This is a follow up to my previous post Corporatism Is Just Another Name For Fascism. This is about the goings on in New York State with a project called the SolarCity disaster. The article was published on Sept 22, 2016.

…rather than symbolizing a shiny high-tech future, the solar-panel factory could become a monument to what US Attorney Preet Bharara described as “pervasive corruption and fraud” allegedly infecting Cuomo’s signature economic development programs.

Federal prosecutors Thursday leveled public-corruption charges against eight individuals including Cuomo’s former right-hand man, Joe Percoco, stemming from what was described as “two overlapping criminal schemes.”

The most prominent public official named in the case was Alain Kaloyeros, the former president and guiding visionary behind the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, who was entrusted with an extraordinary degree of control over Cuomo’s biggest state-subsidized tech projects.

And:

Over the past quarter-century — with the support of every governor since Mario Cuomo — Kaloyeros has built a public-private tech empire, now based at a gleaming, 1.3 million-square-foot “NanoTech Megaplex” adjacent to the SUNY Albany campus. The SUNY Poly complex hosts 3,500 scientists, researchers, engineers, students, faculty and staff, plus a tech-oriented public high school.

Kaloyeros has parlayed hundreds of millions of dollars in state government grants and capital investments into R&D partnerships with leading tech companies, including IBM, Intel and Samsung.

Along the way, he pioneered the technique of creating a college-controlled nonprofit real estate subsidiary to build and manage state-subsidized research, manufacturing and office facilities shared with private corporate tenants. Such closely held subsidiaries figure prominently in the federal and state corruption cases.

Well if the State loses money it is all good. Because Corporatism/Fascism requires taxpayers to make up the losses.

It is illegal for most people to have a gun in New York City. This policy, enforced as Stop and Frisk, has improved police/community relations. According to Breitbart.

It should be extended to the rest of the country. /sarc

Breitbart is giving ammunition to the enemy by supporting General Warrants. The colonists went to war over such in 1776.

We are not the people we used to be.

What people who support the Stop and Frisk policy are not getting is that once precedent is set on some population it will eventually be used on all of us.

From a comment at Zero Hedge.

Rommel was indeed magnificent. He said there were four different types of people in the world.

Lazy and Stupid

Energetic and Stupid

Lazy and Smart

Energetic and Smart
 
 
 
He said to run a military campaign you should:

Get rid of the Energetic and Stupid. They are dangerous.

Give the lazy and stupid menial labor

Make the Energetic and Smart your staff officers

Make the Lazy and Smart your field commanders

I must have a different definition of friendship than most people, because I’m having trouble understanding this:

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — A new survey from Monmouth University shows that seven percent of voters have cut ties with a friend over the 2016 Presidential Race.

CBS News reports that nine percent of Hillary Clinton supporters said they’ve lost a friend because of the election and, 6 percent of Donald Trump supporters have said the same, as well as 3 percent of other voters. Monmouth noted that 7 percent of voters in previous political campaigns have also ended friendships.

So far in my 62 years of life, my true friendships have never been based on political agreement. My political beliefs and those of my friends have spanned the political spectrum. Political views not only vary, they drift back and forth. Now, I have had friends and acquaintances I met through politics, and in those cases it is understandable that my view of them and their view of me might change if our political views were to change, but my actual, real life, friends are people who know me well enough to know that I would never condition genuine friendship on agreement with me. Nor would I establish a close friendship with anyone who conditioned the friendship on agreement. Conditional friends are not real friends.

I would submit that those who say they have “lost” friends because of politics really have not lost friends. Rather, they learned (or should have!) that people who decided to not be their friends over political disagreements were never their friends in the first place. Similarly, those who jettison friendships over political disagreements could not have been friends in the first place.

As to those who condition friendship on political agreement, I just don’t get such a fragile, precarious definition of friendship, and I wonder if such people have any real friends.

Maybe I’m getting too old. I grew up in an era when friends could discuss politics and disagree freely, knowing that such disagreement between friends was healthy for the friendship (if not for the health of a free society).

I guess I should be glad the percentage of people who have lost friends over politics is so low.

They have lost nothing.

This graphic is an update: (4 Oct 2016 0525z)

Fascism is NOT coming to America. It is here already. The American version is also sometimes called Corporatism. Or Crony Capitalism. David Stockman rails against it in this article

…since 1987 when Greenspan arrived at the Fed in this era of bubble finances I call it incepted, we basically have a bifurcated economy. The bottom 90% of the population has no more real net worth today if you use an honest inflation measure to deflate nominal values. It has no more net worth today than it did in 1987. That’s nearly 30 years of going nowhere. The top 1% has gained 300% in net worth, which the Forbes 400 to take the final clip on this, is 1,000% gain.

Now, that’s not market capitalism at work. That is a, as I called it, a deformed or mutant system of crony capitalism and finance-driven economic life coming right out of the central bank and that whole complex of unsound policy that has produced a result that is very unsustainable. Not only has there been no net worth gain as we lay out in the book but if you just go to the year 2000, real median household income – again, deflated with, I think, an accurate measure of the cost of living faced by most households – is down nearly 20% from where it was when Bill Clinton was shuffling out of the White House.

Charles Hugh-Smith has this to say:

The crony-capitalist answer is always the same, of course: bribe the government to create and enforce private monopolies. This process has many variations, but a favored one is to deepen the regulatory moat around an industry to the point that competition is virtually eliminated and innovation is shackled.

Businesses protected by the regulatory moat can charge whatever they wish, becoming monopolistic rentiers that are parasites on the consumer and economy.

State-crony-capitalism destroys democracy and the economic vitality of the nation. I’ve covered this many times, and there is no solution to this oppressive marriage of state and monopoly other than innovations that open wormholes in the monopoly.

Chief IO has a rather long comment on the subject. This is an excerpt:

Monsanto pushing legislation to ban private traditional seeds and seed sharing, and promoting GMO products. (Why would a seed company want to ‘destroy’ a seed market? So you must come to the company store…)

EPA is used to forbid all sorts of things that can be done easily and cheaply, and where the alternative is very expensive (and available from very few, or one, supplier). So, want to make your own “trash to fuel FT machine”? Well, better check out all the “regulations” on fuel refining and production … if you don’t have a few full time lawyers to fill out the paperwork and a few more to defend against the EPA suing you, it’s a no-go. And who DOES have those lawyers? AND the already established refineries? Oh yeah…

Once corporations figure out that it is cheaper and easier to get the competition banned and them mandated, than to create new products; and that they can make lots of money as the sole provider of a crappy product but not that much making good products in a competitive market; well, lets just say that the campagne contributions flow…

He goes on with:

Corporations are very happy under a Socialist Third Way / Progressive / Market Socialism / Fascist / “Government regulated Coopetition” (whatever you name you like to apply to the same beast) system. They are not very happy with wide open competitive markets. See all of Europe for an example of “Managed Markets” (yet another name…) The French are masters of this technique, and the Germans not far behind. The Japanese innovated the Keiretsu as a way to limit competition to manageable chunks with government supervision.

Like I said, it DOES work. What galls me is just that we run around putting 20 different names on the same process and that just hides what’s really going on. All for political reasons. Very “un-tidy”… You’d think these folks had something to hide…

At any rate, I’d like our economy to move back more toward a “Mixed Economy” with less of it “regulated and rescued” and be a bit further from a Lange Type Socialism and more like the Socialism Lite we used to be. Somehow some folks think that means I want laissez faire (which is prone to other evil failures); even more folks think Corporations must be laissez faire machines and tools of the Evil Right Wing; when the reality is that they are much more useful to the Third Way Socialists of the world… and make much more stable profits under them.

Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Banks. They no longer compete for business. They buy government.

Here is just one example from a recent post of mine. Pharmaceutical Company Supports Cannabis Prohibition To Protect Its Profits.

Kinda makes you want to vote for Trump don’t it? He might not be any better. He certainly will be no worse. And I like his choice of enemies.

Here is an anecdotal follow up to my post Clinton Is Losing The Anti-Prohibition Voters. It pretty much describes how the anti-Prohibitionists (mostly Democrats) feel about how the Democrat politicians have handled their issues. Mostly with a wink and a nod before elections and after the election is over – nothing. Here is a link to the comment at Zero Hedge.

But it is not the first time or place I have seen such sentiments expressed. The comment is in response to Loretta Lynch declaring that cannabis is not a gateway drug.

It’s a toe-dipping maneuver. If Clinton thinks she can have Low-renta Lynch stump for the Millennial vote with the now all-too-frequent bait-and-switch regarding cannabis legalization (The Big Dawg hubby did the same shit back in 1992, remember?) then Clinton really is brain-damaged (and probably from those bottled meds that Low-renta was yammering about).

The kids are onto the Dems, big time, with Debbie Wasser-face stepping in it big time with her ignorant comments on FL’s bid to change the MJ laws last year…and catching hell from those same voters. Doubling down on her stupidity regarding the issue isn’t helping her. The Millennials have already been burned once.

People have such short memories. After Prop215 passed in California in 1996, Mr. Clinton sicced the Justice Department on doctors who recommened cannabis, the docs fought back on a First Amendment defense, and the dog-faced bitch Janet Reno that ran the Justice Department back then had to do some serious back-pedaling when the DoJ lost. Having the Institute of Medicine come out with a report in 1999 that said that cannabis was not a gateway drug didn’t help the Fed cause any, but the truth has been ignored by the very Federal Gub’mint that commissioned it, allowing the lie to continue unless challenged by knowledgeable citizens.

The Dems have always been two-faced about their support of cannabis law reform, sounding like activists to get votes. This latest bit from Low-renta is just more of the same.

Quite uncouth. But not uncommon.

Choom Boy gave them a wink and a nod and then nothing. The Democrats have lost the trust of about 1/2 (my estimate) of their former rabid anti-Prohibitionist supporters. That will affect the coming election.

If the question is “what to do about xxx” and the answer is “we need a law” you are talking to a socialist.

And with laws come enforcers. And expenses. And exemptions for the connected. etc.

In the words of our ecocrazies – it is unsustainable.

But while it continues it is going to hurt like hell.

I got an ad from a right wing site advertising home security. What interested me was their pitch. Here are two of the bullet points.

Do you know how to protect your home from invasion?

What about rouge cops and looters?

What interested me was that those on the right now fear “rouge cops”. That is a change form the “cop suckers” they usually are.

And what worries it?

Pharmaceutical executives who recently made a major donation to an anti-marijuana legalization campaign claimed they were doing so out of concern for the safety of children — but their investor filings reveal that pot poses a direct threat to their plans to cash in on a synthetic cannabis product they have developed.

On August 31, Insys Therapeutics Inc. donated $500,000 to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, becoming the single largest donor to the group leading the charge to defeat a ballot measure in Arizona to legalize marijuana.

There is more. A disclosure statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

Legalization of marijuana or non-synthetic cannabinoids in the United States could significantly limit the commercial success of any dronabinol product candidate. … If marijuana or non-synthetic cannabinoids were legalized in the United States, the market for dronabinol product sales would likely be significantly reduced and our ability to generate revenue and our business prospects would be materially adversely affected.

They have only your best interests at heart. Just ask their accountants.

And there is worse to come for them. Opioid use down in states with medical marijuana.

According to Breitbart Chelsea Clinton has stepped in it. Big Time.

In a campaign appearance Saturday in Youngstown, Ohio Chelsea Clinton suggested that marijuana has the ability to kill.

During her speech, Clinton said, “We also have anecdotal now from Colorado, where some of the people who were taking marijuana for those purposes, the coroner believed after they died that there were drug interactions with other things they were taking.”

Breitbart mentions that the DEA begs to differ.

The DEA acknowledges that there has never been a reported death from an overdose of marijuana. According to the Washington Post, “On its own, marijuana is not known to have any fatal dosage level. The DEA itself acknowledges that nobody has ever died from marijuana alone.”

Here is a link to a DEA pdf on the subject. In case you were wondering. Breitbart also discusses legalization results in Colorado.

The state has also seen a drop in highway deaths as well as a drop in overdose death of harder illegal drugs such as heroin.

And that led me to look at a hardcore anti-Prohibition site on the subject of Chelsea’s comments. High Times.

During a recent appearance at Youngstown State University, Clinton—campaigning on behalf of her mother, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton—told a crowd of students that “anecdotally, we have lots of evidence” that cannabis is effective in treating epilepsy and stimulating the appetites of those undergoing chemotherapy treatment. But she then went on to say that there are still some public health concerns associated with pot consumption due to recent deaths in Colorado.

“We also have anecdotal evidence now from Colorado where some of the people who were taking marijuana for those purposes, the coroner believes, after they died, there was drug interactions with other things they were taking,” she said.

Although there is no documented evidence that marijuana has ever contributed to the death of a single human being in the thousands of years it has been used by civilizations across the globe, prohibitionists often dig deep into their sagging bags of propaganda to convince the average citizen that the effects of cannabis can be both devastating and deadly. But this is the first we have heard of marijuana potentially interacting with other drugs and causing people to suffer their untimely demise.

Well OK. High Times also reports that Chelsea “walked back” her statement. But that is not the most interesting thing. The original High Times article got over 100 comments. And the comment section was very supportive of Trump. I’d say in the 50% to 75% range of support.

This comment was typical of what I saw.

Last I checked her Mom has killed more people than Marijuana.

Now cannabis is not a very important issue. Except to the 10% of the population our government is making war on. And they are rabid on the issue. And for the most part those folks were planted on the Progressive Plantation. If Trump can get just half of those to vote for him such a shift would mean a landslide for him. Because those voters used to be very reliably Democrat.

I entered the Flash-Light™ in the competition. I didn’t win, place or show. But quite a few people liked the idea. I also met some people who may be interested in my help with electronics design. The light was originally featured here at Classical Values in July of 2012.

You can see videos of the winners doing their 3 minute pitches and get other details at Eigerlab Fast Pitch Competition.

I had originally gone to Eigerlab in 2006 for help in developing the Flash-Light™. Back then the place was run by incompetents. The crew running the place now is much better.

I should add that the free food, coffee, and cake was outstanding. The best part of the night? Everyone was talking business.

Update: 30 Sept 2016 0301z

My esteemed first mate informs me that the Eigerlab page linked above does not list this year’s winners. It lists the winners from 2013 by showing videos of their pitches. The 2015 winners are listed at the bottom of the page.

I have built a delta robot which does not yet do exactly what I want it to do and exactly when I want it.

I’m thinking about the work ethic here. George Washington opposed slavery because he thought it destroyed the work ethic, while here I am madly focused on a thing which would make things for me without my having to do any work.

To Karl Marx it seemed like common sense (and indeed, natural law!) that those who do the work should own the means of production. Yet there has always been a struggle among the “those.” Those who create versus those who technically make that which was created to be made by them. These two are not synonymous, and thus even Marxists have been forced to recognize the power of those — or that — which we would call the creator.

If workers should overthrow what was deemed the state, if workers could seize what was called the “means of production” because they were already operating it, is that not an argument for robots doing the same thing?

Seriously, why not Marxist robots?

I don’t mean this shit.

No, Marxism is supposed to be based on scientific, natural processes.

Nor this.

In neither case are the robots themselves being considered. If they are the ones doing the work, then according to classical Marxist theory, why should they not take over?

I think that a good case could be made for a Marxist-style takeover by robots.

And if you factor in “the environment,” why, the case becomes even more compelling. Robots do not consume — nor do they need to consume –anywhere near as much energy or natural resources as humans. They have an inherently much lower carbon footprint, are much “greener,” and I think many environmentalists would agree if they were to think about it.

Perhaps the robots should take over the world. By any logical standard, they would do a better job.

Hell, isn’t that what it’s all about?

Building a better world?

That last post (and perhaps some of the comments to it), reminded me of a interesting possible new use for a fairly well known product.

A can of this stuff could fairly easily be rigged up between a car’s radiator and grill, and with the trigger linked to an ordinary choke cable (or other similar device), it could be triggered to spray not only bears in the road, but maniacal demonstrators blocking the road. As the latter are violent criminals who, by trapping people in their cars, are committing false imprisonment, and possibly kidnapping, this would seem like a more humane alternative than running them down in self defense.

Spraying them saves lives!

Plus, the life you save could be your own.

Lest anyone think I am advocating cruelty to animals or people,as we all know, a Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy Is a Bear Is a Demonstrator.

Right?

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s professional demonstrators. My antipathy goes back to the 1990s, when I was a target of their wrath. I know the mindset of these people and I understand their tactics so well that they trigger very unpleasant feelings of nostalgia. This week’s news has been dominated by the same people, using the same professional tactics, except unlike the old days they they no longer limit their targets to their ostensible enemies, such as police or public officials. They attack ordinary citizens, often for no other reason than being in their cars.

While the professional activists would never admit it publicly, ordinary citizens are in fact their enemy, for the simple fact that they are not out there in the streets supporting them. That they are in cars makes them even more worthy of hatred and scorn, for the activists are steeped in a neo-primitivist mindset which disdains modernity, progress, civilization, and of course the automobile.

So they attack. And ordinary people trying to drive home in their cars are of course much softer targets than armed police officers or National Guardsman.

What I particularly despise about this is that I don’t especially like driving, and I consider it an unpleasant activity. It makes me claustrophobic and I often feel trapped in this unnatural metal box, surrounded by other people in their unnatural metal boxes. For me, being stuck in traffic is absolutely the most unbearable aspect of modern life.

That there are people who would deliberately block traffic to draw attention to their causes is bad enough, but when they then attack drivers and their families, they cross a line which should never be crossed in a civilized society. They are despicable scum. Moreover, being attacked after your car has been roadblocked is worse than a home invasion burglary, because there is less that you can do. Self defense is fully justified, and I am in 100% sympathy with the remark that got Glenn Reynolds in trouble. I share his sentiment.

That won’t get me kicked off Twitter, as I don’t use it. Nor will I face a malevolent academic cadre howling for my job. But I suppose that if the activists get their way, in the future I could actually face discipline for saying or thinking thoughts that activists disagree with.

You think I’m kidding? Read this. (Did anyone think this could not happen here?)

Whoever you are, whether you’re at work, in your car, or even trying to study in a library, they will not leave you alone.

Evidently Republicans are changing their tune.

YouGov’s latest research shows that most Americans still support legalization of marijuana, and that support for legalization has increased slightly, from 52% in December 2015 to 55% today. Most of this change is a result of changing attitudes among Republicans. In fact, for the first time, Republicans narrowly tend to support legalization, 45% to 42%.

Yeah. A slight increase of 3% in seven months (the poll was done in July). That is a heck of a rate of change for a politically divisive issue. If it keeps going at that rate support for legalization should be around 60% by October of next year.

Rand Paul says Hillary is sick.

“Her losing consciousness, there, which by all appearances she did lose consciousness, is not something commonly associated with pneumonia.”

Some election music with violins. Stevie Nicks – Landslide.

For those of you not familiar with MEMRI here is a link to MEMRI.

What Bill leaves out is the 5 point (roughly) bias in favor of Democrats that most polls have until it gets close to election day.