BLACK SWANS

BLACK SWANS

The term Black Swans was introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb whose credentials as a market trader and writer are impressive. A Black Swan event is "an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict" and that has an outlier effect on the financial markets. 

The author is a contributor to Seeking Alpha and this was published June 21, before the Brexit vote. He presents these three Black Swans:

Black Swan One:

Approval by UK voters to Brexit. This was unexpected and already came to pass this morning although the article was written and published June 21, three days ago. Results are grand-scale declines in markets and the loss in value measuring billions of dollars.

Black Swan Two:

Evidence of mosquito-transmitted Zika virus in the US. This is almost a certainty, but largely ignored by most of us because, unless we are pregnant or expecting to become so, the virus has no impact on us. The human, economic and public health impact of this event will be much larger than anyone thinks today.

Black Swan Three:

No candidate will win the necessary Electoral College majority to become President. All Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate needs to do is win one state, New Mexico, that has elected him governor twice. That might put the majority out of reach for Clinton and Trump.

Then things get muddy. What if...the rules are in place for this to happen:

Should nobody win the Electoral College, the Senate will choose the Vice-President; a Vice-President who will become President until the House chooses a President by a majority vote (with each state casting a single vote). Imagine if Trump's or Clinton's Vice-Presidential candidate ended up President of the United States (depends on how the Senate swings this fall) because a faction in the House decides to vote for Gary Johnson (and continues to do so in subsequent votes), ensuring that neither Clinton nor Trump becomes President.

Keep worrying!

THE WATER TRICK

THE WATER TRICK

A man goes to the doctor, worried about his wife’s temper.

The doctor asks, “What’s the problem?”

The man says, “Doctor, I don’t know what to do. Every day my wife seems to lose her temper for no reason. It scares me.”

The doctor says, “I have a cure for that. When it seems that your wife is getting angry, just take a glass of water and start swishing it in your mouth. Just swish and swish but don’t swallow it until she either leaves the room or calms down.”

Two weeks later, the man comes back to the doctor looking fresh and reborn.

The man says, “Doctor, that was a brilliant idea! Every time my wife started losing it, I swished with water. I swished and swished, and she calmed right down! How does a glass of water do that?”

The doctor says, “The water itself does nothing. It’s keeping your mouth shut that does the trick.”

Father's Day

Hope all had a great day. Mine was perfect.

Why Trump?

Editorial Page Editor of the Detroit Free Press, Stephen Henderson (who is a Pulitzer Prize winner) is so aghast that some lawmakers would vote to give parents more choices in their kids’ education – and avoid sending to them to Detroit’s failing public schools – that he apparently wants them murdered.

"We really ought to round up the lawmakers who took money to protect and perpetuate the failing charter-school experiment in Detroit, sew them into burlap sacks with rabid animals, and toss them into the Straits of Mackinac."

~Stephen Henderson

You wonder why Trump has hit a nerve in America where this behavior is condoned because he is black and liberal.

HEROES

My friend Lee sent an article by Chuck Yeager in which he talked about meeting a true hero, a WWII vet who jumped into Normandy.

One line struck me--"...the media chooses our heroes."

Daily we are bombarded with words about "heroes," the ones selected by the media. They  are not actually heroes, they are mostly in the entertainment business and if they are black, so much the better. Political correctness, ya know. Michael Jackson, Prince, Muhammad Ali...I really don't pay much attention.

Nothing about the Navajo Code Talkers, nothing about the WWII vets. Complete silence when it comes to the Viet Nam generation, unless you were a draft dodger.

Where are the editors, the experienced ones with a sense of propriety and perspective? Gone with the Yahoo/Google control of what we see.

I don't want my heroes selected by some twenty-something who only went to a liberal arts college in the northeast. Thanks. I'll choose my own.