֎ How would a quarantine actually work in the U.S.? It would be an utter mess. Part of the reason is that the federal government can’t just step in with a quarantine. America’s public-health system is split into 2,684 state, local, and tribal public-health departments, and each of them have jurisdiction over whether to impose quarantines if needed. [The Atlantic]

The U.S. economy has been something of a ticking time bomb for some time.

• Growth has declined over the last two years despite higher government spending and a $23.4 trillion national debt.
• The labor market has boomed, but many of the jobs added have been hourly service-industry positions that offer limited health insurance.
• Brookings Institution reports that 44% of all U.S. workers earn barely enough to live on.

֎ As if corruption from the outside world isn’t enough, and Donald has spread a blanket of ‘executive privilege’ unheard of in history, and two billionaires ran for president at the same time, and a blatantly guilty president was found not guilty by the Senate, and money in significant sums flows into every Congressperson’s bucket on a daily basis – now Congress is making the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) a useless watchdog. OCE does not have subpoena power, so lawmakers have decided that not cooperating is the better approach. All OCE can do is request a visit and look at surface evidence but Congress simply ignores these requests.

Most if not all OCE requests have to do with misappropriation of campaign funds and illegal liaisons with private enterprise (e.g. Mar-a-Lago). As 44 percent of the population struggles to sustain a household, elected officials are accepting abundant cash. Is it any wonder none of them will vote for term limits?

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One needs to escape this disheveled world for the sake of sanity. This is so needed that mariner spent the entire day in his shop sorting large containers of junk – most of it brought from the farm 10 years ago. The day passed quietly with no thought beyond whether he wants to keep 37 brackets used to frame buildings.

Ancient Mariner