Au-Dios

The comet Neowise; Photo: NASA

    Some people who have been in a near-death situation have reported that they saw a bright, often white, light, warm and welcoming as if it drew them closer and closer to a new part of their life.   One thing is certain and that is that whether it is true or not, we will all find out the answer.  Of course, that may also be the simple version since our ability to see color is severely limited when tested against an animal which is far more advanced in that field such as...a hummingbird.  Wait, what??  Smithsonian was a bit more blunt about it, saying that when we compare ourselves to hummingbirds, we're basically colorblind.  Said part of the article: The study results suggest hummingbirds—and perhaps all bird, reptile and fish species that possess the fourth type of UV-sensitive cones—experience a world awash in extra colors humans can’t imagine including UV-green, UV-red and UV-yellow.  For birds, these additional colors don’t just paint a pretty picture, they are likely essential for finding food, picking mates and escaping predators, according to the paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Added a similar article in National Geographic: ...this extra level of discernment might also have been a trait of dinosaurs, which are thought to have sported colorful feathers.  Some six years ago I had written a post of colorblindness (which has a link to help you determine is you're colorblind and if so, to what degree and to what colors), but this isn't about that, but rather about what we perceive as important in a color, and what that color may represent.  Take the symbol Au which represents the metal, gold.  Dios, in many languages, represents God.  And for some, as it has been through the ages, the worshipping of gold has become an almost religious pursuit.  Take the example of a town such as Greenwich, Connecticut... 

    In a piece from The New Yorker, the author asked how once-liberal leaning Republicans in a small town of 62,600 came to "...accept the terms of Trumpism as the price of power."  Harrington (Brooke Harrington, an economic sociologist at Dartmouth) said, “For an earlier generation, even if your heart wasn’t in it, you’d say, ‘I’ve got to join the local charity board, to project that I deserve this wealth.’ ” The current generation, instead of focusing on the local charity board, prefers targeted private philanthropy, bypassing public decisions on whom to help and how.  “The underlying massive change is that wealth no longer needs to justify itself—it is self-justifying,” Harrington said.  “I look back, and I think, That’s when we gave up on being a ‘we.’ ” ...The hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen paid $14.8 million in cash for a house, then added an ice rink, an indoor basketball court, putting greens, a fairway, and a massage room, ultimately swelling the building to thirty-six thousand square feet—larger than the Taj Mahal.  In a final flourish, Cohen obtained special permission to surround his estate with a wall that exceeded the town’s limits on height.  It was nine feet tall...As Americans have reckoned with the origins of our political moment --the Trump years, the fury on all sides, the fraying of a common purpose-- we have tended to focus on the effects of despair among members of the working class who felt besieged by technology, globalization, immigration, and trade.  But that ignores the effects of seclusion among members of the governing class, who helped disfigure our political character by demonizing moderation and enfeebling the basic functions of the state.  We—or they, depending on where you stand—receded behind gracious walls...In the long battle between the self and service, we have, for the moment, settled firmly on the self.  To borrow a phrase from a neighbor in disgrace, we stopped worrying about “the moral issue here.”  Who are Americans ready to help? And who are we willing to ignore?

Graph from ALLY July analysis

    Of course, it is easy to pick and choose what statistics or comments help or hurt a person or a town or a country.  In that sense, we can all become "blind" to other views (the author of the New Yorker piece points out that Greenwich, CT. has a diverse population, not only in race but in wealth and attitudes).   Those people getting evicted or now facing a massive hospital bill after surviving Covid-19 (in general, the testing for the corona virus is subsidized and free, but not the resulting costs of admission to the hospital or ICU), likely have little interest in hearing about mansions with ice rinks and shenanigans happening on Wall Street.  Cash is king, even if it is just a piece of printed paper; if you believe that a $20 bill will buy you a bag of groceries, then that paper is as valid as a chunk of sparkling metal (as a side note, $20 in the shattered economy of Lebanon will buy you a single box of cereal).  So when the U.S. government decides to print a bunch of paper, or to tell you that they have plenty of precious metals or materials sitting in reserve, you simply have to trust them...or do you?  You're wealthy, on paper, even if you produce almost nothing of value or certainly, nothing of real value to those struggling to breathe and on a ventilator (or operating one).

   TIME featured a special issue dedicated to those facing or dealing with the new virus, saying in part: The virus laid bare the world’s extraordinary inequalities and injustices.  Lists of so-called vital professions were published all over the world, and surprise, positions such as “hedge-fund manager” and “tax specialist for multinationals” were not on them.  Suddenly it was crystal clear who did the really important work in health care and education, in public transport, in supermarkets.  The general rule seemed to be: the more vital your work, the less you are paid, the more insecure your employment and the more at risk you are in the fight against the coronavirus.  James Meek wrote a piece in the London Review of Books that said: The divide between communal health advocates and tech fixers represents a deeper choice: between actions that aim to help an individual, so may indirectly help everyone, and actions that aim to help everyone, so may indirectly help the individual.  Lockdown requires each individual to accept personal constraints for the sake of the community, even when they are not themselves ill.  When China decided to lockdown the city of Wuhan, I somehow pictured a quaint town or small city: but as Meek points out (and I'll highlight here): Wuhan​ is one of the great cities of China, bigger than any European city apart from Moscow.  So if city that large can cooperate for the greater good, it becomes distressing to hear of people in the U.S. stabbing or shooting people merely because they're being told to wear a mask; the claim that it is "their" liberty or "their" right as an individual to decide for themselves, something they'll defend until you ask them for their views on abortion (in which case such "individual" rights and arguments seem to go out the window).  It may be time for each of us to step back and perhaps take off our blinders, even if we think that we've never had them on...

    One only has to look up (at least until the end of July 2020) and view the 3-mile wide comet, Neowise, an object described by NASA as: ... cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock and dust roughly the size of a small town. When a comet's orbit brings it close to the sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets.  Neowise survived passing near our sun; and to put that into perspective, imagine a basketball-sized orb of light in front of you (our sun) and you holding up a grain of sand (our planet) -- all of that heat and that energy hitting you, even when you may feel that it is hotter than normal outside, is just a mere speck of the heat our sun is producing.  Our sun --which is considered just a medium-sized star-- can easily hold a million of our earths; and now scientists have discovered a black hole that can swallow a million of our suns.  We need to maybe have a different outlook, not only of our own views, but of others as well.  Editor Susan Goldberg wrote in National Geographic: We feel bad when we throw out things that shouldn’t have become trash (like uneaten, past-its-prime produce) or expend resources needlessly (like leaving lights on when we’re away).  This guilty feeling is deeply ingrained; the origins of the expression “waste not, want not” can be traced to the 1500s.  But we do waste, in ways big and small...What if we could recapture waste and turn it into something else?  This concept, called the circular economy, is not entirely new...The idea that we might put an end to trash may seem far-fetched—and it is, but in a good way, Kunzig (senior editor Robert Kunzig) told me. “It reminds me of a line in Diner, a movie I love: ‘If you don’t have good dreams, you got nightmares.’ The circular economy is like that—it’s a dream we have to try to make real.”  Maybe we need to realize that we can only really see what is inside of ourselves, not because of something we lack but of something we choose not to see.  There will always be those in mansions, just as there will always be those struggling to stay alive.  But maybe we need to think of not simply discarding or tossing things away --people, feelings, emotions, morals-- and instead think of how to bring things around full circle.  Perhaps something as simple as a ball of frozen gas that briefly appears in our skies before heading out in its own circular path, can teach us a thing or two...

--As an end note to make those of you not able to or not wanting to or just feeling a bit helpless as your 401k fades from all this gibberish about the "market," there's this from Bloomberg a month ago: A 2017 study by Hendrik Bessembinder of Arizona State University looked at every listed stock between 1926 and 2016 and found that four out of seven actually performed worse than T-bills.  Furthermore he found that the most common outcome for a stock is a complete 100% loss.  And even more astoundingly, the study states that the entire net gain for the market since 1926 can be attributed to just 4% of all stocks...FWIW, there was a study that was done by Rob Arnott at Research Affiliates that claimed monkeys throwing darts at a newspaper did, on average, outperform the market.  However, that study only used a pool of the 1000 largest and most liquid stocks for their sample, which is likely to be a different pool than tickers generated by a random ticker generator. (Or a semi-random one in the case of Scrabble tiles because the letters aren't evenly distributed.)  A large, liquid portfolio, for one thing, is less likely to contain a bunch of dogs headed to zero.  Still sound like gibberish?  Bear in mind that since the 1800s, the average bond interest rate has remained above 5%, peaking at just over 15% in 1981 (in my early days, even a EE savings bond paid 6% interest)...looking back at those days of savings accounts, it's painful to think that today's rates of less than 1% are considered "generous."