Before getting into Pearl's Ashes on this nostalgia Tuesday, a couple of Trump matters. Federal judges are blocking most of Donald Trump's seemingly unconstitutional edicts. The  White House is looking into impeaching any judge that rules against Trump . The House first impeaches this judge, and the Senate needs to convict. However, two-thirds of Senators need to vote to convict, so this won't happen anytime soon . This has happened 15 times in our history, the most recent, G. Thomas Porteous Jr. in 2010. Trump will keep appealing, leaving it to the Supreme Court to decide.  If this body routinely supports the President, we will have a serious Constitutional Crisis.  Democracy will fall to Dictatorship. If Hamas doesn't return Israeli hostages by Saturday afternoon, "the   ceasefire   will be terminated," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday in a statement following a meeting with his security cabinet. Netanyahu's statement comes after  P...

The latest info about COVID-19, the Delta variant and vaccinations: There appears to be a  decline of vaccine effectiveness , but not as bad as was shown in Israel.  Numbers like drop to 39% after six months might be closer to double that number. Further, those who are vaccinated, if so unfortunate as to get infected,  almost always get mild symptoms , and few die. The Delta variant is around  twice ( maybe 60% ) as infectious  as the Alpha original, but causes more severe illnesses, as the  hospitalization rate is double  that of the Alpha.  This is why hospitals are today overburdened 98% of the new cases are those who are unvaccinated . From the  New York Times  this morning: Those who are fully vaccinated have a one chance in 5000/day of being infected. In some of the safer states where more were vaccinated, this chance improves to 1 in 10,000/day.  Thus, in a 3-month period, the vaccinated here have a 1% chance of contracting C...

I stumbled across a draft of the following posting that was supposed to be published on 11 January 2021, five days after that awful day in the U.S. Congress when Donald Trump, still in office as president, was attempting to orchestrate a coup.  In a rare error of this type, it turned out I had no blog on 11 January 2021.  So I'm inserting it today unchanged.  Note: My optimism about this pandemic was unwarranted.  But the Delta variant, this B.1.617.2 strain, had not yet been detected.   Read this article , which indicates that the first notice was in India in February, with some speculation that it was more transmissible. I even went on to suggest that Congress would impeach Trump and the Supreme Court would concur.  Of course, this did not happen, which is slowly pushing the Republican party into someday fracturing.  Then again, perhaps I again might be too optimistic. The reason why I am posting this article today is that I recently woke up in ...