Life never knows the return of spring. --John Gay in Beggar's Opera
I saw an interview with an investor with a large short position on Tesla. He says the company makes no money, is years behind Ford and the Germans in engineering and is planning a car in 2020 for which no production facilities are yet built. He say the company is worthless. Worthless!
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
One arms dealer was suspected of reporting directly to Putin.
The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
This was a surprisingly difficult story to find.
Slate has an angry article about Hallmark, the old movie channel, and their annual Christmas movies. The gist is that these old film not only are irrelevant, they are vicious and filled with anti-minority and sexist material. "In 2017, the network is premiering 21 original Christmas movies (up from 20 last year)—42 hours of sugary, sexist, preposterously plotted, plot hole–festooned, belligerently traditional, ecstatically Caucasian cheer." So says the author.
Ordinarily I would come up with something dismissive, like a reference to the Black Madonna, but this is becoming more than stupid. This has moved beyond the silly into the more dangerous irrational credo of the revolutionary devotee. After all, Marxism was stupid.
Who is...Lisa Bloom?
A sign of the times:
Munger writes, "Take down those statues. Put them in museums, preserve the memory of what they symbolize, but don’t give them places of honor. Because the statues don’t honor the brave sacrifice of the soldiers in the era of the Confederacy. They honor the cowards and racists who re-enslaved black citizens in the era of Jim Crow."
How he knows this, I do not know.
A report from The Hill states that attorney Lisa Bloom had solicited wealthy donors and tabloid media to pay women who agreed to come forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct.
Reuters, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and others reported that special counsel Robert Mueller's office had subpoenaed President Donald Trump's records from Deutsche Bank. Trump's attorney says it hadn't. ABC reported that candidate Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election. He didn't (as far as we know). The New York Times ran a story claiming that K.T. McFarland, a former member of the Trump transition team, had acknowledged collusion. She hadn't. Then, CNN topped off the week by falsely reporting that the Trump campaign had been offered access to hacked Democratic National Committee emails before they were published. It wasn't.
....If we are to accept the special pleadings of journalists, we have to believe these were all honest mistakes. They may be. But a person might then ask: Why is it that every one of the dozens of honest mistakes is prejudiced in the very same way? Why hasn't there been a single major honest mistake that diminishes the Trump-Russia collusion story? Why is there never an honest mistake that indicts Democrats?
Yitu's Dragonfly Eye is a facial recognition system developed in China. "Our machines can very easily recognise you among at least 2 billion people in a matter of seconds," says the chief executive and co-founder of Yitu.
Currently, the U.S. federal government spends about $2.4 trillion per year--about 12% of GDP--on entitlement programs. This amounts to $7,500 per person annually. Only 48% of this spending goes to people officially classified as poor. The federal government provides more than $50,000 per year in Social Security and Medicare benefits to retired middle-income couples. And this is at a time when almost half of households headed by people under age 65 have incomes less than $50,000.
Currently, the U.S. federal government spends about $2.4 trillion per year--about 12% of GDP--on entitlement programs. This amounts to $7,500 per person annually. Only 48% of this spending goes to people officially classified as poor. The federal government provides more than $50,000 per year in Social Security and Medicare benefits to retired middle-income couples. And this is at a time when almost half of households headed by people under age 65 have incomes less than $50,000.
[Adam] Smith believed that the Britain of his day was the most advanced nation in the world precisely because it had, through the serendipitous unfolding of chance, circumstance, and the intended and unintended consequences of individuals’ choices, established laws and institutions that protected individuals’ independence and security. But he saw this British success at risk due to the influence of the self-serving principles of the mercantile system.--Evensky
Google moved to strip from its news search results publications that mask their country of origin or intentionally mislead readers, a further step to curb the spread of fake news that has plagued internet companies this year.
The Dodgers dumped $47.5 million worth of contracts on the Braves, with first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, starting pitchers Scott Kazmir and Brandon McCarthy and infielder Charlie Culbertson going to Atlanta. The Dodgers get stuck with outfielder Matt Kemp and the two years, $43 million on his deal.
Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Clayton Kershaw, Dallas Keuchel, Josh Donaldson, Charlie Blackmon, Andrew Miller, Craig Kimbrel and perhaps David Price all become free agents.
I wonder if any time in history a people complained so much about a tax cut.
The Amtrak train that derailed in Washington state, killing three and injuring dozens, was traveling at 80 miles an hour in a zone with a speed limit of 30 mph.
The news is really scary. I try not to watch hard news but I watched CNN last night and it was a relentless assault on Trump from his policy to his posture. Every discussion was framed negatively and, when it wasn't, the moderator refocused the discussion. They even dragged him into the Amtrak wreck. While FOX is similar, they really see themselves as entertainment and not hard news, but CNN thinks highly of itself. I then watched South Park who did a parody of Trump critics. The whole TV experience was dizzying.
Ceci concludes that a year of education raises IQ by 1-3 points; another study says 1-5 points. This is usually explained by the "teaching to the test" effect.
I'm so confused. The Braves traded Matt Kemp to the Dodgers for Brandon McCarthy, Scott Kazmir, Charlie Culberson, Adrian Gonzalez and cash considerations. The Dodgers reportedly have no intention of keeping Matt Kemp and will likely release him. The Braves have absolutely no intention of keeping Gonzalez, and released him.
"It is truly remarkable that the advocates of the restrictive system should pretend to consider your memorialists as wild theorists, when there cannot be a plainer matter of fact than that if a man pays two dollars more for his coat, his plough, or the implements of his trade, it is a loss to him, which he must pay out of the proceeds of his industry, and that the aggregate of those individual losses is an actual national loss." This is from Albert Gallitin.
17% of newlyweds in the United States now marry someone of a different race or ethnicity, a fivefold increase since 1967, when interracial marriage was legalized.
The Steeler-Patriot game was the highest rated NFL game on CBS in two years.
Canada became the 9th country to allow a third gender, rather than male or female, on passports and government documents. That came two months after country number 8, Pakistan.
California became the first US state to legally recognize nonbinary genders, and Germany’s top court ruled that lawmakers must legally recognize a third gender from birth.
Researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have confirmed that microscopic fossils discovered in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old piece of rock in Western Australia are the oldest fossils ever found and indeed the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth.
AAAaaaaannnnndddddd.....a picture of one of the microfossils discovered in a sample of rock recovered from the Apex Chert, a rock formation in western Australia
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