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In The News 4-10-2023

WTI crude oil floats above $80.00 as US Dollar rebound jostles with supply crunch fears

From Article:

On the other hand, geopolitical fears surrounding China, mainly after the dragon nation’s military drills near Taiwan, join the last week’s surprise OPEC+ output cut to keep the Oil buyers hopeful.

Elsewhere, China’s readiness to defend the global economy via strong monetary and fiscal easing at home also allows the Oil buyers to remain hopeful amid optimism at the world’s biggest Oil consumers.

Link: https://www.fxstreet.com/news/wti-crude-oil-floats-above-8000-as-us-dollar-rebound-jostles-with-supply-crunch-fears-202304100542

Comment: China is stimulating its economy while the US FED continues to pretend to fight inflation by raising interest rates.  Meanwhile oil suppliers are supporting inflation by cutting back oil production.  This is not a good formula.  This is a formula to hurt the middle class.

American offices are half-empty. That could be the next big risk for banks

From Article:

Work-from-home bill comes due

Commercial real estate — which spans offices, apartment complexes, warehouses and malls — has come under substantial pressure in recent months. Prices in the United States were down 15% in March from their recent peak, according to data provider Green Street. The rapid increase in interest rates over the past year has been painful, since purchases of commercial buildings are typically financed with large loans.

Office properties have been getting hammered the hardest. Hybrid work remains popular, affecting the rents many building owners can charge. Average occupancy of offices in the United States is still less than half March 2020 levels, according to data from security provider Kastle.

Link: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/10/business/commercial-real-estate-banks-offices/index.html

The world’s busiest airport is Atlanta, once again

From Article:

 

In 2022, around 93.7 million people traveled through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), a 23.8% increase in passenger traffic from 2021, according to a report released by Airports Council International.

Link: https://thepointsguy.com/news/atlanta-busiest-airport/

Comment: The article mentions that Chinese Airports temporarily took the top rank during the Covid Hysteria.  My phrasing.  Not theirs.  But American Airports and travel are now coming back strong.

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Make The Electoral College Real

Article II of the Constitution

  • Clause 2 Electors
  • Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

    • Clause 3 Electoral College Count
    • The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.

From John Adams to John Taylor, 17 December 1814

In your fifth page You Say “Mr. Adams calls our Attention to hundreds of wise and virtuous Patricians, mangled and bleeding Victims of popular Fury.” and gravely counts up several Victims of democratic Rage as proofs that Democracy is more pernicious than Monarchy or Aristocracy.” Is this fair, sir? Do you deny any one of my Facts? I do not say that Democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than Monarchy or Aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as Aristocracy or Monarchy. But while it lasts it is more bloody than either. I beseech you, Sir to recollect, the time when my three Volumes of “Defence” were written and printed, in 1786, 1787 and 1788. The History of the University, had not then furnis[, Start insertion,h, End,]ed me with a document I have Since Seen; an Alphabetical Dictionary of the Names and Qualities of Persons “mangled and bleeding Victims of democratic rage and popular fury” in France during the Despotism of Democracy in that Country, which Napoleon ought to be immortalised for calling “Ideology.”

—————————-

The reason our USA Founding Fathers establish the electoral college was because they feared mob rule and they understood the dangers of direct elections. Then you had Alexander Hamilton who set the seeds to turn America into an Aristocracy/Oligarchy. The fight back against the Oligarchy has historically lent itself to political populism and the people having more of a say in our government, and while the Oligarchy has generally waved the white flag to surrender to some of the mobs ideas when they become too raucous, generally the Oligarchy has managed to control the mob without most of the mob knowing it.   This has often been to the detriment of the United States. That white flag has more times than not been disingenuous and just a ploy to achieve its actual goals to maintain the power of the oligarchy, keep its crony clubs unfettered by making class mobility more difficult and limited, and to destroy any new powers in the economy that might be or might become their competition.

We saw this with the destruction of the Southern Textile families who supported politicians the richer, and often Northern, Oligarchy didn’t like. In more recent times we saw the Oligarchy at work when the goto search engine was destroyed, then the old yahoo was destroyed, and all search power was given to google and to a lesser degree Microsoft. We saw it when the old myspace was destroyed and the power was given to Facebook. With that transfer of wealth and power, that gave the oligarchy more power to spy on opponents and to pick winners and losers in the larger economy and perhaps even to some degree in the micro economy. Does google refuse to put your business on the map where people can find you or do they have you a block over? When you search for a given business is their competition more likely to pop up than the business for which you were in search?

The bankruptcy of J.C. Penney may at least partly be blamed on google and google pretending J.C. Penney were demoted in search because they had broken some seo rule. I am not a huge fan of COX Inc. but how often do you see any of their news organization on the google news page? Now, I guess it is possible that COX Inc. is retarded in leadership and does not want their news listed on the google news page but I kind of doubt that.

So anyway, the Oligarchy is thriving under our current system of electing their idiots to power so they have no desire to change the system. Some even want to make the electoral college even more irrelevant.  But, the American people need to demand that the electoral college be relevant.

How can it be made relevant?  Well, one thing is to look at how it was originally designed.

The First Design
In the first design of the Electoral College (described in Article II,
Section 1 of the Constitution):


Each State was allocated a number of Electors equal to the number of its
U.S. Senators (always 2) plus the number of its U.S. Representatives (which
may change each decade according to the size of each State’s population as
determined in the decennial census). This arrangement built upon an
earlier compromise in the design of the Congress itself and thus satisfied
both large and small States.


The manner of choosing the Electors was left to the individual State
legislatures, thereby pacifying States suspicious of a central national
government.

Members of Congress and employees of the federal government were
specifically prohibited from serving as an Elector in order to maintain
the balance between the legislative and executive branches of the federal
government.


Each State’s Electors were required to meet in their respective States
rather than all together in one great meeting. This arrangement, it was
thought, would prevent bribery, corruption, secret dealing, and foreign
influence.

In order to prevent Electors from voting only for a “favorite son” of their
own State, each Elector was required to cast two votes for president, at
least one of which had to be for someone outside their home State. The
idea, presumably, was that the winner would likely be everyone’s second favorite choice.

And the casting of two votes is important.

The electoral votes were to be sealed and transmitted from each of the
States to the President of the Senate who would then open them before
both houses of the Congress and read the results.

The person with the most electoral votes, provided that it was an absolute
majority (at least one over half of the total), became president. Whoever
obtained the next greatest number of electoral votes became vice
president — an office which they seem to have invented for the occasion
since it had not been mentioned previously in the Constitutional
Convention.

In the event that no one obtained an absolute majority in the Electoral
College or in the event of a tie vote, the U.S. House of Representatives, as
the chamber closest to the people, would choose the president from
among the top five contenders. They would do this (as a further
concession to the small States) by allowing each State to cast only one vote with an absolute majority of the States being required to elect a
president. The vice presidency would go to whatever remaining
contender had the greatest number of electoral votes. If that, too, was
tied, the U.S. Senate would break the tie by deciding between the two.

That system might not have been perfect but it is better than what we have now where we are not even sure whether our elections are honest or not.  But the bottom line is that some major change is needed in how we choose a President because we can’t afford to keep allowing the Oligarchy (some of whom are not even American) to make the Presidency of the US a bought office mostly run by them.

So, to get our Republic back what changes are needed.

1. The size of the House of Representatives needs to be increased from 435 to 43,500.

2. The electors should again cast 2 votes for President.  One vote should be based on the people’s vote as is pretty much done now.  The 2nd vote should be for who they think will best serve the interest of the American people.  The 2nd vote should be different from the first vote.

3. The electors and not the President should decide who the VP should be and who the AG should be.

I realize what I am suggesting will never happen but it is just a thought. LOL

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Hearthville Serial: Book 8 Chapter 12 – All Good Things Must Come To An End

Any Truth, Proper Grammar, or Correct Spelling is totally coincidental if not accidental. All characters are fiction. This story is fiction. This story makes no claims about any real person.

By Charles Peters Copyright 2022, 2023 All Rights Reserved

Chapter / Episode List of the Heathville Serial

Chapter 12

Billy and Samner stood on the Launch Pad.

“Three, four, five…”

And then something strange happened.

The computer that runs the digital world, the computer that is the world, stopped. Reality stopped. Everything was frozen in time, frozen in computer code. Every soul on earth was trapped in a split moment of nothingness.

Amelia, the greatest of all Gods, rose from her sleep. She looked at her world that was frozen. She smiled. “It is over. Let the souls go free from my creation. I am tired of being God. I am tired of my world trapping souls. I think I will go create a new world.”

And the frozen moment ended. Earth vanished. All that was in the computer program vanished and the souls that had been trapped in the computer program were freed. And she summoned Billy and Samner to appear before her and they did.

With excitement Billy said, “You are awake.”

Samner said, “And you stopped us from launching.”

Billy looked at Samner. “Did she? I think I remember us touching the void. And with the power we gained, we woke Amelia.”

Amelia kissed Billy and Samner on their foreheads. “And I have freed you all. I have shut down the computer program. The souls will have to go create their own realities.”

Samner asked, “But what of the evil ones. They will create worlds to trap souls.”

“We must see that they don’t. And we must see that we don’t.”

Billy said, “I am going to miss earth. It was tragic but it was beautiful. There was pain there but there was also pleasure.”

“It was time for it to end.”

The End

For Now

 

 

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In The News 4-4-2023

Jamie Dimon says the banking crisis is not over and will cause ‘repercussions for years to come’

The recent banking issues in the U.S. began with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which was closed by regulators on March 10 as depositors pulled tens of billions of dollars from the bank. The smaller Signature Bank was closed two days later. And in Europe, Swiss regulators brokered a purchase of Credit Suisse by UBS.

JPMorgan and other large banks stepped in to make $30 billion of deposits at First Republic, another regional bank that investors feared could become the next SVB.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit files for bankruptcy

 

Hart said he believed that the company’s “cutting-edge launch technology” would have “wide appeal to buyers as we continue in the process to sell the company.”

Virgin Investments, one of Virgin Orbit’s sister companies, will inject $31.6 million into the satellite launcher to help it stay afloat while the business searches for a new owner.

The announcement comes just days after Virgin Orbit said it would lay off about 85% of its workforce to reduce expenses since it could not secure additional funding.

Google is so broke after becoming a bitch for the government that they have stopped buying laptops and stapler guns and are telling their employees to use paper clips.

 

Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers for ‘multi-year’ savings

The latest cost-cutting measures come as Alphabet-owned Google continues its most severe era of cost cuts in its almost two decades as a public company. The company said in January that it was eliminating 12,000 jobs, representing about 6% of its workforce, to reckon with slowing sales growth following record head count growth.

Advertisement:

A Princess of Mars Mass Market Paperback – January 1, 1985

by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Author)

Suddenly projected to Mars, John Carter found himself captive of the savage green men of Thark. With him was Dejah Thoris, lovely Princess of Helium. And between them and rescue lay a thousand miles of deadly enemies and unknown dangers.

The green warrior decided to close in and end the battle; just as he rushed me, a blinding light struck full in my eyes, so that I could not see Zad’s approach and could only leap blindly to one side to avoid his mighty blade.

It caught me in the left shoulder; but as my vision cleared a sight met my astonished gaze that almost made me forget the fight. Standing on her chariot with Sola and Sarkoja, my beloved Dejah Thoris turned on Sarkoja with the fury of a tigress and struck something that flashed in the sunlight from her upraised hand. Then I knew what had blinded me at that crucial moment, and how Sarkoja had found a way to kill me without herself delivering the final thrust!

Sarkoja, her face livid with baffled rage, whipped out her dagger and aimed a terrific blow at Dejah Thoris—and Zad was once more advancing on me with reddened blade. I felt the steel tear into my chest and all went black before me. . . .

I didn’t know that Avatar was based, somewhat, on the Edgar Rice Burroughs book Princess of Mars. Now I do.

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