11.26.2020

Madame Bovary

 On the evening when the Bovarys were to arrive at Yonville, Widow Lefrancois, the landlady of this inn, was so very busy that she sweated great drops as she moved her saucepans. To-morrow was market-day. The meat had to be cut beforehand, the fowls drawn, the soup and coffee made. Moreover, she had the boarders’ meal to see to, and that of the doctor, his wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was echoing with bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour were calling for brandy; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long kitchen table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was being chopped.


From the poultry-yard was heard the screaming of the fowls whom the servant was chasing in order to wring their necks.

11.09.2020

Anna Karenina

    A silence followed. She was still drawing with the chalk on the table. Her eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her mood he felt in all his being a continually growing tension of happiness.

“Ah! I’ve scribbled all over the table!” she said, and, laying down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.

“What! shall I be left alone—without her?” he thought with horror, and he took the chalk. “Wait a minute,” he said, sitting down to the table. “I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.”

He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.

“Please, ask it.”

“Here,” he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, “When you told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?” There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, “Is it what I think?”

“I understand,” she said, flushing a little.

“What is this word?” he said, pointing to the n that stood for never.

“It means never,” she said; “but that’s not true!”

He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d.

Dolly was completely comforted in the depression caused by her conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch when she caught sight of the two figures: Kitty with the chalk in her hand, with a shy and happy smile looking upwards at Levin, and his handsome figure bending over the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute on the table and the next on her. He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant, “Then I could not answer differently.”

He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.

“Only then?”

“Yes,” her smile answered.

“And n... and now?” he asked.

“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so much!” she wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. This meant, “If you could forget and forgive what happened.”

He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”

She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.

“I understand,” she said in a whisper.

He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and without asking him, “Is it this?” took the chalk and at once answered.

For a long while he could not understand what she had written, and often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He could not supply the word she had meant; but in her charming eyes, beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And he wrote three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she read them over her arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer, “Yes.”

“You’re playing secrétaire?” said the old prince. “But we must really be getting along if you want to be in time at the theater.”

Levin got up and escorted Kitty to the door.

In their conversation everything had been said; it had been said that she loved him, and that she would tell her father and mother that he would come tomorrow morning.

Optimizing your life and social acceleration

 https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006985188/optimize-your-life.html

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/10/no-time-but-the-present-breaking-bread-with-the-dead-alan-jacobs/

9.27.2020

Perhaps I should have expected to feel wildly out of place at Prepper Camp. I am a vegetarian agnostic feminist in a creative field who sits to the left of most American socialists: I want immediate and radical action to halt climate change; Medicare and free public higher education for all; abortion pills offered for pennies in pharmacies and gas stations; the eradication of billionaires; the destruction of capitalism; and the rocketing of all the planet’s firearms into the sun.

And yet I am also, in the darkest corners of my heart, a doomsday prepper myself. I live in Florida, where hurricane season runs officially from June through November, and both the Gulf and the Atlantic are regularly beset by calamitous storms. It just makes sense, living on that vulnerable spit of land between two roiling, unpredictable bodies of water, to ensure that one’s house has at least a two-month supply of food and at least nine modes of procuring drinking water in case society breaks and city services are cut off. (My family’s are: a rain barrel [1]; filtration straws [2]; a sun oven to pasteurize water with solar heat [3]; a Sawyer Squeeze water-filtration system [4]; a hundred-gallon airtight bladder, to be filled at the first sign of trouble [5]; a gas grill for boiling [6] and, in a pinch, dew collection [7]; iodine tablets [8]; and a tub with a tarp over it to let evaporation run off into a clean bowl [9].) We have medical kits in both of our cars and bug-out bags prepared for each family member, in case we have to flee in minutes. This kind of preparation is all still somewhat in the realm of the normal. Less so: I have negotiated for my family a hideout in New England with a fully stocked tiny house that has a woodstove and solar heat, with forests around it for firewood and cleared land for gardening. There are established fruit trees, water sources, and plenty of wildlife, if necessity forces us to set aside our moral revulsion and kill our fellow creatures for sustenance. In both Florida and New England, I have libraries of foraging and food-storage books; if I don’t always have direct knowledge, I know where to find it. I take boxing classes for self-defense; I have made my children learn archery. I have signed them up, for years, with the Boy Scouts so they will know how to build fires and handle knives safely, even though its soft-focus, quasi–Hitler Youth nationalism makes me queasy.

It is not that I have horrendous visions of an electromagnetic pulse taking out the world’s power grids, or of oil and gas production ceasing and leaving seven billion humans to revert to the pre-industrial era, or even of World War III being launched on an otherwise normal day because Trump can’t resist the urge to push the big red button. But I can see how fragile the institutions of society are and how ever-more frayed they are becoming under the weight of late-stage capitalism. I see in vivid near-hallucinations how climate change will exacerbate every human-rights issue until we cannibalize ourselves. There will be mass displacement, pandemics, tribalist violence, genocide, food and water scarcity, deforestation, desertification, cities underwater. The warming planet, the mass extinction that has already begun, the fact that I need my children to live at least beyond the span of my own life: these things murmur in my ears, give me waking nightmares. Such profound eschatological horror can only be slain by action. I ready myself for as many possibilities as I can so that I may keep my raging anxiety under control.

https://legacy.harpers.org/archive/2020/03/waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world-lauren-groff/

9.20.2020

33 chains

 https://genius.com/11385265

Humanity's strengths and weaknesses

 Humanity's strengths and weaknesses

Things were designed to do:
Think about sex
Feed ourselves every day 
Put ourselves and our family above others 

Things we have learned to do:
Delay gratification 
Read

Things we still can’t do:
Solve large-scale collective action problems 
Perform long-term strategic thinking 

 The quality and diversity of people in a city mirrors its extant housing stock.

Covid Reflections

 Covid Reflections

Folks have done a lot of reflecting through Covid. Here are some of my takeaways, brain farts:

Neanderthal theory: Trump is a dinosaur. We can proactively decide, based on science, who is fit to lead a nation of 330 million and who is not. Our politicians, our senators, our process is a dinosaur that needs to be modernized, else we will get eaten alive by other nations.

We are in the clutches of a madman. What we hold dear about democracy could be lost.  It places a weight, unnecessary weight upon each of us. We must search our feelings for the will to rebel against fascist demonstrations of power and consolidation of power at the highest levels of government and justice.  What job opportunities for our children will be available in a world controlled by Trump and people like him?   

Covid is actually the perfect opportunity/demonstration for Rawlsian justice: if you don’t take care of the poorest, the richest will get sick, as opposed to aids, poverty, race, etc. that can be segregated to a defined group and the group can be made to suffer. In fact the people that are least compliant, least likely to wear masks, are most likely to feel the pain of this wrathful Covid gd.     

We have made the robots that have taken over and they are corporations with one primal directive: profit over human health, wealth, or security. Corporations globally need to adhere to a new set of rules.

Instead of it's the economy stupid, it's the stupids, stupid. Why would people ignore the dangers of Covid. It's way way too complicated for them to wrap their heads around (e.g. how it's transmitted, etc.)

For decades after the fall of Hitler, Germans had intense shame that they could have followed a fascist into a war a that murdered 6 million+ people and destroyed their country. What needs to happen for Republicans to wake up? Do we need to get invaded by another country? Do we need to go bankrupt? Does everyone need to lose a family member or friend to Covid?

If you make over 100K, your should be thinking about how you can get involved in public governance. Folks are vastly underequipped to step up.  We need to raise wages for elected officials so they are competitive with the best and brightest industries. We need competency over here. 

The idea that normal, everyday people would have to be charged with the idea of remaking society or bringing back the equity of another generation, which was never good, blows my mind.

We are destroying the earth, that much is clear. This is the point at which the smallness of the earth is catching up to us. We have had stupid, pigheaded leaders before, but there was only so much destruction they could wreak.

Towards a new model of global governance. Trump and leaders like him are dangerous to the health and well-being of the world. Simply from a personality characteristic point of view, he would most certainly get us all killed quickly if he or someone like him were to reign despotically for a long time. What are the characteristics of despots and potential despots and how can they be identified early?

We need to make a commitment to stopping global warming in its tracks, whatever the cost, and devising new strategies to live at a high quality of life for a long period of time, including population control.

The lesson from Collapse (Jared Diamond) is not simply that the world could fall apart, but the scale on which it could happen.

We are re-imagining the world and a government ready for the 21st century and not living in the 19th or 20th. We have a 18th century Constitution for a 21st century Republic. Time for a 2.0.

Silence is complicity.

I wish we had a 10-year anti-poverty pledge in Durham that had some teeth.

Take as an assumption that instability has been more common in Human history than stability
So why do we assume that we will get out of this jam of global warming, resource depletion, global governance, war, without new solutions?

Covid has helped me see with a great clarity that the political process is inherently broken, that a governor might decide how many people live or die in a state, based on when they put a stay-at-home order in place or whether they hired more or less contact tracers and testing infrastructure.

(April 2020)
Why don't we have sophisticated contact tracing?
Why don't we know where covid patients live?
What is going to be the result of 2 trillion dollars worth of assistance
Epidemiologist academics have failed us. The industry is engineered to generate papers, not praxis.
Why is there not more (bilingual) community and state-level messaging?

What did we learn from Covid

1. We need leaders and processes and governance that is results oriented.

2. We need global governance to solve global collective action problems, backed up with real money (Covid, climate change, resource depletion, food and water scarcity, nuclear proliferation).

3. Power is actually held by a small number of people, and it trickles down.  The president, governors, etc.

4. We need better leadership. Well now everyone should run for every city council position, every school board position. We need the Reverend Barbers, the Bomani Joneses, the Roger Bennetts, the John Olivers to actually take the elected positions, and the highest ones they can attain or be appointed to.

5. In the absence of power, all we can do is educate.

6. I retain: the capacity to determine my own fate; the capacity to make changes; the capacity for self-expression.

The coming recession

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/politics/budget-deficit-coronavirus.html

6.16.2020

Do the Right Thing: Systemic Racism and Covid

Do the Right Thing | Spike Lee | 1989

Covid might have been the tinderbox that allowed the George Floyd protests to ignite, but the here and now of racism are the black and brown folks that are disproportionately getting sick and dying of Covid today. Right now. The white liberal response is to hashtag the eff out of this situation, but in fact we should be pressuring officials right this minute to get more testing and tracing in low-income communities, more education of health behaviorsPPE, and protecting families that aready are infected.

It’s not too late to do the right thing. While Instagram activity is crazy high, black and brown people are still getting infected with Covid, right this minute. Let’s reform our police departments, and educate our parents, and set city budgets right, but what can we do right this minute to take down the silent killer that already taken 56 Durham lives and who knows how many more until a vaccine is found and administered.

5.18.2020

CVS

To watch a Latino family try to get medications when they don’t speak English. The cashier uses Google Translate. The child is sick, and the father’s brown shoes are worn thin. What promised land is this?

5.08.2020

4.30.2020

The long middle

I feel like this is the end but it is not the end.  

All that I can control is what is in front of me.  

It may feel like the end of the world, but it is not the end of the world.

Everything is stalled out.

As we sink into the monotony of the days and the depression of everything having changed, we realize how precarious the health and wealth of our civilization is.

What we need to do:

Not trust leaders who don't care about the environment
Not trust leaders who are racist
Invest in leaders that demonstrate intelligence and champion science
Invest in self-sufficiency

4.27.2020

Aggregate Public Health

With public health in the forefront of the fight against Covid, I think this abstract idea of aggregate public health has taken hold of the collective imagination like never before (i.e. flattening the curve, social distancing). But why stop with Covid? Perhaps this the time to think broadly and insightfully and take clear concerted action on:
  • Obesity 
  • Cigarettes
  • Weed 
  • Alcohol
  • Domestic abuse
  • Suicide
  • Opioid Addiction
  • Other plagues?

4.19.2020

asterisks

Dear Rog, on your pod with Rebecca Lowe, you talked about the asterisk that will inevitably be attached to Liverpool‘s league win this year, the irony being that this is one of the winningest sides in the history of football. I couldn’t agree with you more, but for different reasons. Just as 9/11 seems to demarcate the moment that popular culture shifted from modern to postmodern, this Covid crisis will be seen as a inflection point of its own. In the pre-Covid era, our daily lives were infused with snark, irony, narcissism, ostentatious wealth, unbridled consumer capitalism, storylines of multi-multi-million dollar football contracts and foreign owners that play and cultivate teams like they were horses. In a post-Covid era, we will, we must, embrace football, but without this bullshit. If the burning trash pile also known as Donald Trump has taught us anything, it is that we still have an appetite for intelligence, and as two of the most intelligent football commentators of the world’s most intelligent and elegant game (I mean, what football commentator uses the word "interstitial" (correctly) in his pod or interviews a Booker prize nominee?), we can see plainly that to be a champion of football, as Klopp and his team has achieved, is of only limited worth. Most important is health, security, and the protection of safety nets for all people, rich and poor, black, white, and Latinx. The asterisk is present because the historical era that it demarcates, like B.C. or B.C.E., is context already to a world gone by.

last one here


https://genius.com/13815592

4.12.2020

If we were as concerned about public health as we are concerned about Covid, we would regulate beer, liquor, and cigarettes more.

4.05.2020

The Long Emergency

As recently as late February, we were still bemoaning our over-busy lives.

The week that the shit hit the fan in Durham, March 16th, I woke up every day as if waking up from a nightmare, a nightmare where everyone lost their job, and a vague specter of death moved through our community. Every day was like going to war with an imaginary demon. Every day was like going to war, but the army you were commanding was losing badly.

Our potential demise as a modern civilization was rendered far closer than we ever imagined. Suddenly, many bourgeois privileges, like going to bars and restaurants, were spoken of in the past tense as if we were speaking of the one-time wealth of ancient Rome.

We had been so blind, and Covid-19, like a biblical Tower of Babel, or an actual literal plague, laid us bare. The orange-tinted emperor had no clothes. The economy, reliant on consumer spending like a perpetual motion machine, had no clothes. The city officials, teachers, school administrators, health officials, were left listless, wholly unprepared to react to a crisis of this magnitude and scope. There was no reaction. All we could muster was "stay at home".

And stay at home we did, or at least those that could afford to. While time slipped through our fingers, Latinx families were expected to follow English website instruction for homeschooling. (Was this really the most creative solution to this problem? Why weren't teachers reaching out? Even using Google Translate for assignments for grade-schoolers would have been better than nothing.) This was the stratification of information access in its most obvious, blatant, and unsparing form. In an attempt to social distance and for lack of beds, homeless folks slept outside at the shelter in March.

I like to use something I call emetic theory as a way to understand the value, if any, in what is happening. In the Winter of 2014/2015, only a year after I had taken ownership, the Bakery hired an employee who proved to be toxic in the most stereotypical sense. She caused long-serving employees to leave. She was mean to staff and to management. She was resentful and disagreeable to put it mildly. To make matters worse, before things came to a head with her, I hired her partner as well, and the toxin spread. When the fireworks were over, they had both quit in a span of three weeks, and I had lost 1/3 of my staff. The way the Bakery was coming apart, it was as if it had swallowed an emetic and was throwing up; literally every day felt like possibly the last we could go on together. The Bakery at the time was barely staying afloat financially. It was at that point that I realized I needed either to step up as a manager, or I was going to go bankrupt. I began thinking more as a manager, and less as a staff member and worker, which had been my role since I joined Ninth Street Bakery as a bread mixer in 2009. I needed to think about what a leader would do. It was an uncomfortable role for me. I was quiet. I was humble. I wasn't good with people. I wasn't particularly good at giving praise, or letting people know they were appreciated on a regular basis, especially when I was feeling stress, which was every day. All those things needed to change if I wasn't going to go down with the ship. Painful as it was, the emetic the Bakery swallowed as a result of those two toxic employees was positive in the long run, both for the Bakery, and for me as a manager. Covid-19 is not comparable in scope, magnitude, or severity, but a blind man can see the fissures, cracks, and outright canyons laid bare by the unequal distribution of suffering dispersed by this emetic, whether it be access to health care, education, basic goods and services, or something as simple as health education on the risk and pathway of viral transmission. This may actually be a chance to take a look at the dysfunctional things in our economy and fix them, to trim fat and excess, and to redistribute wealth more equitably. A twilight of the idols so to speak.

Trump's reaction to Covid from the get-go has had all the overtones of an alchemist trying to convince a scientist that they can transform shit into gold. The fact that we give him or his administration or the (elected) officials that answer to him hand and foot any credence is a shameful reflection on us all. The idea that we can do very smart things in the field of global capitalism, yet and leave a nation of 320 million to be governed via systemic corruption, racism, monied influence, and willful ignorance hurts my soul and boils my blood. In a world of Covid, or perhaps post-Covid, complacency and ignorance will no longer be tolerated. Why is South Korea so much better than us at this? And Hong Kong? And Singapore? As my Nana would say, "You’re not so great.  You’re not so terrific."

In many ways, Covid has brought everything to fore that Trump always wanted. He wanted the borders closed. He saw international trade come to a screeching halt. Like Trump, we no longer shake hands anymore. Like Trump, everyone is socially isolated in their "tower".  His disputed claims of wealth and ostentatious bombast now fall hollow like never before amid severe economic crisis. He is the loneliest man, and as Deleuze would say, "the ugliest man". And he still hasn't released his taxes. And with his xenophobic race taunting of the "Chinese virus", he opens the door for an international race war. He is so dumb and misguided I can literally see the wheels of cognition turning.

I call Trump "racist grandpa". I had a grand-uncle who survived Auschwitz, and like many persecuted minorities, was subsequently racist to other minorities, having heard him use the n-word once. It was the kind of thing that as a young adult in the late 90's, I tolerated and chalked up to the ignorance of having been a Polish immigrant in a new and often hostile world (he lived and raised a family in Brooklyn when being from Brooklyn meant something). Like my grand-uncle, we somehow allow Trump to continue being racist, as well as classist, sexist, homophobic, etc. How he is not impeached for misconduct and abuse of power has as much to say about his inability to see plain facts and string them together as it does our inability to depose him. He is an embarrassment.

To win at a public health intervention like Covid takes conformity. We all need to move like a school of fish to win at social distancing. But to win at a political intervention like new civil rights (read upending structural racism, gerrymandering, expanding Medicaid, installing Medicare for all, fighting environmental racism, removing insider trading, lying Senator Burr, etc.) takes concerted and sustained action, both at the national and state level. When you look at a relief package like the CARES Act, it turns out that all along we had the money, lots of money apparently, to give direct payments to poor and working class people, we just didn't have the political will to stomach it. As with massive outlays for wars of deception and interference, the money is there and has been there to lift people out of poverty, just not the political will. It's abysmal. I didn't realize that the government had 2T dollars to give to poor and working class people, it just took a global pandemic to show it.  And the amount of that actually going to actual folks is like 230B. It's so wrong. We could actually lift every poor person out of poverty tomorrow if we wanted. I think what this shows is that all the time we had the money to provide direct payments to citizens. We just didn’t have the political will.  We willingly and voluntarily let people live in poverty. We could raise the living standards of millions of people and create a generation of voters that believe justice means bringing everyone up to a basic level of safety, security, and well being. Do we keep growing, or do we redistribute what we have? Ironically, Covid is a virus built on stratification. The first people to transmit and fall victim to Covid and transmit it internationally were the folks that have the income to travel by plane regionally and internationally: NBA stars, movie stars, health ministry officials, international soccer players and coaches, for example. The next tier of people to get it were those bourgeois who fly in planes, go to bars, restaurants, clubs, concerts.  A lack of discretionary income to be in places where people gather for leisure meant that the poor and the working class, the 3rd world, were both the last to get it, and also the least prepared to perform behaviors like social distancing or to get adequate health care or health information. At Wholefoods, only 25 people at a time can be in the store. At Compare Foods, there are no limits and people confusedly negotiate and ignore the blue taped Xes on the ground near checkout meant to indicate appropriate social distance.

I put this all in context to stake the claim that there is still time to put our intellectual capital and moral wherewithal to work.

I wish I had right now:

Better information!

Information is the foe of panic and fear of the unknown.

I wish I had:

1. Confidence that contact tracing is happening for all hospitalized and non-hospitalized cases. How many public health workers are intersecting with the community to do this work?
2. Where are the hotspots in your community? How is the community being messaged about this?
3. Public health advisories. How are we communicating about health behaviors to all communities?

This is a public health crisis, and it has already proven fatal in communities where information is not shared effectively about risks and behaviors.

Leaders need to step up and think as hard about the transmission of information as the transmission of the virus. Leaders will step up through this crisis, and pretenders will step out or step aside or step down or be deposed.

If there is any opportunity in Covid, it is to think twice about getting back on the capitalism treadmill if and when things return to normal. Covid effectively pulled the Andon cord on our economy. The question is what and how we will fix what was broken. What if we didn't keep growing and instead redistributed what we have? If we base wealth on growing GDP quarter after quarter, we are doomed to fail eventually as a society and as a civilization. What would it mean to clean the slate? What type of people are we going to be when we return to the capitalist treadmill, how are we going to be changed by this? What will we demand of our leaders? Covid has taken the wheels off of the capitalism train, and not eager to get up back on that treadmill, I see the pain in the eyes of all who have been laid off or affected; there must be a 3rd Way, a way to distribute wealth equitably without these extremes and lack of safety nets. What would I do if I got off this treadmill?

Addendum: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/opinion/climate-change-covid-economy.html

Virus culture

Coronavirus culture is really STI culture gone global.

The blame.
The resentment.
The guilt.
The confusion.
The feelings of invincibility that it can't happen to you.

Axioms of Viral Culture
1. Information is often insufficient, inadequate, and untimely.
2. No one tries to give someone else a virus.
3. You can blame others, but it won’t be as half as bad as the blame you hang on yourself.

1.17.2020

So rather than feel that we are on the continual upswing of consumer capitalism, i think we are somewhere closer to peak or overshoot.

I've been mildly obsessed with this stuff since 2005.

Around that time, the theme was "peak oil" as the catalyst for societal change, which proved to be false. But even if peak was not 2010 but instead will be 2030, the societal changes that will occur will be the same. There's been no meaningful decrease in the amount of oil consumed since the peak oil scare, which leads me to believe that we will go on consuming as much as we can right up until the point that supply decreases not through conservation, but because producers are literally running out.

I spend a lot of time trying to predict the near future (10-30 years out), which is problematic. More useful is to know where will be 150 years out and backwards-solve to discover what we should be doing in the immediate term.

Year 2200 - global warming has made large swathes of the Earth virtually uninhabitable, without access to fresh water or capacity to grow plants or tend animals. Weather is highly volatile, leaving island nations and low-lying places constantly flooded.

Year 2100 - the end of liquid petroleum means that nations are burning shale, coal, gas and wood for energy, exacerbating global warming. Liquified natural gas and battery cells provide a modicum of energy for transportation fuel. Communities reduce sprawl for walkability and use of lower-energy-use transportation like motorcycles, scooters, electric carts, bicycles, trains, and light rail. Nuclear plants are going in at high cost, but it is difficult to maintain consistent maintenance of power grids across depopulated areas.

Year 2050 - In an attempt to maintain a bourgeois lifestyle and consumer economy, oil producers continue to produce until they literally can no longer satisfy demand. Conservationists are outdone by politicians shouting empty promises to a public that doesn't want to see the writing on the wall. Prices skyrocket, and inflation combined with reduced GDP torches financial markets, setting interest rates high, devaluing currency, and putting businesses into a conservative wealth hoarding. Unemployment increases and publicly funded programs and safety nets retreat. The price of commodities increases. Nations begin saber-rattling and with nuclear arms at the ready, catastrophic attacks are imaginable for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the name of preserving a way of life that upper classes in 1st world nations have enjoyed for decades while lower income people and 3rd world nations continue to suffer deprivations and hardship.

2050 really isn't that far away. It's possible we'll live to see it. Our children certainly will. And their children will likely live to see 2100. What is the the likelihood that the quality of life that we enjoy will be also shared by our grandchildren? What is the probability that they will inherit whatever wealth we or our children generate in our lifetimes?

1.02.2020

i looked up and asked, what happened?
suddenly no one cared about anything anymore.