Tag Archives: responsibilities

Pettiness

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The headline says it all:

The Revenge of Jim Mattis

The op-ed then continued.

In his statement to the Atlantic, Mr Mattis denounced in particular Mr Trump’s threat this week to order the military to restore order amid riots in US cities. He said this threatens the Constitution, which is overwrought given that George HW Bush and other Presidents have done this. Mr Mattis also undersold the significant harm that riots have done in many cities (see nearby).

This is a misreading of history that, from a man who has styled himself a student of it, can only be taken as cynical. Mattis is ignoring the use of the military to restore order amid riots by Presidents Eisenhower and Bush the Elder, entirely constitutional uses.

And

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.

Mattis ignores even recent history, about which he’s mischaracterized the divisiveness extant. He carefully ignores the utter contempt with which Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the man she hoped to replace, Barack Obama, held millions of Americans: bitter Bible- and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country, irredeemable and deplorable. He carefully ignores the NLMSM’s so-unifying practice of calling Tea Partiers “tea baggers,” then- (as now) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) calling them astro-turfers. He carefully ignores current Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential nominee Joe Biden’s contempt for black Americans: if they’re confused about whether to vote for Biden, they’re not black. (Biden since has extended that Progressive-Democratic contempt to 10-15 per cent of Americans being just not very good people, but that post-dates Mattis’ diatribe.)

Mattis also carefully ignores Trump’s work toward unification—prison reform; jobs for blacks, Hispanics, women; funding for Historically Black Colleges; on and on.

These are breathtaking…failures…by that historian.

And this letter from an erstwhile Presidential lawyer:

Jim:
I slept on your statement and woke up appalled and upset. You lost me. Never dreamed you would let a bunch of hack politicians use your good name and reputation—earned with the blood and guts of young Marines. You did what you said you would—engage in this discourse. Marines keep their word.
The phony protesters near Lafayette park were not peaceful and are not real. They are terrorists using idle hate filled students to burn and destroy. They were abusing and disrespecting the police when the police were preparing the area for the 1900 curfew. Jim, this is the new nihilism. See Dan Henninger in WSJ today. Marines support the police in harms way.
Did you forget that President Bush used active duty Marines to quell the riots in LA? President Trump has countless cities and some snowflake governors and mayors wetting themselves in the use force to protect innocent lives and property. The AG of Massachusetts thinks burning property is good protest.
Three more policemen were stabbed and shot in NYC last night.
Think about it. Should he be upset about the obvious failure of leadership? Where are you Jim?
Marines go to the fight.
No one divided this country more than Obama. He abandoned our black brothers and sisters. He gave guns to the cartels. He apologized for our precious sacrifice and generosity overseas.
President Trump has done more to help our minority brothers and sisters in the three years than anyone in the last fifty. Ask the black pastors. Ask the leaders of the black colleges and universities. He got them funded. Ask them about the prison reform which ended the draconian sentences imposed on young black men by the laws enacted by Biden and his hacks. You need to bone up on your homework and stop listening to Uncle Leon.
I understand, you had to stick to the assigned narrative which did not include three years of corrupt investigations and evidence to destroy this President, his office, and his lawful free election. Nancy has no tolerance for dissent in the ranks—including those with stars.
You said nothing of the ugly, hate filled, disgraceful comments of Pelosi, Schumer, Perez and other Democrat hacks defaming the President and his office. You said nothing of the unlawful sanctuary cities and the unlawful release of hoodlums. You said nothing of the resistance movement to paralyze our courts and our government operations. You said nothing of the obstruction and subversion of our immigration laws. You said nothing of MS-13 killers and the drug cartels who own huge sections of our major cities. Jim, do you think that hateful rhetoric and those corrupt actions were inspiring and unifying? Do you think the DI’s at Parr’s Island would find such behavior as unifying?
Maybe, your problem, is a lot deeper. Perhaps you ought to explain how and why you (and John Allen), as CG Central Command, did not engage and take out Iranian Major General Soleimani who roamed the Middle East and wreaked havoc and death of American boys with his infamous IEDs?
Why did it take President Trump to have the instinct and balls to take him out (of course over the objection the geniuses in the Pentagon)?
Looks like the Persian mullahs were a one horse sleigh and Trump nailed the horse….forever. It has been quiet ever since. Perhaps, your anger is borne of embarrassment for your own failure as the leader of Central command. Did you applaud when the President recognized the central problem in the middle east? Did you applaud the President when he wanted to save American lives by bringing them home in one piece?
John M Dowd

The Wall Street Journal says in the first link above,

Mr Mattis, the former four-star Marine General, is a man of accomplishment and dedication to country.

In his book, Call Sign Chaos, however, Mattis wrote:

I don’t write about sitting presidents.

General Mattis was, indeed, a man of accomplishment. It seems, though, that Mister Mattis’ word is less accomplished. As is his level of rationality.

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.

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.

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.