Plague Journal, Liftoff, Maximum Burn
1. Across the United States, thousands of businesses have closed during the pandemic, but the demise of so many beloved hangouts cuts especially deep.
They were local landmarks — watering holes, shops and haunts that weathered recessions and world wars, only to succumb to the economic ravages of the coronavirus.
2.The myth of a stolen election lives on in a new attack on voting rights.
Georgia’s Republican legislators have discussed toughening state rules on voting by mail and on voter identification. In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers were considering reversing moves that had made it easier to vote absentee, and their counterparts in Wisconsin were considering tighter restrictions for mail voting, as well as for early voting.
3. A citizen journalist who posted videos from Wuhan, China, is set to go on trial on Monday.
Zhang Zhan, a 37-year-old former lawyer, reported on the lockdown in Wuhan. She was arrested and faces accusations of spreading lies in the first known trial of a chronicler of China’s coronavirus crisis. Three other citizen journalists have disappeared from Wuhan.
Even though the pandemic has killed more than 330,000 people in the United States, put millions out of work and shuttered businesses across the country, the market is now tipping into outright euphoria.
While the stock market ended with a small loss this past week, the S&P 500, Dow Jones industrial average and Nasdaq are just shy of record highs. Many investors, even those leery of growing signs of overconfidence, say it’s reasonable to expect stocks to continue to climb.
NOTE: the news snippets are taken from the Sunday edition of the New York Times
We live in a strange time. We are besieged by a pandemic, as the President reluctantly signs the $900 billion relief bill last night. An estimated seventy 
percent of Republicans who voted for him believe his story that the election was stolen… Livelihoods of millions of Americans disappear as small businesses no longer withstand the pincers of mounting debt and insufficient cash flow. Internationally the pandemic and disruption of normal trade relations results in chaos that contributes to the ascendance of totalitarian regimes, the demise of democracy. Today Zhang Zhan was sentenced by a Chinese court to four years in prison on charges of “picking fights and provoking trouble,” Truth telling becomes more expensive.
With the aforementioned in view, the stock market yet ascends to the stratosphere like a Lockheed Martin Atlas V rocket. Times have never been better.
4 thoughts on “Plague Journal, Liftoff, Maximum Burn”
Another recent article appearing in the NYTimes chronicled the inequity on a world wide basis with regard to the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine. The article’s contents do not come as a surprise that wealthier nations will receive many more doses on a per capita basis than poorer nations and even when the vaccine does reach third world nations, only the elite will be given the vaccine. One can only imagine how far down the list fall the refugees in Sudanese or Syrian camps.
The “caste” systems we as a species have created around the globe in order to make ourselves feel better about our positions within the hierarchy of humanity, make us all less human. We relegate the poor to a category of the expendable because of birth or education or size of bank account or color of skin.
Donald Trump rails about a “rigged system” and in this context he is correct. We have a highly rigged system in place that keeps the poor mired in poverty because it’s convenient. On rare occasions a few escape the confines of destitution and are then held up as examples of what is possible if one puts their mind to improving the self. Yet the climb out of humanity’s basement has more to do with luck and serendipity than bootstraps. The obstacles that anyone must overcome to reach a level of monetary success if they start off poor (especially if they are of a darker skin tone) are truly monumental.
And those who raise the warning flag of the consequences of this inequity are mired in hypocrisy (for the most part). I say this from the point of view of someone who cannot claim ignorance of the troubles of the world and yet I’m writing this from the warmth of my home tucked into a neat, spacious neighborhood of a relatively bucolic suburban setting. I have funds in my bank account and food in my refrigerator. I will join a march, walking side by side with incensed students who are spending $40,000 (or more) on tuition each year and will climb back into their 2019 Prius to ride back to their own comfortable home all the while feeling smug about their “statement” of solidarity. I am no different for I too wear the t-shirt proclaiming my connection to the oppressed, yet cling to my creature comforts.
I once wrote a poem about my envy regarding the NPR Saturday morning broadcaster, Scott Simon. Since it is apropos of my words here today, I offer it below. I wish I had an answer for the questions about privilege I raise here but I don’t.
Scott Simon
I am angry at you Scott Simon,
usurper of my life,
replacer of what I might have been.
My voice could have been heard,
my voice should have touched so many,
my voice would have given a voice
to those without one.
But I was distracted, or busy or tired.
You stepped in.
Perhaps I had less drive, less talent,
less passion or just less luck.
I am angry at you Scott Simon.
Our ages are the same.
We saw the same glass booth, the same Sputnik.
Those same shots in Dallas, LA and Memphis
rang as loud in your ears as in mine,
but you took them somewhere;
to Sarajevo, to Somalia, to Baghdad.
I sat and imagined living.
I watched television.
I saw injustice and cursed it
from rationalized safety of four walls.
I am angry at you Scott Simon.
You filled your life with my dreams.
Now you hold a mirror to me and
all I see are shadows,
pieces of what could have been,
played out against a harsh light of
57 years of potential.
Or maybe I’m just angry at me.
After all, it must be better that
one of us made a difference
than neither of us.
It is most difficult to see anything at all at street-level, from the vantage of a high rise apartment here in 1-Percentville. Many of us never venture outside into the fetid air. Perhaps we are conveyed to the next event on our schedule by the town car and driver… The poor live and die as they always have, and it is best that we not think about it, not think at all.
Indeed, your luck was different than that of Scott Simon. With a few degrees shift perhaps your trajectories would have transposed? Counter-factual musings are fatuous. Your conclusion is undeniable: Someone has made a difference!
She was sentenced to 4 yrs in prison.
What we are witnessing in the markets is an illusion. Take it from a guy that lived 18 of the last twenty years trading. To spare lengthy verbiage, humor me and consider two numbers: the M3 (the total of all US dollars worldwide, including some expats tab at a Thai gin mill) is about 2.75 Trillion Dollars – our National debt i s about 74 Trillion dollars ( a number so large , I read one person could not write it out in a lifetime.
Notice all the ads for cryptocurrencies lately; if not, just turn on Bloomberg? I told friends to buy Bitcoin the week of 5Nov20 (the only True crypto – all those others , including JP Morgan’s, Amazon’s, PayPal’s and so on are just regulated, controlled fiat currencies in different guise) The week of Nov.th HR2099 was made public. In case you missed it, it announced Fed Regulated banks could accept custodianship of crypto currencies. Bitcoin was trading about $13k then – it is a little over $27k today.
This will not be the first time in our nation’s history that ‘money’ has been torn up and replaced (go research-I’m tired).
Where to you think you will land when we go over this cliff. My advice? Buy Silver as it has a better percentile return and BitCoin (as I said, the other soon to emerge ‘coins are crap}. Our we could start a pool to guess what the dollar will be worth when deregulated.
Blessings
The ultimate cliff is that of mortality, which none of us will avoid.