When are you grown up? The short answer is Never.

Auntie Nan, so the story goes, asked on her sixty fifth birthday: "Am I grown up yet?"  It's a good question.  Forty years later, I have the answer.
"No."
The fuel ages.
The fire does not.

The answer has competition.
- "Yes, if you have obtained the age of majority."
- "You are only as old as you feel".
- "Yes, but you will be raised from the dust of death to judgement at a later date".
- "It's Groundhog Day until you learn something useful.  That's karma"

The evidence of aging is plentiful.   As for growing, babies stop just over five feet tall and develop wrinkles with liver spots.  As for being an adult, the root meaning is "ripe" and is answered as soon as you can reproduce successfully.

My viewpoint:
The fuel ages.
The fire does not.
It's a process.

In English, the fuel is named  "I".
We don't know the nature of fire.
It's okay not to know the answers
but a good question helps.

Chinese companies acting like there is no future for them

Credit exists when people trust long term.  No future, no investment.  Planting orchards and making 30 year loans only happen when people believe in the future.   What does it mean when Chinese companies send crap PPE and masks?   It means the future has turned dead to them.

The clip below is from France (Daily Mail) as nurses try on PPE from China recently.

Dumb guy in kitchen comes up with tips

FILL THE SINK WITH HOT SOAPY WATER WHEN YOU START THE MEAL, NOT AFTER.

Hot soapy is ready

How come nobody else seems to do this?  My fingers stay clean and I get to re-use my favourite knife, spatula,and  bowl at will.  ALSO  find a way to hang the hand towel on the outside of the sink cupboard,  When you need it, you need it.

POTATO IN THE MICROWAVE
In several minutes you can be frying thin chips of potato for breakfast. Slice up a raw potato into a bowl, add a drop of oil to reduce sticking and hit high for about 3 minutes. Transfer to the greasy pan.
Or, make mashed potatoes in moments.   Same routine.  Check with fork to see if the spuds are soft enough to take out of the microwave.

CORN ON THE COB A LA MICROWAVE.
How come almost nobody does this?   Leave the husk on and give one cob about two minutes. It's sweeter and crisper than boiled corn and way faster.  Also, it's cute and country to serve wrapped in green tassels and it stays very hot for about ten minutes.  When you peel the husk back, you get a handle to hold onto.  If it's not quite done, the kernels at that end will look a little white. If so, with the husk still on, give it a bit more time.

Peel when you eat

HAVE GARBAGE RIGHT BY THE SINK NOT UNDER THE SINK
This should be a no-brainer.  Especially for a composting pail where you have to put wet greasy things.  An even better solution is restaurant-style to have a hole in the counter (with an easy to clean rim) and a bag underneath.  One guy did a study and found the garbage was the most frequented spot in his kitchen so he made it central.  Just find something that looks nice.

BOWLS AND SPICES AND KNIVES  YOU USE ALL THE TIME: MOVE  THEM CLOSE.
Another no-brainer.  Never mind where they were kept before.   Get them on the wall above the sink, hanging from cupboards, in canisters by the stove.

CROCKERY YOU USE A LOT SHOULD BE CLOSE AND  ALL THE REST SHOULD NOT
That means you split the plates and cups and glasses into a few you use at every meal.  Put them on the handiest shelf.   Move all the rest further away.   Two cereal bowls on the bottom shelf, 10 up above. And so on.

USE A "SPROINGER".  PROPERLY CALLED A "SPRING WHISK".
If the spring is right, you can mash potatoes,  mix up the flour-sugar-salt stuff for baking, whisk eggs, get the jello dissolved.  I bought a couple new ones and threw them away because the spring was too soft except for eggs.  This old timer works great.

PUT DIFFERENT STUFF IN THE SAME PAN.
I watched a retired army cook do a steak and vegetable meal for three on a single 8 inch fry pan.  He had the meat hanging over the sides and kept it in rotation.   When I've got the main thing fried or whatever, I keep it to one side and add the frozen peas in a corner, and the leftover mashed in another and let it sit on low for a few minutes, often with the heat off, usually with a lid.   I wash fewer pans and it's all warm and ready to serve at the same time.

FREE SALAD VINAIGRETTE
Those sweet and crispy Yum Yum pickles have juice that is wasted.  It's a great vinaigrette.

TRY TEAK TONGS.
They don't scratch the Teflon pans.  Flip tomato slices, bacon, fried chicken, scallops and stir almost anything in place of a wooden spoon. Pinch a noodle to taste for doneness. Fetch pickle slices from a jar.  Rinse and re-use until supper is ready.

ONE NEW RECIPE FOR THE WORLD:  MEATLESS BEEF STROGANOF.
You don't need the steak.  Just use your favourite recipe with the sour cream, mushrooms, onions, with broth, thickener, maybe Worcestershire sauce and dry mustard.   Same good taste.  When you bring the leftovers from the fridge, you can add steak later and it will taste fresh-made each time.  You won't be flustered having vegetarian guests.

GRIND THE GRUNGE IN THE SINK STRAINER.
A bristly scrub brush will break down the grungy bits in the sink strainer.  You don't have to grab the stuff with your pinkies and then rinse them and dry them.

MY QUALIFICATIONS AS A DUMB GUY IN THE KITCHEN ARE SECURE.
Although I've been cooking for ten years, I usually skip the apron, sometimes use the dishcloth to wipe up a spill on the floor, lick things I shouldn't, and have to be told when to change my shirt.

There may well be Democrats in Heaven

Some burns, some does not

Bat flu or COVID-19 is wildfire, consuming the results of decades of decisions to suppress risk and renewal, and the flames are uniquely tailored to our culture. The many survivors will populate the world going forward and their values will prevail. They survive because they survived, not because they were better or worse people. So of course, there will be some Democrats in heaven.

When wildfire races across the land, many creatures die in groups large and small. Others burrow underground. Some fly over top. The fast and strong do an end run. Clever mammals may build an asbestos suit or trap some breathable air below the surface of a lake. Heck, a few will watch safely from orbit. Those are the active players. Other survivors will just happen to be there: There will be lots of fish doing regular fin and gill stuff in deep water and they never notice a thing. Others will happen to be in a patch missed because the wind shifted for ten minutes. Virtue does not mean you will survive. Surviving means you survived.

We are experiencing a stress test of our culture.

Rapid change is upon us. Some of the dead-fall being burnt up is called over-regulation and some of the over-fliers are innovators. Big government is doing fine.

Ratchet effect: When the bat virus crisis is gone, government will keep its new fatness.

"The growth of government that attends national emergencies is not surrendered fully when the crisis ends. Instead, a ratchet effect operates whereby much of the crisis-borne growth of government becomes institutionalized in agencies and practices and, more important, in the dominant ideology of political elites and the general public."

This is quoted from Reason.com

Horgan and Boudreaux.

Death by expert. Do you want a virologist to tell you how to do your job and run your home?

Experts can kill you.   The write-up for Delaney's "A Plague of Experts" spells it out: 

"Danger derives ....from the ability of the expert to marshal the top-down legal authority and resources of government in the practice of their specialty."

We are living through such a hell with CORVID19.   The virus is invisible and there's nothing you or I can hear, smell, taste or measure to prove it's there or not and if we're avoiding it or not.  This is the perfect setup for global governance types to advance their top-down agendas to give voice to superior types of people like themselves.   "Trust me" is the mantra  (and I respect people who have studied and learned well their field).  "Trust me" is also the doorway that government loves best.  It didn't quite work for climate change but it is going like a house on fire for bat virus shutdown fear. You heard of the camel's nose under the tent.    With "Trust me", the camel gets to walk right in the front flap behind the experts who got you to open up. 

TRUST BUT VERIFY.
Puhleeze.

For an entertaining rant, see below for Sarah Hoyt's "A plague of credentialed experts" or from a few weeks earlier, "A plague of madness".

"The plague that has laid this country low, destroyed our economy and brought us to a place that no external enemy could have brought: this plague of experts. Or perhaps I should say “experts” since most of them have behind them only a long string of failed prognostications, followed by promotion within the “civil servant” echelons.  Yes, I am talking about Doctors Birx and Fauci. I’m already seeing people pointing fingers at the president and complaining that he’s relied too much on these “experts.”

What a way to go: Lab pups smother toddler

Too cute not to post.  As one Twitterer put it:  "When my time comes, this is how I want to go".
Golden labs bury this toddler in love and curiosity.

Tsunamis mess with GPS and radio.

The Richter 9.0 earthquake underwater near Honshu, Japan on March 11 2011 pulsed seawater sideways.   And it pulsed air pressure up.  As reported eloquently by spaceweather.com "When the earth trembles, even the edge of space moves."   It was more than a single burp.  As the water tsunami propagated and bumped into things underwater, the ocean's surface pulsed.  Ocean ripples we couldn't see from earth were  interfering with each other from a satellite's perspective.  "The waves scramble GPS signals and interfere with radio communications"

Picture:  Rippled ocean rings detected from space. (Reproduced from spacewather.com).















Video below:  A reminder of the horrific flood in some corners of Japan.
"Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, 2011"

Fire liars: If California on fire in 2019 freaked you out, get perspective.

If it bleeds,it leads is newspaper lore.  "Burns" or "Scandal targets our political opponents" lead too.  Take a closer look at BURNS.

2019 as California was apparently being burned to the ground, 4.3 million acres burned across the US, rather less than usual and far below historic averages  See the chart for 1926 to 2017.


Zoom out a bit more.  Were those 40 million acre numbers from the '30s a blip or a background?

Further back as mentioned in a California study: 

“It was apparent from the fire record that there were two dramatic changes in the fire pattern. First, fires became less frequent and more widespread in the study area following the substantial Euro-American settlement of the 1850s. Secondly, fires were generally eliminated from the study area after 1924 when fire suppression efforts were becoming more effective in accessible areas.” Many of these studies mention American Indian burning for enhancement of food, materials, basketry, and other resources: “People have affected fire regimes and forests in the study area during different times in known and unknown ways. Before European settlement, native Americans set fires that may have burned through the study area. Local Klamath [mountain] tribes used fire extensively to promote acorns, berry, root and fiber production and to hunt game.”

No Bird Apocalypse: Populations rise and fall with habitat change and guessing rules.

I was sad that songbirds were disappearing until I read this by a scientist who did bird counts.  It's complex.  There's good news.

First, here's an example of a bad news headline:  Three billion North American birds have vanished since 1970, surveys show.  

Counter-information you need to know:

-1 to 3 billion birds are killed each year by cats.. (Note the uncertainty.)

-About 1 billion birds die each year crashing into window reflections.  (Again uncertainty)

-Another third of a billion get whacked by cars and trucks each year. (Uncertainty)

Baby barn swallows, Knight's Inlet

-Almost half a billion of the loss is in three non-native species: House sparrows, pigeons and starlings.  

-Forests loving species are approaching pre-colonial levels as forest cover has rebounded.  

-Before spraying for spruce budworm in the US,  Tennessee warblers that specialized in eating those morsels exceeded 110 million. Their number has dropped to 30 million as the budworm count
dropped.

-COUNTING IS GUESSWORK.  The models used are no more accurate than the COVID-19 ones.

The models assume that each stop will account for all the birds within a 400‑meter radius. Because a crow is readily detected over that distance, no adjustments are made to the number of observed crows. But hummingbirds are not so easily detected. The earlier surveys assumed a hummingbird could only be detected if it was within an 80‑meter radius. So, to standardize the observations to an area with a 400‑meter radius, observations were multiplied by 25. Recent survey models now assume hummingbirds can only be detected within 50 meters, so their observations are now adjusted by multiplying by 64.  Thus, depending on their detection adjustments, one real observation could generate 50 or 128 virtual hummingbirds. That number is further scaled up to account for the time‑of‑day effects and the likely number of birds in the region’s un-surveyed landscapes.
Setting aside assumptions about the regional homogeneity of birds’ habitat, one very real problem with these adjustments that has yet to be addressed. If one bird is no longer observed at a roadside stop, the model assumes that the other 127 virtual birds also died.

"Spot the difference" Sex is weaponized by the party.

Sure looks like Blasey-Ford lied and was lionized by the agenda of the press and the Democrats, and it sure looks like Tara Reade told the truth and is being de-platformed by the agenda of the mainstream press and the Democrats.  The common principle is NO PRINCIPLE.  If it's good for our guy, promote.  If it's bad for their guy, promote.  (from ace.mu.nu) 

Update:  We hear from Tara.

Tara Reade: I Used to Think That Charges of Media Bias Were a Republican Talking Point. But Now I'm Living It In Real Time.

Every Good Marriage Ends With Somebody Dead

There's a nice jingle about "something borrowed, something blue" in wedding prep.  Think of the blue as a reminder:  You may be crying the blues someday.   Marriages can end in lots of ways but all the good ones end with somebody dead.   We sign on eagerly and if we do well, we sign off in tears.

"Til Death Do Us Part".  As a survivor, you can say, "Our marriage was completed".    Whatever was in the IN tray, is now in the OUT tray.  Duty and privilege are done.

Space News April 2020

Artists version from Science Daily

1.   There is a flash of light BRIGHTER THAN A TRILLION STARS, every twelve years.  In galaxy OJ 287 a black hole (150 million solar masses) is zinging around one of the biggest ever found (18 billion solar masses).  Every twelve years the little one grazes the big one's disk.  The Spitzer telescope was on the other side of the sun for the predicted date of July 31 2019 and recorded what Earth bound astronomers could not.   Picture a NASCAR crash with sparks flying as the chassis scrapes against a wall.  Then replace it with the image of the light of a trillion stars exploding into view inside a single galaxy, over and over again.  That galaxy may be nearly sterile, the last place we'd want to go looking for intelligent life.  Science Daily

2.    Comet ATLAS made the news and then fell apart and those pieces too, just as it was getting bright enough to see with the naked eye.   Great picture from the Hubble








3.   Comet SWAN is incoming.  Just discovered two weeks ago when it burped some hydrogen, it has rapidly reached magnitude +5.5 and is just barely visible to the eye April 29th.  It appears to have been bumped towards the inner solar system for the first time ever. Maybe we will all get
to see it.    Spaceweather 













4.   A big rock flew by today.  It didn't miss by a mile.  It missed by millions of miles and is only news because it is big.  Named OR1998  (the year it was first identified) it is a couple kilometers wide and tumbling.   You can see the list of all asteroids down to about 5 metres diameter that are coming anywhere near earth by checking the list at Spaceweather.com for updates.  What's interesting is the Arecibo observatory made a radar film.





5.    Is Space-Time Smooth Or Chunky?

Or is gravity particular at the smallest scale?  A clever measurement has moved the decimal point over.  The answer is still "apparently not".  Light from a wobbly pulsar beam some ten billion light years distant was measured for energy spread.  The tool they used is called ESPRESSO.  The rationale:

"If space-time really is frothy and bubbling, then this should affect anything passing through space-time. For example, a beam of light going along its merry way will encounter all sorts of microscopic bumps and jostles — a Planckian gravel path rather than a smooth highway.  Sometimes those little jostles will give the light a boost, nudging up its energy level, and sometimes the light will encounter a little speed bump, slowing it down. The net effect is that light traveling through a frothy space-time will slowly spread out in energy. This effect is incredibly, incredibly minute, so tiny we couldn't possibly hope to measure it in a laboratory. But thankfully, nature can provide a laboratory for us. If we can find a nice, coherent beam of light in space (in other words, a natural space laser), and that beam of light travels over billions of years to our telescopes, we can measure the spread in energy and use that to measure the frothiness of space-time."  (They found it and found a cloud in front of it with iron atoms that absorbed light in a precise way.)

For General Flynn, here at last is the smoking gun.

General Flynn was just about the first casualty when the Deep State turned on Trump and his people.
I never expected Priestap's words to be so plainly evil. Only a journalist or Democratic politician can fail to see what's going on here.

"What is our goal?" he muses.
"Truth/Admission
or to get him to lie so we can
prosecute him or get him fired."

This is moving the Overton Window, adding weight to whatever is revealed next.









UPDATE 1:

UPDATE 2:

Believing stuff that isn't so: Jumping cactus and viral doom.

We make up stories to explain stuff.   In the Okanagan, a lot of people believe in Jumping Cactus. Why?  Because they cross a patch of desert and find cactus bits stuck to their pants.  Do they look at the cactus closely to see what mechanism gave it muscles?  Do they wonder how come the vegetable kingdom is acting like the animal kingdom?  No.  They make up a story and tell others.
I like a good story too but this one just isn't so, as Reagan said.

Bits of cactus stick to the back of my shoe.  My foot has a little snap forward at each step and the cactus is sticking from my shoe on a spine, a sort of springy pole vault.  Up she goes.

 Viruses are tiny but they don't work by magic. They can't live outside you for many hours and they don't have jet packs to get around.    They have to be physically shipped across the space between you and they need to do it while they are fresh.  That means that most of the outdoors is almost absolutely safe everywhere at all times, if you aren't up close to people.  And if no one has been there for a few days, the viruses are screwed and dead.

None of this means compromised seniors should be casual about infection.  Absolutely not.  But for the rest of the population, a little common sense, please.   There are thousands of KINDS of bacteria and virus making their home in you all the time, you're never without them.    Purity isn't the goal.

Babylon Bee: some greatest hits

Best Babylon Bee satires in recent weeks..

If you have ever had a political opinion, been to church or been married, you'll like their stuff.

Wild Wild West Dot Com - You've neighbors you didn't ask for

Thousands of people who care nothing for me are now my neighbors.   They vote me up and down at will when I appear in the digital swamp. They give me a jingle from the call centre and email me from Kenya.   Seems like the whole world is ready to put in their two cents for free.    It’s the Wild Wild West.com

It's complicated

Back in the day in village and tribe, we met our neighbors every week and were probably kin.  We took great interest in their sexual unions, their work and kids, status, belief and doings.  Without written law, we apparently shaped life with story-telling, shaming, kinship rules and brute force.    True, we now have nations and clubs and corporations  complete with  recorded  votes,  constitutions, patent law, health officers and enforcement officers.

But we’re simultaneously back in the village, an increasingly global culture, thanks to the speed of light.   The word "neighbor" is built around the word "nigh" or "near" and everyone with a cell phone is now near you.  Though we be thousands of miles apart, we can connect in less than a second and pay less than a penny for the touch.  So we're neighbors now. “Connect”  means “reach out to” and “like”.   It also means “target”.  (Think “deplatforming” and “doxing”).

Our institutions haven’t caught up. They are somewhat hierarchical.  The internet neighborhood is a looser network that admits initiatives from a lot of nodes.  The second is becoming more important than the first.  Managing what happens in your information neighborhood is getting to be as powerful and important for safety, wealth and health as voting for your MP and Senator.  Somehow managing the information neighborhood and managing the geographic neighborhood must co-exist.  The impetus for change is arriving at the speed of light.  Institutions will be playing catch up.

Story-telling, shaming, rules of association and force have regained great power.  How do we tame and civilize them?

Pill reminder, better than postit notes

Make this pill reminder at home for free and brag a little.
I drew seven circles in a clump,using the pill bottle base
and labelled them Monday to Sunday.
When I take a pill, I put the pill bottle down on tomorrow's date.
That's all. 
If the pill bottle is sitting on today,
I haven't taken it yet.
 I was having a hard time remembering at 11 pm
if I had taken the pill at 8pm or was it the day before?

This won't work for everyone but is great for a single prescription.  Someone could print a bunch of these on plastic and sell them by the dozen.

Google lies to you every day

Ground-breaking stories on the US food chain in a time of Coronaviryus have been posted on Conservative Tree House.   Google makes sure you and I don't hear from them.  They don't fake the story, they hide conservative sourced information.   Have a look for yourself:



The search term is
"conservative tree house food chain"
in GOOGLE and DUCK DUCK GO..
Google acknowledges the site exists (but not the topic) in fifth position.  Duck recognizes the site and the topic for all five top spots.

Who knows what you watch on the internet? Touché from Dilbert