August 20

It is bright and sunny today--and hot. The patio was already touching 90F just after we finished breakfast about 8am. I had thought I would do a bit of tidying up but decided not. Mom had some banking to do this morning and we decided to take a side trip to a little local bakery for some sweets. I am just hanging out reading the feeds in my e-mail.

I found this piece on Naked Capitalism that is interesting and not in a good way. I have been reading stories about the declining efficacy of COVID vaccines for the last couple of weeks including one from Israel about two weeks ago which reported that they are advising boosters for all people over age 50. I wondered at the time when we would get that advise over here. Over the last few days the CDC has issued that advise for those who got the Modern and the Pfizer shots when the reach 8 months after their last shot. I noticed that cases in my state have gone up though my county isn't as bad as places south of us. We still wear our masks and are "getting religious" about it. We have noticed lately that most of the employees of stores we have gone to are wearing masks. Today many of the customers are also.

We have noticed the rising food prices (and prices of almost everything else) for some years. Our usual joke is that the government economists don't shop for their own food because the inflation we saw never seemed to get into the official figures. According to Bloomberg the phenomenon is world wide and has gotten worse with the pandemic which drastically reduced incomes and disrupted supply chains.

Researchers at the University of Washington have reported that heat related deaths have increased by 74% since 1980 and deaths related to extreme cold has increased by 31% since 1990. I would love to see a graph of the year by year deaths put against the increasing global average temperature. Also did the researchers take into account population increase?