The cruise continues with two days at-sea, getting into St. John's, Newfoundland on Thursday, August 20.  I'll be including activities on board, but this period allows me to provide further episodes for a couple of series I earlier began.  Today, Part 3g of My Life. The story of My Life began  as a post on 31May2026, after I realized that, from the age of 5, my life could be represented by three periods of 27 years:  education, work and retirement.  To summarize: The average person spends the first 20 to 25 years growing up and going to school, the next 40 years working, and the final phase in retirement, generally only around 10 years. My life: I was born in 1940, and my life expectancy was supposed to only be 45.    This comes from Google AI citing Our World Data. I was born in Hawaii, not then yet part of the USA, but if I asked Google AI, what would my life expectancy be if I were born in the U.S. in 1940, the answer was 61.4. Were I to ask, since...

Before getting into Pearl's Ashes on this nostalgia Tuesday, a couple of Trump matters. Federal judges are blocking most of Donald Trump's seemingly unconstitutional edicts. The  White House is looking into impeaching any judge that rules against Trump . The House first impeaches this judge, and the Senate needs to convict. However, two-thirds of Senators need to vote to convict, so this won't happen anytime soon . This has happened 15 times in our history, the most recent, G. Thomas Porteous Jr. in 2010. Trump will keep appealing, leaving it to the Supreme Court to decide.  If this body routinely supports the President, we will have a serious Constitutional Crisis.  Democracy will fall to Dictatorship. If Hamas doesn't return Israeli hostages by Saturday afternoon, "the   ceasefire   will be terminated," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday in a statement following a meeting with his security cabinet. Netanyahu's statement comes after  P...

Season 21 of American Idol has two weekends to go.  Last night three contestants were eliminated and now 5 remain.  The show also had a scoop of a lifetime, for on walk in King Charles III and Queen Camilla.  He was only crowned Saturday.    Lionel Richie and Katy Perry   had joined Nicole Scherzinger, Andrea Bocelli and others in just entertaining them.    Watch this all here .   One of the five finalists is Iam Tongi, a Kahuku High student from  Hawaii.  The next show will be on May 14 to whittle the number down to three for the final on Sunday, May 21. About the topic of today, here is a headline you might have missed...from the  United Nations : UN DESA Policy Brief No. 153:  India overtakes  China as the world’s most populous country Some time last month--can't find the exact day--both their population reached 1,427,775,850.  But India is growing, while China is declining. Both countries had close to 6 ...

For the next few days I will focus on China, for Sunday, January 22, is Lunar Chinese New Year, and a whole lot of things are tormenting that country today.  To begin, is China the oldest civilization?  The answer is no. Well, then, shouldn't Africa be where early versions of us first settled?  This answer is yes, for  Australopithecus goes back perhaps 7 million years . and the  first  Homo sapiens  developed at least 300,000 years ago  on that continent, and maybe even several hundred thousand years earlier. However, if you do a thorough search for the oldest serious human settlement, Africa does not dominate.  It  all depends on what is really a civilization, or country . Historians seem to be in agreement that a true civilization/country needs to have a managed economy with infrastructure and political alliances.  A mere city is not good enough, for these have in history tended to disappear, sometimes by drought or armed conflic...