FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH (1907) – Written by Thomas William Lawson, a writer and stock manipulator who made a fortune from shady stock deals … in between advocating for cleaning up Wall Street to shut down those fleece jobs. The reforms Lawson campaigned for were taken up decades later when Franklin Roosevelt appointed future Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas to head the Securities Exchange Commission.
Coincidentally enough the overall feel of Friday the Thirteenth put me in mind of FDR’s cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. The novel did that with its New York setting, with the way the story takes place late in T.R.’s presidency and most especially with the way it dealt with ethics in the marketplace.
Jim Randolph, one of the novel’s main characters, is in the T.R. mold: he may be a bloated rich pig but at least he’s a bloated rich pig with a sense of noblesse oblige. Jim shares Teddy Roosevelt’s disdain for the Trusts and for con men who use the stock market to rip off their clients.
It’s not as if Jim Randolph is as fiery as Teddy Forstmann was in his opposition to Leveraged Buy Outs during the 1980s, but like Forstmann he has a sense of what makes for a healthy economy and frowns upon the fly-by-night operators who thrive on irresponsible “frenzied finance” as Randolph calls it. Continue reading
And we have another member for the real-life League of Extraordinary Women! Her name is Asra Q Nomani, an outspoken critic of the reactionary elements of Islam. She also authored a courageous op-ed piece for the Washington Post‘s website. 
“And I’m not a ‘bigot,’ ‘racist,’ ‘chauvinist’ or ‘white supremacist,’ as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some ‘whitelash.”
American Liberals are so anxious to discredit Muslims like Asra who DON’T hate the Western World and to depict them as if they aren’t “authentic.” (As I often point out, to the bullying fascists of American Liberalism, the only “authentic” voices of groups that those American Liberals think they “own” are the voices that agree with every word that American Liberals say.) 
WINNERS: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA – No matter who won the presidential election in 2016 they were guaranteed to do a better job than the weak, inept and crooked little man named Barack Obama. To quote Democrat Al Franken “No English-speaking person could do a worse job than” Obama. 
HAPPY NEW YEAR! As a light-hearted start here’s a look at events that happened on New Year’s Day in the past.
Here are just a FEW of the latest blood-soaked actions committed by fanatics from the homophobic, xenophobic and misogynistic religion which continues to retard the rest of the world’s social progress.
I THINK THE DEMOCRATS HAVE FOUND THEIR 2020 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE! Nobody will ever match the criminal career of the Hillarytron or get as many cops killed as Obama has, but hey! There is obviously a great farm system in the Party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, the Spoils System, Tammany Hall, Jim Crow, making police Public Enemy Number One, vote fraud, Cities of Illegal Immigrants and making death threats against members of the Electoral College! Democrats are so innovative!
The world mourns the passing of Mercury Astronaut and later Senator John Glenn, “the Clean Marine” himself! (No relation to the Spotless Spartan or the Hygienic Hoplite). 
As 2016 rapidly comes to a close I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one of the most moving stories of the year: Kellyanne Conway becoming the first woman to successfully run a Presidential campaign in America. Conway’s work resulted in the election of Donald Trump, so congratulations to Ms Conway for shattering the glass ceiling! 
