2019-20 ACT Gambling and Racing Commission Annual Report

Once again, the Calvary comes to the rescue. Americans can now heave a sigh of relief after months of having to watch their fate hang in the balance as both Democrats and Republicans sparred over stimulus. After foot-dragging and name-calling for several months, Congress decided to approve a $600 stimulus package. However, the incoming Biden administration has promised an additional $1,400 making the total of $2000 in stimulus to be received by Americans.
As expected, some of that money would find its way into the stock market. The explosion of retail trading made possible by apps such as Robinhood and Etoro has meant that more people can trade in stocks for zero or little commission. Flush with cash from the government, people are trying to the stock market to increase their money.
Based on the prevailing macro-economic conditions, financial valuation, and social trends, we have compiled a list of stocks you should be spending your $2000 stimmy on.
DraftKings
As more states become amiable towards online gambling, one of the stocks which would benefit from expected legislation would be DraftKings. The expanding legalization of digital sports betting is an emerging trend. The November election results showed voters in several states largely approved ballot measures that legalized sports betting and other gaming expansion measures.
On the revenue side, DraftKings saw a 98% year-over-year surge to $132.8 million in the latest quarter, reported on Nov. 13. In the quarter, the company raised its full-year 2020 revenue range to $540 million-$560 million, which equates to 25%-30% annual revenue growth.
DraftKings also introduced 2021 revenue guidance of $750 million to $850 million, which equates to 45% year-over-year growth using the midpoints. The resumption of major sports such as the NBA, MLB, and the NHL in the third quarter, as well as the start of the NFL season, has generated tremendous customer engagement and revenue which implies that this stock would definitely see some significant upside.
Square
2020 was a very good year for Square. The company’s share price soared above 250% last year and was one of the pandemic winners in the market. Given the company’s fundamentals, Square's stock price will repeat the type of growth it saw in 2020. The services that Square provides -- particularly its Cash App, which allows people to send and receive money without physical contact -- have become more necessary during these times of social distancing and working from home. Revenue for the Cash App was up a whopping 574% year over year in the third quarter.
The company is also invested in bitcoin having out in seed capital in acquiring bitcoin. With bitcoin estimated to cross the $40,000 mark and possibly running as far as $146,000, this would shore up the company’s reserves.
GM
One reason why investors have been wary of the EV sector is the mounting debt and huge cash burn. This has made investors question the profitability of stocks in the electric vehicle space. With more EV stocks coming through the market through SPACS, investors are already mulling the idea that this may be a bubble. However, one company that many believe to have potential in the EV space is GM. Apart from having the infrastructure necessary to build cars, the company is can leverage its brand to ensure loyalty from customers. In addition, while other EV stocks such as Tesla and NIO may be fully stretched, share prices of General Motors are cheap, plus the company is been raking in profits.
In November, GM announced it plans to invest $27 billion in EV and autonomous vehicles through 2025. GM also plans to release 30 EV models globally by 2025. For comparison, Tesla currently has exactly four EV models. Earlier this week, the company signed a deal with Microsoft for its autonomous vehicles. GM continues to execute well on its Core and Future businesses and remains one of the best-positioned companies in our coverage over the long run. The stock is a good buy for the long haul.
AMD
As the digitalization of the world continues at an astronomic pace, microchips would continue to play a more prominent role. Already, there is a shortage of chips worldwide which means demand and prices would surge. One company poised to benefit from this growing demand is AMD. The company has managed to chip away at Intel's CPU dominance thanks to its superior product line, which is based on a smaller manufacturing node, allowing it to deliver better computing performance and reduce power consumption. The use of chips would continue to grow as more people are drawn to cryptocurrency mining, online gaming, and data center storage. AMD was one of the biggest winners in2020, and the trend is expected to continue well into this year. It is also one stock that may not be affected by the rotation into value as microchips would continue to be in demand.
TSM
Taiwan Semiconductor is a dedicated foundry that manufactures semiconductors for other companies. It aims to lead in both semiconductor technology and manufacturing, providing an open collaboration platform to build enduring trust with its customers.
The core strategy of Taiwan Semiconductor is its flexible business model. TSM does not need to design its own chips and prove its performance against the competitors; it only has to provide the technology and base for producers looking to make the best and fastest chips suited to their products' needs. By maintaining high-quality manufacturing processes and offering a collaborative platform to its customers, Taiwan Semiconductor ensures that it caters to producers across the spectrum even as technology rapidly evolves.
The company has experienced strong growth: From 2015 to 2019, net revenue increased by a solid 26.9%, while net income increased 12.7%. However, as smart technology has become ever more central to lives the company's growth has begun to heat up. In Q3 2020, the company boosted its net revenue by 21.6% year over year, while net income increased by 35.9%.
ETSY
Etsy provides an online e-commerce platform where creators of arts and crafts, vintage items, and other unique goods go to sell their products. Etsy has something that many high-growth companies don't -- a profitable business model. It boasts a trailing-12-month operating margin of 16%, making this unique online marketplace a buy today even at its premium valuation. It has outmaneuvered eBay (EBAY), avoided the Amazon (AMZN) crush, and dodged competition from Overstock.com (OSTK) and Wayfair (W).
When it reported third-quarter results on Oct. 28, Etsy reported a 128% leap in revenue to $451 million, well above Wall Street estimates of $412.7 million. Adjusted earnings came in at 70 cents, vs. estimates of 57 cents. In addition, gross merchandise sales jumped 119% to $2.6 billion.
Sunpower
Interest in renewable energy sources has soared immensely and continues to rise with each passing day. Two key forces are behind this surge: Increased awareness and urgency to address climate change, and falling costs of generation using renewables. Among renewable sources, solar energy looks most promising, due to its more predictable generation pattern. Solar's share in electricity generation is expected to rise from roughly 3% currently to more than 20% by 2050. SunPower (NASDAQ: SPWR) is one stock poised to benefit from these trends.
With a huge government push, California leads the way in solar adoption. Still, only 9% of homes in California have solar installations, representing a huge untapped market. In the new homes segment, SunPower has headway, having already worked with 18 of the top 20 builders in California. The company captures more than half of California's new homes market.
Its low-cost model positions it well to compete on pricing. The company can leverage its vast customer base to sell its storage products. Moreover, its leading position in the commercial and California's new homes market provide SunPower an edge over others in these segments.
PLUG
Plug power provides hydrogen fuel cell turnkey solutions to electric mobility and stationary power markets. The company continues innovating end-to-end hydrogen fuel solutions by harnessing its unique capabilities and is the largest buyer of liquid hydrogen in North America.
Though the company has not posted any profit, many hedge funds are bullish on the stock, with analysts having high recommendations. The company’s $1.5bn deal with South Korean conglomerate SK Group into American hydrogen company has certainly drawn a lot of attention, with many investors gauging the company’s profitability.
Plug Power’s core business is providing fuel cell-powered forklifts for commercial customers. However, it has expanded to hydrogen production following its acquisition of two hydrogen companies.
These acquisitions expand the plug’s addressable market which has already exceeded $30 billion. The resulting vertical integration of the acquisitions makes Plug Power an even stronger company as can now provide the hydrogen that powers its vehicles.
This definitely allows Plug to leverage on its already existing customer base which includes some of the best companies in the country. Plug Power raised its 2024 guidance to $1.2 billion in revenue and $200 million in operating income. Shares of PLUG have risen by 111% in the last month.
Tesla
Returning to the green-energy theme, Tesla is one stock that has significant upside. The company is positioned to benefit from the clean energy drive of the Biden administration. Apart from that, Tesla is the leader in its sector and continues to increase its delivery numbers. Tesla is now the most valuable auto company in the world. It has recently surpassed Facebook (FB) by market capitalization. The stock has recently received upgrades from analysts and if the EV market continues to evolve, Tesla would continue to be in the pole position, which gives it significant market share and of course revenue.
GrowGeneration Corp.
For those looking at balance sheets and income statements, GrowGeneration Corp is one highly profitable marijuana stock to watch in 2021. The company has the largest chain of specialty hydroponic and organic garden centers in the U.S. with 36 storefront locations. In essence, the company supplies products necessary for growing cannabis and works closely with major marijuana companies in the U.S. market.
Shares of Grow Generation returned a whopping 880.98% in 2020, posting the fastest-growing quarterly results in the industry. It is expected that the company would continue its momentum this year. The shares of the company have so far risen by 20% this year.
Additionally, the company continued strategic acquisition and expansion plans in the quarter, giving GrowGen more growth potential for 2021. It was easily one of the best performing cannabis stocks for 2020. In essence, GRWG stock showed greater market stability than other pot stocks in the U.S. in 2020.
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Feathers over Arretia is an indie RPG dealing with the most serious criminal elements threatening society: smol birbs. The game takes place in the fictional city of Arretia, a modern setting with some minor fantasy elements.
HISTORY
PART I
THE FOUNDING MYTHS
All great cities of the Ancient World have foundation myths, Arretia is no different. There are competing stories that claim legitimacy as the “true” foundation myth of the city. Both have considerable academic merit and the debate has continued for centuries as to which is the “true” myth. However recent excavations on the Mount of Cages, which contains some of the most ancient remains of the old part of the city, have revealed a third story in recent years that is as popular as it is fantastic.
Myth 1 – The Aristotelian Connection
334BC
Crowned King of Macedon at age 20 with the death of his father Phillip II, Alexander consolidated power on the Greek countryside, taking on Illyria, Thebes and Athens before continuing his father’s life’s work: the invasion of Persia.
In 334 BC Alexander set foot upon the shore of Asia Minor opposite the Hellespont and claimed the entirety of it’s continent with the ceremonial thrust of a spear into the ground.
His tutor and advisor Aristotle, perhaps the smartest man alive at the time, prudently informed the young conqueror with a whisper that this moment should be commemorated for posterity as generations would want to know where it was the gods themselves acquiesced to his demands for land.
Alexander’s exact response isn’t known but he broadly let Aristotle know that if it was so important, he could do it.
So a small shrine was erected at the spot where the spear lay, consecrated by a priestess of Delphi retained with the party for such events and a plaque was written in Greek and Persian telling all who could read of its history. Aristotle himself dictated the passage and etched his own mark into the bottom with hammer and chisel.
In May 334 BC, when Alexander defeated Memnon of Rhodes in The Battle of the Granicus River, the first blow against the might of Persia, Aristotle recommended a similar monument be made. Alexander was impudent and demanded the tutor just make a sign pointing to the last shrine to save time. A slip of the lip caused that sign to read “Με αυτόν τον τρόπο στην πλάκα του Αριστοτέλη” or “This way to Aristotle’s plaque.”
Some say that this mistake made its way back to the young King who decided to make sure such a mistake could never again occur, founding innumerable cities in his own name from that day forward. Ironically, playing right into Aristotle’s original ploy to get Alexander serious about building a legacy and not just pursuing glory in vanity.
Over decades, the spear was eventually stolen and the shrine looted but the plaque remained stalwart and vivid as the day it was carved, as did the signs directing people to its location.
But “Aristotle’s plaque” became shortened to “Aristotle’s [land]” and eventually was misread as Arretia in a Roman census which stuck around to the present day.
Myth 2 – The Disgraced Commander
323 BC
Even before Alexander’s retreat from India in the final year of his life, the empire he had spent years building was already in danger of crumbling.
Disloyal generals, governors and bureaucrats of the West who once groveled at his feet were no longer cowed upon his departure to lands further and further East. Threats of rebellion simmered and the empire was already being carved up by conspirators in back rooms long before Alexander ever lay upon his deathbed.
Before the Wars of the Diadochi tore this empire asunder a dozen times, one of Alexander’s most loyal allies Antigonus I who had followed him all the way from Greece having served his father Philip II had his son Antigonus II sent in secret back to his holdings in Macedon with a fortune in gold to build support for his claim to the empire once Alexander finally died without an heir.
However his return was slow and exorbitant as the young noble caroused at every city and village on the long journey from Persia and by the time he had finally reached The Hellespont, not only was much of his fortune squandered but his own party betrayed him, throwing him off of the gangway at the last second before boarding ship which sailed towards Crete. Either bad fortune or the very wrath of the gods saw it cast to the bottom of the Aegean where the gold remains undiscovered to this day.
Learning of his son’s incompetent failure, Antigonus I had his name stricken from history and rewrote his family lineage so that Demetrius I was his issue, not Antigonus II. Historians debate how much gold was lost in this event but many agree that had the trip been successful, Antigonus I might have bought-off Ptolemy long enough to keep the empire from falling to civil war.
Yet locals still recall in vivid detail the folly of Antigonus II and took to calling the area where he was betrayed as ανόητος ηλίθιος στη νερό (silly idiot in the water) which was shortened over time to ατοςιος σερό and eventually αρτηρία or Arretia today.
Myth 3 – The First Flight
440 BC
In 1989, a small excavation at the Mount of Cages began as a joint effort by the Committee of Arretian Historical Preservation (CAHP) and the Fine Arts College of Arretia (FACA) to find relics of the city’s past succeeded and may have changed history with its discovery of a plaque far more ancient than any others before it.
On this plaque in worn Copper and Jade was the following: 𒀀𒆷𒀸𒊭𒄠𒈪𒅖𒉺𒋫𒀀𒀸𒉿𒈾𒀜𒋾𒅖 (Wanattis patas Alasammis) along the faint impression of a human foot.
Tests determined the plaque to be authentic, tracing back to the middle of the 5th Century B.C.
The human foot was determined to be that of a young woman.
One enterprising youth working on a PHD in Comparative Linguistic Studies suggested that the engraving might be Luwian Swadesh, a form of ancient Cuneiform thought to be used by the Trojans.
Translated the plaque reads: “[where from] the sea [a] woman’s foot.”
Although the subject on intense debate between Arretian, Turkish and Greek scholars, it is believed by some that this spot was where Helen of Troy first stepped on land after being abducted by Prince Paris in the time immediately before the Trojan War. This theory is buoyed due to Arretia’s proximity to the ruins of Troy and soil erosion patterns suggest that the Mount of Cages was at one time a natural jetty sticking out into the sea.
Now a Professor Emeritus of the Linguistics Department of the FACA, Dr. Merlin Bruce Codlack’s book “Beneath the Mount” maintains that the old form of Trojan gave rise to the common use of the name Arretia for the area over centuries as the spoken language was invaded by Greek cognates which turned “Alsammis” and “patas” to “Arretpatas” by the time of Alexander who adopted the name simplifying it to Arretia in the process.
PART II
ANCIENT HISTORY
The meteoric ascendancy of Greece during the time of Alexander brought prosperity to Asia Minor along with immigration at rates unheard of. Due to its strategic position in a natural harbor, a small trading community sprang up in the region which grew at an accelerated pace due the influx of trade between itself, Byzantium and Rhodes.
Ancient merchants who spoke of the glory of the Colossus as it was being built in the 3rd Century BC made mention of the cheap provisions that could be had a few days sail further along the coast at Arretia which now boasted a considerable farming community lured to the area by cheap land and fertile soil.
Migrating herds of black cattle moving along transits laid by the Hittites 1,000s of years earlier became an increasingly common site in the town. Before long, the citizens had erected crude palisades and a considerable watchtower upon what would later be known as the Mount of Cages where a band of far-sighted archer mercenaries from across the Greek world stood ever vigilant, paid in turn with generous land grants and even more gracious payment than could be found anywhere else in the Mediterranean.
PART III
PRE-ROMAN OCCUPATION
Centuries of good fortune, prosperity and mild weather turned the small town into a bustling city by the time of Rome. Generations of increasingly confident watchmen and prudent city defense planning had turned the once wooden tower into a stone monolith which through the clever use of mirrors and a coal fire was able to light the sea for miles around at night while lenses developed by Archimedes himself at Syracuse were re-engineered to make Arretian scouts unrivaled marksmen capable of sighting fleets days before they would normally be spotted – in no small part egged on by a merchant class of considerable power which gambled heavily and recklessly with commodity speculation. A common phrase at the time was “no grain ship can leave Alexandria for Rome without some Arretian knowing about it, selling and trading its cargo before the sails are even unfurled.”
All of these marvels paled in comparison to Rhodes to the South and Arretians prided themselves on being the underdog rival, resulting in a hundred fortunes lost beneath the soaring arm of the Colossus won back under Arretia’s stone monolith.
Despite most mapmakers placing Arretia firmly within the bounds of the territories of the Seleucid Empire, the only tax ever paid to that crumbling backwater was a single pure silver slug approximately 10 grams in weight paid annually by one of the many merchant families via courier addressed directly to the King of the Seleucids. When this tradition first started with the founding of the city during the days of Alexander, such a payment was a king’s ransom but over time became so much of a pittance that the families boasted decades of “taxes” were pre-paid in their basement next to the cheap wine and how droll it all seemed that some distant king truly needed the money.
In 217 BC, the Selucid King Antiochus III the Great in an attempt to revive the dying empire made war on Egypt and lost at the Battle of Raphia. Though bloodied, the king engaged in a restructuring of his lands which was mostly focused on quelling rebellions and consolidating power in the East while giving up on retaking Syria for the time being. In service to these efforts, he raised taxes and Arretia found itself the subject of an event that has been colloquially known as The Shaming of The King.
The story goes that the Seleucid King’s tax collector arrived in Arretia to find its walls (once wooden now solid stone) manned with troops in full battle regalia and the gate locked. However the side gate (known as the Eye of the Sling) was opened just enough that he might crawl through it and a small banner made of finest silk confirmed that was expected of him saying “για τους φτωχούς (for the poor)” with an arrow pointing down at it. The tax collector humbly crawled down into the gate finding it covered in animal muck and mud along the bottom. When he crossed the threshold the patriarchs of the merchant families stood proud and tall alongside strongboxes arrayed before him. When the tax collector stood up, covered in filth, the men tipped the boxes over, showering his feet in silver coins a hundred deep which sank quickly into the mud before walking silently back to their estates without a word. Tradition states that the tax collector spent days sifting through the muck as it hardened, collecting a small fortune before realizing he had no possible way to carry it back to his King in the East. Legend states that he stole a muck-rakers cart and escaped through the gate which had been left open in the meantime with a pile of silver and dung half a man high. He was eventually able to find passage back in less humiliating fashion but the message was clear: Arretia thought King Antiochus III to be a common beggar, no more.
PART IV
ROMAN INVOLVEMENT
The Vote
By the 1st Century BC Rome’s ascendancy was all but assured. While Carthage remained a valuable trade partner, its destruction in the Third Punic War half a century earlier made even the richest houses of Arretia quake with fear. In 145 BC, exactly one year after her strongest ally was burnt to the ground and her fields salted the great houses organized a plebiscite.
All adult male citizens and freemen or women who owned property were allowed to vote. Voting occurred over a three week period allowing even the most disparate of farmers or merchants out at sea an opportunity to vote.
The vote was simple: shall Arretia resist Rome, yay or nay? Nay votes were symbolized by a feather from a rooster, chosen at random in the market stalls from vendors as part of a lot system while the yay votes came from hens along similar lines. Over three weeks it is said there was not a single unplucked chicken in Anatolia. On the final day it was found that the ‘nays’ had won by a landslide and the great houses debated how best to interpret this matter.
The three richest houses proclaimed they would sign a treaty of friendship with Rome, offering them a similar deal to that offered to the now defunct Seleucid Empire.
Over the Winter a grand ceremony was planned and preparations made for the envoy.
The Landing
Two great ships were built, The Romulus of Apollo and The Remus of Februus, adorned in gold and silver respectively. Carried by sails of silk, rowed by the tallest slaves of Parthia, full of exotic spices from the Far East, captained by men who claimed to have reached the Southern-most Tip of Africa and full of a ransom fit for any three emperors combined, along with a single daughter of each great home trained in Latin, the fleet anchored off Rome’s Portus artificial harbor off the north bank of the Tiber on April 5th, 144 BC on the dawn of the Festival of Fortuna Publica, or the "luck of the people."
The young women approached the senate and handed forth reams of purple vellum explaining the offer of Arretia to the upstart hegemon. Lucius Aurelius Cotta, Counsul a the time and elected during the Fortuna Publica festival in 154 BC coincidentally, accepted the terms: Arretia would provide logistical support, technical expertise and ships to the Roman Navy 10 talents of silver annually paid to the Roman Senate Build a new Pantheon in Arretia for the Roman Gods Rome would exempt her citizens of any taxes or drafts Rome would become her protectorate should any enemies declare war on the merchant republic
The Byzantine Period
While Rome seemed unstoppable, Arretia was a haven of intellectual involvement and oligarchy as the richest men and women of the known world demanded citizenship, if only to avoid the harsh taxation of Rome at home. Soon there was a row of homes, all empty, where dozens of Arretian “citizens” “lived” but even the most fastidious bureaucrat in Italy was hopelessly lost in the ocean of paperwork Arretian civil servants produced daily.
So it was that when Constantine the Great decreed that Constantinople would be the new Capitol of the Roman Empire, the whole of Arretia held its breath. Along with his tax reform and re-issuance of the currency (debasing it with cheaper metals and forcing all Roman citizens to pay in coin for government fees and taxes), Constantine demanded Arretia triple their existing tribute until Constantinople was finished with construction of the Hagia Sophia (Megale Ekklesia or Big Church) Arretian merchants, craftsmen, builders, surveyors and brick layers descended upon the new city like a flock seagulls upon an uncovered market stall, determined to have it finished in record time.
Legend has it that for every brick laid in Constantinople, another was laid in Arretia. The old Pantheon was retrofitted behind closed gates and under grand tents. On February 15th, 360 AD during the reign of the emperor Constantius II when The Hagia Sophia was concentrated and opened to the public. While The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem had more artifacts on display, The Hagia Sophia held the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch and The Pantheon still had the largest dome in the world, The Ecclesiae Baptismate (Church of the Baptism) contained by some estimates nearly 40% of all pieces of the True Cross to exist in the world at the time, ironically making the Cross replica itself nearly 74 feet tall.
The Plague
The Plague of Justinian 541 AD killed untold millions throughout the world, originating in either Asia or Africa, the first documented reports of its involvement according to Byzantine source Procopius was in Egypt’s port of Pelusium.
The Arretians tell a different story.
In 540 AD a sailor from the Far East was found floating in the Indian Ocean 100 miles off the coast of Axum by an unknown Arretian vessel. Its captain recorded in stone tablet (as all wood and papers had dissolved in the salt water) this message. He then scuttled the vessel to the bottom of the sea to protect the world as best he could and forestall the inevitable coming devastation:
The [man] is turning black before our eyes as though some fire burns from within his groin and [armpits]. The spits the most vile [substances] and convulses in the night. I notice [on myself] the same growing painful lumps and it is my duty to stop this [plague] before my crew are infected. May God have mercy on [us].
Spies and merchants (if there ever was truly a distinction to the Arretians) reported on rumors in Pelusium of a sickness that spread like locusts.
The 15 Great Houses of Arretia held an emergency meeting that very night, un-customarially sharing all possible information on the sickness and concluded in a matter of hours that the city must survive, no matter the costs.
In the most Arretian way possible a 2 day state of emergency was declared. Any and all food stores were seized, any and all ship traffic in the harbor was seized, the bowels of all ships emptied while furious captains were silenced with bags of silver too large to carry by any one pack animal, and sent back to their port of call without explanation.
The countryside was picked clean and all foreign citizens warned to not return to the city upon pain of death. The walls were redoubled with temporary wooden facades, the gates sealed shut with leaded locks for which no key was made. From the highest aviaries to the lowest jetties, not an inch of the city went upturned. Every fishing boat was impressed and triple staffed for back-to-back shifts until the sea around Arretia was scraped clean of all marine life.
On the last night, all boats were returned to the harbor where they were dismantled, along with the harbor itself while the stone edifices of the great houses and mansions of the typically unoccupied but ostentatious ‘Roman Quarter’ were thrown into the harbor creating a temporary breakwater which was reinforced with pitch and tar until water sealed and a great fire set ablaze on the shore. Boiling water in so great a quantity bathed the city in salt, collected from windows, walls and the ground itself to preserve every scrap of meat and fish possible.
An especially hardy species of mushroom from far off Gaul of the Grooty Strain (brought over by some trader years earlier) was discovered growing underneath a porch and at once a massive team of laborers set to work retrofitting every basement, vault and catacomb into nurseries for the tiny gray intrusive species.
On the dawn of the third day Arretia had gone from a glittering example of the height of civility into a militarized, insular micro-nation where the rich and poor alike bore the filth of manual labor and the treasures of a dozen generations lay in the hands of foreign nations that had no idea why they had reversed centuries of trade policy on a whim.
Only Justinian’s spies had even a clue and they warned him that the Empire of Rome itself might do the same, a premise shouted down in the Senate a handful of times until bodies started piling up in the street, far too late to matter.
Accurate records are not possible but it is said Arretia lost a tenth of her population to starvation, rioting and disease. But not one single death from plague was ever noted.
By the time the Black Plague entered the world, Arretia had learned from the mistakes of the past and had years worth of imperishable stocked away in hidden caves with secondary and even third basements covered in edible plants that thrived in the dank, lightless environment supplying a grateful populous who still shared stories of the darkest time in her history. The Venetians claim to have invented the Quarantine but in fact, Arretia had perfected the practice while Venice was still flotsam floating in the Adriatic Sea.
PART V – THE OTTOMANS
Almost 500 years of constant war, against the Huns, Cumans, Samaritans, Sassanids, Seljuks and others on just her Eastern borders, the Byzantine Empire strained at the edges and much of Asia Minor was lost to the Turks. In 1071AD a number of very forward-thinking members of the Great Houses of Arretia sent spies along with the Roman Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes in his campaign to once again bring all of Anatolia under Roman rule. At the Battle of Manzikert on August 26, 1071AD two very important events took place:

1. The Emperor himself was captured and would be paraded throughout the Seljuk Empire in chains before ransomed at a price even the Arretians found exorbitant
2. The Arretians returned upon the fastest horses money could buy from dubious mercenary Pechenegs in the middle of the night still drunk on the glory of victory

The Great Houses were divided on whether or not to prop up an Empire that seemed on the brink of collapse who they had sunk mountains of gold and silver into in the hope that they could once again establish themselves in the hinterlands, whether they should take advantage of the weakness of Rome to declare independence and even take Constantinople while it remained unguarded by her legions or bend knee to the Turks. The matter was put to vote, however in order to maintain perfect secrecy only members of the ruling families were able to participate, those that were in the city at the time that is. By a margin of exactly 1 vote which came from what would later be described as “the desiccated corpse of a Pater familias dug up from a catacomb, adorned in sweet perfumes and operated by a series of pulleys and bellows,” Arretia switched sides.
Some say The Cross in The Ecclesiae Baptismate which had towered over pilgrims for hundreds of years was torn down that morning while other historians maintain it was buried under a nearby hill until such time as the city could be returned to its old faith safely. Whatever the case, the building was converted to a Grand Mosque and a procession left a few days later to pay homage to their new suzerain in Isfahan.
A cohort of 400 of the strongest boys Arretia had to offer arrived at the head of the caravan, to comprise the a contingent of troops that over time would come to be the Elite Janissary of the Ottoman Empire. With them came oxen laden with ten years worth of tribute in gold, and the plans for a massive highway to be built along the route to facilitate trade between the new allies.
Sultan Alp Arslan’s Grand Viser accepted the terms as dictated by the Arretians after hardly a glance at the treaty, so great was his desire to impress such a fabulously wealthy nation that came crawling on its knees without the rattle of a saber, they were essentially the same as offered the Romans before him and the Ottoman Fleet quadrupled in size with the flourish of a quill upon purple parchment.
The Arrentians, with the exception of those cohorts they sent every year and what few sailors they could not procure from elsewhere, remained circumspect of their new Ottoman masters and it is often said that even the Imam in the Grand Mosque still wore a cross under his robes. Though coffeehouses, hookah dens and other Near Eastern proprietors were already common in the city, a new flood of Turkish shops came and went as they realized that the Arretians were terribly nepotistic in their shopping patterns and the Great Houses were willing to sell storefronts with one hand while making sure no suppliers or contracts would ever make it through customs with the other. While the flag above the city changed shape and color, its people still walked through Roman style bathhouses and drank wine freely in the plazas and museums.
Over the centuries during the Siege of Malta in 1429 AD, Siege of Rhodes 1522 AD, the Second Siege of Malta in 1565 AD, and Constantinople itself in 1203 AD, 1204 AD, 1235 AD, 1236 AD, 1376 AD , 1391AD, 1394-1402AD, 1411AD, 1422 AD and finally 1453 AD, it is said the families of Arretia wept as openly as their once-bretherin Romans. There stands a plaque in the central plaza listing the name of every Arretian who died in those sieges, to the puzzlement of modern historians it seems that either those commissioning the plaque were unconcerned with accuracy or almost 10% of those three cities were comprised of Arretians. DNA testing of survivors is inconclusive but ongoing.
PART VI – MODERN HISTORY
The Ottoman Empire waned with time, eventually becoming the “Sick Man of Europe” and the West conspired for decades over who would get Arretia for their own like squabbling children looking at the will of a man on life support.
Following the conclusion of WW1 and the imposition of the Treaty of Sèvres on August 10th, 1920 Arretia was nominally under Italian rule for the first time in 100s of years.
In a drunken, semi-coherent speech in April 1923, ‘Il Duce’ Benito Mussolini (having recently succeeded in a coup the year previous and setting about dissolving any political opposition) proclaimed to an audience of fellow blackshirts that “Direct rule from Rome would begin again in Arretia by morning!”
The following morning Moussolini awoke with a hangover and a single feather on his pillow beside him. Thinking nothing of it, as he was used to errant feathers poking out of his pillow from time to time, he simply re-fluffed his own pillow to find it strangely heavy and lumpy.
Opening the case, he found it stuffed full of Italian Lire, exactly ₤ 2,250. The same amount he had mailed to his Mistress for rent that month. In a rush he grabbed a phone and had the operator connect him with her, who answered very surprised as she pointed out he himself had paid her rent via check and spent the night with her before leaving in the very early morning.
It took hours for his bank to confirm the check was genuine and his signature authentic. Moussolini called for Achille Starace, the Press Secretary of the Office of the Presidency of the Council and his brother Arnaldo Mussolini, the editor of the state-occupied Fascist newspaper Il Popolo, to shred any and all documentation of his speech the night before.
In a single night, Italian dreams of returning Arretia to its dominion vanished.
Rumor has it that Carmine Coppola heard the story from a relative who was there that night for the speech and told an impressionable Francis Ford Coppola about it in his childhood, sparking the famous horse’s head scene in 1972’s The Godfather. The Italian government has neither confirmed nor denied the connection.
Arretian pseudo-independence was celebrated by thousands of sailors between 1940 and 1943 who’s lives were protected by their ‘Eagle-eyed guides’ spotting submarines at the last second, steering unarmed convoys away from sea mines or even bad weather long range radar couldn’t pick up. During the Battle of Britain, those same guides filled in gaps left by long-range spotter balloons and rode along RAF Spitfires and P-51s when their own spotters, gunners and even pilots were too tired, wounded or shaken to keep the skies friendly.
Though not formally invited to the Yalta Conference in February, 1945, Arretian diplomats helped steer Marshall Plan funding for years, were instrumental in negotiations for the Treaty of Paris in 1951, creating the European Coal and Steel Community, were the first non-continental member of the EU in 1973, wrote almost half of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, kept the Common Currency negotiations from falling apart in 1999, bought half of all Greek Debt during the European Financial Crisis of 2008 and ironically now own half of all proven European Oil Reserves due to meddling in Brexit Negotiations just two years ago, buying North Sea drilling rights for pence on the Euro. While the EU is ruled from Brussels, most politicians would concede that most legislation is written in Arretia using Arretian ink by Arretian claws and hands alike.

This is a long review about Option Alpha. I tried to post this on Investimonials but that website was glitching so here it is on Reddit. I'm not riffing here on Option Alpha but trying to provide an unbiased review to the community. Hopefully this helps someone make a better decision before they part with their hard earned money.
A lot of people are getting into options, whether its theta gang or long directional option trading. My warning to everyone is that don't necessarily fall for option trading services/rooms specially when they don't list an accurate trade log and PnL account performance.
This review below here is more applicable to the Theta gang option traders/option sellers so if you are a option buyedirectional optional trader than this review won't apply to you.
Here is the TLDR - At the very best if you want very low single digit annual returns while taking huge risks and want to take the headache of making 100s of option trades, spend tons on trading commissions and subscription fees ($100 to $300 per month), waste time making option adjustments and then create a tax headache paying short term capital gains tax rates (your highest income tax bracket) on profits and filling out IRS forms at the end of the year then this is the service for you. Also the return on your time spent understanding option alpha and then implementing its strategies is negative.
Normally I would not write reviews unless I thought that subs were getting ripped off. Let me start of by saying that I don't think Kirk (the founder of Option Alpha) is running a scam per se, but he is basically bilking gullible subscribers who are very new to options trading and have been sold the dream about option selling as the ONLY proper way to make money in options.
This service is a total waste of time for the individual investor. The last few years the returns have been flat after all these trades (basically up a few % or down a few %). This is before accounting for option commissions, and taxes (selling options ie. premiums are always taxed as short term capital gains at your highest income tax rate so you get no benefit vs holding stocks or buying options over 1 year) and subscription fees. Accounting for all this basically makes this a negative return. In fact I think it is better to buy a balanced Vanguard index fund or VTI etf and just Dollar cost Average into that every month vs using this system. Atleast with VTI you can expect to make 6% over the long term. The simplest strategy which is to buy VTI etf will beat Option Alpha over the long term with fewer headaches and invested time and energy.
Let start of with the good stuff first. The option education videos are free, extremely well made so that even total beginners can understand option selling. Kirk is a gifted teacher and explains everything in simple language. If you are a complete beginner than these videos will help. Things I learnt that are useful - adjusting losing positions and how to beta hedge. However they don't get deep into the intricacies of options that professionals worry about.
The education is totally biased towards option selling strategies. They try to sell the Option Alpha system (where you are a net seller of options) to the subscriber as basically running a an insurance business or creating your personal casino where you make 100s of trades ever year to eke out a small premium for taking on the risk. They then go on to basically sells you the system as being better than buying and holding ETFs or stocks over the long run and - how option buying doesn't work 80% of the time and how buying and holding stocks is riskier than selling option premiums. This is all good in theory. But in practice it reminds me of this quote - "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.". In reality, what they don't talk about is the fact that the success of option selling relies on harvesting variance premium in the option markets (historically around 3% or so). Unfortunately in recent years the variance premium has at times declined to negative levels. The sign for VRP can flip positive to negative for different underlyings and is not always positive every single month of the year. So making money with this system is basically entirely dependent on luck. Atleast the stock market tends to grow over the long term with earnings growth and GDP growth, but there is no guarantee that this will be the case with variance premiums which could be permanently arbitraged away by option sellers and brain dead option selling strategies such as Option Alpha. Option selling has to be done smartly or not at all.
The basic system is this:
Naively diversify by selling wide Iron butterflys/condors (this is the bread and butter trade about 80 to 90% of all trades) or credit spreads (about 10% to 20%) on these sector ETFs - SPY, TLT, XOP, XRT, EEM, OIH, FXI, XLP, XBI, GLD etc. Sell options about 30 to 45 days to expiration. I say naively because whenever markets crash everything goes down together so infact naive diversification is really di-worsification. Never have more than 5% of risk in any one ETF. They like to start out trades with a 1% to 2% risk per position and then scale in as adjustments are and will be needed. Good luck following this strategy if you have a small account as you will be taking greater risk. Then do this every single month or so without regard to broader macro conditions or IV levels or trend. Doesn't matter what EEM is doing or FXI is doing. Does Option Alpha look at price action, fundamental analysis, news flow, macroeconomics etc or anything else at the individual ETF level? No it doesn't appear they do. If and when positions move against you (which they regularly do) then waste time adjusting your positions and tracking credits to prove to yourself that you did make a tiny profit. They try to center the strikes as the underlying moves with adjustments and additional scaling in positions but honestly it doesn't work over the long term.
At the end of the year after 100s of trades (6 to 10 etfs x 4 (assume butterfly or condor) x 2 (opening and closing) x 10 (every 35 to 45 days) = assume 600 trades per year not including the adjustments and additional scale ins that will be needed), subscription fees (between $100 to $300 per month), broker commissions, pay short term capital gains and then waste additional time filling out dozens of pages of IRS forms with the 100s of option trades all to make a small single digit low annual return if lucky. The thing to understand is this, with option selling you generally risk $3 to $4 for every $1 of gains. So you can have 3 winning trades and then the 4th one will blow up profits. To counter this, they will show you how to make adjusting trades (only one side of the butterfly is underwater, so the whole position can be adjusted) or scale in so that strikes are centered around current underlying price. Even after adjusting which is not a guarantee of profits, the overall the results are just extremely lame. If you refuse to adjust positions it will be impossible to make any profit with this system. This is not to say other option selling strategies don't work (there are some that can work but they require a true edge) but its just that Option Alpha doesn't work. The free Theta gang on reddit or discord probably does a better job than OA.
As such there is nothing even remotely proprietary about Option Alpha. There is no edge. Because there is always a risk that all positions can simultaneously lose money in a crash as all assets trade downward, so Option Alpha advises that only use 40-50% of the account value for option selling and keep the rest as cash as a hedge against blowing the account up. Recently they advised having a 1% long VXX calls positions to hedge black swans/market crashes which I think is an improvement over the system of past few years.
I personally think that selling this system to gullible retail subscribers is extremely irresponsible. You can argue that option selling has a place within pension funds or other entities that have a lot of money who need yield income tax free and who have a proprietary system with an edge that can makes better risk adjusted profits but Option Alpha is basically gambling and praying for profits. If selling options is so good, how come I have not heard of a single Hedge fund that only does this with 100% of their capital? There were some crooks in Florida who blew up one fund that was selling energy options (you can look up Optionseller.com on google - website is defunct now). I'm not saying Option Alpha is pursuing similarly risky strategy since these are all defined risk trades and they do ask to hold 50% in cash. But it is conceivable that you can lose 100% of the amount you have put into selling options - that is the other 50% of the portfolio under a true black swan scenario. Maybe making adjustments etc will save the portfolio but its not really a guarantee. Btw the stock market can never goto zero. We can get another market crash and yes it could take a long time to recover but it can never goto zero (the businesses underlying these stocks have real value unlike options/derivatives). With stocks you have time to sell even with a 10% gap down overnight. Options will get blown up much faster.
This strategy is not at all the best way for the individual investor to invest. The only market where this system works is even Implied volatility is high ( so that you get extra compensation for selling time decay) and the market moves sideways. However in practice the market is either steadily marching higher and IV is low, or IV is so high (that you get a decent premium) but the market is rapidly moving in either direction so you will endlessly keep adjusting positions or keep taking losses. Options are complicated instruments and if you don't understand vol skew, statistics and probability, option greeks properly and can't backtest with good data than it is literally gambling and praying for profits. There is a real risk that naive option selling can blow up accounts. Option selling only makes sense in certain market regimes and only when done smartly. To tell retail traders that they should trade this way all the time for the rest of their life is extremely irresponsible.
Here is the thing. What I'm mad about is that Option Alpha has spent all this time very aggressively marketing this system and spent the last few years trying to develop an autotrading platform. It has been recently launched in Beta mode if you upgrade to lifetime membership for $2000-$2500. My hope is that the autotrading system will work and not blowup accounts due to software glitches like the Knight Capital software glitch fiasco in 2010.
I think they know these strategies don't work. The website claims that there have been 200k people who have signed up. I think at any given time they have 1000s of subscribers who come and go. If we assume 4000 subscribers per month at avg of $100 per month is $400k per month or $4.8 million per year. This is better than a lot of smaller hedgefund managers. For Kirk's own account, it appears that he trades a $300k portfolio, but his main source of income is selling Option Alpha subscriptions and doing real estate investing. How come his account is not millions of dollars now after almost a decade? But still around 300k? The simple reason is this doesn't work and instead he invests his income from Option Alpha subscriptions into other things/real estate investing etc.
The founder of OA has institutional experience trading and as such I would have expected him to focus on improving trading performance, creating new strategies, backtesting etc, interacting with members, rather than selling snake oil promises.
There isn't enough skin in the game. Option Alpha has forums where members can talk to each other and there are probably some legitimate strategies there (none are based on the Option Alpha) developed by members. But the OA founder has been completely AWOL last few years. Zero participation. Zero time trying to refine or improve his strategies on Option Alpha. They could have hired professional optional traders or even subscribed to institutional level stuff to help them out but no they have been focused entirely on making money. There are other free blogs and similar option newsletter services which also trade condors and butterflys which have shown much much superior results, however OA refuses to adapt their strategies or spend any time engaging with members. The focus has been on scaling the business and selling promises about the new autotrading system.
I think the founder has realized that this Option alpha is going nowhere and so has decided to pivot into autotrading. Gullible retail investors have been financing the build out of this service it seems.
Want another proof of what I'm saying? You can sign up for free membership and see the performance section. First the performance section does not tell you the performance from one year to the next. The only thing you can see is the meaningless numbers such as avg profit and loss on different option selling spreads and win rate. It is impossible to reconstruct PnL performance from these metrics. I think this is very misleading. Even Motley Fool shows their performance for their $100 per year newsletter. Almost any good newsletter and or trading/membership service shares performance/trade log for the past few years. If this is just about education then charge only for educational videos and don't have trade alerts and monthly membership/weekly elite calls etc.
Another note on some of the enhancements they up-sell on the website. The tools are almost totally useless. The backtester sucks. The scanner sucks. The forum is basically impossible to use properly.
The research reports (each priced at $400) are not worth the money.
Let me summarize the technical indicator report - use commonly used oscillators that everyone knows already at a medium term time-frame and buy at oversold condition and sell at overbought condition. I mean C'mon everyone already knows this. Does Option Alpha appear to use this research - nope!
The profit matrix report will tell you that there is no limited-loss option selling strategy that produces a CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) above a low single digit return. Not a single one. This is not surprising since the variance premium per academic research is around 3 to 4%. Shouldn't this be disclosed to regular subscribers instead of asking them to pay another $400 bucks?
Covered calls research report - sell short dated deep OTM calls. Viola! There is no actionable information in these reports. These reports are a few years old and the information is not updated. The reasonable price for such reports should have been $20-$30 not $400.
You can even find REITs or dividend paying stocks that have a higher yield than than option alpha strategies.
In fact I'm not even confident if Option Alpha has used proper back testing methodology and not made mistakes. You will learn more spending this money on a proper backtesting website that professionals use. Even Seeking Alpha and Reddit have better options strategies articles for free. A lot of academic research is available for free. Tasty Trade has similar trade ideas for free. The bottom-line is that Kirk is not a skilled trader. And has made no effort to improve or adapt to the market environment the last few years. All effort has gone into growing the business and up-selling membership with very aggressive sales tactics. He is a master salesman so be careful. Its really the case of the blind leading the blind.
Just blindly sell options every month without any edge and charge big money for it without any real view about the direction of the underlying or IV.
Just to be clear I do not have unrealistic expectations from a newsletter service/system. If I'm subscribing to an expensive service than I expect that I should have a reasonable chance to make greater than 10% on my account annually. I'm not expecting 100% nor even 20% - just a reasonable 10% to 20%.
The best thing about OA is the free educational videos and the podcast. Use that and skip the paid services. Time will tell if the new autotrading pivot will work well and I would suggest waiting until it is proven to work.

FEATHERS OVER ARRETIA
WORLD BUILDING
Feathers over Arretia is an indie RPG dealing with the most serious criminal elements threatening society: smol birbs. The game takes place in the fictional city of Arretia, a modern setting with some minor fantasy elements.
To read the pitch see:
https://www.reddit.com/illegallysmolbirbs/comments/k0p19n/thanksgiving_announcement_the_illegallysmolbirbs/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=illegallysmolbirbs&utm_content=t3_kexuy4
To read the first dev diary where I go into the characters you can play as see:
https://reddit.com/illegallysmolbirbs/comments/kexuy4/christmas_announcement_dev_diary_1_the_dream_team/
HISTORY
PART I
THE FOUNDING MYTHS
All great cities of the Ancient World have foundation myths, Arretia is no different. There are competing stories that claim legitimacy as the “true” foundation myth of the city. Both have considerable academic merit and the debate has continued for centuries as to which is the “true” myth. However recent excavations on the Mount of Cages, which contains some of the most ancient remains of the old part of the city, have revealed a third story in recent years that is as popular as it is fantastic.
Myth 1 – The Aristotelian Connection
334BC
Crowned King of Macedon at age 20 with the death of his father Phillip II, Alexander consolidated power on the Greek countryside, taking on Illyria, Thebes and Athens before continuing his father’s life’s work: the invasion of Persia.
In 334 BC Alexander set foot upon the shore of Asia Minor opposite the Hellespont and claimed the entirety of it’s continent with the ceremonial thrust of a spear into the ground.
His tutor and advisor Aristotle, perhaps the smartest man alive at the time, prudently informed the young conqueror with a whisper that this moment should be commemorated for posterity as generations would want to know where it was the gods themselves acquiesced to his demands for land.
Alexander’s exact response isn’t known but he broadly let Aristotle know that if it was so important, he could do it.
So a small shrine was erected at the spot where the spear lay, consecrated by a priestess of Delphi retained with the party for such events and a plaque was written in Greek and Persian telling all who could read of its history. Aristotle himself dictated the passage and etched his own mark into the bottom with hammer and chisel.
In May 334 BC, when Alexander defeated Memnon of Rhodes in The Battle of the Granicus River, the first blow against the might of Persia, Aristotle recommended a similar monument be made. Alexander was impudent and demanded the tutor just make a sign pointing to the last shrine to save time. A slip of the lip caused that sign to read “Με αυτόν τον τρόπο στην πλάκα του Αριστοτέλη” or “This way to Aristotle’s plaque.”
Some say that this mistake made its way back to the young King who decided to make sure such a mistake could never again occur, founding innumerable cities in his own name from that day forward. Ironically, playing right into Aristotle’s original ploy to get Alexander serious about building a legacy and not just pursuing glory in vanity.
Over decades, the spear was eventually stolen and the shrine looted but the plaque remained stalwart and vivid as the day it was carved, as did the signs directing people to its location.
But “Aristotle’s plaque” became shortened to “Aristotle’s [land]” and eventually was misread as Arretia in a Roman census which stuck around to the present day.
Myth 2 – The Disgraced Commander
323 BC
Even before Alexander’s retreat from India in the final year of his life, the empire he had spent years building was already in danger of crumbling.
Disloyal generals, governors and bureaucrats of the West who once groveled at his feet were no longer cowed upon his departure to lands further and further East. Threats of rebellion simmered and the empire was already being carved up by conspirators in back rooms long before Alexander ever lay upon his deathbed.
Before the Wars of the Diadochi tore this empire asunder a dozen times, one of Alexander’s most loyal allies Antigonus I who had followed him all the way from Greece having served his father Philip II had his son Antigonus II sent in secret back to his holdings in Macedon with a fortune in gold to build support for his claim to the empire once Alexander finally died without an heir.
However his return was slow and exorbitant as the young noble caroused at every city and village on the long journey from Persia and by the time he had finally reached The Hellespont, not only was much of his fortune squandered but his own party betrayed him, throwing him off of the gangway at the last second before boarding ship which sailed towards Crete. Either bad fortune or the very wrath of the gods saw it cast to the bottom of the Aegean where the gold remains undiscovered to this day.
Learning of his son’s incompetent failure, Antigonus I had his name stricken from history and rewrote his family lineage so that Demetrius I was his issue, not Antigonus II. Historians debate how much gold was lost in this event but many agree that had the trip been successful, Antigonus I might have bought-off Ptolemy long enough to keep the empire from falling to civil war.
Yet locals still recall in vivid detail the folly of Antigonus II and took to calling the area where he was betrayed as ανόητος ηλίθιος στη νερό (silly idiot in the water) which was shortened over time to ατοςιος σερό and eventually αρτηρία or Arretia today.
Myth 3 – The First Flight
440 BC
In 1989, a small excavation at the Mount of Cages began as a joint effort by the Committee of Arretian Historical Preservation (CAHP) and the Fine Arts College of Arretia (FACA) to find relics of the city’s past succeeded and may have changed history with its discovery of a plaque far more ancient than any others before it.
On this plaque in worn Copper and Jade was the following: 𒀀𒆷𒀸𒊭𒄠𒈪𒅖𒉺𒋫𒀀𒀸𒉿𒈾𒀜𒋾𒅖 (Wanattis patas Alasammis) along the faint impression of a human foot.
Tests determined the plaque to be authentic, tracing back to the middle of the 5th Century B.C.
The human foot was determined to be that of a young woman.
One enterprising youth working on a PHD in Comparative Linguistic Studies suggested that the engraving might be Luwian Swadesh, a form of ancient Cuneiform thought to be used by the Trojans.
Translated the plaque reads: “[where from] the sea [a] woman’s foot.”
Although the subject on intense debate between Arretian, Turkish and Greek scholars, it is believed by some that this spot was where Helen of Troy first stepped on land after being abducted by Prince Paris in the time immediately before the Trojan War. This theory is buoyed due to Arretia’s proximity to the ruins of Troy and soil erosion patterns suggest that the Mount of Cages was at one time a natural jetty sticking out into the sea.
Now a Professor Emeritus of the Linguistics Department of the FACA, Dr. Merlin Bruce Codlack’s book “Beneath the Mount” maintains that the old form of Trojan gave rise to the common use of the name Arretia for the area over centuries as the spoken language was invaded by Greek cognates which turned “Alsammis” and “patas” to “Arretpatas” by the time of Alexander who adopted the name simplifying it to Arretia in the process.
PART II
ANCIENT HISTORY
The meteoric ascendancy of Greece during the time of Alexander brought prosperity to Asia Minor along with immigration at rates unheard of. Due to its strategic position in a natural harbor, a small trading community sprang up in the region which grew at an accelerated pace due the influx of trade between itself, Byzantium and Rhodes.
Ancient merchants who spoke of the glory of the Colossus as it was being built in the 3rd Century BC made mention of the cheap provisions that could be had a few days sail further along the coast at Arretia which now boasted a considerable farming community lured to the area by cheap land and fertile soil.
Migrating herds of black cattle moving along transits laid by the Hittites 1,000s of years earlier became an increasingly common site in the town. Before long, the citizens had erected crude palisades and a considerable watchtower upon what would later be known as the Mount of Cages where a band of far-sighted archer mercenaries from across the Greek world stood ever vigilant, paid in turn with generous land grants and even more gracious payment than could be found anywhere else in the Mediterranean.
PART III
PRE-ROMAN OCCUPATION
Centuries of good fortune, prosperity and mild weather turned the small town into a bustling city by the time of Rome. Generations of increasingly confident watchmen and prudent city defense planning had turned the once wooden tower into a stone monolith which through the clever use of mirrors and a coal fire was able to light the sea for miles around at night while lenses developed by Archimedes himself at Syracuse were re-engineered to make Arretian scouts unrivaled marksmen capable of sighting fleets days before they would normally be spotted – in no small part egged on by a merchant class of considerable power which gambled heavily and recklessly with commodity speculation. A common phrase at the time was “no grain ship can leave Alexandria for Rome without some Arretian knowing about it, selling and trading its cargo before the sails are even unfurled.”
All of these marvels paled in comparison to Rhodes to the South and Arretians prided themselves on being the underdog rival, resulting in a hundred fortunes lost beneath the soaring arm of the Colossus won back under Arretia’s stone monolith.
Despite most mapmakers placing Arretia firmly within the bounds of the territories of the Seleucid Empire, the only tax ever paid to that crumbling backwater was a single pure silver slug approximately 10 grams in weight paid annually by one of the many merchant families via courier addressed directly to the King of the Seleucids. When this tradition first started with the founding of the city during the days of Alexander, such a payment was a king’s ransom but over time became so much of a pittance that the families boasted decades of “taxes” were pre-paid in their basement next to the cheap wine and how droll it all seemed that some distant king truly needed the money.
In 217 BC, the Selucid King Antiochus III the Great in an attempt to revive the dying empire made war on Egypt and lost at the Battle of Raphia. Though bloodied, the king engaged in a restructuring of his lands which was mostly focused on quelling rebellions and consolidating power in the East while giving up on retaking Syria for the time being. In service to these efforts, he raised taxes and Arretia found itself the subject of an event that has been colloquially known as The Shaming of The King.
The story goes that the Seleucid King’s tax collector arrived in Arretia to find its walls (once wooden now solid stone) manned with troops in full battle regalia and the gate locked. However the side gate (known as the Eye of the Sling) was opened just enough that he might crawl through it and a small banner made of finest silk confirmed that was expected of him saying “για τους φτωχούς (for the poor)” with an arrow pointing down at it. The tax collector humbly crawled down into the gate finding it covered in animal muck and mud along the bottom. When he crossed the threshold the patriarchs of the merchant families stood proud and tall alongside strongboxes arrayed before him. When the tax collector stood up, covered in filth, the men tipped the boxes over, showering his feet in silver coins a hundred deep which sank quickly into the mud before walking silently back to their estates without a word. Tradition states that the tax collector spent days sifting through the muck as it hardened, collecting a small fortune before realizing he had no possible way to carry it back to his King in the East. Legend states that he stole a muck-rakers cart and escaped through the gate which had been left open in the meantime with a pile of silver and dung half a man high. He was eventually able to find passage back in less humiliating fashion but the message was clear: Arretia thought King Antiochus III to be a common beggar, no more.
PART IV
ROMAN INVOLVEMENT
The Vote
By the 1st Century BC Rome’s ascendancy was all but assured. While Carthage remained a valuable trade partner, its destruction in the Third Punic War half a century earlier made even the richest houses of Arretia quake with fear. In 145 BC, exactly one year after her strongest ally was burnt to the ground and her fields salted the great houses organized a plebiscite.
All adult male citizens and freemen or women who owned property were allowed to vote. Voting occurred over a three week period allowing even the most disparate of farmers or merchants out at sea an opportunity to vote.
The vote was simple: shall Arretia resist Rome, yay or nay? Nay votes were symbolized by a feather from a rooster, chosen at random in the market stalls from vendors as part of a lot system while the yay votes came from hens along similar lines. Over three weeks it is said there was not a single unplucked chicken in Anatolia. On the final day it was found that the ‘nays’ had won by a landslide and the great houses debated how best to interpret this matter.
The three richest houses proclaimed they would sign a treaty of friendship with Rome, offering them a similar deal to that offered to the now defunct Seleucid Empire.
Over the Winter a grand ceremony was planned and preparations made for the envoy.
The Landing
Two great ships were built, The Romulus of Apollo and The Remus of Februus, adorned in gold and silver respectively. Carried by sails of silk, rowed by the tallest slaves of Parthia, full of exotic spices from the Far East, captained by men who claimed to have reached the Southern-most Tip of Africa and full of a ransom fit for any three emperors combined, along with a single daughter of each great home trained in Latin, the fleet anchored off Rome’s Portus artificial harbor off the north bank of the Tiber on April 5th, 144 BC on the dawn of the Festival of Fortuna Publica, or the "luck of the people."
The young women approached the senate and handed forth reams of purple vellum explaining the offer of Arretia to the upstart hegemon. Lucius Aurelius Cotta, Counsul a the time and elected during the Fortuna Publica festival in 154 BC coincidentally, accepted the terms: Arretia would provide logistical support, technical expertise and ships to the Roman Navy 10 talents of silver annually paid to the Roman Senate Build a new Pantheon in Arretia for the Roman Gods Rome would exempt her citizens of any taxes or drafts Rome would become her protectorate should any enemies declare war on the merchant republic
The Byzantine Period
While Rome seemed unstoppable, Arretia was a haven of intellectual involvement and oligarchy as the richest men and women of the known world demanded citizenship, if only to avoid the harsh taxation of Rome at home. Soon there was a row of homes, all empty, where dozens of Arretian “citizens” “lived” but even the most fastidious bureaucrat in Italy was hopelessly lost in the ocean of paperwork Arretian civil servants produced daily.
So it was that when Constantine the Great decreed that Constantinople would be the new Capitol of the Roman Empire, the whole of Arretia held its breath. Along with his tax reform and re-issuance of the currency (debasing it with cheaper metals and forcing all Roman citizens to pay in coin for government fees and taxes), Constantine demanded Arretia triple their existing tribute until Constantinople was finished with construction of the Hagia Sophia (Megale Ekklesia or Big Church) Arretian merchants, craftsmen, builders, surveyors and brick layers descended upon the new city like a flock seagulls upon an uncovered market stall, determined to have it finished in record time.
Legend has it that for every brick laid in Constantinople, another was laid in Arretia. The old Pantheon was retrofitted behind closed gates and under grand tents. On February 15th, 360 AD during the reign of the emperor Constantius II when The Hagia Sophia was concentrated and opened to the public. While The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem had more artifacts on display, The Hagia Sophia held the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch and The Pantheon still had the largest dome in the world, The Ecclesiae Baptismate (Church of the Baptism) contained by some estimates nearly 40% of all pieces of the True Cross to exist in the world at the time, ironically making the Cross replica itself nearly 74 feet tall.
The Plague
The Plague of Justinian 541 AD killed untold millions throughout the world, originating in either Asia or Africa, the first documented reports of its involvement according to Byzantine source Procopius was in Egypt’s port of Pelusium.
The Arretians tell a different story.
In 540 AD a sailor from the Far East was found floating in the Indian Ocean 100 miles off the coast of Axum by an unknown Arretian vessel. Its captain recorded in stone tablet (as all wood and papers had dissolved in the salt water) this message. He then scuttled the vessel to the bottom of the sea to protect the world as best he could and forestall the inevitable coming devastation:

The [man] is turning black before our eyes as though some fire burns from within his groin and [armpits]. The spits the most vile [substances] and convulses in the night. I notice [on myself] the same growing painful lumps and it is my duty to stop this [plague] before my crew are infected. May God have mercy on [us]. 

Spies and merchants (if there ever was truly a distinction to the Arretians) reported on rumors in Pelusium of a sickness that spread like locusts.
The 15 Great Houses of Arretia held an emergency meeting that very night, un-customarially sharing all possible information on the sickness and concluded in a matter of hours that the city must survive, no matter the costs.
In the most Arretian way possible a 2 day state of emergency was declared. Any and all food stores were seized, any and all ship traffic in the harbor was seized, the bowels of all ships emptied while furious captains were silenced with bags of silver too large to carry by any one pack animal, and sent back to their port of call without explanation.
The countryside was picked clean and all foreign citizens warned to not return to the city upon pain of death. The walls were redoubled with temporary wooden facades, the gates sealed shut with leaded locks for which no key was made. From the highest aviaries to the lowest jetties, not an inch of the city went upturned. Every fishing boat was impressed and triple staffed for back-to-back shifts until the sea around Arretia was scraped clean of all marine life.
On the last night, all boats were returned to the harbor where they were dismantled, along with the harbor itself while the stone edifices of the great houses and mansions of the typically unoccupied but ostentatious ‘Roman Quarter’ were thrown into the harbor creating a temporary breakwater which was reinforced with pitch and tar until water sealed and a great fire set ablaze on the shore. Boiling water in so great a quantity bathed the city in salt, collected from windows, walls and the ground itself to preserve every scrap of meat and fish possible.
An especially hardy species of mushroom from far off Gaul of the Grooty Strain (brought over by some trader years earlier) was discovered growing underneath a porch and at once a massive team of laborers set to work retrofitting every basement, vault and catacomb into nurseries for the tiny gray intrusive species.
On the dawn of the third day Arretia had gone from a glittering example of the height of civility into a militarized, insular micro-nation where the rich and poor alike bore the filth of manual labor and the treasures of a dozen generations lay in the hands of foreign nations that had no idea why they had reversed centuries of trade policy on a whim.
Only Justinian’s spies had even a clue and they warned him that the Empire of Rome itself might do the same, a premise shouted down in the Senate a handful of times until bodies started piling up in the street, far too late to matter.
Accurate records are not possible but it is said Arretia lost a tenth of her population to starvation, rioting and disease. But not one single death from plague was ever noted.
By the time the Black Plague entered the world, Arretia had learned from the mistakes of the past and had years worth of imperishable stocked away in hidden caves with secondary and even third basements covered in edible plants that thrived in the dank, lightless environment supplying a grateful populous who still shared stories of the darkest time in her history. The Venetians claim to have invented the Quarantine but in fact, Arretia had perfected the practice while Venice was still flotsam floating in the Adriatic Sea.
PART V – THE OTTOMANS
Almost 500 years of constant war, against the Huns, Cumans, Samaritans, Sassanids, Seljuks and others on just her Eastern borders, the Byzantine Empire strained at the edges and much of Asia Minor was lost to the Turks. In 1071AD a number of very forward-thinking members of the Great Houses of Arretia sent spies along with the Roman Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes in his campaign to once again bring all of Anatolia under Roman rule. At the Battle of Manzikert on August 26, 1071AD two very important events took place:

1. The Emperor himself was captured and would be paraded throughout the Seljuk Empire in chains before ransomed at a price even the Arretians found exorbitant 2. The Arretians returned upon the fastest horses money could buy from dubious mercenary Pechenegs in the middle of the night still drunk on the glory of victory 

The Great Houses were divided on whether or not to prop up an Empire that seemed on the brink of collapse who they had sunk mountains of gold and silver into in the hope that they could once again establish themselves in the hinterlands, whether they should take advantage of the weakness of Rome to declare independence and even take Constantinople while it remained unguarded by her legions or bend knee to the Turks. The matter was put to vote, however in order to maintain perfect secrecy only members of the ruling families were able to participate, those that were in the city at the time that is. By a margin of exactly 1 vote which came from what would later be described as “the desiccated corpse of a Pater familias dug up from a catacomb, adorned in sweet perfumes and operated by a series of pulleys and bellows,” Arretia switched sides.
Some say The Cross in The Ecclesiae Baptismate which had towered over pilgrims for hundreds of years was torn down that morning while other historians maintain it was buried under a nearby hill until such time as the city could be returned to its old faith safely. Whatever the case, the building was converted to a Grand Mosque and a procession left a few days later to pay homage to their new suzerain in Isfahan.
A cohort of 400 of the strongest boys Arretia had to offer arrived at the head of the caravan, to comprise the a contingent of troops that over time would come to be the Elite Janissary of the Ottoman Empire. With them came oxen laden with ten years worth of tribute in gold, and the plans for a massive highway to be built along the route to facilitate trade between the new allies.
Sultan Alp Arslan’s Grand Viser accepted the terms as dictated by the Arretians after hardly a glance at the treaty, so great was his desire to impress such a fabulously wealthy nation that came crawling on its knees without the rattle of a saber, they were essentially the same as offered the Romans before him and the Ottoman Fleet quadrupled in size with the flourish of a quill upon purple parchment.
The Arrentians, with the exception of those cohorts they sent every year and what few sailors they could not procure from elsewhere, remained circumspect of their new Ottoman masters and it is often said that even the Imam in the Grand Mosque still wore a cross under his robes. Though coffeehouses, hookah dens and other Near Eastern proprietors were already common in the city, a new flood of Turkish shops came and went as they realized that the Arretians were terribly nepotistic in their shopping patterns and the Great Houses were willing to sell storefronts with one hand while making sure no suppliers or contracts would ever make it through customs with the other. While the flag above the city changed shape and color, its people still walked through Roman style bathhouses and drank wine freely in the plazas and museums.
Over the centuries during the Siege of Malta in 1429 AD, Siege of Rhodes 1522 AD, the Second Siege of Malta in 1565 AD, and Constantinople itself in 1203 AD, 1204 AD, 1235 AD, 1236 AD, 1376 AD , 1391AD, 1394-1402AD, 1411AD, 1422 AD and finally 1453 AD, it is said the families of Arretia wept as openly as their once-bretherin Romans. There stands a plaque in the central plaza listing the name of every Arretian who died in those sieges, to the puzzlement of modern historians it seems that either those commissioning the plaque were unconcerned with accuracy or almost 10% of those three cities were comprised of Arretians. DNA testing of survivors is inconclusive but ongoing.
PART VI – MODERN HISTORY
The Ottoman Empire waned with time, eventually becoming the “Sick Man of Europe” and the West conspired for decades over who would get Arretia for their own like squabbling children looking at the will of a man on life support.
Following the conclusion of WW1 and the imposition of the Treaty of Sèvres on August 10th, 1920 Arretia was nominally under Italian rule for the first time in 100s of years.
In a drunken, semi-coherent speech in April 1923, ‘Il Duce’ Benito Mussolini (having recently succeeded in a coup the year previous and setting about dissolving any political opposition) proclaimed to an audience of fellow blackshirts that “Direct rule from Rome would begin again in Arretia by morning!”
The following morning Moussolini awoke with a hangover and a single feather on his pillow beside him. Thinking nothing of it, as he was used to errant feathers poking out of his pillow from time to time, he simply re-fluffed his own pillow to find it strangely heavy and lumpy.
Opening the case, he found it stuffed full of Italian Lire, exactly ₤ 2,250. The same amount he had mailed to his Mistress for rent that month. In a rush he grabbed a phone and had the operator connect him with her, who answered very surprised as she pointed out he himself had paid her rent via check and spent the night with her before leaving in the very early morning.
It took hours for his bank to confirm the check was genuine and his signature authentic. Moussolini called for Achille Starace, the Press Secretary of the Office of the Presidency of the Council and his brother Arnaldo Mussolini, the editor of the state-occupied Fascist newspaper Il Popolo, to shred any and all documentation of his speech the night before.
In a single night, Italian dreams of returning Arretia to its dominion vanished.
Rumor has it that Carmine Coppola heard the story from a relative who was there that night for the speech and told an impressionable Francis Ford Coppola about it in his childhood, sparking the famous horse’s head scene in 1972’s The Godfather. The Italian government has neither confirmed nor denied the connection.
Arretian pseudo-independence was celebrated by thousands of sailors between 1940 and 1943 who’s lives were protected by their ‘Eagle-eyed guides’ spotting submarines at the last second, steering unarmed convoys away from sea mines or even bad weather long range radar couldn’t pick up. During the Battle of Britain, those same guides filled in gaps left by long-range spotter balloons and rode along RAF Spitfires and P-51s when their own spotters, gunners and even pilots were too tired, wounded or shaken to keep the skies friendly.
Though not formally invited to the Yalta Conference in February, 1945, Arretian diplomats helped steer Marshall Plan funding for years, were instrumental in negotiations for the Treaty of Paris in 1951, creating the European Coal and Steel Community, were the first non-continental member of the EU in 1973, wrote almost half of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, kept the Common Currency negotiations from falling apart in 1999, bought half of all Greek Debt during the European Financial Crisis of 2008 and ironically now own half of all proven European Oil Reserves due to meddling in Brexit Negotiations just two years ago, buying North Sea drilling rights for pence on the Euro. While the EU is ruled from Brussels, most politicians would concede that most legislation is written in Arretia using Arretian ink by Arretian claws and hands alike.

Notes and Highlights of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s Live Update December 17, 2020
Notes by mr_tyler_durden and Daily Update Team
Watch here:

• Youtube: Update (YT Channel)
• Facebook: Update (FB Page)

Headlines

• 234,021 Cases (+3,349), 2,316 Deaths (+54)
• New cases by county: 475x Jefferson, 178x Kenton, 171x Boone, 126x Fayette, 119x Campbell, 106x Pulaski, 103x Hardin, 94x Daviess, 86x Madison, 80x Warren, 70x Wayne, 57x Laurel, 57x McCracken, 57x Shelby, 56x Pike, 48x Oldham, 44x McCreary, 38x Russell, 37x Taylor, 34x Jessamine, 34x Perry, 33x Bell, 32x Christian, 32x Letcher, 32x Nelson, 31x Bullitt, 31x Lincoln, 30x Anderson, 28x Allen, 28x Graves, 28x Henderson, 28x Marion, 28x Marshall, 28x Rowan, 27x Mercer, 26x Boyle, 24x Clinton, 24x Grant, 24x Montgomery, 23x Logan, 23x Ohio, 22x Floyd, 21x Adair, 21x Scott, 21x Spencer, 20x Calloway, 20x Fleming, 20x Mason, 19x Boyd, 19x Carter, 19x Casey, 19x Trigg, 18x Franklin, 18x Meade, 18x Muhlenberg, 17x Woodford, 16x Martin, 16x Whitley, 15x Knox, 14x Clark, 14x Garrard, 14x Hopkins, 13x Barren, 13x Harlan, 13x Simpson, 13x Washington, 12x Clay, 12x Lawrence, 12x Pendleton, 11x Knott, 10x Carroll, 10x Monroe, 9x Harrison, 9x Larue, 9x Lee, 9x Morgan, 9x Rockcastle, 9x Todd, 8x Bath, 8x Greenup, 7x Cumberland, 7x Jackson, 7x Lyon, 7x Owen, 6x Bourbon, 6x Hart, 6x Henry, 6x Johnson, 6x McLean, 6x Trimble, 5x Butler, 5x Gallatin, 5x Green, 5x Nicholas, 5x Union, 5x Wolfe, 4x Breathitt, 4x Carlisle, 4x Edmonson, 4x Estill, 4x Hancock, 4x Leslie, 3x Breckinridge, 3x Fulton, 3x Grayson, 3x Powell, 3x Webster, 2x Bracken, 2x Caldwell, 2x Elliott, 2x Lewis, 2x Livingston, 2x Owsley, 1x Ballard, 1x Hickman, 1x Magoffin, 1x Metcalfe
• New deaths by county: 67 M Bullitt, 72 M Bullitt, 94 F Calloway, 83 F Carroll, 47 M Casey, 81 F Christian, 69 M Christian, 97 F Clinton, 82 M Clinton, 76 M Daviess, 92 F Fayette, 88 F Graves, 63 F Grayson, 68 F Grayson, 85 F Hardin, 94 M Henderson, 84 F Hopkins, 64 M Hopkins, 98 M Hopkins, 82 F Jefferson, 97 F Jefferson, 47 M Jefferson, 87 M Jefferson, 85 F Jessamine, 55 M Jessamine, 77 M Johnson, 66 M Kenton, 75 F Knott, 79 F Knott, 75 M Larue, 88 F Logan, 88 F McLean, 76 F Madison, 85 F Madison, 90 F Madison, 99 F Madison, 77 M Madison, 89 M Madison, 83 M Mason, 87 M Mason, 76 M Monroe, 81 F Muhlenberg, 77 M Muhlenberg, 61 F Nelson, 52 M Nelson, 75 M Oldham, 86 M Oldham, 95 M Oldham, 70 M Robertson, 87 M Robertson, 63 M Russell, 92 F Spencer, 73 F Union, 58 F Washington
• Good News .
  • 1. I am happy to share that Taica now plans to expand the Clark County operation with a $4.4M investment that's gonna create another 20 good paying jobs.
  • 2. I'm excited to announce a $450,000 grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission's Distressed County Infrastructure Program to upgrade wastewater infrastructure in Middlesboro.
  • 3. So today, the Commonwealth is in an even stronger position to help Kentuckians as we emerged from this pandemic after the Kentucky Supreme Court reinstated an almost $1.3B award for the Commonwealth of Kentucky and a judgment against Pokerstars.
• Alright, the Healthy at Home Eviction Relief Fund is closed to applications, we had to close it today at noon, and that's because we now have 396 completed applications. <...>We're going to spend all of those dollars, all $15M and we're going to help at least 3477 households, I think that number will be more like 3,700.
• Vaccine: So yesterday we were happy to confirm all 11 of the hospitals that Kentucky set to receive the initial delivery of vaccines have confirmed their receipts. <...> So the new news today is Pfizer has confirmed a second shipment for next week of 27,300 doses. Now the majority of this, and I'll explain in a minute, is going to go to our long term care program. We're excited that a second shipment was finally confirmed, I will say that this is lower than we anticipated based on the first allocation.
• So today we are also starting our vaccine campaign, so that we can provide information to Kentuckians and build their confidence in these amazing vaccines. So, there are a couple phases of the campaign. <...> Video: It's just a little shot but the COVID-19 vaccine does more than keep you from getting sick. It will get folks back to work. Get our kids back at school. It's a shot of relief, of hope. All we have to do Kentucky is keep doing our part. We can't all get the vaccine at once, but we'll all get a turn. Get the facts, at http://kyCOVID19.ky.gov/
• WH Report: That despite the nation escalating dangerously, we have seen a stability, that would be their way of saying a plateau, in new cases and a decrease in test positivity. That means we are doing better while the rest of the nation is doing worse. Here is what we showed in the map, just on Monday, that hospitals are reporting critical staffing shortages. We showed it more in ICU beds and how many are taken, but the state is managing. <...> A couple of other points, they talk a little bit about the vaccine and their current thinking, especially as we get past the stage they're in. They ask us to ensure comprehensive analysis of next tier priority of vaccinations, understand immunization of individuals over 65 will have the greatest impact on hospitalizations and deaths. In other words, if we want to cut down our deaths as quickly as we can, after long term care, they're suggesting we look at Kentucky ages 65 and up. That'll reduce deaths and also create more hospital capacity for everybody else who might get sick. And then they give some pretty startling statistics if you haven't seen them for those over 70 with COVID infection. 20% or more that get the infection are admitted to the hospital, nearly 10% die.<...>Also, a couple other warnings here, and significant warnings that at this point if you're over 65, or with a significant health condition, don't go to any indoor public space where anyone is unmasked. The White House now says that is an immediate threat to your health. So make sure you get groceries delivered, or have them have them brought to your car, and your medications delivered. That's where we are.
• Dr. Stack: So as we look to Christmas, and Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, and New Years, and all the other holidays that happen around this time of year, it's very important that we adjust what we normally would do for the COVID year. So, we are again asking you to limit the size of your gatherings to eight people max, and no more than two households. Ideally you would stay with only your own household. I know this is difficult. I enjoy as much as anyone else getting together this time of year, clearly it is a highlight of the last few weeks of any year. But if you get together with people with whom you do not live, you should assume someone in that group is infected. If you eat and drink and take your masks off, you should assume you are at high risk for getting infected. The disease is that widespread at this time. <...>
• Dr Stack: The Governor already commented that the KY COVID-19 hotline ((800) 722-5725) is now prepared to begin addressing people's general questions about vaccines. So if you are curious about its safety or its appropriateness for you they are prepared to answer general questions. Obviously, there is still limited information on a number of things you may be curious about and as we get more information the personnel there answering your questions will get progressively more information they can share. Things that you should not call that hotline for are asking to schedule appointments, asking “When am I going to be able to get the vaccine?”, advocating for when you should get the vaccine, those are things that they are not in a position to answer. So please save that hotline for people who have questions, who have information they're trying to find, and perhaps you have more difficulty navigating our website. For everyone else, our website- we will continue to update the vaccine page, so that we put more information, as we go forward, as we learn more about the guidance from the federal government and the subsequent phases for the vaccination we'll also try to put information there, so that people can have a one stop shop to go and find more recent updates.<...>
• I've seen some reports that some Pfizer vials of vaccine contain an extra one or even two extra doses. Is that something that you're hearing from hospitals around Kentucky and could that mean that there are more than the 38,000 doses in this initial shipment? -- Let's send that over to Dr Stack because he just put out his opinion on that today. And let's hear from him directly.
  • Dr Stack: [...] So yes, whenever they fill these vials the overfill just a little bit to make sure that they don't under fill the vial and it turns out that a lot of sites for reporting that they were able to pull out a full sixth additional dose for a five dose vial, it may be there's extra material beyond that. The FDA issued some tweets, even for me it seems odd that Twitter has become an official communication platform, but they have shared that they recommend that those extra doses, if they are full doses, that they be used. And I issued a memorandum today to the 11 hospitals who currently have inventory in Kentucky that they should, in fact, feel permitted to use those while we await official FDA guidance via channels, other than Twitter, so they are able to do that.
• Will the number of people who choose not to get vaccinated have any impact on the timeline of when the state will start relaxing restrictions and mandates? -- We believe- I think the answer there is yes and no. We believe that enough Kentuckians are going to be willing to take the vaccine to where that won't be an issue but there will be the amount of time it takes to get everyone who wants to take a vaccine, a vaccine. You know they say nationally they want more than 70% maybe closer to 80% of individuals to take the vaccine, obviously getting there is going to require us having more knowledge on younger adults. But right now where I see public opinion, I believe that we can get there in Kentucky.
• We've gotten questions from listeners, discussing the differences between the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines. Is there one that either of you prefer over the other, or you have equal confidence in both and you're just going to be happy to get one or the other? Thank you. -- [...] Pfizer right now has been through the emergency approval process, Moderna hasn't gotten through that yet. Provided it does, and all things being equal, they appear to be 94, 95% effective each. Pfizer has a three week time period between initial shot and booster, Moderna has a four week time period, but if you're asking me in working on the logistics of getting the vaccine out all over the Commonwealth, Moderna doesn't require the deep refrigeration and so in many ways that makes it easier to get out to people.
  • Dr Stack: So I agree with the governor, that there are differences in the timing and the logistics, but I would say if you are willing to receive a vaccine, and I hope the vast majority of you will be, then I think you should take whichever one you could get. It appears that though there are different timings and storage characteristics the performance of both is functionally equivalent and so you will get similar protection for both of them, so I would take the first one you can get.
• Slides from Update

Full Notes

• Hi everybody, it's four o'clock on Thursday, that’s when we get together and remember that we're gonna get through this, and we're gonna get through this together. I want to thank Logan County Schools for today's mask and for everything they do to educate our children, whether remotely, or in-person. Thank you for all your efforts in protecting our kiddos. We're going to start today with a couple pieces of good news, both in our economy, and in fighting COVID-19, then we're going to look at some of the entries in the White House report. And then get to our COVID report for the day, which, while the numbers are showing that we are stabilizing, or at least a little decrease from last week, we have our highest number of deaths today. So that'll be a tough part of today, but let's start with good news which we need to celebrate when we have it, and we do today.
• So today I'd like to share news of another great company growing here in Kentucky. Taica Cubic Printing Kentucky, in Winchester, provides cubic printing, paint application, and assembly services on substrates for tier one automotive suppliers. The company opened its Clark County facility less than a decade ago, but it's already become an important and critical part of that community. Taica’s initial investment in Winchester planned for the creation of 30 jobs at about $22 an hour, but to date, the company has created 44 jobs paying an average hourly wage of $26 an hour, and they're not finished growing yet. I am happy to share that Taica now plans to expand the Clark County operation with a $4.4M investment that's gonna create another 20 good paying jobs. Like many industries, it's been a difficult year for the automotive sector. So I am all that much happier to see the continued success of companies like Taica. Kentucky is home to more than 520 automotive suppliers that cover nearly every aspect of the industry. Taica's announcement today adds to the more than 100,000 Kentuckians employed by automotive related businesses. The industry's continued growth, and the creation of quality job opportunities with strong wages, will be crucial in our recovery from this pandemic, so the commitment of Taica and other auto suppliers to our state is greatly appreciated. So thank you to the leaders of Taica Cubic Printing Kentucky, and everyone who had a role in this expansion. And congratulations to Winchester and Clark County on the growth of a great company.
• Today we also have some good news for Eastern Kentucky. I'm excited to announce a $450,000 grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission's Distressed County Infrastructure Program to upgrade wastewater infrastructure in Middlesboro. The current system is 34 years old and frequently fails, requiring expensive repairs. Middlesboro will use the funding to update the main sewage lift station and address aging pumps at the wastewater treatment plant. Upon completion, the upgrades will save the city $17,000 annually in operation and maintenance expenses, and it's going to provide better wastewater service for 605 businesses and more than 4300 households. Clean drinking water is a basic human right and even in the midst of this pandemic this administration with our federal partners have been investing, especially in areas that haven't seen that steady supply of clean drinking water. We have put dollars upon dollars in Eastern Kentucky to try to correct a decades long failure to give people that basic human right of clean water. This is a big part of how we build stronger communities and prepare for our future post COVID. So congratulations to Middlesboro on the award and thank you to everybody who worked on it and made it possible. Because of your work I'm confident we'll build a stronger, better Kentucky.
• Alright, this next one, I don't know if you all have seen the news on TV but it's a big one. So today, the Commonwealth is in an even stronger position to help Kentuckians as we emerged from this pandemic after the Kentucky Supreme Court reinstated an almost $1.3B award for the Commonwealth of Kentucky and a judgment against Pokerstars. That's right, $1.3B. The Supreme Court reinstated the Franklin circuit court judgement, concluding the Commonwealth decades long fight against illegal offshore internet gambling. This will never be enough to make up for the damage to Kentucky's families and the states from the years of irresponsible and criminal actions, but this is a good day for Kentucky. This better positions us to emerge from this painful pandemic to help Kentuckians, to help our businesses, to provide quality health care to more Kentuckians, to strengthen our public schools and keep our promises to educators and other public employees, some of whom have been on the front lines battling the fallout of this company's greed. I also want to congratulate J Michael Brown, my executive cabinet secretary, for bringing actions on behalf of the Commonwealth in 2008, in this matter when he was the secretary of the justice and public safety cabinet, under another Beshear, seeking to stop the unregulated untaxed and illegal offshore gambling operations that were operating in Kentucky. Once the Kentucky Supreme Court's opinion is final, the Commonwealth will take aggressive steps to collect the judgment or the benefits of all Kentuckians. And I'm going admin, Michael and I have both been lawyers for much of our career and coming into this job I'd had the good fortune of securing one of the larger verdicts in the last 20 years in Kentucky of 11.4M. Well I think Michael’s case just brought in 1.3 billion, so I think once again, he gets that first place prize but I'm continuing my best to try to learn as much as I can from him.
• Alright, the Healthy at Home Eviction Relief Fund is closed to applications, we had to close it today at noon, and that's because we now have 396 completed applications. And that's going to grow as some tenants and landlords call in and complete their applications. Remember, we had $15M to help people to make sure they didn't get kicked out of their home, and to make sure that they didn't emerge from this pandemic with significant debt. We're going to spend all of those dollars, all $15M and we're going to help at least 3477 households, I think that number will be more like 3,700.
• Alright, let's go to the best news we've been having recently, and that's vaccines. So yesterday we were happy to confirm all 11 of the hospitals that Kentucky set to receive the initial delivery of vaccines have confirmed their receipts. These hospitals included Pikeville Medical Center, Baptist Health in Madisonville, Corbin, and Louisville, as well as Mercy Health Lourdes in Paducah. Here are some of the pictures of our frontline heroes being vaccinated, with what I believe is a miracle, a 94-95% effective vaccine. And remember these folks are folks working on COVID wings, that go in every day knowing they could contract this virus but they want to help your loved one to make sure that they can get better. So here you can see the first vaccine, in Paducah being given to Dr. Bradley Albert Albertson, a physician double-certified in both internal medicine and pediatrics, let's watch (Video).
• Alright. You see everybody clapping? I got to tell you there is a new energy amongst our frontline workers. Seeing how quickly this day came, and knowing that as we move into 2021, we are going to defeat this virus, we are going to win. We have to take care of each other until we get there. So, all these pictures you've been seeing which are truly amazing, and they ought to give you hope, you ought to stay vigilant, but they ought to give you hope in a second wind. Everything you're seeing right now as part of the first allocation that came to Kentucky, the week of December 13th through the 19th and that's our first 38,025 doses from Pfizer. About two thirds of that went to long term care and the rest, went to those 11 hospitals. So the new news today is Pfizer has confirmed a second shipment for next week of 27,300 doses. Now the majority of this, and I'll explain in a minute, is going to go to our long term care program. We're excited that a second shipment was finally confirmed, I will say that this is lower than we anticipated based on the first allocation. And we'll be watching that as we move forward because the speed at which we can vaccinate long term care, the speed at which we can get back to something like-normal depends on the amount of the vaccine that we get. And it's by and large out of our control, but I want to make sure that I am transparent when we receive numbers about what we'll get, and if they're changed on us. So that same week Moderna, we believe, will get the initial allocation of 76,700. The vast majority of that are going to acute-care hospitals, all over the Commonwealth so that every acute-care hospital that is treating COVID patients, either gets it to administer itself, or a partner hospital that's gotten all the way through the system, if the other one hasn't, we'll get their amount so that they can provide those vaccinations- but every acute-care hospital, we believe next week, will have a certain number of vaccines for their frontline healthcare workers, and then we believe that the week of December 27th-31st, we will get 33,800 more doses of Moderna.
• This is just December and this, again, doesn't get us through our frontline healthcare workers or through long term care. So what we'll see is, in the very least, the first couple weeks of January, if not all of January, will still be going to those most at-need populations. So everybody stay patient. It's a wonderful day. We can see the end in sight. And it's also a little scary knowing how bad COVID is right now and there's a vaccine out there and and and you want it, especially during this most dangerous time. But those who are part of our healthcare capacity need it first so that they can be in that hospital, if one of your loved ones needs their help. And then those that are disproportionately dying- Long Term Care residents, which make up almost 66% of all deaths in Kentucky, again, need to come first. Now there's a lot of questions out there about who's next after this group. The answer is the federal government hasn't come to terms with that yet. I will show you in a minute some statements from the White House Task Force, especially as it comes to age. And if number one thing is to stop deaths in fighting COVID and how we distribute the vaccine, then age is the most effective manner at rolling out the vaccine if that is the ultimate goal.
• So today we are also starting our vaccine campaign, so that we can provide information to Kentuckians and build their confidence in these amazing vaccines. So, there are a couple phases of the campaign.
  • First is education. There we want to assure awareness and public confidence about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
  • Second, we want to ensure understanding of the phased rollout of the vaccine when that information is available. And that requires patience too.
  • Third, we want to help Kentuckians know that by visiting http://kyCOVID19.ky.gov/ they can get trusted information about the vaccine. There's going to be an update to our vaccine page and information there on Monday.
• After the education phase of the vaccine campaign, comes the engagement phase, that's engaging with Kentuckians especially discreet population groups, through the correct channels to encourage commitment to taking this vaccine. Messaging will be shaped based on what we learned through community outreach efforts with black, Hispanic, and rural populations, specifically. What we learn in these discussions will help shape how we openly, honestly, and effectively communicate with those populations and ensure that there is an equitable rollout of this vaccine, that everybody gets protected; and that we not only provide the information but we provide it in the best way to get as many people protected as possible. Our goal for the campaign is to remind Kentuckians that no one likes the idea of getting a shot, but shots are just a small fact of life.
• Why? Because a shot is and always has been the end of wondering what might happen. And this little shot does more than keep you from getting sick, it gets folks back to work, it gets your kids back in school, it gets our economy up and running again. It's the road to getting back to so many things that we enjoy. It's a shot of relief and a shot of hope.
• The FDA authorized vaccines continue to arrive in Kentucky, all you have to do is do your part. We can all get the vaccine at once, and we'll all get a turn. You can find all the facts that http://kyCOVID19.ky.gov/
• Alright, we're gonna run it again. So here's a look at our first general message advertisement that will be hitting the airwaves soon. It'll come with audio, when it does,
• Video: It's just a little shot but the COVID-19 vaccine does more than keep you from getting sick. It will get folks back to work. Get our kids back at school. It's a shot of relief, of hope. All we have to do Kentucky is keep doing our part. We can't all get the vaccine at once, but we'll all get a turn. Get the facts, at http://kyCOVID19.ky.gov/
• It's a lot better when we play it at the right time. So that's just the first of the messaging, as it will roll out. And that part of keep doing your part is so critical because we still have very high levels of COVID, it's still taking a lot of lives. In fact today I believe it's taken 54 lives. So let's keep doing our part to protect one another, until everybody gets a chance to get this vaccine, a shot at getting their shot.
• I want to go over some of what the White House report this week. It says, first in their summary, the White House coronavirus Task Force sees what we're seeing in our numbers. That despite the nation escalating dangerously, we have seen a stability, that would be their way of saying a plateau, in new cases and a decrease in test positivity. That means we are doing better while the rest of the nation is doing worse. Here is what we showed in the map, just on Monday, that hospitals are reporting critical staffing shortages. We showed it more in ICU beds and how many are taken, but the state is managing. In other words, we're at a dangerous place but we are not over the tipping point yet. It's one of the reasons we're prioritizing the vaccine for our frontline health care workers but also why we need your help.
• A couple of other points, they talk a little bit about the vaccine and their current thinking, especially as we get past the stage they're in. They ask us to ensure comprehensive analysis of next tier priority of vaccinations, understand immunization of individuals over 65 will have the greatest impact on hospitalizations and deaths. In other words, if we want to cut down our deaths as quickly as we can, after long term care, they're suggesting we look at Kentucky ages 65 and up. That'll reduce deaths and also create more hospital capacity for everybody else who might get sick. And then they give some pretty startling statistics if you haven't seen them for those over 70 with COVID infection. 20% or more that get the infection are admitted to the hospital, nearly 10% die. You’ve got to think for those are 70 this thing is 10 times more deadly than it is to the rest of the population. So this is advice from the White House Task Force and these are considerations they're asking us to take as we look at the next tier.
• Also, a couple other warnings here, and significant warnings that at this point if you're over 65, or with a significant health condition, don't go to any indoor public space where anyone is unmasked. The White House now says that is an immediate threat to your health. So make sure you get groceries delivered, or have them have them brought to your car, and your medications delivered. That's where we are. If you're over 65, or you have one of these medical conditions, don't go to any place that is not enforcing a mask mandate for everybody inside. For those who continue to refuse to wear masks and want to be served in facilities, the White House is saying you are a deadly threat to anyone over that age. Please wear that mask when you go out. And if you're under 40 assume you became infected if you gather beyond your immediate household. Again, this is saying that we shouldn't get out with those outside of our household.
• Again, a couple more that you can read here, but the final one warning about any gathering during December holiday. In other words, this Christmas, which is certainly one of my, if not my favorite, day of the year- do it with your immediate household. Do it with those that you live with. Remember what Christmas is about and remember the example that Jesus said and his teachings about caring for one another. Let's not do Christmas in a way that would dishonor loving our neighbor as ourselves. Let's make sure that we do the right thing over this holiday to protect those we love and all of those around us.
• Positive cases today: 3,349 - Now that is a lot, but it is still less than last week
• Probable cases: 828
• Total confirmed cases: 234,021
• Children Under 18: 372
• New cases by county: 475x Jefferson, 178x Kenton, 171x Boone, 126x Fayette, 119x Campbell, 106x Pulaski, 103x Hardin, 94x Daviess, 86x Madison, 80x Warren, 70x Wayne, 57x Laurel, 57x McCracken, 57x Shelby, 56x Pike, 48x Oldham, 44x McCreary, 38x Russell, 37x Taylor, 34x Jessamine, 34x Perry, 33x Bell, 32x Christian, 32x Letcher, 32x Nelson, 31x Bullitt, 31x Lincoln, 30x Anderson, 28x Allen, 28x Graves, 28x Henderson, 28x Marion, 28x Marshall, 28x Rowan, 27x Mercer, 26x Boyle, 24x Clinton, 24x Grant, 24x Montgomery, 23x Logan, 23x Ohio, 22x Floyd, 21x Adair, 21x Scott, 21x Spencer, 20x Calloway, 20x Fleming, 20x Mason, 19x Boyd, 19x Carter, 19x Casey, 19x Trigg, 18x Franklin, 18x Meade, 18x Muhlenberg, 17x Woodford, 16x Martin, 16x Whitley, 15x Knox, 14x Clark, 14x Garrard, 14x Hopkins, 13x Barren, 13x Harlan, 13x Simpson, 13x Washington, 12x Clay, 12x Lawrence, 12x Pendleton, 11x Knott, 10x Carroll, 10x Monroe, 9x Harrison, 9x Larue, 9x Lee, 9x Morgan, 9x Rockcastle, 9x Todd, 8x Bath, 8x Greenup, 7x Cumberland, 7x Jackson, 7x Lyon, 7x Owen, 6x Bourbon, 6x Hart, 6x Henry, 6x Johnson, 6x McLean, 6x Trimble, 5x Butler, 5x Gallatin, 5x Green, 5x Nicholas, 5x Union, 5x Wolfe, 4x Breathitt, 4x Carlisle, 4x Edmonson, 4x Estill, 4x Hancock, 4x Leslie, 3x Breckinridge, 3x Fulton, 3x Grayson, 3x Powell, 3x Webster, 2x Bracken, 2x Caldwell, 2x Elliott, 2x Lewis, 2x Livingston, 2x Owsley, 1x Ballard, 1x Hickman, 1x Magoffin, 1x Metcalfe
• Northern Kentucky has gotten hit hard. Pulaski County multiple days of high cases, but every single area in the state has multiple counties with 30 or more cases. Remember, it's everywhere.
• Total tests conducted: 3,207,769 (PCR: 2,968,844, Serology: 99,173)
• Positivity Rate: 8.45% - Our positivity rate it's down a little bit, but it's still pretty flat at 8.45%
• Total hospitalized: 12,129
• Currently hospitalized: 1,817 - Hospitalization up a little bit
• Total in ICU: 2,830
• Currently in ICU: 431
• On a ventilator: 254
• Total recovered: 33,666
• New deaths today: 54
• Total Deaths: 2,316
• Alright, so our death report today is going to be one of the hardest since early on. It's by far the most people that we've lost. And remember that's a reflection of where this virus was about three weeks ago, and where it was trending because increase in deaths follow an increase in cases. More people get infected, a percentage of those will be hospitalized, and a percentage of those will die. So the more people who get infected the more people need to go to the hospital and the more people don't make it. I hope we don't have another day, where we have 54 deaths and this is going to be hard, because these are 54 families that need our help, and our compassion, and our green lights which is the color of compassion and renewal. They also need us to do better. Follow the rules to follow the restrictions because if you don't know someone who's been lost to COVID, someone close to you hasn't been lost to COVID, or someone close to someone you know then you're not listening. Because it has happened all over, Kentucky- far, far too much loss.
• (continued in stickied comment)

The [man] is turning black before our eyes as though some fire burns from within his groin and [armpits]. The spits the most vile [substances] and convulses in the night. I notice [on myself] the same growing painful lumps and it is my duty to stop this [plague] before my crew are infected. May God have mercy on [us]. 

1. The Emperor himself was captured and would be paraded throughout the Seljuk Empire in chains before ransomed at a price even the Arretians found exorbitant 2. The Arretians returned upon the fastest horses money could buy from dubious mercenary Pechenegs in the middle of the night still drunk on the glory of victory