Invisible Themepark

Category: Contemplations

  • Predicting the Date Kamala Harris Becomes President

    With Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president, a major power shift has happened in the White House. But there is also the belief that another power shift will happen within Biden’s presidency: that Joe Biden is a passthrough for Kamala Harris to become president.

    Whether Biden dies or becomes incapacitated is impossible to predict. But if Biden abdicates, my prediction (or projection) is that it will be 2 years and 17 days after his inauguration date. The “17 days” gets a two-day extension, as you’ll see at the end.

    How Will It Happen?

    Abdication. Biden is old enough that he can plausibly leave the presidency at any time.

    Death is another possibility, as it is for all of us at any moment. Biden will be 78 years old on the date of the inauguration. But he’s a hardy 78-year-old with no major outstanding health concerns.

    Many of the examples of Biden’s cognitive dissonance can be chalked up to his famously loopy style; the whole hairy legs and pony soldier bit. Other examples might be attributed to him being a campaigner whose every word and pause and misstep is weighed and balanced to the nearest gram by social media.

    Will It Happen By Year 1?

    This is too soon to happen by plan. The first year of a presidency passes fast. By the time that whirlwind First 100 Days of a Presidency are done, nearly one-third of the year is gone.

    Not within the first year.

    Can It Happen By Year 3?

    If Harris assumes the presidency before Biden completes his term, she needs to establish enough groundwork for re-election. If she takes office in 2023, that leaves little or no time before campaigning for the 2024 election.

    Not in the third year.

    Can It Happen By Year 4 (Election)?

    Why would strategizers place Harris in an uncertain position when there is a certain solution at hand? Trying to elect Harris in 2024 is uncertain; it’s all left up to the voters. Switching her out for Biden ahead of 2024 is a certain thing.

    No.

    Harris as President: February 8, 2023

    That leaves the two-year mark as the date that Kamala Harris will become president. Two full years after Biden becomes president would be January 20, 2023.

    The “17” is a number that I can’t shake, one of those psychic-reading numbers floating in my head. From a less woo-woo angle, though, it does push things a notch past January 20, 2023. It would be too strange to abdicate on the exact two-year anniversary, fodder for conspiracy theorists.

    This “17” takes us to February 6, 2023. But that’s a Monday. I see this as happening more mid-week: Wednesday.

    Kamala Harris will become president on Wednesday, February 8, 2023.

     

  • Death Pledge: Our Love Affair With Mortgages

    Be tipped off to the fact that “mort,” meaning “death,” in French, is part of the word “mortgage.” It’s like the hired killer who just happens to let slip that he’s going to come back and kill you. Mortgage means death pledge.

    The reputation of the home mortgage was burnished to a high gloss over much of the 20th century. Advertisements for home mortgage loans invariably featured warm-and-fuzzy icons: family, dogs, children. It’s all golden, beautiful, and heart-swelling. As a financial consumer, there are few acts more virtuous than taking out a home mortgage.

    Mortgages are not all bad. Mortgages are applied to things that are generally good: homes. And homeownership helps to create a tighter, more caring community. Mortgages usually carry lower interest rates than do personal property or unsecured loans.

    Kenneth A. Snowden is Professor of Economics at UNC Greensboro. In “Mortgage Banking in the United States, 1870–1940,” he delineates the path of the mortgage from farm to home.

    Mortgages in the U.S. began in the 1870s on the farm. From 1900 to 1940, the U.S. urban population increased from 40% to 56.5%. In the 1940s, the share of farm-to-home mortgages shifted, so that the majority of mortgages were now applied to the residential market. In other words, the classic home mortgage that we all know.

    Yet debt is debt, no matter how you slice it. Zillow’s United States Home Prices & Values page tells us that the average price of a house in the United States is currently $248,857. The average mortgage interest rate is 3.41% (30-year FHA fixed rate).

    When you’re finished with that sucker (or when it has finished you off), you will have paid a mind-boggling $148,948 in interest. Interest alone.

  • Let’s All Check Out Valerie Plame’s Hot Beach Body

    Search results on Google and other search engines are either organic or not. Organic means that the results are supposedly raw and unfiltered. “Not” means paid or sponsored results. Yet even those organic results aren’t so organic and natural. At the very least, Google knows who you are, so it tailors results for you.

    What is more contestable is whether Google changes results to fit its worldview. It does. Which makes this all the more interesting: Search suggestions displayed at the top of the Google Image results that, in the view of some, may be viewed as sexist and demeaning. I have noticed this for as long as Google has had this leaderboard feature–not sure what to call this secondary search, other than “firming up your search results.”

    This came about when I was reading up on former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who recently died, then found myself reading up on his ex-wife, former CIA officer and writer Valerie Plame. I was surprised to see that the first-ranked suggestion for Plame was “body.” Yet since Plame doesn’t frequent beaches, isn’t a Hollywood-type celebrity, and isn’t at all in the business of exposing flesh, anyone searching for Valerie Plame in a bikini on the beach will need to be content with this #1 image search result:

    Plame has accomplished more in her life than sitting in a bikini on the beach in Malibu–which she doesn’t do. But who knows? As a 56 year-old mother of two, Plame might be flattered that a great number–if not the majority–of searches are for “Valerie Plame body.” I know that, as a 55 year-old father of one fighting dad bod, I’d be thrilled if the world cared.

    Image-searching random names, male and female, for suggestions related to body (including bathing suit, beach, etc.) and purposely avoiding the young and the hot, yields the following.

    Body Suggestions: Appear

    • Valerie Plame: #1 for “body”
    • Lena Dunham: #1 for “body”
    • Joanna Gaines: #1 for “bathing suit,” #4 for “beach,” and #7 for “body”
    • Lauren Bacall: #5 for “bathing suit”
    • Naomi Watts: #6 for “bathing suit”
    • Amy Chua (Tiger Mom): #6 for “body”
    • Michelle Obama: #7 for “body”
    • Jon Hamm: #9 for “package” and #11 for “dad bod”
    • Daniel Craig: #11 for “beach”
    • Jed Rubenfeld (Amy Chua’s husband): #12 for “body”

    Body Suggestions Do Not Appear

    • Ruth Bader Ginsberg
    • Chip Gaines
    • Brad Pitt
    • Oprah Winfrey
    • Barack Obama
    • Liam Neeson
    • Bernie Sanders
    • Kamala Harris

    Note

    Lena Dunham’s results might be considered an exception; they might be skewed in this direction since she is a well-known anti fat-shaming advocate.

     

  • May They Forever Be Old: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Death at Age 44

    Growing old means that people you once viewed as old are now younger than you. Life is always safest when you are buffered on all sides. We buffer ourselves with family and friends. Money is a buffer. The battlefield is safest if you’re the person in the middle, not the edges. Life’s edges bring great things and they bring ruin. Those two people at the Antarctic-level extremes, those who live with the howling winds and who are nearest the gossamer border between life and death are the just-born infant and the elderly contemplating death. They are closer to each other than one might consider.

    So it is good to always have people ahead of you on that slowly-advancing conveyor belt to the grave. Barring inconvenient events like accidental death, you’ve got it made. You can watch the clock and calculate everything down to the minute.

    For most of my life, I viewed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death as being right on the money, not premature at all. By then, his powers as a fiction writer had passed and he was living in Hollywood, pounding out screenplays and treatments, and living with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who was eight years Fitzgerald’s junior. It was an awkward matchup: an alcoholic novelist of former greatness and a gossip columnist of present popularity.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940. He was 44 years old, ten years younger than me. How is this possible? It’s possible because you realize that the definition of old when you are young is continually shifting. Yet eventually this shift comes to a halt, and you’re the one at the very edge.

    Only six inches down and to the left, we learn that Ruth Slenczynska is laid up in bed:

    Ruth Slenczynska Laid Up in Bed

    With a surname like Slenczynska and a profession like pianist, one night think that she is Pole whose American tour was interrupted by appendicitis. But no, Miss Slenczynska comes from the decidedly American city of Sacramento, California, which lies at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers. At age 93, Miss Slenczynska is still very much with us, reportedly living in Manhattan and giving piano lessons.

    Cast your mind back once more, because Ruth Slenczynska is known as the last living link to legendary composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.

    Sergei Rachmaninoff

    Slenczynska remembers that:

    [Rachmaninoff] took me to the window, he said, “Look down at those trees, mimosa trees. And I want you to make a sound that has the golden color of mimosa in it.” I said, “How do you put color into a sound?” I never imagined the concept of color in a sound. I said, “Show me.” Now, that was the big advantage of being nine years old because a child just naturally asks.

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