Shaky Danny

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...

No one believes Trump will be President. They fail to realize that he will, of course, change all his positions after he is nominated: -Of course I was lying, how else would I get the nomination?  Usually politicians shade their position rather than flat out contradict it. But we are talking Trump: -Abortion is necessary. You think I’m stupid? Hey, I’ll kill the kids myself. If Carson can be president, I can be a doctor. -Open borders, everybody gets in. Why check? They can’t be worse than what we’ve got. -When I’m president, I’ll turn the Pentagon into a combination mall, condos and offices. -If Warren won’t be Vice President then I want her in treasury.  -No more Obamacare. We will have traditional Republican single payer. -Legalize it, all of it. -Get the Police off the streets, safer for everyone. -My first act as president will be to line Goldman Sachs against the wall and shoot them. Citibank? What Citibank? HSBC goes to Guantanamo, after we send t...

At first I was sort of pleased with the increase in declared atheism. I told my son: -I just don’t want to hear about flying saucers. I suspected that most atheists had some sort of belief; we just hadn’t added the conspiracy or UFO check boxes yet.  But now I’m getting irked. I had blamed Benjamin Franklin. Once lightning was explained, God didn’t seem as necessary. But there seems to be a general failure to declare, not just religion, but anything else. Is other going to become its own gang? Caucasian is a racist term, predicated on the belief that we all came from some group in the Caucasus that was considered attractive.  Colors seem to be acceptable for black and white, but the brown, yellow and red people don’t approve. Now we need ten check boxes for sex: -Sex? -Yes I can see why people resist classification. I’m worried that we will lose culture. Christine recently dragged me to church and they had a reading from Jonah. I don’t know of any other stor...

Sorry don't know where else to post. Lot of bloviating. There are probably a lot of reasons for this dumb message and the messages are similar. Good argument for better messaging. What seems to be happening in my case is that Avast, what do you want, it's free, is pushing out a software upgrade for windows 10 using its windows 7 program. This breaks everything better than a virus could.  If you can bring up Avast there will be a message that a program upgrade is waiting in the software updates section, pushing that through, restarting each time it asked, fixed it for me. Then it broke again. Guessing Avast is trying to tell me something, perhaps pay them. Uninstalled Avast then things worked again. Avast sent me a very nice email explaining how to uninstall. If you don't want their web service then troubleshoot program(right click) gets you to control panel. Hello defender.

George Washington – France John Adams – Dutch pirates Thomas Jefferson – France James Madison – France James Monroe – England John Quincy Adams –England Andrew Jackson – Dutch pirates Martin Van Buren – Dutch pirates William Henry Harrison –Dutch pirates John Tyler -Dutch pirates James K Polk – Dutch pirates Zachary Taylor – England Millard Fillmore – Spain Franklin Pierce - no James Buchanan - no Abraham Lincoln – no Andrew Johnson – no Ulysses S. Grant – England Rutherford B. Hayes – England James A. Garfield – no Chester A. Arthur – England Grover Cleveland – England Benjamin Harrison – no William McKinley – no Theodore Roosevelt – England William Howard Taft – no Woodrow Wilson – dupe of England Warren G. Harding – no Calvin Coolidge – no Herbert Hoover – Germany Franklin D. Roosevelt – England Harry S. Truman – Taiwan Dwight D. Eisenhower – Taiwan John F. Kennedy – no Lyndon B. Johnson – Taiwan Richard Nixon – ...

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...

The hardest part about managing anyone, including spies, is initiative. When someone is acting as your employee, whether as a spy or in any other capacity, you are responsible for their actions. They don’t know the big picture. They can’t know the big picture. You can’t have them running around knocking things over and messing everything up. Spies, like any other employee have to take direction.  James Bond better not kill anyone unless it is authorized.  That is what is so wrong with the Booth conspiracy. The idea that any spy ring would act without authorization makes as much sense as you going to work and deciding what your job assignment is.  Even if Booth himself decided to kill Lincoln, it is difficult to believe that the rest of the ring would go along without authorization. Abraham Lincoln is the only president known to have been killed by a conspiracy. There have been suspicions about others. The fact of eight convicted and four executed confirms conspir...

I am a big fan of the unsaid obvious.  Perhaps the best example was the fact that AIDS is passed by anal intercourse.  Sorry Magic. This deference of reality to propriety demonstrates the dangers of hypocrisy.  I remember the idiot virgin clubs where they proudly refrained from sex, because of all the dangers, then got that goofy sly look and mumbled about other things you could do.  Lazy eye is a good current example. If you look up strabismus, they will tell you that the cause is unknown. This is a lie. If you look up fetal alcohol syndrome, one of the symptoms is strabismus. It may be that there are other causes. But fetal alcohol causes strabismus. If you have a cast to your eye, perhaps your arms and your temper are a little short; chances are Mom was hitting it. Some people might consider this a lapse in good taste, but I think it is preferable to recognize a developmental disorder rather than a hereditary one. If they were truthful rather than pusill...