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On September 4th 2016
Elevating the hands on, boots on - the dubbed the 'Saint of Gutters"to one of the Catholic Church's highest honors. Pope Francis canonized Mother Theresa praising her radial dedication to society's outcasts and her courage on shaming the world 's leaders for the crime's of poverty "they themselves created".
Riders in the city of "Brotherly LOve' take different turn , by cruising historic streets in Th openly naked biker ride in 81 degree temperatures. Hundreds of people in various state of undress or dress set out Saturday for a ride through some of Philly's main streets, land marks and sights naked bike ride which started 2009 promoting cycling as a key form of transportation and fuel conscious consumption. It is also ostensibly to encourage body positivity,
The course runs 13 miles this year 0000
Nota Bene:
At a gathering of current and former U.S. officials and private-sector executives Friday in Washington, concern was rampant that the United States has fallen behind China in the development of several key technologies, and that it faces an uncertain future in which other countries could challenge its historic dominance in the development of cutting-edge communications and computing technology.
The gathering was convened by the Special Competitive Studies Project, an effort spearheaded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the stated purpose of which is "to ensure that America is positioned and organized to win the techno-economic competition between now and 2030, the critical window for shaping the future."
Among attendees, the prevailing sentiment was that the nation's ability to actually win that competition was under threat.
Dire predictions
A few days before the summit, the SCSP issued a report predicting what would happen if China became the global technological leader.
"Understanding the stakes requires imagining a world in which an authoritarian state controls the digital infrastructure, enjoys the dominant position in the world's technology platforms, controls the means of production for critical technologies, and harnesses a new wave of general purpose technologies, like biotech and new energy technologies, to transform its society, economy and military," the report said.
The report envisions a future where China, not the U.S., captures the trillions of dollars of income generated by the new technological advances and uses its leverage to make the case that autocracy, not democracy, is the superior form of government.
In the report's grim vision, China promotes the concept of a "sovereign" internet, where individual countries limit the flow of information to their people, and where China develops and possibly controls the key technology supporting critical infrastructure in countries around the world.
Finally, the report warns that under such a scenario, the U.S. military would lose its technological lead over China and other competitors, and China might be in a position to cut off the supply of "microelectronics and other critical technology inputs."
'Nothing is inevitable'
In an address to the summit, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan appeared to agree that the nation faces significant challenges in keeping pace with China in the development of new technology.
"We know that nothing is inevitable about maintaining America's core strength and competitive advantage in the world," Sullivan said. "And we know that it has to be renewed, revitalized and stewarded, and that is especially true when it comes to U.S. technological leadership."
In China, he said, "we're facing a competitor that is determined to overtake U.S. technology leadership and is willing to devote nearly limitless resources to do so."
"....President Joe Biden finally visited the devastated island on Monday. He quickly made it obvious why he stayed away for so long. He appeared to fall asleep during an event honoring victims of the fire. He looked lost while exiting a stage.
Senior moments may be inevitable for someone 80 years old, but they can’t explain this. He told fire victims that he had a “little sense of what it’s like to lose a home.” Fifteen years ago, he said, a lightning strike started a fire in his home. “I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette and my cat,” he said....."
~victor Joecks
"never has ever seen this."
Newt Gingrich blasts 'absurdity' of new Trump charges: This will nominate him 'by a landslide'
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich joined "Fox & Friends" Wednesday, calling the new indictments of former President Trump in Georgia an "absurdity," and ...
Fox News
Biden's will shorten vacation in Nevada Lake Tahoe trip to finally visit Maui, Hawaii in the wake of deadly wildfires (expected to reach 200) amid growing criticism from Maui citizens that he is vacationing instead of doing a emergency visiting Hawaiian disaster....
"photos of JB sunning himself on the beach while Hawaii smolders, but mainstream media don't care....Biden has a symbolic role. Amerians en mass can't go to Hawaii to our sympathy ."
~Victor Joecks
“In the eight years that my father was President of the United States I never once sat in the room with business associates and called him on the phone. If I had, the Democrats would have skewered me.”
When I posted that tweet the other day, it got a huge response.
As we know from this week’s big whistleblower news, over the course of 10 years – while Joe Biden was vice president and when he was out of power – Hunter Biden put his father on speaker phone at least 20 times during meetings he was having with foreign business people.
That bombshell proved Joe Biden was lying all those times he told voters and the media that he never once talked with Hunter about his sweet business deals with Ukrainian gas companies and Chinese banks.
It also showed how differently Joe and my father were when it came to using the power and political influence of the presidency to enrich their extended families and friends.
The story of how my father “helped” me goes back to Election Night in 1966.
My dad was running for governor of California. I was 21 and working on a trucking dock in Los Angeles, loading oil well freight from 5 p.m. to 1:30 am.
I had just dropped out of college. And when I did, my parents laid down the law.
They said, “While you were in college, we picked up the tab. But now that you’ve dropped out, you get to pick up the tab. Find a place to live and get a job.”
The victory celebration for my dad was at the old Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I got off early from work and remember going up to my father and congratulating him on winning the governorship.
The next thing I did was ask him for a job.
I thought any politician would immediately open the door and give their offspring a job if they wanted it or needed it. But my father said, “I don’t believe in nepotism.”
I guess I should have asked for the job before I voted for him, but he really believed what he said.
When he became president, I got a call from White House lawyer Fred Fielding. It was a simple conversation.
“You are going to be approached by many people who will want to use you to get to your father,” he said. “They will offer you all kinds of things. Please, before you do anything, pick up the phone and call me. Here’s my number.”
Anytime anyone would call me – and many people did – I’d call Fielding. I’d tell him I was approached by X, Y or Z and what they wanted me to do.
Most of the time, Fielding would say, “You’re calling me, so your gut is probably telling you it’s not a good deal. So go with your gut.”
That’s what I did – and still do – because the attempts to buy the Reagan brand have never really stopped.
In 2019, when Volodymyr Zelensky was running for president of Ukraine I was offered $100,000 just to fly to Kiev to endorse Zelensky.
It wasn’t because I knew anything about Zelensky or Ukraine, it was because of who my father was.
I didn’t have a White House lawyer to call for advice, but I had the knowledge I needed to make the right decision. I went with my gut and declined the Ukrainian offer, figuring it would not look good if I was ever hauled before a congressional committee.
Based on the revelations about the Biden family’s dirty operations, First Son Hunter obviously does things differently. So does his dad.
If I had called my father about endorsing Zelensky he would have told me not to do it, but he was a better kind of president.
He understood he was serving the country. He wasn’t asking the country to serve him – or his family.
....or we could just sell beer"
~Michael Ramirez
RIGHT???
Congressional Democrats returned home last week to tout new federal legislation intended to stop a surge in retail theft. It’s an interesting concept, but the trio might also consider explaining to members of their own party how coddling criminals can encourage wrongdoing.
On Wednesday, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Reps. Dina Titus and Susie Lee were in Las Vegas to promote the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act of 2023, which all three have co-sponsored. The proposal, which would give federal prosecutors increased power to go after organized theft rings, comes in response to an increase in inventory “shrinkage” at businesses large and small in many areas of the country.
Thieves “are becoming increasingly aggressive, and our associates are threatened every day with knives, guns, Mace, bear-spray, stun guns — you name it,” said Scott Glenn, vice president of asset protection for Home Depot. Indeed, in recent years it has become common to see surveillance video of brazen thieves in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and elsewhere walking out of a store after helping themselves to whatever they can carry.
But why would that be? It couldn’t have anything to do with misguided “defund the police” policies that became all the vogue in progressive circles, could it? It’s all completely removed from leftist district attorneys who have vowed not to prosecute offenders for crimes such as shoplifting and vandalism, isn’t it? And surely it couldn’t be related to Democratic legislatures, including in Nevada, redefining what constitutes a felony when it comes to those looking for the five-finger discount, right?
There’s nothing wrong with criminal justice reform and ensuring that those who make a mistake have a chance at redemption. But when such good intentions morph into willfully turning a blind eye to antisocial and criminal behavior, they become a detriment to public safety and a threat to law-abiding citizens and their neighborhoods. Just ask the people of Oakland, where NAACP leaders recently requested that a state of emergency be called as a result of rampant crime that goes unpursued by the authorities.
Making improvements doesn’t entail locking up a mother who steals baby food or a teenager who lifts a candy bar. It simply means sending the message that there are consequences for engaging in illegal behavior — particularly over and over again.
Expanding federal statutes to attack large-scale retail theft operations may do a modicum of good by adding more resources to the fight, although state and local laws already exist to combat such activity. But it might be just as effective for voters to recognize that Democrats who advocate defunding the police or ignoring whole portions of the criminal code are neither compassionate nor working in the best interests of their constituents.
— Tribune News Service
Gambling and Trading - Beating the Spread $$$
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Accept Reality or Pretend: Your Choice
"I believe that most people prefer to think that a 'business approach to investing' just makes sense - plain and simple. Though if you bring the discussion further, and really delve into what that means, and specifically, how it's reliant upon prediction, then you get a lot of blank stares. People have told me that they might not know the ins and outs of how their money manager is making decisions, but they know he is using 'sound investment principals' and they feel safe with that. When I bring up price being the real-time determinant of value, when I bring up money management and systematic trading decisions, as a clear way to be actively involved in your chance of turning your nest egg into an eagle, I get a lot of negative responses. The feedback I get is that people want to think that you need to be a hard working detective to really dissect these companies, understand the businesses, know the management, read the economy and then make an investment based on these 'facts'. They really would rather have that, and pay for that, and buy into that - then work on themselves and take responsibility. I certainly don't think everyone is that way, but it seems that the majority is."
The way I look at gaming and trading is this:
In gambling, the house always has an edge. It varies by game, but they always have an edge. If they have a 1% edge, then for every million dollars bet, they will get $10,000 in revenue. If they run $100 million through that game, they will get $1 million in revenue.
In casinos, some people win big, some people lose big. But statistically, the house knows that its edge will bring in the revenue. As a gambler against the house, you cannot get around it. You can, however, play games that have the least house edge and you can use prudent risk and money management to make a living gambling. It is possible and there are guys doing it. But that does not mean the house will still not get its revenue from others, like Aunt Martha and Cousin Bob.
With trading, I am the house. I have the edge (side note: if you don't have an edge, you should not be trading). Your edge could be a particular setup that works 58% of the time. That's an edge. You could have a setup that works only 30% of the time, but your edge is taking frequent small stops and riding very large gains when you are right. That's a legitimate edge. Likewise, in spread betting you have to beat the spread.
The point is, trading is like owning a casino. It is not like being a casino customer.
That's why I get a little ruffled when uninformed people (usually well-meaning friends or relatives) say "Trading is gambling." They are, of course, correct. But in Vegas, the house gambles, too -- against the customers. Do they lose? Of course not. They have an edge. You have to beat the spread.
My advice to traders and gamblers -- part-time and full-time -- is to keep doing it as long as you think you can make money at it, and as long as you can stand the risk along the way. And don't be ashamed of it.
Gotta have an edge and beat the spread. That's the GRAIL
Written by: Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, Kurt
Jason Aldean
Album: Try That In A Small Town
Released: 2023
A former police volunteer claims to have discovered the identity of the figure behind some of the most shocking crimes in British history, unmasking the 19th-century murderer who terrorised the nation as Jack the Ripper.
Sarah Bax Horton – whose great-great-grandfather was a policeman at the heart of the Ripper investigation – has unearthed compelling evidence that matches witness descriptions of the man seen with female victims shortly before they were stabbed to death in 1888 in the East End of London.
Her detective work has led her to Hyam Hyams, who lived in an area at the centre of the murders and who, as a cigar-maker, knew how to use a knife. He was an epileptic and an alcoholic who was in and out of mental asylums, his condition worsening after he was injured in an accident and unable to work. He repeatedly assaulted his wife, paranoid that she was cheating on him, and was eventually arrested after he attacked her and his mother with “a chopper”.
Significantly, Ms Bax Horton gained access to his medical records and discovered dramatic details. She told The Telegraph: “For the first time in history, Jack the Ripper can be identified as Hyam Hyams using distinctive physical characteristics.”
Witnesses described a man in his mid-thirties with a stiff arm and an irregular gait with bent knees, and Ms Bax Horton discovered that the medical notes of Hyams – who was 35 in 1888 – recorded an injury that left him unable to “bend or extend” his left arm as well as an irregular gait and an inability to straighten his knees, with asymmetric foot dragging. He also had the most severe form of epilepsy, with regular seizures.
The victims were prostitutes or destitute. Their throats were cut and their bodies butchered in frenzied attacks with the authorities received taunting anonymous notes from someone calling himself Jack the Ripper. They are some of the most infamous unsolved crimes.
At least six women Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly – were killed in or near Whitechapel between August and November 1888.
Hyams’ medical notes, taken from various infirmaries and asylums, reveal that his mental and physical decline coincided with the Ripper’s killing period, escalating between his breaking his left arm in February 1888 and his permanent committal in September 1889.
“That escalation path matched the increasing violence of the murders,” said Ms Bax Horton. “He was particularly violent after his severe epileptic fits, which explains the periodicity of the murders.”
She added: “In the files, it said what the eyewitnesses said – that he had a peculiar gait. He was weak at the knees and wasn’t fully extending his legs. When he walked, he had a kind of shuffling gait, which was probably a side-effect of some brain damage as a result of his epilepsy.”
Witness accounts of the man’s height and weight were similar to the details in Hyams’ medical files, Ms Bax Horton discovered.
“They saw a man of medium height and build, between 5ft 5in. and 5ft 8in. Tall, stout and broad-shouldered. Hyams was 5 foot 7 and a half inches, and weighed 10 stone 7 lbs… His photograph demonstrates that he was noticeably broad-shouldered,” she said.
She has concluded that Hyams’ physical and mental decline – exacerbated by his alcoholism – triggered him to kill. The murders stopped at the end of 1888, around the time Hyams was picked up by the police as “a wandering lunatic”. In 1889, he was incarcerated in the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, north London, until his death in 1913. Jack the Ripper never struck again.
Various suspects have previously been suggested as the man behind the killings, including the artist Walter Sickert, who painted gruesome pictures of a murdered prostitute.
Hyams had been on a “long list” of around 100 culprits, but Ms Bax Horton said he had been discounted because he had been misidentified. “When I was trying to identify the correct Hyam Hyams, I found about five. It took quite a lot of work to identify his correct biographical data. Hyam Hyams has never before been fully explored as a Ripper suspect. To protect the confidentiality of living individuals, two of the Colney Hatch Asylum files on patients, including Hyams, were closed to public view until 2013 and 2015.”
What makes her research particularly extraordinary is that it was prompted by her chance discovery in 2017 that her own great-great-grandfather, Harry Garrett, had been a Metropolitan Police sergeant at Leman Street Police Station, headquarters of the Ripper investigation. He was posted there from January 1888 – the murders’ fateful year – until 1896.
Ms Bax Horton, who read English and modern languages at Oxford University, is a retired civil servant who volunteered with the City of London Police for almost two decades until 2020. She had no idea of her ancestor’s history until she began researching her family and found herself studying the Ripper case.
She will now present her extensive evidence in a forthcoming book, titled One-Armed Jack: Uncovering the Real Jack the Ripper, to be published by Michael O’Mara Books next month.
It is written in tribute to her ancestor and his police colleagues.
Paul Begg, a leading Ripper authority, has endorsed it. “This is a well-researched, well-written, and long-needed book-length examination of a likely suspect. If you have an idea of the sort of man Jack the Ripper might have been, Hyam Hyams could be it,” he said.
by
John Stossel
THIS WEEK, while we celebrate the work of America’s founders, I honor a living freedom fighter: billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai.
When Communist China crushed freedom in Hong Kong, Lai could have gone anywhere in the world and lived a life of luxury. But he chose to stay in Hong Kong and go to jail.
A new documentary, “The Hong Konger,” tells his story.
Lai grew up in poverty in China.
“My mother was (imprisoned) in a labor camp,” he recalls. “We were just 5 or 6 and managing ourselves without an adult in the household. When I was 8 and 9, I worked in the railway station carrying people’s baggage.”
There he learned about a little British-controlled island near China called Hong Kong, where people were less poor. So he went there “in the bottom of a fishing junk, together with maybe 100, maybe 80, people, and everybody vomiting.”
Once in Hong Kong, he was amazed at how plentiful food was. “I never saw so many things for breakfast. I was so moved. I was crying.”
He got a job in a sweatshop. “We had to wake up before 7 and worked until 10 p.m. But it was a very happy time ... a time that I know I had a future.”
The chance to have a future makes such a difference.
At the time, Hong Kong was an unusually free country. Police enforced law and order, but otherwise, the British rulers left people alone. That allowed people to prosper.
“The British gave us the institutions of freedom,” says Lai. “Rule of law, free speech, the free market ... That created the best in the world. That was very enlightening for me.”
Lai eventually saved enough money to start a clothing business. “I started a very small factory. Eventually we became one of the biggest sweater factories in Hong Kong.” Gradually, his clothing business, Giordano, made him rich.
Lai assumed that the Communist Chinese, seeing the prosperity in Hong Kong, would leave the island alone. After all, even the Communists were embracing some capitalism.
“I thought China is going to be changed,” says Lai. “China is going to be like Western country that I’ve been to. I was very excited.”
But then came the Tiananmen Square massacre. That inspired Lai to start a media company. Media are important, he said, because they deliver information, “which is choice, and choice is freedom.”
Lai’s media business thrived. He covered Chinese government abuses when other Hong Kong media wouldn’t. “Everybody was so chickened out, so scared. They went into self-censorship to avoid offending the Communists.”
Even foreign investors kept quiet to protect their investments in China.
Then, in 2020, China passed a “national security” law that declared it illegal for Hong Kongers to criticize the Chinese government.
“It became impossible for media to survive!” complained Lai. “Whatever we say can be sedition.”
A conviction for sedition would mean jail time, three years to life.
But Lai kept his paper open.
“If we just surrender,” he said, “We will lose the rule of law. Lose the freedom. We will lose everything.”
Hong Kong did lose its freedom, but Lai still refused to leave. “I came here without anything. ... I owe freedom my life. ... Don’t think about the consequences. Do what is right.”
For publishing the truth about the Communist government, Lai was arrested and sentenced to five years in jail. Chinese officials say they may add more years.
Still, Lai says he doesn’t regret his decision to stay.
“It would be so boring just being a businessman. I want to make my life more meaningful and interesting. That’s why I got into the trouble I got into today. And I’m happy to have it.”
Happy?
Jimmy Lai is a remarkable man, and a hero of freedom.
,,,, was an affront to our US Constitution
~Michael Ramirez
