Category Archives: Uncategorized

I am encouraged by the comments on our Radio Free Ricochet post.  I go back and forth on some of the overarching issues on how to handle things at times.  This website well pre-dates its function as a relief valve or safe harbor for Ricochetti.  That is not its manifest purpose, but it is a welcome opportunity to take care of friends.  As such, we’re not founded here on complaining about others.  This is not verizoneatspoop.com, which was a real website years ago.

One thing that most of us do have in common is a set of viewpoints or an approach to discourse which is not exactly welcome over there.  This is more than an accident — we are largely self-selected for this trait.  Yet it is not … Continue reading →

So Democrats are angry that Trump keeps throwing them off of their new “Better Deal” campaign with flareups about social issues. They’re worried that things like transsexual bathrooms are proving to be unpopular with voters. They’re worried that the Alt-Right and the Alt-Light are stretching the Overton Window wider than the southern border. The linked article notes…

” Whether it was his response to the Charlottesville white nationalist march or his condemnation of NFL players who knelt during the anthem to protest police brutality, Trump forced Democrats onto the battlefield of his choosing.”

Maybe the Democrats should have thought this through a little better before grabbing their pile of chips and going all-in on Black Lives Matter, gender-is-a-spectrum, and  “So DIE already, whitey”.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article182495486.html

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Apparently, Alec Baldwin has co-authored (had written for him?) a book on the President.The title:  You Can’t Spell America Without Me

I love looking at maps. Just recently, for example, I was wasting time looking at Google maps of the Las Vegas valley. I moved to Las Vegas in August, and I was curious about how many actual cities are in the valley. I discovered that there are four cities here: Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City. So then I was examining their actual boundaries, and discovered that “the Strip” is not even in the city of Las Vegas! It is in the county. So there’s a piece of trivia for you.

Here is a map I just came across this morning that I thought you all would appreciate. It shows all of the counties that changed party in the 2016 election. (Source)

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Well, here it is.  Claire Berlinski, an editor-at-large over at Ricochet.com, has written a post describing her dissatisfaction with Trump, and detailing the reasons why she won’t discuss her book.  But she won’t discuss the reasons for her dissatisfaction with Trump, arguing that it takes a book.  That’s right, no way to summarize the argument in a way that preserves its essence.  You’ll just have to read the book to find out what’s in it. Fair enough — this is book sales, not legislation.  At the same time, I think that discussing a book too much can discharge the creative tension, essential in non-fiction just as much as in fiction.  So there are good reasons to shut up about one’s book, even to financial backers.

Yet she takes … Continue reading →

I haven’t seen the tax bill, haven’t even read any facts about it, so I am just responding to Rush Limbaugh’s opening bit on his Friday show.  He describes the structure of the tax in question as this: the first $45,000 of income gets taxed at a very small relief rate.  Then money after that gets taxed at a higher, normal rate.  More rates may ensue, I don’t know, and then when you are above a certain threshold, your tax rate is 39.6%.  That is the top proper bracket.  Then a funny thing happens: your millionth dollar of income, however that may be defined, will be taxed at a penalty rate which is 6% higher, so 45.6%.  Let’s call these 40 and 46 just for convenience.  You … Continue reading →

Please use the media library here to post images, even in comments. Hotlinking is using an image from another site without the common courtesy of stealing it proper. Hotlinking not only uses somebody else’s property without their permission (let’s call it fair use), but then steals bandwidth by calling the image from their site every time a visitor here loads the local page (minus cache, etc). Nobody here profits from such use, and I assume fair use by all posters here, an assumption which I also graciously extend to myself. Thank me. I’m welcome. I still reserve the right to do Amazon links or some such thing, but even then I won’t profit from the presence of somebody else’s images. “Money” posts will be squeaky clean. Note that … Continue reading →

Have you guys heard of Professor Wildberger? He’s a mathematics professor at the University of New South Wales. I stumbled upon this video a couple years ago and thought it was really interesting. It is called, “The mostly absent theory of real numbers.” He goes through some standard textbooks and shows how most do not define real numbers. Of the few that do, they do not do so in a way he finds satisfactory. He says near the end that “the real numbers cannot be constructed in the usual kind of fashion. So next time it will be dedekind cuts that will be on the chopping block.”

Then I started watching his other videos, and I like his teaching style a lot. I’m not a math major, but … Continue reading →

Former DNC chair Donna Brazile turns on Hillary, Obama, and her predecessor Debbie Wasserman Schultz. This continues the theme put forth by our esteemed proprietor:

The Clinton machine has become toxic for Democrats.

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC

Released today, the report is rather scathing, but sanitized of details such as names.