Disaster

As the National Health Service crisis deepens, over 20 hospitals in England have been forced to declare a ‘black alert’. NHS England classifies a black alert as a “serious incident” meaning the system is such under severe pressure that it is unable to deliver certain actions and comprehensive emergency care. At least 23 hospitals have been forced to issue the warning declaring that they cannot cope with increasingly overwhelming patient numbers, meaning that patient safety can no longer be guaranteed.

Just as California's liberal elites had convinced everyone that climate change had permanently altered global weather patterns such that the entire state was doomed to be stuck in a perpetual drought which would inevitably render it about as inhabitable as the surface of Mars within years, an unrelenting series of storms has struck and in a matter of days filled lakes, overflowed rivers and buried mountains in snow.  And just like that, 40% of California was lifted from a drought that had plagued the state for a decade.

In what may be a very symbolic, if not necessarily humorous flame out, D.C. Fire and EMS are working to put out a blaze Wednesday afternoon in the Watergate complex. The fire is on the 13th floor at a building in the 700 block of New Hampshire Avenue NW, officials said. Several floors have smoky conditions, officials said quoted by NBC.

The blaze supposedly broke out as Washington focused on another political scandal as Donald Trump was blasted BuzzFeed and CNN over a “fake news” report.  It's not clear whether the building has been evacuated.

In what could be a giant blow to Big Pharma, Donald Trump has asked Robert F Kennedy Jr to chair a commission on vaccination safety ….and he has agreed. “President-elect Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies and he has questions about it,”  Kennedy told reporters after a meeting with Donald at the Trump Tower on Tuesday.

Since Donald Trump won the US election, small business optimism has exploded higher (from 94.9 in Oct to 105.8 in Dec). At the most optimistic since 2004, the last 2 months have seen the biggest spike in hope since 1980's Reagan era spike.

Notably, as @SentimentTrader notes, extreme small business optimism preceded: the '87 crash, '95 rally, '97 crash, '98 crash, '00 crash, and the '03-'06 rally.