THE GOLDEN AGE OF LIFE-SAVING VACCINES IS COMING

Two days after the Russian  rebellion, the surprise is that the news media was actually on top of all the action.  You would have thought that the absence of any kind of reliable information from that country would suppress "the truth." 

First, earlier today, released was an 11-minute audio by the leader of revolt as defiant as ever.  Then, later at night, a 5-minute address to his nation by Vladimir Putin, where he essentially reinforced what I thought was the reality. 

Essentially, there was this revolt led by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group (about 40,000 mercenaries), which ended in a compromise arranged by Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko.  Certainly, this exposed Putin as vulnerable, and no matter what was decided, places Prigozhin as enemy #1 to Putin.  What is the future?  Stay tuned.

It is not popularly known, but there are already decades-old hepatitis B vaccines to prevent liver cancer, and HPV vaccines, introduced in 2006, to prevent cervical cancer.  A typical case is Jamie Crase who was 34 when she thought she would die young with ovarian cancer.  However, she is now 50 and has no sign of cancer.

Scientists today reported on an expanded list of vaccines for cancer to be available in five years.

• Unfortunately, this initial injection will only shrink tumors and prevent cancer from returning, not prevent it.
• Experimental treatments will come for lung and breast cancer, with melanoma and pancreatic cancer to follow.
• Early efforts will be for something relatively specific, like a noninvasive breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ.
• 
  The medication will boost our immune system to kill cancer cells using that same platform for COVID-19 vaccines, mRNA.
• Like in teaching T the same to fight tumors.

• 
  Moderna and Merck are jointly developing a personalized mRNA vaccine for melanoma.  From early notices, these vaccines will be expensive because each one will need to be made from scratch, unlike for covid, which ended up costing pennies/shot.

There is a failed history.

• First, Provenge was approved in the U.S. in 2010 to treat prostate, bladder and skin cancer.
• Cancer overcame this treatment.
• But medical researchers learned a lot from this failure.

A few months ago Moderna reported it hopes to offer new vaccines also for heart disease and other conditions by 2030, which is only 7 years away.  All are also based on messenger RNA technology.  And the irony of all ironies is that COVID remarkably will show researchers the way to a whole host of other more significant cures!

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HOW MUCH RISK SHOULD YOU TAKE?

The implosion of Titan opens up the age-old question of how much risk should anyone take.  The standard blowback is to stay in bed and certainly avoid leaving home if you want to avoid risk.  True, whether it's merely falling or getting into a traffic accident, security is compromised when you venture forth.  Did you know that second only to motor vehicle accidents is falling, which itself accounts for 15% of all accidental deaths in the U.S.  

But why even live if you do nothing, something only a very few rich souls can enjoy.  So we all proceed through life in school, work, family stuff, watching TV, traveling, and the like.  Then there are those who hang glide, savor bungee jumping, do night scuba diving, and, if you can afford it, take Titan to see the Titanic or, like Jeff Bezos, three years ago boarded his New Shepard rocket on an 11-minute journey on July 20 to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of Armstrong stepping on the Moon.  

Odds were made before he left, and because of the simplicity of his flight in not even orbiting, his chance of dying was estimated to be one in a thousand.  The odds of being killed on a commercial plane flight is one in 11,000,000.  And, incidentally, if your plane does crash, you still have a 72% survival rate if you are sitting in a central rear seat, compared to 56% if you are in a center mid-plane seat.  So when you make a plane reservation, don't do what I do, which is to pick a window seat in first class.  Choose a green seat.

Whether for personal security, finance, sports or whatever, how much risk one takes could well determine how successful you become in life.

A study has shown that—contrary to popular belief—older people make riskier decisions than younger adults. Older people’s generally more positive emotions make them more optimistic when gauging risks. In addition, older adults are less deterred by the risk of losses than younger adults are. These are the findings of a study conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and published in the journal Psychological Science.

But, to the contrary, Forbes indicated:

Ever wonder why your parents or grandparents seem to take fewer risks?

While the general perception is that older persons don’t take risks for potential rewards, a new study points to the type of risks that older people often avoid.

But the actual explanation behind less risk-taking is likely related to declining levels of dopamine in the brain,according a new study of over 25,000 people recently published in the journal, Current Biology.

Further, read Neuroscience for those details.

• Throughout adult life, your dopamine level falls by up to 10% every decade.

• 
  Dopamine is a chemical in the brain involved in predicting which actions will lead to rewards.  Those who have a higher concentration of dopamine will tend to gamble more to win money, etc.
• Thus, older people were less attracted to big rewards, making them less willing take risks.

Or read Risk-Taking Differences Across the Adult Life Span:  A Question of Age and Domain.  

• Risk-taking tendencies in the financial domain reduce steeply in older age for men.
• However, financial risk-taking does not drop much for older women.

• 
  Interestingly enough, risk-taking in the social domain instead increases slightly from young to middle age, before reducing sharply later in life.
• Social risk-taking

• 
  Recreational risk-taking reduces more steeply from young to middle age than in later life.
• Ethical and health risk-taking reduce relatively smoothly with age.
• If any of this really makes any sense to you, you will become an expert on this subject if you read the entire, very long, article.

Part of the above is reflected in what former President George H.W. Bush did on his 85th birthday with a 10,500 foot sky dive over main.  He said, just because you're an old guy, you don't have to sit around drooling in the corner.  Get out and do something.  Get out and enjoy life.

Or maybe wealth can provide a clue.  A study of 1,125 millionaires found they're more optimistic and likely to take risks.

• German scientist studied 1,125 millionaires (net worth of $1.9 million) to identify the behavioural straits they shared, relative to the non-rich and those who inherited their wealth.
• Had a higher tolerance for risk, but found this dangerous when they later find themselves in power.
• They were less neurotic.

Or more, the one trait that separates billionaires from the rest of world is that they believe you reap rewards by taking high risks.

• 
  Even risk rejection, embarrassment and disappointment.
• In effect, you're asking for help, from anyone.
• Billionaires are great at relationships. 
• Don't be foolish.  Don't rush into taking risks.  Pay for opinion before diving into something.

Space travel is certainly a high risk adventure, and I've previously mentioned Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos as two, but there are already eleven of them who took that trip.  Here is one view on how billionaires approach risk.

Wikipedia shows 11 billionaire astronauts:

• #1  2001  Dennis Tito (right):  first billionaire into space and first space tourist to the International Space Station.
• #5  2021   Richard Branson:  first billionaire to fly in his own spacecraft.
• #6  2021 (nine days later)  Jeff Bezos

So how much risk should you take?  I took a lot of risks throughout my life.  

• 
  I could have gone to the University of Hawaii, but did not bother to even apply there.  By some amazing fluke, I found myself a freshman at Stanford.  
• Spent time at the NASA Ames Research Center on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  Failed, but so has anyone else.

• 

  Worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, twice, on laser fusion.  Failed, but so have LLNR and ITER.

• 
  Became an engineering professor at the University of Hawaii, where I ended up running the renewable energy institute for the Pacific.  
• 
  Worked in the U.S. Senate and drafted the original legislation for hydrogen and ocean thermal energy conversion.  
• Took very early retirement in 1999, and nearly a quarter century later, still have an office on the Manoa Campus, to develop the Blue Revolution, write books, and I even gave a TEDx talk on the Blue Revolution in December of 2021.  

• A few years ago I decided I had done enough for humanity and decided to enjoy life just for myself.
• I've entered various stages of euphoria since then, and just might be in one today.

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WHO IS YEVGENY PRIGOZHIN?

This latest brouhaha within Russia is momentous, for it is the first real challenge in 23 years to Vladimir Putin's autocratic rule.  However, the significance is minimal relative to that Russian Revolution of 1917.  Responsible for all this unexpected activity is a former close friend of Putin, and hot dog entrepreneur:

Yevgeny Prigozhin is a Russian oligarch who has a net worth of $1 billion. Known as "Putin's Chef," in the 1990s Yevgeny Prigozhin parlayed a hot dog stand outside of a flea market into a restaurant which was frequented by the Deputy Mayor of Saint Petersburg. That Deputy Mayor was a young man named Vladimir Putin. Putin was so passionate about Prigozhin's cooking that he made his company the official caterer of the city. When Putin became President of Russia just five years later, Prigozhin's company Concord Catering, became the official caterer of the Russian government. Over the years Concord reportedly has received billions in government contracts to provide everything from school lunches to military and prison food services. This catering empire has turned Yevgeny Prigozhin into a billionaire. Today he also runs a network of companies that include the paramilitary organization Wagner Group and a number of companies accused of interfering in the US elections in 2016 and 2018. Integrally tied to Russia's Ministry of Defence and the GRU, Prigozhin's operations have drawn sanctions internationally and criminal charges from the US.

He is 62 years old and spent nine years in prison for theft and fraud.  It was after his release in 1990 that he opened a network of hot dog joints with his stepfather, got rich and gained considerable influence.  The Wagner Group was said to be Putin's private army, and they dabbled in Africa and the Middle East, helped out Russia in Ukraine, and gained special permission to recruit convicts.  Their efforts allowed Moscow to plead plausible deniability.

The Wagner Group was first organized by Dmitry Utkin, a Russian officer in the Chechen Wars, and he formed this group in 2014 at around the time Russia annexed Crimea.  There are several explanations as to why Wagner, but the most prominent one has to do with Utkin's own call sign, Wagner, and Utkin's passion for the Third Reich and the German Composer Richard Wagner.

Very little real information is available about what truly is happening in Russia, for this is a controlled society where official information is totally controlled by the Kremlin.  But here is my personal take on what happened:

• For several months now, Prigozhin has been complaining about the ineptitude of Russian forces in Ukraine.  His group has been slighted in gaining armaments from their defense department.

• 
  While there might have been some internal skirmishes, he lost his patience and felt the timing was right to make a grand stand by sending a convoy to Moscow to plead their cause.
• Certainly, he has friends in the internal bureaucracy, and this built his confidence to do something for the future of Russia.  He himself is an oligarch, and he also has close friends there who are disenchanted with Putin.  Prigozhin has everything to gain from a strong country, and is an enemy of the West.
• 
  While he doesn't want to run the country, he has unveiled certain flaws and weaknesses of Putin's hold over the nation.  This apparent fragility is more real than earlier thought.
• This action he took probably places him next to Alexei Navalny as endangered within the country.  #3 now, though, is Putin.

Yesterday I participated in 15 Craigside's golf tournament.  Eight of us went to the Royal Kunia Golf Course and had a fun time.  This troubled course has quite a sad history:

• 
  Was for a long time land for sugar cane.
• Royal Kunia in the late 1980s was master-planned by Herb Horita and Castle &Cooke Homes as a 2,000-unit development.
• A golf course was built in 1994, but was kept closed because the owners had a $13 million debt to the city.  
• 
  That infamous councilwoman Rene Mansho tried to gain concessions for the company, but that failed.
• She is mostly remembered for shockingly killing the first attempt at mass transit in 1992.  If this project had continued, Honolulu would be a different city today.
• In 2002 she was convicted for misusing funds and spent a year in jail.
• She volunteers her time now on a Lion's project, Going Green.
• There was a sense then that we had too many golf courses in Leeward Oahu, 15.
• Since 2003 when it officially began play, $1 of every golf fee goes to the City and County of Honolulu, forever.
• 
  Then in 2017, the Star-Advertiser reported that the 172 acres (the golf course) would be sold for farm crops, livestock or maybe a waste disposal facility.
• The community wildly clamored.
• In the fall of 2021, the Royal Kunia Community Association sent out its first newsletter in a decade.
• Said that Royal Kunia is a Master Planned Community envisioned to be home to 4,000 dwellings, parks, a school, industrial spaces and 3 golf courses.
• Haseko Royal Kunia is responsible in Phase II to get up to those numbers.
• This newsletter is now into edition 6 for 2023 Spring.

• In any case, the course somehow continued to operate, but the promised clubhouse never was built.  Read why you might want to golf here.
• Sensational Robin Nelson-design rolls gracefully through its 7,007 yards.
• The Gold Senior's tee box, however, is usually (except for par 3s) around 100 yards closer to the green
• Rating/Slope:  73.8/136 (Black)
• $79 golf fee...but we paid only $47.

So on to our personal golf tournament.

This bag of spam musubi, apple, three macadamia nut candies and water was prepared by the dining room.

Steve and John with their musubi.

Mary Ann.

George.

David sizing up his putt.

On the last hole I lost my ball in that pond and ended with an 8.  15 Craigside provided local cuisine, boiled peanuts and edamame of two flavors, with other stuff, including wine and beer.

Our golf group.

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