First, yes, the Donald Trump/family New York fraud court case began today with The Donald personally in attendance. Trial will last into December and at worst will only cost him $250 million, which he'll contest. No jail time for this infraction.
Got this in my e-mail this morning:
Good morning, Patrick! We are excited to share the historic news that California Gov. Gavin Newsom will appoint EMILYs List President Laphonza Butler to fill the seat of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
As EMILYs List founder Ellen Malcom said, the governor has made an extraordinary choice. Laphonza was the first Black woman and the first mother to lead EMILYs List. She will become the only Black woman serving in the U.S. Senate and the first openly LGBTQ+ person to represent California in the chamber. And as a champion for labor rights and working people everywhere, we know that she will serve the people of California honorably.
The California 2024 Senate election now becomes complicated, for there is a March primary for this seat. The way this state runs, the two finalists will be Democrats, with three currently announced to run: Katie Porter, Adam Schiff and Barbara Lee. And Butler can also join the race if she so wishes. Plus, on 5November24, there will need to be another election to fill the remaining days of Feinstein's seat. Of course, if one of them wins both, that individual will have a seniority lead over any new senator.
Want to immediately become a billionaire? It's Powerball time again. 10:59 EDT tonight for $1.04 billion. If you take all the money, you get slightly less than half a billion dollars. The odds of you pulling this off are one in 292.1 million. Two years ago, there was a $2.04 billion Powerball winner.
Well, Taylor Swift showed up again to watch Travis Kelce and his Kansas City Chiefs. Also in the suite at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey were Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Sophie Turner, Blake Lively and Antoni Porowski. No doubt more Swifties were in the audience.
A few of us in the Photography Club at 15 Craigside had lunch yesterday with Scott, our instructor, who has been coming every month now for a decade. He is the digital imaging specialist for the Honolulu Museum of Art. All he gets out of volunteering is lunch. We each month turn in a few photos, and they are shown for comments. This photo to the left is one I took on a flight from Sydney to Tokyo. For reasons I don't truly understand, everyone seemed to like it. Enlarge it and you will see a reddish smudge in the mid-left side of the shot. What was that?
At lunch I mentioned how just the fact we were now here at 15C meant that we have done well in life. We all started with nothing much, and in different ways became triumphal. What made us successful? One resident later that day sent me a link to Chatri Sityondtong from Thailand, who today is mostly known to be the founder and chairman of ONE Championship, a mixed martial arts behemoth. No question that he is wealthy and truly successful. I watched the video and noted the following:
With no money and no support from his family, as his father had abandoned them, Chatri went to the USA and graduated from Tufts, then Harvard.- He said a good part of his success had to do with suffering, sacrifice and dealing with adversity.
- From very little, I ended up at Stanford, but the school provided everything, so I never agonized.
He started his own financial company, then another, and became very rich. But he gave that all up to return to the Orient, and started over, and became rich again. After my PhD I joined the University of Hawaii, and more than half a century later, still have an office on campus.
You can go to Wikipedia and read about him. There are other contrasts about our lives, but the one factor that stood out was that we attained our own success in totally different ways. He suffered, while I did not. I guess my concluding assessment is that there is no one way to gain success in life. Another is, what is success?
For some, it is to become a billionaire. And most will fail if that is your goal. As I have not really done anything truly fabulous, maybe my goals were too easy to accomplish. Well, maybe not, for my one goal left is to Save Planet Earth and Humanity, the theme of this blog site, not exactly an easy task. And while I have failed at this, I remain, still, happy about my attempts.
Part of this feeling is that I have continued to harbor hope that one, if not all of the following crusades, will contribute to the advance of our society.
- I worked on laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
- I spent some time at NASA's Ames Research Center on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
I wrote the original U.S. Senate bill on hydrogen that became law.- I integrated the full range of my professional interests into the Blue Revolution. You can watch my TEDx talk on this subject I gave almost two years ago.
Typhoon Koinu formed this weekend, and is now up to 125 MPH. Taiwan and Hong Kong are threatened.
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