Hammurabi Lives!

 

                              Hammurabi Lives!

Things that recur and recur and recur may be telling you something.

The tribal law of retaliation, (Lex Talionis = Tit-for-Tat), was written by the ancient lawmaker Hammurabi during the period 2285-2242 BC. It has been ridiculed as crude and primitive but probably was a real philosophical advance for the time. It was actually an effort to eliminate tribal justice that would hold groups responsible for individual acts and individuals for group acts. The Feud. Hatfield and McCoy thinking.

What does this "primitive " thinking remind you of? Right. Identity politics.

Ours is a primitive time, disguised by Chanel and noble proclamations.

Aristocracy

 

                                                                      Aristocracy

The Supreme Court vacancy allows the rest of the citizens--and the world--to watch the politicians in all their glory. It will be a crash course on all the problems built into us that the Constitution tries to protect us from. Mendacity, vanity, arrogance, hypocrisy, lust for power will all be on parade while the presumed watchdog, the Press, doesn't bark.

Some, feigning morality and fair play, will urge the Republicans to give up their advantage for the larger, better cause. Usually they would--from weakness, not sensibility--but probably will not this time, certainly to the high-minded criticism of their predatory opponents. But one small thing appeared in the growing discussion that is indicative of the whole, rotten mess. Ms. Ginsburg made a dying wish that the vote on her successor be withheld until the new President is sworn in. As if the seat were a legacy. Something to bequeath.

Hers.

Epigenetics of Despair

We are now in the New Age of Mendacity. Self-deception is not required, but it helps. For example, Trump thinks he is a lion. The Press thinks they are not jackals.


                          Epigenetics of Despair

Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were recently arrested for attacking a police car with Molotov cocktails.

Both are attorneys. This should raise some serious questions. 
Is the orderly legal function of the state seen, by its very agents, to be illegitimate? Is the education of the agents of the courts so inadequate, or the choosing of candidates of such so inadequate, that the citizenry has reason to fear them? And what laws can be broken with impunity? Are the rest of us able to break laws because of our political vision, or for some other reason we see as valid? If so, which ones?
Or, is it only some special people among us that have such privilege?
How does this lawlessness differ from the abusive lawlessness of the police they are protesting?
And, is the damage or failure of this community so great that even achieving the trappings of apparent success, that the rest of the culture admires, is inadequate? If so, what will substitute for the social and economic advances that previous cultures have viewed as their ambition and the evidence of their success?

Civil Asset Forfeiture

Ocasio-Cortez Appears On ‘The Price Is Right,’ Guesses Everything Is Free--Headline from Babylon Bee

Chris a lot better yesterday.

As if we don't have enough problems, the U.S. Senate will soon have an Environmental Justice Caucus, to be chaired by three Democrats: Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Tom Carper of Delaware and Cory Booker of New Jersey. Environmental Justice, no less.

I've never read this: In other words, to make the wiretaps appear to be legitimate, GCHQ and others were quietly and off-the-record approached by Brennan and associates over their fears of what a Trump presidency might mean. The British responded by initiating wiretaps that were then used by Brennan to justify further investigation of Trump’s associates. It was all neatly done and constituted completely illegal spying on American citizens by the U.S. government.

The British support of the operation was coordinated by the then-director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan who has since been forced to resign. 

Warren Buffett, the man behind a print-media empire that includes the Buffalo News and Omaha World-Herald, doesn’t think most newspapers can be saved. By 2016, the newspaper industry’s ad revenue was nearly a third of what it was a decade before, falling to $18 billion from $49 billion, according to Pew Research Center. “It upsets the people in the newsroom to talk that way, but the ads were the most important editorial content from the standpoint of the reader,” Buffett said.

More predictions by geniuses in 1970:

1. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

2. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

3. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

Here's a shocker: Legendary reporter Bob Woodward said Sunday that the FBI and CIA’s reliance on the Steele dossier “needs to be investigated” now that the Mueller report has undercut many of the salacious document’s claims.

Showing downward trends in US temperatures over the last 100 years, especially since the 1930s:

Intellectuals, educators and politicians promised that sticking it to the rich was the path to socialist paradise. As government intervention in the economy—particularly through price and exchange controls—damaged living standards, Venezuelans voted for more of it. Little did they know that by targeting the rights of successful entrepreneurs in the name of social justice, they were setting up the country to fail.--O'Grady

This is the anniversary of the first day of the Easter Rebellion in Dublin, 116. 

                                            Civil Asset Forfeiture

Civil asset forfeiture is a practice that allows law enforcement to seize money and property from someone suspected of wrongdoing, but who has not yet been charged with a crime. Many are never charged with a crime and even still find it difficult, if not impossible, to get their seized property back.

At the heart of this practice rests the belief that a person’s property can be charged with a crime, even if the person themselves have not been formally charged or convicted. And the precedent for this was set in medieval England. During this time, if a person was killed by an object or weapon, that item was essentially charged with murder and forfeited to the British Crown. Initially, the item was sold and the money received was given to charitable organizations. Eventually, though, the monarchy began keeping the money for itself. And thus, the very dangerous precedent of civil asset forfeiture was set, and it would later greatly impact the American founding.

The Navigation Act of 1600, part of the broader Navigation Acts, mandated that any ship bringing cargo into the “New World” had to first go through British checkpoints for inspection. Additionally, any cargo ship leaving the American colonies with goods was also required to be checked before continuing on to its destination. The purpose of these inspections, of course, was to ensure that the Crown got its cut of the loot.

Americans were outraged at the taxation policies and unwilling to convict their fellow citizens under the law.  But by charging the property, and not the “pirates” with a crime, the Brits had found a loophole.

Recognizing that enforcing these policies through port inspections was going to be more difficult than initially expected, Britain began incentivizing captains and crews of the Royal Navy, and other agents of the state, to do their dirty work for them. In exchange for their services, those willing to enforce the rules were allowed to keep the seized ships as prizes, which only made the practice more appealing and, thus, more widespread. The Navigation Acts were one of the grievances that finally led the colonists to revolt against the Crown with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. 

But governments, like people, can rise above principles when money is involved and this country now uses the same technique with criminal cases, particularly drug trafficking.

(from Hunter)

Kamala Harris vs. James Madison

There have been some hearings on judicial nominees. On December 5, Kamala Harris posed a series of written questions to Brian Buescher, President Trump’s nominee for district court in Nebraska. The third question reads as follows:

Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.” Mr. Anderson went on to say that “abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.” Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?

Her follow-ups included “Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization?” and “Have you ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women’s reproductive rights?”

Buescher, a Nebraska native and graduate of the Georgetown Law Center, replied that he joined the Knights when he was 18 years old; that his involvement includes charitable work; and that his job as a judge is to apply the law regardless.

Article Six, Section Three, of the Constitution states, “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or Public Trust under the United States.” But these people are above all that. The foundations of the law must not hamper the righteous. This is a virtual teaching moment as to why the limits of government were designed as they were by the geniuses that formed the American Constitution.

Ex Post Facto

 

Imagine what it would be like if Roe vs. Wade was not only overturned but the government pursued and prosecuted women and physicians who had participated in abortion procedures when it was legal.

Ex post facto laws retroactively change the rules of evidence in a criminal case, retroactively alter the definition of a crime, retroactively change punishment for a criminal act, or punish behavior that was legal when that behavior was committed.

In essence it redefines the rules of the past.

 Inherent in the concept of Western justice is the concept of "due process," where a citizen knows what behavior is legal, what is not and how the government can use the legal system to distinguish and punish bad behavior. It  is essential that those rules be known and not whimsically changed.

An ex post facto law is considered a hallmark of tyranny because it deprives people of a sense of what behavior will or will not be punished and allows for random punishment at the whim of those in power. More, it allows a government or group to target a person or group specifically, using legal past behavior as a weapon.

So ex post facto laws --along with its tyrannical cousin, the bill of attainder--are specifically prohibited (Article 1, Section 10 Clause 1, and Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3) in the U.S. Constitution.

Ex post facto is more than a despotic tool, it is a way of thinking. Take, for example, the recent request of a Chicago pastor to remove George Washington's name from a city park because he owned slaves. Washington did indeed own slaves. But it was legal when he did. One might want to hold him responsible for an immoral act of owning slaves but, at the time, while  slave ownership was debated it not considered immoral by any culture. Some thought it immoral, like the debate over abortion today, but it flourished at the time of the American Revolution. Indeed, the ambiguity over slavery evidenced by the founders of the American nation was unusual.

Holding people responsible for moral principles not yet accepted requires a lot of confidence; one might find oneself on the long end of the police baton in the future. It also requires purity, the belief that you and your judgment are beyond question and you can apply your judgment righteously against people quite unaware of the debate. Your enemy just need be flawed. The victim is like Dante's Virgil, subjected to the spiritual laws of a man he never heard of, from a time he never knew.

If that makes you think of cruel and outrageous religious groups, you are right.

Rago

Joe Rago of the WSJ died this week at the age of 34. He had won a Pulitzer Prize.
Here is an excerpt from his article on the ACA just before it was passed,  "The Obamacare Crossroads," March 20, 2010:

Democrats are on the cusp of a profound and historic mistake, comparable in our view to the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act. Everyone is preoccupied now with the politics, but ultimately at stake on Sunday is the kind of country America will be. . . . In our world of infinite wants but finite resources, there are only two ways to allocate any good or service: either through prices and the choices of millions of individuals, or through central government planning and political discretion. This choice is inexorable. Stripped of its romantic illusions, ObamaCare is really about who commands the country's medical resources. . . .
A self-governing democracy can of course decide that it wants to become this kind of super-welfare state. But if the year-long debate over ObamaCare has proven anything, it is that Americans want no such thing. . . . The ugliness of the bill, and of its passage, means that some or all of it might be repealable, but far better not to make the tragic mistake in the first place.

Hendrickson

Most wanderers make no mark.

Sue Hendrickson is a wanderer. She has been a diver, an explorer, and a collector of insects encased in amber (a la Jurassic Park) many of which have wound up in the collections of natural history museums and universities around the world.

 

In 1990 she was a fossil hunter. She was near Faith, South Dakota hunting fossils where she found three large bones sticking out of a cliff. At the time she was working for the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. Further evaluation revealed a large skeleton, over 90 per cent complete, of a T. Rex.  Black Hills Institute of Geological Research paid $5,000 to the land owner, Maurice Williams, for the right to excavate the dinosaur skeleton, which was cleaned and transported to the company headquarters in Hill City. They named the dinosaur "Sue," after her. It was the largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered.

 

In 1992, a long legal battle began over Sue. The U.S. Attorney’s Office claimed Sue’s bones had been seized from federal land and were therefore government property. It was eventually found that Williams, a part-Native American and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, had traded his land to the tribe two decades earlier to avoid paying property taxes, and thus his sale of excavation rights to Black Hills had been invalid.

 

When ownership was finally awarded to Williams after a protracted legal battle he put the skeleton up for auction. In October 1997, Chicago’s Field Museum purchased Sue at public auction at Sotheby’s in New York City for $8.36 million. Sue’s skeleton went on display at the Field Museum in May 2000. The tremendous T. rex skeleton–13 feet high at the hips and 42 feet long from head to toe–is displayed in one of the museum’s main halls.

Sue’s extraordinarily well-preserved bones have allowed scientists to determine many things about the life of T. rex. They have determined that the carnivorous dinosaur had an incredible sense of smell, as the olfactory bulbs were each bigger than the cerebrum, the thinking part of the brain. In addition, Sue was the first T. rex skeleton to be discovered with a wishbone, a crucial discovery that provided support for scientists’ theory that birds are a type of living dinosaur.

 

The original discoverer, Hendrickson, and the original  researchers, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, got nothing out of all this.
In 2005, Glamour magazine honored Hendrickson in their "Glamour Woman of the Year Awards."

A View of Hillary's Trouble

Here is a segment of an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano on the recent State Department paper on Clinton's management of her emails and server. He is a FOX guy with libertarian tendencies and is a real strict constitutionalist so he is not open-minded about these questions. Nor is he dumb, though:

"Today is a big deal for a couple of reasons. First, it directly refutes a statement she has made dozens of times, 'it was allowed', we now know that it was not allowed. She never even asked."

"She signed a two page statement under oath on her first day on the job which was given after she had a two hour tutorial by two FBI agents telling her about the proper care and legal obligations for state secrets. In that oath she swore that she had the obligation to know how to care for state secrets and to recognize them."

"Here is what's new in the report today. Her server in her house went down a couple of times, and when it went down the blackberry wouldn't work. The state department IT people said 'here use a state department blackberry', and she said through her assistant Huma Abedin 'no because we are concerned with the Freedom of Information Act', so she went dark and she had documents verbally read to her rather than transmitted to her through the state department email system."

When the interviewer expressed surprise that Clinton was concerned about having documents subject to FOIA, Napolitano hammered home the the point that now the FBI has intent.

"Now what does this tell the FBI? This shows intent. You don't have to prove intent when you're talking about espionage, you can prove it by gross negligence, there's ample evidence of gross negligence. But avoiding the transparency laws shows a consciousness of evading the requirements."

He concluded that only a political decision could keep her from indictment.

Consensus and Its Discontents

There is a fascinating study out on studies and results that centers upon what the researchers call the "paradox of unanimity."

In a police line-up, the probability that an individual is guilty increases with the first three witnesses who unanimously identify him or her, but then decreases with additional unanimous witness identifications. 

In a new paper to be published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society A, a team of researchers, Lachlan J. Gunn, et al., from Australia and France has further investigated this idea: The "paradox of unanimity."
"If many independent witnesses unanimously testify to the identity of a suspect of a crime, we assume they cannot all be wrong," coauthor Derek Abbott, a physicist and electronic engineer at The University of Adelaide, Australia, told Phys.org. "Unanimity is often assumed to be reliable. However, it turns out that the probability of a large number of people all agreeing is small, so our confidence in unanimity is ill-founded. This 'paradox of unanimity' shows that often we are far less certain than we think."
The researchers showed that, as the group of unanimously agreeing witnesses increases, the chance of them being correct decreases until it is no better than a random guess.
In police line-ups, the systemic error may be any kind of bias, such as how the line-up is presented to the witnesses or a personal bias held by the witnesses themselves. Importantly, the researchers showed that even a tiny bit of bias can have a very large impact on the results overall. Specifically, they show that when only 1% of the line-ups exhibit a bias toward a particular suspect, the probability that the witnesses are correct begins to decrease after only three unanimous identifications.
The mathematical reason for why this happens is found using Bayesian analysis, which can be understood in a simplistic way by looking at a biased coin. If a biased coin is designed to land on heads 55% of the time, then you would be able to tell after recording enough coin tosses that heads comes up more often than tails. The results would not indicate that the laws of probability for a binary system have changed, but that this particular system has failed. In a similar way, getting a large group of unanimous witnesses is so unlikely, according to the laws of probability, that it's more likely that the system is unreliable.



They supply some real world examples.
In the recent Volkswagen scandal the company fraudulently programmed a computer chip to run the engine in a mode that minimized diesel fuel emissions during emission tests. But in reality, the emissions did not meet standards when the cars were running on the road. The low emissions were too consistent and 'too good to be true.' The emissions team that outed Volkswagen initially got suspicious when they found that emissions were almost at the same level whether a car was new or five years old! The consistency betrayed the systemic bias introduced by the nefarious computer chip.
A famous case where overwhelming evidence was 'too good to be true' occurred in the 1993-2008 period. Police in Europe found the same female DNA in about 15 crime scenes across France, Germany, and Austria. This mysterious killer was dubbed the Phantom of Heilbronn and the police never found her. The DNA evidence was consistent and overwhelming, yet it was wrong. It turned out to be a systemic error. The cotton swabs used to collect the DNA samples were accidentally contaminated, by the same lady, in the factory that made the swabs.


This is important in corporate decisions. The dissenting voice should be welcomed. A wise committee should accept that difference of opinion and simply record there was a disagreement. The recording of the disagreement is not a negative, but a positive that demonstrates that a systemic bias is less likely.


Abbott's main point (and most controversial one): Mathematics is not exceptionally good at describing reality, and definitely not the "miracle" that some scientists have marveled at. Einstein, a mathematical non-Platonist, was one scientist who marveled at the power of mathematics. He asked, "How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?" In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described this problem as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." The conclusion on this miraculous correlation with reality? It's wrong.


Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.


A graph of Gunn's results of line-up studies (the probability that an individual is guilty increases with the first three witnesses who unanimously identify him or her, but then decreases with additional unanimous witness identifications. Different colored lines represent various failure/error rates, with yellow representing zero failure.):


 From Lisa Zyga in Phys.org             

Pao! Kaboom!

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is a VC firm, a big one with a number of high profile guys (including John Doerr, the firm’s best-known partner.) They see themselves as more than innovators, they see themselves as leaders. When a former partner, Ellen Pao, sued them alleging gender discrimination they did not settle; according to many, they fought because they were offended.
There has been a lot of debate over gender bias in the industry. According to research from Babson College, the percentage of female venture capitalists is now 6 percent, down from 10 percent at the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999. The tech industry is male dominated and engineering is top-heavy with men.
Vignettes emerged in court. Mr. Doerr’s told an investigator that Ms. Pao had a “female chip on her shoulder.” Chi-Hua Chien, a partner, said women should not be invited to a dinner with former Vice President Al Gore because they “kill the buzz.” A senior partner at the time, Ray Lane, joked to a junior partner that she should be “flattered” that a colleague showed up at her hotel room door wearing only a bathrobe.

Ms. Pao is married to Alphonse Fletcher Jr., a Wall Street financier whose hedge fund is bankrupt. Pension funds are suing to recover their money amid accusations of fraud. Kleiner tried to insert Mr. Fletcher into the case, which would have raised questions about Ms. Pao’s motives in bringing suit, but the judge, Harold Kahn, refused to allow it.

Pao lost her case last week.

Death by Cop

In 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 140 blacks were killed by police. That same year, 386 whites were killed by police. Over the 13-year period from 1999 to 2011, 2,151 whites and 1,130 blacks were killed by police. So 34.45% of deaths by police action were Black. Blacks make up 13.2% of the U.S. population.

In 1968, shootings by law enforcement were the cause of death for 8.6 out of every million blacks. For whites, the rate was was 0.9 deaths per million.
By 2011, law enforcement shootings caused 2.74 deaths for every million blacks, and 1.28 deaths for every million whites. While the death-by-police rate for whites has held pretty steady over the last 45 years at about the one-in-a-million level, the rate for blacks has fallen. In the last several decades the numbers of blacks killed by cops are down nearly 75%.

Excluding practice on the gun range, 95% of officers — including those in big-city departments — have never discharged their firearm in the line of duty. 

 

In 2014, 114 police were killed in the line of duty. The average age was 40. 110 were male, 4 female, and the average time of service was 12 years, 6 months.

No Law, No Peace

A return to a previous note that has some ongoing pertinence. From a good review of Machiavelli by John Gray in The New Statesman: "...modern law is an artefact of state power. Probably nothing is more important for the protection of freedom than the independence of the judiciary from the executive; but this independence (which can never be complete) is possible only when the state is strong and secure. Western governments blunder around the world gibbering about human rights; but there can be no rights without the rule of law and no rule of law in a fractured or failed state, which is the usual result of western sponsored regime change. In many cases geopolitical calculations may lie behind the decision to intervene; yet it is a fantasy about the nature of rights that is the public rationale, and there is every sign that our leaders take the fantasy for real. The grisly fiasco that has been staged in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – a larger and more dangerous version of which seems to be unfolding in Syria – testifies to the hold on western leaders of the delusion that law can supplant politics."

"There can be no rights without the rule of law." That is a concept worth reflecting on because so often you see rights argued as infringed upon by all law. Rousseau etc.. And "law is an artifact of state power." So a bit of a contradiction, no? But the American structure is very different and was very new. In America the government is also restrained and limited by law. That is where the safety of our rights lies. 

No law, no peace.

Supremes and the ACA

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case claiming that the administration is violating its own health care law, the ACA, which clearly specifies that financial subsidies can be given only to insurance purchased on "exchanges established by the state." By the individual states. So far just 13 states have set up such exchanges. Yet the administration is giving tax credits to plans bought on the federal exchange — serving 37 states — despite what the law says. This sounds like a clear violation of the ACA as created.
The administration is arguing that "exchanges established by the state" is merely sloppy drafting and that the intent all along was to subsidize all plans on all exchanges.
But that is not true, at least according to the esteemed Professor Gruber, the very loose cannon from the very loose administrative ship. On a separate video in a different speech, he explained what Obamacare intended: "If you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits."
The idea was simply to coerce states into setting up their own exchanges by otherwise denying their citizens subsidies.
This may have been a stupid idea, but it was no editing "error." And, like it or not, it is the law. It can be changed by Congress only, not by the Executive. This might be a great moment where a bullying and manipulative subset of the culture gets hoisted by its own petard.

For an honest Supreme Court, this will be a slam dunk. Or a Rodman rejection.

Markopolos and "Our System"

Starz has a story on Harry Markopolos, an accountant turned fraud investigator, who did years of research trying to expose Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. It is much too long with annoying diversions into Markopolos' growing--and seemingly merit-less--paranoia but it is unforgettable in several areas and is important in what it reveals about what we believe is "our system."

Markopolos started as an accountant working for Ramparts, an investment company in Boston. The company was trying to break into the options market and were stymied by Madoff's success. No one wanted to shift money from Madoff to Ramparts. Markopolos was assigned the task of evaluating Madoff's performance so Ramparts could compete with them. 

Marlopolos says that in five minutes he knew it was a fraud. Why? Because he never lost money. The hallmark of investing is that you can not plan on every contingency and sooner or later you will be wrong and will lose money. Madoff never did. So investing guarantees you will, at some point, lose money. There are no exceptions that are real.

With this insight, Markopolos moved deeper. Soon it became clear to him that Madoff was not investing anything, he was just pretending he was and recorded pretend profits. That lured more investors in and, with the new money from new investors, he paid the earlier investors. When Markopolos started looking at this, Madoff had a fund of 3 billion dollars. When Madoff was exposed the fund had a paper value of 50 billion.

More, it became apparent that Madoff was not alone. He required a complex of many "feeder funds" who had investment money to place and chose to place it with him. These funds received much more money for placing the money than the fees Madoff himself demanded in his scam. Indeed, Madoff's take was a relatively small percentage (but of a considerably larger pie.) Markopolos realized that most of the feeder funds were involved, at least passively, in the fraud. (It was similar to the Jasmine character in "Blue Jasmine.)

Markopolos went to the SEC. Every time he showed them his figures they said they were impressed. Every time they did nothing. It is important to note that Ponzi schemes are fragile. As they have no real investments, they are easy for a regulator to spot. All you have to do is say, "Who sold this IBM stock for you and who bought it?" Checkmate, because no stock was bought or sold. This simple check was never done. More, at some point in the middle of Markopolos' campaign, the SEC's  main overseer of this area married Madoff's niece. Married his niece!

Markopolos went to the press. Our guardians of last resort. A story was put together by Forbes. It was never run. He went to the WSJ, to their top investigative reporter, in 2006. He was impressed. The story never ran. Markopolos implies there were simply too many opposing forces at work, the elites too close, too many people with a lot to lose, for the press to reveal the scam.

In 2008, eight years after Markopolos started his campaign, the credit crunch began. Fearful people wanted to pull their money out of the exposure in markets and everyone began requesting their money. Madoff's client/victims too. But there was no money, only fraudulent paper transactions. So Madoff fell. It is important to realize there was not a single agency or news release that stimulated the failure; the failure was generated by market dynamics. Like the ill child of cultist parents, Madoff succumbed to natural forces.

Of the 300 firms, 300, implicated in the fraud, there have been less than a dozen individual arrests.

This is a grim story with grim lessons. First, the characteristic of a real investment is that it will lose money. That should never be forgotten. Two, the investment arena is huge and complex. But it is also motivated by greed and, if possible, corruption. No one's better nature will shield you. Nor is reputation much help. (Madoff was a past president of NASDAQ.) Three, success in this area occurs but it is similar to knocking down all three bottles with a ball at the county fair: The contest is designed to beat you. Four, the government oversight is a sham bigger than Madoff himself. What this means in other areas of the government I tremble to think. Five, the watchdog press has more interests and concerns than truth. When they are placed in an awkward position, they will sacrifice us.

God help us all.

Great Expectations and Their Judgments

A fascinating case has just bobbed up in the Italian Courts. In the city of L'Aquila in central Italy, six scientists and a government bureaucrat have been sentenced to six years in jail for failing to predict an earthquake that killed 300 people in 2009.

This is a spectacular insight into how people think and what they expect. Usually we run into the streets with torches and pitchforks because someone exceeded their authority or moral limits. Here the scientists failed the community by not living up to the community's expectations, despite the fact that the community's expectations were absurd. No one can predict earthquakes. Nor can they read Tarot cards. But some people believe and, if enough Tarot card readers end up on a jury of your peers, some strange things can happen. You need go no farther than the Wee Care Nursery School or the Fells Acres Day Care Center.

Clearly the jury believed that these poor people were responsible for following nonexistent protocols for unknown processes towards imaginary solutions. This is hauntingly reminiscent of modern popular American politics where alternative energies that do not exist and no one uses are touted and financially supported as a solution to our energy problems.

Sometimes the self appointed experts can claim too much. But usually they can find safety in the cynicism and short memories of their electorate victims. Here the fantasies have grown a judicial arm.

Blagojevich and Libby

So the bathoic Blagojevich is convicted on one of twenty-four counts, lying to the FBI during the investigation. I don't know if this is an indictment of the jury, the electorate (sort of the same), how inept a crook Blagojevich is or Fitzgerald. There is a recurring pattern here, though. Some guy is rousted, investigated to death and the only thing they get him on is lying during the questioning. The same thing happened with Libby. Fitzgerald--again--knew who the leak source was but pushed on and trapped Libby in some inconsistency and sent him to jail. I have absolutely no sympathy for politicians of any stripe and believe they are all probable felons and traitors. But this catching an innocent man for what he does in the course of an investigation that exonerates him is creepy. Sort of like kicking in the door of the wrong house and then arresting the owner for resisting arrest.

Carter vs. Salmela

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf4BoCP26rM&feature=player_embedded

This hockey moment raises interesting questions about hockey and the world. I have watched this film over and over and think the hit was legal, within the rules of the game. This brings us to the next question: Is legality enough? I think what the bankers, loan officers and ratings managers did over the last years was legal as well. But is it enough?
It is impossible, of course, to legislate a spirit of a game; that is where sportsmanship starts and that can be nebulous and dangerous. So, too, a culture; that area is morality. But there must be some consideration for analysis of behavior outside of the strictly legal. Legality should be the floor of behavior, not its ceiling. I have no good answer for that unwritten area. Make better people? After all, the hockey culture used to enforce "sportsmanship" with fists. And Salmela, unconscious before he hit the ice and with retrograde amnesia, made so little fuss he did not go to a hospital (where a traumatic unconscious/amnesia diagnosis might have put in in an ICU bed for a night). That type of culture is very forgiving.
Yet the hit was vicious, delivered against a player after the play was officially over by a man who knew it was unexpected and dangerous. Here the legality has no social function other than protect the perpetrator who should, in a civilized society, be last in the queue for protection.
Such a system, as the sage said of prostitution, is "technically perfect".