Half Sigma

Autumn in Brooklyn

The Herman Cain Ebonics accent

One of the things I can’t stand about Herman Cain is his Ebonics accent. I figure that if he were really smart, he would have realized long ago that he was speaking with a low class accent, and would have tried to tone it down. Alternatively, he realizes he speaks in Ebonics, but he values sounding black more than he values sounding like an educated and smart American. In either case, I think this disqualifies him from being suitable for being President. I know it’s difficult to unlearn how you were taught to speak as a child, but Herman Cain doesn’t strike me as being interested in even trying.

I think that one of the reasons SWPLs loved Obama so much is because they secretly hoped that black people would see a black man speaking proper English, and then they would start imitating him and stop speaking in Ebonics. Of course, SWPLs would never admit to such a thought, because that would be highly racist to think that.

Although I don’t really get why it’s racist to notice when people aren’t speaking proper English. Our schools should be teaching black kids to speak proper English. Because intelligence is a hereditary trait, there’s no hope in ever getting the average black kid to read as well as the average white kid, but I don’t see why black kids can’t be trained to speak correct English. And we’d be doing a black kid a big favor if we taught him or her how to speak correct English, because who wants to hire someone speaking in Ebonics?

Herman Cain fiasco

I have no comment on this story because I'm not sure of all the facts. I don't like Cain very much, but it's possible that people are making stuff and reporting on this because they don't like Republicans and/or they want to punish him for being a traitor to his race by being an outspoken conservative.

Sorry about the lack of content

Because of a change at work which is giving me a slightly better-sounding title and a slightly better compensation package, I haven't had time to write blog posts during working hours, which is when I do my best blogging.

People may wonder how I had so much time to blog and surf the web on my employer's time in the first place. Well, I work for a company that has a monopoly, so we don't need an efficient workforce to make money.

Good "climate change" talk

Transcript of lecture by Matt Ridley (I assume that's Matt Ridley the author of many science books).

Jon Corzine and MF Global

If there’s a reason why people should be pissed at the top 1%, or in this case the top 1 % of the top 1%, the story of Jon Corzine and MF Global should justify it.

First of all, let’s note that Jon Corzine, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, is a big-time Democrat. There are some clueless people in the conservative blogosphere who have this notion that rich people are Republican, or that Wall Street is Republican.

And then on the liberal side of the blogosphere, there are people who still have the notion that Republicans are rich while Democrats represent the middle class. That’s also false. In New Jersey, the super-rich Jon Corzine ran the state of New Jersey into the ground, and then he was voted out of office in favor of the solidly middle class Chris Christie, a mere government employee for most of his life. Well, maybe he was upper middle class, but his government job paid him less than $200K so he was in the 99% along with the Occupy Wall Street people, because you have to make more than $300K to be in the top 1%.

And while Chris Christie was saving New Jersey from its fiscal mess, Jon Corzine was busy running MF Global into the ground. And if you read the article I linked to above, you will see that Jon Corzine was not just a mere victim of a company which would have gone bankrupt without him. Rather, Jon Corzine directed the company to engage in risky investment strategies that wound up losing so much money that the company went bankrupt.

It’s worth noting that if someone like a computer programmer left his job for ten years to do something else, no one would ever hire him in his original field ever again. But different rules apply to the top 1% of the top 1%. Corzine’s decade in politics apparently didn’t create the perception that his skills were too outdated to work again in his previous profession.

The final kicker is that not only did MF Global lose money on bad investments, yesterday it was revealed that $700 million of customer money is missing.

My prediction is that Jon Corzine will still be rich after all this is over. Conservative libertarian types sticking up for rich CEOs make the ridiculous argument that they make a lot of money because they have more “risk.” While what Corzine did was risky for shareholder, customers, and ultimately the US taxpayers through the SIPC, Corzine himself is not going to personally go bankrupt. Nope, he will be able to keep the massive salary he was paid to run MF Global into the ground. And someone will probably hire him again.