Cleto Escobedo III, R.I.P.

A tragic Loss

I have a small bit of tangential history here. I am heartbroken for all of Cleto's family and all of his friends in our mutual Las Vegas music tribe.

"Thinking critically?"

 

I got to teach collegiate "critical thinking" for 5 fun years while living in Las Vegas (evening school adjunct faculty; my day gig was that of a credit risk analyst in a bank). I never really liked the curricular title. I'm likewise guarded about cavalierly using the word "idiot."

Too many of my students came in thinking "oh, cool, we're just gonna argue about stuff endlessly and get our gripes off our chests..." 

Also, "idiot" is not a dtrect synonym for "stupid," notwithstanding common invective usage. Greek "idios," aware of only one's self. Yeah, one could argue that such egocentric fixations are "stupid:" I suppose, but, dunno, brosdly.

Stay tuned... 

 

UPDATE

 

Will have to get back to this. Cleto Escobedo III just died.

Andrew Ross Sorkin follow-up.

The gift who keeps on giving.
   

   
apropos of some prior posts, e.g., here, and here.

 

He's certainly making the interview rounds of late. Justifiably so. A delightful man. His SME chops are compelling. His totally pleasant, self-deprecating personality could not be more endearing.

 

See also Andrew's chat with Anthony Scaramucci. Interview length ~0.002 Scaramuccis.

Gotta say, I have new respect for Scaramucci after viewing his 1929 Sorkin interview. Astute guy. I've not paid sufficient attention to him. 

Do yourselves some serious favors; acquire and study Andrew'a books. I've moved on to several new titles, but keep looping back around.

 

  

Below: Recurrent relevant riff of mine. "An ongoing concern, one rather acutely ramping up in recent years, is one of our sociopolitical Bifurcation (particularly as it goes to economic policies). to wit, [1] Those of us bound by the law yet not protected by it, in contrast with [2] those protected by the law but not bound by it. Which cohort applies to you?"

 

Human affairs get "governed" one way or another. Sorry, MAGA you're-not-the-boss-of-me "FreeDumb & Liberty" peeps.

Another, older fav book of mine:

 

If there were only one man in the world, he would have a lot of problems, but none of them would be legal ones. Add a second inhabitant, and we have the possibility of conflict. Both of us try to pick the same apple from the same branch. I track the deer I wounded only to find that you have killed it, butchered it, and are in the process of cooking and eating it. 

The obvious solution is violence. It is not a very good solution; if we employ it, our little world may shrink back down to one person, or perhaps none. A better solution, one that all known human societies have found, is a system of legal rules explicit or implicit, some reasonably peaceful way of determining, when desires conflict, who gets to do what and what happens if he doesn’t. 

The legal rules that we are most familiar with are laws created by legislatures and enforced by courts and police. But even in our society much of the law is the creation not of legislatures but of judges, embedded in past precedents that determine how future cases will be decided; much enforcement of law is by private parties such as tort victims and their lawyers rather than by police; and substantial bodies of legal rules take the form not of laws. but of private norms, privately enforced. 

Going farther afield in time and space we encounter a much greater diversity, both in the sources of legal rules and in the ways in which they are enforced. If we are considering all systems of legal rules in all times and places, the ways in which legal rules are created and enforced in America in this century are simply data—one out of many possible solutions to the problem of human conflict, one out of many possible systems of legal rules.

Friedman, David D.. Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters (p. 3). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

Connection to these newer books will commence as we speculate upon where things might plausibly (interconnectedly) head—e.g., AGI/LLM/robotics, private finance/ECON markets, crypto, etc...

 

UPDATE

 

This is nicely done.

 

Recall my "Tranche Warfare" 'eh?

NPR: A reporter outlines Trump's options to subvert the 2026 midterm elections

Heard this on WYPR while driving. Well worth your time. Goes to this post.

 

David A. Graham of The Atlantic.

My Grandson Calvin and his newborn baby brother Arlo

How blessed am I?

PROVE ME WRONG

The Article I Branch is intubated in hospice care, with a DNR taped to the fridge. The Article III Branch, well... 

 

Give Donald Trump a millimeter, he'll take a light year. His Feb 18th, 2025 Executive Order was clear.

Sec. 7.  Rules of Conduct Guiding Federal Employees’ Interpretation of the Law. The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.  The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.  No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General..      

HE decides what the law is. So he thinks.

 

UPDATE

 

Donald Trump has had an unhappy couple of days. First, the NY, NJ, VA, and CA elections and referendum poll results, followed by the SCOTUS  Trump tariffs case Oral hearing today. I listened via C-SPAN. It went long, and was largely skeptical pf the Solicitor General's Fred Astaire arguments.