Ending 2020 Quotes

The kind of hope I have doesn’t begin and end with demanding everything go back to the way it was when it can’t, it can’t ever, that’s not how time works.

We were, each of us… at a crossroads of public and private dynamics which had brought us to this frame-worthy moment. I thought of the different currents and crosscurrents of history which had formed, merged, broken apart, and reformed to create the opportunity for us to give something essential to each other’s lives.

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that.

In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.

The world’s demographic structure passed the point of no return twenty to forty years ago. The 2020s are the decade when it all breaks apart.

2017 is the Year of Jubilee! Receive its blessings in your spirit! Forgive and be forgiven. Reconcile and be reconcilable. Revival is due!

I guess it doesn't matter how you do it—any human who uses the death note meets an unfortunate end.

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.

My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

Between 2013 and 2020, Beijing’s pollution levels fell by 55%.6 Across China as a whole, they fell by 40%.

201106172012 OUTGOING MESSAGE SENT TO 555-432-2020 MESSAGE COMPOSITION AS MMS BODY OF TEXT: I KNOW WHERE HIS EARS ARE. YOU’LL HAVE THEM SOON. MY GIFT. END OF MESSAGE.

Sometimes your heart can lead you to a dead end.

Have faith that no matter how lost you might at times consider them to be, that in the end, there is good reason for everything we are set to experience.

Only those who have learned to live on the land will find sanctuary

When the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 triggered the sharpest decline in consumer spending ever recorded, commentators were soon debating how many deaths might be acceptable to keep the economy “open.

20 Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, 21 Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end.

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.

It may seem strange to suggest that high levels of illness might make human beings tougher, but the effect on a society of relatively regular and lethal epidemics and the mortality they cause certainly might have created a level of resilience that most of us today probably don't possess.

He called it a proteinaceous infectious particle, or prion. Prusiner’s paper fared well in peer review, but the editors of Science hesitated for months before publishing it, afraid of a backlash. The idea was outlandish—​but it was also right. Prusiner received a Nobel Prize for his heresy in 1997. Further work by Prusiner and others revealed that prions behave something like the secret weapon from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut imagined a form of water called ice-nine, a “super-crystal” that froze at room temperature and turned any normal water it touched into itself. A single crystal would set off a chain reaction, causing the oceans to ice over, ending all life on Earth.

Back when I dressed nice and uh... had some money in pocket I'd meet girls, you know. And eventually you gotta Pop the question, right? Do you charge for sex or do you sleep with people you actually like? of course that didn't ALWAYS end well... and now it's 2020 and they give me TRUMP or BIDEN. oh you assholes. I guess Karma is a bitch. No thanks... I think I'm staying in.

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.

According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, for the fifty years following the Great Depression, the tax rate on the highest income bracket averaged 80 percent, redistributing much of the richest Americans’ wealth. Beginning in the 1980s with the advent of politicians like Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and with growth increasingly seen as the be-all and end-all of economics, far less was asked of the wealthy. The comparable tax figure for 2020 was 37 percent.

I believe in myself. I believe in those who work with me. I believe in my employer. I believe in my friends. I believe in my family. I believe that God will lend me everything I need with which to succeed if I do my best to earn it through faithful and honest service. I believe in prayer and I will never close my eyes in sleep without praying for divine guidance to the end that I will be patient with other people and tolerant with those who do not believe as I do. I believe that success is the result of intelligent effort and does not depend upon luck or sharp practices or double-crossing friends, fellow men or my employer. I believe I will get out of life exactly what I put into it, therefore I will be careful to conduct myself toward others as I would want them to act toward me. I will not slander those whom I do not like. I will not slight my work no matter what I may see others doing. I will render the best service of which I am capable because I have pledged myself to succeed in life and I know that success is always the result of conscientious and efficient effort. Finally, I will forgive those who offend me because I realize that I shall sometimes offend others and I will need their forgiveness.

Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,

The research is still in its infancy, as we have seen, but, in early March 2020, Nature Communications published a model study that followed the link all the way from shelf to sickbed in one case: malaria, one of those beneath-the-radar diseases, affecting some 230 million and killing 400,000 per year, the vast majority in rainforest biomes. Deforestation is a boost for the mosquito vectors. More sunlight reaches the soil where the larvae develop; when biodiversity retreats, fewer animals prey on them. Nigeria suffers most from malaria due to deforestation. It is largely caused by the export of timber and cocoa. Such commodities end up in the north: consumers with the greatest malaria footprint are the cocoa-guzzling Dutch and Belgians, Swiss and Germans. 'In this unequal value chain, ecosystem degradation and malaria risk are borne by low-income producers' - or, in plainer terms: the Europeans get the chocolate and the profits, the Africans the mosquitos.

Season's Greetings by Stewart Stafford Season's Greetings To those we are needing, While I am leading The Festive charge. Christmas love is fleeting, The snow is sleeting, And there's every chance of feeling, A thaw in my cold heart. Season's Greetings everywhere, Let War cease and all be fair, A heart that's full of Christmas cheer, Bravely faces the New Year. And so, we feast and celebrate, For those we've lost, we contemplate, Christmas is an emotional stocktake, Of those still here and those that are late. The year winds down to that last date, Resolutions tempting fate, New Fear's Eve, many hate, And choose to socially-isolate. Season's Greetings while you can, To every woman, child, and man, Season's Greetings, don't you wait Hold back now, and it's too late. And in the end, all we do, Is create memories for the few, Who mattered while we strode this earth, Then back to the place before our birth. Season's Greetings, decorations down, Bittersweet crunching sounds, Topple the tree to live again, Twelfth Night, the inevitable end. © Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.

The number of infections kept rising. By the end of March the US led the world in infections and deaths caused by the virus. What does Trump do? He refuses to wear a mask. He’s not going to look like a weakling. Testing? Overrated. It increases the number of infections. Why doesn’t the country have enough PPE and ventilators? Obama’s fault. The President is in charge, but if there’s any failure, it’s the fault of governors and mayors. He keeps repeating his mantra, “The situation is under control.” Pence’s team will whip the virus. Or was it Jared’s team? This virus isn’t as bad as the flu. America always wins. Doesn’t matter who or what the enemy is, we always triumph. We’re going to kill that little bug. Those people wearing masks are doing it to spite me, Donald J. Trump, the greatest President in history. “The situation is under control.” But the deaths keep mounting. It surpasses annual deaths from auto accidents, 34,000. It surpasses US deaths in the Vietnam War, 58,000. Next, it’s going to surpass total deaths of US soldiers in World War I, 116,500, and it’s not going to stop there.

We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.

McCullough observes that, “We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.

Five years later, the legacy of Trump’s presidency and his promises can be addressed. There never was an infrastructure bill. Trump’s budgets consistently proposed cuts to the social programs he vowed not to touch. He did little to combat the opioid epidemic he promised to end, with deaths rising by the end of his tenure. The national debt Trump promised to erase has ballooned by almost $7.8 trillion. Trump’s failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing remains the nadir of his public approval, surpassing even the days following his incitement of an armed attack on the Capitol building in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump has the worst jobs record of any president since 1939, with more than three million lost. He is, in fact, the worst jobs president “god ever created,” despite inheriting an economy that had finally begun to boom in the later years of the Obama administration. The promises of better healthcare didn’t materialize, and the job and wage growth from the economy he inherited were crushed by the pandemic he refused to address. Those were not the promises Trump kept.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it.

Trump is a complete package of the Founders’ greatest fears—delusions of royalty, appeals to the basest appetites of the polity, populism over small-r republicanism, and vulnerability to the blandishments of foreign powers who so obviously are welcome to corrupt him with gifts or flattery of his ravenous ego. To date, his actions have had the possible check of the 2020 election hanging over him, which has influenced him whether or not he admits it. Trump needs to win reelection to continue his nation-state level, god-tier grifting and to avoid prosecution. He thrives not on a competition of ideas but on the division of the country. Our parties and politics will follow him down, fighting a dirtier, more savage battle until we’ve forgotten what it means to share even the most common baseline with our fellow Americans. The cold civil war is warming by the day. He’s not the only centrifugal political force, but he’s the most powerful. This will only accelerate if he is reelected. There will be no end to his ambition and no check on his actions. He will conclude that he’s the winner who wins, and for him that will justify everything in his catalog of errors and terrors. We’ve learned there is no bottom with Trump, no level to which he won’t sink, no excess he won’t embrace.

This outbreak is the result of several forces coming together. The enemy is not just the virus itself. We ourselves are also our own worst enemies in this fight. Or at the very least, we are accomplices to the crime. I'm told that there are a lot of people who are now suddenly waking up to just how meaningless it is to go around every day shouting empty slogans about how awesome our country is. They know that those cadres who go around giving speeches on political education, but who never take concrete action are utterly useless. We refer to them as people who live off the labor of their mouths. And they certainly know that a society that lacks common sense and fails to pursue the facts as they present themselves, not only ends up harming people through words, but can actually result in the loss of human lives. Many, many human lives. This is a lesson that resonates deeply. And also comes with a heavy weight. Even though we have all lived through the SARS epidemic of 2003, it seems we have all quickly forgotten the lessons we supposedly learned then. Now fast forward to 2020. Will we forget again? The devil is always on our heels and if we aren't careful, he will catch up to us again and torture us until we finally wake up. The real question is, do we even want to wake up?

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that. The legislative branch will essentially absorb the responsibilities of the executive branch, with a streamlined body of elected representatives, an equal number from each state, forming the new legislature, which will be known simply as the Senate. The “party” system of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, et al., will un-complicate itself into Liberals and Conservatives, who will debate and vote on each proposed bill and law in nationally televised sessions. Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored. For example, senators will be prohibited from having any past or present salaried position with any company that has ever had or might ever have a professional or contractual connection to federal, state, or local government, and each senator must submit to random drug and alcohol testing throughout his or her term. The long-term effects of this reorganized government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of legislative accountability and public trust, and state governments will follow suit no later than 2024 by becoming smaller mirror images of the national Senate.

The time-staggered nature of the industrialization process—from Britain to Germany to Russia and northwestern Europe and Japan to Korea to Canada and Spain—combined with the steadily accelerating nature of that process, means that much of the world’s population faces mass retirements followed by population crashes at roughly the same time. The world’s demographic structure passed the point of no return twenty to forty years ago. The 2020s are the decade when it all breaks apart. For countries as varied as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, the question isn’t when these countries will age into demographic obsolescence. All will see their worker cadres pass into mass retirement in the 2020s. None have sufficient young people to even pretend to regenerate their populations. All suffer from terminal demographics. The real questions are how and how soon do their societies crack apart? And do they deflate in silence or lash out against the dying of the light? Coming up behind them—rapidly—is another cadre of countries whose birth rates have dropped even faster, and so who will face a similar demographic disintegration in the 2030s and 2040s: Brazil, Spain, Thailand, Poland, Australia, Cuba, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, and Switzerland.

from the upcoming novel, Agent White: A figure dressed all in black ran across the rooftops in the rain. A black cloak fluttered behind him as he ran two and sometimes three stories above the sidewalk where Ezra Beckitt stood. Long silver hair tied back in a ponytail flew out behind him, exposing ears that came to sharp points. His left ear was pierced with a silver ring, high up in the cartilage. Like the old man, this black figure wore a sword; but this weapon was long and thin, slightly curved. The blade stuck out behind him for three and a half feet, almost seeming to glow against the grey backdrop of the rain-soaked cityscape. Suddenly, the figure in black looked down into the street and saw Ezra there. More, he saw Ezra seeing him. Startled, he lost his sure footing and slid down the steep incline of an older building’s metal roof, the busy street below waiting to catch him in an asphalt embrace. The figure in black got his feet under himself and pushed, flying out into space above the street. For an eternity Ezra watched him, suspended in the air and the rain with his cloak spread in midnight ripples around him, and then the figure in black flipped neatly and landed on the sidewalk half a block away. The pavement cracked, pushing up in twisted humps around the figure in black’s tall leather boots. Before the sound of this impact even reached Ezra the figure was up and gone, dashing through the morning throngs waiting for buses or headed to the ‘tram station. Ezra saw a girl’s hair blow back in the wind created by his passing, but she never noticed him. A young techie blinked his 20-20’s (Ezra’s own enhanced senses picked up the augmented eyes because of a strange, silvery glow in the pupils) and turned halfway around, almost seeing him. And then the figure in black darted into an alley, gone. Ezra drew his service weapon and ran after, pushing his way through the sidewalk traffic. Turning into the alley he skidded to a stop, stunned; the figure in black was still there. The alley was just wide enough to accommodate Ezra’s shoulders- he couldn’t have held his arms out at his sides. Dumpsters spilled their trash out onto the wet pavement. The alley ended in a fire door, the back exit of a store on the next street over. Even if it was locked, Ezra didn’t think it would pose a real problem for the figure in black. No, he was waiting for him. Ezra advanced with his gun out in front of him, and his eyes locked with the figure in black’s. His were completely black- no pupils, no corneas, only solid black that held no light. The figure in black smiled, exposing teeth that looked very sharp, and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. He wore leather gloves with the fingers cut off. His fingers were very long and very white. “Don’t even think about it,” Ezra said, clicking the safety off his weapon. “I am a Hatis City Guard, an if you move I will put you down.” This only seemed to amuse the figure in black, whose smiled widened as he drew his sword. Ezra opened fire.

In January 2004 President George W. Bush put NASA in high gear, heading back to the moon with a space vision that was to have set in motion future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Bush space policy focused on U.S. astronauts first returning to the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. Portraying the moon as home to abundant resources, President Bush did underscore the availability of raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. “We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging, environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement,” he remarked in rolling out his space policy. To fulfill the Bush space agenda required expensive new rockets—the Ares I launcher and the large, unfunded Ares V booster—plus a new lunar module, all elements of the so-called Constellation Program. The Bush plan forced retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 to pay for the return to the moon, but there were other ramifications as well. Putting the shuttle out to pasture created a large human spaceflight gap in reaching the International Space Station. The price tag for building the station is roughly $100 billion, and without the space shuttle, there’s no way to reach it without Russian assistance. In the end, the stars of the Constellation Program were out of financial alignment. It was an impossible policy to implement given limited NASA money.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear that by several measures, the health status of Black Americans is on par with that of people living in far poorer nations, and that at every stage of life Black Americans have poorer health outcomes than white Americans and even, in most cases, than other ethnic groups. Racial health disparities show up at the beginning of life and cut lives short at the end. Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life—a racial gap that adds up to thousands of lost lives every year.13 African American adults of all ages have elevated rates of conditions such as diabetes and hypertension that among white people are found more commonly at older ages. In the first half of 2020, owing to the pandemic, the Black-white gap in life expectancy increased to six years, from four in 2019.14 This inequality when it comes to the health of Black people’s bodies is rooted in false ideas about racial differences, developed and spread during slavery, and long challenged by Black medical practitioners and scholars, that still inform the way medical treatment is administered in America.15 To understand the racial divide in the health of our nation that was stripped bare by Covid-19, we must examine the roots of these myths. — In the 1787 manual A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on the Climate of the West-Indies, a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that Black people could bear surgical operations much more easily than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.

For many, an explosion of mental problems occurred during the first months of the pandemic and will continue to progress in the post-pandemic era. In March 2020 (at the onset of the pandemic), a group of researchers published a study in The Lancet that found that confinement measures produced a range of severe mental health outcomes, such as trauma, confusion and anger.[153] Although avoiding the most severe mental health issues, a large portion of the world population is bound to have suffered stress to various degrees. First and foremost, it is among those already prone to mental health issues that the challenges inherent in the response to the coronavirus (lockdowns, isolation, anguish) will be exacerbated. Some will weather the storm, but for certain individuals, a diagnostic of depression or anxiety could escalate into an acute clinical episode. There are also significant numbers of people who for the first time presented symptoms of serious mood disorder like mania, signs of depression and various psychotic experiences. These were all triggered by events directly or indirectly associated with the pandemic and the lockdowns, such as isolation and loneliness, fear of catching the disease, losing a job, bereavement and concerns about family members and friends. In May 2020, the National Health Service England’s clinical director for mental health told a Parliamentary committee that the “demand for mental healthcare would increase ‘significantly’ once the lockdown ended and would see people needing treatment for trauma for years to come”.[154] There is no reason to believe that the situation will be very different elsewhere.

WHY DIVERSIFY? During the bull market of the 1990s, one of the most common criticisms of diversification was that it lowers your potential for high returns. After all, if you could identify the next Microsoft, wouldn’t it make sense for you to put all your eggs into that one basket? Well, sure. As the humorist Will Rogers once said, “Don’t gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself. Think of it this way: In the huge market haystack, only a few needles ever go on to generate truly gigantic gains. The more of the haystack you own, the higher the odds go that you will end up finding at least one of those needles. By owning the entire haystack (ideally through an index fund that tracks the total U.S. stock market) you can be sure to find every needle, thus capturing the returns of all the superstocks. Especially if you are a defensive investor, why look for the needles when you can own the whole haystack?

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.

In the first day of the fighting, America’s new president, Joe Biden, called me. We had known each other for close to forty years, from the time we both came to Washington, he as a young senator from Delaware and I as deputy chief of Israel’s embassy to the United States. Four days after the 2020 elections Biden was declared president-elect. In the twenty-four hours after that declaration I followed twenty other world leaders in offering my congratulations. This elicited the ire of President Trump, who to this day believes that I was the first to do so. Now in our phone call President Biden said that America stood by Israel’s right to defend itself. But in the coming days, as the fighting escalated and the press reported on mounting Palestinian casualties, he began to push for a cease-fire. “Bibi, I gotta tell you, I’m coming under a lot of pressure back here,” he said. “This is not Scoop Jackson’s Democratic Party,” referring to the strikingly pro-Israel senator whose long tenure ended in the 1980s. “I’m getting squeezed here to put an end to this as soon as possible.” I responded that I was getting squeezed by millions of Israelis in underground shelters who rightfully expected me to knock the daylight out of the terrorists. For this the IDF needed a few more days to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist infrastructure. Our intelligence could pick off more prime targets, especially since Hamas’s underground bunkers were no longer secure. Biden agreed but resumed the pressure to end the fighting the next day. As I did earlier with Obama during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, I asked and got from Biden during Operation Guardian of the Walls a commitment to fund the replenishing of Iron Dome interceptors, a defensive weapon system that enjoyed broad bipartisan support in the US Congress. Each phone conversation with the president brought the end of the fighting closer. I could buy a little more time, but it was clear that we would not have the seemingly unlimited time we had in 2014. Nor did we need it. Within a little over a week, the IDF’s main battle goals were achieved, but I had one more objective in mind. With some luck and a bit more intelligence work, we might be able to pick off Mohammed Deif, the Hamas terrorist chief who was responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis and who had managed to evade all our previous efforts to target him.

Some of the world’s biggest banks and investor groups have swung behind a pledge to raise $200bn by the end of next year to combat climate change. In a move the UN said was unprecedented, leading insurers, pension funds and banks have joined forces to help channel the money to projects that will help poorer countries deal with the effect of global warming and cut reliance on fossil fuels. The announcement came at the start of a UN climate summit in New York aimed at bolstering momentum for a global agreement to lower planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions due to be signed in Paris at the end of 2015. “Change is in the air,” said UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. “Today’s climate summit has shown an entirely new, co-operative global approach to climate change.” The summit opened with business and government pledges to make cities greener, create a renewable energy “corridor” in Africa and rein in the clearing of forests for palm oil plantations. The private sector’s contributions marked a “major departure” from past climate summits, the UN said, adding in a statement that financial groups “had never previously acted together on climate change at such a large scale”. One obstacle to the Paris agreement is developing countries’ insistence that richer nations must fulfil pledges made nearly five years ago to raise $100bn a year by 2020 for climate action.

By 2025, even drug dealers will not take cash. South Korea plans to have no cash at all by 2020.1 In Sweden, the European country going cashless first, buskers use contactless machines. A new app, BuSK, lets Londoners do the same thing. In Holland, a coat developed for the homeless allows people to give money by swiping a card on their sleeve.2 Physical money in your hand – a system of payment that began 600 years before the birth of Christ – is coming to an end. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook says the next generation ‘will not even know what money was.

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

Ownership is dead. Access is the new imperative. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that by 2020, 50 percent of the world’s largest enterprises will see the majority of their business depend on their ability to create digitally enhanced products, services, and experiences. Focusing on services over products is also a sound business strategy. Zuora’s Subscription Economy Index, which you’ll find at the end of this book, shows that subscription-based companies are growing eight times faster than the S&P 500 and five times faster than US retail sales.

On battery technology, other automakers have a long way to catch up to Tesla, which has its own battery production facility and a development head start of at least four years. Then, what do other automakers know about delivering software updates to their customers over the air? GM has said it will bring over-the-air updates to its general fleet “before 2020.” But what advantages have the incumbents ceded to Tesla while it has been collecting and learning from fleet data since the Model S hit the roads in 2012? No electric all-wheel-drive car has been put into production by any company other than Tesla. No car company has a charging network that comes close to being as extensive as the one Tesla has been working on since 2o12. In the United States, no automaker has been able to sell directly to consumers or establish its own Apple-like retail stores.

both Tesla and GM think battery prices will come down fast enough for electric cars to be more affordable than equivalent gasoline cars by the early 2020s. The Chevy Bolt sells for less than $35,000, after subsidies. Tesla plans to be producing Model 3s at a rate of hundreds of thousands a year by 2019. Other electric car companies, new and old, are developing competitive strategies. It is still difficult to predict how quickly the sales of electric cars will overtake those of gasoline vehicles. Even assuming all goes well for Tesla and their electric competitors, it could take years, or decades. Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s study estimated that electric cars will account for 35 percent of new car sales by 2040. That’s based on battery prices decreasing at a slower rate than Tesla and GM anticipate. But, as noted earlier, gasoline cars will face the difficult task of competing with electric cars that are both cheaper and better.

At other charter networks, the changes made to boost college success might look a little different, but they share one commonality: making students more independent learners and thus more likely to survive on a college campus. At Boston’s Brooke Charter Schools, for example, which just launched its first high school and has yet to send any graduates to college, the mindset begins in the earliest grades. During one visit there, I watched fourth-grade teacher Heidi Deck practice “flipped instruction,” in which students, when presented with a new problem, are first asked to solve it on their own, armed only with the tools of lessons learned from previous problems. “We really push kids to be engaged with the struggle,” said Deck. Next, she invites them to collaborate with one another to solve the problem, followed by more individual attempts to do the same. Always, Deck expects the students to figure out the puzzle. This is exactly the opposite of the most common approach to instruction, in which teachers demonstrate and then have students practice what they just watched. That’s dubbed the “I do —we do —you do” approach. With flipped instruction —and the many other teacher innovations here —“kids have to do the logical work of figuring something out rather than repeating what the teacher does,” said Brooke’s chief academic officer, Kimberly Steadman. The goal: Starting with its Class of 2020, the first graduating class Brooke sends off to college, all its students will be independent learners, able to roll with the surprises that confront all college students, especially first-generation college-goers.

Instead of creating and enforcing the laws, government workers will serve as mediators or facilitators between the law and the democratic demands of the general public. An end to ruling with an iron fist will emerge no later than 2022 in the United States, and no later than 2030 for all other nations.

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.

Near the end of the Imperial Age in 1920, there were about fifty countries. As of 2020, the count is over two hundred.

A pessimistic orientation does not seek accommodations with the system. We share the goal of the undercommons, which “is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed” (Halberstam 2013, 9). Moten and Harney don’t play the liberal game of reform; they are constantly reframing the problems at hand. What questions we ask are crucial—for bad questions yield worse answers, ones that compound the problem. On prison abolition, their intervention is decisive and reconfigures the coordinates of the debate: for them, it is “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery” (Moten and Harney 2013, 42). How do you abolish a society? How do you fight state power? Is anti-statism, ethical (that is, nonviolent) anarchism, the only solution? Is it a solution? Or do you dare to seize power, as with the example of Morales? A universal politics takes these questions to heart. For this reason, its skeptical negativity is put into the service of a more virtuous end: locating antagonisms, rather than settling for conflicts or pseudo-struggles. Its challenge is to sustain the antagonistic logic of class struggle, and avoid the comfort of static oppositions. The cultural Left has its enemies (Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Erdoğan, Modi, Duterte, Netanyahu, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Suu Kyi, MBS, etc.)—and, conversely, notorious leaders blame liberal media, demonizing bad press with the “enemy of the people” charge—but nothing really changes; the basic features or coordinates of the current society remain the same. Worse, the liberal capitalist system is legitimized (only in a free democracy can you, as a citizen, criticize tyrants abroad and, more importantly, express your outrage at the president, politicians, or state power without the fear of retribution) and the cultural Left is tacitly compensated for playing by the rules—for practicing non-antagonistic politics, for forgoing class insurgency and not engaging in class war (Žižek 2020f)—rewarded with “libidinal profit” (Žižek 1997b, 47), with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment” (2007, 147), an enjoyment-in-sacrifice. That is to say, cultural leftists, with their “Beautiful Souls” intact, enjoy not being a racist, a misogynist, a transphobe, an ableist, and so on. Hating the haters, the morally repulsive, the fascists of the world, is indeed an endless source of libidinal satisfaction for “woke” liberals. But what changes does it actually produce?

When people arrive in San Francisco, they often discover there isn’t room in the shelters for them. “People come from all over the United States, thinking it’s some sort of spa here,” said a homeless man, “some sort of nirvana here. And they find out that it’s very expensive to live here.”26 The same was true in Los Angeles. “For the first time in 13 years, Los Angeles opened its housing voucher wait list last year,” said Dr. Margot Kushel. “The city drew 600,000 applicants for 20,000 slots, highlighting the enormous unmet need.”27 And more services attracted more people to Seattle. “I do think we have a magnet effect,” said Seattle’s former homelessness chief. Nearly one-quarter of the homeless in King County, in which Seattle is the biggest city, said they became homeless outside of Washington State.28 Mayor Breed said she opposed Proposition C because she feared that spending yet more on homelessness services, without any requirement that people get off the street, would backfire. “We are a magnet for people who are looking for help,” she said. “There are a lot of other cities that are not doing their part, and I find that larger cities end up with more than our fair share.”29 After San Francisco started offering free hotel rooms to the homeless during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, first responders reported that people had come from across the state. “People are coming from all over the place—Sacramento, Lake County, Bakersfield,” said the city’s fire chief. “We have also heard that people are getting released from jail in other counties and being told to go to San Francisco where you will get a tent and then you will get housing.

Facebook is perhaps the most powerful and the least responsive to criticism. In 2020 alone, stories have emerged of Facebook’s highest-ranking policy staffer in India intervening to keep incitement by the country’s ruling BJP party online; of board member Peter Thiel dining with white nationalists; and of the prior role played by Facebook’s External Oversight Board Member Emi Palmor in censoring Palestinians’ speech. In each of these cases, the response from Facebook executives has been weak at best. The line where the state ends and Facebook’s rule begins is increasingly murky.

About 230 million Indians fell into poverty—defined as living on less than $5 a day—in the first year of the crisis. Around 15%—including 47% of female workers—had failed to find employment by the end of 2020.

El individuo ya no es una caja negra. Por un lado, porque no para de dejar sus rastros por todo el ciberespacio; y, por otro, porque gracias a las neurociencias, la psicología cognitiva, las biotecnologías, cada vez sabemos más sobre cómo reacciona a los estímulos y, por ende, permite abrir múltiples formas de manipulación. El modelo de Huxley ya habría dejado de ser una fantasía. Los avances en inteligencia artificial pronto podrán además automatizar diferentes formas de intervención sobre el alma humana según convengan a quienquiera que tenga el control

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)

Needless to say, perhaps the most extreme ideas the president floated or considered for using the military came at the end of his tenure. At that time some of his most extreme 2020 campaign advisors, including disgraced former national security advisor General Michael Flynn, recommended he use the military to seize voting machines in the 2020 election. They actually drafted an executive order to implement the idea.

With both the hardware and software needed to fully emulate human intelligence, we can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable from that of biological humans, by the end of the 2020s.

Gallup’s 2020 figure of 20% is moreover, as noted in Chapter 3, toward the lower end of serious polling organizations’ estimates. The others, including our preferred GSS, date the start of the recent uptick several years earlier than do Gallup’s figures.

Cops aired for thirty-two seasons and was canceled by Fox in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. For years prior, Cops had been criticized as evidence of an unholy alliance between law enforcement and media—the show was dependent on the police allowing TV crews to shadow their street work, which would only be allowed if the police were featured in a positive light. When public sentiment toward law enforcement collapsed, the very premise of a program delivered from that viewpoint was seen as irredeemable. There was, however, an ancillary aspect to Cops that played an underrated role in its watchability: the uniqueness of its geography. Cops was filmed in multiple cities across multiple states, and since the sole focus was on criminal activity, it ended up featuring neighborhoods and communities that would never appear on TV for any other reason. It’s possible to argue that Cops was a soft form of fascism, but that it was also an unorthodox form of tourism.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere that traps the sun's heat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has risen steadily since the nineteenth century and is now at it's highest levels in 800,000 years. As a result, global temperatures are also rising: 2020 was one of the hottest years on record. But the planet is not warming evenly. The polar regions are heating up five times faster than anywhere else on Earth. As a result, polar habitats are changing dramatically. Snow covers the Arctic for fewer days each decade, and the glaciers over Greenland and Antarctica are melting away. Sea ice is changing, too, getting thinner and covering less ocean. Polar bears depend on Arctic summer sea ice for hunting and traveling, but within a few decades, there might be none left. Changes in climate and habitat have other consequences for polar animals. Some adaptions that supported survival are becoming unhelpful or even harmful. For example, blubber keeps marine mammals warm in cold water (see page 13). As temperatures continue to rise, the same blubber could cause those animals to overheat. When days get longer, ptarmigan turn brown for camouflage when the snow melts (see page 20). If warmer spring temperatures melt snow before the days lengthen, birds that are still white will be more visible to predators. As climate chance continues, these and other polar species may find it harder to persist.

Unsurprisingly, the nation’s xenophobia has seeped into popular culture. Bollywood, long known for its extensive Muslim involvement across the entire industry, is being forced to toe the anti-Islam perspective. Many in Bollywood happily pushed the hard-line Hindu nationalist agenda, releasing films that openly celebrated the actions of the Indian armed forces. In a similar vein, the Israeli series Fauda, which features undercover Israeli agents in the West Bank, has been hugely popular among right-wing Indians, looking for a sugar hit of war on terror and anti-Islamist propaganda in a slickly produced format. During the May 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, the right-wing economist Subramanian Swamy, who sits on the BJP national executive, tweeted that he loved Fauda.28 The post-9/11 “war on terror” suited both India and Israel in their plans to pacify their respective unwanted populations. To this end, Israel trained Indian forces in counterinsurgency. Following a 2014 agreement between Israel and India, pledging to cooperate on “public and homeland security,” countless Indian officers, special forces, pilots, and commandoes visited Israel for training. In 2020, Israel refused to screen Indian police officers to determine if they had committed any abuses in India. Israeli human rights advocate Eitay Mack and a range of other activists petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court in 2020 to demand that Israel stop training Indian police officers who “blind, murder, rape, torture and hide civilians in Kashmir.” The court rejected the request, and in the words of the three justices, “without detracting from the importance of the issue of human rights violations in Kashmir.

During the forty years from 1978 to 2018, typical workers saw their compensation rise by a meager 12 percent; CEO compensation, meanwhile, ballooned by 940 percent. As of 2020, home health and personal care aides, one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy, took home $27,080 per year on average. Other workers who provide socially necessary care, like preschool teachers, take home just over $30,500 a year. Food and service workers, meanwhile, take home just $21,250 a year. For the 7.5 million US residents who work these three jobs—and for the families dependent on them—staying afloat is a constant struggle, if not an impossibility. I wish I could say these occupations were the anomaly, but they’re not. What was once America’s working class is today its working poor.19 The

Globalization is not just continuing—it’s accelerating. In 2020 there will be 40% more 25–34 year olds with higher education degrees from Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa than in all OECD countries (a group of 34 countries primarily in Western Europe and North America).

In 2020 there will be 40% more 25–34 year olds with higher education degrees from Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa than in all OECD countries (a group of 34 countries primarily in Western Europe and North America).

According to an OECD report published in 2012, the United States and European Union countries will, by 2020, only account for around 25% of college-educated people in the world.

I can see perfectly and clearly. And my glasses are still on the nightstand. I bolt upright and look around my room. Everything – every poster, every tool, every spare part, every spool of wire – I can see it all crisp and clear. I saw every strand of Mom’s hair in perfect precision. Her tired eyes. The steam rising from her mug. It should’ve all been a blurred mess of colored blobs. I should’ve had to drag my glasses on before any of my surroundings made sense. I grab my glasses and slide them on. Everything shifts out of focus. I take them off and my world sharpens. I scowl down at my frames like they’ve betrayed me somehow. Then I fumble for my cell phone and dial Porter’s number. “Alex?” “You have to do something,” I say, panicked. “I woke up and now I’m Peter freaking Parker.” “Peter who?” “I can see. Like 20/20. I don’t need my glasses anymore.” “Oh. Well, that must be a residual from Shooter Delaney. She was a sharp shooter, you know.” “Is that all you have to say?” “What do you want me to say?” “I want you to tell me how to reverse it.” There’s a pause on the other end of the phone. “You want… your bad vision back?” “Yes.” “…Why?” “Because my other option is explaining to my parents how I have perfect vision all of a sudden. I’m pretty sure they won’t buy the whole ‘bitten by a radioactive spider’ thing.

Maybe, as some have argued, a less consumerist, less consumption-based aspiration will evolve as a global ambition. The American Dream of economic prosperity leading to happiness could, by the end of the decade, be replaced by a more pragmatic goal of making the most of what you have.

From the insistence in 1940 that government cannot discern what is or is not a religious cause, we came in the spring of 2020 to an insistence that the government must forcibly shut down churches that fail to comply with sweeping public health rules about “virtual” services. What begins with a claim that the state must be neutral toward religion ends with an imperative that the state persecute religion in the name of neutrality.

No president ever had been left a more dismal legacy by his predecessor. Untamed fire had scorched the earth at home and abroad. Obama inherited a howling recession that wiped out millions of Americans’ jobs and savings; two wars, with 161,000 American troops in Iraq and 38,000 more in Afghanistan, some on their third and fourth tours of duty, their commanders with no clear goal in sight nor any glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel; and an American political warfare machine that now resembled a rusting 1948 Cadillac resting on cinder blocks. Bush had run it off the road.

Marat Mindiyarov, an unemployed teacher who lasted four months at the IRA, said the job required him “to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.

The whole thing, said the President, was a paradox … of trying to meet the threat to our values and institutions by methods which themselves endangered these institutions. Here was an existential dilemma of the cold war: using undemocratic methods to defend American democracy. But Eisenhower believed that the ends would justify the means when the issue was national survival.

Now standing at the end of this diabolical year 2020, All I'm asking for Lord is that you please bring this horrible Pandemic #COVID19 to and end for the sake of all humanity!

Advent Season by Stewart Stafford A house bedecked in verdant wonderment, With lights that mirror the starry firmament, Where the Christmas Star did once shine, To guide worshippers to the Divine. The wreath on the door is a welcome portal, For any passing cheerful mortal, Wishing to enjoy warm company, And mountains of gravy-drowned turkey. Nostrils fill with cooking scents, That waft through the house with excitement A feast to consume on the 25th, After the Man in Red has paid a visit. Children orchestrate great noise, And sit and play with gifted toys, While adults watch and reminisce, On childhoods past and favourite gifts. The Wheel of Time turns, Festivities End, And the year itself begins again. In Time's juvenile crawl, Or adult speed, Life zips forward, and history repeats. © Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.

The twelve months ending September 2020 tallied the highest number of overdose deaths in the country’s history—87,000, according to a preliminary estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Much of that was due to illicit street fentanyl. By the time this book is published, we will likely have learned that close to 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2020—dwarfing any annual tally the country previously produced.

Reduce the duration of your showers by two to

One of Thiel’s favorite books was The Sovereign Individual, a little-known political screed—that is, until Thiel started talking it up. The book, published in 1997 by a venture capitalist, James Dale Davidson, and a journalist, William Rees-Mogg, is a cyber-libertarian manifesto that predicts the end of the nation state. The book, which was reissued in 2020 with

Active demonization of the protest movement had already begun while it was still limited to Punjab. At the end of November, when the farmers’ march was finally stopped on the borders of Delhi, the rhetoric against them was ratcheted up. The BJP general secretary in Uttarakhand on 29 November 2020 called the protestors pro-Pakistan, pro-Khalistan and anti-national. Gujarat’s deputy chief minister called the farmers anti-national elements, terrorists, Khalistanis, Communists and pro-China people having pizza and pakodi. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Chouhan wrote an article blaming the protests on vested interests. Law and justice minister Ravishankar Prasad associated them with the mythical ‘tukde-tukde’ gang. The BJP vice president in Himachal Pradesh called the protests the work of anti-nationals and middlemen. The same day, the party’s spokesman in the state called the protestors miscreants who were the same people behind Shaheen Bagh. On 17 December, the BJP chief minister in Tripura, Biplab Deb, said Maoists were behind the protests, while Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath claimed Opposition parties were using farmers to fuel unrest in the country because they were unhappy about the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. He also blamed communism and those who wanted to promote disorder and didn’t want to see India prosper. BJP national spokesman Sambit Patra called the farmers extremists in the garb of food-providers, another spokesman called them terrorists, and BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya called them anarchists and insurrectionists. On 17 January 2021, a BJP MP from Uttar Pradesh said the protests were backed by anti-national powers. A BJP MLA from Gujarat wrote to Amit Shah asking him to hang or shoot the protestors. Even in March 2021, the slander of calling the thousands of protestors fake farmers and terrorists continued. The New York Times reported that this demonisation cleaved to a pattern from Modi’s playbook: first the accusations of foreign infiltration, then police complaints against protest leaders, then the arrests of protesters and journalists, then the blocking of internet access in places where demonstrators gathered. All this was akin to India’s actions in Kashmir, and against the protestors of Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere

A COWBOY TO REMEMBER. This Sleeping Beauty inspired contemporary Western will be out early 2020 from Kensington Books.

Before 2020 ended Bezos came to personify the rapacious opportunism of the billionaire class who were extracting wealth from a public health emergency, at the expense of employees laboring in proximity to the virus.

At the end of the Cold War, workers received an estimated eleven cents of every dollar they earned for their employer. Thirty years later, they made less than six cents on the dollar. In effect, the personal returns employees received for their labor were cut in half.

At the end and beginning of each cycle, there is the sense of failure and disaster. Yet each time the United States has re-created itself, perhaps imperfectly, but with a rebirth of startling superiority.

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.

Mexican-Americans are turning nativist. The demographic in the United States that consistently polls the most anti-migration is not white Americans, but instead (non-first-generation) Mexican-Americans. They want family reunification, but only for their own families. Never forget that anti-migrant, build-the-wall Donald Trump carried nearly every county on the southern border when running for reelection in 2020.

success is a triad: 1) money making, 2) wealth preservation and building, and 3) health. Part One is just the front end of the system.

However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself.

Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Russia entered a promising period of democratization that was ultimately weakened by political upheavals and attempted coups, overwhelmed by economic crisis, and undermined by declining opportunity. Vladimir Putin was the first populist president of a major country in the twenty-first century. He came into the presidency at the end of 1999 promising to make Russia a great power again, blazing a restorationist political trail at home and abroad. Putin set a personalized, bravura style of leadership that others, including Donald Trump, sought to emulate. And over the next two decades Putin rolled back Russia’s democratic gains to firmly entrench himself in the Kremlin. First he served as president, then as prime minister, and then as president again. Each time he made adjustments to Russia’s political system, until finally, in 2020, he amended the constitution. In theory, Vladimir Putin can now stay in power until 2036. Under the guise of Putin strengthening the state and restoring its global position, Russia slowly succumbed to authoritarianism.

You’ll feel it one day.” She rolls into sitting position at the edge of the bed and looks in the mirror. “The desire to go back to when you were uncertain about who you’d turn out to be. When you lived foolishly thinking you could be something other than what you became in the end.

labs that enrolled in the FluNet Global Influenza Surveillance System—a network of reference labs that sample for flu as a way to track its global spread—recorded 4,623 cases of flu in 2019 but just 53 in 2020. In Chile, there were 5,000 cases in 2019 and 12 in 2020; and in South Africa, the network’s labs detected 1,094 cases in 2019 and just 6 in 2020.53 In New Zealand there was a “near extinction” of influenza.54 With so little flu virus migrating, a similar scenario played out in the US during our fall and winter. By the end of January 2021, the CDC had recorded only 1,316 positive flu cases in its surveillance network, compared to 129,997 they had recorded over the same time frame in 2019.55 The mitigation we put into place was designed to deal with a pandemic flu, not COVID, and it worked much better against its intended viral target.

Had ivermectin been employed in 2020 when medical colleagues around the world first alerted the authorities to its efficacy, millions of lives could have been saved, and the pandemic with all its associated suffering and loss brought to a rapid and timely end.

But with the car nearing production, Musk needed capital and asked Thiel if he’d be interested in investing. Thiel said no—indicating that he was passing in part because, according to Musk, “he doesn’t fully buy into the climate change thing.” In doing so, and in choosing his own political bias over the audacity of Musk’s bet (not to mention the overwhelming evidence offered by mainstream climate science), Thiel lost out on a chance to own a substantial chunk of a company that would be worth $800 billion by the end of 2020. Instead of Founders Fund, Musk took the deal to VantagePoint Venture Partners, a little-known firm with a reputation for investing in green energy companies. VantagePoint wound up with 9 percent of Tesla when it eventually went public.

In the US, even more obscenely vast gains during the pandemic have prompted calls for a windfall tax on super-rich tech titans to help pay for the economic recovery from the pandemic. Senator Bernie Sanders and Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, both Democrats, have introduced legislation dubbed the “Make Billionaires Pay Act” for a one-off 60% tax on the wealth gains of billionaires between 18 March [2020] and the end of the year to help working Americans cover healthcare costs. Under Sanders’ proposal, [Jeff] Bezos would pay a one-time wealth tax of $42.8bn, and [Elon] Musk would pay $27.5bn.66

My Amazon had under 150,000 employees. By the end of 2020, it had an astounding 1.3 million employees.

Hollow (2020) Written in response to the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol on Sunday 7th June 2020. You came down easy in the end the righteous wrench of two ropes in a grand plie briefly, you flew corkscrewed, then met the ground with the clang of toy guns, loose change chains a rain of cheers. Standing ovation on the platform of your neck punk ballet. Act 1. there is more to come. And who carved you? They took such care with that stately pose and propped chin. Wise and virtuous the plaque assured us. Victors wish history odourless and static but history is a sneaky mistress moves like smoke, Colston, like saliva in a hungry mouth. This is your rightful home here, in the pit of chaos with the rest of us. Take your twisted glory and feed it to the tadpoles. Kids will write raps to that syncopated splash. I think of you lying in that harbour with the horrors you hosted. There is no poem more succinct than that. But still you are permanent. You who perfected the ratio. Blood to sugar to money to bricks. Each bougie building we flaunt haunted by bones. Children learn and titans sing under the stubborn rust of your name. But the air is gently throbbing with newness. Can you feel it? Colston, I can’t get the sound of you from my head. Countless times I passed that plinth its heavy threat of metal and marble. But as you landed a piece of you fell off broke away and inside nothing but air. This whole time You were hollow.

At the peak of the winter surge, we were losing as many as seven thousand patients a week in nursing homes to COVID. About thirty thousand long-term care facilities were impacted by COVID with outbreaks. Less than 1 percent of America’s population lives in long-term care facilities, but by the end of 2020, this population accounted for about 40 percent of all COVID deaths—nearly 175,000 in total.55 During the worst week of infections, the week of December 17, there were 72,586 COVID cases diagnosed in nursing homes.

By August, the pandemic of 2020 seemed more likely to end up closer to the 1957–58 Asian flu in terms of excess mortality. (As we saw in chapter 7, the Asian flu killed up to 115,700 Americans, the equivalent of 215,000 in 2020, and between 700,000 and 1.5 million people worldwide, equivalent to 2 to 4 million dead today.) That meant that in August 2020, COVID-19 was still capable of killing many more people.

The government had no response to this finding, just as it had none when India fell in GDP per capita behind Bangladesh. In 2014, India’s per capita GDP ($1573) was about 50 per cent ahead of Bangladesh’s ($1118).179 At the end of the financial year 2020–21, Bangladesh was at $2227 and India at $1947.180 In the Modi years, Bangladesh has quietly doubled its income while India has produced much bluster without performance.