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it makes no sense to compare the federal budget to a family budget, which is what the Consumer Price Index is based on. One needs to use a broader index, like the gross domestic product deflator, which measures price changes throughout the entire economy.

For large numbers, the percentage of the gross domestic product is both the easiest to find and best to use.

Since the “burden” of the debt basically falls on the entire economy, the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio is generally considered the best measure of that burden. It also facilitates international comparisons without having to worry about exchange-rate adjustments.

international price comparisons can be especially tricky because current market exchange rates may not accurately reflect relative values or standards of living. Economists generally prefer to use something called “purchasing power parity,” but such data is not always easy to come by

There is much more to say on this topic. I recommend an essay on the Measuring Worth website that discusses different measures of value over time and how they materially affect our perceptions. There are also new statistical measures coming online that may provide even better data, like the Billion Prices Project from M.I.T., which gathers price data in real time directly from store price scanners.

This is an area where trial and error is the best strategy. The important thing is to make an effort to provide proper context where it appears necessary and not to simply ignore the problem.

The S&P 500 closed Tuesday at the highest level in nearly three months. The Nasdaq has spiked 40% since March 23, fueled by the resilience of Big Tech, and is now within striking distance of all-time highs.

unprecedented stimulus from the Federal Reserve, and investors not wanting to miss out on monster returns once the economy recovers.

That means that while Main Street is still grappling with coronavirus, racial crisis and the impacts of both, Wall Street is doing just fine. Fed policy has allowed markets to decouple from economic reality.

Although the unrest was initially sparked by the killing of George Floyd, the continued broader economic discontent is an undercurrent.

that the American dream is not alive and well.

The divide between rich and poor was worsened by the Great Recession and its aftermath. The US government's response relied heavily on easy money from the Fed, rather than the kind of fiscal stimulus that can help lower-income Americans.

First, the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately hit poorer Americans, many of whom work in the hospitality and service sectors rocked by the pandemic. Nearly 40% of low-income workers lost their jobs in March alone, according to the Fed.

Sleep is tied to many positive health outcomes according to a constant stream of medical research, much of which recommends more than seven hours a night. My goal was to sleep eight hours each night, and for the first two weeks of the month I tried and failed. I didn't manage it once. It started stressing me out.Wake up, people: You're fooling yourself about sleep, study says I did get more sleep than I would have otherwise because I prioritized getting to bed earlier. But between work, training for a marathon, kids' bedtimes and evening plans, my life was not conducive to that schedule. But since I'm making up the rules (and you make up yours) I gave up on sleep.

Research ties nature exposure to both longevity and happiness, so I made it a goal to commune with nature every day. This could include a run through a park, stopping to hug a tree (which I did at least once), or watching a convoy of ants cross a sidewalk.

Another super-habit for mental and physical health, I made an effort to incorporate meditation in some form -- whether it was 10 breaths, 30 minutes, guided, formal, mantra-led, what have you -- every day.

In order to simply increase my own, general awareness, every day in January my goal was to notice something new. I kept my eyes open, looked a bit longer, stopped to read the history markers, noticing buildings or took a different route than normal -- small ways to avoid sleepwalking through life.

At CNN, I sit near a constant pile of sweets. And that combined with my weakness for them equals a snacking problem. So in July, my goal was to make fresh fruit my standard snack of choice and eat at least one piece or serving a day. And more water -- at least a pint before coffee in the morning.

In August I attempted to not stay seated for more than 30 minutes during waking hours. Recent research has associated a number of poor health conditions with a sedentary lifestyle. And while no one can definitively say how much sitting is bad for us, moving every 30 minutes has emerged as a good guideline.

My commitment in September was 15 minutes of some form of creative writing each day, almost entirely in a writer's notebook that I've had since college. It's full of random dialogue, lists and story plots, and I used to write in it often but not so much in recent years.

Read a novel. That was it. Given that I mainly read non-fiction, this idea seemed rather novel (sorry).

My intention was to make a daily gesture of gratitude -- an emotional state with its own positive health outcomes -- and I quickly fell behind. I decided instead (because, again, I make up the rules) to make the goal a total of 30 thank yous, one for each day of the month, and I managed to cram them all in.

In another attempt to combat unhealthy snacking, my final goal for 2019 was to convert my diet into one filled with non-processed, whole foods. Carrots and peanut butter instead of donuts; almonds instead of old Halloween candy -- you get the idea. I also declared my intention to track my progress and give myself a daily score.

the primary benefit of a diary as a purely pragmatic record of your workday productivity and progress — while most dedicated diarists would counter that the core benefits are spiritual and psychoemotional — it does offer some valuable insight into the psychology of how journaling elevates our experience of everyday life:

We can’t, however, simply will ourselves into better habits. Since willpower is a limited resource, whenever we’ve overexerted our self-discipline in one domain, a concept known as “ego depletion” kicks in and renders us mindless automata in another

the key to changing a habit is to invest heavily in the early stages of habit-formation so that the behavior becomes automated and we later default into it rather than exhausting our willpower wrestling with it. Young also cautions that it’s a self-defeating strategy to try changing several habits at once. Rather, he advises, spend one month on each habit alone before moving on to the next

a diary boosts your creativity

This is one of the most important reasons to keep a diary: it can make you more aware of your own progress, thus becoming a wellspring of joy in your workday.

The second reason is focalism. When we contemplate failure from afar, according to Gilbert and Wilson, we tend to overemphasize the focal event (i.e., failure) and overlook all the other episodic details of daily life that help us move on and feel better. The threat of failure is so vivid that it consumes our attention

the authors point to a pattern that reveals the single most important motivator: palpable progress on meaningful work: On the days when these professionals saw themselves moving forward on something they cared about — even if the progress was a seemingly incremental “small win” — they were more likely to be happy and deeply engaged in their work. And, being happier and more deeply engaged, they were more likely to come up with new ideas and solve problems creatively.

Although the act of reflecting and writing, in itself, can be beneficial, you’ll multiply the power of your diary if you review it regularly — if you listen to what your life has been telling you. Periodically, maybe once a month, set aside time to get comfortable and read back through your entries. And, on New Year’s Day, make an annual ritual of reading through the previous year.

This, they suggest, can yield profound insights into the inner workings of your own mind — especially if you look for specific clues and patterns, trying to identify the richest sources of meaning in your work and the types of projects that truly make your heart sing. Once you understand what motivates you most powerfully, you’ll be able to prioritize this type of work in going forward. Just as important, however, is cultivating a gratitude practice and acknowledging your own accomplishments in the diary:

Fields argues that if we move along the Uncertainty Curve either too fast or too slowly, we risk either robbing the project of its creative potential and ending up in mediocrity. Instead, becoming mindful of the psychology of that process allows us to pace ourselves better and master that vital osmosis between freedom and constraint.

Schwalbe reminds us of the “impact bias” — our tendency to greatly overestimate the intensity and extent of our emotional reactions, which causes us to expect failures to be more painful than they actually are and thus to fear them more than we should.

When we think about taking a risk, we rarely consider how good we will be at reframing a disappointing outcome. In short, we underestimate our resilience.

what you do every day is best seen as an iceberg, with a small fraction of conscious decision sitting atop a much larger foundation of habits and behaviors.

don’t let yourself forget that the good life, the meaningful life, the truly fulfilling life, is the life of presence, not of productivity.

This was the despairing prediction of a Kurdish man trying to save his family from the Turkish advance, speaking to CNN's Nick Paton Walsh inside Syria.

Over the weekend, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan summed up Trump's national security leadership like this: "Foreign-policy decisions in this administration look like the ball in a pinball machine in some garish arcade with flashing lights and some frantic guy pushing the levers ping ping ping and thinking he's winning."

Finally, some good news. China and the United States seem to have stepped back from the brink with a trade war truce.

Ironically, another of Trump's failings, one in which Fauci may be in some ways complicit as a member of the coronavirus task force -- to stand up a comprehensive national testing and tracking system -- may frustrate the President's effort to get the country up and running quickly with no vaccine in sight.

The gulf between Trump's approach and scientific rationality is expected to be further underscored Thursday with House testimony from Dr. Rick Bright, who says he was ousted from his job developing a coronavirus vaccine because he questioned Trump's enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for Covid-19. Bright will warn, according to his prepared testimony, that the US could face "unprecedented illness" and the "darkest winter in modern history" if it doesn't do a better job of preparing for a second wave of the pandemic.

Trump's use of the world "acceptable" in relation to Fauci's comments is instructive about how he sees subordinates in his administration. The history of his three years in power shows that officials who do not provide the justification and the pretext for his actions or who prefer to act on their own perceptions of the national interest are eventually ousted.

In recent weeks, Trump has shifted from an approach rooted in benchmarks for phased state openings based on a waning of the virus to one based on opening the economy whatever the cost.

Rising attacks on Fauci have taken their toll on his standing with the President's supporters, even though he is warmly regarded by the rest of the country. In a new CNN/SSRS poll, 84% of Republicans say they trust Trump to give them information on the virus. Only 61% of the same slice of the electorate say they trust Fauci, who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.

"I'm a scientist, a physician and a public health official. I give advice, according to the best scientific evidence," he said. "I don't give advice about economic things."

"For as long as we have citizens willing to follow their example, to carry on their burden, to continue their legacy, then America's cause will never fail and American freedom will never, ever die."

But that doesn't mean it isn't jarring, as the most wrenching moment so far approaches in the nation's battle against a pandemic that while ebbing in terms of total deaths is trending up in 18 states, is steady in 22 and easing in 10 more. More than 98,000 people in the US have now died from the coronavirus and more than 1.6 million have been infected. More than 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and the unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels.

There was little evidence of a deeper meaning to his presidency at this stage than personal and political grievances.

No White House could have been fully prepared for the disaster and subsequent economic hollowing of this year's pandemic

Trump spent much of Memorial Day, fulminating against Cooper, complaining that the North Carolina governor was "unable to guarantee" the arena for the convention in August can be filled to capacity. The President is determined to deploy the full pageantry of convention season to portray a nation and economy in the full throes of what he calls a "transition to greatness."

Yet such a spectacle as the Republican convention seems utterly incongruous with real-world events. Sports teams that use such arenas are expecting to play without fans for at least months in a bio-secure environment. The prospect of thousands of delegates pouring into convention cities from all over the country, including coronavirus hotspots, is a huge headache for organizers.

"In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space."

It was not immediately clear whether Trump and the Republican National Committee are serious about pulling the convention from Charlotte.

Trump has used federal resources multiple times to fly to his resorts and golf courses. Trump's two rounds this weekend struck critics as inappropriate during a national crisis and on a weekend when American remembers its war dead.

"Nearly 100,000 lives have been lost, and tens of millions are out of work. Meanwhile, the president spent his day golfing," Biden wrote in a tweet accompanying an online ad Saturday.

Trump may not come under such criticism had he not been so dismissive of Obama's afternoons on the golf course -- and saying he wouldn't have time to play golf if he was elected president.

"From the very beginning, the goal of bringing this case was to reveal the truth, regardless of the outcome. Speaking the truth was something that I owed to my children and to all those who have remained steadfast in their support of me," he said. "I feel at peace knowing I have finally accomplished that."

"The disappointment I feel today is beyond words. I'm heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence, and sway of my ex-husband," Heard said.

In her testimony, Heard said that Depp was verbally and physically abusive during their relationship. She also accused Depp of sexual violence.

Depp claimed multiple times on the stand that he has never struck a woman, denied Heard's allegation of sexual battery and called himself a victim of domestic abuse by Heard, which she denies.

Heard had notably fewer vocal supporters than Depp in the entertainment business and in and around the courthouse.

The Higgs boson was the last missing piece of the Standard Model, which explains all we know about subatomic particles and forces. But there are questions this model does not answer, such as what happens at the bottom of a black hole, the identity of the dark matter and dark energy that rule the cosmos, or why the universe is matter and not antimatter.

When physicists announced in 2012 that they had indeed discovered the Higgs boson, it was not the end of physics. It was not even, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the beginning of the end.

A coincidence is the most probable explanation for the surprising bumps in data from the collider, physicists from the experiments cautioned, saying that a lot more data was needed and would in fact soon be available

The Large Hadron Collider was built at a cost of some $10 billion, to speed protons around an 18-mile underground track at more than 99 percent of the speed of light and smash them together in search of new particles and forces of nature. By virtue of Einstein’s equivalence of mass and energy, the more energy poured into these collisions, the more massive particles can come out of them. And by the logic of quantum microscopy, the more energy they have to spend, the smaller and more intimate details of nature physicists can see.

Since June, after a two-year shutdown, CERN physicists have been running their collider at nearly twice the energy with which they discovered the Higgs, firing twin beams of protons with 6.5 trillion electron volts of energy at each other in search of new particles to help point them to deeper laws.

The most intriguing result so far, reported on Tuesday, is an excess of pairs of gamma rays corresponding to an energy of about 750 billion electron volts. The gamma rays, the physicists said, could be produced by the radioactive decay of a new particle, in this case perhaps a cousin of the Higgs boson, which itself was first noticed because it decayed into an abundance of gamma rays.

Or it could be a more massive particle that has decayed in steps down to a pair of photons. Nobody knows. No model predicted this, which is how some scientists like it.

“We are barely coming to terms with the power and the glory” of the CERN collider’s ability to operate at 13 trillion electron volts, Dr. Spiropulu said in a text message. “We are now entering the era of taking a shot in the dark!”

"The European relationship has changed and will now be shrouded in skepticism,"

Trump's outward aggression affected all aspects of European life, be it trade, defense or even the emotional shared ideas and cultural ties.

All those things suddenly seem debased and of less value."

"When they did take big stances on things like China or Iran, they chose not to involve anyone, leaving Europeans scrambling for a response,"

But he might have to accept that America's role in these relationships has changed."

This has led to lots of countries having to think more seriously about their future with a less assertive US,"

"In some respects, it was a good thing Trump forced us to think more about diplomatic initiatives, NATO and withdrawal of US troops,"

A view many European officials share is that no matter how friendly Biden is, Trump happened once -- and could happen again.

In 2024, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Mike Pompeo, or any other of his allies could conceivably pick up the torch and win an election.

"We cannot afford to be naive. If you look at the number of votes that Trump got, he wields an influence on American voters.

This anti-global, 'America First' undercurrent in American politics is still very much alive and we have to hedge our bets,"

For the US, it's unclear whether being downgraded as a diplomatic force is something that its citizens, who've lived through four introspective years of "America First," will even care about.

Regardless, the Trump era has left Europeans with little choice but to wait and see how much of a priority Biden places on reclaiming America's place on the world stage.

Ten Republicans, including the House's No. 3 Republican, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, joined all Democrats to impeach Trump for "incitement of insurrection."

"We know that the President of the United States incited this insurrection, this armed rebellion against our common country,"

"There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution," Cheney said.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday that Trump "bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters,"

In the Senate, McConnell is not planning to bring the Senate back for a trial before January 19, meaning the trial won't begin until Trump is out of office and Biden has been sworn in.

Pence sent a letter Tuesday saying he would not seek to invoke the 25th Amendment as Democrats had urged, and Trump is not considering resigning.

After the House vote, Trump released a video statement calling for calm as the threat of new riots -- which Trump said he'd been briefed on by the Secret Servic

"From a public health perspective, you cannot have an effective national response to a pandemic that excludes enormous segments of the population. That's both illogical and immoral," Sarmiento says.

"With one of the worst jobless reports in quite a few years, the primary focus right now should be on American workers and lawful immigrants," said Chris Chmielenski, deputy director of Numbers USA. "We should make sure that those people are taken care of first."

"This is a crisis moment for hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers and families that don't have any sort of a basic work protections, like sick leave, like unemployment insurance," says Sarmiento of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

The frequency and severity of domestic abuse will likely increase while Americans stay home for weeks or months during the pandemic, said Katie Ray-Jones, president and CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, a service that connects victims of domestic violence with local resources.

The calls National Hotline staff have received since the start of state shutdowns are startling, Ray-Jones said: One woman said when she tried to go to work at an essential business, her abusive partner began to load his firearm to scare her into staying. Another said that her partner threatened to expose her to the virus on purpose and swore he wouldn't pay for treatment if she fell ill.

Domestic violence cases spike in times of prolonged stress and disruption, like financial crises and natural disasters.

"Many of the options that battered women and their children use as safety valves to get away from violence are no longer available," he told CNN.

And once the stay-at-home orders are lifted, Ray-Jones said she expects victims to flood hotlines. They may not know how many victims there are until the coronavirus pandemic is over.

Fears about joblessness on this scale could jolt markets again. Investors have priced in a recession by now, but may still be processing the size of the hole the coronavirus has blown into the global economy, Jeffrey Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at Charles Schwab, told me.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is now down 35% from its all-time high in mid-February, erasing all its gains since President Donald Trump's inauguration. Between January 20 and last Thursday, $27 trillion was wiped off global stocks, according to Bank of America.

And yet, those accounts, while surely sincere, are also so simplistically heartwarming that they're misleading -- bowing to America's impulse to see certain black lives as a balm for the bruises of the political moment.

Consider the congressman's relationship with President Donald Trump. In March 2017, when the administration was only a few months old, Cummings met with Trump in the Oval Office. The two reportedly spoke openly about race, with the former explaining how the latter's comments about black communities, which he had characterized as poverty-addled hellscapes, were "insulting" and that "probably nobody (had) ever told (him) that."

Rather than retreat into defensiveness, Trump replied: "You're right -- nobody has ever told me that."

"To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically," Cottom explained. "It is to anticipate white people's emotions and fears and grievances because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul."

Annual data, which go back to 1929, show that the unemployment rate peaked during the Great Depression at an average of 24.9% in 1933.

Goldman Sachs warned Wednesday that the real jobless rate will peak at 35%, up from the bank's previous projection for a peak of 29%.

, told CNN last week that the real jobless rate could hit 25% before "hopefully" falling following a transition period this summer.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday that the "consequences could be really serious" if states reopen ahead of the guidelines issued by the White House.

Goldman also upgraded its GDP forecasts, predicting a "somewhat more V-shaped path" as states relax lockdown orders. The bank now expects rapid annualized growth of 29% in the third quarter, up from 19% previously.

And Goldman noted several "serious health risks": "insufficient testing and contact tracing" in some states, reopening high-risk sectors and limited evidence of how effective measures like social distancing and will be.

"Prolonged weakness could cause severe scarring effects such as permanent layoffs and business closures that delay the recovery," Goldman Sachs economists wrote.

Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.

The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.

One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.

This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.