Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Last month my jury duty service brought me to the courtroom where a murder trial was being conducted. I was not selected for the jury. Dozens of us were dismissed even before being interviewed in the process called voir dire. Once my service as a prospective juror ended I remained curious about the case. I started searching for news about the murder, the victim, and the goings-on in the trial. I found...next to nothing. There was no local news coverage about the trial. For a murder!

I thought about it again today. It's been a few weeks since I last went looking. It's now past the point where the judge predicted the trial would be complete. Again I've found next to nothing. Five (scraps of) Things I did find:

• The superior court's online records are laughably poor. Like, "Welcome back to the internet circa 1998" poor. It's silly that Santa Clara County, the literal home of Silicon Valley, has such primitive IT.


• The records don't indicate what verdict was rendered, or even explicitly if a verdict was rendered. I can only surmise that the two defendants were convicted of something as the records show sentencing hearings scheduled 3 months from now.


• With multiple searches, both on Google and on the major local newspaper's own site, I found only two articles about the murder. One was from February 2021, shortly after it occurred; the other from March 2021, when the defendants were charged.


• There is zero news coverage of the trial. Yes, I consider my searching fairly specific. I know the full names of the defendants, the victim, and the judge, plus the name of the venue where the trial occurred. Zero.


• There is no news coverage of the victim. The two articles I mentioned above identify him only by name and age. There's no mention of where he lived, what his job was, who his grieving friends and family are, etc.

The news vacuum around this case reminds of something I read in a lengthy news piece a few years ago about the confessions of a serial killer. He noted that he got away with so many murders because the authorities, the news, and the public at large didn't care about the people he murdered. Once the victims were tied— rightly or wrongly— to drug gangs, the authorities stopped searching so hard, the news stopped reporting it, and people moved past it. It was like, "Oh, another alleged drug trafficker got killed, nothing to see here."

Was the victim in this case associated with illegal drugs— or anything else illegal, immoral, or unpopular? I don't know; I can't find any details! But it was stated in the charges of the trial that the defendants are alleged gang members and allegedly committed the murders as part of a gang. But more than that, I don't know. And I only know that because I was in the room when the judge read the charges. That's more than can be said for the news media, apparently.

Scientists have agreed that the baby boy is on the way. ...No, this isn't a gender reveal thing, it's weather. This past Thursday the NOAA declared that the conditions for the phenomenon known as El Niño (Spanish for baby boy) are in place. A warmer patch of water has been observed in the eastern Pacific ocean off the southwestern coast of the US and Mexico. The presence of this warm water shifts the pattern of the Pacific jet stream, resulting in wetter or drier, warmer or cooler weather across the US and beyond. Example coverage: Reuters article, 8 Jun 2023; Los Angeles Times article, 9 Jun 2023.



The "main" effect of El Niño is a rainier winter in Southern California. I quote main because it's the one you're most likely to hear about— because so much of the new & entertainment media is based in Southern California. During the El Niño season of 1997-1998, for example, Tonight show host Jay Leno did a shtick about El Niño basically every night for months. That winter LA logged 31 inches of rain, more than twice its average (link: LA Almanac).

Aside from wetter conditions in Southern California and the Southwestern US, El Niño also means drier and warmer than normal conditions in the Pacific Northwest across to the Midwest. Where I live, on the San Francisco Bay in California, it can go either way depending on exactly how the jet stream forms up. If it tilts up a bit to the north, it funnels warmer, wetter air toward us in the winter. That's the more likely pattern overall. But if the jet streams tips a bit further south, the SF Bay Area gets a dose of the northwest's drier winter weather.

Right now I wouldn't mind getting some warmer, drier weather. We've had tons of rain this past winter season. We even had a freaky burst of June rain this past week. And it has been cooler than normal for several months. I'm ready for some warm, dry, beautiful summer to set in!

Today Fox News settled a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems at the last moment before it went to trial. With jury selection complete, Fox asked for a brief delay and, in a last-ditch, 3-hour negotiation, settled with Dominion for $787 million dollars and change over false claims it aired that Dominion's voting machines rigged the 2020 election against Donald Trump. Dominion had asked for damages of $1.6 billion and public acknowledgement of the dishonesty.

While some marvel at the number, over three-quarters of a billion dollars, it really isn't that huge.

• One, it's less than 8% of Fox New's revenues last year.


• Two, it's less than half what Fox News founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch paid to settle his divorce from his second wife, Anna Murdoch Mann— all the way back in 1999. (Murdoch divorced wife #4, Jerry Hall, last year and recently called off an engagement to would-be wife #5, Ann Lesley Smith.)


• Three, it avoids the costly reputational damage of Fox News executive and star personalities having to testify, in open court, that they knowingly put liars on TV and promoted their lies.


• But most importantly, $787 million is only a drop in the bucket compared to the damage done to the whole United States by Fox News's propagation of the Great Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump through widespread vote fraud.

Former President Donald Trump was indicted on criminal charges late yesterday. We don't know what the charges are yet, as the specifics are under seal from a grand jury in New York City. We do know, though, that that grand jury was looking at details related to hush money Trump paid to prostitutes, particularly whether the way he sourced the money and reported it constitutes business fraud or election fraud. Thus the charges are likely related to that. And we're told there are more than 30 charges in the indictment.

This is historic. It's the first time a former president in the US has been charged with a crime— let alone more than 30 crimes. That fact has been trumpeted in headlines of... practically every single fucking media source in the country. That's unfortunate because it carries with it a particular subtext— that because this has never happened before, it's likely inappropriate now. Like the laws of the US are suddenly being rewritten to "get" one guy. The other bit about history news orgs should mention to keep this in proper context is that there has never before been a president who allegedly committed so many crimes as Donald Trump. You don't want to be charged with crimes? Stop crime-ing!

Trump and his enablers in media propaganda and politics are predictably losing their minds over this. Of course, they started setting the groundwork for it weeks ago, knowing it was coming eventually. "What would he possibly be indicted for?" an ally in Congress demanded, expecting the answer to be "Nothing". Oh, people on Twitter had a field day answering that rhetorical question with facts. "I am the most innocent person ever," Trump boasted at a campaign rally several days ago.

Now that the indictment has landed.... "INDICATED," Trump fumed in one of his social media posts last night, continuing his pattern of accidentally (on purpose?) misspelling key words.

This is likely only the first of many indictments for Trump. This one comes from a prosecutor and grand jury in New York City. That's NY state law. There are also investigations in, among other places, Georgia for Trump's alleged election interference there, and the US Department of Justice for... well, basically years of financial and political corruption.

Ahead of the time switch for Daylight Saving Time last weekend there were days of articles in the news warning of all the dangers of Daylight Savings. We could expect to see spikes in fatal car crashes, heart attacks, weight gain, diabetes, teenager moodiness, and more they breathlessly warned. Will no one stop this insanity?

Now we're 5 days in to DST. What's actually happened? Well, I don't have stats on car crashes, heart attacks, etc. And none of them have happened to me so I can't even offer anecdotal evidence. 🤣 But here's what did happen:

• Dinner time has snuck up on me.

Seriously, that's it.

The past few weeks I'd gotten accustomed to the sun beginning to set as a cue that the workday is done and it's time to start making dinner. Now with the time change sunset is about 7:15pm. The past several days I've been thinking, "Huh, I feel hungry, but dinner's not for an hour or two..." only to notice it's already 6pm or later. Or I'm still working only to notice it's already 6pm.

I'm sure I'll adjust within another few days at most.

A few days ago I saw an article that caught my eye, "America's 401(k) millionaires have plunged by a third" (CBS MoneyWatch 24 Feb 2023). It's interesting because (a) I watch news about investing and retirement; and (b) it's another article in a line of junk statistics about 401(k) accounts I've seen covered in the news.

The reason it's junk is that they're taking data from just one brokerage company, Fidelity. The real statistic is that of accounts held at Fidelity, there are one-third fewer with balances of over $1 million. Why does that make a difference? Well, for the literal headline it makes a small difference, but it renders false most of the other statements in the body of the article.

Why are the conclusions false? ...Or unsupported, if you'd prefer a softer word? It's because most people don't have all their retirement money in a single account. For example, I have four retirement accounts spread across three different brokerages. And I'm not alone. Other articles in the same few past days have reported that most Americans have fragmented retirement accounts. (Fragmented is not necessarily bad, BTW. Mine are fragmented mostly because they're different types of accounts. I manage them all, and they're all working efficiently.)

BTW, it's not just one news media company that doesn't really "get" retirement math, it's basically all of the general media. Numerous other news outlets ran the virtually the same story. Why don't they get it? Frankly it's because most retirement articles in the general media are written by 23-year-olds with little financial education or life experience. Moreover they may be  overseas contractors who have no cultural familiarity with American retirement systems. Or possibly they're AIs that only know how to draw straight-line (if erroneous) conclusions from simplistic data presented to them.

2022 was a tough year for investors. After the broad market rose 25% in 2021 investors were looking forward to a continuation in 2022. Indeed the market rose on the first two trading days of the year... but then it started falling. It never regained its highs. As the chart below shows, the S&P 500 Index finished the year 19.2% below its start (3849.28 vs. 4766.18).



I've quipped before that The Market Is Not The Economy. Well, any one market index is not even the whole market. I consider the S&P 500 the most representative for discussing overall market trends. Other indices out there are the Dow Jones, Nasdaq composite, and Russell 2000.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average— "The Dow" or DJIA for short— gets a lot of attention in daily news coverage. It's not a great representation of the market because a) it includes only 30 stocks, unlike the 500 in the S&P 500; and b) it uses a simplistic method of "price weighting". These extreme simplifications made sense in the late 1800s (!) when the index was created but are way out of date today. Yet news organizations continue to report it thousands of times every day because... well, tradition. The Dow dropped 8.8% in 2022. That would seem to be rosier news than the S&P's 19.2% drop, but as I said, it's not broadly representative. That's just what's happened with the share prices of the few largest companies.

The Nasdaq Composite dropped 33%. Ouch. That index includes a lot of stocks, all ~3,100 that are listed on the Nasdaq exchange. And unlike the Dow it's weighted by market cap rather than share price, meaning the biggest companies have the most impact on it. The Nasdaq exchange is very tech-heavy, though, so it's more biased to the rises and falls of the tech industry.

Of the four indices I've named in this article the Russell 2000 gets the least attention. It's basically a small-cap index. It's compiled by taking the larger Russell 3,000 index and considering only the 2,000 smaller market-cap companies in it. That makes it a good counterpoint to the S&P 500, which is all large-cap companies. The Russell 2000 is down 21.5% for the year. That's closer to the S&P 500's 19.2% drop than the other two indexes, and it aligns with what I've experienced over the year as an investor: most companies are down for the year, and small- and mid-cap companies have had it worse than large-caps.

It has been disappointing watching the Democrats' lead in national polls erode over the past few weeks. They went from having a good chance of taking over the Senate while being close to even in the House, to being a bit behind in the race to control the Senate and most likely to lose the House. I blame inept messaging for their loss of ground.

Democrats have a number of good issues on their side. Abortion rights are supported by a majority of the voters nationwide. Republicans are trying to restrict voting rights based on falsehoods about the "stolen" 2020 election. And their policy platform is based on cruelty and hatred. To be sure, there's a segment electorate for whom these positives, but they're a minority.

So what have Republicans done right to turn the issues in their favor? They've gotten voters focused on inflation and crime. These "kitchen table" type issues are more immediately powerful than wonkier issues like whether ballot drop-boxes are open for 1 day or 7 days, or whether abortion is banned after 6 weeks, 14, or 20.

What have Democrats done? Frankly, they've screwed the pooch. They have done almost nothing to try to control the messaging, or even respond to it.

I blame Democrat leadership for this. Four years ago there was scuttlebutt about whether Nancy Pelosi was the right leader for the party. I was, and still am, on the side that Ms. Pelosi is the wrong leader. It's not because of her position on issues, BTW. I agree with her positions. It's because her understanding of campaigning is horribly outdated. She's leading the party's campaigning like it's still 1992. And she's not the only one. There are a lot of senior Democrats who need to go— not because they're old, per se, but because they've let their skills and leadership fall horribly behind.

What do I mean by "Like it's still 1992"? Three big things. ...Not all of which are specifically 1992, though the first is.

First, 1992 with Bill Clinton's election was when the power of "the 24 hours news cycle" was proven. Clinton's messaging team worked hard to stay ahead of news stories and thus control the messaging. People made jokes at their expense about how an unfavorable story on CNN wasn't really a national emergency that required multiple senior advisors staying up half the night in the White House's Situation Room. But it worked. Clinton and his team stayed ahead of new stories, exerting ability to shape them by fast response. They ran circles around Republicans who were accustomed to waiting for news media to come to them, or appear on Sunday talk shows. Today Republicans have learned that lesson while Democrats have forgotten it.

Second, Democrat leadership has remained in denial about the reality that Fox News, and other smaller players in its ecosystem, are basically propaganda machines for conservative politics. Fox and allies don't report news, they make it up. And they repeat their points, with distorted or false stories, morning, day, and night. In a context like this, Democrats can't simply wait for reporters to come to them and help get their message out— especially when traditional news media have been hollowed out. Even the traditional media today tend to "report the controversy" rather than dig to report the facts, because reporting "He said/she said" is easier and cheaper.

Third, Democrat leadership has completely missed the importance of social media. To me, this is what complaints that people like Nancy Pelosi (and Chuck Schumer, etc.) are "too old" means. It's not that, say, 68 is okay and 82 is not okay; it's that failing to understand the single most important shift in communication of the past 15 years is not okay. Republican leadership is killing it on social media. Younger Democrats are active on social media, but the party's leaders have totally missed the boat.

Continued in next blog entry....

Yesterday I wrote "Are We in a Recession?" noting that while a simplistic technical definition says yes, other significant factors say no. But a lot of ordinary people think we are. A recent CNN poll, for example, found that 64% think we're already in a recession. As business cycles are driven by expectations of the future, ultimately if people think we're in a recession then we are in a recession— or soon probably will be.

Okay, so why do people think we're in a recession?

I figure half of those saying we're in a recession now are the 1/3 of the country who get their news from Fox News, et. al. Conservative media have been screaming about economic collapse since... about January 6, 2021, when Congress acknowledged Joe Biden's victory in the Electoral College despite a conservative lynch mob whipped up by former president Donald Trump storming the Capitol. Morning, noon, and night they pound the table about how Democrat political leaders are villainous morons bent on destroying the US because they hate it. So of course people who get their world-view from the fever swamps think we're in a recession. They're also think we're in a socialist dictatorship led by a mentally incompetent man who stole the election through 10,000,000+ fraudulent votes.

What about the other half of the people who say we're in a recession now? Partly it's the knock-on effect of the conservative media fever swamps. When major media outlets like Fox scream that we're in a recession, other media feel compelled to cover the "story". They phrase it as a question— "Are we in a recession?"— and write stories to "cover the debate". But even asking the question, and repeating it in headlines daily, causes many people to assume the answer is yes. Or at least that "yes" is as likely an answer as "no".

It's interesting to note that the result from last week's opinion poll, "Are we in a recession?" is no different from results of similar polls three weeks ago— well before the Commerce Department's Thursday announcement that Q2 growth was -0.9%. So facts aren't changing many people's minds. Furthermore consider that the flip of the poll number, 36% who think we're not in a recession, is basically the same as President Joe Biden's approval number— which has been mired in the 30s for a year or more. So basically the recession question is just another front in the opinion war from political opponents on the right and those on the left they've frustrated by making the government dysfunctional.

Ugh. I don't even want to have to write about this. I've put off writing about it for at least a day, intending to wait for more perspective on the issue, but political news cycles nowadays move too fast for that. So here's a quick summary of what I know now, organized as Five Things:

1) 48 hours ago Politico published news about a leak of a draft decision from the US Supreme Court overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal, within certain broadly accepted restrictions, in the US. Link: Politico article, 2 May 2022, updated 3 May 2022. To say the shit hit the fan would be an understatement.

2) The leak is of a draft opinion. It was written in February, based on oral arguments heard in the court in December. The final decision isn't expected until June. Anything could change between now and then. But the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined (so far) by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, brings together a majority count of 5 justices who've strongly opposed abortion in past decisions and other writings. Three of these justices were nominated to the court by a president who boasted that choosing justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade was his chief concern.

3) Overturning Roe v. Wade is enormous. It's a huge precedent that has guided the lives of women, by affirming for them the right to control their own bodies and reproduction, for nearly 50 years. In federal jurisprudence there is the policy of stare decisis. Latin for "stand by things decided", it means that judges should respect the precedent of previous decisions on an issue rather than whipsawing the law back and forth when they happen to disagree with it. Other Supreme Court decisions have been overturned, but few if any as major as Roe. The only one that comes to mind is Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that upheld racial segregation through the sham doctrine of "separate but equal". It was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Some try to add Dred Scott to that list.... But (a) Dred Scott was clearly a terrible decision, not only affirming slavery in the US but extending some of its practices to non-slave states; and (b) Dred Scott was not overturned by the courts. It was overruled by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

4) The impact of this change will be swift. First, numerous states have "zombie" laws banning abortion since before Roe v. Wade in 1972. Many of those laws, rendered unenforceable for nearly 50 years, were never repealed. They could be enforced immediately after a new Supreme Court decision. Second, approximately 13 states have passed "trigger" laws to ban abortion. These laws say that if the Supreme Court permits abortion to be outlawed by the states, those states will do so. Third, there are all the other states controlled by Republicans that I expect will have new laws banning abortion in place by the end of the year. By the end of the year it's quite likely the abortion would be outlawed in a majority of the states in the US.

5) While the political left and center are outraged by this draft decision— a recent survey found that 60% of Americans were in favor of retaining Roe v. Wade as-is— surprisingly the political right is, too. Except the right is going nuclear about the leak. Fox News in its first daily cycle of coverage used the word leak twice as much as abortion. Conservative politicians have been all about "the leak", too. And they are apoplectic about it. Prominent politicians like Fla. governor Ron Desantis are calling it an insurrection. Imagine that... the political right has just been granted the top item on their wish list for the past 50 years— and all they can do is rail about how unfair it is. Understand, though, this is part of a bad-faith ploy. By shifting attention to the leak rather than abortion, they crowd abortion out of the news stream. And they need to because this position on abortion is unpopular with a majority of the country. But even worse, their deliberate use (and frequently reuse) of terms like insurrection is a stratagem to minimize the actual mob insurrection against the US Capitol on January 6, 2020. They are deliberately hijacking the term to scramble what it means in people's minds and establish a false equivalency.