I have the greatest privilege of being associated with Native cultures of many continents.. thus satisfying my curiosity and desire to travel and the chance to help them with my medical expertise. these notes are from those travels. I am a professor at the University of Havana
I am not a fan of watching sports on TV but I like to be abreast of what is happening, especially from an anthropological point of view.
When we were growing up in Australia, Tennis and Swimming loomed large and the great athletes were heroes of a country, beginning to look for its own identity. Cricket was also huge in our imagination. I remember watching a one day cricket match at MCG between the West indies and Australia, without realizing that it would have a profound effect on my life and travels in the Caribbean, I did get to know the Caribbean reasonably well, the English and Spanish parts.
This week's US Open pitted two teenagers. their backgrounds were very interesting and a tale of the times .
Both were born in Canada, one of whom now is British.
The Canadian had an Ecuadorian father and a Filipino mother. She confesses not knowing much about the Philippines or Ecuador, except to say that my maternal grandfather cooks great filipino dishes.
On the other hand, the British teenager, whose father is Romanian and mother Chinese, talks proudly of her Romanian and Chinese backgrounds and in fact, can speak Mandarin and also visits her ancestral lands frequently.
The Chinese social media celebrated Emma's victory.
This is a wonderful moment, to see these two young women representing so many different cultures, and not to downplay the role of Canada and Britain in their victories.
To me Leylah is Canadian and Emma is British. I am happy Emma speaks Chinese, I am sure Romanian too. Leylah speaks Spanish and French, I am certain.
My interest in genealogies started long before I became an Anthropologist but studies in Anthropology (kinship system) only fired that flame.
Emile Durkheim is considered Father of Modern French Sociology and had influenced many an anthropologist, including his nephew Marcel Mauss (The Gift). I would dig a little deeper, the curiosity which is characteristic of my people, and find out that Durkheim's father was a Rabbi.
I wanted to know what made the great founders of modern anthropology (why rather than what?) become the persons they became.. and their personal journeys
Malinowski was British but was born into a Polish well off family.
Boas was American but was born in what is now Germany.
When I was reading Anthropology in London, we had lovely sessions with Prof. Adam Kuper (south african born, british) about the history of Anthropology. I had read Medicine previously and very proud to be a Physician but Anthropological education was a medal to be worn proudly on a Medical Uniform!
What a nice way to start a week in Miami..at the end of the week, I expect to be in another continent, as usual with the hopes of unexpected pleasures..
25 companies around the world made semi conductor chips before Covid 19.
USA used to make 37% of the all the world's supply but now only 12 %.
Intel now does not have the most advanced technology in the USA now. Silicon valley started with Intel.
Steve Jobs moved the manufacture to Taiwan, TSMC, which manufactures the most advanced chips. This is the largest supplier of chips for American cars.
During the covid pandemic year, the production now has become limited to just four countries (or companies): Taiwan, USA, Singapore and Israel.
Mark Lu, the CEO of TSMC had this to say to the Americans: You have the capacity to produce so many more PhDs and scientists so make sure that a sizable portion go into fields of innovation such as Chip making!
It is of interest to note that nearly 80 per cent of the Graduate students in the STEM, at American Universities are from Asia, China has the largest number of graduate students. Remember a large number of Chinese students are also studying in other developed countries.
There is a glut of computer programmers and computer repair people, that just wouldn't cut it. Proportionately more R &D are done at the American affiliates in Israel.
Technology for the future is a global issue, we cannot just hold back the knowledge or the know how from each other. Share the knowledge, help with manufacture and distribution and also to share the huge profits these companies accumulate.
Today, Sunday 2 May 2021 Sixty Minutes, an investigative journalistic TV programme, had the above topic and also the one below.
Michael Lewis has written 14 books, most of them about people who saw things coming – crashes on Wall Street, the next great idea in Major League Baseball, the value of a left tackle in football. His new book, called "The Premonition," follows a group of doctors and scientists who saw the pandemic coming, and raced to sound the alarm. But this is not just a book about the past. The book itself is a premonition.
Lewis writes that at the beginning of the pandemic one of those people was Dr. Charity Dean, a disease control expert, and the assistant director of California's Department of Public Health. In January of 2020, Dean was alarmed when she saw images circulating on social media that appeared to show Chinese authorities welding apartment doors shut to keep residents indoors.
Dr. Charity Dean: And watching those videos on Twitter, 'cause I had no other source of information, I thought, 'They know something we don't and this is real.'
Michael Lewis: Charity, who thinks she's all alone, all alone in the world, aware in January that this pandemic is gonna sweep through the United States and nobody's doing anything about it, including her state government. And nobody will listen to her. And all of a sudden, she's introduced to the Wolverines. When she finds these people, it's, like, yeah, these are my people.
John Dickerson:(the interviewer) Who were the Wolverines?
Michael Lewis: The Wolverines were a group of seven doctors, all of whom at one point or another had worked in the White House together, and who stayed in contact and kind of helped the country navigate various, various previous disease outbreaks. But they weren't in the decision making apparatus in the U.S. government.
John Dickerson: Why are they called the Wolverines?
Michael Lewis: They're called the Wolverines because a fellow White House employee dubbed them so. It had some obscure reference to the film "Red Dawn."
Michael Lewis: …where these group of high school kids named the Wolverines go up and try to defeat the invading Russians.
John Dickerson: In other words, the Wolverines had to take things into their own hands 'cause there was nobody to stop the invading force.
Michael Lewis: That's right. They were a guerilla disease fighting operation.
John Dickerson: Because the people actually who were supposed to be fighting the disease weren't doing it.
Michael Lewis: Weren't doing it.
President Trump on January 22, 2020: We have it under control. It's going to be just fine.
In late January, as President Trump and the federal government publicly showed no urgency over the virus, Lewis writes that the Wolverines tried a work-around: getting the states to move. It's why the Wolverines recruited Charity Dean, hoping if she could push California to act, the federal response might quicken.
Michael Lewis: She asks one of them, 'Who's running the pandemic response?' And one of them says, 'Nobody's running the pandemic response. But to the degree that anybody's sort of running the pandemic response, we sort of are'
John Dickerson: This is fantastical, I think, to most Americans. Which is, they think there is something called the Centers for Disease Control. And there are big buildings in Washington that have Health and Human Services. Why did the Wolverines have to do what there are huge institutions designed to do?
Michael Lewis: That's a great question (laughter). That's a very good question, right?. In the first place, the Trump administration abdicated responsibility for running the for the federal government. He just walked away from that. He said, 'Governors, you're on your own.'
(the above from CBC)
It did not end there. As the death rate was mounting and the virus was vacationing in these Great USA with gusto, the CDC and some doctors in charge kowtowed to an ignorant administration bent propagating medications with no shown efficacy and a lackadaisical attitude (much like what is happening with Bolsanaro in Brasil and Modi in India )
CDC center for disease control was not helping as they did not know what to do. There was absolutely no testing. while the doctors in California and the Wolverines were worried about the onslaught, they had to find a way to test the people.
Joe De Risi
They built the lab in eight days. It could produce COVID test results in 24 hours and they offered its services for free to county public health offices across California, which is when DeRisi discovered how starved for resources public health offices were.
Joe DeRisi: We had a whole bunch of clinical results they were sending to a county. And we sent them by fax because that's how they officially receive results.
John Dickerson: Did you even have a fax machine?
Joe DeRisi: No. But we, we got curbside delivery at Best Buy and were able to buy a $300 fax machine. It was the first fax machine I'd seen in years. But the problem was, after we faxed these results, we got a call the next day sayin', 'Why did you only return half the results? 'We realized that their circa early '90s fax machine only had a page buffer that could hold about half the results we sent. So we literally went back to Best Buy, got another curbside delivery, and drove up a new fax machine up to that county public health office because they didn't have the budget to buy their own new one.
Michael Lewis: I chose my story, my characters, to dramatize those pockets of deficiency in our society so we could see them. Cause they saw them. I just followed the characters.
There were pockets of success. Charity Dean helped convince Governor Gavin Newsom to shut down California on March 19, the first state to do so.
California has registered 3.7 million COVID cases to date, not the 20 million once feared. Dean credits Carter Mecher's vision with giving her the courage to push. So does fellow-Wolverine Dr. Matt Hepburn, who ultimately led vaccine development for the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. But still, nearly 600,000 Americans have died.
Michael Lewis: It's like a superhero story where the superheroes seem to lose in the end. They're there to fight this pandemic and to save American lives. They don't appear to do it. But the little wrinkle on the end of it is you know they learned things that are gonna help us the next time around.
(sorry i couldnt get rid of the commercial on the following video, but Mr Lewis's words are worthwhile, forget the ridiculous advertisement.
The stories of each character's struggle to be heard highlight what Lewis says is a key point: public institutions are ill-equipped to move fast enough to handle a large-scale pandemic. His characters worry the country is still vulnerable.
John Dickerson: What connects them, the characters?
Michael Lewis: They love life. They realize how important it is. And they want to save it. And so they all have some, this emotional component of when they hear 600,000 Americans died. It's not just a number.
John Dickerson: Michael writes that all of you are motivated by your, your love of life. Do you agree with that characterization?
Dr. Carter Mecher: My training was in critical care medicine, so I operated ICUs. And in an ICU, what I got to see and what I got to witness was the final struggle for a lotta human beings. I got to see the last, last days, last weeks, last moments of a lot of people. And, you know, in sports they talk about, you know (emotional) – sorry. They talk about, like, you know, players leaving it all on the field. And you know when I would see these patients in the ICU, I would watch them in that struggle. And they left everything on the field, everything. And you know, my question for us is, almost 600,000 people in this country have left everything on the field. And the question is, have we?
(from CBC)
After watching the episodes I was visibly upset. Shouldnt Trump along with Bolsanaro and Modi be tried for Genocide, being responsible for the majority of Covid 19 deaths ?
When would the selfish capitalist style of USA become mellowed and think of the millions of its citizens who various reasons need protection? from their own elected officials?
When would the 100 million unvaccinated adults in USA will be enlightened that they cannot go on being a danger to their fellow citizens? I would warn the unvaccinated: as more and more people are protected, the virus will come looking for you! Both Pfizer and Moderna vaccine which are being rolled out in enough quantities have shown to have excellent protection.
Yesterday walking past two vaccination centres, sitting there empty, i felt such a pang in my heart from my brothers and sisters in Brazil and India.. People are concerned about USA because there seems to be a sizable portion of brain washed people, to whom you cannot leave the destiny of this country. Many of these clueless people admire and follow their brand of right wing politicians who were among the first to get the vaccinations when it became available, way back in December 2020. The majority of the Republican lawmakers FAIL to disclose their vaccination status but there is a strong feeling that a good proportion of them are vaccinated.
To those who are not vaccinated (without a sound medical exception), I want them to know that they do not love their neighbour as thyself as their religious teachers tell them and they also do not have the right to kill your neighbour.
As of 6 a.m. EDT May 1, a total of 103,422,555 Americans had been fully vaccinated, or 31.2 percent of the country's population, according to the CDC's data.
Israel leads the world in vaccination rates with more than 60 percent of their adults vaccinated. Followed by UK, Bahrain, Kuwait UAE . Chile in our Americas, which gave us Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral and Salvador Allende has the highest rate of vaccination in Latin America, closely followed by Uruguay who gave us Jose Mujica, Benedetti and Galeano, is close behind. As expected, Bolsanaro's Brasil and Modi's India trail behind most other countries for their vaccination rates.
Today I remarked to my good friend Jose, as we were driving towards Palacio de Jugos for our Cortaditos : we are so lucky, Life is almost is at a normal level for us, even though both of us (vaccinated) had our masks on and maintained social distance from others at the cafe..
May all the people, all over the world, have the same FREEDOM!
PS. If you can watch today's 60 minutes on YOUTUBE, when it is uploaded on the platform, please do so. Tonight's show also included a lengthy interview with Secretary of State Blinken.
We are in the middle of celebrations.. for various cultures, various sentiments and various symbolisms.
Harvest Moon for the Indians
Autumn Moon and memories of Cakes eaten at this time.
The National Day of China
We had just finished Yom Kippur and tonight begins Sukkoth, jewish and Israeli holidays..
The first photo to arrive was from Ganzhou China , 12 hours ahead to the Miami time Zone.
Photo taken while walking along the river in Ganzhou by a friend.
At Luoyang City, in Henan province considered to be the birthplace of Chinese celebrations, the National Day was being celebrated.
Watching the photographs from China where people were enjoying full moon and celebrating their National Day, where life has come back to normal, I felt our social isolation even more acutely...
They trust their government to do what is the best for all the people of the country even if you have to take severe measures in Wuhan City as they did. Now the most populous nation is one of the few on the planet where a normal life is possible.
I had alerted friends in Thailand, Malaysia, India and a photo arrived from Tehran, Iran
Thank you my dear friend. I think of Iran and the wonderful people live there, now under more difficult conditions than ever before.
Beautiful photos of the Moon from different parts of Brasil arrived. Lovely and thanks to MMD in Bauru.
In Miami, it had been raining and I did not think i would be able to see anything. but the Harvest Moon did not disappoint me.
Boca Grande is one of my favourite parks on the way down to Key West. I was so happy to receive the picture of the Harvest Moon from there.
I felt so connected to the world ..
It is raining in Saint Martin .. It is cloudy in the UmonHon Indian Reservation ...From Baracoa they sent me this photo
The people of that first pueblocito of Cuba tend to go with their families to one of the many rivers that criss cross Baracoa.
It had been raining . I felt such a fantastic sensation going out to the patio and listen to the harsh rhythm of the rain.
tonight is 15 Tishrei 5781 in the Jewish Calendar
It is the first night of Sukkot
The feast of Tabernacles, rememberance of the time spent in the Desert after being cleansed out of Egypt about 3300 years ago. It is customary to build a hut in your house but this year it is not possible so here is a modified version (inside) from my brothers house in Israel.
Today has been a wonderful day, once again lots of people to be thankful..
