Tag: us

Unions are racist

there was once a national movement to eliminate Chinese restaurants, using innovative legal methods to drive them out. Chinese restaurants were objectionable for 2 reasons. First, they threatened white women, who were subject to seduction by Chinese men, through intrinsic female weakness, or employment of nefarious techniques such as opium addiction. In addition, Chinese restaurants competed with “American” restaurants, thus threatening the livelihoods of white owners, cooks and servers; unions were the driving force behind the movement.

Bail Reform Tipping Point?

Lawsuits have been largely successful in court, thanks in part to actions taken by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, which issued an amicus brief on the issue last year. In that brief, it argued that “a bail scheme that imposes financial conditions, without individualized consideration of ability to pay and whether such conditions are necessary to assure appearance at trial, violates the Fourteenth Amendment” and its equal protection clause and is thus unconstitutional. Although new US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has expressed skepticism about past efforts on jail and criminal justice reform, the shift to a new administration is unlikely to affect the changes that are taking place around bail reform, experts say.

Identity collisions

Identity collisions are the new Identity theft

For 18 years, I thought she was stealing my identity. Until I found her. A woman apparently using my name meant a nightmare of unpaid traffic fines and a criminal record. But when I tracked her down, a different story emerged

It’s amazing that our society is so primitive as to rely on name + birthdate as some sort of unique key when it clearly isn’t.

Procter & Gamble church

Named the fastest-growing church in America in 2015, Crossroads has been described by the Cincinnati Business Courier as both an entrepreneurial church and a church for entrepreneurs. Indeed, it was originally a startup—or more accurately an unofficial spinoff from Procter & Gamble Co., the $65B conglomerate based downtown, a few freeway exits south of the main church. In 1990, Brian Wells, a brand manager for Clearasil, started a singles Bible study with a P&G power couple, Vivienne Lee Bechtold, then a brand manager in beauty care, and Jim Bechtold, a marketing executive. The group, which met at the Bechtolds’ home, quickly grew to more than 100 people. Eventually the singles started marrying and having children, and Jim Bechtold asked Wells 1 morning, while the 2 carpooled to work, whether it made sense to start a church.

Automating Populism

Here’s how quickly populism can be automated:

  1. Trump or Bannon picks an issue: the narrower and more inflammatory the better. Make the vote a yes or no.
  2. Trump asks his supporters to tell him what they want.
  3. His supporters download the app to their smartphones and vote.
  4. A little programming and marketing magic radically improves the number of Trump supporters using the app and reduces spammers/non-supporters attempting to skew the vote down to a trickle.
  5. Millions of Trump supporters download the app and vote.
  6. Once the decision is in, the app makes it easy to call or spam message to the user’s Congressional representatives. Millions of calls roll in.
  7. A bill that codifies that issue is fast tracked in Congress. Massive pressure via the app and the White House gets it passed quickly.
  8. Connecting action and results quickly generates buzz. Repeat. This time with 10 m downloads.
  9. The app evolves. The pressure from the network increases. It consumes the Republican party.

Trump Dirt

It should be trivial to find dirt on Trump. This is very plausible. Then why was the oppo research so incompetent? You have a guy with decades of mafia activity, probably the most of anyone who ever ran for office, and you can’t find it? More fuel for my thesis that the Democrats suck at fighting.

So, okay.

Let’s say that you’re Trump. You’ve spent your entire career in the vaguely mobbed-up world of New York real estate developers, and after being forcibly ejected from that by a series of bankruptcies, you enter the even more mobbed-up world of international financing for hotels intended for Saudi princelings and Russian oligarchs in countries with a lot of natural-resource wealth.

No one will lend you money through normal channels because, again, whenever anyone lends you money you piss it all away on gold toilets and giant shit-fights with subcontractors, so you have to rely on things like Bayrock Group, headquartered in Trump tower, which developers describe as just a weird giant money pipeline from Kazakhstan and Russia to New York. And in the midst of all of this, you decide that you’re just going to stop paying taxes, not pay your contractors, and basically act like a sexual-harassing parody of a 1970s boss.

It’s not that Trump can’t stand up to an investigation of his Russia ties, although that will produce an embarrassment of minor revelations immediately — Felix Sater, for instance, who’s a minor Russian mafioso who provided financing for Trump projects in the 1990s. It’s that Trump can’t stand up to literally any investigation whatsoever. Turn over literally any rock in Trump’s life, and you’ll find a weird squirming nest of maggots underneath it.

There might be not much to the Russia story: the worst of it might be that Roger Stone was scheduling document dumps with Wikileaks. (He has already strongly implied that he was doing this.) But if you start pulling on any loose thread in that sweater, the entire thing is going to come unraveled and a giant pile of borderline criminality is going to come spilling out.

I would be surprised if even Trump has a strict accounting of where all the bodies he’s buried in his career are. Which means that he has to prevent an investigation of Russia ties whether or not he’s guilty.

The leakiest administration

The constant flow of embarrassing information paints a fractious and incompetent White House, an unstable and immature Commander-in-Chief, and near-daily blunders both diplomatic and domestic. And beyond the daily embarrassment, the persistent leaks reveal ongoing counterintelligence investigations. The hull is taking on water, and yesterday the Administration sacrificed its first crewmember in a desperate maneuver to stay afloat.

excellent, this couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of idiots.

Russia Hybrid War

In the eyes of Russian military strategists and political technologists, they’re just catching up to the West and using its own strategies against it. More importantly, gibridnaya voina is really a combination of 2 different but related strategies. The first is a simple softening of a country before a ground invasion. It involves propaganda and political destabilization to undermine a country’s defenses. This is what the world saw in both Crimea and the Donbass region of Ukraine. The second strategy uses the same tactics and techniques, but it isn’t designed to soften a country for a ground invasion. When Russia opens up another RT affiliate in Western Europe, it’s using this strategy. The goal is simple — expand Russian soft power to make the world more agreeable to the Kremlin’s point of view.

Union corruption costs trillions

with all the discussion of conflicts of interest in the Trump cabinet, it strikes me that the most glaring conflict in the public sector is ignored: The CoI between state and local politicians elected with the support of public sector unions who then participate in compensation negotiations for the members of those unions. Here the temptation of the politicians to buy the support of the unions with public money is overwhelming. The impact of this is potentially trillions when public pension liabilities are included