We were in Phuket as COVID-19 was just getting started in February of 2020.  In fact, WHO had not yet declared this to be a pandemic.  Here is what I said almost six years ago: Phuket is the largest island of Thailand, but also a province and city, including 32 more tinier islands.  The area is slightly less than Molokai, which is slightly smaller than Singapore.  The ocean it faces is the Andaman Sea.  The population is approaching 400,000, although there are an additional 200,000 unregistered migrants, ex-pats and others.  The city is 536 miles south of Bangkok . That disastrous Indian Ocean Earthquake of 2004 brought tsunamis to the west coast of Phuket, where we are staying.  While 5300 were killed in all of Thailand, Phuket reported 250 deaths. Like Hawaii, Phuket gets around 10 million visitors per year.  Caucasian tourism is high, from Europe, Russian and the USA.  We'd guess that 80% of the guests at the Le Meridien is white.  Am...

We are a few days away from our exciting adventure to the Orient.  One stop will be Taiwan.  However, Japan-China relations just deteriorated. Japan's first female Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on 31October2025.  All went well. But on November 7, Takaichi veered from Japan's policy of " strategic ambiguity " about Taiwan, suggesting that an attack on Taiwan could amount to a "survival-threatening situation" that would permit Japan to exercise collective self-defense. This drew the ire of China, which has maintained that Taiwan is part of China, and that they will someday, by force, if necessary, regain total control,  as was done with Hong Kong.  We also will visit that city, twice on this trip. Takaichi refused to retract her remarks. Usually, most of what happens is just tense talk, but this time, China urged their citizens to hold off on any trip to Japan this year. If the Chinese take this seriously, Japan will be si...

There was period from early 2020 into the end of 2021 when this blog site on Thursday was devoted to COVID-19. Remember that the official worldwide count of Covid deaths is just over 7 million.  However, the suspicion is that perhaps 36 million actually died. As far back as late 2021, it was estimated that  nearly 44% of the world's population caught Covid at least once .   This rate was as high as 79.3% in sub-Saharan Africa, as low as 13% in parts of Asia and Oceania, and 31% in the U.S. and Canada.   Forty countries had more than 70% at least once infected. Of Americans under 18, through the end of 2022, only 10% were not infected ( Novids) . 25% of Americans had still not caught Covid by the end of 2023 .  However, and this was not explained, 55% of adults think they have never had Covid. Only 13% of those 16-29 years old were Novids.  The infection rate for Blacks and Whites were about the same, around 77.5%. Asians 66% and Hispanics 81%. A...