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...

Yesterday I featured Part 1 of this posting.  I left at #9, Supervolcanoes.  Here are the remaining eight ways Humanity could go extinct.  I will today particularly focus on what I've all my adult life feared most, nuclear war. #8  Solar Storms The most intense storm peaked in the September 1-2 period of 1859, and is known as the  Carrington Event .  Carrington was a British astronomer. The aurora borealis over the Rocky Mountains was so bright, that gold miners thought it was morning. Even Hawaii saw this phenomenon . Telegraphs gave operators shocks.  However, there is a much-publicized conversation between two operators in Boston and Portland ( Maine ) who were able to communicate without using batteries to power the line. If this were to happen today, the USA alone stands to lose $3.35 trillion to our general economy. Researchers examining carbon-14 tree rings and beryllium-10 in ice cores found two other major solar storms:  in the years 774-...

The whole World had 289,936 covid cases this past week, and South Korea alone was responsible for 229,668 of them, or 79%.   The USA was #2 with 21,309, or 7%. Interestingly enough, of the 576 world deaths this past week, S. Korea had only 52 of them, or 9%.   Brazil had 171 covid deaths, or 30%, while the USA had 139 deaths, or 24%. There remains a range of questions and unknowns about our past pandemic.  One of them is, where did this all start?  Well, no doubt about the location being China, and almost surely Wuhan.  But where and how exactly?  The  New York Times  this week summarized the current state of knowledge: Was China initially hiding the truth?  Yes. The country was concerned, and ordered the original coronavirus samples be destroyed.  Maybe this was smart, but was "coverup" the reason? This Wuhan lab was known to purposefully create dangerous viruses to learn how to combat them before they emerged in the wild....