Without fire, snow pack declined

When fires are suppressed, people pretend to be forest fires.
Their forest management changes snow pack.  Who knew?

Picture is from a Japanese study and gives
an idea what "thinning" might be like.

Absent fires, tree density climbs in managed forests. (I believe this is not true of a climax forest but we don't have them)    With tighter canopy,less snow reaches the ground and the sheltered ground by the trees is slightly warmer.  University of Nevada researchers tried thinning strategies on the shores of Lake Tahoe and learned that removing mid-size leafy trees had the most impact.  (The linked article doesn't give numbers for the reader to judge).

Five Lessons From History Fit The VIrus Crisis Like A Glove

Here are the best parts of Housel's insight, found at "Frontline Thoughts" by Mauldin.

Lesson #1: People suffering from sudden, unexpected hardship are likely to adopt views they previously thought unthinkable.
Lesson #2: Reversion to the mean occurs because people persuasive enough to make something grow don’t have the kind of personalities that allow them to stop before pushing too far.
Lesson #3: Unsustainable things can last longer than you anticipate.
Lesson #4: Progress happens too slowly for people to notice; setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore.
Lesson #5: Wounds heal, scars last.

It's a good read.  Continue here.
There is a link to Mauldin's free newsletter.

Critical comment:  Lesson #2 is phrased poorly in my view.   The people and policies needed to sustain something are different from the ones needed to grow something.

Good joke on the lockdown beach cop patrol

Alphabet Sex Is Surplus Sex. LGBPTTQQIIAA+

Alphabet sex is surplus sex and so are weird personal pronouns.  They point to sex being surplus, not needed to survive today and influence tomorrow.  The employment of twats and thingies is optional. 

A motor that's revved out of gear can wind up to crazy rpm.  And the sexually viable who don't engage their drive to have babies wind up somewhere weirdly new.  This is normal.   Instead of seeing righteous revolution or vilest sin, take note that evolution is at work and the niches that prosperity have opened up are being populated by experiments.  Some will fail.  Some will propagate. Or the niches disappear along with prosperity, as would happen if the time of coronavirus prolongs.





Lewis Carroll has a prescient comment on pronouns:

He would answer to "Hi!" or to any loud cry,

Such as "Fry me!" or "Fritter my wig!"

To "What-you-may-call-um!" or "What-was-his-name!"

But especially "Thing-um-a-jig!"

While, for those who preferred a more forcible word,

He had different names from these:

His intimate friends called him "Candle-ends,"

And his enemies "Toasted-cheese."

Fear of Corona is on the decline. (Laugh warning)

From Snopes a picture of real dead murder hornets.

They say real socialism has never been tried. LOL

"Think of socialism like a fancy baked good"

"The Science Is Settled" is Unscientific. Think global lockdown and climate change.

My hero, physicist Richard Feynman, said:  "All questions must be doubted and discussed".
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts".

"It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding, we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt."

"The communist views are the antithesis of the scientific, in the sense that in communism the answers are given to all the questions — political questions as well as moral ones — without discussion and without doubt. The scientific viewpoint is the exact opposite of this; that is, all questions must be doubted and discussed; we must argue everything out."

And this:
"Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle with authority".

Climate change and Bat Flu Lockdowns are populated with experts who turn nasty when questioned.

RINCE BOUCHE ADDED: Isaac Asimov quote, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny...’”

Lockdown fix: Protect Nursing Homes. Free The Economy

Horowitz at Conservative Review documents that the horrifying preponderance of Coronavirus deaths are in nursing homes.  Everywhere else is now in a normal range. This is a no-brainer.  Customize the response.  Free people to do their work and pursue their happiness.  Make the major focus support for nursing home care with people and money.

"As I reported yesterday, not only do deaths in nursing homes now compose more than 50% (and in some states as high as 80%) of total deaths from the beginning of the entire epidemic, that percentage is sharply increasing in every state day by day. This means that nearly all the new deaths, depending on the state, are occurring in nursing homes. Every state has a recorded death count that you can track by date, but the recording of the subcategory of nursing home deaths is pretty new in most states."

This information wasn't being published separately nor was it collected in a timely manner.  Horowitz goes on to document new numbers from fifteen states.

CDC Seems To Be Tweaking The Lockdown To Help Democrats Win The 2020 Election

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Quoting from American Greatness "Is the CDC Meddling with the 2020 election"  And WTF is this about the CDC pushing mail-in voting for the Democrats' agenda?

"The Coronavirus crisis is reaping big political benefits for Democrats. President Trump’s signature achievement—a booming economy with record low unemployment, rising middle-class wages, and a sky-high stock market—lies in tatters. President Trump has been denied access to his only stimulant—energetic political rallies where he connects directly with supporters across the country.  Instead, the president has been stuck in Washington, D.C., listening to the advice of “experts” who used fraudulent models to convince him in late March to “shut down” the country.  Trump’s rival, Joe Biden, has been safely shuttered away in his home studio where he struggles to read teleprompter scripts or offer articulate responses to softball questions from late-night hosts. The Democratic National Convention has been canceled so the American electorate won’t be able to assess Biden’s frailty and incoherence on a national stage a few months before Election Day.
The Centers for Disease Control is looking more and more like the 2020 version of James Comey’s FBI. The agency that foisted the disastrous experiment of “social distancing” on 330 million unwitting American lab rats continues to inveigh on matters far beyond its purview or expertise.   The CDC has prepared yet another outlandish plan to prolong the nation’s misery. ...
As one would expect, the guidance is a labyrinth of costly, unconstitutional, and draconian recommendations that would result in a permanent paranoid police state for the foreseeable future...
This latest guidance, however, isn’t the only politically-motivated stunt coming from the CDC. The agency has published a series of voting recommendations that fulfill long-sought goals of the Democratic Party. This includes mail-in ballots and early voting."

95% of CDC staff donations in 2016 were to the Democrats.  You have probably seen Dr. Fauci's fawning letter to Hillary Clinton:  "Please tell Hillary I love her more than ever"  This is way out of line for a guy given the chance to control all the democrats and republicans in America.

The Lockdown Has Been Effective to Capture Budget Increases and Inflate Power

See Parkinson's law and this from "Wretchard the Cat":

It seems that many coronavirus deaths were caused because political taboos, bureaucratic fiefdoms and virtue-signaling mandates stood in the way of common sense action. The system was paralyzed by its own rhetoric. To a great extent the bureaucratic empires performed as designed. They used the crises to capture budget increases and inflate their power while carefully avoiding anything politically incorrect. A winning strategy in normal times, a disaster in the present. Even though the press coverage is designed to make one side look stupid it has had the unintended effect of making everyone look imbecilic, including the press itself. Nothing about the people on TV inspires confidence. Nothing.

Parkinson's analysis fits here:
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion
and two later corollaries:
An official wants to multiply work for subordinates, not rivals.
Officials make work for each other.

New York City: Heads Should Roll for Coronavirus Hell

New York City is in a Coronavirus hell of its own, world class. Some heads should roll.
There are caveats but see the two lists.  If New York City is counted as a country, it is the most infected country on earth and it is the country that has the most deaths per million.
And NYC was the chief engine that sent the virus around the US.  Summarized from PJ Media Article   Some caveats noted below.

Infections:  The amount of testing isn't normalized between the 10 sources.  More tests will tend to have more "cases".  Some argue persuasively that essentially everyone will pick up the infection over time, thereby making antibodies.  In that case, a high rate of infection just means that infections were brought forward in time.

Deaths:  Policy placed sick people into homes full of vulnerable seniors.  Other reasons, click here.
A high rate of deaths cannot be defended.

Update:

Don't trust the Imperial virus model. Don't trust the people who do.

"There would have been no harm if politicians had understood that models were educated guesses.
But a technically naive political and media class approached it with superstitious awe and
beguiled by the trappings
fell prostrate at it's feet"   Richard Fernandez  a.k.a.  wrechardthecat .

Such will keep happening.
The naive political and media class are beguiled by what advances their agenda.
That agenda is for our people tell other people what to do, for their own good. Profit thereby.

He continues:

"Undocumented equations, no bounds checking, side effects of ad hoc code unknown among other possible problems. They didn't fully understand what their own model was modeling. If true this is a far more serious problem than Ferguson having an affair, tantamount to relying on a ouija board to guide important decisions. It sounds like they had a poorly understood problem with state, reentrants and maybe race conditions. Basically the accusation is that Imperial's model is legacy code based on assumptions nobody understands and gives different results for the same inputs."

UK Voters Smarter Than Government. Millions were cutting virus spread BEFORE lockdown.

Your government likes to get out in front of a parade, to preen with power and trumpet virtue. Data from Great Britain show voters were smarter than the government.  Without fines or force, they had cut 80% of their travel on shared public transport and 25% of their private car travel.  This makes sense, more sense than blanket rules.  Telling everyone to stay home does not.  The free market of ideas works.

This is not aberrant, not a data meteor from outer space.  Did you know that literacy was rising rapidly BEFORE it became government policy.  I used to think we owed it to our government.

From: "The Cultural Origins of Popular Literacy in England"

"In the absence of externally provided schools, indigenously supported settings were responsible for the creation and transmission of popular literacy.  Thus, over several centuries, the literate popular culture of England largely made itself."  

And this detail from the same passage:

Pottinger of the US DNI addresses Chinese citizens directly in Mandarin. One of the most remarkable speeches I have ever heard.

Matt Pottinger (deputy head of the DNI) delivered this remarkable speech in Mandarin a couple days ago, building on his study of Chinese history before the Communists took over.  He calls for Chinese populism to recognize their home grown yearning for government for the people, not just for the elites.  He starts with the May 4th Movement of 1919 and ends today.   Although I'm linking to the English transcript, you are going to want to listen to the video with english subtitles to understand how powerful it is.

The leaders of the May 4th Movement gave decisive input to the UN's Declaration of Universal Human Rights.  They also led the change from an elite Chinese that no common people spoke to one that the governed actually spoke and understood.     Pottinger updates the story with Dr Li who was suppressed for reporting the Wuhan virus and with Hong Kong peaceful demonstrations.

"One final thought, from a U.S. perspective: Hu Shih famously preferred solving concrete problems to wallowing in abstract political theory. But let me break his rule against discussing “isms” to ask whether China today would benefit from a little less nationalism and a little more populism. Democratic populism is less about left versus right than top versus bottom. It’s about reminding a few that they need the consent of many to govern. When a privileged few grow too remote and self-interested, populism is what pulls them back or pitches them overboard. It has a kinetic energy. It fueled the Brexit vote of 2015 and President Trump’s election in 2016. It moved the founder of your university to pen a declaration of independence in 1776. It is an admonition to the powerful of this country to remember who they’re supposed to work for: America first.
Wasn’t a similar idea beating in the heart of the May Fourth Movement, too? Weren’t Hu Shih’s language reforms a declaration of war against aristocratic pretension? Weren’t they a broadside against the Confucian power structure that enforced conformity over free thought? Wasn’t the goal to achieve citizen-centric government in China, and not replace one regime-centric model with another one? The world will wait for the Chinese people to furnish the answers."

Lead taken from a reference in "American Thought Leaders" Jan Jekeliek interview of  Steve Yates

Social Distancing stopped being federal policy April 30

Did you know that the President's order mandating social distancing of six feet has expired, as of April 30th.   He did not renew the order.   The next moves are up to governors as is fitting in a federation.

As I recall, the distancing stuff started in my neighborhood before rules were declared. It arrived at first by bits and pieces, a shopkeeper here, a citizen there.   Then politicians found cover at the front of the safest parade.  Once there, the sceptre is raised, the fasces shaken but this isn't leadership.   "Safe" is soon going to be on the other side of the ledger.  Queue up hypocrisy but welcome it too.  "Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue".

UK And US Trade Talks Are Not A Side Show

Fast tracked negotiations for a free trade agreement were announced today, May 5.

The economies are linked in a big way already.  From the announcement:

The United States and the United Kingdom are the first and fifth largest economies in the world, respectively. Total two-way trade between the two countries is already worth about $269 billion a year. Each country is the other’s largest source of foreign direct investment, with about $1 trillion invested in each other’s economies. Every day, around one million Americans go to work for UK firms, while around one million Britons go to work for American firms.

Where are the grownups?

Such a shock it was to drop off my son at UVic.  I looked around and asked out loud, "What are all these kids doing walking around without their mothers?"  More sobering is to realize the kids I went to school with are running the country now. 

Kurt Vonnegut was there first.
It's bad and it's good.
Matters you saw neglected in your youth are now
public policy.  "Environment" and   "Recycling".
It's also good that big change can come in one generation.
This can sustain your hopes for the future.

N95 masks do less than you think. Viral load matters.

Viral load matters.   Social-distancing and masks aren't absolutes, for crying out loud.  They cut back the number of copies you receive of the COVID-19 bat flu virus.   After four months, here finally is something that recognizes degrees of threat instead of absolutes.  Astonishingly, the authour had to piece together the evidence from older sources and common sense instead of from shiny new research.  The topic has been ignored in the press and not touted by experts with mikes.  We need better data.

Initial viral load seems likely to have a large impact on severity of Covid-19 infection. If we believe this, we should take this seriously, and evaluate both general policy and personal behavior differently in light of this information. We should also do our best to confirm or deny this hypothesis as soon as possible.

The failure to collect more and better information about Covid-19 has been atrocious, shameful, expensive and deadly.

What can those masks do?  Less than you imagine.  The bat virus is about 125 billionths of a meter across.  The highest-rated hospital-grade N95 masks stop 95% of  the particles that are 300 billionths of an inch across.  And only if properly fitted.  In other words, you can expect about one in twenty to get through.  Those virus copies mostly aren't floating around like little no-seeums on their own but are in much larger water droplets breathed, sneezed and coughed, about 3000 droplets per cough.   A realistic goal of a mask is to stop fine spray getting up your nose. to reduce incoming viral load.  And to protect others from the same, but then you shouldn't be that close to them in the first place.       If the virus you fear is in your neighbourhood, you'll probably pick up some copies.  That's with or without social distancing and with or without a mask.  But you can reduce the viral load.

Light load of wind (virus)

More from the article:

Mostly we’re not collecting any data at all that isn’t massively biased.
The more I think about the Covid-19 situation, the more I think the highest leverage thing most people reading this can do is to find ways to get our hands on better data.

Heavy load of wind (virus)

Antarctica Ice Changes: 16 years of satellite mapping show it's complicated

Most of Antarctica has had slight gains in ice over the last 16 years but a small area in the west by the Amundsen sea has had major ice loss, over fifteen feet in some places.   Why there?  Will this detail be reported in the popular press?    Watts Up With That reprints material from the long term NASA ICESat-2 mission map.    First indications are that floating ice that was buttressing the adjacent glaciers has been breaking off, allowing accelerated motion towards the sea.

Economic Lockdown is a Giant Boo Boo. Who can save face now?

Worldwide Lockdown beats previous follies like Tulipmania and the South Sea Bubble.  What's missing is data in our inbox to evaluate the lockdown costs, a lockdown which has been called "The Greatest Mistake In History".   A quote for that:

Michael Levitt, professor of structural biology at Stanford Medical School and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, recently stated, “There is no doubt in my mind that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.”

One side of the balance sheet is trumpeted while the costs in economic ruin are currently "de-platformed".  It's like the joke about a SWAT team chasing terrorists who run into a department store.  The team locks into place around the shop next door, "because it has fewer exits".   The workplace and its diseases are more complex than the lockdown narrative.  People with a badge of office and a received narrative have launched a simplistic experiment in economic destruction.  They don't know what will happen.  They hope it will make them look good and lives will be saved.   Looking good trumps saving lives.

The single biggest crunch of the lockdown is social distancing, with two meters (an arbitrary number) for some and indoors only for others.  This is a sensible thing to consider but  not for blanket enforcement.  It has never been tested like this.  It's an experiment.  The latest information points to an unsuccessful experiment.  An input for that statement:

Julie Kelly at American Greatness: "The history of science, sadly, is littered with bad experiments gone horribly wrong. The Great Social Distancing Experiment of 2020, when it is over, will very likely be toward the top of that list."

She points out that a sensible experiment in "bending the curve" to avoid overloading ICU resources  isn't currently needed but the lockdown fever burns on.   The correlation is missing between how much many lives were manacled with lockdowns and how many people were ill.

The lockdown seems to be settling into a political question, not a health one.  Politicians see no easy way to back down with glory.