I’m assembling my full The Daily Letter postings from their start on 6/16/2022. Here are the first five:
THE DAILY LETTER, begun 6/16/2022.
Number 1.
By Gene W. Edwards.
An in-Depp dark look at media gossip.
If you followed the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial . . . and you and I know more about those two than they do, particularly as a couple, you and I are out of our depth because . . .
Those were personal matters of a “stinky” nature that should have been settled amicably and quickly out of court, including a separation. A worldwide-covered trial solved nothing. Judging the matter from the outside is also a profitless, self-deluding enterprise. One is sure to get it all wrong.
What those two did amounts to defecating in public. They ruined their careers and reputations by sinking — stinking — to the bottom of the barrel. Now we do we not even care what movie either is in; we only want to know what they allegedly do to each other, which is also drama.
I urge you, and myself, to tune out such juvenile pyrotechnics and work on our own lives. I rank their situation and trial as 1/3rd from the bottom = 2/3rd negative, 1/3rd constructive.
Tabloid fodder is exciting. Instead, look for meaty stories that change the world — wherever they appear — and leave the rest — leave gossip — alone.
Love (is greater than gossip),
Gene.
This begins my daily missive, 365 days a year, to all those who want to read it. It’s like a newspaper column, and I promise to keep it interesting and informative.
INDEX and KEY WORDS:
Depp, Johnny
drama
gossip
Heard, Amber
tabloids.
*****
The Daily Letter.
Number 2, 6/17/2022.
By Gene W. Edwards.
Duck.
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and acts like a duck , , ,
Surprise! It is a duck. It’s the economy, stoopid, the alleged economy.
We’re not going into a recession; we are in a recession — and a deep recession is called a depression. The wolf of the Great Depression is knocking at the door, and poor Little Red Riding Hood is about to swing it wide open, hoping to give that Big Bad Vicious Varmint of uncertainty, fear, and poverty a free pass at burnin’ down the house!
As long as we’re in the business of mixing metaphors, let’s go broke. Duck. Wolf, A nursery babe as innocent as a cherub. The Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House.” All of them in one unhinged existential-singularity paragraph? What harm?
The pyro-technocrats running the Federal Reserve don’t know what they’re doing. Neither do the Washingtonians, the medics, the bankers, the economists, the doomsdayers, or the Candides of this world; they’re all in bed together. Nothing but business as usual — of marker swings — enters into their puny little heads.
Tesla has dropped 50% in price from its early-in-the-year high. Amazon, Apple, Costco, Google, Walmart: all of them have taken a hit — including your 401K. And how about that inflation?!
Market jitters are turning into a collapse approached like a thief in the night, just like COVID-19 did. In late 2019, our government knew what was coming from China but did little or nothing about it until way too late, March of 2020, three months later. Now there are one million dead of COV and counting, and that’s just in this country.
Yes, COV spread to our economy in March two years ago and never stopped, may never stop. We’re dealing with the after”math” of what shutdowns can do, including the sanctions against Russia. Rather than teaching people how to take care of their own health and build their own immune system — the shots are just icing on the cake — Big Brother came out of the closet and onto Main Street, and onto Wall Street, bearing a Bully Billy Club.
So, what should you do about all of this? Gather survival goods. Factor-in worst case scenarios. Have some cash on hand for a rainy day. Buy gold and silver. Buy a pellet gun. Dump your stock until it goes back to the price point where you got out. Have a working wood or coal fireplace or stove, and plenty of fuel for it. Have a big bag of beans and rice on hand that you can sprout. Economize. Fill and cover a big tub of stored water. Pay off all debts. Keep nothing on any credit card; pay all new debits within hours as you go, Think about where and how you could live if the grid or economy, or both, goes down. Have a refuge, even if it is only in your mind. How will you keep body and soul together?
I’m not talking about Armageddon. I’m talking about human failure. We’re the most undependable of all mammals, and we decidedly are all animals no matter how clamorous and empty-headed our protestations. Unfortunately, we’re the human family, a dysfunctional family.
When trouble comes, duck.
Love (even in times of trouble),
Gene
*****
INDEX and KEY WORDS:
Big Brother
Don’t know what they’re doing.
Ducks (it’s a duck)
market jitters
recession
Tesla
Survival
*****
The Daily Letter.
Number 3, 6/18/2022.
By Gene W. Edwards
Sing a song of no Pence?
Mike Pence deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Executive Order 11085, by decree! Joe Biden, although a Democrat president, should give it to him now!
Trump did everything he could to subvert the election (2020) and American democracy. He depended on his subservient lackey, Mike Pence, until 1/6/2021 — to steal the election for him. Pence, instead, led our 50 states in the Electoral College count in Congress that ratified Joe Biden’s victory (he won by 7,000,000 votes, and by an indisputably reassuring Electoral College count of 306 to 232).
For his efforts, Pence became a party pariah, like Liz Cheney. The insurrectionists chanted, over and over, “Hang Mike Pence!” They erected a gallows for him. Once inside the capitol, they were as near as 40’-50’ feet of him, to capture him and to drag him — beaten and bloody — through the streets, along with Nancy Pelosi and any other miscreants to their mind — or, most likely, just to summarily hang Mike Pence.
Instead, during and after the insurrection, Mike Pence stayed at the capitol, along with ALL the electors, as they did their civic duty to our nearly-lost democratic republic, despite over 100 members of congress clear unto today still publicly continuing to echo Trump’s numbskull Big Lie that the election was a fraud! Instead, they are a fraud, and a dense one at that!
*****
I now suggest it is Mike Pence who should lead the Republican Party, not the disenthroned King of Chaos, Donald Trump, a man destined to go the way of the worst psychopaths in American history, both politically and personally, by deed disgraced and dishonored — marginalized — beyond recognition and electability, even to many of his today’s gullible and uneducated minions.
I don’t care for the Republican agenda, and even Pence is a vote- and support-collecting, self-serving, shallow, automaton as vacuous as a Roomba — like many of our leading politicians, reticent when he should be noisy.
Normally he, Mike Pence, bent, and still bends, any way the wind blows, but he didn’t on 1/6/2021, when he almost became another Nathan Hale — to his massive credit! It is Pence, in particular, who now needs to hold a giant press conference in which he tells us who Trump really is and the anguish Trump created for Pence and his family — and this country. In doing so, he will resurrect his political career, albeit not without personal and political cost.
Therefore, I conclude this letter by saying, “Hail, Hail, to the New Chief — of the Republican Party: Mike Pence! Hail, Hail, Hail!”
“Hark! Long LIVE Mike Pence — for his boundless service to this great country — on 1/6/2021!”
Love (in the face of all difficulty),
Gene
*****
INDEX and KEY WORDS:
1/6/2021 insurrection
Electoral College
Pence, Mike
*****
The Daily Letter.
Number 4, 6/19/2022.
By Gene W. Edwards.
. . . And The Joker wins.
“How popular is Joe Biden?” is the title of a Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com graphic.
I’ll now echo a Geico commercial to introduce Silver’s result: “Boom shakalaka, boom shakalaka, scoop: there [here] it is.” Ready?
Disapprove: 54/2%
Approve: 39.4%
Result: 14.8% more people disapprove, than approve, of Joe Biden’s job performance — and his numbers keep dropping. He approval rating was only 10% behind his disapproval rating for the longest while (months in a row).
If you add the two above numbers, they add up to 93.6%, which means 6.4% of those polled are uncertain regarding whether they approve or disapproved of Biden. But even if you add 6.4% to 39.4% — Biden wins-over all 6.3% of them, which equals 45.8% — Biden is still in a toilet ready to flush.
Nate Silver carefully finds and aggregates all polls regarding Biden’s approval vs. disapproval rating and then averages them to get the result. Cherry picking which one poll you want to go by, such as Quinnipiac’s, never works.
In short, Joe Biden is about ss popular as poison apples! If his numbers continue to flounder at 39.4%, or worsen, his party (its caucuses) will have to dump him in 2024, present a different Democrat for the voters on November 5 of that year . . . and that candidate would probably be Kalama Harris, who is also not popular.
****
So now I’m going to use my intuition regarding the above trends.
Will Joe Biden be reelected in 2024? No.
Will he run? No.
Will Harris be the Democratic candidate? Yes.
Will Harris win? No. (NO!)
Will Trump be convicted of any crimes by the Justice Department (DOJ)? Yes.
Will he do jail time? No.
Will Trump run? Yes.
Will Trump win his party’s nomination? No. (A surprise.)
A Republican will win the 2024 General Election? Yes. (A definite yes.)
And that Republican is Mike Pence. We could do worse.
What is Harris’s present approval rating according to me? 45
Her disapproval rating? 52
I’ll even do some numbers for you. I was almost spot-on in them regarding the 2020 election.
Harris: 230 Electoral College votes.
Pence: 308 Electoral College votes.
In 2020, Biden won 306 and Trump 232. I predicted Biden would win 320 electoral votes.
My above numbers for 2024 almost mirror 2020’s result, but in reverse.
And now I’ll add:
Which party wins the Senate? Republicans.
Which party wins the House? Republicans.
In short, the Democrats are repudiated at the polls in 2024. Our country wants a change in direction and a new set of directors.
The Republicans in 2024 win the “superfecta,” the U.S. Presidency, Senate, House, and Supreme Court. What they don’t win is, it’ll still take 60 votes to get Republican legislation past filibuster in the Senate. The Republicans won’t be able to repeal Obamacare, etc.
One would hope the economy does well under the Republicans. You know the “old” saying regarding elections, etc.? “It’s the economy, stupid!” (It’s the stupid economy!)
Love (and boom shakalaka),
Gene.
*****
INDEX and KEY WORDS:
Biden, Joe
fivethirtyeight.com
My predictions:
Electoral Collete
Biden, Harris, Trump
2024 General Election
Presidential polls
*****
The Daily Letter.
Number 5; 6/20/2022.
By Gene W. Edwards.
Trumpeting oneself.
Trump is campaigning again, big rallies, repeating his Big Lie that he won the election and that Pence (“Mike”) betrayed America and him. Trump also only attributes one death to the insurrection, the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, who was trying to force access to a door that led to the House chamber.
I personally feel anyone who invades the capitol should be shot the moment they force entry. Had the capitol police had nothing more than 2,000 cannisters of tear gas on hand, the invasion of the capitol by Trump’s minions could have been deterred.
The capitol police were also hardly armed. The maxim, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” was ignored. “Capitol intelligence” (security executive leadership) in this case was an oxymoron, a compound word including the word “moron.”
*****
What happens next could surprise you. Now that the whole insurrection is being pinned on Trump, class action lawsuits from everywhere may be directed at him. I suggest a lawsuit of 100 billion dollars! Trump could end up broker than Amber Heard. He’s not liquid and has no major lender left standing; even Deutsche Bank wants nothing to do with him. He’d have to liquidate assets right and left (no left and right).
His appeals case would probably be prioritized all the way to the Supreme Court, and without any significant recourse for him of reducing the amounts. Tort lawyers love to bring such cases in which they are awarded as much as one-third of a huge judgment for both punitive (to punish the defendant) and compensatory (lost incomes, injury, etc.) damages. All parties but Trump would “win the lottery” in amount.
*****
Law, they say, is the lowest form of communication — but one that often works. The Attorney General, Merrick Garland — his Justice Department — is also after Trump’s ass.
As Trump continues to spout his psychopathic lies, a scoundrel who is also an egoist, demagogue, and narcissist, he loses more and more adherents. The old saying, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time” applies. No one needs to be coerced by Trump to do or believe anything proffered by him.
*****
Despite all that, if Trump suddenly left the 2020 election behind him and just offered a program of beating inflation, cutting government spending, reducing regulation, and affirming “states’ rights,” he might have a shot at reelection. But that’s not how Trump is wired. His level of getting things done is almost nil. He has succeeded through bluster, bluff, threats, condemnation, and personal dishonest. What you think you see is not what you get.
Biden is enormously unpopular, as a big government and New World Order guy — mandates, sanctions, financially supporting war against Russia, etc. — so Republicanism, as I described it in the paragraph above this one, is alive and well! America does want a change in vision. The USA is at the point of “Do something different, even if it’s wrong.”
*****
Are we at the point of electing a Republican for president in 2024? I hope that a so-called “dark horse” candidate emerges, one that preserves the best of both our political parties. I wouldn’t give much of a chance to Biden, Harris, Trump, or . . . ?
Here are my predictions. On a scale of 0–100, which of the following has a shot at winning the presidency in 2024:
Biden: 0
Trump: 0
Harris: 0.
DeSantis: no,
Pence: no.
Someone else: yes.
Get ready to say President _ _ _ _ _ in 2024. And who is that?
I don’t know. I do know this: America is at a political crossroads. In the mere 28 months and “change” between now and the November 5, 2024 General Election, America yearns for real leadership and real answers.
I’ll conclude with. Which party wins the 2024 General Election for president?
Republicans: Yes.
Democrats: No.
Let’s see what happens next!
Love (sometimes works if you verify and untrust first),
Gene
*****
INDEX and KEY WORDS:
Babbitt, Ashli
Biden, Joe
Big Lie
Capitol police
1/6/2922 insurrection
psychopathic
Trump, Donald