Confusing isn’t it?
So it never really felt like a patriotic celebration at all, not that we are staunch patriots as we are more globalists than anything else, but this broken-up approach didn’t help in fostering a patriotic bond.
Trump’s demagoguery had thrown that concept under the bus for four years and already badly damaged it.
Next year, our National Holiday will fall on a Monday and we might see a more united approach to that summer celebration...
They have also been very instrumental in controlling and manipulating them for a vast variety of reasons. Their success has depended a lot on the intelligence, education, common sense, fearfulness or gullibility of their target audience.
When one compares religious faith to belief in conspiracy theories, there isn’t much difference. Both creeds cannot prove their respective validity, and must use hear-say, irrational or unproven theories to advance and state their claims.
Anything based on commonsense, on science or proven facts is systematically rejected by proponents of both sides (religious and conspiracy advocates) that are all basing - not proving - their “truth” on isolated and group testimonies, ancient, reported events or the sheer numbers of believers they have been able to enlist and enrage to echo their claims.
The crowd effect if you will. This to me is enough to conclude that conspiracy theories and religions are cut of the same cloth.
As snow is beginning to blanket the slopes of Australia and New-Zealand, ski resorts are starting another winter season, still under the presence of Covid-19.
This time folks are getting used to the routine, but vaccination seems to be lagging woefully behind and is holding up the free-wheeling activity we now see in the United-States.
Yet, demand appears strong and, as an example, Thredbo in New South Wales, Australia, broke pre-season online sales records but still wants to cap season pass sales, claiming that their new business model is “moving away from a volume-based system. Good luck with that!.
In Australia, the slow vaccine roll-out has forced the government in Victoria, where Falls Creek, Mount Hotham, and Mt. Buller are located, to require visitors from the Greater Melbourne area (still a hot spot for the pandemic), to produce a negative Covid-19 test before hitting the slopes.
As for New Zealand is concerned Paul Anderson, CEO of NZSki, which operates Coronet Peak, Mt. Hutt, and The Remarkables adds: “There doesn’t seem to be a sense of urgency to get everyone vaccinated, so a majority of the ski resort staff won’t get their shots until later in the season. Only the ski patrol and medical rescue teams may have access to the vaccine since they’re the ones to be in regular close contact with guests...”
Tomorrow, Biden will miss his vaccination target because protection against Covid-19 has become very much politicized.
The less educated, the more gullible and the most backward people are, the most likely they were to refuse their Covid-19 shot and to be in support of Trump.
Including Utah, of course!
Having just left South Africa, we now found ourselves in the middle of the Indian Ocean, between Durban and Perth, still battered by a very rough winter sea and again suffering from a horrible seasickness to which neither Jean-Pierre nor I were used to.
We rarely went out on deck anymore and spent most of our time sleeping, eating, drinking and, when we couldn’t avoid it, dancing.
Well, there were exceptions; to celebrate his 24th birthday on July 3, after drinking more than a few cocktails, my friend JP had the dubious idea of convincing South African passengers that just boarded in Durban to throw lounge chairs overboard, into the Indian Ocean.
All of them were caught red handed by the ship security and JP had said in his defense, “We threw these for the sharks, they looked very tired; we thought they’d an opportunity to rest!”
Spectators and musicians were feeling a bit antsy as the first big outdoor concert that was supposed to fire up the Deer Valley amphitheater last Wednesday night.
We were pleased to be outside, eating our dinner and returning to our summer routine after last year’s interrupted summer.
At any rate, these concerts have to be seen as a special show where things are turned around.
The crowd is the stage, wanting to be seen and noticed at all costs, while the band is almost the audience and fills the air with some sound and no one seems to care about how it plays...
There’s internet speed and internet speed. We see it and read it on the commercials, put it seldom translate. Mbps ? What’s that ?
To get started, let’s define what “Mbps” stands for. It means “megabits per second” as a measure of internet bandwidth, or the capacity or bandwidth of the download, or upload rate of an internet connection. So the larger number, the better, okay?
This brings me to two rankings found on Wikipedia, first the mobile download speed, collected in late 2020 by Opensignal. The second is for the list of top 100 fastest fixed broadband internet connection speed in April 2021, according to Speedtest.net. In my opinion, these results are rather optimistic.
Yesterday, I checked my son’s “fast” Xfinity internet and found it to be half of what I now get from T-Mobile. Speed delivery widely varies with the kind of device used too; from mobile phone to tablets and to personal computers.
Then there is Google Fiber, that is offered in 17 US cities claim download and upload speeds around 1,000 Mbps, but actual speed measured by Oakla Speedtest claim that early on, Google Fiber’s average actual speeds were 235.67 Mbps for download and 223.31 Mbps for upload.
So actual numbers are often a small percentage of what’s promised because the actual speed varies all the time. I suggest you download Oakla Speedtest or some equivalent and test all your internet speeds on phones, desktop and laptop computers.
Just like me, you might end up being very surprised!
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