Petulant Pelosi: A Despicable Fraud and Another Petulant Harassment. Ross Rants.

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Europe and energy. (See 1 below.)
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Pelosi is a despicable fraud and has sought to harm the nation because of her hatred of Trump and desire to play political games. (See 2 below.)

And:

Another BS harassment act from Petulant Pelosi.

Purposely passing legislation that is obviously un-constitutional takes gall and Petulant has plenty of that. (See 2a below.)
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Ross Rants. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)

Energy Paradoxes Put Europe in a Precarious Position

By Victor Davis Hanson

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world's 
largest importer of oil and natural gas.

Oil output in the North Sea and off the coast of Norway is declining, and the European Union is quietly 
looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it.

Europe itself is naturally rich in fossil fuels. It likely has more reserves of shale gas than the United
States, currently the world's largest producer of both oil and natural gas. Yet in most European
countries, horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas and oil are either illegal or face so many court
challenges and popular protests that they are neither culturally nor economically feasible.

The result is that Europe is almost entirely dependent on Russian, Middle Eastern and African sources
of energy.

The American-Iranian standoff in the Middle East, coupled with radical drop-offs in Iranian and
Venezuelan oil production, has terrified Europe -- and for understandable reasons.

The European Union has almost no ability to guarantee the delivery of critical oil and gas supplies
from the Middle East should Iran close the Strait of Hormuz or harass ships in the Persian Gulf.

Europe's only maritime security is the NATO fleet -- a synonym for the U.S. Navy.

Vladimir Putin's Russia supplies an estimated 30 percent of Europe's oil needs. In times of crisis, Putin
could exercise de facto control over the European economy.

In other words, Europe refuses to develop its own gas and oil reserves, and won't fund the necessary
military power to ensure that it can safely import energy from problematic or even hostile sources.

It's no wonder that Europe's traditional foreign policy reflects these crazy paradoxes.

Energy neediness explains why the EU was so eager to maintain the so-called "Iran deal" with the
theocracy in Tehran, and also why it was nervous about the anti-Russia hysteria that arose in the United
 States after the 2016 election.

Past European distancing from Israel reflected Europe's fear of alienating Arab oil producers in the
Middle East and North Africa.

Europeans are also uneasy about the Trump administration. They see the current U.S. government as
nationalist and unpredictable. Americans appear not so ready as in the past to enter the world's hot spots
 to ensure unimpeded commercial use of sea and air lanes for the benefit of others.

The result is a sort of European schizophrenia when it comes to America and foreign policy in general.
On one hand, the European Union resents its military dependence on Washington, while on the other it
prays for its continuance. The EU loudly promotes freedom and democracy abroad, but it is careful to
keep ties with oil-exporting Middle Eastern autocracies that are antithetical to every value Europeans
promote.

Germany agrees with its allies that Russian imperial agendas could threaten European autonomy. But
privately, Berlin reassures Putin's Russia that it wants to buy all the gas and oil that Moscow has to sell.
Germany increasingly seems far friendlier with a suspicious Russia than it is with an America that
protects it.

In sum, what ensures that Europeans have enough daily gasoline and home heating fuel are not
batteries, wind farms and solar panels -- much less loud green proselytizing. They count instead on a
mercurial Russia, an array of unstable Middle Eastern governments and an underappreciated U.S.
military.

In a logical world, Europeans would retake control of their own destiny. That re-calibration would entail
beefing up their military power, and their navies in particular.

They also would begin to frack and horizontally drill. Europeans would push ahead with more nuclear
power, hydroelectric projects and clean-coal technologies -- at least until new sources of clean energies
become viable.

Europe should applaud U.S. gas and oil development, which has upped world supplies, diversified
suppliers and lowered global prices. Europeans should especially remember that the U.S. military
keeps global commerce safe for all vulnerable importers such as themselves.

But these remedies are apparently seen in Europe as worse than the disease of oil and gas dependency.

The result is again chaos. Europe lectures about greenhouse gases while it desperately seeks supplies of
fossil fuels. Germany usually sets the tone in Europe, and it is the most hypocritical in both denouncing
and buying fossil fuels from unsavory sources.

The danger for Europe now is that the charade may soon be over.

Americans are self-sufficient in gas and oil. They have lost interest in Middle East quagmires and
petro-regimes. And they don't like patrolling the world for countries that both count on and ankle-bite
the U.S. military. Meanwhile, the more Europeans pander to oil-rich Russia, Iran and various Gulf
states, the less respect they earn in return.

It is hard to be both the world largest importer of gas and oil and the loudest critic of fossil fuels, but
Europe has managed to do it.

(C) 2020 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His
latest book is The Savior Generals from BloomsburyBooks. You can reach him by e-mailing author@
victorhanson.com.

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2) Pelosi’s Impeachment 
Offenses

The Senate should vote to acquit or convict on the evidence at hand.

The Editorial Board

House Democrats have finally vouchsafed to deliver their impeachment articles to the Senate, a month after they claimed their rushed votes were essential to save the republic. The Senate can now do better by the Constitution by holding a trial that judges President Trump without validating the partisan House process and its weak case.

Nancy Pelosi’s delay in appointing House managers further exposes how Democrats have defined impeachment down. The House hearings blocked GOP witnesses and limited cross-examination. Despite selective leaks and a pro-impeachment media, they failed to move public opinion or persuade Republicans that Mr. Trump committed impeachable offenses.

And now the Speaker admits she withheld the articles to intimidate Republicans into calling witnesses that the House wouldn’t call. “We think we accomplished in the past few weeks is that we wanted the public to see the need for witnesses, witnesses with firsthand knowledge of what happened, documentation which the president has prevented from coming to the Congress,” Mrs. Pelosi said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “Now the ball is in their court to either do that or pay a price.”

In other words, having failed to make an adequate case to remove Mr. Trump, Democrats are trying to drag out impeachment to further tarnish his reputation and mousetrap Senate Republicans running for re-election. She demands what she calls a “fair trial” after preventing a fair impeachment probe in the House. This is an abuse of the impeachment power.

Mrs. Pelosi said on the House floor Wednesday that her month delay allowed new “evidence” to emerge. But if that’s true, why did the House rush its votes before the holiday? In any case the new evidence she cites is merely more detail about what we already know. She is hyping ex post facto justification for the House failures to help Democrats retake the Senate in November.

Given all this, we can understand the impulse in some Senate quarters to dismiss the articles outright. But the trivialization of impeachment by the House shouldn’t be compounded in the Senate. The electoral politics matter but doing well by the Constitution counts for more. The Senate can do its duty with a trial by hearing the House managers and then voting to acquit Mr. Trump on grounds that these charges aren’t close to impeachable.The fundamental question is whether Mr. Trump committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” These should be defined as either exercising powers a President does not have, or violating some statute or constitutional prohibition. The former could be spending money not appropriated by Congress or quartering troops in the Capitol. The latter could be, say, lying under oath or using the IRS to punish political opponents.

In our view the facts of the Ukraine imbroglio don’t qualify as impeachable on either grounds. Mr. Trump exhibited poor judgment in unleashing Rudy Giuliani to ask Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. He did the same in undermining his own Ukraine policy by delaying the delivery of military aid.

But both efforts were resisted by his advisers and Members of Congress. The aid ultimately flowed and there was no Ukraine investigation. Mr. Trump broke no law, and other Presidents have tried to use foreign policy to serve domestic political ends. Voters may conclude these are grounds for denying Mr. Trump re-election. But if they are enough to short-circuit a presidential term, then many more Presidents will be impeached.

The second article—obstruction of Congress—is even weaker. Democrats want to oust Mr. Trump simply for defending his powers as President to have confidential discussions with his top advisers. Bill Clinton made similar privilege claims but lost in court. The House could have gone to court against Mr. Trump to see how its claims played out. But Democrats wanted to rush to meet their own arbitrary political calendar, and now they want the Senate to do what the House wouldn’t.

Democrats nonetheless say that these acts are impeachable in Mr. Trump’s case because he had a “corrupt motive,” as the House Judiciary Committee staff report puts it. But the acts are either impeachable or not. If the House can divine the motive of Presidents for foreign-policy actions and use it for impeachment, then that too is an invitation to make impeachments far more common.

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Contrary to Mrs. Pelosi, the Senate’s job now is to convict or acquit Mr. Trump based on the facts at hand, not to continue the House’s investigation so more facts can dribble out. We doubt former national security adviser John Bolton has anything shocking to disclose since this is the most porous Administration in history. He would also still be limited by Mr. Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

At this stage we don't see what good would be done by calling Senate witnesses. If Mr. Bolton is called, then Republicans may call Hunter or Joe Biden or both. This would be a circus, and it would pay too much homage to the flimsy House evidence and rigged process.

The Senate may not even need to hear from the President’s defense team. Let the House managers make their case. If a majority of Senators believe the evidence is as inadequate as we do, then repudiate this impeachment with votes to acquit on both articles.

2a) Congress Declares War, but Only the President Can Make It

The effort to tie Trump’s hands in Iran would be unconstitutional if it weren’t meaningless.

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

Democrats, joined by a few Republicans, responded to the killing of Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani by questioning the president’s authority to order that strike. But the resolution they passed last week makes a mockery of Congress’s own powers. It purportedly “directs the President to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces to engage in hostilities in or against Iran or any part of its government or military” unless Congress authorizes the use of force or an Iranian attack on the U.S. is “imminent.” But it’s styled as a nonbinding resolution. That means it doesn’t need Senate approval, but it also makes no pretense of having the force of law.

Which is just as well. Congress cannot limit the president’s constitutional authority to wage war in the way it pretends to here.

The resolution purports to restrict the president’s power to an even greater extent than the 1973 War Powers Resolution. The latter was enacted over President Richard Nixon’s veto, and every president since has regarded it as unconstitutional. It demands that the White House notify Congress anytime U.S. forces are introduced into hostilities abroad, then either obtain congressional authorization or withdraw troops within 90 days. The new resolution applies to all forms of military power, including drones and missiles, and claims to prohibit them effective immediately.

It’s true that the Constitution assigns Congress the power “to declare war.” Yet even in the 18th century, a declaration of war wasn’t required to create a state of armed conflict, governed by the laws of war. Today, such a declaration has to do with how citizens and property from belligerent and neutral states are treated, rather than the actual use of force. The last time Congress formally declared war was in 1942. Since World War II, lawmakers have approved U.S. military actions by other means, from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed President Lyndon B. Johnson to expand U.S. involvement in Vietnam, to the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.

The power to declare war is different from the power to make war, which belongs to the president in his role as “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” There are few constraints on that power when the president is defending Americans, civilian or military, against armed attack.

True, the Framers didn’t grant the president power to initiate hostilities at his pleasure. They gave Congress, not the president, the authority to raise and support armies, to create a navy, and to make rules and regulations for their governance. It’s also up to the legislative branch to define the legal framework for armed conflict: offenses against international and military law, the procedures for their prosecution, the treatment of captured enemy property and prisoners and so forth.

Congress also has the power “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia.” Military officers are subject to Senate confirmation. Congress can use its exclusive appropriation powers to limit or eliminate funding for a particular conflict—if lawmakers are prepared to take the resulting political risks. Inaction or nonbinding resolutions have no constitutional import.

Even if it passes legislation, Congress cannot dictate when and how the president exercises his power over the military forces it has provided—especially in selecting targets. Like any American, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is free to speak her mind. But her claim that the attack on Soleimani was “provocative and disproportionate” is preposterous.

Iran has been engaged in on-and-off armed conflict with the U.S. since “students” seized the embassy in Tehran in 1979. Soleimani was a uniformed member of the Iranian armed forces, and a critical player in Iran’s worldwide terror campaign. All that made him a legitimate target. The notion that Soleimani was too senior to be killed finds no support in the laws of armed conflict. Even the most senior military leaders can be targeted, as the U.S. did in 1943 when it shot down Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s plane in New Guinea.

Nor is it legally relevant, as some congressional Democrats have claimed, that killing such a high-ranking officer could heighten the danger of a wider war. Any military action has the potential to escalate hostilities, as do other exercises of presidential authority. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s imposition of an oil embargo against Japan in August 1941 arguably prompted the attack on Pearl Harbor four months later.

Under Mrs. Pelosi’s logic, virtually every major foreign-policy decision would require congressional authorization. Imagine if President John F. Kennedy had to ask lawmakers for approval during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 before subjecting Cuba to a “naval quarantine,” an act of war against Havana. The threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba was real, but it wasn’t “imminent” in the sense that Mr. Trump’s critics use that word today.

Kennedy acted to prevent a long-term, highly dangerous change in the nuclear balance of power that would have put Moscow in a position to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. with virtually no warning. But there was no reason to think an attack was planned for the immediate future.

Kennedy decided that action, while risky, would enhance deterrence, as President Trump did when he ordered the killing of Soleimani. The president deserves credit for a decision that would, at any time until recently, have been considered a triumph by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served in the White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
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3)The China deal is now a fact, better than the press and talking heads has made it out to be, and USMCA has now followed. The EU is in meetings in DC now to make a deal. The UK is ready to make a deal. Japan has made a major deal already. This is a major historic change in trade the Dems and press will not be able to counter with any credibility. They will just try like Schumer to claim Trump was taken to the cleaners. All this is happening just as the Dems want to impeach Trump. It is no coincidence of timing by the Dems. Pelosi chose the same morning as the trade deal signing to announce sending over the impeachment in order to get her press friends to talk about impeachment instead of the trade deal.  The contrast is stunning, and terribly destructive for the country.  Keep in mind, all the criticism you heard that tariffs will harm the economy which proved not to be true to any real degree, and comments that the US will never get a good deal with China,  etc. China, on the other hand, has had its worst GDP year in decades. Interestingly, Copper has risen 7% suddenly as trade tensions disappear. The Shanghai shipping index is suddenly rising. Both important indicators of new growth coming. Lighthizer should get a hero medal. Phase I does not cover several issues but it does have a real enforcement clause despite what the press and Schumer say. Trump just won the Midwest.

Holiday retail sales had a very good 4.1% increase. As time moves on, and as earnings show major beats, especially with major banks, I am getting the sense we could be in store for a better year than most anyone forecast. Q3 may be the point at which capex noticeably picks up. If things do fall into place, and if Iran does not instigate another major crisis, 3700 on the S&P is possible by year end, if Trump is reelected. A lot has to go right, but most of the major trade deals are done, Trump is very likely to get reelected, and in the end Iran knows it cannot start a shooting war, or Trump will destroy their military and economy. The big issue is, can the EU get Iran to talk seriously, and that only will happen if they get tougher and do not roll over again faced with Iranian return to enrichment. This is the main issue that will determine where the stock market goes. Most other things seem to be headed in the right direction for a good stock market this year. If several of the major Dow companies have good earnings beats like the banks had, then stock prices will not seem so out of line as PRE ratios get more in line, and there will be more up to go. We will know in three weeks where things are headed on earnings. 

Watch the ten year.  It is saying things are good and stable, and inflation is not anticipated. The Fed continues to feed cash into the Market thru its new version of QE. The fiscal deficit feeds economic growth even it builds up a future disaster. 100 million workers have a 401K. Home mortgage apps are at a record level, meaning a lot of owners and buyers are getting very low rates, which means their debt is very manageable, and they have extra cash monthly to save or spend, or pay off credit cards. Gas prices remain low, leaving cash to spend elsewhere. Their job is secure and wages are rising for low income workers. Latinos are starting new businesses at a record level. The net worth of almost all workers continues to rise rapidly. Personal consumption continues to rise at 2%, driving up GDP more than most have forecast. Look for surprises on the upside. We are in a great place economically. If you have not been all equites for the last three years you really missed the best opportunity to create wealth in your lifetime. You blew it. If you have been in annuities, you really blew it.

While the Chinese still want to dominate the world long term, I think they may have realized that cooperating on some things with the US is in their long term best interests, and war is not, now that the US has rebuilt its military. My guess is they have concluded Trump will be reelected, and it is better to  get a deal done now than after November. We may be entering a new era with China where there is more cooperation on various issues that keep the world safer and more economically strong. Whatever you may think of Trump personally, he has completely changed the relationship with the world, and geopolitics. And that is making the deep state, liberals, and the press go nuts. Everything they have said and believed for decades is proving wrong. Take note, there is still no Christmas surprise nor New Year action by Kim. Maybe he read the memo. Trump has a long history of telling other people to F off and getting away with it. That makes a lot of people and countries crazy. No American president has ever done that before in geopolitics. It is very disconcerting to foreign leaders and the DC establishment to deal with a guy who does not play by the old established diplomatic and political games rules. They have no idea what is going on and are off balance, so they attack and try to get rid of him thru Russia investigation, the dossier, and now Ukraine. .

Global sovereign debt is now $253 Trillion, 322% of world GDP. Chinese sovereign debt is 55% of its GDP but total Chinese debt at all levels is 310 % of GDP.  They have a major problem. The Chinese Belt and Road program has funded all sorts of infrastructure deals in Africa and SE Asia. Much of that debt is in default or nearly so. It is likely the Chinese intended this to happen so they could foreclose on mines, ports and other major properties to gain economic and political control. In Zambia the government is in default and as a result they have no power 2o hours a day sometimes. The Chinese banks are squeezing. This is going to get to be a serious situation in many nations in the next couple of years. The US is in no position to bail out these nations.

Paul Schmelzin, a senior executive of Bank of England, has done a study of interest rates going back to 1321. He has concluded that declining interest rates are consistent with the historic trend and we may not see high rates again other than periodic spikes. This is world rates, not just the US. He claims negative rates are not unique to today. His theory, which is backed by his data, suggests we may be in for a much longer period of low rates than everyone thinks. I don’t know, nor have I read the full study. I have to believe his work was peer reviewed by BOE so it is credible. If that turns out to be true, we may see asset prices remain higher than we otherwise might expect, and the Fed may not raise rates as much as one expect when the time comes. There is still $11 trillion of negative rate sovereign debt in the world, down from $17 trillion last year. It is interesting data, and we just do not know if seven centuries of data is a good predictor of rates in today’s world. With world inflation remaining very low, rates are not going up much for the foreseeable future. The Fed has to be careful not to raise much when the time comes next year, and causes the dollar to be over-priced. An article in the WSJ covering the same topic concluded that the central banks have essentially lost control of the impacting the economy to the extent they once did. Changes in the make up of the economy and demographics have materially changed the impact of interest rates. For example, services and software related products, healthcare, and education  and services now account for 47% of the economy vs 26% in prior periods. Manufacturing and real estate which are interest rate sensitive are now a far smaller segment of the overall economy. Baby boomers do not generally borrow. They repay debt, so a large portion of the population is interest rate insensitive other than as it impacts returns on savings. Because these returns are so low it drives more older people to investing dividend yielding stocks. Less loan demand means lower rates are more likely to prevail. Lower rates drive up asset prices including real estate and stocks.  We have seen in Japan for decades,  and more recently in the EU, negative rates have little impact on economic recovery.  This suggests that low rates will prevail in the US for maybe a few years. That is not a prediction, just an observation.

Schmelzin also tears apart Picketty’s claim that the wealth gap is growing, and that the wealth of the upper echelon is growing faster than economic growth. Picketty’s work was always more political rhetoric  than good economic data, and Scmelzin says Picketty ignored several key data sets. I have always felt Picketty was nothing more than an opportunist left winger who was hailed by the far left as a hero because he slammed capitalism, and said there has to be a wealth tax—Warren platform. Not many economists pay attention to Picketty.

Oil is back to under $59. Not good for oil field cap ex, but very good for consumers, and for keeping inflation down.  For the first time in 26 years, personal income of all major urban areas in the US had real gains in personal income. No wonder the Dems never talk about the economy in their debates. Their party line about large numbers being left behind is simply false, and is now provable with data. It seems that even CNN has thrown in the towel on beating Trump, and that suggests Bloomberg has a chance to buy the nomination. Problem is he is the super wealthy 77 year old white Jewish billionaire from NY who wants to take away guns and tell you how big your cup of soda has to be. That will not fly in large parts of the country, and the far left will choke if they have to vote for a white male billionaire 77 yr old who bought the nomination. He is not able to beat Trump.

Iran seems relatively quiet for the moment, other than threatening the EU, which is just more of the same old rhetoric. They know the EU is much more likely to fold than Trump, so  they will try to drive a wedge between us and the EU. Each day with nothing happening is a good day, as the protests ramp up, and as the EU seems to be edging closer to pressuring Iran. Several objective experts say this time the protests are different, and much more dangerous for the regime. I don’t know, but it feels different this time, and with Trump and Pompeo constantly encouraging them, opposite of Obama/ Kerry, it is likely the protests will continue for a while.  It  is likely a lot of young Iranians will get killed as this evolves. In a lot of these uprisings throughout history, the more killing that happens, the more outraged the people become, and at some point the army and police refuse to shoot.  In Iran there are large numbers of thugs who will shoot no matter what, and so it is hard to know when the tipping point happens, but at some point it is possible as sanctions cripple the entire economy. Iran could become Venezuela with millions fleeing. As the added sanctions kick in, and the Iranian economy goes into real collapse, their ability to meet protestors demands is getting to be impossible. Their ability to fund their proxies is now hitting a wall. They have never been squeezed like this before.  Of course the EU says, let’s just talk, and will still not get on board with Trump. Trudeau blames Trump for the plane shoot down. He is a young left wing fool just parroting Dem talking points instead of being outraged at Iran. If the EU really came aboard, Iran would really be crushed. Mnuchin says China is cutting its oil purchases.  More economic pressure. Nobody knows what happens next, but the Iranians know they cannot get away with more attacks on Americans, or they get blown to  bits. They are now in a box. What does the US press do- still tries to find a reason to blame Trump, and claim he is the true bad guy, and it was wrong to kill the world’s leading terrorist. There are no words to explain this lunacy. Still crickets from the Dems and US press in support of the protestors. They are still selling appeasement. Warren now claims Trump gave an investment tip to his friends alerting them about the killing and is demanding an investigation by the SEC. Sometimes you just can’t make this Sh-t up. She is really deranged. If you listen to the rhetoric from the Dems, they sound like apologists for Iran instead of American leaders. 

I am sure Pelosi staged the spectacle of the march across the capital to deliver the impeachment papers in order to get air time and divert from the China deal. Of course the press was very accommodating to her. They treated the China deal as a secondary story when it is in fact, a historic story. The GAO is an agency of the House and was told to opine by the Dems.  Its employees union donated 100% of its election contributions to Dems. How coincidental they ruled the day the impeachment began. Ignore what they say.  Parnes will be the momentary hero of the press, but he is clearly making up junk hoping to avoid prison, just like Michael Cohen. The president of Ukraine has now said he is a liar. DOJ says he is a 100% liar. Madow had been working on that Parnes interview for weeks and just waited for Pelosi to move before she released it. The press has spent far more time on Parnes than USMCA and China, in case you still think the press reports objectively. Bolton is not going to get to testify and his ploy was simply to play with Trump for firing him. Mulvaney will also not be allowed to testify. The Dems will claim cover-up all year, and that Trump is really guilty, but Trump is correct about the need to protect executive privilege. No president could ever function if his closest advisors and docs could all be publicized by the opposition in Congress. It is the same as attorney client privilege. If I have to hear Schumer droll about cover up and transparency I am going to get ill. 

Bloomberg is not going to get the nomination, but he is going to be a major factor spending over $100 million to fight Trump who he hates. He is the sole person responsible for the Dems getting the House in 2018. He personally funded 23 of the winners. He is why we have impeachment. He knows how to apply his money. The Dems railed against big money for Republicans, but between Soros and Bloomberg, they make any spending by Republican big names is kindergarten. 

A British international strategy firm predicts that as many as 40% of countries will experience uprisings or violent protests. Maybe they are right. Hong Kong will continue to protest, but China will just ignore it. 

Brick and mortar are not dead as is being proven by Target popup stores in urban areas, Young people like a store to go to for pick up  packages and for getting some basic items in the neighborhood. Not everything is delivered to the snowflakes front door due to theft. In store pick up also saves retailers a major cost of delivery. You will see more of it. That puts Walmart in very good position.

You know you are getting older, and have  reached a really good place in life when you are very happy that you woke up on this side of the grass, gotten on the tennis court, had a fun game with your buddies, and did not really care who won. There is always the disappointment that your game was not as good today as you perceive your skill level to be. It must be the wind, or the bright sun, or something other than your misperception of your true skill level.  

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