WHY ARE WE HERE? WHERE WILL WE GO?

My desktop is full of Trump jokes, so today, I'm dumping them on you.  This posting will be presented bass ackward, starting with where The Donald needs to be dumped today, Lake Charles, Louisiana.  It was exactly 50 years ago when I last visited this city.  Well not quite, for a city needs 100,000 residents and Lake Charles then had a population of almost 80,000.  Want to guess what it is today?  Approaching 80,000. Why should Trump be in Lake Charles?  Well, don't presidents visit sites suffering from catastrophic damage?  Sure, almost always it's after it's safe, but if he can so quickly get over COVID-19, a mere Category 2 hurricane should not be a problem for him.  The middle of Hurricane Delta 's eye will actually pass over Lake Arthur, located around 40 miles east of Lake Charles, early this evening. Next, my song #81, and here are the finalists, all popular during my teenage years: Love is a Many Splendored Thing :  The Four Aces The ...

It was damning enough that the boorish performance by Donald Trump in his debate with Joe Biden last week hurt his cause.  Then soon thereafter Trump contracted COVID-19.  He could have blamed Biden, but it was all too clear that the unmasked nomination ceremony at the White House of Amy Barrett to the Supreme Court was probably the super spreader source.  More than 20 people working there have now been infected, and it is the world hotspot, in cases/million, for this disease. Wonder why Amy Barrett escaped this ambush?  No Neanderthal gene?  ( scroll down to my previous posting ) Not sure, but the primary reason is that she already suffered from this coronavirus a few months ago.  Oh, an aside, she is (was? ) a church leader for a secret church society known as People of Praise , which is severely anti-abortion and where only men are ordained to head family and church.  The Democrats will have some fun if enough Republicans can stay healthy for the c...

Experts are slowly beginning to understand why some of us are more prone to become infected from COVID-19 with higher  mortality rates.  Pre-conditions and older age certainly hurt, and so does economic level.  Now, your genes are coming into play. As only a beginning, if you have Neanderthal genes , that is now almost a pre-condition for COVID-19 mortality, or soon will be.  How do you know if you harbor this cluster of genes?   You can test for your DNA.  Genetics Digest provides some guidelines: Don't necessarily buy a popular brand. Look for the details you want. Find a company with a professional in charge. Top three: #1 CRI Genetics :  two options, $99 and $199 ( supposedly they had a 50% off offer that expired yesterday ) #2 23andMe :  $99, $199 and $499 kits #3 AncestryDNA :  $99 and $119  You need to confirm with them about that Neanderthal gene. In general, what are your odds of harboring this gene  ( the darker the pur...

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...

Saturday Night Live finally returned Saturday night, and opened with the  Trump ( Alex Baldwin ) versus Biden ( Jim Carrey ) debate .  It was a hoot! My Monday postings in the past provided reviews of two films I saw over the weekend.  As I've stopped going to movie theaters, here are two productions dealing with the USA versus USSR space race from Prime and Netflix.  First, though, I'll start with a  historical perspective so you can appreciate when these events occurred: Salyut ( salute or fireworks--changed from Zarya for dawn because China had a program called dawn ) program: 1971-1986--Salyut 1-7 Salyut 1 became the first crewed space station, and there were 9 in all 71 successes and  10 failures, with 4 cosmonauts lost in space Soyuz:  the spacecraft that took the cosmonauts to Salyut flew 786 missions, with only 3 failures ten variants nothing was reusable While supposedly a civilian operation, like NASA, much of the earlier Salyut missions were...