Shaky Danny

  A ridiculous amount of effort is spent criticizing Hillary Clinton’s character. When elections are that close, every infraction is magnified. There is a much simpler material explanation. It is pathetic how cheap Congress is. Most of their time is spent on phone banks raising money. There was a moment when it looked like Chicago’s alderman Vrdolyak would be sent to Congress. Imagine: -This is a billion-dollar appropriation? I get more than this for a zoning variance. Occasionally money rains on Washington. World War II was cost plus. Johnson unleashed Taiwan. When Nixon made the China deal, they had so much cash they were shoving it into filing cabinets. Reaganauts were Nixon wannabes. Bush Sr. held up the Saudis for Kuwait. Hillary Clinton was queen. She shook down healthcare so hard their teeth rattled. Everyone in Washington should love Hillary Clinton. The Saudis had to sit down, and Ross Perot complained about the service. Insurance and Pharmacy were in a bidding war t...

  Anyone who says “peace in the Mideast” should be slapped. They are announcing that what follows is stupid. Peace never had anything to do with the Mideast. The statement is arrogant. How would you like to hear “peace in the US”? American policy in the Mideast should be mute. It is disgusting to hear Americans advise and excuse each group their atrocities. Americans are never short of advice. “Debate” in the US has circled around who’s better. It is not going to convince anyone that they should shut up and take it because their families had it coming.   No one has rounded up their criminals. Here is a quick review of America’s relationship, keeping an American eye for the man behind the curtain and the emperor’s clothes: Before World War II, the countries of the world refused Jewish refugees from Germany. Germans made that a big deal. During and after the war Churchill sent Jewish refugees to Palestine. British grabbed Palestine from the Ottomans. Some Pan Arabism is no...

Brandon Johnson has just been elected mayor of Chicago. Except Byrne we have always elected lawyers, even prosecutors, in the hope that they would avoid indictment. So far, they have. Johnson is the first schoolteacher. As a teacher Johnson is trying to approach crime from a Confucious perspective, systemically. Here are some obvious concerns: A court clerk just made the mistake of self-publishing a book about a recent case. In general police, prosecutors, judges and even clerks should be cautious publicly expressing opinions that could be thrown back at them, endangering testimony, and convictions. It is unfortunate that people closest to issues are precisely the ones constrained from public discussion. Police are not screened for clerical aptitude. Clerical tasks are a major part of police work, especially investigations. Back in the 90’s the federal government confronted domestic violence. Their solution was the development of a form that must be filed if the husband was not arr...

  Recently there has been some fluff that we couldn’t find American workers to build a new integrated circuit plant. Our workers say it is because they are not getting enough money. Boomers bemoan: -Our kids are too dumb to get the jobs we used to have. Depend on Americans to find the racist reason even when it is against us. Foreign workers may get less than citizens, but that is not enough for a business decision, particularly on a subsidized plant. As I explain in this blog in Income Disparity and Bribes , in 1969 America removed discretionary fund as an accounting entry. This has several consequences. Companies moved the amount in that entry to executive compensation, so it is now after tax. Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has a graph showing executive compensation on an upward diagonal from 1970 on. CEOs used to get ten times base earnings. Take the difference then apply the tax rate gives us the total compensation, for the bribes and kickbacks require...

  I recently learned about pistol compensators. These are vents you can install on your pistol to lessen recoil. Since the recoil is what drives the reload, you have to be careful the compensator doesn’t jam the gun. This is a variant of the gas operated action on assault rifles that allows them to be the small plastic toy looking guns that are so popular. Shooting guns used to be more difficult. You can find YouTube videos of people shooting old rifles that hit them in the face because they are not used to the recoil. There are also laser pointers you can attach to the gun. Fire a round into the target at the range you expect to use. Fix the laser dot on the bullet impact. From then on, within range, your shots should hit the dot. Eventually we will have the Tom Swift electronic rifle. The gun won’t need a hammer anymore because it will fire with a spark. This will allow the cartridge to be held still and contained with no blow back. The cartridge may not have a case. Even if ...

The Supreme Court functions as a safety valve. When the court fails, it is a big mess, we have had a civil war. In 1974 people were voting with their feet. Illegal abortion was so prevalent that the court had to act. The prisoner’s dilemma underlies our concept of justice. Say a juror is fixed. How does the juror know that they will be paid? If they are paid ahead of time, how does the fixer know the juror will stick? At this time, it has been announced that there are five judges who will rule against abortion. The early decision is a blatant loud fart. As Biden explained, it ignores the ninth amendment. The ninth amendment is intended to prevent this argument. As Pogo said: -I got rights I ain’t even used yet! If privacy or women’s equality are rights, then abortion should be legal. Buttigieg explained why abortion, whatever the term, should be a private family, not an arbitrary government decision.  It is a difficult medical and personal decision made in hard circumstance...

Danley, Paddock’s girlfriend, appears to be receiving undue attention. Perhaps because she and Campos are the only ones involved who aren’t white. Vegas police haven’t presented well. I’m thinking that Reno 911 is more real than satire. Paddock seems to have given Danley the opportunity for a fat lawsuit. Maybe it’s just that all parties are concerned with liability but there is smoke. Did Paddock belong to somebody? Odd that Paddocks tax returns have not yet been released. I doubt that he was operational, those guys been there, done that. He could have been in a support function.  The only operational goofs I can think of are Oswald and McVeigh. Some of the smoke is Paddock as “professional gambler”. Supposedly, with comps, if you play big slots you can profit. This is why Vegas has so many rich gamblers and the casinos are broke. When gamblers play for comps they identify themselves to the casino. Everyone knows the machines are throttled. There is nothing illegal about ...

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...

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 ...

Any time someone gives you a rate for anything, it’s been jiggered.  The unemployment rate is a well-known example. In 2012 the reported unemployment rate was around 8%. If I take the total reported employment of around 134,000,000 then apply it to the total population between 20 and 64 of about 162,000,000 I get around 17%. That seems a little high for 2012 but it gives you an idea of the variance. At this point economists start throwing smoke.  Most economics seems to be disputes about rates.  Disability, yadda yadda, looking for work, employability, underemployment, I’ve known a lot of deranged people who have jobs.  A good rule of thumb seems to be double the reported rate. Google real unemployment and double the rate seems the general conclusion. Given the tremendous amount of data available and studied we should have immediate, accurate and complete information segmented across any desired index of our unemployment.  Given that we don’t it is obvio...

I am not going to get into the issues of truth and justice because I am not a good advocate for that.    I think there are some teachable moments in the Martin/Zimmerman case.    It is so rare that children might pay attention to us older folk and this instance may give an opportunity.   Given that all phone calls are recorded it seems to me that Mr. Martin’s last call should be subpoenaed from the phone company. There was some doubt about testimony that could be answered and it would give a more reliable timeline of events as well as state of mind.    The precise GPS coordinates may be helpful as well. http://open.salon.com/blog/paul_j_orourke/2013/07/17/where_was_trayvon_the_missing_minutes There has been an observation that the administrations characterization of vigilante justice could also be applied to our foreign policy: http://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/holders_amazing_anti_drone_war_speech/ I think we should hunt down all vigilantes. ...

This should be read at poetry slams, open mic events, or wherever writers might congregate. All movies, romance, comedy or drama are really horror movies. The one thing that cinema does well is draw you into their premise and then surprise and shock you.    That sense of outrage as you find yourself sympathizing with the loser, cheering for some victorious social deviant and then realizing its absurdity is what makes movies so entertaining. The last good action movie I saw was  Heathers , the humor, violence and sex seemed believable to me. I liked the premise that adults would accept a rash of teenage suicides that were really homicides.  Body Heat  was good; the combination of mystery and sympathy for the villains enchanted me.  The Three Stooges  shorts were a respectable depiction of violence. Most action movies suck.    The hero gets captured, the villain gets killed.    This is because they have to have the dialogue betwe...

This is an example of the dog that didn’t bark.    Arafat was killed by polonium poisoning.    This poison has the property of leaking residue all over the place, which residue is traceable to whichever nuclear reactor created it.    Any intelligence agency worth anything has its own private sample of this poison and determined which country killed Arafat and no one is saying. If it were Israel the stool pigeons would have reached a crescendo.    This leaves one likely candidate. The poisoning of  Litvinenko two years later by polonium seemed odd. It appeared that Russia intended to put a big greasy thumb print on the murder as a warning to other dissidents.    Were they also waving a big sign pointing at Arafat? Currently the US government has claimed the right to murder terrorists.    But this was the poisoning of a world leader in 2004. It appears that taking out Saud’s stooge was irresistible to the Bush admini...

You would think that if econometrics and modeling had any validity at all then the issue of the cause and resolution of the great depression would be resolved.    Obviously they don’t.    The debate generally centers on some well propounded common sense axiom that has been violated and the ensuing consequence as proof of its validity.    A good synopsis is in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Depression It is generally held that World War II ended the great depression.    This correlation has been unfortunate for America’s self-perception and foreign policy. The debate for whichever cause is met by instances where such stupidity did not cause the great depression. I offer prohibition as a major factor.    The untraced illegal flows of capital may have severely burdened all the other extenuating circumstances.    The opium trade should also be considered.    When investors can get muc...

The OJ case was remarkable in that it encapsulated all the deficiencies apparent in our criminal justice system.    Part of the difficulty of recognizing the problem is that it is so easy to dismiss incompetence without recognizing its systemic nature.    The vagaries of state law and tradition make it easier to dismiss aberrant events in other jurisdictions. Illinois laughs at the foibles of Wisconsin judges and police. Even the antics of Buffalo Grove and Arlington Heights are merely sources of entertainment to the rest of us, unless you are the one being stopped.    Regardless of his guilt, if OJ had been tried in Chicago he would have been convicted.   As OJ demonstrated in the Bronco episode he couldn't even break the speed limit.    He was framed in Vegas for running his mouth.    He didn't murder his ex and her boyfriend, he hired it done. Put yourself in the shoes of the Los Angeles police.    OJ’s plane is in...

I am always startled at my own innocence and naiveté.    Every Chicagoan knows that the police killed the Moran gang.    The papers reported it as: -Men in police uniforms. This may be the origin of that journalist’s trick that persists to this day: -Men in government army uniforms, etc. Of course, who wears official uniforms?    Officials, but that would be in poor taste, and might lead to misadventure.   Yet I was surprised when I read  Get Capone  by Eig; I think most of us assumed that the hit had been ordered by the gangster establishment.     This had always been puzzling, as Capone usually observed the proper and traditional forms.    What Eig suggests is that the Chicago police operation may have actually belonged to the Chicago police. Capone was coming under indictment, his grip was loosening and the Police, with the backing of the FBI, wished to reassert themselves as equals rather than juniors...

Occasionally you will read a business story about some great CEO flying in to save a sale.    At first you will nod approvingly about a hard working executive protecting his company.    But then you might wonder, doesn’t this company have sales people? Is he going to fix general ledger next week and lead the research break through the week after that?    The answer is that the Chief Executive is the only one left who can lay down the cash briefcase. In the old days, the disparity between lowest and highest compensation in a company was about 10 to 15 to 1. Now the disparity is enormous.    Like most government disasters, this was caused by reform.    Back in the sixties a Texas firm demonstrating good old fashioned American ingenuity was caught paying incentives to its sales employees out of its discretionary account.    Recognizing a loophole of gigantic proportions that anyone could use, Congress with the advice of the IRS...