"Covid-19 Pandemic Update 10/12/20"

by David Leonhardt

10/12/20

"Making sense of Sweden: The White House event to celebrate Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination - a gathering that appears to have spread the coronavirus - would have violated the law in Sweden. It was too large. More than 200 people attended the Barrett celebration. In Sweden, public events cannot include more than 50 people. Anyone who organizes a larger gathering is subject to a fine or up to six months in prison.

If you’ve been following the virus news out of Sweden, this fact may surprise you. Sweden has become notorious for its laissez-faire response. Its leaders refused to impose a lockdown in the spring, insisting that doing so was akin to “using a hammer to kill a fly.” They also actively discouraged mask wearing. Ever since, people in other countries who favor a more lax approach have held up Sweden as a model. Recently, as new cases have surged in other European countries, some of Sweden’s defenders have claimed vindication.

How are you supposed to make sense of all this? Several readers have asked me that question, and the answers point to some lessons for fighting the virus. I think there are three key ones from Sweden:

1. It is not a success story. Over all, Sweden’s decision to let many activities continue unabated and its hope that growing immunity to the virus would protect people does not look good. The country has suffered more than five times as many deaths per capita as neighboring Denmark and about 10 times as many as Finland or Norway. “It was a terrible idea to do what they did,” Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, told me.

2. But Sweden did more than some people realize. It closed schools for students ages 16 and older. It encouraged residents to keep their distance from one another. And it imposed the ban on big gatherings, which looks especially smart now.

Compared with other viruses, this one seems especially likely to spread in clusters. Many infected people don’t infect a single other person, while “as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission,” The Atlantic’s Zeynep Tufekci has explained. Given this, it’s less surprising that Sweden’s recent virus performance looks mediocre rather than horrible.

3. Swedish officials have been right to worry about “sustainability.” Strict lockdowns bring their own steep costs for society. With a vaccine at least months away, societies probably need to grapple with how to restart activities while minimizing risk.

Sweden’s leaders do not seem to have found the ideal strategy, but they are asking a reasonable question. “We see a disease that we’re going to have to handle for a long time,” Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s top epidemiologist, told The Financial Times, “and we need to build up systems for doing that.”

The fact that Sweden is no longer an extreme outlier in new virus cases - even as life there looks more normal than in most places - offers a new opportunity to assess risk."

In other developments:

• The number of confirmed new coronavirus cases around the world has accelerated in the past week and is consistently exceeding 300,000 per day for the first time. Here’s a map showing global outbreaks.

• President Trump announced on Twitter that he was now immune from the virus and could not spread it. Twitter labeled his post “misleading and potentially harmful.”

• Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert, took issue with the Trump campaign, which he said featured him in an advertisement without his consent and misrepresented his comments.

• Memory loss. Confusion. Grasping for everyday words. Some virus survivors are coping with troubling cognitive long-term symptoms that have impaired their ability to work and function normally. “It feels as though I am under anesthesia,” one said.

Oct 12, 2020, 1:32 AM ET:

 Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak 

The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 37,512,600 

people, according to official counts, including 7,792,420 Americans.

      Oct 12, 2020 1:32 AM ET: 

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

OCT 12, 2020 7:24 AM: "Hundreds Of Bars To Close As BoJo Backs Tough New 'Localized' Lockdowns: Live Updates"

OCT 12, 2020 4:15 AM: "Coronavirus Survives On Banknotes For Up To 4 Weeks, Study Finds, As Cash Usage Plunges"

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Updated 10/12/20, 3:23 AM ET

Click image for larger size.

- https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

“America For Sale; Economic Wipeout; Massive Housing Bubble; Unemployment Tsunami; Wealth Transfer”

Jeremiah Babe,

“America For Sale; Economic Wipeout; Massive Housing Bubble;

 Unemployment Tsunami; Wealth Transfer”

"October Stock Market Crash? 80% Drop With Bank Failures And Bankruptcies"

"October Stock Market Crash? 

80% Drop With Bank Failures And Bankruptcies"

by Epic Economist

"Experts are warning that a stock market crash is brewing and it will devastate the prospects of an economic rebound and boost a massive banking crisis with bankruptcies/ In this video, we examine the signals pointing to an unprecedented collapse on the markets and use experts' insight to explain to you how this may be the biggest monetary disaster in American history.

Market watchers are alerting that with so many different deteriorating elements piling up, at this point, a crash is unavoidable. Even the Fed's extraordinary monetary policies and the Congressional stimulus plans that inject trillions of dollars to keep the bubble inflated won't be enough to hold off the financial crash for much longer. 

Despite the remarkable rebound in stocks we have recently witnessed, this upswing hasn't been supported by the reality of the beaten U.S. economy, and stocks are being priced for a fully materialized economy recovery, and if there's something we surely know, is that the economy isn't improving at all. 

Although we have seen unemployment rates fall, the numbers are still worrying and approximately 20% of the jobs that were lost are gone for good. Furthermore, forecasts project the U.S. economy will likely spiral down again during the last three months of 2020 and by 2021 the GDP could decline by 1.7%. 

Right now, the biggest concern is that a second wave of viral infections will emerge as we approach the cold season, triggering more business closings and significantly reducing business activity. And, in case of a substantial surge in cases, that itself could lead the stock market into a crash. But unfortunately, the outbreak-related disruptions are just one of the numerous signs that a stock market crash is looming. 

Amongst the most worrying signals that the market is about to break is the growing corporate debt bubble. The U.S. corporate debt has jumped to $11 trillion in 2020, as many companies struggled to replace earnings lost to the outbreak-induced lockdown. In this sense, a second wave of infection cases could spark a larger surge in defaults, and of course, markets won't like that.

Also, the national debt bubble will certainly add more pressure to a financial meltdown. The fiscal stimulus spending alone has added $4 trillion to the national debt up until now, which has driven the debt-to-GDP ratio past 100%. From now on, GOP resistance will cut back on stimulus spending, meaning that stock market triumph has its days numbered.

Additionally, according to stock market rules created by Wall Street veteran Bob Farrell, a bear market starts with a large downfall, which is then followed by a "reflexive rebound." We have witnessed both of those stages this year. If the market continues to follow the rule, the third stage will cause a dramatic decline.

The possibility of a contested election, for its part, will spread fear amongst investors, who think a Trump-Biden legal fight will linger for a long time and act as a driving force to create a more acute, longer-term stock market collapse. Strategist at Contrarian Macro Advisors, David Hunter disclosed that he believes we are on the brink of “the biggest monetary disaster in historical past". 

The strategist separates his apocalyptic prediction into two distinct phases, In a nutshell, Hunter expects a large “soften up” rally to take place within the subsequent few months, and ultimately it will "set the stage for an 80% inventory crash". In his perspective, the only repercussion that stemmed from the economic crisis resulted from the viral outbreak was a “fake-out sell-off”. 

And the results of it were only a blip on the radar of a lot bigger, debt-and-leverage-fueled development that has been constructing for years. That’s why he defends that the huge amount of debt and leverage on which the monetary system is based upon will start stumbling. By adding some extra trillions of presidency and Federal Reserve stimulus into the equation, then we'll dive even deeper in debt.

At this stage, liquidity injections will only be one more aggravating factor, because our monetary system will be so overly-stressed by the excessive amount of debt, businesses bankruptcies, and unbacked leveraged that the next stock market crash will likely break historical standards, leaving us in a deep economic rock bottom one more time."

Musical Interlude: Chuck Wild, Liquid Mind, "A Calm Heart"

Chuck Wild, Liquid Mind, "A Calm Heart"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"What strange world is this? Earth. In the foreground of the featured image are the Pinnacles, unusual rock spires in Nambung National Park in Western Australia. Made of ancient sea shells (limestone), how these human-sized picturesque spires formed remains unknown. In the background, just past the end of the central Pinnacle, is a bright crescent Moon. The eerie glow around the Moon is mostly zodiacal light, sunlight reflected by dust grains orbiting between the planets in the Solar System. 

Click image for larger size.

Arching across the top is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. Many famous stars and nebulas are also visible in the background night sky. The featured 29-panel panorama was taken and composed in 2015 September after detailed planning that involved the Moon, the rock spires, and their corresponding shadows. Even so, the strong zodiacal light was a pleasant surprise."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

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‘"When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged

in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams,

to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where

he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."

- Walt Whitman

The Poet: Kerrie Hardie, “What’s Left”

“What’s Left”

“I used to wait for the flowers,

my pleasure reposed on them.

Now I like plants before they get to the blossom.

Leafy ones – foxgloves, comfrey, delphiniums –

fleshy tiers of strong leaves pushing up

into air grown daily lighter and more sheened

with bright dust like the eyeshadow

that tall young woman in the bookshop wears,

its shimmer and crumble on her white lids.

The washing sways on the line, the sparrows pull

at the heaps of drying weeds that I’ve left around.

Perhaps this is middle age.  Untidy, unfinished,

knowing there’ll never be time now to finish,

liking the plants – their strong lives –

not caring about flowers, sitting in weeds

to write things down, look at things,

watching the sway of shirts on the line,

the cloth filtering light.

I know more or less

how to live through my life now.

But I want to know how to live what’s left

with my eyes open and my hands open;

I want to stand at the door in the rain

listening, sniffing, gaping.

Fearful and joyous,

like an idiot before God.”

~ Kerrie Hardie

“The Ghost With Consciousness And Potential”

“The Ghost With Consciousness And Potential”

by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOM

“One day a ghost paid Ari a visit. She had long blond hair and wore a banana-colored satin nightgown. Even though she had the power to interrupt and to come and go as she pleased, she arrived between sessions as a gesture of respect and good will.

"I never got to use my talents!" the ghost wailed. She floated about the room, agitated and unable to alight. "Now I'm dead and buried!"

"You can't create where you find yourself these days?" Ari asked the miserable ghost.

"No!  I just wander the universe, pointlessly and aimlessly!"

"But you sound like you still have a brain?" That seemed to surprise the ghost. She shot out of the air and sat down suddenly.

"That's true," she replied.

"And you can talk to people?"

"Yes."

"Then why not be a muse?"

"A muse," she murmured. For an instant she looked happy. But then a new thought creased her brow. "Since I never manifested my own potential, how can I help others?"

"Just by telling the truth. Are ghosts more honest than the next person?"

"Not particularly."

"Too bad. But that was an honest thing for you to say! So it appears that you can tell the truth. So, if I were you, I would think about why I hadn't been able to create while I was alive, I would learn the painful truth about that, and then I would visit people who are despairing and help them."

The ghost fell silent. "I'm drawing a blank," she finally said.

"About?"

"About why I avoided creating my whole life long. Not that it was such a long life!" she interjected suddenly. "I died at thirty-nine."

Ari nodded. "But if it had been sixty-nine or eighty-nine-"

"No, you're right. I was not on the path to creating. I could have lived another fifty years and I wouldn't have accomplished anything." She flew off the chair and circled the room ten or fifteen times. Ari, watching her, began to get dizzy.

"Come down here!" he cried. "Settle down for a moment!"

The ghost dove to her seat and sat there hunched and moody.

"For a lifetime you couldn't create," Ari said. "Why should you be able to figure out the reasons for that in a split second? Don't you think it's going to take a little time?"

This cheered her. "Well, all right. But how will I learn?"

"Picture the thing you always wanted. What was it?"

She had the answer on the tip of her tongue. "To spin stories like Scheherazade," the ghost said with real passion. "To hold audiences captive. I knew Scheherazade. She had something I didn't have. Some spunk. Some fire. A gleam in her eye. Something!"

"No!" Ari disagreed. "She manifested something that you didn't manifest. There's a difference. Don't you have a fire burning in you?  Of course you do!"

"She was also beautiful," the ghost continued.

"That's no way to think!" Ari leaned forward."Your mind is brooding about the accomplishments of others. You're thinking about Scheherazade, not about you. You're making yourself into a failure by thinking about her successes. Your despair flows from your envy."

"Thank you!" the ghost said bitterly.

"Plus, you didn't hear me."

"What did you say that I was supposed to memorize?" she said, the irony in her voice perfected in the coldest reaches of the universe. "What was so damned important?"

"That you have potential," Ari replied. "You have all the genetic material you need. Just not the mental health."

"Mental health!" the ghost exclaimed. "I've been insane for hundreds of years!" The ghost flew up out of her seat and began circling the room at breakneck speed. She seemed out of control and bent on crashing into walls and objects. But, strange to say, she had no accidents whatsoever.

"You came here because you wanted to change," Ari said softly, so softly that the ghost could not have been expected to hear him. Yet she did.

"Maybe," she said, still buzzing about.

"You do want to change. I know that."

"Change! How can a ghost change!"

"You keep running from the obvious. You can still think. But you won't. You have retained consciousness but you are not willing to grow in awareness."

Tears trickled down the ghost's pink cheeks. They fell from the air and dotted the small table between Ari's chair and the chair reserved for clients.

"Even a ghost can heal," Ari said. "If she can love again."

"Love?" the ghost whispered. "Have we been talking about love?" She stopped in midair. "You mean- ?"

"Love yourself. If you can accomplish that, then you will begin to love others. The desire to help will well up out of that self-love and that other-love. One day, without noticing what a tremendous trip you have taken, you will have become a muse."

A new fluttering filled the room. Then silence descended. The ghost had vanished, her disappearance accompanied by the tinkling of bells. For a moment Ari wondered if a ghost had really visited. He sat quietly, feeling for shifts in the universe. In a while it came to him that a little more love was present in the universe, which he took to be proof of the ghost's visit and of its successful outcome.

MORAL: You can make yourself anxious in all sorts of ways. The answer is to love yourself and, out of that love and devotion, demand that you do whatever work is necessary."

- http://www.dailyom.com/

"There Are Times..."

"There are times the lies get to me, times I weary of battering myself against the obstacles of denial, hatred, fear-induced stupidity, and greed, times I want to curl up and fall into the problem, let it sweep me away as it so obviously sweeps away so many others. I remember a spring day a few years ago, a spring day much like this one, only a little more sun, and warmer. I sat on this same couch and looked out this same window at the same ponderosa pine.

I was frightened, and lonely. Frightened of a future that looks dark, and darker with each passing species, and lonely because for every person actively trying to shut down the timber industry, stop abuse, or otherwise bring about a sustainable and sane way of living, there are thousands who are helping along this not-so-slow train to oblivion. I began to cry.

The tears stopped soon enough. I realized we are not so outnumbered. We are not outnumbered at all. I looked closely, and saw one blade of wild grass, and another. I saw the sun reflecting bright off the needles of pine trees, and I heard the hum of flies. I saw ants walking single file through the dust, and a spider crawling toward the corner of the ceiling. I knew in that moment, as I've known ever since, that it is no longer possible to be lonely, that every creature on earth is pulling in the direction of life- every grasshopper, every struggling salmon, every unhatched chick, every cell of every blue whale- and it is only our own fear that sets us apart. All humans, too, are struggling to be sane, struggling to live in harmony with our surroundings, but it's really hard to let go. And so we lie, destroy, rape, murder, experiment, and extirpate, all to control this wildly uncontrollable symphony, and failing that, to destroy it."

- Derrick Jensen 

"A Language Older Than Words"

Musical Interlude: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"

Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"

The Daily "Near You?"

Wasilla, Alaska, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"This Is My Wish For You..."

“Thoughts on Evil, Human Nature”

“Thoughts on Evil, Human Nature”

by W. Christopher Epler

“Carl Sagan, author and astrophysicist from Cornell, used to wonder if atomic weaponry would be the nemesis of most “advanced species”. A flight of fancy of sorts since whales and elephants are certainly advanced species but don’t feel the need for technology (and should we patronize them for this since they aren’t rapidly destroying the planet?). Is it possible that much of science and technology are actually synonyms of self destructive stupidity? A kind of short sighted greed, perhaps.

In any event, what has now totally blocked the evolution of the human species is pure evil. The fringe of astronomically rich sociopaths is the absolute outer limit of evil. Similarly, so do all mentally ill religious fanatics poison the march of human civilization. And, probably most of all, the Earth’s Paris Hiltons and astronomically rich parasites (and vampires – remember, it’s all really OUR wealth), necessitate convoluted social/financial structures and processes which are the “crown of thorns” or highway to hell (or your metaphor of choice) for Homo sapiens.

Maybe the wrong species got killed off during the demise of the Neanderthals.

Remember, “human” is a generic word that evolution has experimented with in actually a great many forms – we’re just the form that is still standing. But what’s the problem? Not a candy ass “religious” problem or a candy ass “political” problem but THE problem? Why is our species well on its way to going extinct? Indeed, why is it a near certainly that Home sapiens are going bye bye in the relatively near future (and taking countless “innocent by-stander” species with us in the process)? However, alas, they are just a sample of evil, since evil is as omnipresent as our breath. But what IS evil? Well, we don’t have to get particularly metaphysical about this. Evil is a function of human society. It has to do with the interactions of quantities of us (or probably any advanced life form).

So there’s a decidedly “quantitative” variable here. As our numbers increase, so does the complexity of our social infrastructure. And that seems to be the rub, since invisibly and insidiously the “social game rules” are conditioned into our vulnerable, biological brains. And just here is the door to hell. This dimension can be called “consensus reality” and it’s an admixture of language (always language!), the past, memory (not always our friend), and the miscellaneous conditionings of our time, place, and families (often profoundly dysfunctional). More openly, here are the programmed religions, laws, constitutions, and “theories” we so love to worship. In short, here is the stopping point of our species. Not atomic weapons, but the accumulated programming of years of social/psychological conditioning. The “operational definition” of all of the above is thought, because consensus realty IS thought; hence the thing the human race does best is think itself to death.

On a positive note, words like liberation, transcendence, and Enlightenment are “mystical” (the shoe fits) alternatives to this “swallowed whole” existence. The intelligence limitations of our species are still sublimely unknown, but whatever pragmatic value consensus reality may offer, our lives don’t even BEGIN until we get straight that this fire storm of conditioning that has become the “mind set” of the entire human race (indeed, the very “God” of the human race), is fundamentally, radically, and biologically arbitrary and random. In the context of this piece, what this means is that the social game rules that perpetuate the “Have’s,” that justify their astronomical wealth and power, and that (worst of all!) give an obscene “righteousness” to deranged lunatics who so love to commit genocide for the glory of God, aren’t worth the toilet paper they are printed on.

And exactly here is where our species is probably doomed, since many are called but few are chosen when it comes to being true to your birthright self and finding a reality/creativity/intelligence center that trivializes millennia of evil-perpetuating conditioning. Remember phrases like, “Might makes right”, “Manifest Destiny”, “survival of the fittest” (translation, survival of the wealthiest), and the loathsomely hypocritical “Divine Right”.

Of course these sayings (and even laws) are merely the tip of the iceberg. The dungeon is elsewhere. It is deep within the infrastructure of the collective human mind. Do we know that it is infinitely unjust that the elites spend more money on their wardrobes than most of us spend on our families in an entire lifetime? Do we know it is evil when religious fanatics try to steal an entire country and turn the lives of the people who have been living there for centuries into a WW2 concentration camp?

One response to these questions could be that we’re not sure if these things are evil, but almost certainly the world does know these things are filthy, evil, and infinitely unjust. However, you can know things on the “surface” of your mind that you play games with in the depths of your mind. The tragedy is that the world basically turns the other way from these evils and injustices because in the depths of our conditioning we are historically programmed to accept them. Hence, it is the deep, collective mind set that permits and justifies evil. We know better, but our “unconscious” (to use that word) “accepts” evil because we have been programmed to adapt to it for millennia.

The literally unimaginable suffering that necessarily goes with the existence of Greek God-like elites would make Jesus weep, but we accept The Haves (the evil) – indeed, most of us probably envy them. This is the paradox of evil. If we didn’t “accept” evil, it couldn’t exist! But since literally billions of us DO accept evil, that makes us an evil species.

This is not intellectualizing or empty theory. If the human race said no to “The Beast”, to the “Have’s”, to genocidal religious fanatics, to the Rockefeller’s, to the Rothschild’s, to the Bush’s, to murder in the name of God subhuman filth, to Saudi Princes, etc., etc., we could destroy them in a week. And I mean “non theoretically” destroy them in a week. Remove them from the planet as in cease to exist – now you see them, now you don’t! There are times in life you must be limitlessly aggressive. We can either watch The Beast destroy Mother Nature and our children’s future, or WE can destroy the beast. Remember, we know exactly who they are and we know exactly where they are. So what in the name of truth, beauty, and goodness are we waiting for? Certainly not for the paper bullets of religion and politics. ULTIMATE hardball is the name of this game.

Hence, looked at one way, there is great hope. Looked at another way, it is hopeless. It all comes down to how each of us deals with a lifetime of conditioning. Liberation is transcending the box. The world IS the box. So consensus reality (the home of evil) can be left. This is called being true to ourselves, or perhaps even Enlightenment. However, as a species, the probability that we will leave the box in sufficient percentages to “eliminate” evil is probably very, very small. Fortunately, even though our paralyzed and conditioned species continues to equate life with a moronically defective consensus mind set, each of us is still able to stretch our intelligence/spiritual eagle wings and leave this evil box forever. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: we’re the dogs – never the tails.”

- http://www.sott.net/

○

Freely download “Beyond Good And Evil”, by Friedrich Nietzsche, here:

-https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/beyond-good-and-evil.pdf

“Being A Human in This World, A Personal Credo”

“Being A Human in This World, A Personal Credo” 

by John Robbins

“I am someone who works and prays for world peace. Perhaps you are, too. But our society is spending a billion dollars a day preparing for war. I believe that inner peace is found when you love the world as it is, rather than faulting it for not living up to your expectations. 

I believe in forgiveness. 

I believe in accepting others for who they are. But I am part of a society that is spending far more on weapons of mass destruction and producing far more toxic waste than any other in the history of the world.

I believe in bringing a positive attitude toward life. I believe that love is stronger than fear. But our country now has more gun dealers than gas stations.

I have stood with my hand over my heart, pledging allegiance to this country and reciting the words “with liberty and justice for all.” I want this nation to be the land of the free. But today a greater proportion of U.S. citizens are behind bars than any other country in the world. Many states now spend more money on prisons than on education. I have been stirred to my core by the words and example of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe in this country’s promise of equal opportunity for all. But young black males now make up 6 percent of the population of this country, and 50 percent of prison inmates.

I want to uphold the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people. I believe that how we treat each other says a lot about us as people. But how do you honor the dignity and inherent worth of every human being when shoe companies are paying basketball players $20 million to endorse their shoes, while paying their workers 20 cents an hour to make them?

I believe that that every child is a precious treasure. I affirm that all children deserve to be nurtured and protected. But in this rich and prosperous country more than 25 percent of all children are living in poverty.

I have been proud of my country. But today, among the world’s industrialized nations, our nation is number one in billionaires – and number one in children and elderly living in poverty. Number one in real wealth – and number one in unequal wealth distribution. Number one in big houses – and number one in homelessness.

I love the natural world, and do my best to honor the living Earth. Perhaps you do, too. But even as many of us do what we can, the tropical rainforests are being destroyed so people whose cholesterol levels are too high can eat hamburgers a quarter cent cheaper. Rainfall now often contains such high levels of pesticides that it would be illegal to sell as drinking water. And the tallest mountain on the east coast is a garbage dump.

I draw great strength from my kinship with animals. Some of my best friends have had four legs. Perhaps you, too, have had a relationship with an animal that has enriched you as a human being. But much of our food today comes from animals raised in factory farms that resemble concentration camps.

There is so much pain and death in our times. This is not an easy time to be a person of conscience and feeling. It can be terribly hard today to stay in touch with your deep soul. It can seem all but impossible to keep your love alive. The world has a way of blowing relentless hurricane winds at our little flickering candles of faith.

This is what I have to say at this time in history. I stand here in the face of the anguish of our time, and I affirm that it is possible to see it all, to gaze fully into the abyss, and yet not become bitter and broken.

I stand for this. We are not here to be defeated. Our hopes are not empty vessels holding no truth. I stand for this. Our dreams and prayers are rooted in something greater than the forces of death.

I stand for this. Our despair and fury at the world’s brutalities are part of our awakening. There is something mysterious taking place in this world that is part of our healing.

I stand for this. This world is not a tragic and terrible mistake. With all its flaws, it is still a sacred path to our destiny as human beings. There is horror and agony here, yes, and it can be overwhelming. But there are also infinite opportunities for new life, beauty, and the learnings of love.

Bitter winds are howling. Let them howl. We can shelter each other and put our little flames together. Maybe then we will find ourselves better able to face adversity. Maybe then we will find that the pain we feared would destroy us rather brings us back to what gives us life.

I stand for this. There are sources of joy here, and we are here to protect them and cherish them.

I stand for this. If we meet the world with eyes that do not flinch and hearts that are open, we will find ourselves capable of what is asked of us.

I stand for this. We who are alive, with breath in our bodies and love in our hearts, have much to be thankful for.

I stand for this. In our connection with each other we are more than strong and brave. We are humble enough to be human in this world.”

- http://www.johnrobbins.info/

“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”

“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, 

and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”

“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”

by Maria Popova

“In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ the White Queen remembers the future instead of the past. This seemingly nonsensical proposition, like so many elements of the beloved book, is a stroke of philosophical genius and prescience on behalf of Lewis Carroll, made half a century before Einstein and Gödel challenged our linear conception of time.

But no thinker has addressed how the disorienting nature of time shapes the human experience with more captivating lucidity than Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), who in 1973 became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures. Her talk was eventually adapted into two long essays, published as ‘The Life of the Mind’ (public library) – the same ceaselessly rewarding volume that gave us Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning.

In one of the most stimulating portions of the book, Arendt argues that thinking is our rebellion against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude. Noting that cognition always removes us from the present and makes absences its raw material, she considers where the thinking ego is located if not in what is present and close at hand:

“Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego – summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s – is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls – and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them – does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.”

Echoing Thomas Mann’s assertion that “the perishableness of life… imparts value, dignity, interest to life,” Arendt adds: “Man’s finitude, irrevocably given by virtue of his own short time span set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities: it manifests itself as the only reality of which thinking qua thinking is aware, when the thinking ego has withdrawn from the world of appearances and lost the sense of realness inherent in the sensus communis by which we orient ourselves in this world… The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”

T.S. Eliot captured this nowhereness in his exquisite phrase “the still point of the turning world.” But the spatial dimension of thought, Arendt argues, is intersected by a temporal one – thinking invariably forces us to recollect and anticipate, voyaging into the past and the future, thus creating the mental spacetime continuum through which our thought-trains travel. From this arises our sense of the sequential nature of time and its essential ongoingness. Arendt writes:

“The inner time sensation arises when we are not entirely absorbed by the absent non-visibles we are thinking about but begin to direct our attention onto the activity itself. In this situation past and future are equally present precisely because they are equally absent from our sense; thus the no-longer of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead.”

[…]

In other words, the time continuum, everlasting change, is broken up into the tenses past, present, future, whereby past and future are antagonistic to each other as the no-longer and the not-yet only because of the presence of man, who himself has an “origin,” his birth, and an end, his death, and therefore stands at any given moment between them; this in-between is called the present. It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change – which we can conceive of cyclically as well as in the form of rectilinear motion without ever being able to conceive of an absolute beginning or an absolute end – into time as we know it.”

Once again, it is our finitude that mediates our experience of time: “Seen from the viewpoint of a continuously flowing everlasting stream, the insertion of man, fighting in both directions, produces a rupture which, by being defended in both directions, is extended to a gap, the present seen as the fighter’s battleground… Seen from the viewpoint of man, at each single moment inserted and caught in the middle between his past and his future, both aimed at the one who is creating his present, the battleground is an in-between, an extended Now on which he spends his life. The present, in ordinary life the most futile and slippery of the tenses – when I say “now” and point to it, it is already gone – is no more than the clash of a past, which is no more, with a future, which is approaching and not yet there. Man lives in this in-between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward “the quiet of the past” with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of.”

This fluid conception of time, Arendt points out, is quite different from its representation in ordinary life, where the calendar tells us that the present is contained in today, the past starts at yesterday, and the future at tomorrow. In a sentiment that calls to mind Patti Smith’s magnificent meditation on time and transformation, Arendt writes: That we can shape the everlasting stream of sheer change into a time continuum we owe not to time itself but to the continuity of our business and our activities in the world, in which we continue what we started yesterday and hope to finish tomorrow. In other words, the time continuum depends on the continuity of our everyday life, and the business of everyday life, in contrast to the activity of the thinking ego – always independent of the spatial circumstances surrounding it – is always spatially determined and conditioned. It is due to this thoroughgoing spatiality of our ordinary life that we can speak plausibly of time in spatial categories, that the past can appear to us as something lying “behind” us and the future as lying “ahead.”

[…]

The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent – either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared. Reflection draws these absent “regions” into the mind’s presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself.”

This elusive gap, Arendt argues, is where the thinking ego resides – and it is only by mentally inserting ourselves between the past and the future that they come to exist at all: Without [the thinker], there would be no difference between past and future, but only everlasting change. Or else these forces would clash head on and annihilate each other. But thanks to the insertion of a fighting presence, they meet at an angle, and the correct image would then have to be what the physicists call a parallelogram of forces.

These two forces, which have an indefinite origin and a definite end point in the present, converge into a third – a diagonal pull that, contrary to the past and the present, has a definite origin in the present and emanates out toward infinity. That diagonal force, Arendt observes, is the perfect metaphor for the activity of thought. She writes:

“This diagonal, though pointing to some infinity, is limited, enclosed, as it were, by the forces of past and future, and thus protected against the void; it remains bound to and is rooted in the present – an entirely human present though it is fully actualized only in the thinking process and lasts no longer than this process lasts. It is the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man; it is somehow, to change the metaphor, the quiet in the center of a storm which, though totally unlike the storm, still belongs to it. In this gap between past and future, we find our place in time when we think, that is, when we are sufficiently removed from past and future to be relied on to find out their meaning, to assume the position of “umpire,” of arbiter and judge over the manifold, never-ending affairs of human existence in the world, never arriving at a final solution to their riddles but ready with ever-new answers to the question of what it may be all about.”

“The Life of the Mind” is one of the most stimulating packets of thought ever published. Complement this particular portion with Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, Dan Falk on how our capacity for mental time travel made us human, and T.S. Eliot’s poetic ode to the nature of time.“

- https://www.brainpickings.org/

○

Gregory Mannarino, “Markets, A Look Ahead: Critical Updates And A Warning”

Gregory Mannarino,

“Markets, A Look Ahead: Critical Updates And A Warning”

- https://traderschoice.net/

"How It Really Is"

 

"The Problem With Most People..."

"The trouble with most people is that they think with their

hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds."

- Will Durant

"Covid-19 Pandemic Update 10/11/20"

By Carole Landry and Judith Levitt

"More than one million new coronavirus cases in three days. The world recorded the highest total ever in such short span, a reflection of resurgences in Europe and the U.S. and uninterrupted outbreaks in India, Brazil and other countries. The number of new cases is growing faster than ever worldwide, according to a Times database.

The second wave in Europe has dimmed hopes of a rebound from the economic catastrophe delivered by the pandemic. The European Central Bank’s chief economist cautioned that the 19 countries of the eurozone might not recover until 2022.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has yet to shake off questions about the effects of his bout with Covid-19 on his energy and focus. His office has not offered a medical briefing since he was discharged from the hospital six months ago."

Oct 11, 2020, 8:01 AM ET:

 Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak 

The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 37,282,500 

people, according to official counts, including 7,748,047 Americans.

      Oct 11, 2020 8:01 AM ET: 

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count

◆

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

10/11/2020 - 08:10: "The Second Act Will Be Worse Than The First: Lockdowns Are Not The Answer"

◆

Updated 10/11/20, 5:23 AM ET

Click image for larger size.

- https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Greg Hunter, "Boatloads of Money Coming No Matter Who Wins"

"Boatloads of Money Coming No Matter Who Wins"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

"Money manager Axel Merk manages about $1 billion in assets. Surprisingly, the signals he is getting from the markets are relatively calm despite the political storm sweeping the country. Merk explains, “The markets are not pricing in a panic. There is also a betting market about when the results are going to be known, and that has priced in less tensions. The results are going to be known sooner rather than later. The markets are pricing in a clear winner.”

Maybe the markets are seeing what Merk is seeing no matter who wins in November. Merk says, “We love one guy and hate the other guy. I care more about fiscal spending. As I said earlier, yeah, we are going to spend a boatload of money. They are going to spend it a little differently and on different priorities, but they are going to spend a boatload of money. They are politicians, and they can’t help it. One big difference with Trump is we are going to get a reduction in regulation and regulatory burden, and with Biden we will get an increase.”

Either way, expect deficits and money printing as far as the eye can see or until the US dollar breaks. Merk says, “What’s going to break the dollar? Something is going to break it, we don’t know. Maybe it’s going to be coming from some place we don’t know about. The states are good candidates, and who knows which state it’s going to be. If the Democrats have a sweep, maybe they bail out the states. We have quite a polarized electorate these days, and if we are going to bail out the Democrats, I don’t think the other states are going to like it. Marriages often break up over money, and if we cannot do our budgeting, there is going to be fighting. Of course, the Fed is probably going to help everybody out, and we are going to patch this thing up longer than we can imagine.”

Merk likes gold because of all the money printing and the eventual inflation that is surely coming from printing all those digital dollars. He also likes a diversified portfolio, but one of his very favorite investments is gold. Merk tells me he holds more than some people would and is holding it as a core investment. His simple advice for the little guy is, “Spend less money than you make so you can save more.”

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One

 with money manager Axel Merk, founder of Merk Investments.

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Spirit Moves"

2002, "Spirit Moves"

Full screen mode recommended.