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.

A Murder of a Black Man

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Dave Patrick Underwood was a black man in front of the Ronald V Dellums Federal Building and US Courthouse in Oakland, CA. He was murdered in a drive-by shooting as part of the larger rioting and looting that’s going on throughout California under cover of “protesting” the murder of George Floyd, another black man, 2,000 miles away in Minneapolis, MN.

Underwood was employed by the DHS’ Federal Protective Service, he was on duty guarding the building, and he was in uniform.

California’s Progressive-Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom,

who speaks of the protests that followed Floyd’s death as an example of people “rightfully outraged at how systemic racism is allowed to persist,” said of Underwood’s murder that “no one should rush to conflate this heinous act with the protests.”

Apparently, Dave Patrick Underwood wasn’t black enough to suit Newsom.

Disgusting.

Humor

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Because we need some.

I can’t believe I got fired from the calendar factory. All I did was take a day off.

I just found out I’m colorblind. The diagnosis came completely out of the purple.

Just burned 2,000 calories. That’s the last time I leave brownies in the oven while I nap.

A cop just knocked on my door and told me that my dogs were chasing people on bikes. My dogs don’t even own bikes….

That’s enough of that.

Bob and Joe are walking home late one night and they pass a graveyard. Bob suggests taking a shortcut through it but the Joe has to meet someone elsewhere so they part company.
The next day they meet up.
“You made it through the graveyard then?” says Joe.
“Yeah, but you’re right there’s something creepy going on in there,” says Bob.
“Like what?” asks Joe.
“Well, I could hear this really strange sound, like music being played backwards.”
“Really?” says Joe, “Tell you what, why don’t I get my tape recorder and we’ll cut through there tonight, see if we can record it?”
The next day they meet up again and Joe plays the tape.
“That sounds classical,” say Bob.
“Yeah, it’s Beethoven’s 9th symphony – I’m playing the tape backwards,” says Joe, “And I found out where it’s coming from, come and see.”
Joe leads Bob back to the graveyard and up to a grave marked “Ludwig van Beethoven.”
“I don’t get it,” says Bob, “Why is the music coming out backwards?”
“It’s obvious really,” says Joe, “He’s decomposing.”

A lost dog strays into a jungle. A lion sees this from a distance and says with caution, “This guy looks edible, I’ve never seen his kind before.”
So the lion starts rushing towards the dog with menace. The dog notices, but as he’s about to run, he sees some bones next to him and gets an idea. He says loudly, “Mmm…that was some good lion meat!”
The lion abruptly stops and says, “Woah! This guy seems tougher then he looks, I better leave while I can.” Over by the tree top, a monkey witnessed everything. Evidently, the monkey realizes the he can benefit from this situation by telling the lion and getting something in return. So the monkey proceeds to tell the lion what really happened. The lion says angrily, “Get on my back, we’ll get him together.” And they start rushing back to the dog.
The dog sees them and realized what happened. He then gets another idea and shouts, “Where the hell is that monkey! I told him to bring me another lion an hour ago…”

When you call a dog, they usually come to you.
When you call a cat; they take a message.

A woman is walking in the park when she sees a man playing chess with his cat.
She says to the man “I can’t believe what I’m seeing, a cat that plays chess, what a clever animal.”
The man replied “Nah, Lady, this cat’s not clever at all; I’m beating it 6 games to 1.”

Europe Objects

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The US will allow to expire/revoke sanction waivers associated with the failed Iran nuclear weapons development Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action treaty. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, the nations whose businesses will be most affected, are unhappy. The projects in which these nations’ companies are engaged, they claim,

serve the nonproliferation interests of all and provide the international community with assurances of the exclusively peaceful and safe nature of Iranian nuclear activities[.]

What these nations must answer, though, which they’ve been at pains to not answer since the 2015 agreement’s inception, is the manner in which Iran’s nuclear “activities” are peaceful and safe when the Iranian government has said all along that Israel must be destroyed—and its nuclear weapons program would provide significant weaponry for that goal.

What these nations must answer, and which they’ve also been at pains to avoid, is how peaceful and safe Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be after the JCPOA expires in a few short years, and all fetters disappear.