The  James Webb Space Telescope  ( JWST ) had a successful launch on Christmas day.  This $10 billion system is on a 29-day journey to Lagrange Point 2, around a million miles away.  Note, that our Earth blocks the Sun's rays from the JWST.  We won't know if it will work until after it gets there, and first sight might not be received for three months.  In the meantime,  there appears to be no way to correct any mistake  as we did for the Hubble Telescope.  The JWST has six times the collecting size of Hubble's, and is 100 times more sensitive. The  Canary Island's La Palma Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption  which began this past September, finally ended after 85 days, the longest on record for this island: 3000 buildings destroyed. $1 billion of damage. I've always wanted to visit La Palma because I have featured it several times in this blog and one of my books as the future potential site to create a  mega-tsunami , a possible analog of the Big Island of Hawaii se

The   New York Times   this morning provided graphs that showed why Republicans will become a truly minority party if only the pandemic went on for a few more decades.  Well, that's an exaggeration, and that's not what they said, but a higher rate of Republicans is dying from COVID-19: Turns out the death rates were similar until the end of last year.  What happened was that vaccines arrived, and today,  40%  of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about  10%  of Democratic adults.  Why has this happened?  Disinformation, promoted by  Fox News , Sinclair Broadcast Group and online sources.  The question is if this is because of conservative policy, or because those who watch Fox News are predisposed to be less inclined anyway.     NYT  further suggested that the difference will drop because the new Pfizer and Merck antiviral treatments for those who contract COVID-19 will result in fewer deaths, plus red American will reach herd immunity faster through natural i

                              From  Worldometer  (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):          DAY    USA    WORLD     Brazil      India      South Africa June     9    1093     4732         1185        246       82 July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572 Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130 Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82 Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85 Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118 Dec     30      3880    14748       1224       299      465 Jan      14       4142     15512        1151        189      712                  Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398 Mar     2        1989      9490        1726       110      194 April   6          906     11787         4211       631       37 May    4         853     13667         3025     3786      59   June   1         287    10637         2346      3205       95  July   7          251      8

 From the morning  New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing.  They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans.  What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we are prematurely open