Many years ago I had a friend with a truly annoying habit. She’d tell me about something that happened in her day, or her life, or the life of someone we knew, and then she’d add, “So that’s bad,” or “So that’s good.” At the time, I had just admitted to myself that I really was an intuitive, and I had begun my first tentative steps onto the path of living a spiritual life. I’d known her for more than a decade when I noticed her habit. Everything from finding a lucky penny, “So that’s good,” to losing her keys, “So that’s bad,” to finding them, “So that’s good,” got a rating. Rating? Is that what I mean? A judgment. A commentary. A qualification? Maybe quantification is better. Point being, she tacked on a judgment at the end of every story like some constant binary report card. When I was stronger in my own spiritual studies, a journey which she not only witnessed with me, but quasi-participated in, three or so years later, I asked her if she knew that she judged every experience or if she was unconsciously keeping a tally. She looked at me as if I had just landed from Planet Q, and responded, clearly astonished, “I do?” The United States has just passed a stranger-than-usual Memorial Day. The news is full of the good and the bad.
Read More
Notice the shadowy flag in the picture. Opinion columnist Charles M. Blow is not known for mincing words. “Trump put politics, his own political fortunes, over the lives of the American people, and the result has been catastrophic.” Nothing new here, right? The Outbreak aggregator went with this. “While the country neared six digits of death, the president who repeatedly criticized his predecessor for golfing during a crisis spent the weekend on the links for the first time since March. When he was not zipping around on a cart, he was on social media embracing fringe conspiracy theories, amplifying messages from a racist and sexist Twitter account and lobbing playground insults at perceived enemies, including his own former attorney general.” Again, just a yawn. Predictability is just so ... predictable. Columbia University researchers put forth a distinctly different model of the disease trajectory this week the theme of which is that had the U.S. acted just two weeks earlier, the death toll would be more than two-thirds less than it is. Mr. Blow again, “But Trump had spent the previous week downplaying the severity of the virus and blaming growing coverage of it and alarm over it on the media.” On the media. On testing itself. On China. On Obama. Or the governors. Or immigrants. Or the epidemiologists. Or the inspectors general. Or the airlines. Or any other of his flavor-of-the-moment pet scapegoats. Meh.
Read More