WAS COVID-19 CHINA'S FIRST STEP TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD?

From Worldometer,  COVID-19 new deaths:

           DAY USA   WORLD   Brazil      India   South Africa

June      9     1093    4732        1185      246         82

July       5       251    3572          535       421       173

             7       993    5504        1312       479       192

           12       380    4118          659       500       108

           15     1001    5760        1261       614       107

           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
          31       512     4226         619       818        121
 Sept    1     1164     5899        1165     1025       114
            3     1090     6311        1218     1-26        126

Summary:  Certainly not getting better.

Trump's latest illegal tactic:  telling his supporters to vote more than once.  Turns out that there is no universal illegality among the states, and NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN CONVICTED AND PENALIZED FOR TRYING TO DO THIS.  Maybe he's found a way to beat Biden, because Democrats are more honest.  Sure.

From The New York Times morning briefing today:

• Meet the White House’s new coronavirus adviser: Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist and frequent Fox News guest who questions the value of masks and promotes a strategy of herd immunity, in which the virus runs through the population before petering out.

• The German government said it had “unequivocal evidence” that Aleksei Navalny, a vocal opponent of Vladimir Putin, was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok.  The U.S. equivalent of Navalny is JOE BIDEN!

Also:

This is how a conspiracy theory might start.  If you were in the Trump administration, you're creatively trying out fake news to help him get re-elected.  Why not shift the COVID-19 blame to China for this novel coronavirus, which, of course, he already has, but more, scare the voting public to vote for him because this pandemic was initiated by China to take over the world.  With the USA egging Taiwan on to tick China off, I again show this photo to the left.  Not drunk, but influenced, then, of course, we come to the rescue.

Or start with something like this scare story.  Click on it, so you better appreciate the rest of this posting.  Add ports to their portfolio.  Well orchestrated, you can swing a lot of votes with a smart ad campaign to frighten a sufficient number of Americans to vote for an anti-China and pro-military candidate like Donald Trump.  On Sunday, I played Trump's religion card.  Today, his China gambit.

The reality?  Both China and India are handicapped by having too many people to take over the world. They have 36% the world population.  Remember how the UK took advantage of the technologies of that imperial century, with a little more than 10 million people, to rule over 400 million, where the sun never set?  Then came the USA with our new technologies and assets from World War II. 

The next, and fourth industrial revolution, is clearly artificial intelligence.  The U.S. is large, but not too.  We have the dominant high tech conglomerates dwarfing the world.  Soon, AI will be replacing humans in more than half the jobs.  India and China will then be in real trouble.  Unemployment will be a problem for America too, but there will be sufficient opportunities in infrastructure development and renewable energy (which is somewhat inefficient in that more people will be required).  Global warming remediation will provide this transition.

The prognosis into 2050 and beyond?  The USA will continue to be #1 for the foreseeable future. History will show the mishandling of the Coronavirus Pandemic made us #1 in deaths.  Nevertheless, the purpose was served, for now Trump will not get re-elected.  As we have the right mix of high tech and optimal population, our dominance will continue into the next century.  China is this villain in 2020, thanks to Trump, and their international influence will continue to expand for some time to come, but take over the world?  NO CHANCE.

I'll close with a couple more Chinese features.  I play poker and a very poor bridge.  I know nothing about Mahjong.  Neither do most of you.  I'm too old to try to learn now, but some of you out there, maybe.  One tale says Confucius created this game, with the shuffling 144 tiles evocative of bird sounds, for the meaning of mahjong is, loosely, sparrow.  A closer truth is that this now national past time evolved around a century and a half ago near Shanghai.  However, from much of World War II until 1985, mahjong was prohibited in China.  In any case, here is how to play the game in less than 6 minutes.

Did you know that there are more Chinese restaurants than all the McDonald's, KFCs, Pizza Huts, Taco Bells and Wendy's in America, combined?  But only 40,000 of them.  In China, can't quite come up with a number, but as there are almost 9 million restaurants in that country, and 56% of them in Beijing serve Chinese food, there probably are something around 5 million Chinese restaurants in the world.  Some talented Chinese food preparers:

Typhoon Maysak came and went, causing substantial damage over South Korea.  Remember in the Gulf of Mexico when Hurricane Marco snuck in from the south and made landfall where Texas met Louisiana?  Then the more powerful Hurricane Laura entered from the east under Florida, with the eye touching the USA at just about the same spot as Marco?  Well, the same thing is happening in the Orient.  Maysak arrived from the south, then from the east, Typhoon Haishen will slip under Japan, then head for just about the exact same spot in South Korea.  However, while the track below only shows a strength up to Category 4, the current speculation is that Haisen will attain Super Typhoon status, or Category 5 at a speed higher than 157 MPH.

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