, the politicians are guaranteed contributions from both corporate and union coffers, the payments of which are justified for ‘saving jobs’ in the politicians’ jurisdictions.

    This type of market meddling is especially prevalent when new companies seek to introduce innovative products and services that better those offered by calcified corporations no longer nimble in the marketplace – especially in areas involving the application of new technologies.  This has been going since time immemorial in the form of royal guilds to whose members the crown gave exclusivity in this or that area of commerce.  Today the practice continues in the form of regulations, ostensibly for consumer protections, that are operationally the equivalent of ‘letters of marque’ which license some corporations to act rapaciously toward newcomers.

    A recent and most egregious example of this is presented in Cato Institute’s Policy Analysis issue #834 (download here).  In there, Will Zerhouni – attorney, former federal prosecutor, and entrepreneur – takes us through the case of Michigan’s attempt to exclude Tesla from its auto market in order to protect established dealers.  Its executive summary reads –

    In the area of technology and startup innovation, new market entrants routinely find themselves besieged by analog-age incumbents hijacking the levers of government in an attempt to squelch competition. Nowhere is that phenomenon more apparent than at the state and local level.

    In recent years, states and localities have worked to undermine beneficial economic disruption by using state and local laws and regulations to bar startup companies from competing fairly and freely in the market. Trailblazers such as Tesla, Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb are finding market entry barred in places as diverse as California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Texas, Michigan, New York, Utah, and Washington, D.C.

    In one particularly egregious case from 2014, Michigan amended its franchise auto dealer statute specifically to exclude Tesla from the Michigan market. This amendment was introduced on the eve of the adjournment of the legislature, and it was passed with no debate, no legislator input, and no committee process. In response, and after multiple unsuccessful efforts to gain the cooperation of Michigan regulators and legislators, Tesla finally sued Michigan in order to be able to sell its cars in that state.

    This policy analysis will look at the Michigan legislative restrictions on Tesla as a case study of state and local interference with free-market operations on behalf of established market participants at the expense of newcomers to the market. It will also explore Tesla’s legal arguments in its Michigan litigation and evaluate its prospects of success.  (emphasis added)

    Reading this analysis is an eye-opener for those of us not versed in that area of government perfidy.  One takeaway is a set of tools (indicators) that lets the reader see the growing tentacles of corporatism already entwined in his own community, and to identify new ones spawning.  Mr Zerhouni concludes his analysis with –

    In the end, there is already an avenue for disruptive market entrants. The surest remedy for states overstepping their bounds lies not in new federal statutory or regulatory schemes but in courts applying more rigorous rational basis review. If courts adopted the rigorous rational-basis analysis … companies such as Tesla, Uber, and Airbnb would stand a fighting chance of enriching consumers with new services, products, and goods—and legislatures could focus their efforts on governance for the benefit of all citizens instead of the established few market incumbents.

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    20 comments on Corporatism in America – An update

  • Sandbox – 6apr18

    [It's tax season, and those of us who pay taxes are paying huge amounts.  The top 20% of earners pay 87% of the nation's income taxes (see graphic), and a lot, and I do mean a lot more of total taxes when you consider state income taxes for states like California.  More here.  gjr]

    2018incomeTaxes

    Posted at

    in

  • ‘Quants’, Kelly, and the RK formula

    George Rebane – 19 May 2010 (V5apr18)

    [I originally posted this little blurb on some work I had done on the Kelly formula prior to 2010.  Well, after some more noodling and squiggly pushing I found that there was a conflict in the way odds and expected gain/loss were defined which required me to revise what is now the RK formula.  As a result, I took down the 19may10 version and am now replacing it, appropriately edited and modified where required, with the current corrected version which still reflects its original publishing date.]

    Contrary to the rumors you’ve been hearing for the last year plus, GeorgeW didn’t cause the Great Recession.  This fiasco had three main progenitors – government idiots, corporate greedies, and some very clever, but not clever enough, Wall Street traders practicing the arcane art and some of the more dubious science of financial engineering.

    Scott Patterson has been reporting on things financial for the WSJ, and recently wrote The Quants – How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It (2010) which immediately shot up to the top of the charts and is still there.  I finished Quants before going on travel and was just going to add it to my collection of finance and economic history books.  But then I thought that there might be some little gems of broader interest there.

    Patterson goes back to the beginnings of financial engineering in the 1960s, and takes us right up to the fall of 2009, the Great Recession and all.  In fact, the whole purpose of the book is to explicate the role of the quants in fostering the recession.  What’s a quant?  A quant is a person trained in many of the mathematical ideas and toolsets of the system sciences.  A bunch of them came from research universities like MIT, Caltech, UC, … .  They are generally at the PhD level, so they have a demonstrated ability to think out of the box and extend human knowledge.

    Now these young graduates were snapped up by various ‘Wall Street investment houses’ and hedge funds.  Their job was to examine the price behavior of all kinds of securities around the world, and then apply their math wizardry to develop automated trading programs to lickety-split execute profitable arbitrage transactions that their algorithms discovered in the massive daily dataflows of the finance and securities industry.  Since I have some knowledge of these high-jinks (actually, I also claim to be a financial engineer), this kind of historical background fascinates me.  And doubly so since the political reverberations of this recession will be with us for a long time to come.

    Financial engineering actually began with Modern Portfolio Theory credited mainly to Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe.  They both became Nobelists for their work.  MPT is used to allocate funds among a short list of competing investments like stocks.  Sharpe’s contribution was the Capital Asset Pricing Model or CAPM which introduced the notorious alpha and beta numbers to a stock.  Brilliant and elegant modeling of an investment world that turned out not to exist – well, not to exist quite like their equations required.

    Today MPT and CAPM are used primarily by professionals for CYA purposes to manage other people’s money.  If the client’s portfolio blows up, you can always point to the Nobel prizes and claim you did the prudent thing.  And thereby hangs a tale, or should I say ‘tail’?.

    Most of the applied financial phrenology is still based on the view that security prices move up and down sort of like a drunkard’s (or random) walk.  If you assume this, you can fit nifty bell curves to the magnitude of price movements, and off you go into the land of stochastics.  Stochastics is a fancy word for random processes that depend on other random processes.  The problem with the random walk model is that it doesn’t predict big catastrophic price swings very well – practically not at all.

    (To continue reading, please Download Quants2_2018)

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    3 comments on ‘Quants’, Kelly, and the RK formula

  • Gun violence town hall in Nevada City (updated 7apr18)

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 April 2018.]

    Today the Second Amendment and gun violence are on the minds of many people.  Both subjects have widely different meanings for Americans, and the usual conversations held on these topics more often than not find people talking past each other because they share no common facts, definitions of terms, knowledge of history, and usually debate only to promote totally different futures for America.  In short, neither their agendas nor narratives are compatible.  On 20 April there will be a town hall meeting in Nevada City to attempt a better understanding of all this that I’ll tell you about in a minute.

    Since the Parkland shootings, the Left has again made gun control a national issue, seeing it as the most recent not-to-be-wasted perfect storm to flood the country with the next layer of gun control laws.  What distinguishes their current efforts from the past is that the cat is finally out of the bag – the Left’s goal is not just adopting what they call ‘common sense’ laws and regulations, but the total abrogation of civilian gun ownership.  And former Supreme Court Justice Stevenson openly declared the preferred method to be through the repeal of the Second Amendment.

    What continues to fuel the debate in the media is the way that information on guns – their types, functioning, gun deaths, gun violence, (yes, these are different), ownership rates, applicable laws, the effect of various levels of controls, etc – how all this is disseminated.  Listening to the gun confiscation folks, you would think that there has been a dramatic increase in gun violence, however that is characterized.  Looking at the plain facts, gathered and published by outfits like Pew Research, FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, Centers for Disease Control, and other reputable private and public agencies, the reality is quite different.

    Here are some “stubborn facts” to consider when you next talk about gun violence and gun control –

    • Violent crime is down and has been on the decline for decades.
    • The principal public safety concerns with respect to guns are suicides and illegally owned handguns, not mass shootings.
    • A small number of factors significantly increase the likelihood that a person will be a victim of a gun-related homicide.
    • Gun-related murders are carried out by a predictable pool of people.
    • Higher rates of gun ownership are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.
    • There is no clear relationship between strict gun control legislation and homicide or violent crime rates.
    • Legally owned firearms are used for lawful purposes much more often, about 450,000 times annually, than they are used to commit crimes or suicide.
    • Concealed carry or CCW permit holders are not the problem, but they may be part of the solution. CCW permit holders are arguably the most law-abiding people in the country.  Our police, who are very law-abiding, still commit crimes at 6 to 10 times the rate that CCW holders do.

    To put the loss of human life into some perspective, consider that insect bites kill more people than the criminal use of guns.  More people are stabbed to death each year than are shot with rifles.  Surprisingly, the London murder rate with knives is now higher than the gun murder rate in New York.  And each year medical mistakes kill over 20 times the number of people murdered with guns.  So, there is much more to know about gun violence than what is repeated on every-day media.  (more here)

    In light of all this, a group of concerned progressives will gather in the Nevada City Council chambers on the evening of 20 April to hold a town hall in order to “find common ground for efforts that can be initiated right here in Nevada County to make us all safer.”  The meeting, moderated by Judge Tom Anderson, will be a discussion and not a debate.  It will feature a panel that includes Carla Wolfclaw, who wrote on school security measures after the Columbine massacre, and a number of locals to which I have been added to provide either some measure of balance or, perhaps, comic relief, not necessarily in that order.  More information will be available soon on local radio and in The Union.

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

    [6apr18 update]  Until something more formal appears in the media, I am posting below the draft "blurb", as received, from the organizers on the upcoming town hall.  Since the receipt, I have been informed by KVMR that they will do a live broadcast of the event.

    Foothill Arts Resources & Media (The FARM) is a 501 C 3 Non-Profit entity.  Our mission is to provide professional assistance & occasional funding to local projects that would be of interest to our community, in addition to producing our own events. Our team is comprised of passionate individuals with long-term experience in activism, organizing and event planning, as well as strong independent media involvement.

    Our current project is to produce a Town Hall Meeting on the topic of Guns; this will include gun safety, gun violence, interpretations of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, student input, judicial and law enforcement input, and an opportunity for knowledgeable panelists to share their thoughts, feelings & expertise. The goal is to bridge the gap, and rather than be divisive, to find areas where we, as a community, can find common ground, and begin to find workable solutions to this important, ongoing and highly charged topic.  This will be a forum in which the public can ask questions of the panelists. (These questions will be vetted by our team, and will include all points of view, as our goal is to be inclusive).

    The meeting will be carried LIVE on NCTV and streamed over the internet on Friday, April 20th, 2018 at 6:30 P.M. and will be held in the Nevada City Council chambers at 317 Broad St. Nevada City, CA.

    We are planning to work with KVMR to see if they, too, would be interested in carrying the event. We have received a “thumbs-up” from The Union, as well.

    [7apr18 update]  I received the following press release entitled, 'Town Hall Notice – Guns a Community Dialogue' from Ms Patricia Smith of FARM.  It is posted as received.

    Press Release:

    Guns: A Community Dialog will be the topic of a public Town Hall Meeting to be held on Friday, April 20, from 6:30 – 8:30 pm in the Nevada City Hall Council Chambers, 317 Broad Street. 

    The Town Hall is being produced by Foothills Arts Resources & Media (FARM) with partners NCTV and KVMR who will carry a LIVE broadcast of this event. (NCTV, Comcast Ch. 17 or Suddenlink Ch. 16; KVMR, 89.5 FM.) It will also be streamed over the internet at www.kvmr.org and nevadacountytv.org.

    Superior Court Judge Thomas Anderson will moderate. The panel consists of Amanda Wilcox, Legislation & Policy Chair of the California Chapters of the Brady Campaign; Carla Holtzclaw, School Safety Trainer & Consultant, retired educator & former Chair of the Santa Clara County Behavioral Health Board; Dr. George Rebane, certified range safety officer, life member of the NRA, who has researched and written extensively on the Second Amendment; Morgan Margulies, a senior at Nevada Union High School and captain of the campus debate team; Jerod Johnson, a retired Grass Valley Police captain, gun safety expert and owner of The Range, and Michael Gomez, former Bureau Chief, California Dept. of Justice Commission on Peace Officer Standards & Training (POST).

    Among the topics to be discussed will be school and public safety procedures, warning signs of mental health issues, gun proficiency & safety training, concerns of our youth, and Second Amendment rights.

    The goal is to bridge the gap, and rather than be divisive, find areas where we, as a community, can reach common ground. Foremost is finding workable, local solutions to this important, ongoing and highly charged topic.

    This will be an inter-active forum in which the public can ask questions of the panelists via written cards. All points of view will be included, however the questions will be vetted to eliminate duplication and remain within the time limitations of a live broadcast.  FARM is a 501 (c) 3, non-profit. Our mission is to provide professional assistance & occasional funding to local projects that would be of interest to our community, in addition to producing our own events.

    Seating is limited: Info:530-268-5754 or see FARM's Facebook page, Foothill Arts, Resources and Media FARM where you can reserve a seat.

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    174 comments on Gun violence town hall in Nevada City (updated 7apr18)

  • Our Constitution – capricious or a constant?

    George Rebane

    USconstitution2America’s Constitution is one of its prime founding documents.  Founding documents of any social order – nation-state, kingdom, tribe, … – are written and disseminated to define the durable component of that order to its members.  Even monarchs and dictators who rule by force and at their whim have issued decrees that define a new scheme intended to last sufficiently so as to allow their subservients to order and organize their lives.  Such documents serve no function if it is known that tomorrow they may again change.

    Founding documents are therefore drafted with great debate and contention to hammer out a work product that all parties see as a durable social contract upon which long-term plans may be made and based, and which will define the structure of governance and a stable foundation for generations.  Founding documents represent the sum total of a society’s wisdom, forged through the politics of their time, that its elected or endowed leaders are able to bring to bear.

    From time immemorial the wise of a society have known that the sentiment of the public square is capricious, often with destructive and deadly after effects.  This is a baked-in human attribute that even the people themselves comprehend and have come to dread.  With this understanding they have therefore been willing to trade some of their liberties and wealth for a stable and secure social order.  In response, wise rulers and leaders have made such founding documents hard to change.  As with our Constitution, changes to it are possible, but these must follow known and deliberative procedures that can only proceed at a very dignified pace.  This has served us well for almost two and a half centuries.

    No one argues that during its life our Constitution has had to endure numerous assaults.  Heretofore these assaults have been few and focused always on some or other particular provision. Today we have added changing the permanence of the Constitution, many calling it “an 18th century relic”.  The Constitution’s constancy is under targeted assault by a contingent of collectivist elites who are bent on fundamentally transforming the United States of America by leading a substantial contingent of our lightly read and/or neurologically challenged who have been subjected to almost three generations of being taught that America is the globe’s malignant tumor.  

    The primary tack for this transformation is to be achieved through the wholesale purchase of more votes through 1) the modern embodiment of the state providing unending bread and circuses, and 2) the de facto importation (through porous borders and lax immigration policies) and subsequent enfranchisement of illegal alien hordes who then become securely bonded to prominently positioned progressives to whom they owe their welcome and weal.

    As part and parcel of this assault, today we debate whether and how Americans should count ourselves, and those who live in our midst illegally, so as to establish the basis for our federal benefits and representation in Congress.  Our Constitution has some very specific guidance for such countings.  Section 2 of the 14th Amendment clearly states that only citizens can vote, and only the number of citizens determine representation in Congress.  The 15th Amendment underlines that it is “the right of the citizens of the United States to vote”; nowhere in our carefully amended Constitution is that right provided for anyone else.

    Those among us who are bent on America’s fundamental transformation are also bent on an interpretation of the Constitution as a bendable document that should respond to whatever the selectively assembled are prompted to shout from the public square.  Their argument demands being responsive to the malleable demands of the multitude – ‘after all we are a democracy, and the people should get what they want when they want it.’  The trouble is that we are not a democracy, and the last thing thinking people want is to live under a founding document that flaps capriciously in the winds of the moment before becoming a shredded remnant.

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    8 comments on Our Constitution – capricious or a constant?

  • Scattershots – 1apr2018 (updated 4apr18)

    George Rebane

    Democrats admit to using illegal aliens to boost their receipt of fed funds and stacking Congress with their representatives.  Today on Fox News Sunday we saw videos of both CA AG Xavier Becerra and Rep Brad Sherman (D-CA) admit and argue for illegal aliens being counted in the upcoming census so that CA would not lose congressional seats and federal monies that are doled out on the basis of the number of presumed citizens and legal residents of our country.  They were completely unabashed in stating their positions as if that was an understood constitutional mandate – whoever can successfully crawl under our border fence, according to these two progressive worthies, is due the full benefits of American citizens.

    The recent revelations from Dems on their contempt for the United States of America and its Constitution is both alarming and refreshing.  First, it was former SCOTUS justice Stevens admitting that the ‘sane, common sense gun controls’ with which the Left has been bamboozling us for years is just a bald-faced sham.  They really want the Second Amendment gone so that gun confiscation can proceed apace, and they won't then have to dick around anymore with the ongoing bit by piece removal through a constant drizzle of ratcheting regulations that constructively destroy that amendment.  And now they admit that retaining US sovereignty through control of its borders and access to citizenship has never been something they have promoted, and that their oaths of office to preserve and defend America were just a scam that such lying sacks of s#!t have to swear in order to obtain the powers of elective office.  A21 on steroids.

    [2apr18 update]  States are broke – liabilities total more than available cash or reasonable foreseeable revenue streams.  Politicians of all stripes have always been willing to sell the future welfare of their voters down the drain if they can be re-elected just one more time.  And the voters in their turn have been stupid enough to vote for pandering politicians’ promises that have no chance of being delivered.  Mainly, because they too don’t know that there’s no free lunch.  As we have pointed out here for more than a decade, vote buying public employee pensions, along with more entitlements than one can count, are the culprits of our failing fisc.  And the beat goes on.  (more here)

    [4apr18 update] From today’s WSJ website – “Police Scrutinize YouTube Shooter’s Social Media for Motive: The woman accused of shooting three people inside YouTube’s headquarters before killing herself left a social-media footprint that included rhetoric against YouTube for allegedly censoring her video content.”  (emphasis mine)  The woman did no such thing; her rhetoric unequivocally stated that YouTube censored her – she did not allege the censoring, she accused YouTube of doing it.  The media have become so timid of being sued or something, that their reporting has become silly with the obvious and existential being described as ‘alleged’, as if there were still some other conclusion waiting in the wings.  Don’t you chortle a bit when you hear, “After killing (umpteen) people, the alleged shooter then turned the gun on himself.”? And after hearing eyewitness testimonies and counting bodies, including that of the shooter, the reporter still puts the killer into the 'alleged' category??  The silliness is always corroborated by the absence of any subsequent investigation by the authorities to find an alternative perpetrator.  (I’m reminded that this is even true when justice screws up badly, as occurred in finding OJ innocent.  No one launched an investigation of who actually killed his wife and the unlucky guy returning her sunglasses.  Mrs Simpson’s murder is not an unsolved crime, we know the alleged murderer killed her.  We can't say it, but did sue the bejeezus out of him in the double-jeopardy civil suit.)

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    46 comments on Scattershots – 1apr2018 (updated 4apr18)

  • He Is Risen!

    George Rebane

    HeIsRisen

    Hearing that strong assertion, the Christian answers joyfully, ‘He is risen indeed!’

    For us, Christmas is the promise, and Easter its fulfillment.  The summation of all Christianity is Christ’s covenant in the promised transcendence of Man, all concentrated into one simple declaration – ‘He is risen!’  Without this, our faith is a fraud; with it, Christianity promises Man to become an unending part of God’s love of all of Creation.

    Posted at

    in

    ,
    2 comments on He Is Risen!

  • Sandbox – 30mar18

    [The Union is on an anti-gun binge, led by editor Don Rogers' editorial (here).  More needs to be said about the hoaky poll they are conducting.  Let's see if they publish a mea culpa on how easy it has been to subvert the poll's count as reported by our commenters.  gjr]

    Posted at

    in

  • “Biased Algorithms” – Advent of Politically Correct AI

    George Rebane

    [9apr18 – An edited version of this commentary appeared (here) in the 9apr18 edition of The Union.]

    Do you want to see the latest on how the progressives plan to take down our lead in one of the few remaining areas of technology in which we are still the world’s gold standard?  Tolerated by formerly science-driven institutions like MIT, the ACLU with activist allies like the ‘AI Now Initiative’ are starting to hold conferences at which they lament that “opaque and potentially(sic) biased mathematical models are remaking our lives—and neither the companies responsible for developing them nor the government is interested in addressing the problem.”

    The growing hysteria is built around the proposition that “algorithmic bias is shaping up to be a major societal issue at a critical moment in the evolution of machine learning and AI.”  Has anyone else discovered this “major societal issue”?  The claim of the hysteria leaders is that the machine algos will somehow discriminate against the minorities and the poor, because they were either surreptitiously programmed to do such dastardly things, or they learned to do it on their own (gasp!) when given an objective utility function to maximize along with copious amounts of realworld data.

    The Left’s activist elites have decided that government should somehow start regulating the kind of AIs we can use in our businesses and homes.  These limited knowledge types (aka ignorant) believe that they can dictate through regulatory means how machine intelligence should continue to develop and grow so that it’s the best for the most.  This is the shared and overwhelming hubris of collectivists.  According to their initiatives, we should prepare to soon see establishment of the Bureau of Socially Sensitive AI that will attempt to vet every machine-learning utility function, and then test/certify the performance of such AIs before they can be used by consumers or commerce.  (more here)

    It is argued that such intervention will make the machine algos more transparent, sensitive to human needs, and prevent the usual litany of discriminants that promote racism, sexism, homophobia, gender bias, xenophobia, … , you know the drill.  Of course, those who are studied in the arts and technologies of smart machines know that this is madness right from the gitgo.  It also hearkens back to how Stalin sank Soviet agriculture by setting up bureaucrats under anti-geneticist Trofim Lysenko to tell the collective farmers how much to plant of what and when.

    Today, scientific and technical knowledge expands at an unimaginable pace, and bureaucracies (government and corporatists) react, if at all, at a snail’s pace.  Most of what they claim to know and write into gun-imposed laws and regulations is already false.  Ronald Bailey expands on this in ‘Half the Facts You Know are Probably Wrong’.

    But all this is still possible with the country now firmly in the grip of dumbth (q.v.).  In the past and in the large, human ignorance was mitigated by market forces as economist Walter Williams once more points out in his ‘Human Ignorance and Market Genius'.  His "bottom line is that ignorance is omnipresent. The worst kind of ignorance is not knowing just how ignorant we are. That leads to the devastating pretense of knowledge that’s part and parcel of the vision of intellectual elites and politicians.”  And that “devastating pretense” is what overwhelmingly impacts the votes of the most desperate and deluded among us.  Just listen to their voices as they mass and march on our malls and streets.

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    10 comments on “Biased Algorithms” – Advent of Politically Correct AI

  • Ruminations – 26mar18 (updated 30mar18)

    George Rebane

    More illegal aliens (Dreamers or whatever) became criminals when/if they worked on any part of Hillary’s campaign in 2016.  Federal law specifically prohibits foreign nationals from working on or contributing to candidates’ campaigns in federal elections. The records should still be there if they were paid by check or if they paid by check.  Anyone want to make book on whether those crack lamestream journalists will pick up on this.

    And speaking of real Russian collusion.  It now turns out that Russia has for some time supported US anti-fracking activists with payments through various front organizations.  Since Mueller is looking for Russian collusion wherever the evidence leads.  You think anyone will notice if he doesn’t put too much effort into this part of the investigation?

    The Dems are having a hell of time trying to figure out how to position their ‘Trump loves Putin’ narrative after the Presidents long list of sanctions against Vlad is coming out, now also containing the largest and most meaningful support of ally UK by kicking out 60 Russky intelligence attaches and closing their Seattle consulate.  I’m sure they’ll think of something, even if it’s only changing the subject.

    And staying on the Dems a bit – how about their refusal to confirm Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Germany?  Openly gay, Mr Ric Grenell, cleared by the Senate’s Foreign Relations subcommittee, is opposed by Democrats for alleged anti-woman tweets in the man’s past, they won’t even let it come up for a vote.  Another twist in their party-above-country movement.

    [27mar18 update] Startling numbers on the so-called Hillary states – it seems that they ain't what their promoters claim to be.  (more here)  H/T to correspondent.

    The weekend's kiddie crusade headcount of kiddies was disappointing.  Only about one in ten were under 18.  The rest were made up of the usual activists and leftwing loyal followers.

    [28mar18 update]  Best NRA spokesman since Obama has turned out to be former SCOTUS justice Stevens who now publicly has confirmed what we all have known to be the Left's final solution for the Second Amendment by calling for its repeal (here).  And as I commented in the last Sandbox - the First and Second Amendments are joined at the hip. For evidence of that, just take a look at countries where their First is proscribed because their Second doesn't exist. And for that, you can start with the EU countries before going afield into the less developed world.

    [29mar18 update]  The politicization of justice in America can be debated until the cows come home.  One can make the case that we never had  apolitical justice in our land.  But, I do believe the debate about that can now be laid to rest, ALL applications of justice today are political.  And the more loudly some worthy stands up to deny it, the easier it is to use his very own citations to debunk his denial.

    [30mar18 update]  Contemplating the evolution of blacks protesting since the days of the dignified and powerful demonstrations that were led by the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, I range between mystified and saddened.  Specifically, today we see the blacks’ public response to the tragic police killing of Stephon Clark showcased by his brother Stevante.  Why do African-American leaders tolerate and even encourage such distinguishing behavior of angry black demonstrators that continues to support the stereotype of blacks held by many non-blacks?  Is it not in the interest of the black community to return to the demonstrably successful methods and manners of MLK?

    Posted at

    in

    ,
    29 comments on Ruminations – 26mar18 (updated 30mar18)

RR FUNDAMENTALS

About the Bastiat Triangle

Glossary & Semantics

A Conservetarian Credo

Commenting Rules

RECENT POSTS

RECENT COMMENTS

CATEGORIES

20 comments on Corporatism in America – An update