The Tell-You-What-You're-Going-To-Do People Seem The Most Immune To Any Consequence Of Shutdown.

Why is it that the pillars of society always seem to be sitting on top of the heap, instead of down below giving support?   As far as I can tell, the most secure and status rich position I can occupy in Coronavirus Land is to be a politician, an expert and a government employee.

As Richard Fernandez, a.k.a. Wretchard The Cat, observed a few minutes ago (See tweet).

The top dogs secured their position with "Trust The Science" cant.  We want to believe it but know it's not trustworthy.   As Richard Feynman, the physicist, said:  "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts".  Any talk of "received wisdom" is misdirection, the argument from authority but not from verifiability.

You don't quarantine the healthy. This has never been done before.

Dr. Dolores Cahill:  "We have never in hundreds of years quarantined healthy people".  You know it's true.  Instead we isolate the sick and protect the weak.  What happened to common sense?

UPDATE:  Youtube censored this.  Go to Bitchute to view.

If the sick wear a mask, it's to protect you from them for the ten days or so they are infectious, even though the mask reduces their own oxygen supply a bit. The oxygen stress can weaken them and may let viruses already present in their system overwhelm the native defense.    As she points out, there are hundreds of thousands of viruses in our bodies and it's important for our microbiome that we actually come in contact with bacteria and viruses.   (Near the 18:00 mark in the video.)
(Again: Go to the bitchute link to see.)

Good explanation for the Tunguska event. Glancing blow from an iron meteorite

The 1908 kaboom over Siberia that laid flat 80 million trees may have been a 150 meter iron meterorite that bounced off our atmosphere.  That explains why there's no impact crater and there don't seem to be scraps lying around on the surface.    An ricochet ice meteor would have melted before wrecking the landscape,  a rocky one would have disintegrated and a mostly pure iron one would have vaporized a bit but otherwise held together.
Reported at sciencealert.com

Soaring Corvid Case Numbers Are Good News.

Media report case numbers as cumulative bad news.    Dr. Dolores Cahill points out this is completely wrong. We recover almost universally, flushing the virus in about ten days.  The recovered are not cases, they are healthy and immune. The more there are, the better protected the elderly ill are.
Source:  Video near the ten minute mark.   UPDATE:  YouTube censored the video. Go to BitChute link instead.

Remember, "infectious" doesn't mean it's bad.  It means the virus propagates quickly.   In three or four weeks a virus bloom can generally cover the world and be put down again.

Cows Dance To See Grass For The Very First Time

I'm cheering these Holsteins hopping for joy, seeing real grass for the first time.   We've been fed curated news by superior people who know what's best for us.  The chance to find things out for ourselves is better.

One Atom Transistor

Quantum tunneling at a single atom has been harnessed for an entangled logic device.
This is the twenty first century I've longed for.
The research is reported here from the US.

This is almost the same story as the New South Wales research.  The image attached is from that.

NSW image, taken I believe with a quantum
tunneling miscroscope.

How was it set up?  A silicon chip received a one atom layer of hydrogen.  An individual H atom was zapped and replaced by a Phosphorous atom.  Heating the chip disposed of the H atoms.  I don't have to understand the detail to know this is significant, to operate finely at a new order of magnitude.

An Unusual Tribute To A.Y. Jackson

This hooked rug is a work of art, a tribute to A.Y. Jackson.  Seventy years ago, my mother transcribed the colours from a print of Autumn Mist.  Though yarn has faded, the rug in its gilded frame looks good to this day.

Post-Coronavirus Re-Opening Plan Suits Bureaucrats.

If it captures budget increases, adds staff and influence, it's a success.  Found at Powerlineblog.

It's okay to be all three

Pictured in Powerline humor.

Trump To Restore WHO Funding To Same Levels as China. LOL

WHO's own data for 2019 show the US has been  the#1 (14.67%)  and Communist China has been the #49 (0,21%) donor.  You read that right!

'The Trump administration will shortly resume funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), but it will be at the same level as China, according to a Fox News report released Friday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” '

This is the best laugh of 2020.

Assessments and donations to WHO

It's a little more complicated.  There are member assessments and a much larger sum of specified donations above that amount.  "Restore" then has two different meanings.  The second biggest player is the Gates Foundation and the third biggest is a vaccine NGO you never heard of, the GAVI Alliance.  Those two combined donate more than the US.  The UK and Germany show up next. 

The top donors

The bottom donors

It appears that China has been getting a special discount for being poor and downtrodden while coming close to being the largest economy in the world.  They get an excellent  bang for their buck by going after individuals.  The individuals control all the donated funds and set policy too.

Do Canadian Political Parties Have A Platform? Three proclaim it and three don't bother.

I've been to the website of the six Canadian political parties looking for "Platform".

The Conservatives, the NDP and the Bloq don't bother mentioning they even have a platform. 

The Liberals, the Greens and the Peoples Party have one and make it sound like it matters.  See the screen shots and "click to embiggen".

Link to conservative.ca

Link to the Bloq Quebecois

Do they stand for anything? Your time and money accepted.

Link to NDP.ca

The next three promote

their platform:

Click here for the Liberal Party link

Click here for the Green Party link

Click here for the link to both pages
for the People's Party of Canada

If there's chicken in the soup, it's called chicken soup. COVID deaths are over-counted.

Scare stories aplenty say coronavirus deaths are under-counted.  Evidence  and common sense point the other way.    One example: The San Diego County Supervisor says they only had "six pure, solely coronavirus deaths"  out of 190 recorded coronavirus deaths as of May 13.

Chicken  soup

1.  If there's chicken in the soup, it's called chicken soup. It's called chicken soup even if there are more veggies than chicken and the chicken was just powder in the broth.   The same happens with COVID deaths.  Doctors will often be right.  (It was the chicken in the chicken soup the mother-in-law made).  What goes on the death certificate will often be wrong.   Any death with the virus detected or antibodies to the virus detected, goes on the books as a COVID death.  Yet, as you know, many people have mild infections and the presence of antibodies in the general population runs possibly fifty times higher than the rate of hospitalizations.  This is just common sense. Many will die that have the virus incidentally or as one more stress among many.

Chicken soup

2.  It's complicated.  A seriously ill person has a lot of systems failing and generating symptoms.  A skilled physician can still just be guessing.
3.  A bump in deaths today means a dip later.  This is no excuse to belittle current deaths of the elderly.  Most deaths are people who were at risk of dying in the very near future.  Someone in a hospice with three weeks to live, will be called a COVID death if she tests positive near her death.  The deaths have been moved forward weeks or months and the patient was expecting to die soon.  This troubles me less than deaths of people who'd normally live another ten years.
4.   Hospitals have a financial incentive to over count.  The CARES act gives a 20% funding bonus for COVID related treatment, at a time when hospitals are in financial crisis because other services have been cut back or suspended.
5.   Some see the pandemic as an opportunity to gain power for socialist agendas and find it helpful, not that people died but that the stats say a lot of people died. Fearful voters allow their freedom to be replaced by benevolent paternalism.  I am sure this influences the reporting but not the treatment.  "To make things look a little bit worse".
6.   Birx of the CDC says she thinks about 25% of the deaths are over counts that mix case counts with death counts, a result of CDC's antiquated accounting system.
7.   New York City is the death epicentre.  NYC policies and their infectious subway have an outsize effect on US statistics.

This post builds on a good article by John Lott at Townhall.com which has supporting links to CARES, Dr. Birx and more.

KINSA, And The Health Weather Map Of The USA. Yes, There Is One.

The health weather map of the US from Kinsa is the twenty first century I've been waiting for. People that bought the digital thermometer use an auto app sending data to Kinsa where a map is daily generated of all 2000 counties.  Go to healthweather.com

"Kinsa’s illness signal consists of data from over 1,300,000 thermometers with 60,000-160,000 readings driving our signal every day."

It defaults to a guesswork map of atypical fever reports they think are attributed to coronavirus.  The drop down window (upper right) gives three more views.
"Atypical"  "Trend  and  "Observed".  These three don't involve guesswork. The color tells you how it compares for the same season other years.
What's stunning is that levels of fever are low or way below average everywhere now.
A lot of fevers that aren't coronavirus-linked are way down.

This county map is of all fevers in continental USA.  Possibly as low as it's ever been for mid-May..
A guessed-at map (C.Atypical)  shows where coronavirus may be raging but it is a coloured
subset of this greyed one.

You'd be crazy not to try home schooling young kids. Lessons from the lockdown.

Sam Sorbo's opening point in Jan Jekielek's interview is, "Don't feel inadequate".
If you made it through high school you can surely impart something to a third grader. Or if you think your own education was wasted, why would you send your youngster where you went?

The persuasive and beautiful author's words, transcribed from the American Thought Leaders video,  2:20 to 3:25

I immediately began launching a series of videos that I call the Accidental Homeschooler to encourage parents because a lot of parents feel completely inadequate. They’re just not up to the task. And that’s sad for me. I don’t think that that should be the case. And the more that I thought about it the more I realized that it is the case that we feel inadequate because that is the way we have been educated to feel. And in fact I would say that we haven’t so much been educated as we’ve been schooled. So you know a parent says to me, “Oh I can’t do it, I can’t home school because, you know, I just don’t even know how”. And I say to them, “You went through high school, right?” “Yeah, I’ve gone through high school”. “And yet you feel unqualified to teach a third grader? I mean you must then question your education. How effective is your education if you’re not able to impart the things that you learned? And then, if in fact you say, No my education was awful, why would you consign your child to the same system that arguably is worse today than when you went to school?

She realized that when she was helping her kid with homework at the end of the day when everybody was tired, she was doing homeschooling.

Pool Noodle Keep-Your-Distance Hats On The Patio? You Can't Make This Stuff Up.

The Cafe Rothe in Schwerin, Germany re-opened its patio Saturday.  Customers wear pool noodle hats.   You can't make this stuff up.  Story distributed by CNN.

SIdney Has A Corona Lockdown Crooner

Every day for the past month, he's crooned from his drive for an hour.  His audience is whoever cares to stop, not that he waits for you to show. 

About one thirty in the afternoon he brings the amp and cordless mike to his property line and begins to sing in a rich and lazy style.  First Avenue in Sidney gets this treat or otherwise for about an hour.  What are YOU doing to make the home stays worthwhile?

Remy Sings: "It's Illegal To Go Surfing, In The USA".

I Vote For Democracy. Experience shows we vote in four more governments at the same time.

We are governed by more than democracy and its votes.  There are four other votes.
In the democracy, our vote is small but has the same weight as any other vote.
.

Benevolent dictatorship
now applied to a pandemic

Our experience as infants is with benevolent dictators. Parents note our vote but the vote has no rights to  prevail.  Because we are dependent, this works astonishingly well.

Our experience in social media and groups is that shaming from high-status members shapes our decisions.  We have a vote but choose to cancel our own vote to keep status and avoid shame.

Our experience in the markets is that people with the most money have the biggest vote.  We may both wish a Lamborghini but in the markets, our vote is quantified in dollars and the higher number prevails.

Our experience with contracts is that we will sell our vote to receive a benefit.  This can be taking on a mortgage or agreeing to work for someone.  We vote to enter the contract, but surrender the right to leave until we have fulfilled some promise.

All five systems of government co-exist.

Currently, the infant model of benevolent dictators prevails.  People with big hats in Government and Health have been centre stage telling us what to do for two months but the spotlights are moving towards other figures now entering the scene.

Democracy:  All votes the same value and non-negotiable.  An honor system with checks.
Infancy:  Vote over-powered by certain others at will.
Status:   We override our own vote.
Market:   We compete to put our vote over the top.
Contract:  We sell our vote for a benefit.

CCP Calls Trump And Pompeo "Enemies of Mankind".

The China narrative is curated with almost iron-clad control.  The CCP secretary has okayed calling Trump and Pompeo "Enemies of Mankind".  See banner photo from May 14.  Remember when the curtain goes up in China, what you see is what the playwright put there.  Kyle Bass reports.

We have a stage in America too but cranks and the odd patriot get to wander on and off-stage too.

Remember the 2019 call for a People's War.

Beijing calls for a “people’s war” against Washington’s “greed and arrogance,” according to reports. “The most important thing is that in the China-US trade war, the US side fights for greed and arrogance … and morale will break at any point.

Contrast that with President Trump's approach, that he expects the Chinese leader to do what's best for China.

Too Quick To Re-Open. Let Me Explain That.

"Too slow to close" is the first outrage voiced by the left.

"Too quick to open" is the second outrage voiced by the left.

This is not about health. 

The correct translation is:

To slow to expand the role of government.

To quick to shrink it..

There's no contradiction. The same principle is applied in different settings.




Update:  This sounds about right: