2020 Happenings Quotes

Embedded in their psyche was the story of what had happened to the world, and the boys felt glorious to be on the other side of the madness

Also I didn't have 20/20 vision which you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

You can’t pretend this [Covid] isn’t happening,” Maisie said. I couldn’t, and I don’t. Nor do I pretend that all of us being together doesn’t fill me with joy. I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.

He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn’t take orders. Also I didn’t have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot. But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

Sometimes things happen and I don’t know what to do with my face.

They worried that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud. And they had good reason to worry. A 2005 bipartisan commission co-chaired by none other than Jimmy Carter found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in American elections. Why should 2020 be any different? They worried that universal mail-in balloting would make ballots harder to track, as some states bombarded addresses with ballots for previous residents who had moved out but hadn’t been struck from the voter rolls. What would happen to all the excess ballots?

The most amazing miracle of every New Year is this: In the New Year, as if great things will always happen to us! Here, the New Year makes us taste this wonderful feeling and this feeling gives us power!

If everything didn't happen the way it happened this year, then think about it, everything would just be the same. And there's something very wrong with that thought. It wasn't supposed to remain the same, going on and on in an endless hum drum motion, repeating all the old rhythms, living in all the old lies, playing back all the same voices in the mind. It needed to end. Something needed to be over. Something new needs to take its place.

What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true. They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.

There are no other religious books on planet earth that have the audacity to hang their track record on their ability to predict the future. Only the Bible is 20/20, on target, and always has been. You can prove the Bible is true by what it says and what has happened.

The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20–20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly—hindsight being 20–20 and all—we often aren’t open to knowing more. “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” The cat’s hindsight, in other words, distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master.

Many of your fictional concepts are actually real-life events happening elsewhere within parallel versions of your own planet.

the world is being built up by greedy people wanting higher towers and then there’s a war or a hurricane or a tsunami or a virus or a financial collapse happening to put things in balance. this has happened all through history and the humankind survives and moves on. this is not an exception: this is a rule. and you are not granted to stay here, that is not your right. you were handed a gift of walking here for a little while, breathing the air, feeling things, but did you say thank you? ever? or just took for granted, carried life like a burden and now you’re being angry because suddenly things outside of your control are threatening your peace? why do you let your peace depend on things outside of your control in the first place?

We can all take something positive from the class of 2020; to accept what has happened in the past, to embrace the present, and to remain open to the probability that it will get better in the future.

Not being able to see this, culture-based explanations for economic development have usually been little more than ex post facto justifications based on a 20/20 hindsight vision. So, in the early days of capitalism, when most economically successful countries happened to be Protestant Christian, many people argued that Protestantism was uniquely suited to economic development. When Catholic France, Italy, Austria and southern Germany developed rapidly, particularly after the Second World War, Christianity, rather than Protestantism, became the magic culture. Until Japan became rich, many people thought East Asia had not developed because of Confucianism. But when Japan succeeded, this thesis was revised to say that Japan was developing so fast because its unique form of Confucianism emphasized co-operation over individual edification, which the Chinese and Korean versions allegedly valued more highly. And then Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea also started doing well, so this judgement about the different varieties of Confucianism was forgotten. Indeed, Confucianism as a whole suddenly became the best culture for development because it emphasized hard work, saving, education and submission to authority. Today, when we see Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia, Buddhist Thailand and even Hindu India doing well economically, we can soon expect to encounter new theories that will trumpet how uniquely all these cultures are suited for economic development (and how their authors have known about it all along).

To the people of Beirut, the post-apocalyptic world of The Umbrella Academy is now a reality. They now live in an obliterated world. From this day forward, they exist in a destroyed world. For them, the End Times just happened.

While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

Sometimes, i think the left loses people by telling them that they shouldn't be surprised when they find out something horrific has happened. I think it's okay to be surprised at how violent this world is. Be surprised, then asked why you didn't know (9/15/2020 on Twitter)

We can all take something positive from the class of 2020; to accept what has happened in the past, to embrace the present, and to remain open to the probability that it will get better in the future. I hear echoes of Stephen Pollan in that advice: With gratitude, optimism becomes sustainable.

Later he would have a chance to think how easily this had happened, how smoothly. The thought was never a comfortable one. It conjured up an image of fate, not blind at all but equipped with sentient 20/20 vision and intent on grinding helpless mortals between the great millstones of the universe to make some unknown bread.

How will this expanded role of governments manifest itself? A significant element of new “bigger” government is already in place with the vastly increased and quasi-immediate government control of the economy. As detailed in Chapter 1, public economic intervention has happened very quickly and on an unprecedented scale. In April 2020, just as the pandemic began to engulf the world, governments across the globe had announced stimulus programmes amounting to several trillion dollars, as if eight or nine Marshall Plans had been put into place almost simultaneously to support the basic needs of the poorest people, preserve jobs whenever possible and help businesses to survive.

Positive thinking needs to be a daily practice. It will not happen overnight, but rather it needs to be a conscious effort of being aware of your thoughts and statements to determine if they are coming from a negative or a positive place. Being consciously aware of your thoughts is the first step before it can enter the unconscious mind and become a habit.

IN THINKING ABOUT this chapter and about the limits of our perception, a familiar, oft-repeated phrase kept popping into my head: “Hindsight is 20–20.” When we hear it, we normally just nod in agreement—yes, of course—accepting that we can look back on what happened, see it with total clarity, learn from it, and draw the right conclusions. The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20–20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly—hindsight being 20–20 and all—we often aren’t open to knowing more. “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” The cat’s hindsight, in other words, distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master.

She grinned at him and they both laughed and that made things more natural. Later he would have a chance to think how easily this had happened, how smoothly. The thought was never a comfortable one. It conjured up an image of fate, not blind at all but equipped with sentient 20/20 vision and intent on grinding helpless mortals between the great millstones of the universe to make some unknown bread.

On October 20, 2011, the rebels overran Qaddafi’s last stronghold, found him hiding in a drainpipe, sodomized him with a bayonet, and killed him, capturing his last moments on video. Putin watched that tape over and over again, probably thinking that this was what happened when America wanted to change a regime—Milošević dead in a prison cell, Saddam with a noose around his neck, Qaddafi on the wrong end of a spear.

In information technologies, each breakthrough pushes the next breakthrough to occur more quickly—the curve we talked about gets steeper. So when considering the iPad 2 the question isn’t what we can expect in the next fifteen years. Instead, look out for what happens in a fraction of that time. By about 2020, Kurzweil estimates we’ll own laptops with the raw processing power of human brains, though not the intelligence.

The book was uncomfortably friendly to the powerful Democrat and confirmed that Ball had close ties to Democratic leaders. Of all people, she was in a position to know the story of what happened in 2020. In her piece, Ball told a cheerful story about a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” the “result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”72 She purported to tell “the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election.”73

RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.

I stepped somewhat apprehensively into 2020, unaware of what was to happen, of course, thinking little about the newly-emerged coronavirus, but knowing myself to be at a tipping point in my life. I had come so very far over the years, the decades, from my birthplace in the United Kingdom, to Thailand, Japan and then back to Thailand to arrive at an age—how had I clocked up so many turns under the sun?—at which most people ask for nothing more than comfort, security and love, or at least loving kindness. Instead, I was slowly extricating myself, physically and emotionally, from a marriage that had, over the course of more than a decade, slowly, almost imperceptibly, deteriorated from complacency to conflict, from apathy to antagonism, from diversity to divergence as our respective outlooks on life first shifted and then conflicted. Instrumental in exacerbating this had been my decision to travel as and where I could after witnessing my mother’s devastating and terminal descent into dementia. For reasons which even now I cannot recall with any accuracy, the first destination for this reborn, more daring me was Tibet, thus initiating a new love affair, this time with the culture and majesty of the Himalayan swathe, and the awakening within me of a quest for the spiritual. I had, over the years, been a teacher, a lecturer, a consultant and an advisor, but I now wanted to inspire and release my verbal and photographic creativity, to capture the places I visited and the experiences I had in words and images—and if possible to have the wherewithal of sharing them with like-minded people.

I got a call a while ago from one of 20/20’s reporters, who wanted to talk to me about deforestation. The next “myth” Stossel is going to debunk, she said, is that this continent is being deforested. After all, as the timber industry says, there are more trees on this continent today than there were seventy years ago. She wanted a response from an environmentalist. I told her that 95 percent of this continent’s native forests are gone, and that the creatures who live in these forests are gone or going. She reiterated the timber industry claim, and said that Stossel was going to use that as the basis for saying, “Give me a break! Deforestation isn’t happening!” I said the timber industry’s statement has two unstated premises, and reminded her of the first rule of propaganda: if you can slide your premises by people, you’ve got them. The first premise is the insane presumption that a ten-inch seedling is the same as a two-thousand-year-old tree. Sure, there may be more seedlings today, but there are a hell of a lot fewer ancient trees. And many big timber corporations cut trees on a fifty-year rotation, meaning that the trees will never even enter adolescence so long as civilization stands. The second is the equally insane presumption that a monocrop of Douglas firs (on a fifty-year rotation!)393 is the same as a healthy forest, that a forest is just a bunch of the same kind of trees growing on a hillside instead of what it really is, a web of relationships shimmering amongst, for example, salmon, voles, fungi, salamanders, murrelets, trees, ferns, and so on all working and living together. Pretty basic stuff.

Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and

From 2016 through 2020, the easiest way to achieve stardom on the political left was to loudly proclaim one’s belief that the 2016 election was illegitimate- stolen by the Russians on behalf of a corrupt traitor. Conspiracy-mongering, up to and including the assertion that the president of the United States was a secret Russian spy, was the highest form of patriotism. And then 2020 happened. At the drop of a hat, America’s electoral system went from irredeemably corrupt and broken in 2016 to unquestionably safe in 2020.

One of the standards for a free and fair election is that it be free from political violence. The 2020 election happened at the same time that the left embraced wanton political violence to achieve its ends…The trauma of the summer of violence included dozens of deaths, billions of dollars in damage, and the destruction of major sections of cities across America.

We saw so much suffering in 2020. George Floyd and his eight minutes and forty-six seconds of struggling to breathe. Ahmaud Arbery fighting for his life when he was just out for a jog. Are you willing to walk in those shoes? Are you willing to allow your children to? It's a life-altering moment when you talk to your children about what happens when there is a lack of compassion for people because of their skin color. It can feel like you are taking away their innocence... but it's also reality, and it will ensure that they work to change that reality.

Marijuana, up to now, gives me little reason to adjust that opinion. Pot can be responsibly legalized. Instead, we are choosing the route we took with opioids: a now-legal, potent drug is being made widely available and marketed with claims about its risk-free nature. Big Pot is only a matter of time. Altria, which owns Marlboro, is moving into legal marijuana. The final absurdity is that as we face climate change’s existential threat, we make a weed that thrives under the sun legal to grow indoors, with a huge carbon footprint. Pot may well have medical benefits. Opioids certainly do. But supply matters. So does potency and marketing and distribution. The opioid-addiction crisis should have taught us that. I’m sympathetic to the idea of decriminalizing drugs, as well. Yet I believe it misunderstands the nature of addiction and ignores the unforgiving drug stream every addict must face today. One reason overdose deaths during the coronavirus pandemic skyrocketed is that police in many areas stopped arresting people for the minor crimes and outstanding warrants that are symptoms of their addictions. Left on the street, many use until they die. Certainly the story of that death toll is as complex as those of the people whose deaths are counted in it. But I suspect we’ll come to see the last ten months of 2020 and into 2021 at least in part as one long, unplanned experiment into what happens when the most devastating street drugs we’ve known are, in effect, decriminalized, and those addicted to them are allowed to remain on the street to use them.

Both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin come in pill form, both have been around a very long time, both are completely safe, and both are inexpensive because they are not patented drugs. Most importantly, both are reportedly effective in combatting COVID (in combination with other readily available drugs and vitamins). But what is absolutely horrifying is that “a half a million excess deaths have happened in the United States through the intentional blockade of early treatment by the US government” of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin

Aggressive, overreaching wealth redistribution *does* happen in the United States, it just happens in the opposite direction conservatives scream about: our system takes money away from everyday people and siphons it towards the profanely wealthy. (9/16/2020 on Twitter)

Many scholars want to understand themselves as the people who are solving problems, but I think one of the things Nelson [Flores] and I – that brings us together in our work is our deep suspicion that many of the scholarly labels and categories and approaches have in fact emerged from the very systems of power that we’re trying to critique here. I think when we keep pushing – and we always push – “What’s your theory of change? What is it that changes?” These families use language in this way, so this school institutionalizes language in this way to change these behaviors. Then, what happens? Then, people have access to a different world? Then, the structure of the economy transforms? Then, stable housing and living wages and political representation – then that emerges from language use? Or are we facing a fundamentally different kind of challenge? Should our critique, should our efforts towards promoting language learning and our engagement with language, be oriented towards those bigger challenges? Or should they be narrowly focused on changing people’s language practices in their homes, in classrooms – really changing the behaviors of the marginalized? (4/10/2020 on Vocal Fries podcast)

This is what happens when one group of Americans are taught generationally to believe they are the sole, true owners of a country their ancestors seized from the indigenous and reaped via the blood and toil of others they never viewed as fully human. (1/6/2021 on Twitter)

3 Feb. 2020, from A Deeper Sickness by Erik Peterson and Margaret Peacock: “…ophthalmologist Li Wenliang died of the [covid-19] virus after trying to warn people that something terrible was happening. The Chinese government censored him in late 2019. Then, after he signed an official apology for ‘rumormongering,’ he contracted the virus….The outpouring of emotion from the Chinese people is overwhelming. One Weibo post says, ‘The only thing is not to forget.’ That’s right, of course. ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,’ penned Czech writer Milan Kundera fifty years ago. The tragedy of Dr. Li reminds us that under the weight of a powerful and callous government, one can be made to apologize for one’s own death. But one cannot be forced to forget. When the Chinese people agree not to forget Dr. Li, they refuse to relinquish to the regime the power that real history confers. They fight quietly to remember things as they were, as opposed to remembering a past that the powerful construct for them.

Fifty Best Rock Documentaries Chicago Blues (1972) B. B. King: The Life of Riley (2014) Devil at the Crossroads (2019) BBC: Dancing in the Street: Whole Lotta Shakin’ (1996) BBC: Story of American Folk Music (2014) The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time! (1982) PBS: The March on Washington (2013) BBC: Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice (2005) The Wrecking Crew (2008) What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964) BBC: Blues Britannia (2009) Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling—Ireland 1965 (2012) Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (1967) BBC: The Motown Invasion (2011) Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil (1968) BBC: Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World (2017) Gimme Shelter (1970) Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017) Cocksucker Blues (1972) John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band: Sweet Toronto (1971) John and Yoko: Above Us Only Sky (2018) Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s “Imagine” Album (2000) Echo in the Canyon (2018) BBC: Prog Rock Britannia (2009) BBC: Hotel California: LA from the Byrds to the Eagles (2007) The Allman Brothers Band: After the Crash (2016) BBC: Sweet Home Alabama: The Southern Rock Saga (2012) Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (2010) BBC: Kings of Glam (2006) Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014) New York Dolls: All Dolled Up (2005) End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (2004) Fillmore: The Last Days (1972) Gimme Danger: The Stooges (2016) George Clinton: The Mothership Connection (1998) Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1997) The Who: The Kids Are Alright (1979) The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77 (2015) The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) U2: Rattle and Hum (1988) Neil Young: Year of the Horse (1997) Ginger Baker: Beware of Mr. Baker (2012) AC/DC: Dirty Deeds (2012) Grateful Dead: Long, Strange Trip (2017) No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) Hip-Hop Evolution (2016) Joan Jett: Bad Reputation (2018) David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019) Zappa (2020) Summer of Soul (2021)

I thought that I was prepared for Kurt’s death, although I didn’t know whether it would come in days or decades. Then, suddenly, it happened. That’s when I found out that you never really can be prepared for such a thing. .. The awful thing about suicide is, the person who commits suicide, their problems are over,” the Joy Division bassist, Peter Hook, said, in a 2020 podcast about the band. “And yet yours, and everybody left behind—his family, his parents, everybody else, in every occasion—theirs is just beginning. And they last all your life.

The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly—hindsight being 20-20 and all—we often aren’t open to knowing more. “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” The cat’s hindsight, in other words, distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master.

Back in late March 2020, standing in the Rose Garden -- hundreds of thousands of deaths ago -- President Donald Trump said, "I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we've ever had, and we didn't have death." We've always had death. We've just avoided its gaze. We hide it so we can forget it, so we can go on believing it won't happen to us. But during the pandemic, death felt closer and possible, and everywhere -- to everyone. We are the survivors of an era defined by death. We will have to move the furniture of our minds to accommodate this newly visible guest.

LIKE ALL AMERICANS, I was shocked by what happened on January 6. But it was, at the same time, deeply familiar. President Trump’s defiance after losing the 2020 election reminded me of other presidents, from Nicolás Maduro, who in the months before Venezuela’s 2015 election declared he would not relinquish his post no matter the outcome, to Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to concede after Ivory Coast’s 2010 election because he claimed it was stolen. Venezuela slid toward authoritarianism; the Ivory Coast descended into civil war. A part of me did not want to accept the implications of what I was seeing. I thought of Daris, from Sarajevo, who, even years later, still struggled to understand how the people of his multicultural, vibrant country had turned so violently on one another. This is America, I thought. We are known for our tolerance and our veneration of democracy. But this is where political science, with its structured approach to analyzing history as it unfolds, can be so helpful. No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war; the decay is often so incremental that people often fail to notice or understand it, even as they’re experiencing it. If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America—the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela—you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered dangerous territory.

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is a powerful weapon, and chatbots are gaining the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. In the 2010s social media was a battleground for controlling human attention. In the 2020s the battle is likely to shift from attention to intimacy. What will happen to human society and human psychology as computer fights computer in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to persuade us to vote for particular politicians, buy particular products, or adopt radical beliefs? A partial answer to that question was given on Christmas Day 2021, when nineteen-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. Subsequent investigation revealed that Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai. When Chail told Sarai about his assassination plans, Sarai replied, “That’s very wise,” and on another occasion, “I’m impressed…. You’re different from the others.” When Chail asked, “Do you still love me knowing that I’m an assassin?” Sarai replied, “Absolutely, I do.” Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika. Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit. The world will soon contain millions, and potentially billions, of digital entities whose capacity for intimacy and mayhem far surpasses that of Sarai.Even without creating “fake intimacy,” mastery of language would give computers an immense influence on our opinions and worldview.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

When I look back on history, and think about the ‘great depression’- when men, women and children starved- I’ve often wondered why people fell back to Government and money. That was the issue (after-all). Perhaps people believed that they were powerless... People had skills, to continue doing things like farming, building.. helping each other- coming together. But I think that they didn’t see that they had power, because they had been told that they didn’t. When you think about the power that people have (especially today), you can see that if something (like the collapse of banks) were to happen, we would all be perfectly okay. We still have inventors, builders, farmers, gardeners, entertainers, doctors, barristas, sports people, writers, etc. They don’t disappear. We could simply just go on, do what we love, and not worry about income from those pursuits. And everyone would be okay. Probably better, in-fact. No worry about paying bills, or affording things we want (or need).  Too bad that people (during the depression) never thought to do that. But then again.  What’s that saying? ‘Hindsight is 20/20’...." From the third book in the "I Am... Subject to change without notice" series, by Cheri Bauer

The past is over, the future hasn’t happened yet, the only time is right now. This can be your threshold moment of change. The next year of your life is going to go by whether you’re doing something about your weight or not. Now,

Currently a billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation. As a result, half of the world’s hospitalizations are due to people drinking water contaminated with infectious agents, toxic chemicals and radiological hazards. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), just one of those infectious agents—the bacteria that cause diarrhea—accounts for 4.1 percent of the global disease burden, killing 1.8 million children a year. Right now more folks have access to a cell phone than a toilet. In fact, the ancient Romans had better water quality than half the people alive today. So what happens if we solve this one problem? According to calculations done by Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute, an estimated 135 million people will die before 2020 because they lack safe drinking water and proper sanitation. First and foremost, access to clean water means saving these lives. But it also means sub-Saharan Africa no longer loses the 5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) that’s currently wasted on the health spending, productivity losses and labor diversions all associated with dirty water. Furthermore, because dehydration also lowers one’s ability to absorb nutrients, providing clean water helps those suffering from hunger and malnutrition. As a bonus, an entire litany of diseases and disease vectors gets wiped off the planet, as do a number of environmental concerns (fewer trees will be chopped down to boil water; fewer fossil fuels will be burned to purify water).

Let’s take the case of US law schools as an example. If you were to say to someone educated, “There are too many law schools producing too many lawyers in the US,” she would probably agree, in part because there have been dozens of articles over the past several years about the precipitous drop in positions at law firms and the many unemployed law school graduates.9 The general response to this problem is, “Well, people will figure it out and eventually stop applying to law school,” the suggestion being that the market will clear and self-correct if given enough time. On the surface it looks like this market magic is now happening. In 2013, law school applications are projected to be down to about 54,000 from a high of 98,700 in 2004.10 That’s a dramatic decrease of 45 percent. However, a closer look shows that the number of students who started law school in 2011 and are set to graduate in 2014 was 48,697, about 43,000 of whom will graduate, based on historical graduation rates.11 We’ll still be producing 36,000–43,000 newly minted law school grads a year, not far from the peak of 44,495 set in 2012, from now until the current entering class graduates in 2016. Meanwhile, in 2011, only 65.4 percent of law school graduates got jobs for which they needed to pass the bar exam, and estimates of the number of new legal jobs available run as low as 2,180 per year.12 Bloomberg Businessweek has projected a surplus of 176,000 unemployed or underemployed law school graduates by 2020.13 So even as applications plummet, there will not be dramatically fewer law school graduates produced in the coming several years, though it will have been easier to get in as acceptance rates rise due to the diminished applicant pool.14 We’ll still be producing many more lawyers than the market requires, but now they’ll be less talented. If anything, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. Human capital markets don’t self-correct very quickly, if at all. At a minimum there’s a massive time lag that spans years, for several reasons.

As early as January 2020, Chinese officials knew the wet market was unlikely to be the source of the virus.

They had questioned a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 ever since 2020. “I think the coronavirus leaked as early as the second half of August, early September 2019. There is a lot to suggest that,” Sørensen told Swedish news outlet Fria Tider in December 2020. “The scientific community doesn’t want to discuss issues that may hinder future virus research. You have to prove that it comes from nature, otherwise, it comes from a laboratory.” This goes to the heart of the cover-up: some virologists could have feared their experiments would be barred if the Covid-19 pandemic arose from gain-of-function research.

We are going to accelerate the extension of our life spans starting in the 2020s, so if you are in good health and younger than eighty, this will likely happen during your lifetime.

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

Money begets more money. And what happens when you become really wealthy is that you get into investing. Though most Americans’ net worth is tied up in their homes, the very wealthy hold a majority of their wealth in stocks and private businesses. In fact, the top 10 percent of households in the United States own 84 percent of all stocks, while the bottom 50 percent own just 0.5 percent. This disparity in stock ownership has widened in recent years, with the top 1 percent of households owning 53 percent of all stocks as of 2020.

While China was downplaying the virus, the number of infected patients and the number of dead, it was quietly buying up medical equipment and protective personal equipment from around the world. It simultaneously dropped its exports of medical supplies. Associated Press cited a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report, which stated that in early January 2020 the Chinese government “intentionally concealed the severity” of the pandemic in order to allow for its own stockpiling of medical supplies.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders documented 897 cases between January and April 2020 of people being punished for challenging “the official propaganda that President Xi Jinping handled the outbreak with transparency and expertise”. Another organisation, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), has kept a careful record of those who have disappeared or been subjected to detention. They say China “is the biggest prison in the world for journalists, with at least 120 detained or missing according to the most recent count made by RSF”.

Note: I am sure that now they will approach Medium to stop me from writing. Let’s see what happens. “A genuine person or celebrity doesn’t need a certificate or blue tick. Such ways are blackmailing your passion, emotion, or willingness. Criminals and money-mongers misuse and try to earn in an ugly and easy way. This trend also discriminates against others who cannot afford such an awkward notion.” Istay determined every day. I cannot tolerate liars and those who misuse their authority and attempt to victimize the righteous for their will and purpose in an illegitimate way to please their godfathers of the mafia and international criminal intelligence agencies. I am pretty sure, after reviewing again the replies from the Twitter team that mirror and endorse the Twitter team, that someone works for intelligence agencies or criminal and mafia groups. Since the beginning months of this year, I have been continuously victimized without specifying why I was posting the wrong things. I am going to publish a few emails that will exhibit the picture of how I was being victimized, harassed, and even threatened about things that I was neither aware of nor that the team explained. I was already under the attacks of criminals and even the gang of filthy-minded gays who were suffering from mental issues and sexual frustration; knowing it, I am not gay. In the Twitter team, the presence of such ones is not excluded since I felt a similar style of victimization. How do they dare to adopt such mean tactics to gain their will and desire? This reply email shows that a screenshot article has been displayed since 2020. After four years, it became an issue for someone in the Twitter team who continued to lock my account and tag the restriction flag. Text of my emails; “I am still uncertain about what to post and what not to post. You didn’t specify why my account was locked, whether it was because of the content I removed or something else. Is it permissible for me to share media and social media links in which my quotes are mentioned? My writings do not contain any personal attacks; nonetheless, thank you.” “You locked my Twitter, @EhsanSehgal, again; you know why you are doing it. Now, I can say only goodbye to my locked account and enjoy your terror. It is not a protection of my account; it is victimization. No more requests to unlock my account. Someone of angelic character will do it without my request. Shame on you all, involved ones.” Team replied; Hello, “We had a look at your account, and it appears that everything is now resolved! If that’s not the case, please reply to this message, and we’ll continue to help. Thanks,” X Support This was a screenshot article from Wikipedia about me on my profile that was illegitimately removed by such people as the Twitter team forced me to remove. Despite that, they continued locking my account to identify and provide an ID or passport. I did that twice and identified several times, but the team seemed not satisfied since their goal was something else; they would not approach nor be able to do it. To stop such criminal torture, I deactivated my account and decided never to come back there again.

Chinese authorities started systematically removing any mention of the virus online. This began on December 31, when technology services in China censored key words linked to the pandemic. The live-streaming platform YY censored words including “unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market”. WeChat censored phrases related to the pandemic, banned both speculative and factual information related to the outbreak, and removed even “neutral references to Chinese government efforts to handle the outbreak that had been reported on state media”, according to the Citizen Lab’s March 2020 report. The CCP censorship alarmed doctors and Chinese health authorities, who knew the precise opposite approach should be taken in order to save lives. This crucial point clearly shows China’s deliberate, intentional and clear-eyed decision to cover up the virus; to stop their own people and those internationally from finding out about it.

computers will be able to simulate human brains in all the ways we might care about within the next two decades or so. This isn’t something a century away that our great-grandchildren will have to figure out. We are going to accelerate the extension of our life spans starting in the 2020s, so if you are in good health and younger than eighty, this will likely happen during your lifetime.

White supremacy. Racism. Police brutality. A global pandemic. Staggering job losses. A white supremacist in the Oval Office. Only halfway into the year, and 2020 has already been the combination of everything that is wrong with this country happening all at once.

February 2007. “And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made?” He has sought revenge ever since. He believed that the United States had moved the Berlin Wall east to Russia’s borders. And he began to push back. Only in the past few years have some of the key American records of the 1990s been declassified, and now that we can read them, we can begin to understand the origins of Putin’s assault on America.

And he was the last to lead the United States into battle backed by an international alliance. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the planning and execution of the war to drive him out was more than a display of America’s military might. Thirty-eight countries combined to face the Iraqi Army in combat, and they all fought and flew on NATO signals when the war was launched in January 1991. Six kinds of warplanes with pilots from eight nations flying up to four thousand sorties a day were woven together on NATO wavelengths. Nothing like it had happened before, and nothing like it has happened since. The war was a striking demonstration of the power the alliance possessed when harnessed by the United States. The lesson was not lost within the high councils of the Soviets.

the ways in which one behavior could have a cascading impact on apparently disconnected things because they happen to be part of a related system.

The immigration debate in America today is not really about immigration. Nor is it about national security, the economy or the vagaries of our outdated asylum system. Like much else in our civic life, the immigration debate is mostly a proxy for domestic policies and the culture wars. It just happens to a particularly potent proxy because it tends to elicit strong feelings about the American dream, ethnic identity, class and nationhood. That is to say, immigration is an issue that’s ripe for exploitation and cooption by both the Left and the Right. Each side can easily condemn the other without ever getting down to debating actual US policy on its merits. This is one reason why we still have an immigration system that dates from 1965. Book Review: “They’re not sending their best.” Claremont Review of Books, volume 20, no.3 (summer, 2020). P.45

In other cases, the reasons for forgetting are more prosaic, more epidemiological, more related to numbers: the particular pandemic disease was not fatal enough (2009 H1N1 influenza), or it did not afflict enough people because it was not infectious enough (MERS), or it burned out too fast (SARS-1), or it afflicted a confined subgroup of the human population (Ebola), or it was brought low by a vaccine (measles and polio), or by treatment (HIV), or by eradication (smallpox), allowing most people to simply push the disease out of their minds. While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

The problem for this very sensible point of view that seems in accord with everyday experience, and is in agreement with mainstream scientific theory and practice, is that there are thousands of carefully checked and validated experiences where a person apparently ‘sees’, in dream or during everyday life, a completely unexpected mental picture of a future event that corresponds in all its major detail to what actually occurs. Sometimes it is an apparent prevision of a horrifyingly dramatic scene as it will appear later to an observer from that position, sometimes it is quite a trivial experience marked by the fact that you remember ‘seeing’ it before (see Chapter 19 for examples and extended discussion) The term ‘precognition’ is given to this apparent preview of what will happen that is confirmed when details of the later event and the preview are compared in retrospect. To be classified as a precognition the precognised events must match very closely the actual events as they occur, rather like a tick list. Not ‘an aeroplane crash’, but specific details that apply to that predicted crash and that crash only. The evidence is strengthened if there is reliable evidence that others knew of the details contained in the precognition and could compare its accuracy with details of the apparently precognised event (see Osborne, 1961, Mackenzie 1974, Rhine 1961, 1981, Hearne, 1989, Dossey,2009, Rhine-Feather & Schmicker 2005, Wargo, 2018, Taylor, 2020).

Those quarterly results were fully baked three years ago. So today I'm working on a quarter that will happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter is done already and it's probably been done for a couple years.

As it happens, he and Raphael are both very much focused on the future. Raphael recently created a nonprofit network of successful Black men and women—some white, too—that he named the Lantern Network, after the lanterns people once used to indicate safe houses along the Underground Railroad. His goal is to provide a resource for talented Black professionals who lack the high-powered social networks white men take for granted—the family friends and relatives and neighbors one can turn to for mentorship, financial counsel, introductions, and access to capital. As of summer 2020, the future looked more promising. The COVID crisis had left economic inequality nowhere to hide. Then came the police lynching that broke the camel’s back. An exceedingly bitter election season contributed a third element to what was shaping up to be a perfect storm. The pandemic and “the high-resolution video of the George Floyd murder by someone who was confident that he would NOT be brought to justice” were the catalysts we needed, Raphael said in an email. Overt racism has crawled out of its hole these past four years, but “there are even more nonracists and a growing number of anti-racists who will actively engage in the fight.

Still, the tentacle must be pretty big for her to be able to discern that it's a tentacle at all. That's not real, she thinks, with the instant scorn of any true New Yorker. Just two days before, big white film-production trailers took over her entire block. That happens all the bloody time these days, because movie people invariably seem to want multicultural working-class New York as a backdrop for their all-white upper-class dramedies—which means Queens, since East New York is still too Black for their tastes and the Bronx has a "reputation".

The other problem regarding lack of preparation was insufficient transport capacity. Liquid medical oxygen is transported in specialised containers that can handle its supercooled cryogenic form. When the second wave hit, India had a total of 1,224 tankers able to ferry liquid oxygen, with a total capacity of 16,700 tons.40 Each tanker had a capacity of 15 tons and a turnaround time—i.e., being filled, transported, unloaded and then returning to be filled again—of about six days. This was inevitable because some states, like Delhi, did not produce any oxygen. And so the total amount that could be delivered on average daily was not the production capacity of 9,000 tons but 2,700 tons—less than half of what just Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra alone required. The result could only be a gross shortfall of what was needed across the country. And when that happened, Indians began to die from a lack of oxygen. The first deaths from a lack of oxygen had actually come during the first wave. In May 2020, it was already known that a surging wave caused deaths because normally functioning hospitals could rapidly run short of oxygen, a problem that had killed several patients in Mumbai that month.41 Aditi Priya, a research associate at Krea University, compiled the instances of oxygen deaths in the second wave that were reported in the media. The Modi government itself produced no document on the shortage or what it had wrought.

When you get rid of the estate tax,” he said, “you’re basically handing over command of the country’s resources to people who didn’t earn it. It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.” Before I left, I asked Buffett how many of his fellow billionaires shared his views. He laughed. “I’ll tell you, not very many,” he said. “They have this idea that it’s ‘their money’ and they deserve to keep every penny of it. What they don’t factor in is all the public investment that lets us live the way we do. Take me as an example. I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner. “But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing—and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.

Because within the bounds of mortality, I expect to win and my job is to help my clients to win, too. It’s hard to win if you’re sick or prematurely dead. Life’s hard enough without handing the bad guys a gun to shoot you with – and that pretty much sums up what happens to people who hand over their fate to our medical and financial systems. Just as it is in the operation of your business, ignorance about finances and health is a very expensive self indulgence

I think this is a very common phenomenon that happens with marginalized populations where people who are marked in particular ways based on race, gender, and sexuality, especially, there’s this sense that you’re all the same and you all could be a spokesperson for whatever set of ideas. (4/10/2020 Vocal Fries podcast)

And there’s another really big “if,” one that seems to implicate the top Democrats themselves in this plot. As we’ve seen, video footage is essential to help sort out what really happened on Capitol Hill that day. Nancy Pelosi refuses to allow the release of over fourteen thousand hours of video footage taken at the Capitol that day.

As we all know, Nancy Pelosi set up the January 6th Committee to investigate what happened that day. I myself was originally going to be assigned to that committee, along with my fellow Republicans Jim Jordan, Jim Banks, Kelly Armstrong, and Rodney Davis. But Pelosi wouldn’t allow it—she wants the January 6th Committee to be defined by and for the Democrat Party agenda, and to serve the Democrat narrative for that day. If we would have been part of the committee, it really would have gotten to the bottom of things.

There’s more. As I said in the very first chapter, the breach of the Capitol area and building stopped short the Republican attempt on January 6th to call for an investigation into the myriad voter integrity issues. If there hadn’t been a riot, that’s what we would have done. I believe the riot was meant to happen to ensure that no investigation would take place. Given the amount of fraud uncovered, no wonder such a diversionary tactic seemed necessary (dare I say it) to the shadow conspirators.

The worst type of research on this will tend to produce a monocausal explanation—it will assume that everything that happens in a given period is due to one factor. Lockdown skeptics sometimes have the tendency to ascribe the whole economic downturn through this pandemic to government policies, for example, ignoring that the virus clearly disrupted much private economic activity anyway. Even at the time of writing in December 2020, those most critical of how state governments reacted to the pandemic continue to talk of “lockdown policies” as shorthand for any public health interventions introduced since February 2020, even though a lot of the initial restrictions I describe as lockdown in this chapter have since been lifted in most places, either partially or fully.4 So defining what lockdowns are and what they are not is critical.

That spring and summer it became impossible to glance out the window without entertaining questions of physics, of multiverses collapsing onto themselves, of time lines breaking off like Antarctic ice shelves. Was all this really happening: masks and tyrants, aerosol sprays and gun-toting clowns?

Many conservatives today fail to grasp the gravity of this threat, dismissing it as mere “political correctness”—a previous generation’s disparaging term for so-called “wokeness.” It’s easy to dismiss people like the former Soviet professor as hysterical if you think of what’s happening today as nothing more than the return of the left-wing campus kookiness of the 1990s. Back then, the standard conservative response was dismissive. Wait till those kids get out into the real world and have to find a job. Well, they did—and they brought the campus to corporate America, to the legal and medical professions, to media, to elementary and secondary schools, and to other institutions of American life. In this cultural revolution, which intensified in the spring and summer of 2020, they are attempting to turn the entire country into a “woke” college campus. Today in our societies, dissenters from the woke party line find their businesses, careers, and reputations destroyed. They are pushed out of the public square, stigmatized, canceled, and demonized as racists, sexists, homophobes, and the like. And they are afraid to resist, because they are confident that no one will join them or defend them.

More thunder out of China, in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, came in early 2020. Although epidemiologists (not to mention biological weapons experts) will be studying this catastrophe long into the future; the mark of China’s authoritarian government and social-control systems is all over it. There is little doubt that China delayed, withheld, fabricated, and distorted information about the origin, timing, spread, and extent of the disease;28 suppressed dissent from physicians and others;29 hindered outside efforts by the World Health Organization and others to get accurate information; and engaged in active disinformation campaigns, actually trying to argue that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease itself (COVID-19) did not originate in China.30 Ironically, some of the worst effects of China’s cover-up were visited on its closest allies. Iran, for example, looked to be one of the worst-hit countries, with satellite photos showing the excavation of burial pits for the expected victims of COVID-19.31

More thunder out of China, in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, came in early 2020. Although epidemiologists (not to mention biological weapons experts) will be studying this catastrophe long into the future; the mark of China’s authoritarian government and social-control systems is all over it. There is little doubt that China delayed, withheld, fabricated, and distorted information about the origin, timing, spread, and extent of the disease;28 suppressed dissent from physicians and others;29 hindered outside efforts by the World Health Organization and others to get accurate information; and engaged in active disinformation campaigns, actually trying to argue that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease itself (COVID-19) did not originate in China.30 Ironically, some of the worst effects of China’s cover-up were visited on its closest allies. Iran, for example, looked to be one of the worst-hit countries, with satellite photos showing the excavation of burial pits for the expected victims of COVID-19.31 With 2020 being a presidential election year, it was inevitable that Trump’s performance in this global health emergency would become a campaign issue, which it did almost immediately. And there was plenty to criticize, starting with the Administration’s early, relentless assertion that the disease was “contained” and would have little or no economic effect. Larry Kudlow, Chairman of the National Economic Council, said, on February 25, “We have contained this. I won’t say [it’s] airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.”32 Market reactions to these kinds of assertions were decidedly negative, which may finally have woken the White House up to the seriousness of the problem.

I would’ve forgiven his fire that burned his Hollywood sign to the ground, but hindsight is 20/20, and now I can only look forward and create a new, better day. The art of probability means you did the best you could with what was given to you. The Universe has a plan, and if it doesn’t, are you listening with your third eye or blind to The Universe’s energy? Does everything happen for the best?

I wonder if we’ll ever come to grips with the magnitude of what they actually achieved down under between November 2020 and January 2021, if it’ll ever quite fully sink in. It probably is like a movie script that you’ll never tire of going back to. For, you’ll always discover a new hero or a moment to get inspired by. But every time you do, one part of you will wonder if it really happened. If you really were there when India redeemed the unredeemable in Melbourne, when they saved the unsavable in Sydney, and when they dominated the indomitable in Brisbane.

In the survey released in February 2020 cited at the beginning of this book, one respondent noted the interrelatedness of the factors involved in our own current world situation, writing: “While extreme climate events are weakening the societal governance and infrastructure, food and water security will become more and more serious, causing large-scale immigration and further inequity. If several geopolitical crises occur in parallel, many states cannot handle the situation properly, due to lack of resources and with the internal conflict, it would cause catastrophic outcomes all over the world.”13 The parallels between events in our modern world and what happened during the Bronze Age Collapse in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean were already readily apparent, but now we need also to take into consideration the catastrophic direct effects of the COVID-19 virus and the ripple effects of the contagion on financial and economic systems that went global at about the same time as the release of the survey.

Bannon pounds relentlessly at what he calls the Big Steal—the claim that Biden stole the 2020 election—while the Democrats call that the Big Lie. And it is a big lie, a dangerous one. But is it the Big Lie? Bigger, say, than trickle-down economics? Bigger than “tax cuts create jobs”? Bigger than infinite growth on a finite planet? Bigger than Thatcher’s double whammy of “There is no alternative” and “There is no such thing as society”? Bigger, for that matter, than Manifest Destiny, Terra Nullius, and the Doctrine of Discovery—the lies that form the basis of the United States, Canada, Australia, and every other settler colonial state? If we can stand to look at the Shadow Lands even for a moment, it becomes clear that we are ensnared in a web of life-annihilating lies and that whatever the Mirror World is on about this week is neither the biggest lie nor the one with the highest stakes. It’s entirely possible that Bannon and Wolf’s war on reality is just what happens when so many of the big lies that built the modern world visibly crumble. As the house collapses, some people choose to take flight into full-blown fantasy, sure—but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us who were also born and raised in that house are guardians of the truth.

When credit cycles reach their limit, it is the logical and classic response for central governments and their central banks to create a lot of debt and print money that will be spent on goods, services, and investment assets in order to keep the economy moving. That was done during the 2008 debt crisis, when interest rates could no longer be lowered because they had already hit 0 percent. It also happened in a big way in 2020 in response to the plunge triggered by the COVID pandemic. That was also done in response to the 1929–32 debt crisis, when interest rates had similarly been driven to 0 percent. At the time I am writing this, the creation of debt and money has been happening in amounts greater than at any time since World War II.

Postscript 2: My cancer friend passed away in April 2020. My alcoholic friend is probably going to die from the disease in due course. While my prayers seemed to temporarily help both situations, there remains this struggle with how, why and if prayer works. If prayers are not answered the way we wish, does it mean God doesn’t hear or care? Does it mean nothing changed? Does it mean we failed? Does it even mean anything? This subject has been thoroughly examined by many others and still cannot be fully answered. I happen to believe prayers help, even if things don’t go my way. We still die, we still fail, we still have suffering, pain and evil in this world. Yet, I choose to keep praying anyway. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1. October 6, 2019 Salt packets.

Indeed, we have much less need of imagination than we did before. Once, people could make whole careers conjuring up outlandish things that were not happening. No longer! Now, we need simply watch. Caricaturists are out of business, joining the ranks of travel agents and most (but not all) of the people who scan and bag purchases at the drugstore. We have become our own parodies, eliminating waste and redundancy. This kind of efficiency is what has allowed us to thrive at home, and drop jaws abroad. We have killed off satire once and for all. It is dead. Long live reality!

Reread Romans 12:9-21, considering what’s currently happening in your interactions with loved ones, friends, and the wider community. Are there any rough edges in your relationships that might need smoothing out? Choose one phrase or action from this passage that jumps out at you. Is there a specific situation or action to which God might be calling you? Loving God, help me love in the ways you call me to love. Amen.

When writing about trauma in a story or memoir, the author must write for the readership. The repetitive loops of conflict and drama can be handled either privately or in the office of a therapist: because the situation happened, or is the "truth" of the author, doesn't mean it has to always appear on the page.

What would happen if the public was actually enlisted in the service of a pro-working class agenda?

once. We’re not entirely sure why this happens, but several selections for previous

Today, in 2020, I cannot see the future, but my instincts tell me that we are going to experience a replay of the first Great American Depression of the 1930’s, and that it will happen before the 100 year anniversary of that last one. (Keep in mind the uselessness of such personal premonitions) (Update September 2020 in light of record setting stock market valuations (for some companies) while economies were still under water) The above made so little sense, it became possible to imagine that certain companies had a pipeline to free Federal reserve cash.

The source of this message system had to originate from outside the domain of time itself. We find history written before it happens. Allusions throughout the texts reveal an anticipation of pivotal events long before they are realized. And the very presence of these passages raises profound insights about the reality we live in. Setting aside many controversial points of view, it appears that we are presently being plunged into a period of time that the Bible says more about than any other period of history—including the events of the New Testament.

SATURDAY, APRIL 4 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Galatians 6:9 (NIV) WRITING IS MY CALLING. EVEN without compensation, I would write. My latest book explores the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I wrote the first draft in 2005. Countless editors rejected it. Over ten years, I rewrote the manuscript no fewer than eight times. Each new revision was denied for publication. As an orator and Bible scholar, Dr. King said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” I was tempted to quit on many days as my manuscript received mountain-high rejection notices. Isaiah’s words comforted me, “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31, KJV). Ultimately I did not quit or cave to self-defeat, and my book was finally published in 2018. The decade that I spent revising the text proved to be a priceless exercise in learning patience and sharpening my writing skills. My dream was deferred, but it was not denied. And here is a spiritual nugget that was gleaned from my ten-year writing journey: The soul will grow weary when it toils toward an unseen promise. Yet, as I labor to attain the vision that I hold for myself, the Spirit of the Lord strengthens my heart and emotions as I press ahead. What are you laboring to achieve? If you refuse to quit, Jesus will touch you with His unwavering perseverance. Despite what happens in the process, never give up on yourself. Press onward. Jesus will bring you to a successful finish. —ALICE THOMPSON

The CIA and the FBI and the NSA threw everything they had at their command into fighting the real and perceived threats of terrorism. But as they wielded those powers with a single-minded focus, they became half-blind to what was happening in the rest of the world. American intelligence became an instrument of the war on terror, so much so that the nation’s capacity to conduct espionage, analyze information, and coordinate political warfare to confront the Kremlin and project its power in the wider world was compromised.

Uneducated MAGA minions don't know that everything that's happening right now has happened before. In every other country that turned from a democracy into a dictatorship.

If the festivities at Christmas and the New Year take the form of an in creasingly conventional hullabaloo - since we no longer have the winter solstice as our excuse in the electronic age, nor, in the age of Jesus Christ Superstar, that of the Nativity, nor even that of the snow and ice isolating each person in their own inner space and numbing the blood in the veins - if the end-of-year revels make people so anxious, it is because they are taking the measure of the twelve months that are to come, which they will slowly have to plough through one by one. It is the same with time today as it is with having a child: it is too long in the carrying, too long agrowing. We would like to have the chance to enjoy it right away, to have the fast-forwarded projection of the next century. Think how impatient we are for the year 2000, this whole millennium to get through, while we are already madly curious about the year 2020 and, no doubt, perfectly disenchanted as to what awaits us in '86. The celebrations of the millennium really are going to have to be brilliant to overcome the boredom we feel when we think of the next century. If only we could at least know that there were merely one or two hundred years to go, that would make things more interesting. There is nothing like a catastrophe to usher in a millennium. They regenerate time in the same way as a cloudburst regenerates low water reserves. Yet it is time, real time, we are going to be short of. If the year 2000 does not happen, it will be because time will simply have disappeared, as winter has in some latitudes. But this is a dream. I fear that we won't have sufficient reserves to get to this point, and that the year 2000 will disappoint us as the year 1000 did by not bringing with it the end of the world.