Shaky Danny

I don’t know what happened. Dope means they toyed with her and that is why she broke. I hate the word surreal. We all have some commitment to Bayesian analysis. Recognize that it is a probability and all probabilities include frustration as an outcome. Calvinism, the widely held belief enshrining Bayesian outcomes that things are as they are, frequently fails. This may be explained as fractal dynamic or failures of framing, but may simply be the consequence of chance. Confusing improbable with surreal simply means that your smug world view has been challenged by experience. Likely is not always so. Explication still requires likely. We are indisposed to accept the miraculous, even when it is so. In the case of Sandra Bland the difficult anomaly is that she died stoned. If you believe that she somehow smuggled the dope in herself, I suggest you attempt it. If all the various formality and process of incarceration guarantee anything, they ensure that you will not have marijuana...

Warfare has countless examples of ignoring the obvious, cavalry before World War I, fortified emplacements before World War II, techno-war before Vietnam; generals begin fighting each war with the lessons learned from the past. Now we have fighter planes. Drones are currently successful because they are used for ground support. This is a mission that has long been neglected. It is difficult to justify expenditure on fixed wing propeller aircraft even though they are the best means of assisting ground troops. Drones have stepped into this vacuum.  The next obvious step in Drone evolution is to give them jet capability. This is a disruptive technology. Defense companies are disinterested because it will end their expensive all-purpose fighter jets. Air forces don’t want to lose their fighter pilot culture. What a tremendous profit opportunity and with such a low entry level cost. Just as electric cars have made power engineers sexy again, stealth given opportunity to rad...

Proposed Congressional legislation: 1. The National Security Agency is only authorized to intercept communications. Any other such authorization it may require must be obtained from the Defense Department. 2. Nuclear weapons can only be launched with the initiative of the president and the four senior military commanders. There is no individual initiative to launch and any attempt to supersede this initiative nullifies it. 3. The President has no authority to initiate military action. All such action must be initiated by Congress. Congress must annually explicitly approve all military missions. Loss of approval ends the mission. Military violation of a nation’s sovereignty without explicit consent of congress receives minimum sentence of five years.  It has become obvious that our nation’s electorate does not respect the executive. For the safety of the country and the world, Congress must act. National Security Authority has been abused on several occasions, most notably ...

In the south, the British were freeing slaves. They were the side of freedom. Admittedly not enough to make a difference, else the British would have won. Up north, Attucks, who was a seaman and used to being treated even was just cutting up. John Adams, defending the British soldiers who fired on the crowd at, their trial, described Attucks as one of a “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mullatoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs". Attucks was upset about impressment and competition for jobs, ignoring slavery. One of the reasons for the revolution that Attucks started was to maintain slavery. A chump is someone who ignores the big picture: The legendary black sniper who fought for the confederacy or all the slaves who returned with Lee from Gettysburg. The 442 nd infantry regiment of Japanese Americans who fought while their families were interred. All pales in the face of 2.5 million Indians fighting for Britain after repetitive starvation holocausts contin...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently excoriated a reporter who revealed Emanuel’s travel plan to Cuba. It is generally thought that he was taking umbrage after a difficult interview. But most reporters are respectful of itinerary and family information, and Emanuel may well have had reasonable expectations that were violated. This brings me to the legendary example of the danger of this sort of privacy violation. One of the good things about People Magazine is that it provides an archive. So I will give you the offending article directly. This was in the Chatter column 11/10/1980 : “Hanging 5 Reportedly worth more than $150 million, John Lennon stands to augment that considerably when his new album, Double Fantasy, which he made with wife Yoko Ono, comes out this month. Where does all that money go? Well, the ex-Beatle has been investing heavily of late in the works of a young artist. Patrons of a gallery on Manhattan's Upper West Side saw one of the canvases when an employee of ...

Conspiracy theory is in disrepute because it has become a religion.  People want to believe that there is someone in charge who knows what they are doing.  Just because there isn’t someone in charge who knows what they are doing doesn’t mean that people don’t conspire.  Watergate is where conspiracy theory becomes pop art criticism. I have a possibility. Everyone imagines a conversation where Nixon is told that he has to take the fall and he says in that Nixon voice: -I’m not going without a pardon. My question is when that conversation takes place and with whom. People naturally put that conversation at the end of his service.  This doesn’t make logistical sense unless it occurred at least as far back as the second election. Nixon has to be complicit in his own impeachment. Why would Nixon want to be impeached?  Because he required a pardon. Tricky Dicky, the evil monster with the world on his enemies list, knew that he would spend the rest of his li...