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I was finally unblocked by Quora earlier today. I was reblocked by Quora two hours later. Below is my appeal note for the benefit of anyone else who may find themselves in this situation.

I have literally solely asked nine questions since getting unblocked. Which of the nine questions violated any policy? Which policy was violated? If they did not violate any policy, could you please unblock my account?

The nine questions are:
1. If Speaker Pelosi does not pass on the impeachment articles to the Senate, when do they expire?
2. If President Trump wanted to apply for a writ of mandamus to unstall his impeachment if Speaker Pelosi doesn’t pass the process on to the Senate, how would that be done?
3. Did Joe Biden intervene with the Navy to lessen Hunter Biden’s punishment?
4. Can you count cards and ‘sell the count’ to the players at the table for a guaranteed profit without actually gambling?
5. Is not naming House prosecutors (called managers) to prosecute the President’s impeachment a defense of Trump or an attack on him?
6. Since FISA was passed in 1978, why has it only been in 2019 that an inspector general done a thorough review of a FISA case?
7. Is the Bloomberg Group’s five million euro fine by a French financial markets watchdog for a lack of journalistic ethics a fair penalty?
8. What will happen to Puerto Rico’s crime rates now that their gun laws have been radically revamped (effective date 1/1/2020)?
9. Would you invest in a robot to be rented out for short-staffed factories?

Quora is a great Q&A platform that has teething problems. One of them is the character of its moderation. I wouldn’t mind so much except that I get a bit of mad money from them through their Quora partner program. I used to ask questions (paid activity), answer them (unpaid activity), and comment (unpaid activity). After being suspended for two weeks without any actual content being marked as being a problem, I’ve decided to let people know that I am solely changing my behavior because I can’t figure out how to paint within their lines or even figure out where their lines are to determine whether I want to write there anymore. Here’s the profile update in case that goes away.

I got the message Quora.

I can be suspended without any answers or comments being moderated and appeals won’t necessarily reverse it. I’m currently limiting my Quora fun to questions until I get clarity on how to participate within the rules and not be subject to sanctions. As in so many other parts of my life, I’m apparently a minority in ways that matter.
I actually am interested in your answers and only ask questions I have a personal or professional curiosity about. If you would like to discuss my questions, I am generally reachable on social media as TMLutas. My personal email is dbrutus -at- mac -dot- com
I do ask questions that come in large data sets. Examples of what attracts my attention might include:
* Who are all these people/groups that the US has sanctions on and why are they there? Do they deserve it?
* Is this true?
* What things that people think are constants are actually variables?
* What are the fixed points of human nature and how do they express themselves?
I have a personal goal to ask twenty questions a day as it exercises my brain and keeps my thinking from getting too much in a rut. If I can do that inside an hour, I’m upping the number.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is the current king of describing hate in the United States of America. But does it do a good job? If the SPLC isn’t fit for purpose, the rot won’t start in listing inappropriate groups. It will inappropriately deal with certain brands of hate or hate ideologies.

One of the pages on the SPLC website describes hate ideologies. According to the SPLC, there are 20 different ways that Americans hate including the catchall group “General Hate”.

I didn’t realize hatred was expressed in so few ways. But is hate really expressed in so few ways? In the SPLC telling, whites hate blacks and blacks hate whites. That’s a pretty common result of lived experience. If you receive enough hate, people respond with a hate of their own. The idea that hate only flows in one direction is unnatural and unexpected. You would think that most every long-standing expression of hate would have return fire headed the other direction but that’s not always how the SPLC sees it.

Misogyny and Misandry naturally pair but only Misogyny (Male Supremacy) gets an entry. Misandry is invisible.

Phineas Priesthood naturally pairs with Black Bloc as both are not organizations per se but labels describing violent political actions. Black Bloc is invisible to the SPLC.

Anti-Muslim ideology naturally pairs with Muslim extremism. Muslim extremism is invisible.

Neo-Confederate longing for the antebellum South naturally pairs for anti-southern bigotry that discriminates against the accent or the address. But the latter is invisible.

Stuffing hate ideologies down the memory hole is something that the SPLC seems to have significant experience at. How do they pick the ones that are not mentioned?

I wonder.

In 2019, New York finally did it. They gave up pretending that they can ever run the state under the state constitution and the normal rules of American governance. After pretending since WW II that the state’s housing situation was in a temporary state of emergency started by that war and periodically renewing the state of emergency this year, the rent control and stabilization kept the emergency but got rid of the time limit. The state of emergency is now permanent.

On pages three and four of the bill, six separate edits make it clear that New York has adopted a permanent state of emergency. There’s no more renewals, no more expirations, no more re-examination, no return to normalcy.

Most importantly, there is no state Constitutional amendment. The guarantee for just compensation for a taking of property remains. The prohibition of using the government to provide private benefit remains. In a time-limited emergency, such guarantees can be temporarily suspended, but not permanently. The state of New York has been claiming Hitler as their justification for suspending the New York Constitution for decades. No longer.

Now New York claims the right to suspend their Constitution permanently and to widen the suspension from a few limited districts to the entire state. This is a horrifically bad idea. It’s also probably unconstitutional. But will anyone notice?

Sometimes your eyes can trick you.

HT: Political Calculations

The US maintains a list of individuals and organizations it sanctions under various programs here. Does anyone out there independently keep track of these individuals/groups and why they’ve been placed on the list?

The New York City Subways were largely built by private enterprise and had private owners. Rides were $0.05. The private owners of the various systems couldn’t keep offering service for that low a price and were discussing raising the fares.

The city took over the multiple private systems in 1940. The stated reason was in order to save the nickel fare. They did, for seven whole years. They then doubled it to $0.10. The current fare is $2.75 a ride, an inflation of 5,500% from the takeover date of 1940. Annualized over the 79 years that’s 5.2%. Average inflation has been 3.72% over that period of time.

Mayor Bill DeBlasio just proposed looking into taking over the regional electric company, ConEd which serves the city and Westchester County. His stated reason is to reduce the number of service failures.

Note: as I wrote in the comments, I asked for someone to check my math. The numbers were recalculated and the verbiage edited. I’ve never thought it was important but I’m not an economist. I’m also not an alumnus of the University of Chicago. I was invited on this blog many years ago as someone “at heart” and have been contributing ever since. The University of Chicago is not responsible for me and I’m not responsible for it.

It’s useful to review how to fix conditions of overcrowding in a facility. There are two fixes available.

1. You build more capacity
2. You increase training and oversight of the personnel running the facilities if they’re not behaving adequately

Both of these fixes require more money allocated by Congress. It helps when the Executive requests more funding but Congress doesn’t require it.

Go look at the legislative history. President Trump asked for more funds, Congress turned him down. It wasn’t his own party that denied him, it was the Democratic delegation that was against relief.

President Trump sought to work around the restrictions by declaring an emergency and using military construction money. It was left wing advocates who went to court to fight Trump, preventing him from building more facilities.

The left wing solution is to cause so much suffering so that our hearts break and we stop enforcing the law.

That’s cruel. It’s cruel on purpose.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alleges misbehavior by camp personnel. She is one of a small select group, just 535 people strong who could directly improve the situation by introducing legislation that would force improvements in behavior. She has yet to introduce any.

The Congresswoman is a prominent part of the cruelty agenda.

In a normal country, hard questions would be asked by the mainstream media of those who have recently been part of this cruelty agenda.

Resolved: The US needs at least two political parties that can reliably be trusted to hold power without driving the US constitutional settlement into a ditch and risk civil war.

Query: What are the names of the two (or more) parties?

You’d think that this would be an easy thought experiment. What do you think is the percentage of the US population who couldn’t readily name two parties they fundamentally trust? Has that number been going up or down over the past decade?

If you go to where Mexico meets the US at the Pacific Ocean you will see a curious thing. There appear to be two fences. One appears to be on each side of the border.

This arrangement is normal and benign. Both countries have their own security needs.

But there’s a journalistic scandal staring at you right in the face. The US media conversation covers the US fence often enough. I can’t seem to find any coverage of the Mexican border fence. Why is it there? How much coverage does it have? How much does it cost to maintain it?

The idea of Mexico paying for its own fence along our common border simply doesn’t enter into the US conversation about borders and relations with Mexico. Omitting it does make for simplified narratives, but mostly that’s in the service of laziness. We could do better, but we don’t.

I published a question on Quora.That’s not particularly unusual for me. What was more unusual that I got people following the question (they were interested) but nobody answered the question. That’s not an ordinary occurrence, answers are usually much higher than follows.

Here’s the question:

Does your state’s government adequately police against infanticide and how can you tell?

I would think with the legislation in NY and VA, this would be a question in the hearts and on the lips of pro-lifers everywhere. It’s not like it’s something that the police wouldn’t answer. But nobody seems to want to touch this with a ten-foot pole.

Why?

This is lifted from one of many retyped responses to people who just want to engage in history-free, context-free thought experiments on whether socialism is any good. This particular one came in response to a person who was defending the USSR as a viable method of organizing society.

“The problem is, and likely will remain for the foreseeable future, that there are wannabee genocidaires who would like to be signing the death warrants for those who resist the advance of socialism. There is no reliable test to separate those evil people from those who haven’t figured out why socialism landed on the ash heap of history and genuinely want to run through what happened, what went wrong, and why so many people died in the pursuit of this idea of implementing the labor theory of value as government policy.”

If there is a reliable test, I certainly would love to know it. The ignorant are coming out of the US education system by the boatload. The malicious are far fewer than that, but so dangerous that they can’t be ignored.

Vox Day is an alt-right figure who is a perfect illustration of why the alt-right needs to be engaged and not just thrown into the outer darkness. He’s accomplished, influential, smart, and cruel. He claims to be interested in the truth. No matter where it leads, he wants to follow and his position is that at the end of any journey committed to the truth, you’ll end up alt-right.

He is more correct about mainstream western society than mainstream society (left or right) is comfortable admitting. There are sacred cows aplenty in both conventional camps and people do notice them and treat those conventional pieties with the cynicism they deserve. These positions leave an opening for alternative political camps with a greater fidelity to truth. Vox Day is attempting to position the alt-right as a better-enough successor to conventional conservatism in order to reorient international politics.

But when encountering something he is unfamiliar with, does he have the guts to actually chase it down and educate himself?

De-russification is largely about Russia’s peripheral states attempting to get people to switch allegiances to the local nation from Russia. It’s very close to classic American melting pot politics. It also appears to be working, something that Vox Day has made claims cannot sustainably happen when talking about the future of the USA.

So what will Vox Day do when he reads up on the subject? Will he condemn the Baltic states’ efforts and be consistent across societies? Will he reassess the chances for melting pot politics in the USA and attempt to move the alt-right to a different destination? Stay tuned. The man is unlikely to leave the subject permanently unaddressed. It’s too obvious a weak spot for his camp.

I’m assuming, without any evidence whatsoever, that Vox Day actually is not aware of what de-russification entails. It’s the charitable thing to do. But doing so without following up is not charitable. It is merely foolish.

“What if the Internet interprets Silicon Valley as damage and routes around it?” – Glenn Reynolds

Dear journalists, here’s the link to Harvey Weinstein’s IMDB page. For every entry, there are potential questions you could be asking. The man has 331 production credits, 79 credits where he plays himself, and 34 movies which offered screen thanks to the man.

For example, Piers Morgan used HW as a guest host multiple times over the course of four years. Did he behave himself? Call up each and every one of those 34 movies and ask for comment on HW’s situation and ask if any new prints will continue to offer him thanks.

The opportunities just go on and on and on. All from one single web page, and I gave the link.

You’re welcome.

It is now possible to convert electricity to money using an Internet browser (like the one you’re likely using to read this post) in amounts lower than $0.001, which is the smallest unit of account for the US Dollar. Jobs earning that amount are constantly available by doing math on your computer that works on supporting open ledger systems called blockchains.

The product of the math work turns into cryptocurrency fractional coins which, when accumulated in large enough amounts can be sold for dollars, euros, yen, or any other conventional currency around.

The transaction costs are orders of magnitude lower than in the conventional banking system, enough that large classes of transactions that were impractical are now merely somewhat expensive. There’s a lot of room for efficiency improvements at present.

You can see an experiment running the first iteration I’m working with this concept at the project blog for Charleston Dry Feet. It’s currently generating litoshi from anyone who visits. Proceeds go to the worthy project of fixing Charleston, SC’s deficient storm water drainage system. You can turn the widget on or off with a button click.

The proposition that logic is a universal, is unitary, used to be something of a consensus position. The idea of universal logic was (and remains) very useful. It meant that one could, without any other shared beliefs, have some sort of conversation with anybody and, if constructed correctly, the conversation would progress and lead somewhere.

Communism does not believe in the universality of logic. This is why communism keeps coming back. Logical refutations have no effect because they are constructed with bourgeois logic, something that a priori is rejected by communists as an improper lens for examining communism.

If you don’t care about truth per se and want an indestructible ideology, this weeble like characteristic of not accepting logical refutation is very attractive. This is why ideologies that have no particular opinion on economic class or the proper way to distribute goods and services fall into the communist orbit. Their defects need to be papered over and the communists provide the only available cure for pesky objective, logical examination and refutation.

In a communist country, teaching logic is both a dangerous act and a necessary act. Without any logic at all society collapses. With a well taught, well formed mind schooled in logic, communism is rejected, which means a trip to reeducation or worse.

Yet throughout the communist period, math teachers went and taught their lessons including the concepts of logic and how to apply it to students. Philosophically, they were behind enemy lines and entirely within the power of their enemies while they openly taught a major building intellectual concept that doomed the State.

This is bravery, and almost entirely unrecognized.

Sarah Hoyt’s site has an interesting article entitled The Free Market versus Death Panels. I recommend it in general but it misses one point that I think deserves some examination. There is one exception to the market rule that is so embedded in our social mores that both market and non-market advocates alike pass over it. They shouldn’t. It’s called triage.

I have never met a free market advocate of medicine who does not recognize and accept non-market allocation in terms of emergency care, specifically when medical treatment systems and personnel are overloaded. When you have 10 operating theaters and 50 people who need surgery, who gets in first and who gets in last? The market would institute surge pricing and let the ill or their care circles sort out how much they can wait. Triage orders it so that the fewest number of people die.

It’s an important footnote to recognize triage and to explain *why* that limited exception is ok, properly fenced off with limiting principles so the exception doesn’t swallow the rule, and what is the reason we’re all generally ok with triage causing more suffering and against surge pricing.

First is to note that triage causes excess suffering because it is designed, and functions well at minimizing loss of life at the cost of extending suffering for those condemned to delays in treatment by the triage system. We’ve all made a moral decision that some non-fatal suffering is an acceptable payoff for a reduced fatality count when medical systems are overwhelmed and resources have to be quickly, efficiently deployed to reduce fatalities.

It’s important to cover these things because they take away all the central planner’s best arguments away from them when you reconcile the free market with triage. Solidarity, the common good, human decency, these are the heartstring appeals of the statists who falsely claim that free market medicine will cause wicked outcomes because the market has no sense of solidarity, the common good, or human decency.

These statists are wrong. But they have to be shown wrong. Examining triage is a very good way to do it.

Here are the basics. There are 59 national parks operated by the National Park Service. 17 are owned both on the surface and subsurface by the Feds with 42 having split ownership with private subsurface ownership of mineral rights. 12 parks currently have oil/natural gas drilling already occurring on them, or more than one fourth of the 42 split rights parks.

The National Park Service has been ordered to review the rules as to what is necessary to drill for oil and gas within a park, or in certain circumstances next to a park, if the subterranean horizontal section includes NPS administered park lands.

There’s a lot of confusion about what exactly has changed. Right now it’s only a rule review.

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
William Gibson

The microcomputer revolution put computing into people’s hands in the 1970s and 1980s. The Internet revolution started connecting all those computers in the 1990s. Neither of these revolutions have reached and been fully integrated into the task of popular oversight of our governments.

If they had, the world would be a very different, much better run place. Our politics would be very different.
In 2100, both these revolutions will likely have completed and integrated into the way we elect and manage our governments.

Today, we legislate the creation of governments to do things by certain criteria, then judge their performance and retain or replace elected leadership based on that performance. Every part of the last sentence has an element of guesswork in it. We do not have a comprehensive list of all our governments. We do not routinely get a list of what each of them does. While a government probably has performance metrics to judge success or failure. The standard is not routinely shared with the public, and the current values of performance known inside the government is also not routinely shared.

In the future, not only a comprehensive list of governments will exist but they will be mapped so that you will know which governments claim jurisdiction where you are or at any particular place in the country. What each of them do will be routinely made available (with reasonable exceptions for legitimate state secrets), the standard for successful performance, and the current performance data will be routinely shared, computer to computer. A simple to understand but dense data presentation will be available so that the metrics an individual voter cares about will be presented along with whether performance is adequate for each metric monitored by the standard of the individual voter. A routine daily review might take a minute over breakfast.

All of this is possible with today’s technology. Some of it is even a reality today. Citizen Intelligence is committed to making it reality for all governments so citizens can monitor them easily and affordably.

If this idea of easily, quickly, and cheaply keeping tabs on all governments interests you, please comment below or send us a message.

[[Repost from the Citizen Intelligence Facebook page – February 6]]

Here is an opinion piece written by Kyle Pope and arrogantly signed “The Press Corps” without actually soliciting any other signatures of journalists.

What really gets me is his fifth point “We’ll obsess over the details of government” which is simply, objectively not true. If it were true, certain artifacts would have produced and an entire category of journalism would be common because a press corps that was obsessed over the details of government would use those artifacts to easily and cheaply create certain stories that they do not create.

When you read about Flint, MI and its lead pipe problem on the web, did the site geolocate you, identifying your own water system, list out the lead pipes used there, the date when the last one is projected to be replaced, and give you the contact information of the office that can move that lead free date up? No, you didn’t because years before, nobody identified all the water systems and arranged a cheap way to regularly get their pipe inventory into a database along with the install dates and expected lifespans. That would be the mark of a press corps that was obsessed over the details of government.

That would be journalism worth paying for and the kind of story that I would like to write and see written.

Here’s what is missing to do that Flint story correctly.

Comprehensive list of all governments that operate their own water systems with contact information
List of the private water systems overseen by various government oversight bodies
Each water system’s pipe inventory with install and expected replacement dates along with type/material of pipe.

I really would love to not be building out these basic data structures. The established press, which does have the resources to do such a thing quickly, just is not interested so others have to step in.

Given the recent passage of UN Security Council resolution 2334 condemning Israel for its settlement policy, I look forward to the US putting forward fair and even handed resolutions in the Security Council regarding the settlement of people. That would be perceived, rightly, as trolling on the part of the Trump administration.

There’s a good amount of potential here.

There are the religious fatwas condemning the sale of PA land to infidels. Separately, selling to Jews is officially a death penalty crime.

Then there’s the two tier refugee system of the UN itself where all refugees except for Palestinions are processed under one set of rules while Palestinians have a separate and unequal system. It will be fascinating to see how the double standard is defended by people who claim to view even handed and fair treatment as a core value.

Then there’s the insistence that all Jews currently living in PA territory leave without exception even for those whose historical ties to the area predate the creation of Israel.

The point isn’t to actually pass any such resolutions but to destroy the shield of silence held in protection over these existing positions and practices that would have trouble surviving honest scrutiny. Who would vote in favor of maintaining a double standard for refugees? We actually don’t know right now because we don’t call out the double standard and force people to take a position. The double standard is just the way things have always been.

Today is election day for the US. Tomorrow is the annual meeting for my homeowners association. I’m looking at a fraudulent proxy statement issued in my name for that HOA annual meeting.

We’ve gotten out of the habit of treating fraud seriously, depending on the high reputational penalties associated with getting caught doing such things in the first world.

My HOA’s budget is tiny, about an eighth of a million. The amount of energy being spent on controlling it is beyond foolish.

Here’s Project Vote’s NY voter registration guide. The footnotes have been linked to the underlying laws and the federal court case.

Here is an excerpt

A. Are there restrictions on the voter registration drive offering something of value to a person in
exchange for completing a voter registration application?

It is a felony under New York law to pay, lend or contribute, or offer or promise to pay, lend or contribute any money or other valuable consideration to or for any voter, or to or for any other person, to induce such voter or other person to place or cause to be placed or refrain from placing or causing to be placed
his name upon a registration poll record.14

Federal law states that whoever pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years. 15 At least one federal appellate court has interpreted payment as intended to include forms of pecuniary value offered or given directly to an individual voter, and indicated the value should be based on an assessment of the monetary worth of an item from the perspective of the voter receiving the item. That case held that food vouchers could be payment.16

In Madison Square Garden, Madonna just offered oral sex to anybody who votes for Hillary Clinton.

The NY law violation is a misdemeanor, fine set between $100-$500 and/or imprisonment not less than one year.

The Federal law violation is a felony, fine set at not more than $10,000 and/or imprisonment for up to five years.

My son just asked me if we can AirBNB our house while we evacuate for the hurricane (we’re currently leaning towards sticking Matthew out).