Tuesday, September 15, 2020

 

Last night I went to bed at 10:30, got up once during the night, again at 5:30, waking/getting up at 7:15.

Last night I played 4 games on Chess.com, winning all 4. The last game was close but he blundered his queen in the endgame.

I wanted to go for a power walk this morning but it was raining.

Teresa left at 9am to get an appointment at Nueva eps.

I watched the first 20 minutes of the Today show. I left the apt at 10am and I got as far as the gas station when I realized I wasn’t wearing my facemask. (As I was leaving the parking garage a car was coming in so I snuck out the gate without having to go through the guardhouse where maybe someone might have mentioned something.) I returned to the apt, put on my facemask, washed my hands and left again.

At the mall I had a café con leche at Todo Fresa. About 11:15 I went into Exito and paid the utility bill then picked up a few items and took a taxi back to the apt.

Teresa called just as I returned to the apt and asked me to meet her for lunch at El Pastelito by our old apt.

I changed from jeans into shorts and left the apt. I arrived at the restaurant where we had a nice menu del dia. She went to visit her mother and I returned to the apt.

I am watching an interesting Netflix series and I’m only in episode 5 of season 1.

Teresa returned at 7pm with a chicken pastry for me for dinner.

 

America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been “shocking” and “unbelievable,” with matters made much worse by “terrible leadership,” said Bill and Melinda Gates in a series of interviews this week.

The couple condemned the United States for bungling its pandemic response. They criticized not only the Trump administration for its inaction, but also national bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for making key errors over the past year.

“You know, this has been a mismanaged situation every step of the way,” Bill Gates told Stat News. “It’s shocking. It’s unbelievable — the fact that we would be among the worst in the world.”

 

Starting in late March, President Donald Trump began touting Easter Sunday as the day that America should reopen after the nationwide coronavirus quarantine.

"I would love to have the country opened up and raring to go by Easter," he said on Fox News on March 24, adding that it would be great to see "churches packed full of people for Easter."

Pressed on how he came up with that timeline, which most medical experts said would create a dangerous environment through which Covid-19 might spread wildly, Trump told reporters this:

"It was based on a certain level of weeks from the time we started and it happened to arrive, we were thinking of terms of sooner. I'd love to see it come sooner."

Easter Sunday fell on April 12 this year.

On April 13 -- aka the next day -- Trump had this exchange with Washington Post editor Bob Woodward about the virus:

TRUMP: And Bob, it's so easily transmissible, you wouldn't even believe it.

WOODWARD: I know, it's --

TRUMP: I mean, you could, you could be in the room -- I was in the White House a couple of days ago, meeting with 10 people in the Oval Office and a guy sneezed, innocently. Not a horrible --

WOODWARD: Yeah.

TRUMP: You know, just a sneeze, the entire room bailed out, OK? Including me, by the way.

And that conversation, of course, came almost a month after Trump told Woodward on March 19 that he "wanted to always play [the virus] down."

 

Scientific American is backing Joe Biden for president, the first endorsement in the magazine's 175-year history. The editors backed Biden in the magazine's October policy and ethics section while calling President Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic "dishonest and inept."

In the announcement, editors wrote that the endorsement was not given lightly, but with sufficient evidence to support that "Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science." The article also calls into account numerous decisions on the Trump administration's part to roll back environmental protections and medical care in legislation. 

"That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment," the editors wrote. "These and other proposals he has put forth can set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future."

 

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, facing a surprisingly serious challenge from former state Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison this fall, has latched on to an, um, interesting issue to bash Harrison: tax returns.

Late last week Graham released 11 years of his taxes and called on Harrison to do the same.

Over the weekend, Graham tweeted this: "It's been 72 hours since I released 11 years of state and federal tax returns and challenged @HarrisonJaime to do the same. Crickets. What is he hiding?"

And then on Monday, in a press event at a gun shop, Graham said this of Harrison: "I've released 11 years of my tax returns. Where are your tax returns? How did you make your money?"

 

The US has 6,521,289 ð 6,565,583 ð 6,612,789 coronavirus cases with 193,700+ ð 194,200+ ð 195,500+ deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 716,319 ð 721,892 ð 728,590 cases with 23,288 deaths.  Medellin has 55,405 ð 56,111 ð 56,896 cases, an increase of 583 from September 14^th to 15^th. Envigado has a total of 3,138 cases, an increase of 47 from September 14^th to 15^th.

 

Joke of the day

A forgetful old gasman named Dieter,

Who went poking around his gas heater,

Touched a leak with his light;

He blew out of sight –

And, as everyone who knows

Anything about poetry can tell

You, he also ruined the meter.