Corruption III

 

You’ll Be Back

When you're gone, I'll go mad
So don't throw away this thing we had
Cause when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love

But if the King does it is the law, correct?

King George was admittedly a mad tyrant. The United States was founded by fighting a revolution against his tyranny. But maybe he was just in the wrong time and place. According to the US Supreme Court decision in 2024’s Trump v. US, anything that the Chief Executive does in his official capacity is legal. So everything that King George did was legal because he was the king, and everything George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the rest of the founding fathers did was illegal. I guess the  Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, etc., might have been moral documents but they were all illegal documents.

There is a considerable difference between legality and morality. King Henry II of England uttered to his court ”Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest.”  Legally this was not a command to his assembled court. However four knights  present took this to be an instruction to murder Thomas Beckett. According to the recent Supreme Court decision King Henry committed no crime. However that was not the moral opinion. King Henry was deemed morally guilty of the murder of Thomas Beckett, and was forced to do penance for that crime. There is a difference between legality and morality. There shouldn’t be, but there is. The Supreme Court may be legal, but it is immoral.

 

Inequality II

  

I Have A Dream

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

It is not only morally true, it is mathematically true.

If the absolute is perceived to be in flat space, its variance is 1.41, which is the rounded value of the square root of 2 . If it is curved hyperbolic space and the imaginary axis is considered, the variance is 1.47, or ~1.5.  According to wave theory the amplitude squared should be twice the variance, which makes it approximately 3.  100% of the absolute should be within 3 times its standard deviation, σ. If a function is confined to only one value of the imaginary axis, i.e. the coefficient of the imaginary axis is 0, the perceived variance is limited to this reality, then 100% of the absolute should exist with 3 times the standard deviation divided by ~1.5, or 2 times the standard deviation. This is equal to 5/6 σ².

Additionally for a value of s=½, the range parameter of a logistic or hyperbolic secant squared distribution, the Probability Density Function, PDF, of this normal distribution must be 50% at the mean/median/mode, μ. For any value of s, to be a normal distribution, the mean must be less than 1.44 times the value of the median.  This requires that for a system of n individuals to act as if they were a normal absolute, the mean of the system should be no more than 1.44 times the median of the system.

If the observed mean is more than ~1.5 times the median, then it is suggested that the distribution is NOT normal in that therefor some of the n individuals in the system will have more than 100% of the absolute.    To prevent this merely requires that at equilibrium, no individual should have more than 5/6 of the variance, σ², which is equal to μ+2σ, or the system is abnormal and is NOT acting as the absolute.

In 2022, the report of the distribution of wealth by country according to the Global Wealth Databook published by USB, formerly by Credit Suisse, shows that in most countries the mean wealth was fairly stable in the past but has become more inequitable over time.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2024/02/distribution-of-wealth-iii.html 

In the United States the distribution of mean to median wealth was 4.7 in 2000 and increased to 5.1 in 2022. This increase in wealth has largely come because the US tax code has increased the discretionary income available to the highest percentage, This means that more of that discretionary income could be saved and invested.  The tax code changed in 1981 so it is hardly surprising that the inequality  has been increasing since that time. Not going back!

Corruption II

 

Anything Goes

Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose
Anything goes

Does it have to be in prose, written down, for it to be obstruction?

In its 2024 decision in Fischer v. United States, the Supreme Court, SCOTUS, opined that obstruction of justice only involves written evidence. Based on that decision SCOTUS has shown that morally it is no better than a mob boss. A mob boss depends on the absence of any written evidence of his crimes. The saying is that nothing should ever be in writing. It should not even be said if a wink or a nod will do. A crime can be committed without written evidence as far as the mob is concerned. Obstruction to commit a crime therefore can not be limited to just written evidence. Morally Al Capone was a gangster. Legally he might have been not convicted of any  crime except tax evasion, and that is not typically  considered to be the crime of an gangster. Expect that this Supreme Court might use the definition of an honest man which echoes the mob definition, that an honest man is one who stays bought, while morally the definition of a honest man is one who can’t be bought.

Leaders

 

Moses

As Moses supposes his toeses to be!
A Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is
A rose is for Moses as potent as toeses
Couldn't be a lily or a daphi daphi dilli
It's gotta be a rose cuz it rhymes with mose!
Moses!
Moses!
Moses!

Let's hear it for Moses!

Moses famously did not enter with the Israelites whom he was leading into the Promised Land. Joshua did.  But that did not mean that Moses turned the Israelites around and forbade them from entering the Promised Land.  Luthen in the  Star Wars series Andor says that “ I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.” The saying is that  a belief in the future is why old men plant trees and young men go to school. The future is uncertain and scary.  There is no guarantee that the promised land is better, …that the sunrise will ever come,… that the tree will grow… or that the education will pay off.  All of these things may benefit the group. They may not benefit the user.

We count on those individuals that think more of the group than themselves if we are part of that group. Thank you Joe Biden for being our Moses, and Kamala Harris for being our Joshua.  Embrace the future.  Not going back.

Corruption I

 

Hazy Shade of Winter

Time, time, time
See what's become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities|
I  was so hard to please
Look around
Leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

Does time matter in a bribe?

According to the 2024 decision of the Supreme Court in Snyder v. US, a payment after a transaction such as the awarding of a contract for garbage collection, is a gratuity, a gift.  A payment before a transaction can be considered a bribe, a pay-off.  This use of a moment of time is NOT in accordance with the popular perception of a bribe, pay-off.  For example, if Judas Iscariot had not received his 30 pieces of silver until after he betrayed Jesus, the popular perception is that those 30 pieces of silver would still be a bribe, not a gift.  The time at which a bribe occurs should have no bearing on whether it was a morally a bribe. According to SCOTUS, legally it might not be a bribe, but morally it is, and will always be, a bribe.

Engineers II

 

Seabee ( Sea Battalion of Engineers) Song

We're the Seabees of the Navy
We can build and we can fight
We'll pave our way to victory
And guard it day and night.

Why I wanted to be an engineer, …to build and guard.

Engineers believe that planning on being lucky is NOT a plan.  That is why we insist on redundancy and insurance. And THAT is why engineers are boring. The irony is from an individual's point of view, eliminating redundancy AND not paying for insurance appears to save cost ( in the short term).  (Why pay for something you aren't using?). 

The problem is that if the primary system fails, you are glad to have redundancy.  And in the words of Yogi Berra for AFLAC insurance, "When you are hurt and miss work, it doesn't hurt to miss work."  You need insurance when your primary fails.  The irony is that insurance requires the lucky AND the unlucky to share the risk.  The fewer people that are willing to buy insurance, the more costly it is for everyone else that remains. 

And in a nutshell that is the problem with the US today .  Too many plan on being lucky.  And when anyone is unlucky, it is their own fault. It wasn't always this way.  "We will all hang together or we will all hang separately."  "United we stand". "We the people" NOT "Me the person".  Sharing is caring.

Moderation

 

Liar, Liar

Liar, liar, pants on fire
Your nose is longer than a telephone wire
Best be leavin' why I'm sad
Been out all night, know you been bad
Don't tell me different, know it's a lie
Come to me, honey, see how I cry

Moderation is no virtue?   What a lie!

One of the greatest lies in American politics was told in the course of the Barry Goldwater campaign for President. “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Liberty is always a virtue. Extremism is always a vice. Justice is always a virtue, as is moderation. This is an example of a false binary outcome. An outcome is not Win or Lose. It is Win, Lose OR Tie. Stating it as liberty and no liberty, or justice and no justice ignores ties,  the  middle ground which is moderate liberty or moderate justice. Is liberty for the individual OR liberty for the group? They are not the same. What is desired is liberty for both, i.e. moderation.

When individuals act as a group, they do not choose an outcome that is best for the group without considering what is best for them as an individual.  That is a Nash Equilibrium, named after mathematician John Nash. It occurs when the outcomes for any individual does not exceed 5/6 of the ideal variance of the group. Thus the battle between individuals and society, fascism and democracy, left and right, Democrat and Republican, populism and pluralism, or conservative and liberal, are all false dichotomies. It is the Nash Equilibrium, moderation for the group, which should prevail.

When the American voters are given the chance, they will choose moderation for the group, and the result may be perceived as a landslide by the side that opposes that moderation. This was evident in the Barry Goldwater election. Unfortunately, it is also true when a candidate lies that they are moderate for the group, as in the election of Richard Nixon over George McGovern. “Both sides” also ignores moderation. There are three outcomes, not two, and hopefully journalists will present all of three, and not just two sides.