Today at Tocumen Airport. Tocumen Airport Authority photo.

Welcome, tourists – but beware

So many Americans were fed this anti-scientific nonsense that COVID-19 is like the flu, and with that erroneous rap the supposition that the northern winter makes it more dangerous while it’s less so in the warm tropics. Let’s hope that by the next equinox there will be a good vaccine available to limit the data available to prove or disprove that hypothesis. The disease has killed a lot of people here in Panama, and in Brazil and its neighboring South American countries. It seems as deadly in the tropics as anywhere.

Enjoy your time in Panama, all you visitors. Wear a mask in public. Obey the health decrees, even when they seem silly. Come and go, neither catching nor spreading any illness.

Perhaps you will fall in love with this place and look for a way to stay. True love, though, implies some detailed knowledge and lots of mutual respect. Love, learning and respect – the world always runs short of those, so your additions will be appreciated.

Yes, a con man must be brought
to justice. But not just him.

Is election fraud in the cards? Donald Trump has been into just about every other sort of fraud.

Will another civil war be the manifest destiny for the USA? Donald Trump’s “fine“ young nazis are clamoring for that.

A lot of things might happen. That’s why the Republicans, who blocked all of Barack Obama’s judicial appointments for the last two years of his term then filled them with the most miserable imaginable lot under Donald Trump, are rushing through what looks to them like one last court pack.

It appears that after a prolonged right-wing period with some conservative Democratic interludes, American voters are on the cusp of a realigning election, under aged and somewhat stodgy leadership at the top perhaps, but stepping into a generational change. It’s not like when boomers came in and behaved much like their elders. That’s not so much about personalities or ideologies but because times are different. Unending wars all over the place, mass incarceration, the world’s most expensive health care and the rich paying no taxes are now unsustainable luxuries, no matter what promises have been made to which lobbyists.

Will Trump’s gunmen – and gun boys – drag the country down into an inferno, with judicial blessing, before change will be allowed? If you are an American citizen eligible to vote, it’s up to you. There needs to be a Democratic landslide to nullify all of the Republican tricks, to wrest control of the US Senate from the hands of Trump enablers and to unpack the courts. Vote blue, and leave any arguments about what shade of it to future primaries. America needs you right now.

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