"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me."
"The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished. The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste. This diminutive stature of mankind was daily sinking below the old standard."
- Edward Gibbon,
"The Decline And Fall of The Roman Empire"
"You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?'
The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?"
"Horror succeeds horror… the virus is once again amok. The United States reported over 145,000 fresh cases Wednesday - a record. We are told daily fatalities near 2,000. A vaccine is not yet ready. What, then, is to be done? A four-to-six week national “lockdown” - with little room for escape? If the man from Delaware seizes the White House… as expected… you may have one.
May we introduce you to Dr. Michael Osterholm? Dr. Osterholm directs the University of Minnesota’s Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Mr. Biden has appointed him to his "special coronavirus transition advisory team." Says Dr. Osterholm: "A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine."
“As Comprehensive and Strict as Possible”: In the good doctor’s telling, the previous lockdown was a minimum security jailing. Inmates were granted excessive freedom of movement. He instead would impose a maximum security imprisonment. Inmates must confine themselves to their cells unless absolutely necessary. Many would naturally face solitary confinement.
Yet it is necessary to halt the virus, he insists. Dr. Osterholm (from a joint New York Times column with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari): "The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential. To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible."
“As comprehensive and strict as possible.” Meaning, gentlemen? We should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers. By that, we mean people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently.
Just so. We were informed in March that a two-week jail term would scotch the bug. Yet the jailing was repeatedly extended. Now we are told four-to-six weeks in maximum security is our liberation. We bet high that six weeks would become eight weeks would become ten weeks. “We can’t risk opening too soon,” will be the renewed refrain.
What about the vicious economic carnage that would result - even greater unemployment, more shuttered businesses, shriveled local tax bases?
We Just Need to Print More Money: Fear not, say Dr. Osterholm and Mr. Kashkari: "We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers for losses to small companies to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that. If we did that, then we could lockdown for four-to-six weeks."
We can? We can cover all the lost wages for individual workers, losses to companies small to medium-sized, losses to city, state, county governments? Who - precisely - is “we?” And where will “we” find the money? “We” will find it nowhere because it does not exist. It must be fabricated, conjured into being at a keystroke. And so the nation would plunge deeper and deeper into debt. Is it necessary? Under lockdown conditions we suppose it would be. But is a lockdown justified by the facts? Answer shortly. First, an observation…
The Economy Is Not a Machine: Here is the invisible assumption behind lockdowns: Wise men can comatize an economy for weeks or months, then jolt it awake on command. It will proceed to purr, throb, bristle… as if a six-week coma factored nothing at all.
But an economy is not a soulless, inert machine. It will not be switched off and on as the wiseacres please. It will not bend to their wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers and drills. The implements are too crude. The economy instead is a dynamic organism… with a dizzying riot of arteries, veins and capillaries… jungles of interconnected nerves… ligaments and tendons… bones and muscles. Its infinite complexity eludes the mechanic with his simple tools. And an extended lockdown risks serious, potentially lethal, economic damage. But do lockdowns even work — as their boosters claim they work?
Kicking the Can Down the Road: The likely answer is no. They may delay infections. But they do not prevent them. The virus will pounce once the inmates are freed. And so lockdowns merely boot the beer can down the street. They only prolong the pandemic.
Johan Giesecke, professor emeritus at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute: "Everyone will be exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, and most people will become infected. COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire in all countries. There is very little we can do to prevent this spread: a lockdown might delay severe cases for a while, but once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear. I expect that when we count the number of deaths from COVID-19 in each country in 1 year from now, the figures will be similar, regardless of measures taken.
Measures to flatten the curve might have an effect, but a lockdown only pushes the severe cases into the future - it will not prevent them. Our most important task is not to stop spread, which is all but futile, but to concentrate on giving the unfortunate victims optimal care."
Next, we come to Professor Graeme Ackland of Edinburgh University: "Unless a vaccine magically appears and is rolled out across the entire population in the next six months, then shutting down society is unlikely to reduce overall deaths. Lockdowns essentially just postpone these deaths and prevent immunity building up, in some cases resulting in more deaths long term. The way out of any epidemic is herd immunity, which is when enough people in the population are infected that the virus can’t spread. We need to focus on protecting older people who are going to be affected by coronavirus, not people who aren’t."
Meantime, JPMorgan research reveals higher mortality rates in severely locked-down countries. Higher mortality rates, that is, than in lightly restricted countries without the heavy hand.
Sweden: Consider brave little Sweden. She was roundly denounced for leaving her economy largely open… resulting in needless misery and death. Yet through October 10, the data inform us that: Sweden’s COVID mortality rate was 583 per million. And the heavily bolted down countries? The United States mortality rate was 660 per million. Spain: 704. The United Kingdom: 628. Italy: 597. Belgium: 875. That is, each exceeds heartless Sweden’s. And what of the death and suffering lockdowns have wrought?
The Other Side of Lockdowns: Spring lockdowns witnessed dreadful surges in suicides, alcoholism, other substance abuse, domestic violence, etc. We must next consider the unfortunates who succumbed to otherwise treatable maladies because they failed to receive adequate treatment under lockdown conditions.
Dr. Joel Zinberg, associate clinical professor of surgery at New York’s Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine: "Deaths from chronic, non-emergent conditions also increased as patients put off maintenance visits and their medical conditions deteriorated. In the second study of excess deaths, the five states with the most Covid-19 deaths from March through April (Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), experienced large proportional increases in deaths from non-respiratory underlying causes, including diabetes (96 percent), heart diseases (89 percent), Alzheimer’s disease (64 percent), and cerebrovascular diseases (35 percent). New York City - the nation’s Covid-19 epicenter during that period - experienced the largest increases in non-respiratory deaths, notably from heart disease (398 percent) and diabetes (356 percent)."
Invisible Victims: Do these lives matter - the suicidal, the overdosed, the diabetic, the heart-diseased, the demented? Many hazard that lockdowns will murder more victims than the virus itself. They are the invisible victims. They do not make the news. They serve no political interest. No “dashboard” tracks their demise.
Regardless… we suspect renewed lockdowns are in prospect… especially if Mr. Biden wins his race. Yet one question lingers in the air: Will a frustrated American people go along this time? Many are in a foul frame of mind these days..."
"Are there any questions?" An offer that comes at the end of college lectures and long meetings. Said when an audience is not only overdosed with information, but when there is no time left anyhow. At times like that you sure do have questions. Like, "Can we leave now?" and "What the hell was this meeting for?" and "Where can I get a drink?"
The gesture is supposed to indicate openness on the part of the speaker, I suppose, but if in fact you do ask a question, both the speaker and the audience will give you drop-dead looks. And some fool - some earnest idiot - always asks. And the speaker always answers. By repeating most of what he has already said. But if there is a little time left and there is a little silence left in response to the invitation, I usually ask the most important question of all: "What is the Meaning of Life?" You never know, somebody may have the answer, and I'd really hate to miss it because I was too socially inhibited to ask. But when I ask, it is usually taken as a kind of absurdist move - people laugh and nod and gather up their stuff and the meeting is dismissed on that ridiculous note. Once, and only once, I asked that question and got a serious answer…
Papaderos rose from his chair at the back of the room and walked to the front, where he stood in the bright Greek sunlight of an open window and looked out… he turned. And made the ritual gesture: "Are there any questions?" Quiet quilted the room. These two weeks had generated enough questions for a lifetime, but for now there was only silence.
"No questions?" Papaderos swept the room with his eyes.
So. I asked.
"Dr. Papaderos, what is the meaning of life?"
The usual laughter followed, and people stirred to go. Papaderos held up his hand and stilled the room and looked at me for a long time, asking with his eyes if I was serious and seeing from my eyes that I was.
"I will answer your question."
Taking his wallet out of his hip pocket, he fished into a leather billfold and brought out a very small round mirror, about the size of a quarter. And what he said went like this: "When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place. I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine - in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.
I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child's game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light - truth, understanding, knowledge - is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it. I am a fragment of a mirror whose design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world - into the black places in the hearts of men - and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life."
And then he took his small mirror and, holding it carefully, caught the bright rays of daylight streaming through the window and reflected them onto my face and onto my hands folded on the desk."
"Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living."
- Alysha Speer
"The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool."
- Scott Turow
"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."
"The avatars of good government, Joe Biden, and his righteous Democrats, seem a little bit spooked by the globe-of-silence enveloping Mr. Trump and his lawyers the past few days. The Dem’s narrative at this point, mid-game, is that… “the election was the most secure in the nation’s history” (The New York Times). Anything else is a “conspiracy theory.” Here’s what the Democrats don’t tell you: theories are subject to proof, and proof brings theories into compliance with reality, including, sometimes, the part about conspiracy. Such as a conspiracy to queer the recent election with vote tabulation software and other wizardries.
I guess we’ll find out what can be proven, and that is all the president is attempting to do, like anybody with faith in the scientific method. In Oakland County, Michigan, for instance, comprising the northwest suburbs and exurbs of Detroit, the graph shows a mysterious bending of votes off a trend-line at a pretty clear break-point. Each blue square is a voter precinct.
Click image for larger size.
Chart by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai
The very same plotline is repeated in several other Michigan counties heavily trending for the president in early voting and then swooning mysteriously for Mr. Biden after a four-hour break in action. How to account for this strange occurrence? The worm in the machine, perhaps: a simple algorithm (i.e., set of coded instructions) embedded in the Dominion vote tabulation software — product of a company, to remind you, partially owned by Senator Feinstein’s husband, Richard C. Blum, and represented by lobbyist Nadeam Elshami, Nancy Pelosi’s former chief of staff. It was Mr. Elshami’s mission to visit state legislators around the country and persuade them to adopt (that is, purchase) the Dominion system. The algorithm appears to subtract votes from one candidate and add them to the other candidate. It’s a feature, not a bug. Weird, a little bit.
So, that’s one thing that remains to be proven. How did the algorithm work? Can it be isolated and described? Did its task leave digital footprints? Not all the software geniuses in the USA work for Silicon Valley. Some may be assisting Mr. Trump’s attorneys in figuring this out and constructing cases for the various courts. Since it takes more than a day-and-a-half to bring lawsuits, that may account for the Democrats’ rush to peremptorily discard such formal inquiries and just declare Mr. Biden the winner. Similar ballot tabulation doings show up in the Georgia vote, where a recount is underway, this time with observers and without four-hour mystery pauses. And then there is Pennsylvania.
If DC is the Swamp, then Pennsylvania is a Nile Valley of ballot harvesting, overflowing its banks every November to fertilize especially the loamy precincts of Philadelphia, where votes spring up like ground ivy. As it happened this season, on top of that rich reaping of cultivated votes was an additional layer of state government monkeyshines now headed for adjudication in the US Supreme Court. Will they dare to take the case? It’s not a sure thing, but they’d better have a good reason not to because a whole lot of vested credibility in our national system of government is at stake.
In the meantime, I’m standing by to see how things pan out. If those three states electoral votes — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia — are shifted to Mr. Trump’s column by re-tabulation, with late-reporting North Carolina added, then the President will end up with 278 electoral votes, making him the winner (and leaving Mr. B the loser with 229). Other combinations of adding or subtracting the electoral votes of these states-at-issue would leave no clear winner and thus propel the matter into the House of Representatives, where the peculiar constitutional math (one vote for each state delegation) does not favor Mr. Biden. Doesn’t look like the extreme long-shot that the captive news media is touting it to be.
Of course, in the event that none of this goes Mr. Trump’s way, then, of course, Mr. Biden moves into the White House with his two German shepherds plus the entire RussiaGate cast-of-characters, a delegation of Silicon Valley nobs, and half of K Street to assist him in governing the USA. That outcome will set up all the right people to preside over the greatest economic collapse in the history of the world. Okay, have it your way. Just sayin’."
"James Madison is surely smiling from his grave. Pursuant to his constitutional design, a badly divided electorate got an utterly gridlocked government - with the Supreme Court and Senate in the hands of one party and the House of Representatives and White House marginally in the hands of the other. That’s as good an RX against tyranny as it gets.
Vlad Putin is probably smiling, too. His economy is being battered by Washington’s bully-boy sanctions because he has been falsely accused of throwing the election to Trump in 2016. This time, even by the lights of the Dem and Deep State Russophobes, however, Putin appears to have been AWOL.
Yet the natural Blue Wave that was allegedly aborted in 2016 by Putin’s hackers and social media trolls didn’t happen. What we got, instead, is Sleepy Joe (apparently) stumbling into the Oval Office with few electoral college votes to spare. That is, the real people of Flyover America, not the Kremlin’s trolls, again voted for the Donald and came up but a whisker short.
Ordinarily, conservatives should be smiling most of all. Donald Trump is no friend of liberty, small government or fiscal and monetary rectitude, and he’s now (almost) gone. More broadly, large, fully mobilized governmental majorities are the handmaids of Leviathan. Always and everywhere the expansion of state power gets abused by ambitious politicians and government apparatchiks for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. So paralyzed government is just the thing to safeguard personal liberty and private prosperity.
Nor are we talking just, or even mainly, about the threat of old-fashioned mailed fists and boot-heel tyranny where citizens are rounded up and jailed. Today’s Leviathan presents more often than not as the Nanny State, wielding a velvet glove of regulation, taxation and fiscal subvention in the name of the public welfare and protection of citizens from themselves. But the result is tyranny just the same.
The War on Drugs is a 50-year old example, while the swift, shocking and economically catastrophic imposition of economic martial law last spring to eradicate a super-flu is but the latest. Yet now this eight-month old excrescence of Nanny State oppression threatens constitutional government and capitalist prosperity like rarely before. So the fact that the Dem majority in the US House has been cut and the Senate will likely remain Republican is in many respects all to the good.
For one thing, all the hobgoblins that have terrified Mark Levin and Sean Hannity - Supreme Court packing, elimination of the Senate filibuster rule, sacking the Electoral College, making Washington DC and Puerto Rico (Dem) states, prohibition of fracking and outlawing of fossil fuels, Medicare-for-all, legalization of millions of new immigrant (Dem) voters - are now absolute dead letters.
Even better, Sleepy Joe may well abdicate to a Kamala Harris Regency, but it will be one shorn of the Progressive/Left part of the equation. That’s because on substantive legislation it will take 60 votes to break a Senate GOP filibuster, but it will be a rare day inside the beltway when 100% of the Senate Dems including Manchin (WV) and Tester (MT) and 11 Republicans are corralled in favor of the kind of Bernie/AOC stuff that got stuffed into the Dem platform.
To the contrary, we can already hear the cries of "sell-out" and "betrayal" coming from the Progressive-Left whenever Sleepy Joe or Kamala, as the case may prove to be, send their equivalent of Stevie Mnuchin, knee pads in hand, up to Capitol Hill to pleasure with compromises Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who is now secure in another six year term and a guaranteed 60-years on the public teat.
Indeed, we suspect the Washington Republicans - as undeserving and feckless as they have been for years - may end up with the best of all worlds. That is, being handed a cornucopia of attackable red meat for the 2022 mid-terms owing to the tabling of leftist agenda measures by a Biden Administration chok-a-block with progressives and woksters, even as they would have odds-on capacity to block Senate passage or even serious consideration.
So far, but, finally, not so good. Alas, the one great flaw in James Madison’s design for a democracy hobbled with checks and balances is the case where the horse manages to get out the barn door, anyway. Then you need strong majorities on both sides of Capitol Hill aligned with White House policies in order to enact positive measures to put the horse back in its stable.
We are referring, of course, to the calamitous fiscal estate that has resulted from 40-years of deficits-don’t-matter drift and four years of the Trumpian fiscal bacchanalia. The whole thing is now one giant Doomsday Machine driven by trillions per year of automatic entitlements, a rapidly swelling retirement-based Welfare State and a deeply embedded military-industrial-surveillance complex and its counter-part domestic pork barrels.
That all was bad enough, but the Lockdown Nation economic calamity and the Coast-to-Coast soup lines that have been enacted by the bipartisan duopoly to indemnify 150 million households and millions of businesses, almost certainly guarantee that the fiscal equation will now go tilt. That is, a perpetually weak debt-entombed economy and the resulting depleted government revenues (including state and local government, which are the one thing Biden will get funded in the coming Everything Bailouts) will result in double-digit Federal deficits as far as the eye can see, as we will quantify on another occasion.
Needless to say, our newly-elected gridlocked government is not about to do anything to ameliorate this embedded fiscal calamity. You can be sure that the GOP Senate won’t enact any material Biden tax increases; and by the same token, a Biden Administration already failing to make progress on the Progressive-Left agenda won’t be embracing social security, medicare and other entitlement reforms. And, of course, the merchants of war own the Congress regardless of party, election results or actual national security needs.
But here’s the thing. Under any circumstance, these now guaranteed double-digit annual deficits (i.e. $2 trillion plus at current GDP levels) aren’t sustainable because compounding interest expense eventually sends the ship-of-state into the fiscal drink. In fact, in an economy that has been systematically and brutally stripped of private savings for decades by central bank financial repression, the only way to finance persistent double digit fiscal deficits and keep interest rates from lurching upward is via 100% monetization of new debt issues.
Undoubtedly, Wall Street’s talking heads might initially find that prospect untroubling, and perhaps even indulge in more insanity on the apparent theory that the great 2020 election uncertainty is coming to a imminent end, and that a nice, pro-stimulus 47-year Swamp Creature will be shuffling into the Oval Office.
Yes, the uncertainty about the name of the next president is ending soon, even as the Donald’s desperate effort to reverse his loss in Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere comes a cropper in a Supreme Court of his own making. At the same time, a far more consequential uncertainty is just beginning. No known laws of economics or experiences of history permit 100% of massive public debts to be monetized indefinitely at the central bank’s printing press.
It is only a matter of time until the Fed’s prodigious money-printing blows the nation’s egregiously inflated and speculation-ridden financial markets sky high. That’s the real end game of the gridlock that emerged from the vote on November 3. And it’s most definitely not the good kind imagined by the wise men who wrote the nation’s constitution.
No matter what happens in the corridors of Washington DC, the Fed's money printing will continue at a breathtaking speed. For savers, retirees, and anyone earning in US dollars, this massive increase in currency creation and inflation is the single biggest threat to their financial future."
“President Trump dropped a bomb this week on election fraud. He said the election machine and software company called Dominion “Deleted 2.7 million Trump Votes nationwide. Data analysis finds 221,000 Pennsylvania votes switched from President Trump to Biden.” If this is proven, and I think it will be, this would shut down Biden and the election would be Trump’s along with the GOP.
Top Trump election attorney Lin Wood, who got millions of dollars from mainstream media outlets (MSM) such as CNN for defaming Nick Sandman, tweeted out “Soon no objective fair minded person would be able to deny massive voter fraud perpetrated in planned coordinated scheme to steal our Presidency. They have all been caught.” On the law, Wood is good, and he would not make such statements on Twitter if he did not already have a darn good provable case.
Of course, the MSM is ignoring any news of massive voter fraud, which is now in abundance. The MSM is not going to give up the con job that the “Pretender in Chief,” Joe Biden, actually won this election. Biden and his fellow Democrats got creamed, and this is with massive voter fraud that is now apparent in multiple states."
"Even Stricter Lockdowns Are Coming & They Are Going To
Be Extremely Devastating For The U.S. Economy"
by Epic Economist
"Even more strict government-mandated lockdowns are coming, and the result of it will undoubtedly be catastrophic for the beaten U.S. economy. The health "advisory board" of the new administration has announced plans to shut down the entire economy for up to 6 weeks starting on January 2021.
Right now, amid a spike in registered cases, many states are already imposing more restrictive regulations to limit the operations of local businesses and, of course, they are also witnessing a growing number of permanent closures, bankruptcies, and lay-offs.
But as of January, the situation is going to get much worse. Struggling businesses won't stand a chance and the labor market's wounds will only get more inflamed. By contrast, a recent study has graphically shown that no meaningful results have been achieved from lockdowns and leaders shouldn't be jeopardizing entire economies with the enaction of such ineffective measures. In this video, we analyze how the second round of groundless lockdowns is about to devastate what's left of our economy.
When the health crisis burst earlier this year, a panicked response was to institute lockdowns all over the nation. The result of it was the worst economic meltdown ever experienced, one that even exceeded the damages of the 1930's Great Depression.
Over 60 million Americans were suddenly pushed out of their jobs and filed claims for unemployment benefits. A massive wave of business bankruptcies and permanent closures decimated the once-imposing U.S. economy. And in spite of all of that, there wasn't a significant contraction in registered viral cases.
Back then, the fearful response that led to widespread business shutdowns was understandable considering the circumstances. But as things settled a little bit more, and it became possible to see how the restrictions hurt the economy. Yet, even after seeing the devastation previously suffered, the new administration disclosed to have plans to shut everything down once again.
Perhaps, by seeing what is going on in states that are already instituting a new round of lockdowns, something could change. Although the new health advisor's recent statements have given us reason to believe this will be our inevitable fate.
Last Wednesday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced new restrictions for New York. In the state, the number of new cases reported daily has quadrupled over the past month. Now, all bars and restaurants are required to close doors at 10 p.m., following in the same footsteps of New Jersey's vigorous action against nightlife, which also has limited indoor gatherings to 10 people.
New York has become the state with the tightest restrictions in response to the second wave of viral infections, and the trend has been expanding across the country. For instance, Maryland's Governor Larry Hogan and California Governor Gavin Newsom also announced plans to enact tighter restrictions in the coming weeks. In Illinois, authorities are limiting the functioning of several business sectors, while in California, half of its counties might need to tighten restrictions over the next week.
Consequently, a tsunami of job losses is ravaging the labor market. At the present day, the U.S. unemployment rate is at 26.3 percent, and more lay-offs are being announced on a daily basis. For example, Exxon has informed that they will be letting 14,000 workers go by the end of the year, Disney has communicated that they will be laying off thousands more workers.
Even financial institutions that are commonly known for managing their budgets and finding alternatives other than massively furloughing employees during hard times are now announcing plans to substantially cut their staff. A recent forecast found that the financial industry will see its headcount fall by 10% by mid-2021, especially since lockdowns enhanced the home office trend and it will become even more complicated to find a job under these circumstances.
However, a very intriguing report out of JPMorgan that analyzed lockdowns around the world found no meaningful curve development differences between countries with and without strong curve intervention.
The results of the study made the bank conclude that lockdowns and social distancing measures aren’t actually that effective and the existing public health intervention to remain in place next year should focus on economic/public mental health over the urge to close the curve.
But knowing that the representatives that are about to take over the White House seem to have learned nothing from our previous experience, we will soon find ourselves again in the middle of a horrifying economic depression."
"These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of island universes a mere 500 million light-years away. Also known as Abell 2151, this cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star-forming spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack gas and dust and the associated newborn stars. The colors in this remarkably deep composite image clearly show the star forming galaxies with a blue tint and galaxies with older stellar populations with a yellowish cast.
Click image for larger size.
The sharp picture spans about 3/4 degree across the cluster center, corresponding to over 6 million light-years at the cluster's estimated distance. Diffraction spikes around brighter foreground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy are produced by the imaging telescope's mirror support vanes. In the cosmic vista many galaxies seem to be colliding or merging while others seem distorted - clear evidence that cluster galaxies commonly interact. In fact, the Hercules Cluster itself may be seen as the result of ongoing mergers of smaller galaxy clusters and is thought to be similar to young galaxy clusters in the much more distant, early Universe. "
"Sitting with our sadness takes the courage to believe that we can bear the pain and we will come out the other side. The last thing most of us want to hear or think about when we are dealing with profound feelings of sadness is that deep learning can be found in this place. In the midst of our pain, we often feel picked on by life, or overwhelmed by the enormity of some loss, or simply too exhausted to try and examine the situation. We may feel far too disappointed and angry to look for anything resembling a bright side to our suffering. Still, somewhere in our hearts, we know that we will eventually emerge from the depths into the light of greater awareness. Remembering this truth, no matter how elusive it seems, can help.
The other thing we often would rather not hear when we are dealing with intense sadness is that the only way out of it is through it. Sitting with our sadness takes the courage to believe that we can bear the pain and the faith that we will come out the other side. With courage, we can allow ourselves to cycle through the grieving process with full inner permission to experience it. This is a powerful teaching that sadness has to offer us - the ability to surrender and the acceptance of change go hand in hand.
Another teaching of sadness is compassion for others who are in pain, because it is only in feeling our own pain that we can really understand and allow for someone else’s. Sadness is something we all go through, and we all learn from it and are deepened by its presence in our lives. While our own individual experiences of sadness carry with them unique lessons, the implications of what we learn are universal. The wisdom we gain from going through the process of feeling loss, heartbreak, or deep disappointment gives us access to the heart of humanity."
"It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive."
