Last week I posted a two-part series on red wines.  On this nostalgic Tuesday, I will make it a five-part series with a visit I made in 2019 to France, where we tasted champagne and Bordeaux wine and cognac.  Parts 4 and 5 will be posted on subsequent Tuesdays. But first, a few newsworthy items. As my  blog expressed yesterday , President Donald Trump has transformed himself from dud to hero. Looks like that  fragile ceasefire for the Israel-USA vs Iran War is holding.   Lot of questions about where those 880 pounds of enriched uranium might be  to  future role on how the International Atomic Energy Agency can check on Iran  to  how long the ailing 85-year old Ayatollah can hang in there  to  a million others.  However, give Trump credit for solving this war in less than two weeks.  Israel still has that Gaza Strip problem, and there continues the Ukraine-Russia war, but the world today is in a safer place than yesterday. ...

It was only a matter of time when  Donald Trump clamped down on California , the state he most hates. That ICE issue with immigrants is only a secondary matter.  He was waiting for any kind of protest to show this Democratic state who is the real boss. What he did in activating the National Guard and calling in the Marines without the involvement of Governor Gavin Newsom has happened in the past. Trump is out to embarrass Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to tarnish their image. Most fearfully, he is merely testing out how he can refine his quest to become dictator. Can't the courts check him?  They have no enforcement capability.  Trump controls the Department Defense, Department of Justice and the National Guard. Even Time magazine agrees with me. Oh well, the worse is yet to come.  On this nostalgic Tuesday, I reach back to Chapter 6 of my book,  SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth , titled,  Blackout:  Six Hours to Seattle.   I summar...

 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 a...