WHAT A SUMMER OF 2024

Today is like the end of summer, for tomorrow begins September.   But you can enjoy life until Tuesday, for Monday is Labor Day, a national holiday.

All things considered, the world at this very moment is doing fine:

• Internationally:
• The Hamas attacked Israel on 7October2023.  There will be a three-day cease fire beginning tomorrow in the Gaza Strip to vaccinate 640,000 Palestinian children against polio, which has no cure.  The first case in 25 years was just reported, so maybe this is a possible first step to a larger truce to come. Two doses of two drops of a live virus to be taken orally.  2000 medical volunteers will do the job.  The world yet awaits that expected revenge response from Iran on Israel.
• Russian invaded the Ukraine in February 2022, and remains in control.  But the fact that Ukraine has lasted this long, and is now into Russian territory, is a surprise.  The U.S. is approaching a trillion dollars for the Afghanistan war (still spending).  $113 billion so far to Ukraine.  The European Union has committed $162 billion through 2027.

• 
  About the trials of Donald Trump.
• Jack Smith has reactivated action in Florida and DC.  Judge Tanya Chutkan will next week decide how to proceed on Trump's coup attempt on 6January2021.  Chances are that there will be no court action until next year.  However Smith could make things difficult for Trump over the next few months.
• When Judge Juan Merchan of New York will sentence Donald Trump remains largely unknown.  However, he keeps getting insulted by Trump and his cohorts that, surely, Merchan will do something by November 5.
• Trump's Georgia trial is paused, and there is no sign of any reactivation.  What a shame.  This would have all occurred on live TV.
• If Trump beats Harris on November 5, then his legal delays will have worked, for as president he can find ways, with the help of his Supreme Court, to throw them all out.  Good reason for a few more on the fringe to vote for Harris.  All in all, these delays will hurt Trump.

• 
  Abortion has Republicans perplexed.
• Trump/Vance vs Harris/Walz on November 5?

1.6. That’s how many points Harris leads Trump by in RealClearPolitics’ latest polling average. Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight’s weighted average shows Harris with a 3.4-point lead.

The vice president led Trump by five points—48%-43%—among likely voters in a Suffolk/USA Today poll taken Aug. 25-28, a massive shift from Trump’s 41%-38% lead over President Joe Biden shortly after Biden’s rough debate performance in June (the latest survey’s margin of error is 3.1 points).

• 
  Yesterday, Wall Street stocks rose and the Dow Jones Industrial Average scored a second consecutive all-time closing high at 41,563.   The expectation is that the Federal Reserved will cut interest rates in September.  
• On July 10 you could get 162 Japanese yen for a U.S. Dollar.  Today?  Down to 146.  That's a 10% drop.  Future?

Last week, Georgia Tech upset Florida State in NCAA football.  Nothing startling occurring so far today.  Tomorrow, in Allegiant Stadium, USC vs LSU at 7:30 EDT on ABC.  LSU is favored by 4 points, with an under/over of 64.5.

More important than the beginning of the NFL on Thursday in Kansas City for the Chiefs vs Ravens game, is that Taylor Swift will be there to see Travis Kelce, and has suggested plays for her team.  Says Chief's QB Pat Mahomes, she is the most famous person in the world.  Mahomes married his high school sweetheart in 2022 and has a third child coming.

This will be meaningless for most of you reading this, but last night a brand new University of Hawaii women's volleyball team hosted SMU, which won their league last year, and has a host of seasoned players they added from other NCAA teams.  They now allow teams to pirate other players in most sports.  Hawaii lost a couple to other universities, and added no one in particular.   SMU won the first game 25-7.  The year was essentially over for Hawaii after that first game.  But miracles do happen, and Hawaii managed to win the fifth overtime game, 15-13.  Maybe they will have an interesting team this year.  I have never seen another Hawaii volleyball game where this happened in my life, and I've had an office on the Manoa Campus for more than 50 years.  Actually, the first Hawaii women's volleyball game was only thirty years ago, in 1994.

The 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival kicks off Wednesday with the premiere of Tim Burton’s sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” (Rotten Tomatoes: 78) and starry fare will follow, like the sexually provocative Nicole Kidman film “Babygirl” (RT 91) and the George Clooney-Brad Pitt team-up “Wolfs.” To follow, Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in Joker:  Folie à Deux, Daniel Craig in Queer and Angelina Jolie in Maria (RT 71)of opera singer Maria Callas in Maria.

Not on that list is The Apprentice, Rotten Tomatoes 77, which will soon be in your neighborhood theaters.

Taking its name from a certain television series, The Apprentice is a shrewd and darkly amusing tragicomedy that dramatises Donald Trump's rise to fame and fortune in the 1970s and 80s. What that means is that some viewers will condemn it for being too harsh and others will condemn it for not being harsh enough. But the filmmakers' cunning efforts to show their subject as a human being rather than a superhero or a supervillain are what make it so watchable. While the movie begins with a disclaimer that many of its events are fictionalised, the former president has threatened to take legal action.

Barack Obama just released his 2024 summer playlist, a compilation of 145 songs, plus others.  Don't know most of them.  Some are familiar:  #20 Satisfaction (Rolling Stones), #41 Where Did Our Love Go (Supremes), #51 Nowhere to Run (Martha Reeves and the Vandellas), #57  Walk Like an Egyptian (Bangles), and a few more.  This is his eighth since 2015.  #1 that year was Ain't Too Proud to Beg by the Temptations, and there were only 20 songs.  Joked that he wanted a job at Spotify after his presidency.

Rolling Stone magazine has their 50 best summer songs, ever.  #1 is Good Times (1979) by Chic (left), #2 Dancing in the Street (1965) by Martha and the Vandellas, and #3 Got to ive It Up (1977) by Marvin Gaye.  Oldest on the list from 1958 were Summertime Blues by Eddie Cochran at #21 and Summertime by Sam Cooke.

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WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO BE A DINOSAUR?

Next month, Scientific American will feature dinosaurs.

Early in my youth, I made dinosaur figures using plaster of paris.   I then wanted to be a paleontologist.  I now know that this occupation forces you to spend ungodly time in horrible places with terrible weather.
 

But about that above Scientific American article:

• Begins with the Tyrannosaurus Rex.  Note some fluffiness, as explained in the end of this posting.
• Brain weighed less than a pound.  
• We have a 3-pound brain, while an elephant has an 11-pound brain.  
• Dinosaurs and elephants were similar in size: T-Rex had a length of 40 feet and height of 20 feet, but elephants weighed more, 12,000 lb vs 9,000 pounds.
• A human brain is 2% of our body weight.   Elephant = 0.1% and dinosaur = 0.01%.

• 
  T-Rex had 3 billion neurons, while humans have 100 billion and a Nile crocodile around 0.8 million.  An emu has roughly 1.3 billion neurons.  Thus,  T-Rex was not capable of advanced planning or coordinated social hunting.  But it is suspected they could sniff the wind and identify living prey.
• Odor detection (number of olfactory receptor genes)
• Dinosaur  =  600, around same as cats, allowing for identification of living prey
• Humans  =  400
• Elephant  =  2,000 (can sense water 12 miles away)
• 
  Eyesight of dinos about same as birds.  
• As for example, an eagle can spot a rabbit from half a mile away.
• Dinos had color vision.
• Elephants see yellow and blue, but not red and green.
• Dogs and cats are mostly colorblind.

But the average dinosaur in itself does not say much because some were as tiny as a chicken and, well, many were large, more than 100 tons.  Watch this video.

• 
  Dinosaurs appeared around 250 million years ago.  Sizes?
• The heaviest is the Argentinosaurus at 75 tons (right).
• Longest is the Supersaurus at 130 feet.
• Tallest is the Sauroposeidon at 69 feet.

• 
  For the longest while, the T-Rex was thought to be the biggest land predator at close to 10 tons.  However, some scientist now think that the Spinosaurus might have been double that weight..

• 
  In 1842, English naturalist Sir Richard Owen coined the term Dinosauria, derving from the Greek Deinos, meaning fearfully great, and sauros, or lizard.
• The greatest dino-hunter was American Barnum Brown who explored from 1897 and found the first specimens of the T-Rex.
• 
  This will disappoint many, but the Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago, while the T-Rex only became prominent a few million years before that extinction event 66 million years ago.  They never saw each other.
• 700 known species of dinosaur fossils have been found on all seven continents.
• Dinosaurs as we know them mostly disappeared 66 million years ago when something from outer space crashed on the coast of the Yucatan, called the Chicxulub Impact, triggering the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, eliminating 75% of plant and animal species.  
• 
  The energy released was more than a billion times that of the combined Hiroshima/Nagasaki Atomic Bombs.  Sunlight was blocked (50%) for more than a year, and maybe two.
• In the history of Planet Earth, this was the only extinction event caused by an asteroid.
• If you were a dinosaur heavier than 55 pounds, you did not survive.  This event began the current Cenozoic era.
• Luis Alvarez and son Walter proposed their concept of a massive asteroid 6-9 miles wide being responsible.  The signature was the element Iridium.

You can make up your own list, but paleontologist Steve Brusatte and author of the book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, has a ranking of the top 10 dinosaur films of all time:

• #1    Jurassic Park, 1993, Rotten Tomatoes 92.
• #2    Jurassic World, 2015, RT 71.
• #3    Walking with Dinosaurs.  2013, RT 24.
• #10  Jurassic Park III, 2001, RT 49.

Interestingly enough, Book Authority has the Top 10 Best Selling Dinosaur Books of All Time, and...

• #1    The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Steve Brusatte.
• #2    Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs, Robert Sabuda.  12 pages of pop-up stuff, mostly for children.
• #3    Dinosaurs, Kathleen Zoehfeld.  For school children.
• You can click on the source to see the rest.   Yes, probably not your kind of list.

The Guardian has a longer list of 20:

• #1    Jurassic Park.
• #2    King Kong, 2005, RT 84.
• #3    One Million Years BC, 1966, RT 67.
• #20  Jurassic World:  Fallen Kingdom, 2018, RT 46.

To end, more and more, paleontologists are beginning to think that the largest dinosaurs had feathers.  This the Yutyrannus huali, weighing in aat 1.5 tons, a cousin of T-Rex, has has here a shaggy coat of proto-feathers.  Read how out present birds came from dinosaurs.

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DONALD TRUMP AND THE COVID PANDEMIC

A coronavirus outbreak began in Wuhan, China in December 2019.  We were on the Diamond Princess  in the Orient that month.  Came back to Hawaii.  

• However this same ship on 20January2020 boarded an 80-year old passenger from Hong Kong with a respiratory ailment, and started the international spread.  

• 
  The Diamond Princess on 3February2020 returned to Yokohama, but had to anchor at sea, for a strange new disease seemed to be spreading.
• Unknowingly, we flew from Honolulu to Bangkok, Thailand on 11February2020.

• 
  That day the World Health Organization announced the official name for this virus would be COVID-19, CO for corona, VI for virus, D for diseases and 19, the year (2019) it was first discovered.
• Ultimately, with 2,666 passengers and a crew of 1,045, 712 became infected, with 14 deaths.  Interestingly enough, 20% of the people on the ship were infected, and of those, 2% died.  So far, in the world, there have been 704,753,890 cases and 7,010,681 deaths, a mortality rate of 1%.
• Passengers testing negative were allowed to leave the ship on 19February2020.
• WHO on 20February2020 indicated that  of all the number of this new virus cases in the world outside of China, half of them were on the Diamond Princess.
• 
  On 20February2020 we flew from Phuket to Chiang Mai.  Click on that for you'll find interest in this flight:
• Already, most of the passengers were wearing masks...except me.
• A person sitting between us had a mask on, but was coughing.
• We tried not to face him, but nevertheless found out that he was visiting from China.
• So I asked how did he get into Thailand.  He said that he flew out of a small airport in China to Phuket, and there were no restrictions.  Only international airports then checked.
• But heck, I had a Chang beer and some macadamia nuts.
• I was somewhat worried about contracting this new disease, but nothing happened. Whew!
• We returned home on 17February2020 with posting titled, I'M HOME AND FEELING FINE.
• The COVID-19 timeline:

Next, some Trump history on how he handled the COVID-19 Pandemic:

• To quote CNN: The Point on 21September2020 (just before the presidential election):

Donald Trump gives himself an ‘A+’ for his handling of the coronavirus. Uh, what?

• 
  Above was the title of the article.
• At this point, the nation was nearing 200,000 covid deaths.
• Going back to mid-March 2019 as the virus was beginning to spread, Trump rated himself a 10 out of 10.
• 
  Then in July of 2019, when asked by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward what grade he would give himself, Trumps said an A.
• How, you might ask yourself, could this President give himself top marks in handling the pandemic when he had admitted to downplaying the threat it posed to the public, driven skepticism about mask-wearing, pushed unproven (and even dangerous) remedies to deal with the virus and repeatedly underestimated the death toll?
• Simple! Trump lives in a fantasy world of his own creation. He always has. In that world, he is the smartest, the savviest, the coolest, the best-looking and the winningest person in the world. Objective facts fall by the wayside in that world. And Trump has always – whether in the business world or the political one – surrounded himself with people who affirm that his world is the real one and the actual real one is some sort of conspiracy narrative driven by his “elite” enemies in the Democratic Party and the media.
• Keep in mind that this article quote below was published just about four years ago when Joe Biden was running against then-President Trump:

An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday showed former Vice President Joe Bidenwith a massive 51% to 29% edge over Trump when it comes to who is more trusted to effectively deal with the coronavirus.

• Put plainly: There is simply no evidence the country is “rounding the corner” on the virus as Trump suggested Monday. And while Trump is free to give himself whatever grade he wants in how he has dealt with the virus, his constituents disagree. Profoundly.

Mother Jones a year later had a headline:

• CORONAVIRUS

NOVEMBER 17, 2021

New Revelations Emerge on How Donald Trump Killed 400,000 (or More) Americans

• 
  Remember, a pandemic was announced in March of 2020.  Between March 9 and May 29 of last year, the CDC held no press briefings.
• Why?  Kate Galatas, CDC communications official, said the White House thwarted the agency's attempt to schedule such briefings, especially the one in April that would have emphasized the need to wear masks.

• 
  The CDC was worried about asymptomatic people spreading the disease, but Trump's covid task force coordinator Dr. Scott Atlas (who was not an infectious disease specialist) wanted testing only of those with symptoms to reduce the numbers.

• 
  As researchers from UCLA noted in March 2021, the United States could have avoided 400,000 COVID deaths if the Trump administration had implemented a more effective health strategy that included mask mandates, social distancing, and robust testing guidelines.
• We’ve long known that Trump did the opposite of what public health experts advised. More concerned with his own standing in the polls than with the health and safety of the citizenry, Trump dismissed or minimized the threat and sent a mixed message on masks, social distancing, and testing.
• Moreover, it’s dumbfounding that killing 400,000 through ineptitude is not a disqualification for political leadership. Trump remains the GOP’s 2024 frontrunner, and party leaders continue to genuflect before him.
• Remember, this article was published almost three years ago.

Not that President Joe Biden's administration is perfect.  A couple of days ago, a mostly neutral Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (chief supporter of Trump), said that this administration pressured Facebook to censor some COVID-19 content during the pandemic.  First, why send the letter to Jordan (was it requested by Jordan?), second, what exactly was censored, and third, how many citizens were thereby killed?

How safe are those COVID vaccines?

The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis, but do not appear to cause infertility, Guillain-Barré syndrome, Bell’s palsy, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) or heart attack, according to a new National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report examining whether COVID-19 vaccines can cause certain harms. 

The above was reported in April of this year.  A new study by the Journal of the American Medical Association found the following:

• Not significant, but mostly affects young men.
• So a study at the University of Versailles of people ages 12 to 49 showed that those with vaccine-related myocarditis were HALF as likely to be readmitted to the hospital for heart-related events compared to those with normal myocarditis.
• In any case, the risk associated with getting myocarditis--inflammation of the heart muscle, often triggered by the immune system in response to an infection--is LOWER than the risk that can come from getting COVID.
• The findings indicate that the risk of myocarditis linked to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is very, very low.

In other words, you should go ahead and get the covid update vaccination which is now available, and will be covered by your medical plan.  The latest news:

• The new shot targets a SARS-CoV-2 strain called KP.2.
• Recommended for everyone 12 and older, plus there is FDA emergency authorization for infants up to the age of 11.
• Novavax has an updated vaccine targeting the JN.1 virus, which has not yet been approved.
• At one time JN.1 was the dominant strain, but more recently in August, KP.2 has been the most prevalent.
• Note that these new COVID shots are called UPDATED, not Booster.  Why?  boosters are additional doses of a previous formula.

Keep in mind the following.

• 913,000 Americans were hospitalized from COVID in 2023, and more than 75,500 died.
• Most of them had not received the booster shots.
• 
  Why you should be vaccinated, now!!!  The article was published more than three years ago, and even more so applies today!!!

Nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. now are in people who weren’t vaccinated, a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been and an indication that deaths per day — now down to under 300 — could be practically zero if everyone eligible got the vaccine.

• The older you are, the more are your chances of being hospitalized and worse, especially if you have any compromising medical ailment.

• 
  This updated vaccine will protect you from getting infected, but if so unlucky, will minimize hospitalization and death.
• But whoops, strain KP.3.11 just overtook KP.2 as the dominant strain.
• However, these strains are related, so the update should still be very effective.

• 
  For example, last year, the booster targeted the XBB.1.5 strain, but JN.1 became dominant.  There is a wide genetic distance between the two.  Yet, the vaccine largely worked.  KP.3 is next to KP.2 in genetic commonality, which is good.

• 
  You can take this KP.2 updated vaccination even if you never before received any previous ones.
• At 15 Craigside, a pharmaceutical company is coming here on September 11 to do the inoculation.
• They pre-register you for insurance, watch over you for a while to insure you don't get an unexpected reaction, and they check your vitals for two days to ascertain that all went well.
• You can't imagine how convenient this is compared to yourself trying to find a place to do it. 

Shanshan is now a tropical storm, but is moving more slowly, with an eye to move north tomorrow, thus avoiding Osaka and Kyoto.  Considerable rain and flooding, messing up with all forms of transport near the track.

I'll close with a Major League Baseball first.  Shohei Ohtani's dog, Decoy, became the first to walk the ball to the plate to  start a game, and with a perfect strike to Ohtani.  Watch this video.  I should add that Shohei was the first batter up for the Dodgers, and hit a home run.  He now has 42 home runs and 42 steals, and could well reach 50/50, to become the first to do that.  Then, next year, he will add pitching to his repertoire.  He is not doing that this year because of an operation.  He is already considered to be the best baseball player ever, and why not the best athlete ever.

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