Wednesday, August 19, 2020

 

Quarantine Day #155.

Last night I went to bed at 10:30pm, quickly fell asleep, got up 3 times during the night, finally waking/getting up at 6:45.

Last night I played 3 games on Chess.com, winning 2 and drawing 1. In the first game I had white and played the London System. I was soon up a couple pawns but he evened things out until the endgame when I went up a queen. Once again I had to take his remaining pawns as I ran out of time forcing a draw. In the 2nd game I had the black pieces and played the Sicilian Defense, was never in trouble, and checkmated him in 62 moves. In the 3^rd and last game I had the black pieces and played the Sicilian Defense again. This was by far my most challenging game. Constant pressure prevented me from castling, he had a won game but in the endgame he blundered and I checkmated him.

I watched a new War of the Worlds TV series on Direct TV. It wasn’t very good and the reviews I read on IMDB.com were scathing. It also appears that the first season of 8 episodes were shown over a few night last December and they also haven’t made season 2. I think I’m done with that one.

Something on the morning news about “light at the end of the tunnel” while showing an ICU ward so I hope there’s good news for a change. New infections seem to have stabilized in the large cities here.

I watched the first 20 minutes of the Today show then went for my 45-minute walk. At the end I walked to the Pasteur pharmacy on Avenida Poblado and bought a bottle of calcium tablet for Teresa. While waiting to complete my purchase a couple young ladies stopped and asked me if I wanted to buy an LED lightbulb. Around the corner I saw a young man, probably all a team, doing the same.

When I returned Teresa informed me that her girlfriend with ovarian cancer passed away and she will soon be leaving for the mass in La Estrella. I reminded her not to shake hands, hug, or kiss anyone because I don’t want her returning with the virus.

Medellin Guru posted that the entire board of directors of the Medellin utility provider EPM resigned. This leaves Medellin’s mayor Daniel Quintero alone. The board took this action after a collapse in corporate governance when the politically inexperienced mayor took major decisions that would normally go through a ratification process through the board of directors.

Teresa left at 11:15.

Working on those Chess.com chess puzzles I keep bouncing between a rating of 1700 and 1800.

For lunch I ordered an individual pizza from Papa John’s that was delivered by a Rappi driver (bicycle) 50 minutes later. I tip well.

In the afternoon a strong breeze came up and it got a little chilly as the temp fell to 74 degrees.

Jose called me and we chatted for awhile. We’re hoping things will improve soon so we can return to playing chess at the mall.

 

Stuart Stevens spent four decades helping Republicans—a lot of Republicans—win. He’s one of the most successful political operatives of his generation, crafting ads and devising strategies for President George W. Bush, Republican presidential nominees Mitt Romney and Bob Dole, and dozens of GOP governors, senators and congressmen. He didn’t win every race, but he thinks he had the best won-lost record in the Republican campaign world.

And now he feels terrible about it.

Stevens now believes the Republican Party is, not to put too fine a point on it, a malign force jeopardizing the survival of American democracy. He’s written a searing apologia of a book called It Was All a Lie that compares his lifelong party to the Mafia, to Bernie Madoff’s fraud scheme, to the segregationist movement, even to the Nazis. He’s pretty disillusioned.

 

A person who visited a bar during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has tested positive for the coronavirus, health officials in South Dakota said.

 

Scientists may now have an answer to one of the most crucial lingering questions about COVID-19: whether people develop long-term immunity.

Early research suggested that coronavirus antibodies — blood proteins that protect the body from subsequent infections — could fade within months. But in their concern about those findings' implications, many people failed to consider our immune system's multilayered defense against invading pathogens.

Specifically, they discounted the role of white blood cells, which have impressive powers of recollection that can help your body mount another attack against the coronavirus should it ever return. Memory T cells are an especially key type, since they identify and destroy infected cells and inform B cells about how to craft new virus-targeting antibodies.

A study published Friday in the journal Cell suggests that everyone who gets COVID-19 — even people with mild or asymptomatic cases — develops T cells that can hunt down the coronavirus if they get exposed again later.

 

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci said Russia's claims of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine is "bogus”.

 

Coronavirus vaccines won’t be mandatory, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, at a time when many Americans are apprehensive about vaccination in general.

Fauci said that he’s still cautiously optimistic that at least one effective, safe COVID-19 vaccine will be approved by the end of 2020 or early next year.

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison came under fire from anti-vaxxers following comments that he wants to make coronavirus vaccines “as mandatory as you can possibly make it.”

 

Fox News has already moved on from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee’s damning new report dissecting the Kremlin’s effort to help President Donald Trump win the 2016 election and the direct links between his associates and Russian intelligence.

The president’s propagandists have spent the years since his election developing a complex alternate reality in which claims of Russian election interference or corrupt ties between Russia and Trump and his associates are a hoax promulgated by the duplicitous anti-Trump media and the “deep state.” In their telling, the real story is malfeasance related to the investigations into Trump associates' Russian meddling by special counsel Robert Mueller and other law enforcement officials.

In the year leading up to the report’s publication, Fox’s weekday prime-time shows alone produced more than 600 segments chewing over every possible data point to make that case, according to Media Matters’ internal database. 

By contrast, the network has already dropped the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Tuesday report down the memory chute. Fox ran a handful of segments covering the story on Tuesday and early Wednesday morning -- but has not mentioned it since the 5 a.m. EDT hour. 

It’s not like there’s nothing to cover. Over nearly 1,000 pages, the report outlined “a wide range of Russian efforts to influence the Trump Campaign and the 2016 election,” providing a wealth of new details that are devastating to the Fox narrative and putting a bipartisan sheen on the old ones, including:

·        Russian President Vladimir Putin “directed the hack-and-leak campaign,” in which Russian intelligence targeted Democratic Party emails during the 2016 election and released them through WikiLeaks and other outlets. This was part of a wide-ranging Russian effort to “damage the Clinton Campaign and tarnish what it expected might be a Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and generally undermine the U.S. democratic process.”

·        Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign’s one-time chair, was a “grave counterintelligence threat” whose role and proximity to Trump “created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.” Notably, Konstantin Kilimnik, a close business associate to Manafort, is identified as “a Russian intelligence officer” with whom Manafort was sharing campaign details and who “likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” The committee also “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected” to the hack-and-leak operation.

·        Trump and his campaign tasked his longtime political adviser Roger Stone to “obtain advance information about WikiLeaks's planned releases” of Democratic Party emails stolen by Russian intelligence, and they believed he had succeeded in doing so. The committee also assessed that Trump spoke with Stone about WikiLeaks on “multiple occasions”; the report notes that the president had claimed in written statements to the special counsel’s office that he did not recall any such conversations.

·        George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, repeatedly tried to set up a personal meeting between Trump and Putin. The people he worked with to try to do that indicated that he “was not a witting cooptee of the Russian intelligence services, but nonetheless presented a prime intelligence target and potential vector for malign Russian influence.” The committee also assessed that Papadopolous learned about the Russian hacking campaign from an individual with Russian ties “well before any public awareness,” and that it is “implausible” that he did not tell the campaign about that information.

·        Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist, and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer, were among the participants in a June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower in New York City with Donald Trump Jr. and senior campaign officials, who intended to “receive derogatory information that would be of benefit to the Campaign from a source known, at least by Trump Jr., to have connections to the Russian government.” The committee assessed that Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin “have significant connections to the Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services,” that were “far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”

 

Teresa returned at 5:30.

I understand the government lost their right to have special rules protecting those of us who are over 70 years old so, like others, we are allowed out 2 hours a day for exercise.

After my usual 4 games on Chess.com it was 9:30 and I turned the TV to CNN (channel 706) and watched the remainder of tonight’s Democratic National Convention. President Barack O’Bama delivered a powerful address to the nation. It was an unfortunate, but necessary, all hands on deck to the nation.

It started raining here about 10pm and continued through at least 2:30am.

 

The US has 5,436,026 ð 5,485,220 ð 5,523,886 coronavirus cases with 170,100+ ð 171,300+ ð 172,500+ deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 476,660 ð 489,122 ð 502,178 cases with 15,979 deaths.  Medellin has 36,055 ð 36,956 ð 37,928 cases, an increase of 970 from August 18^th to 19^th. Envigado has a total of 2,023 cases, an increase of 32 from August 18^th to 19^th.

 

Joke of the day

Finland has just closed their borders. No one will be crossing the Finnish line.