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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Biden should support the UAW

On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. That night, I'll be in person at LA's Book Soup for the launch of Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You." On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

The UAW are on strike against the Big Three automakers. Biden should be roaring his full-throated support for the strike. Doing so would be both just and shrewd. But instead, the White House is waffling…and if recent history is any indication, they might actually come out against the strike.

The Biden administration is a mix of appointees from the party's left Sanders/Warren wing, and the corporatist, "Third Way" wing associated with Clinton and Obama, which has been ascendant since the Reagan years. The neoliberal wing presided over NAFTA, the foreclosure crisis, charter schools and the bailout for the bankers – but not the people. They voted for the war in Iraq, supported NSA mass-surveillance, failed to use their majorities to codify abortion rights, and waved through mega-merger after mega-merger.

By contrast, the left wing of the party has consistently fought monopoly, war, spying, privatized education and elite impunity – but forever in the shadow of the triangulation wing, who hate the left far more than they hate Republicans. But with the Sanders campaign, the party's left became a force that the party could no longer ignore.

That led to the Biden administration's chimeric approach to key personnel. On the one hand, you have key positions being filled by ghouls who cheered on mass foreclosures under Obama:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

And on the other, you have shrewd tacticians who are revolutionizing labor law enforcement in America, delivering real, material benefits for American workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

Progressives in the Biden administration have often delivered the goods, but they're all-too-often hamstrung by the corporate cheerleaders the party's right wing secured – think of Lina Khan losing her bid to block the Microsoft/Activision merger thanks to a Biden-appointed, big-money-loving judge:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

These self-immolating own-goals are especially visible when it comes to strikes. The Biden admin intervened to clobber railway workers, who were fighting some of the country's cruelest, most reckless monopolists, whose greed threatens the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

The White House didn't have the power to block the Teamsters threat of an historic strike against UPS, but it publicly sided with UPS bosses, fretting about "the economy" while the workers were trying to win a living wage and air conditioning for the roasting ovens they spend all day in.

Now, with the UAW on strike against the monopolistic auto-makers – who received repeated billions in public funds, gave their top execs massive raises, shipped jobs offshore, and used public money to lobby against transit and decarbonization – Biden is sitting on the sidelines, failing to champion the workers' cause.

Writing in his newsletter, labor reporter Hamilton Nolan makes the case that the White House should – must! – stand behind the autoworkers:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/whose-fault-is-it?

Nolan points out that workers who strike without the support of the government have historically lost their battles. When workers win labor fights, it's typically by first winning political ones, dragging the government to the table to back them. Biden's failure to support workers isn't "neutral" – it's siding with the bosses.

Today, union support is at historic highs not seen in generations. The hot labor summer wasn't a moment, it was a turning point. Backing labor isn't just the moral thing to do, it's also the right political move:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

Biden is already partway there. He rejected the Clinton/Obama position that workers would have to vote for Democrats because "we are your only choice." Maybe he did that out of personal conviction, but it's also no longer politically possible for Democrats to turn out worker votes while screwing over workers.

The faux-populism of the Republicans' Trump wing has killed that strategy. As Naomi Klein writes in her new book Doppelganger, Steve Bannon's tactical genius is to zero in on the areas where Democrats have failed key blocks and offer faux-populist promises to deliver for those voters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

When Democrats fail to bat for workers, they don't just lose worker votes – they send voters to the Republicans. As Nolan writes, "working people know that the class war is real. They are living it. Make the Democratic Party the party that is theirs! Stop equivocating! Draw a line in the sand and stand on the right side of it and make that your message!"

The GOP and Democrats are "sorting themselves around the issue of inequality, because inequality is the issue that defines our time, and that fuels all the other issues that people perceive as a decline in the quality of their own lives." If the Democrats have a future, they need to be on the right side of that issue.

Biden should have allowed a railroad strike. He should have cheered the Teamsters. He should be on the side of the autoworkers. These aren't "isolated squabbles," they're "critical battles in the larger class war." Every union victory transfers funds from the ruling class to the working class, and erodes the power of the wealthy to corrupt our politics.

When Democrats have held legislative majorities, they've refused to use them to strengthen labor law to address inequality and the corruption it engenders. Striking workers are achieving the gains that Democrats couldn't or wouldn't take for themselves. As Nolan writes:

Democratic politicians should be sending the unions thank you notes when they undertake these hard strikes, because the unions are doing the work that the Democrats have failed to accomplish with legislation for the past half fucking century. Say thank you! Say you support the workers! They are striking because the one party that was responsible for ensuring that the rich didn’t take all the money away from the middle class has thoroughly and completely failed to do so.

Republican's can't win elections by fighting on the class war. Democrats should acknowledge that this is the defining issue of our day and lean into it.

Whose fault is a strike at the railroads, or at UPS, or in Hollywood, or at the auto companies? It is the fault of the greedy fuckers who took all the workers’ money for years and years. It is the fault of the executives and investors and corporate boards that treated the people who do the work like shit. When the workers, at great personal risk, strike to take back a measure of what is theirs, they are the right side. There is no winning the class war without accepting this premise.

Autoworkers' strikes have been rare for a half-century, but in their heyday, they Got Shit Done. Writing in The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson tells the tale of the 1945/46 GM strike:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-18-uaw-strikes-built-american-middle-class/

In that strike, the UAW made history: they didn't just demand higher wages for workers, but they also demanded that GM finance these wages with lower profits, not higher prices. This demand was so popular that Harry Truman – hardly a socialist! – stepped in and demanded that GM turn over its books so he could determine whether they could afford to pay a living wage without hiking prices.

Truman released the figures proving that higher wages didn't have to come with higher prices. GM caved. Workers got their raise. Truman touched the "third rail of American capitalism" – co-determination, the idea that workers should have a say in how their employers ran their businesses.

Co-determination is common in other countries – notably Germany – but American capitalists are violently allergic to the idea. The GM strike of 45/6 didn't lead to co-determination, but it did effectively create the American middle-class. The UAW's contract included cost-of-living allowances, wage hikes that tracked gains in national productivity, health care and a defined-benefits pension.

These provisions were quickly replicated in contracts with other automakers, and then across the entire manufacturing sector. Non-union employers were pressured to match them in order to attract talent. The UAW strike of 45/6 set in motion the entire period of postwar prosperity.

As Meyerson points out, today's press coverage of the UAW strike of 2023 is full of hand-wringing about what a work-stoppage will do to the economy. This is short-sighted indeed: when the UAW prevails against the automakers, they will rescue both the economy and the Democratic party from the neo-feudal Gilded Age the country's ultrawealthy are creating around us:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9?sk=207d6afdb89b0351b92233cc3318ab94

There's a name for a political strategy that seeks to win votes by making voters' lives better – it's called "deliverism." It's the one thing the Trump Republican's won't and can't do – they can talk about bringing back jobs or making life better for American workers, but all they can deliver is cruelty to disfavored minorities and tax-breaks for the ultra-rich:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Deliverism is how the Democrats can win the commanding majorities to deliver the major transformations America and the world need to address the climate emergency and dismantle our new oligarchy. Letting the party's right wing dominate turns the Democrats into caffeine-free Republicans.

When the Dems allowed the Child Tax Credit to lapse – because Joe Manchin insisted that poor people would spend the money on drugs – they killed a program that had done more to lift Americans out of poverty than anything else. Today, American poverty is skyrocketing:

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4206837-poverty-made-an-alarming-jump-congress-could-have-stopped-it/

Four million children have fallen back into poverty since the Dems allowed the Child Tax Credit to lapse. The rate of child poverty in America has doubled over the past year.

The triangulators on the party's right insist that they are the adults in the room, realists who don't let sentiment interfere with good politics. They're lying. You don't get working parents to vote Democrat by letting their children starve.

America's workers can defeat its oligarchs. They did it before. Biden says he's a union man. It's time for him to prove it. He should be on TV every night, pounding a podium and demanding that the Big Three give in to their workers. If he doesn't, he's handing the country to Trump.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

[newstfionline]

Sunday, June 25, 2023

The World’s Empty Office Buildings Have Become a Debt Time Bomb (Bloomberg) In New York and London, owners of gleaming office towers are walking away from their debt rather than pouring good money after bad. The landlords of downtown San Francisco’s largest mall have abandoned it. A new Hong Kong skyscraper is only a quarter leased. The creeping rot inside commercial real estate is like a dark seam running through the global economy. Even as stock markets rally and investors are hopeful that the fastest interest-rate increases in a generation will ebb, the trouble in property is set to play out for years. After a long buying binge fueled by cheap debt, owners and lenders are grappling with changes in how and where people work, shop and live in the wake of the pandemic. At the same time, higher interest rates are making it more expensive to buy or refinance buildings. A tipping point is coming: In the US alone, about $1.4 trillion of commercial real estate loans are due this year and next, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. When the deadline arrives, owners facing large principal payments may prefer to default instead of borrowing again to pay the bill.

Inflation, health costs, partisan cooperation among the nation’s top problems (Pew Research Center) Inflation remains the top concern for Republicans in the U.S., with 77% saying it’s a very big problem. Gun violence is the top issue for Democrats: 81% rank it as a very big problem. When it comes to policy, more Americans agree with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party on the economy, crime and immigration, while the Democratic Party holds the edge on abortion, health care and climate change.

The Brown Bag Lady serves meals and dignity to L.A.’s homeless (USA Today) A Los Angeles woman, known affectionately as the Brown Bag Lady, is serving the city’s unhoused population with enticing meals and a sprinkle of inspiration for dessert. Jacqueline Norvell started cooking meals for people on L.A.’s Skid Row about 10 years ago in her two-bedroom apartment after getting some extra money from her Christmas pay check. She bought several turkeys and prepared all the fixings for about 70 people, driving to one of L.A.’s most high-risk areas to hand out the meals. “We just parked on a corner,” said Norvell. “And we were swarmed.” She says people were grateful and she realized the significant demand. Norvell’s been cooking tasty creations ever since. Norvell garnishes each dish with love and some words of encouragement. In addition to the nourishment, each bag or box has an inspirational quote. “We’ve got to help each other out,” she said. “We have to.”

Facing Brutal Heat, the Texas Electric Grid Has an Ally: ‌Solar Power (NYT) Strafed by powerful storms and superheated by a dome of hot air, Texas has been enduring a dangerous early heat wave this week that has broken temperature records and strained the state’s independent power grid. But the lights and air conditioning have stayed on across the state, in large part because of an unlikely new reality in the nation’s premier oil and gas state: Texas is fast becoming a leader in solar power. The amount of solar energy generated in Texas has doubled since the start of last year. And it is set to roughly double again by the end of next year, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. “Solar is producing 15 percent of total energy right now,” Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said on a sweltering day in the state capital last week, when a larger-than-usual share of power was coming from the sun. So far this year, about 7 percent of the electric power used in Texas has come from solar, and 31 percent from wind. The state’s increasing reliance on renewable energy has caused some Texas lawmakers, mindful of the reliable production and revenues from oil and gas, to worry. “It’s definitely ruffling some feathers,” Dr. Rhodes said.

Guatemalans are fed up with corruption ahead of an election that may draw many protest votes (AP) As Guatemala prepares to elect a new president Sunday, its citizens are fed up with government corruption, on edge about crime and struggling with poverty and malnutrition—all of which drives tens of thousands out of the country each year. And for many disillusioned voters—especially those who supported three candidates who were blocked from running this year—the leading contenders at the close of campaigning Friday seem like the least likely to drive the needed changes. Guatemala’s problems are not new or unusual for the region, but their persistence is generating voter frustration. As many as 13% of eligible voters plan to cast null votes Sunday, according to a poll published by the Prensa Libre newspaper. Some of voters’ cynicism could be the result of years of unfulfilled promises and what has been seen as a weakening of democratic institutions. “The levels of democracy fell substantially, so the (next) president is going to inherit a country whose institutions are quite damaged,” said Lucas Perelló, a political scientist at Marist College in New York and expert on Central America. “We see high levels of corruption and not necessarily the political will to confront or reduce those levels.”

Chile official warns of ‘worst front in a decade’ after floods, evacuations (Reuters) Days of heavy rainfall have swollen Chile’s rivers causing floods that blocked off roads and prompted evacuation in the center of the country, amid what has been described as the worst weather front in a decade. The flooding has led authorities to declare a “red alert” and order preventive evacuations in various towns in the south of Santiago. “This is the worst weather front we have had in 10 years,” Santiago metropolitan area governor Claudio Orego said.

Crisis in Russia (NYT/AP) A long-running feud over the invasion of Ukraine between the Russian military and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s private Wagner military group, escalated into an open confrontation. Prigozhin accused Russia of attacking his soldiers and appeared to challenge one of President Vladimir Putin’s main justifications for the war, and Russian generals in turn accused him of trying to mount a coup against Putin. Prighozin claimed he had control of Russia’s southern military headquarters in the city of Rostov-on-Don, near the front lines of the war in Ukraine where his fighters had been operating. Video showed him entering the headquarters’ courtyard. Signs of active fighting were also visible near the western Russian city of Voronezh, and convoys of Wagner troops were spotted heading toward Moscow. The Russian military scrambled to defend Russia’s capital. Then the greatest challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his more than two decades in power fizzled out after Prigozhin abruptly reached a deal with the Kremlin to go into exile and sounded the retreat. Under the deal announced Saturday by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Prigozhin will go to neighboring Belarus. Charges against him of mounting an armed rebellion will be dropped. The government also said it would not prosecute Wagner fighters who took part, while those who did not join in were to be offered contracts by the Defense Ministry. Prigozhin ordered his troops back to their field camps in Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian regular soldiers.

In Myanmar, Birthday Wishes for Aung San Suu Kyi Lead to a Wave of Arrests (NYT) In military-ruled Myanmar, there seemed to be a new criminal offense this week: wearing a flower in one’s hair on June 19. Pro-democracy activists say more than 130 people, most of them women, have been arrested for participating in a “flower strike” marking the birthday of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader who was ousted by Myanmar’s military in a February 2021 coup. Imprisoned by the junta since then, she turned 78 on Monday. The protest—a clear, if unspoken, rebuke of the junta—drew nationwide support, and many shops were reported to have sold all their flowers. Most of the arrests occurred on Monday, but they continued through the week as the military tracked down participants and supporters. In some cities and towns, soldiers seized women in the streets for holding a flower or wearing one in their hair. Some were beaten, witnesses said. The police have also been rounding up people who took to Facebook to post a birthday greeting or a photo of themselves with a flower. Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, called the campaign the latest example of the “paranoia and intolerance” of Myanmar’s military rulers.

Sweltering Beijingers turn to bean soup and cushion fans to combat heat (Washington Post) China’s national weather forecaster issued an unconventional outlook this week: “Hot, really hot, extremely hot [melting smiley face],” it wrote Tuesday night on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. It was imprecise, but it wasn’t wrong. The temperature in Beijing hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday, a public holiday for the Dragon Boat Festival. It was the highest June recording since 1961. Visiting the Great Wall was “like being in an oven,” said Lin Yun-chan, a Taiwanese graduate student on her first trip to Beijing. The heat wave is almost the only thing anyone can talk about. Much of the online discussion revolves around food. People are sharing advice about the most hydrating snacks for the hot weather: mung bean soup and sour plum drink are popular options. Entrepreneurs looked for ways to capitalize on the heat wave: One promoted a seat-cushion fan designed to combat a sweaty butt, while tourism companies touted trips to the south of the country, which is usually hotter but currently less so.

Your next medical treatment could be a healthier diet (WSJ) Food and insurance companies are exploring ways to link health coverage to diets, increasingly positioning food as a preventive measure to protect human health and treat disease. Insurance companies and startups are developing meals tailored to help treat existing medical conditions, industry executives said, while promoting nutritious diets as a way to help ward off diet-related disease and health problems. “We know that for adults, around 45% of those who die from heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, stroke, that poor nutrition is a major contributing factor,” said Gail Boudreaux, chief executive of insurance provider Elevance Health speaking at The Wall Street Journal Global Food Forum. “Healthy food is a real opportunity.”

[keravnous]

- agent 14/agent haines; the heart wants what it wants

Somewhere sirens are going off, howling with the steady, racing heartbeat of the city. They sweep to Steve's ears but they do not manage to reach his brain - currently oddly occupied with keeping his eyes locked on a figure a few meters away.

The man sits alone, smoking his third cigarette in under seven and a half minutes. Dark circles under his eyes, framing his face delightfully, only adding to his typical Los Santos appearance: stressed face, five o'clock shadow, chain smoking and the shakes of visible caffeine abuse.

Steve had never seen him before.

"Boss?"

"Yeah?", he just can't bring himself to look away. The man takes his phone out, seemingly picking up a call, his face immediately crunching up in annoyance.

"We're heading back in, are you coming with us?"

He lits another cigarette. Steve wants to lick the smoke from his lips, wants to know if he tastes like it too, wants to taste the fire of his lighter, to bury his hands in his dark locks and never let go of him again -

"Yeah, fuck. Sure."

Steve gets up, chair screeching loudly over the concrete, getting his hopes up that the stranger would look up at the noise, react to it in any way. But the loud screeeech is like any other noise in this goddamn city really, one that citizens get used to over time and eventually grow to ignore it completely. Thus he doesn't look up at all, continues to hiss into his phone and Steve retreats, like a beaten dog, back into his office.

_

It takes him thirty minutes to realize - a government offical and a highly decorated one, too - that his office's windows head towards the terrace. But when he peeks through the blinds the plaza's already deserted.

-

It takes a whole week full of nerve-wrecking lunch breaks and one or two bombings somewhere in Europe, before he sees him again. He doesn't wear a suit this time and Steve is convinced that he has to be a banker, taking his break here instead of his office's cantine.

He feels like he's struck by lightning. He wants to walk over there and introduce himself, but he also just wants to sit, admire from afar, to never move again. The man lights a cigarette and that also ignites a fluttering feeling in Steve's stomach and his chest, sending tingles straight to his fingers. The small butterflies leave a burning sensation and he wants to tear his chest apart, grab them by their wings and riiiip them out, until blood spills everywhere. Dave and Sanchez are arguing, but he can't hear them anymore, the pounding of his heart too loud, a static noise filling his ears. His body is releasing all the build-up tension worth the week's wait, and his hands grab the armrests of his chair.

This is crazy. He's crazy. This man is a complete stranger and here he is, highly decorated Special Agent Steve Haines, national hero and model employee of the FIB, and its his own body that's suddendly betraying him.

The man looks up and Steve's world stops. The noises fade, maybe his heart even stops pounding - he really can't be sure.

The man has pretty eyes, all blue and green like the atlantic ocean far out on the sea, in the shimmering sunlight. He's pretty. Very much so. He's maybe around his own age, maybe a little younger, high cheekbones that probably (Steve's uncannily sure about that) deliver quite a show once the man laughs. He looks good in his clothes. A little too good.

Steve wants to get up and leave. Steve wants to sit and continue to stare. Steve wants to rip his clothes of his body - wants to disappear, because he can't stand the other man's eyes on him. Checking him out. Judging him.

It's quite the stare, really. One that could send him to his knees or make his blood boil.

Steve's phone rings on the table, the take-away cups vibrate with it and he nearly jumps in his chair. He picks his phone up hastily and the stranger throws him an arrogant smile, one brow cocked up and looks down at his laptop again. Steve gets up and leaves the table.

_

It's Friday and it's been a week since he felt like his body was completely failing him. Since then the stranger had spent every lunch break at the plaza and Steve had locked eyes with him multiple times, had bathed in the soaring tingles of his body.

Today, he's finally alone, with Norton on a trip to Liberty City and Sanchez having called in sick yesterday. He takes the elevator down to the ground floor and checks his hair in its mirror one last time, until the doors swing open with a loud diiing. He steps out, passing through the entry hall like a conqueror and then he's outside, the air all warm and mushy around him. His gaze falls upon the terrace.

The man is not there. His table is empty and so is his chair. Steve's shoulders slump.

He sits down and chugs down a cup of coffee and then another one and suddendly someone behind him clear's their throat.

"Got some fire?"

He turns around and his heart skips a beat. It's him.

_

He does taste like smoke. And a little sweet, a little spicy. It makes his lips tingle and burn, his groin growing hot.

He breaks their lips apart, as he presses the smaller man against the tiles of the bathroom.

"What's your name, huh?"

"Warren", his cheeks are red. He's so hot, his hands are hot against Steve's scalp and he presses himself against the other man, rolls his name around with his tongue.

"Warren. I'm Steve." The answer is another heated kiss and a hand that rushes to the fly of his trousers.

_

He doesn't see him again after this, not during his lunch break nor anywhere else in the city. The weeks turn into months and sometime inbetween Steve stops to care.

_

He's at a bar with some guys he still knows from college. They bore him but one of them pays for the drinks so he decides he could survive a few more hours. They talk and talk and talk and Steve can't bring himself to care and then he sees it.

A familiar leather jacket and suddendly their gazes lock. Warren smiles and Steve can't stop himself from smiling back.

_

They are in a bathroom again, hungrier this time. "I am sorry", Warren breaks the kiss, only for Steve to dive back in, "I had to leave. Work-related."

"Where'you working?", Steve's lips nibble at his throat, taking in is taste and his scent. He feels high with it.

"Maze Bank. I-I'm a banker", bingo.

"Looked the part", Steve grabs his hips and they stumble backwards against the stall's door and Warren presses himself between Steve's opened legs.

" 'n you?", he's slurring as Steve's hands wander underneath his shirt, up up up his back. He doesn't feel like lying, trying to would be uselss anyway. Steve knows what he and his colleagues look like.

"Government." Warren looks at him, a second too long, and Steve isn't quite sure what to make of it. But then their lips lock again and he choses not to think about it too much.

_

A week and three hook-ups later and Steve's locked in in his office. He feels horrible, but some things about Warren just don't add up and his paranoia is slowly kicking in. And so is his curiosity. He types the name into the blinking field, letter by letter. Slowly, so he won't make a mistake.

No data found.

Steve runs another program. And another.

He does not exist. Warren simply doesn't exist.

Steve leans back and rubs his eyes. He's so fucked.

_

Steve doesn't remember how he ended up on the living room of Warren's appartment, button-down torn and nose bleeding heavily. The cut above Warren's eyebrow bleeds as well, warm blood tickling down his cheeks and onto Steves neck.

Warren's hard and pressing against him as he raises his fist for another blow. Steve can't stop himself and laughter bubbles out of him, his ribs aching and hurt shooting, spiraling through his body. Warren, one ocean eye blue and lilac and a nasty scratch on his forearm, looks at him baffled.

"What is it, Haines?"

"The fuck", he's gasping for air, Warren's hard dick still poking his hip, "Do I know."

They look at each other while Steve's laugh is slowly ebbing away and Warren clenches his teeth. "I hate you, you fucking FIB-maggot."

"No, you don't", Steve rolls his hips up and Warrens eyelids flutter, "Not as much as I hate you, you fucking spy."

Warren rolls his hips against Steve's and his body falls forward, one hand lazily holding his weight, right next to Steve's head. He tilts his chin towards it and places soft kisses on the warm, thin skin that's between his teeth and Warren's veins. They both moan. He should kill him on the spot, getting rid of a potential threat and the competition all in one, but he can't bring himself to stop.

"Fuck me like you mean it", Warrens lips are pressed against his ear and his fingers claw hungrily at his chest, as he sighs needily into Steve's ear. He's ready to oblige.

_

The next time he sees Warren the sun's up again and the air is crisp and cold. He's wearing his leather jacket again and Steve wants to get up, head over to his table and tear it from his shoulders. Sanchez lights a cigarette and Dave says something stupid again, but Steve can't bring himself to care.

He looks at Warren, Fourteen, and his white shirt. The opened collar exposes his neck and the dark-red bitemarks. He inhales the smoke of his cigarette and as his lips wrap around it again he locks his gaze with Steve. His stomach tingles and 14 raises a brow. Cocky, arrogant, inviting and challenging. Steve feels one corner of his mouth tilting upwards as he leans back into his chair, legs spread wide.

Oh, this would be one fine game.

[murdershegoat]

the one you’ll love forever

(also on ao3 // kofi)

lena’s had the envelope for as long as she can remember; it’s thick and padded and the very last thing her father gave to her before he killed himself. though it’s yellowed with age, lionel’s immaculate script still stands out, the ink as black as when he first wrote on it. 

open when you find the one you’ll love forever

she had almost opened it once before, young and reckless and hopelessly in love with her high school girlfriend. part of her is glad she caught her cheating before she decided to open it, part of her - a much larger, more bitter part - still hates veronica sinclair with a fiery passion.

but now she knows it’s finally time.

it’s been a long time since she and kara first met. it’s been a long time since they said ‘i love you’ for the first time, since she cleared a drawer for kara at her place. their lives are so far intertwined that lena can no longer imagine what life would be like without kara by her side.

but this morning, lena rolls over in bed and although kara’s side lies empty, she can smell the coffee percolating and she sees a note scribbled in kara’s messy scrawl.

bad guys who start before 8 are evil guys. coffee and bagels waiting for u -- love u!

and somehow, lena knows. she knows, as a peaceful warmth spreads through her body, that this is all she’ll need forever.

kara is the only person she ever wants to love.

she stretches as she stands up, her neck annoyingly stiff, and heads to the safe that sits in the very back of her closet.

and then, as she drinks her morning coffee she finally opens the envelope. there’s no long letter like she used to dream of, but instead she finds a key and a piece of paper with an address. a quick google search later, she’s already scheduled her private, ridiculously fast Luthorcorp jet to leave for switzerland in a couple of hours.

she’s already on board and sitting across from jess when she gets a call from kara.

‘hello, sweetheart,’ she says, blushing as she sees the little smirk on jess’s face.

‘i called your office and they said you’re out for the day,’ kara says quickly. ‘everything okay?’

‘just a last minute meeting in switzerland,’ lena lies easily. ‘thought it would be easier to convince them to sign the contract if i was there in person.’

‘do you want me to meet you for lunch?’

‘that little place in zurich?’ lena offers.

‘you read my mind. okay. gotta run, love you.’

‘love you, too,’ lena replies, this time whispering into the phone, lest jess smirk at her expense one more time.

it’s only when they’re in the air, each with a drink in their hand that jess says,

‘strange, i don’t remember seeing a meeting on the books for today.’

lena laughs nervously. ‘how very strange indeed.’

///

zurich is much colder than national city, but lena welcomes the change in weather. she wishes she could go skiing or sightseeing, but instead the car takes her straight from the airport to a bank in the middle of the old town. the building is aging, yet beautiful, and as soon as lena steps inside she is greeted by a woman who takes her coat and leads her to a counter.

‘my name is lena luthor--’ 

‘of course, ms. luthor,’ the concierge cuts her off. ‘we’ve been expecting you since this morning!’

lena frowns; she hadn’t informed them of her impending visit. but she bites her tongue as she’s led through the building. eventually, she finds herself on the seventh floor in an empty office.

‘ms. luthor!’ says an older man walking in after her, and going to stand behind his desk. ‘my name is rudy, i’m an old associate of your father’s. it is a pleasure to meet you.’ he shakes her hand warmly, and despite the instincts she’s spent a lifetime refining, she decides she can trust him.

‘i’ve got this,’ she says, skipping pleasantries and holding up the key.

‘i know,’ he says, and lena manages to hide her surprise. ‘there is a sensor in the key that lets us know when it has been held by a person. it was advanced technology back in the day, courtesy of mr luthor.’

so that’s how they knew she was coming.

‘that key, as you may have guessed, opens a safety deposit box that has been held here for you for a very long time.’ he buzzes the intercom and doesn’t even say anything. moments later, a young banker walks in with the box.

‘and it’s never been opened?’

‘not since your father closed it.’ he regards her for just a moment, in an almost grandfatherly way. ‘you know, you don’t look a thing like him. but there is a kindness in your eyes that i fondly remember was in his as well.’

lena doesn’t know how to respond; she can’t remember the last time somebody said something nice about her family to her face. rudy senses her awkwardness, and smiles graciously.

‘i’ll give you some privacy.’

he retreats from the room and suddenly lena is alone with the mystery that’s been with her for most of her life. she inserts the key into the lock, and turns it. with a satisfying click, the latch opens.

inside, she finds a ring box, and a handwritten note, again in her father’s writing.

it was your mother’s, and her mother’s before that. i’m sure you know by now, but her name was Anne, and she was absolutely wonderful in every way imaginable. she loved you more than life itself, and i know she would’ve wanted you to have this.

lena knows that her mother’s name was anne -- she had hired a private investigator a long time ago. but seeing it confirmed in her father’s handwriting brings tears to her eyes, and suddenly she feels like a child again, lost without the parents for whom she so desperately yearns. there’s a polaroid attached to the note. in it, anne sits on a window ledge, staring out at the view. her hand grasps the sill she sits on, and a ring sparkles on her finger, catching the light in a glorious way.

she opens the ring box, and is surprised (yet again that day) to find, not a  claddagh ring, but a simple silver band with a modest diamond set in it. it’s so unlike any of the luthor jewelry she has - big and extravagant and worth millions.

and yet, it is priceless.

she slips the box into her purse, along with the note and polaroid. she thanks rudy for his kindness.

and then she meets her girlfriend for lunch.

///

‘so the meeting went well?’ kara asks an oddly quiet lena. they’ve finished lunch, and slowly work on the hot chocolates kara decided they both needed. lena decides she doesn’t want to lie to her.

‘i didn’t have a meeting,’ lena says. ‘i was emptying a safety deposit box.’

‘oh,’ kara says with a frown. ‘why didn’t you tell me?’

‘i wasn’t sure what i was going to find.’

a beat passes.

‘well? what was it?’

lena hesitates for just a moment.

and then she puts the box on the table between them, and flips it open.

‘oh my god.’

‘i know this moment is supposed to be thought out and planned and romantic or whatever. i don’t know. this ring was my mom’s and-and my father left it for me to give to ‘the one i’ll love forever.’’

‘lena--’

‘i know we haven’t talked about marriage much, and i don’t want to make you feel pressured in any way. but i know that my love for you feels... it feels steady. it feels like i’ve had it in my heart forever. and i know that this ring is meant for you, if you want it.’

kara smiles. she smiles and lena feels as though she wants to cry because of the overwhelming love that aches in her chest.

‘there’s a ring sitting in my old room in midvale that eliza’s been keeping safe for me. my mother heard me talking about you when i was last on argo city and handed it to me almost immediately.’

‘a ring?’ lena asks, her voice breaking.

‘i love you, lena. i plan on loving you forever, if you’ll let me.’ 

‘forever doesn’t seem long enough,’ lena says, and kara laughs. she leans across the table and kisses her deeply.

‘i’m sure we can figure something out, then.’ 

[notebooknebula]

Brad Smotherman on Flipping Real Estate

https://www.jayconner.com/brad-smotherman-on-flipping-real-estate/

Brad Smotherman manages a 7 figure flipping business, and hold notes across Middle Tennessee. We invest in multiple states, and have houses from Michigan to Georgia right now.

Real Estate Cashflow Conference: https://www.jayconner.com/learnrealestate/

Free Webinar: https://www.jayconner.com/training/wtgtmn-webinar-rev2-podcast/?oprid=&ref=42135

Jay Conner is a proven real estate investment leader. Without using his own money or credit, Jay maximizes creative methods to buy and sell properties with profits averaging $64,000 per deal.

The Private Money Academy http://www.JayConner.com/Trial

———————————————————————-

Jay Conner (00:01): Well, hello there! And welcome to another exciting episode of Real Estate Investing with Jay Conner. I’m Jay Conner, your host of the show. Also known as The Private Money Authority. And if you’re brand new to the show, here on this show, we talk about all things that relate to real estate investing. We talk about investing in single family houses, commercial projects, small apartments, self storage, land deals, notes. And we also talk about how to get funding for those deals creatively and with private money. Now, if you’re brand new to this show, I’m known as The Private Money Authority, because from 2003 to 2009, I relied on the local banks and mortgage companies to fund my deals. But then I got cut off with no notice in 2009, but it was one of the biggest blessing in disguise. I was introduced to this wonderful world of private money.

Jay Conner (01:02): Since that time I’ve never missed out on a deal. I’ve rehabbed over 400 houses. Done even more deals creatively. And the reason I’ve never missed out on a deal since 2009 is because I got the cash ready to buy those all cash deals. And as we know, most of the sellers require all the money. So I’ve got a brand new free gift for everybody that’s tuning here on the show. And that is, I just launched The Private Money Academy. Which is a monthly membership where we actually have two live zoom conference a month with yes, yours truly me. For at least an hour to an hour and a half answering all your real estate investing questions. Getting you plugged into private money and funding for your deals. And we also have a hot seat session where we will take one of the members of the Academy, put you in the hot seat, analyze your business, and create a plan to take you and your business to the next level.

Jay Conner (01:57): So I have a free gift for everybody tuning in, and that is four weeks absolute free access to The Private Money Academy. And you get to come on the next two live shows for the Academy membership. Absolutely for free! You can take advantage of that and learn all about it after the show today at http://www.JayConner.com/Trial that’s http://JayConner.com/Trial Be sure and check that out, come on in to the membership for free, and I’ll see you on the inside of those live zoom conference coaching calls.

Jay Conner (02:41): Well, as you know, if you’ve been tuning in to Real Estate Investing with Jay Conner, we have amazing guests and experts here on the show. And today is no exception. Before I bring my special guest out of the green room and here to the forefront. Let me tell you just a little bit about him. Well, my guest today is a real estate investor and a mentor. And he owns and manages a seven figure per year flipping business. So my guest and I, we’ve got a lot in common. Well, his passion is being a top house flipper in the nation. And his other passion is also helping other newer investors build a sustainable real estate investing company. Well, with 11 years, he started back in 2010 on the real estate investing side. With 11 years in the real estate investing business, he’s invested in over 15 States. And yes, today on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about how do you do this business remotely and totally virtually.

Jay Conner (03:41): He also has houses all the way from Michigan to Georgia. And today he has completed over 550 transactions today. Yes, he knows what he’s talking about from experience. In addition to that, he focuses on buying single family flips creatively. Using both subject to the existing note strategy, and he buys a lot with owner financing. In fact, he is known as the Owner Finance Guy. He also uses the strategy of selling retail or with owner financing, with creating wrap around notes. I know you’ve heard that terminology. Wrapping around a note. And if that’s sort of a new term to you or an old term, and you don’t know what it means, we’re going to talk about that on today’s show as well and how you can utilize that strategy as well.

Jay Conner (04:34): Well, he is also the host of one of the top 100 business podcasts in the nation. And the name of his podcast is Investor Creator. And there on the podcast, he teaches new and seasoned real estate investors. How to take their house flipping business to a multiple six or even seven figure income without sacrificing freedom. After all, what do we want in this real estate investing world is, wealth and freedom. And my guest today is an expert in that area. My guest lives in Nashville, Tennessee. And with that, welcome to the show, my friend and expert, Mr. Brad Smotherman! Brad, welcome to the show!

Brad Smotherman (05:18): Jay, I appreciate you having me on. I have a feeling we’re going to have so much fun with this. I’m just going to have to take a nap after we get done.

Jay Conner (05:24): Yes, you are! My lands! Brad, I’m so excited to have you on. And I know just by your intro, your bio and the short period of time that we’ve been around each other, we’ve got a lot in common. In fact, my best guess, one of your core values, and one of your secrets to success is having the mindset and the framework of putting other people first, having their interests ahead of your interest. Would you agree with that?

Brad Smotherman (05:52): Hundred percent! A hundred percent!

Jay Conner (05:54): So Brad, first of all, you look entirely too young to be this successful, but anyway, I’ll go beyond that statement pretty quickly. You’re from Nashville, Tennessee. You grow up in Nashville?

Brad Smotherman (06:06): I did. Born and raised.

Jay Conner (06:08): You’re sing country?

Brad Smotherman (06:10): No. I don’t see anything. And that’s a good thing for everybody that would have to listen. So for the people that know how to sing it I’ll just listen politely like everyone else.

Jay Conner (06:20): But now you enjoy going to the Grand Ole Opry, right?

Brad Smotherman (06:22): Oh, certainly! And like I was telling you guys before I’m out taking my grandmother to see Merle Haggard there twice, and we saw George Jones once and just had a great time. So, absolutely!

Jay Conner (06:33): That’s awesome. Well, I’m excited to have you here on the show today. Brad, because you’re known as the owner financed guy. You’re an expert in the area of buying houses on terms controlling them creatively or whatever. So first of all, if you would explain to the audience, what is your business model look like?

Brad Smotherman (06:59): Well, I think my business model is a little bit different than most because everybody out there, especially the past five or six years, what they wanted to do is, you know, they wanted to wholesale something. They wanted to fix something and flip it. And you know, the past 10 years we’ve had an explosion of these fix and flip TV shows. And frankly, Jay, those shows just give me anxiety. Like I can’t watch them. Literally. I went to the dentist the other day and asked me what I wanted to watch as I’m sitting there in the chair. I was like anything, but this HGTV stuff, right?

Jay Conner (07:25): Well, wait a minute, Brad. Now, why would I, why would a reality show that I’m sure is real, that shows you how to make a hundred grand in 30 minutes with no headaches. Why would that give you anxiety?

Brad Smotherman (07:36): Well, just like, you know, I mean, it’s not real. And then, you know, secondly, I’m looking at what they’re spending on the kitchen. I’m thinking I could do it for a sixth of that. And then the person buying the house, it’s like, well, what do you do for a living? And they say, well, we catch butterflies and rainbows all day. And our budget’s 2 million bucks and it’s just like, it just doesn’t seem exactly genuine to me. But maybe they’re just in a different market, a better market than I’ve ever seen. Let’s just say that.

Jay Conner (08:01): Yeah! I get it, Brother, I get it. Sorry to interrupt. What’s your business model looks like?

Brad Smotherman (08:04): Yeah. And that’s a hundred percent fine. So, you know, I started in 2010 and my background was very similar to yours in a certain way, although I didn’t live it. So I worked for a builder developer. Well, I sold real estate through college and everything was going really, really well up until the crash of ’08. And in 2009, the bankers came in and said, well, sorry, we’re going to have to call your loan. You have 30 days to pay us off. And as you know, during that time, there’s really no way to refinance commercial lending, you know, especially a development loan. And so it bankrupted them. And luckily I was able to learn the lessons from the crash without actually having to be involved in the crash. And so when that happened, I realized very quickly, I didn’t want bank money in my business. Very similar to what you’re dealing with. Right?

Brad Smotherman (08:46): So it’s like, guys, being able to raise private money is paramount to this business. Like what Jay is talking about is super, super important. But, so I got started in 2010 and back then, you really couldn’t wholesale because no, very few people had an equity position that was big enough to where you could wholesale it. And then also the fix and flip model was very difficult because that couldn’t get money. And so I had to find another way. Well, what I found worked. Has always worked and what I feel will always work is creating owner financing. And so what we do is we buy creatively when we buy and then we sell with owner financing and a vast majority of our transactions. We still go retail at times and that’s okay. But what we want to do is we want to create longterm cash flow with longterm capital assets. And for me, I’d rather have that in mortgage notes. I feel like it’s far more scalable than rentals. We’re able to get paid to take the note in most of our transactions. It’s not like I’m putting cash out there to invest. We’re getting longterm assets given to us. And I just had to find another way because I couldn’t, I didn’t want to wholesale, I couldn’t wholesale. And the fix and flip model looked like really difficult to me during that time. And so we’ve been pretty much doing a similar model ever since.

Jay Conner (09:53): So to recap what you just said, tell me if I got it right. Your core model is buy on terms, buy with owner financing, buy with subject to, buying creatively without paying all the cash. Take that same property, turn around and sell it creatively to a new buyer with owner financing or what have you. So let’s break that down. First of all, you said, the reason you do that is because you want to build longterm wealth by leveraging an asset that’s going to continue to pay you monthly for a long time. Is that right?

Brad Smotherman (10:38): A hundred percent. That’s right.

Jay Conner (10:40): So in today’s market, I know from my own business, I know from my students’ businesses that finding a deal today in the multiple listing service is a bonus. The deals are not in the multiple listing service buying large. So we have to find our deals off market. We have to find houses that are not in the multiple listing service. So if you don’t mind pulling back the curtain for us just a little bit and give us a little sneak peek as to what is working for you today to find these people that have houses for sale, or maybe they haven’t considered selling their house. How do you find these deals?

Brad Smotherman (11:30): That’s a great question. Well, I mean, as we know, everything starts with a motivated seller. So the foundation of the business is marketing for motivated sellers. Now for me, real estate is a means to an end. I mean, if I can do this business with dump trucks or swimming pools, I would do that. I’m not in love with houses. They break, they smell bad. Some of them. One of my apprentices yesterday in San Antonio, he’s buying a house that has 70 cats in it. And I can’t imagine how bad that is, but you know, at the end of the day, marketing comes down to two different avenues. We can do sweat marketing, or we can do paid marketing. Man. When I started, I didn’t have any money. So I had to do the sweat marketing side of things. And so the examples of that would be, you know, putting out bandit signs, you know, although you’re paying for the sign, what I would do is I would put them out Friday night and pull them up early Monday morning.

Brad Smotherman (12:13): And so a hundred signs, a couple of hundred bucks would last me three or four months, right? So that’s more of a sweat technique as opposed to leaving them out. Another one that were having a lot of success with is actually networking with wholesalers because wholesalers are slave to the 70% rule. We’re able to go in and do deals that they can’t do, right? Because we buy creatively as opposed to just throwing cash offers around all over the place. Right? So I’ve got an apprentice in Texas. He’s done three transactions this month, where wholesalers are bringing him the deal. You know, one of them is at a 0% owner finance rate. Now why a wholesaler would want to make a $5,000 assignment fee on a deal where we’ve got like four years and this thing is going to be paid off and we’ve got an $80,000 note on it.

Brad Smotherman (12:55): I don’t really understand. Okay. So that’s a couple of options in terms of sweat marketing. What I hope for people is that they understand that marketing is an investment. It’s not a cost. So effective marketing should at a minimum of 25 X. So if you’re spending a thousand dollars in effective marketing per month, you should over time buy at $25,000 per month in equity. Right? As an average. Now, what I hope for people is that if you have to start with the sweat side, that you go to the paid marketing side, as soon as you can. Okay? So in my world, the best paid marketing that we can do is Pay-per-Click so being there on Google ads, whenever they’re there, like people are searching for us. Searching, sell my house fast, or companies that buy houses. We want to be there. When people have already realized that they have a problem and we can be there to offer a solution, but it has to be done very well. I know a lot of people that have lost a lot of money when it comes to doing Pay-per-Click campaigns, because they don’t understand how to drive traffic number one, and how to create conversion. Once someone is, has landed on a page number two, but those are examples of sweat marketing paid marketing that we use in our business.

Jay Conner (13:57): Excellent! So as we know, and most of our audience here knows. When talking to an off market seller, a person that owns a single family house, you know, they don’t have it in the multiple listing service. They have some type of motivation. Most of these people are going to be anticipating when you’re starting that conversation with them of you buying their house. Most of these people like 99% of them are more having their mind that, well, if I sell my house, I’m going to get all the money, right? I mean, it’s like, that’s the traditional way. I sell a house, I get all the money. But now, you come along and you are going to be talking to them about creative selling or them becoming the bank. Or there’s a note and they’re going to get payments. What are your secrets? And as our friend Eddie would say, talk off points. Well, what are you, what are your secrets or scraping that takes a person that’s never considered selling on terms and waiting for all their money over time, from the point of then expecting to get all the cash up front?

Brad Smotherman (15:06): That’s a great question. And what I would submit to you is the first thing that we can’t do is make offers. So in my world, I really feel like an offer is a commodity to shop. And I can’t even begin to tell you how many houses that we’ve gone in and bought because, you know, two or three other investors had gone in and left an offer behind for them to think about. And then we come in because we won’t give them our price. They’re giving us a price. We’re making sure that that’s the least that they will take. And then we’re going to switch it to terms. So let’s say that someone says, well, and we talk about things in terms of cash at closing. So if somebody owes a hundred thousand dollars and they want to sell the property for 115, then I’m going to switch it and say, well, so your cash at closing is $15,000.

Brad Smotherman (15:48): So assuming that they would sell to me for that $15,000 cash at closing, then I’m going to say, well, you know, I can do that. If we can do it another way, and this is how we can make it work. So I’ve never given them a price and they’ve given me the price. So I mean, what we’ve done there is we’ve made it very difficult for them at that point to really begin to pull back and think about it because we’re giving them their number. We never give a price ever. Now, Jay, there’s some times that we do pay cash for properties, we just bought one outside of Huntsville, Alabama, about a month ago that the people had paid $160,000 cash for it in 2012, we paid 15,000 for it. And, you know, it’s like at that price, I don’t really feel the need to negotiate terms.

Brad Smotherman (16:29): You know, it’s like, we’ll just pay the 15K. And I thought about it. It kinda hurt my feelings to not get 0% owner financing on that 15. But I was like, you know, they need the money. They need the 15 grand we’ll just go ahead and pay it. But the short answer is I think the real skill is to, to be able to negotiate with people, without giving them a price, giving them an offer. I feel like if you give an offer, it’s a commodity, a commodity for them to shop. I also think it’s kind of acrimonious. People feel like they’re good negotiators because somebody can say, well, I want $200,000 from our house. And you can say, well, how does a hundred thousand sound? I don’t think that’s negotiation at all. I think that’s horse trading. And like my family came from the agriculture world.

Brad Smotherman (17:09): So, I mean, we were pig farmers. I mean, and I saw that growing up all the time, you know, that doesn’t work for houses as well. Like if we can make people realize that we’re not there to take advantage, if we can make the number work, then we will make it work. But there’s equity. There’s two types of equity. There’s equity at price and equity in terms. So if we can create equity in terms, a lot of times that’s a better equity position for us to have as a longterm play, as opposed to just like really working in the 70%. If that makes sense.

Jay Conner (17:37): Do you ever offer or give multiple offers or multiple strategies of saying, okay, if you want your price, we can do it this way. If you’ve got to have all cash, we can do it this way. And if you want a third option, we can do it this way. Or do you, most of the time stay with say the the terms negotiation and conversation?

Brad Smotherman (18:02): And that’s a great question. So we don’t do like the three offer strategy of like, we can do it this way, this way, or this way, this way, because what I’ve found, at least in my own personal experiences that I had people say, well, I want this price with that term.

Jay Conner (18:14): They want to pick and choose the way they want it.

Brad Smotherman (18:18): Yeah. It was like, we’ll take this closing date. We’ll take that price with those terms. It’s like, well, that’s not really how it works. What I’ll say to that is it’s really common for us to, to bounce back and forth between price and terms. So if someone says, okay, this is the price that we want, they’ll say, well, if you want it like that, here’s how we can make that work. And they said, well, that doesn’t work for us. And then we’ll go back and say, well, is that price the least you would take? And so we start talking about pricing in. And I’ve had situations where we have to kind of go back and forth three or four times before we land somewhere. And it’s generally somewhere kind of in the middle that we find that people will work within kind of the median based on what they’re hoping for. You know, if we can substantiate pricing and values and costs to where we can show like, Hey, these are the numbers that you’re working with. Like, this is the value. This is the cost to get it there. Here’s my breakeven number. You know, what are you hoping for your cash at closing people generally tend to be a little bit more reasonable if we can substantiate why they should accept a lower price and what they were hoping for.

Jay Conner (19:15): When you have someone that is agreeable or at least open. They’re open to the idea Terms and, you know, taking payments or equity over time or whatever. Do you, in your, in your conversation, do you tell them how long or how long the term of the note would be? Or do you ask them what’s the longest they could go? Or how do you get to that agreeable length of the note?

Brad Smotherman (19:51): Yeah. So what we talk about is in terms of some now and some later, so we’re going to talk about it and say, okay, how much cash do you need at closing to make it work? And they’ll give us a number and we’ll kind of negotiate that. It’s like, okay, if I can get you X at closing, then how soon were you hoping to get, no, we do it this way. We can either do payments every month, like an annuity or retirement plan, or we can do a lump sum in the future, which were you hoping for? Generally, people kind of gravitate towards the payments per month. But the thing that we never mentioned is interest. Okay. We never really talk about terms. We’re going to talk about it in terms of, you know, $20,000 at closing and $500 per month until paid.

Brad Smotherman (20:27): And so people are kind of looking at that and saying, especially if they’re a landlord. Guys, if you’re, if you’re dealing with a landlord that has free and clear property and they’re tired landlord, you should absolutely be able to negotiate owner financing because these people are open to receiving payments. That’s what they bought the property for in the first place. Well, if we can just kind of segment it to being like, well, how much do you need at closing? What would you like a lump sum in the future? Or would you like monthly payments? Generally, they’re going to say, well, I’d love monthly payments and we can negotiate something, but we never really talk about it in terms of, well, it’s a 10 year loan and here’s the rate we never mentioned. Certainly we’d never mentioned interest. We don’t really ever talk about the term as well.

Jay Conner (21:03): So you would agree that most of the terms that you structure are payments with no interests?

Brad Smotherman (21:10): Correct. A hundred percent. I’ve only paid interest twice on owner finance deals. And both of those were properties I wanted. They were both lake properties and I was like, I’ve gotta have this. I think I paid a 3% rate on one and four and a half on the others.

Jay Conner (21:24): I love it! I love it! Well, Brad, now let’s really change gears from the owner financing thing and the term thing to this world that you’re in of investing remotely. My lands! You are in, you’ve invested in 15 States. You invest from Michigan to Georgia. And when I asked you a question that could take you three days to answer, but you got about three minutes instead.

Brad Smotherman (21:55): We’ll work with that.

Jay Conner (21:55): But how in the world do you invest remotely in 15 different States? And we know what, we know everybody’s concerns are. I mean, how do you find those deals, you know, out there in a different state, what’s your boots on the ground? How do you make sure you’re not being taken to the cleaners? How do you manage all that stuff remotely? And you know, my land! You can’t drive by it and see what’s happening to the property. I mean, what does that world look like?

Brad Smotherman (22:24): Yeah. And you’re right. That would be about a three hour answer. But to put it into three minutes, the first fundamental that we have to understand is that the farther away we are from our own personal market, the cheaper the property must be. So we have to have a higher discount. Now, I’ll buy something at 60 cents on the dollar cash in my backyard, but I’m definitely not going to do that, you know two States away, right. So we have to have a greater discount because you’re a hundred percent, right. We’re going to have issues that we don’t expect right now. We don’t have, you know, a large amount of like workforce that can help us in these deals generally. Right. So what we’re going to do is we market to areas that we like, okay. And because we’re marketing in big geographic areas, our lead cost is actually quite a bit lower.

Brad Smotherman (23:12): It’s substantially lower. So we can do one of two things. We can either have a lower ad budget, or we can keep our ad budget the same and have maybe three or four times a lead flow. Okay. So let’s just say we have four times the lead flow. Well, what that means is that, that deal that comes around twice a year, three times a year is going to happen for me roughly every two months. Or, you know, the deal that happens every four months is going to happen for me every month. So I can be a little bit more picky based on what I’m looking at. And so in terms of the value, the decisions are very easy, actually. So I mean, case in point, we just bought one in Montgomery, Alabama. The property had a comp across the street that sold in in February for 76,000, we bought this one for 13, so we have it under contract.

Brad Smotherman (23:59): And so once we have an under contract, we go into due diligence. So the first thing we’re going to look at is value. So what is the value based on what we expect right now? So we feel like roughly this thing’s worth $75,000 and I can probably owner finance it for 89 or maybe 99,000 with a 10K down payment. You know, at a minimum 10K. So with that, we’re gonna talk to two or three brokers in that market, real estate agents that are gonna give us CMAs. Give us an idea of value. And then we’re going to then once the value looks okay, we’re going to switch to condition. So we’re going to get actually a home inspection on this property. Okay guys, once we have three different CMAs from agents and they all kind of make sense for one another, like there’s congruency in those three CMAs, and then we go and we get the home inspection, we’re going to know really everything that we need to know in terms of that property, especially with the discounts that we’re buying.

Brad Smotherman (24:48): So, I mean, the question being is that a little bit more risky than buying it around backyard? It certainly is. Whenever, if you were paying dollar for dollar the same amount, but if you’re paying 60 cents in your own backyard or 20 cents in another state, then I would ask you, well, which is more risky at that point. Okay. So short answer, we’re going to get things under contract that we feel pretty comfortable with. Then we’re going to verify and find the facts that we know and what we don’t know. At that point, we’re going to make a final decision. Sometimes we have to renegotiate price most of the time we don’t, because it’s just such a severe discount on the front end. And I mean, in terms of management, the thing is that we’re owner financing most of these, almost all. And so if we’re owner financing things, we’re serving the least served in the most underserved buyer pool in the country.

Brad Smotherman (25:32): There’s a lot of people that need owner financing. And since March, this is what I heard from Eddie Speed yesterday. And Jay, I know, you know, Eddie. So he said that if a hundred people could get a mortgage in March before this COVID thing hit, then right now there’s 64 people that can get a mortgage that’s left out of those hundred. Well, what happened to those other 36 people? Did they just decide not to buy? Well, no, they need owner financing at this point. So we’re serving a very needed, a very underserved buyer pool that needs owner financing. So sell the house with owner financing, create the note. I don’t want ownership and property. I feel like property is liability. We want to own the paper. Okay. So we create owner financing. So the house owner financing to have a longterm cash flowing asset. And in a nutshell, that’s how we buy remotely.

Jay Conner (26:18): To what extent do you buy houses remotely with owner financing? To what extent is, are you comfortable with the amount of repairs or rehabbing involved?

Brad Smotherman (26:33): Yeah. I mean, we’re not going to rehab anything. So if the property means that the grass cut, somebody better go cut the grass because we’re going to buy it. We’re going to sell it as is, you know, the best example that I have with this. I had a house that I bought for $2,000 one time. And now I don’t understand why people do what they do sometimes. Jay, I know that doesn’t resonate with you. I’m sure that you’ve never seen anything that didn’t make sense. But for me, I see a lot of things that don’t make sense in my world. And this lady sold me the house for $2,000 and she had just done new vinyl and new windows on the exterior. They surely looked great, but she said, I don’t want you to go in the house because I’m afraid you won’t buy it.

Brad Smotherman (27:07): This was maybe six or seven years ago. And I’m actually going to look at houses. I said, well, respectfully, I have to go look at, you know, I have to go inside. And so this lady, the roof look kind of bad, but I didn’t realize how bad the roof was. She did new vinyl, new windows. She didn’t do the roof. And so water had been pouring into this house for like four or five years. And so like, literally the back half of this thing was gone. I mean, it was like molded. It was soft, the subfloor, you couldn’t stand in the kitchen, all this, it was a mess! But we sold it with owner financing. As is! Like, I’m not going to do that kind of construction. I’m not a construction guy. Literally I had to come over. I had to have a handyman come to my house and replace the doorknobs because I don’t know how to do any of that stuff. So like, I’m terrible.

Jay Conner (27:46): You and I have something else in common, my friend!

Brad Smotherman (27:49): Glad to hear that, man! I think we’re like kindered souls just, probably not from the same parents, just generationally, but you know what I’m saying? We’re cut from the same cloth.

Jay Conner (28:00): A brother from another mother.

Brad Smotherman (28:04): For sure.

Jay Conner (28:07): So you’re not gonna do any, you’re not gonna do any major rehabs. I get it. So my lands! How do you find, so are you finding most of these deals remotely in other States? Again, as you mentioned using Pay-Per-Click. Google Pay-per-Click.

Brad Smotherman (28:25): A hundred percent. So, I mean, these are people that are actively searching to solve a problem and we’re there when they need to be.

Jay Conner (28:30): I love it when people are looking for me and I’m not looking for them.

Brad Smotherman (28:34): Big difference because people don’t understand the difference in the negotiation structure. So, I mean, if I’m contacting someone to sell me something, versus someone contacting me to buy something, that’s a huge difference in the frame of negotiation. And so we always want to be where someone is searching for us. If we can be, of course, there’s always exceptions. You know, like anything works some of the times. So we can do the text, we can do the direct mail. I used to do 70,000 direct mailers a month. I don’t do any of that anymore because it comes down to, I don’t want to contact someone to sell something. I want people contacting me to buy something.

Jay Conner (29:08): Final question, Brad. At least almost final question I have to, I have to precursor that. So we know how you’re finding these deals. You got all these people that need owner financing. They don’t know there’s a way. So how in the world do you get the word out to all these people that you’ve got owner-financed terms available? How do you find the buyers?

Brad Smotherman (29:29): And that’s a great question. So our big three are Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, and then putting yard signs out that say owner financing. And so…

Jay Conner (29:38): My number one on a, so I sell, I don’t do owner financing out here in this market. That’s another conversation. I do a lot of rent to own. I love your model. Regardless. It’s the same buyer, whether they’re buying owner financing or they’re buying rent to own. But with that, Facebook marketplace, hands down. Is my best lead source for finding these owner finance buyers.

Brad Smotherman (30:04): Yeah. It’s really amazing. I’ve got a, I’d say she’s at least half time and probably closer to three quarter time. And the poor girl, she probably has carpal tunnel by now because like you post a house for sale with owner financing and all of these buy-sell-trade groups. And like, you can see like the computer almost begin to melt because it’s overheating from all the people responding. And it makes sense. I mean, it’s really common in a market. So I’m in Nashville, Tennessee. The last time I checked, there were 2,700 houses on the market on the MLS to service everyone that could get mortgage financing. Well, there were three that were offered with owner financing and they were mine. And so it’s like, if that’s the case, you can see the disparity in the supply demand curve. You have a huge group of demand for very, very little inventory. And so selling the houses never really been a problem.

Jay Conner (30:53): I love it! Brad, I know my audience wants to stay connected with you. How can they stay connected with Brad Smotherman?

Brad Smotherman (31:00): Yeah. So for those that are interested more on owner financing and what we do, then you can listen to my podcast, Investor Creator, on iTunes and the various other platforms. And if anybody wants to reach out to me directly, feel free to do so. At http://BradSmotherman.com

Jay Conner (31:13): That’s awesome, Brad! It’s so great to have you here on the show, Brad, I really enjoyed our conversation. I know the audience did as well. And so let me give it to you for parting comments and final advice.

Brad Smotherman (31:26): You know, the thing that I want to say to people is, always would try to instill the amount of hope that I can, you know, I think a lot of people want to do this business and they have a lot of fear. And I remember how that was in 2010 when I started, because you know, I started in the brokerage business. I was a realtor and not a super successful one at that. I made a living, but you know, whenever I decided to be an investor, I thought, gosh, like nobody’s going to leave a loan in place. Nobody’s going to sell out a discount. Nobody’s, you know, and it’s the same thing that I’ve heard, you know, and here’s kind of like the hierarchy of beliefs that fell down for me. I thought nobody would leave alone in place. Well, that happened.

Brad Smotherman (32:01): And then I thought, well, nobody’s going to sell at 50 cents on the dollar. And then that happened. And then I thought, well, nobody’s going to give me 0% owner financing. And then that happened. And then I thought, well, all of this is because we’re that good in person. We can’t do it on the phone. And then we started buying all of those on the phone. And so at the end of the day, I mean, this business works. It’s an amazing business. It changes lives. And if you feel compelled, you have a passion for the business and you have a passion to help people with their problems and you can do very well in this business. Stay with it.

Jay Conner (32:28): That’s awesome! Brad, thank you so much. And thank you! My audience for tuning in. It’s always great to have you here. And I know you found this episode very valuable. I’m Jay Conner, The Private Money Authority. Wishing you all the best and here is to taking your real estate investing business to the next level. And I’ll see you on the next show. Bye for now!

[baddadjokez]

514 Dad Jokes

What do you call a fake noodle? An Impasta.​I would avoid the sushi if I was you. It’s a little fishy.​Want to hear a joke about paper? Nevermind it’s tearable.​Why did the cookie cry? Because his father was a wafer so long!​I used to work in a shoe recycling shop. It was sole destroying.​What do you call a belt with a watch on it? A waist of time.​How do you organize an outer space party? You planet.​I went to a seafood disco last week... and pulled a mussel.​Do you know where you can get chicken broth in bulk? The stock market.​I cut my finger chopping cheese, but I think that I may have greater problems.​My cat was just sick on the carpet, I don’t think it’s feline well.​Why did the octopus beat the shark in a fight? Because it was well armed.​How much does a hipster weigh? An instagram.​What did daddy spider say to baby spider? You spend too much time on the web.​Atheism is a non-prophet organisation.​There’s a new type of broom out, it’s sweeping the nation.​What cheese can never be yours? Nacho cheese.​What did the Buffalo say to his little boy when he dropped him off at school? Bison.​Have you ever heard of a music group called Cellophane? They mostly wrap.​Why does Superman gets invited to dinners? Because he is a Supperhero.​How was Rome split in two? With a pair of Ceasars.​The shovel was a ground breaking invention.​A scarecrow says, "This job isn't for everyone, but hay, it's in my jeans."​A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says, "Make me one with everything."​Did you hear about the guy who lost the left side of his body? He's alright now.​What do you call a girl with one leg that's shorter than the other? Ilene.​I did a theatrical performance on puns. It was a play on words.​What do you do with a dead chemist? You barium.​I bet the person who created the door knocker won a Nobel prize.​Towels can’t tell jokes. They have a dry sense of humor.​Two birds are sitting on a perch and one says "Do you smell fish?"​Do you know sign language? You should learn it, it’s pretty handy.​What do you call a beautiful pumpkin? GOURDgeous.​Why did one banana spy on the other? Because she was appealing.​What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef.​What do you call a cow with two legs? Lean beef.​What do you call a cow with all of its legs? High steaks.​A cross eyed teacher couldn’t control his pupils.​After the accident, the juggler didn’t have the balls to do it.​I used to be afraid of hurdles, but I got over it.​To write with a broken pencil is pointless.​I read a book on anti-gravity. I couldn’t put it down.​I couldn’t remember how to throw a boomerang but it came back to me.​What should you do if you are cold? Stand in the corner. It’s 90 degrees.​How does Moses make coffee? Hebrews it.​The energizer bunny went to jail. He was charged with battery.​What did the alien say to the pitcher of water? Take me to your liter.​What happens when you eat too many spaghettiOs? You have a vowel movement.​The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray was a seasoned veteran.​Sausage puns are the wurst.​What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear.​Why shouldn’t you trust atoms? They make up everything.​What’s it called when you have too many aliens? Extraterrestrials.​Want to hear a pizza joke? Nevermind, it’s too cheesy.​What do cows tell each other at bedtime? Dairy tales.​Why can’t you take inventory in Afghanistan? Because of the tally ban.​Why didn’t the lion win the race? Because he was racing a cheetah.​What happens to nitrogen when the sun comes up? It becomes daytrogen.​What’s it called when you put a cow in an elevator? Raising the steaks.​What’s america’s favorite soda? Mini soda.​Why did the tomato turn red? Because it saw the salad dressing.​What kind of car does a sheep drive? Their SuBAHHru.​What do you call a french pig? Porque.​What do you call a line of rabbits marching backwards? A receding hairline.​Why don’t vampires go to barbecues? They don’t like steak.​How do trees access the internet? They log on.​Why should you never trust a train? They have loco motives.​Is your refrigerator running? Better go catch it.​The future,the present and the past walked into a bar.Things got a little tense.​I saw an ad for burial plots, and thought to myself this is the last thing I need.​I just found out I'm colorblind. The diagnosis came completely out of the purple.​I'd tell you a chemistry joke but I know I wouldn't get a reaction.​Have you ever tried to eat a clock? It's very time consuming.​I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.​Read enough of our funny puns, and you'll be punstoppable.​Yesterday a clown held the door for me. It was a nice jester.​I used to go fishing with Skrillex but he kept dropping the bass.​The wedding was so emotional even the cake was in tiers.​What does a house wear? A dress.​Why can't bicycles stand up on their own? Since they are 2 tired.​I owe a lot to the sidewalks. They’ve been keeping me off the streets for years.​Imagine if alarm clocks hit you back in the morning.It would be truly alarming.​Why is a skeleton a bad liar? You can see right through it.​What do you receive when you ask a lemon for help? Lemonaid.​A man sued an airline company after it lost his luggage. Sadly, he lost his case.​What does a dog say when he sits down on a piece of sandpaper? Ruff!​What do you call crystal clear urine? 1080pee.​At my boxing club there is only one punch bag. I hate waiting for the punch line!​An untalented gymast walks into a bar.​Einstein developed a theory about space, and it was about time too.​I was accused of being a plagiarist, their word not mine.​My friends say they don’t like skeleton puns. I should put more backbone into them.​Let me FILL you in on my trip to the dentist.​Why does the singer of Cheap Thrills not want us to Sia?​Traveling on a flying carpet is a rugged experience.​Cartoonist found dead in home. Details are sketchy.​The old woman who lived in a shoe wasn’t the sole owner,there were strings attached.​Did you hear about the crime in the parking garage? It was wrong on so many levels.​My new diet consists of aircraft, its a bit plane.​Have you ever tried to milk a cow which has been cut in half? Udder madness.​Why are there fences on graveyards? Because people are dying to get in.​Why do trees have so many friends? They branch out.​Models of dragons are not to scale.​Never discuss infinity with a mathematician, they can go on about it forever.​Why don’t some couples go to the gym? Because some relationships don’t work out.​Don’t trust people that do acupuncture, they’re back stabbers.​A persistent banker wouldn’t stop hitting on me so I asked him to leave me a loan.​I ordered a book of puns last week, but i didn't get it.​People say i look better without glasses but i just can't see it.​Don’t judge a meal by the look of the first course. It’s very souperficial.​I heard Donald Trump is going to ban shredded cheese, and make America grate again.​I relish the fact that you’ve mustard the strength to ketchup to me.​What do you call a young musician? A minor.​Police were called to a daycare yesterday, where a 2-year-old was resisting a rest.​If artists wear sketchers do linguists wear converse?​I changed my iPod name to Titanic. It’s syncing now.​Jill broke her finger today, but on the other hand she was completely fine.​I smeared some ketchup all over my eyes once. It was a bad idea in Heinz- sight.​I flipped a coin over an issue the other day, it was quite the toss-up.​I got hit in the head with a can of soda? Luckily it was a soft drink.​I heard that the post office was a male dominated industry.​Why isn’t suntanning an Olympic sport? Because the best you can ever get is bronze.​What do you mean June is over? Julying.​Why is Kylo Ren so angry? Beause he’s always Ben Solo.​These reversing cameras are great. Since I got one I haven’t looked back.​The candle quit his job because he felt burned out.​Our maintenance guy lost his legs on the job, now he’s just a handyman.​Going to bed with music on gave him sound sleep.​A magic tractor drove down the road and turned into a field!​I met some aliens from outer space. They were pretty down to earth.​The plane flight brought my acrophobia to new heights.​My phone has to wear glasses ever since it lost its contacts.​I, for one, like Roman numerals.​How do mountains see? They peak.​The show was called Spongebob Squarepants but everyone knows the star was Patrick.​This is not alcohol, water you thinking?!​Novice pirates make terrible singers because they can’t hit the high seas.​I told my friend she drew her eyebrows too high. She seemed surprised.​The earth's rotation really makes my day.​If I buy a bigger bed will I have more or less bedroom?​Two peanuts were walking in a tough neighborhood and one of them was a-salted.​Two ropes were walking in a tough neighborhood and one of them was a-frayed.​What kind of shoes do ninjas wear? Sneakers.​I got a master’s degree in being ignored; no one seems to care.​After eating the ship, the sea monster said, I can’t believe I ate the hull thing.​Smaller babies may be delivered by stork but the heavier ones need a crane.​A bartender broke up with her boyfriend, but he kept asking her for another shot.​I had a pun about insanity but then I lost it.​He couldn’t work out how to fix the washing machine so he threw in the towel.​Why does the man want to buy nine rackets? Cause tennis too many.​Why don’t cannibals eat clowns? Because they taste funny.​If I got paid in lots of Pennes I would make loads of pasta.​I thought I saw a spider on my laptop, but my friend said it was just a bug.​A doctor broke his leg while auditioning for a play.Luckily he still made the cast.​The tale of the haunted refrigerator was chilling.​Why are frogs so happy? They eat whatever bugs them.​If you wear cowboy clothes are you ranch dressing?​I was addicted to the hokey pokey but I turned myself around.​Simba, you're falling behind. I must ask you to Mufasa.​I bought a wooden whistle but it wooden whistle.​The bomb didn't want to go off. So it refused.​The sore mummy needed a Cairo-practor​I feel sorry for shopping carts. They’re always getting pushed around.​The display of still-life art was not at all moving!​On Halloween October is nearly Octover.​Pig puns are so boaring.​Why couldn’t the dead car drive into the cluttered garage? Lack of vroom.​What do you call Samsung's security guards? Guardians of the Galaxy.​What does Superman have in his drink? Just ice.​How does a penguin build it’s house? Igloos it together.​Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.​The safe was invented by a cop and a robber. It was quite a combination.​What do you do when balloons are hurt? You helium.​One hat says to the other, "You stay here, I’ll go on a head."​How many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh? Ten tickles.​When does a farmer dance? When he drops the beet.​When the scientist wanted to clone a deer, he bought a doe it yourself kit.​If people ask how many puns I made in Germany I reply, "nein"​Did you hear about the invention of the white board? It was remarkable.​If Donald Trump becomes president, America is going toupee.​Can February March? No, but April May.​I hate Russian Dolls, they are so full of themselves.​What do you do to an open wardrobe? You closet.​The magazine about ceiling fans went out of business due to low circulation.​So what if I don’t know what apocalypse means? It’s not the end of the world!​Some aquatic mammals at the zoo escaped. It was otter chaos.​A backwards poem writes inverse.​Getting the ability to fly would be so uplifting.​I asked my friend, Nick, if he had 5 cents I could borrow. But he was Nicholas.​The soundtrack for Blackfish was orcastrated.​Where do you imprison a skeleton? In a rib cage.​There’s a fine line between the numerator and the denominator.​I used to work at a hairdresser but i just wasn’t cut out for it.​Why is metal and a microwave a match made in heaven? When they met, sparks flew.​The lumberjack loved his new computer. He especially enjoyed logging in.​Garbage collectors are rubbish drivers!​When the church relocated it had an organ transplant.​Lettuce take a moment to appreciate this salad pun.​The scarecrow get promoted because he was outstanding in his field.​Sleeping comes so naturally to me, I could do it with my eyes closed.​I never understood odorless chemicals, they never make scents.​What do prisoners use to call each other? Cell phones.​Why was dumbo sad? He felt irrelephant.​When a clock is hungry, it goes back four seconds.​Old skiers never die. They just go down hill.​Did you hear about the pun that was actually funny? Neither have we.​You know why I like egg puns? They crack me up!​Want to hear a pun about ghosts? That's the spirit!​I used to make clown shoes… which was no small feat.​Did you hear about the human cannonball? Too bad he got fired!​What happened when the magician got mad? She pulled her hare out!​Did you hear about the circus that caught on fire? It was in tents.​The one day of the week that eggs are definitely afraid of is Fry-day.​A hen will always leave her house through the proper eggs-it.​The man who ate too many eggs was considered to be an egg-oholic.​All the hens consider the chef to be very mean because he beats the eggs.​Eskimos keep all of their chilled eggs inside of the egg-loo.​Under the doctor’s advice, the hen is laying off eggs for a few weeks.​I had a real problem making a hard-boiled egg this morning until I cracked it.​The best time of day to eat eggs is at the crack of dawn.​The chicken coop only had 2 doors since if it had 4 doors it would be a sedan.​Crossing a cement mixer and a chicken will result in you getting a brick layer.​That reckless little egg always seems to egg-celerate when he sees the light turn yellow.​Hopefully this egg pun doesn't make your brain too fried or scrambled.​Don't ever have multiple people wash dishes together. It's hard for them to stay in sink.​People using umbrellas always seem to be under the weather.​I dissected an iris today. It was an eye-opening experience.​What was Forrest Gump’s email password? 1forrest1.​What planet is like a circus? Saturn, it has three rings!​Before my father died he worked in a circus as a stilt walker. I used to look up to him.​Why did the lion eat the tightrope walker? He wanted a well-balanced meal!​I really look up to my tall friends.​I hate negative numbers and will stop at nothing to avoid them.​Long fairy tales have a tendency to dragon.​It takes guts to make a sausage.​Why shouldn’t you give Elsa a balloon? Because she’ll “Let It Go”!​What do you call cheese that’s not yours? Nacho cheese!​How do you make a tissue dance? Put a little boogie in it​What do you get when a witch goes to the beach? A sand-witch!​Where do cows go on Friday nights? To the mooooo-vies!​What did the mommy tomato say to the baby tomato? C’mon, ketchup!​Why did the banana go to the doctor? Because he wasn’t “peeling” well!​What did one snowman say to the other? Do you smell carrots?​Why didn’t the skeleton go to the dance? Because he had no body to go with!​What is a pirate’s favorite letter? Arrrrrr!​What does a piece of toast wear to bed? His pa-JAM-as!​What does one eye say to the other eye? Something between us smells​Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide!​What happens when an egg laughs? It cracks up!​What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear!​Why didn’t the teddy bear want dessert? Because he was stuffed!​Why can’t you tell a joke while ice skating? Because the ice might crack up!​What do you call a pig that knows karate? A pork chop!​What’s mommy and daddy’s favorite ride at the carnival? A married-go-round!​How did Cookie Monster feel after eating all the cookies? Pretty crummy!​What do you call a skunk who flies in a helicopter? A smelly-copter!​What do you get when you shake a cow? A milkshake!​How do you catch a squirrel? Climb up a tree and act like a nut!​Why did the bee get married? Because she found her honey!​What did the ocean say to their airplane? Nothing, it just waved!​Where do eskimo pigs live? In pig-loos.​What’s a dinosaur called when it’s sleeping? A dino-snore!​What did the cookie say to the annoying cookie? Crumb on!​Why did Mickey Mouse go up in space? To find Pluto!​What does Olaf eat for lunch? Icebergers!​What letter is always wet? The C!​How do you throw a space party? You planet.​How was Rome split in two? With a pair of Ceasars.​Nope. Unintended.​The shovel was a ground breaking invention, but everyone was blow away by the leaf blower.​A scarecrow says, "This job isn't for everyone, but hay, it's in my jeans."​A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says "Make me one with everything."​Did you hear about the guy who lost the left side of his body? He's alright now.​What do you call a girl with one leg that's shorter than the other? Ilene.​The broom swept the nation away.​I did a theatrical performance on puns. It was a play on words.​What does a clock do when it's hungry? It goes back for seconds.​What do you do with a dead chemist? You barium.​I bet the person who created the door knocker won a Nobel prize.​Towels can’t tell jokes. They have a dry sense of humor.​Two birds are sitting on a perch and one says “Do you smell fish?”​Did you hear about the cheese factory that exploded in france? There was nothing but des brie.​Do you know sign language? You should learn it, it’s pretty handy.​What do you call a beautiful pumpkin? GOURDgeous.​Why did one banana spy on the other? Because she was appealing.​What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef.​What do you call a cow with two legs? Lean beef.​What do you call a cow with all of its legs? High steaks.​A cross eyed teacher couldn’t control his pupils.​After the accident, the juggler didn’t have the balls to do it.​I used to be afraid of hurdles, but I got over it.​To write with a broken pencil is pointless.​I read a book on anti-gravity. I couldn’t put it down.​I couldn’t remember how to throw a boomerang but it came back to me.​What did the buffalo say to his son? Bison.​What should you do if you’re cold? Stand in the corner. It’s 90 degrees.​How does Moses make coffee? Hebrews it.​The energizer bunny went to jail. He was charged with battery.​What did the alien say to the pitcher of water? Take me to your liter.​What happens when you eat too many spaghettiOs? You have a vowel movement.​The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray was a seasoned veteran.​Sausage puns are the wurst.​What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear.​How did Darth Vader know what luke was getting him for his birthday? He could sense his presence.​Why shouldn’t you trust atoms? They make up everything.​What’s the difference between a bench, a fish, and a bucket of glue? You can’t tune a bench but you can tuna fish. I bet you got stuck on the bucket of glue part.​What’s it called when you have too many aliens? Extraterrestrials.​Want to hear a pizza joke? Nevermind, it’s too cheesy.​What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.​What do cows tell each other at bedtime? Dairy tales.​Why can’t you take inventory in Afghanistan? Because of the tally ban.​Why didn’t the lion win the race? Because he was racing a cheetah.​Why did the man dig a hole in his neighbor’s backyard and fill it with water? Because he meant well.​What happens to nitrogen when the sun comes up? It becomes daytrogen.​What’s it called when you put a cow in an elevator? Raising the steaks.​What’s america’s favorite soda? Mini soda.​Why did the tomato turn red? Because it saw the salad dressing.​What kind of car does a sheep drive? A lamborghini, but if that breaks down they drive their SuBAHHru.

[blueiscoool]

The Long-Lost 1923 Silent Film 'The First Degree' Found in a Basement

It played in Peoria, and everywhere else.

Then, the world’s only remaining copy of a 1923 silent melodrama produced by Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle, presumed lost by film historians, remained stashed for decades in a box of unmarked and highly flammable nitrate film reels. The box sat perilously close to a hot-water heater in a closet, in a house, in Peoria.

Now, Chicago Film Archives has digitally transferred and restored the rarity titled “The First Degree,” about a sheep farmer with a secret and the climactic courtroom confrontation that spills the beans. Directed by Edward Sedgwick, best known for Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman,” the film is not yet available for general viewing, online or otherwise.

CFA director of film transfer operations, Olivia Babler, hopes that a public screening with live musical accompaniment can be arranged as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic abates, and allows others to make the discovery for themselves.

“It’s pretty amazing it’s survived,” Babler says. “All five reels.”

Like most silent films considered lost and then, miraculously, found, “The First Degree” tells a story of near-misses and pure chance.

It began with the Charles E. Krosse Collection, named after a Caterpillar Inc. marketing executive. Krosse acquired a collection of films, mostly agricultural trade films, from C.L. Venard Productions of Peoria. To CFA, Krosse donated the largely unlabeled load of 35 millimeter and 16 millimeter reels, many of them nitrate film prints ranging in quality from “well preserved” to “literal powder.”

In 2006, Chicago filmmaker Stephen Parry drove down to Peoria to look through the collection in hopes of finding rare barn dance footage, in whatever form, for his documentary on the long-running Chicago radio variety show “The National Barn Dance.” (The documentary’s called “The Hayloft Gang.”) He sorted through the boxes with the help of then-CFA archivist Carolyn Faber, now the Media Preservation & Digitization Librarian with School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“We had one day to go through about a hundred film cans,” Faber remembers. In one closet, a stack of boxes, full of combustible and largely crumbling nitrate film stock, teetered inches away from a hot-water heater.

Krosse and Parry lugged the “really smelly cans” outside. Faber noticed a strange sight in the back yard: many of the trees had scorch marks, “pretty high up.” Krosse told her that he knew he shouldn’t throw away the disintegrated nitrate film stock. So he tried lighting it on fire to get rid of it, to which the nitrate said: ka-boom.

Back in the CFA Chicago office, the surviving boxes of marked and unmarked films remained mostly unexamined for 14 years. Babler, who came to the CFA in 2017, says that “we’ve known we had reels labeled ‘The First Degree,’ with a question mark, since the donation came in.” The “lure,” she says of this collection, “wasn’t that it was mainly agricultural films; it’s that a lot of films were unlabeled, or came with a question mark, or weren’t quite legible. Or simply said ‘unidentified silent narrative.’”

Like “probably every archive in the world,′ she says, “we always have a backlog of processing and cataloguing to do. And with the pandemic, we’ve had a lot more time to focus on our collection.” In late June 2020, Babler at last got a good look at what turned out to be a remarkably preserved nitrate film stock edition of “The First Degree.”

It became a top priority for digitial scanning and preservation. And now, a movie consigned for decades to the Library of Congress list of “Lost U.S. Silent Feature Films 1912-1929 1/4 u2033 has been found.

Watching the restored version today, you realize anew how much film history lies somewhere in the vast mercantile middle ground between the great and the terrible. The film’s star, Frank Mayo, was a big name at the time; here he plays banker turned sheep farmer, an ex-con wrongly convicted of a crime. “Strangely silent and aloof” is how he’s described by one intertitle.

The story pits Mayo’s character against a vicious and manipulative half-brother. Both men love the same woman. Much of “The First Degree” unfolds in flashback, as Sam is brought before a grand jury (not too grand; it’s a small town, set nowhere in particular, though filmed in Universal City, Calif.) for reasons unknown.

The plot sidewinds to a courtroom climax jam-packed with incident and gunfire and a happy ending. It was good enough for The Chicago Daily Tribune. “I don’t see why we can’t have more pictures with Mr. Mayo in them,” the unnamed critic wrote. “He is a splendid actor and a convincing one. BESIDES – he’s good-looking and doesn’t appear to be unduly conscious of the fact. ALSO when he’s in a fight – it’s a FIGHT.” Mayo is indeed an intriguing, relaxed presence on camera, even now, 97 years after the filming.

Digging through unmarked boxes, says Faber, “most of the time you never find something like this. Finding something when you’re not looking for it – that’s usually what happens. Sometimes it’s 14 years later.” And sometimes, she says, “it’s never.”

“The First Degree” will be shown with live musical accompaniment at Chicago Film Archives when the COVID-19 pandemic allows, on an undetermined future date. For more information on the archives, or to donate, go to chicagofilmarchives.org.

By Michael Phillips.

The First Degree is a silent film from 1923 directed by Edward Sedgwick. The film is a rural melodrama starring Frank Mayo, Sylvia Breamer, and Philo McCullough. A Universal Pictures production, it is one of the Carl Laemmle-endorsed “The Laemmle Nine,” nine films released from Christmas 1922 to February 19, 1923. The screenplay by George Randolph Chester is based on the short story “The Summons” by George Pattullo (published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914). The cinematography is by Benjamin H. Kline.

Long thought to be a lost film, a complete, partially-tinted 35mm domestic distribution print of the film was discovered at Chicago Film Archives in June 2020 in the Charles E. Krosse Collection, a collection of mostly agricultural and sponsored films produced and distributed by C.L. Venard Productions of Peoria, Illinois.  CFA has since digitally preserved the film.

Frank Mayo as Sam Purdy. Sylvia Breamer as Mary. Philo McCullough as Will. George A. Williams as Sheriff. Harry Carter as District Attorney.

Sam Purdy receives a call from the Grand Jury of Lincoln County. He is wanted to give testimony in a case involving the theft of his sheep, but before he learns this, he makes a confession regarding the murder of his half-brother, Will, the night before. Purdy goes on to tell the jury of the myriad ways his brother has wronged him over the last several years, motivated out of a mutual affection for a woman named Mary. Via flashback, Sam tells the room of how Will had him sent to jail for a year for a bank robbery he did not commit. While in jail, Sam studied law and starts life afresh when released. Sam runs for County Prosecutor and all is going well with him until Will turns up, threatens blackmail, and exposes his past and forces him to again leave town. Sam gets another start and is successful as a sheep farmer in a rural town when Will again appears and blackmails him. A fight takes place and Sam supposes that he has killed his brother in the scuffle. But as he finishes his testimony before the Grand Jury, much to the surprise of the members, in comes the sheriff conveying the prisoner in the sheep-stealing case is Will.

[kittyramblesalot]

Everything A Real Estate Agent Doesn't Want You To Know, A Year In Review 2006

Through 2006 I have written a number of articles known as the "Everything A Real Estate Agent Doesn't Want You To Know" series which has long been a consumer oriented series of information to help home purchasers and sellers protect themselves when conducting a real residence transaction. These articles are a natural extension of courses I have written known as "Everything A Real Estate Agent Doesn't Want Your house Buyer To Know" and "Everything A Real Estate Agent Doesn't Really want A Home Seller To Know". The first book written through 1990 was called "Everything A Real Estate Agent Doesn't Want You to definitely Know" and it had a fair degree of national success, extra than I thought it would, when I introduced it towards the media during 1991/92. We sold the book in each state in the U. S. including Alaska, Hawaii and since far as Pakistan and Japan. This was not a damaging performance for a self-published under-funded author. I wrote the book because I was a licensed real estate agent in the talk about of Ohio and, more importantly, I was a readily available mortgage banker for a few years and I saw a large number of home buyers and sellers experience financial damage as a result of dealing with inexperienced and unethical real estate agents. Many of the agents happen to be either totally incompetent or so self interested that they would certainly mislead buyers and sellers, anything to get them to indication a purchase offer or a listing contract. Many of these family home buyers and sellers who were cut through the neck and also didn't even realize they were bleeding because they lacked understanding and insight into how the real estate game is competed. These books have always caused friction between real estate agents and myself because many agents resent the heading of the books and the ill conceived premise that the position is that all agents are bad crooked people today, which is false. In fact , whenever I did a media gig I always made it a point to clarify this is NOT a baby blanket indictment against real estate agents. There are good, honest, knowledgeable, full time mum real estate agents in the business who are highly professional. The problem is they are the particular minority and not the majority. The major problem with the real estate market place as a whole is the ease with which a person can get a realty license. While the educational requirements vary from state to state, normally, anybody can get a license to sell real estate in about 90 days. This just doesn't make sense to me. Consider that many realtors are little old women who operate part-time, do not have business or selling background, go to school for 33 or 90 days and are licensed to represent home owners in property transactions from around $50, 000. 00 and up. I mean, a lawyer has to go to school for more effective years to get a license to write a fifty-dollar will or perhaps represent somebody in a petty traffic accident. But silly-sally can go to school for 30 days and list the $250, 000 house for sale? That does not compute in my thought process. What kind of representation will a seller get from a in someones spare time agent with one toe in the tub? And the full-time pros know what I am talking about. I have had many close interactions with agents while I was in the business and the the important point is that part timers are often the weakest relationship in getting a deal done, unavailable for showings, etc . The bottom line, part time agents give part time results if you are a buyer, seller or a full time agent attempting make a living. And the truth is that most people, especially first time residential buyers and sellers don't know what is going on... not really. How you find an agent to sell a home, the nature of contract law as well as negotiable elements of listing contracts, purchase contracts, etc . will be way beyond most first time buyers and sellers. The actual result is that sellers sign stupid long-term listing agreements with the wrong agents and the wrong companies and individuals pay way more for property then they would if they received more insight into the workings of real estate transactions including commissioned real estate sales agents. I didn't originate the problem, I identified the problems and the solutions for home buyers plus sellers. CAVEAT EMPTOR is legal jargon which means "buyer beware" and it means what it says. Whether you happen to be a home seller or home buyer, you better determine what you are doing when you are making decisions and signing contracts for the reason that, it is your duty to know and ignorance is no alibi under the law. If you do a stupid real estate deal, it will be your fault. Which is a shame because buying or selling a home is actually a BIG business decision. It is a business transaction composed of individuals, emotions, contracts and cash and those are all the compounds for legal and financial pain if you don't know what what you are doing, and most people don't. And how are people likely to get access to this information that will protect their legal and personal interests before they buy or sell a home in any case? THE POWER OF THE NAR OVER GOVERNMENT AND MEDIA The things many people don't know is the National Association of Realtors Ò (NAR) is one of America's largest special interest categories who have incredible lobbying power over our politicians to put in writing real estate laws that benefit the real estate industry, not even consumers. Thus, the caveat emptor clause... state as well as federal real estate laws are written in the interests of this local real estate company and not you. Something else people are un-aware of is the tremendous advertising influence the NAR seems to have over print and electronic media to manipulate the news you will read, hear and see because of their advertising dollar power. There may be an article written by Elizabeth Lesley of the Washington Journalism critique called Demand Happy News And Often Get It and it exposes the corruption and manipulation of the news consumers trust in to make decisions about buying or selling a home. I strongly encourage everyone to read this article. Real estate is like the stock market utilizing some ways. When you hear of a fad like "flipping" you may be probably at the tail end of that gimmick bubble, kind of like the dot. com days... everybody jumped in as they quite simply thought it was hot and it was really the end of the us dot. com bubble. A lot of people have gotten caught with their dirt bike pants down on the flipping angle. Home foreclosures are " up " across the U. S. because real estate agents and the lenders what person cater to them (the real estate industry has tremendous determine over the lending industry because the are the source of so many place loans) have qualified otherwise unqualified borrowers, by positioning them in gimmick loans. In the mad dash for you to milk the market, people have been steered in to interest primarily loans, negative amortization loans or attractive teaser borrowing products like low interest adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) and other mindless financing that is NOT in the best interest of the buyer. Consumers many of the foreclosures are happening. Naïve and gullible individuals were sold a bill of goods based on unrealistic place values. The market got hyped and the agents and providers were right there to exploit buyers and sellers. Does some people make money? Sure. But many people have found themselves with wall with too much "house", too big a payment along with a housing market that looks pretty bleak for a while... All you will need is one ripple in our fragile economy to turn the estate market into a landslide. Here's a news flash: Typically the economy is on shaky ground. The economy has long been kept strong by housing sales and corporate profit margins and both are an illusion. The real measure of typically the economy is durable goods, like automotive sales, which you'll find in the tank causing massive restructuring and layoffs. Individuals can't afford to buy cars because they are scraping the enameled off their teeth trying to make house payments... So , whoever you are, and you read my real estate articles, take into account the reason I have done what I have done, and will perform what I do, is because I am on the side of the consumer. Now i'm on the side of the person who wants to be a better, more up to date consumer. I am on the side of the person who wants to save a handful of thousand on their real estate transaction by being smart and about the more level playing field with real estate agents. And you really know what? By educating people and teaching them how to achieve deals more intelligently, how to weed out the piece timer agents from the pros and save a few dollars in the process, I am actually helping the professional full time providers. The truth is that honest agents won't have a problem with my place because it will get rid of the riff raff.

[mycryptosuite]

Live National 2Sure Today for 18/02/2023

Live National 2Sure Today for 18/02/2023 Live national 2sure today – 2 sure lotto numbers for today, Two Sure Prediction for National Weekly. We use only Hot numbers to generate two sure for you (Numbers are hot when they have been drawn very frequently. National live banker for today is not a joke, we are winning and winning for live – live banker for today – ghana lotto forecaster…

[princessgracekelly1956]

ABOVE: IN HOTEL SUITE at The Barclay, the Rev. Joseph B. Graham and Mrs. Rosemary T. Callan give a silver paten to Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace. The plate commemorates the International Eucharistic Congress, which will open in Philadelphia on Aug. 1. Prince Rainier and Princess Grace will participate in the congress.

The Philadelphia Inquirer - July 12, 1976

Princess Grace, Prince Rainier host 300 at Bicentennial salute 

By RUTH SELTZER

Monaco's Sovereign Prince Rainier III and his Philadelphia-born wife, Princess Grace, entertained 300 guests Friday at a cocktail reception at the Philadelphia Country Club in Gladwyne. 

It was Monaco's Bicentennial salute to the United States and Philadelphia. It was a beautiful party. 

Prince Rainier and Princess Grace welcomed guests. They stood in a receiving line with their three children, Princess Caroline, Prince Albert and Princess Stephanie. Princess Grace's brother, Councilman John B. Kelly Jr., was at the head of the line. 

“Doesn't Grace look marvelous!" exclaimed one guest. "She never seems to look a year older!" said another. 

Princess Grace wore a lovely white silk pajama ensemble. 

There was an informality about the party - relaxed and very pleasant. Hors d'oeuvres - hot and cold - were served. A trio played background music. 

We saw Princess Grace and Prince Rainier twice that day. Before going to the country club for the cocktail party, we attended a presentation ceremony in their honor. 

At the ceremony, in a Barclay Hotel suite, the Rev. Joseph B. Graham presented a sterling silver paten - a plate for the eucharistic bread - to Prince Rainier and Princess Grace in recognition of the part they play "in Christian life throughout the world." 

Father Graham is director of institutional services of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Prince Rainier and Princess Grace will participate in the 41st International Eucharistic Congress, which will open in Philadelphia on Aug. 1. On Aug. 2, Rainier and Grace will keynote the plenary session of an all-day conference on family life. The conference will be held at the Philadelphia Civic Center. 

At Friday's presentation ceremony was Mrs. Rosemary T. Callan, board chairman of the C & B Corp. of Warminster, Bucks County. There, too, were Saul Lapp, president of the firm, and John Neville, who is also an official of C & B. That firm has produced commemorative silver plates (exactly the same as the one given to Prince Rainier and Princess Grace). The plates will be sold (at $300 each) to help underwrite the expenses of the Philadelphia Archdiocese in hosting the Eucharistic Congress here. 

The first plate, number 1, will be presented to Pope Paul VI. It will be accepted in his behalf at the Eucharistic Congress by James Cardinal Knox of Australia, who has been appointed papal legate to the congress. 

Silver plates will also be presented to President Ford, Archbishop Jadot (the apostolic delegate to the United States), and John Cardinal Krol, Archbishop of Philadelphia. 

Cardinal Krol attended Monaco's party Friday at the country club. He arrived at the same time that we did. For several minutes, Cardinal Krol chatted with Princess Grace and Prince Rainier. 

Mr. and Mrs. Richard C. Bond were at the party. He is board chairman of Philadelphia ‘76 Inc., the city's Bicentennial agency. There, too, were City Representative Albert V. Gaudiosi and his wife, Cecelia; Deputy City Representative Anna Marie O'Brien and her husband, John T. O'Brien; William L. Rafsky (executive director of Philadelphia ‘76 Inc.) and his wife, Selma. 

Princess Grace's mother, Mrs. John B. Kelly, was at the party. So were Grace's sisters, Mrs. Donald Caldwell LeVine and Mrs. Margaret Kelly Conlan. We talked with Mrs. LeVine (Lizanne) and her husband, Don. 

Several of Princess Grace's cousins were there. Mrs. E. Shirley Turner came up from Middleburg, Va., for the party. She is Grace's cousin, Jean. 

Princess Grace's cousin, John Lehman, and his wife, Barbara, flew up from Washington for the party. He is deputy director of the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. 

Mayor and Mrs. Frank L. Rizzo were invited, as were Gov. and Mrs. Milton J. Shapp. They sent regrets. 

At the party, we said hello to Fire Commissioner Joseph Rizzo and his wife, Marge (the mayor's brother and sister-in-law). Police Commissioner Joseph F. O'Neill and his wife, Eleanor, were there. 

Curtis P. Laupheimer, who is Monaco's consul in Philadelphia, and his wife, Betty greeted guests. So did Alfred J. Laupheimer Jr. and his wife, Jenny. Alfred and Curtis are brothers. Alfred, who now lives in Delray Beach, Fla., is Monaco's consul in Florida. 

Mr. and Mrs. Joseph S. Rambo were at the party. Mrs. Rambo (Maree) was Princess Grace's bridesmaid. The wedding in Monaco took place in April 1956. Three months before the wedding, the engagement of Miss Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier III was announced at a luncheon given by her parents, Mrs. John B. Kelly and the late Mr. Kelly, at the Philadelphia Country Club. 

At Friday's party, in the same clubhouse, were Trenton banker Mary G. Roebling; Wanamaker president Robert Drew Harrison and Mrs. Harrison; William S. Cashel (president of Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania) and Mrs. Cashel; G. Morris Dorrance (board chairman of Philadelphia National Bank) and Mrs. Dorrance; Thacher Longstreth (president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce) and Mrs. Longstreth; Atlantic City Race Track president Robert P. Levy and Mrs. Levy; Philadelphia's City Council president George X. Schwartz and Mrs. Schwartz; Wilmington's Mayor Thomas C. Maloney and Mrs. Maloney. 

The Rev. Dr. Leon Sullivan and Mrs. Sullivan were there. So were British Consul-General and Mrs. Denis Richards; Mr. and Mrs. George J. Hauptfuhrer Jr., Jules Lavin; Mrs. William T. Coleman Jr. (wife of the U. S. Secretary of Transportation) and her son, Bill; Mrs. Richard S. Schweiker (wife of the U. S. senator) and her son, Malcolm; Lennox Moak (the city's budget director) and his wife, Helen; U. S. District Judge and Mrs. A. Leon Higginbotham; U. S. District Judge and Mrs. John Morgan Davis; Mrs. Russell Austin; Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Farmer; Mr. and Mrs. John M. Seabrook; Tom Foglietta; Lt. Gen. and Mrs. Willard Pearson; Hillel Levinson (managing director of Philadelphia) and his bride, Caryl; Rear Adm. Wycliffe Toole Jr. (commandant of the Fourth Naval District) and Mrs. Toole; Mr. and Mrs. John Gribbel 2d; and Mr. and Mrs. James A. Nolen Jr. 

Wharton Shober, president of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital, was at the cocktail party. Earlier in the day, Mr. Shober gave a luncheon in Hahnemann's executive suite. Prince Albert, who is now 18, arrived with his uncle, Councilman Kelly. The luncheon, which we attended, was in honor of the U. S. Equestrian Team, on the eve of the team's departure for the 1976 Olympic Games. Prince Albert, heir to the throne of Monaco, presented a commemorative scroll to the team. The scroll, given on behalf of Hahnemann, was accepted by Jack LaGoff, the team's coach. 

Last week in Philadelphia was summed up best by Marie Cashel, wife of the president of Bell Tel. Said she: "On Sunday, we went to a luncheon for the President of the United States. On Tuesday, we went to a dinner for the Queen of England. Today we are at a cocktail party given by the Prince and Princess of Monaco. Tomorrow, we'll get back to work in our garden."

[en--dear]

“You have to think big at the beginning—that’s the problem for most people.” I’m sitting with Thomas Sacchi on a warm Friday evening in the bar of the Houdini Cinema, Zürich. Propped next to a large window on the mezzanine level, we have an elevated vantage point as the Badenerstrasse strip stirs below. “When we first approached local authorities,” he continued, “our proposal was to build a new piece of city—to bring together work, living and culture.” Sacchi is on the board of the Kalkbreite Co-operative, where the Houdini is located, and was the project manager during the creation and construction of what has become Zürich’s emblematic co-operative housing development. He also rents an apartment in the mixed-use complex, completed just west of the city centre in August 2014.

Kalkbreite is unique in many ways. Owned by the City of Zürich and earmarked for potential development as far back as 1978, the awkward triangular plot, which is the size of a full city block, is flanked on one side by a sunken train line and remains a functioning tram depot. Thanks to a clever design scheme by Müller Sigrist Architekten that integrates the nine-metre high depot hall and curved track into the building’s supporting frame, the site now boasts 97 affordable housing units for approximately 250 people, 5,000 square metres of retail space, offices and ateliers, as well as a publicly accessible raised plaza. More striking than the architecture, though, is the economics. The project was initiated by a grassroots collective of ten people and developed in line with an independent non-profit model that rejects speculation in favour of sustainability.

Switzerland has a long history of co-operatives. As Andreas Hofer, one of the original leaders of the co-operative housing movement, later explained to me in his office at the seminal Kraftwerk1 development, “co-operatives are in some way part of the national myth.” The country’s two major supermarket chains, for example, were founded, and continue to operate, as co-operatives, with a combined membership exceeding half the Swiss population. An early 20th-century product of the broader European labour movement, co-operatives in Switzerland soon began to provide non-market rental housing to their working-class members. In the process, they acquired large land holdings at cut-price rates on what were then the peripheries of growing cities.

In 2007, Zürich celebrated the centenary of non-profit housing construction, with the inauguration of the Mehr als Wohnen (‘more than living’) project. But today’s co-operative renaissance has its roots in a more turbulent era. Despite its image as a rich and antiseptic city of bankers, Zürich in the 1980s and 1990s underwent a period of explosive change. The Züri brännt (‘Zürich is burning’) youth riots of 1980 birthed a rebellious countercultural movement, which eventually collided with a permissive drug scene that by 1986 had become a magnet for dealers and users across Europe. The decision, in 1992, to end an ill-fated experiment with an open-air drug market at the Platzspitz ‘Needle Park’, coincided with a citywide financial crisis triggered by the collapse of an overheated real estate bubble.

These social and economic upheavals were intertwined. As Zürich transformed in the 1980s from an industrial to financial centre, investors converted homes into offices, fuelling a housing shortage. The ensuing property frenzy led prices and rents to skyrocket. Apartments were often left empty, with their owners focused on profiting from a quick resale. Hofer arrived to study architecture during the ‘hot summer’ of 1982 and remembers that affordability was already a contentious issue: “It was impossible to live in the city.” A squatting scene that had emerged around cultural spaces quickly evolved into a broader movement. “It was not a radical left-wing thing. Because the problems were so pressing—even for the middle class—there was a spirit of solidarity. If one house was destroyed, we moved collectively to the next. Even in the richest areas, quiet occupations were tolerated.”

In part because of the drug epidemic—and the violence, crime and rampant prostitution that came with it—families were fleeing the city. But the high cost and limited availability of housing was even more alarming. By 1992, Zürich’s population had shrunk to its lowest level since 1945. Graduating in 1987, Hofer recalls that he and his friends felt personally confronted. “As professionals, we thought: what are we doing? Are we going to work with the speculators to destroy our city?” The group of young architects, geographers and planners formed the Konzeptgruppe Städtebau in 1988 to explore alternative urban development strategies. Three years later, they founded the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA), and visited cities like Berlin and Amsterdam that had begun to experiment with the legalisation of squats.

“We tried to decide whether the time was ripe not only to demonstrate, but also to promote a project,” Hofer says. The crisis of 1992 had coincided with heated debates around new planning laws, which in Zürich were updated on a 20-year cycle. Sensing an opportunity, Hofer, the artist Martin Blum, and anarchist author P.M. (Hans Widmer) printed 700 copies of a small book called Kraftwerk1—Projekt für das Sulzer Escher Wyss Areal, which contained a proposal for a self-organised, sustainable living-and-working complex to be built on a former industrial site. “We didn’t have money, we didn’t have land, we didn’t have anything,” Hofer explains. “But nobody wanted to invest in Zurich. So naturally, there was a big discussion about the future of the city. In a way, we were an answer.”

Encouraged by the reaction, the newly formed association organised the KraftWerkSommer festival in 1994. More than 60 events took place in a disused former factory, including concerts and parties, but also discussions and planning sessions focused on the project and a new vision for the city. Hofer laughs: “At the end we were completely bankrupt.” But the cultural program served its purpose—the Kraftwerk1 building and housing co-operative was formed the following year. “We contacted landowners and developers and because of the crisis it was not absurd for them to talk to us.” When a planned office development fell through, the new investor was open to ideas; “They were so desperate that they saw us as their last chance.”

Completed in 2001, the Kraftwerk1 development was not the first to experiment with collective approaches. But by taking advantage of existing co-operative frameworks and partnering with leading architects, it revived and opened up a stagnant sector, and became an important model for how to finance groundbreaking projects on former industrial sites. Sixteen years later, the basic approach is now well established. At Kalkbreite, members pay a refundable fee of 1,000 CHF ($1,300), providing the start-up capital. Residents then purchase an equity ‘share’ in the form of a 26,000 CHF ($34,000) deposit (also refundable). Rents are set per square metre by amortising the cost of the land lease plus construction loan over a 62-year period. If interest rates drop, so do rents, which are currently 20 percent below market levels. In theory, once the loan is paid off rents will only have to cover ongoing maintenance and operations.

The co-operative model has even greater appeal because, unlike Australia, Switzerland is a nation of renters. In Zürich, only nine percent of the population owns their home, in a city where the median house price exceeds 1.5 million CHF ($2 million). Long-term tenancy is an attractive prospect due to the security and stability offered by a system of open-ended leases, limited power to evict, and rent controls over the lifetime of a lease. But this also creates an uneven playing field, where remaining in the same apartment for a number of years equates to a greater and greater discount on the going market rate. The other factor is supply. The Zürich housing sector has been under strain since the late 1990s, when the city and economy began to rebound. Sustained high demand is reflected in incredibly low vacancy rates.

In a referendum held in November 2011, on the back of a decade of rising rents, three quarters of the population voted in favour of a ballot measure mandating that affordable, non-profit apartments make up one third of the city’s total rental stock by the year 2050. It was perhaps this event, more than any other, which has set the scene for an upswing in co-operative-driven construction in recent years. By Zürich standards, the target is not overly ambitious. Around 27 percent of rental apartments already operate on a non-profit basis, with 20 percent managed by co-operatives and the remainder by the municipality itself. The biggest challenge is the city’s continuing building boom. As the overall residential stock expands, non-profit construction is locked in a race to outpace private development.

Kalkbreite was one of a handful of projects featured in the exhibition Together! The New Architecture of the Collective, which opened in June at the Vitra Design Museum. It appeared alongside related developments in Germany, Japan, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, South Korea and the United States. When I asked Andreas Ruby, one of the exhibition’s curators, why he thought the projects were largely clustered in central Europe and east Asia, he was blunt: “Because the United States, United Kingdom and Australia are obsessed with home ownership. Europe is much more a renter’s market, so people are more open to non-ownership-based housing models. It is telling that the only project we have from the Anglo-Saxon world is for homeless people.”

When I put the question of exportability to Hofer, he was more optimistic. “Co-operatives can be a stabilising element in any real estate market. You can approach it as a pure financial system, where future profits are collectivised, and everyone gains from falling rents.” Then came the caveat. “But you cannot export it 1:1. People visit from all over the world and see a development that has worked, where rents are cheap and people are happy. But it has to be adapted to fit the local context.” And what about the turmoil that engulfed the city three decades ago? “The housing market is inherently conservative and influenced by strong political lobbies. So a financial crisis, a social crisis—these can trigger a crucial moment of reflection. It is possible to change the system through reason, but humans often need a deep crisis to get reasonable.”

This article originally appeared in Issue 8 of Assemble Papers, ‘Metropolis.’ A big thanks to Alexis Kalagas for introducing us to the co-operative housing initiative across Zürich. All photography in this piece is by Ciro Miguel. You can read more about the Kalkbreite co-operative on their website (German only), or join the urban revolution with INURA.

[xtruss]

Immigrant Stories Are American Stories

— July 11, 2016 | Columbia Tribune

Recently I read the remarkable story of Wyoming’s most famous and beloved Muslim -- Zarif Khan, aka “Hot Tamale Louie.” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Kathryn Schulz’s article “Citizen Khan” (The New Yorker, June 6, 2016) is not only great writing; it is an extraordinary immigrant’s tale with relevance to anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant sentiments that have polarized American politics over the past year.

The subject of Schulz’s story is Zarif Khan, a Sunni Muslim born in 1891 in an Afghan village near the Khyber Pass. Seeking a better future, he left home in 1907, made his way to San Francisco via Bombay and ultimately arrived in the surprisingly cosmopolitan frontier town of Sheridan, Wyo., in 1909. The enterprising young immigrant and the new state of Wyoming were a good fit. True to Wyoming’s motto as “the Equality State,” the folks of Sheridan seemed not to give a hoot that Khan was a Muslim or that he didn’t become an American citizen until 1926.

Khan opened a small café and sold hot tamales, chili and hamburgers from the time of Buffalo Bill when President Taft was in office until the arrival of the Beatles in America during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Louie’s tamales and burgers were legendary, and Khan was beloved for his hospitality and generous contributions to the Sheridan community. In February 1926, he finally became a naturalized American citizen. But under the racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Khan did not qualify as “white.” Later that same year, his newly gained citizenship was revoked, and it wasn’t restored until 1954. Throughout the ordeal, Khan remained a good American.

He eventually married Afghan-born Fatima and fathered six children, all but the first born in America. Over the years, he sent money to improve the impoverished village he had left in 1907. When Khan was murdered in 1964 while visiting his ancestral village, he was mourned back in Sheridan and throughout the region. Those who remember Zarif Khan speak fondly of his character and “Louie’s” — an egalitarian gathering place for bankers, rodeo riders or anyone who needed a free meal during hard times.

After Khan’s death, Fatima went into the hospitality motel business. Her relatives also immigrated to Wyoming and became part of its Muslim community. Now more than 30 Khans, mostly relatives of Fatima, live and own businesses southeast of Sheridan in Gillette -- a town whose economy is tied to the energy industry and ongoing cycles of boom and bust.

Last fall, leaders in Gillette’s Muslim community established the Queresha Mosque in a converted house they had purchased near a local golf course. In December, an ex-Marine unemployed oil field mechanic named Bret Colvin told Wyoming Public Radio reporter Miles Bryan, “I don’t want Jihadis in my neighborhood.” Colvin also created a Facebook group, “Stop Islam in Gillette,” that lists 389 members. When threats to disrupt and defile the mosque were posted, the local police and the FBI got involved.

Though Khans and Colvins have been a part of Wyoming’s history for more than 100 years, a small group in Gillette sees Muslims as a threat to Wyoming’s cultural traditions, or worse. Schultz points out the irony:

Who the Khans are and where they came from and what they are doing here is a long story, and a quintessentially American one. The history of immigrants is, to a large extent, the history of this nation, though so is the pernicious practice of determining that some among us do not deserve full humanity and full citizenship. Zarif Khan was deemed insufficiently American on the basis of skin color; 90 years later, when the presence of Muslims among us had come to seem like a crisis, his descendants were deemed insufficiently American on the basis of faith.

Given the tone of today’s American political rhetoric, Zarif Khan’s story and the drama playing out in Gillette, Wyo., today are both timely and truly alarming.

🇺🇸🇵🇰

[newstfionline]

Saturday, September 25, 2021

Biden Assembles the Quad (Foreign Policy) U.S. President Joe Biden is on a mission to project an image of unity and cohesion with three of the world’s largest economies today as he hosts the leaders of Australia, India, and Japan for a meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—the Quad—at the White House. The summit, the first in-person gathering for the group since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, caps a busy few days of Asia-focused diplomacy for the White House following the agreement of the AUKUS defense pact with Australia and the United Kingdom last week. That focus is underlined by additional one-on-one meetings Biden holds today with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. The summit is expected to conclude with the announcement of several initiatives designed to deepen relations between the four countries including student exchanges alongside plans to counter China’s domination of key industries like semiconductors and 5G networks. China’s reaction to the meeting has echoed the tone it took with AUKUS. Asked about the Quad summit last week, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian decried “exclusive ‘cliques’ targeting other countries” and said the group was “doomed to fail.”

Expensive garbage cans (Mission Local) San Francisco is years into an extremely expensive process of buying new garbage cans, with July seeing the Board of Supervisors vote to spend $427,500 on 15 prototypes for the three possible models of new trash can, with a per-trashcan price tag of $12,000 to $20,000 each. At the end of the day, San Francisco plans to buy 3,300 of the cans, and while the initial goal was to buy $1,000 cans, it’s looking like they might end up paying $5,000 a can. All told, the city will have to spend $6.6 million to $16.5 million on the misbegotten project, the brainchild of a disgraced former city official facing charges of fraud and lying to a federal agent. What’s wild is there are plenty of off-the-shelf models they could have gone with, from the $3,900 Bigbelly to New York’s $632 can, Los Angeles’ $449.51 can, D.C.’s $987 can or even Portland’s $1,851 can.

Migrant camp shrinks on US border as Haitians removed (AP) Haitian migrants waited to learn their fate at a Texas border encampment whose size was dramatically diminished from the almost 15,000 who gathered there just days ago in an effort to seek humanitarian protection in the U.S. but now face expulsion. The administration recently extended protections for more than 100,000 Haitians already in the U.S.—many of whom left their homeland after its devastating 2010 earthquake—citing security concerns and social unrest in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But it doesn’t apply to new arrivals. Homeland Security said nearly 2,000 Haitians have been rapidly expelled on flights since Sunday under pandemic powers that deny people the chance to seek asylum. About 3,900 were being processed for possible return to Haiti or placement in U.S. immigration court proceedings. Others have been released in the U.S. with notices to appear in court or report to immigration authorities. Thousands have returned to Mexico. Authorities expect the camp will be empty in about two days, according to a U.S. official with direct knowledge who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Sub snub just one symptom of longtime French unease with US (AP) Liberty and Fraternity, yes. Equality, not so much. Born of a revolution fought for liberty, ties between the United States and its oldest ally, France, have long been fraternal, but they’ve also been marked by deep French unease over their equality. French concerns about being the junior partner in the relationship boiled over last week when the U.S., Britain and Australia announced a new security initiative for the Indo-Pacific, aimed at countering a rising China. The AUKUS agreement scuttled a multibillion-dollar submarine deal that France had with Australia, but, more alarmingly for the French, pointedly ignored them, reinforcing a sense of insecurity that has haunted Paris since the end of World War II. France has long bristled at what it sees as Anglo-Saxon arrogance on the global stage and has not been shy about rallying resistance to perceptions of British- and German-speaking dominance in matters ranging from commerce to conflict. Thus the latest affront, AUKUS, resulted in an explosion of ire, with the French loudly protesting and recalling their ambassadors to the U.S. and Australia while shunning the British in an overt manifestation of centuries of rivalry.

German millionaires rush assets to Switzerland ahead of election (Reuters) A potential lurch to the left in Germany’s election on Sunday is scaring millionaires into moving assets into Switzerland, bankers and tax lawyers say. If the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), hard-left Linke and environmentalist Greens come to power, the reintroduction of a wealth tax and a tightening of inheritance tax could be on the political agenda. “For the super-rich, this is red hot,” said a German-based tax lawyer with extensive Swiss operations. “Entrepreneurial families are highly alarmed.” The move shows how many rich people still see Switzerland as an attractive place to park wealth, despite its efforts to abolish its image as a billionaires’ safe haven. No country has more offshore assets than Switzerland and inflows accelerated in 2020, to the benefit of big banks such as UBS, Credit Suisse and Julius Baer. Geopolitical tensions and fears of the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic fallout made Switzerland’s political stability attractive.

Evergrande’s missed payment (Foreign Policy) Chinese property giant Evergrande appeared to miss a deadline to pay interest on part of its mammoth debt on Thursday, prompting fears that the company could soon default, causing ripple effects across the global financial system. Writing in Wednesday’s China Brief, FP’s James Palmer outlined the tricky politics at play for Chinese authorities. “The company appears to be doomed,” Palmer writes. “The question that remains is how much of the Chinese economy it will take down with it, and whether its fate is a symptom of much bigger problems.”

Korean War peace treaty “premature” (Foreign Policy) North Korea has again rejected a call for a formal end to the Korean war, which ended with an armistice agreement in 1953. South Korean President Moon Jae-in made the overture in his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, but on Friday, North Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Ri Thae Son said any talk of a peace treaty would be premature so long as “the U.S. hostile policy is not shifted.” North Korea has so far ignored U.S. negotiation efforts, although Moon speculated that the country “is still weighing options while keeping the door open for talks,” citing the relatively low-level provocations Pyongyang has tried since Biden became president.

Taliban official: Strict punishment, executions will return (AP) One of the founders of the Taliban and the chief enforcer of its harsh interpretation of Islamic law when they last ruled Afghanistan said the hard-line movement will once again carry out executions and amputations of hands, though perhaps not in public. In an interview with The Associated Press, Mullah Nooruddin Turabi dismissed outrage over the Taliban’s executions in the past, which sometimes took place in front of crowds at a stadium, and he warned the world against interfering with Afghanistan’s new rulers. “Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Turabi told The Associated Press, speaking in Kabul. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.” Since the Taliban overran Kabul on Aug. 15 and seized control of the country, Afghans and the world have been watching to see whether they will re-create their harsh rule of the late 1990s. Turabi’s comments pointed to how the group’s leaders remain entrenched in a deeply conservative, hard-line worldview, even if they are embracing technological changes, like video and mobile phones.

Putting a Disturbingly Low Price On Life (BBC, Guardian, National Army Museum, The Conversation) There has been renewed focus on civilian deaths in Afghanistan following the U.S. military’s admission that an August 29 drone strike, intended for ISIS-K fighters, instead killed 10 civilians, including seven children. According to data collected by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), a London-based charity conducting research and advocacy on the incidence and impact of global armed violence, UK forces are linked to the deaths of nearly 300 Afghan civilians. Through a series of Freedom of Information requests, AOVA was able to obtain Ministry of Defense compensation logs revealing a total of £688,000 was paid out by the UK military for incidents involving 289 deaths, among them 86 children, between 2006 and 2014. The average amount paid was £2,380.      One of the most serious incidents listed in the logs is the award of £4,233.60 to a family following the deaths of four children, who were mistakenly shot and killed in December 2009. Some payments were less than a few hundred pounds. In February 2008, one family received £104.17 for a confirmed fatality and property damage in Helmand province. The author of the research said reading the files was difficult: “The banality of the language means hundreds of tragic deaths, including dozens of children, read more like an inventory.” AOAV estimates 20,390 civilians were killed or injured by international and Afghan forces during the two-decade-long conflict. This is just one-third of the number killed by the Taliban and other insurgents. 453 British soldiers died in combat operations between 2001 and October 2014. During the entire 20-year engagement from 2001 to 2021, 2,455 U.S. service members lost their lives, including the 13 killed by ISIS-K in the Kabul airport attack August 26, 2021; 20,740 American military personnel were injured.

Hezbollah flexes its muscles in Lebanon and provides free Iranian fuel (Washington Post) Lebanon’s new government got off to an inauspicious start this week. As parliamentarians gathered to approve the cabinet lineup, the electricity went out—a common occurrence these days—and the chamber was plunged into darkness. To the rescue came Hezbollah, the militant Shiite movement designated by the United States as a terrorist organization that is also a political party here. Lawmaker Ibrahim Musawi swiftly procured two generators from the organization’s offices. Eventually, the electricity came back on and the generators were no longer needed. But the episode provided a fresh opportunity for Hezbollah to remind the Lebanese who wields real power in their steadily collapsing country. Days earlier, Hezbollah had flaunted its clout by trucking Iranian diesel fuel into Lebanon to help alleviate chronic fuel shortages that have left people without public electricity sometimes for up to 24 hours a day. The amount of fuel imported—just 33,000 tons—was meager compared with Lebanon’s vast needs and was only enough to last the generator-dependent country for a few days. But Hezbollah has milked the opportunity to portray itself as a savior, making the fuel available free to hospitals, charitable institutions, emergency services, municipalities and other institutions that have had services crippled by the lack of electricity.

Jailbreak shines light on mass incarceration of Palestinians (AP) The cinematic escape of six prisoners who tunneled out of an Israeli penitentiary earlier this month shone a light on Israel’s mass incarceration of Palestinians, one of the many bitter fruits of the conflict. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have passed through a military justice system designed for what Israel still portrays as a temporary occupation, but that is now well into its sixth decade and critics say is firmly cemented. Nearly every Palestinian has a loved one who has been locked up in that system at some point, and imprisonment is widely seen as one of the most painful aspects of life under Israeli rule. The saga of the six, who were eventually recaptured, also underscored the irreconcilable views Israelis and Palestinians hold about the prisoners and, more broadly, what constitutes legitimate resistance to occupation. Israel classifies nearly every act of opposition to its military rule as a criminal offense, while many Palestinians see those acts as resistance and those engaged in them as heroes.

[travelonlinetipsofficial]

Explore the spectacular scenery of the Wild West on this luxury train

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Explore the spectacular scenery of the Wild West on this luxury train

Photo courtesy of Rocky Mountaineer, Emotioncinema.com

The luxurious Rocky Mountaineer has long been heralded for exceptional luxury scenic train excursions through the majestic Canadian Rockies. We were one of the first to experience the launch of its first U.S. itinerary, “Rockies to the Red Rocks.”

Explore the majesty of the American Southwest from Denver to Moab (or reverse) in a luxury train, as you view ever-changing landscapes through a domed car. This 354-mile trip through the American Southwest’s most scenic natural wonders includes dramatic canyons, awe-inspiring mountain ranges, healing hot springs, sandstone cliffs and so much more.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

A smiling welcome

From the first moment you board the train, you’ll feel the warmth and genuine friendliness of the Rocky Mountaineer staff, who make it their job to cater to your every need throughout your voyage.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

Bar service at your call

You’ll enjoy an open bar across your journey on the Rocky Mountaineer, offering both a variety of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks to enjoy as you gaze out on the amazing terrains of this spectacular journey.

Photo courtesy of Tony DiBona

Gourmet meals await you

Fine dining is an important part of the Rocky Mountaineer experience. Guests are offered a choice of entrees to select from. Have dietary restrictions? Not a problem, as the talented kitchen staff can handle your request if alerted in advance.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

Explore the majesty of Arches National Park

Several side trip tours are available on the “Rockies to the Red Rocks” itinerary. One we can definitely recommend is a bus tour through the splendor of Utah’s Arches National Park.

Originally a cattle ranch in the early 20th century, it was designated a national park in 1971. Visitors come from around the world to experience the grandeur of the park, which boasts over 2,000 arch formations, 483 species of plants, 186 species of birds and 52 species of mammals.

Photo courtesy of Tony DiBona

Marvel at Delicate Arch, Arches National Park

Among the most iconic arch formation in this national park is the 52-foot-tall Delicate Arch, billed as one of the world’s most famous natural stone arches. A bus tour can take you there as part of the Rocky Mountaineer optional itinerary.

The arch is visible from a viewpoint below, but you can opt to hike the 1.5 miles of moderately difficult hiking to the top. There you will be rewarded with an unbeatable view of this majestic arch and the surrounding landscape.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

Magnificent outlook on the Colorado River

Another optional tour on the Rocky Mountaineer itinerary is a scenic drive to Dead Horse Point State Park, where you can soak in one of the most spectacular scenes in the Southwest. The view on the expanse of Canyonlands National Park, stretching to the south and the majestic Colorado River below, is truly a sight to behold – and photograph. 

Photo courtesy of Tony DiBona

Dreamy desserts

If you have a sweet tooth, you’ve come to the right place. The talented Rocky Mountaineer chefs are famous for their incredibly delicious desserts.

Photo courtesy of Tony DiBona

A classic ghost town

In the 1880s, Cisco was a railway servicing point that provided coal to the steam locomotives that plowed through this remote region just outside of Moab. Today, Cisco is a ghost town, having been abandoned in the 1970s when the interstate bypassed it. History buffs may enjoy a glimpse at what remains, for a classic look back in time.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

Savor the views along Ruby Canyon

Sit back and enjoy the golden reflections on the sandstone cliffs from your comfortable seat onboard the Rocky Mountaineer as you leave Moab and slowly make your way through Ruby Canyon. Popular for river rafting, this 25-mile portion of the Colorado River is largely inaccessible.

Watch out for the sign painted on the canyon “Utah/Colorado,” marking the border between the two states.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

Glenwood Springs: Dip into history

With the arrival of railroads in 1887, Glenwood Springs experienced a tourism revolution with an influx of visitors seeking out its healing waters and climate to rejuvenate both body and spirit. Rocky Mountaineer passengers will have the opportunity to tour this charming historic town. Overnight accommodations include the Glenwood Springs Resort, Hotel Denver and Hotel Colorado.

Photo courtesy of Tony DiBona

During your visit, you’ll have the opportunity to enjoy the healing waters of Glenwood Hot Springs, which is among the world’s largest hot springs pools. Open year-round, you can soak in naturally heated water with 15 minerals to help you re-energize and renew tired muscles.

Photo courtesy of Tony DiBona

Relax in the lounge car

Rocky Mountaineer SilverLeaf Plus passengers have access to the lounge car, where they can relax, engage in conversation or order signature drinks – all while viewing the magnificent scenery from this intimate setting.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

Close-up views of nature’s glory

Nothing beats soaking in nature’s glory from the seat of a train, especially one that can access canyons and gorges inaccessible by car. Another advantage of train travel is that you can give full attention to the landscapes surrounding you, without having to keep your eye constantly on the road.

Photo courtesy of Tony DiBona

Photography tip

It goes without saying that most travelers rely on their cell phones these days to record wonderful memories of their trips to share with friends and family. While it may seem daunting to snap pictures or create videos from a moving train, this photo tip will definitely lessen your need to hit the “delete” button upon review of your images.

Position your cell phone directly on the train window and you will discover that this simple trick eliminates glare and reflections, resulting in that perfect shot.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

Tunnel vision

As the Rocky Mountaineer approaches Denver, we enter the Moffat Tunnel, built in 1928 by Denver banker and visionary David Moffat. His dream was to have a railroad directly west from Denver cutting through the Continental Divide. You’ll pass through this historic, 6.2-mile tunnel on your voyage.

In 1979, the tunnel was designated a National Historic Engineering Landmark.

Photo courtesy of Tony DiBona

Explore Colorado’s elusive Gore Canyon

The most difficult challenge you’ll have on this trip is taking your eyes away from the window and the scenic landscapes that await you at every turn. As you enter Gore Canyon, you’ll be met with towering views on red cliffs, some 1,000 feet high, that rim this canyon along the upper Colorado River.

The canyon has no road and can only be viewed from the train and from rafting and whitewater boats. Its raging rapids make it one of the most exhilarating and dangerous river rafting venues in Colorado, and you can catch the action right from your panoramic train window.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

Big 10 curve, an engineering marvel

David Moffat didn’t stop after constructing the Moffat tunnel. He had the vision to connect Denver and Salt Lake City, which required laying tracks along a steep climb up the front range of the Colorado Rockies.

The Big 10 Curve remains an incredible engineering feat to this day, which you will experience on this historic route on your approach to Denver with the Rocky Mountaineer.

Photo courtesy of Joanne DiBona

Welcome to Denver, Colorado

In the 1860s, the discovery of gold and silver in the Rocky Mountains transformed Denver from a dusty frontier town to a cosmopolitan city. The Mile High City is known for its world-class cultural attractions, historic neighborhoods, a vibrant dining and craft brewery scene, eclectic nightclub and music venues – all within a short drive from the majestic Rocky Mountains.

Photo courtesy of Tony DiBona

A fitting end to an unforgettable journey

It seems appropriate that we would end our unforgettable train adventure at Denver’s historic Union Station, originally built in 1881. The station is now part of a mixed-use development, which includes a hotel, several restaurants and retailers, and a picturesque vintage train hall (the Great Hall a.k.a. “Denver’s Living Room”).

Denver is also one of a limited number of U.S. cities that offer very reasonable transportation to the airport via their comfortable, fast and efficient rapid transfer system you can board directly from Union Station.

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[orbemnews]

The Fed Is Betting Inflation Expectations Will Stay Controlled. It’s a Gamble. Turn on the news, scroll through Facebook, or listen to a White House briefing these days and there’s a good chance you’ll catch the Federal Reserve’s least-favorite word: Inflation. If that bubbling popular concern about prices gets too ingrained in America’s psyche, it could spell trouble for the nation’s central bank. Interest in inflation has jumped this year for both political and practical reasons. Republicans, and even some Democrats, have been warning that the government’s hefty pandemic spending could push inflation higher. And as the economy gains steam, demand is coming back faster than supply. It’s a recipe for bigger price tags for everything from airline tickets to used cars, at least temporarily. The Fed, which Congress has put in charge of controlling inflation, thinks the jump in prices this year will fade as data quirks, supply bottlenecks and a reopening-induced pop in demand work their way through the system. For now, officials see no reason to tap the brakes by slowing down large-scale bond purchases or raising interest rates, policy changes that would slacken demand as an antidote to accelerating inflation. And the Fed has big reasons to avoid overreacting: The problem in the wake of the 2007 to 2009 recession was tepid price gains that risked an economically damaging downward spiral, not fast ones. Inflation far above the central bank’s comfort level hasn’t been a feature of the economic landscape since the 1980s. But prices have stayed in control for so long partly because of muted inflation expectations — a critical factor in the Fed’s current approach. After the central bank’s campaign to choke off rapid inflation in the 1970s and 1980s, consumers and businesses learned to expect slow, steady gains year after year. Shoppers who don’t anticipate price increases may be reluctant to accept them, curbing a business’s power to raise them. But if consumers begin to anticipate faster gains, companies could regain their ability to charge more, locking in today’s temporary price bumps and calling into question the Fed’s plan to support the economy for months and even years to come. Already, there are early signs that expectations could move higher as the economic backdrop changes dramatically. A spate of survey- and market-based gauges of inflation outlooks are already quickly climbing. Were they to shoot up more than the Fed finds acceptable, it could force the Fed to react by dialing back support sooner rather than later. And if officials lift rates early and substantially to control inflation expectations, the risk is a swift return to economic slump. “One of the main tools the Fed has to control inflation and inflation expectations is — it has the ability to cause a recession,” said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard and former top Obama administration economic official. “That’s not entirely comforting.” The possibility that inflation expectations could jump too high is a different challenge than the one the Fed had been facing. It has spent recent years worrying that prices were too tepid and inflation expectations drifting uncomfortably low. Partly to keep them stable, central bankers changed their whole policy-setting approach last August. They now aim for 2 percent annual price gains on average over time, welcoming periods of faster gains. Some Fed officials — like Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago — have said they’re happy to see inflation expectations rising, taking it as a sign that the plan is working. Others have played down the risk that inflation expectations will jump too high before the economy fully heals. “It seems unlikely, frankly, that we would see inflation moving up in a persistent way that would actually move inflation expectations up, while there was still significant slack in the labor market,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said during an April 28 news conference. But price gains have suddenly become a hot topic, and one weighing on the public’s mind. Inflation chatter abounds on cable news, and especially conservative outlets. Fox Business is airing segments that discuss inflation this month at five times its normal rate, according to data from the Gdelt Project. On Fox News Channel, mentions of inflation have surged to six times the normal rate. Google searches for “inflation” have taken off, Twitter inflation hashtags have increased, and monthly price data reports have newly become front-page headlines. The surge in attention comes amid stories of computer chip shortages, gas lines, and surging lumber prices, and also as overall measures of real-world price gains are speeding up. Today in Business Updated  May 17, 2021, 12:48 p.m. ET Consumer Price Inflation surprised economists by rocketing higher in April, data released last week showed, rising by 4.2 percent. While prices were expected to climb for technical reasons, supply bottlenecks and resurgent demand combined to push the data point much higher than the 3.6 percent analysts had penciled in. Fed officials use a different but related index to define their inflation goal. Eye-popping gains are widely expected to cool down as supply catches up with demand and reopening quirks clear, but as they catch consumer attention, inflation expectations are shooting higher across a range of measures. And that poses a risk. “Price spikes caused by temporary pandemic oddities could have a more lasting impact if they raise inflation expectations substantially,” analysts at Goldman Sachs wrote in a May 16 research note. Market-based expectation measures are surging, with one that gauges where inflation will be in five years touching its highest level since 2006 last week. A consumer survey collected by the University of Michigan — and closely watched by top Fed officials — jumped in preliminary May data, rising to 4.6 percent for the next year and 3.1 percent for the next five, the highest level in a decade. The gap between short- and long-term expectations is echoed in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations. Americans’ year-ahead inflation expectations rose to the highest level since 2013 in April, but the outlook for inflation over the next three years has been much more stable. Fed policymakers have taken heart in the fact that households seem to be preparing more for a short-term pop — something central bankers have said they are willing to look past without lifting rates — than for years of superfast price gains. But they have been clear that there are limits to tolerable increases, without precisely defining what those would be. If expectations started to rise “month after month after month,” that would be concerning, Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said during an interview on May 10, before the latest Michigan data were released. She declined to put a number on what would worry her. Inflation expectations data are notoriously hard to parse, and the consumer trackers tend to be heavily influenced by gas prices. The Fed has recently been using a quarterly measure that has moved up by less. But the speed of recent adjustments has called into question how much acceleration would be a problem, signaling that people have come to accept inflation in a way that will keep actual prices rising. The inflation outlook is uncertain both because of the unusual moment — the economy has never reopened from a pandemic before — and because the way the government approaches economic policy has shifted over the past year. The Fed’s new policy approach, adopted last August, both aims for periods of higher inflation and doubles down on the central bank’s full employment goal. Practically, it means the central bank plans to leave rates low for years, and it has helped to justify continuing a huge bond-buying program that the Fed began at the start of the pandemic downturn. Those policies make money cheap to borrow, ultimately bolstering demand for goods and services and helping prices to rise. At the same time, the federal government has drastically loosened its purse strings, spending trillions of dollars to pull the economy out of the pandemic recession. Both the fiscal and the monetary response are meant to keep households economically whole through a challenging period, so there was also a risk to having less-ambitious policies. Things will most likely work out, economists have predicted. The demand boom anticipated in 2021 is unlikely to last, because consumers’ pandemic savings will eventually be exhausted. Supply issues should be resolved, though it is not clear when. Many analysts expect prices to moderate over the next year or so. But some underline that expectations are the vulnerability to watch when it comes to inflation, in case they shift before the smoke clears and prices slow their ascent. “This is something people are talking about in their daily lives, it’s not just a Washington thing,” said Michael Strain, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute. “My expectation is that expectations will remain anchored — but it’s clearly a huge risk.” Jim Tankersley contributed reporting. Source link Orbem News #Betting #controlled #expectations #Fed #Gamble #Inflation #Stay