I believe we are seeing the end of the "Wealthy White Man" era.

It is how the corruption of society, government, and international relations begins and sustains. Money can buy everything.

July 2, 2020
By Haven Orecchio-Egresitz

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell

FBI agents (click here) in New Hampshire have arrested Ghislaine Maxwell, a British heiress and longtime girlfriend to Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein died by suicide in jail last August while facing charges related to the sex trafficking of dozens of underage girls. His victims have accused Maxwell, the daughter of media baron Robert Maxwell, of procuring and grooming the young girls to sleep with the rich and powerful in Epstein's circle....

Very big and exciting news.

June 25, 2020
By Jason Kelly

(From left) Maverick Carter and LeBron James.

...The pair thought it was going to be a big year (click here) for different reasons. On March 11, the same day the NBA suspended its season and a little more than a week before their adopted hometown ordered residents to shelter in place, James and Carter formed the SpringHill Co. after raising $100 million. They describe it as a media company with an unapologetic agenda: a maker and distributor of all kinds of content that will give a voice to creators and consumers who’ve been pandered to, ignored, or underserved.

SpringHill is named for the Akron apartment complex where James and his mom moved when he was in sixth grade. It consolidates the Robot Co., a marketing agency, with two other businesses. The first, SpringHill Entertainment, is behind The Wall, a game show on NBC, and the movie Space Jam: A New Legacy, which stars James and is scheduled to be released next year. The second, Uninterrupted LLC, produces The Shop: Uninterrupted—an HBO talk show featuring James, Carter, and other Black A-list celebrities—as well as Kneading Dough, an online partnership with JPMorgan Chase & Co., in which athletes talk about money to promote financial literacy. (“They do it in a way that’s incredibly relatable,” says Kristin Lemkau, chief executive officer of JPMorgan’s U.S. wealth management business, who created the show with Carter.) Uninterrupted, a hybrid production-marketing business, is also responsible for a Nike Inc. shoe collaboration and a hoodie collection for Pride Month designed with soccer star Megan Rapinoe and basketball great Sue Bird....

Texas is very hot right now, That is due to the hot air that arrived with the dust. The dust is not causing the heat, the air the dust traveled on caused the heat. The dust will ultimately become particulates that will accumulate water vapor to cause rain once the heat abates. It is a large amount of hot air though.

Donald John Trump did not have time for his PDBs and national security briefings because of “Executive Time.”

Put differently, if there is no time in the schedule then there is no opportunity for exchanging vital knowledge. 

Okay, here we go. The addition of the flu. This is out of China.

July 1, 2020

By Rachael Rettner

In the midst of COVID-19, (click here) the last thing we need is another pandemic. But scientists in China are now warning that they have identified a new flu virus in pigs that could possibly cause a future flu pandemic.

The virus, called G4 EA H1N1, is a genetic mix of the H1N1 "swine flu," which caused a flu pandemic in 2009, and other flu viruses. The study, published Monday (June 29) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found evidence that G4 EA H1N1 has infected workers on pig farms in China. But importantly, there is no indication that the virus spreads from person to person, according to CNN....

Let me clarify why the USA needs to be very vigilant regarding this virus. China currently OWNS pig farms in the USA. (click here)

Smithfield Farms sold their operations to China a few years ago. The pig FARMERS that supplied Smithfield Farms are in several states and they know who they are. There MUST BE STRICK STANDARDS IN REGARD TO THE PEOPLE AND SUPPLIES USED ON THESE FARMS. 

China businessmen/women could easily carry this new virus into the USA and to the pig farms here. NOW, is the time to prevent infections making it into the USA and DEFINITELY control it to remain in China. 

The National Academy of Science isn't publishing this for no reason, this is very important and the containment of any global spread is extremely important.

From the Proceedings:

Contributed by George F. Gao, April 28, 2020 (sent for review December 9, 2019; reviewed by Ian H. Brown and Xiu-Feng Henry Wan)

Pigs are intermediate hosts (click here) for the generation of pandemic influenza virus. Thus, systematic surveillance of influenza viruses in pigs is a key measure for prewarning the emergence of the next pandemic influenza. Here, we identified a reassortant EA H1N1 virus possessing pdm/09 and TR-derived internal genes, termed as G4 genotype, which has become predominant in swine populations since 2016. Similar to pdm/09 virus, G4 viruses have all the essential hallmarks of a candidate pandemic virus. Of concern is that swine workers show elevated seroprevalence for G4 virus. Controlling the prevailing G4 EA H1N1 viruses in pigs and close monitoring in human populations, especially the workers in swine industry, should be urgently implemented.

These findings need to be expedited and they may have already been sent to the White House. If there is any evidence to this virus in the USA it will fall on the shoulders of the White House IF NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE TO PREVENT THE SPREAD.

No one in the scientific community has been sitting on their hands. This is from 2009.

A swine influenza virus (SIV) (click here) vaccine-challenge pig model was used to study the potential of a conserved matrix 2 (M2) protein vaccine alone or in combination with an inactivated H1N1-vaccine to protect against H1N1 and H1N2 viruses. The H1N1-vaccine and heterologous H1N2-challenge virus model has previously been shown to prolong fever and increase SIV-associated pneumonic lesions. The M2 vaccine in combination with the H1N1-vaccine reduced the H1N2 induced fever but not virus shedding. The M2 vaccine alone reduced respiratory signs and pneumonic lesions to levels similar to the negative control pigs following H1N2 infection. This study found that the M2 protein has potential as a vaccine for SIV-associated disease prevention. However, development of an immune response towards the major envelope HA protein was required to reduce SIV shedding

I think the innovation of the face masks available today is wonderful.

Breathable Face Mask (click here) With Clear Window Visible Expression For The Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

This one is very thoughtful in providing a face mask that disabled Americans find helpful, especially with their caregivers.

I have a concern for all these magnificent masks, in that there is no rating system. The new "social masks" need a way of testing them and assessing their effectiveness. The consumer needs to feel confident they are purchasing the mask they need to protect them from each other's potential to carry the virus. I doubt Homeland Security will take up this task, but, I think the better authority to develop a system of testing and a classification ID is the CDC. If there are foreign methods already in use that can be applied to American masks, all the better.

Americans need to take this seriously. The "social mask" provides freedom of movement while being responsible. I think they need to feel confident in their choices.

Happy National Postal Worker Day

'Wait a minute Mr. Post Man!' (click here)

We want to say thanks!

And make sure you do just that this Wednesday for National Postal Worker Day.

Of course, you'll want to thank your post women as well, I guess there weren't post women back when the Marvelettes wrote that song.

National Postal Workers Day a chance to show our appreciation for everything they do six days a week, rain or shine.

And on this special day, here's a little factoid that might impress your friends:

Back in 1913, the Postal Service started delivering packages up to 11 pounds.

You could send anything as long as it didn't weigh too much, and I mean anything, including children.

For the whopping price tag of 15 cents, little James Beagle, barely under the weight limit, was delivered to his grandma just a few miles away.

And believe it or not, that kind of thing actually happened for more than a year before the postmaster general decided it probably wasn't the best idea.

Good call, buddy.

There are about 490,000 postal workers across the country.

National Postal Worker Day was put together by some Seattle postal carriers in 1997.

Pompeo stated Russian interference in Afghanistan is nothing new. Then why does Russia have favored nation status with Trump?!?

July 1, 2020

Taliban commanders (click here) have confirmed that Russia has offered financial and material support to its members in exchange for attacking US forces in Afghanistan.

The practice was first reported by the New York Times last Friday, which cited US intelligence officials.

President Donald Trump has since strongly denied that he was told of this intelligence, and has attacked its credibility, characterizing the existence of Russian bounty payments as fake.

But three separate Taliban sources told Insider that they were aware of Russian bounty payments being made — though they stressed that only the less-disciplined elements on the fringes of the group would take up such an offer....

Fringe or no fringe Putin is practicing contract killing.

The USA fails to stem SARS-CoV-2 within the population of the country.

There are now 2 strains that are known. The "G" strain is more contagious and is the strain that entered New York. The changes revolve around a "U" nucleotide. I think the "G" is a popular reference and not scientific.

This is a unique strain to the USA, in that, it came from a Seattle student with flu symptoms. This strain contains five mutations that cannot be traced to any other part of the world. Uracil is the scientific name of ONE OF FOUR nucleotides bases. Yes, the human genome is built on 4 bases linked together to form 20 nucleotides of "3 base chains."

uracil (U) (click here)

Five weeks later, (click here) a high school student in Snohomish County, Wash., developed flu-like symptoms. A nose swab revealed he had Covid-19. Scientists sequenced the genome of his coronavirus sample and found it shared the same distinctive mutations found in the first case in Washington, but also bore three additional mutations....

The confirmed cases of COVID-19:

Globally - 10,321,689

USA - 2,573,393

The USA now accounts for more than 24 percent of all confirmed cases.

The Americas have 5,218,590 confirmed cases. The Americas are more than 50 percent of confirmed cases. Of the Americas, the USA is more than 49 percent of the confirmed cases. The USA leads in the number of confirmed cases.

Deaths caused by COVID-19:

Globally - 507,435

USA - 126,573

The USA now accounts for nearly 25 percent of the deaths. The USA leads in the number of deaths.

The USA has FAILED to protect it's people, hence, it's economy. Now, the strategy by the White House is to return the economy regardless of leading the world in cases and deaths, ALLOWING more and more danger to the people and increasing the chances of infection and/or death.

The CDC has been issuing guidelines to stem "at risk" behavior.

Guidelines including for funerals (click here)

These are a few of the guidelines for riding in elevators when unable to take the stairs, which has it's own "Passing Distance" problems.

The recommended measures will include: (click here) 

- requiring all riders to wear masks;
- limiting the number of riders;
- marking paths on the floor to direct people in and out;
- and posting signs to remind people to "not talk unless you have to,"

Nancy Clark Burton, a senior industrial hygienist at the CDC, told the Times.

Senator Harris is the only qualified Democrat with an extensive history of police reform. Critics will always exist.

I think some of the resistance to Senator Harris during her presidential run was her laughter. She tends to smile and laugh at times when perhaps is best expressed with a more serious tone. I know she finds challenges to her ideas amusing because they are well thought out, but, a response that incurs a smile should be curtailed to a serious attitude that takes on the challengers rather than dismissing them.

I wish her great luck in pursuing the VP post. I think she is great and will be greater as Vice President.

June 29, 2020
By Jeffery Taylor

Kamala Harris’s push (click here) for police reform in the Senate is shaping up as an audition for the job of Joe Biden’s vice president, as she makes herself a highly public voice for change after years as a no-nonsense prosecutor.

By promoting a bill to ban police chokeholds and make other changes -- and by publicly clashing with a senior Senate Republican over the legislation -- Harris has put herself front and center in the debate over congressional efforts to change police behavior.

The reform debate burnishes the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general as a social-justice activist. It also protects the Biden campaign from potential criticism of her efforts while in those jobs to slow innocence bids and punish parents whose children were truants, among other contentious actions....

Peace lost to heavily armed anarchists.

June 30, 2020

New video shows (click here) the chaotic aftermath (click here) of Monday’s deadly shooting in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest area — which one volunteer medic described as a “war zone.”

Footage posted on Facebook by Converge Media shows the frenzy inside the cop-free CHOP zone after gunfire erupted there around 3 a.m. on Monday, leaving a 16-year-old boy dead and a younger teen critically wounded.

The nearly 40-minute clip also shows the bullet-ridden white Jeep Cherokee SUV that the teens were believed to have been riding in.

Witnesses said they had spotted the vehicle near one of the makeshift barriers around the protest zone just before the shooting, Seattle Police said....

The only "carrot and stick" Trump has with Putin to stem any war is the G8.

Trump doesn't read. He has repeatedly refused national security meetings while he was a candidate. It isn't that Trump didn't have the information about the assassination of American troops, it was that he didn't bother to know it.

September 2019
By Shannon Bugos

Less than one year (click here) after President Donald Trump informally announced that the United States would withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the State Department announced on Aug. 2 that the move was officially complete. The treaty’s death leaves just the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in place to limit U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons deployments, and that pact is due to expire in February 2021.

For several years, the United States has alleged that Russia was in violation of the INF Treaty by testing and deploying a banned missile system, and Washington pinned its treaty withdrawal squarely on Russia. “Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in announcing the U.S. move. “Over the past six months, the United States provided Russia a final opportunity to correct its noncompliance. As it has for many years, Russia chose to keep its noncompliant missile rather than going back into compliance with its treaty obligations.”...

Trump is not a competent leader.

June 29, 2020
By Carl Bernstein

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls (click here) with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations....

All this is happening because Trump is an absentee president. It isn't as though he even cares about these developments. He just has no will to confront major powers unless it is to defame and demean allies. They are easy to pick on without worrying about real confrontation.

Besides, I think Trump believes if he can only get the strongmen of the world to understand how much better life would be if they were all capitalists along with him, the world would have peace. 

June 29, 2020
By Eva Dou and Shibani Mahtani

China on Tuesday (click here) adopted a contentious national security law that will allow Beijing to override Hong Kong’s judicial system and target political opponents in the city, stripping the territory of autonomy promised under the handover agreement with Britain and raising the prospect of further retaliation from Washington.

The move has strained China’s relations with the United States and other Western nations, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying on Friday that Washington would place visa restrictions on Chinese officials responsible for curtailing freedoms in Hong Kong. On Monday, China said it would impose reciprocal measures on unspecified American officials, while the U.S. Commerce Department suspended some of Hong Kong’s preferential trade treatment under U.S. law....

Now is the time for Democrats to shine.

June 29, 2020

Democrats hoping to flip the Senate (click here) seized on a major Supreme Court ruling on Monday striking down a Louisiana law that would've restricted abortion access, attacking Republican candidates in crucial races across the country for supporting conservative justices who dissented in the case.

Nowhere was that more evident than in Maine, where state House Speaker Sara Gideon sharply criticized Sen. Susan Collins for voting to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, even though Collins supported the court's decision.

Gideon touted her endorsements from groups supporting abortion rights like NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood Action and publicly questioned whether Collins still believed that Kavanaugh viewed Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision in which the court ruled that the Constitution protects a pregnant woman's right to choose to have an abortion, as "settled law."...

Abortion must be safe and available.

June 7, 2019
By Domenico Montanaro

Three-quarters of Americans (click here) say they want to keep in place the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Roe v. Wade, that made abortion legal in the United States, but a strong majority would like to see restrictions on abortion rights, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll.

What the survey found is a great deal of complexity — and sometimes contradiction among Americans — that goes well beyond the talking points of the loudest voices in the debate. In fact, there's a high level of dissatisfaction with abortion policy overall. Almost two-thirds of people said they were either somewhat or very dissatisfied, including 66% of those who self-identify as "pro-life" and 62% of those who self-identify as "pro-choice."

"What it speaks to is the fact that the debate is dominated by the extreme positions on both sides," said Barbara Carvalho, director of the Marist Poll, which conducted the survey. "People do see the issue as very complicated, very complex. Their positions don't fall along one side or the other. ... The debate is about the extremes, and that's not where the public is."...

Susan Rice (click here) is not qualified to be Vice President. She had interesting foreign policy credentials, lacks sincere domestic experience and economic credentials, and is another Clinton when it comes to the right-wing press.

Trump knew about the Taliban and his response was to withdraw them from Afghanistan. 

Putin has leverage over Trump. He has done nothing but walk all over him and spit in his face and Trump smiles and asks for more. Trump is compromised. The USA is not safe with him in the White House.

May 26, 2020
By Barbara Starr

Washington - Senior US military commanders (click here) have been discussing options for significantly reducing the US troop presence in Afghanistan earlier than planned, according to several defense officials.

The closely held discussions were sparked in part by worries that President Donald Trump may want to withdraw troops before voters go to the polls in order to fulfill his 2016 campaign promise to bring troops home, the officials said.

Trump has said he would like to pull American soldiers out of Afghanistan ahead of the timeline set out in a February agreement with the Taliban -- a prospect that raises concerns within the Pentagon about troop safety and the possibility it could spark renewed violence in the country.

The New York Times first reported the Pentagon plans.

It is not clear if Trump has asked for a full withdrawal or would agree to let some number of troops stay, but military leaders could present Trump with options for a decision within days....

Well done former Vice President Cheney.

Thank you.

PS: Good looking hat.

I want to briefly point to reports of adult inflammatory disease during and/or having COVID-19. I am not surprised and this is exactly why no American should be staring down this virus figuring it won’t harm them. This inflammatory syndrome first showed up in children about two months into this pandemic. There are reports in several countries including the USA that adults are showing prolonged symptoms of COVID-19, including chronic low grade fevers that abate only with rest. These adults can be testing negative or positive for the virus.

My understanding of this after reading about it is that is a chronic reaction to cell, tissue and organ damage, This is a very dangerous virus. It is not the flu. This is a larger virus in size and it lysis cells to release replicated RNA. It is more than likely the cell, tissue or organ damage continues even after the patient is testing negative for the virus. 

This new syndrome is chronic and cannot be cured so much as treated. Everyone will not have that same symptoms because different cells, tissues or organs were affected. We know there have been brain injury as well as heart attacks from this virus. Why would any medical doctor expect the same exclusive symptoms to this new chronic disease? The only qualifier is exposure and illness from the virus before the onset of symptoms. 

I am wondering if asymptotic patients testing positive for COVZiD-19 are experiencing any of these inflammatory reactions. I also encourage long term tracking of symptomatic patients. I do not believe the viral inflammation is not finished with them. ANY inflammation of any human body cell, tissue or organ is damage and can effect longevity. 

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication may relieve the inflammation, hence the symptoms but regular doctor visits should be mandatory to insure the medication isn’t a problem,

"Good Night, Moon"

Waxing gibbous

8.2 days old

59.1 percent lit

June 27, 2020
By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

For sky gazers, (click here) this warm July provides plenty of planets.
As July opens its evening sky, cosmic companions Jupiter and Saturn rise in the southeast around 9:30 p.m. By midnight, the planetary chums hang out high in the south.

Jupiter is magnificent at -2.7 magnitude, while the ringed planet Saturn is substantially more dim at 0.2 magnitude, brightening only slightly, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory.

The gibbous moon begins to approach the two gaseous giant planets July 3 near the star-spangled Sagittarius constellation, which you can spot above the southeastern horizon. On July 5, the moon officially becomes full at 12:44 a.m. Eastern time. (For the Central and western time zones, the moon becomes officially full July 4.)

The bright moon scoots by the teapot handle asterism in Sagittarius on the evening of July 5 to form a trio with Jupiter and Saturn. By the next night, the gibbous lunar companion moves along....