On 6 January 2001 then president Donald Trump clearly attempted to overthrow our Democracy.  The effort was inept, but still criminal.  In hindsight, after   all 10 living former Department of Defense secretaries published in the  Sunday, 3January2021, issue of the Washington Post a public letter , declaring that the U.S. presidential election was over, Trump should have realized that without the Department of Defense, there was no hope for a successful coup. The letter – signed by Dick Cheney, James Mattis, Mark Esper, Leon Panetta, Donald Rumsfeld, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel, Robert Gates, William Perry and Ashton Carter – amounts to a remarkable show of force against Trump’s subversion efforts just days before Congress is set to count Electoral College votes . Watch William Cohen explain on CNN their motivation for this extraordinary action. Okay, that was one Republican effort to destroy our Democracy, although I would argue that the culprit was Donald Trump, not the entire party. 

Checking Worldometer, there were 122,971  new World Covid cases this past  week , 84,153 for just the USA.  This probably means that many countries are just not reporting anymore.  Japan and South Korea had for the past few months always been at or close to #1.  They must have given up keeping score. The World on 21 January 2022 had 3,847,291 new cases, just on that date. On a daily basis, the world new cases/day dropped by a factor of 219 from the peak last year.   The deaths/day fell to around 700,000 around mid-December of last year. I can count eight to ten waves, with the final one this summer unworthy of being included. The USA had 108,386,688 total covid cases, with 1,174,847 deaths. Thus 32% of Americans have been infected. Actually, probably closer to one in four, for many got it more than once. There was only a 0.3% chance that you died from covid if you were in the U.S. The mortality rate was 1.1% Since the beginning the World had 695,250,823 total cases, with 6,915,134 tota