Torrid temperatures – Meeting with financial advisor – My aunt’s birthday – A considerate bear – Tribulations of a funeral home director – Hi-ho, Silver; Trump, the temper-tantrum kid, rides again – Evening statistics
The heat continues but if all goes well it will go down below 90 tomorrow. A 6-mile loop on suburban streets that are all but level felt nearly as draining as the 23-mile hike I did on a mountain ridge last week.
I met with my financial advisor in the morning before I went in. “Met” in this case has to be interpreted in a figurative sense. He is not allowed to receive anyone in his office, and our meeting was conducted via Zoom. He is an astute man and has steered me through many a financial upheaval, including the 2008 recession, and under his guidance my portfolio has been holding steady over the past half-year. We naturally discussed certain factors that will affect the economy for the long term. I asked about the upcoming election. I have no wish for Trump to be re-elected, and it is highly unlikely that he will be whether I want it or not; but I have no illusions about the consequences. Any economic climate Biden creates will be less favorable to investors than Trump’s administration would have been. My advisor told me that the main factor that affects investors is uncertainty, which is why October, the month just preceding elections, tends to be the most jittery in the stock market. Once it is known for certain who is to be president, investors can devise their strategies accordingly. I also asked whether our mountain of debt (at this point greater than the GNP) was at all likely to cause a crash along the lines of the Great Depression. He said that it was unlikely; a more probable outcome, regrettably, is that the generations after ours in thirty or forty years are the most likely to suffer the consequences of our national improvidence when the bills are called in.
I spoke with my aunt today to wish her a happy birthday – how frustrating it is that I could not get up to New York in person to be with her! Her children in Florida, Georgia, and Chile are likewise cut off from her on account of travel restrictions. But one of my cousins set up a link to enable us to upload videos sending her good wishes, and she was delighted with it. I also sent a little present last week that reached her in good time, and she was pleased with that as well. If we were still using the convention of the four humors, her temperament would undoubtedly be classified as sanguine. (I’m not sure how I would rate – either choleric or melancholic, I suppose.) But I am determined to get to New York to be with her whenever it becomes possible.
There is a rather amusing story from Mary Esther, FL, about a bear that raided a wheeled trash can, rolling it out, spilling the trash onto the lawn, and picking out the food that appealed to him – he apparently was rather finicky and passed over some home-made lasagna in favor of a beef-and-cheddar sandwich from Arby’s. Afterwards, however, the bear afterwards was polite enough to wheel the trash can back to the side of the driveway. It reminds me a bit of a Stooges episode in which a bear, after harassing the Stooges on a camping trip, drives off with their car and even makes a hand-turn signal when going down the road.
And then there are stories that are much less amusing, quite grim in fact. In Hidalgo County, TX, one funeral home director is finding it impossible to keep up with the rate of deaths. Of the 150,000+ Americans who have died from the virus, over 6,000 of them are from Texas and over 300 in Hidalgo County alone. Aaron Rivera has had to take in 100 bodies in the course of three weeks and his facility is so overloaded that 45 of these bodies had to be stored in a refrigerated 18-wheeler that he was forced to buy specifically for this purpose. Hidalgo County is on the border with Mexico; and for a short time, the Mexican Consulate offered burial help to anyone who originally came to Texas from Mexico. Now they have stopped making such offers; they too are overwhelmed.
Donald Trump never ceases to astonish me – perhaps “astonish” isn’t quite the right word, for it is impossible to feel surprise for any display of effrontery from him; but the sheer number of ways in which he defies all conventions of integrity, patriotism, legality, and common sense is simply bewildering. He has today made rumblings about delaying the November election on the grounds that the number of mail-in votes would make the results more susceptible to fraud. As many were swift to point out (including Nancy Pelosi, who issued a particularly stinging rebuke to him, and, perhaps more surprisingly, a large number of Republicans as well), the date of the election is a matter for Congress to decide, and he has no authority whatever to alter it. Not that that will stop him from attempting it, if he believes that such a step is necessary for him to win. I do not believe that we have ever before had a President in our history who is so ignorant of the laws of his own country.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 17,452,708; # of deaths worldwide: 675,543; # of cases U.S.: 4,634,077; # of deaths U.S.: 155,067. The news from Africa is becoming more troubling. I commented yesterday on the under-reporting that could be – indeed, almost certainly is – going on in Iran. The relatively low number of reported cases in several African nations may be due to the same cause. In Somalia, for instance, 32% of those tested came out positive for the virus – suggesting that there are many cases of COVID-19 going undetected, since the number of those tested is a relatively small portion of the population. Nationwide deaths in South Africa are 60% higher than they were at the same time last year, according to government data. At this point they have a shortage of testkits and as a result are testing only medical care personnel and persons in need of hospitalization.