First Blog

Corruption.  Everything is measured these days.  It has been said if it cannot be measured, it doesn’t exist. So, even corruption has been measured.  While there is no real method to measure actual corruption, it is measured indirectly by perceptions of residents.  So, we go transparent, that is to the transparency website to examine corruption*.   A total of 176 countries were evaluated.  The lower ranked countries have the lowest scores (based on a 0-100 score). They are by plagued by untrustworthy and badly functioning public institutions like the police and judiciary.  This includes bribery and extortion. Higher-ranked countries tend to have more freedom of the press, public access to information about public expenditure, higher standards of integrity for officials, and generally independent judicial systems.   Below, we show the bottom or most corrupt countries (Table 1) followed by the top or least corrupt countries (Table 2). Table 1. Most corrupt countries C

One political type made an accurate point about all the Hillary emails, of which there have been thousands, that being none from Bernie or Donald have appeared.   He asked why we haven’t seen any from Trump?   Could be the Trump group has better security?   Absolute security is easy and almost free, if you want to use it.   It is a certainty that Hillary was careless about security.   The reason is simple.   Neither she nor her team fully understood how easy hacking can be.  One thing I've learned is many of those at premier levels do not respond well to new things.  To plea d ignorance or amat eur status , they expos e themselves to themselves and to others.  Old hands have trouble with new events and new concepts. So, they hide it or ignore what's happening.  Another reason exists, perhaps about Trump but certainly about others.   We generalize beyond Donald as he is unlikely to win the election.  Why can it not be so that multiple, maybe hundreds, of important po