Some Personal Thoughts on Various Things

A water lilly

This virus business uncertainty is personally disorienting to a non-trivial extent. So much is flying under the radar that many things our federal government has done or is doing is getting too little public attention. Much MAGA!! is going on right under our noses.

Small things

A conversation I had with a more informed and intelligent mind than mine a few days ago, told me that the current issue of Car and Driver magazine reports that a 1990s Newt Gingrich law, named to imply that the data of people who give personal information the law states required would protect people's information required to get a driver’s license, actually made it legal to do the opposite. The law was deceptively and intentionally named something like “Protection of Driver’s Privacy Act.” That law claimed to protect the rights of states to sell driver’s personal information to private entities. In fact, what Newt did to us legalized states to sell sells driver personal data to any dirtbag or dipstick on planet Earth. Thank you Newt and 1990s republicans (now Trump Party).

So what? If I recall the conversation correctly, the state of Florida sold Florida driver information for $77 million to whoever Newt’s corrupt law allowed. What is really galling is that the state of California sold California drivers out for a puny $56 million (if my memory of the conversation is good). California sold me out cheap. I want my data back. (But of course, it is too late for that -- it has been resold as many times as there were 3rd party buyers for it)

I greatly prefer to not rely on my memory for any fact assertions in my posts here. I much prefer quote directly from original sources, e.g., the Car and Driver magazine article, but measures to deal with the Trump Virus (the TV) has shut the local Barns & Noble store down. I could not buy the magazine and quote directly from it. The TV is responsible for this weakening of honest communications in American society.

Insider trading by members of congress and white collar crime

Multiple sources report that pillar of the community and valiant patriot Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), chairman of the senate Intelligence Committee, sold about $1 million in stock to avoid the hit the TV has had on the stock market. Burr knew that a major stock market collapse was imminent. The New York Times writes:

“On the morning of Feb. 4, Mr. Burr assembled members of the committee in a secure room on Capitol Hill to hear for the first time from intelligence officials about how foreign powers were responding to what the World Health Organization had days earlier declared a global health emergency.

Their warnings were not highly classified or all that specific, drawn largely from diplomatic wires and publicly reported information, according to three people familiar with them. But at a time when the White House was playing down threats from the virus, intelligence officials from the C.I.A. painted an early picture of the outbreak’s geopolitical implications.

The next day, Feb. 13, Mr. Burr sold off 33 different stock holdings, worth a collective $628,000 to $1.7 million, liquidating a large share of his portfolio.

At least four other senators, as well as about two dozen House lawmakers, also sold some of their financial holdings in the same period. Like Mr. Burr, the other senators said they did nothing wrong and were not acting on information unavailable to the general public.”

Powerful democratic senator Dianne Feinstein was one of the traders. So were the valiant patriots James Inhofe, R-OK (climate science denier and God believer), Kelly Loeffler, R-GA, and David Perdue, R-GA. All claim innocence. Are they all innocent? Probably not in the spirit of the law, but probably in the letter of the law. The letter of the law requires proof of intent to commit an illegal criminal act beyond a reasonable doubt.

Why do you think that? Good question. Glad you asked. Here’s why: Smart white collar crooks do not leave a paper trail and rely only on trusted people to help them commit their crimes, usually ones bound by secrecy agreements. I've tried to get this point about plausible deniability across before. In the case of Burr, he claims he acted only on publicly available information, but what he was saying in public contradicted what he was saying in private. Absent contrary tangible (paper) or witness evidence, that is enough to get the crook Burr and his corrupt colleagues in congress off the hook.

From what I can tell, proof of intent to commit an illegal insider trading act beyond a reasonable doubt is impossible in about 99.999% of cases. Not 99.9% (one in a thousand). I estimate 99.999% (one in a hundred thousand) inside traders ever get caught. For example, the last time I looked about 15 years ago, the SEC would not even bother to investigate any single trade that netted less than $100,000 per trade. All crooks had to do was break their trades up into $100,000 increments and almost always avoid investigation and even less common prosecution and even less common conviction. Congress makes damn sure that law enforcement is crippled by limited budgets to enforce laws. That congressional anti-rule of law, pro-thief attitude applies in spades to the IRS which is now so crippled in its law enforcement budget that about $600 billion/year in tax cheating is allowed to go unpunished (the net tax gap is a topic for a different discussion).

In other words, congress and especially the Trump Party (formerly the GOP) is pro-crime and pro-theft by certain white-listed segments of society including members of congress, rich people who support Trump and business owners who support Trump.

And there's this: Burr is asking for an ethics investigation. He should. Now that Trump has neutered ethics in government, Burr is about 99.999% certain to be found pristine and good to go. If Burr asked for a DoJ investigation, it is about 99.9999% certain that he would be found pristine and good to go. After all, attorney general Barr works for Trump and Trump wants to protect his Trump Party supporters in congress so Barr will absolve all of them, except maybe Feinstein since she is a stinking democrat.

Miscellaneous

Sean Hannity denied calling coronavirus a hoax nine days after he called coronavirus a hoax. Lying obviously doesn't faze liars. Lying is legal and that is good enough.

The president fired the head of the US pandemic response unit after she stated publicly in 2018 that the US was not prepared for a pandemic. I suspect that once he heard that, coupled with the fact that she was an Obama invention, he flew into a mindless Trump rage and fired all of them. (don't have the link)

As what is probably part of his ongoing disloyalty purge in the federal government, the president has fired the acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Some insiders see it as a purge of career professionals in a function set up after 9/11 to protect the nation from further attacks. This is more evidence that the president takes his orders from Moscow.

Before the virus outbreak, multiple warnings went ignored: “That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August. The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.”

Conclusion

Relax. We’re in SNAFU-FUBAR mode. All is well.