Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Trump's former VP, Mike Pence, has a two book contract for $4 million with Simon & Schuster.  Maggie Haberman says that Pence's book deal is "grating on" Trump.   Well, yes, but Pence has so many distinctions going for him.: 1) First Republican Vice President of the 21st century not to have shot anybody in the face during his tenure; 2) Apparently refused to participate in a coup d'etat to preserve the life of Trump's administration;  3) Thereafter fled Capitol Hill with secret service protection while a crowd chanted for his death; and 4) His head was a comfy home for a fly during a televised debate. If you can't make a book out of all that, what would it take??? 

  So ... POTUS 45 is said to be looking for a book publisher. This is a traditional thing for ex-President's to do, after all. More so than scheming for some fantasy "reinstatement" under the hidden reinstatement clause of the constitution. [It was written by the founders on invisible ink on the back of unused bamboo ballots. That clause.]  Anyway, COLT 45 wants to sell a book about his presidency. But getting a prestige main-line publisher to sign on is, according to reports, proving to be difficult.  Presidential memoirs are always ghost-written -- heck it can be an assembly-line operation. The Trump organization is up to the task of putting together a book to which he has put his name. They've done it before. But they don't want it to look like a vanity production. And they probably don't want a committed conservative publishing house like Regnery. Random House published Trump: The Art of the Deal in the '80s. There has been considerable consolidation ...

  Found on Quora recently:  Does it make a lot of people angry how "rigged" the stock market seemed in 2020 and lately in 2021? Why or not? How is it true that the stock markets are more rigged than any time in history?  Let us consider that question. It represents the failure of generations of finance journalist, including your correspondent, to convey to the public any real sense of how markets work. It also represents a stark case of presentism, the impulse to give the latest things the greatest importance, ad all superlative words, so that the latest rigging, whatever exactly it may consist of, must be the most rigged ... ever.  Our friend may certainly be making reference -- since he has in mind the last year and a half -- to the Paycheck Protection Program and its fallout. As the severity of the pandemic became obvious, Congress passed the CARES bill, including the PPP. As a consequences, hundreds of millions of dollars seem to have been fraudulently allocated....

Terry McAuliffe won the Democratic Party's nomination for Governor earlier this month, setting up an autumnal show-down with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin.  There was no suspense in the Dem primary, McAuliffe won with 62% of the vote, and the second-place finisher got only 19% . Nobody was biting nails.   McAuliffe is an old-school political hack, who guaranteed the loan that the Clinton's used to buy their nice new house in Westchester County (pictured above) when they were ready to  move out of their leased Pennsylvania Avenue place in DC. He almost immediately thereafter became the head of the DNC and is credited with valuable modernization of the fund-raising machinery there. He also had a big part in running HRC's campaign in 2012.   His opponent, Youngkin, is a former CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the biggest private-equity management firms in the world. He played a big part in Carlyle's transformation from a partnership into a publicly traded ...

 I don't believe in chartism. Let's start with that. Chartism is the hypothesis that stock markets, like an etch-a-sketch, draw pictures, and that some of these pictures are bullish, others bearish. But, just for fun, let's discuss a Chartist pattern today. The most renowned of them is the cup-and-handle.  You see an example above. At the right edge of that chart, a true Chartist would be screaming to himself, "BUY!!!"  Here are a couple of points: This formation only matters if it happens AFTER a longer bullish period. And it is a "continuation" pattern. That is: the cup-and-handle illustrate that the bull market in XYZ stock has taken a necessary "breather" and is ready to resume its upward course. You see that the "cup" formation is supposed to be a U-shape, not a V. Also, chartists are happiest when the volume numbers at the bottom of the cup are low. Both of those facts signal that there was no rush to dump the stock once it star...

  During all the heated debate about the Texas "election integrity" bill, I asked what seemed to me a simple question in a tweet. I asked if the Texas law had a no-food-or-water clause analogous to that in Georgia, passed into law earlier this year.  I hadn't located the actual bill text yet when I asked. It turns out I had to find it for myself -- nobody on twitter was at all helpful. Here is the link:  Bill Text: TX SB7 | 2021-2022 | 87th Legislature | Introduced | LegiScan And the answer, at a quick scan, is "no." There is no analogous clause.  But, to get back to my story: I asked this question on twitter and received only one reply (no answer). The reply wondered why I hadn't said "New York" instead of "Georgia" for purpose of comparison. After all, New York has the "same" rules.  A little research indicates further: no, New York does not have the same rules. It has some similar rules, which seem to have been in place for y...

On May 19 a young news associate working for the Associated Press in Arizona was fired because it said she had authored “some tweets” that “violated AP’s News Values and Principles.” Nobody has pointed to misconduct in her work for the AP itself. What seems to have happened here is that a campaign by the Stanford College Republicans singling Emily Wilder out as an “anti-Israeli agitator” by way of questioning the AP’s objectivity on the issue started to catch fire, and the AP sought to douse that fire quickly. My understanding is that (1) Wilder had worked at AP for only 17 days when she was fired, (2) she had not written the contested tweets during that 17 day period, and (3) she had created them while an undergraduate at Stanford College, when she was with the campus newspaper. On May 15, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the building in Gaza used by the AP in the coverage of that conflict. This was part of a broader exchange of fire between the Palestinian group Hamas and Israel, and i...