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Obama filled a bowl with apples,Trump filled eyes with fake gold
President Barack Obama kept a large bowl of apples on the Oval Office coffee table so workers and visitors could help themselves while meetings were held. So many were eaten in the room, the bowl had to be replenished often.

President Donald Trump keeps a solid gold “artifact” with his name on it and a few gold coasters on the coffee table.

The first president to use the Oval Office was President Franklin Delano Roosevet. It was designed and built for him in 1934 for his inability to walk because of polio.

Born in Hawaii, an American state in the Pacific according to the sane, Obama was enthralled with the myth and reality of John Chapman, later called Johnny Appleseed, who for 50 years planted thousands of apple trees in the 18th and 19th centuries in the Midwest and East, many in organized orchards because in real life he was a successful nurseryman. His desire was to provide apples for the settlers.

He was rather weird because he wore a tin pot on his head which served as a hat to keep the sun out of his eyes — and used as a personal cooking and eating vessel!

He always wore “Thrift Store” clothes because he often gave people worse off his clothes. He wore shoes only in the winter, so his feet were hardened and callused.

So, Obama served the American people apples to demonstrate how he wanted to serve them politically. So, after Obama served the “common good” with his best ability, Donald Trump served himself by worshipping gold all around the Oval Office and White House.

Some of the items displayed on tables, mantles, and shelves are real gold “stuff” received as gifts and bribes. He also bought cheap décor items at Home Depot and other suppliers — along with cans of gold paint and plastered the crap around on the walls and fireplace to remind people of Versailles.
He might as well have a sign above the main entrance: “White House Mall and Mercantile with Thrift, Grift, Gilt, Bribes, Scams — Foreign and Domestic, and Pardon Sales.”

Plato proposed rich be limited to four times the wealth of poorEconomists have estimated that Elom Musk, the first trillionaire and the wealthiest man in the world to this point in history, if he transformed his wealth to $100 bills and stacked them, the stack would reach 679 miles above Planet Earth.

Put another way, his net worth is 5,000,000 times as large as the wealth of the average American family.
Musk has the usual billionaire characteristics and foibles: obscene greed,  sexual predation, malignant narcissism and total lack of empathy, sympathy and pedagogy of the average human being.

He has fathered at least 14 children by five women in his life — and perhaps many more because of his sexual addiction. He hates the LGBTQUIA+ community with a vicious passion demonstrated by saying his transgender daughter is dead. Actually, she is very alive and happy with her transformation — and hates her father with a vicious passion.

His favorite device and weapon is the wood chopper in which he tosses everything he hates. His second weapon is the chainsaw, which he starts and waves around with glee whenever the nasty spirit moves him.

Almost 2,500 years ago one of the ancients who still remain as our leading Western philosophers, Plato (428-347 BCE), was born in Greece. He was the student of Socrates, perhaps still the world’s greatest questioner, and the teacher of Aristotle, who knew a lot about important issues and is still quoted in many political arguments.

Plato also studied astronomy and mathematics with the followers of Pythagoran geometry.

Plato: “Inequality is a disease of the soul because of greed”
At the same time, Socrates used simple language to explain insatiable greed. He compared it to a leaky jug. The more you poured into it, the more the jug demanded.

Plato decided that a four-to-one ratio was the ideal split between the wealthy and the poor. This is why a “common good” society must teach that the evils of supreme greed to maintain a healthy balance of wealth for a thriving republic.

As an example of how deeply the world is in serious inequality trouble, a life preserver recovered from the site of the Titanic recently sold at auction to a wealthy person who out-bid other wealthy persons to pay $900,000 for the artifact.

Plato and other educated  Greeks called this disease pleonexia.

Plato also wrote that 4-1 was an impossible ratio to use if great inequality exists, but he encouraged politicians to do what they could, with a sense of fairness, to try to level society by shaming those with excessive fortunes. He wrote that real poverty consists not in amount of one’s property but in an increase of one’s avarice. If a person has insatiable greed, he is actually a slave to his desires.

As a child, Plato experienced an unusual political act. The major city Athens was torn apart by inequality of the rich and poor, so he heroic lawgiver canceled all of the debts of the poor “to the great chagrin of the rich.”

As he grew up in Athens, he also experienced the Peloponnesian War which was three civil wars based on class and the rich and poor. It proved to be a democratic revolution of the poor against the rich — then followed by another oligarchal revolution.

Socrates agreed that if a state had rich and poor, it would end up being two states in the same area constantly conspiring and fighting with each other. This is why I constantly refer to the United States as the Divided States of America. I admit, I stole the idea

Asia has more billionaires than any other major area on Planet Earth
The Hurun Global Rich organization has just published the list of the cities scattered around the globe with the most billionaires. It’s a fascinating list because that’s where most of the world’s problems exist, whether it is war, civil war or extreme poverty.

I’m going to screw around with the list just to make politicians think about it.

As an example, San Francisco has 86 while Moscow has 84.

Los Angeles and Bangkok have 40 each.

Palm Beach, Florida (pop. 110,000) has 24 while Tokyo (the largest city in the world at 37 million) has 31.

New York City has 146 while London has 102.

Stockholm, Sweden has 29 while Dallas, Texas has 28.

Dubai in the Middle East (population 4 m) has 24 while Seoul, South Korea (population 26 m) has 32.

OK, politicians and all committees of the United Nations, get to work and destroy the inequality in the world before it gets too hot to live on.

To make our Divided States of America politicians think a little more, five of the top seven cities with the most billionaires are Chinese with a total of 552 billionaires.

Do you think we can remain the superpower of the world?

China now has much faster super computers than we do and dominates in some AI fields.

Do you still think “All men are created equal?”
A decade ago, billionaire Warren Buffett said: “There’s class warfare, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

In 2026 the Hurun group estimated the world had more than 4,000 billionaires, with China at top with 1,110, the DSA second with about 1,000, and India third with lightly more than 300.

Billionaire Peter Thiel, the gay tech investor and creator of PayPal, is representing about 80% of our billionaires when he wrote in 2014: “Our economic world is represented by a small few that radically outstrip all rivals, a power dynamic that is the law of the universe.”

In other words, the wealthy today generally do not believe Thomas Jefferson’s idea that “All men are created equal.” 

Being a wealthy White man owning 600 slaves who did all his scut work, he probably didn’t believe it either.

The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, posted in his X that billions of humans on earth are born unequal to serve the wealthy who possess super intelligence. 

It seems the ideal that “all men are created equal” was very radical 250 years ago and is still radical today, particularly by the wealthy billionaires who can’t live and get by on $999 million.
Remember? Bernie Sanders wanted to know after a billionaire “explained” to him that billionaires contributed to the “wealth” of the poor in the entire world in providing housing, healthcare, nutritious food  and happy times for billions of the global poor!

Ken Griffin is one of the richest of the rich who govern us
I haven’t written about Ken Griffin since he took his superyacht to the Atlantic in 2019 to escape the ravages of COVID 19. 

He stayed there until the deadly virus was somewhat controlled — but after the Divided States of America had lost about a million people to the virus.

He has been busy making money every second of the last two decades. He finally gave up several hours of money-making to give an interview to Gary Sernovitzin in the June 22 New Yorker titled “Billions and Billions: The Hedge-Fund Titan Beats the Competition at Making Money — and Spending It.”

Every voter should read it. It reveals why we have homeless, sick, dying, dangerous climate change, 450 million guns, and 150,000 suicides, murders and millions of wounded a year over half a century.
Here’s how Ken spends his money. In 2019 Ken bought a four-floor penthouse near Central Park for $238 million, the most expensive home bought in the DSA.

He also has properties and homes in Aspen, Hawaii, Montana Southhampton, Saint Tropez, London, Palm Beach, Cocoanut Grove, Star Island — and four more apartments in New York City.

He has bought 27 acres on Palm Beach Island  for $450 million to build another estate for himself, perhaps the most expensive home ever built in the world. The main house will have 18,000 sq.  ft. The guest house near it will have 7,000 sq. ft.

He recently bought more land on Star Island so he could construct berths for six yachts. All of his close friends have superyachts.

He has plans for 37,000 sq. ft. of other buildings and space for pickleball and padel courts.
When asked about his real estate holdings, he responded: “It doesn’t impact my life. We’re a nation obsessed with home ownership, it’s almost good, right? We still believe in America. We want to have the American Dream. God Bless.”

If you read the article, you will discover he spends every second awake thinking how he will make and spend his next billion. He has been that way since he went to an expensive private school and an expensive Harvard. I have no idea how else he enjoys life.

Ken divorced his wife in 2015 and has not remarried. He has three children in Miami private schools.

Anne Dias, the mother of his children, made national news when she asked for a million bucks a month for child support. I guess he would have a hard time living on $999 million.

He voted for Trump.