Russell Hasan's Blog

The short answer is: no, and it's because of the coronavirus. In chess, when a player can take two of your pieces on his next move, if you move one to safety, then the other is lost, and this is called being forked. Donald Trump is forked. If he eases social distancing to save the economy, your grandparents die (along with up to a million other people), and the voters will blame him. If he doesn't, the economy dies and we all lose our job and starve to death. There is no winning move for him to make. Voters won't understand, or won't care, that it is not his fault and the virus is to blame. Ironically, the Democrats were weak foes whom I believe Trump would have beaten easily, but in the coronavirus, Trump faces an enemy as tough, as resilient, as crafty, and, yes, as contagious as he is. It is precisely the type of opponent he is ill equipped to handle and was not ready for. I'll be voting Libertarian and have no skin in the RepPa vs. DemPa game, but right now t...

Today we're going to learn about the Libertarian Party! Come on! It will be fun! Everyone knows about the USA's two party system, with the Democrats and the Republicans. Did you know that there are other political parties in the United States? Well there are! And the Libertarian Party is the largest third party in America. Generally, Democrats are liberals and Republicans are conservatives. Members of the Libertarian Party are usually libertarians. There is no one definition of what makes a person be libertarian, but their ideas are often based on one of four thinkers: philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, economist Murray Rothbard, or economist Ludwig von Mises. Libertarians support unregulated free market capitalism. Issues they feel strongly about include: legalizing drugs, giving people the right to own guns, and cutting taxes. The Libertarian Party generally supports any policy that maximizes individual freedom and limits governme...

What is the philosophy of Objectivism? Let's learn about it together! I bet you'll learn something new! Objectivism is the name of a philosophy--a set of ideas--developed by novelist Ayn Rand in the 20th Century. Objectivists are people who practice Objectivism. What do Objectivists believe? They think that a person should be happy, and that your happiness is the moral and ethical purpose of your life. They claim that rationality and reasoning are your main tools to succeed in the world, and that success causes happiness. They promote capitalism and individualism, feeling that the individual is more important than society. Did you know? The 1980s were called The Decade of Greed because many people were influenced by Objectivism at that time, including high-ranking officials of the Reagan Administration. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was also a known Objectivist. Who was Ayn Rand? She was born in 1905 in Russia to Jewish parents. She lived through the 1918 Communist...

As the coronavirus crisis triggers a forced switch for schools and colleges to online learning and for office workers to work from home, it is worth speculation that some of these changes are permanent. Schools and businesses are figuring out how to do everything remotely online. That know-how is worth money, and, even after the crisis is over, they will need to recover their investment in that know-how, probably by continuing to use it. Also, real estate costs money. People are always going to pay for their homes, so if people work at home or learn at home, then the cost of the office or the campus vanishes, costs go down, so profit goes up. Sadly the joy of the experience of being on campus or in the office is lost, but once people get used to its absence they may not care. Tomorrow may be here today, earlier than any of us wanted to see it.

The coronavirus crisis has caused an unprecedented level of volatility on Wall Street, accompanied by one day which saw the largest single-day drop on almost 30 years. Why stocks are collapsing is simple: the coronavirus is going to cost every business money, so they will have less profit and pay smaller dividends, so their stock is worth less. Such a correction is actually how the market is supposed to work: prices send signals to tell people what things are really worth, and the stocks are now not worth as much as they were in our recent economic boom. A more interesting question is why is there so much volatility? It has been reported in WSJ, and is obvious if you look at recent charts of the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average, that most of the volatility is either right when the market opens or right before it closes. They say that investors buy and sell based on news. I think the major institutional investors have ways to buy and sell US stocks while the market is...

It was recently in the news that "6 million Android phones are at risk of being hacked." Then if you dig deeper it turns out these are the older devices in poorer countries with versions of the Android OS which Google has stopped supporting. Let me explain what "not supported" means. It means if the OS developer finds a bug or exploit (a vulnerability a hacker can exploit) they are not legally obligated to push a fix or security update. So, yes, an unsupported OS is a hacker's paradise, but that's not news, every tech person already knows that. A lot of people say a lot of things are fake news these days, but that one might really actually deserve to be called fake news. It would be like saying that people have invented this great thing called the wheel and that's worth a headline. Wheels are great, but that's not news.

While everyone is aware now that the Astros stole signs using a camera in center field during their tainted World Championship 2017 season, everybody seems to have forgotten the initial allegations that made reporters begin to dig: New York Yankees players alleging the 'Stros were stealing signs during the 2019 playoffs. Why isn't MLB investigating and handing out punishment for that? Maybe because MLB in its fear of the players' union cut a deal for prosecution immunity if the Astros confessed, which is reason why the culprits, those Astros players, were not and never will be punished by MLB. Were the League to do its job and rake some muck, the Astros players and the union would call their lawyers and sue, and MLB fears messy litigation. Do you job, Rob Mansfred!

Master legal reasoning. Improve your writing and hone how to draft a brief. Understand the intersection of political philosophy and the law, and how that should shape your legal arguments to judged and juries whether you are a seasoned lawyer or pro se. Impress your friends with your grasp of logic. This paper provides a new system of logic, including philosophical principles and logical notation, based on the work in logic done by Aristotle and later by Ayn Rand but also with a nod to modern Analytical philosophy, which is extremely useful to lawyers for analyzing facts to determine whether they satisfy the elements of a claim, as well as organizing arguments to a jury and presenting evidence. A libertarian politics emerges from the system of logic as a byproduct of the logical analysis of the intersection of law, politics, and philosophy. Required reading for lawyers and citizens who want to understand the law and how and why it impacts them. Learn more at  https://www.amazon....