• THE COVID CRISIS HAS CONTRIBUTED TO WHAT ALREADY was a huge number of empty or underutilized office buildings, public school buildings and parking lots; the federal government alone owns some 45,0000 properties. In the Next Normal, occupancy requirements will be undoubtedly less, resulting from increasing digitization, at-home workers, flexible work arrangements and service delivery methods. So local government agencies as well as building owners are already identifying “underpopulated, obsolete or no longer desired properties that can be re-purposed if owned , or consolidated if leased, to reduce footprint and operating costs as well as unlock capital value… and untapped potential for public-private partnerships to create new infrastructure or other assets…which, in the face of unprecedented uncertainty and acceleration of trends that were already underway long before the pandemic, could also solve community shortages of affordable housing or senior care facilities.” [HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW – 7/10/20]
  • THE ‘ASIAN GIANT HORNET’ SCARE a few months ago turned out to be a non-event. In California, one nest was discovered being smuggled into San Francisco a while back – possibly since, in Asia, Hornet Liquor is a “gourmet treat or even a health aid believed to ease arthritis pain.” While the bug is large (up to the size of a female thumb) and with giant stingers (pain equivalent to several yellow-jackets stinging simultaneously), the likelihood of facing one is remote. [SCIENCE NEWS – 5/29/20]
  • “THE ‘WOKE’ MOVEMENT IS TODAY’S NEW RELIGION, a revival of sorts in Puritan style intolerance, an era of our nation’s earliest religious zealots. ‘Woke’ is the new ‘Saved,’ based on one of Puritan theology’s core tenets: innate depravity – the doctrine that humans are inherently wicked as a result of ‘Original Sin,’ now updated to ‘White Supremacy,’ dividing humans into the Saved or Damned, Saints or Sinners, and now classified as either Oppressors (white) or Victims (nonwhite), with new-faith adherents viewing themselves as the ‘elect,’ redeemed, as it were, by a predestined grace, and convinced they possess a higher truth committed to imposing on others… where heretics – whose false doctrine imperils the larger community – must be rooted out and dissenters must be humiliated, shunned and branded (with a scarlet ‘A’ of shame). Today, Bigot & Hater are the new Witch & Wizard… For corporations, professing ‘solidarity’ with the new religion is good business. But for the movement’s leaders, the goal of this secular faith is to dismantle as irredeemably ‘racist’ the sinful nation in which we live, and to build (in the Puritan phrase) a new City on a Hill, made in their own image.”   [RED STATE – 7/24/20]
  • MEANWHILE, AS IF TODAY’S PROBLEMS WEREN’T CONCERNING ENOUGH: The journal Scientific Reports contends that “if humanity continues down its current path, civilization as we know it is heading toward ‘irreversible collapse… Latest research suggests that the debate on Climate Change will be almost obsolete if global deforestation of the planet continues, since tree’s services range from carbon storage & oxygen production to soil conservation and water cycling regulation supporting natural and human food systems… Physicists now predict that deforestation will claim the last forests on earth within 100 to 200 years – but also that human systems could reach a ‘point of no return’ in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable earth lends to breakdown of nations and the international order within 20 to 40 years” anyway.  [NEOSCOPE – 7/18/20]
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:  Amazingly simple theory for a happy life. See video attached.

          California University Trustees have dictated that for 430,000 undergrads either ‘Social Justice’ or ‘Ethnic Studies’ – like Police Reform, Disparities in Public Health or the Economics of Racism – will now be required for graduation, in order “to empower students to meet this moment in our nation’s history, giving them the knowledge, broad perspectives & skills needed to solve society’s most pressing problems.” 

         CDC Director Redfield acknowledged in a recent news conference that CDC Public Health strategy of mass isolation lockdown has resulted in double the number of deaths from drug overdoses than from Covid, and disclosed that CDC is now pushing for all Americans to wear masks to prevent virus spread. But if underwear, jeans, or slacks doesn’t stop flatulence, how is a cloth bandana or mask going to stop a virus?

       It’s been rumored that Mahatma Gandhi, who walked barefoot through life and developed callouses on his feet, along with having eaten very sparsely which made him frail and created consistently bad breath, led to a long-secret epitaph as a “super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.”