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The Bloomberg Effect

The economy is strong and the stock markets continue their frenetic upward journeys. This is not very likely to change over the next 10 months, which means that it will prevail at and up to the 2020 Presidential election. What started as a recovery from the worst economic recession since The Great Depression during the 2nd half of Barak Obama’s first term, continued on into the 2016 election, which graced us with Donald Trump as our 45th President, as a full-on Bull Market. His tax cuts on corporate profits laced bull’s feed with copious amounts of amphetamines, which shifted the recovery into hyperdrive. The markets will, as they always do, correct themselves to more appropriate values, but like a speeding train, it takes some time to harness enough gravity for them to slow down. Trump’s economic policy pushed the Financial Markets to levels which far exceed the values of their underlying constituents, giving them much further to fall when the bubble bursts. The challenge is how to c
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The Trial

Last week, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath to the Senate, duly empaneled to serve as jurors in the Impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States. It reads: “I solemnly swear or affirm, as the case that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald J. Trump, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: so help me God.” The Senate promised the American People that in its dual role of Judg e and Jury, it will individually and collectively don the blindfold of impartiality and hold high the Scales of Justice as the Founders would have had it. NOT! The Senate’s Republican majority has already declared to all those concerned, that all charges against the President are unfounded, baseless and without merit. Republican Senators effectively hobbled the Impeachment process before its opening gavel. They swore an oath, knowing full well their intention break it before lifting their hands from a

Transparency

Transparency Whenever Trump is asked a direct question about Giuliani’s activities vis-a-vis Ukraine, he sidesteps it, immediately squashing the question and redirects into a subject having little to do with the substance of the question itself. In this case, the new subject was a well-honed monologue about his love and admiration for the "Greatest NYC Mayor Ever," sounding more like an NFL coach’s glowing endorsement of his wide-receiver who had just scored the winning Super Bowl touchdown. One can only imagine what kind, and how many layers of dirt the Mayor has on the President!

Language

Setting : The order queue inside McDonald's (drive-through line too long.) Mission : Aquire a 6 Piece Chicken Nugget Happy meal and deliver it to a really hungry Anna Sfoglia. Narrative : Waiting on the pickup queue situated to the left of the first queue. Looking around I note a scene worthy of Orwellian prose; more than a dozen people waiting to either order or to pick up, all of them laser-focused, their heads leaning forward at near exactly the same angle, on their cellphones. No verbal communication. No interaction whatever with their surroundings. No reason to look up from their device, save hearing an order number to pick up, or the mundane chant of “can I help whose next?” Rhetoric : What happened to senseless banter while standing captive on the McDonalds queue? Senseless, but nonetheless pure and simple human interaction. Focusing on the exchange of opinions, ideas, complaints, however mundane. Rant : And what the hell is a “whose?” Is it plant, animal, human? I

Sir, we're out of bullets!

Trump quote: "When I took over our military, we did not have ammunition, I was told by a top general, maybe the top of them all, 'Sir, I'm sorry sir, we don't have ammunition.'” It’s unclear which “top of them all” General the President is referring to; perhaps General Motors, General Mills, General Electric, maybe General Hospital? These could conceivably be wanting for ammunition, tho ugh I struggle a bit to think of why they’d need it in the first place. The President did say “military,” did he not? Hmmm. Anyway, we all know the President; he can be narcissistic, psychotic, and sociopathic from time to time, and yes, he is a pathological liar with the bonus trait of believing many of his own lies. This is just the way he is, no big deal, and if this scares our allies abroad, so what, it’s America First in this banana republic. Come on already, the President HAS told us repeatedly, time and time again, over and over, many times over, that immediately upon h

The Myth of Democracy

I thought that I learned bunches of new stuff from Sapiens, Prof Harari"s blockbuster about the political, religious and economic myths that helped us manage the many challenges to its survival our species faced over its 300,000-year existence. Harari asserts that Human Rights are not endemic to our, or to any species. A complete dissection of the human body will reveal no biological evidence of "Human Rights." This is because Rights are not Human, they are imaginary constr ucts, they are myths. Human Rights are not part of the physical "us," rather, they are figments of our collective imaginations. We cannot eat them, wear them, make them wash our cars; we just have them, why? because most Americans say we do, why? because our government told us so, how? by included Human Rights as part of a larger, more inclusive myth called "Democracy." The Democracy myth was crafted, ratified and deployed by our Forefathers, then, to ensure its ongoing effecti

One Man, One+ Vote

You don't stop the little kid from whining about not being able to play with the big kid by giving the little kid bigger bats, because if you do, you'll end up having to impeach the leader of the free world and spend the better part of the next decade cleaning up the mess he left behind. We don't need the Electoral College because we have the Senate. Each state gets two Senators, which means that residents of any given State get proportionately higher Senate representa tion relative to all more populous States. Sounds ass-backward to me, but hey, I don't make the rules. Ironic as it may seem, the U.S.A, the world's bastion of Democratic processes and principles, there exists an indirect and non-linear relationship amongst the State's between population and representation. Think about it, the smaller a State's population, the greater the per capita Senate voting power of a vote cast in that State, a paradigm that is most clearly demonstrated in WY (pop.