Skip to main content

WILL THOSE INCOMING COMET AND ASTEROID THREATEN LIFE ON PLANET EARTH?

 From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):


         DAY   USA    WORLD   Brazil     India      South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185           246            82
July    22     1205     7128         1293         1120          572
Aug    12     1504     6556        1242           835          130
Sept     9     1208      6222       1136          1168            82
Oct     21     1225      6849         571           703            85
Nov    25      2304    12025        620           518           118
Dec    30      3880    14748       1224          299           465
Jan     14       4142     15512        1151           189            712              
Feb      3       4005    14265       1209          107           398
Mar     2        1989      9490        1726          110           194
April   6          906     11787         4211          631            37
May    4         853     13667         3025        3786           59 
June   1         287    10637         2346         3205            95
 July   7          251      8440        1595           817            411
Aug    4          656    10120        1118            532           423 
Sept   1        1480    10470          703           505           235
        22       2228      9326          839           279           124
        29        2190      8859         643           309           108
Oct    5        1811       7495          686           285          103
          6        2102       8255         543           315            59
        12        1819       7544         201           249             37 
        19        2005      7528         401           160             80 
        27       1594       8671         433           734              62 
Nov   3        1436       7830        186           458             23
        10        1493      8366         264           362             48
        17        1416       8440        374           470              11
Dec    1        1633      8475         266           477             28 
          8        1324       7894         231           159             36
        15         1690      8233         227           343            54
        16           997      7115         173            391            36
        17         1653      7359         126            289           35 
        22         1634      7686         137            434           99 
        29         1777      7393         147            268           81
        30         1354      6758         154            220         126
Jan    5          1802     7551          133            325          110  

Summary:

  • Well, the Omicron variant is certainly causing havoc, increasing new deaths in the USA.
  • However, the jump to 1802 new deaths remains considerably below a year ago, when it was 4142, continuing into February with 4005 on 3February2021.
  • #2 in new deaths was Russia with 828 and #3 Poland 631.
  • There are two Omicron epicenters:  U.S. and Europe.
  • Vietnam had 17,017 new cases and 19 new deaths.
  • South Korea had 4,443 new cases and 57 new deaths.
  • China had 91 new cases and no new deaths.
  • Japan only had 1 new death yesterday, and Indonesia, with double the population of Japan, had 4 new deaths.
  • The number of new cases in the U.S. was a fearsome 704,661, an increase from the day before when it was 595,810.
  • That number of new cases about equals the sum of the next three countries (new cases/million):
    • #1  U.S.  704,661 (2110)
    • #2  France  332,252 (5072)
    • #3  UK  194,747 (2847)
    • #4  Italy  189,109 (3136)
  • States new cases (new cases/million):
    • New York  80,897 (4149)
    • Florida  59,487 (2767)
    • California  55,323 (1298)
    • Alaska  886 (1213) new cases with no new deaths
    • Hawaii  2611 (1865) new cases with no new deaths
    • Vermont  805 (1290) new cases with 2 new deaths

It was a year ago today that the U.S. Congress was invaded.  Some thoughts:

  • The only previous attack on the Capitol was in 1814 when British troops set fire to it. 
  • Blame intelligence or whatever, but how can you plan for something like this when the last time was more than two centuries ago, and close by was the enemy.
  • 727 have been charged. Remember, 7 people died, including three police officers. The judicial system decided to first convict misdemeanors.  Thus, the sentences were relatively light.
  • The next phase will be for felonies, and the sentences will go up.
  • The final group will be leaders who organized the riot (and according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, even those who were pre-meditating before that event), and could include active Congressional members up to former president Donald Trump.
  • Clearly, the Democrats want to use this event to increase their Congressional numbers on November 8, 2022.  They want Trump to continue to lie, for just that simple act of immorality will ruin the Republican party if they continue to hold back in accordance.
  • The House committee leading the investigation has a plan to prosecute leaders of the attack.
    • Republican development for the coup actually began before the 2021 presidential election.
    • It started with Trump warning that there would be election fraud. 
    • Ironically, if there was any hanky-panky, the Republicans were the ones trying to limit voting and such, including Postmaster General DeJoy, who will finally soon be replaced.
    • If Trump lost, the strategy was to gain the support of Republican-controlled state legislatures to somehow reverse the vote count.  The federal courts stopped this.
    • Failing that, they wanted Vice President Pence to on January 6 declare the electoral count void, leading to the House voting on who would be president.
    • The voting would be by states, so Trump would be the victor.
    • The riot itself, if anything, scared Pence to instead do the right thing, something he might have done anyway.  But if this insurrection did not occur, who knows what would have happened.
    • Donald Trump got close to remaining as president....but not really, for what killed the coup was the 3January2021 letter released by all ten living former defense secretaries, including the by-then-resigned Mark Esper, declaring the election was over and Biden had prevailed.
    • Also, Trump needed the support of the military, but that public letter and the patriotism of Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and his commanders, scuttled the effort.
    • I would not be surprised if some congressional members and Donald Trump himself get indicted by the summer.

Did you see Don't Look Up, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Lawrence and Jonah Hill?  It's showing for free on Netflix.  Has to do with a comet that destroys Planet Earth.  Yup, I gave away the ending.  Rotten Tomatoes did not particularly like it, bestowing 55/77 scores.

Anyway, let's get real.  According to Space.com, megacomet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (MCBB) is the find of the decade.  

  • This comet is the largest icy body ever identified and perhaps more than 100 miles in diameter.  
  • That popular Hale-Bopp comet of 1997 was 37 miles across and was visible to the naked eye for 18 months, twice as long as the Great Comet of 1811.  Came as close as 1.315 AU, or 120 million miles.
  • Halley's Comet (right), incidentally, which came in 1986, and will return in 2061, is only 6.8 miles in diameter.
  • MCBB has already sprouted a tail even though it is so far away from our sun.
  • This comet will pass by our Earth in ten years, but, as of now only as close as the orbit of Uranus and Saturn, which is about a billion miles away.
While we ponder about that incoming megacomet, did you know that asteroid 7482, with a diameter of almost a mile, will on January 18 be shooting past us at a speed of 43,000 miles per hour only 1.24 million miles away?  That would be around five times the distance of the moon from us.  That Don't Look Up asteroid was a little more than 5 miles in diameter and was a large piece of rock.

But back to that arriving comet, The Daily Beast said:  The Most Monstrous Comet Ever Known is Headed Straight for Us.  It is 20 times larger than the asteroid from that film.  Further, the speed and conformation of a comet causes nine times more damage than an asteroid.  To calm you down, though, there are so many more asteroids out there that the likelihood of a major impact from an asteroid is 100 times greater than from a comet.  Plus the article grossly exaggerated the truth about the headed straight for us statement.

Sent to me today:

-
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases.  Very few are aware that a new one,   BA.4.6,  is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples .  However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6.  Here is a  reference  as to what this means.  A series of two injections is involved.  Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab  co-packaged with  cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on  subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicious and troublesome.  This strain has also been spreading in
Post a Comment
Read more

Part 3: OUR NEXT AROUND THE WORLD ODYSSEY

Before I get into my third, and final, part of this cruise series, let me start with some more newsworthy topics.  Thursday was my pandemic day for years.  Thus, every so often I return to bring you up to date on the latest developments.  All these  subvariants  derived from that Omicron variant, and each quickly became dominant, with slightly different symptoms.  One of these will shock you. There has been a significant decline in the lost of taste and smell.  From two-thirds of early patients to now only 10-20% show these symptoms. JN.1, now the dominant subvariant, results in mostly mild symptoms. However, once JN.1 infects some, there seem to be longer-lasting symptoms. Clearly, the latest booster helps prevent contracting Covid. A competing subvariant,  BA.2.86,  also known as Pirola , a month ago made a run, but JN.1 prevailed. No variant in particular, but research has shown that some of you will begin to  lose hair  for several months.  This is caused by stress more than anythi
Post a Comment
Read more

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota.  Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north.  Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge.  If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic.  Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing.  The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University.  Caught a bus. Was called the  Century 21 Exposition .  Also the Seattle World's Fair.  10 million joined me on a six-month run.  My first. These are held every five years, and there have only been
Post a Comment
Read more