Tom Faranda's Folly

Two short videos from the March for Life

First, a one minute time lapse from Students for Life.

 

And here are five minutes of interviews with young people - why they attended.

Very good: Martin Sheen's favorite stories from the movie "Gettysburgh"

Martin Sheen is a great raconteur. I meet him almost 20 years ago, before he was the President in "The West Wing" and spent a couple of hours with him. He's a wonderful person.

Gettysburgh came out in 1993 and is a very fine movie, although I thought Sheen was miscast as Robert E. Lee.

From five years ago: "How Kobe Bryant’s Catholic Faith Pulled Him Through His Darkest Hour"

I suppose the lesson from today's terrible crash taking five lives - life is always precious ... and precarious. This was sent to me by my friend Jessica and is an article from five years ago.

What most people don’t know, though, is that he’s (Bryant) Catholic. And that, according to a recent interview, his Catholic faith helped him through one of the darkest times of his life. 

 

A brief interview with Kellyanne Conway - good and some humor -even if you're a Trump-hater

"Kellyanne Conway: 'We were naïve to think everyone would get behind Trump after 2016 win'"

Hlllary on Sanders: "Would Be More Likable If He'd Just Have The People Who Don't Like Him Assassinated"

In a candid moment, she told the interviewer that if she were running the Sanders campaign, the vocal critics would find themselves "swimming with the fishes."

"Look, if you want to be likable in politics, you've got to be willing to fight for it, and maybe kill for it," she said. ...The best kind of likability is the kind that comes when people are too afraid to speak up against you."

"I want people to be afraid of how much they love me," she added.

Many political commentators quickly condemned her remarks but have since turned up dead.

Good news tax reform: "Carried interest" loophole to be closed

The carried interest loophole has been around for years. It allows hedge fund operators to convert their management fees from ordinary income to capital gains and pay at the lower capital gains tax rate. Grossly unfair. Could of/should of been closed years ago. Why didn't Clinton or Bush or Obama close it?

Carried interest refers to a longstanding Wall Street tax break that let many private equity and hedge fund financiers pay the lower capital gains tax rate on much of their income, instead of the higher income tax rate paid by wage-earners.

President Donald Trump vowed to close the loophole during the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Republican tax legislation signed into law by Trump in December required fund managers to hold investments for at least three years before becoming eligible for the lower capital gains rate, but it exempted corporations.

Media reports soon followed saying that some investment funds were setting up pass-through entities known as S-corporations in the hopes of qualifying for the corporate exemption and skirting the carried interest restriction.

On Thursday, the Treasury and its tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service announced that forthcoming regulations will prevent S-corporations from taking advantage of the carried interest exemption.

S-corporations are a form of business entity that passes profits on to business owners as personal income.

 Bit more information if you hit the link above.

Does President Trump need a food taster?

Without meaning to be, this is a very funny article. Or - I have an odd sense of humor (perhaps it's both?). Can't you just see one of the Secret Service food taster people tasting the water before the Prez drinks it? Roman Emperor Claudius was killed by poison in AD 54 even though he hired a food taster named Halotus.

Nancy Pelosi's daughter said she handed Trump a bottle of water without anyone checking it

The daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was able to hand over a bottle of water to President Donald Trump without having anyone check for contamination, according to a new book about the White House.

An excerpt from "A Very Stable Genius," written by Washington Post journalists Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, highlighted a glaring security lapse in the White House that took place six weeks after Trump's inauguration. The excerpt was published on Vanity Fair on Monday.

Alexandra Pelosi, the House Speaker's daughter, had been directing the filming of a documentary inside the White House on March 1, 2017, when the president appeared, the book said.

Trump had asked for a bottle of water during filming, but in the absence of a staff member to give him one, Pelosi took out a bottle of Aquafina from her purse and handed it to him, the authors said.

To her shock, there were no checks or protocols, the book added.

"I've been to the White House," she told Rucker and Leonnig. "There are always protocols. Here there were no rules, no protocol." 

"There's so much wrong with the whole thing. I'm thinking, Isn't there someone who's supposed to guard what he's eating and drinking?"

"Hillary Clinton kicks off the 'stop Sanders' movement"

This is amazing - "nobody likes" Sanders? Isn't that the pot calling the kettle ... The pro-Sanders websites are going berserk.

Nothing the Clintons do is accidental. And so when the news broke less than two weeks before the Iowa caucuses that in a forthcoming Hulu documentary, Hillary Clinton badmouths her 2016 rival Bernie Sanders as a “career politician” whom “nobody likes,” it didn’t just call attention to the ill feeling still lingering from that year’s bitter primary campaign. It also signaled that Clinton has thrown her weight behind the nascent “Stop Sanders” movement gaining steam among Democratic power brokers. The question now is whether Democratic voters will follow her lead — and whether Barack Obama himself might come out of semiretirement to join the cause.

Derek Jeter Hall of Fame announcement

Short message - Derek Jeter Hall of Fame announcement

And here's a very nice interview on the MLB network - Derek Jeter Discusses Being Elected to the Hall of Fame

 

Martin Luther King Jr. - "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

A defense of civil disobedience. "An unjust law is no law at all."

It was indeed written by MLK from jail to fellow clergy "who agreed that social injustices existed but argued that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts, not the streets. As a minister, King responded to these criticisms on religious grounds. As an activist challenging an entrenched social system, he argued on legal, political, and historical grounds. As an African American, he spoke of the country's oppression of black people, including himself." Quote is from the wikipedia article about the letter.

On the crucial question of obeying "The Law"  here is MLK's money quote:

The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

The whole letter can be found here - "Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]"  - and doesn't take long to read - prints out at eight pages.  

 

Three years ago today -

Trump was signed in/ordained ... what's the right term?

 

Perhaps the most famous Martin Luther King Jr. quote ... and the "I have a dream speech"

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

 

I have read that the expression "I have a dream" was not in his written text - he ad libbed it.

Martin Luther King's Address at March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Washington, D.C. One of the greatest of all American speeches.

Short - LSU college football champions meet with Trump

Short and amusing.

All-time best - Donald Trump impression!?

HAHAHA!

Google becomes 4th company to reach $1 trillion in market value

Google - parent company Alphabet - joins Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. Apple and Microsoft alone, are larger than the Russell 2000 (the bottom 2,000 stocks of the Russell 3,000). 

The search-engine giant joins peers Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as the only firms to reach the threshold during intraday trading. Apple and Amazon accomplished the feat in the summer of 2018, while Microsoft hit $1 trillion for the first time in April of last year. Amazon never closed above $1 trillion and has fallen well behind Apple and Microsoft, which have rocketed past that level recently.

The massive gains for technology stocks come with Silicon Valley companies ascending to the forefront of the world economy and flexing their muscles in new arenas such as health care and transportation. Despite concerns about stricter regulatory scrutiny, the biggest technology companies have continued soaring in value, highlighting how investors favor firms that steadily improve sales in a world with tepid economic growth and low interest rates.

*************

“Google is one of those critical, important leaders in multiple areas,” said Michael Lippert, who manages the Baron Capital Opportunity Fund that counts Alphabet among its largest holdings. “You almost can’t live your life without Googling things.”

***********

The largest five companies in the S&P 500—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook Inc. —now account for about 19% of the index in terms of weighting. Five years ago, the largest five components in the broad equity gauge made up 12%, illustrating the growing dominance of a handful of the biggest tech stocks.

***************

Apple is now approaching a $1.4 trillion market cap, while Microsoft is at $1.27 trillion and Amazon is at $931 billion. Facebook stands at $633 billion.

 

Attorney General Bill Barr takes his orders from a "Catholic Cult"?!?!

That's according to The New Yorker.

This refutation is from the NY Post. 

Bill Barr is plugged into, and gets his marching ­orders from, a network of reactionary Catholics, whose tentacles reach into the highest echelons of power. At the center is a sinister, secretive organization with a Latin name: Opus Dei, “the Work of God.”

That’s the impression you might take away from a new profile of the attorney general in The New Yorker. All that’s missing are the hair shirts, cilices and murderous albino monks — the kind of thing too many secular elites believe about the lives of devout ­Catholics generally and members of Opus Dei especially.

The winding and often tendentious essay paints Barr as President Trump’s wartime consigliere, out to dish payback to the US intelligence community for launching #RussiaGate — rather than, you know, look into real abuses recognized as such by foreign-intelligence judges and even FBI honcho Christopher Wray.

Along the way, writer David Rohde dwells on Barr’s Catholic faith and worldview. He brings up Barr’s association with the Catholic Information Center, a small cultural nonprofit in Washington, where swamp denizens stop by to buy spiritual books, hear the Mass and generally find uplift.

“Led by a member of the arch-conservative group Opus Dei, the center is a hub for Washington’s influential conservatives,” Rohde darkly suggests. ...

It could be that these men meet at the CIC afterhours to plot how to install Melania Trump as the Most Catholic Empress of the Americas. … Or it could be that they, like members of any other faith, seek spiritual fellowship and give their nonworking hours to helping others find the same.

*****************

This is egregious nonsense. For starters, Barr isn’t, in fact, a member, as the organization was forced to clarify in November, breaking its usual policy of not identifying members or non-members. More important, people who attend Opus Dei ­activities don’t show up for ­ominous conspiracies.

Hit the link above for the  rest, it's pretty interesting. FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm not a member of Opus Dei; I know a handful of people who are. And they are all good folks.

CNN goes after Bernie Sanders

I suppose CNN has the knives out because they don't think Bernie can win against Trump. "More journalism from our friends on cable news". Their farcical attack led to record number of donors to Sanders.

Biden at the debate: "I'm just like you folk. I put my pants on one arm at a time."

Yeah. Vintage. Joe Biden: 'I'm Just Like You Regular Folk, I Put My Pants On One Arm At A Time'. OK it's actually the Babylon Bee. But it could have been Biden.

 

Enlightening: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon interview

Jamie Dimon is really smart, and very articulate. Well worth listening to, if you care about the state of the Country ... and your $$$! This is part one of a two part series.

WSJ: Cancer survival rates: USA v. United Kingdom and France

Well here you go. The United Kingdom's National Health Service is often held up (by Bernie Sanders, et al) as the gold standard for what we should have. It is much less costly. OK, but there's such as thing as the law of diminishing returns and also the expression "You get what you pay for." Only in one case, France with liver cancer, do either of these healthcare systems show better outcomes than the USA, and that is by a small amount. FULL DISCLOSURE: I started this weblog way back in 2005 to report on my own chemotherapy treatment for lymphoma. And I'm still here.

Where You Want to Get Cancer. Mortality rates are falling, especially if you live in the U.S.

Excerpt from the editorial is below the graph.

 

The five-year survival rate is now 98% for prostate cancer, 92% for melanoma and 90% for breast cancer. Between 2013 and 2017, the death rate for men with melanoma declined by a stunning 7.6% annually. Screening and treatment improvements also helped reduce the death rate for breast cancer by an average of 1.5% annually from 2008 to 2017.

Scientific understanding of cancer and its genetic determinants has advanced by leaps over the past decade. Most women now know, for example, that mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes increase the risk for breast and ovarian cancers.

****************************

But the drugs require enormous investment and therefore aren’t cheap once they’re approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has rejected immunotherapies because they were too expensive, though it has had to relent in some cases after patient protests.

Such government rationing and price controls on drugs are one major reason that countries with socialized medicine like the United Kingdom have lower cancer survival rates than the U.S. The age-adjusted cancer mortality rate is about 20% higher in the U.K and 10% higher in Canada and France than in the U.S. Survival rates for hard-to-treat cancers are also higher in the U.S. than in most countries with nationalized health systems.

According to a study in the journal Lancet last year, an individual diagnosed with pancreatic cancer between 2010 and 2014 had nearly twice the likelihood of surviving five years in the U.S. than in the U.K. The five-year survival rate for brain cancer in the U.S. is 36.5% compared to 27.2% in France and 26.3% in the U.K. For stomach cancer the five-year survival rate is 33.1% in the U.S. compared to 26.7% in France and 20.7% in the U.K.

Diagnostic and treatment advances in the U.S. are also accelerating. Google’s artificial intelligence can now detect breast and lung cancers with better accuracy—meaning fewer false positives and negatives—than radiologists. AI systems are also enabling researchers to identify more genetic links and to personalize treatments.

Even the report’s gloomiest news has a silver lining. Death rates for liver cancer are rising faster than for other forms of the disease, but Hepatitis C drugs could greatly reduce the incidence and have come down 80% in price since 2014. It’s also worth highlighting that the disparity in cancer death rates between blacks and whites declined to 13% in 2017 from a peak of 33% in 1993.

Steve Bannon not my cup of tea, but much of what he says in this interview makes sense (to me anyway)

With Maria Bartiromo & about 12 minute long. "What President Trump did is go against the established order..." no denying that ...