Dear Commons Community,

Deep in the Mars-like landscape of Utah’s red-rock desert, a gleaming metal monolith (see video above) was found last week in one of the most remote parts of the state.

The smooth, tall structure was found during a helicopter survey of bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, officials said Monday.

A crew from the Utah Department of Public Safety and Division of Wildlife Resources spotted the gleaming object from the air Nov. 18 and landed to check it out during a break from their work.

They found the three-sided stainless-steel object is about as tall as two men put together. But they discovered no clues about who might have driven it into the ground among the undulating red rocks or why.

“This thing is not from another world,” said Lt. Nick Street of the Utah Highway Patrol, part of the Department of Public Safety.

Still, it’s clear that it took some planning and work to construct the 10- to 12-foot (3- to 4-meter) monolith and embed it in the rock.

The exact location is so remote that officials are not revealing it publicly, worried that people might get lost or stranded trying to find it and need to be rescued.

The monolith evokes the one that appears in the Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Because it’s on federal public land, it’s illegal to place art objects without authorization.

Bureau of Land Management officials are investigating how long it’s been there, who might have created it and whether to remove it.

Somebody is having some fun!

Tony

 Dear Commons Community, 

Business leaders are celebrating yesterday’s performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaking the 30,000 point mark for the first time in its history.  Analysts were crediting news about the latest progress in developing coronavirus vaccines,  the transition of power in the United States to President-elect Joe Biden, and the appointment of Janet Yellin as Biden’s Treasury Secretary. These probably all contributed, but there were also longer term business developments that have helped the Dow reach this milestone.  The Associated Press has an article (see below) this morning analyzing the rise in the Dow for those of us who do not follow it closely.  

Tony

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The Associated Press

EXPLAINER: Why the Dow topped 30,000 for the first time

By STAN CHOE

November 25, 2020

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street busted through its latest milestone Tuesday, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 30,000 for the first time.

The Dow rose 454.97 points, or 1.5%, to close at 30,046.24. Investors were encouraged by progress in the development of coronavirus vaccines and news that the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden is finally beginning. Traders also welcomed word that Biden has selected Janet Yellen, a widely respected former Federal Reserve chair, as treasury secretary.

The milestone is an attention-grabbing psychological threshold, and it’s an encouraging signal that the market’s rally is broadening beyond the handful of stocks that carried Wall Street through the pandemic. But the Dow at 30,000 means less to most investors’ 401(k) accounts than the fact that broader market indexes are also at record highs.

Here’s a look at how the Dow has rallied to its latest multiple of 10,000, the first time that’s happened since January 2017, and what it means for investors.

WHAT IS THE DOW, EXACTLY?

It’s a measure of 30 companies, mostly blue-chip stocks spread across a range of industries. They include tech stars like Apple and Microsoft, as well as more traditional industrial companies like Boeing and Caterpillar. Other behemoths in the Dow include Nike and The Walt Disney Co.

Unlike many other measures of the market, the most important thing for the Dow is how big a stock’s price is, not how much a company is worth in total. That means a 1% move for UnitedHealth Group has a bigger effect on the Dow than the same movement for Apple, even though Apple is worth more than six times the insurer. That’s because UnitedHealth Group’s stock price is $336.01 versus $115.17 for Apple, due to having a smaller number of total shares.

HOW BIG A DEAL IS DOW 30,000?

It’s just an arbitrary number, and it doesn’t mean things are much better than when the Dow was at 29,999. What’s more impactful is that the Dow has finally clawed back all its losses from the pandemic and is once again reaching new heights. It is up 61.5% since dropping below 18,600 on March 23.

It took just over nine months for the Dow to surpass the record it had set in February, before panic about the coronavirus triggered the market’s breathtaking sell-off.

WHAT GOT THE DOW THIS HIGH?

The Dow’s rocket ride to 30,000 got big boosts from the Federal Reserve, which slashed short-term interest rates back to roughly zero and took other measures to stabilize financial markets, and Congress, which came through with trillions of dollars of financial aid for the economy.

The economy has improved since the pandemic’s initial shock. For instance, claims for unemployment benefits dropped from 6.9 million in March to 742,000 last week. Company profits didn’t tank as much as initially feared. And the possibility that a COVID vaccine could begin distribution by the end of the year has recently given the market more reason to be optimistic.

Among individual companies, Apple did much of the heavy lifting early in the Dow’s recovery after its price soared nearly $275 to above $500 by late August. A four-for-one stock split on Aug. 28 cut Apple’s stock price below $130, diminishing its impact on the Dow, even though its total market value continued to rise.

Since then, Honeywell and Caterpillar have provided the biggest boosts to the Dow as expectations have built for a recovering economy.

Looking over the longer term, profits strengthened sharply for most Dow companies since it first rose above the 20,000 threshold at the start of 2017. At American Express, for example, analysts expect earnings per share to bounce back from the pandemic and tally $6.69 next year, versus $6.07 in recurring earnings in 2016.

At the same time, investors today are more willing to pay higher prices for each $1 of earnings because alternatives are less attractive. The yield on the 10-year Treasury Tuesday was 0.88% compared with 2.5% in January 2017.

SO THIS MEANS MY 401K IS DOING BETTER?

Probably, but not because the Dow is at 30,000. For most 401(k) accounts, what matters much more is how the S&P 500 is performing. That’s because many, many more stock funds either directly mimic the S&P 500 or benchmark themselves against that index than the Dow.

Nearly $4.6 trillion in investments directly track the S&P 500, while another $6.65 trillion measure themselves against the index’s performance. That total of $11.24 trillion is roughly 360 times the $31.5 billion in investments that track or benchmark their performance against the Dow.

Tuesday’s rally also pushed the S&P 500 above its record high set on Nov. 16.

WHY PAY ANY ATTENTION TO THE DOW, THEN?

One thing the Dow’s final leap to 30,000 indicates is that it’s no longer just tech stocks driving the market.

Five Big Tech companies — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google’s parent company — alone account for nearly 22% of the S&P 500 by market value. That gives their movements incredible sway over the S&P 500. The Dow doesn’t even include Amazon, Facebook or Google’s parent company.

The dominance of Big Tech early in the market’s recovery is a big reason the S&P 500 returned to its pre-pandemic record in August compared to November for the Dow. More recently, with hopes rising that a vaccine or two may be arriving soon, the stock market’s gains have begun to broaden out.

The Dow is more heavily weighted toward stocks in the financial and industrial industries, which have done better than tech recently after earlier getting walloped by the pandemic.

NEXT STOP IS DOW 40,000, RIGHT?

Many strategists along Wall Street are optimistic that stocks can keep climbing in 2021, mainly because of the prospects for a vaccine. But the market is facing plenty of threats in the near term. Chief among them is the worsening pandemic, which is pushing governments around the world to bring back varying degrees of restrictions on businesses.

Bitter partisanship also means Congress is making little to no progress on delivering more financial support for the economy in the meantime. That sets the stage for a potentially bleak winter for both health and the economy.

So don’t be surprised if the Dow crosses back and forth over the 30,000 threshold a few more times.

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning asking the question: Will Covid-19 Revive Faculty Power?   While the pandemic has spurred professors across the country to organize, the concern is that they may be too late!  Here is an excerpt from the The Chronicle piece.

“The pandemic, with the financial pummeling that accompanies it, is a mighty force, perhaps impossible to combat. By the beginning of July, more than 51,000 higher-education employees had already been furloughed, laid off, or had their contracts not renewed, according to Chronicle reporting. Some boards and presidents have acted unilaterally, with little incentive not to. Decades of adjunctification have already thinned the ranks of full-time college instructors and weakened the collective power of the teaching staff — perhaps past a point of no return.

However, across the country, faculty members are campaigning to be meaningfully heard by the powers that be at their institutions — big and small, elite and open access. They’re laying the bricks of new structures of faculty and staff governance after decades of erosion. In some ways, the pandemic has become this “great leveler,” says Jennifer Fredette, an associate professor of political science at Ohio University. Tenured professors are feeling the insecurity that contingent faculty members have long experienced. A raw deal has reached their doorstep, she says, and they’re now saying, “Nobody deserves this.” Still, Fredette says  this movement is bigger than one institution. It feels impossible to go backward. “I don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle.”

After a panicky spring came a summer of fear, anger, and growing resentment. Nationwide, instructors have been denouncing myriad decisions that they say weren’t constructed with shared-governance principles in mind. In some cases, concerns about their own health are going unheeded, they say, as college leaders make tuition-paying students a priority over employee safety.

Faculty groups have criticized austerity measures for affecting the lowest-paid workers first, rather than cutting from the top. The City University of New York’s faculty and staff union is suing the university for not reappointing around 2,800 employees, seeking to rehire those people and award back pay and benefits. Grass-roots protests have cropped at Canisius College, in Buffalo, and Carthage College, in Wisconsin.

Some college boards rubber-stamped the decisions of their leaders. Trustees at Radford University, in Virginia, passed a resolution that gave the university’s president budget-cutting powers to meet “challenges associated with the Covid-19 global health pandemic,” Nonprofit Quarterly reported. Trustees at Ohio University did something similar, ratifying “all staffing, operational, and financial decisions” related to Covid-19 made by the president, The Chronicle previously reported. Faculty in the University of Wisconsin system have cried foul about a financial plan they say is a power grab, the Wisconsin Examiner reported.

At Pennsylvania State University and Purdue University, professors chastised their leadership for largely skirting the professoriate while making plans for the fall semester, including decisions about instruction. Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, insisted on national television that Purdue must give it “the old college try” and reopen. Its chapter of the American Association of University Professors said in a press release that leaders had brought “not one single piece of legislation regarding changes to instruction due to Covid-19 to the University Senate, the faculty representative body at Purdue, let alone reopening plans.”

And control over what happens in one’s own classroom seems to vary drastically from campus to campus. Contingent faculty, especially, have far less power to assert their will if they want to work remotely. Protesters staged “die-ins” at Penn State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a car caravan at Boston University. At least two faculty groups — one at UNC and another at Appalachian State University — were so alarmed with their institutions’ fall plans that they pleaded publicly with their students not to return to campus. A group of faculty and staff members in the UNC system sued in an attempt to delay the reopening. (After 135 students and staff tested positive for Covid-19 during the first week of classes, UNC-Chapel Hill pivoted to remote instruction.)

In late June, the AAUP warned that the pandemic “must not become the occasion” to “jettison normative principles of academic governance.”

I gave a talk last week at the Online Learning Consortium’s ACCELERATE conference basically making the case that the pandemic has eviscerated faculty governance at most college campuses.  Traditional governing procedures related to collective bargaining, class size, faculty and staff dismissals have been bypassed to meet the dire fiscal situation that colleges are facing.  It was my conclusion that without a substantial federal stimulus package, higher education’s fiscal situation is not going to change soon and if it doesn’t, faculty governance will be in jeopardy

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Veteran Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein has publicly named 21 Republican senators he says have “repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for [Donald] Trump and his fitness” for office.

As Trump continued to try to subvert the results of a presidential election he clearly lost to Joe Biden, Bernstein said on Twitter (see post above) he was “not violating any pledge of journalistic confidentially [sic]”.

His information, he said, came from “colleagues, staff members, lobbyists [and] White House aides”.

Then he named names.

They were: Rob Portman (Ohio), Lamar Alexander (Tennessee), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), Roy Blunt (Missouri), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), John Cornyn (Texas), John Thune (South Dakota), Mitt Romney (Utah), Mike Braun and Todd Young (Indiana), Tim Scott (South Carolina), Rick Scott and Marco Rubio (Florida), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Richard Burr (North Carolina), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Martha McSally (Arizona), Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts (Kansas) and Richard Shelby (Alabama).

The list contained senior Republican figures such as Thune, the majority whip; Rubio, acting chair of the intelligence committee; and Grassley, a former judiciary committee chair.

Some on Bernstein’s list, Sasse, Cornyn, Collins and Murkowski among them, have criticized Trump publicly. Romney, Rubio, Murkowski, Toomey and Collins have recognized Biden as president-elect.

Bernstein, 76, worked with Bob Woodward on the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

Woodward’s coverage of Trump has produced two bestselling books, Fear and Rage, which have relied on unnamed sources highly critical of Trump – and, in the latter case, the president’s own on-record and highly damaging thoughts.

Speaking to CNN on Friday, Bernstein said: “Many, if not most, of these individuals, from what I have been told, were happy to see Donald Trump defeated in this election as long as the Senate could be controlled by the Republicans.”

He went on to say that with few exceptions, their craven public silence has helped enable Trump’s most grievous conduct—including undermining and discrediting the US the electoral system.

Tony

GSA Administrator Emily Murphy

Dear Commons Community,

With the backing of President Donald Trump, the head of the General Services Administration informed President-elect Joe Biden yesterday  that the official governmental transition process has been approved.

GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, after weeks of delay, said in a letter to Biden that he is now able to access millions of dollars in federal funds and other resources to begin his transition to power. Trump in a pair of tweets vowed to continue his legal fight but said, “I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.”

Biden’s transition had been stalled by the GSA as Trump waged a spurious legal battle across the country to contest the results. Michigan certified its results yesterday and Pennsylvania plans to do so shortly.

It is also expected today that Biden will officially announce a number of cabinet-level appointments.

The presidential election is over!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

BBC/PBS NOVA recently aired two documentaries (see above trailer)  highlighting written communication as one of the greatest inventions in human history.  The first documentary examines the development of the alphabet.  It is an incredible presentation of how the letters of the alphabet evolved from the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, China and the Sinai Peninsula to Phoenicia, Greece and Rome.  For example, it shows how the letter “A” started as a hieroglyph symbol for a bull.  It takes the viewer to the ruins of Serabit El-Khadim on the Sinai Penisula where one of the first alphabets was  depicted on its walls somewhere between 1850 BC and 1550 BC.

The second documentary examines the development of writing implements such as pens and paper to the invention of movable type and the printing press.  It shows how papyrus, parchment and paper were actually made. There is also interesting commentary on the importance of Johannes Gutenberg’s decision to print the Bible as his first commercial book. Prior to the printing press an illuminated book might cost as much as the price of a house.  The vast majority of people at the time, if they could read, could never afford to buy a book so providing something  as popular as the Bible might excite them enough to buy it at a reasonable cost.

In sum, I found both documentaries an education.

They are available for free viewing at the NOVA website:

Alphabet A to Z:  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabet/

How Writing Changed the World: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-how-writing-changed-the-world/

Below is a review that appeared in last week’s Science.

Great stuff!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie blasted President Trump’s legal team as it pursues its bumbling quest to overturn the November election.

“Quite frankly, the conduct of the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment,” Christie said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Trump lost the Nov. 3 election to President-elect Joe Biden, but has launched a series of lawsuits seeking to claim victory in states narrowly won by the Democrat. But the cases have been largely dismissed, and judges have consistently rejected Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

The Trump campaign lost one of its most important cases on Saturday night, when a federal judge in Pennsylvania both rejected a major Trump lawsuit in the state and excoriated the president’s legal team for its speculative arguments. In the decision, the Republican judge even mocked the Trump team for presenting a “haphazardly stitched together” argument, “like Frankenstein’s Monster.”

Despite the humiliating legal setback, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani issued a statement on Saturday claiming that the rejection “turns out to help us in our strategy to get expeditiously to the U.S. Supreme Court” through the appeals process.

Both Giuliani and fellow attorney Sidney Powell have advanced a number of conspiracies about the election, including last week at a surreal press conference in which they claimed a “massive influence of communist money” had been funneled into the election.

On Sunday, Christie cited the conduct of Powell in particular for her unsubstantiated claim that the Republican governor of Georgia is part of a conspiracy to rig the election against Trump.

“Sidney Powell [is] accusing Gov. Brian Kemp of a crime on television, yet [is] unwilling to … lay out the evidence she supposedly has,” said Christie, a former U.S. attorney. “This is outrageous conduct by any lawyer.”

Georgia is one of the states narrowly won by Biden; Trump is pursuing a recount unlikely to change the result.

Reuters reported late yesterday that Powell was no longer on Trump’s legal team.

Christie further praised Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., for clearly acknowledging Biden’s victory after the Pennsylvania judge’s ruling on Saturday night. In a statement, Toomey described Judge Matthew Brann as a “longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist.” Trump responded to the statement on Twitter, where he called Toomey “no friend of mine.”

Christie said he hopes more Republicans step forward.

“As much as I’m a strong Republican, and I love my party, it is the country that has to come first,” he said.

Republicans – come out, come out, wherever you are.  Don’t be afraid of the big, bad Trump!

Tony

 Riderless Horse at John F. Kennedy’s Funeral

Dear Commons Community,

We remember that on Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas.

Crowds of excited people lined the streets and waved to the Kennedys. The car turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. As it was passing the Texas School Book Depository, gunfire suddenly reverberated in the plaza.

Bullets struck the president’s neck and head and he slumped over toward Mrs. Kennedy. The governor was also hit in the chest. 

The car sped off to Parkland Memorial Hospital just a few minutes away. But little could be done for the President. A Catholic priest was summoned to administer the last rites, and at 1:00 p.m. John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead. Though seriously wounded, Governor Connally would recover.

The president’s body was brought to Love Field and placed on Air Force One. Before the plane took off, a grim-faced Lyndon B. Johnson stood in the tight, crowded compartment and took the oath of office, administered by US District Court Judge Sarah Hughes. The brief ceremony took place at 2:38 p.m.

The United States was never the same.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press reported yesterday that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will receive an International Emmy award for his once-daily televised briefings on the coronavirus pandemic that killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers this spring.

The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, whose members include media and entertainment figures from over 60 countries and 500 companies, announced  it plans to present the award to the Democratic governor in a live-streamed show tomorrow.

International Academy President & CEO Bruce L. Paisner said Cuomo is being honored with the academy’s Founders Award for using his briefings to inform and calm the public. Previous recipients include former Vice President Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, and director Steven Spielberg.

“The governor’s 111 daily briefings worked so well because he effectively created television shows, with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure,” he said. “People around the world tuned in to find out what was going on, and New York tough became a symbol of the determination to fight back.”

Cuomo used his more than 100 Powerpoint-driven slideshows and his sometimes emotional, sometimes acerbic style to provide daily updates and detail his administration’s efforts to shutter the economy and avoid predictions of as many as 100,000 people hospitalized at once.

The pandemic peaked in early-to-mid April, when over 18,000 people were hospitalized at once and hospitals and nursing homes reported as many as 800 deaths in one day.

New York has reported at least 34,187 deaths of people due to COVID-19, according to data from John Hopkins University & Medicine. And at least 6,600 residents have died in nursing homes, according to state data, which doesn’t state how many nursing home residents died in hospitals.

The number of daily infections, hospitalizations and deaths plummeted as Cuomo slowly reopened the state’s economy this summer, when about 1% of tests were coming up positive.

New York is now seeing far fewer deaths and hospitalizations than this spring. Still, the state’s daily average of COVID-19 cases over the past seven days has more than doubled in two weeks as cases surge nationwide.

My wife and I watched Governor Cuomo regularly while isolating in our home.  We deeply appreciate all he has done in New York to help keep us safe.

Well-deserved recognition!

Tony