How Sanctimonious Politicians Can Get Off The Hook. So It Still Goes In The State of Alabama. FDR, HST and Surfacing The Right Leader.

If you are a sanctimonious politician there are several ways to redeem yourself and escape any punishment. Just admit you are an oaf, accept full responsibility (which means nothing), apologize and then run for re-election as a reformed lout. It worked for Bill and, no doubt, might for Senator No Franken Sense.

Another way to slip by is to shift the focus to Trump and pose why he should be allowed to escape for his own prior sexist ways and comments.

Finally, in the next few days, as Trump pardons a turkey will Minnesotans do likewise?

I might remind my memo readers what I wrote, several months ago, about  "Big Jim" Folsom who was running again to be Governor of Alabama.  He was accused of being involved in a paternity suite and a reporter from The Birmingham News interviewed him and asked did he have a response.  "Big Jim was a colorful man and he replied:'when they throw mud on your Sunday shirt, leave it alone.  It will dry and fall off.'

And, so it still goes in The State of Alabama.  (See 1 below.)

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This from a dear friend, a true patriot and fellow memo reader. (See 2 below.)
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Joel Ross keeps on ranting. (See 3 below.)
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This afternoon I watched two segments of GPB's excellent documentary entitled: "The Roosevelt's".

I did not learn a great deal because, though I was young, I was old enough and interested enough to keep abreast of his presidency and the war. I was 11 when he died.

I remember taking my father to Warm Springs to see his hero and I also remember my father bought a copy of the unfinished painting which he kept on his office desk.

What I found interesting in the documentary was the comment that FDR took us from the conservative belief that government was responsible for creating conditions so Americans could have the opportunity to enjoy the right to pursue happiness all the way to the government being "obligated" to provide a life of happiness.

Because of the Great Depression, soon to be followed by World War 2, Roosevelt was provided opportunities that greased the tracks for his brand of  socialistic solutions. Consequently, we all know and/or have learned once the toothpaste is out of the tube (read entitlements) you cannot return it to the tube.

Government and politicians cannot ignore but neither can they resolve and/or provide for all of man's problems and/or desires. Maintaining a practical and financially sound balance is where it all seems to unravel.

Roosevelt's impact and philosophy has hung over all subsequent administrations in varying degrees.

His wife, Eleanor, had a tremendous influence over his thinking and when it came to social matters, ie. equality for all etc., though he leaned in her direction, the give and take of realistic politics caused him to often pull back, for which he has been soundly criticized. (Knowing about Hitler's incarceration of Jews etc.)

FDR was an amazing man, a president who left an indelible mark but who also died leaving his belief that he could control the destiny and events he, and perhaps Churchill, caused, to be unfulfilled and which we are wrestling with even to this day.

Upon FDR's death many thought we were doomed because he was followed by Truman.  In my opinion, FDR could not have been followed by a better man.  Truman knew war, read history, was of the people, was capable of making hard decisions then going to sleep and had the courage of his convictions. Yes, HST made some whoppers but, over all, a great president.

Heretic-ally speaking, I proffer it is possible Trump may eventually prove, he too, is the right man for the current times. Perhaps a long shot but events have a way of surfacing the right leader.  Sooner or later all excesses must be corrected.

Time will tell.  Stay tuned.
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Dick
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1)

Mental exercise for the over-60 crowd. 
Which of the following names are you familiar with? 

1. Monica Lewinsky
2. Spiro Agnew
3. Benito Mussolini 
4. Adolf Hitler
5. Jorge Bergoglio
6. Alfonse Capone 
7. Vladimir Putin
8 Linda Lovelace
9. Saddam Hussein 
10. Tiger Woods

You had trouble with #5, didn't you?

You know all the liars, criminals, adulterers, murderers,   
thieves, loose women and cheaters, but you don't know the Pope?? 

Lovely, just lovely...

sometimes I worry about you. 

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2)  Hillary Clinton Explains Why She’s Above the Law


The media, the Democratic Party, and, most of all, the Clintons sense that their carefully-stacked house of cards is getting ready to fall. Free from the consequences of political loss, liberal pundits are turning on the former president for his decades of unpunished sexual violence. And, increasingly, you can see former Clinton supporters preparing for the day that their favorite political crime syndicate finally gets the justice it deserves. Is Hillary getting nervous? Judge for yourself.

In a recent interview with Mother Jones (a more friendly press outlet she could not have found), the former secretary of state attempted to explain why there was no reason whatsoever that she should be under investigation for her role in approving the sale of uranium to the Russians. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions signaling that prosecutors were now perusing the evidence that wrongdoing may have occurred in the Uranium One deal, Clinton said it was an “abuse of power” on the part of the Trump administration.

“If they send a signal that we’re going to be like some dictatorship, like some authoritarian regime, where political opponents are going to be unfairly, fraudulently investigated, that rips at the fabric of the contract we have, that we can trust our justice system,” Clinton said. “It will be incredibly demoralizing to people who have served at the Justice Department, under both Republicans and Democrats, because they know better. But it will also send a terrible signal to our country and the world that somehow we are giving up on the kind of values that we used to live by and we used to promote worldwide.”

Oh really? So, by this standard are we to assume that if Clinton had become president, she would have insisted that the Justice Department turn a blind eye to any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia? Because that’s the deal, right? That’s what she’s saying? That political opponents must never be investigated, no matter the crime? Please. This is something Democrats have invented out of whole cloth to protect a woman they know is guilty not only of endangering state secrets but quite probably much worse. You don’t get to exonerate yourself from a lifetime of misdeeds simply by running for president.

“I regret deeply that this appears to be the politicization of the Justice Department and our justice system,” Clinton said. “This Uranium One story has been debunked countless times by members of the press, by independent experts. It is nothing but a false charge that the Trump administration is trying to drum up to avoid attention being drawn to them.”

Well, if it has been debunked and it’s nothing but vaporous false charges, then Hillary Clinton has nothing to worry about, right? So she won’t mind if the Justice Department takes a close look at the facts. She won’t mind, perhaps, if they interview some of the Clinton Foundation’s top donors to see how they benefited from the sale of Uranium One to the Russians. Because it’s all false charges and politicization and vast right wing conspiracies as far as they eye can see, there’s really no problem, then is there?

 No problem at all.

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3)  It appears that Amazon might have made a material mistake in its purchase of Whole Foods. Real estate industry people say Amazon did not realize that many Whole Foods stores are in shopping centers where the other stores have leases that prohibit things like Whole Foods having lockers for package pick up and other things Amazon was seeking. Either Bezos was willing to forgo these things in these locations because he has bigger objectives, or they just screwed up in due dili is not known, but it is interesting.

Bitcoin is all the rage but to me it is nothing but a huge risk and maybe a Ponzi scheme as Jamie Dimon and others say it is.  I would not go near it because it could collapse at any moment. Some people have made huge gains, but last week it dropped 29% in a day then recouped that loss. There is no real basis for the currency.  It is backed by air. Nobody even knows who created it, or how. It is not a currency as the world knows currency. Maybe Dimon and many others are wrong, and Bitcoin will become real, but to me it is just too opaque and high risk. Now there are others producing other crypto currencies, and that to me just intensifies the make believe aspects and raises the huge risk this is all going to blow up at some point.  Blockchain is a different technology and is real and will be used by major banks soon.  It is a way to keep track of all transactions with money and who is tied to that transaction and to tie all related transactions together which is a very good way to help prevent fraud. All the major banks are perfecting it and will be using it.

You may not be aware that Lexis Nexis and Equifax use Google search as the software platform for their searches. They both have teams of people in India who intervene in complex searches, and the humans decide what is the relevant answer. Google basically uses key words in what is known as a statistical method, and it delivers up relevant sites or answers just tied to that key word. So, you get a page of possible related sites or responses, and then you need to pick the one you like. The Google system give false positives, and as the lead article in the Wall St Journal pointed out this week, “ Google Has Chosen an Answer For You-It’s Often Wrong”. That is because it is actually just matching key words  with no context. Statistical search is very limited.  The company I have a new JV with uses cognitive natural language neural search, which allows the algorithms to do a much better search by relevance, and in context of what is being asked. The person searching asks a natural language question and gets a natural language based answer. Nobody else has solved this technology, so it is now used by major companies like Amex and Pay Pal to do credit checks by looking at every public database in the world going back may years and seeing what the person or company has posted, may have committed a crime, or been sued, and what the reviews of that company are, and then the computer gives a score. It is used by banks to discard potential borrowers before the sales call is made, or before the loan is underwritten, to save time for loan officers making sales calls, and to avoid defaults. It does this in 2 minutes or less for just a couple of dollars. Verizon and British Telecom use it to detect fraud on its systems, and others use it to do detailed searches for cases in law, or to do a much more refined search than Google to determine for advertisers what is of interest to you. Because Lexus Nexis sometimes uses humans, they cannot scale their capacity, nor can they cover everything relevant in context.  This gives you some idea where AI is going. In an instant the computer can search the whole world and find out in context anything about anyone, or any entity, and deliver up a response in context of what the searcher is actually seeking vs the Google response of a bunch of possible answers you then have to dig through.  Just think for CIA, NSA, FBI etc the power of that. Just think if the bad guys were to have access, what nefarious things they might use it for. Example- take the Franken or Roy Moore messes. This search engine can look across the world and see back as long in time as there is data in some database if there is dirt on someone that the press or others might not know. We are just at the beginning of this AI technology, but the group I am affiliated with has made a break-through in search technology that is great in some ways, but scary in other ways. The credit agencies, both the individual raters of your credit and ones like the big rating agencies are now looking into what we have, and eventually it is likely your credit rating will not be a FICO score, but a score based on all of the things on the net you posted, or are said about you, or that may be in a police file or lawsuit. Tests are being run now at banks to determine if this system would have prevented loans from being made that later went into default. So far it seems to be more accurate than just human underwriting. Think about how lawyers can use it to do searches on the opposition and to search piles of documents to save huge amounts of time, and to search data bases of relevant cases. Or in a deposition to check the accuracy of what the person says in one or two minutes while they are sitting in the depo. You wondered what AI is all about.  This is just one small corner of that future. It drives cars, operates machines and does all sorts of cool things on your new smartphone that you do not even know is happening. The computer actually learns by taking in more and more data and seeing patterns, and recognizing the relevant things, then changing its reactions based on all of the new data is takes in.

One day soon it will be able to fight wars with AI robots, and that is what everyone is really afraid of. This is the world we are about to enter and why Musk is warning of what AI may someday be able to do. Like many things, there are wonderful things from new technology, but potentially really bad things.

So now we know that Facebook and Twitter knew, or should have known that Russia was using them to post all sorts of false stories to impact the election. They both knew for years that ISIS used it to radicalize people.  Yet in both cases they did little to stop these actions. Silicon Valley has been resistant to work with the CIA, NSA and FBI to stop terrorists from these postings, and only recently have begun to really cooperate. They think it is great that the FBI cannot penetrate phones and computers the way they once did even where lives are at stake, or where a crime has been committed and investigators need to see if there are others linked to the terrorist. Privacy is fine but not where lives can be lost because Silicon Valley is resisting law enforcement valid efforts to get information under court order. Congress and the courts need to rectify this situation.

It is really disgusting to learn that Congress has a slush fund to pay off women to shut up. Al Franken is the political example of what Hollywood has accepted as bad actors for decades. Roy Moore was a terrible choice of candidate for many reasons, and I am sure is being attacked by the establishment to prevent him from becoming a Senator, and having the ability to disrupt the Senate even more than McCain and others now do. You have to love how Hilary says Bill should be excused because that was long ago, even though he raped someone. What a bunch of hypocrites the press and left are – here is a guy who admitted sexual harassment of an intern in the oval office and who raped someone, but then they make him a hero and Hilary covers it up, and she is revered by women. They attack Moore for actions from 40 years ago, but Bill Clinton is exonerated and revered despite much worse sexual harassment from a similar time period. One female liberal journalist says Franken should be let off the hook because he apologized, but Moore should not because he did not apologize. What a bunch of crap that is.  Franken needs to be thrown out since they also refuse to seat Moore. There is actual proof and an admission in Franken’s case. This is going to be a real mess in Washington for a long time.  For me, they should take Hollywood and DC, put them all on a rocket ship, and fire it off into deep space. To me, any man that has to use coercion and threats of a job to have sex, is a guy with no self-esteem, and no right to be in that position.

Hilary needs to shut up and retire. She said Trump would be “horrible” if he did not accept the outcome, but now she is doing exactly that claiming the election was rigged by Russians and Trump, and he is not the legitimate president. Maybe there is no criminal activity re the uranium deal, but there were massive bribes to the Clintons through donations to the foundation and speaking fees. Many assumed she would be elected and they gave millions or tens of millions to buy access and influence, and the foundation was the laundry.  There needs to be a DOJ investigation, and it all needs to be aired.  The corruption in Washington needs to stop.

I listened to CBS Evening News the other night just to hear how they report things. They talked about the tax bill and flat out lied about some provisions to make it look bad.  i.e. they said mortgage interest would no longer be deductible among other false statements.  That is a lie.  Just ignore all the crap on the mainstream media, and wait to see what the final bill really says. Read what your accountant and lawyer put out, and go by that, not the media.

Joel Ross

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