SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT CHINA?

From Worldometer,  COVID-19 new deaths:

           DAY USA   WORLD   Brazil      India   South Africa

June      9     1093    4732        1185       246         82

July     19       412    4606          715       675         85

           22     1205    7128        1293     1120        572

           26       450    4307         556       715        114
Aug      1    1462     6429       1191       765        193
            3       467     4430         514       514        213

            5     1362     6292       1394       849        345

          10       534     4813         593     1013        198
          12     1504     6556       1242       835        130
          16       522     4525         582       961        162
          18     1358     6312        1365    1089        280

          24       510     4356          679      854        100

          25     1290     5856        1215    1066        149

          30       369     4182         398       960          47
Sept     3     1094     5886          830    1083        174
            4     1033     5814          855    1066        115
            5       707     4822          646    1044        101
            6       432     4129          456    1008        110
            8       496     4477          516    1107          82
            9     1208     6222        1136    1168          82
           10    1090     5988          922    1213          97
           13      392     3905          389    1140          20
           14      480     4374          454    1054          52

Summary:  The trend, save for India, is downward.

Donald Trump (not only was he his usual inconsiderate self when he boasted to the left, but he was, again, wrong) will brag a lot about how well this third quarter has been...and it has, but only because the previous quarter was about as bad as it can get.  Further, didn't check, but whoever sent this to me is usually right:

On the face of it, that shouldn’t even be a question. After all, stocks are up; the economy added more than a million jobs in “August” (I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute); preliminary estimates suggest that G.D.P. is growing rapidly in the third quarter, which ends this month.  But the stock market isn’t the economy: more than half of all stocks are owned by only 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom half of the population owns only 0.7 percent of the market.

Today, Trump did gain a victory, given credit for bringing Israel, the UAE and Bahrain together.  They were not at war, but this agreement is a positive sign for peace in the Middle East.  Perhaps his harshness with Iran is working.

If that's possible, Benjamin Netanyahu is in worse shape than Donald Trump.  Just this weekend, thousands of Israelis demonstrated outside his official residence in central Jerusalem, demanding that he resign over his trial on corruption charges and, like Trump, mishandling of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  On Sunday Netanyahu again imposed a countrywide lockdown because of worsening infection conditions.  The backlash is especially condemning, as on Friday, the Jewish High Holiday season begins.  At least he tends to wear a mask.

From The New York Times:

• The newest Social Progress Index, a global report card, finds that out of 163 countries, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than in 2011, Nicholas Kristof (here with his wife,, Sheryl WuDunn--they together won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1990) of Times Opinion writes.

About polls regarding the USA:

• A survey supported by the National Science Foundation showed that Americans are the unhappiest they've been in 50 years.  That was in May.  
• In July from Pew, 90% were dissatisfied with the state of the country.
• In August, the U.S. fell 25 spots from #50 to #25 on the Bloomberg Misery Index.

Of course, Donald Trump blames China for everything these days.  While they are indeed beginning to get formidable, the last thing they want to do today is take over the world.

How imposing?  China is surpassing the USA.  If you have any time at all, this is worth your while to flip through the slides.  Here are just a few items:

• High  speed trains reach 217 MPH, where 2,800 pairs run daily connecting over 550 cities throughout the country.
• Three Gorges facility produces 22,500 MW of electric power.  The total production capacity of hydropower from 18 states in the U.S. is 22,878 MW.  China's Haihetan Dam will be operational in 2021 with a 16,000 MW capacity.
• Just in 2018 China acquired 20 deepwater ports the world over, and control both ends of the Panama Canal.  China owns 10 ports in the USA, including Houston and Miami.
• The USA infrastructure is fraying.  Recently, China built:

• The Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge, the world's longest bridge measuring over 164 kilometres (102 mi)
• The Xihoumen Bridge in Zhejiang province, the second-longest suspension bridge span
• The Sutong Bridge in Jiangsu province, the second-longest cable-stayed span
• The Sidu River Bridge, the highest bridge in the world
• Chaotianmen Bridge, the longest arch bridge span
• Beijing has a highway with 42 lanes.  There remain traffic jams.
• Will construct 215 new airports by 2035, when China will surpass the U.S. as the leading air travel country.

• There is a skyscraper boom, where one 57-story building was recently built in 19 working days:
• The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, tallest in the world, took five years to build.
• Sky City in Changsa will be 10 meters taller and completed in three months.  Except it hasn't begun yet.
• Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia was supposed to be the tallest when completed this year, but the project stalled.
• So Dubai is now constructing something even taller, called the Dubai Creek Tower, to be ready for the 2021 Expo.
• Anyway, China has five of the ten tallest skyscrapers, with their Shanghai Tower at #2 today and USA's One World Trade Center #6.
• Read the rest of the presentation yourself...it goes on and on.

So, in short, we can be impressed about China...but we should be worried about the USA.

On the lighter side, some talent and fun:

Hurricane Sally is shown in some reports as a Category 2, but chances are that she will make landfall as a high end (74-95 MPH) Category 1, with the eye passing right over Mobile, Alabama tomorrow.

Sally is moving at around 2 MPH.  I can walk 2 miles in less than an hour, so this really low speed means possible opportunity to gain strength, certainly accompanied by considerable flooding and storm surging.

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