COVID-19: Is Joe Biden in Trouble?

From Worldometer, I continue this table to show how new deaths best determine the phase of COVID-19:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

Apr  21         ?    534   1481      430            86               1        5362

        22         ?    437     931      435          125               1        5008
        23         ?    464   1435      440            54               2        5033
        24         0?  420     718      367            78               0?      4200
        25         0?  415   1073      378            59               0?      4650
        26         0?  260     779      288            19               2        3102
        27         1    333     762      331              9               1        2816
        28         0?  382   1065      301            48               1        2983
        29         0?  323   1374      453            62               2        8471
        30         0    285   1789      268          105               1        5291   

Summary:

• The World new death rate seems to be increasing.
• The USA had our highest new death figure in weeks.
• Germany hit triple digits again.
• Brazil is #3 in new deaths with 390, following the U.S. #1 with 1789 and the UK #2 with 674.
• Brazil now is #3 in new cases with 6019, compared to the U.S., 23,247 at #1, and Russia, 7099 at #2.  Peru, Ecuador and Chile are now climbing in new cases.
• Still not a serious concern, but India, Pakistan and Bangladesh appear to be on the upswing in new cases.

Advice to Joe Biden:  come clean, say I overstepped, I'm sincerely sorry...and move on.  Your lawyers can sufficiently fend Tara Reade off over the next 6 months.  Or better yet, get her to accept your apology, and it might even be possible for her to endorse you, for she apparently is appalled by Donald Trump, for here is his serial predatory list:

At least 17 women (or, maybe 20) have accused Donald Trump of varying inappropriate behavior, including allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault, all but one coming forward with their accusations before or during his bid for the White House.

The latest accusation came days ago from writer E. Jean Carroll, more than two years into Trump’s presidency, prompting a new denial from Trump.  This latest occurred in June of 2019.  Joe Biden's?  25 years ago.   That's around the time when Donald Trump was accused of sexual intercourse with a 13 year old, several times, arranged by pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who is said to have committed suicide.  Carroll is so scared today that she has a loaded gun.  Surely Tara Reade is not so threatened today.  Regarding Trump's policies:  here is what he has done against women since becoming president.

On the humor front:

'Life is short, drink the good wine first'

Society is awaiting this mutual aid fellowship group, Weight and Alcoholic Watchers Anonymous (WAWA).  Treat both conditions at the same time.

Try this puzzle.

If you give up, click on THIS.

I'm now into 1968, tracing music in my life.  Here is a collage of Billboard's #1 hits in 1 minute and 15 seconds.  As I think about it, what I said yesterday about myself actually happened this year.  In the World, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, Boeing introduced the 747, Richard Nixon elected president and Cultural Revolution initiated by Mao Zedong.

The Soviet Union, France, Israel and the USA all lost submarines in 1968, all under mysterious circumstances.  The Soviet K-129 disappeared close to Hawaii.

I later while working in the U.S. Senate became indirectly involved, for the seabed mining bill being spearheaded by Senator Spark Matsunaga was part of a CIA plot to shield recovery of the K-129.  It had to do with the Glomar Explorer and seabed mining.  A colleague at the University of Hawaii, John Craven, was directly involved, and is also credited with finding the American submarine Scorpion.

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COVID-19: Conspiracy Theories

From Worldometer, I continue this table to show how new deaths best determine the phase of COVID-19:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

Apr  21         ?    534   1481      430            86               1        5362

        22         ?    437     931      435          125               1        5008
        23         ?    464   1435      440            54               2        5033
        24         0?  420     718      367            78               0?      4200
        25         0?  415   1073      378            59               0?      4650
        26         0?  260     779      288            19               2        3102
        27         1    333     762      331              9               1        2816
        28         0?  382   1065      301            48               1        2983
        29         0?  323   1374      453            62               2        8471

Summary:

• Wait a minute, why such a jump in World deaths?  Well, turns out that the UK reported 4,419 new deaths to correct a miscount.
• The USA experienced a jump in new deaths.
• The USA had 13,666 new cases, the highest in the world.  Russia was #2 with 5,841.

Updates:

• Brad Pitt expressed optimism about Gilead Sciences' remdesivir.  No, looking at the photo, this actually looks like Anthony Fauci.  Important because this is the first actual drug to shorten the length of COVID-19 recovery.  Mind you, this only reduces 15 days to 11, but is at least a minor breakthrough.  Certainly not a game-changer.  On April 10 I said:

Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD) is credible and intriguing, already in Phase 3 clinical trials with remdesivir, which is for treatment, not a vaccine.  Stock has risen 13.2% this year.

          Gilead was at 73.5 that day, and today should close at around 84.
          Fauci peremptorily dumped into a basket with other competitors
          that latest Oxford vaccine breakthrough.

• The large front page headline in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser this morning was:  ANTIBODY TESTING ON WAY.  Scroll down to my next posting.  Antibody testing is a mess and inaccurate.  "On the way" is a long way away.  This post-test, and a pre-test, would be a safe way for tourism to recover.  These tests need to be given to anyone who is boarding a flight to Hawaii.  Will this ever happen. No.  While instant testing will soon be generally available, there is a matter of cost, speculated to be from $10-$50/test.  We would need to give 500,000 tests/day for all incoming visitors and residents.   Since the beginning of testing, the U.S. is at around 6 million tests, total, or, over a two month period, 100,000/day.  Hawaii has one-half of one percent the population of the nation.
• The bottom line is that sufficient testing capability just won't be available, maybe forever.  Several of those entities loosening lockdowns will see a second wave, delaying their recovery.  The growing sentiment is that a few extra deaths in this war might be necessary for a quicker economic recovery.  After all, those who die will mostly be old, with pre-conditions anyway, and of an ethnic minority.

• He did it again.  There are COVID-19 hotspots, two being nursing homes and meat-packing plants.  Donald Trump went out of his way to convene the Defense Production Act to force these factories to stay open.  It's almost like he wants this sector of the community to sacrifice themselves for the good of the national food supply chain.  This he could regret, because the Hispanic vote (to be larger than African-American numbers) could well be the margin of difference on November 3.

Said Jimmy Kimmel last night:  You know the only reason he didn't wear a mask is because Trump won't wear one, right?  Mike Pence, he's required to keep his lips free at all times for kissing his master's ass.

Here is one top ten of COVID-19 conspiracy theories:

• Blaming 5G


• It is biologically impossible for viruses to spread using the electromagnetic spectrum.
• This conspiracy has taken off because the pandemic just happened to occur at a time when certain population centers had recently converted to 5G, including Wuhan, New York City and Milan.
• This fear was egged on by the Kremlin.
• WHO repeated that virus cannot travel on mobile networks.
• However, virtually everyone misses the point.  It is possible that certain concentrations of electronic signals could well affect your immune system.  This might apply to high radiation sources like communications antennae.  However, there is no medical proof that phones cause damage to your DNA or cause brain tumors.
• It doesn't help when celebrities like Woody Harrelson, John Cusack and Wiz Khalifa tweet their concern.
• In the UK and across Europe, arsonists are destroying cell phone towers.

• When Bill Gates criticized the defunding of the World Health Organization, he became the target of right-wing pundits and antivaxxers:
• is accused of causing the virus
• is part of a dastardly Gates plot to vaccinate the world
• who also wants to implant digital microchips to track and control people

• The virus escaped from a Chinese lab:
• After all, there is a virology institute in Wuhan, which has been long studying bat coronavirus.
• Epoch Times (an extension of the Falun Gong religious movement, which is a thorn in the side of the China leadership) produced a slick documentary (see the 36 minute alarm) calling it the CCP virus.  Media around the world picked this up and, just by reporting on it, gave it credibility.
• A leading bat dung expert and prominent virologist did some genetic sequencing and showed that the virus circulating in Wuhan was not related to the ones being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  But there are those who would say...can you believe her?

• COVID-19 was created as a biological weapon:

• Acccording to Pew Research, three in ten Americans believe that COVID-19 was made in a lab as a biowarfare weapon and either intentionally (by the USA and released in Wuhan) or accidentally (escaped in Wuhan). 
• This theory picked up interest as a right-wing talking point from some dumb statement by Republican Senator Tom Cotton (above), who sounds like another Trump, and airing by the Washington Examiner (a highly conservative media outlet).
• This theory (and the previous one) was debunked by genetic sequencing proving that the origin was in bats.
• The Washington Examiner later admitted that this story is probably false.

• The U.S. military imported COVID-19 into Wuhan

• The Chinese foreign ministry widely circulated that Americans brought the virus during their participation in the 2019 Military War Games in Wuhan last October, when it all started.
• They called it the USA virus.

• Blame GMOs
• Anti- GMO (genetically modified crops) activists blame every possible ailment to GMO, including this coronavirus infection.
• The ultimate weapon will be a vaccine, which are all genetically modified virus-based.

• COVID-19 doesn't actually exist
• David Icke (on the left) and InfoWars Alex Jones say this made-up virus is just a plot by the global elite to take away our freedoms.
• The political right thinks any quarantine and lockdown is evil.

There were others, and you can find them if you click on the lead link.  However, isn't it interesting that Republicans, conservatives and related fringe-groups seem to be prevalent in all these conspiracies?  Here is a useful handbook by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky on how to recognize and debunk these wacko theories.  

Let's see, I'm up to the Top Songs of 1967.  Sure, it was more than half a century ago, and I remember then remembering that gasoline was as low as 10 cents/gallon in Los Angeles only recently, but did you know that:

Dow Jones Industrial Average 905
Average Cost of new house $14,250.00
Average Income per year $7,300.00
Average Monthly Rent $125.00
Gas per Gallon 33 cents
Average Cost of a new car $2,750.00
Movie Ticket $1.25

That year I had decided to return to graduate school, and C. Brewer not only sent me to work at the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association on Keeaumoku (where there is now a park) to prepare for my departure, but said it would continue to pay my salary while I was away.  Here, Hutchinson Sugar Company's manager Bill Baldwin wished us goodbye.

I'd like to close with a young superstar from the Netherlands and South Africa.  You probably don't know her, but Amira Willighagen, who is now 16, attained stardom six years ago when she won Holland's Got Talent.  In some of the "wonderful moments clips" people send around during this time of the Pandemic, she is misidentified as the granddaughter of Luciano Pavarotti.  

I compare her audition song, of O Mio Babbino Caro with that of Jackie Evancho.  Evancho appeared on America's Got Talent when she also was 10.

Amir has had a number of successful albums, and she dedicates half of the revenues to her Lucky Children Foundation, primarily to build playgrounds for poor children of South Africa.  She said when she first visited the country at the age of seven, she went out to play and was shocked to find that they only ran around and threw stones.

About Jackie, she is already 20, has issued eight albums and been the subject of three solo PBS concert specials.  She also tours, but with the coronavirus still virulent, her next appearance will be at The Villages in Florida in November.

-

COVID-19: What is Wrong with America?

From Worldometer, I continue this table to show how new deaths best determine the phase of COVID-19:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

Apr  21         ?    534   1481      430            86               1        5362

        22         ?    437     931      435          125               1        5008
        23         ?    464   1435      440            54               2        5033
        24         0?  420     718      367            78               0?      4200
        25         0?  415   1073      378            59               0?      4650
        26         0?  260     779      288            19               2        3102
        27         1    333     762      331              9               1        2816
        28         0?  382   1065      301            48               1        2983

Summary:

• Whoops, the World, USA and good parts of Europe showed increases in new deaths.
• Ominously, still somewhat low, but African countries are picking up in new cases.
• Also up are several countries in the Middle East.
• Bangladesh has 549 new cases, Pakistan 697 and Indonesia 415.
• Singapore had a jump of 528 new cases.
• Parts of South America are not reporting.
• Mind you, the USA itself had 11,903 new cases, so those numbers today don't look like much.  But be watchful.  The second most new cases was Russia with 6411.  In comparison, regarding total deaths, the U.S. has 57,862, while Russia only has 867.
• The USA passed a million total cases, now up to 1,022,259, while the World is at 3,105,574.

What troubles me most about President Donald Trump is that no matter how horrible he acts, he still maintains a 35-45% support level.  What is wrong with America?

ABC asked the public what one word describes Trump (they missed pathological liar, but those are two words):

The ten most common words that respondents gave were: "incompetent," "arrogant," "strong," "idiot," "egotistical," "ignorant," "great," "racist," "a------" and "narcissistic."

How different can two leaders be?  Governor Andrew Cuomo blames himself for a variety of mistakes, but is smart, thoughtful, decisive and a lot more.  If those ABC ten terms best describe the President of the U.S., how can anyone with any kind of decency want him to lead the country?  This befuddlement of mine can only be explained by the worrisome conclusion that too many in this country are like him.

Was America great before the invasion of COVID-19?  Yes, in many ways, as for example, we have the most powerful military in the world.  But has it been worth spending, each year on war, as much as the next seven nations, combined?

All that even though we don't have a mortal enemy today.  Yes, our economy seemed to be doing better than anyone else's.  But at what expense?  Our infrastructure, health, education, environment....?

Here is a New York Times summary of:

The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940 is written by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca and Jimmy Narang:

Abstract

We estimated rates of “absolute income mobility”—the fraction of children who earn more than their parents—by combining data from U.S. Census and Current Population Survey cross sections with panel data from de-identified tax records. We found that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. However, distributing current GDP growth more equally across income groups as in the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the “American dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.

A Pew poll says the same:

Are you doing better than the previous generation? The Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., asked nearly 43,000 people in 38 countries around the globe that question this past spring. Residents in 20 countries said people like them were better off than they were 50 years ago. In Vietnam, 88% felt better off, followed by India (69%), South Korea (68%), Japan (65%), Germany (65%), Turkey (65%), the Netherlands (64%), Sweden (64%), Poland (62%) and Spain (60%). Overall, 43% of people in those countries said they were better off.

Where is the USA?

The U.S. was among the other 18 countries in which people said they were actually worse off than half a century ago. In Senegal, 45% felt this way, followed by Nigeria (54%), Kenya (53%), the U.S. (41%), Ghana (47%), Brazil (49%), France (46%), Hungary (39%), Lebanon (54%) and Peru (46%). Venezuela, which has suffered from political unrest and economic turbulence in recent years, was last on the list. Some 72% people there said they felt worse off than 50 years ago (only after Mexico, Jordan and Argentina).

Another Pew poll taken last year showed:

Eighty-seven percent of Americans are worried about our political leadership.  You can place most of the blame on President Donald Trump.  A future posting will suggest how America can become great again.  You can already guess what will be #1, and certainly re-election would not be it.

About social distancing, some schools in China used an idea from the past for a different reason.  In those days of the emperor, people in the court wore this stick to prevent them whispering to each other:

I couldn't find the Top Songs of 1966, so I'll instead go to the 100 Best Songs of 1966, which will occupy 17 minutes of your life.  Here is a clip of all the #1 Billboard songs of 1966...in 2 min 15 sec.

About the only memorable thing I did in 1966 was to put together what might well have been an inspiration for Woodstock.  Naalehu then had an annual July fair.

Dante Carpenter (of later mayor and Hawaii Senate fame) was chairman of the event.  I sat next to him in our office at the Hutch factory.  He asked me to find something different and extraordinary.  So I talked a bunch of rock groups from the Big Island to participate in the first battle of the bands.  I also provided free tickets of this event to a DJ in Hilo, who gave them out and came to MC the show.  If you did not know, Naalehu is far from Hilo (66 miles), Kona (59 miles of windy road) and Waimea (122 miles). 

With Pro Wrestling, this no doubt became the most attended feature in the history of the gathering.  I could have gone on to become a successful impresario, but went back to graduate school instead.  Conversely, if I had not left, I might well still be in Naalehu, if alive.

-

COVID-19: Testing 101

From Worldometer, I continue this table to show how new deaths best determine the phase of COVID-19:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

Apr  21         ?    534   1481      430            86               1        5362

        22         ?    437     931      435          125               1        5008
        23         ?    464   1435      440            54               2        5033
        24         0?  420     718      367            78               0?      4200
        25         0?  415   1073      378            59               0?      4650
        26         0?  260     779      288            19               2        3102
        27         1    333     762      331              9               1        2816

Summary:

• A good day for humanity, as the World has dropped in new deaths for three straight days:  4650 to 3102 to 2816.
• The U.S. in not increasing in new deaths, but today was higher than Friday.
• China and South Korea are down to 1 new death.
• Germany is into a single digit.

I'll focus on tests today.  Here is a table with minor significance as I can determine:

Country           Deaths / Million People  Tests / Million People

USA                                170                               16,977

Mexico                              10                                    525

Spain                               530                               28,779

Italy                                 446                               29,600

France                             350                                  7,103

Germany                            71                               24,738

Portugal                             91                               32,414

India                                     0.6                                 482

Ecuador                              33                                 3,203

Israel                                  23                                34,971

Saudi Arabia                        4                                  5,745

Qatar                                    3                                29,749

Bahrain                                 5                               68,980

UAE                                     8                              106,904

Sweden                             225                                 9,357

Denmark                            74                               26,900

Norway                               38                               30,310

Finland                               35                               14,878

Iceland                                29                              135,833

However, you can detect trends.  In Scandinavia, Sweden took the economy over health route by avoiding any serious lockout, plus took fewer tests.  But their death rate is much higher than partner countries.

Mexico is right next to the USA, but they are on the low end of testing, and has 1/17 the death rate of the U.S.  India is right next to Mexico in tests/million, but their death rate is 1/283 that of the U.S.  Probably, if a country is not beleaguered by deaths, they don't need to bother with tests.  

Africa has hardly any deaths and they are very, very low on test rate.  Algeria has the most deaths, 432,  and they are about the average in test rate at 148 tests/million.

Israel tests at more than double the test rate and thus has one-fifth the death rate of the USA.  But when you compare them with their equally well-to-do countries in their region, they test about average compared to them, but have a death rate five times higher.  Those rich countries of the Middle East are all between a low 2-8 deaths/million, but the rate of testing varies from 5,745 to 106,904, and the highest tested country, UAE, had the highest death rate.  But 8 is less than 1/20 that of the USA.

Yet every medical group has indicated that the whole range of testing is absolutely necessary to insure for a safe return to economic normalcy, with a vaccine as early as possible to prevent future pandemics.  Donald Trump keeps bragging that we are by far the country that tests the most people.  He is right.  But that is because we have a larger country.  If you divide the number of tests by our population, you get 1.7% tested.  However, the number is even lower because those who are sick got more than one test.

Also, Trump has said too many times that we're doing a GREAT JOB on testing.  We have been averaging more recently only a million tests per week, and since the beginning of this pandemic more than two months ago, only 5.6 million total tests.  Medical authorities feel that we need  20 million tests/day.

Testing 101:

• Pre-test to identify infection by COVID-19:
• Mostly RT-PCR (Polymerize Chain Reaction), starting with a swab.  Will be difficult to scale-up.  This is essentially the test that takes several days for results, and also the Abbot Labs 5-minute test.  About $50/test.
• Antigen test, using a swab, not yet quite ready, but should give results in minutes and can be quickly up-scaled.  Tests for Dengue and Zika were 90-95% accurate, a figure that might apply to this coronavirus.  Perhaps $10/test.  As much as this will be an even bigger game changer than the Abbott option, there are experts who say that antigen tests will not ever be developed.  Companies like E25Bio, Gehrke, Tang and OraSure are involved.
• Post-test sero-survey of antibodies (IgM and IgG), which peak around 9-11 days after infection, which generally needs a drop of blood.  

A particularly scary unknown is that 20-80% of COVID-19 cases could be asymptomatic (meaning the symptoms are anywhere from none to very minor).  All the above tests would be able to identify this group.

We should be in decent shape by mid-summer regarding pre-testing, for the 5-minute Abbott Labs test machine will have increased in production by 50,000 day today, to 2 million/day.  Each device can make 470 tests/day.  All the better if an antigen system can be successful.

Abbott also has a post-test serology antibody test, and says it will be able to have available 20 million available in June.  This one gives results in 6.5 hours.  However, I haven't yet heard if this option is truly accurate.  There are numerous other companies in competition, but the pervading medical opinion is that post-test options are less than reliable.  One problem is that the Food and Drum Administration allowed more than 120 manufacturers into the marketplace without agency review.

As part of any national plan for economic re-development, there needs to be an effective contact tracing program, something that is spotty today.  Some time back I suggested that the military be used to work with those mega-tech firms.  This pandemic war is today.  Boots-on-the-ground soldiers are "only" training for the future, but a lot of them can be assigned to serve this role...now...if some leadership can be shown by the White House.

About the matter of the vaccine?  Maybe someday, luckily in a year, but a couple of days ago I thought that an internal partnership would be the most effective way to find one as soon as possible.

I can't seem to find the Top 30 Songs of 1964.  So here is Billboard's Top 100 of 1964 in 17 minutes.  However, there is a Top 30 Songs of 1965.  I'm trying to think what I was doing in those two years, and the best I can remember is working at the Hutchinson Sugar Company and going fishing.  See that smoke?  Comes from the factory.  Close by was a pier where I fished.  That's Pearl and her car back then.

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COVID-19: Perceived Reality in Purgatory

From Worldometer, I continue this table to show how new deaths best determine the phase of COVID-19:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

Apr  15         1    578   1558      324            97               3        6351

        16         ?    525   1796      318          139               4        6239
        17   1290    575   1338      298          151               1        6857

        18         ?    482   1090        41            74               2        4888
        19         ?    433   1117      410            10               2        4344
        20         ?    454   1202      399            64               2        4307
        21         ?    534   1481      430            86               1        5362
        22         ?    437     931      435          125               1        5008
        23         ?    464   1435      440            54               2        5033
        24         0?  420     718      367            78               0?      4200
        25         0?  415   1073      378            59               0?      4650
        26         0?  260     779      288            19               2        3102

Summary:

• A good Sunday, for new deaths declined throughout, except for South Korea, which jumped from zero to 2.  The U.S. leads with 779 new deaths, with the UK at 413 in second place.
• The USA still leads with new cases at 18,007.  Second place is Russia with 6,363 and third, the UK with 4,463.  Worrisome are Turkey with 2,357 new cases and Peru with 2,186.

My Sunday religio-sci sermon.  What is real and what is not?  If something is visible, is it real?  Probably, except maybe for ghosts and angels.  As you can't see most microorganisms and anything beyond our visible range, are they real?  Of course.  Why can we only see and/or measure 4.9% of what apparently exists?  Scientists have declared, for example, that 95.1% of everything that exists in our Universe is dark, meaning, it's there, but can't be seen and/or measured.

Something so simple as light is still an enigma.  Photons are not atoms and have no mass, but can be related by Einstein's famous energy equals mass times velocity (speed of this photon) squared.  Like magic.

Fundamental science is, thus, nebulous and uncertain, even more so than religion, which at least mostly has a common prime mover, God.  While the Christian, Islam and Buddhist God leans towards mostly being male, some argue that It is genderless, which is closer to most Hindu references, at the foundation an androgynous universal life force.

Even Jesus, as interpreted by a few modern scholars, could have been female.  As society changes over the next millennium, who knows what Jesus or God might be someday.  Like science, religion seems to be adjusting, yet The Bible has for almost two millennia been certain about the Genesis. Will science get any closer to determining the matter of the Big Bang and what is what?

Calculation by biblical scholars seem to home in to a Planet Earth at the age of around 6000 years.  Scientists at the time of the American Revolution a couple of centuries ago guessed an age of about a million.  It took until 1913 for 1.6 billion years to be the age.  In 1956 Clair Patterson and George Tilton said 4.55 billion years.  Today?  4.54 billion years old.  This is taught in elementary school, and again and again.  Yet, polls show that 40% of Americans believe our planet is 10,000 years old.  How can one explain this perceived reality?  It goes back to what goes into the mind from youth.

In any case, as time marches on, the trend seems to be that God will ultimately not be human-like.  More like a force, or the sum total of the Universe, a metaphor, abstraction, an allusion...perhaps even an illusion.  Which gets back to why I'm here today:  perceived reality.

Science has three branches:  formal (like mathematics), natural (physical/life) and social (like sociology).  The further you move away from math towards psychology, the less rigorous science gets, with the transitioning humanities essentially merging with religion.

Yesterday (scroll down to next article), we had brain scientists explaining why a brown and light blue dress is not seen as a brown and light blue dress.  Dress, yes, but gold and white or black and royal blue?  Fundamental science attempts to explain perception and gets lost when it comes to dark energy/matter.

So to the matter of why we all once believed in Santa Claus, but in our approach to adulthood, either continued to believe in an omnipresent God or not or neither.  This is what Richard Dawkins "might say about the Santa Delusion":

My goal in all of this is that, as children, you should be raised only on truth, reason, fact, and intellect. Together we should be working toward a point in the not-so-distant future where the words "Santa Claus" or "Kris Kringle" or "Father Christmas" create the same response as fingernails on a chalkboard. There is nothing wrong with disbelief in Santa. I can see that the topic makes many of you uncomfortable. However, this should not be viewed as a bad thing. You may weep now, but your tears are a positive, not a negative.

If you're waiting for the first compelling evidence that God exists or not, it won't be at this blog site.  What was the Universe before the Big Bang?  Who created God?  Either one, or both, your best guess would be your perceived reality.  Why Purgatory?  It's a long story that started with this posting, but later expanded to Planet Earth.

And speaking of expiating sin (this is what we're doing in this perdition before going to Heaven), here is what a college friend sent me yesterday, from her brother, who got it from an acquaintance. It was not intended for inclusion here, but the timing is ideal to provide a point of view about what could well be the situation in Purgatory today, and the possible consequences:


It’s telling, how right-wing “Christian” fundamentalist America fails to appreciate how truly biblical are these times.  God repeatedly gets pissed, and people die.  He gets pissed at His own worshippers as much as unbelievers, maybe more so.  He gets pissed the worst and most frequently when people are mistreated.  He gets most pissed at the rich and powerful, but everybody suffers.  He destroyed Israel because its priests and royalty didn’t take care of the poor and disadvantaged.  Just ask Isaiah.   Whenever immigrants are involved, He’s on their side.  He harasses and kills people we would normally consider innocent, like the Egyptians who suffered bugs, frogs, boils, blood and killer fog because of Pharaoh’s intransigence.  Apparently He holds us all responsible for our leaders.  He uses available infidel armies to punish His own people – Assyrians, Hittites, Babylonians (and the Russians are now available).  But most importantly and most biblical, the people He’s pissed at don’t get it, despite multiple warnings.  Pharaoh didn’t get it.  The judges of the nine tribes didn’t get it.  The priests of Judah didn’t get it.  The Pharisees didn’t get it.  “Christian” America doesn’t get it."

So let me neutralize some antagonism with another item sent yesterday.  Here is something a lot more uplifting.  It's about a mother who turned a mentally deficient child into a genius.

Go ahead, click on it.  Only a minute long.  You will shed a tear or two.  But was this true?  Snopes looked into this story and determined that there was no such letter.

Oh, well.  Let's continue my chronological nostalgic musical pathway to my present.  Here are the top 30 songs from 1963.  The first half of the year was a difficult time for me, as threatened with the draft and getting sent to Vietnam, I joined the Army Reserve and was sent to 8 weeks of basic training.  I'm not exactly the soldier type.  Some of those songs helped me through this trying period.

However, I was so physically challenged that I had to overcome, so extended this rigor into 8 more weeks of advanced infantry training.  Got to learn how to shoot all kinds of weapons.  More importantly, I became a stronger person and kept watching my physical health for the rest of my life.  In all my years at the University of Hawaii,  and I still go to my Manoa Campus office, I have not taken a day of sick leave.  Returning to 1963 when I became a normal citizen, I was assigned to that famed 442nd regimental group.

But that was only for two weeks in the summer, for I was still in the sugar industry where I was too far away to attend weekly training.  A good part of that year was spent at the Kilauea Sugar Company on Kauai, and our home was a trainee cottage, where our backyard was the Slippery Slide from South Pacific.  This is where I took this photo of Pearl and Pepper.

To close, another song, Hawaii Aloha, 1000 unified voices from us to the World, and a second, Island Style:

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