But first, something more about  gold,  a metal I featured yesterday in this blog.  Well, after hitting an all-time high of $5,594.82/ounce, settled at $5,149.99/oz, 4% lower today.  However, spot prices still up 19% for January and 3.6% this week. I should add that silver is also jumping high, then similarly dropping 6% to $108.84/ounce, after reaching $121.64/oz.  This metal has surged more than 50% this year.  Finally, platinum, too, is following the same path, hitting a record high of $2,918.80/oz on Monday, then falling 1.7% to $2,650/oz. We are 10 days to the start of the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics in Italy.  Everything you need to know about these Olympics : Will run from February 6 through 22. Venues will include Milan, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Valtellina, Val di Fiemme and Anterselva. Remember that Italy is 6 hours ahead of New York, 9 hours from Los Angeles and 11 hours from Honolulu. Opening Ceremony. February 6. Milano San Siro Olympic Stadiu...

After I posted my blog yesterday, I thought I'd watch that classic 1964 anti-nuclear war black comedy,  Dr. Strangelove , which got 98/94 ratings from  Rotten Tomatoes .  Conveniently, I had recorded it some time ago off TCM.  Of course I had seen it a long time ago, but forgot all the details.  A timetable of what was happening during that period: There was a half-hearted  Bay of Pigs invasion  in April of 1961.  Incredibly, there is a true story of how five of us as Stanford juniors actually had planned to swing through the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the spring break, then join this attack.  Good thing we chickened out. The  Berlin Crisis  came in August of 1961 when the wall was built between East and West Berlin. I graduated and in June of 1962 moved to the Hutchinson Sugar Company in Naalehu on the Big Island of Hawaii, a location where I could not receive radio or television. Came the  Cuban Missile Crisis  from 1...

 The World is not at peace.  There is still war in Ukraine. Israelis are again killing people in the Gaza Strip. The  USA yesterday bombarded dozens of targets in Yemen  controlled by Iran-backed Houthis, killing at least 31. President Donald Trump has a draft list of  43 countries banned from entering the U.S .  There are three categories, red, orange and yellow.  On the red list are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. The Doomsday clock was on 28January2025 moved to 89 seconds to midnight,  THE CLOSEST EVER TO DOOMSDAY .  Not only the threat of nuclear armageddon because of Russia, but now also global warming and the threat of artificial intelligence. One of my more obscure subjects of interest is world peace.  My first  Huffington Post  article, in 2008, was entitled:   Well, Barack, We Have a Problem ... This article was published when Barack Obama and ...

Did you know that the Doomsday Clock was just set to its most dangerous time in history?   Atomic scientists who worked on on the first atomic bomb founded in 1945 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  Feeling great remorse about what they had done, these scientists created the Doomsday Clock in 1947.  The closer to midnight the closer to the end of humanity.  The time was initially set to 7 minutes away from midnight.  They've changed it 26 times in 78 years.  After the end of the Cold War in 1991, the clock was set to 17 minutes, or 1020 seconds to midnight.  That is chairman of the board Leonard Rieser making the adjustment on 26November1991.  They just re-set it to 89 seconds.  Tomorrow, the details. That introduction about does it for science day, but let me proceed to President Donald Trump, as he is going haywire on human and global rights, that I can foresee growing protests to escalate over the coming months.  Thus,  Rolling ...