Shaky Danny

  A problem good students have is that when they are discouraged from understanding something, they take the hint. I’m attempting to boil away some of the mystical malarkey around our everyday understanding of inflation. Don’t demand to understand or agree with every detail. Inflation is a catchall for rising prices. I don’t have the prescription for rising prices. What I can do is categorize inflation first by currency and then by class. Use of this generic term obscures the distinction between currency inflation, our currencies value against other currencies and domestic inflation when our prices increase but stay in range of other nations or the price of oil. At this point there may be some free market(oxymoron) apologists who make their living prattling that currency inflation can be ignored: -The market will adjust. Cheaper currency means greater competitiveness in the world markets. This will lead to innovation and growth in the cheaper country. After which we all h...

  I’m reluctant to attempt analysis of DJT’s war. It is easy to confuse consequences with causes. One obvious result is that US is now the principal supplier of liquid natural gas (LNG) to Europe. After Russia was forced out when their pipeline was blown up, Qatar was partners with US selling LNG to Europe. Now Qatar is struggling while Saudi Arabia is moving oil to China out its back door. Given the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Qatar this appears providential. You may be dismissive of this as a cause. How much revenue is received as against war expenditure? What you fail to grasp is the much larger financial value of the new relationships and contracts. Again, who knows how those decisions were made. But US now supplies almost all LNG to Europe.   I find President Grants struggle with his Great Financial Depression instructive. Grant recognized a presidential responsibility for the economy, advocated several innovative solutions and then, unpopular as it was, ended US...

  How do I write anything as horrifying or ridiculous as reality?  When we tell stories we want to interest you. We fear the trite and banal.  There was a child, Shane Tamura, who played football in high school. Later he decided that resultant brain injury had ruined his life. Being an American he got a rifle to shoot up NFL headquarters. But he got confused and shot up the wrong office. Did he laugh before he killed himself? Was he careful not to shoot his head? Another child, Dick Cheney, decided he wasn’t cut out for lineman, academics or the law and went into government. He successfully supported executive expansion only to see the clown become president. The irony only apparent to him at the end of his life. Charlie Kirk, a debate me bro raised prodigious money argued that we must have guns and being consistent, that meant that people would be killed for their opinions.   A fan agreed with him. The worst court decision ever made. Supreme Court has decided ...

  In my book Conspiracy 101 I criticize Marx for not realizing until after his book Capital was written that capital is not only the means of production; producing earnings, but it also has the amazing quality of expanding financially. You can borrow on capital. Once financial instruments are created based on future values they multiply, they are traded and speculated on. When understanding events, this financial value is far more impactful than simple earnings. Recent events have reminded me that capital can also collapse. The value of assets is aspirational. Even with earnings people can perceive that the future value will not justify the investment. Oil is an excellent current example. Even with oil earnings you can see that people aren’t anxious to invest. US is not building new refineries to process our light crude. Canada builds pipelines but again a refinery is too much. Venezuela bought US refineries but even with its huge reserves no one wants to invest in a new Venezue...

This is a list of leaders who were assisted by the US and were problematic: 1. Adolph Hitler Avrill Harriman 2. Ho Chi Minh Charles Fenn 3. Sadam Hussein Kim Roosevelt 4. Osama Bin Laden Michael G. Vickers 5. Manuel Noreiga George HW Bush 6. Vladmir Putin Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright 7. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Kim Roosevelt 8. Ngo Dinh Diem John F. Kennedy 9. Mobutu Sese Seko Larry Devlin 10. Rafael Trujillo Major James J. MacLean 11. Juan Bosch Richard Naradof Goodwin 12. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Michael G. Vickers 13. Jalaluddin Haqqani Michael G. Vickers 14. Boris Yeltsin Warren Christopher 15. Jean-Bertrand Aristide Ira Kurzban 16. Victoriano Huerta Henry Lane Wilson 17. Syngman Rhee Millard Preston Goodfellow 18. Husni al-Za'im Kim Roosevelt 19. Gamal Abdel Nasser Kim Roosevelt 20. Ferdinand Marcos Lyndon Johnson 21. Napoleon Bonaparte Thomas Jefferson 22. Pol Pot Michael Eiland 23. Josep...

  Historian’s emphasis on leadership and the decisions leaders make ignores the ordinary material facts surrounding those decisions. These histories of leadership over circumstance are favored by those in power and their subordinates. Material conditions are ignored in favor of personalities. This personification obscures the obvious. But there are moments in history where individuals made the difference. Here are some possibilities: Another obscured area is who the decision makers are. The Hamilton musical based on Ron Chernow’s biography attempts to redress this by giving glory to a functionary. But ignores that Alexander Hamilton was working for Robert Morris. Hamilton was on Washington’s staff, representing Morris. Thank heavens he was there to summon Morris when Washington, scared of heading south, was about to attack New York rather than Yorktown. Morris paid to transport Washingtons army to Yorktown. Imagine how the French would have felt if we hadn’t supported them at Yor...

  Back in the 60’s when the Earth was cool Fuzzy Logic computer programming had a moment.   Rather than strict decisions, the program totaled weights into a variable then tested for the decision. If the expert was thinking that way, I suppose that code might be easier to read. We might think of that as coding a synapse. If you wanted to juice it up, you could give the expert a screen to set the weights or write more fuzzy logic to determine the weight conditions. I worked on a program that had started fuzzy. The fuzzy had been replaced by strict determinist logic. It was more important to be consistent than be right. Artificial Intelligence follows the same path. At some point the learning is turned off and the final decisions are hard coded. AI gives the specification then people lack patience and value predictability.   I have noticed the Waymo effect. Terrible name for self-driving cars, sounds like whammo. Initially people were worried, then we realized that Way...