THE TRIALS OF DONALD TRUMP

Rationality and logic has mainly prevailed through most of our lives.  Every so often you meet someone, or face a circumstance, that makes no sense at all.  Some you'll never understand, some you'll rationalize to satisfaction.  I've long wondered why so many believe in fables from the past that formed religion.  But I'm in the minority.  Then there is this continual support for Donald Trump that defy rationality.  I can almost understand why he still is by far the leading Republican candidate, but how can Trump and Biden be tied for the upcoming presidential election in latest polls when Independents and Democrats are also included?

About Trump, support comes in various ways:

• You work for him.
• You are in the same family.

• 
  The Democracy Fund Voter Study Group in 2017 reported that these group supported Trump:
• American Preservationists 20%
• Staunch Conservatives 31%
• Anti-Elites 19%
• Free Marketeers 25%
• Disengaged 5%

But that was six years ago. A more recent poll says:

A majority of Americans say the multiple criminal investigations into former President Donald Trump's conduct are fair, despite Trump's continued efforts claiming they are conspiracies against him, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds.

The survey of more than 1,300 adults also found that despite the love for him among Republicans, Trump remains highly disliked, continues to struggle mightily with independents — and 6 in 10 Americans don't want him to be president again.

As expected, there's a huge partisan divide — 9 in 10 Democrats say they are fair, while 8 in 10 Republicans call them a witch hunt. A slim majority of independents call them fair, but they are closely split, 51% to 47%.

Republicans?

• 45% say he has done nothing wrong.
• 43% say something unethical but not illegal.
• 75% want Trump to be president again.

Independents?  

• 37% have a positive view of Trump.  
• 67% don't want Trump to be president.
• Most Republicans will vote for Trump.  Most Democrats will vote for Biden.  Most Independents will vote for Biden.  Biden should win if there is not a serious third party candidate.

More specifically, who are these pro-Trump people?

• White men without degrees, white evangelical Christians, and those who live in small towns.
• However 75% say he has done something illegal (46%) or unethical (29%).
• Only 23% think he's done nothing wrong.

Knowing all the above, here is the current Trump situation:

• Is the first U.S. president to be indicted in our 234-year history.  And he has now been indicted in three criminal cases, with a fourth coming from Georgia.

• 
  34 felony counts in New York that he falsified business records to conceal hush-money payments to a porn star Stormy Daniels.  Trial date is scheduled for 25 March 2024.
• 40 felony counts in Florida for hoarding classified documents and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them.  Trial could start on May 20, 2024.  Why?  This a compromise date, for Trump requested to delay until after the 2024 election and the Justice Department wanted December 2023.

• 
  4 counts in Washington, DC to overturn the 2020 election.  
• Trump appeared in court yesterday, August 3, to be charged.
• Judge Moxila Upadhyaya...

...warned Trump: “It is a crime to try to influence a juror or to threaten or attempt to bribe a witness or any other person who may have information about your case, or to retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice. Do you understand these warnings and consequences, sir?” 

"Yes," Trump replied.

• 
  Next court appearance scheduled for August 28 when U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan will preside.  She expects a trial date to be announced.

Regarding Georgia:  Trump issued what appeared to be a taunting message to Willis on Truth Social on Thursday. "I need one more indictment to ensure my election!" the post said.

Crank in the Republican primaries/caucuses, and there is an overload problem:

• 2023
• August 23  First GOP presidential primary debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• September 27  Second GOP presidential debate in Simi Valley, California
• 2024
• January 15   Iowa caucus (40 delegates).
• January or February  New Hampshire (date still not determined....they want to be first, 22 delegates).
• February into March  (182 delegates from Nevada, South Carolina, Michigan, Idaho and DC).
• March 5   15 states with 865 delegates.
• March 12   3 states with 141 delegates.
• July 15-18  Republican National Convention will be held in Milwaukee from July 15-18.
• 5November2024  Presidential Election Day.

Noticed something glaringly obvious?  All of Trump nemeses are women.  So appropriate for a world class misogynist.

Kind of a digression, but something about Joe Biden from Quora:

David W. Rudlin

 · 

Follow

Author of the Inspector McLean Mystery series Updated 8mo

Initial inflation was 1.5% when Trump left office. Can Democrats share what happened?

 

Not a Democrat, but happy to help.

In January 2021 when trump left office, 77,400 Americans died of COVID.

The vaccines were out, but trump didn’t have a distribution plan, saying that was up to the states.

Schools, restaurants, and stores were closed. Few people went away for Xmas. Life was essentially on Pause.

GDP shrank by 3.5%, making it pretty remarkable there was any inflation at all. No demand = no shortages.

Biden came in and immediately went to work putting jabs in arms. Confidence returned, more quickly than anyone expecting. The shutters were lifted, and people began to return to normal life.

Meaning they wanted the stuff they were consuming before the pandemic began. Except COVID didn’t affect just the demand side of the equation, it also slammed supply. Other countries had done some version of what we’d done, meaning lots of stuff didn’t get made or harvested or shipped, and suddenly we had close to the usual level of demand, PLUS a need to build up inventory that had disappeared or rotted during the shutdowns.

For the past few decades businessmen around the globe had been adopting Toyota’s “just in time” approach to supply chains. That saves lots of money (at least for the companies on the buying end) when everything is working normally. But it left everyone standing naked when adult swim ended.

For example, right now in Japan there’s a four-year wait for a new Lexus. Which is made in Japan. But it uses chips made in China, and China is still in lockdown. The same thing is happening in the US; have a look at what it costs to rent a car these days.

None of this should be surprising. You can’t expect the world to stop and then suddenly pick up where it left off. So anyone paying attention would have known that a period of sustained inflation FOR THE WORLD was inevitable.

Then Putin, Ukraine, wheat shortage, etc.

I can hear you asking, “Isn’t it Joe Biden’s job to deal with all of that?” It is, and if you look at the US inflation rate compared with, say, the UK (10.4% headed for a forecast 18%), you’d have to conclude he’s outperforming his peer group.

None of this is to suggest the current inflation isn’t anything other than tremendously painful. And it’s made worse by companies seeing an opportunity to jack up prices under cover of widespread inflation.

But the one thing it’s not is surprising. The same thing would have happened to trump if he hadn’t lost.

Last point, and again, I am NOT a Democrat:

If the Republicans have a better idea for how to handle the current nightmare, let’s hear it. I’ve heard endless criticism of Biden, but only for not giving everyone a bike for Xmas. I can’t think of a single GOP leader who has said, “He should stop doing X, and start doing Y.”

Note Rudlin's disdain when he did not even capitalize Trump.

Hurricane Dora was up to 140 MPH yesterday, but has slightly weakened to 130 MPH today.  The projected path, though, will take her sufficiently south of Hawaii that we might see some moisture around mid-week.

Typhoon Khanun, instead of heading for China, made a right turn, weakened, but will soon shift to the north, re-become a typhoon, but probably make landfall over Kyushu as a tropical storm.

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COVID AND THE STURGEON SUPERMOON

I can't find any explanation of why this is occurring, but South Korea again leads the world in most covid cases during the past week.  This has been going on for more than a month now.  From Worldometer, new cases this past week:

• World  272,971
• #1  South Korea  210,672 (77%)
• #2  USA  32,537  (12%)
• Covid deaths during the past week:
• World  590
• #1  USA  129
• #2  Brazil  116
• #3  S. Korea  71
• Mortality rate average this past week:
• World  0.2%
• USA  0.4%
• Brazil  1.2%
• S. Korea  0.03%
• Covid deaths/million population:
• #1    2    Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Malta.
• #5    1    S. Korea, Canada, Croatia
• #12  0.4  USA, Guatemala, Romania, Norway

How does one make any sense of these differences?  Take mortality rate, for example.

• The annual mortality rate of the seasonal flu is around 0.1%.
• With all the vaccinations and infections, the mortality rate of covid, which was at 1% for much of the first two years, has dropped to 0.2% for the world and 0.4% for the USA.
• But Brazil remains around 1%.
• The mortality rate of covid in S. Korea is one-third that of the flu.
• Some day some sense will be made of these discrepancies.

Next, what do we know about the uptick in covid cases this summer in the USA?

• Covid hospital admissions, positivity rates and emergency visits have seen national increases this summer.
• Interestingly enough, this has also occurred the past THREE summers.
• Whether its vaccination or previous infection, 96% of blood donors show antibodies.
• The most recent surge occurred this past winter, and this summer's rise is not as serious.
• Many other countries have also experienced a wave this summer.
• In Japan, for example, there has been a fourfold covid case increase from May to July.
• China's wave began in April into June, jumping from 11 million/week to 65 million/week.
• No mention was made about what is happening in South Korea.
• Why do cases rise in the summer? 
• People travel.
• Masks are generally not worn.

As cases are rising, should you get a booster shot?

• Probably, but maybe better to wait, for the FDA will be authorizing Pfizer's updated covid vaccine later this month.
• Moderna submitted their request late in June for monovalent shots to target XBB.1.5 subvariants.
• Yet, there is a sense that older individuals or with weakened immune sytems who plan to travel and place themselves in close quarters with other people, might want take this current booster if their last one was at least three months ago.
• The current booster is for Omicron BA.4/5 variants.  The majority of current illnesses come from other subvariants.
• When in doubt, get again vaccinated, for this does protect you from getting seriously ill.
• The general advice is to still wear a mask in public settings, but this is not a mandate.

Two days ago I alerted you to watching the super moon.  For historical reasons, this was the Sturgeon Supermoon because the Farmer's Almanac indicated that Indians were able to catch more of this fish in the Great Lakes when this moon appeared.  Here are some photos from around the world.

Two from Turkey, first, Instanbul's Camlica Mosque (Chris McGrath) and Edirne's Selimiye Mosque (Cihan Demirci):

An ancient temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, south of Athens (Aris Messinis):

Over temple in Jiujiang, China (VCG, Getty images):

Statue of Liberty (Gary Hershorn):

Moon over Manhattan as seen from New Jersey (Seth Wenig).

Typhoon Khanun passed just south of Naha, leaving some damage, moved west, then, very unusually so, stalled, and will next make almost a U-turn, to bring more problems to Okinawa, then head north for Kyushu.  However, the 140 MPH power of the storm just two days ago is now down to 80 MPH and will further weaken.  However, when the eye reaches the Pacific Ocean, strengthening is expected back to hurricane strength.

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WHEN DECISION MAKERS GET SERIOUS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING, IT MIGHT BE TOO LATE!

World leaders have been going around in tiny and larger circles since 1979 when the First World Climate Conference was held in Geneva.  Sure, there have been all kinds of agreements and promises, most countries seem committed, but the fact of the matter is they are actually not doing very much.  

What were you doing in 1979?  I had joined the staff of U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga in DC, and saw no political interest in global climate change.  I don't recall even one major hearing on this subject during my three years there.  

That First World Climate Change Conference eventually led to the formation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.  Who remembers that the Second Climate Conference occurred also in Geneva in 1990?  Geneva also hosted #3 in 2009.

You might say, in parallel, the United Nations also held gatherings, beginning 1949 with the UN Scientific Conference on conservation and resources, in New York.  

• Then in 1972, the First Earth Summit in Stockholm.  Not much interest was shown about global warming in these early years, and this general attitude largely prevailed for another 20 years.  

• 
  There was concerned interest in the ozone layer in 1979, that led to excellent policies.  
• Almost a decade later the IPCC was formed. 
• The 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro setting the framework for agreement. 

• 
  The first Conference of Parties, or COP 1, was held in Berlin in 1995, with an an annual gathering since then.
• A particularly important one was COP 3 in 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol (I actually attended this session) was adopted.
• Then in 2015 (COP 21) came the Paris Agreement.  195 countries signed on.  
• This year was COP 28 in Dubai, and COP 29 could be held in  Australia, the Czech Republic or Bulgaria next year.  COP 30 is scheduled for Belém, Brazil in 2025.

I've written too many times that the only way decision-makers would finally make necessary decisions to curtail global warming is if many millions die of heat and flood and hurricanes one hot summer.  There is at least one more way...but it might then be too late.

Say the Gulf Stream from Florida to Europe stopped.  While serious action will then be taken,  there is  nothing much you can do to re-start the current.  Europe will thus, ironically suffer through a cold wave.

On the mega scale, the global conveyor belt, scientifically known as The Thermohaline Circulation (watch how these currents move), circulates the globe in 1000-year cycles. 

• Warm surface current currents carrying less dense water away from the Equator toward the poles, and cold deep ocean currents carrying denser water away from the poles to the Equator.
• The volume of water transported would be equal to 100 Amazon Rivers, or 16 times the flow of all the world's rivers combined.
• This current travels though the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern and Arctic Oceans.
• Climate change could slow or even stop the flow.
• The last time this happened was 12,000 years ago.
• The Gulf Stream is a part of this conveyor belt.

Could climate warming shut down the Gulf Stream?

Because the thermohaline circulation is mainly driven by differences in the water’s density, it depends upon the cold dense waters that sink into the deep oceans. Global warming can affect this by warming surface waters and melting ice that adds fresh water to the circulation, making the waters less saline; this freshening of the water can prevent the cold waters from sinking and thus alter ocean currents.

Did you see the film, The Day After Tomorrow?  Then again, maybe you shouldn't, for Rotten Tomatoes bestowed 45/50 scores.  Shutdown of Thermohaline Circulation was why the world went haywire.  

This phenomena as a danger was highlighted in a 2021 paper, and seems particularly noteworthy, for Florida ocean waters reached 101F this week at a buoy in Manatee Bay 38 miles south of Miami.  How hot was this?  So hot that it broke the previous world record of 100 F in Kuwait Bay three years ago.

• 
  The Gulf Stream is part of the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation (AMOC--yes, they have names for the various portions), and in this study published in Nature Geoscience, the AMOC showed an unprecedented decline in the 20th century (1990s), which accelerated in the 1960s, briefly recovered in the 1990s, but declined again from the mid-2000s.

• 
  The AMOC is in its weakest state in more than a 1000 years.
• If there is a collapse, European temperatures will drop by 6 degrees Fahrenheit, although it could be as much as 18 F.  To quote:

The new analysis estimates a timescale for the collapse of between 2025 and 2095, with a central estimate of 2050 if global carbon emissions are not reduced. Evidence from past collapses indicates changes in temperature of 10 degree celsius in a few decades, although these occurred during ice ages.

Thus, this tipping point seems imminent, perhaps as soon as 2025.  Mind you, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change latest study indicated collapse was unlikely within the next 100 years.  Read this paper from the latest Scientific American.

The photo today shows where Typhoon Khanum is today,  As of 2:30PM on Wednesday, Khanun (name of a Thai jackfruit) was already 60 miles west of Naha.  The storm has significantly weakened today, from 140 MPH yesterday, down to 115 MPH.  Interestingly enough, Khanum will make an oblique turn to the right, skip China, and head for Kyushu.

Hurricane Dora formed, and is expected to strengthen into a Category 3 or 4 as she moves west.  The current projection is that the eye will probably move past the Big Island of Hawaii several hundreds of miles to the south.

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DO YOU BELIEVE IN FLYING SAUCERS? WHAT ABOUT UAPs?

Today, I'll re-look at a subject largely discredited in higher academic circles:  flying saucers.  The more common term is UFO, or unidentified flying object, coined by the Air Force in 1952.  However, a new one has just surfaced, unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, generally linked to the Navy-led UAP Task Force established by the Pentagon in 2020.  Adam Goldsack already in 2021 wrote a book with this term.  Read this article to catch up on all the recent hoo ha delving into early sightings and what Congress is doing today.

Although I don't believe in the type of flying saucers the media now and then tosses out at you, I've nevertheless looked into this subject, and here are some of my past postings:

• 
  ALIENS and FLYING SAUCERS (2018)....there were many more earlier articles.
• WHY THIS SUDDEN UPSURGE OF INTEREST IN UFOs? (2021).  This was Part 1, and there were three parts.
• Part 2
• Part 3
• ON THE MATTER OF KNOWN AND UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS (2023)

But first, gaze up into the sky, for you will see a blue supermoon this month.

The first supermoon will be seen Tuesday evening as it rises from the southeast, appearing slightly bigger and brighter than normal. At the end of the month, the second supermoon will be even closer.  We won't see two supermoons in one month again until 2037, according to Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi. 

A supermoon happens three or four times/year when the moon is closer to being 226,000 miles away, than the other extreme of 251,000 miles, the apogee.  So you actually do see the moon when closer that looks 14% larger and 30% brighter.  But you won't see a bluer color.  The "blue moon" term has to do with this only happening every so ofter, or not regularly.  So, therefore, the only blue supermoon will be the second one on August 30.

People in the USA are rather religious and tend to believe more about other supernatural phenomena than most advanced countries. 

•  Americans pray more often, are more likely to attend weekly religious services and ascribe higher importance to faith in their lives than adults in other wealthy, Western democracies, such as Canada, Australia and most European states, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

  
  For instance, more than half of American adults (55%) say they pray daily, compared with 25% in Canada, 18% in Australia and 6% in Great Britain. (The average European country stands at 22%.) Actually, when it comes to their prayer habits, Americans are more like people in many poorer, developing nations – including South Africa (52%), Bangladesh (57%) and Bolivia (56%) – than people in richer countries.

• Considering our advanced educational requirements, the following graphic is almost freakish. We are an outlier anomaly.

• Take flying saucers, for example:  41% have seen alien spacecraft.
• 34% believe they are alien ships.
• 57% believe in aliens, compared to 31% for Bigfoot and 26% for the Loch Ness Monster.

Conversely, in there seems to be a general belief that flying saucers from some remote civilization will not be possible because of it would take too much energy to travel such long distances.  Furthermore, should there be such an encounter with Planet Earth, almost surely the intelligent life would be some form of artificial intelligence.

Yet, James Deardoff had a thought in 1985.  Click on that link to read his summary.  Essentially, he argues that if a civilization somewhere in our Milky Way Galaxy could find a way to travel at only 1% the speed of light, the odds are high that we would have been reached by now.

I long ago worked for NASA's Ames Research Center, and all those astrophysicists involved with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program I was in almost totally divorced themselves from flying saucers and those myths.  I suspect this remains true today.  However, I interacted with someone  from Stanford, Ron Bracewell, who believed that humanity came to be through contact with extraterrestrials, and the Ames people nodded in general approval.  The proximity of his office and scholarly eminence made the difference.  When I worked at Ames that summer, I lived on the Stanford campus.

The July 2023 issue of Stanford Magazine has an article, First Contact, featuring one of their faculty, Garry Nolan, who is the man you call when there is no Earthly explanation.

• He has published 300 papers over a 30-year career as an immunologist in the Sanford School of Medicine, who spent his post-doc under Nobel laureate David Baltimore of MIT.
• What drove him into extraterrestrials is that in his youth he said he had two alien encounters.
• One might surmise that a scientist would pay a reputational cost for embracing what was once largely seen as tabloid fodder. Nolan recalls a senior figure from the National Cancer Institute taking him aside in a bar around 2014 to warn him he was ruining his career.
• 
  However, he was brave enough to publish last year in Progress in Aerospace Sciences, for few academics of any stripe would actually do so, the possibility of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects).
• This paper revisited that luminous red mass--around 50 pounds of molten iron--reported to have fallen on Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1977.
• His team concluded that this blob came from an advanced aerial vehicle, the first time any peer reviewed article in the mainstream dared to so exclaim.
• 1977 was a particularly fertile year for UFO sightings, for several officials in Mississippi encountered a metallic blue object that looked life a spinning top, 15-18 feet off the ground, and were told to keep quiet about it.
• Recently, Nolan has said that aliens are "100%" living among us.
• 
  Back to that article, earlier, in the 1970's, Peter Sturrock, another Stanford faculty member, now a professor emeritus of applied physics, hired a French scientist, Jacques Vallée, who in 1969 had helped the U.S. Air Force declare that flying saucers were bunk, to interact.  Vallée subsequently inspired Steven Spielbergs 1977 movie, Close Encounter of the Third Kind.  Nothing came of this alliance.
• Since 2007 the Pentagon has apparently been running a cover UFO program, and annually reports to Congress.

Thus far, though, anyone waiting for confirmation of UFOs from the government is still waiting. The Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office “has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” the head of the office recently told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.

• In conclusion, Nolan said:

“I don’t have something that I could put on the kitchen table that will float with anti-gravity that I can point my friends to,” he says. “I agree with you that the hard data is not in your hands yet, but don’t stop me from getting it.”

I spent so much time above to get to what happened last week in Congress, from Time.

• 
  Jimmy Carter, in 1969 when he was a private citizen, said he saw a flying saucer.  It was probably the planet Venus.  But maybe not.
• The House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security held a day-long meeting with multiple witnesses.

• 
  Most conspicuous was Air Force Major David Grusch, who led a government task force on UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the new term replacing UFO.
• U.S. military forces  have reported 650 instances of flying objects no existing technology can manage.
• In 2020, the Pentagon released videos of three Navy UAP sightings.
• But:

Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough in a statement to TIME, the Department of Defense (DoD) “has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently. The Department is fully committed to openness and accountability to the American people…DoD is also committed to timely and thorough reporting to Congress." 

What about the reality of what is happening?

...science is where things get awfully tricky—especially when it comes to how and why E.T. would be coming to our particular spot in the universe. There are up to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way—virtually every one of which is circled by at least one planet, and many by multiple planets like our own solar system. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across; a single light year is just shy of 9 trillion km (6 trillion mi.). Unless Einstein is wrong—and he hasn’t been yet—nothing can exceed light speed, and merely approaching it would take an astonishing degree of technological achievement. 

Now take all of those figures and multiply them by two trillion—or the number of galaxies that observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have estimated are in the universe. That makes for an awful lot of planets and an awful lot of cosmic real estate for a visiting spacecraft to cover just to come to our little world.

Time magazine showed ten historic photos of unidentified aircraft going back to 1950.  Here is the 1990 Calvine photo taken in 1990.

Here is another by Sergio Loaiza in 1971 over Costa Rica.

That photo is discredited in a TV program that ran for three seasons, one show and another.  Want more?  Here is a two-hour video of UFOs.

So we have 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars out there, or 8 times 10 to the 24th power, or at least ten septillion planets, and probably a lot more.

In other words, beginning with Gugliemo Marconi, we have been beaming radio signals out into space since 1895 (or maybe 1894 or 1897), and they travel at the speed of light, meaning that in 2023, our presence has been announced to extraterrestrial intelligence up to 128 light years away.  That is only about one-tenth of one percent the two-dimensional size of our Milky Way Galaxy.  Actually half of that, for the latest data shows that our galaxy is 200,000 light years across.

As billionaires spend their bucks in the romance of outer space, the general public equally gabbles about mysterious space mysteries and love conspiracy tales.  Although I have a sense that there is other intelligent life somewhere else in the Universe, it is also possible that we are it.  No matter, an advanced version of us from out there in space, if they suddenly appeared, most probably would be in some form of artificial intelligence, non-human-like and certainly not organic.  If not them, I think it is possible that humanity will evolve into an ultimate form of AI and expand our presence throughout our galaxy, and in time all of space.  After all, we are young, less than 14 billion years old, with around 100 trillion years left to accomplish all that.

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