Thanks Phaedrus

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and John Wooden. If you don’t know them, you should.

Dearest Editor,

Regarding July 11 “PG&E Knew Aging Grid Was Fire Risk”: We don’t have a capitalistic system in America. Bankruptcy laws and and law regulating corporate structure insulate individual decision makers from responsibility.  There is a lot of finger pointing going on and none of it gets to the point of anyone suffering from failure, as would happen in a real capitalistic system. The consequences are borne by the collective. Conventional wisdom has said we would never have any progress or innovation if risks were not absorbed by a fascistic safety net. We have to weigh the costs, such as a burned town and 85 people lost, compared to higher energy costs reflected by a properly managed system.

Love, Fritz

Somehow got on this soul music kick. Some people don’t know the history of genius, Stevie Wonder. He’s a little older than me and, I can’t remember where but it was in L.A., I saw Little Stevie Wonder when I was a teenager. He’s in the news for awaiting a kidney transplant in the fall. That is what reminded me, and sent me to find this video (check out the band’s accompaniment):

Not that the world would really be different if he had won. But Clinton or GHW Bush? Please strike the word freedom from all the phony so-called patriotic songs, posters, events, and rocks

H. Ross Perot, the billionaire founder of Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Perot Systems Corp. and a two-time independent candidate for president, has died at the age of 89 after a five-month battle with leukemia, the Dallas Morning News reports.

Perot was diagnosed in February, but continued to show up to the office most days in his suit with an American flag on the lapel.

Widely credited with throwing the presidency to Bill Clinton in 1992, Perot got 19% of the popular vote as a third party candidate. He ran again in 1996. Perot’s former rival, George H W Bush, died back in November at the age of 1994. His other two presidential rivals, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole – who was the Republican candidate running against Clinton in ’96 – are both still alive.

As of July, Forbes estimated Perot’s wealth at $4.1 billion, and that didn’t include the money he’d transferred to family members. A self-made billionaire, Perot started on his way to success with a $1,000 loan. At first, it was a one-man operation. Some credit Perot with being ‘the Bill Gates of the 1960s’. He became a multimillionaire when he took his first company EDS, public in 1968, and then a billionaire in 1984 when General Motors bought EDS for $2.6 billion.

Perot’s friendship with fellow billionaire Ken Langone, the founder of Home Depot, dates back to the 1960s, when he hired Langone to take EDS public.

The East Texas-born billionaire was awarded the Churchill Medal in the 1980s – becoming only the second American to receive one – for his work on behalf of POWs held during the Vietnam War, and for organizing a daring mission to rescue two EDS employees who were imprisoned in Iran back in 1979. Perot was widely regarded for his philanthropic efforts.

Thanks to Zero Hedge