Geomagnetic Superstorms More Common Than You Think. The 1921 Storm You DIdn't Hear About Was As Big As The 1859 Carrington Event.

It began on May 12, 1921 when giant sunspot AR1842, crossing the sun during the declining phase of Solar Cycle 15, began to flare. One explosion after another hurled coronal mass ejections (CMEs) directly toward Earth. ... pens in strip chart recorders pegged uselessly to the top of the paper....And then the fires began. Around 02:00 GMT on May 15th, a telegraph exchange in Sweden burst into flames. About an hour later, the same thing happened across the Atlantic in the village of Brewster, New York. Flames engulfed the switch-board at the Brewster station of the Central New England Railroad and quickly spread to destroy the whole building....  On some telegraph lines in the USA voltages spiked as high as 1000 V.
During the storm’s peak on May 15th, southern cities like Los Angeles and Atlanta felt like Fairbanks, with Northern Lights dancing overhead while telegraph lines crackled with geomagnetic currents. Auroras were seen in the USA as far south as Texas while, in the Pacific, red auroras were sighted from Samoa and Tonga and ships at sea crossing the equator.

They found some old magnetic chart recordings that did not go offscale when the May 1921 CMEs hit....The storm attained an estimated maximum −Dst on 15 May of 907 ± 132 nT, an intensity comparable to that of the Carrington Event of 1859,” they wrote in their paper.

The expanded story with newspaper clippings from the day are at Spaceweather.com 
Update:  I see they picked it up from WattsUpWithThat.

Coronavirus Freed Our Inner Tyrant

At American Thinker,

"When the coronavirus landed on our shores, communist China came with it. We have become part of a mass scale human experiment in government control and it turned out that stripping away our freedom wasn’t all that difficult. Under the guise of concern for our health and well-being, tyrants came out of the woodwork."

Bringing enlightened leadership to the locals who,
at first, go along obsequiously.
(Jose Garnelo 1892)

 Carol Brown expands the thought: "Our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our lives are being destroyed as the left solidifies and expands their oppressive powers. We’ve been herded around like cattle, threatened, isolated, confined, silenced, and arrested."

This is true enough but the inner tyrant can be found left, right and centre. Some of this traces to our family structure where as infants we experienced being tightly managed.

I close with the C.S. Lewis quote:

"To be "cured" against one's will":

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience".

“

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Watch a doctor explain covid-19 to medical people.

It's 90 minutes university-level and it's complicated.  The news we've been reading is like a sandbox toy compared to the suite of Craftsman tools presented in this illustrated lecture by Dr Seheult  at medcram.com    You can sign up for a free view.  This is the latest as of April 30.   When you know more, you still won't have easy answers.  But you will be informed.

Progressive Intellectuals

A quote from The Centurions by Jean Larteguy: 

"They were always obsessed by their own problems; they listened in raptures to the beating of their heart; anything served as a pretext for them to probe their souls in order to produce a spate of words"

Mac supports Windows

Why not give convicts masks instead of releasing them?

We can still be friends

Quotable:
Saying "We can still be friends" is like your mom telling you
that your dog died and saying, "You can still keep it".

College Tuition: More money chasing the same goods

Did you hear about college educations getting better and better?  Neither did I.  From the Spectator's article on "Covid College" (lessons learned):

"Only a fool pays the full price for a second-rate product. Only a fool believes real-world contact can be delivered secondhand by Zoom. Our colleges may teach the higher foolishness, but the cost of higher education — ahead of inflation every year since 1980, and devalued accordingly — is a lesson in popular credulity."

The cost of education has gone up far faster than inflation.  But it hasn't got better.  The money pumping it up is going to go somewhere else after the Covid experience. The classes disappeared into the ether but the money kept going into the hole where they used to be.      This is inflation but not across the whole market, just in the college market.  It's unstable and will correct towards a mean.

Get over it. You always have viruses.

Get over it.  You always live with viruses, some 20 trillion of them call you their home.  Your body's immune system cleans the troublesome ones up.  Usually it's successful, even with a bad new one like the Wuhan coronavirus.  They are not going to go away.  As Bill Maher says, "You can't sanitize the universe".

You have about 37 trillion cells in your body.  And about 100 trillion bacteria.  When you step on the scales in the morning, bacteria account for several of those pounds.   There are about 10 viruses for every bacterium and some of them infect those poor little bacteria too.   Those cells of yours operate off about 22,000 genes.  There are another nearly 8 million genes beavering away in the same tissue, but they are bacteria and virus genes, not your own.   Add to that about 8% of your own genome which is re-packaged virus.  It's complicated in a lively way and not a simple fight between bad bat bugs and humanity.  (I Contain A Multitude by Ed Yong is an eye opener.)

About 8 percent of the human genome consists of retroviral DNA sequences that have inserted themselves into the human germline, where some of their functions have been adopted to serve essential functions for their host’s survival and development.

Here's one minute of common sense from Bill Maher:

Bipartisan Student Call For End Of Confucius Institutes

Colour me surprised.   As reported by Campus Reform, the "College Democrats" and "National College Republicans" issued a joint statement asking American universities to close all Confucius Institutes in the name of academic freedom.

Source

Surprising but not earth-shaking.  The College Democrat site doesn't mention this although the Republican one does.  Neither group is supported by mass voluntary donations from university students, as far as I know.  It's possible to take in higher ed and never run into either one.  Still, it is unusual to have left and right voices agree that a foreign agenda-driven group doesn't belong inside the beating heart of a university.

What may be significant is that larger bodies have not discouraged the smaller ones from taking this position.  Like the Catholic publishing "Nil Obstat", national parties apparently haven't discouraged it.

Evidence Of Politics in Fed Interest Rates

The chart shows the fed followed one policy during Obama's era  (near zero federal funds rate) and a different policy of ramping up during Trump's term.  This is fuel if you wish to dislike Chairman Powell.  The details don't match the narrative well.   Rates that had risen to pre-2008 levels are going down during the current crisis and the plummeting rates from the 2008 crisis corresponded perhaps only coincidentally with President Obama's election.  A little deeper is the thought that interest rate "setters" are always playing catch-up to reality.  As noted by Zero Hedge, even running interest rates several points negative won't fire up the economy because those rates are devastating to investors and savers, even while being a deal for would be borrowers.

Reproduced at Gateway Pundit

Seniors Fall In Love But Its Not That Simple

Youngsters can dream about "Making a life together".  Seniors already have a life that they spent half a century choosing and tending.    For the young, "Making a life together" is up-sizing, for seniors, it is down-sizing.

Young and Poor

Young at heart, but not so poor

Cheeky Babylon Bee - 3 Good Stingers

More at the source.

WSJ Editorial Goes There: "As for Mr. Schiff, no one should ever believe another word he says".

The Wall Street Editorial Board comes out and says it:

“Newly released Congressional testimony shows that Adam Schiff spread falsehoods shamelessly about Russia and Donald Trump for three years even as his own committee gathered contrary evidence.” “As for Mr. Schiff, no one should ever believe another word he says.”

The WSJ editorial is behind a paywall but a goodly chunk is excerpted at foxnews.com/opinion.

Who Got General Flynn Unmasked.?

This list shows who got eavesdropping material on General Flynn that should have been unavailable.  Names include Joe Biden, John Brennan, and Obama's chief of staff.  It was collected as part of overseas spying by the NSA and someone asked to unmask the name of an American citizen who was "incidentally" in the conversation.   Someone specifically asked to find out who he was and what he said.  This list is not a list of all the un-maskings out there during those three months.  It's a list of people who wanted to know about General Flynn specifically.  There was no approved pathway to do this directly but they piggybacked on foreign snooping to get around the rules.   The names were published today by Acting DNI Grennell.   There is also snooping done within the USA by the FBI and this is not referenced.    Click to EMBIGGEN


  Commenter Chojun at Conservativetreehouse adds:  "Note that Obama’s Chief of Staff requested to unmask Flynn on Jan 5th – the same date of Obama’s “By the book” meeting."  Also:  These are word for word transcripts, not summaries that were being circulated.

Coronavirus Vaccine: Get some context

Daily headlines tout a new vaccine breakthrough.  If the story is simple, it's not useful.

From Rud Istvan at WUWT comes a better perspective.

Excerpted:

There are at least 8 promising vaccines in active global development, not just one.
Vaccines can last a lifetime (smallpox) or five years (shingles, tetanus).  No one knows how this will work for the Wuhan flu virus.  To date, no one anywhere has developed a vaccine against a coronavirus  (SARS is a coronavirus).
The Wuhan virus (before it enters your cells ) has three sites than can be targeted with a neutralizing antibody:  Each works differently.  There's the capsid N protein and on the S spike are sites S1 and S2.

Amplified:  A vaccine has to deal with a moving target.  One ampoule is unlikely to fix you forever.  All viruses are mutating all the time, and since their generation is measured in hours rather than decades, things move along briskly and usually without much consequence.  There are already dozens of subspecies around, just like there are Scots and Englishmen and within England there are Lancashiremen and Cockneys, but still pretty much all homo sapiens.   Don't freak out about "THE VIRUS IS MUTATING OMG" stories.

Trump: 100 Trade Deals won't make up for the Plague from China

President Trump tweets:   "As I have said for a long time, dealing with China is a very expensive thing todo.  We just made a great Trade Deal, the ink was barely dry, and the World was hit by the Plague from China.  100 Trade Deals wouldn't make up the difference - and all those innocent lives lost!"

Americans With Disabilities Act Reduced Disabled Employment

John Stossel points out:

Once the ADA passed, my stutter makes me a member of a “protected class.” ... I could have accused them of failing to “accommodate the disabled,” as the law requires. Even if I didn’t win, the lawsuit would be expensive. It’s safer for employers to avoid members of “protected classes.” Far-fetched? Look at the stats:
Before the ADA passed, 59% of disabled men had jobs. After it passed, the number fell to 48%. Today, fewer than 30% have jobs.   Once again, a law that was supposed to help people did the opposite of what politicians intended.

"I made my reputation
curing that"

Like any law,  the ADA successfully increased manpower and budget for a bureaucracy. Other consequences matter less unless a public stink is raised.