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When Police Pull You Over

I bought the house several years earlier and rented it to one of the maintenance guys that works for me. It was in what some might call the iffy part of town. I had been to it only once. To discuss the improvements needed with our partner in the local real estate business. This time, since the tenant had moved out, I was returning to see what kind of shape it was in. I was in my BMW 760 and was cruising around the neighborhood, trying to remember where the hell it was!

A cop in an unmarked police car pulled me over. He was young, and he looked uneasy. He peered furtively inside the car as he asked me for ID.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I told him the truth.

“You are looking for a house you own. But you don’t know the address?”

“Yeah, I know how it sounds. I own a few houses in this area. But I don’t personally manage them.”

He gave me the “Oh, sure” look.

He told me to step out of the car and put my hands on the hood. Then he patted me down. That felt wrong. But in an odd way, it was exciting. “I’m getting frisked,” I thought. “That’s sort of cool.”

Then he asked if he could check the contents of the car. Again, that felt wrong. But I thought, “Why not? He won’t find anything incriminating, and he’ll realize that I’m an upstanding citizen.”

It finally dawned on me that the poor guy had figured I was some sort of drug dealer, cruising around my neighborhood in my $150,000 car. And that made me nervous. Because I’d read enough to know that planting evidence on innocent people is not all that rare. If he wanted to, he could do it!

I had a thought. I asked him if I could call Giovanna. She would be able to tell him the exact address of the house I was looking for and verify that I was the owner. He said okay. I made the call. She conveyed the information. And after that, his tone of voice changed from suspicious to mildly apologetic.

There are two lessons I took away from this.

One (which I should have known): It’s not a good idea to cruise iffy neighborhoods in an expensive car. Two: If and when you are pulled over by a cop for no obvious reason, you should be very careful about what you say to him. It was foolish of me to be so cooperative with this cop. It worked, because he was a good cop. But it could have gone the other way.

Here is a brief explanation of the rules.

And here are some clips of people following the rules. Click here and here and here.

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Ready for an Uncomfortable Conversation?

Let’s Take an Honest Look at Our Secretary of the Treasury 

This is painful to watch.

Janet Yellen, who was appointed by the Biden administration to lead the Treasury Department, is responsible for “formulating and recommending domestic and international financial, economic, and tax policy, participating in the formulation of broad fiscal policies that have general significance for the economy, and managing the public debt.”

She has an impressive resume. She got a PhD in Economics from Yale University. She taught at Harvard. She served as a staff economist at the Federal Reserve, became head of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and served in various capacities under the Clinton and Obama administrations. After a spell with the Brookings Institute, Biden invited her to head the Fed in 2020.

Since then, we’ve seen the US economy weaken in almost every important sector, while inflation rises to historical levels and the strength of the dollar dwindles to the point where it could very well be replaced.

That’s not entirely her fault. Nor is it entirely the fault of the old guy that appointed her to her office. The enfeeblement of the economy and the destruction of the dollar began half a century ago when Nixon disconnected the value of the dollar from the price of gold, which allowed the government to spend money it didn’t have to fight wars we couldn’t and didn’t win. Not just the proxy wars generated by the military-industrial complex, but the war on drugs and the war on poverty, which haven’t worked – at all – but devalued the US’s greatest economic advantage, the universal belief in the US dollar.

What bothers me about Yellen is how painful it is to watch her try to defend the futile and insanely expensive bad economic policies that have caused so much destruction. Despite her distinguished education and long years of experience, the poor woman is no longer capable of answering basic questions about economics. Let alone defend what the Treasury has been doing these past two years.

Click here for a clip that shows how very incompetent she is. (There are MANY similar clips. I’ve included a few in past issues.) How can anyone with a modicum of economic intelligence watch this poor old lady try to defend what the Treasury Department is doing and not feel sorry for her?

If you disagree, please write to me, and defend her any way you can. I’d love to believe that she knows what she is doing.

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Who Wants Gun Control? 

In a recent essay in The Free Press, Nellie Bowles (a very smart and funny writer) wrote that “while conservatives balk at even the mildest gun control efforts… progressives have absolutely no intention of enforcing even existing gun control laws.”

* Example #1. Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner explaining why he will no longer prosecute illegal gun possession: “We do not believe that arresting people and convicting them for illegal gun possession is a viable strategy to reduce shootings.”

* Example #2. US Attorney for DC Matt Graves justifying why he has declined to prosecute 67% of all those arrested in his district: “The declinations are mostly coming after arrests in cases such as gun possession, drug possession, and misdemeanors – not violent crimes.”

AI: Let’s Take a Pause Before This Gets Out of Hand! 

The news about AI is moving at an incredible pace. Last week, Google announced that it had launched an application it calls “Bard.” Testing was scheduled to begin immediately in the US and the UK.

This week, Elon Musk joined Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and more than 1,000 other AI experts and industry executives in signing an open letter calling on all AI labs to “immediately pause” training of systems more powerful than Chat GPT-4 for at least six months. Citing extensive research, they argue that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose “profound risks to society and humanity” and change the “history of life on Earth.”

A Government Agency Does One Thing Right 

I’m inclined to be skeptical of government programs on many levels and for many reasons. My observation is that, even if they are well-intentioned, they tend to do more harm than good.

I don’t feel that way about the FTC’s Consumer Alerts program. The agency sends out warnings about scams to the public. The warnings typically explain how the scams work and provide advice on how to protect against them. Impressively, the alerts are short and comprehensible, a rarity in US government publications of any sort.

Click here to see an email scam they’ve been alerting me to lately.

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Tetris 

Directed by Jon S. Baird

Starring Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Sofia Lebedeva, Anthony Boyle, and Toby Jones

Released by Apple TV+ Mar. 31, 2023

K had read a positive review of Tetris in the NYT. I lowered my expectations, braced myself for an attack of woke, and watched it. It was quite different and quite a lot better than I expected.

Tetris is the story of Hank Rogers, a creator, and broker of computer games, who, in 1988, discovers an early version of a digital computer game at a trade show. He plays it for five minutes, decides that it’s the next best thing, and then sets out on a monomaniacal adventure to get the rights to market it. It takes him all over the world and, finally, to the Soviet Union, where he meets Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor, and, against all odds, secures the rights to the game and then, along with Pajitnov and family, escapes to the US.

Here’s where the woke comes in: The film has been criticized by some for the casting of Egerton, a Welsh actor of English descent, as Rogers, who is of partial Indonesian descent.

Critical Reception 

Critics weren’t crazy about Tetris. My feelings were captured by one of the comments I read: “While it’s nowhere near as addictive or fast-paced as the game, Tetris offers a fun, fizzy account of the story behind an 8-bit classic.”

Interesting 

Hank Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov reviewed the script, made suggestions, and were able to keep many of the core elements of the story in the movie. However, Rogers noted, “It’s a Hollywood script; it’s a movie. It’s not about history, so a lot of [what’’s in the movie] never happened.”

You can watch the trailer here.

And click here for an article from Yahoo Entertainment comparing the movie to the reality.

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Here’s a Great Idea… From the People that Brought the World Four Years of Economic Destruction, Social Polarization, and Global Hysteria! 

Rather than apologizing for all the misinformation and bad advice it has given the world re the COVID pandemic, the WHO is doubling down with a new set of proposals that will give it more power to mandate shutdowns, dispense unfounded safety protocols, promote drugs that don’t work and criticize those that do, and (most disturbing) control speech among all its members. The US is a member. Which means our free speech rights could be subordinated to the unnamed bureaucrats of this busybody international organization.

But wait! There’s more!

Besides giving themselves much more power, the new proposals will alter the fundamental mission of the WHO. In a draft of the proposal, the phrase “with full respect for the dignity, human rights, and fundamental freedoms of persons” has been deleted and replaced by “equity, coherence, and inclusivity.”

Where have we heard that before?

You can read more here.

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“He Never Comed Back” 

You’ve probably heard it said that Mandarin is the most difficult language for English speakers to learn. Other contenders include Hungarian, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Basque, and Navajo.

But learning English is no walk in the park. Among other challenges, English grammar is difficult to master because of all the exceptions to the rules.

Click here for a funny take on irregular English verb conjugations.

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Why I Contribute to the Innocence Project

One of the cruelest aspects of our criminal justice system is the strategy of the police and court system to force the accused to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. Before this happened to someone I knew, I would never have believed that anyone would ever admit to a crime he/she did not commit. But it happened. And when I investigated, I discovered that it happens every day. Literally every day. There is so much evil in the world, one would be hard put to identify which form of it is the worst. But accusing, prosecuting, and then imprisoning innocent people of crimes you know they didn’t commit is high up on my list.

Too few people care about this. But for those that do, rectifying the injustice is worth celebrating. Click here and here for two success stories.

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"Were it not for hypocrisy I’d have no advice to give."
"Were it not for sciolism I’d have no ideas to share."
"Were it not for arrogance, I’d have no ambition."
"Were it not for forgetfulness, I would have no new ideas to write about."