Will Nails Win? Is Beto Irish Equivalent of Obama? Going Cashless.What We Should Know. Our Son In Law's New Digs.

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Blake and Dagny coming from Florida late this evening with their paternal great grandma and grandma for the St Patrick's Day Parade.  I am green with envy but not joining them.

Is Beto the Irish equivalent of Obama?
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 My friend and fellow memo reader believes we should go cashless now. (See 1 below.)
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What should any fair minded person now know?

We know Hillary was given debate questions in advance in order to advantage her over Sanders.

We know Hillary and The DNC obtained and paid for a dossier which was used by senior officials in The FBI to obtain FISA Warrants.

We know these FISA Warrants allowed those in Obama's Administration to spy on Trump's campaign and set up The Mueller investigation.

We know Bill Clinton met with Obama's Attorney General and claims they discussed grandchildren  while the above was occurring.

We know wordage in statutes, allegedly broken by Hillary, were altered in their application to protect Hillary from legal claims .

We know Hillary, while Secretary of State, engaged in transactions with Russian operatives that led to: a) the sale and transfer of uranium to Russian entities and b) concurrently her husband was given an enormous speaking fee by a Russian entity payable to The Clinton Foundation.

We also know Obama was unaware of his comments to Medvedev indicating were Obama re-elected he would be in a position to be more co-operative with Putin. Talk about where some real collusion was?

We know certain Democrat Party operatives continues to pursue Trump with the hope of impeaching him based on spurious claims he either colluded with Russians and/or sought to thwart Mueller's investigation.

We know the Democrat party has been, and continues to be, engaged in activities that leave them bare to claims they have perpetrated one of the greatest treasonous political cover ups beyond anything our republic ever witnessed.

We know members of The Obama Administration orchestrated many of these actions because they could not accept a Trump victory.

When the truth is finally known, I have no doubt, we will also learn Obama was totally aware of what was going on but was protected from having his finger prints on any of the manipulations undertaken by those involved.

Finally, it is evident, rascals like Rep. Schiff and Nadler, among others, are concerned their desire to impeach Trump may be thwarted/undercut by the conclusions of the Mueller Investigation and therefore, are seeking other claims on which to base their impeachment pursuits

One would think Americans would be outraged but that does not seems to be the case.  If The Deep State is allowed to go unscathed and those involved in treason up to their arm pits are given a pass then one more nail will have been driven into America's adherence to the rule of law coffin.

Add the above to the fact that virtually every Democrat candidate for the presidency favors and/or supports sanctuary cities, some even want to eliminate ICE and all have resisted efforts by Trump to protect our borders, it would appear voters would also be outraged that additional nails have been proposed to bury our nation's adherence to the rule of law.

Why is this important?  First,our nation was founded on the concept that all citizens would adhere to our laws and second, unless we do we become a lawless society and will have thrown away our cherished freedoms, rights and protection to live in and enjoy the fruits and benefits of the greatest democracy on earth.

Those who believe in chaos, who perpetuate falsehoods and speak drivel that we are not the greatest democracy on earth obviously have other nefarious goals. They seek to replace the failings of our society with radical proposals that will further complete Obama's transformation goals.

Therefore, I submit The Democrat Party, as presently constructed, is the greater threat to our republic than any external threat we face from any other adversary.

Consequently, when Trump attacks the mass media, I believe he is warranted in pointing out the threat their biased alliances are causing because, they too, have been engaged in under and false -reporting of the aforementioned cover-ups and skulduggery of Democrats.

In my world of connecting dots, I also find the pursuit of bribery undertaken to place undeserving/unqualified students in colleges and universities simply is another piece of evidence regarding the breakdown of America's societal standards.

If we can no longer place justified faith in our government and educational institutions and their employees and elected servants that they  will adhere to the equal applications of standards the nails win. (See 2 below.)
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Our son-in-law, Martin Thaler, is seen in the new Kaplan Center housing his department  and is a nationally recognized professor of design and has won many awards for his creativity.  (See 3 below.)


Unable to re-post the actual pictures of the Kaplan Ceter but you can Google. Truly a beautiful building.

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Good thing I am not Israel's PM because I would level any Gaza building over 2 stories.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/9-rockets-fired-at-border-towns-idf-assesses-tel-aviv-rocket-attack-was-mistake/?utm_source=Breaking+News&utm_campaign=breaking-news-2019-03-15-2037291&utm_medium=email
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I understand 12 Republicans Senators voted their conscience yesterday but where was their conscience when Obama kept violating the constitution?  Where was their conscience  when Obama chose to bypass the Senate and called a treaty an agreement when it came to shipping 1.5 billion in the dark of night to Iran?
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Dick
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1)  Washington Times

Why America Should Go Cashless

By Peter Morici  

Cash is king - not so much these days.

Most folks purchasing a Curry Chickpea Bowl at Sweetgreen or a Nora Roberts novel at an Amazon brick-and-mortar store reflexively pay with a credit or debit card or an app - they might be surprised if they try a 20-dollar bill.

Those "Legal Tender for All Debts Public and Private" are no longer accepted at a growing list of restaurants and retailers.

Prior to MasterCard and Visa, the only take everywhere, everything means of payment was cash. Merchants were reluctant to accept out-of-town checks from travelers, who often purchased American Express Travelers Cheques.

Now, trying to buy a sandwich with cash or those Cheques can cause embarrassment, as businesses increasingly find cash a costly nuisance and expose them to pilfering.

Credit, debit and third-party apps require merchants to pay transactions fees to banks and services like PayPal or Apple Pay, but cash requires daily visits to banks to obtain small bills and coins to make change and end-of-day return hauls or expensive daily visits from Brink's trucks to discourage late night holdups.

Cashless restaurants say checkout lines move more quickly during rush periods, though that depends on the speed of the connection to the payment service. At Thomas Sweet - Washington's premier purveyor of ice cream - a sign firmly suggests cash on hot summer evenings. And who wants to be melting instead of indulging.

Paper money is dirty - a great conveyor of germs - and enables the gray market for tradesmen and merchants who sometimes forget to report all their sales to the IRS and local sales-tax authorities. And dark money enables terrorists and more ordinary criminals.

The Bank Secrecy Act requires bank tellers to report to the Treasury Crime Financial Crimes Enforcement Network unusual withdrawals exceeding $2,000 - without your knowledge.

Twenty years ago, many folks routinely paid for a shopping spree at high-end stores with cash but these days withdrawing large sums from the banks for that purpose invites an inquiry from someone as warm and cuddly as Joe Friday on the trail of a counterfeiter.

Local politicians in places like New York are complaining - or at least trolling for votes among preciously-minded, left-leaning professionals and gray marketers - that cashless stores discriminate against the poor, homeless and illegal immigrants.

Massachusetts and Philadelphia have passed statues requiring merchants to accept cash - though the City of Brotherly Love carves out parking garages and membership stores like Costco. The latter seems more likely the product of good lobbying than any genuine justifications - none would be competitively disadvantaged, made safer or more democratic than for example small convenience stores or gas stations if required to accept cash.

A proliferation of such laws - in New York City, Councilman Ritchie Torres is pushing one - would stifle innovation and the build out of artificial intelligence with its potential to boost productivity growth and raise wages.

At Amazon Go stores, shoppers register their mobile device and payments app when entering, software keeps track of what they put in their cart and they leave without passing a checkout line - faster, cheaper, better.

As that model proliferates, stores will become less expensive to operate and competition will drive down prices for consumers - poor folks as well as rich.

In China, reliance on cashless transactions is way ahead of the United States. Services like Alibaba's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay are supplanting banks and forming partnerships across Europe and expanding in South Asia.

By smothering the domestic market, local protectionism in New York City and elsewhere would stifle the development of similar American technologies and erode the competitiveness of U.S. banks that are developing services similar to Apple Pay.

Already the federal government issues food stamps through debit cards. It would not be a big leap to make those more widely available and usable for more purposes than groceries. And to require banks and supermarkets to recharge government cards and transfer funds among cards - much as the subway systems transfer credits from expiring to new cards.

Tax refunds and paychecks could be issued via debit cards with funds transferable to other cards or bank accounts at physical locations or online.

Instead of pandering to voters by shackling progress, liberal politicians would better serve the interests of the poor by enabling them with mobile payment systems.

Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.

Peter Morici

Professor

Robert H. Smith School of Business

University of Maryland

New Cell: 703 350 9701

pmorici@rhsmith.umd.edu

Twitter: @pmorici1

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2)

On Watch: How Donald Trump was Targeted by the FBI In this episode of “On Watch,” Judicial Watch Director of Investigations & Research discusses how the FBI abused counter-intelligence policies to target Donald Trump.

Daywatch Updates

FBI Begins Releasing Strzok-Page Communications, DOJ Objects to Preservation Order Judicial Watch received 87 pages of records from the Department of Justice revealing former top FBI official Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page’s profanity-laced disdain for FBI hierarchy and policies. The DOJ, meanwhile, is resisting Judicial Watch’s request for a court order to preserve all responsive Page-Strzok communications. READ MORE

Comey’s private memos on Trump conversations contained classified material More than half of the memos former FBI James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents. This revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules . READ MORE ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3) The cloud like exterior of the new Kaplan Institute, designed by John Ronan, on IIT's campus in Chicago. Steve Hall The Bauhaus in the Age  of Frictionless Design By ZACH MORTIC The new Kaplan Institute at Chicago’s IIT is a direct descendant of the Bauhaus. It is also, in some ways, everything the Bauhaus was not The Institute of Design at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) may be the most direct offspring of the Bauhaus, which was the most influential design school in the world. Founded by former Bauhaus faculty member László Moholy-Nagy in 1937, and later absorbed into IIT (whose architecture school was then led by Mies van der Rohe, himself a former Bauhaus director), the graduate school has had seven-plus decades to marinate in the context of early 20th-century experiments that forged art with industry. And architecturally, it’s been an exceedingly steady simmer—until now. Mies designed IIT’s campus, including the famous steel-and-glass Crown Hall. The Institute of Design’s new home, the 70,000-square-foot Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, is the campus’s first new academic building—by Mies or anyone else—in 40 years. It represents one of the most pervasive and influential types of architectural space today. The building looks, and functions, like a tech office, with break-out spaces, a communal kitchen, acoustically swaddled furniture, and staircase seating. The Institute of Design shares the $37 million facility with IIT’s entrepreneurship and maker hub. Staircase seating in the bright-white new Kaplan Institute. (Steve Hall) Like many tech offices, the building is open-plan, but with spaces for group huddles and private concentration. (Daniel Chichester) Walk into the Kaplan Institute, and the first thing you’ll notice is how bright and pristine it is. The white walls, floors, and ceiling are a counterpoint to the dour brick and black steel of Mies’ ultra-minimalist campus. The original Bauhaus was obsessed with materiality, delving into how each material expresses its fundamental nature, whether ceramic, fabric, metal, or paper. But the materials at hand today are much different. “We define material to be data,” said Denis Weil, the institute’s dean. The old Bauhaus was as obsessed with new technology as these designers are today, but in the 1920s, that meant welding glass with steel. Today, it means virtual, digital products. Much of the school’s output, then, is not tea kettles or chairs, but apps and other feats of computer programming. After graduation, Weil says, most students will work in innovation consulting with large consultancies, as front-end programmers with tech firms, or in traditional UX design. And this transition from corporeal to digital drives the formal expression of the building. The original Bauhaus was obsessed with materiality. “We define material to be data,” said Denis Weil, the institute’s dean. On a tour, Weil showed off past and current projects at the school, and their wild diversity would have delighted the Bauhaus founders, given their own push to break down barriers between industrial production, artisanal craftsmanship, and experimental art. One project he pointed to used audio greeting cards to help police explain Miranda Rights in Spanish. Another was an attempt to elicit more energy-efficient behavior by apartment tenants. This is design that’s about making strategic interventions to change human behavior, rather than offering up widgets to make problems disappear. Germany’s Bauhaus was run on a more cloistered studio-based model, where masters would create alongside apprentices, away from the distractions of the world. The infrastructure required for those studios (looms for textiles, kilns for pottery) encouraged more physical separation, as opposed to the institute’s current digital-heavy scrum. “The studio comes from a time where we felt that designers need to withdraw, and that the power comes out of the vision of the designer,” said Weil. “That’s not at all how design happens today ... if the designer’s role is [that] of the integrator and facilitator, it makes sense to have a studio as a place where you interact—hence the open-office concept.” The Kaplan building is not a temple of holy creation, but a conference room for sorting and crowd-sourcing the best ideas. There’s a public-to-private spectrum of spaces, from shielded chairs for solitary work to grand forums. Most space is in-between, with moveable walls and bump-outs for conversation among a handful of people. The building is filled with colorful furniture and writeable dry-erase walls. Its architect, John Ronan, wanted it to be friendlier than the typical Miesian architecture on campus. “I wanted to use materials that were not available to Mies,” said Ronan, who teaches at IIT’s architecture school. That meant an ETFE façade system. ETFE (or ethylene tetrafluoroethylene) is an ultra-strong and lightweight polymer, and Ronan used it to cover the center’s second floor. Three balloon-like sections make up the semi-opaque walls. A pneumatic system automatically inflates and deflates chambers of the ETFE to block excess light on sunny days or let more light in when it’s overcast. The ETFE wall on the building’s second floor modulates daylight and glare. (Zach Mortice) As the second floor cantilevers out over the glass-walled first floor, comparison to a cloud is unavoidable. The design products of the school migrate to the cloud and the building turns into one—albeit a cloud that’s been poured into rectilinear, factory-stamped mold. But the first-floor machine shop, filled with 3D printers, routers, and laser cutters, is a clue that physical objects do still have a place here. Despite the digital focus, not all of the school’s products are immaterial. (Daniel Chichester) The halls of the early Bauhaus were wilder than these quiet corridors, with avant-garde dances and parties. For a metal-themed Bauhaus party, for instance, “Invitations suggested that gentlemen come as an egg-whisk, a pepper-mill or a can-opener, while ideas for the women included a diving bell, a bolt or wing-nut, or a radioactive substance.” One of the Bauhaus’s earliest sages was the robed mystic Johannes Itten, a devotee of an obscure neo-Zoroastrian, racist religious sect called Mazdaznan, who began each class with controlled breathing exercises. And then there’s the photo of dark-haired female Bauhaus students messily coiffed in the style of the Cure’s Robert Smith, which offers something  timeless about outsider self-expression. ”The mystical-robe stuff is completely gone,” said Jeffrey Mau, an instructor at the Institute of Design who focuses on the history of the Bauhaus. Today, “You won’t find too many art-school kids with blue hair and tattoos. Everybody looks like they’re in business school.” Which makes sense, because some are (the Institute of Design offers a dual MBA degree). But the tidiness isn’t totally antithetical to the Bauhaus in its prime. The Bauhaus’s second director, Hannes Meyer, nurtured the school to profitability through commercial partnerships, according to the New York Times. Its most profitable product was wallpaper, as Architectmagazine pointed out. At the Institute of Design post-Mies, Jay Doblin, who became director in 1955, sought professionalization, adding theory and critique to what had been a largely experiential field of master-and-apprentice craft. Under Doblin, faculty put more emphasis on business-friendly new product development and less on open-ended experimentation. That legacy is reflected in the spotless, tidy condition of the Kaplan Institute. “There’s still a janitor walking around cleaning scuff marks off the floor with a tennis ball on a stick,” said Mau. “It sets a tone of, ‘Where can I spread my work out and leave it?’” This is partly due to how new the building is—things could change. The building is made from tough and resilient materials (polished concrete, exposed fireproofing) that should be able to absorb some creatively channeled destruction. “I imagine it’ll look quite different in a year or two,” said Ronan. “It’s not a precious thing. It’s meant to be a working space that can get messy. It’s a canvas for the students to finish with their work.” The Bauhaus was never a purist organization, but through most of its brief history there was room for art. At the Kaplan building, this space seems to have largely been filled by “innovation.” It’s in the building’s name and serves as an implicit mission statement. By moving its emphasis from experimentation to innovation, the school narrows its scope from holistically using design as a tool of self-expression to using it as a tool for technocratic managers. That, too, is a measure of the Bauhaus’s influence, which has been absorbed and re-interpreted through the day’s economic value system. The best art and design schools are those that can take the bumps and scratches that come with an endless parade of young minds carrying bizarre and messy ideas, and it remains to be seen if the precise and tidy Kaplan Institute will be called into action this way, and if so, how it will bear the smudges. Its writeable walls are so far mostly filled with lecture talking points and assignment due dates. It doesn’t feel like a place to scribble yet.