Thursday, August 6, 2020

Wednesday, August 5, 2020


Quarantine Day 141.

Last night I went to bed at 10:30, got up once during the night finally getting up at 7:15. If I have oatmeal at night (lots of liquid) then I get up 3-4 times during the night but if I have something simple like an apple then I tend to get up 1-2 times during the night.

Last night I played 4 games on Chess.com, winning 2, losing 1, and tying 1. I was winning one of the games but was running out of time so was forced to take my opponent’s last pawn in order to draw due to him having insufficient material.

I had the white pieces in 3 of the games. My new rating is 1233.

Last September I hurt my left shoulder, probably from a gym exercise although I didn’t feel any discomfort until hours later. As long as I can remember I’ve always slept on my left side (which I’ve read is the best side to be on anyway) but I couldn’t any longer because of my sore shoulder. It took a while to learn to sleep on my right side – at least it’s better than feeling pain. After 10 months my shoulder finally feels healed but I’m having trouble getting back to left side sleeping because I’ve gotten so used to right side sleeping. Sorry for the rambling.

I finally bit the bullet and fixed my out-of-order blog postings.

I watched the first 20 minutes of the Today show then left for my 50-minute walk. Teresa returned soon after, having only walked around the inside of the apt complex.

My daughter sent me a Whatsapp message introducing her own Youtube channel as a life and career coach. Just go to Youtube.com, search for Jeannie Andresen and she is the one with the big smile.

We were playing parcheesi when I heard the Dunkin Donuts theme song. I asked Teresa if she wanted a donut and she surprised me by saying “yes”.  I looked outside and saw the van just the other side of Exito. I changed my shoes and put on my mask and by then it was almost at the guard house. I went downstairs and bought 2 filled donuts (1 whipped cream the other strawberry) for 6mil. Teresa chose the whipped cream one.

Teresa beat me in parcheesi today 4 games to 3. 90% of games end with each of us taking turns throwing the dice and whoever hits the desired number (again, usually ‘1’) wins. She is know ahead overall 167 games to 164.

For those of you mostly housebound like me, if you have Netflix I highly recommend these series: Dirty John, You, Designated Survivor, and The 100. Right now, I’m working on the 7-season series Blacklist but I’m not sure I’ll continue.

 

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have called for the nation's public schools to re-open this fall, but a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that children of all ages are susceptible to coronavirus infection — and can efficiently transmit the virus to others.

The study analyzes a coronavirus super spreader event at a Georgia sleepaway camp in June. Several hundred campers (with a median age of 12) and staffers (with a median age of 17) were tested for COVID-19. Of the 344 individuals for whom test results were available, 260 came back positive for COVID-19, or more than 75%.

 

Neil Young sued President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign Tuesday for copyright infringement, saying he doesn’t want his music used as a theme song for a “divisive un-American campaign of ignorance and hate.”

The Grammy-award winning Canadian-born musician filed the lawsuit through his lawyers in Manhattan federal court, seeking up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each infringement.

A message seeking comment was left with a campaign spokesperson.

The legendary singer cited repeated use of two songs: “Rockin’ in the Free World” and “Devil’s Sidewalk.”

 

Emergency room physician, Dr. Megan Ranney, called out Donald Trump for dismissing 160,000 American deaths and failing to come up with a national pandemic strategy more than six months into this public health crisis.

In a discussion with MSNBC’s Ari Melber, Dr. Ranney blasted Trump for acting as though the U.S. coronavirus casualties are meaningless, particularly during his disastrous Axios interview.

Dr. Ranney also debunked Trump’s claim that his administration is doing everything in its power to stop the coronavirus.

“The claim that we are doing everything is just blatantly false,” the doctor said. “The federal government still lacks a comprehensive national strategy around testing, around personal protective equipment, or around national mandates for masking.”

 

White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci agreed on Wednesday that the United States has the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world. “Yeah, it is quantitatively if you look at it, it is. I mean the numbers don’t lie,” Fauci said when asked during an interview with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta whether the U.S. had the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak. The U.S., which accounts for less than 5% of the world population, leads all other countries in global coronavirus infections and deaths.

 

Magically, as soon as federal agents withdrew from Portland, the rioting disappeared. As restrained Oregon state police took the place of federal agents around the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse downtown, the protests were peaceful and people went home rather than engage.

 

The Atlantic: “No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, ‘I don’t take any responsibility at all.’”

 

For the third straight week, no NBA players tested positive for the coronavirus. As it turns out, we are not powerless to stop the deadly pathogen. We just have to take it seriously.

That may seem like rudimentary analysis five months into a pandemic that’s killed nearly 160,000 Americans. But with President Donald Trump nonchalantly saying the catastrophic death toll “is what it is” — as if he were Bill Belichick talking about an errant call in the fourth quarter — it is easy to feel defeated. And with nearly every country in the world currently closed to Americans, we are literally trapped.

But we possess the ingenuity and resources to curtail the coronavirus. The missing ingredients are willpower and discipline. The NBA is running a comically restrictive bubble at the Walt Disney World resort, where players face mandatory quarantine for menial offenses such as picking up delivery food or chicken wings at an area strip club. But the stringent formula is working. After all, there is an estimated $1 billion in revenue at stake.

 

Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that the massive explosion in Beirut was a bomb attack has revived fears of the president’s potential to foment international crises.

In off-the-cuff remarks at the White House on Tuesday, Trump called the blast a “terrible attack”.

“I’ve met with some of our great generals and they just seem to feel that this was not some kind of a manufacturing explosion type of event,” the president told reporters. “It was a bomb of some kind.”

Soon after, CNN quoted Pentagon officials as saying there was no evidence of any attack, raising the question of where Trump got his information. Lebanese officials were reported to have sought urgent clarification from US diplomats.

 

For the second time this summer, voters in a solidly Republican state have decided now is the moment to expand Medicaid coverage through the Affordable Care Act.

Missouri voters passed a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid during Tuesday’s primary elections; 53 percent of voters supported the measure and 47 percent opposed it. That vote comes about a month after Oklahoma voters also decided to expand Medicaid via ballot referendum by less than 1 percentage point.

 

Trump sues Nevada for expanding voting by mail as he declares the practice "safe" in GOP-led Florida. Trump falsely claims on "Fox & Friends" that Nevada will mail ballots to people who aren't registered to vote there

 

The US has 4,719,276 ð 4,772,487 ð 4,821,668 coronavirus cases with 155,800+ ð 157,100+ ð 158,300+ deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 327,850 ð 334,979 ð 345,714 cases with 11,624 deaths.  Medellin has 22,511 23,158 ð 23,968 cases, an increase of 800 from August 4th to 5th. Envigado has a total of 1,411 cases, an increase of 33 from August 4th to 5th. Well, for the past few days new cases have plateaued. Hopefully, that will continue.

 

Joke of the day

The Sunday School lesson for the first graders was on the plan of
salvation. The teacher asked, "If I sold my house and my car, had
a big garage sale, and gave all my money to the church, would I
get into heaven?"

"No!" all the children answered.

"If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard, and kept
everything neat and tidy, would I get into heaven?"

Again, the answer was, "No!"

"Well," she continued, "then how can I get to heaven?"

One boy confidently answered, "You've gotta be dead!"


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