This year has been tragic.. SO many lost.. so many to mourn. It started quickly after 2020 began and seemingly never stopped since then…
Neil Peart of Rush dead of brain cancer at 67 in Los Angeles …
The actor’s mother, Jane Badler, confirmed Harry Hains died at the age of 27. He was an actor in AMERICAN HORROR STORY and the OA
Jim Lehrer, the retired PBS anchorman who for 36 years gave public television viewers a substantive alternative to network evening news programs with in-depth reporting, interviews and analysis of world and national affairs, died on Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 85.
Dead in a helicopter crash.. RIP Kobe Bryant #RIP
Kirk Douglas, the son of a ragman who channeled a deep, personal anger through a chiseled jaw and steely blue eyes to forge one of the most indelible and indefatigable careers in Hollywood history, died Wednesday. He was 103.
Mad Mike Hughes was his name. Flat earth was his game. He set out to prove the truth. Hughes, a self-styled daredevil, flat-Earth theorist and limousine stuntman, died when his jury-rigged contraption propelled him on a column of steam, spiraled through the air and cratered into the sagebrush outside Barstow, California. He was 64.
Eddie Van Halen.. dead in ’20
Jeremy Bulloch, who played the role of Boba Fett in the original Star Wars trilogy, died Dec. 17 at age 75 following health complications, including several years living with Parkinson’s disease.
Longtime Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek died Nov. 8 at age 80 following a battle with stage 4 pancreatic cancer
Sean Connery, the Scotland-born actor who was the first star to play James Bond and became one of the franchise’s most iconic stars, died at the age of 90 on Oct. 31
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Sept. 18 at the age of 87 from complications of metastatic pancreas cancer.
On July 24, icon TV talk show host, singer, and media personality, Regis Philbin, died from a heart attack in his home
WWE is saddened to learn that Jon Huber, known to WWE fans as Luke Harper, died at the age of 41..
In 2020, so many deaths.. so much COVID. The New York TIMES did a front page story when the death toll hit 100,000.. since then the number dramatically soared above..
We write a year in review each year.. We have done this since we began a website in the year 2000, with 2001 officially being the first named year in review with logo and full wrap..
2020 is the first in these two decades where it feels like than stellar.. less than a twelve month period of 52 that seems worthy of remembering. Because we sadly will NOT forget..
Just about every news headline we saw this year finished its fact with “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”
People voting “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”.. Snowstorm “amid the coronavirus pandemic.” Graduation ceremonies “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”.. Someone stubbed their toe “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”
The election was set to be the big story of the year. All of that tension build up the reality show showdown of Donald Trump vs Joe Biden. Rallies and huge conventions were set to dominate our short attention spans.
Those predictions were dead wrong.
A virus that started in 2019 would obviously become the story of 2020.
U.S. health officials said they diagnosed a second patient with the China coronavirus in January of 2020 after a Chicago woman returned from Wuhan with the infection.. at that time they were monitoring 63 others. The virus obviously had begun to take hold long before lockdowns and government intervention.
The Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, and the funeral for Kobi Bryant were among those super spreader moments.. fleeting moments from an old world that now seems so far gone.
And if you remember that global hysteria, you will recall how much of the world was brought to a halt in the year 2003 .. The virus was discovered in 2002.. it spread around quickly..and there has been no recent known transmission from human to human since 2004..
This new disease has unfortunate potential to be SARS II.. hopefully not worse..
A view from within Wuhan seems desperate.. sources that Coal Speaker have talked to from inside tell of empty streets.. People fearfully staying in their homes and staying away from people.. There is a massive construction project underway to build a hospital from the ground up in just days–enough for 1,000 patients.
One day a few months from now (we hope) we can look back on this time and breathe a collective sigh of relief.. we can applaud the ingenuity of human and thank our lucky stars that the pandemic coronavirus, Covid-19, was a moment in time that we all muddled through together..
We did hope. And the hope is just … still hope.
As the year ends, there is a strong chance that this may be the story of 2021… for all the wrong reasons.
THE not BIGGEST STORY OF THE YEAR: The rejection of Donald Trump
Trump still had big rallies, where he could. But he didn’t get a convention, a serenade.. He didn’t get a strong economy. He got a virus, a pandemic and a national nightmare that never seemed to end.
What caused the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020? It would be interesting to see how the election would have ended up in 2019, prior to COVID-19, if Trump battled Biden. Or Sanders.. or someone else.
The economy was strong, the chances of a Democratic defeat looks equally likely.
Fate was beholden to another prospect. Instead, the national mood turned against Trump and he became the first president to get denied a second term since 1992..
But that’s showbiz…
THE DREAMS OF 2020
One of the biggest stories of the pandemic was the nightmares on main street that it brought..
All around the world, something strange was occurring across the planet in March and April.. reports varied, but it seemed some form of night terrors had taken hold.
People of different background and national origin had reported strange dreams. Strange visions at night. I even had one, vivid in my mind to this day..
My father and I were looking out of the window in his kitchen .. my 9-year-old son was busy with a Pokemon toy, shaped like a cross, digging in the dirt.. I wanted to yell out, commanding him to stop. But my dad told me not to.. when I looked out next I saw my grandfather–my dad’s dad–helping my son dig holes… Before I knew it, people who were residents of the nursing home where my mom is living right now were walking towards the square-shaped holes in the dirt.. And they were younger, they were happier.
This was all a dream–a reoccurring dream I have been having over the previous two weeks..
At that time, Professor Mark Blagrove, an expert in sleep and dreaming at Swansea University’s department of psychology has explained that cabin fever, financial pressures and lack of stimulation from being indoors so much is wreaking havoc on sleep patterns around quarantined nations..
It seems that the pandemic dreams have faded since that time.. but wow were they were. And wow were they visceral.. They happened. They happened so much that they began to seem real.
Tons of people from sea to shining sea are thankful for Vicks Pure ZZZs because of this pandemic.
THE MOST IMPORTANT WEBSITE OF THE YEAR
Yet another year where it was not mine. This time, the championship award goes to a site that many fans left: The Drudge Report.
Early in 2019, it appeared that the libertarian influencer began to change his brand from slightly pro-Trump to mightily against.
The links on the site changed style so much that many conservative outlets who relied on Drudge for years suddenly abandoned the site. Some said his web traffic collapsed…
But through it all he didn’t change, with each day of the 2020 election cycle seemingly turning more and more against the President.
And finally, in the end, a link and photo expressed it all when Trump lost, with the headline saying “You’re fired.”
BIGGEST LOCAL STORY OF THE YEAR: THE DEATH OF GRAFFITI HIGHWAY
There were amazingly important local events (for those new to this site we broadcast from Eastern Pennsylvania) .. but the biggest local event had to yet again indirectly take place in “amid the coronavirus pandemic.”
In April 2020, as lockdowns in Pennsylvania took hold, countless people flocked to what many deemed a safe refuge. The former town of Centralia, and its Graffiti Highway.
As the members of the Breakfast Club found out, when you mess with the bull you get the horns. This weekend the bull was put on the spot.. A choice had to be made. Continue to have thousands of people per month stream into this ‘hot spot,’ pun intended, or do something.
News broke early Monday morning: Land owner Pagnotti Enterprises hired Fox Coal Co. Mining to truck 400 loads — between 8,000 to 10,000 tons of dirt — to cover the unofficial popular tourist destination… Trees and grass is rumored to be getting planted next.
State police were actively forcing people away from the scene.. Some lucky news hounds on Facebook got photos, or even live video from the Coal Region site HO BOTT NEWS.
The highway died.
Long live Graffiti Highway.
THE BIGGEST ENTERTAINMENT OF 2020: THE DEATH OF THEATERS
It’s over!!
WONDER WOMAN 1984 has officially premiered on HBO Christmas day, instead of theaters.
As of October 2019, only 305 drive-ins remain in the U.S., according to the United Drive-In Theatre Owner Association (UDITOA). But during the coronavirus pandemic, the promise of a shared entertainment experience from the comfort of a controlled, socially distant environment has fueled a drive-in resurgence — and movies are only part of the offering.
With most live events on pause, the drive-in movie theater became Covid Summer’s go-to venue. In April, Doc’s Drive-In Theatre in Buda, Texas, welcomed 85 cars for a socially distanced wedding live-streamed on the theater’s two screens. Churches resumed drive-in services, reviving a practice rooted in the 1950s. In cities around the world, idled shopping malls and empty parking lots hosted ad-hoc screens for pop-up community movies, while existing drive-ins expanded their offerings to include concerts, art shows and stand-up comedy performances. Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium turned its football field into a giant outdoor cinema. And in July, a boat-in movie theater even popped up in Key Biscayne, Florida, complete with a 60-foot floating screen.
Could it be? The rebirth of something long gone? A lost art and a long feeling…
The revenge of the past.
THE INSURRECTION OF 2020
There was so much this year it is hard to believe that during some trying months of 2020, we actually thought the White House would be attacked…
There are these moments when you realize you are living through fast moving history..
Only days ago the nation was greeted with news of lockdowns and curfews due to a virus.. now we are hit by arrests and curfews due to protests going violent in cities across the United States..
Tonight, as the President of the United States was set to address the nation from the Rose Garden, a decision was made to tear gas relatively peaceful protestors in Lafayette Park.. That is where the “church of the presidents,” St. Paul, had fire damage from protesters a day ago.
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THE LOST NOSTALGIA OF 2020
This year was a tragic moment for those who loved weird nostalgia. Roadside America is no more, and the insides are being auctioned off after sellers failed to sell the famous attraction.
Various local affiliates across different cities in multiple states are reporting that people are receiving packages in the mail. Unsolicited.. NO orders. No expectations.
According to reports, the packages are coming from China and they contain… Seeds. The mystery is what the seeds are and why they are being mailed.
The disgraced Hollywood kingmaker was convicted Feb. 24 of raping an aspiring actress and sexually abusing a TV and film production assistant. The verdict was celebrated by his dozens of accusers and their supporters as a watershed moment for the #MeToo movement.
The coronavirus pandemic triggered a global recession as numerous countries went into lock down. The Dow Jones industrial average suffered its worst single-day point drop ever on March 9.Kim Jong Un death rumors
Ghislaine Maxwell arrested..
And murder hornets.
Finally…
THE YEAR OF VIRTUAL
For better or worse, most of us did not see each other much in 2020. It was all virtual. Zoom.. Teams. Pick your poison.
These were paradigm-shifting events after all.
Virtual has made business… better? Worse? Or just different.
Schooling has become.. better? Worse? Or just different.
All those memes and jokes about the “worst year in history” are now behind. Suddenly people are social media blitzing their profile pictures and stories with happy and hopeful messages. Clearing out that dreaded ’20 from our sight and moving forward with open eyes to ’21..
We have done this before, as humanity.
This yearly ritual of desperation to end the morbid year we are in, and a new profound hope for the months to come.
With each New Years Eve kiss that turns into a drunken slobber fest after Midnight, we strike the usual tone. Year in and year out.
For as much as we want the time to change, we get stuck in our ways. We don’t change at all, don’t adjust.. don’t do anything much to lose weight, and decry the ‘terrible new year’ we are stuck in come February and March.
Heck sometimes even late January..
But maybe this time it will in fact be different.
2020 was a year made up of terrible mixtures of awful and perfect things. Working at home brought us closer to family and friends, but somehow made us distant from neighbors and loved ones who were the most dear to us before lockdowns. It was filled with unprecedented death and heart ache, but yet joys and moments of inspiration.
For every drop of tear gas fired into crowds, there were tears of love at new life, new love, and equal amounts at the bedsides of those passing away from a rampant virus. For most, window-side as we were not allowed in to see loved ones during the most wrenching moment in a life..
2020 was unfair. And just. 2020 was the best of times. And yes clearly it contained the worst of times.
Some may argue that the new year and celebrations about it are pointless. That they don’t matter..
If it does not matter why did humanity take to the traditions so early? There has to be something special, no?
It wasn’t always filled with love and splendor of course.
In the year 46 B.C.E. the Roman emperor Julius Caesar first established January 1 as New Year’s day.
Janus was the Roman god of doors and gates, and had two faces, one looking forward and one back. Caesar felt that the month named after this god (“January”) would be the appropriate “door” to the year. Caesar celebrated the first January 1 New Year by ordering the violent routing of revolutionary Jewish forces in the Galilee. BLOOD flowed in the streets.
In later years, Roman pagans observed the New Year by engaging in drunken orgies—a ritual they believed constituted a personal re-enacting of the chaotic world that existed before the cosmos was ordered by the gods.
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We are all in the mood for a deep breath, now. A recovery.. not from hustle and bustle, but rather more of a recovery from everything else.
525,600 minutes 525,000 moments so dear 525,600 minutes How do you measure, measure a year? In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife..
We had the experiencing of all of them in am amplified way in 2020.
So here’s a cup of hope… maybe 2021 will actually be better. Maybe it will be a positive experience for humanity.
Indeed, a cup of hope for the new year. But is that cup half full.. or half empty?
The eyes of the beholder will get a bird’s eye view in 2021.
After all these months, all this build up… the bust. Call it the 2020 luck.
Here in this ‘neck of the woods’ of Pennsylvania, the cloud cover was too thick to see the historic Christmas star. The perfect line up of Jupiter and Saturn for the first time since the 1200s and the last time of most of our lifetimes unless science finds a way to freeze our bodies..
There is still some hope.. Experts say the so-called “Christmas star” will also be visible after sunset on Tuesday, Dec. 22.. So let’s hope the clouds clear before the Christmas storm!!
The perfect conjunction.. just as solstice occurs.. and the darkness begins before the ‘sun rises.’
This year has been one of the roughest in modern history.. 2021, for all its hope that midnight January 1 may bring, will most likely be equally challenging.
The Jupiter and Saturn alignment could not have come at a more appropriate time according to the gazers of the stars.. astrologers have looked to this conjunction as a massive moment in human history. Biblical scholars have equally paused at the magnificence of this time in their worldview. And while the wonders of the heavens made us wonder, a volcano came to life on earth.
Jupiter and Saturn are outer planets, meaning they move much more slowly across the clock face of the sky; as such, they’re believed to have influence on a grander scale — on society as a whole rather than on individuals. On top of that, the conjunction is taking place on the winter solstice, one of the most spiritually significant days of the year. It’s the longest night, meaning it marks the point at which days will finally start growing longer — a time associated with rebirth in all forms.
Jupiter is said to be the planet of optimism, expansion, healing, growth, and miracles; Saturn, conversely, is associated with restriction, responsibility, and long-term lessons. When these energies combine, we can expect a major ideological reset
The great conjunction “sets the tone for the ethos for the next 20 years affecting the arts, music, theatre, literature, entertainment, designer fashion, food, music, mathematics, science, politics, and the government agenda,” famed astrologer Susan Miller writes on her blog…
Whenever Jupiter and Saturn change signs, the entire look and feel of life changes, too. Jupiter changes signs once a year, and Saturn, closer to three years. If you met Saturn’s demands since he entered Capricorn in December 2017, your old challenges will begin to melt away now. In fact, Saturn usually leaves a gift by the door as thanks to you for dealing with his rigors—that might come as soon as January. Both Saturn and Jupiter are moving into Aquarius—Saturn on December 16 and Jupiter on December 19 https://www.astrologyzone.com/a-note-from-susan-miller-december-2020/#ixzz6hJxwllsB
And just as the planets began their grand alignment, a grand volcano erupted on Earth.
The Hawaii county Civil Defense Agency has asked residents to stay indoors after the Kilauea volcano erupted following a series of earthquakes.. The U.S. Geological Survey says Hawaii‘s Kilauea volcano has erupted. A magnitude 4.4 earthquake hit about an hour after the volcano began erupting. Hundreds felt the earthquake but significant damage to buildings or structures was not expected
We’ve seen a star used in about every nativity skit we’ve watched at church. But what is the significance of this celestial body, apart from the fact it directed shepherds (and eventually the Magi) to Bethlehem? Stars do seem to play multiple roles throughout Scripture. Let’s analyze some verses in which they play an important part. Matthew 24:29: “Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”
Astronomical signs point to the second coming of Christ. Although we cannot predict when he will return, when we see natural phenomena occurrences, we remember that such will be the conditions of the Last Days.
Each December 25 the Sun is re-born as it begins to rise an additional degree each day, making the days longer until June 21 when the Sun remains in place for three days before continuing to rise again, Dank explained.The metaphor represents Jesus birth and his body remaining in the grave for three days before rising again, he noted. The signs of Capricorn and Sagittarius parallel Jesus’ birth in a stable between the constellations of the horse and goat, Dank continued.
When the Sun enters Virgo, represented by a maiden with wheat, it corresponds to Bethlehem (which means “House of Bread”) and Jesus’ title as the “Bread of Life,” he revealed. Dank covered how Leo represents Jesus as the “Lion of Judah” as well as why the New Testament account records 30 years from Jesus’ birth until he was baptized by John. This period is associated with Saturn and the planet’s 30 year orbit of the Sun, and takes place under the sign of Aquarius, he pointed out.
Christmas has some pagan origins, as most things do.
The Yule log, the evergreen, the lit candle in a window–are all documented.
Santa and Krampus used to travel as good cop and bad cop..
Even before Fox News declared that there is a ‘war on Christmas,’ many puritans in America did not even want Christmas to be celebrated. They did not like burning human sacrifices .. they did not log the phallic image of the Yule log.
They did not appreciate fearing the ghosts of the night as winter’s brutal chill set in…
Scary ghost stories of Christmases long long ago
For those who believe that Halloween was the scariest holiday of all, think again!
Roger Clarke authored a book titled A NATURAL HISTORY OF GHOSTS: 500 YEARS OF HUNTING FOR PROOF.
He detailed why the Victorian age became the prime time for paranormal tales to be woven by people around the holiday season!
The popularity of ghost stories was strongly related to economic changes. The industrial revolution had led people to migrate from rural villages into towns and cities, and created a new middle class. They moved into houses that often had servants, says Clarke, many taken on around October or November, when the nights were drawing in early – and new staff found themselves “in a completely foreign house, seeing things everywhere, jumping at every creak”. Robbins says servants were “expected to be seen and not heard – actually, probably not even seen, to be honest. If you go to a stately home like Harewood House, you see the concealed doorways and servant’s corridors. You would actually have people popping in and out without you really knowing they were there, which could be quite a freaky experience. You’ve got these ghostly figures who actually inhabit the house.”
Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters.
Kira Cochrane of the UK GUARDIAN writes this to describe humanity’s long love of telling ghost stories around this time of year:
Christmas has long been associated with ghosts, says Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof. Just before Christmas 1642, for instance, shepherds were said to have seen ghostly civil war soldiers battling in the skies. This connection continued in the Victorian era through Dickens’s story, and through the ghost stories he later published at Christmas in his periodical All the Year Round, with contributors including Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell.
It would also continue in the tradition started by MR James, the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, who would invite a select few students and friends to his rooms each year on Christmas Eve, where he’d read one of the ghost stories he had written, which are still popular today. They include Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book (1895), in which an ancient holy book brings forth a demonic presence, first announced by a hand covered in “coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny and wrinkled”.
The popularity of ghost stories was strongly related to economic changes. The industrial revolution had led people to migrate from rural villages into towns and cities, and created a new middle class. They moved into houses that often had servants, says Clarke, many taken on around October or November, when the nights were drawing in early – and new staff found themselves “in a completely foreign house, seeing things everywhere, jumping at every creak”. Robbins says servants were “expected to be seen and not heard – actually, probably not even seen, to be honest.
If you go to a stately home like Harewood House, you see the concealed doorways and servant’s corridors. You would actually have people popping in and out without you really knowing they were there, which could be quite a freaky experience. You’ve got these ghostly figures who actually inhabit the house.”
Santa Claus is even paranormal–-he can sweep across the globe and enter homes across the planet, sparing enough time to throw down some presents and even eat about 25 billion cookies and glasses of milk.
Even the reindeer have time for carrots.
We tell our children at an early age to believe in something paranormal, to put faith in something hopeful.
Adults who laugh at the notion of Santa then go to church on Christmas morning and sing about another paranormal moment when an angel impregnated a woman with God’s son..
The darkest time of the entire year begins now. And the sun rises on December 25.
Joe Biden gets a coronavirus vaccine shot, then says, “We owe these folks a lot. The scientists and the people who put this together, the frontline workers, the people what were the ones that did the clinical work.”
Attempt to reassure nation over its safety..
Meanwhile the MUTANT STRAIN spreads ..
Which could be vaccine resistant if all goes WRONG..
As this post is written, there are only 5 days left until Christmas. That is four shopping days. four/five food prep days.. Six stressful days of work, COVID-19 fears, and also wrapping. Santa can’t do it all, after all..
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight. The night of Christmas that is…
That is one sentence from the famous Christmas song O little town of Bethlehem. The song was written in 1868 by Phillips Brooks, a rector of Philadelphia, after a trip to the Holy Land and seeing the nighttime Bethlehem from the hills of Palestine. When he returned he had his church organist, Lewis Redner, write the melody for the Sunday school choir.
It’s been a beloved Christmas classic every since.
O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
Hopes and fears are met this Christmas season.. Most states and nations are seeing COVID-19 restrictions, some are decrying government overreach and calling officials grinches who stole Christmas. Others are praising the lockdowns and hoping that Christmas 2021 could be close to “normal” again. The debate is fierce.. there is so much misery throughout the entire planet as the scourge of the pandemic shakes nations and causes hospital surges just before the season’s greeting..
But at the same time vaccines are now becoming available. Hope. But major news networks have reported of reactions, such as one nurse fainting after receiving it, and others experiencing elevated heart rates. Fear.
2020 was like many other year. Tumultuous and divisive. But this one seemed to not only hit us hard but rot us to our cores. It was rancid with toxic drama, each and every day in your morning fishwrapper or your TEE VEE.. All with the expressed purposely of seemingly dividing us even more than we were.. If that is possible.
We knew 2020 would be awful. The election and all that. But we didn’t know we would be faced with a global virus .. that one kind of took us off guard, didn’t it.
And after the past 12 months, with fever pitched arguments raging over fevers, not one of us knows the future, has the magic answer, or can predict what the hands of time will share with in 2021. We are spectators in this global game. Faced with fears and hopes, we can choose the mental path we want..
Lockdowns and stress have caused chaos in our personal lives. The religious will look to that star of Bethlehem and see hope. They will see intuition, and they will see promise. Others may see just a natural course of space and time meeting at the right moment. Pure coincidence. Pure luck, and nothing more.
What do you see…
It reminds me of the movie SIGNS, one of M Night Shymalan’s strongest films. There is one important scene where Mel Gibson’s character is explaining what humanity will think as lights in the skies appear globally and aliens make themselves known. Hope? Or fear.. the age old question that the LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM so eloquently captures.
HOPES AND FEARS THROUGH THE YEARS
We have been through change and chaos and rampages before.. 12 months have done us justice..and sometimes harm. Christmas has always felt like that summary of the year, the final period of time is which we could take a brief break and try wrapping out heads around the whirlwind of the past few months prior.
There were other times in history where we were challenged in the hope vs fear department.. The Christmas of 2004 particularly stands out. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami occurred at 07:58:53 in local time on 26 December, with an epicenter off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia. It was an undersea megathrust earthquake that registered a magnitude of 9.1–9.3 Mw, reaching a Mercalli intensity up to IX in certain areas.. Back in 2004, we reported that Christmas Day ended in a disaster..
We can turn to local papers to see how other Christmas front pages reported the news of the days, with fears and hopes displayed properly.. We will go local on this one.
50 years ago, the 1960s ended with assassinations and war, malaise and a Hong Kong Flu pandemic.
The POTTSVILLE REPUBLICAN front page talked about how the government was in damage control over a vast civilian spying program being revealed… sound familar?
The dawn if the Reagan era brought a new hope in 1980, forty years ago .. The same paper spoke about hope during the Christmas season. The importance of dinners.. the traditions. Maybe it was those Americana Reagan ads of the 1980 campaign .. With a Charlie Brown comic to help.
1990 brought some fear.. The Gulf War run-up was beginning and the world was on edge about what would occur.. the local paper brought that to the forefront with hopes that troops would come home safety from the Middle East. Little did anyone know it would be 40 years later with troops still there!
In 1999, just days before the Y2K fears would be blown pieces, the local paper went to Sheppton to watch Santa happily sliding. An ad appeared next to the photo talking about following the Y2K issue on the 2000 millennium site at the paper (something I recall working on when I worked there that year):
And finally, just ten years ago, the swine flu was done . . . and stores were still open (but closing).. as evidenced by this front page photo showcasing the Schuylkill Mall shoppers, with a closed store in the background:
And now 2020.. the headlines we now encounter are raging with insanity. Nothing seems normal… nothing.
Hope. Fear. You decide…
After all, you have to ask yourself as to what kind of person are you. Are you the kind of person who signs, who sees miracles. Or do you believe that people just get lucky…
Is it possible that there are no coincidences.
The Christmas light will shine in 2020! First time since the 1200s. Look up! And ponder.. and conjure.. and wonder.
Some London train stations and trains were crowded on Saturday night as people left the city.
The government had announced earlier that day that the city and other parts of south east England would be under new Tier 4 restrictions come midnight.
I don’t understand any of these people. Last thing I would do is get on a packed train in a pandemic. Wreckless for themselves and their families and friends. Just stay at home alone, drink prosecco and watch Singing in the Rain. I did that once in London – best Xmas ever.
Another wrote,
Christmas in London is cancelled, so everyone is going home, filling train stations and feeling vulnerable. This is a pandemic. It’s not about who gets home first. The rules are for all!!
AND FOR THOSE SCARED THAT THIS NEW COVID VARIANT WILL ESCAPE THE LOCATION IT IS IN, FEAR NOT. IT WILL NOW DEFINITELY ESCAPE THE LOCATION IT IS IN WITH PANICKED PEOPLE ESCAPING THE CITY ON PACKED TRAINS..
If they didn’t want this new variant to get out of London, it’s just found a possible new route. It’s called the train line to the East Midlands from St Pancras station tonight … 👇 pic.twitter.com/hIPOMG7Bex
Advocate Aurora Health, a health care system in Wisconsin and Illinois, said Friday that it paused COVID-19 vaccinations after health care workers “experienced reactions” from the Pfizer shot. Four team members at Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, Illinois, experienced “tingling and elevated heart rate,” according to a press release. The center’s vaccination program is temporarily paused as experts investigate.”These four team members represent fewer than 0.15% of the approximately 3,000 who have so far received vaccinations across Advocate Aurora Health. At this time, we can share three team members are home and doing well, and one is receiving additional treatment,” Advocate Aurora Health said in a statement. They explained that reactions are an expected side effect of vaccination, and they still encourage others to get vaccinated to put an end to the coronavirus pandemic.
Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told reporters late Friday that the reactions had been reported in more than one state besides Alaska and that the FDA is probing five reactions.
“We are working hand in hand with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we’ve actually been working closely with our United Kingdom colleagues, who of course reported the allergic reaction. I think we’ll be looking at all the data we can from each of these reactions to sort out exactly what happened, and we’ll also be looking to try to understand which component of the vaccine might be helping to produce them,” Marks said.
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MEANWHILE.. BRAZIL HAS GONE TO ANOTHER ANTI-VACCINE PATH.. -idiot of note Brazil’s Bolsonaro warns virus vaccine can turn people into ‘crocodiles‘
As vaccines roll out, some are starting to talk about the ‘herd immunity’ that they could bring.. Released documents from the Trump Administration also show they secretly desired herd immunity by allowing more infections..
But what is herd immunity.. and can it even be achieved with COVID-19?
By definition, this is what herd immunity is: resistance to the spread of an infectious disease within a population that is based on pre-existing immunity of a high proportion of individuals as a result of previous infection or vaccination.
This time we are experiencing a novel virus, so this notion of the old rules may apply or could be quite different..
To reach herd immunity, about two-thirds of the world population – four billion to five billion people – need to be vaccinated. Each person has to have two doses – that is 10 billion doses of the vaccine. This has never been done before. We can be confident in the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. But the pandemic will not be solved by next Easter or next summer. It will take the whole of 2021 and well into 2022, if you think of the global challenge.
The last time the globe faced a medical challenge of this nature was the Spanish Flu — though that seemingly was much more deadly and terrible in its impact, but modern society then was not what it was today. So the comparison actually is probably not as fair as comparing the impact of COVID to, say, the 2009 Swine Flu..
Well, probably in the summer, but not necessarily, there was a short, mild wave of influenza. Since we don’t have viral samples, we can’t really prove that. But we do know that in the fall of 1918, influenza, which we have since discovered was the H1N1 strain of influenza, ripped through the world, basically, and particularly the United States. And then there was a second wave or surge in the January to April part of 1919, which was pretty darn bad, but not as bad as the fall one. And then there was another surge, by the way, that nobody talks about, in the winter of 1920.
Well, by the time it was over, probably 40 million people around the world died. In the United States alone, anywhere from 550 to 750,000 people died, and at least 10 million Americans got very, very sick with influenza, which as you know is not a common cold, not a mild infection. It makes you quite ill indeed. There was very little medical care as we understand it. A hospital was basically a bed and maybe somebody feeding you hot liquids. There was no IVs, no antibiotics. And a lot of people who got the flu got a secondary bacterial pneumonia. And that’s what killed them, because there was no medication for that.
He went on to say,
Let’s be clear about this term of herd immunity. And I’m telling you this is an old pediatrician. Herd immunity was never developed as a population kind of a measure when a virus spreads through a particular community. It was based on active immunity, giving people immunizations, giving lots of children immunizations, for example, for measles, mumps. And when you immunized actively, 90 or more of percent of a community, then when that infection came into that community, subsequently, it would not spread.
The notion of letting it rip and letting a lot of people get it– first of all, you would never get levels of 60% to 90%, which is what people are estimating you would need. 20% simply wouldn’t do it. And what is the point of living in the 21st century, if we’re relying on 13th century methodologies of letting it spread throughout a community to protect us? Not to mention the incredible expense of taking care of people and the terrible tragedy of those who would die.
AND ON HOW IT ENDS:
As a doctor, I make prognoses all the time, however. There’s a wonderful poem by TS Eliot, this is the way the world ends, with a whimper, not a bang. And it was written in 1925, but I’m blanking on the title of the poem. But will it just go away? Will it just vanish, like a miracle? Well, hopefully. I think, what the magic bullet that will protect us, and then end this nightmare, will be a safe, potent, and effective vaccine.
