Willem's Planet

I see the Christ The Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro is considered one of the ‘new’ Severn Wonders of the World. (So who decided which wonderful things the seven ‘Wonders’ are?  The ‘New Seven Wonders of the World was an initiative that started in 2000 as a project for the new millennium, to choose Wonders of the World from a selection of 200 existing monuments. The New7Wonders Foundation – based in Zurich, Switzerland – announced the winners announced on 7 July 2007 in Lisbon.   They claim more than 100 million votes were cast through internet or by telephone, but critics say not enough controls were in place and that the survey was therefore ‘unscientific’).

I watched most of the opening ceremony on Friday night (brought to us tape-delayed and stuffed with commercials by NBC here in the USA).  It was not Beijing 2008 or London 2012, but still a great show.

And I actually like watching the ‘delegations’ of athletes with their flags from of all of the world coming into the stadium.

 

The Weather Channel reminded its readers in a tweet that the 2016 ‘Summer’ Olympic Games is technically being held in winter. (It’s winter in the southern hemisphere, of course).  Rio de Janeiro is about as far south of the equator, compared to the distance  Miami is to the north of the equator.

 

The International Olympics Committee and Team USA are informing corporations that the Olympic rings and the Twitter hashtags #teamusa and #Rio2016 are copyrighted and not to be used by corpprations. So on Monday night Stephen Colbert ‘introduced’ his new ‘tea’ called Musa Tea (grown on the ‘Musa Mountain’), and displayed the hashtag #TEAMUSA on the screen. Yes, the IOC Is a money making machine, but money (or the lack of spending it in the right places?) could not fix dangers such as the Zika virus, sewage in the swimming and sailing water (‘keep your mouth closed’ is the advice), uninhabitable Olympic housing and crime. Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to the Olympics and hope it goes well.  The world needs it to go well.

 

Hillary Clinton accepted her nomination as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency officially today.  The Democrats ran a great 2016 National Conference, packed with entertainment and party leaders in attendance.  They also rolled out the heavy artillery to make the case against Republican candidate Trump, and speaking out in support of Hillary Clinton.  On Wednesday night nobody less than New York American business magnate, politician, and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, Vice-President Joe Biden and President Obama himself, rallied the supporters in the arena in Philadelphia.  President Obama spoke heartfelt and eloquently about the American values of inclusion and diversity, and many other things.  ‘President of the United States’ was all the lettering on the big screen banner behind him, said.   No need to say more.  I am going to miss him as President, as I know many millions of my fellow Americans will, as well.

Meanwhile, back at the Republican National Committee offices tonight, chairman Reince Priebus fired off a tweet urging Republicans to contribute to Donald Trump’s campaign.

The responses were brutal.  Here is a sampling from Twitter, safe for printing in a newspaper.

@Reince I’d rather set fire to my own money than donate to Trump’s GOP.
@Reince It’s over. You’re done. #ripGOP
@joekarce @Reince Yeah that tea party thing worked out REAL well. *sarcasm* Trump is killing the GOP. #goodriddance
@joekarce @tmkrause @Reince at least HRC is not a draft-dodging Putin-loving traitor like Comrade Trumpsky! #SovietTrump #DonTheCon
@Reince Tax returns first.
@SWNID @Reince who cares… Geesh
@Reince Never again in my life. And I have sent y’all a lot. Hope your party dies, actually.
@Reince Hahahahahahahahahaha! (No.)
@Reince Sure. As soon as you nominate a Conservative. Or Republican. Or human being. #NeverTrumpOrHillary
@Reince no.
@Reince I’ll write a check if Trump releases his tax returns, promise.
@Reince No. The GOP is dead. You let Trump kill it.
@Lonestarmomcom @Reince Go get it from the rich guy that doesn’t pay his damn taxes Reince! Frig off!
If I donate, what assurances can you offer that my money won’t go into #DonaldTrump’s legal defense fund for his countless lawsuits? @Reince
@Reince you must be so proud.
@Reince congrats on personally murdering the GOP. Good job!

 

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show last night started with an homage (of sorts) to Hillary, in a psychedelic video short. Death, taxes and Hillary was the tagline .. but it is not such a sure thing at all that Hillary will be elected Madam President in November.  (It was a historic moment today at the Democratic National Convention when, for the first time, a woman was officially nominated for President).   Incredibly, candidate Trump got a little bump in his poll numbers despite a somewhat rag-tag Republican convention.   In some ‘battleground states’ they are even, say the polls.  

First Lady Michelle Obama hit a home run with her speech at the Convention tonight, many political observers just saying Wow!  The speech was heartfelt and personal, about her eight years in the White House (‘I wake up every morning in a house built by slaves’), how she and the President had to protect their daughters, and try to give them as normal a life as they could.  She also had praise for Hillary Clinton and for her tenacity in the face of opposition, and unmistakable criticism for Donald Trump : saying that the big issues cannot be boiled down to 140 characters (a reference to Trump’s Twitter messages).  She also said that since the president has the nuclear codes, the nation needs someone is steady, measured and well-informed.  Yes, let’s all agree about that !

It’s the Democrats’ turn for their convention this week, held in Philadelphia.  There are 57 fiberglass donkey statues around town, part of the host committee’s Donkeys Around Town program.  A donkey is the Democratic party’s symbol and there are 50 for the states, five for U.S. territories, one for Washington, D.C., and one for Democrats Abroad.

Here is a set of panels from Bloomberg Businessweek that outline the ‘state of the art’ of measure that one can take to be secure on-line.  There is a new Jason Bourne movie out, and I’m sure some of what’s described in here will feature in it. I guess if you are Edward Snowden, you have your audio jammer and bug scanner, you go all cash, run Tails (no Windows! or Mac OS!), wear sunglasses all the time in public.  Man! If you”re not paranoid before taking all these measures, they are sure to get you there. And does it help? As Joseph Heller of Catch-22 fame said: ‘Just because you’re paranoid, it does not mean that nobody is tracking you’.  Even so – I guess I will try to stop using wi-fi at the airport, change my passwords more often, and clear my browser cookies from time to time. 

 

 

Meteorologist Ryan Maue reported about the warm weather prevailing all other the continental United States, in a tweet.   Some meteorologists use the term ‘heat dome’ : a stationary mass of high-pressure air that is not getting dissipated as usual by the continental jet-stream.

Elsewhere on the planet, the hottest temperatures on record outside of Death Valley, California, have been recorded : 129 ºF (54ºC) in Kuwait and in Iraq.

 

The New York Times reports that just a few miles from the Cleveland downtown, recently getting a $50 million make-over, hundreds of dilapidated homes are getting torn down. The long shadow of the predatory lending of in the run-up to the 2008 global financial crisis resulted in blighted neighborhoods.   The number of residents in the Cleveland metro area is down from 1 million to about 400,000.  Check out all the red dots I got from real estate site zillow.com.

‘The Northern Mariana Islands cast 9 votes for Donald J. Trump!‘ yelled their representative on the floor of the convention center today, during the official count of the votes that saw Trump be officially nominated as the 2016 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States.  ‘How bizarre, I thought‘, and where in the world is this speck of island anyway?. (It’s in the north Pacific, close to Guam).  And if I were king for a day I would terminate their ‘United States Commonwealth’ status immediately (as punishment for voting for Trump, of course).

 

Wow.  I followed today’s Republican National Convention speeches on and off, and happened to see the speech Mrs.Trump (Melania) made. Kudos to her, she did well, was the immediate consensus from the panel of pundits, but a little later, a bombshell.  There is no question that key parts of the speech were plagiarized.  Says Ezra Klein on vox.com : For one thing, she or her speechwriter appear to have cribbed a whole paragraph from Michelle Obama’s Democratic Convention speech in 2008. For another, she and/ or her speechwriter included a full-on Rickroll.   What is a Rickroll, I wondered? Well, Wikipedia to the rescue. ‘Rickrolling is a prank and an Internet meme involving an unexpected appearance of the music video or lyrics for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

Melania’s speech had the words in ‘he will never, ever give up and most importantly, he will never ever let you down’.  The Trump campaign surely has some damage control to do – and a speech writer to fire.

Cleveland, Ohio is hosting the Republican National Convention this week.  Ohio is an ‘Open Carry’ state, which means guns can be carried openly on one’s person.  The law that allows that come with lots of caveats – don’t point the gun at someone, loaded or not. Firearms may not be taken into courtrooms, jails, schools, bars or parts of airports.  And not inside the Convention Center in Cleveland.  With 3 more police offers murdered just this morning in Baton Rouge, the Police Union petitioned Ohio Governor* John Kasich to suspend the Open Carry permission in the security zone.  No can do, came the reply : he does not have legal authority to do that (a bill eh signed into law.  Does that make sense?). Does it make sense that the list of 72 items prohibited in in the ‘event zone’ include umbrellas with metal tips and tennis balls, but not guns? Of course not. Can I bring a gun that shoots tennis balls? wondered Stephen Colbert out loud on his Late Show on Friday night.

*Kasich, a former 2016 Republican candidate for President, is unlikely to appear at the Convention, even though it is in his home state!  He not supporting Donald Trump.

 

Alright, another week with a little too much ‘breaking news’ of the bad kind, with the terrible event in Nice, France, and the bloody coup attempt – that had apparently failed – in Turkey. (I say all of this knowing that there are on-going wars elsewhere in the world, that are no lober considered ‘news’).   The events in Turkey made me look it up in Wikipedia, and check out the Bosphorus Bridge that was closed for awhile by the Turkish Army.