Are You in Line to Die?

   

                  Corona Virus Testing, Speed Kills

If your following the news, New York has had an outbreak explosion. The question is why? I think I may have figured it out. I spent over forty years of my life in logistics. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Nor am I a rocket scientist. but using common sense and what has been released about the virus I see a possible cause.

America wants a solution now and they thing testing everybody will solve the problem, but the way they are doing it may be part of the problem. The drive thru testing program was not thought out completely. At least I don’t think so. Here is why.

Cars line up to be tested. As I understand it the virus can live in the air for up to three hours. The first car pulls up and rolls down the window. Theoretically the person doing the test is protected. If the first car pulls up and rolls his window down and he is positive. Air flows into the car, but contaminated air flows out. He tests positive and they put him in quarantine.

The next car pulls up, the driver opens his window. Air flows out of his car, but air also flows into his car, he was not positive and passes. However air from the first car flows into his car and he is now contaminated. In three hours anywhere from eighteen to thirty six cars do the same thing. Each unprotected driver may be exposed to the virus.

You stopped one case of the virus, but how many more did you create. Somebody needs to share this with the idiots in charge. I don’t know who to contact, but I know somebody needs to contact those doing the test.

If nothing else they need to re-screen all those who went have come down with the virus and find out if they went thru a drive thru test. Hopefully I am wrong, but I see a possible reason the number of cases is exploding in New York.

Running lots of tests in a short amount of time may not be the solution. In fact it may be part of the problem. I can post this but it takes readers sharing it to get it to the right people. If you know somebody involved in the testing, share this with them. If you are considering getting tested you may want to reconsider.

If you need to get groceries you may want to use the call in and pick up system offered by Walmart. Staying out of densely populated situations is your safest bet, if y our 70+ like me, having someone else do your shopping may save your life.

If you are laid off and have room, you might consider starting a garden and grow your own food. You might eat a bit healthier and it may save your life in the process.

Depression or Recession, May Be Time to Start Looking Up

Depression or Recession, May Be Time to Start Looking Up

After my Bible reading this morning the best thing I can say is you may want to start looking up. So much has happened in my life in the last forty-eight hours it is hard to sort it all out. Where does one start. There are about a dozen things I would like to share. First of all it is not all about me. I started this blog in March of 2011. My goal was and is to share my life experiences and knowledge that might help others. Especially those things that will keep people from learning things the hard way like I did. Unfortunately I write mostly in the first person and it sounds like it is about me, but that is not my intention.

About a year and a half a go I got hooked on Koi fish and watched tons of videos on the subject on YouTube. Around Labor Day last year my studies took me on a two week trip thru North Carolina visiting Koi Farms and Bamboo Farms. It ended with spending Labor Day weekend at the Atlanta Koi Show. That was an awesome experience and I plan to write a post about it, but I keep getting sidetracked.

When I left the Koi Show my goal was, and is to build my own Koi pond. In the course of studying it came to my attention that a company named Aquascape out of St. Charles, Illinois offered two day hands on training courses on the subject. In pursuit of my goal I signed up to attend their classes on the 16^th and 17^th of March. All went well till last Friday when I was notified that the classes were canceled because of the Corona Virus. That did not stop me from attending their facility and acquiring the materials to build my own pond. I had planned to stay for two days but their coordinator canceled the hotel reservations for people coming to the classes. When I went to check in I found my classes room had been canceled also, even though I had made my own reservations. So rather than stay in the area I put it in the wind and headed home and got here about 1:30 AM Tuesday.

My Bible study this morning made me wonder if my wandering may have had a purpose. I started at Revelation 9:15 and it made me wonder if the Corona Virus might end up causing what is spoken of in that verse and thru to chapter 11. That made me go to Matthew 23 and 24 where Jesus explains the things that are going to happen in the end time. In Matthew 24:15 he mentions the prophet Daniel and that made me remember Daniel 12:4 which tells a prophecy that will be a sign of the end times. It has come to pass in this day and age.

While Israel was not a nation for over two thousand years, Jesus, Revelation and Daniel all give revelations that say Israel had to exist for the prophecies to come true and it has come to pass. If you read my post “A Tale of Life and Death” written in June of 2016 which gives my testimony and is divided into three sections. The last is about an experience I had clear back in January 1967 which has been an ever present experience for me. https://rictheturtleryan.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-tale-of-life-and-death-my-last-post.html Based on that experience I have always felt I would be here for the end of time, which is the Rapture of the Church. As I died technically twice in January of 2004 I thought maybe I was wrong. When I wrote that post in 2016 I was going thru several serious health crisis which made me wonder if my vision would really come to pass. Now the Corona Virus has made me wonder again if I had missed something.

My reading this morning made me realize that the end may not be far away. I have written a lot of post dealing with Biblical Prophecy. Not that I know that much but I have read a lot and can plainly see that the Lord is still working in the world today.

Yesterday at Walmart I had an experience that made me realize how bad this situation is. I saw a lady who was holding her cart and looked totally confused and like she was ready to cry. I asked her if she was okay. She had just lost her job at Ponderosa and did not know how she was going to survive. She had just moved into government housing a little over a month ago. Her first rent payment was due and she did not have the money. She was filling her cart and said she did not know why she was shopping. I told her I had seen a lot of that and that many of the people who were hoarding stuff they did not really need. I told her that a few weeks down the road what they would really need is the money they blew on that stuff. She sort of smiled, and said I was right and picked up a couple things in her cart. She said she didn’t even know why she put them in her cart. She said her landlord went and took a picture of the sign on the front door of Ponderosa and that was all the proof he needed to forgive her rent.

She sort of smiled, and I told her God had her back and was already taking care of her needs. That he would guide her through it. We parted later after finding we knew a lot of the same people. Our paths had crossed several times about thirty years ago when I was trucking. It gave us both a bit of peace in the matter.

Then I came home and started watching TV and listening to all the things the government was supposedly going to do. Spending tons of money they did not have. With no end in sight and the disease still growing I realized the Bible saying that a fool and his money are soon parted had special meaning in this situation. Knowing that is the case, I went to bed knowing the future is not mine to see, but all prophecy will be fulfilled in due time.

So the whole thing is not about knowing what the market is going to do, or how bad the virus will get, but knowing that God has your back. He does if you truly believe in him. At 73 I am a prime target for this thing. So I plan to spend a lot of time in my greenhouse and taking care of my aquariums. I will let others bring me the stuff I need from town, it is time to become a hermit.

Corona Virus vs Financial Depression

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but my niece sent me a comment on the low gas prices. This will probably be one of the shortest posts I have ever written mainly because I have covered it all many times on my blog, I feel I should share my reply. Over the last nine years I have written numerous posts shouting my gloom and doom. Just type the word “Depression” on my search bar and you will get a dozen posts on the topic. While in college I majored in Business Management and took all my elective courses and free time to study the Great Depression.  As I listened to the tales from my parents and grandparents of how they survived the Great Depression it inspired me to understand what caused it.

Most of you have heard of the Great Depression, well I think we are in the start of one. Unemployment is the lowest it has been since back then. Back then the economy was booming and crashed because of uncertainty. That is why the market is crashing now, uncertainty, it may get to where gas is $1 a gallon but no one will be able to afford it. Nobody will be buying luxury items like potato chips. My niece who asked me the question works making potato chips for a living. My reply was. “You better fence your property and start growing some beef. This has a long ways to go, it took the market 3 years to hit bottom back then. The first 4 cases of the Corona virus happened in Washington state on March 5th, it has only been going on for 10 days but it seems like forever and we already have almost 4,000 people confirmed and sixty-five dead. A year from now it may be 4 million, where do you think the market will be then? Just since I originally wrote this just 120 days ago, an additinal 138,000 people have died.

A trip today to Walmart proved to me that the panic is everywhere. The shelves were bare, no bread, no eggs, and very little milk. I did get the eggs at a local chain store, but they were about out. The funny ones were the lack of toilet paper and most popular brands of dog food, and oh yes the main staple of the American diet, Pizza. There were a few but they were all the high dollar ones.

I am sure the market will not take it well. I heard a lot of people trying to be upbeat, because Friday was a good day. The reality is that the market has lost almost 20% of its value in the last week or so. Like I said earlier the Great Depression took three years to hit bottom. When it did hit bottom it had lost 89% of its value. Based on our most recent high the bottom would be around 3245. Kind of scary. The market did not lose all its value in one day. However, the day it did crash the losses for the day were three times the national debt at that time, and yes there were some good days on the way down. To keep things in perspective, The market was at 7949 when President Obama was sworn in.  By the time Trump took office it had grown to 19,804, but fell to 18,917 on election day, It managed to close the day at 19,372. On March 16 of 2020 the market had fallen from a high of 26,671, back down to below what it was when Trump took office. That high was  3.5 times what it was when Obama took office. Sounds impressive, but is appearing to be a bit of a balloon. It was only around 280 when I was born in December 1946. The thing to remember is, it is just a number.

So what makes this a depression versus a recession. It is world wide and there is no end in sight. That uncertainty will drive the market down. During the 08 crisis my wife was due to retire,  Her retirement account at one point lost 60 % of its value. Fortunately, for us, a year and a half later when she actually retired it had recovered all but about 10% of its value.  Fortunately for us her annuity fund recovered the other 10% over the ten years she was drawing on it,  It managed to get back to where it was.. We were Blessed.

The scariest part is that during the Great Depression the government had virtually no debt. The government used their good credit rating to try and bail the situation out. The reality of that is that when World War II started the market still had not recovered. Hoover reacted to slowly and his actions led to the uncertainty that caused the market to fail, a bit of Dejavu as I seeit. By the end of World War II the national debt was 125% of the national GDP. Being the only major country that was not devastated during World War II America quickly recovered by supplying the world’s needs. This time it is the government that is bankrupt, not big business.

 With almost 40 million people unemployed and the benefits the government handed out to stop the market crash set to expire at the end of July, the hand writing is on the wall. If the market recovers it will be a miracle, and probably a temporary one at best. The government can not spend its way our of debt, and it can't print enough money to stop a depression. Not without causing major inflation and a total collapse in the value of the dollar on world markets.

Even depressions have their upside though. My Grandfather did very well during the Great Depression. That story is in one of my posts. He really did sell the family farm twenty years before the Depression, which allowed him to use the money he had in the bank to take advantage of the situation. He ran his own insurance company and saved many people from losing their homes. That story is in one of my posts you will find it by typing depression in the search bar.  Heard and upside to this one. Dominoes stock is the highest it has ever been and they have hired 10,000 people, Walmart is the highest its stock has ever been also.

We will know very quickly if I am right about the market. I find it very hard to find a reason why the market might go up. As long as the uncertainty lasts so will the wavering market. I pray I am wrong, but doubt very seriously I am. The low unemployment rate will not save the situation. All the news this weekend was about how everything was shutting down. Definitely not a good sign. Especially with almost 40 million people unemployed and the Covid outbreak turning into a tsunami.