Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

About to Get Spicy!

By -

I’ll begin today not with a prayer but with a quote which I think is quite germane for our times.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world is being destroyed.” — Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (1972)

With that in mind, here’s with the /NQ is doing relative to the comic mega-spike of Monday morning. This deceit has been about 80% reversed so far (irrelevant to the Trump clan, who already secured profits on their long ES/short CL positions).

(more…)

Rage Against the Machine

By -

Long-time readers know of my disposition toward government, and by government, I mean any government, be it federal, state, or local. I consider them to be a magnet for waste, fraud, and laziness, and I daresay if every single government employee on the planet vanished instantly into thin air, almost all of us would be vastly better off (to say nothing of demonstrably wealthier).

The frustrating thing about government waste is that you can’t do a damn thing about it. you just have to live with the fact that your assets are going to the worst of humanity. Here in my fair city of Palo Alto I have read about countless instances of the kind of crap that makes me despise government more by the day. First, there’s this gem:

(more…)