Politics and science, humor and hypocrisy. METANOODLE
My best use is to appreciate one or two people well, and when she died this spring of cancer, I became unemployed.
"What does home mean to me?" a friend asked.
When Helen stirs awake and turns towards me, she tucks her head under my chin, casts a leg over and drift back to sleep in my arms. That's home and since she gave up the ghost, I've been homeless too"
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Data reposted by Instapundit from Knox County TN show 70%
of all infections, whether symptomatic or not, are accounted for by Nursing Homes, Assisted Living and interactions in the community at large...NOT restaurants, bars and grocery stores and workplaces. This is a small sample geographically but comprehensive..
From the WUWT survey titled "Where are all the sick people", come a reminder that every winter we knew people who were sick with the usual Type A and B flus but most of us know no-one or almost no-one who's had Covid-19. That's egregious because the Covid-19 numbers are based not on symptoms but on (somewhat erratic) test reports whereas the flu numbers are based on sniffles and coughs and complaints we could see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. As noted, the numbers of symptomatic flu cases is 35 to 45 million every year
Here in the same article is a survey of several thousand people. The questions were "Do you know anyone currently sick with Covid-19" and "Do you know anyone personally who had to stay home because of Covid-19 in the last nine months?"
Most people don't have anyone in their circle who is sick or who was sick and most of the exceptions know 1 to 5 at most. Is this enough to shut down productive society, to stop relationships, to isolate neighbours, to bankrupt restaurants and hotels and brand people with masks, enmeshing them in curfews even?
When I read reports about "cases" rather than sick people in the most recent stories, I call baloney.
If, however, you want to protect the elderly with other morbidities, let's do it to our utmost.
From the Washington Post.
A lot of elderly people died without a hug, collateral damage of Covid management.
I expect good data to have balance, on the one hand this, on the other hand that. The other hand has been silent about the costs of isolation and the cancellation of normal life.
From suggestion at Instapundit. Rules are for little people. Edit "rich" menu to include "credentialed with a side of smug"
So, are you okay with less insect poison and not okay with more corn with edited DNA? Check out the chart. BT corn (resistant by design to a specific bacteria) is the main maize grown now and all that insect poison has disappeared.
The chart on insecticide use is from Watts Up With That.
The insecticide disappears from the data in 2010.
Canadians put aside record amounts of cash this year, thanks to government. Centralized money was redistributed and not immediately wasted, an astonishing turn of events. Comment from the National Post source: "Government transfers were actually larger than the amount of money lost in the labour market" and "it’s not unthinkable that some of this money went to people that didn’t need it" and "High savings rates are in turn expected to put a damper on Canada’s economic recovery". Businesses as well as individuals have set aside some extra cash. Set asides may be higher as cash accounts but not investment accounts were tallied.
"A library should include as much of what you do not know as your means allow". Quoted here.
This is in the same spirit as the Feynman quote heading this blog: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.". At the link is another pointed quotation:
“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.” — Lincoln Steffens
To add one more layer to this ham sandwich before you bite down, remember Donald Rumsfeld's apothegm:
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones".
We live with abundance. Think of this tale from a Mennonite village in the Crimea in the early 1900's. The women kept their laying hens in a shared shelterand every night put a finger up their hens to agree on who got an egg next day and who did not. A bit of yarn was tied to the leg of each hen in lay. Told me by a woman whose mother had hens there.
The worst hit part of Dresden after the firestorm started by bombing in WW2. Think of the crisped corpses in thousands, formerly neighbours.
Nationwide US data for land assessment recently came available. Think of it as cost per acre or per lot. Here' s a map. This was presented in Watts Up With That as a metric for comparing costs of conservation plans. It also overlaps the distribution of democrat (red) and republican (green) voters. The author was surprised that his data was more predictive of land transaction costs than the aggregate of local assessor numbers.
“Why” is downstream from “Is”.
And I conclude that meaning is not intrinsic to life.
It is extrinsic, we add it.
What brings the thought?
How I loved my sweetheart, now gone.
She stopped.
My life is richer for loving her now
though she died.
Yes, Fox News is bleeding viewers but a story about Fox Corp tumbling 6% right after the election is misleading, kind of bogus. It was much higher last winter before the Covid collapse. The pre-election and post-election numbers hardly differ.
This appalling contrast isn't about nudging, it's about outright deception and misdirection. I typed "Who owns Dominion Voting Machines" into Google and DuckDuckGo and was shocked. DuckDuckGo takes a stab at answering the question and Google doesn't even bother with the question but launches straight into "Nothing to see here!" stories about fraud. Google bizarrely suggests that "Wo owns" might be a better search than "Who owns". (No one seems to have a fair answer at the moment. Soros as owner appears to be a head fake, Feinstein's husband as a major owner may not be, Pelosi family involvement may be small and indirect.)
