by John Walters

Jejune June

As we head into the final weekend of June, I don’t think it’s too soon to believe that this month will be remembered as “naive, simplistic and superficial.” The Dow and the NASDAQ soared without any fundamental reasons to do so; many states “reopened for business” while here we are on June 26 with yesterday being a RECORD day for new coronavirus cases ( > 40,000).

Oh, and the chief of… wait, let me see with whom this dude is affiliated again…checking… oh, yes, the CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL says that actual positive Covid-19 cases are likely TEN TIMES the number that have been diagnosed. Or more than 20 million.

All that plus sports commissioners blustering with confidence that their sports will be reopening soon (“full speed into that iceberg, lads!”).

It’s been quite the jejune June.

Kung Flu Pander

A spot-on editorial by Paul Krugman highlighting how America overall is not to blame for the coronavirus, but rather gung-ho blinders-on Republicans who just looked at the coronavirus as if it were Al Qaeda or climate change and thought that a red baseball cap would be enough to overcome it.

Krugman’s most blistering sentence(s):

It’s not that the right is averse to fearmongering. But it doesn’t want you to fear impersonal threats that require an effective policy response, not to mention inconveniences like wearing face masks; it wants you to be afraid of people you can hate — people of a different race or supercilious liberals.

Eggs-Actly.

And now, in the face of overwhelming evidence, the right and Fox News is still clinging to its stupidity. It’s a lesson for all: they will NEVER yield in their stubborn refusal to acknowledge the world has changed. Ever. Even to the death.

Will The Sh*t Ever Hit The Fan?

In brief, Yes.

Airlines and banks and travel industry and the hospitality industry and the food service industry and Wall Street analysts and ESPECIALLY CNBC are blithely going about their business telling us how good of a sun tan we’re able to get now that the ozone layer has been destroyed. Or encouraging us to hunt for sea shells now that the tide just went out 500 feet. There’s a reason the tide is out 500 feet, however.

A tsunami is coming.

Right this minute, if I had the means and the smarts and was someone like Michael Lewis, I’d be doing the deepest of dives into the artificial propping up of the stock market. I guess even I could use stock phrases such as “cheap money” and “the Fed” and “stimulus packages,” but I’m not sophisticated enough to know how they all work.

What I do know, from watching enough Kurt Russell Disney films as a lad, is that The Computer is Wearing Tennis Shoes. In short, something unnatural is taking place to prop up the stock market. Something probably unethical and perhaps even illegal. And we’ve seen enough to know that in the end the market will come crashing down, the rich folks who engineered it will say that nobody was able to foresee it, Lewis will have his bestseller and eventually an Oscar-nominated picture, and the little guy will end up footing the bill.

We’ve seen this movie.