GREATEST OF ALL TIME

Some latest news of today from the Sunday New York Times:

• What about the latest advice on booster shots?
• One thing is generally known:  these vaccines all protect you from dying.  But there remains a lot of confusion.
• First, no doubt these vaccines all lose effectiveness over time.  
• But how much?  A lot of conflicting info.
• Pfizer's vaccine drops from 96% to 84% after four months, but a third shot could bring effectiveness up to 95%.  No mention yet of how this figure drops at eight months.
• 
  The panel advising the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommended booster shots, and it's as clear as muddy water:
• For healthcare workers and those who are 65 and older, or at high risk of severe illness from infection, yes, you're eligible.
• For some reason, they specifically indicated those 16-64 not be given a booster shot. 
• What then about those 12 to 15?
• Moderna individuals will need to wait, but can they get the Pfizer as the third shot?
• No decision about a second Johnson&Johnson second inoculation.
• All the above was advisory.  Both the FDA and CDC still need to announce their decisions. 
• This is one matter where science is being challenged by morality:  should the rich get a third shot before the poor get any?
• 
  38,000 customers outside New Orleans still are without power from Hurricane Ida.
• If all countries meet their promised emission cuts:  THE GLOBAL AVERAGE TEMPERATURE WILL STILL RISE 5 F.

As this is Sunday, good a day as any to talk about The Greatest of  All Time, or GOAT.  To begin, there was a time in sports when a goat was the person who royally screwed up to lose a game.  So there are totally conflicting definitions of this term.  Today, I will only address the capitalized version, or GOAT.

No doubt in my mind that if a world poll is taken, the GOAT would be God or Allah, as all major religions, save for maybe Buddhism, have some form of this fictitious immortal.  Way up there would also be Shiva, Buddha, Mohammad and Jesus.

Way back in 1978 white separatist Michael Hart published a book ranking the 100 people who most influenced human history.  The #1 person would then be the GOAT:

• #1  Muhammad
• #2  Isaac Newton
• #3  Jesus
• #4  Buddha
• #5  Confucius
• #10  Albert Einstein
• #100  Mahavira

But, hey, a white separatist?  And no Abraham Lincoln in the top 100?

I would think Time magazine might be a more respected source.  In 2013 it came up with the 100 most significant figures in history:

• #1  Jesus
• #2  Napoleon
• #3  Muhammad
• #4  William Shakespeare
• #5  Abraham Lincoln
• #6  George Washington
• #7  Adolf Hitler
• #100  John Locke

So again, a religious leader is considered the GOAT.  There must be something to religion.

Note that there are no females.  BBC History Magazine in 2018 had a list of 100 women who changed the world:

• #1  Marie Curie
• #2  Rosa Park

The next three were Emmeline Pankhurst, Ada Lovelace and Rosalind Franklin.  I vaguely remembered Franklin as that scientist who never quite got mentioned much for discovering the structure of DNA.  Ever hear of the other two?  We remember Watson and Crick for their double helix.

• Six years ago, while on a river cruise on the Danube, I visited Shonbrunn Palace in Vienna.  Maria Theresa once lived there, and I named her as my most extraordinary female in all of history.  Got to tell  you about her, and to quote from my posting:
• Was active around the time of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
• Blond, blue-eyed and short, at the age of 23, pregnant with her fourth child, her father, Emperor Charles VI (right) of the House of Hapsburg, suddenly died.

• 
  The emperor not having a son, Maria Theresa became the first female ruler of the empire, which included Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Lodomeria, Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands and Parma.
• Mind you, her husband, Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, was not exactly a liability, although he was known to have mistresses.  However, he was not involved at all with running the country, but instead, became quite a successful entrepreneur.  To the right are Maria and Francis, with son Franz Joseph.
• THEY HAD 16 CHILDREN.

• 
  Franz Joseph became Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia, and was President of the German Confederation from 1850 to 1866.  Incredibly enough, he was still running things in 1914 when his heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, were assassinated, and Joseph's staff essentially sent the ultimatum that sparked World War I, resulting in 9 million deaths.  He died at the age of 86!

• 
  Youngest daughter was Maria Antonia (Marie Antoinette, right), who became Queen of France  at age of 14 and guillotined by revolutionaries.
• Maria Theresa was hardly perfect, for she was a bigot and had a dislike of Jews, but allowed them flexibility at commerce.
• She also never bathed, for water in those days was considered to be dangerous.
• A devout Roman Catholic, she found a way to tax the clergy and introduced secular subjects such as law into their universities, initiating the decline of theology as the main foundation of higher education.
• Reformed their educational system and improved medical care.

• 
  Outlawed witch burning.
• Not an intellectual and was smart enough to recognize the mental superiority of her advisors.
• Earned a ton of titles, but was never made Empress.
• Maria Theresa ruled for 40 years.  
• The country was on the verge of bankruptcy when she took over, was challenged by several nations who wanted to test her mettle, but she persevered, and her territories, and Europe in general, prospered for more than a century after she passed away.  Overcoming economic turmoil, though a series of wars and all the politics associated with her job, she continued bearing children to the age of 39.
• Surviving smallpox at the age of 50, she lived to the ripe old age of 63, when the life expectancy in Europe in the late 1700's was around 33

Okay, why did she have so many children?  All but one daughter was married off to expand her empire.  She allowed one, her favorite Marie Christine (who she called Mimi, left), to marry for love because they (Duke Albert-Kasimir of Saxe-Teschen) were born on the same day.

Tell me, now, has anyone ever heard of any female in the history of humanity who was more extraordinary?   Doesn't Maria Theresa  deserve to be the most outstanding female leader, heck, make that, leader, of all time?

Apologies to Tom Brady, the New York Times this morning reported on an entirely different kind of goat:

Lani Malmberg travels around the West with a few hundred goats, which eat the tall brush and grasses that power wildfires and restore fire-ravaged lands to greener pastures. After the goats digest the brush, their waste returns organic matter to the soil, increasing its potential to hold water — a 1 percent increase in organic matter can hold an additional 16,500 gallons of water per acre, Malmberg said.

Looking for a murder mystery involving a Secretary of State?  Hillary Clinton did as her husband and partnered with another best selling author, Louise Penny, to write State of Terror.  As you must know, Bill teamed with James Patterson on two of them.