How To Maintain Social Distancing And Anti-Social Distancing

Anti-Social Distancing

Social Distancing

Re-Opening COVID Death Models Were Wrong And Ridiculous.

This chart from the Imperial College London show the updated serious best guesses of what COVID deaths would rise to in the first eight weeks after reopening four states:  WA  NY  MA FL    With early May as the start point, they charted three scenarios where people either continued staying mostly home or increased their circulation by 20% or 40%.  Black is the data they already had. Blue is the no-change guess, yellow the 20% guess and pink the 40% guess.  Now look at the little red dot superimposed on their devastatingly wrong guesses.  It sits at the bottom of the chart at the extreme least worrisome of their guesses or even below it.  Some states have had an increase in the last couple weeks but this is outside the frame of the experts' test.  If included, they'd be a small blip in the bottom third of the bottom bar of the charts.

Have you been shaking for fear about those recently hyped death numbers that would scarcely register on the experts' opinion page?  Seriously, do you want public policy made by fools who are in love with their credentialed fancies?  Why would you trust politicians who say the blue yellow and pink guesses are why they have to shut you down and wield unprecedented power?

Bloody Mary With Extra Carbs and Protein

Unified Theory Explaining the Creation of the Moon and Stonehenge

Political Pants On Fire

Found in July 23 open thread at Instapundit..

Enhanced Video From Moon Landing

Beautiful to watch.  The source article tells how massive computing power interpolates from source video shot at 12 frames per second or less.   The first is a moon buggy ride from Apollo 16.  The second is footage of touchdown and emergence from Apollo 15.

Yes, Paris Has Changed. Immigrant Population taking over by the numbers.

Covid deaths by State since the beginning: No Pandemic in about forty of them.

All the states death rates per million are posted in this one chart.  The anchor point to match the starting points is the first time deaths rose above a background level of  one in ten million.  Three quarters of the states hardly moved the needle.  New York and New Jersey are the biggest offenders or victims.

Covid deaths have declined steadily for 3 months, now at seasonal baseline. Media panic talk cases instead.

The grey lanes show normal seasonal deaths for pneumonia and flu.
Covid is history folks

SPACEX, Not NASA Gives Bang For The Buck. Dragon VS Orion And No Hidden Fees.

NASA's Orion:  20 years to first launch in 2023.
SPACEX's Dragon Capsule:  13 years to complete 12 manned launches by 2020.

NASA by 2023 will have cost $20 billion, about half of it in hidden budgets.
SPACEX by 2020 has spent $6 billion and would have launched sooner if NASA hadn't delayed it.

Here's a made-up metric for timely value:
NASA  20 years x $20 billion divided by 1 launch =  400 launch units per flight.
SPACEX:   13 years   x $6 billion divided by 12 launches =  6.5 launch units per flight.
ADVANTAGE SPACEX by over 60 fold.

Story including the bit about hiding the true budget in other areas at "behindtheblack.com".

Yes, Twitter has secret blacklist buttons.

The Twitter hack July 15th led to a reveal of the admin panel used by twitter monitors.  Plain as day, algorithms are overruled by admin choices.  "Jack" lied to congress. if this screen shot is verified.  Summary story is that a hacker paid $2000 to a Twitter insider for his login.

Universal Covid Vaccine Will Probably be Dangerous

"Vaccines are hard to develop, and can be dangerous. This is a vaccine for a disease where 40% (at current estimate, up from 35% before) have no symptoms, and where only about .4% die. It’s also a widespread disease — this isn’t Ebola where you could vaccinate 50,000 people and bring an outbreak to an end. You’d have to vaccinate a billion or more. When you vaccinate huge numbers of people for a disease that isn’t very dangerous, your vaccine has to be very safe to be better than the disease. That doesn’t go well with a rushed development effort."

Quoted convincingly at Instapundit with links beyond.  July 14 2020

Boston Dynamics Robot Does Back Flips and More.

Twisted stats about twisted covid stats

Covid reporting is full of distortions, imbalance and deliberate misdirection at times but this chart doesn't put it right.  If you look up "Tuberculosis", 1.5 million died from it in 2019 which gives about 4000 deaths per day, not 1014.   There are about 500,000 death attributed to Covid19 worldwide which gives about 1400 per day.  No way 56 per day is correct.  Chart appeared in July 13 open thread comments at Instapundit.

My Life Doesn't Matter Meme

from Imgflip Meme Generator

Big Company Boycotts Hardly Dint Facebook Advertising

Facebook gets the bulk of its income from smaller players and worldwide.  The mega corporate temporary ad boycotts don't tip the scales much.

Do you agree with the theories of Schrodinger?

Covid charts from WUWT: Hospitalizations, Deaths, Test Numbers, Positives.

In summary, the outdoors are safe, hospitalizations and deaths are way down, there was no spike after crowd and riot events, the number of tests is way up. Detail and discussion at Wattsupwiththat.
(In the first two charts, the blue line marks the date of public protests in crowds.)

White Throated Sparrows Suddenly Singing New Song Across Canada

An extraordinary change has come to White Throated Sparrow songs. In BC in the mid-nineties, a new song was being heard. By 2004 it was adopted across half of Alberta.  In 2019 it was spreading through Quebec.  For such a baked-in distinctive to change so rapidly is astonishing.
Was:  "Oh my sweet Canada, Canada, Canada" and is now, "Oh my sweet Cana-Cana-Cana-Canada".
Crowd-sourced recordings available on the internet fueled this story.

Lying dog-faced pony soldiers report Mt. Rushmore speech.

Some things that President Trump actually said:

They enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever when they said: “All Men Are Created Equal!”
This left-wing cultural revolution will never be allowed to destroy our way of life or take away our freedom.
No movement that seeks to dismantle these treasured American legacies can possibly have a love of America at its heart.
We believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for EVERY American!

What the press reported:

Red Guards and Democrat Mobs

Quoting straight from Wikipedia, and the parallels are strong.  For "Mao", substitute Leftist leaders in the Democrat machine who think they are going to lose honest elections.

Cancel culture

(The Red Guards)" were formed under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1966 in order to help party chairman Mao Zedong combat “revisionist” authorities—i.e., those party leaders Mao considered as being insufficiently revolutionary. Mao was thus making a bid to regain control of the CCP from his colleagues, but the Red Guards who responded in August 1966 to his summons fancied themselves as new revolutionary rebels pledged to eliminating all remnants of the old culture in China, as well as purging all supposedly bourgeois elements within the government. Several million Red Guards journeyed to Beijing to meet with Mao in eight massive demonstrations late in 1966, and the total number of Red Guards throughout the country may have reached 11 million at some point. While engaging in marches, meetings, and frenzied propagandizing, Red Guard units attacked and persecuted local party leaders as well as schoolteachers and school officials, other intellectuals, and persons of traditional views. Several hundred thousand people died in the course of these persecutions. By early 1967 Red Guard units were overthrowing existing party authorities in towns, cities, and entire provinces. These units soon began fighting among themselves, however, as various factions vied for power amidst each one’s claims that it was the true representative of Maoist thought. The Red Guards’ increasing factionalism and their total disruption of industrial production and of Chinese urban life caused the government in 1967–68 to urge the Red Guards to retire into the countryside. The Chinese military was called in to restore order throughout the country, and from this point the Red Guard movement gradually subsided."

UPDATE:  At Instapundit July 6th.

And the underlying article, right on point, is here.

Strange new disrespect

Governments overplayed their hands with mandates that they are losing the ability to enforce. I was talking to a friend about this today and he was like, “A lot of people who never noticed are noticing that the government is made up of idiots and nothing happens if you break their rules.”

Copied from Instapundit.  Link to the rest of it here. 
While left-loving politicians blessed the disorder of BLM and Antifa and Marx, better grounded and happier people were coming to a different conclusion.

One ring to bind them: The enemies of democracy and of the rule of law are coalescing.

Stephen Green:

“It’s getting harder and harder to craft individual blog posts when so much news keeps coming down the pike and it’s all related to everything else. Antifa is riots is #BlackLivesMatter is #DefundThePolice is Marxist revolution is cancel culture is civilian disarmament is George Soros is mainstream media bias is the Democratic Party.”

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Space News July 2020

Comet NEOWISE will probably be visible to the naked eye later this month.  It brightened by 2.2 magnitudes in four days as it heads behind the sun. (June 30th report).

Expand to view cross-eyed

Noctilucent clouds are prominent this season, now in 3D.  About 80 km high at the edge of space, the couple- kilometer-thin layer of puffs of meteor dust was cleverly photographed by two friends who lived 120 km apart.  They doctored the joint imagery so you can glimpse the 3 D structure of the clouds.  If you cross eyes properly, you can see for yourself.

Mercury isn't a comet but it has a tail, a faint one of sodium vapour. From AstroBob: Day-side temperatures run to 450C and night-side to -170C. Heat strips heavy atoms.  Sodium scatters sunlight well so it is a good target. Solar wind pushes the atoms away to form a faint tail.  Italian amateur astronomer, Alessandrini, took the photo.   (There's an SF story about Mercury in which the perpetually turned away side was named "June" because "What is so rare as a day in June".)



A detailed colour-coded geologic map of the entire moon has been published. There is zoom-in detail available on line.  See expanded article at EarthSky.org

How much room does the Universe have to record information about itself?  This overlaps the question, can the universe be self-aware?  This PBS ten-minute Space Time talk eyeballs it.    (Black holes feature prominently). Information  capacity is proportional to surface area, not volume.  The smallest unit imagined that may be used for a mark is a Planck unit.  This leads to an eyeball number of 10¹⁸⁰ Planck units in the universe and some eyeball calculations that match a Planck unit to each element in the visible universe.  The conclusion, a great deal of self-reporting is possible.          This is an interesting question.   The mass of our ideation is tiny and an improbable event, the child of a child of an improbable vortex of probability, yet somehow consequential.  As one author wrote, we weren't predicted but the universe expected something like us would be along.

A treasonous few have the bullhorn but they will not prevail. Michael Flynn describes today's attacks on America.

Posted in the Western Journal by Michael Flynn:

'I was once told if we’re not careful, 2 percent of the passionate will control 98 percent of the indifferent 100 percent of the time.
The more I’ve thought about this phrase, the more I believe it. There is now a small group of passionate people working hard to destroy our American way of life. Treason and treachery are rampant and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals who uphold our laws are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history. These passionate 2 percent appear to be winning.'

Flynn was going to investigate billions of off-the-books money
that Brennan and friends managed.

'The attacks being presented to us today are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort that uses racism as its sword to aggravate our battlefield dispositions. This weapon is used to leverage and legitimize violence and crime, not to seek or serve the truth.'

OpenRAN: A new way to advance 5G to beat Huawei subsidized attacks

Open Radio Access Network is being developed in the US.  This lets you pick and choose 5G system elements from different suppliers and have them work together, while saving a lot of money.  Huawei but also Nokia and Ericsson only sell package systems, not elements.  This makes prices higher and also makes it easier for a state actor like Huawei to make below-market forays into other nations. The mix and match networking has price points below the system pricing.

I didn't know the Pentagon has a $200,000,000 5G budget and this is helping researchers.
OpenRAN information from this article in the Washington Post.

Send Money!

Canada has a Receiver General whose chief purpose is to receive money.  I'm told that one of the first banks in the USA started by putting out a sign, "Deposits Accepted".  This joker has the right idea, offering to protect people from bad thoughts.

Old Mice Gain Muscle and Lose Fat When ATB Receptor Is Prompted. Humans Have Similar Pathway.

Maybe not too good to be true:  Brown fat in mice has a lot of ATB sensors which when prompted, signal a burn off to the brown fat.   Muscle tissue has some of the same receptors.  When those ones are signaled, more muscle tissue is laid down.  This is a "two-fer" made in heaven if it safely works on seniors who could lose fat and bulk up muscle at the same time.  The net result in the mice was a slight loss of weight and a younger figure.  The mice burned almost 50% more oxygen and the healthy changes were in place after just four weeks. The conclusion, of course, is that more research is needed. Research by Prof. Dr. Alexander Pfeifer from the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University Hospital Bonn summarized at Science Daily.

Three Gorges Dam End of Life Approaching; UPDATE

This photo published in Epoch Times shows Three Gorges dam appears to have deformed in the last ten years.  China at first said the photo was deformed by digital processing.  Another party said the dam is built of blocks linked to each other, not massively anchored to bed rock and the movement is plausible.  Chinese academia thinks the dam should expect a 50 year life time.   Twenty million people live downstream.  Best case may be another 40 years.

UPDATE: I leave this image up but it's wrong. The image below I was able to verify however.

UPDATE:   When did this start?  Google Earth shows a computer generated picture of the dam, not the real dam.

Covid Suits Democrats. Good Change Will Come In Second In November.

Covid suits Democrats.
-Covid can hide a Demented Biden from the public and protect him from Trump with a Zoom type debate.
-Covid gives cover to suppressing Trump's mass rallies and demonizing them if it can't suppress them.
-Covid covers having no convention at all to keep disaffected Bernie followers off the air and to hide defective Biden from voters.
-Covid isolation measures keep voters from free and open exchanges outside the curated news stage.
-Covid gives cover for the coup de grace of mail in voting to save lives.  This disaster favours the party most prepared to cheat as the distribution, storage and collection of votes falls outside bipartisan supervision.
-Covid hype that is used to keep some states shut down will continue to damage the economy and money troubles move votes away from the party in power. Thus, democrat run states will be last to open.

This sad tally comes from The Conservative Tree House.
I've rarely felt less hope for the United States of America.
Changes to make America more dynamic, safer, just and profitable for its people are also on the move.
Looks like they will place second.

Aggressive China Has Disputes With 18 Bordering Countries.

See map.  As noted, this doesn't include troubles inside the conquered territories.  This is reported in Indiatvnews.com

Black Lives Matter Outrage Mostly Comes Not From Black Lives.

A Pew report finds scarcely one person in six is black at those BLM rallies and protests.
Five out of six are not Republicans.
The tan bars show the % of the general census each BLM group stems from.

Those Strzok Notes: Obama and Biden Doing Dirty

And a plausible transcript (Conservative Tree House).

Where do migrants with inventions to their credit go? From China (and Canada, India, France the UK and Germany) to the United States. Overwhelmingly.

Understanding Lockdown In Your Area

Why didn't I think of that? Father's Day GIF gem

I'm having trouble reading the news

BLM protesting the bump on the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea. See FBI chart.

Best explanation of the chart: The shooting death of a black man by a white police officer is NOT what drives BLM.

Exquisite detail. If Tolkien built model railroad scenery, this is how he would have done it.

This video is called "A Scenic Overhaul - Yorkshire Dales Model Railway"  I watched the grass grow and the road age with my jaw dropped.  I want to live in such a world, a sweeter one than this.

Genius solution: How to hug your embarrassed pre-teens in public.

Easy when they are little.
Takes a touch of genius
to carry it into middle school.

A friend's boys had reached a certain age. When Mom gave them a hug as she dropped them off to school, they were so embarrassed.  Her brilliant and simple solution was to tell them, "I need the hug.  Tell them your Mom needs it".   It worked and they hug her to this day as grown ups.
   

What's wrong with this picture? 001

This photo is a charmer and it is posed to look accidental.  I see only one cat has had a chance to take a lick.  That means the camera was at the ready.  The milk puddle doesn't look like any spill I ever made with far flung tiny drops in some direction.  Instead, it has neat boundaries as if carefully poured onto the floor.  The bright yellow mug is bone dry!  It was laid on its side to complete the composition.  Yet, I love the picture and the four creatures are doing something that comes naturally.  They aren't trying to lie to me.  But the photographer is deliberately making one thing look like another thing.

Government Isn't Big Enough! Doxxers, BLM, AntiFa and the Twitter Mobs are the Wild West, Beyond the Remit of Law.

Cheap social media create mobs that live outside the remit of Law and Order.   Congress and Parliament are not designed to rule these powerful flash alliances.   Congress and Parliament's response is measured in days and months while the challenges form up on the scale of hours and days.  The alliances occur within political parties and corporations and restaurant staffs and newsroom people.  They are becoming the first line of influence and power in our societies.  And they are the wild wild west that cowboy flicks told tales about.   The closest we have to a sheriff is Donald Trump.      Money always go where it gets the biggest result and these extra-judicial alliances are gaining wealth and the power to redistribute wealth.

Red China has made progress bringing this under control with millions of cameras, social scores for every individual.  These scores determine whether you can buy a plane or bus ticket even.  Closer to home, we have people in power who are falling in love with the prospect of doing the same, starting with instructions on how everyone should breathe and where they should walk, contact tracing software and who they should associate with in a time of Covid.   The CCP or Wuhan flu has motivated men and women who should love freedom but prefer power.

Grief is looking forward

Grieving isn't looking back, it's looking forward fruitlessly.
Being alive is being ready for what's next.

When someone you love isn't there anymore, the readiness to meet them is still there.
It's like a train that comes off its track.
The wreck goes on and on forward with the momentum of expectation
and meets nothing until, in time, the momentum subsides..

Did I hear that right? Black Americans Owe White Americans?

Compare the wealth of Black Americans who were brought to the US as slaves to the wealth of Black Africans who stayed behind and were not.      The amount those men and women lost by coming to America should be the reparations they are owed, plus some damages.  Except it's the other way around.  Black Americans would owe White Americans.

Thought developed by Dilbert's inventor, Scott Adams.

Of course there were millions of white slaves too, enslaved by North African Muslims in previous centuries.   These don't qualify for reparations because BLAME.  (Black Lives All Matter - Exclusively.)

Ikea jokes write themselves

I slept fine, you didn't.

With two in diapers, I remember thinking, "If it adds up to five hours, I can make it through the day."

Include Influenza A and B in Those Killer Flu Stats

I know older people terrified to go out on the street or to even sit close to a friend for a conversation.  They're afraid of COVID-19.   Part of the cure is to add back in the ignored deaths, the tens of thousands of mostly old people dying every winter from plain old garden variety killer flu.

CDC estimates for last year are 35.5 million got sick.
490,000 were hospitalized.
34,200 were killed by the flu.
The flu season is about five months long.
Roughing in the numbers, over 3000 on the average day were put into hospital and 200 were dropping dead every day.  And this, Gd help us, isn't even considered news!

In the chart below, COVID19 is included, accounting for the unexpected third peak this year.

CDC stats for all types of flu this winter
and previous years.

Grieving and Error 404

When the one you love dies, you grieve. But there's no there to go back to anymore.
Dialing up the past is the same as getting " Error Message:  That Page Does Not Exist". 
The one who is gone, who stopped, has changed you. The changed you continues.

George Floyd's Autopsy Shows No Life Threatening Injuries, No Neck Injury. But You Knew That. Read It For Yourself.

The mob and its agents have had no autopsy but George Floyd did and it is reproduced in full here.  That there was no neck injury but a load of drugs including fentanyl has no bearing on the mob.  That is just the evil spirit of the times egged on by evil men and women. some evil by intent, some by disposition.    The image shows the first two pages of the twenty page un-redacted report.

Deeper in the report you learn of serious heart issues.  (Arteriosclerotic heart disease, cardiomegaly and hypertension). You learn there were no petechiae present. (That means the little red dots that would be caused by strangulation). The medics the police called tried hard to save his life  and this is fully described.

                           
            Section 3: "No life-threatening                                            injuries identified". 
                                                            Fentanyl, meth and more









Hat tip to American Thinker.com
Nov2021  Autopsy link fixed.  h/t  L Griffin