1669 Ruth Bader Hindenburg

Note to readers:  This post was written before Justice Ginsburg made her ill considered apology for her ill considered act.  Sorry your honor but you were right the first time and you’re wrong now.

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Oh, the Humanity!  A little old lady from Brooklyn has caused a fire worthy of the Hindenburg.  Not only did Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg set the blimpish windbag Donald Trump afire, she did it without so much as a match and a cubic yard of hydrogen.

Ginsberg had the gall to do what pretty much any little old lady from Brooklyn might do and that is call Donald Blimp a “faker.”  Probably she had a better word than faker in mind.  But the dignity of the court, don’t you know.

The first to pipe up were the hangers on who cite the federal code of judicial conduct which bars judges from taking political stands.

Turns out, the code does not apply to Supreme Court justices who not only can rule until death -- and in some cases after death --  but can say anything they want.  Justice Ginsburg was not on the bench when she spoke.  But it wouldn’t matter if she were.

So Trump says she should resign because her mind is shot. She’s “mentally unfit,” he says. Right. When and if she develops that hole in her head, she will still be smarter than most of the rest of us.

Blimp wants her to recuse herself from any Supreme Court case involving him.  What noive! What case involving him would be worthy of consideration by the court?

What Justice Ginsburg did is not all that unusual. Scalia did it all the time.  So did Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall.  

Poor Ruth.  She’s not even Mexican.  Although she is Jewish and in Trump World, that might be almost as bad, even if his daughter is married to a Jewish guy and has converted. (These things can be undone.  Being born a Jewish woman in New York cannot.)

But Trump isn’t the only critic.  Even Ginsburg’s supporters are piling on. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times editorial pages have joined in.

Senators Murphy (D-CT) and Durbin (D-IL) don’t like what she said.  And White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest says “She didn’t earn the title Notorious RBG for nothing.”  

The failed Republican candidates for the presidential nomination don’t like it.  And McConnell and Ryan are livid.  Big surprises.

We are so used to public figures of stature and power giving us doubletalk that when one doesn’t, it’s a cause celebre.

We love it when the little guy speaks truth to power.  How about cutting the judge some slack. It’s power speaking to power.

Today’s Quote: "He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. ... How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that..." -- Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “clarifying” her position on Trump a day or so before re-clarifying with an apology.

Shrapnel:

--It’s hard to understand the RBG hysteria because every word out of every Supreme Court justice’s mouth is political, even if less direct.  Instead of yelping about “crossing the line” or weaseling that “I would say the same thing no matter who she was talking about,” one can learn something here.  If someone of that stature takes that step, maybe there’s something to it, even if they later say they didn’t know the gun was loaded.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1668 Venezuela Under Water

It was only in the high 80s in Caracas the other day. That’s low for this time of year when the temperature often rises above 100.

So a relatively mild day for Venezuela’s new national pass time, standing in line.

With the country’s dependence on slumping oil prices, luxuries like bread and toilet paper are scarce if available at all. It’s like the Soviet union in the post war

Photo: thegatewaypundit.com

years.  Bread lines. We hear stories about people eating cats and pigeons.  When they eat at all.

This is the story of Junior Perez, 25, one young man in a population of more than 30 million.  Word spread earlier in the week that there would be toothpaste available for the first time in awhile. Limit two tubes per customer.  So Junior got onto the line.  And waited.  And waited. And waited along with abuelas on portable lawn chairs and petroleous who had nowhere else to go because they don’t work much these days.

Along come a couple masked guys with guns and they notice Junior is using a cell phone.  Imagine, a cell phone and it appears to be working.  So they do what any masked guy with a gun would do, they command Junior to turn over the phone.

But Junior treasures his phone -- who there wouldn’t? He declines the command and starts running toward the pharmacy door.  The gunmen, being gunmen, fire.  And they hit Junior in the back and he goes down.

He’s not dead.  Not yet.  

The gunmen have the phone.  And at this point you’d expect the line -- at least that part of it -- would kind of break up to help Junior or get out of the way.

But it doesn’t.  No one moves.

Junior, on the ground along with most of his blood, dies.

The gunmen are going through Junior’s pockets to see what other treasures they can extract.

Still, no one moves.

These days a case like this is not unusual.  More than two dozen people including a toddler have been killed while on line in the last year, the AP says.

And it quotes a pharmacist who was waiting for his own ration of toothpaste thus:

“These days you put the line before everything… you get what you need and you don’t feel sorry for anyone.”

When baby needs shoes or Imodium, safety comes second even in a country with one of the world’s highest homicide rates.

Over in the Palacio de Miraflores, president Nicolas Maduro doesn’t know what to do. His mentor and predecessor Hugo Chavez left the country in economic ruin, appropriating factories and depending on oil for every nickel in the treasury.

Oh, one more thing:  Venezuela is paying its bondholders on time and in full when all it would have to do is default and use the money for toothpaste.

All investment carries risk.  And if you bought into Uncle Hugo’s delusional and unworkable scam, you don’t deserve to be rewarded for your bad choice.

Headlines:

-Obama makes pretty speech in Dallas, signifying nothing.

-Police chief gets standing ovation from crowd at Dallas Memorial, signifying something.

-Bernie endorses Hillary sending many of his supporters into anaphylactic shock.

Grapeshot:

-Shouldn’t something called “headlines” be placed at the head of a post and not near the end?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1667 Drunk on Data

It’s a new addiction.  Reduce everything to numbers.  And then what?  Shoot at their feet and make ‘em dance… just like in the old time cowboy movies.

What do they do with all those surveys they shovel at you on the internet?  Especially when people lie on them?  Especially when they try to quantify an emotion out of context.  Especially when the terms are undefined.

“Good service” or bad can mean something different to everyone.  Some minor annoyance (the wheel on my cart squeaked) can annoy someone to the point that he dislikes the entire experience.

“If the election were held today, candidate X would beat candidate Y by Z-points.”

It gets worse when the stats look backward:

“Candidate X beat candidate Y by 5 points.”  So why is candidate Y taking the oath of office?  Oh. Well. When we said X won, we meant among coal miners under the age of 55 in Boca Raton, FL.

All this is part of a larger problem that we’ve addressed before, here and here:  Take something, wrap it in statistics and everyone will believe it.  We are as a culture math phobic and unwilling to fix it.

At our peril.

Surely there must be at least one type of therapy for that. If not, it’s the only widespread affliction without one.

We need those numbers.  But that’s not all we need.

Big data don’t confuse people.  People confuse people.  The only weapon against bad data are law abiding citizens armed with good data.

In a world dominated by figurer hounds like Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight and Nate Cohn who writes for the Upshot section of the New York Times, we need explanations.  (We also need more guys named Nate to work for similar departments at the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Someone please call the World Federation of Nathans and motivate.)

There’s no doubt we need good data.  After all, without it how would health and life insurance companies know how much to overcharge us?  How would we know how many refugees have fled the Middle East war zone?  How would we know who was elected President.  Oh, wait. That number of votes doesn’t really count.

We need figures.  But we need to remember that coating a lie in arithmetic doesn’t mean it’s no longer a lie.

Shrapnel:

-- “Business Insider” is a popular and insightful website run by fallen Wall Street star Henry Blodget and partly owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Lately it’s been promoting Amazon regularly. Bezos’ other media company, the Washington Post, hasn’t gotten the memo… yet.

--A bunch of guys dressed in Confederate Army uniforms raised their battle flag on the pole outside the South Carolina capitol building Sunday to the cheers of brain dead and robotic followers in the crowd.  It was “Bring it Back” day for people who didn’t like the recent ban of the flag. They called the sanest recent action to take place on those grounds “the greatest act of treason” ever committed on that piece of land.

Grapeshot:

-What happens when your memory foam mattress gets too old to remember you?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1666 Hi, I'm Hillary and I'll be Your Server Tonight

Oops. Wrong kind of server.  Let’s start this one over:

Olympic medalist Hillary Clinton did it again: Speed skated to the gold.  Now what? Now plenty.

The FBI cleared her of various charges having to do with classified material and her use of a private email server rather than the State Department’s.

When he read his no prosecution announcement the FBI director showed all of the poise and sincerity of a prisoner of war on camera praising his North Korean captors or a kidnap victim in a filmed ransom demand. But he managed to slime her even without a legal leg to stand on and was cornered into agreeing to investigate whether Clinton perjured herself in testimony to congress.

Of course, what she did was wrong wrong wrong.  But as they say on Wall Street, the market has already factored Benghazi and emailgate into the current price of her stock and she’s still tracking well ahead of the competition.

Congress is a starving dog and Hillary is a meaty bone. They won’t drop the matter.  The republican majority lives to quash any gain any democrat makes in any area. And now that they’ve more or less polished off Obama, it’s on to the next. And the next is Clinton.

Did you catch any of the congressional hearings?  Like any congressional hearing it was an opportunity for members to make self serving speeches, sometimes ask a question, not listen to the answer and continue gnawing.

Did Clinton perjure herself before a kongressional kangaroo kourt that no one respects and no one should? Maybe.  It’s a family tradition. And a congressional one. Haul a Clinton into a hearing room, ask things that are none of its business, decide there was perjury and try to pry them out of the picture.

The State Department had put its investigation on hold pending the outcome of the congressional investigation, and will now resume it.

Will they find something the FBI missed?  Unlikely.  Isn’t there a double jeopardy involved here?  Well, yes and no.  Technically, she wasn’t found not guilty, the Justice Department just decided against charging her.

So the department is free to go for sloppy seconds.

Today’s Quote: “Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor.  It’s the other way around. They never vote for us.” -- Political philosopher and poet Dan Quayle.

Shrapnel:

--The sanctimonious and self righteous members of congress had best remember what goes around comes around.  Do you recall Denny Hastert’s holier-than-thou performance at the Bill Clinton impeachment?  Denny got his and Trey Gowdy (Gowdy Doody to his friends) will get his, too.

--Why do cops shoot civilians without obvious reason?  Dead men tell no tales.  Best to eliminate a witness whose testimony in a real court might convict a rogue officer.

--The fatal shootings and woundings of police officers in Dallas Thursday night remains a developing story. But retaliation of this kind does not solve any problems. It just creates new ones.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1665 Why You Don't Shop

There’s something wrong with a world in which big box bargain retailers can present stuff for sale more attractively than fancy department stores.

Been in a bigger Macy’s or Kohl’s lately? Some of them look Jackson Pollock paintings.  Pig pens.  Rats’ nests.  

As physical stores fight for survival against online sellers, they are busy shooting themselves in their feet.  There are two reasons: not enough people on the floor -- workers or customers -- and the death of the standard retail model.

Let’s look at the second one first.  The standard retail model is simple. The store buys stuff wholesale and sells it retail.  When it runs low on the item, they put it on sale to clear it out.  Sometimes they entice customers with a loss leader, a product on which they intentionally lose money to attract foot traffic.

What is replacing that is: buy wholesale. Post a retail price for ten minutes then put the stuff on sale.  At the same time find some items you can overcharge for.

What this is supposed to do is keep the cash flow steady and completely forget the value of any one piece of merchandise.  The hoped for outcome: overall profit by turning a lot of stuff into loss leaders while charging more than necessary for good selling goods.

During the recession, we sheep were all trained to use coupons.  Even those of us who hate them joined in.  The appearance of a bargain is just as good as a bargain itself.

Now, we can’t live without those coupons.

Kohl’s has a good trick:  spend a certain amount and you get a $10 “Kohl’s Cash” coupon at checkout.  But you can’t use it until some future date.  So you come back.  Once inside… gotcha.

Macy’s in king of coupon confusion.  “X dollars” off if you spend “Y.” “Z% off if you use your Macy’s Amex card.  

Now, about populating the sales floor.  Sales are down, so is hiring.  That’s partly because no one comes to shop.  That depresses sales further, so more coupons.  But there aren’t enough clerks to handle increased register traffic or to clean up and sort the stock that people have taken off shelves or racks and not put back.  There’s that Jackson Pollock thing again.

As a result: I’m not going back there any time soon because it’s a mess and you can’t find an open register.  This further depresses sales, discourages hiring and the cycle continues.

The only way to train a publicly traded corporation to do something or to stop is through its stock price because the corporation doesn’t really care about any breathing beings except shareholders.

So here’s an optimistic note.  Fancy retail stocks have been taking a huge beating.  That may cause some executive who hasn’t visited a selling floor since he was promoted from stock boy to wander out and see what’s going on in the jewelry or better dresses department.

And that could lead to more hiring, more open registers, neater sales floors and a rise in sales followed by a rise in stock price.

If you want to know what your Macy’s should look like, take a walk around a Target.

And here’s the best part:  If you get hired as a sales or stock clerk, and you do a half decent job, you’ll eventually end up in an executive suite.  They come with free ulcer medicine.  But they also come with a living wage and you don’t need a fancy education to land there.

At internet stores, if you get hired as a warehouse worker, that’s where you’re likely to remain as long as you work there.

Quote of the day: “May I wrap the blue one up for you?” -- James Cash Penney speaking to a customer who can’t decide between blue and green and may decide on nothing if not nudged a bit.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1664 Art and Antiques of the Future

Is this art?

This Benett Newman painting sold for $44 million dollars in 2013. The painting is huge.  And you can copy it or paint a variation with zero ability to draw, maybe even zero ability to see.

Assuming we don’t melt, flood, burn, choke or radiate earth into subatomic particles, what will serve as the antiques of the future?

Is there anything made today that will survive a few generations and become a future treasure?

When we think of antiques, we think of overstuffed or intricately carved furniture. We think of old paintings or lithographs and other prints by famous artists.  We think of milk bottles made of glass, substantial but rusted tools, the advertising signs of defunct beers, manual typewriters, peddle-driven sewing machines and newspapers with headlines announcing the assassination of Lincoln, and dated two days after he was shot.

Now what?  What’s left from the last 50 or 60 years that will remain memorable in the late 21st century? Cars are utilitarian and generally artless.  Name one big name painter whose works sell now for six or seven figures.

Will anyone ooh and ahh over that La-Zee-Boy recliner or that Ashley dining room set made of particle board in Vietnam?  How about that pea green 1970s Kelvinator refrigerator or the yellow Hotpoint stove?

Maybe a petrified PC or early Mac will make the cut. Or a giant Maglight.  But a five blade Gillette “Fusion” razor won’t, even if the microchip-guided battery operated vibrating feature still works and there’s still such thing as an aaa battery.

What will be the demand for Swatch watches or Bic pens or Anderson Windows or Bose radios in 2060?

And then, there’s music. Are Notorious B.I.G. and Johnny Rebel the Beethoven and Lorenz Hart of tomorrow?

And books?  Where to begin. Today's Fiction often is so bad it makes you long to re-read Ivanhoe, previously the worst novel in the English language.

Much modern architecture has drawn its inspiration from tail finned, multicolored cars from the 1950s. The buildings look like vertical versions of the DeSoto Firedome eight, but made of glass.

Better save that stovetop iron, those Caruso records and that Rheingold Beer sign.  They’re going to have to last at least another generation.

Shrapnel:

--Alligator tag team?  That’s what the father of the kid killed at Disney in Orlando says.  Not one, he says, but two ‘gators, one attacking his son, the other himself.

--All across the land the plea cries out for a return to national unity.  Earth to America: Happy Birthday and when were we ever united over anything after WWII?  It’s not a melting pot, guys, it’s a stew pot and while we don’t need to watch the ingredients all that closely, we do need a taster to try a spoonful before we dig in.

Grapeshot: Fireworks don’t kill people, yokels and macho men kill people but they use fireworks as the celebratory weapon of choice.

July 4th quote: “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” -- George Washington, American military leader and politician.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1663 Goodbye Nancy Grace

Longing for November.  That’s because the contract between Turner Broadcasting and America’s Most Obnoxious TV performer ends in October.

Nancy Grace, the shrieking shrew of two professions already overloaded with those character flaws will be leaving HLN which is CNN’s third rate television “news” service… something between In Touch Magazine and the Midnight Globe supermarket tabloid.

Nancy has a law degree.  And not just a puny juris (doctorali imaginarium) doctor, but an LL. M, which is a “masters of law,” something lawyers study for when they feel there aren’t enough letters after their names.

She’s been with various Turner networks for about a dozen years.  There she’s used to hysterically try and convict such luminaries as Casey Anthony and Jodi Arias.

The Anthony jury failed to hear Nancy’s instructions and thus wrongly acquitted Anthony of murdering her toddler.  Arias’ jury convicted.  That means Judge Nancy batted .500 in two of the bigger cases she tried sans court, an admirable record.

Grace never met a guest she couldn’t cut off or talk over.  Out shouting an invited bloviator is one of TV’s big no-nos. She turned it into a high art.  Well, maybe a low art.

So, she had the best of two worlds, a legal career that didn’t depend on serving actual clients or a prosecutor’s office and TV where her co-stars flared ever less brightly than she.

Let’s stop a minute and consider those law degrees.  A juris doctor is more like a second bachelor’s degree. It is tough.  But it’s nothing like a real doctorate, say an MD, DO, PhD or even the marginal EdD.  Only lawyers and evangelists would call an undergraduate degree a “doctorate.”

Nancy is within kissing distance of 60 and we’re not sure that her departure is voluntary.  But lately, she’s been popping up on ABC which is desperate to capture or recapture ratings from the newly invigorated CBS and NBC in mornings and evenings.

Has that helped?  Probably not.  Viewers of major networks are less likely to buy the National Enquirer than, say, Time or Forbes.  But ABC will figure that out soon enough.

Nancy Grace is the most inappropriately named public figure since Donald Trump started calling himself a multi billionaire.  There is no grace or gracefulness about her.  She is a loud mouthed, cranky, southern belle with a shrill delivery.  She and her handlers confuse omniscience or omnipotence with obnoxiousness.  Apparently they don’t give English vocabulary lessons in Juris Doctor school.

Grace is the kind of person that makes you want to take a shower after a minute in her presence.  But she may hold the record for performers who incite violence against television receivers.

She is the gold standard of awful.  Fortunately, that kind of gold just had a meltdown.

Today’s Quote: “It’s not perfect.” -- Tesla Automobiles describing its “autopilot” driver assist feature after a driver using it died in an encounter with a tractor trailer truck in Florida.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016