No skin in the game/rev I

People with no skin in the game ... aka, entities given permission to do stupid shit.

• Bankers, both commercial and investment: They get bailed out if things go south. 
• Insurance Companies: As long as they get their premiums, particularly medical, it matters not how they screw patients and docs alike.  
• Hospital execs: Using grossly overpriced and inefficient software to run their hospitals, it’s ok as long as expenses are passed on to patients.
• Religious leaders: Paradise awaits but never arrives.
• Defense contractors: Dealing in death while keeping hands clean.
• Economists: The dismal science that’s not a science. 50/50 chance of being right.
• Judges: Forever separate from the cases they decide on.
• Government Bureaucrats: Hidden in the endless realm of governmental complexification, bad policy goes unpunished unless it’s so bad, somebody has to take the hit.
• Politicians, including presidents: Remain forever separate from catastrophic economic and foreign policy initiatives as long as they get reelected. Nam, Iraq Libya and Afghanistan
• The MIC/Military Industrial Complex: They own the politicians so endless war makes lots of money while people and countries die. Nam, Iraq Libya and Afghanistan ...

Professions requiring no skills outside of the ability to BS. Religious leaders and politicians.

Any questions?

A modest proposal ...

The kleroterion was a stone thing that you stuck names in. Then you ran come colored balls through a tube, and the row/column the white ball landed on would be the ‘winners’. Animation via TedEd

Back in 2015, BRT posted a piece titled Sortition = Equality by Lot, whereby citizens of ancient Athens were randomly selected by lot to run the government for X amount of time, the only true way democracy can actually happen as the notion of "electing" specific individuals goes away, thus eliminating the creation of a defacto ruling oligarchy, a situation that has plagued the US for over 200 years.

To whit:

Sortition,  election by lot, a method of choosing public officials in some ancient Greek city-states. It was used especially in the Athenian democracy, from which most information about the practice is derived. With few exceptions, all magistrates were chosen by lot, beginning with the archons in 487–486 bc; likewise the Boule (council) of 500 and the juries of the law courts were chosen by lot. The practice of sortition obviated electoral races and provided for the regular turnover of officeholders. The operations of government were thus not in the hands of experts, but, through the system of sortition, the Athenian democracy provided at least some practical political education for its citizens.

The rationale of sortition was the equality of all citizens. 

Seems more people are starting to ask why sortition cannot be the law of the land in the US given just how corrupt, expensive and inept our government has come to be.

The Greeks called this system of random access democracy sortition. Think for a moment how sortition would look in the modern world. It would basically look like jury duty. You’d go to vote and instead of selecting the local lord or drug lord, you’d put your own name in, if you wanted. There’d be no campaigning, no advertising, just go home and watch the lottery results. Then you’d end up with a Parliament that literally represented the people.

You’d immediately get 50% women’s representation, no quotas required. You’d immediately get far more poor and middle-class people represented, and much fewer millionaires. You’d immediately get more minorities represented (still within the racist ways we define citizenship).

Sortition actually leads to a far more representative democracy than Representative Democracy. And representation matters. What we have now is a bunch of rich people maybe deciding to do something for the masses, whose lives they really cannot understand and who aren’t even in the room. Under sortition the poor, etc would simply be in the room, able to speak for themselves.

Sounds like a plan to me.

We are but ...

We are but temporary arrangements of the quantum foam whereby we experience entropy as every system goes to its highest level of disordered information without exception save for life as life temporarily steals energy from the environment in order to survive for at least a little while. Seems yours truly is not alone in believing this notion rings true as Over Time, Buddhism and Science Agree that everything's connected and that change is the only constant in an existence we will never fully understand.

All things, especially living ones, are marinating in the river of time. We see and understand that our bodies will wear out and we will die. At least that’s how it looks through the lens of Western science, where all things come to an end, winding down in a final surrender to entropy. But there’s another perspective, surprisingly in harmony with science, that helps us revisit that huge and ancient terror—fear of time itself—in a new and perhaps even reassuring way. And that is the perspective offered by Buddhism.

For Buddhists, the “center cannot hold,” as the poet W.B. Yeats pointed out, because it doesn’t exist as something rigidly separate from everything else. Nothing is permanent and unchanging, ourselves included. Attempting to cling to a solid, immutable core of a self is a fool’s errand because time not only creates anarchy, it provides the unavoidable matrix within which everything—animate and inanimate, sentient and insensate—ebbs and flows.

As Buddhists see it, all organisms are necessarily, unavoidably—even marvelously and gloriously—impermanent. In Sanskrit, the word for impermanence is anitya. To understand anitya is to achieve something remarkable: opening a door onto the accord between modern western science and ancient eastern wisdom.

 The Tao rules. :)

Meander: To follow a winding course ...

This wonderful illustration depicting 18th century astral environs depicts an age forever gone, where artistry, combined with movable type, created pieces both nuanced and detailed in a way computers can never match. In some ways, this is similar to what one can find on the net when no specific intent is part of the equation. For the past few hours, here are some of the tidbits yours truly has found 12/27/20 ...

How Climate Change Is Ushering in a New Pandemic Era kicks off the tour with Rolling Stone waxing poetic on how COVID-19 is just the beginning of the pandemic circus thanks to Climate Change.

The Archives of an Unfulfilled Genius tells the story of Edward Stringham, the obscure but brilliant The New Yorker collator, who collated the world in his off hours, unknown to all save for Vicki Desjardins, one of the very few who knew just how smart this man truly was.

Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea, a very long piece from The New Yorker, depicts a group of explorers determined to reach the deepest depths in every ocean in the world.

Sea level—perpetual flux. There is a micromillimetre on the surface of the ocean that moves between sea and sky and is simultaneously both and neither. Every known life-form exists in relation to this layer. Above it, the world of land, air, sunlight, and lungs. Below it, the world of water, depth, and pressure. The deeper you go, the darker, the more hostile, the less familiar, the less measured, the less known.

2050, the real start point for GW is writ large in Robinson's powerful novel titled The Ministry for the Future,  stating just how different the world will become just 30 years from now.  Just started reading Ministry but so far, it walks the walk without issue. 

Splinterlands,  written by John Feffer, talks about the political ramifications coming our way due to yet again, GW. 

The Spy ...

Yours truly discovered John Le Carre via the superb The Spy who Came in From the Cold film staring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, a senior spy tasked with one more mission of sowing damaging disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. Done in black and white with Claire Bloom and Oscar Werner as co stars, Le Carre's work depicts a world of ambiguity and betrayal played by both the east and west, a dark reality totally opposite of the faux world of James Bond, beautiful women and gadgets to kill for. In learning about this extraordinary writer, one finds his take on the world to be nuanced and realistic to a fault, something readily seen by a wonderful 2010 interview with Le Carre, conducted by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan of Democracy Now.

 

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We are on the road in London, just along the Thames, not far from Parliament, not far from MI5 and MI6, the international and domestic spy agencies here, so it is most relevant to bring you John le Carré, this hour we spend with the foremost spy writer of our time.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Now, it might confuse our audience when I say, “Welcome to Democracy Now!, David Cornwell.” Explain where John le Carré came from.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I’ve told a lot of lies about that in my time, I have to confess. I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name. So the fact that I was in a secret department does not play a part.

Then, I think I decided that I needed three pieces to a name, that they would arrest the “I” and put an accent on the last part. Then the word carré in French has a bunch of ambiguous meanings. A balle carrée, for example, is a dance where the ladies ask the men to dance. Carré at roulette, if you put a numéro carré, you put a counter on each corner of a number. And so it goes on. And I think an homme carré is a little bit a dubious guy. That seemed to me to suit me perfectly at that time.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, in the interests of transparency, we’ll just call you David Cornwell, if that’s OK.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Just David will do fine.

The cash nexus ...

Now, this isn’t fiction. That part of it isn’t fiction. Money laundering is simply everywhere. On the grand scale, it’s endemic to banking. You have to bear in mind that when Lehman Brothers wasn’t going to function anymore and the big banks weren’t lending to one another, back at that terrible time, $352 billion of illegal money were then tacitly released upon the market, and that was about the only money people were lending to one another. So, money laundering is not some distant fantasy. It’s actually how you handle the profits of extortion, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy and huge quantities of drug money, how you get that into the white sector. And what we are gradually learning from these little exposés that come to light is that there is almost no way of denying people, in the end, the profits of their crime, which is a tragedy. And it’s also a frightful annoyance, because we pay vast sums of money across the way here to agencies that are supposed to stop money laundering. Doesn’t happen.

The corruption of intel ...

And I suppose that if I could generalize about my work in intelligence in those days, for better or worse, we counted ourselves an elite with a very considerable responsibility: to speak truth to power, like good journalists, that whatever we came upon, however offensive it was to those in power, we told it straight. And what I fear I have seen in the run-up to the Iraq War in this country is the politicization of intelligence to fit the political intentions of our masters. And to my mind, that was a terrible moment in the history, the visible history, of intelligence work in this country, where the intelligence service itself became effectively co-author and signatory to the so-called dodgy dossier, which — on the strength of which Colin Powell was able to present a dire picture of the threat from Iraq, which turned out to be untrue.

On corporate power ...

AMY GOODMAN: — whether we’re talking The Constant Gardener, which took place in Kenya, or we’re talking The Mission Song, which took place in Congo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s where I have seen globalization at work on the ground. It’s a pretty ugly sight. It’s a boardroom fantasy. What it actually means is the exploitation of very cheap labor, very often the ecological disaster that comes with it, the creation of mega-cities, the depletion of agrarian cultures and tribal cultures. It’s about — the effect of globalization, again, where I have seen it, has been negative, as far as the local population is concerned. It’s enriched the very few in the country where it takes place. And it has totally dismayed the inhabitants otherwise. So, ask me what corporate power means to me, it means the ability of the individual to sacrifice his own instincts, his own decent instincts, in the name of the corporation, that people will do things to — on behalf of the corporation, to a group of people, which they would never do to their next-door neighbor, so that all the decent humanity seems to be set aside the moment they walk through the corporate doors.

Read the Democracy Now piece in its entiriety. Long, detailed and totally spot on as BRT has talked about these issues for a long time. Glad to see I'm in good company without question.

It's inevitable ...

It's inevitable. AI now learns on its own without human intervention, which means, in time, general intelligence AI becomes the start point to super intelligence AI, Timeframe, unknown but ... as Agent Smith said to Neo, Its Invitable. To whit ...

The new system, which DeepMind is calling MuZero, is based in part on DeepMind's work with the AlphaZero AI, which taught itself to master rule-based games like chess and Go. But MuZero also adds a new twist that makes it substantially more flexible.

That twist is called "model-based reinforcement learning." In a system that uses this approach, the software uses what it can see of a game to build an internal model of the game state. Critically, that state isn't prestructured based on any understanding of the game—the AI is able to have a lot of flexibility regarding what information is or is not included in it. The reinforcement learning part of things refers to the training process, which allows the AI to learn how to recognize when the model it's using is both accurate and contains the information it needs to make decisions.

In essence, this is how we solve problems ... Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

But MuZero also excelled at a panel of Atari games, something that had previously required a completely different AI approach. Compared to the previous best algorithm, which doesn't use an internal model at all, MuZero had a higher mean and median score in 42 out of the 57 games tested. So, while there are still some circumstances where it lags behind, it's now made model-based AI's competitive in these games, while maintaining its ability to handle rule-based games like chess and Go.

Overall, this is an impressive achievement and an indication of how AIs are growing in sophistication. A few years back, training AIs at just one task, like recognizing a cat in photos, was an accomplishment. But now, we're able to train multiple aspects of an AI at the same time—here, the algorithm that created the model, the one that chose the move, and the one that predicted future rewards were all trained simultaneously.

Partly, that's the product of the availability of greater processing power, that makes playing millions of games of chess possible. But partly it's a recognition that this is what we need to do if an AI is ever going to be flexible enough to master multiple, distantly related tasks.

Chaos incarnate ...

 

Well, we all know that Biden won but we also know chaos incarnate in the guise of The Donald reigns supreme until January 20 whereupon the worst president in history finally goes, either voluntarily or not depending on how deep Trump's insanity happens to be at that point in time.

For starters ...

Trump’s final weeks in office are creating chaos for Congress, which will return next week for a possible government shutdown as it holds an unusual holiday session to vote to override the president’s veto of an annual defense bill.

Trump’s surprise opposition to a COVID-19 relief and omnibus spending package means the government could shut down on Tuesday, days before runoff elections in Georgia that will determine the Senate majority.

Trump’s flurry of moves have divided the Republican Party, as has his series of controversial pardons that Democrats are criticizing as a gross misuse of authority.

It gets better.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), referring to House Republicans, said on a Wednesday conference call that he felt “Trump threw us under the bus” given he was absent from negotiations only to undercut the relief bill after it had passed.

Trump abruptly upending the relief deal is just his latest break with Republicans in Congress.

The president on Wednesday followed through on his threat to veto the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) after complaining it did not repeal an unrelated policy that offers protections for social media companies. Both chambers of Congress passed the bill with enough votes to override a veto.

Trump also made waves on Tuesday and Wednesday by announcing two batches of pardons for controversial allies, including Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner and former Reps. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) and Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.). Collins and Hunter were two of Trump's earliest supporters in Congress, and both pleaded guilty to various corruption charges.

“This is rotten to the core,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), one of the more outspoken Trump critics in the Senate GOP conference, said in response to the pardons of Manafort and Stone.

Endgame. The repugs let this crap happen. Over a hundred supported sedition regarding Trump's attempt to overturn the election and yet they still remain in office because the dems are gutless while the country remains at sea with an inept and corrupt governing body that no longer knows how to govern. BRT has talked about this travesty for YEARS and now this inability to do anything of consequence to save American democracy has arrived. Will our country survive? 

"No one knows, do one?" - Fats Waller.

I'm back...

Black Cow - NYC fall 2019

I'm back. A little shakey from the hospital after having my spleen removed and experiencing shit that teaches one what's really important, BRT will continue to comment on the world with whatever wisdom this old writer has to offer. To you my loyal readers, for sticking around, tears come to mind in copious amounts without a doubt. Thank you.

Best

Robert E. 

Ding Dong ...

The Donald is gone, We will endure two+ months of Aging Orange raging and trying everything possible to stay as President but in the end, he may be dragged out of the WH to face the Southern District of New York for money laundering, tax fraud and influence peddling along with other crimes and misdemeanors we don't know about. In a truly excellent article from The Guardian titled Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. But read this before you sing the Hallelujah Chorus by Thomas Frank as his piece eloquently extends the thoughts of BRT's An epic CF for the ages ... regarding what Biden has to do if this nation is to survive.

Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. Finally, we have come to the end of Donald Trump’s season of extreme misrule. Voters have rejected what can only be described as the crassest, vainest, stupidest, most dysfunctional leadership this country has ever suffered.

Biden’s instinct, naturally, will be to govern as he always legislated: as a man of the center who works with Republicans to craft small-bore, business-friendly measures. After all, Biden’s name is virtually synonymous with Washington consensus. His years in the US Senate overlap almost precisely with his party’s famous turn to the “third way” right, and Biden personally played a leading role in many of the signature initiatives of the era: Nafta-style trade agreements, lucrative favors for banks, tough-on-crime measures, proposed cuts to social security.

What Biden must understand now, however, is that it was precisely this turn, this rightward shift in the 1980s and 90s, that set the stage for Trumpism.

Beginning with Clinton and Obama and losing with Hilliary, the dem's switch worked well until it didn't.

Let us recall for a moment what that turn looked like. No longer were Democrats going to be the party of working people, they told us in those days. They were “new Democrats” now, preaching competence rather than ideology and reaching out to new constituencies: the enlightened suburbanites; the “wired workers”; the “learning class”; the winners in our new post-industrial society.

However, there are consequences when the left party in a two-party system chooses to understand itself in this way. As we have learned from the Democrats’ experiment, such a party will show little understanding for the grievances of blue-collar workers, people who – by definition – have not climbed the ladder of meritocracy. 

But the biggest consequence of the Democrats’ shabby experiment is one we have yet to reckon with: it has coincided with a period of ever more conservative governance. It turns out that when the party of the left abandons its populist traditions for high-minded white-collar rectitude, the road is cleared for a particularly poisonous species of rightwing demagoguery. It is no coincidence that, as Democrats pursued their professional-class “third way”, Republicans became ever bolder in their preposterous claim to be a “workers’ party” representing the aspirations of ordinary people.

Endgame

I have been narrating our country’s toboggan ride to hell for much of my adult life, and I can attest that Biden’s triumph by itself is not enough to bring it to a stop. It will never stop until a Democratic president faces up to his party’s mistakes and brings to a halt the ignoble experiment of the last four decades.

Should Joe Biden do that, he might be able to see that he has before him a moment of great Democratic possibility. This country has grown sick of plutocracy. We don’t enjoy sluicing everything we earn into the bank accounts of a few dozen billionaires. We want a healthcare system that works and an economy in which ordinary people prosper, even people who didn’t go to a fancy college. Should Biden open his eyes and overcome his past, he may discover that he has it in his power to rebuild our sense of social solidarity, to make the middle-class promise real again, and to beat back the right. All at the same time

Does he have the smarts and guts to do this, only time will tell.

 

An epic CF for the ages ...

 A dear friend sent me this gem, proving the 2020 election was an epic CF for the ages.

Final thoughts on the wonderful election of 2020 and how the Democrats blew it yet again. As a result, nothing will change. We will still continue to love Israel. We will still continue to wage never-ending war to feed the maw of the MIC. We will continue to demonize Russia and ... we will still be under the control of McConnell, the de facto President of the United States with term limits remaining but a dream and the monstrosity known as the tax code will continue to game the system for the rich and powerful while increasing inequality to levels far beyond the the Gilded Age. Oh, I forgot, Glass-Steagall will never come back.

Backgrounder: Bernie was screwed twice by queen Hillary, first with help from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the second with the DNC even though Bernie won the right to be the Democratic nominee to be President both times. In 2016, the entitled queen lost, running a horrible campaign while the party ran on celebrity endorsements and no coherent policy iniatives set in place to explain to people why the should vote democratic. In 2020, complicit with a corrupt press, the strategy comprised of bashing Trump 24/7, spouting never ending slogans and again, no viable policy initiatives put forth. What comes to mind here, the dems knew Bernie would win but Wall Street and the despised super delegates denied him a second time as a traditional candidate was considered to be the better choice as the elite only care about ... their money and not the welfare of the country.

Now think Bernie, Mr. Policy incarnate and ... respect from Trumpers and The Donald himself as they knew he was the real deal. With him as candidate, the senate would have gone blue and the house would gain more Democrats. 

‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive,’  - Sir Walter Scott 

Bernie’s denial, the work of corrupt and inept fools running things, disallowed a politician who’s competent and actually honest with the guts to discuss the 3rd rail issue of Israel, going after taxes of the power elite and challenging the MIC’s policy of never ending war.

2016

  Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC - Donna Braazile

 ... The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

It gets way better.

The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

2020 

     Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) flashes a victory smile March 12, 1952, in Concord, N.H., as he reads a newspaper account of his victory over President Harry S. Truman in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. (File/AP)

Before ‘Stop Bernie,’ a brokered Democratic convention stopped Estes Kefauver

In 1952, Kefauver, a U.S. senator from Tennessee, won 12 of 15 primaries. But it didn’t matter. 

He was wrong. The upstart senator’s rise sparked a “Stop Kefauver” movement by Democratic Party leaders and led by sitting President Harry S. Truman that resulted in the nation’s last convention that wasn’t decided on the first ballot.

The resistance foreshadowed the current “Stop Bernie” fervor in the Democratic establishment about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the democratic socialist who has emerged as the front-runner for the nomination. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that dozens of Democratic Party officials said they would oppose the nomination of Sanders if he arrives at the convention in Milwaukee in July without the majority of delegates needed.

Biden won, thank god. I'm praying he will do well, the nation's counting on it but I still say it's time for the progressives to take over now, beginning in 2022. As a note of real hope, many more  repugs in the senate are running for, of course, reelection than the dems in 2022, thus making it  possible for the party of the donkey to take back the senate and eliminate Mitch as the retched de facto  president of the United States. 

Originalism ...

The actions of the esteemed Mitch McConnell, beginning with his not allowing Merrick Garland, a jurist respected on both sides of the asile, to appear before the senate based on his rabid hatred of Obama “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’ “ and ending with Amy Barrett being rapidly rammed through just days before the election without getting all the facts needed to learn more about this marginal person, says it all about Mitch, who should have been impeached and removed from office on the Merrick Garland fiasco but ... as my loyal readers know, this is not just about these issues but rather on why originalism fails on all counts regarding the Constitution and how it applies to law, is.

During her confirmation hearings, Amy Coney Barrett argued that the judicial philosophy known as “originalism” should guide judges in their interpretation and application of constitutional principles. Most famously associated with the late Justice Antonin Scalia (for whom Judge Barrett clerked), this idea sounds simple and sensible: In determining what the Constitution permits, a judge must first look to the plain meaning of the text, and if that isn’t clear, then apply what was in the minds of the 55 men who wrote it in 1787. Period. Anything else is “judicial lawmaking.”

In some cases, interpreting the Constitution with an originalist lens is pretty easy; for example, the Constitution says that the president must be at least 35 years old (“35” means, well, 35), that each state has two senators (not three and not one), and that Congress is authorized to establish and support an Army and a Navy. But wait a minute. What about the Air Force? Is it mentioned in the text? Nope. Is there any ambiguity in the text? Again, no. It doesn’t say “armed forces”; it explicitly says “Army” and “Navy.” Did the Framers have in mind the Air Force 115 years before the Wright brothers? Not likely.

And these are the easy cases. How about terms like due process? What does due mean? Is a process that locks you up for life without access to a lawyer “due”? How about an “unreasonable” search and seizure? Is wiretapping “unreasonable”? (We wonder what the Framers thought about wiretapping or cyber theft.) Does “freedom of speech” apply to corporations, which didn’t exist in their modern form in 1787?.

The intellectual dishonesty of many originalists is exposed by their reluctance to follow their own logic regarding certain landmark cases, now widely recognized as milestones in our national progress toward “a more perfect union.” The easiest examples are Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia, the former concerning school integration, the latter, interracial marriage, illegal in Virginia until Loving in 1967. Both decisions explicitly fail the originalist test, yet Judge Barrett asserts they were correctly decided and endorses them as “super-precedents,” a convenient dodge that evades the troubling implications of her supposedly simple theory of constitutional interpretation.The real problem with the originalist theory is that it allows no room for ethical, moral, or political growth. If the Framers didn’t think it, it’s not allowed.

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and paid close attention to the drafting of the Constitution from his official post in France, understood this danger explicitly: “I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions,” he wrote in an 1816 letter addressing what he perceived to be weaknesses in the new government, “but … laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

In this writer's opinion, both originalism and Scalia's thought process are extremely marginal at best.

Going, Going, Gone ...

To make the images that appear in this story, the photographer Pelle Cass locked his camera onto a tripod for the duration of an event, capturing up to 1,000 photographs from one spot. The images were then layered and compiled into a single digital file to create a kind of time-lapse still photo.

Cornell versus Dartmouth, women’s lacrosse, October 2019

The special boost for recruited athletes, known as preferential admission, can be equivalent to hundreds of SAT points. According to The Washington Post, Harvard, which typically admits approximately 5 percent of its applicants, reports acceptance rates as high as 88 percent for athletes endorsed by its coaches. “Parents see the numbers,” says Luke Walton, an Olympic rower and the founder of Rower Academy, a San Diego–based recruiting consultancy for high-school crew athletes. “They see that if their child can get the backing of a coach, they are likely to get in. That’s a shiny object—a fishing lure for parents. They look at that and say: ‘That’s the answer. Sports is the answer.’ Along with the ability to pay 70-80K per year to get Harvey into Harvard.

This bucolic frenzy of the monied class pushing their kids to the max with emphasis on sports in order to get into highly rated colleges is slowly going away thanks to COVID-19, the ongoing 2020 great depression and the real possibility of economic collapse due to the harsh reality of fixed cost's and how they apply to virtually every business in America including higher ed. Consider that the nation is in the grip of the 2nd/3rd wave and the fact kids are not in school paying exorbitant tuitions shows how strongly fixed costs are embedded whereby you have to have 100% paying customers to cover fixed costs and make a profit. This is obviously not happening. End result, said colleges try to survive by lowering tuitions, which won't work, due to fixed costs, forget profits forever, or vastly increase the number of students, which also won't work because of the aforementioned fixed costs must keep pace with the larger enrollment which means finding more customers to cover costs and make a profit becomes a Wicked Problem. 

Here's another dose of realty ...

As the global tsunami of Wave 2 sweeps away the sandcastles of denial, fantasy and magical thinking, it's worth recalling that the Covid-19 virus has four features that make it difficult to control: 

1. It is highly contagious. 

2. Carriers with no symptoms can infect others. 

3. A significant percentage of older / compromised patients develop severe symptoms that require hospitalization. 

4. Once the healthcare system is overwhelmed, the system cannot provide care to everyone who needs it. As a result, the death rate rises the moment the healthcare system is overwhelmed / breaks down. 

And this.

The global economy was teetering on the edge of recession and financial implosion long before the pandemic appeared. Ending the pandemic cannot restore an illusion of "growth" that masked a hollowed out, fragile, brittle global economy. 

The Global Depression was baked in long before the pandemic. All the pandemic did was kick out the last rotten 2X4s holding up the fading facade of "growth." 

Unfortunately, central banks can't "print" experienced doctors or nurses. When the front line of healthcare workers is depleted by illness and burnout, there are no substitutes or Big Tech robots-to-the-rescue. The healthcare system we've optimized for "creating shareholder value" (i.e. unlimited greed pathologically pursued by any means available) will break down and that will be that. 

Central banks can't "print" creditworthy borrowers, solvent companies, real-world collateral, risk-free "investing," oil, jobs, trust in failed institutions, social cohesion or anything else of importance that is now scarce. 

The belief that central banks printing currency can "buy/fix" everything that's broken, lost or scarce is the ultimate in denial, fantasy and magical thinking. All that was unsustainably fragile, corrupt and brittle is unraveling, and thinking that ending the lockdowns, approving a vaccine, etc. will stave off causality is the supreme indulgence in denial, fantasy and magical thinking.  

The bloodbath begins ...as profits disappear.

Ohio Wesleyan University is eliminating 18 majors. The University of Florida’s trustees this month took the first steps toward letting the school furlough faculty. The University of California, Berkeley, has paused admissions to its Ph.D. programs in anthropology, sociology and art history.

As it resurges across the country, the coronavirus is forcing universities large and small to make deep and possibly lasting cuts to close widening budget shortfalls. By one estimate, the pandemic has cost colleges at least $120 billion, with even Harvard University, despite its $41.9 billion endowment, reporting a $10 million deficit that has prompted belt tightening.

Lastly ... remember,  COVID-19 is just the warmup for, you guessed it. Global Warming.

All the world's a stage

The image says it all. You can have it all, all you need is money even if reality tells you otherwise. Why is this so? It's because we MAKE NOTHING ANYMORE. After the impact of deregulation, courtesy Ronnie Reagan, where corporations were encouraged to offshore in order to gin evermore profits for corporate stockholders while creating modern China, the country became a shell of itself, cored out from the inside out. Which means we have no real money so the substitute  is ... be sold stuff you don't need with money you don't have. - George Carlin

All the staging is a means to an end, and everyone in America is nothing more than a means to an end: close the sale so the few can continue exploiting the many. 

You know how realtors stage a house to increase its marketability: first, they remove all evidence that people actually live there. (Of course a vacant house is ideal for staging because there's none of the messy real-life stuff to deal with.) 

All the clutter of everyday life must be moved elsewhere so the house can look like a bloodless furniture showroom. In other words, fake. 

Then various tricks /cues are employed to activate the sense of "home": induce the "smell of fresh bread" in the kitchen, adorn rooms with vases of fresh flowers, and have a few fake "family" photos set on bookshelves. 

It gets better ...

"Fake" is now itself fake as the meta-marketers seek to undermine the concept of fake to sell the idea that what we recognize as fake is actually real: we're told that it's the real thing that's been hidden from view that's fake. The photo on the shelf of the fake family is real, we're told; what's fake is the actual real photo of the messy real-world family who actually lives here. 

Given that everything is staged, trust has been completely destroyed. To trust anything being presented as a means to an end--i.e. a con, a scam, a sales pitch, a fake scent of fresh bread, etc.--is to be a chump. 

Staging is no substitute for reality. The frauds, cons and scams are failing to keep the simulacrum world glued together because no matter how expert the marketing and how great the desire to close the sale so the few can continue exploiting the many, reality intrudes right when the deal's about to close and the whole absurd contraption collapses in a heap. 

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

As you like it - Shankespeare

 

Bombs Away :)

No words needed. :) 

Imploding in real time ...

President Donald Trump waves to the crowd at a campaign rally at Gastonia Municipal Airport, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020, in Gastonia, N.C. | AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Imploding in real time comes to mind as The Donald continues to flail in hopes of avoiding prison via the Court of the Southern District of NY. Deep down, Trump knows he's a failure and that he screwed the pooch regarding COCID-19. 

LAS VEGAS — Monday was a day of rage for Donald Trump.

He woke up at his Las Vegas hotel, a gold brick of glass on the edge of the Strip next to an abandoned lot, and was already in a foul mood. The previous day he had seen a TV ad that accused him of belittling American soldiers. “Losers. Suckers. Dopes. Babies,” the ad said. “That’s how Donald Trump describes our men and women in uniform.” He had railed about it at a rally in Carson City — “a horrible, vicious ad!” — and it was still infuriating him later that morning. After seeing the ad, he screamed, “I blew my stack!”

Any questions?

Addendum ... Trump did well on the final debate.

Separation of Church & State yet again.

Separation of church and state vs religiosity to the max, a question not only raging in France over the killing of a respected teacher by an extremist ... due to the fact he showed the Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the blessed Mohammed in a classroom but also to what's happening in America with a combination of the ultra right believers putting christ into the equation in their pursuit to take over America. 

These two actions are truly dangerous, brought about by 

1. The flood of immigrants to Europe thanks to the destruction of Lybia by the US and ...
2. The elimination of the separation of church and state in America thanks to the Robert's supreme court. 

With this in mind both situations are liable to explode at any moment as modern civilization  is now under attack.

Last Friday, teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in a terrorist attack in the northern Paris suburb of Éragny after displaying the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his students during a lesson, anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said.

The 47-year-old's murder has now reignited the long-simmering conflict over secularism in France.

In early October, a matter of days before Paty's murder, French President Emmanuel Macron said: "There is in this radical Islamism, a methodical organization to contravene the laws of the Republic and create a parallel order, to erect other values." Macron was speaking in Les Mureaux, a north-western suburb of Paris where officials have been working with the Muslim community to combat Islamist extremism.

The question to ask here is, will laïcité survive in France?

Secularism -- known as "laïcité" in French -- is deeply ingrained in French culture, with many believing that nothing -- not even one's religion -- should come before national identity. Yet for those with a strong faith, this tenet is a complex one to hold.

"It's an activist secularism," Catherine Fieschi, director of the Global Policy Institute at London's Queen Mary University, told CNN.

"Laïcité is a tenet of the Republic, it's cross-party. This cuts across the spectrum -- leftist social democrats are just as against religion in the public realm as [those on the right.]"

Addendum ...

Pedestrians walk along Marseille's Old Port as the town hall is lit up in the French Tricolor to honor slain teacher Samuel Paty, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020. French history teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northwest of Paris, by an 18-year-old Moscow-born Chechen refugee, who was later shot dead by police. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Another reason why this fight for a secular France rings true ...

The slaying has prompted massive protests in France and prompted a swift crackdown on radical Islamic groups by authorities.

President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday gave France’s highest civilian award, the Legion of Honor, to Paty during a solemn ceremony at the Sorbonne university in Paris, Agence France-Presse reported.

He said the educator was slain by “cowards” for representing the secular, democratic values of the French Republic — and vowed, “We will not give up cartoons.”

“He was killed because Islamists want our future,” Macron said. “They will never have it.”

America is now in the crosshairs. To be continued.