Some Moments Of Great Happiness Followed By Moments Of Profound Shock And Sadness

     Some of the happiest memories of my time at Tulane University are the magical times when we would get in the car and drive from New Orleans to Houma, Louisiana. We would arrive at the house of my Uncle Howard and Aunt Marion. Aunt Marion would have worked all morning cooking a lovely pork roast with white meat. There would be excellent vegetables and a salad. It would be a time of warm love and lively conversations. Each year at this time, Elena and I go to a special dinner at Pizza Delfina in Palo Alto. You need to sign up and pay in advance. You eat outside with some bright and lively people. There are wonderful salads and vegetables. The centerpiece is a beautiful white meat pork roast washed down with great Italian beer. It is like being back at Aunt Marion's house long ago. It is a happy time!

     After that happiness last night, I awakened to sadness this morning. The Financial Times of London announced that progress was not being made in negotiations in Turkey to free up Ukraine grain for shipment to North Africa and the Middle East. This sets up the real possibility of hundreds of thousands of people starving to death and many more suffering painful hunger.

     Then I got some sad personal news. Colleen Roth Moore was a good friend in high school. She stayed interested in all of us. She would keep in touch with the alumnae of Ross S. Sterling High School. Each October, she would open her home in Conroe, Texas, for a reunion of Ross S. Sterling graduates. Colleen seemed to be in good health and just fine. I got the sad news from her daughter that she had passed away unexpectedly. In the original ending of the movie "Blade Runner" from 1986, Harrison Ford and Sean Young are riding in a futuristic flying car. Harrison Ford gives a monologue that ends with these profound words:

       "Then none of us knows how much time we have left."

  

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By San Francisco Standards, We Are Wealthy!!!

 

How much money makes you ‘wealthy’ in San Francisco? The number keeps rising —by over $1 million in a year

Kellie Hwang

June 29, 2022

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San Francisco survey takers said it would take an average net worth of $5.1 million to be considered wealthy in S.F. in 2022.

Nick Otto/Special to The Chronicle 2020

The amount of money it takes to be considered “wealthy” in the Bay Area remains millions of dollars higher than in other big metropolitan regions — and has increased substantially from last year, according to the latest edition of Charles Schwab’s survey on wealth.

Respondents to the 2022 Modern Wealth Survey said it will take an average net worth of $5.1 million to be considered wealthy in San Francisco in 2022, compared to $3.8 million in 2021 — that’s an increase of 34% in one year, and more than double the national average. In 2020, respondents said it took $4.5 million to feel wealthy in San Francisco. The nationwide average also increased from 2021 to 2022, but by only 15%.

To be “financially comfortable,” a San Francisco resident would need a net worth of $1.7 million, versus $1.3 million in 2021 and $1.5 million in 2020. Nationwide, respondents said it takes $774,000 to be financially comfortable.

Survey respondents were asked at what level of personal net worth a person in their area would be considered wealthy, and financially comfortable. While net worth was not explicitly defined in the survey, it generally includes the value of all of a person’s assets, including their home and mortgage balance, minus their liabilities.

The two average net worth values from San Francisco respondents were by far the highest out of the 12 total metro areas surveyed. The second-highest net worth of $3.9 million to be considered wealthy came from respondents in Southern California, which includes Los Angeles and San Diego counties, followed by New York’s figure of $3.4 million. Denver respondents gave the lowest net worth at $2.3 million.

To be considered financially comfortable, New York respondents said an average net worth of $1.4 million would do the trick, while Southern California’s figure came in third at $1.3 million. Denver again came in with the lowest net worth of $671,000.

According to Charles Schwab, 750 San Francisco residents ages 21 to 75 participated in the survey from Feb. 10 to Feb. 27. The other major metros included 500 to 750 survey respondents, depending on the area.

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American Civil War II And Its Impact On Financial Markets

       We are going to talk about American Civil War II and how it would affect financial markets and each of you personally. Before I get started, please allow me to repeat the prediction of Ray Dalio. He owns the number one hedge fund in the US. He is bright. He has an incredible research team behind him. He rates the probability of such an event happening at 30%. He says it is just as likely as a shooting war between the US and China.

       On Sunday one of our readers in Toronto got so curious about the possibility of American Civil War II that he went out to a bookstore and bought the book that I have discussed previously. After reading a few pages of the book, he posed the question to me:

       "What happens to financial markets if a second civil war erupts?"

        I pointed out to David that the most dangerous moment comes at the end of the 2024 presidential election here in the US. If it is a very close election and no one including the US Supreme Court can determine who is the winner, we might see a military intervention to solve the problem. Elena gets upset when she hears this. She says that this has never happened in the history of the US. People in various think tanks and academic organizations see this as a real possibility. One would assume that conservative senior military officers would support the Republican candidate for president. People predicting this say that it could be either candidate.

    A military intervention would lead to the Constitution and civil liberties being suspended. Military force would be used to keep the chosen candidate in power. Any armed resistance would be brutally crushed.

     Does this mean that you will have tanks on your street fighting pitched battles and jet fighters overhead dropping bombs?

      Elena and I have 14 years of experience with military coups and military dictatorships in South America. You will not have tanks and pitched battles in your neighborhood. The violence will take place in highly populated urban areas.

     How would this political instability and uncertainty affect financial markets? It would be devastating. Learn to think like a South American with experience in such events. They make sure that their house or apartment is paid for. In that way, they have a roof over their heads regardless of what happens. Stock markets will crash. Banks will fail. We could see a situation where the US defaults on its massive national debt. You will need cash and gold in your residence. You will need a good supply of food and water. You will need to have the capability to generate your own electricity. This includes a solar power system and a heavy-duty generator powered by natural gas.

    Let us hope that we will all awaken, and this will be a bad dream that never actually happened.

 

From History to Poetry: Mai Der Vang Explores the Archival Record in Her Celebrated Volume "Yellow Rain" | National Security Archive

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Where Did "The Black Death" That Killed 60% Of Europe's Population Come from?

 

The Sexacentennial Mystery

It took more than 600 years but scientists finally discovered the origins of the Black Death, CBS News reported.

In a new study, researchers pinpointed the source of the pandemic in a region in Central Asia after analyzing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site.

The Black Death eradicated 30 percent to 60 percent of the population of Europe from 1346 to 1353. Scholars have been debating the source for years until a research team discovered a clue in an 1890 work describing an ancient burial site in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan.

The team came across a surge in burials between 1338 and 1339 with a number of tombstones describing the cause of death as “pestilence.”

“When you have one or two years with excess mortality it means that something funny was going on there,” co-author Philip Slavin said in a statement.

Slavin and his colleagues went to the burial site to extract genetic material from the teeth of seven people buried there. Researchers explained that teeth contain blood vessels, which could provide them with evidence that blood-borne pathogens were responsible for the inhabitants’ demise.

The findings showed that the pathogen was Yersinia pestis, commonly known as the plague – and the specific pathogen responsible for the 14th-century pandemic.

The authors acknowledged that the data sample is very small but other scientists said the research methods could be used to resolve other ancient scientific mysteries.

Will Russia Kidnap NATO and US Officials?

 

The Disappeared

RUSSIA/ UKRAINE

Russian lawmaker Oleg Morozov of the pro-government United Russia political party, the largest in the country, was recently sharing his thoughts on a Rossiya-1 state television talk show. Speaking to pro-Kremlin TV host Olga Skabeyeva, he asked: what if Russian agents kidnapped a NATO country defense minister while they were visiting Kyiv to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy? The minister would wake up, shocked, in Moscow.

“You mean we abduct them?” Skabeyeva responded, according to Reuters.

“Yes,” Morozov answered. “And then we would sort out who gave which order for what, who is responsible for what exactly. It is not such a mythical picture … There are new rules in the world now. Let all those war ministers gathering in Kyiv think a little about what it would be like to wake up in Moscow.”

This comical political rhetoric alludes to but also elides the horrific recent history of kidnappings in the Russo-Ukrainian War. “All over Ukraine, people are missing, forcing families to become detectives,” went the headline of a Washington Post story about Ukrainians seeking to solve the fates of around 9,000 missing loves ones who have disappeared since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. Authorities are simultaneously investigating 13,000 alleged war crimes in the same period.

Sometimes the kidnappings are designed to intimidate Ukrainians living in a war zone, as France 24 explained, referring to Ukrainians who were detained, abused and tortured because they spoke out against Russian occupation. Russian forces have also made a point to “disappear” Ukrainian local officials, like mayors, who might organize resistance movements, Vox noted.

But Britain recently imposed further sanctions on Russia to signal disapproval over Russian forces abducting Ukrainian children and giving them to Russian families, the Guardian reported. The sanctions include Maria Lvova-Belova, a Putin ally who is the Russian children’s rights commissioner. She stands accused of running a state-sanctioned abduction program. Ukrainian officials claim that Lvova-Belova has masterminded the kidnappings of more than 2,000 children.

Russia has also taken other measures to absorb Ukrainians and wipe out their identities. As the Daily Beast noted, Russian occupiers of the Ukrainian city of Kherson recently decreed that all children born in the region since the invasion started would automatically be considered citizens of Russia. These measures are common throughout history when powerful nationalist forces seek to erase communities who don’t fit in with their plans, wrote University of South Carolina Law Professor Marcia Zug in the Conversation.

What’s inconvenient for them, though: Just because people disappear doesn’t mean they will be forgotten.

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Eating Dinner With New Orleans "Old Money"

     On the evening of May 19, 2022, I found myself in a country club venue near the campus of Tulane University. It was the first event of the 50-year reunion of the Class of 1972. There were beautiful tables for the guests. There was a great band playing classic New Orleans jazz. There was a well-stocked bar giving out free drinks. Not many people showed up at first. Then the event got packed with people. I have a picture of the attendees including me that I will treasure for the rest of my life for a special reason that I will explain now.

    As I took my seat for the gourmet dinner to follow, I heard all sorts of talks about exclusive boarding schools. I heard talk of East Coast preparatory schools and academies where people from the famous Kennedy clan would send their children to high school.

     The man seated next to me commented that he owned a conglomerate that was in agribusiness and oil and gas. He commented that his father bought him a house in the French Quarter when he was a freshman at Tulane. I recognized the man from Tulanian magazine. I remarked that he had made a $2 million dollar contribution to the Tulane Medical School. He modestly replied that the contribution was made a few years ago.

     It dawned on me that I had landed right in the middle of "New Orleans old money." These were people who had had money and privileges all their lives. I compared my early life and the early life of Elena to these very wealthy people. In 1955, my mother insisted that my father buy a home for our family. They agreed to purchase a home located at 5715 Belarbor Avenue in Houston for $12,000 US. Here is a link to show you the house where I spent my formative years:

https://www.redfin.com/TX/Houston/5715-Belarbor-St-77033/home/30064420

      It had 1216 square feet of living space (112.97 square meters for our metric readers.) Dad was able to get a 100% loan to buy the house because he was a veteran of the US Army. His monthly house payment was $100 US. Dad had a brand-new 1955 Chevrolet Belaire. His car payment was $45 US per month. Dad's salary as an advertising salesman was $600.00 US per month.

    I lived in that house from 1955-1966 when I started to live in other places because I could not get along with my mother. Mother and dad sold the house in 1970 and bought another house for $20,000 US. When they both died they left a very modest estate that included that house and some personal property. They never owned stocks and bonds. They never had a retirement fund. They never owned two cars.

    Elena had much more humble beginnings. Her father bought a plot of land on a shell road just outside of Buenos Aires. With his own hands, he built a solid house that still stands to this day. The house had electricity. Running water was limited to a well outside the home. For many years the family did not own a car. Everyone depended on public transportation. Elena's house only got a television much later.

    The wealthy people I was with that Thursday night never lived through the poverty that Elena and I experienced as young people. When I was at Tulane, these same wealthy people "looked down their noses at me" because I was from a poor family.

    My group picture with those wealthy people is a precious reminder to me of how far Elena and I have come. After 18 years of hard work, the run-down house that we bought in January of 2004 is now valued at $1,600,000 US. We are not rich like the people I was eating dinner with in New Orleans. But we are no longer poor.

 

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The Economist Magazine Cover For 6-25-2022

 

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JUNE 25TH 2022

SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image

Our cover this week brings together the two sides of the crisis in oil and gas. One is the energy shock—the most serious since the Middle Eastern oil crises of 1973 and 1979. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has supercharged high fuel and power prices and in most countries that is leading to inflation, weak growth, squeezed living standards and a savage political backlash. The other is the urgent requirement to move towards net zero carbon emissions by phasing out  fossil fuels. If governments respond ineptly, they could trigger a relapse towards fossil fuels that makes it even harder to stabilise the climate. Instead they must follow a perilous path that combines security of energy supply with climate security.   A lot of our design effort this week was spent on that same perilous path, trying to get across the conflict between the energy transition and the shortage of oil and gas. As you will see, it is hard to keep two ideas in your head at the same time.

Here is an ingenious attempt. Cheaper dirty energy is no good if it comes at the expense of clean energy; the transition will fail if energy costs soar. During the transition, the world needs to find the ideal intersection between the two.    It’s clever, but we are in the middle of an energy crisis. And an (incandescent) lightbulb conveys a scientific breakthrough rather than the hard trade-off between conflicting imperatives.

These sparring pylons say that a fight is going on. But a fight between what exactly? If you look closely, the mast on the left has some oil drums beside it and the one on the right has a radiation warning. Although oil is rarely used to generate grid power these days, it’s true that eliminating fossil fuels means swapping carbon for uranium. However the energy transition also involves solar, wind, green hydrogen, as well as the short-run incentives for fossil fuels needed to keep the lights on and cars on the road.

The conflict is clearer still in this image of two deer locking horns, with oily antlers dripping gunge onto the eco-stag. It’s a striking image, but unless you already know what we are writing about, you will struggle to understand it. We have drifted too far from the ideas of an energy crisis and the green transition.

Attentive readers will recognise this image. It almost made the cover in March, when we wrote about how the transition to renewables will give rise to new electrostates supplying green metals such as copper and lithium. Back then we admired how simply by angling some chimneys energy becomes a weapon. However, to the eyes of commissioning editors, familiarity may be a handicap. Or perhaps this idea lacks precision, having been designed with a slightly different cover in mind. Either way, it failed for a second time.

This design brings together notions of renewables and crisis by sticking some wind turbines, solar panels and other kit onto the helmet of a GI. The helmet not only summons up images of war in Ukraine, but also serves as the framing device for the investments in future energy technologies. It says that renewables won’t make progress if the crisis isn’t dealt with, too.    This is a device we used at the end of 2018, when we were writing about chip wars between America and China. That was one mark against it. The other is that it is very American, whereas the energy crisis is global.

In the end, we didn’t have to create ambiguity. We found it in this haunting photograph, which embodies the duality that makes so many of our themes hard to illustrate. The jostling of turbines with ageing electricity poles creates a sense of transition. The crowding conveys unease and aggression. Are we looking at dawn or dusk?    All we needed to do was to zap the headline with 1,000 renewable volts.

Cover image • View large image (“The right way to fix the energy crisis”)

Zanny Minton Beddoes Editor-in-chief

Backing stories

If You're Patient and Persistent, You Tube Can Be A Treasure Trove!!!!!

        I made an amazing discovery last night. Each of us probably has YouTube on our computer. To me, it is a neat tool to watch videos and learn how to do various things when I have to make repairs, etc. I discovered last night that there is a lot more to YouTube. Elena is a fan of very obscure foreign films sometimes going back decades. I watched an obscure Italian film from decades ago. They were not speaking Italian as we know it. The actors were speaking an obscure Italian dialect. Elena next found an Indian film from the late 1959s in Hindi with English subtitles.

    Right there, I began to see that if one is patient and persistent, YouTube is a treasure trove with almost limitless possibilities. Please take the time to do some serious exploring. There are some wonderful surprises there.

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Some Encouraging Words For The People Of Ukraine

 

THE BATTLE FOR UKRAINE

Answered by 

Eric Wicklund

 

Jun 14

How long can Russia last in Ukraine war before its army is depleted?

I would give it 6 months before Russia is not able to continue in any meaningful way. Not because all their troops are dead, but because they are unable to maintain a high operational tempo due to dwindling supplies. Russia has a LOT of artillery rounds, but they won’t last forever.

Russia depends on its own supplies provided by an economy the equivalent of Spain, while Ukraine depends on supplies from the largest economies on Earth (EU and USA).

From a material standpoint, Russia has no hope of lasting longer than Ukraine.

Russia’s strength is its artillery.

Russia is playing it safe, staying under the cover of a massive artillery umbrella. To the uneducated, it may appear that it is paying dividends for Russia. Each day, they are gaining a little ground. They simply pummel an area into oblivion—whether civilians are living there or not—Ukrainian forces disengage to avoid casualties, and Russian troops move in. You can see it on the map every day. But is Russia really winning?

Rope-a-Dope

You may not think the sport of boxing has anything to do with modern warfare, but stay with me here. In the 1974 fight, Muhammed Ali fought George Foreman. Ali was a clever, quick fighter, and an excellent tactician, similar to Ukraine. George Foreman was a mountainous bruiser who used his bulk and powerful punches to win his fights, much like the Russian army.

Though big and strong, Ali knew it wasn’t smart to go toe-to-toe with Foreman; instead he developed the technique of “rope-a-dope.” Ali would lean lean against the ropes while Foreman threw heavy-handed haymaker punches wildly. To the uneducated, Ali appeared to be losing, but when the moment was right, Ali sprung off the ropes in the 8th round, connecting with a perfectly aimed punch, and he defeated Foreman. Below is a gif demonstrating rope-a-dope at its finest. It’s not from the ’74 fight, but demonstrates how to exhaust a bruising fighter.

Rope-a-dope. None of the heavy punches (like Russian artillery) connects with the enemy it is aimed at.

In this war, Ukraine is being a clever hunter, allowing his simple-minded prey to exhaust itself. Russian fights like an unintelligent animal, applying maximum force in all situations, whether needed or not. Ukraine deftly trades land for time, counter-attacking when the situation favors it, retreating to avoid casualties when it does not. Ukraine is rather like a bullfighter, deftly evading the far more powerful bull, waiting until the time is right to plunge his sword into the beast.

A graceful, artful bullfighter (Ukraine), battling a simple-minded brute (Russia).

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