Monthly Archives: June 2020

Sharp Contrast between Floyd Protests and Tea Party Protests

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In the aftermath of the George Floyd murder,

Protests and looting occurring nightly across America are being followed by a different phenomenon the following mornings: volunteers swooping in to clean up the garbage, debris and graffiti that is often left behind.
In communities from California to Florida to Rhode Island, people are showing up with brooms, shovels and paint to help damaged businesses and neighborhoods. Like the protests, the efforts are sometimes spontaneous and sometimes highly organized.

One group of cleaner-uppers, Shannon D’Souza and five friends, drove in a caravan of three cars re the clean-up.

It’s our way of protesting, said Ms D’Souza, a 35-year-old dancer, as she painted over graffiti left on a gate in front of a market near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street.
“They support us, so we have to support them,” she said of the neighborhood businesses.

And

A Kroger spokeswoman said many nearby residents came out to assist in cleanup efforts, which helped the store reopen quickly.
In Minneapolis, ad hoc cleanup crews have shown up almost every morning after looting, vandalism, and even fires have occurred amid largely peaceful protests.

And

Some of the cleanup efforts were organized even before the damage was done. In Long Beach, south of LA, looters were still rampaging through the downtown district—causing millions of dollars in damages to an estimated 80 businesses, according to local estimates—on Sunday night when Sal Flores-Trimble created a cleanup event for the next morning on Facebook.

All of this is highly commendable—it’s good that the clean-up efforts occurred without requiring cities to do so exclusively—but something is lacking.

There’s no indication that any of today’s protesters ever joined those next day clean up efforts. Of course, the rioters and the looters create most of the mess and would interfere with any prompt cleanup efforts. But where are they those following mornings when “America cleans up?”

It’s true that the looters and rioters were absent from the Tea Party protests of the prior decade. But it’s also true that the Tea Party protesters cleaned up after themselves; there was no need of “community effort” later on.

Facts?

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Twitter has decided to eschew actual facts when it does fact-checking of Conservative posters.

The operator of the popular microblogging platform said it will now focus on “context, not fact-checking” when deciding whether to rule a tweet to be in violation of its policies.

They’re stuck on the lower ground in the High Sierras.

If you’re the fact checkers, where are your facts?

Facts? We ain’t got no facts. We don’t need no facts. We don’t have to show any stinking facts.

Their bias is showing.

America’s Problem

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…according to Walter Russell Mead, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed. He suggested that the world will only wait out the Trump administration, and that the next administration, Trump’s or Biden’s, will face a world grown unresponsive to American leadership, not believing that American society is capable of the role any further.

He closed his piece with this:

Whatever happens in the election, the US administration next year will face a problem even more daunting than the intellectual challenge of crafting a national strategy for an increasingly dangerous time. It will have to convince the world that this time, America really means what its president says.

This overstates the case, and it perpetuates a myth that has suffused too many administrations for far too long.

We don’t have to convince the world of anything, nor should we be defining ourselves in terms of other nations’ approval/disapproval of us. We have only to do what’s best for the United States—which will include ad hoc purpose-designed coalitions, but very few hard treaties.

Putting our nation first—which is not putting our nation alone, as a mendacious press and today’s crop of Progressive-Democrats claim—simplifies Mr Mead’s problem.

Police Training

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“We also have to fundamentally change the way police are trained.”  This is what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden is saying now.  He went on:

And the idea of standing there and teaching a cop and an unarmed person comin’ at him with knife and gonna shoot him in the leg instead of the heart is a very different thing.

Never mind that a person with a knife is not at all unarmed. Never mind that the reason police are taught that when they must shoot—and as a last resort, mind you (for all that there is the very occasional bad cop)—they must aim for center of mass so as not to miss altogether, and they must take care for the people and property that may be beyond the person at whom they’re shooting. Never mind that legs are much smaller targets and much more rapidly moving.

Keep in mind, too, that this is the same Joe Biden whose home defense advice is to shoot a shotgun through a closed door, without regard for target identification.

I won’t get into how out of breath Biden sounded or the general level of coherence that seems lacking in the minute-and-a-half clip.  Just attend to that bit about police training.

This is the incoherence the Progressive-Democratic Party wants to put into the White House.

Keep a close eye on who they choose for his Vice President candidate, and then think about the 25th Amendment.

Chasing Yield

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Chasing yield is the tactic of going for the highest-yielding investment available at the expense of other considerations. One of those considerations that gets disregarded in the chase is whether the yield being…offered…is radically higher than that of other investment vehicles on the market. If it’s much higher, that yield likely is too good to be true.

Another consideration that gets lost in the chase is the underlying soundness of the issuer. Checking the level of soundness is hard work, often tedious and boring. It’s necessary, though, and it’s equally necessary to avoid the flip side of that: the laziness of just jumping onto a handy get-rich-quick scheme, which is what so much of yield-chasing is.

Hence a cautionary tale offered by The Wall Street Journal.

Exchange Traded Notes are “fund” instruments that pedal other people’s debts aggregated into exchange traded fund-like instruments. They’re centered on

options-based strategies and certificates of deposits whose returns are tied to stocks or currencies.

That last is important. When the stock—or stock indexes—or the currency—or currency indexes—fall, the ETN’s instruments fall in value. And whey those instruments fall below a threshold, the issuer can take them off the market.

The issuer is not the ETN—that’s the bit about not owning the asset. However, when the issuer takes its instrument off the market, the ETN is still stuck, and its value falls, and it falls catastrophically if it’s a leveraged ETN.

And that’s what happened during the current sharp market drop. Before the nascent—and still fragile because it’s built on future expectations, not current economy performance—recovery began, one bank alone was forced to take 15 of its ETNs off the market entirely, wiping those investors’ investments. Folks old enough to know better—retirees—but who were trying to double up to catch up from the Panic of 2008 losses, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in hard cash money and money they could have had had they been willing to collect profits along the way instead of letting it all right on their roulette/faro/baccarat bets.

Don’t understand what I’ve written above regarding ETN structure (I’ve been deliberately very high level in my description)? That’s a hint. If you’re not clear on the nature of the investment you’re contemplating, walk away from it.

 

RTWT.