Found at Powerline

"Destroy The Economy And You're Done". Sarah Hoyt Calls It Like It Is.

"Once you allow your rights to be stripped away, you’re not getting them back.

People are humoring you now – sort of --- but it won’t last.
Destroy the state economy and you’re done."

Excerpts below but read the much longer original for the full meal deal.

This isn't Sarah's real picture but fun anyhow

"Even had the Xi disease been as lethal as the stupid model said, and set to kill a million people (out of a population of 300 million) it might be the lesser cost. Yes, go ahead, it’s callous and I want people to die, as all the trolls say. ......realize the choices are "death" and somewhat "less death, maybe", and think that the “less death, maybe” is on the side of not destroying the economy.

"Why were we doing this all in a rush and following a completely unproven strategy, rather than actually taking a few days and working through “Who is most at risk” and then protecting THOSE people? I mean, if we were going to confine the healthy with the sick, shouldn’t we know which of the healthy were likely to become sick, first?

"We know now the chances of your catching this out of doors, or in any situation you’re not shut in with someone infected and sneezing (the myth of asymptomatic spreaders appears to be just that, a myth.

"I have had idiots tell me that fat Jared’s orders are “the law” as if he were the emperor or something. [She is writing from Colorado] .... I can’t begin to tell you how incoherent that makes me. It’s not the law, and it is unconstitutional.
As Das Bild put it, this was possibly the greatest criminal insanity the West ever committed upon itself

"NOW that we know that opening does not in fact bring a huge death toll, what are we doing?
Most sane, normal people — are sick to death of this, and there is a seething anger everywhere. But the politicians are trying to hang on to just a little bit more glory.    ... Inconsistences, panic and outright crazy decisions...  I’ve lived under regimes that rules arbitrarily. Totalitarians, drunk on power, and using their position for petty revenge.
People are humoring you now – sort of --- but it won’t last.
Destroy the state economy and you’re done."

Mouse Brain: Micro Detail And A Video Tour

The NY Post reports on thrilling new detail of the mouse brain developed at the Allan Institute for Brain Science.  This is the twenty first century we were promised.  Also, a video.

"An average of the inherent fluorescence in the
   brains of mice imaged using serial
         two-photon tomography"

"The Allen Mouse Brain Common Coordinate Framework 
(CCFv3), a 3D reference atlas"

Text for the video: “This video depicts a fusion of data in the CCF frameworkThe background grayscale image represents the average anatomy of 1675 individual specimens forming the basis for the common coordinate system.The colored curved lines represented sampled streamlines. The mouse cortex is a 3D sheet organized into layers where connection between the layers are typically perpendicular to the surface, suggesting a hypothetical columnar organization.”

What Is Love, Exactly?

Perhaps it's a simple little fire consuming the fuel life offers, neither moral nor personal.

I"m for it.


A smaller question is "Why is falling in love so pleasant?"   I believe it's part of the same question as "Why do salt and sugar taste good?".  The three rewards are for behaviour that gives our animal self a future, to be fruitful and multiply.

The ghost in the machine or operating system prefers its own protocols and needs to be given baked-in guidance from the animal to pay attention to the animal's needs.

Happy to oblige.  Falling in love is great.  Sweet and salty is tasty in a high value meal of carbs, protein and fat.

Keep Government In Check

"He governs  best who governs least"  I believe Thoreau's point is true. "Least" will vary with the hazard of a situation. 

Rand Paul makes the same point: 
"The founders never intended for Americans to trust their government.  Our entire constitution was predicated on the notion that government was a necessary evil, to be restrained and minimized as much as possible."

Most troubling to me with the current pandemic lockdown is the proliferation of health officials and governors who declare this and that to be the law but without constitution and without the consent of the governed through legislation.  Equally troubling is the equanimity of millions who accept being told how to run their homes and do their jobs.   Let such authority be robustly challenged on the facts.  When the rulers rely on "because I said so", you need better rulers.

Does The Lockdown Still Have An Exit? The Cure Is Becoming Worse Than The Disease

Look at these two quotes.
Richard Fernandez: "If you lockdown long enough, there's no longer enough battery to restart the systems."
Jonathan Turley:  "De Blasio just said on CNN that New York cannot open because it has no money to do so."

(Source is wretchardthecat's twitter feed.  Fernandez is a rewarding read.)

Pandemic Prophets Deserve To Be Resolutely Questioned.

Listen, think, but don't believe each jot and tittle of expert prediction.
Powerlineblog reminds me that "Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of human error."
The quote is from George Eliot.    Experts and politicians selling us models of infection control have destroyed more than a trillion dollars of human capital and yet those models have never been tested properly.

Yogi Berra: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
Ronald Reagan:  "Trust but verify".
Richard Feynman:  "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts".

What Shocked My Grandmother

My dear grandmother revealed to me a wild side you don't consider today. In a year when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, she and her best friend went down by the sea in Scotland.  Hiding behind boulders where no-one could hear or see, they called out their rebellion against all authority and perhaps against God Himself.   "Maybe!"   "Maybe!"  "Maybe".

How radical is that!  They spoke up against predestination and addressed the possibility that God doesn't have a plan unchangeable for everyone in everything and at all times. 

The News Used To Tell You Something Happened..

The news used to tell you something happened

and then you had to decide what you thought about it.

Now the news tells you how to think about something

and you have to decide if if even happened.

Critical thinking skills urgently needed.

Although it has gotten grimly

worse in recent years, news merchants have always misled you.

Bombay 1896

Remember the adage: Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

And my personal favorite from Mark Twain:

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”

Hilary's Campaign Put Out The Cash For The GPS Steele Dossier.

The bill for Steele's Fusion GPS dossier was sent directly to Robbie Mook on Hilary's campaign.  This gem was buried in a release this week of Elias's testimony to Schiff's committee, page 17..
Such slime buckets.    It doesn't qualify as "oppo research" but it was weaponized to destroy the administration after inauguration.

Sourced from Gateway Pundit.

Elon Musk restarts the California factory with classy line: "If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me"

"If anyone is arrested, I ask that is only be me", Elon Musk tweeted May 11.
That puts him back in my "admired" column. Alameda County had health inspectors shut the plant down and put everyone out of work.

Space News May 2020

Mining asteroids will compete with earth mines.
They can be staggeringly rich in nickel, platinum, and gold.
Remember the gold on earth was made in the sun
and migrated outwards before
ending up here. 

The US supports "let's make a deal" for space business.  This is great, in my view. The Artemis accords are being drafted to draw in co-signatories and focus on the moon. They include social distancing:  "The Artemis Accords ... propose “safety zones” that would surround future moon bases to prevent damage or interference from rival countries or companies operating in close proximity. The pact also aims to provide a framework under international law for companies to own the resources they mine, the sources said."

Something uncommon with sun spots.  As we go into the next 11 year sunspot cycle, there are briefly co-existing spots from the previous and the upcoming cycle.  Some with magnetic spin sinister, some dexter.

Everybody loves this artist's impression

Omuamua was the first interstellar object confirmed to be passing through our system.  It is rather long and thin, a shape much less probable to have endured than a somewhat rounder form.  What's new is "excess acceleration" not explainable by gravity.  One way to make sense of this is if it is hollow and has a skin thinner than silk allowing it to function as a photon-driven sun sail.  Likelier is a jetting sublimation of surface ice from the tumbling object.

The Japanese have another success with the Hyabusa2 probe.
Not only did it land again on asteroid Ryugu but a slightly jerky movie has been released of it landing and rebounding immediately after capturing some dirt.   The dirt is coming home.


There's a black hole you can "see" with the naked eye.  Not very far away in our own galaxy is a triple star system, visible in the constellation Telescopium from the Southern Hemisphere.  Two are visible and one is not, but of the stars that shine, the one closest to the black hole "star" has a wobble with a 40 day period.  This is 1000 light years away in our galaxy which is over 100,000 light years across.  Two features:  It is the closest ever found and it isn't reacting violently with its environment.

High res infrared mapping of Jupiter was just released.

Do Californians Improve Texas By Moving There?

Comment at The Babylon Bee

Breaking: Iranian Navy Sinks Its Own Warship in Exercise. May be 40 dead.

An Iranian frigate sank their own warship with much loss of life.  Daily Mail.
(Update: 19 dead)

Georgia was scorned for opening two weeks ago. Critics went suddenly silent

When mockers are muted, that means they know they should apologize but won't.  Instead of hearing more about Georgia's Governor being "a monster with blood about to be on his hands", Governor Kemp tweets May 10th: 

“Today marks the lowest number of COVID-19 positive patients currently hospitalized statewide (1,203) since hospitals began reporting this data on April 8th,” Kemp posted to Twitter on Saturday."

The expanded article is at American Thinker.

SIdney BC Has Some Rusty Roads. The pavement has chunks of embedded iron.

Quite a few Sidney roads have spots of iron with rust tails sloping away.  Where did the asphalt mix come from? I've seen it nowhere else in Canada.  My favourite example is the bicycle lane west of the Airport where this picture was taken.

Oscars and Emmys went hard left because they lost their audience

"The Oscars and the Emmys: If the big, broad, general audience you used to have is gone, and deep down you think it’s never coming back, then why not make a harder bid for the loyalty of the smaller audience you’ve got left? In a time when the entertainment industry is (or thinks it is) a one-party state with no dissenters, you had better echo that politics back to your base.  What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience."

For the original post, go to Instapundit and enjoy the comments too.

Tanzania outs WHO over testing a Papaya positive for Coronavirus? Be very suspicious

At first, this is a delicious story exposing wrongdoing by WHO in Tanzania, a useful bombshell for WHO's critics.    It goes like this:  President Magifuli of Tanzania says they played a trick on WHO and sent a sample of papaya, goat and pheasant for coronavirus testing at their national and all three came back positive.

This sounds like on of those jokes that start:  An Irishman, an Englishman and a Scot walk into a bar.   You can verify, however, that President Magifuli did make the claim, but don't bet the farm yet on its truth.  He has problems of his own at home and although some lab people have been sent packing,
"The Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention rejected claims of faulty tests by Tanzania’s president."   Wait before exploiting the story.  What technician would bother to make up a fake test reoirt for a piece of fruit?

Incidentally, although I saw this story a day earlier, search results seem suppressed on both Google and Duck Duck Go.

President Trump's Humor

As his daughter, Ivanka, said in a 2016 ad, "My father is absolutely fearless" and he loves to post stuff that cast him in a funny light that others would flee.  Preening scalliwags may not like this retweet.   More than CNN's Stelter fit as targets in this memorable week when the DOJ gave up all charges against General Flynn.

Read Roger Kimbal;s, "The New Normal? Ridiculous"

Here's the link.
Here's some reasons.

"Thucydides noticed this. ... The great historian wrote that in a time of civil war certain words changed their usual meanings and took on new ones. For example, “reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question inaptness to act on any.”     It’s not only civil war that produces such linguistic deformations. Any crisis will do...

“The new normal.” Is there a more nauseating flake of smug linguistic presumption? I think that the imperative “stay safe,” born of our coronavirus panic, comes close. But “the new normal” is worse because it pretends to knowledge not just solicitude.

Julie Kelly raised a question that has to have been on the minds of many people. What if “social distancing” doesn’t work?
“We have,” she notes “been assured by the credentialed class that keeping a distance of six feet between healthy people for weeks on end was the only tried-and-true way to prevent the deadly spread of the novel coronavirus.” But what does the evidence show? We’ve shuttered the economy for almost two months. We’ve destroyed trillions in wealth. We’ve put millions out of work. We’ve denied tens of thousands of people access to medical care for anything except treatment of the coronavirus. We’ve imperiled hospitals across the country.