The GameStop controversy

I have said many times before that I don’t really understand how the stock market works. I mean that I understand in theory about how it should work. Companies sell stock to raise money to grow the business. If the company is well run and makes money, its value, and the price of its stock, goes up. If it is run poorly, then its stock price goes down. For an investor, the goal is to identify companies that show promise of growth and success and buy its stock so that when the price rises, you can sell it at a profit. But the modern stock market has in practice so many layers over that basic idea that the relationship between cause and effect, what causes stocks to go up and what causes them to go down, has become highly opaque.
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The purge of those not slavishly loyal to Trump begins

Michigan is a state that has a panel of four people, two Republicans and two Democrats, to certify election results. The Trump camp wanted the board to not certify Michigan’s presidential results even though Jos Biden easily won by a margin of 50.6-47.8% or about 150,000 votes. But one of the Republicans Aaron Van Langevelde voted to certify and the other abstained, resulting in Biden’s victory being confirmed by a 3-0 vote. I wrote about the heated debate back on November 24th..

So now the Michigan Republican party has decided to not renominate Van Langevelde for a second term when his term expires at the end of this month. He is unrepentant.
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The rise and fall of a would-be autocrat

The PBS program Frontline has released an excellent 53-minute documentary titled Trump’s American Carnage that is a review of the Trump presidency. It starts with how he whipped the Republican party establishment to gain the nomination in 2016, in the process making his harshest critics such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham become shameless groveling sycophants. Trump also took aim early at Mitch McConnell, with withering criticisms of his failure to repeal Obamacare, that resulted in McConnell deciding to try and get into his good graces by doing his bidding and never saying anything critical, however terrible Trump’s actions were.
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Black police officers and the insurrectionists

We have seen a lot of videos of the insurrection that took place on January 6th at the US Capitol building. Some of those images showed white people bearing confederate flags and Trump signs attacking an overwhelmed security force, some of them black police officers. The officers said that their superiors had not been ready for the assault and did not seem to have any plan of action, leaving it to the officers to improvise against overwhelming odds. This has led to a loss of confidence in their leadership. Two police officers have taken their own lives following the attack.
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A lesser known aspect of Trump’s attempted coup

While much attention has focused on Trump inciting a mob to attack the US Capitol on January 6th, there was another activity that Trump was engaged in that shows the extent to which he was willing to go to overturn an election in which he lost. This alone is, to my mind, worthy of him being convicted in the trial. This occurred just before the insurrection and involved his attempt to use the department of justice to falsely claim that they were investigating election fraud claims. He was willing to go to the extent of firing the acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who refused to send out such a letter, and replacing him with a lower level official Jeffrey Clark who came up with the idea and was willing to send it out.
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These tough guys turn out to be such snowflakes

One of the features of the insurrection of January 6th was the tough talk of the people invaded the Capitol building with weapons in what seemed, at least on the part of some, to be an effort to take congresspeople hostage. But as soon as they were arrested, they started to whine about how they have been so misunderstood and that they were not armed insurrectionists who planned to take over the government and prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president but were merely ordinary people only doing only what the president wanted them to do.
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Blame-shifting for the emergence of the coronavirus

There is a team of international scientists under the auspices of the UN currently in China to study the origins of the coronavirus, particularly how it made the jump from animals to humans. The first major outbreak occurred in Wuhan which instituted a massive lockdown that managed to suppress the spread so that the city is bustling with activity again, with traffic jams, busy restaurants and markets, and people now move around freely and do all the normal things, though there are still a few restrictions such as you have to wear masks all the time outdoors and groups of people must not exceed a dozen.
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