This is not a great day for the USA, Planet Earth and Humanity.  MAGA for Donald Trump and our country today could well be the acronym for Make American Grim Again.  We've had worse days, but from all fronts, life is grueling. President Donald and Melania Trump went to Texas today, where flash flooding killed 120 people last weekend, with another 161 still missing.  Even though he will be in a Republican stronghold, he will be faced with the fact that  he cut back on FEMA and NOAA funding  that no doubt exacerbated the debacle.  This will not be a crowd that will heckle him for downplaying global warming, but the media will. The State Department will today fire 1300 employees, further drawing the U.S. into isolationism.  The Supreme Court this week cleared the way for these layoffs. The department has already dismantled the entire U.S. Agency for International Development. Is Elon Musk's American Party a concern? To Republicans and Donald Trump, yes. M...

 I reached a milestone today, hitting 4 million viewers: Since my first blog on 29April2008, there have been 6792 postings.  Thus, an average of close to 600 readers/day.  221 countries have visited this site. Actually, in October of 2020 I reached the limit of how many labels I could use, so in parallel I initiated a  different location , which began accumulating another set of viewers, and this blog is up to 172,000 viewers.  So you have an option to read this second site, which has the same content, but looks different.  One of the photos I used in that initial  10October2020 posting  was of Phil Spector.  Why?  My #80 favorite song was featured,  To Know Him is to Love Him , and he started performing by writing that song and is one of the three Teddy Bears.  Then he later developed his wall of sound background music for which he is famous, married Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes and became mad, as in crazy.  Incidentall...