PIPER

Dr. Phillips works at Walter Reed.  Donald Trump tweeted:  Do not be afraid of Covid.  How can the leader of our country continue to be so dumb and irresponsible?  How can his supporters continue to support him?

Let me go on to something from The New York Times:

Outbreaks are again increasing in the U.S. The number of new cases per day has risen more than 25 percent since mid-September. “Covid-19 is spreading again across most of the U.S., hammering rural America and smaller cities and raising anxiety in New York,” Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The outbreak connected to the White House is responsible for about 30 known cases so far — more than the average daily number of new cases recently in all of Australia.

Further on Trump versus Biden:

Oct. 15, New Scientist: “The green economy has grown so much in the U.S. that it employs around 10 times as many people as the fossil fuel industry — despite the past decade’s oil and gas boom.”

June 30, Bloomberg.com: “Tesla Inc.’s market value has surpassed Exxon Mobil Corp.’s in a sign that investors are increasingly betting on a global energy transition away from fossil fuels.” Tesla makes electric cars, batteries and solar products.

Aug. 25, CBS News: “Exxon Mobil, which joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1928, is being removed from the blue-chip stock market index. Its replacement: enterprise software company Salesforce.com.”

April 6, Recharge: “Renewables accounted for nearly three-quarters of global power capacity additions last year — half of which was switched on in Asia, according to latest figures from the International Renewable Energy Agency.”

Sept. 17, Fortune editor Alan Murray: “Lululemon C.E.O. Calvin McDonald told me yesterday his company now has more U.S. stores closed due to environmental risk — fires in the West, hurricane in the Gulf, etc. — than due to Covid-19.”

Enough for COVID-19, Trump and the presidential election.  My posting today will focus on Piper.  Piper?  Usually I give some thought to my pontifications.  This morning I received a set of jokes, interesting features and other likes from my most prolific provider.  I don't think she quite thought I would use a couple of them in this manner, but let me begin with a short 3-minute animation of so-called Piper the dog, which is popular in social media circles as supposedly an Oscar winner:

I thought, how can a 3-minute film win an Oscar, so I investigated.  Well, the cute dog did not get an academy award, but Piper the Sandpiper, only 6-minutes long, did, as confirmed here.

Also arriving in the mail with Piper the dog were two Pipers, magicians from Britain's Got Talent:

That minor disturbance I identified as Delta yesterday just exploded into a Category 4 hurricane, with a track predicted for New Orleans or thereabouts:

Here are previous landfalls this year:

Note that the West Coast of the USA has never experienced a hurricane, and the last one that hit Hawaii was Iniki in 1992.  There is no record of a hurricane making landfall over the Big Island, Maui and Oahu.

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