Waiting for the Chirp Chirp Chirp

471 thoughts on “Waiting for the Chirp Chirp Chirp”

1. Wow! You wrote about all this and I, I wrote about laundry room color 🤣

   1. Laundry rooms have to be SOME color.

   2. I don’t see what color? No, I don’t like the greens of the prior post – more bright and reflective, so that I can MAYBE tell the difference between navy blue and black. Not that there is a rush; it’s not important until/unless I finally manage to add the extension and build a new laundry room / pantry in that.

      1. I’ll point out I don’t like greens inside. I do like pale yellows. We’re going blueish greys to sell. Actually whites with just a touch of blueish grey. Because it will open up the house.
         House we’re buying is dead-green. It’s going to be various tones of yellow, because i like yellow. But not as bright as this house, because…. it looks like cinco de maio vomited inside my house. (We bought it like this.)

         1. “White with just a touch of bluish grey.” Sounds just about right to me! It would open a space up.

            Yellows, though, I can’t really get into, except in the kitchen.

            Haven’t done any painting in years; in fact, since I did all of the eaves and porch posts in what I would call “sky blue in the East about a half-hour before the sun sets on a clear day.” (About time to touch that up, as soon as the roof gets recoated this winter. Yes, I do have the paint number around here somewhere…)

            1. I like yellow in the office, kitchen and dining room. The rest? I like colors so pale you have to squint up to realize they’re not white.

               1. We did our walls with white and a smidgeon of yellow. Not even sure it could be mixed as a single gallon; 5 gallon buckets for the win. (For trim, I used pure white. Since most of the big windows in the house face north, it helps to spread the light.)

                  1. hence future house…

                     1. I’ve heard that there’s a French color of white paint, which is cream with a bit of pink and orange, but not quite apricot, that is really good for making your house look “sunny” during the winter. Apparently it’s the color that a lot of nice Paris apartments have, inside the apartment.

                        There’s a house down the street that is painted that color, on the outside. And it did look pretty nice in winter gray light. (But it is a little noticeable as an outside color. Not that anybody minds, in the land of practically no zoning.)

                        1. ask them the name. 😀

                        2. Oh! That color that’s in all the really old “powder rooms” in historic buildings!

            2. “I want it to be a soft green. Not a blue-green as a robin’s egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds. Now the only sample I could get is a little too yellow, but don’t let whoever does it go too far to the other extreme and go too blue. It should just be a sort of grayish-yellow-green.”

               “Uh-huh. You got that?”

               “Yep, green.”

            3. An old-fashioned science fiction writer would paint it, “as a, shade of purple gray.”

               1. A certain kind of old SF/horror author would say, “the color was indescribable”.

         2. Wife painted our great room (which has a 20-foot ceiling at one end, sloping down to 12 foot at the other) entirely putty gray except for the dining area, which is a bright yellow–almost mango. I love it. She is the Queen of Accent Walls.

            1. It does sound nice.

               We painted a cabin at a camp once which had ceilings at least 20 feet up. The walls were very dark brown; they wanted light off-white. Four coats of Kilz before we could even begin to lay down the four coats of white. And aside from the guy who did the topmost foot on the tall ladder, everything from there to six feet down was mine.
               Talk about a room that needed opening up.

         3. I like very pale cream-yellows for my own house inside. It looks so marvelous when the sun comes in, and the whole place seems to glow.
            OTO, one room we did this year for the guest-bedroom/nursery in a very pale grey-blue with ice-white woodwork trim, and grey-tinted vinyl wood-look flooring, and it looks very nice as well. Sort of seaside cottage-y. May do another room in that scheme – the den/TV watching room. May as well – it’s a small room and I still have half a bucket of grey-blue paint.

            1. Yeah, I think house is going to be done mostly in warm greys and whites, which I find soothing to the eye and will look nice with all manner of other colors in furniture and decor. I’ll save the serious colors for my canvases if/when I can manage to start actually painting pictures again… 😀

   3. Well, I need to figure out a color for my laundry room, too.

   4. K, family friend is an old ranch wife, called Sinner, got married to a wealthy cow guy in Texas.

      Moved down there and they were remodeling the kitchen, spent weeks going over colors and such…. she walked in while they were painting the kitchen and stopped them, with great agitation.
      The workers: but this is the color you chose! Goldenrod!
      Sinner: Yes, yes, I know that’s the color, we’ll still pay for it and the next color, but I CANNOT HAVE THAT COLOR IN THE KITCHEN.
      Husband walks in, already in full “what are you talking about” mode– SInner points at the wall and says, simply:
      Calf scour yellow.
      He stops.
      He looks.
      The color was changed.

      1. I looked it up. Yep, that’s what I thought it must be.

         1. Yep. **gag**

2. “Malice of stupidity” is a wonderful phrase. 😆

   1. Right? I couldn’t decide if it was a typo or intentional. Decided I liked the phrase “Malice of Stupidity”, thus intentional. 100% stealing. Don’t know where I’d ever use it. But still … stealing.

      1. typo but…

   2. Now, is it supine ignorance, or affected ignorance?

3. “Questioning, doubting and examining is not being anti-science. IT IS THE PROCESS OF SCIENCE.”

   *jumps up and down, pointing* THIS! THIIIIIIISSSSS!

   1. I’m at the point where I want to slap anyone who utters the words “the science is settled!” because barring one or two things (and gravity is the only one I can think of just now, in the post-lunch fog) NO IT IS NOT. (And there’s always–or should be–the chance that those very few “laws” rather than “theories” in science might be overturned in light of some new discovery someday.)

      1. Go ahead and slap them, for Ghod’s sake – slap them for me, and for my late Dad, the research biologist. Science is NEVER settled.
         New stuff comes up all the time, new theories, new discoveries, new connections.

         One of Dad’s anthropology textbooks from the late 1940s or very early 1950s — which I read at the age of ten or so because it had keen pictures of skeletons, and stone tools and all — included the Piltdown man, in utter seriousness.

         1. Hell, just ask any archaeologist who’s looking into stuff that goes against the established “historical science”–most of the entrenched archies, I gather, HATE Gobleki Tepi. Because it doesn’t fit with what they “know” to be “true.”

            (Had I a dog in that fight, I’d probably spend all my time trolling them with theories that, for all we know, they had waaaaay more advanced technology before the Flood 😀 )

            1. Wait, you mean they are not landing platforms for the spaceships of the Goa’uld system lords?

               1. Wait, the Goa’uld had platforms in Anatolia? I missed that episode.

                  Total sign note, there are rumors of a new SG series now that Amazon bought MGM. I’m very torn. It is supposed to address open questions from all three series and I really want them for SG-U. That said, with the Masters of pissing off fansUniverse as just the latest example I expect all revivals, reboots, etc. to be woke fests of lesbian heroes saving/destroying toxic white masculinity.

                  I’d hate for SG to be the next victim.

                  1. I’d rather they brought Atlantis back. I tried to watch SGU when it first aired, and I confess it struck me as grey goo. Or at least the pilot episodes did.

                     1. I just want to know what happened with Atlantis itself-last we saw, it was sitting in the middle of San Francisco bay.

                        1. I haven’t made it through to the last season–and I don’t know if I will, given that the actors and most everyone else associated with the show *hated* the ending. And the cast and a lot of the crew had actually scraped together funding to keep filming, and were on the verge of negotiating the right to do so with the studio when they sold the rights out from under them and killed the project dead. Grr.

                        2. And the Wraith were coming . . . .

                     2. It didn’t get better. The whole series carried a sense of creeping doom and futility. “The past was greater than the present and we can never reach such heights.”

                     3. I also never liked SGU. It struck me as an attempt to take the “seriousness and bleakness” of the new Battlestar Galactica (which was all the rage, of course), and stick it into the Stargate setting, which had always stayed away from it. IIRC, the show lasted for just two seasons before cancellation, and ended on a bit of a cliff-hanger (the entire crew but one was going into cryo-sleep, leaving just that one crew member awake to fix some problems on the old, decrepit starship).

                        While I have no interest in the series, I wouldn’t mind finding out how they got home again (or how Earth managed to set up a permanent link to the starship). With a better crew (i.e. one that isn’t full of nuBSG extras), the setting could be a lot better.

                        As you note, Atlantis ended at an interesting point. And afaik, unlike SG-1, there were no Stargate Atlantis movies to detail “what happened afterwards”.

                        1. And at least SG-1 completed the Ori and the Ba’al storylines in their movies. I think the second one (the Ba’al one) was a much better movie. The late Cliff Simon was so awesome as Ba’al.

                           1. “You DARE mock me!”
                              “Ba’al, it’s me. If *course* I dare mock you.”

                           2. There’s a reason one of our first cats was named Ba’al….
                              (the Nice Vet assumed it was “Ball.”)

                           3. I’ve always suspected that actor had soooooo much fun chewing up ALL the scenery. Really, all the ones who got to play System Lords or Gou’auld villains did. So. Much. Fun.

                           4. Any scene where O’Neil and Ba’al snarked at each other was pure gold ( or possibly pure naquada)

                           5. Snark To Snark Combat!

                           6. Oh, and while Ba’al was hiding out on Earth I think he started surfing the Internet, found the Evil Overlord List and was inspired. 😀

                           7. That… explains much

                     4. SGU was grey goo. The entire party should have ended up very sincerely and permanently dead from stupidity.

                        1. Liked Atlantis. Never watched SGU beyond the first 1/2 hour.

                           1. That’s because nobody would have put those people in a car together, much less on a starship.

                              Now, it could have worked, if everybody had maintained a professional veneer at first, and then started to get on each other’s nerves but still tried to be professional. That would have been interesting — a race between “this is interesting and difficult” and “you people annoy me and I’m trapped with you.”

                        2. Not a single competent person in the bunch. SG1 and Atlantis were like Honor Harrington: Competent people doing competent things, and when they screwed up, it was also competently.

                           Starting from the senator who brings his uncleared daughter to the offworld site to the supposed “genius” in charge who couldn’t handle people worth a damn…

                  2. I think a good indicator will be how badly Amazon ruins Silmarillion. If Amazon can do a good job with that, then a new Stargate series might actually turn out well.

                     Though given how badly they mangled “No Remorse” (which was basically In Name Only), I’m not encouraged. The original novel was *excellent*, and based on what I could see in the ads and trailers, none of the original plot was incorporated into the movie.

                     1. Yeah. I’m…not optimistic about the Middle Earth series. Not after I read that they’d hired coaches(?) or whatever you call it for helping the actors with nude scenes. They’re claiming it’s ‘non-sexual’ nudity, and I’m over here going “Uh huh. Sure it is.” (And yes, you can have such a thing, but it’s vanishingly rare in fictional media. The only example I can think of is the movie Medicine Man.)

                        Add to that that apparently the big conference hosted by the Tolkien estate was all about “more woke than thou” in the papers presented…it’s not looking good…

                     2. Amazon is already hiring intimacy coaches for the actors and discussing how they are going to bring the missing diversity Middle Earth needs.

                        Receipt: https://micky.com.au/lord-of-the-rings-fans-upset-as-amazon-series-hires-intimacy-coordinator/?amp

                        My hopes are low. Amazon is going to create “Game of Jewels”.

                        1. I fully expect Amazon to make Morgoth “the good guy:” fighting against the evil racist elves.

                           1. There’s an amusing satire that someone posted online quite a while back that has Noam Chomske and another leftist “intellectual” watching and commenting on the “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy, and talking about how it’s clear that the orcs are the oppressed indigenous species clearly trying to take back the fertile lands that used to belong to them from the colonialist humans and elves.

                              The sad thing is that I can see the current crowd pulling the sort of nonsense that you describe, And it’s a complete ignoring of the text, which clearly traces Morgoth’s rebellion all the way back to his days as Melkor, and aimed at the Creator. It was his pride and arrogance that did him in, and the other Valar (along with the Creator) tolerated it until they finally had no choice but to take him into custody.

                              And even then they were willing to forgive him.

                              At the very least, I fully expect to see a “diversified” cast of elves that makes sure that the ones designated as particularly proud (and thus responsible for much of the ensuing tragedies that occur) are all played by white actors.

                           2. Why not? They did a movie with the Wicked Witch of the West as a misunderstood and spurned innocent woman. They just did a tv series with the Norse god of Lies and Trickery as the hero. They’ve got TV shows with Lucifer as the protagonist. Poor old Melkor was a heavy metal fan discriminated against by a bunch of classical music snobs.

                           3. The Lucifer one only worked because a.) they took it as the premise that the ruler of hell was the one in charge of punishment of sins rather than the actual devil (no, it works with precisely zero theology from pretty much ANY Christian religion, but approaching from “Okay, so that’s your premise, he’s just the prison warden” worked more or less, and also because apparently that was also how the REST of that fictional world viewed it as well) and b.) the actor is ridiculously charming. Like, unbelievably charming in the role. The show still lost me because of the endless juvenile humor, mostly to do with sex. But that one sort of worked in the same way that Dexter sort of worked, heh.

                           4. It kind of works with Jewish legend, where “ha-satan” from Job (the only instance of an antagonist in the main texts) literally means “the accuser” (ie. The angel whose job it is to argue that a human is not good enough for heaven)

                           5. curiously Avocatus Diabolus (sp?) in Catholic canonization trials.

                           6. To be fair, both Loki and Lucifer were entirely clear that their protagonists were not, in fact, what one could call good people, though interaction with humanity could alter their outlooks.

                           7. Indeed, looking at it (at least the tv/movie versions thereof), they’re much the same: charming, amusing, self-centered, and hedonistic. Although one could make the argument that Loki, at least in the first Thor film, was the more responsible of the two and in part justified his behavior–both then and in later films–of “Thor would make a terrible ruler, so we’d better make sure I’m the one on the throne. Of course, when he IS on the throne, turns out he sucks at it, because hedonistic and selfish. But as you said: both have character progression through interaction with other characters. Lucifer, because he meets one who is both immune to his abilities and also makes HIM mortal and vulnerable, and initially he digs that because he’s an idiot adrenaline-junkie; Loki–in the films, anyway–more through his genuine love for his family–particularly his mother and his brother (although boy do they need a good counselor)–than anything else. I’m not sure he’s ever got on board with “mortals are fine” thing, though 😀 )

                           8. Loki in the original myths is the classic trickster god, sort of like Coyote. He’s a pain in the neck, and no one trusts him. But he’s also useful to have around. That’s why Thor doesn’t immediately kill him when Loki shaves the head of Thor’s wife (Sif), and then causes Sif’s replacement hair to turn black (because Loki cheated the dwarves who made it, of course). He’s troublesome. But he’s still more useful than not… right up until he crosses the line and arranges Baldur’s death.

                           9. Sif’s hair being black was a Marvel comic thing, not a myth thing. She got the gold hair in the myth.

                           10. From everything I’ve heard, the Loki series didn’t make Loki the hero. Or the villain. Or even the sad tortured victim. Nope, he was just a grey goo character with no abilities, talking a lot and saying nothing of note. Apparently very little happened in the series, and Loki ceases to be a trickster or clever if you take his powers away or put him in a strange situation.

                               Whereas, of course, Loki without powers would just be Loki working a little harder, and forced to use things like sleight of hand or social hacking.

                           11. But it’s HARD to write someone being really clever. Much better to make him a gray, smarmy twit.

                           12. Yeah I’ve only watched the first two eps of Loki and…I am disappointed so far. They seem to have taken two enormously talented, amusing, and charming actors (Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson) and are having them do…nothing much. At all. It’s BORING. Maybe it improves later on, but I’m not optimistic–and frankly, given how entertaining Loki was–ESPECIALLY in Thor: Ragnarok, where he and Thor were equally fun and worth cheering for–it’s really frustrating. WHY did they not get Taika Waititi to at least have SOME hand in this tv show?? I know he’s probably busy with What We Do In the Shadows, but dammit, that man could at least have made sure it was fun. Or had fun bits. So far, there has been no fun.

                               Or why couldn’t they have done an adaptation of Loki: Agent of Asgard? That was a blast. AND Loki spent a lot of time doing really entertaining things, like speed dating to get information, or becoming female to infiltrate an all-female team of thieves, all the while snarking with his Three-Fates-Witches bosses. They might not have been able to keep the “agent of Asgard” aspect in the MCU continuity, but they still could have a lot more fun than they seem to have done two episodes in. At least Falcon and the Winter Soldier was saved from it’s tendency towards getting preachy by the fact that the two lead actors were really hilarious together, and played up the buddy-cop-movie angle really well. Loki is just…disappointing as heck.

                           13. While I haven’t seen the Loki Series, some have said that it may be a “semi-redemption” story.

                               In some ways, Loki is still the arrogant person we know but he’s put into a situation where he’s has to decisions and the decisions he made may have turned him more to the Light.

                           14. It is also amusing as all get out

                               ________________________________

                           15. He’s not a hero so much as he is an incredibly snarky protagonist who feels very put upon and is doing his best to survive and be ambitious in very difficult circumstances.

                               It helps that Tom Hiddleston is fun as hell to watch.

                               ________________________________

                     3. The no remorse movie was a huge disappointment. Especially as it tied in with Tom Clancy’s Universe. The dynamics of which were very real in our world line. I think I read every Clancy book. Pops was a cold warrior as an engineer with all the targettiing info in his safe in the office and Uncle was a three letter agency station chief that spoke six languages. Dinner convos could get real interesting.
                        I cannot see them doing justice to Stargate.

            2. So that’s why they tie themselves in knots trying to explain it as some “hunter-gatherer ritual shrine” when it’s quite obviously a granary and tax office, built by people who knew what they were doing, and had the resources to support an artisan class.

               I have a new theory about the Neanderthals. What we’ve been finding are the outliers, the outcasts and oddballs and wild men. The ones we haven’t found… we’ve built on top of their villages and fields and burial grounds, and they’re buried beyond recall. No one develops portable lighting sufficiently reliable to honk around in deep caves (nor the written symbols found congruent with their range) without at least that much civilization.

               [I also look at the progression of skulls and skeletons from gibbon to chimp to various proto-humans to modern human, and conclude that the chimp-type skulls and structure are the result of primitive outcrosses, rather than being merely a split from the main lineage. It’s clear something very unlike us intruded between gibbon and human.]

               1. Even biblicaly there are issues. Who exactly was Cain in fear of that he needed a ‘mark’ to protect him? One teacher of mine posited that there were other species that were not allowed the ‘God spark” and therefore did not develop reasoning and etc. Interesting thought. Too bad so many of our neighbors do not seem to have that spark either.

                  1. For that matter, Cain went out and found a wife, and she wasn’t (apparently) related to him. It looks very much as though Adam and his family introduced something new into the world, for good and ill.

                     1. Do we know that?

                        St. Augustine argued that he (and the rest of the sons) married their sisters, and pointed to the Greek gods as evidence that brother and sister marriages were once allowed. After all, the value of incest prohibitions was that you had to enter in new relationships with new people to marry, and at the time, everyone was related.

                        1. To science the theology more, there hadn’t been much time for mutations to happen at all, much less the sort that make inbreeding such a VERY bad idea.

                           There are options besides “reproduced via bestiality.”

                  2. A low population of less than 10,000 humans at the 70,000 BC point. Couple that with a maternal DNA Eve at 100,000 years ago, small wonder we have legends of coming from a single pair of humans.

                     1. Um…. we’re not actually sure of any of that, you know?

                        1. It’s only as accurate as the data they have. I look (among other things) at the gibbon-chimp-human disconnect that absolutely no one seems to notice, and conclude there’s a big hole in their data.

                           1. Yeah, but we now seem to have traces of a “bottleneck” not a primeval eve.

                           2. As I remember the argument for Mitochondrial Eve, it boiled down to “if we assume a steady rate of mutation, then our samples would match about X generations back, which is roughly Y time.”

                              Unstated additional assumption, that all mitochondria came from the same original source.

                     2. Toba Catastrophe Theory is a big controversy among paleontologists. We know there was a VEI-8 supereruption from the Toba caldera 75,000 years ago. Definitely big enough to cause a major extinction event, at least locally. There are indications that it did, and other indications that it didn’t. The arguing goes on.

            3. If they were organic tech that would rot or rust, that’s totally possible. Maybe not plausible, but….

               Someone needs to write that alternate history in a believable way and explode people’s minds.

               1. From what we actually have as hard evidence, it’s apparent the Neanderthals understood wood better than today’s primitives; they made birch glue (which requires extended boiling). My guess is they did a lot more with wood than we realize, all of which would be lost to time.There’s also the cavitied teeth that have been drilled and packed…

                  Another annoyance: archeologists tying themselves in knots to explain away that bone flute, since obviously Neanderthals couldn’t have been advanced enough to play music!! The Official Final Word is that the three round symmetrical holes were made by an animal bite. Obviously these idiots have never seen what happens to a bone bitten by an animal with jaws and teeth strong enough to penetrate bone. You don’t get neat tidy holes; you get splinters.

                  BTW chemical analysis of European cave paintings determined that they’re quite a lot older than anyone thought, and were therefore not made by “modern humans”.

            4. In The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton brought up “the rule of 48”, one of the more entertaining scientific fiascos. As people were starting to understand the cell’s nucleus, it was determined that humans had 48 chromosomes, and here are the pictures to prove it.

               Later on, somebody published that there were 46 chromosomes, and here are the pictures to prove it. Rumor has it that many of these were the same pictures as those “proving” 48.

               Crichton’s scientist’s proclamation: “All scientists are blind”.

            5. So, you’ve met my brother the heretical curmudgeon archaeologist…

               1. Um….. Should I be talking to him? Because I have the mirrorplay thing to write.

                  1. Hmmm…perhaps.

               2. No, but I should… were I in that field, I’d have long since been impaled and left for the crows.

                  I do enjoy Q-Mag’s assorted heresies…here’s one:

                  https://www.q-mag.org/neanderthals-used-chemical-firestarter.html

                  There’s also the island they couldn’t have got to without boats, tho offhand the article refuses to come to hand.

         2. Have a college level physics text from 1910, used by a relative who attended UC Berkeley over 100 years ago. Interesting to see what they didn’t know.

            We seem to have proved we DON’T know what 95% of the universe is. We just name “it” (I prefer “here be invisible dragons” to fill in blank places).

            The most important blessing is to learn what you don’t know. But…
            You will never know what you don’t know.

      2. Even gravity isn’t completely settled.

         1. THIS.

         2. No, but it causes things to settle.

      3. Gravity is settled? Since when? Gravity is on its second model, one that radically redesigns the entire universe to work and while this model accounts for all macro effects observed to date as long as you include this mysterious “dark matter” that no one is sure what it is, except there is more of it than anything else and it clusters along ley lines this web of lines through the universe, it fails to predict anything at the microlevel.

         Note, I agree that gravity is about as science gets. Either of the models explains completely the effects observed at a normal human scale. The second model does a pretty good job of explaining anything from human scale up to just this side of a galaxy. However, in explaining how galaxies form and hold together, much less anything at a larger scale gravity requires a huge fudge factor/extra-constant called dark matter and some universe wide-scale phenomena require a second fudge factor/extra-constant called dark energy even less understood than the first.

         And it doesn’t play at all with QFT.

         1. Economic laws are more fundamental than gravity. You can easily conceptualize a universe without gravity, or with gravity which works differently.

            Try conceptualizing universe without supply and demand or comparative advantage; you will start from lovecraft, and get less understandable from there.

            1. Economic laws are more maxims than science though. Sure, you can’t escape supply and demand, but you can’t build a predictive model. So, “things fall down” is the level of the law of gravity that economics can provide. It can’t tell me the clearing price for the market on anything via a general law.

               Hell, I can tell you scientifically what interest rates for $TENOR money $TIME months from now every day based on the rates people are actually accepting today.

               Guess what, by the time $TIME arrives, the rate for $TENOR money rarely matches my exact answers, and is often quite different. Yes, they are close enough I make a living building such rate curves, but we all understand their predictive nature is nowhere near Newtonian gravity, much less General Relativity.

               1. This is the first time outside of work that I’ve seen the word “tenor” used in that context.

                  1. I think we work in roughly the same field. That is where I picked up the usage.

         2. Heh. That would be why I had the qualifier of “but even it could get overturned if/when we learn something new.” 😀 Because yeah, even the “laws” of science, however few they are, are not settled.

         3. I look at the dark matter theory, and consider that any theory where the fudge factor is an order of magnitude larger than the data is pretty sure to be wrong. (And there you have the real lesson from “Climate Science”.)

            I like a wild-assed theory I heard a while back: gravity has to be a field effect. Otherwise by the time it “reaches out” from the sun to the Earth, we’d have flown away into deep space like a ball that breaks its tether. And the larger the mass, the more resistance to changing velocity within the field (does that sound familiar?)

            So I use something like that in my space opera as the physical foundation for telepathy, and also for how FTL works. (Bigger is slower.)

            1. Although he was talking about singularity at the center of a black hole, I think Michio Kaku had the right definition: “it means I have no idea”.

               1. “It needs an explanation. Having none to hand, I feel free to make one up.”
                  — Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

            2. And that’s ignoring the fact that I’ve heard a number of theories that include not only “dark matter” but “dark energy” as well.

               Admittedly, I only got as far as high school AP Physics, so I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that if you have a fudge factor that lets you add arbitrary amounts of matter and another that lets you add arbitrary amounts of energy, there’s no theory for which you CAN’T make the numbers work.

         4. I too believe exotic dark matter is a fudge factor. Another theory Ive heard of is MOND – modified Newtonian dynamics.

            http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/The_MOND_paradigm_of_modified_dynamics

            1. The above comment was supposed to be in reply to Reziac. 🤔💭🌌

            2. see, i think we might as well call it what it is: aether.

               1. You sure it’s not phlogiston?

                  1. no, just non-luminiferous aether.

            3. I understood about one word in three, but their charted data certainly seems to fit expectations.

               As someone pointed out about climate projections — if a projection can’t predict what’s already happened, it’s obviously wrong.

      4. So, ummm, about that gravity thing… yeah…

         1. There are multiple mainstream theories of how it works. (Most of them sound like Charley Brown’s teacher to me.)

            We can describe pretty accurately how it works on earth, on a human interaction scale.

            We’re alright when it’s in the areas close enough to earth for us to do decent observation.

            We’re… not entirely sure about further out…. or stuff that’s really small….

            1. “We can describe pretty accurately how it works on earth…”

               We can describe pretty accurately how much force will be exerted on an object due to the phenomenon we call “gravity”. And Ptolemaic scholars could predict the future position of a star in the sky better than Galileo–but one of them had a better understanding of the universe than the others.

               1. “Works well enough for what we’re doing” is a decent measure of science, but still doesn’t make it settled.

                  1. more “engineering” than science. Engineering is practical. I approve of it.

                     1. I disapprove of divorcing science from application– you may not know, right *now*, what it’s useful for, but the idea that if it’s useful it’s not science is like the thing where if it’s pretty and enjoyable, it’s not art.

                        Engineering is a specific form of applied science– and I quite approve of it, too!

                        1. yes. I just wanted to point out I highly approve of science with practical applications: by their fruits thou shalt know it.
                           In this house though we believe science might not have any practical applications. Look, I live with a mathematician. When younger son wants to get him going he says math isn’t actually science. It’s theology.

                           1. When younger son wants to get him going he says math isn’t actually science. It’s theology.

                              :gigglefit:

                           2. I mean…I can see that. 😀

                           3. IT has those too.

                        2. Disagree.

                           I think Engineering and Science are different things.

                           Science is a narrowly constrained approach to knowing.

                           Engineering is a narrowly constrained approach to doing.

                           You can be an engineer with out needing to try to ‘know’ the techniques you are applying.

                           Certainly, a scientist can try to know things that have nothing in the way of actual application.

                           They do fit nicely together, and it is convenient these days for all trained engineers to also be trained scientists.

                           I also think mathematics is not strictly necessary for an engineer or a scientist, simply so convenient that it is almost necessary.

                           1. You can be an engineer with out needing to try to ‘know’ the techniques you are applying.

                              Not really- you have to understand it enough to be able to DO anything.

                              It’s like saying you can be a cook, without knowing the why of anything. If you take it to the point of “even if you are constantly failing to the point of being a menace,” then it’s true, but most people mean at least “basically competent.”

                              Certainly, a scientist can try to know things that have nothing in the way of actual application.

                              That we know of yet.

            2. Will. The precise application of a Will.

            3. Yep, we know how it works around us. We know there’s a relationship between mass and distance and how great the ‘pull’ is. We don’t know how to make it, increase or decrease it (except the forementioned amount of mass and distance.) We don’t know for sure if it can be blocked, or how. Fire is easy to understand compared to gravity; and we still burn down thousands of homes, businesses and acres every year.

         2. I did say even it wasn’t really settled 🙂

      5. Even gravity isn’t “settled science.” (For practical purposes, yes – theory is still all over the place.)

      6. I used to be pretty confident in thermodynamics. Then, someone I know who seems legit said that phonons were real. Now I’ve gotten to the point where a lot of things look pretty hairy.

   2. You just don’t “love fucking science”. Why are you a hater? /sarc

      1. Every time I read some tweet by someone who “believes in science!” or “believes the science!” I want to ask,them which denomination of Science they belong to. Sometimes I do ask.

         1. The other day PJM had an article with the following:

            Republicans and others who object to being force-fed recommendations and “orders” by our institutions see science as a process. You know, that thing we learned in elementary school called the scientific method. As MIT researchers noted when studying mask skeptics on social media (emphasis added):
            …
            • “In other words, anti-maskers value unmediated access to information and privilege personal research and direct reading over ‘expert’ interpretations.”

            My response was “so Republicans are the Protestants of science?” 😀

            1. How dare we make up our own minds and think for ourselves rather than except the decrees of the nobility/priesthood.

            2. As religious fights are forbidden at Sarah’s, I will simply note that the parallel is highly inaccurate, if not entirely backwards.

               Basically, the information comes from the scientific equivalent of Thomas Aquinas– evidence laid out, arguments made, and either supported or destroyed by the rational interpretation of evidence. There is no way to know is a valid result.

               While those who declare themselves expert and wish their interpretations to be accepted without question are rather more like any of a thousand self-declared interpreters of the Bible, and if you dare question them they cannot defend it save by declaring you have attacked the word of GOD! There is no question that they will not answer, no matter how little evidence or support there is for the answer they give– should you offer the words of Jesus Himself, then clearly it was “misinterpreted” and instead they are correct.

               1. Cue Foghorn Leghorn: That’s I say that’s a joke, son. 😀

                  (Maybe I should have said “Early” Protestants. Obviously in five hundred years both the Catholics and the Protestants (in all their varieties) have evolved in all different directions that don’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to their 16th Century cognates.)

                  1. I’ve spent far, far too much time in the last week dealing with “jokes” that went feral and became “everyone knows.”

                     That modification doesn’t actually help the situation, I simply chose a common, modern flavor of that kind of “Respect MY authority, the facts shall bow to my conclusion” no-argument sorts that is well known to everyone here so that I didn’t go and jump on folks’ toes.

                  2. Yeah, ‘maybe they changed after a long historical period’ does not salvage the joke in my eyes either.

                     Then and now, both labels attach to a lot of people, engaged in some very complex behavior. Distilling it all down to a simple theoretical model, and attaching it to one or another, is very easy to do incorrectly.

                     Maybe it is tractable with a simple theoretical approach in theology, but trying that in history is definitely a way to get a bunch of people riled up, perhaps without developing any new understandings

                     My saltiness is mostly that I’m tired, /and/ think that Protestant/Catholic has elements worth discussing in order to better understand the current mess. Okay, the insights I’ve been working towards are additional flavors of ‘could be unpleasant’, and I could be fooling myself about there being any utility.

                     1. Anyway, last night during the middle of sleep, I mentally re outlined the essays that make up ‘some religious wars with implications for the current mess’. Thankfully, I persuaded myself that I need to set it aside.

                        My dad is not my subflavor of Christian. My boss is not my subflavor of Christian.

                        I’m trying to speak with my dad more. I’m also trying to get some stuff done that is difficult for me, at the direction of my boss.

                        I will have a harder time with these, if I spend more time in the emotional headspace that actually writing the things will put me in.

                        So I’m a bit less irritable, but am still frustrated from wanting to share. I do not need to be taking that out on others, so I hope I wasn’t too rude yesterday.

            3. The more I learn, the more I’m inclined to believe there are no experts.

               1. Real experts have better things to do. They’re too busy putting their expertise to work to go around proclaiming themselves experts.

         2. I tend to post this clip to mock them. I mean, it has homicidal sentient otters, what more could you ask for? 😀

         3. Imma steal that.

   3. [points] “REEEEEEE!!! THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!”

4. “I hate in between states.”

   Amen to this. I just want to get things over with; unending suspense is not for me.

   1. NOT to be confused with “Flyover Country.” ;-p

5. I about threw one book across the room because the Authors (both actual scientists) used “Because Science” to “prove” their arguments.

   The main reason that I didn’t throw the book across the room was that it was an ebook. 😀

   1. There is a very narrow realm where I would accept that. You see in some mathematical proofs where you get “proof of this theorem is beyond the scope of this problem/chapter/book. See an outline of or full version of the proof in chapter/appendix/reference”.

      At that point, unless it is really out there I’ll press the “I believe” button to continue forward. If it is really out there I’ll follow the bread crumbs.

      I take it this volume did not respect you that much.

      1. The authors had a “thing” against humanoid aliens that got old.

         Especially the “Because Science” claims.

         It got silly when they talked about the alien autopsy film and the ONLY THING they saw at “fault” was the appearance of the alien.

         Note, from what I’ve heard there was plenty things about the film that screamed Fraud.

         1. Interesting. I’ve seen plenty of “humanoid aliens because SCIENCE” in the past. Most around being able to observe the environment (height, binocular vision, etc).

            1. That’s part of the reason that I hated that book.

               1. Yeah…I mean, I don’t give either much credence as one seems trapped in “what I can see is the only thing that can drive this” and the other is “everything is so big it is impossible for the same forces to ever occur elsewhere.”

                  1. While I think the logic behind the likelihood of the basic humanoid body shape is good, until we find other intelligent species WE DON’T REALLY KNOW what aliens will look like.

                     1. I’m guessing that when we meet other intelligent species (if we haven’t already) (OK, I’m assuming we’re NOT talking about dolphins, dogs, cats, parrots, chimps, sasquatch, et. al.), we will be blissfully unaware that we have just met an intelligent species.

                        1. Another unprovable statement. 😉

                           1. “I’m guessing…”

                           2. Glad that you admit it. 😉

                              Seriously, I’ve had “run-ins” with people who believe that All Alien Intelligent Life would be so superior and different than humans that we wouldn’t recognize them.

                              These people don’t admit to guessing. They Claim that what they believe is Fact.

                           3. Not all aliens will be First Ones.

                           4. Most will probably be Pakled. Or Pak’ma’ra.

                           5. Drazi…

                           6. Nod, but it is “amazing” how many “individuals” imagine that they will be. 😈

                     2. I think that should be ‘when we find many other intelligent species…’. A few would be an insufficient sample.

                        1. Valid point.

                           And likely when we decide “well now we know what intelligent life would look like”, another intelligent alien species would show up to show us that we were wrong. 😀

                     3. Well, technically, most of the great apes qualify as an “intelligent species”. They have a sense of self. They use tools. They understand concepts of before, now, and later (at least as well as a 10 year old does.) They can use language to communicate. They pass that information down to future generations, and steal others good ideas. They display some form of empathy for others. They cooperate to achieve goals. What they are not big on is imagination or range. In some respects, stone age technology people treated the great apes more like different tribes than a separate species. And apes appear to think we are like them, but very different; which is probably the most intelligent thing they’ve ever communicated.

                        And yes, as a species, humans treat great apes just as badly as we treat each other. Any one want another helping of bush meat?

                  2. Only takes one question: “What If aquatic aliens?”

                     1. Aquatic Aliens aren’t likely to be humanoid but unless they can live on the land (for at least short period) they are unlikely to have high tech.

                        IE Try forging metals without fire. And underwater volcanos aren’t things that aquatic aliens could safely use. 😉

                        1. Nothing hard about electroplating. Aqueous ionic deposition of metals could yield some truly unique alloys and structures. Biotechnology is another path.

                           Just because WE base our technology on fire doesn’t make it the only way.

                           1. IMO Fire is the simplest way to start technology.

                              While it may not be the only way, I suspect that more species start their rise to High Tech with Fire than with other methods.

                              Still, we don’t know what other paths there are until we meet other intelligent beings. 😉

                        2. What if it’s a chlorine atmosphere, not oxygen?

                           1. First prove that a planet with a chlorine atmosphere can support any sort of life.

                           2. Extremophiles.

                           3. Are there any known Extremophiles that can live in a chlorine atmosphere?

                           4. Known? I have no idea. But every time we’ve said “life can’t possibly exist in X environment”, we’ve been wrong.

                           5. Point.

                              However, I read a book titled “World Building” by Stephen L. Gillett.

                              The last chapter deals with possible worlds that might have “life as we don’t know it”.

                              He talks about some of the problems of worlds that have a different chemistry than ours.

                              Interestingly, while he doesn’t talk about a world with no oxygen but with chloride instead of oxygen, he does talk about a possible world higher levels of chloride in the atmosphere than Earth’s (still with oxygen in the atmosphere). Intelligent life would have “interesting” problems on that world. 😉

                              Oh, it is available as an ebook.

                           6. It’s really all too speculative (and I’m not well-enough versed in chemistry to speculate intelligently beyond simple party tricks). Philosophically, I have trouble saying “impossible”, when I can’t even define what “intelligent life” means.

                              But in reality, I’m the worst kind of bore–if you pin me down and make me honestly answer the question to the best of my ability, I think We’re Alone. Or, we are the Old Ones.

                           7. We’re the Forerunners!

                              We’ll build strange monuments on other worlds so that whatever intelligent species that come after us will wonder Why Those Monuments Were Built! 😆

                           8. First prove that a planet can have a stable chlorine atmosphere at all.

                           9. Stephen L. Gillett in his book World Building doesn’t discuss the possibility but he does discusses life on worlds much different than Earth.

                              He does discuss an otherwise Earthlike planet with high levels chlorine in the atmosphere.

                           10. I think you’d wind up with all the reactive materials turned into insoluble chlorides, and that’s a chemical dead end.

                               The problem with families of reactions other than carbon/oxygen is that it’s the only one that has a bunch of reactive but not explosive states, therefore readily able to gain and release energy as is conducive to life processes without just burning up. Other chemical bases (eg. silicon) tend to form oxides or salts, and then they’re done reacting. Iron is similarly the most likely oxygen carrier, because it’s more reactive with oxygen and therefore more efficient. You can scrape by with copper-based blood (a few Earth critters do), but it’s not as efficient, so not conducive to high levels of oxygen demand.

                               So long as you’ve got our universe’s style of matter, and aren’t futzing around in the middle of a star, chemistry is chemistry, so the basics of life are unlikely to vary all that much.

                           11. Nod.

                               Somewhere I read about some scientists talking about “other chemistries” for life.

                               Most of the possible chemistries had major problems for developing life and a few other possibilities could have supported life but any intelligent life would have major problems with developing any technology beyond “sticks and stones”.

                               One interesting fact is that water is the only liquid known that the solid form would float on the liquid.

                               The solid form of most liquids would sink in the liquid.

                               That makes things very interesting for life that developed in other liquids than water. 😉

                           12. Might be as simple as the fact that carbon dioxide is a gas, and dissolves in water. Silicon oxide is glass, aluminum oxide is sapphire, boron oxide is a chalky solid. Any of them would preclude metabolism as we know it.

                           13. “as we know it”.

                           14. I thought that Piper did a pretty good job in developing the partially silicon-based race in “Uller Uprising.” Note the “partially” there – the soft tissues were still CHON.

                               White did an excellent job for several species in his “Sector General” series. Note there that the “other chemistry” races were extreme extremophiles. Chemistry does behave differently under extreme temperatures (colder and hotter) and extreme pressures (mostly more, but somewhat in less).

                               I am glad that Piper did rethink his one story with viable interfertile species developing on other worlds, and moved that plot line into the Paratime world. I tend to wall anything that has that as a premise.

                           15. Chuckle Chuckle

                               I read a collection of stories set in that Piper Universe and one story has That World settled by Martians (crash landing) just as Earth (in that Piper Universe) was settled by Martians crash landing on Earth.

                               IE The Humans of That World were True Humans which is why they could interbreed with Humans from Earth. 😉

                           16. Well, I don’t blame the world builder for what others do with it after they are gone. (I have read some absolutely terrible Holmes pastiches; and see the complaints here about Austen imitators.)

                           17. Re Writing Observer’s comment about interfertile aliens, E.E. Smith had fun with that in “Spacehounds of IPC.” The science is very dated (written in either the late 1920s or 1930s), and he has Venus, Earth, Mars, the satellites of Jupiter and Titan supporting various humanoid species. None of them interbreed. When the protagonist’s female companion mentions a bestselling novel about an interstellar romance he ridicules the premise, pointing out that even the humans within the Solar System are so different, and so sexually unappealing to one another, that romance just isn’t possible.

                        3. Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve read somewhere that the temperature gradient can go hundreds of degrees over just an inch or two from the outlets or rock surfaces. The water can act like a thermal curtain. Certainly possible for an octopus, squid or fish to pick up a stick-like object and push it through the curtain to the other side to see what happens.

                           1. I’m still freaked out by “octopus beats shark by covering up its gills with two spare tentacles.”

                        4. Try ‘A Darkling Sea’.

                           1. I have the book but I don’t remember how High Tech the Ilmataran were.

                              Note, I didn’t say that intelligent civilized aquatic aliens were impossible. I suspected that they would not be able to develop High Tech. In this book, Humans discover the Ilmataran on their own home world not as Space Travelers.

         2. Oh, gads, yeah that’s one of the “but the smart people said it is more scientific, I shall demonstrate how smart I am!” things that gets old, really fast.
            We get it, you hate star trek and any other cool kid you’ve designated, can you stop signaling and write?

         3. *blink* When the guy who made the film admits he did it as a hoax, maybe one should listen?

            https://nypost.com/2017/09/26/alien-autopsy-filmmaker-regrets-hoax/

            1. Apparently the authors hadn’t heard that.

            2. Yeah, right.
               And Orson Wells just did a joke radio broadcast cast on Halloween 80 years ago!
               The TRUTH is out about John Worfin now!!! You won’t fool us again!!!!!@
               (Is /sarc necessary? )

               1. Wherever you go, there you are…

   2. Another upside for real books. They can be thrown across the room.

      1. “This is not a book to be set aside lightly. It should be thrown, with great force.”

         And those old traditional libraries all had fireplaces, too. For when throwing bad books against the wall just wasn’t enough?

         1. I once had to read a book for grad school that I ended up contributing to the bonfire at the sausage roast. Several of my colleagues did the same thing, with the same book. I had no regrets about removing a copy of that tome from circulation – there were plenty more copies out there, and I’d bought the thing with my own money.

6. Big tech oligarchs announced they intend to coordinate to silence political dissent/disagreement with the leftist-Democratic Party party-line:

   https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/07/26/big-tech-counterterrorism-org-shifts-focus-from-islamic-extremism-to-far-right/

   Note that they are not concerned with actual terrorism or violence because Antifa and BLM organizations that actually engage in violence and terrorist threats are NOT going to be scrutinized.

   1. There’s also been chatter about examining SMS (i.e. text) messages for “misinformation”.

      1. Not just chatter. It is rather clear they are already doing so.

      2. That’s not “chatter”. That was an official notification by the White House Press Secretary.

         1. Twitter also just banned all of the audit accounts that were tracking the audits of elections in disputed states-on the same day Democrats started their Soviet style show trial. It is clear that the tech oligarchs are actively coordinating with Democratic Party leadership in Congress and the White House. Textbook fascism.

            1. Actually, that would be justification for a band of vigilantes to destroy every twitter installation they could find. Zero difference from wrecking Tory printer offices.

               1. I had a slightly different idea.

               2. I had a slightly different idea.

                  Damn, forget ONE lousy quote mark grumble grumble…

      3. Pay attention to the most damning part, one they probably hope most people won’t notice: the group that will be ‘overseeing’ the censorship of text messages will be the DNC.

         NOT the elected government, not even the governmental bureaucracy, but the Democrat Party itself. Your text messages must be approved by The Party! Alles in ordnung!!

         1. Don’t worry, though, it’s completely false because they’re not getting the information directly from the carriers. It’s only stuff their informants send them. It’s J U S T F I N E

            1. It must be, the Good People we are told about would either protest or quit if it wasn’t. Or so we’re told.

               Notice how it also neatly gets around the Brady Rule requiring the disclosure of exculpatory evidence to the defendant. I’m sure their informants from the DNC will provide it.

               Plea bargains because confronted with “overwhelming evidence of guilt? It is to laugh.

               https://www.johntfloyd.com/cases-of-brady-violations-and-prosecutorial-misconduct/

               1. At this point, does it really matter whether they’re emulating the Communist Party, or the Nazi Party?

                  1. whynotboth.gif

                  2. Embrace the power of AND. They are emulating BOTH.

7. I got into it on FB with a friend who is in a medical lab-tech type of field about the CDC test. Apparently it was all a misunderstanding (https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/eua-withdrawal-for-cdc-covid-19-pcr-test-is-due-to-the-development-of-newer-tests-that-help-save-time-and-resources-not-because-the-test-is-faulty/) and the PCR test does indeed only find Covid, not influenza.

   It’s as if your city building department announced that they were going to retire their building code test methods for concrete foundations because there are so many other perfectly good test methods out there, and oh by the way going forward you should use tests that can tell the difference between bad concrete and bad rebar. Oh, we didn’t mean to imply that our test couldn’t tell the difference between concrete and rebar. It was always only for concrete. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Oopsie.

   I would think that given how many people distrust the CDC, they would be extra super careful to write their announcements as to rule out obvious misinterpretations. And I still don’t have a logical, statistically believable reason why there’s been so little flu this year.

   Another friend commented that it was due to a perfect flu vaccine this year plus social distancing and hygiene, and I just don’t buy that those two factors could result in a 97% drop from the 10-year average. I just don’t think that Covid by itself is so much more transmissible/contagious than flu — which is pretty damn contagious — that the same social distancing and hygiene wouldn’t have had a measurable effect when compared to the places that didn’t do the same.

   1. No. They’ve been running tests where they could interpret the flu as COVID. The CDC just told them to stop that. Yeah.

      1. I think, based on testimony from highly experienced clinicians I’ve seen on various interviews (Bret Weinstein’s in particular) that given a careful doctor they can distinguish the damage caused by Covid from that caused by other diseases, and that it’s the body’s response to that damage that causes the symptoms leading to death.

         However: Not every doctor is that careful or experienced. A patient admitted to the hospital and given a PCR test might in fact detect Covid — dead or micro-minimal as that virus may be — and therefore isn’t ever given a flu test. (For all I know, a flu test at the hospitalization stage might never detect anything, because maybe the flu tests don’t detect dead/minimal viruses the way the Covid tests do.) So we have a dying patient and a “Covid diagnosis” and no reason to think it’s anything else, and the doctor isn’t going to do the kind of direct examination to determine if it’s the Covid-type of lung damage or not. Boom: “Covid death”, not flu.

         So a protocol going forward that tests for both Covid AND flu at the same time is a great idea. Why they haven’t been doing that since day one I couldn’t tell you.

         1. And by the way, I’ve seen a lot of smug comments along the lines of “your playing down the Delta strain isn’t going to look so good when they’re intubating your loved one.”

            My response is if they’re intubating my loved one I’m getting a court order and suing them for malpractice. We’ve known since, what, last May? that that was a terrible idea.

            1. They keep telling me this, too. They are fucking insane.

               1. They keep wishing for our deaths when we do or say something unapproved. Then, when we don’t die, they wish for our deaths again. It’s not really about the virus, is it?

                  1. Some people really, really hated my description of having used a heating pad and sweating out a fever to kill off the Coof. When it should have made them happy that one could use simple methods.

                     Pretty sure that cold hospital rooms killed a lot of people.

                     1. You mean simple methods like Chloroquine and Ivermectin? 😦

                        Have they tried to have them banned again this week?

                        1. SSSHHH!

                           Don’t say Voldemort Ivermectin!

                     2. That’s pretty much what I did last year – spent as much time as possible in bed under all my blankets, just breathing. It took a while, but it worked.

                        (I was also taking antihistamines for my allergies, otherwise it’s likely some opportunistic bacteria would have gnawed in. Because my immune system sucks for those things.)

                  2. It’s about power, plain and simple. They want to control every aspect of people’s lives. The CCP Virus was and is simply a pretext.

                     1. Don’t forget the money also!

                  3. I’m wondering when I’m allowed to consider such wishes threats and act accordingly.

                     1. Well, they would; after all they keep telling us our words are violence, so…

                        As someone pointed out, unless the speaker is five years old, it’s always wise to take seriously someone who says they’re going to kill you.

                        1. Five years old or a cat. Don’t ask.

                           1. I’ve had cats. I don’t have to ask. 😉

                  4. They wish people who express disagreement with Critical Race Theory to die as well, and applaud and cheer when people declare they want opponents to die.

                     It is hard to see how this ends in anything other than bloody civil warfare.

                  5. Never has been.

               2. It’s like the co-worker who told me he hoped I died of lung cancer because I told him smokers had rights, too.
                  (For the record, I have never smoked. And aside from barbecue variations I don’t intend to).

                  1. I remember when the anti smoking crowd started to get personally militant with people in the early 80s. I suffered from chronic bronchitis for several years in my 30s and had a wicked chronic cough. They would come up to me and offer advice on the order of ‘if you’d quit smoking you wouldn’t cough’ when none of them had ever seen me smoke (I didn’t). My reaction varied from ‘if I smoked I’d already be dead’ to ‘if I had a cigarette I’d stuff it down your throat’. Said bronchitis was never medically explained but went away on its own after I got a much lower stress job at 40.

                     1. Betcha a lot of these folks are emotional children and if violence takes plsce some of them will be screaming, ” But I didn’t mean that!”

                  2. Just them them you hope they were murdered as they thought others had the right to assert what rights he had.

                  3. My response to “do you mind if I smoke?” is “Do you mind if I sneeze and cough, hard? After all smoking (around me) has consequences.” (Mostly violent sneezing, nothing helps, either). I don’t say anything. I have to either stand up wind (helps a little) or hold my breath when I walk by smokers.

                     Mom’s sister smokes. She’s 83 and frailer, but still … Their younger bother and his wife smoke, 73 and counting. Dad’s younger brothers smoke, or smoked. One is 70, the other is 72 I know that (at least) Oregon death certificate lists cause of death contribution smoking, even if you’d quit decades prior. (Inlaws, and they’d quit before their youngest was born, 35+ years prior.)

                     1. What I find “interesting” that polite Smokers (like I am) get treated like Jerks for smoking IN THE SIGHT of anti-smokers.

                        I also find it “interesting” that the Anti-Smoking Mafia say nothing against Pot Smoking.

                        Oh, D I wouldn’t smoke around you even if I didn’t know about your breathing problems because I’m polite about smoking.

                        Mind you, if I’m smoking outside away from people and some asshole came up yelling at me about smoking, I’d be very tempted to blow pipe smoke into the asshole’s face.

                        1. Regarding the pot smoking. I know. THEY are allowed to smoke inside because “medical” don’t you know. It is worse! I leave. They need their THC (or whatever), they can dang well eat it!

                           Actually pipe smoke I can tolerate slightly better. At least the scent. Which means if we ever meet, I probably won’t have to stand further away than normal (even further than 6′). I can smell the residual smoke on clothing. It isn’t good. No, washing clothing doesn’t help.

                           I don’t understand yelling at total strangers for smoking when they are smoking where they are allowed. Even when they light up without asking. After all that is where they are allowed to. Leave it you don’t like it. (I am NOT the morality police.)

                           Unfortunately leaving last fall when ash and smoke were horrible wasn’t an option. Hunkering down inside an avoiding smoke and ash was all that was possible. And, yes, it was interesting to be fighting wild land fires when I was an older teen. (I was never on a big fire, just small few acre district fires.)

                           1. So, in order to avoid the smoke from big fires, you had to cozy up to a bunch of little ones? 😮

                           2. So, in order to avoid the smoke from big fires, you had to cozy up to a bunch of little ones?

                              –
                              🙂 Nah. I wasn’t on an official fire crew. Not that this mattered back in mid 70s. Anyone working for the USFS back then could be put on a fire line provided one passed the physical requirements, which most field crew, even not fire crew, did. Just that I was never sent to a large fire … Which at the time was sooooo not fair! At least until I was put on smaller local fire. Was called out for small local fires, 3 or 4 times over the 3 of the last 4 seasons I worked for the USFS. (First year? I wouldn’t have sent me either – 18 year old college coed. Although they were sending the 18 year old young men. So really not fair, to them. But ’70s.) Being on any fire is dangerous. But the big ones so much more so.

                              I didn’t want to claim more experience or credit on wild land fires like seen/reported on these days.

                           3. The guy who wished me to get cancer was upset because of the reek coming from the official smoking area and wanted it closed. (It was pretty bad).
                              I ran into him years later and he’d completely forgotten that little exchange. I did not remind him.

                           4. Wet cotton face diapers work well enough to filter out smoke. (Was bad enough here last year that one night I had to wear one indoors.)

               3. They’re ghouls who thrive on death/dying… just like the jackasses who try to get people to support gun control by hoping an opponent’s kids get murdered in a school shooting.

               4. They are Believers.

                  A lot of history has come into sharper focus now that we can see Teh Crazy happening up close and personal.

                  1. “…now that we can see Teh Crazy happening up close and personal.”

                     THIS. I now have a detailed mental map of all of the really nasty stuff from the classical period, as well as the rock-bottom-worst parts of the 20th century that I didn’t directly experience.

            2. I lost two people last year, neither to COVID although the one who was murdered probably only was murdered because COVID gave the killer cover to make the body disappear.

               I nearly died myself, again not because of COVID although four months earlier treatment might have be delayed due to COVID (and I never got the normal PT because of COVID).

               Anyone who says that to my faith can enjoy the redemption of my trial and convention through false teeth.

            3. if the delta and lambda strains aren’t affected by the vaccine, why bother getting it?
               that’s my new question for them.

               1. Well, the vaccine [sic] won’t keep you from getting Delta, but it’ll keep you from getting very sick from it, but not so mild that you can’t transmit it. Not addressed: how frequently vaccinated people get infected with Delta, how frequently they transmit it, and how strongly they transmit it. And if a vaccinated-to-vaccinated transmission happens, does the recipient get an even smaller viral load and thus feel it and transmit it even less, and so on.

                  Another question: I have yet to see anything describing the frequency, duration, and severity range of “long Covid”. Is it 10% of people who have had it or 0.01%? Does it usually last a month or ten months? What is the distribution of symptoms, and are they any different from “long flu” or “long pneumonia”? Just like with Covid itself, I’m not in any way saying it’s not real, just that I have no way to judge the relative risks and consequences, and that annoys me.

                  1. “long covid” is post-viral syndrome, basically. I had it every time I had pneumonia, and a few time with just “colds”

                     1. Either that, or they’re simply hypochondriacs who may or may not have had the Wu Flu at some point in the past. I remember an article on “long covid” where something like 80% of the people featured had never tested positive for COVID (and several had tested negative).

                  2. Pneumonia I had symptoms for a year and a half.
                     Colds, usually for like two weeks.

                  3. Study just came out that anybody being “reinfected” has a much much smaller virus load. Because magically, immunity does lessen spread.

                     1. Yeah, that’s what I thought I’d read before. But all the Official Word is “Fear! For You Can Still Transmit The Delta Variant [dun dun duuuuuunnn]”. Not the actually informative, “You can still get infected but the vaccine keeps it from being a massive infection. You can still transmit it but you’re only going to transmit a small amount of virus not likely to get someone else sick.” Etc.

                        Or if that’s not the case, then give us some goddamned numbers: how many breakthroughs have there been as a fraction of number vaccinated, and how many people have caught it from people with breakthrough infections, and how bad were their symptoms.

                        I get that the vast majority of Americans are scientifically illiterate and almost totally innumerate, but damn it all, STOP TREATING ME LIKE I’M ONE OF THEM.

                        1. Aha! Comes now ABC News with an article about an unpublished CDC document showing that (symptomatic) breakthrough infections are found in only 0.098% (slightly less that 1 in 1000) of vaccinated people, and death is down around 0.0015% of BIs. That’s a good start. Now let’s get good numbers on BI-to-unvaccinated and BI-to-vaccinated contagion.

                           1. Forgot the link: https://abcnews.go.com/US/symptomatic-breakthrough-covid-19-infections-rare-cdc-data/story?id=79048589

                           2. And from Epoch Times, CDC Director Dr. Walensky says:

                              “Information from several states and other countries indicates that in rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variants after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others,” she said.

                              Oh noez, cower in fear everyone! Man, the only way that could have been more conditional and weaselly is if she had used the phrase “linked to”.

                              https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/cdc-studies-propelling-shift-in-mask-guidance-not-available_3923107.html

                           3. Here’s one from the UK. 195 vaccinated people caught it. That’s it.

                  4. The “long covid” symptom list is exactly congruent with hypothyroidism.

                     An examination of the covid-infected with major symptoms found that about 30% had serious thyroid damage (akin to Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which can be precipitated by flu or infection).

                     Gee, I wonder if medicine should maybe look a little more closely at this sheer coincidence.

                     1. That too.

               2. THIS

                  1. either the vaccine protects, or it doesn’t.
                     they’re trying to have their cake, eat it, and give it to someone else all at the same time on this one.

                     1. Don’t forget, they’re taking your cake, and mine, and everybody else’s cake too. Cake is RRRAAACIISSST!!!

                     2. Vaccines can protect to varying degrees, from better-than-nothing to complete, and the protection can vary from “not as sick” to “not sick at all”. Infection and shedding can still happen, you just don’t get symptoms. This is all completely normal.

                        The problem is they tried to SELL it as complete protection, when more likely it’s pretty good and better than nothing, but no vaccine is ever 100% perfect. 60% protection is considered decent, and 80% is stellar.

                        At this point it looks like the main advantage is that with vaccine, those who otherwise might have been sick enough to need hospital care, now don’t get sick enough to bother with the doctor. This is definitely in the realm of “better than nothing”, and we should just roll with it rather than getting our shorts in a lather over the fact that it’s not perfect.

                        1. What’s the word for vastly increases infection rate and makes it more likely to have symptoms?

                           (County has 5% vaccination rate. 74% of the almost-500 cases associated with Independence Day celebrations were fully vaccinated, and 79% of those were symptomatic, AND they checked for viral load. Yes, I’m aware they probably actually “sample selected by people who tested positive across the entire state, and who were in that county at some point,” and thus is invalid– but if they’re going to demand we look at bad science, we will LOOK AT IT and chop their hands off with it.)

                           1. >> “but if they’re going to demand we look at bad science, we will LOOK AT IT and chop their hands off with it.”

                              On that note, didn’t I read somewhere that the “vaccine” doesn’t contain any germs and is therefore not even a true vaccine to begin with? If I’m remembering that correctly then even the name is a lie.

                           2. That’s the mRNA one, yes.

                           3. The ‘vaccines’ currently being used under FDA Emergency Use Authorization contain recombinant RNA which is inserted into your cells, hijacks their metabolic machinery and causes them to synthesize viral proteins — which is EXACTLY what the actual virus does! The only difference is, the ‘vaccine’ doesn’t instruct the cells to manufacture complete viruses.

                              When your immune system is exposed to enough viral proteins, it begins to recognize them as foreign invaders and form antibodies. Almost like a real vaccine would, or recovering from the virus.

                              This is the first time such an approach has been tried so nobody really knows what the long-term effects might be. Nonetheless, the government ‘medical experts’ are demanding that Every American Must Be Injected with these experimental serums NOW, whether they are at any risk from COVID19 or not. Last I heard, they’re trying to lower the mandatory ‘vaccination’ age to 2.
                              ———————————
                              Politics perverts science. Scientists are rewarded, not for finding and reporting the truth, but for telling those in charge of the funding whatever they want to hear.

                           4. They’re all on emergency permission, but at least two of them are more standard vaccine types.

                              https://cogforlife.org/guidance/

                              These guys– if you agree with their view of all human lives being due recognition of their inherent dignity or not– are very accurate on their facts, and offer sources.

                              (They’re the vaccine/fetal cell line version of going to the Mormon church to trace one’s ancestry– you don’t have to agree with why they do it to recognize it’s good quality information.)

                           5. This approach absolutely makes sense and could be a godsend in stopping future diseases in their tracks because mRNA vaccines can be formulated so quickly.

                              With Covid, the mRNA vaccine does what it is supposed to do: induce cells to crank out vast amounts of the spike protein and cause the immune system to generate antibodies against it, so that when the body encounters the live virus it can already recognize the spike protein and destroy the virus.

                              The problem, only discovered after the fact, is that the spike protein itself appears to be toxic. If the mRNA target had been the next-to-the-spike-protein, there probably wouldn’t have been any side effects to the vaccines at all.

                              The other problem that goes to why the vaccines are only partially effective is that a natural immune response would code itself to multiple different proteins on the surface of the virus instead of one and only one. So slight changes to the single targeted protein would logically lead to decreased matching by the immune system.

                        2. (the study is one of those used to justify the CDC demanding masks again)

         2. Because that was wise, but not politically expedient.

            Jordan Peterson is more right than he realizes about how the elite have imbibed post-modernism. They truly have quit thinking there is a world their beliefs/pronouncements doesn’t control

      2. I don’t know what the adult world is doing but we have a test that covers influenza, COVID-19, and 20 other viruses. We have been using it all year(as well as the stand alone COVID-19 tests) and there has been no flu basically. Clinically, I don’t think the diseases look that different, partiality because I’ve heard everything called a symptom of COVID-19. So, not true

         1. (Please don’t read this as challenging, I’m genuinely interested in learning if there’s an answer.)

            So if “there has been no flu basically”, what happened to it?

            The “oh well people social distanced” explanation doesn’t really pass the sniff test logically or statistically, I’m willing to be proven wrong, although every attempt to do so thus far from non-experts has amounted to handwaving and lookasquirrel.

            Was this year’s flu vaccine really perfectly aligned with this year’s version? Did Covid occupy flu’s ecological niche? Does a Covid infection protect against a concurrent or subsequent flu infection? (and if so by what mechanism?) Are we continuing to see depressed rates of flu, or was it only last winter? Do you suspect we’ll see a normal or depressed flu season this coming winter?

            1. When enough people are running around pants-on-head shrieking about one disease, something as mundane as the flu passes unnoticed.

               1. I assure you, if I had caught the usual “kids went back to school” flu, I would have noticed. I had COVID in early February 2020 (yeah, I know), and I haven’t been sick a day since then.

                  1. Me too (although not officially diagnosed), and me neither.

               2. Yup. I had the flu early this year. Got a negative Covid test. Never got a flu test. Just did the normal bed rest, fluids, ibuprofen if fever gets up near 102.
                  Why would anyone with a normal case of flu go to the hospital when they were not allowing visitors and were overworked so your care would be worse than usual?

                  1. Thing is, you’ve still got people who get abnormal cases of the flu. It is generally fatal in some groups, particularly the elderly. So you’d expect to see at least some hospitalization for flu.

            2. I have no idea. I don’t want to pretend I have info I don’t. I would have a HARD time believing that the flu shot was that good, especially since we have terrible rates of coverage usually. Right now, we are seeing viruses that we usually see in winter, at high rates. Why ? I dunno. Did we just push things back with all the social distancing? In which case flu is coming. Or maybe we just don’t understand these viruses as well as we like to think.

               1. I’d bet on the “we don’t understand these viruses as well as we think.”

                  1. That too. I mean, doc, don’t take this wrong, but whenever I start reading on this stuff, I end up going “Uh…. we’re still in the shake stick at sick person and make them swallow some stuff and sometimes it inexplicably it works, but we don’t really know why.”
                     HOWEVER, FYI you shouldn’t tell your doctor “You’re basically a witch doctor” because they want to give you prozac for depression (while you have had some really bad news that day, and also haven’t slept for two weeks with a UTI)…. though he was basically a witch doctor. He took it hard. Fortunately he was just a fill in for my doctor, who would have laughed at me, but who also wouldn’t have tried to push prozac at me.

               2. Second thought. I mentioned below that RV travel is WAY up compared to last year, meaning a lot of people are moving around outside their usual areas. Perhaps that’s led to “winter,” viruses getting swapped around early?

                  1. Saw a quite compelling video on YouTube about how ‘flu season’ is really ‘low vitamin D season’ — cold and flu viruses are always going around, but mostly take hold in the winter when our vitamin D levels are depressed by lack of exposure to solar UV. Vitamin D is critical to proper immune function.

                     Many, many people with clinically significant vitamin D deficiency died of/with the coronavirus, and very few with normal vitamin D levels.

                     1. I haven’t had my Vitamin D levels tested either before or since, but I’ve been taking 3000 IU daily since around April of last year. I suspect that’s part of why I haven’t had so much as a sniffle or scratchy throat this entire time.

                        1. I’ve had one very mild cold. Spouse was told to take even more D than you are and it seems to really help him as well.

                     2. See above about the thyroid damage from Covid. Reduced ability to synthesize and absorb vitamin D is a specific hypothyroid symptom (easily mitigated by taking a reasonably hefty daily dose). They’re looking at the wrong end of the horse.

                        1. Or the end they’re most familiar with; it’s in their mirror every day.

                  2. EVERYONE is driving everywhere. I’ve noticed that.

                     1. There are more out-of-state plates in my neck of the woods than there are in-state ones. It’s been this way since last year.

                        My parents say they’ve counted plates from all of the states, including Alaska and Hawaii.

                        1. We have been fielding a LOT of calls over the last several months from people looking to buy land and inquiring about BLM rights-of-way. In other words, fleeing the cities/insane states.

                           I sure hope they realize that most of that uber-cheap land is a.) in the middle of a high desert, b.) there is literally NOTHING out there, so you’d better be ready to sink a well and figure out how to generate your own electricity (at least wireless coverage is good most places anymore), c.) yes, you will almost certainly have to get a BLM right-of-way to access your property (since most of it is in the “checkerboard” of alternating private and federal lands, legacy of the railroads), and that means you gotta pay rent on it, it sucks, but them’s the rules, please write your congresscritter about it, and d.) realize that for 7-9 months out of the year you may or may not be able to into/out of your property, on account of the snow…

                           1. There’s a lot of property around here that’s completely landlocked by other private landowners. One person bought such a property and took the lockers to court when they wouldn’t grant access. The judge told her that she was SOL. Such easements do not have to be granted. (I know the person somewhat. Karma strikes again.)

                           2. Yeah. I’ve been informing people who call to ask that they will also need to get–IN WRITING–permission from any other landowners whose land they have to cross to do so. Easements are not automatically granted, and verbal permission means precisely nothing. And us feds haven’t got access to the info about who the landowners are (other than what we might know as private citizens) so they’re gonna have to talk to the county clerks about who owns what where.

                           3. In writing permission Legally tied to the property needing access. We’ve seen this two places.

                              Grandparents old property. The property in front was subdivided from the back piece where the house was, so all the legal access rights were built in when property was created.

                              The other example is the family graveyard, a patch of < 1 acre off Hwy 99, access a gated ranch road. For a century or more, because the property was lost by original homesteader, the access has been "implied". That changed late '80s/early '90s when the graveyard was incorporated into a 501(c) and all legally documented as a historical family graveyard. The easement access and adjacent landing (used for parking and shed) are now legally joined, if not full public access*. But it wasn't an easy process. It took a few years and money. Money the people in the group didn't have. It was funded by grants and the Aunt who took this on. (Extended family falls within a wide range of economic levels. Modest middle class to upper middle class. Only one would be considered wealthy, the Aunt that put all this together. The way it had worked before the property was in a living family member's name, passed down, tax free, with no legal access. It was a matter of time before the state got involved. No one was expecting state involvement to be good. With legal recognition a whole slew of new requirements have been involved. But at least now that legal entity can't be revoked. Control can be lost if abandoned by each and every extended family member. Even then the legal entity stays intact, just the state gains control.)

                              Note. The Charles Applegate graveyard in Yoncolla has been in the same state until recently. Shannon Applegate (also current owner of the Charles Applegate house) owned the graveyard property. However her choice was different than above. Because this graveyard has been used by the town, not just Charles Applegate decedents, she choose to have it designated as a historical site and deed it to the city of Yoncolla. In addition, for reasons, the adjacent Masonic graveyard is now being included.

                              * I, as a family member, have access. General public, just because it is a historical site, does not. And, as another Aunt discovered, the friends of the buried, after the burial, do not have the right of access (unless Aunt was with them). Her daughter's friends wanted to visit the grave site to leave flowers, memorials, etc. At least until they all graduated HS and moved on. Cousin was killed at age 12 by a hit and run driver evening of the last day of school.

                           4. The Daughter Unit is working through the process of getting her real estate license in Texas … and matters of easements were one of the big issues in her classes, and presumably on the final exam…

                           5. Yeah, trespassing is a Class B misdemeanor: up to 1 year in state prison, not county, and it can also be a justification for deadly force, particularly at night. They tended to mention it in the CHL tests.

                           6. Which, incidentally, is why Gov Abbott is using it to arrest illegals: they go to state jail and some county judge can’t order a “COVD compassion” release.

                           7. Except in CA where they don’t prosecute trespassing anymore….

                           8. True crime show about neighbors, ahem, coming to blows. One episode: guy bought an acreage, where some of it was behind (rather than beside) his neighbor’s property. Decided to build his house on the property behind, and decided that neighbor’s driveway was HIS access road to his property. Tore it up, installed culverts, dropped all his supplies, dumped trash there. In spite of a surveyor and everyone else saying “NO that is neighbor’s private land, you cannot do this” kept doing it and openly declared he intended to keep dumping stuff, etc until he “drove neighbor crazy enough he just lets me have this piece of property to use.”

                              He drove neighbor crazy all right. But not to the point of getting him to ‘give’ him that property. Nope, he got his skull bashed in instead, and neighbor ended up serving time for 2nd degree murder…

                              So yeah…easements are a big, BIG deal…

                           9. Where the ever loving HELL was law enforcement?

                              I can’t even blame the neighbor that killed him. That’s trespassing, destruction of property, and public declaration of intent to steal via continuing notorious illegal activities.

                              THIS IS WHY WE HAVE LAWS AND ENFORCEMENT.

                           10. Yeah, that’s a big flaw of that show. I don’t know if local law enforcement was just that bad, or if they conveniently skipped covering it in the episode–I actually suspect, given that it escalated to MURDER, that it was a little bit of both. Or even not so much ‘they sucked’ as they downplayed the potential problems, like a lot of even otherwise-competent police departments do with domestic problems. Though given that some of the crap the future murder victim pulled included something that amounted, technically, to burglary and car theft–I do wonder if the local LEOs weren’t just being idiots.

                           11. And yeah, with the exception of ONE cousin that was as entitled-crazy as the victim, even the victim’s own family agreed that 2nd degree murder and 25 years (with presumably a chance of parole) was more than adequate justice. So even most of the dude’s own family thought he was an a**hole who pretty much asked for it…

                           12. “I can’t even blame the neighbor that killed him.”

                               I could — if and only if the neighbor didn’t call the cops first.

                               After that, I’m with you.

                           13. I think he had called the cops multiple times, but either they were indifferent, or the future murder victim did things in just such a manner that there was only so much they could do. (Though I’m in favor of it being idiots all the way down, on all sides.)

                           14. “either they were indifferent, or the future murder victim did things in just such a manner that there was only so much they could do. ”

                               Trespassing is pretty obvious. If I’d been on that jury, there would have been a mistrial.

                               Private property is private property. You either buy it from the owner, or you get a court decision granting you an easement, BEFORE you start building.

                               Same basis for my stance on civil asset forfeiture: Get a conviction, or the cops have no right to take it unless they can show it’s direct evidence, and they can prove it when challenged..

                           15. I suspect the problem is that, until it came to the murder part, nothing else ever GOT to trial. (I only saw bits, but I’m not sure they even ever arrested the future victim. Let alone charge him with anything. Again, not 100% sure how much of the truth the tv show was telling, or if they were fudging bits to make it more dramatic, but…it would lean towards “the cops sucked” if they in fact never arrested the other guy for trespass or anything else…)

                           16. Don’t forget having to check with the State Water Engineer’s office and/or Underground Water Conservation District to see how large of a well you can have, if you are planning on a large capacity domestic well. (Might not apply in your state, but does in many western states.)

                           17. Yeah. I tell them that’s outside my knowledge, but at the very least they’d have to sink a well–and that if their land has anything doing with a stream or a river (most doesn’t, but I tell them anyway) that they had better be VERY aware of water rights that take precedence over anything else they might try to do with that water. Wars were fought over water rights in the past, and huge feuds–both in-family and inter-family–are still going on over them all over this area.

                           18. Hence the old saying that whiskey is to drink, but water is for fighting over…

                           19. The last drought, all non-residential wells were verboten in Oregon. I don’t know if the restriction was lifted in the inter-drought period.

                        2. We’re normally in high tourist season (proximity to Crater Lake helps), but between the large Jack Fire in the west side and the huuuuuuge Bootleg fire in the east, the usual tourists have decided to go elsewhere.

                           Not sure what’s going to happen with Burning Man. Flyover Falls is a pitstop for folks from the north (coming and going), and while BLM was unhappy with the people in 2019 and 2020 was cancelled, $SPOUSE thinks the woke coefficient of the Burners will get it reinstated this year.

                        3. The NEW IMPROVED airline rules may be part of it. Screw wearing a mask for hours on end

                           1. Hawaii’s a hell of a drive, though.

                           2. Maybe they got one of the Cuban truck floaters to design a craft?

                           3. I CAN’T.

               3. I wonder if there’s cross-immunity with flu. Maybe just in the immune system getting in an uproar after Covid exposure, and fighting it any subsequent flu exposure before it can become clinical.

                  Or perhaps it’s doing something like how antibodies for Newcastle disease (of chickens) can cure canine distemper. Yes, really. See Dr.Sears’ treatment, which I have personally seen work.
                  https://www.edbond.com/antidistemper.html
                  (If time is short, you can dose the sick dog with straight Newcastle vaccine.)
                  IIRC he thought it interfered with viral replication in some unusual way.

                  I’m tolerably sure there’s more-conventional cross-immunity between Covid and canine coronavirus.

                  1. When the T-Cells that deal with SARS2 were identified, it was noticed that a large number of blood samples from 2017 already had the T-Cells in question. The theory at the time was that these came from another coronavirus, presumably a common cold that swept through either that year, or in the years immediately preceding the year that the samples were taken.

               4. Most of the clinics (and all of the “public health” people) were using the test that has the EUA. Some good reasoning behind that – a single target test is far easier to process, and also to mass produce, thus cheaper. The test itself was not bad, just the way it was being used in most cases, with a completely out of bounds replication.

                  1. Oh, I agree. Loads of testing, with no idea of false positivity rate. To be fair to my colleagues, lots of it is required by employers. Nursing home staff was being tested weekly, to the point we were doing another test before the results from the last one came back. I’m just saying all flu was not being called COVID-19 because we had tests that tested for both.

               5. They claim that one of the tests used confuses the two. (In the linked thingy. Now I don’t know enough to tell for sure, but it would help explain things.)

            3. My personal bet – a ton of what wold normally be flu cases were diagnosed as COVID

               1. Pumps up the Covid numbers and everybody makes more money also.

            4. For kids, I would guess that there was a massive drop in people sending their sick kids to school– and probably a drop in people bringing in kids to the doctor JUST to get a flu test so they could be allowed to keep them home.

               1. Yes. that would make a huge difference. I mean, I haven’t caught flu since my kids got out of elementary.

            5. Based on the T-Cell findings, it appears that SARS-2 occupies the same niche as one of the recent common cold strains from at least four years ago (since the relevant T-Cells turned up in 2017 blood samples, iirc).

            6. Did COVID somehow block influenza?

               1. I don’t know, is that a thing? It would be nice if some medical science team would actually examine the question and publish some results explaining the mechanism. But every time I’ve run across some “expert” alluding to this hypothesis their “explanation” is a bunch of maybes and conditionals and general handwaving.

8. Chirp, reading I had the image of Phoenix rising from the ashes, which segued to a Felix the cat image. The way things are going perhaps a cartoon character is more apropos.

   On the wrong (I’m tired of saying the left and right sides actually what we have is the right and wrong sides.), hatching their New World Order they seem far too unbelievable to even be cartoon characters.

   I’m with ya, Sarah, hoping the eagle hatches, but if they kill us first, ain’t gonna happen. OK, I’m paranoid today, I posted the following as a reply over on MeWe on the we demant that You WILL be vaccinated subject (Hence I’ll quote myself as I’m lazy and porn to typos {prone, not porn, see what I mean?} this why I’m looking at it twice and may catch some;

   ” Why are they pushing it for a disease far less dangerous (Based on reported deaths even though we know the numbers include death by motorcycle accidents, etc.) than many past flus?

   OK lets go way way out in left field paranoid; The vaccine is a new thing, using Mrna to modify DNA, and has emergency approval avoiding normal testing of vaccines.

   Mrna, messenger rna , hey say I’m a geek in a lab (-or a man wise beyond imagination like, say, Bill Gates or George Soros who have stables full of lab geeks) and I ‘know’ the greatest danger to the world is overpopulation. I’ve this tiny string of rna that causes sterility and/or abortion, if I splice it in to the Mrna, ain’t nobody gonna know until it activates, also ain’t no way anybody can trace it back to me. Cool, I saved the world!

   Yep, way out paranoid. However we do know, based on CDC’s own numbers some 82% of pregnant women vaccinated in their first trimester aborted their fetuses. CDC kind of smothered that data and reported instead, abortion rates over all three trimesters as, if I remember right somewhere around 12%, which I still see as an unacceptable number.

   Actually as I read more and more about the Bad China Cold, vaccine passports, blood clots, etc., my little lab geek above fable may not be all that far out.”

   1. Just think of the reaction if that is proven or looks real likely? And they had to of done it on purpose it could NOT be an accident. My Oh My, that would get peoples attention.

      1. If that were to happen, there’d be no downside to the person doing it. Well, besides being torn apart by the mob. But their friends would support, or at least understand it. “So what if it will make them less likely to get other vaccine? They’ll die even more easily.” C.S Lewis’ busybodies on an industrial scale.

   2. Well, they are so intent on getting everyone to take the vaccine (vaccine?), it seems that Covid is just the reason they manufactured to get the drug into our arms. You know, the vax needed Covid, not the other way around.
      More variants, more threatening coercions to come.
      Young school children are not threatened by Covid, but TPTB want them to get the shot in their arms. They are desperate to make this all happen.
      Trust their motives? It has the smell of a dead fish.

      1. I’m not ready to buy all of this but I won’t dismiss it out of hand either; https://www.lifenews.com/2021/07/27/whistleblowers-experts-warn-of-increased-risks-of-infertility-death-after-covid-vaccines/

         1. Oh joy. That’ll make the 3rd world cooperate with vaccinations…NOT!

         2. IMHO there is nothing beyond belief in your referenced article.
            They will apply psyops and different avenues of pressure to carry on the masquerade as long as we let them.
            Many medical professionals have called it out for what it is, a huge control operation by the governments, oligarchs of Tech and Pharma, WEF and UN. But the whistleblowers get silenced, one way or another. Even Pfizer’s former VP and Chief Scientist says it’s “madness” and involves “evil”.
            It won’t stop unless we fight it.

   3. I really don’t think it’s far out at all. With all the links between Soros, Gates, Schwab, WEF, et al., I find that depopulation bomb idea to be frighteningly plausible. Trying not to end up putting clippings on walls and tying yarn to everything, but the broad picture that I have is not … good. Which is why I truly enjoy Missus Hoyt’s posts and the optimism they bring, but I’m also concerned that there are much darker things than merely man working here. Even for those of us who are Fae, dealing with Those From Below is not a good idea.

   4. These ‘mRNA vaccines’ hijack your cells’ metabolic machinery to produce virus proteins.

      THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT THE VIRUS DOES!!

      Why is anybody surprised that it causes problems?

   5. Yep, way out paranoid. However we do know, based on CDC’s own numbers some 82% of pregnant women vaccinated in their first trimester aborted their fetuses. CDC kind of smothered that data and reported instead, abortion rates over all three trimesters as, if I remember right somewhere around 12%, which I still see as an unacceptable number.

      Do you have a link to the specific document for this please? I’m arguing with someone who won’t accept anything and probably won’t accept this either but it is worth a try.

      1. Oh holy blank, I was expecting this to be hard to find… the FACT CHECK links it, but claims that it’s false because 12% of the women miscarrying was normal (!!!!!) when 700 of the 712 pregnancies that were not lost were for women who got their shots in the third trimester.

         That’s of a total of 827 who were pregnant.

         https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2104983?articleTools=true#page=1

         The chart for the estimated rate of “pregnancy loss” says 25%. This seems to be based on the the estimate from Ob/Gyns for those that occur before the first missed period. The estimate for once the woman realizes she’s pregnant is closer to 15%, and that includes IVF.

         1. Losing the baby in the third trimester is literally a one in a hundred, high-end, risk.

         2. No, 3958 were pregnant. Or maybe around 35,000. I’m not sure what those different numbers are.

            The 827 is the number of pregnancies which ended in some way; either through carrying to term or miscarriage. Of those ~12% were miscarriages at less than 20 weeks. Based on timing it would not be possible for any of the early term cases to have successfully concluded yet.

            The fact check numbers are as screwed up as the original study.

            The chart for the estimated rate of “pregnancy loss” says 25%.

            Where is this chart? I don’t see it anywhere in the document, unless you are adding up all of the Thing Goes Wrong categories in table 4?

            1. Among 827 participants who had a completed
               pregnancy, the pregnancy resulted in a live birth
               in 712 (86.1%), in a spontaneous abortion in 104
               (12.6%), in stillbirth in 1 (0.1%), and in other
               outcomes (induced abortion and ectopic pregnancy) in 10 (1.2%). A total of 96 of 104 spontaneous abortions (92.3%) occurred before 13 weeks
               of gestation (Table 4), and 700 of 712 pregnancies that resulted in a live birth (98.3%) were
               among persons who received their first eligible
               vaccine dose in the third trimester. Adverse out- comes among 724 live-born infants — including
               12 sets of multiple gestation — were preterm
               birth (60 of 636 among those vaccinated before
               37 weeks [9.4%]), small size for gestational age
               (23 of 724 [3.2%]), and major congenital anomalies (16 of 724 [2.2%]); no neonatal deaths were
               reported at the time of interview. Among the
               participants with completed pregnancies who
               reported congenital anomalies, none had received Covid-19 vaccine in the first trimester or
               periconception period, and no specific pattern
               of congenital anomalies was observed. Calculated
               proportions of pregnancy and neonatal outcomes
               appeared similar to incidences published in the
               peer-reviewed literature (Table 4)

               1. I see that, but what point are you supporting with it?

                  1. Ian, I do not have the time to hand-hold you through this.
                     I literally wasted most of my free time this morning finding what you asked for, looking through for any support of your statement that it was mathematically impossible for those whose pregnancy was before week 28 to have completed their pregnancy at the time of the study, went and READ THE FREAKING LINKED STUDY to HAND YOU the rate they claimed–
                     how about you do some of the work, instead?

                     The study does definitely not say what the debunking claims, and you clearly have the time on your hands to go through and pull out numbers, dates, etc. How about you do it on the study, instead of on someone who did the magical work of a basic web search to find it for you?

                     1. Actually after I had asked the question someone else posted that document on the most recent blog post, so I had already skimmed it before you ever posted.

                        After working through the math yes there was enough time for a first trimester pregnancy to successfully complete.

                        Though this still leaves the question of what that 3958 number is. I’m guessing it includes all of the still active pregnancies.

                     2. Correction; just realized that I only did one bound of the range.

                        Women who were just barely still in their first trimester (12wk) would have been in the range of 7 – 9.75 months when the study was published. This is ignoring any time required to publish.

                        On the other extreme a woman who got pregnant the week after getting the vaccine would be in the range 3.75 – 6.5 months at study conclusion.

                        So yes; most women in the study could not have successfully completed their pregnancy in the available time.

                        1. The problem is YOU MADE THE STATEMENT AND I HAD TO BURN MY VALUABLE TIME looking to see if you had ANY SORT OF BASIS for your statement in order to respond AT ALL.

                           It would involve looking through the study to see if they stated when they *stopped* getting the data used for preliminary findings.

                           Your conclusion at the end is also incorrect, since they state that fewer than a third were either first trimester or became aware they were pregnant after the shot, so no, “most” were not thus obviously too early to have given birth, especially when “normal” is 37-42 weeks.

                           1. I should have been more specific: the question at had is whether first trimester pregnancies are failing at anomalous levels. Any woman who was later than that is irrelevant to the question.

                              The time between the vaccination period of the study (Dec 14th – Feb 28) and the publishing date (Jun 17) is 15.5-26.5 weeks.

                              At the close of the study period a woman would have had to be at least 21 weeks in to fit within the normal range and still give birth before the publishing date.

                              At the start of the period she would have to be 10 weeks or more to fit.

                              Therefore by the time the study was published:

                              * all women in their second or third trimester at vaccination time would have completed their pregnancy in some way

                              * most women (~83% assuming an even distribution of start dates) in their first trimester at vaccination time would not have had time to complete a successful pregnancy in the normal range

                           2. Yes, “of those in first trimester, did a normal number report miscarriages,” would be a valid question. A short one, too, which does not make statements which have to be checked in order to start answering the question.

                              Again, though, you didn’t put the time into framing the question, much less trying to answer it yourself, and I’m annoyed because I mistakenly thought that you would at least do that, rather than waste someone else’s time.

                        2. All questions of timing are subordinate to the most important question: Are pregnant women having miscarriages in anomalously high numbers after getting COVID19 shots? The answer seems to be a definite YES.

                           Therefore, in any sane environment, ALL vaccinations of pregnant women would be stopped immediately. THEN they can work on finding out the details and causes.

                           Instead, our ‘Publick Health Authoriteez’ deny that anything is wrong while brandishing the needles. If I had any trust left in them, this would end it. Of course, they burned up the last of their trust more than a year ago. I’d sooner take medical advice from my cat.
                           ———————————
                           Major Strasser has been shot! Round up the usual suspects!

                           1. Ugh. A recent thing I’ve seen pop up this week amongst my left-leaning friends/acquaintances: doing your onw research is BAD AND STUPID because *you’re* not an expert, so how can you possibly know what to research and how to do it correctly? So of course you MUST listen to the medical experts because THEY know how to do it right, and of course are always correct and never lie or change their minds or are wrong.

                           2. Did you see the article that they used to support it?

                              It’s an astrophysicist mocking people for daring to comment on vaccines, rather than doing…what he judges they should.

                              “Don’t you dare read the evidence from people who study vaccines and did actual scientific tests, shut up and listen to me because I studied black holes and am thus a scientist authority!”

                           3. Also: no, I haven’t seen the article. But I am mighty sick of “scientists” like that. They are dishonest to their cores.

                           4. The amount of irony in this may cause a toxic reaction:
                              http://web.archive.org/web/20210731200058/https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/30/you-must-not-do-your-own-research-when-it-comes-to-science/

                           5. Yep, that would be the article some idiot friends of mine were spreading around FB about why we should all obey “the experts.”

                              Behold, both of my middle fingers!!

                           6. Where do experts come from in the first place?

                              Maxwell did not start as an expert in electromagnetics.

                              He, like a bunch of other applied mathematicians and mathematical physicists responsible for certain scientific discoveries, was trained to a certain point, and then worked to extend things they had learned to things that had not been tried before.

                              Some of these discoveries were good, some were bad, and some were not immediately clear. But, you can know more than anyone about a narrow thing, write the textbook on it, and still not be due deference from the public as an expert.

                              The men who formed the first engineering professional societies had been in the habit of reading theoretical texts, trying to apply them in practice, and seeing if they work or do not. They stuff they found that worked, that they told their peers about, was a curated subset of the discoveries. But there would have been nothing special about that curated subset, if the engineers had not delivered results to their customers and to the public.

                              The expertise of the engineers came from the recognition of the public.

                              The expertise of the scientists, whether as researchers or as teachers, came partly from the recognition of the engineers.

                              A supposed ‘professional’ who does work of quality such that a layman can put together a measurably better alternative is not a real professional.

                              If one supposes that the verification or validation or credentialing of experts can validly work in the opposite way, there is nothing stopping me from declaring myself an expert on experts, and credentialing a bunch of sycophants to support my claim.

                              Fundamentally, expertise or professional knowledge is backward facing. It is based in past results delivered to the public. Work done within those results is reasonably safe, but using those tools beyond that is risky. Looking forward, a well run profession is going to produce a certain number of serious mistakes. One of Henry Petroski’s books covers this a little, in a discussion of bridge failures.

                           7. I’m still irritated with sarathered’s friends.

                              How they expect to deal with issues of multi-disciplinary problems and conflicting types of experts, if they cannot be critical about expert claims?

                              Masking, climate science, and that letter by heads of law schools are examples of multi-disciplinary problems.

                              Yes, the obvious experts on masking are medical, but the masks aren’t powered or chemically active, so it is mechanical separation, and mechanical engineers are also relevant experts. Climate Science? Climate Scientists, but because of the fluid and thermal elements of the models, mechanical engineers can also be expert. The letter? You can say that lawyers are experts on the responsibilities of lawyers, but the letter makes a claim that is implicitly inside electrical engineering, so an electrical engineer may comment.

                              Okay, the engineers who will throw around “I have a PE” in online arguments are thankfully rare, so a debating strategy that is vulnerable to one is not entirely risky. Even so, do these friends not expect to get it thrown back into their faces some day?

                           8. I mean, there’s a REASON most of them are in their 30s (or even 60s, for a couple) and are still lefties: they don’t like questioning the status quo. They’ll question safe things–ie, the usual support of the social cause du jour–but not the actual status quo. The reason I’m still friends–though not terribly close, save with a couple–with most of them, is that they are still willing, at least most of the time, to converse with/debate with someone of strong conservative leanings like me (not that I generally have the energy to argue with what amounts to very stubborn, very blind fenceposts. I’m sure they feel the same about me, heh.). But it’s really clear that we will NEVER agree on those things, and it does leave me in a position where, when the chips are down, I doubt I would trust their judgement to help themselves or others survive in the face of inevitable betrayal by their own “side.” They are, alas, useful idiots by and large.

            2. And it’s table 4.

      2. This article claims the data were misinterpreted , but I think it makes the case worth questioning: https://fullfact.org/health/vaccination-miscarriage-CDC-study-inaccurate/

9. I mean, after all while doing experiments on electricity the 18th century was also fascinated with astral projection and other such things, and made no distinction. And the 19th was not much better.

   Like looking for invisible, living poison that can be exorcised by either alcohol or boiling sounds any saner…

   1. Yeah, the reason I cut them a lot more slack than I would similar people today is based on what they knew they were already on the edge of the rational.

      It’s kind of like my response to people who claim they know they’d have accepted the heliocentric universe immediately because it’s obviously true. I just ask them to explain the lack of parallax on the stars, including “well, how would you know they were too far for there to be a parallax without making a gross assumption.”

      People today think they’re brilliant because of what they’ve learned and thus smarted than the people whose work was steps on the way to figuring it out.

      1. explain the lack of parallax on the most stars

         Careful measurement can reveal parallax in observations of stars more than 300 light years distant. We should be able to see detectable parallax in about 40,000 stars.

         1. Tycho was not able to and he was the premier observational astronomer of the age.

            That’s why his revision of Ptolemy which had all the planets orbit the Sun while the Sun orbited the Earth required fewer epicycles than Galileo’s “right” helicentric system.

            Also, how do you know stars can be up to 300 LYs away. How do you measure it?

            I suspect you can explain that but the typical Galileo worshipper cannot, much less name the two men who deserve the real credit for ushering in the Copernican Revolution, Braehe and Kepler.

            1. Well, such precise measurements require photography, and instruments that didn’t exist until the 19th century. Mechanization and machine tools provided benefits to many fields of knowledge.

               1. Yes, but anyone arguing they would have agreed with Galelio during his lifetime is arguing for Tycho’s instruments, not ones for over two centuries later.

                  I don’t think Herschel did measurement of a stellar paralex.

               2. Yes. I can’t think of any non-photographic means of discerning a parallax of one second of arc at that time, and that’s only going to be valid for Alpha Centauri and companions.

                  1. Even Proxima Centauri is over 1 parsec away, it’s ~3.26ly/parsec so its 4.2 Ly is 1.28 Parsec so ~.77 seconds of arc parallax. No way you’re measuring that without photographic methods which show up in mid 19th century or so. However even with photographic plates there’s still a fair bit of slop that for things even in the mid range (50 parsec 100? don’t remember) where the atmospheric uncertainty effects start to overwhelm the measurements. Hipparcos satellite fixes lots of that, but it started playing havoc with the distances to some of the standard candles like Cepheid variables so meant they all had to get tweaked.

      2. Nod, the Earth-centered system is immediately obvious to Everything People of the time knew except when it came to planetary movements and planetary movements was a minor thing for most educated people.

         Now, the Flat Earth thing had so many flaws in it that the Ancient Greeks knew that it was wrong.

      3. As a child growing up in the Arizona mountains, I had to take it on faith that the Earth is three-dimensional – there was no way for me to see the “proof” that it is not flat. Even the couple of road trips that the family took back to the ancestral home in Kansas were just before harvest – and, unless it is a very clear day and the angle is just right, you still don’t see the tops of the water towers and grain silos appear before the entire structure is visible. (No, I wasn’t old enough to know that the height of the sun at noon could only be explained by spherical trigonometry, not by plane trigonometry.)

         I was twenty before I took my first airplane trip on which I actually observed the curvature, and a bit older before I first traveled the ocean to see the “classic” proof.

         1. What do you mean? You could immediately see the Earth wasn’t flat; it was full of mountains! 😛

            1. It was always clear that the Earth was not flat. If it were, cats would have knocked everything off of it a long time ago 🙂

10. Seeking the Singularity in order to gain all power and knowledge seems to be the equivalent.

11. I’m more and more convinced Americans (and probably the whole world) have gone insane. We’ve had wave after wave of hysteria (the Reisistance crap? Hysteria. Me-Too? Yep. The sudden transgender fad? Uh-huh. The Kavanaugh hearings? Yeah, baby. And Covid). Each wave has been worse than the last. I’m wondering if someone has been trying to gin up a, “Let’s kill all the Jews!” wave but so far that hasn’t taken off.
    Will the next wave make “anti-vaxxers,” the scapegoat, or will they be conflated with “white supremacists”? What I fear is I can’t see the hysteria continuing without eventually causing massive violence.

    1. Only the Far Left is actually insane. A smaller and smaller number of shriller and shriller wackadoodles are making most of the noise, driving out those with any remaining grain of sanity. Opportunists taking advantage of the deranged few to gain power are a bigger threat.

       1. The far right is just about as whackadoodle as the far left.

          1. Yeah, but they haven’t got their grubby mitts on the levers of power. (Well. Unless you take my view, that they are not functionally different at all, perhaps they DO)

          2. There is no far right. They call US the far right.
             There is a left that thinks it’s right.

          3. What, exactly, would the Far Right be? People excessively obsessed with personal rights and freedom from government intrusion into every aspect of our lives? USAians who believe the Constitution means what the words say, and that our Founders intended to set those specific words down for posterity?

             I wouldn’t believe anybody could BE as insane as the Far Left if I wasn’t seeing it for myself.
             ———————————
             Does the Left drive those idiots barking mad, or were they drawn to the Left because they were already batshit crazy?

    2. I’m convinced they’re trying to drive us all crazy.

       1. I don’t know about anyone else but in my case they’ve half succeeded

          1. ah. I beat them to it.

          2. I’m weathering it pretty good, but I also know some people it has been pretty rough on.

             I’m a little peeved about that, and I’m still not entirely sure that the choices to cause problems were made maliciously, capriciously, arbitrarily, and pointlessly.

             If I have those proven conclusively, I will definitely carry a grudge.

       2. It’s not just that. It’s also that, in Obama’s words, they actually believe their own BS. In a sense, they a very much like the Inner Party members of Oceania, who simultaneously know that everything they say and do is pure BS, but at the same time are the most fervent believers in the “truth” of the BS. It is this cognitive dissonance that is at the core of their unwillingness and inability to consider any differing view from the current party line.

          1. This. This right here.

    3. Thing is, this is a case where what we can sense of the broader picture, and the actual reality of it, are entirely different matters.

       Okay, I’m pretty extreme, in that I’ve had contact with maybe a dozen people in the past unit of time. The mix of people in that who are reasonably sane, congenitally crazy, or business contacts I don’t know well are more or less unchanged. Anyway, obviously this is not a sample I can extrapolate from.

       Fundamentally, the people we can have an in person bead on are few. Also, probably, geographically concentrated.

       We have a natural tendency to confound the in person estimate with TV people. We assume that the TV people are real, and make up our monkey sphere in proportion to the time spent with them. But, for the case that all TV was reality shows, filmed in state hospitals, we can see that our instinct would be programmed wrong.

       Opposition knows that they can fiddle with this, and fiddles with it on purpose. They’ve gained a lot of influence over how TV money is spent.

       Anyway, Foxfier linked to a thing condemning modern trends in teaching. I’ve been over there, but haven’t the spoons to comment. One of the folks there said ‘at least red states are safe from this’, or something to that effect. I wanted to rave at them about issues in red state education.

       1. Our information about what is going on at the macro level, in real time, depends on proxies that are all varying degrees of horrible now.

          Not as in ‘the information sources are lying to us’, but instead as in ‘these things do not match by way of reliable theory to useful state estimates or predictions’. Because all of our theoretical models are based in past behavior, when we expect some to break, and do not know which ones, we cannot completely trust any. Human behavior is /difficult/.

          The estimates are a tool, and should not be the basis for our state of mind. Have some faith that your fellow Americans will find a right thing to do.

          The worst case, everyone else in the worlds fails you. My read on being a Christian is that this is someone one should be prepared to face anyway.

          Have faith that your own correct actions are not a waste.

          1. THIS. The fact that they’re utterly baffled by Americans dumping 10x the amount of donations on charity shops is amazing.

             1. We are basically deaf people listening to blind people read entrails.

                Additionally, God would not ask us to pick Good in the small choices of our own lives if they were not important.

                We have reasonably reliable information that God does so instruct us. That God should have the expertise to know is also both reasonable and reliable.

                God’s information on how we should make small choices in our own lives is far more reliable than some poll, an internet rumor, or something I pull out of thin air from who knows where.

                In broader information warfare, there is some talk of equipment operating in ‘autistic’ mode. This might actually be an appropriate strategy, except that we are human beings, and very much not widgets. In theory, a widget, specifically an information machine, could be designed to operate sanely in stand alone mode.

                There may be humans who can operate sanely while entirely isolated, but to my sometimes regret I am not one of them. So, telling everyone “I got nothing, and I should be fine operating off of that”, and hearing the occasional response is important for me. May actually be more important for others.

                And, this is a time for a lot of coping with being around, or even in the power of, crazy people. This is always very difficult. Talking to other people, or outsiders, who more closely approximate sane, may even be essential in such circumstances.

                Thing is, human populations are always varied. So, there are people who get driven crazy by crowd madness at different rates, and there are people who are extraordinarily resistant to being driven crazy by peer influence. There are people some where, that can in principle be found in the real world, who are coping with this better, and can help others with their coping.

                But this theory is hard to live in practice, especially if you haven’t tried before to cultivate your personality in that direction.

    4. They’re already trying to do that – the numbers, however, don’t lie. (They do get suppressed, though.)

    5. I guess you missed all the recent “death to the Jews” rhetoric from the BLM crowd as well as the pogroms in New York City, LA and elsewhere where people were openly targeting Jews while shouting chants that called for the entirety of Israel’s Jewish population to be eradicated.

       The left is very much on the “kill all the Jews” bandwagon.,

       1. Since all of the available vaccines involve parts from deliberately homicided humans, the hard push on the vaccination may also be related to creating an excuse to continue the attacks on those observant Jews who reject that, with additional ability to attack observant Catholics or any other philosophy which would walk away from Omelas.

       2. Quibble: when was the hard left *not* on the kill the Jews bandwagon?

    6. Speaking of the standard “Kill the Jews” thing:
       https://the-american-catholic.com/2021/07/29/sweet/
       Andy Ngo Breaking: Antifa Brawl & get beat up at a “We Are Israel” event in El Cajon, Calif.

       1. Bonus, one of the speakers they were trying to intimidate?
          Larry Elder.

          Notice the folks opposing them include a lot of red-neck looking folks.

       2. https://www.eastcountymagazine.org/shield-david
          Notably, they don’t say how many showed up for the Palestinian rally.

12. Possibly another sign of things changing: we called a favorite RV park today to make reservations for early next week, only to be told they’re full up. The camp manager told my husband business is up 250% from last year.
    So all this hooraw about the latest spike and how people need to go back to wearing masks….good luck with that.

13. The CDC has issued new guidelines telling people that they need to mask back up again regardless of vaccination status. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes over with the general public. I know Gov. DeSantis is already saying, “No, we’re not doing that.” But I doubt that the Powers that Be are going to let such a challenge sit unopposed. At the very least, I’m seeing “Florida’s COVID spike!” headlines on news websites.

    LA County has already masked up again, and I don’t think it’s the only county in California that’s doing so. That was made before the new CDC guidelines, of course.

    On a personal note, my co-worker just tested positive. I was informed of that on Sunday. So I had to get a test, and can’t go back to work until I get a negative test result. Went on-line to schedule a test for Monday, and went to the CVS website (Rite-Aid wanted me to register BEFORE I even had a chance to check the available testing times, which is a red flag for me). There was not a single test time slot available for Monday. I had to schedule it for today, instead. And if I’d decided I had to take the test at the nearest test sites, I wouldn’t have even been able to do that. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s really quite ridiculous.

    1. America’s Paper of Record: To Defeat Delta Variant, Experts Recommend Doing All The Things That Didn’t Work The First Time

    2. I’m not the general public – but I’ve already said that I’m not playing that game again.

       Now, I will take my rag with me if I am forced to report for possible Federal jury duty next month. But, as I did before, I will only cover my mouth with it, because covering both mouth and nose, I’ll be on the floor in less than half an hour.

       Only going that far because I anticipate that the Federal judges here (almost all of them Clintonistas or Obamunists) would just love to one-six me.

       1. Seems to me that absolutely refusing to wear a mask would be an easy way to get out of jury duty.

          “yes, your Honor I would love to serve on this jury. Face covering? Oh no. I don’t mask.”

          ….

          “Well, your honor, it’s up to you. Either you let an unmasked person on the jury, or you dismiss me from the pool.”

          ….

          “Contempt? How can you tell? I thought I was hiding it better than that.”

          1. That is a good scenario – but, as I said, wouldn’t work here. Clintonista and Obamunists dominate the Federal Bench.

             I really don’t have the time to spend in the Gulag, held indefinitely without bail. (Although if they would let me have the computer in solitary, I’d get a lot more writing done, I suppose.)

             Nope, the plan is to enter with the rag over the mouth, then, if they force me to cover the nose too, walk on and see how far I get before keeling over. With luck, there will be someone with a cellphone recording it, and I’ll get my fifteen minutes of fame on ZuckerTube (maybe more, maybe less, depending on how fast it gets censored).

       2. Oregon “Health” “Authority” (only two lies in three words–impressive!) is recommending the Vaxxed and Un-Vaxxed do the mask thing because of the scary Delta variant. I also saw a snippet saying that the wildfires are causing COVID cases to skyrocket. Seems they didn’t tell the people in Lake nor Klamath county that. Some firefighters tested positive, so they got their two-week timeout a bit early, but the dreaded spike that the experts predicted were Faucied.

          OHA is warning that Krankheitfuehrer Despicable Kate Brown is likely to order remasking. I predict less cooperation than last time.

          1. From one Oregonian to another …. Oh goodie. (/sarc, jic)

             Which means Agility is going to be sooooo much not fun. I can see it now “Ov …sneeze..er”. Not her fault she misses the command.

    3. I may be reaching my Thomas More moment. The Facade in Chief is reportedly set to declare that all federal workers and contractors must now be vaccinated against the virus-that-must-not-be-named or submit to regular testing and “mitigation.” I thought about buying tickets to a baseball game, but found they were requiring vaccines or testing, so I said, “I’ll wait til next year,” even if I hate to miss out on what may be the home team’s best seasons ever.

       I am not anti-vaccine and am not scared of the current vaccines, I don’t want to retire yet, especially over something that on the physical level seems almost trivial to me. But admitting that 2 + 2 = 5 because Big Brother says so is the first step on submitting to tyranny. Unlike others that may be faced with this dilemma, I no longer have anyone else I need to take care of, but it’s still not going to be an easy choice.

       1. Yeah. I’m over here admiring the huge brass balls of the lowly legal assistant from Lander who just wrote a scathing email to the ENTIRE Dept of the Interior calling out this latest order (we were told to mask up despite vaccination status this morning. Everyone is pissed, to put it mildly). They’re gonna fire her, undoubtedly, but I admire the hell out of her bravery.

          1. If things continue on as they are, then firing might not be such a bad thing in the long run. Though yes, it will suck in the short run.

             1. Yeah. I’m not where I can afford to lose the job, so that’s not a hill I want to die on at this time. (My mask is dangling off one ear as I type, because I’m at my own damn desk, and my coworker is a good fifteen feet away.) There may yet come a day when there is a hill to die on and I quit my job in protest…but in the meantime, I got bills to pay, sigh.

       2. The Daughter Unit, after looking at all the other Covid f**kery, is wondering if the next step is demanding that anyone drawing VA benefits (not just the people working in that establishment) must get the Covid jab. Or even – worse yet – anyone drawing a DOD pension must get the jab to continue drawing a pension and benefits.
          That’s a disconcerting thought. Having risked your life and health while in active service … now, we have another opportunity to die for our country?

          1. Why stop there? Why not go for Medicare or any other sort of government-paid care, etc.

14. There are the types of ‘experts’ like Fauxi using the argument “You don’t know what you’re talking about because I know more Science!! than you! So shut up!”

    I like to use math as an analogy. We all learned algebra and trigonometry in high school. (I don’t know what they’re teaching these days, if anything, but this is an analogy)

    Mathematicians know a lot more than high-school math. Calculus, for starters.

    But the existence of those more advanced mathematics DOES NOT invalidate algebra and trigonometry. Within those limits, a good understanding of high school math places you on EQUAL footing with a mathematical expert.

    And that is how Senator Paul makes Fauxi look like a monkey in those congressional hearings. Because Dr. Paul knows at least as much about the practical facts of viral disease and immune response as any self-anointed ‘expert’. Esoteric details about viral DNA and protein mapping do not invalidate those facts.

    So, Fauxi is reduced to using argumentum ad verecundiam, a well-known logical fallacy.

    1. Plus, Fauci is largely a bureaucrat, and not an actual researcher. And he’s been like that since at least the ’80s. So while he might be more familiar with the topic than Sen. Paul (by virtue of reading reports and summaries that are sent to him), he’s probably not *that* much more familiar with it.

       1. He is a political hack whose track record shows that he is the worst person to listen to for medical advice or recommendations. He is the classic example of an incompetent bureaucrat failing upwards.

          1. because we all remember how they had an AIDS vaccine by 1988….

          2. I would disagree. He’s a highly competent empire-builder. He’s been in the same job for 40 years and had subordinates promoted past and over him. This tells me that he’s found his perfect spot and has fortified himself in place. Empire builders are perfect exemplars of the second type described in Pournelle’s Iron Law.

             1. The only empire Fauxi deserves measures eight feet by ten, with bars on the door.

                1. TBF

                2. And the Imperial Raiment is a cheap orange coverall.

                3. 4 feet down.

             2. Balzaq said “He’s been in the same job for 40 years and had subordinates promoted past and over him.”. When I was young I remember reading “The Peter Principle”. One of the basic idea is everyone sooner or later rises to their level of incompetence. Sounds like Fauci hit his about the time I was learning to program Lisp…

    2. Akshully…

       a) there are totally obscure and esoteric situations where a pure mathematician can say that trig or an algebra are not valid.
       b) Calculus is a bit more of an applied mathematics thing, a lot of the pure mathematicans are into weirder things
       c) being able to handle the weird esoteric stuff does not necessarily mean being any good at the practical stuff
       d) on the other hand, a lot of mathematics learning is incremental, and depends on having a foundation in earlier material. I’m pretty bad at trig…

15. Thanks as always for these posts… This is exactly what’s been bugging me and causing so much gloom looking at the political side of things, both the worry that things are going to keep on declining and that whatever resistance there is will be malformed and stillborn. Still, you are good at encouragement. All I can do is keep with the room cleaning and hope I can survive things with whatever I can manage until then. Figuring out what that next step is has been a headache so far, though…

16. Liminal time is seldom pleasant and often magically dangerous.

    (The aardvark reminds you that it is wise to stay put OR go through the door. Don’t stand in it. Partly because it lets the heat out.)

    1. It’s all turtles and elephants, all the way down.

17. When you wrote this, this thought just bubbled up inside my skull.

    It’s never easy to get out of your shell. But, one day we’re going to have to.

18. Senator Ron Johnson grilled Mayorcas today about all the illegal aliens flooding across our border, trying to nail the squirming worm down. Mayorcas kept stuttering and saying ‘Those are not the correct numbers’ but would not provide ANY numbers in their place.

    Johnson missed a golden opportunity:

    “Very well then, what ARE the correct numbers?”

    “Mumble, stutter, don’t have that information, blah blah…”

    “Why don’t you know? It’s your JOB to know! What are the numbers?!”
    ———————————
    Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

    1. How can you say MY numbers are wrong if you don’t know what the right ones are?

19. Yeah, scientific government comes largely from Auguste Comte, who equated it with the positive stage of history, which he thought was superior to the metaphysical stage when people believed in abstractions like natural rights. That same contempt for natural rights shows up in Jeremy Bentham, who called them “nonsense upon stilts” because they prevented the administrative class doing what they decided was best for the rest of us. Then the Progressives tried to make it the basis for American government.

20. (summarized from the memory of something Richard Feynman said to me many years ago.)

    The evolution of intelligent life has blessed the Earth with creatures that play and learn from experience. Humans amplified this ability by using language to pass knowledge from one individual to another. This meant that knowledge no longer was lost when an individual died and could accumulate over generations. However, incorrect knowledge can be passed along just as easily as correct knowledge so another step — a filter — was needed. Galileo and his contemporaries began by questioning the truth of what was passed down and investigated to discover what the real situation was. This was the beginning of the filter that I call “science”.

    (back to me)

    Scientists are not Gods. They do not get to speak ex cathedra while walking down from a mountain bearing tablets. Someone wants that kind of adulation, start a church. Unfortunately, some scientists have taken that advice literally.

    1. Oh, Hell No! L. Ron Hubbard did that and we’re still not rid of it!

       If only so many scientists didn’t play the “I’m More Scientific than you, therefore I’m right!” game.

       Now I can’t help thinking of The Scientific People…

       Quant Suff!!

       1. If only so many scientists didn’t play the “I’m More Scientific than you, therefore I’m right!” game.

          The “funny” thing is, Galileo was really, really nasty about doing that, with added social pressures. He just got picked up by myth makers.

          If forced, I’d say the oldest, shortest summary of the scientific method with which I am familiar is actually in the Bible. Thessalonians. “Test everything; retain that which is good.”

          Hm. No wonder so many of the modern twits hiss like vampires when exposed to actual science….

          1. Some grad faculty boggled when I described my history dissertation (and MA thesis) as 1. observe things, 2. develop hypothesis, 3. gather evidence to test hypothesis, 4. scrap or refine hypothesis based on data. 5. Repeat until satisfied (or until committee is satisfied.) That’s not how one DOES history. Sort of. Maybe. Ish. But it worked for my topic and process.

             1. Sounds like all my favorite pop history things!

                Oooh, The Gryphon and the Dinosaur

                Spoiler

                Spoiler

                Spoiler

                Did a great bit on that in the intro.
                The lady had a theory from looking at the whole eagle-headed lion-bird and went “Hey, that looks kinda like the hornless cousins of a triceratops! Ooh, they have a dinosaur skull at X museum, I’m gonna go look and prove my theory!”
                She did and… it was the wrong dino.

                Obviously, it didn’t stop there. 😀

                I think you may have been the one who suggested I buy that, some 7 years ago– used in when I did a Dinosaur class for the homeschool group.

                1. Pull up the Wawl Dragon and the Klagenfurt Dragon. They actually found the skeleton of the Klagenfurt dragon, which explains why it looks sooooooo “Wait, that’s not a real dragon dragon.”

                   1. *cheers* I knew I should recognize Klagenfurt– Austrian Lindwyrm!

                   2. K, this has got to be the MOST AMUSING STATUE OF HERC EVER.
                      https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lindwurmbrunnen

                      1. That MOUSTACHE!!!! ::giggles::

                         1. I hadn’t noticed the moustache but looking again I saw it along with his almost pot belly. 😉

                   3. They found the skeleton? LINK?

                      1. There was a Wooly Rino skull found that was associated with the Klagenfurt dragon.

                         Note, the Klagenfurt dragon is based on a legend of the Lindworm. The Lindworm was more of a Giant Snake. 😉

                      2. http://bestiarium.net/lind.html Here’s the bit about the skull, and the legend.

                   4. I SHOULD be working…..

                      1. Call it research for the next shifters book

          2. Uh, that refers to prophecies not science.

             “Do not extinguish the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt, but test all things. Hold fast to what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.”

             1. Since science as we know it had not yet been born, and the scientific method is a rather direct line from that philosophy through natural philosophy to modern scientific philosophy, your objection falls flat.

                1. Suit yourself. Religion is not a single category. There are thousands of them and none are intellectually authoritative for someone who does not accept the revelation, tradition, and sources a particular version is based on.

                   1. There are thousands of religions.

                      However, the Concept of Science Developed in Christian Europe.

                      IMO It did so because those who started the Concept believed in a Law-Giver Creator Deity and believed that the Deity created a World with Laws that Humans Could Understand.

                      Yes, you can say that the seeds for the Concept of Science were started/planted by the non-Christian Greek Philosophers but the seeds didn’t “bear fruit” until Europe was Christian.

                      1. It is a little more complicated that that.

                         The Catholic Church provided considerable stability across much of Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (that is not so simple either). In many ways that stability made the Enlightenment possible. However, the path to the Enlightenment was not obvious and there was no single cause. The Reformation had its part to play but it was more a side effect than a prime mover.

                         It’s beginnings can be, I think, traced to the 14th Century rediscovery of the writings of classical antiquity. These were, in fact, preserved by the Catholic Church — mostly by the efforts of Irish monks. This, in turn, was reinforced by the scientific revolution of the 16th Century which can be conveniently dated to the publication of “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” in 1543 by Nicholas Copernicus.

                         The Enlightenment emerged out of those two intellectual and scholarly movements that have now been retconned as “Renaissance Humanism”.

                         1. There were Christians interested in the study of Nature and “Natural Laws” before the so-called Enlightenment, some of who were clergy and/or monks.

                            For that matter, Copernicus was a cleric.

                      2. Here is a book that rather exhaustively points at the various attempts at science which died on the vine, because the world view they were in did not support scientific method.

                         Without the Judeo-Christian concept of Himself following His own rules, it doesn’t work. Without the idea that we can identify His rules, it doesn’t work. And so on.

                         1. *cough* Islam *cough*

                            1. For some time, the Islamic Position is that Allah doesn’t restrict Himself.

                               IE the Concept of “Natural Laws” means that Allah is deliberately restricting Himself.

                               Christian Theology has no problem with the concept of “Natural Laws” but Islamic Theology has major problems with that Concept.

                            2. IIRC Islam flirted with the idea of Natural Law for several centuries but the scholarly authorities killed that idea: Allah continually re-creates the universe at every moment, and can change how things work at any time.

                               That Arab Science! that everyone points to to somehow show that Western science isn’t original? Yeah, that got killed right then. Funny how that works.

                            3. Because it allowed Mohammed to make it up as he went along. Same reason Leftists don’t like the Constitution, because they can’t.

                               accordingtohoyt.com/2015/01/08/je-suis-charlie/#comment-233518

                            4. Exactly.

                               The insidiousness of “if Allah wills it” as a philosophy goes even further than the “why bother?” aspect most commonly noticed by folks trying to understand it.

                      3. Observability and replicability *do* become more problematic when one assumes that there are gods running around, happily messing with things.

                         1. Yep.

                         2. In Wearing the Cape, that was a major problem scientists AND the religious (like the main character) had with superpowers,

                   2. *Waits politely for a response that is related to the comment it is, in theory, responding to*

    2. …and sometimes the scientist can have butterfingers when bringing the commandments down.

21. This just dawned on me…we’ve got a lot of boxes & we will have more as we unpack. Do you want them? Most of them are 12 12 or 13″ because books, & I’m not 40 any longer. I think I can also hold on to paper. I might be able to get my BIL to take them to their apartment down your way or better yet, to his daughter’s & sit on her porch one afternoon for you. I’ll see what I can figure out.

    Susan Wiederhold

    On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 1:41 PM According To Hoyt wrote:

    > accordingtohoyt posted: ” I hate in between states. I don’t know anyone > who loves them, to be fair. Oh, maybe kids because they’re not aware of > everything that can go wrong. And yeah, grandma used to have her hens hatch > chicks, and I can’t tell you the number of times w” >

    1. might not hurt. We’ve bought a ton, but it’s never enough.

22. Unless I am mistaken that is not chirping we are hearing.
    Rather it’s the sound of several millions of rifle and shotgun actions being cycled through one last function check.

    1. Kind of like the clickers the Paratroops used on D-Day and had the misfortune to find out they sounded somewhat like the K98 Bolt being worked.

23. And it can also be said that, “Questioning, doubting and examining is not being anti-democracy. IT IS THE PROCESS OF DEMOCRACY!”

    1. Indeed. And we’re not in fact a democracy, either.

       1. Not even much of a republic anymore either:

          Via Insty: https://coloradopeakpolitics.com/2021/07/26/aurora-officials-wave-magic-wand-to-invalidate-city-charter-provision/

          Democrats have the same contempt for the Constitution as they do the Aurora City Charter, and they treat it the same way. Many Republicans do so as well.

          Without adherence to the Constitution and its limits on government power, we are a republic in name only. In fact the USA is being transformed into a neo-feudal fascio-communist state that uses racial/ethnic identity group fascist methods to achieve racial/ethnic identity-group communist goals.

          1. So, their contention is that ‘people of color everywhere’ are criminals?

       2. I’m about to the point of wanting to slap anyone who calls this a democracy as much as I want to slap the science-is-settled people.

24. OTOH, the Filipino weightlifter lady who credited her win to a novena and the Miraculous Medal was pretty cool news. And I have to admit that “Hidilyn Diaz” isn’t the worst weird name in the world. I presume it’s Heidi plus Lynn, but I haven’t seen any official name info yet.

    1. …..she’s named HYDAELYN?!?!

       1. Well, she’s 30 years old…. She has a cousin named Allen Jayfrus.

          I mean, they’ve all got baptismal names. She’s Hidilyn Francisco Diaz.

          1. I spent at least half an hour yesterday trying to find what Square was inspired by in naming that planet/character.
             (for those reading and being confused: yes, the planet is a person)

             1. >> “(for those reading and being confused: yes, the planet is a person)”

                [blink]

                I’m sorry, was that supposed to make me LESS confused?

                1. It could be someone named for the planet. 😀

                   It’s like Gaia, but not so evil.

       2. Oh, dear, Utah baby naming trends have spread. I’m so sorry; I thought we had it mostly contained.

          1. LOLOLOL. If I have a granddaughter named Pearl of Great Price, y’all will be in trouble.

             1. And hope you don’t get a grandson named Nephi (destined to be mispronounced forever) or, worse Mahonri Moriancumr. (There’s a reason the dude was known mostly as “the brother of Jared”!!)

25. c4c

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