Ehlana and Ethan:
It has been a cold, wet day around here; so we spent a lot of our day at the lab; followed that up with some play time with our best friends starting around mid-afternoon; and wrapped up our day with a quiet evening at home with Mom and Dad while Cassie, Michael, and May were out visiting family and friends. That’s really all we have for here at home today; so we’ll move on to a quick commentary on some of the biggest news stories of the last week or so.
First up, while Covid-19 cases being reported are down; we know that’s entirely due to the holidays and lack of reporting – not an actual decline. With the New Year just days away, though, if the counts reset to zero then; most people won’t ever hear about the backward revisions that are sure to come over the next few weeks or months. Even with that, we’ll still top twenty-million confirmed cases in our country; and possibly hit three-hundred-and-fifty thousand deaths for the year. Global total cases are over eighty-million; and worldwide deaths from coronavirus will top one-point-eight million. We’re not going to comment on vaccine issues, but only because it is too-soon to offer any informed opinion. Just as with the early days of the pandemic, the data and news about the various vaccines is sketchy at best; and generally-unreliable on both sides of the fight over wide-spread use of the vaccines.
Moving along, our government finally passed a new stimulus package that we really shouldn’t write about, since we have a problem with spending more than nine-hundred billion dollars when most of that goes to the already-rich while the most-in-need will only get enough to at-best pay for a week of very-modest living expenses. If anyone wanted to be honest, it wouldn’t matter how much was given to each person when most of that money would be spent on rent, mortgages, and other necessities – all money that eventually ends up with the richest people anyway. That might sound hypocritical coming from us when our family business is so extensive, but we don’t think that’s true; and our government and most of the wealthiest people in the world could follow our lead and do everything they can to help everyone who is being hurt the most by the pandemic – and all of the actions being forced on them by their leaders. For instance, instead of sending money; why not just forgive all rent, mortgage, and utilities payments until we’re past the pandemic and life begins to get back to normal again? What if every major retailer offers free groceries every week? We’ve heard that the richest people in the world have added hundreds of billions of dollars to their fortunes this year – and think that it would be okay for them to give all of that away; since they’d still be as-rich as they were a year ago while still doing the right thing.
We probably shouldn’t really get into a rant tonight; so let’s just wrap this up by mentioning that most of the ongoing tensions around the world are continuing or getting worse. Our hope for that to change with a new President isn’t very high, but we’d love to be proved wrong next year; and will leave it at that. Winter generally leads to a slowdown in mass protests – at least in the northern hemisphere, and that’s more-true over the holidays, but the ongoing problems around the world aren’t being solved; so we can’t expect any long-term improvement until we do begin to get some of those changes for the better.
Let’s all hope that begins to happen before life goes from bad to worse for too many people!
Okay, that’s all for tonight. We wish that this update could end on a happier note, but while our life here at home continues to be awesome; that doesn’t keep us from being aware that there is a lot of awful happening in the world too. This will be our final bad news report of the year; since we are going to focus on the joy, love, and happiness through the rest of our Christmas break.
This is Ehlana and Ethan Proctor; live from the hidden home of the Magi of the Light – and May the Magi Force be with you!
