Part of the incoming Biden arrival changes include the rule that all White House visitor logs will be available....whenever someone asks.
Why?
Well....VTC type meetings are more or less the norm, so there's no need for anyone to be standing or visiting in the White House. So the logs....frankly....are a juvenile type game to continue playing.
Journalists all hyped up and positive about the open logs? They really haven't thought through the whole routine yet.
What started yesterday is this talk from the Biden-camp that in the first month or two....he'll have a package to send to the House.....to redraw the minimum wage in the US.....to $15 (currently at 7.25 on the national scale).
The likely path? A lot was left out of this story. I suspect you'd see a $2 rise in 2021, with a second rise in 2022, and the final rise by the end of 2023.
So you take the Burger King whopper XL menu and throw it up on the board. $9.49 for the burger, fries and Coke.
You can go and figure that with the $15 standard....the menu has to go up to $11.99. But you aren't really finished, because there's the sales tax increase (9.5-percent there in Nashville). So between 25 to 30 cents will be added onto the bill....making it fairly close to $12.30.
Taking your spouse, and two kids out? Even if the kids go for the regular men items....the man-hour cost went up, and the local sales tax with it.....it's near $45. Would you pay that?
In most locations....sticker-shock would occur. I would imagine around one-third of customers would start to consider their options.
But why just limit your vision with fast-food? Over at your Piggly-Wiggly....probably one-third of the 'help' are making absolute minimum-wage as a start-up job. The folks with five years? They are probably up around $10 to $12. You would probably notice with sales tax included....your weekly $100 cost at the grocery is going by spring of 2022 to around $112.
Will people just accept the trend and higher cost? Or will they step back and limit their purchases for a year or two....trying to rectify this in their mind?
Since DC is going to be granted statehood shortly.....if I were Puerto Rico....I'd walk in with three applications. West Puerto Rico, San Juan (by itself), and the state of Pounce (making up 50-percent of the eastern section).
Then I'd have the Virgin Island folks show up with two applications.....Eastern Virginia and Virgin West....two separate states.
Then I'd have the Guam folks show up with three applications: North Yigo, West Guam, and South Guam.
Then I'd have the Samoa East people show up, followed by the West Samoa folks.
Ten new states after the DC application? Yes.
I sat and tried to watch ten minutes of CNN this week, and the 'hype' was rebellion/insurrection. The chatter (more or less) went to the idea that it rarely happens and you need to take this as serious. I hit 'mute' at some point, and then started to research this whole concept of rebellion/insurrection....historically.
You can go back over 4,000 years and show literally thousands of rebellions or insurrections.
Around 2,000 years before Christ....Egyptian priests got into a insurrection situation, with two groups eventually carving off North Egypt and South Egypt....mostly over interpretations that each had over the God Seth.
Around 500 BC....a rebellion started up in Rome. What can be generally said about this rebellion is that it ended the monarchy that had existed, and kicked the King ( Lucius Tarquinius Superbus) out of power.
The key issue in the Rome insurrection? Well....as 'dad' (the King) was off on a war campaign....'junior' (Sextus Tarquinius) went out and sexually assaulted some well-to-do gal with status. She reported the whole affair to the nobles of the time, and got them all infuriated. An insurrection started up and the kingdom dissolved away....creating a 'republic'.
The Moscow 'Salt' rebellion of 1648? That was mostly about escalating prices in Moscow, and the government finally deciding to dump all taxes, and just have one single tax....on salt. This lasted for about a week, and after enough killing and burning of Moscow....folks had enough of the whole salt chatter.
The first insurrection in the 'new world'? Bacon's Rebellion....started in the summer of 1666....along the coastal regions of Virginia.
Starting in 1829 in France....came the 'War of the Maidens'. What can be said here....the government wrote up new regulations about public lands, and listed out regulations about the cutting of firewood, limited hunting/fishing, and prohibited land for pastured animals. Local guys took to dressing as women, as armed government 'agents' arrived and would physically attack the government folks if provoked over enforcement of the new rules. This rebellion went on fairly strong for a decade, and still continued for another thirty-odd years.
The 'Green Corn' rebellion? That was a 2-day insurrection in Oklahoma (starting 2 Aug 1917). What can be said is that a socialist group in Oklahoma started up a rebellion (mostly farmers and leftists) against the US federal government. Numbers? Generally, it's said that around a thousand folks were on the Green Corn side. Total dead at the end? Three. Between 400 and 500 were arrested, and the rebellion was put down.
The June Struggle of 1987? It was a South Korea uprising where the military-dominated government was put out of business. This 19-day 'campaign' reset the entire government and brought in a new Constitution.
Rebellion and insurrection being 'normal'? Well...yeah, you can judge by history that virtually every single society and country in the world has faced up to rebellion/insurrection, and in some cases.....massive change occurs.
The riots and insurrection in Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis? All part of this dynamic.
The actions of 6 January? Same deal....part of the dynamic.
If anything has changed....news and social media has given us a seat and a view of the full landscape.
This is a series of ten discussions I'm going to do over the next two weeks....discussing favorite conspiracies. New Coke.
Basic facts which you can't dispute:
1. New Coke was this idea that you'd dump sugar-sweetened Coke to a lower-cost formula of high-fructose corn syrup. Thus saving money and charging you the same cost.
2. Taste? I would personally would suggest it was 90-percent of the original Coke. Some folks would disagree.
3. This was all done around the time that DEA was discussing the coco plant business. General gut feeling was that coca derivatives were going to be a long-term product. The company, based on commentary had legit worries about this pipeline disappearing.
This idea lasted in name until 1992, and shifted to Coke II (don't ask the logic).
2002, New Coke and Coke II production ended....sort of.
Last year, Coke talked up the idea of bringing back Coke II/New Coke. It wasn't going to be full production...just a short run to see if consumers went back to it.
Was there a conspiracy here? No. It was a gamble by the leadership of Coke and to get away from the coca derivatives. The taste....frankly, was never the same.
Coke's lead in sales? Since the 1970s...it's all based on fast-food sales and ball-parks. Pepsi took over the rest of the market.
It was all a gamble to get ahead and just failed....conspiracy-wise, it's a marginal '1' on the one to ten scale.
Around thirty years ago....CNN opened up a new network called CNN-Airport Network. Basically, they were running a news operation that only functioned or was shown....at national airports.
Over the years, having been in thirty-odd US airports....I can generally say that it was mostly worthless. The sound reception in some of these airports is crap. You toss in important/critical messages being announced by your airline....so this whole gimmick was marginal, if you asked me.
Back around 2013, I had a conversation with one retired guy in an airport, and he ran through dozens of complaints about CNN, the propaganda value, and the useless nature of the news network. I suspect that ten-percent of American travelers probably felt like this guy.
This week....the director of CNN (Zucker) said 'enough'. He's shutting down the Airport network.
Chief reason? Well....there's just not that many people flowing through the airports because of Covid-19. So advertising just wasn't there to pay for the cost issues.
Is anyone going to miss it? No.
What will fill the TV monitors? Probably travel documentaries if you ask me.
The CIA releasing various UFO documents? Well....yes.
For several decades, information requests have come and gone....usually declined by the CIA. This week....they opened up the library and said 'here....read up'.
Anything worth reading? I spent an hour browsing. You have roughly 2,500 to 3,000 pages in the mix.
There's nothing much there....other than people (some of the airline pilots) just reporting unusual things. Some are probably true....some are probably illusions or schizophrenia episodes.
Was it necessary to classify all of this? Well....no. That's the amusing part of the story. From the thirty-odd documents I looked at....nothing was of a classified nature. The idiots who classified it? I don't think they knew what they were doing or just doing it because someone ordered them to do it.
Did this really settle much? No. It did clear off the CIA as being some treasure-bucket of UFO information.
So if you went through the Air Force, Navy, and various other information 'buckets'? I would imagine the same thing. They have tens of thousands of reports.....which mostly lead nowhere.
It's like your local police having 300 reports in the past year of wild-dog packs running around the county, but then saying they've never (themselves) ever seen a wild-dog pack. Do the wild-dog packs exist? In likelihood, there's probably one single wild-dog pack of four dogs.
In this UFO collection....it could just be one single alien group that keeps getting directions to visit Earth, and they don't really see much to get hyped-up about....so they visit for a day and leave (just to make their supervisor happy). Later, their bosses order them back, and they repeat this one-day visit once again.
