America Armed To The Teeth

This occurred less than two miles from home. Earlier this morning the following article was read in the New York Times concerning an incident in Atlanta.

A Heavily Armed Man Caused Panic at a Supermarket. But Did He Break the Law?

In states with permissive gun laws, police and prosecutors have limited tools at their disposal when a heavily armed individual sows fear or panic in public.

A Publix at an outdoor shopping mall in Atlanta, where an armed man entered the store and was arrested. Credit…Dustin Chambers

By Richard Fausset
Jan. 2, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

ATLANTA — Two days after a gunman killed 10 people at a Colorado grocery store, leaving many Americans on high alert, Rico Marley was arrested as he emerged from the bathroom at a Publix supermarket in Atlanta. He was wearing body armor and carrying six loaded weapons — four handguns in his jacket pockets, and in a guitar bag, a semiautomatic rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun.

Moments earlier, an Instacart delivery driver had alerted a store employee after seeing Mr. Marley in the bathroom, along with the AR-15-style rifle, which was propped against a wall. A grand jury indictment later described what had come next: “panic, terror and the evacuation of the Publix.”

Mr. Marley, then 22, was arrested without incident that day in March 2021. His lawyer, Charles Brant, noted that he had not made any threats or fired any shots, and had legally purchased his guns. Mr. Marley did not violate Georgia law, Mr. Brant said; he was “just being a person, doing what he had the right to do.”

Indeed, Mr. Marley’s arrest kicked off a long and as yet unresolved legal odyssey in which the criminal justice system waffled over what it could charge him with and whether to set him free. Clearly, visiting the grocery store with a trove of guns had frightened people. But was it illegal?

The episode, and others like it, speaks to a uniquely American quandary: In states with permissive gun laws, the police and prosecutors have limited tools at their disposal when a heavily armed individual’s mere presence in a public space sows fear or even panic.

The question of how to handle such situations has been raised most often in recent years in the context of political protests, where the open display of weapons has led to concerns about intimidation, the squelching of free speech or worse. But it may become a more frequent subject of debate in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court decision in June, which expanded Americans’ right to arm themselves in public while limiting states’ ability to set their own regulations.

The ruling also affirmed the principle of allowing states and local governments to ban guns in “sensitive places”; as examples, it cited legislative assemblies, polling places and courthouses. But the high court left much open for interpretation. “A wave of litigation is going to confront the courts with questions about what, for example, makes a restriction on guns in schools and government buildings different than in museums or on public transit,” Jacob D. Charles, a professor and gun law expert at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, wrote in a recent blog post.

A photo provided by the Atlanta Police Department shows the weapons a man had carried into a Publix grocery store in Atlanta at the time of his arrest on Wednesday.

Events like the one involving Mr. Marley, while difficult to quantify, are extreme examples of a problem already bedeviling the police and prosecutors, sometimes from the moment an armed person is spotted in public. All but three states allow for the open carry of handguns, long guns or both, and in many there is little the police can do.

Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a bipartisan law enforcement policy group, said police officers sometimes had mere seconds to determine whether a person with a gun “either legally has the right or he’s a madman” — or both.

“For the average cop walking the street in America, it’s a huge dilemma, knowing there have been countless active shooter situations,” Mr. Wexler said.

Prosecutors initially went all in on Mr. Marley’s case, charging him with 11 felonies: five counts of criminal attempt to commit a felony and six counts of possession of a weapon “during commission of or attempt to commit certain felonies.” An arresting officer said in an affidavit that when Mr. Marley had put on his antiballistic armor in the Publix bathroom and placed the handguns, with rounds in the chambers, into his pockets, he had taken a “substantial step of the crime of aggravated assault,” a felony.

In July 2021, Judge Debbie-Ann Rickman of Fulton County Magistrate Court denied Mr. Marley bond, determining that he posed a “significant danger to the community.”

But court records show that the charges were dismissed in February. Mr. Marley was released from jail after 10 months, only to be rebooked in May, this time after being indicted by a grand jury on 10 lesser counts of reckless conduct, a misdemeanor. The indictment says that Mr. Marley was “loading and displaying” his AR-15 in the restroom and that he left it unattended.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges in August and remains in custody. (Mr. Brant, his lawyer, said he had not filed a new bond motion on his client’s behalf because Mr. Marley was homeless and did not have family or friends to stay with.)

John R. Monroe, a defense lawyer and the vice president of a gun-rights group called Georgia Second Amendment, is not involved in Mr. Marley’s case. But from the outside, he said, it seems baseless.

“I mean, all the guy did was be in the store with guns,” he said. “I go into Kroger with a gun, and I don’t expect to be arrested for reckless conduct when I do that. Based on the information from the case, he didn’t do anything that would even remotely constitute reckless conduct. And shame on the state for even prosecuting him for that.”

Taking out the rifle in the men’s room would have most likely violated the law in Illinois, Florida and California, where open carry is banned, Mr. Charles said. But states with more lenient gun laws have struggled with scenarios similar to the one involving Mr. Marley.

In February, a man named Guido Herrera was discovered at the Galleria mall in Houston, a few yards from a youth dance competition, wearing a spiked leather mask and carrying a Bible and an AR-15-style rifle. An off-duty police officer working as a security guard was alerted to his presence and tackled him. Mr. Herrera was found to have more than 120 rounds of ammunition with him, as well as a semiautomatic handgun holstered in his waistband.

He was charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor that under Texas law includes knowingly displaying a firearm in public “in a manner calculated to alarm.” A jury found him guilty, and he was given a six-month jail sentence.

Prosecutors were openly frustrated. “His circumstance kind of fell in the gaps,” Barbara Mousset, a lawyer with the Harris County District Attorney’s office, said at Mr. Herrera’s sentencing, according to The Houston Chronicle. “He took advantage of some technicalities in the law — he had the right to have that firearm and, ultimately, this was the only charge that we could get him on.”

In an interview, Armen Merjanian, a lawyer for Mr. Herrera, called his client “a proud owner of firearms living in Texas,” adding that Mr. Herrera brought the rifle into the mall because he was worried about it being stolen from his car.

Nathan Beedle, the misdemeanor trial bureau chief in the Harris County prosecutor’s office, pointed to the practical challenges of applying the legal standard. “How long does it take to go from ‘in a manner calculated to alarm’ to deadly conduct?” said Mr. Beedle, who helped handle the Herrera case. “A millisecond, right?”

Not all such cases have ended peacefully. In 2015, a woman in Colorado Springs called 911 after seeing a man in her neighborhood with a gun. The dispatcher reportedly explained to her that Colorado was an open-carry state. Within minutes, the man went on a shooting spree, killing three people.

Police investigating the scene of a shooting in Colorado Springs in 2015 when three people were killed despite warnings from a suspicious witness who warned police of the shooter.Credit…Christian Murdock/The Gazette, via Associated Press

Mr. Brant, the lawyer for Mr. Marley, said his client might suffer from mental illness and was awaiting a formal diagnosis. He said Mr. Marley had attempted suicide during his first, 10-month jail stint.

Mr. Brant also offered an explanation for Mr. Marley’s conduct that day: He had acquired the guns and the body armor, Mr. Brant said, because he had felt threatened by someone in his neighborhood. On the day of his arrest, he had hoped to take his guns to a nearby shooting range but first had to run some errands, which included a stop at the grocery store. (Mr. Marley did not have a car, Mr. Brant said, which is why he was carrying the guns around with him.) While in the Publix men’s room, Mr. Brant said, Mr. Marley had taken out some of the weapons, including the rifle, to clean them after discovering that some guacamole he had bought had caused a mess inside the bag.

Charles Russell, the Instacart driver who came upon Mr. Marley in the men’s room, told police that, at one point, he had heard clicking sounds from a stall that “sounded to him like someone was loading firearms,” according to a police report.

In a recent interview, Mr. Russell, 27, said he had the Colorado massacre on his mind at the time. He recalled thinking, “If I don’t do anything, then I’m afraid of what will happen.”

In a statement to The New York Times, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, which covers most of Atlanta, said her office had taken a hard look at the case but had not found “provable felonies under Georgia law.”

“Georgia’s General Assembly must examine our statutes governing this type of behavior,” added Ms. Willis, a Democrat, referring to the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. “Respecting the right to bear arms should not require that we tolerate people entering public places with assault rifles and body armor.”

Mr. Brant said he did not believe anything Mr. Marley had done that day amounted to reckless conduct in a state that has been vigorously pushing the boundaries of the freedom to carry weapons in public. He alluded to a law signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, more than a year after Mr. Marley’s arrest that allows people to carry concealed handguns without a license.

“What is the definition of reckless conduct?” Mr. Brant said. “Carrying weapons? In a state that requires no permit? And no license? I mean, help me understand, what’s the reckless conduct?”

Richard Fausset is a correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. He previously worked at The Los Angeles Times, including as a foreign correspondent in Mexico City. @RichardFausset

© 2023 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/02/us/atlanta-gun-laws.html

https://www.themetalchannel.net/video-reviews/annihilator-armed-to-the-teeth/

Is there anything that can be done about this madness? Well, yeah, there is, but We The People must first become…

Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch Slaps Trump!

In slap to Trump, Neil Gorsuch tips Supreme Court vote against vague part of immigration law

AP
Apr 18, 2018

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court said Tuesday that part of a federal law that makes it easier to deport immigrants who have been convicted of crimes is too vague to be enforced.

The court’s 5-4 decision — an unusual alignment in which new Justice Neil Gorsuch

joined the four liberal justices — concerns a catchall provision of immigration law that defines what makes a crime violent. Conviction for a crime of violence makes deportation “a virtual certainty” for an immigrant, no matter how long he has lived in the United States, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her opinion for the court.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/04/18/world/crime-legal-world/slap-trump-neil-gorsuch-tips-supreme-court-vote-vague-part-immigration-law/

This caused me to think of something someone dear to me was fond of saying upon being surprised, “Well, blow my hole open!”

From the book, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America,

by David Cay Johnston:

“Trump’s nomination alarmed unions. Jody Calemine, a Communications Workers of America lawyer tool Gorsuch’s Senate confirmation hearing that Gorsuch “is a threat to working people’s health and safety.” Calamine cited Gorsuch’s dissent in a 2016 case to make his point. “That dissent reveals an anti-worker bias and features a judicial activism that will ultimately put workers’ lives at risk.”

Those are unusually strong words about a Supreme Court nominee, but a review of the case shows Gorsuch has little regard for human life, at least when it comes to employers’ power over their workers. He considers a rigid interpretation of the law more important.

The case was about a law Congress passed giving workers the right to refuse dangerous tasks.

Truck driver Alphonse Maddin was nearly out of fuel one January night in 2009. Temperatures had plunged to 14 degrees below zero. Maddin pulled over on an Illinois roadway to figure out where to get fuel. Ten minutes later he tried to drive off, but the rig wouldn’t budge. The trailer’s brakes had frozen. A dispatcher told Maddin to sit tight until a repair truck arrived. Maddin fell asleep in the unheated truck for two hours, awakened by a cousin’s cell phone call. Maddin’s torso was numb, his speech slurred, cousin Georgory Nelson testified, describing classic signs of hypothermia. Maddin radioed his dispatcher, who told him “Hang in there” until help arrived.

A half hour later, certain he was on the verge of freezing to death, Maddin disconnected the trailer and drove to warmth.

TransAm Trucking fired him for not following orders.

Maddin filed a complaint with the Labor Department. An administrative law judge and a review board both found the firing violated federal law protecting workers who refuse unsafe work orders. TransAm, ordered to reinstate Maddin with back pay, took the case to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. It argued that the law protected only workers who refused to operate unsafe equipment, while Maddin drove the truck after being instructed to “stay put.”

Two of the three judges hearing the case concluded that the Labor Department had reasonably interpreted the word “operate,” and upheld the reinstatement with back pay.

The third judge, Neil Gorsuch, didn’t see it that way.

The law “only forbids employers from firing employees who ‘refuse to operate a vehicle’ out of safety concerns,” he wrote in dissent, adding that “nothing like that happened here. The trucker in this case wasn’t fired for refusing to operate his vehicle. Indeed, his employer gave him the very option the statute says it must.: once he voiced safety concerns, TransAm expressly…permitted him to sit and remain where he was and wait for help. The trucker was fired only after he declined the statutorily protected option (refuse to operate) and chose instead to operate his vehicle in a manner he thought wise but his employer did not. And there’s simply no law anyone has pointed us to giving employees the right to operate their vehicles in ways their employers forbid…The law before us protects only employees who refuse to operate vehicles, period (Italics).”

Gorsuch said Maddin had two choices if he wanted to keep his job. He could drag the truck with the frozen brakes locking its wheels, which Gorsuch said would be illegal. Or, Gorscuh wrote, “he could sit and wait for help to arrive for help to arrive (a legal if unpleasant option.)

“Unpleasant” is an interesting word for choosing to die, as Maddin was certain he would have within minutes had he decided to “sit and wait for help to arrive.”

At Gorscuch’s confirmation hearing, Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said that 14 degrees below zero was very “cold, but not as cold as your dissent, Judge Gorsuch.”

People who voted for Trump believing he was their economic savior and political champion could hardly have expected that his first Supreme Court nominee would have a man choose between his life and his job.”

It was not surprising Trump would chose such a person for the Supreme Court.

From the book: “Trump used illegal immigrants with sledgehammers(but no hard hats or other safety gear) to demolish a twelve-story Manhattan department store so he could build Trump Tower. A federal judge, after a trial, held that Trump engaged in a conspiracy to cheat those men out of their full $4 an hour pay.”

Every day the Trumpster, and the cretins with whom he surrounds himself, do things that ASTOUND! I would have wagered my net worth, if not my life, that Gorsuch would have voted with the other four judges who wound up in the minority. Wonders never cease…

Trump Knows The End Game Is Here

Younger Americans do not understand what is happening in the nation’s capital these days, which has put them in a daze. Those of my generation have been here before. A total of SIXTY NINE members of the Nixxon administration were found guilty of crimes, with many going to prison for committing those crimes. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker said recently, “We are in perilous times.” An excellent article explaining the situation appeared today at Salon. I provide excerpts only. Please click on the link and read the entire article.

Defeat is inevitable. Everybody knows it, even Trump

Washington’s legal immune system is about to expel an infection from the body politic

By Lucian K. Truscott IV
01.27.2018

I remember the day I first realized that Richard Nixon was doomed and one way or another would be removed from office. It was deep in the winter of 1974, I had been working for months on my own little corner of the Watergate story, and I was on Capitol Hill to meet one of the deputy counsels on the Senate Watergate Committee. I had been given an address on Capitol Hill for their offices, and when I arrived there I found myself standing outside an old movie theater. I was confused. This was supposed to be the office of the Senate Watergate Committee! I stopped somebody on the street and showed them my notebook where I had written down the address and asked them if I was in the right place. Yes, the passerby said. You’re at the right place. They’re right in there.

I entered through the theater’s front door and found no one in the lobby, so I wandered further inside. The theater wasn’t a theater anymore. It had been transformed into a makeshift office space. Fluorescent lamps hung down from the theater’s high ceiling illuminating a rabbit warren of cubicles packed with file cabinets and office storage boxes and desks buried beneath piles of paper. Phone lines and electrical wires were rigged into overhead conduits and dropped into the cubicles. Phones rang constantly, answered in a cacophony of voices by dozens of lawyers and investigators and researchers and staff assistants and research assistants and interns.

On my way over to Capitol Hill, I had stopped off to see a friend at the Washington Post. Its newsroom was a seething pit of activity. Woodward and Bernstein were there, of course, surrounded by dozens of other reporters working the phones, rifling through files, rushing off to interview sources. Elsewhere on Capitol Hill the House Judiciary Committee was staffing up with lawyers and investigators and researchers, getting ready for impeachment hearings. Only a few blocks away were the offices of Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had been appointed by Congress after Nixon had fired the first special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.”

Jaworski’s offices were packed with prosecutors and staff assistants and researchers and experts in constitutional law, and they were interviewing witnesses and preparing subpoenas and scheduling testimony before the grand jury and filing indictments and announcing that this White House aide, or that campaign official, had pleaded guilty to one crime or another and was cooperating with the investigation. Already, Nixon campaign aide Herbert Porter had pleaded guilty to perjury, and Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, had pleaded guilty to two charges of illegal campaign activities. The indictments of seven more of Nixon’s men were on the way: John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson. Now the special prosecutor was getting ready to subpoena the White House tapes. The end game had begun.

That was the day I knew that Nixon was finished. Not because of the suitcase filled with cash from Bebe Rebozo’s bank headed for a casino in the Bahamas. Not because of the firings, resignations and indictments of figures from the Nixon reelection committee and White House. Not because it was inevitable that Nixon would have to give up the tapes, and the tapes would probably hang him.

As I stood there at the rear of the theater on Capitol Hill watching the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee at work, I realized that I was witnessing Washington’s immune system, and it had detected an infection. The offices of the Senate Watergate Committee, and the special prosecutor, and the Judiciary Committee, and the Washington Post, and the New York Times and the AP and UPI and the networks — all of them were flooding the bloodstream of the nation’s capital with antibodies focused on one thing: ridding the place of Richard Nixon.

Nixon had been in office for more than four years when on June 17, 1972, the so-called Plumbers working for the Nixon reelection committee, at the direction of the White House, were arrested at the Watergate office building in the process of bugging the Democratic National Committee Headquarters. Donald Trump was in office a grand total of four days when his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, committed a crime when he lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump campaign and transition.

See a pattern here? Resignations. Firings. Indictments. Hearings. Special prosecutor. Leaks. Media hordes. And all over Washington, D.C., offices filled with eager beaver investigators burrowing into every corner of the Trump campaign, the Trump transition, the Trump White House and Trump’s business empire.

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has worked his way through the White House staff and the Trump campaign, taking testimony from one witness after another, just like the Watergate special prosecutor worked his way through the Nixon White House and campaign. There is only one witness left to interview: Donald J. Trump.

There is one difference between the two cases. Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski never questioned Richard Nixon about his role in the Watergate burglary and cover-up. He didn’t have to. On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Nixon that the president had to release the White House tapes. Fifteen days later, the inevitable happened. Facing impeachment and the probability of being prosecuted after leaving office, Nixon made a deal for a pardon and resigned.

Now Washington’s immune system is about to expel yet another infection from the body politic. The end game is here. Even Trump knows it.

https://www.salon.com/2018/01/27/defeat-is-inevitable-everybody-knows-it-even-trump/

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives on the East End of Long Island and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better. He can be followed on Facebook at The Rabbit Hole and on Twitter @LucianKTruscott.

Rex Sinquefield’s Agenda

While watching the games of the US Championship I have open the websites TWIC; ChessBomb; and my favorite, Chessdom. The latter has analysis by the big three, Stockfish, Komodo, & Houdini, the three highest rated “entities” playing the Royal game these days. I like to judge the position myself before looking at the evaluation of the programs. One of the things I like about the Chess arena board displayed on Chessdom is the difference of opinion on some moves by the big three. For example, after Mackenzie Molner played the standard third move, after 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5, Timur Gareev, my pick to win the tournament last year in the contest, which was not held this year, played 3…f5, the Schliemann defense, a favorite of a player from LA (that is Lower Alabama to those of us fortunate enough to be from the South), The Dude. The Legendary Georgia Ironman hung the moniker “Rainbow Warrior” on him, but Tim Bond did not like it. After a soliloquy on the movie “The Big Lebowski” while drinking white russians, I began called him, “The Dude.” The Dude would play 1 Nf3 as his opening move with white, but play wide openings like the Schliemann with black. His theory was that “With white one already has the advantage and must play conservatively to keep it. But with black one must try to wrest the advantage from white by any means necessary.” After 3…f5, Houdini has as best either 4 Qe2 or Bxc6. Komodo would play 4 Nc3; while Stockfish shows 4 d3.
After having decided to not go to the website of the StLCC&SC to listen to the broadcast I decided to check it out Sunday. What I found was an interview of Rex Sinquefield by GM Maurice Ashley. One of the first things I heard was Maurice say something about his politics being different from those of Mr. Sinquefield, who responded with some condescending remark about letting him “educate” Maurice sometime. Then Rex went into a rant about Missouri legislation concerning taxes. He said something about a bill that had been passed and vetoed by the Governor, but the veto had been overridden, something that had not happened since the 1800’s. Who cares? Why was this man talking about tax policy on a chess website? And why the hell does it matter to him? He is a BILLIONAIRE! He pays accountants large sums to find loopholes so he does not half to pay taxes. The tax code is written by sycophants of the super-rich to favor the upper crust. What does it matter to him whether tax rates go up or down? And besides, if taxes go down, how will the bill for endless war be paid? Certainly Rex and his ilk will not pay the freight for US troops who are in almost every country on the face of the earth. I turned it off after hearing Rex, who seemed quite pleased with himself, make a disparaging comment about Ben Finegold being uglier than Jennifer Shahade.
The next day, Monday, I surfed on over to the website again to find the pretty Jennifer had joined Yasser fo that day’s broadcast. Unfortunately, there was yet another problem with the broadcast, just like the previous day, and like last year. For that reason I clicked off and went to the Livestream website (http://new.livestream.com/accounts/3913412/events/2966247). The problem persisted on that site as well. Here are some of the comments from the livestream website:
Is it lagging like crazy with any1 else?- Ole Feiring
terrible stream-Gary Sharkey
it is just lagging a lot-Ralf Schnabel
yeah its awful and ruining the coverage last year was the same-Gary Sharkey
Since Rex Sinquefield is a billionaire it would seem he would be able to afford the best video possible. But who knows why the upper crust do the things they do? With that in mind I set down at my ‘puter to watch a program on the History channel, or to be specific, H2. The program is “America’s Book Of Secrets” and the episode is “The Billionaire Agenda.” It can be watched on TV or on the internet here: (http://www.history.com/shows/americas-book-of-secrets/videos/the-billionaire-agenda?m=51896f6e2acad)
Although I do not know Rex Sinquefield, he is as near to the super rich as I will probably get, being only one of the six degrees of separation made famous by Kevin Bacon, no kin, as far as I know, although when asked I always lie and say he is a distant cousin! I know Tony Rich, the manager of the Chess Club & Scholastic Center of St. Louis, having played him in the Missouri state chess championship in 2002, and having visited the aforementioned chess club with the long name. I could not help but think of Rex while watching the program, and what part he plays in the “agenda” of the filthy rich.
I took notes while watching the program and will share them with you. First, there 492 billionaire Americans, with Oprah being the only so-called by the program “African-American,” among the group. Notice there were none called say, “European-American” for example. 152 reside in China and 111 in Russia. Never before in the history of the world has so much wealth been concentrated in so few hands. The number one man on the list, Bill Gates, makes $17,000 a MINUTE! Walmart CEO Mike Duke makes $11,000 an hour. He’s got workers making $8.00 an hour and before he goes to lunch he’s made more than any one of one million Walmart workers make in an entire year. In 1980 an average CEO made 42 times the pay of an average worker. Today an average CEO makes 350 times the rate of an average worker!
What is a billion anything? One billion is a thousand millions. Compare that to one million being a thousand thousands. One million seconds is about 11 and a half days. One billion seconds is about 31 and a half years! One million pennies stacked on top of each other would make a tower nearly a mile high. One billion pennies stacked on top of each other would make a tower almost 870 miles high. One million ants would weigh a little over six pounds. One billion ants would weight over 3 tons – a little less than the weight of an elephant. One million dollars divided evenly among the U.S. population would mean everyone in the United States would receive about one third of one cent. One billion dollars divided equally among the U.S. population would mean that everyone in the United States would receive about $3.33. If you earn $45,000 a year, it would take 22 years to amass a fortune of one million dollars. If you earn $45,000 a year, it would take 22,000 years to amass a fortune of one billion dollars. It is said that in the not too distant future Bill Gates will become the first trillionaire. One trillion is a thousand billions, or equivalently a million millions. It is a 1 with twelve zeros after it, denoted by 1,000,000,000,000. One trillion seconds is over 31 thousand years. One trillion pennies stacked on top of each other would make a tower about 870,000 miles high – the same distance obtained by going to the moon, back to earth, then to the moon again. One trillion ants would weigh over 3000 tons. One trillion dollars divided evenly among the U.S. population would mean that everyone in the United States would receive a little over $3000.
If you spent $10,000 a day it would take you over 300 years to spend the entire sum. It is no wonder Matthew Erich “Mancow” Muller, a talk radio host said he could not wrap his mind around the concept of a billion dollars. Surely his head will explode when Bill Gates becomes the first human to amass one trillion dollars. “Mancow” said, “The only people they can relate to is other billionaires.” Someone said, “They kind of live in their own universe that’s removed from the rest of us, so they’re not grounded in the economic realities he rest of us are.”
Former chessplayer NM Peter Thiel, who has not played since 2004, is among the group of billionaires. One local NM who knew him while living on the left coast can be heard condemning the man for “not giving back by putting money into chess.” Instead, Peter has invested $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute, who want to produce floating cities upon which the filthy rich can live while floating around the ocean in order to not have to pay taxes, or have to follow any rules made by nations or states.
In a 5-4 decision on April , 2014, the Supreme Court decided government cannot limit the amount of money donors can give to political candidates, committee’s and parties.
I read about a new sci-fi show last year, “Continuum” and have been watching it. In one of the episodes We The People were demonstrating against a ruling made by the Supremes in which they ruled that corporations were people. The thing about growing old(er) and having read and watched much sci-fi is that one know everything that seemed so much like fiction back then has come to fruition.
In speaking about the huge sums coming into the political arena it was said that no one knows exactly how much money goes to whom because there is no accountability. “It’s all dark money.” that reminded me of the famous interview after 9/11 in which VP Darth Cheney said, “We will have to work on the dark side.”
Then there was this comment, “Billionaires can exert a subtle control over what issues et put on the national agenda. They can choose the issues they care about and make sure they get talked about while others might not.”
“Are the super rich really working together towards a unified, one world agenda?” If so, I would ask Rex the Billionaire if he was chosen to contribute money to chess and if so, why it was he in lieu of NM Peter Thiel, which would seem to make more sense.
It was heard that, “Billionaires are different from us.”
How did Rex Sinquefield become the Daddy Warbucks of chess? From Wikipedia: “In 1981, Sinquefield co-founded Dimensional Fund Advisors, which manages more than $310 billion in assets as of September 30, 2013.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Sinquefield)
Consider this from the May 8 column, “Now That’s Rich,” by Noble prize winning economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times:
“But that’s not what those hedge fund managers do for a living; they’re in the business of financial speculation, which John Maynard Keynes characterized as “anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.” Or since they make much of their income from fees, they’re actually in the business of convincing other people that they can anticipate average opinion about average opinion.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/opinion/krugman-now-thats-rich.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0),

Rex did not make anything useful for the human race; he did not invent anything to save lives, or improve conditions on this planet for those less fortunate. He is, basically, what is called in the bible, a “money changer.” Those readers who have read the bible will immediately think of the only time Jesus lost control and threw the money changers out of the temple. If Rex had been in the temple he would surely have been tossed out with them like yesterday’s garbage. So, once again, I ask why is Rex Sinquefield funding chess? What’s in it for him? Coming from a man who is opposed to raising the minimum wage (and why is it that it is always those who have too much who want to limit the take of those who have too little?), and against unions, when the only way We The People have of fighting the upper crust is by organizing, it seems incongruous, to say the least.
The program emphasized the fact that the only thing the upper crust cares about is keeping what they have. I thought of the scene in the movie, “Dr. Zhivago,” when the doctor comes home to find his family mansion has been taken over by We The People, and now there are many families living in the huge house in lieu of just his small family. There is a storm brewing in this country and it don’t take no weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. The Russian intelligence service published recently their prediction of revolution in America. I leave you with these quotes from the great American from the Great State of Virginia, President Thomas Jefferson:
“The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.”
“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants .”