Two days ago I reported on the Birmingham, Alabama shooting that left 4 people dead and 17 injured.  As of today, no suspects.  Most probably a gang-related event.  100 shell casings were found.   $100,000 reward for tips that lead to an arrest and conviction of those involved . On to the subject of the day:   KAMALA HARRIS WILL PREVAIL OVER DONALD TRUMP ON NOVEMBER 5 .  That is not my prediction, but that of Allan Lichtman, a historian renowned for accurately predicting 9 of the 10 most recent presidential elections.   This video actually says Lichtman's record is 10 for 10 . Who is Alan Lichtman? Born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents in 1947.  So he is 77 years old. PhD from Harvard. Is a Democrat. Has taught at American University in DC since 1973. In the early 1980s, while a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology, had a 17-episode stint on the game show Tic Tac Dough, and won $100,000. Ran for the U....

Hate to on this Sunday feature killings, but the USA had another  mass shooting yesterday , in Birmingham, Alabama.   Four were killed and more than 20 injured.   Authorities are not sure who or how many were responsible.   No suspects yet.  You can be pardoned for not even knowing this happened, for something similar occurs all the time. There have been more than 400 mass shootings in the U.S. this year. The  FBI defines mass shooting  as an event in which one or more individuals are actively engaged in killing or attempting kill people in a populated area.  Implicit is the use of firearm.  Usually needs to have at last three deaths. ONE THIRD of all the world's public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 occurred in the U.S.  Size of circle indicates relative number of shootings. Not sure why that period ended more than twelve years ago, but that was from  Wikipedia , and until 2012 there have been 4,011 mass shooti...

President Joe Biden finally did what he should have before the primaries.  He dropped out of the race for the  presidency, and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris .  I think Michelle Obama has a better chance against Donald Trump, but Harris deserves this chance.  Biden will remain president until his term ends on 20January2025.  Republicans reacted that this deficient human should now resign, leaving House Speaker Mike Johnson next in the line of succession.  Just maybe this is the beginning of what the Democrats needed, a miracle, to not get blown out by Trump and other Republican candidates on November 5. Kamala Harris will be the first Black/Asian woman to run at the top of any major ticket.  She is 59 years old. Harris was born in Oakland, California in 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, came from India as a 19-year old graduate student in 1958, earning a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley  in nutrition and endocrinology in 19...

Looking back in time, my  posting on 28February2020  summarized my return from Thailand: The fearsome factor was that Thailand had the second-most cases of   covid-19   when I left Honolulu on February 12.  Today, it is #9.  No new cases appeared after I arrived in that country.  No one is known to have died. (Interestingly enough, today  Thailand  is #33 in total cases and #143 in cases/million population.) But on  11 March2020 the World Health Organizaton declared the coronavirus to be a global pandemic .   This was the first time that a pandemic was caused by a coronavirus. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1200 points, the worst since 2008.  The eleven year bull market came to an end. China and Italy were locked down. Tom Hanks posted on Instagram that he and his wife Rita Wilson had contracted this virus.  They were in Australia. Two Utah Jazz players tested positive and the NBA canceled the rest of the se...