Babylon Bee: some greatest hits

Best Babylon Bee satires in recent weeks..

If you have ever had a political opinion, been to church or been married, you'll like their stuff.

Wild Wild West Dot Com - You've neighbors you didn't ask for

Thousands of people who care nothing for me are now my neighbors.   They vote me up and down at will when I appear in the digital swamp. They give me a jingle from the call centre and email me from Kenya.   Seems like the whole world is ready to put in their two cents for free.    It’s the Wild Wild West.com

It's complicated

Back in the day in village and tribe, we met our neighbors every week and were probably kin.  We took great interest in their sexual unions, their work and kids, status, belief and doings.  Without written law, we apparently shaped life with story-telling, shaming, kinship rules and brute force.    True, we now have nations and clubs and corporations  complete with  recorded  votes,  constitutions, patent law, health officers and enforcement officers.

But we’re simultaneously back in the village, an increasingly global culture, thanks to the speed of light.   The word "neighbor" is built around the word "nigh" or "near" and everyone with a cell phone is now near you.  Though we be thousands of miles apart, we can connect in less than a second and pay less than a penny for the touch.  So we're neighbors now. “Connect”  means “reach out to” and “like”.   It also means “target”.  (Think “deplatforming” and “doxing”).

Our institutions haven’t caught up. They are somewhat hierarchical.  The internet neighborhood is a looser network that admits initiatives from a lot of nodes.  The second is becoming more important than the first.  Managing what happens in your information neighborhood is getting to be as powerful and important for safety, wealth and health as voting for your MP and Senator.  Somehow managing the information neighborhood and managing the geographic neighborhood must co-exist.  The impetus for change is arriving at the speed of light.  Institutions will be playing catch up.

Story-telling, shaming, rules of association and force have regained great power.  How do we tame and civilize them?

Pill reminder, better than postit notes

Make this pill reminder at home for free and brag a little.
I drew seven circles in a clump,using the pill bottle base
and labelled them Monday to Sunday.
When I take a pill, I put the pill bottle down on tomorrow's date.
That's all. 
If the pill bottle is sitting on today,
I haven't taken it yet.
 I was having a hard time remembering at 11 pm
if I had taken the pill at 8pm or was it the day before?

This won't work for everyone but is great for a single prescription.  Someone could print a bunch of these on plastic and sell them by the dozen.

Google lies to you every day

Ground-breaking stories on the US food chain in a time of Coronaviryus have been posted on Conservative Tree House.   Google makes sure you and I don't hear from them.  They don't fake the story, they hide conservative sourced information.   Have a look for yourself:



The search term is
"conservative tree house food chain"
in GOOGLE and DUCK DUCK GO..
Google acknowledges the site exists (but not the topic) in fifth position.  Duck recognizes the site and the topic for all five top spots.

Who knows what you watch on the internet? Touché from Dilbert

Chernobyl Came Back As Bat Virus: History Doesn't Repeat But It Rhymes.

"To report that 15,000-30,000 people have died, when the actual number is 56, represents a big error.     (snip)      The greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information."   [Michael Crichton  Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management]

US Coronavirus deaths were modelled at 1.7 million, then at 270,000 or so, then at 100,000 and now less again.  The original high number has sort of faded from the news.  The plan to flatten the curve has sort of faded too, now that emergency rooms are underutilized, but the lockdowns and 'alarums' persist.   The story editing has all happened in the last ten weeks.

Apparently against every Coronavirus death it makes sense to write off hundreds of millions of dollars, disregard individual rights and call for extreme measures.  Last year, 34,000 people in the US died from Influenza A and B but a few million dollars at most was spent that year against those deaths. People went about their lives with fewer edicts handed down from experts armed with models and armed with political beliefs as well.  Very smart people can be very wrong.  Sometimes knowing how smart you are insulates you from self examination.

Back to Michael Crichton:

Is this really the end of the world? Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods? (and pandemics [ed]) No, we simply live on an active planet. Earthquakes are continuous, a million and a half of them every year, or three every minute. A Richter 5 quake every six hours, a major quake every 3 weeks. A quake as destructive as the one in Pakistan every 8 months. It’s nothing new, it’s right on schedule. At any moment there are 1,500 electrical storms on the planet. A tornado touches down every six hours. We have ninety hurricanes a year, or one every four days.

That reference to Chernobyl?  I also read the book Midnight in Chernobyl, not relying on the Chrichton quote.

Cat humor in a time of Coronavirus

Found at Instapundit's open comment page.

Not Knowing Is Okay

Not knowing stuff is okay.  This applies to the question, "Is there life after death?" and "If you died tonight, do you know where you'd go?"      My experience says "No" but isn't probative.  Newton's mechanics does a nice job explaining how a satellite orbits the world but doesn't explain time, light  and the shape of space around black holes.  So, all my personal proof is against "Life after death" and that's enough for now.  Maybe someday an Einstein of the Afterlife will explain it.

Richard Feynman speaks for me:

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

The last little bit I don't have an opinion on:  "Without any purpose, which is the way it really is ...."

Be a gentleman and treat her like a lady:

Courtesy gets bad press today.  Holding a door open to let the lady enter first can trigger rebukes. But I recommend it.  The ladies who don't like that can say so but it doesn't make our world a kinder place.

My mother put "scientist, husband, gentleman" on my father's gravestone. Over the years she told me to be a gentleman.  This meant taking my hat off in the presence of a lady, giving her my seat if none are free, holding the door for her and letting her enter first, keeping to the curb side of the walk so her clothes wouldn't be splashed with mud from passing wagons, being a shield if there's trouble, not making her shake my hand, keeping a leash on my tongue even if scolded, reaching first to pay, and volunteering to do out-in-front dangerous and heavy stuff.  A lot of it stuck.

Why not?  A little structure makes relationships easier to launch and sands down some of the rough spots which are plentiful in all of us.

I recently lost my wife of twelve years.  We had nine years of honeymoon and three of marriage.  By that, I mean, we occasionally walked without holding hands and I didn't always open the car door for her.  So, nine years honeymoon, three years of a good marriage.

Would you believe, there's a web site to generate your own "change my mind" meme.

Don't believe news about the end of the world. It's complicated.

Don't be an information victim. Embrace diversity instead of shutting it down with rules.   This article on complex systems upends the fear -mongering news which is always nattering about the end of the world and need for drastic measures and new values.   http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/182h/Climate/Fear,%20Complexity,%20&%20Environmental%20Management%20in%20the%2021st%20Century.htm

"Explains everything"

Read about Yellowstone Park management and weep.

Haemoglobin molecle with detail suppressed

Check out some of those flow charts explaining how the world works and then take a look at the picture of a haemoglobin molecule, thousands of times more complex than the explanation deemed sufficient for the whole world.

Y2K?  Chernobyl?  Coronavirus?  Population Bomb?  The world will freeze?
What actually happened compared to the panic headlines and books?   Oops, I included Coronavirus before the consensus moved on.

Colour shows electrical variation in a working heart
at one moment of the cycle.  Try to put that on paper.

A Hierarchy of Heterarchies Saving Us From Excesses of Coronaviralism And Acronymic Despots

Astonishingly, President Trump has promoted federalism over a unitary executive for the economy to recover. His guidelines have stirred very little acrimony because they sound responsible.  They leave all implementation to the invididual states but define a metric, just like "weights and measures" is a core job of central government.  ( Article 1 Section 8, Congress shall have power "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures". )

  Christopher DeMuth of the Hudson Institute writes:

Throughout history, national emergencies have led to a more powerful and centralized federal government and to the transfer of federal power from Congress to the executive branch. This time, the federal response rests largely on state and local government and private enterprise, with a wave of deregulation clearing the way. The Trump administration has seized no new powers, and Congress has stayed energetically in the game. .... When asked why he has not issued orders for nationwide home and business lockdowns, he has emphasized that the intensity of the epidemic varies widely and is best met by calibrated state and local judgments—and added pointedly that such steps would conflict with the Constitution.

This is consistent with Presdent Trump's approach to international deals, calling for bilateral and multilateral agreements instead of relying on a centralizing formula with WTO, UN, WHO, International Court and so on.

Look up "Heterarchy".    He opts for heterarchy over hierarchy.  A little more accurate is a slightly disordered hierarchy of heterarchies, to describe the whole field of world trade and the whole of US federalism.  A heterarchy has redundancy with some nodes having more than one way of influencing more distant nodes.  A hierarchy allows top-down control.

Some light peeking through the fog of coronavirus war

Check out the NY Post article whose title says it all:
"Coronavirus going to hit its peak and start falling sooner than you think".
https://nypost.com/2020/03/08/coronavirus-going-to-hit-its-peak-and-start-falling-sooner-than-you-think/

There are parallels between tulip bulb mania and the quarantine orders ramping up like atomic bombs.competing to go off first.  And yet some places in China and Iran had corpses lying in the street waiting to be picked up.  God grant us a little time (months) to sort out the data and work up prophylaxis and vaccine.

We are emerging from a fog of deliberate misinformation and a fog of general data disarray.  The scariest factor apart from the danger to the health-compromised elderly is our own reaction.   Our willingness to believe the worst, to believe that that which we greatly feared has come upon us.  Our institutional impulse to out-virtue the competition by being more resolutely cautious than it.  Our atavistic inclination to fear strangers and prefer our tribe and family above all others.

Goodbye Never Trumper. Hello Never Bernies.

This prediction is like shooting ducks in a barrel.  Lots of Democrats are going to vote Trump this time round.    "I'm doing okay personally and will survive four more years of orange-man-bad until the (D) party gets its shit together..

Two good cups of coffee from one Keurig K cup (Update)

When you know the first four ounces of coffee are strongest, the rest is easy.  Run 4 ounces into my cup.  Then 8 ounces into my wife's cup.  Then 4 more ounces into my cup.   Strong enough for great coffee taste, a little milder than one original cup.  Costco sells their brand of coffee for about 40 cents/K cup.  This split takes you to 20 cents/cup, competitive with brew-from-scratch.

Update:  My wife suggests a tweak:  Drip all 16 ounces of coffee at once into something hot.  Then pour two 8 ounce cups to get a perfectly matched pair of drinks.    BTW, a hot cup for a hot drink keeps it hot far longer.  I like to pour really hot water from the tap or kettle into the cups, dumping it back out when I'm ready to make the coffee.

Did Google lie or leave a poison pill when support for Windows 7 ended January 14th?

I took a screen shot of Windows7 goodbye message to me on the 14th.
That night, I shut the computer as usual.
On the night of the 15th, as I tried to shut down, Windows took over to make 5 updates.
What was that about?

Did they "misspeak"?
Or did they add a poison pill to force me out of Windows7 in a while?
If I trusted the Windows people, I wouldn't speculate.

Manimals and Feminals

Men and women are compound. WHO we are is an emergent operating system that manages the WHAT we are.   The WHAT is sexually-specialized human mammals that have their own operating system.  The former is like Windows.  The latter is like DOS.  Let's call the latter Manimals and Feminals.  Manimals and Feminals have their own agenda and it's alway on, evaluating each other for sexual fitness and survival.       The Manimals and Feminals are top dog in a cellular society of billions (which is hosting and trading with trillions of viruses and bacteria). Those cells have delegated some of their survival to the M and F.  (The organs can be hexadecimal codes and the cells can be binary bits in this metaphor .)  The M and F have delegated a lot of their survival to the operant personalities.    All are having their say everywhere all the time.   This renders humourous our wondrous society so that compound beings are arranging a coffee rendezvous to plan a Christmas party but evaluating M &F breasts and muscle at the same time, while also oxygenating blood and purging wastes in a largely unconscious manner.  They don't quite fit together but we kind of blink at the spots where operating systems are in conflict.  We do the same every day and night with waking and dreaming, blinking and forgetting as required, so the narrative works out.

Culture, family and government are losing layers of management. Big changes coming.

Cheap speed-of-light communication is doing away with layers of management. The person at the end of the line is almost as informed as the person at the front of the line, and can make decisions accordingly.  Large corporations (which have only existed for a few centuries) have shed layers of management but less obviusly government and culture are doing the same.  In large corporations, there are fewer subsidiary bosses than fifty years ago.  Government with layers of senators, elected representatives, ministries, committees, lobbyists, parties and NGO's are being faced with the same challenge.  The voter on the street can easily be more informed than elected representatives were a hundred years ago.  The same challenge is happening in culture, and is especially so for the narratives that hold society together to share common values about what family is for, about children, about life and death.

What does it meant to lose a layer of management in culture?  For one thing, kids are educated in a monoculture with a few adults and hundreds of data -bleeding peers.  For another thing, kids from a one child parent family who are in turn descended from a child of a one parent family.......have no siblings, no brothers and sisters.  They also have no aunts and no uncles and no cousins.  The nuclear family has parents and grandparents and everybody elese is society.   This in turn means that government and popular culture are being recruited to structure what faith and kinship used to look after.   Neither is properly fit for such a role and both will change profoundly and rapidly over the next few tens of years.

Diet shortcut - Measure one thing only: The Pareto Principle

Rewards of weighing less are good looks, better health, knees that stop hurting, and more.  But, having to measure all those calories is off-putting.  Eliminating all  my favorite food from the menu is unappealing.

Plan B will work for many of us.  It's the famous Pareto principle:  You get about 80% of the benefits from 20% of the effort in ust about everything you ever try.  This works for diet.

Say you gain 10 lbs a year and start to look like a blimp and have lower energy.
The math is simple:  One pound of weight gain is just about exactly 3500 calories eaten and stored.
Ten pounds a year translates to eating 100 calories a day too much. 
(The math:  3500 calories x 10 lbs in a year divided by 365 days in a year = 95.9)
CUTTING ONE HUNDRED CALORIES A DAY FROM MY DIET WILL STOP THE BLOAT AND CHANGE MY WEIGHT BY 10 POUNDS A YEAR.
Nothing else has to be counted.  No special foods have to be eaten.

Where is the low hanging fruit to pluck?
It will be one high-calorie treatsie per day.  Maybe two.
Here are a couple examples:

I'd have a few cups of coffee every day with whipping cream and sugar.  My fix was to just have the one cup a day with the works and the rest black, or even just with milk and half the sugar.  The black coffee is zero by itself.  The enriched cup was over 80 calories per shot.

Making supper, I got in the habit of taking a tiny sip of Drambuie every so often.  Drinking alcohol is like drinking fat.  It's high energy.  I weighed the bottle before and after dinner prep and discovered

about 120 calories were sneaking into my diet in those repeated sips.  My fix was to cut the Drambuie and if I want a ddrink, I'll sip a couple ounces of red wine while preparing supper.  The wine has almost one fifth the calorie energy of the Drambuie.

Bacon with liquid fat

Another huge fix is choosing when to use butter or bacon fat in preparing a meal.  Drained bacon has less than half the fat of a couple uncooked slices.  The left over bacon fat usually goes into frying the eggs or the hash browns.  If you decide to fry the egg on a no-stick pan or with a tiny dab of butter, you are ahead about 100 calories each time.   The same goes with frying mushrooms.  I always loved butter-fried mushrooms but can hardly tell the difference from mushrooms fried in a good no stick pan with liberal salting on top.  And the mushrooms have more shape and character.

Bacon that is drained

One or two low hanging fruit fixes, made a habit, can change your weight 10 lbs per year.  No other action or counting needed.  Thank you Pareto.

https://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2019/08/diet-shortcut-measure-one-thing-only.html

https://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2019/08/calorie-cheat-sheet-for-your-diet.html

https://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-does-my-weight-go-up-and-down-when.html

https://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2016/01/losing-weight-successfully-you-manage.html

Calorie cheat sheet for your diet.

You manage what you measure.  This means you have to do some weighing or calorie counting to get a handle on your diet.  You'll never get it perfect  because food, delicious food, is usually mixed up stuff and not a perfect match to what you read in the diet book.

Five comments: 
-I put everything "per gram" so you don't have to mix up "servings"  "1/2 cups" and "per 100 grams" measurements.   
-Put your pot or plate right on the scale and and you can zero out after each thing.   After measuring for one new recipe, put the  cals/gram onto your cheat sheet.  Close is usually good enough.
-If you are like me, you always find a way to cheat.  Like not counting the sips of drambuie or thinking your coffee with a nice dollop of cream and sugar  (100 cals?) is the same as your coffee with milk and a tad of sugar (50 cals?).   In the coffee example, "the extra" in four cups of coffee is more than 10% of your daily calories.     500 excess calories per day or 3500 per week means you will gain a pound a week.
-What you weigh on the scale goes up and down for lots of reasons besides calories.
-Your actual weight goes up and down for non-calorie reasons.

A diet app or a calorie-counter book is one solution.  It gives you a lot of stuff to count and to look up in the search box or the index and takes quiet a while.  It works.
If you do a lot of counting for a month, you get a handle on what a good-for-your-diet meal looks like.  This means you estimate stuff in your head and you can cleverly keep your breakfast and your lunch so they tend to repeat and are easy to count.  Unfortunately, after a while I get careless at estimating and gain again.   Here's where a cheat sheet comes in handy to keep me honest without making too much busy work.

My cheat sheet suggestion is below. ( It's a spread sheet link so you can edit it for yourself   (shift-click)  with some  favourite food and treats.  My most common foods are listed (calories per gram) and I can see them on one page and can usually figure the whole meal from this one page.   Down below is an even simpler wallet-size cheat sheet, listing a few categories of food.  This is helpful when you are eating out.  You can eyeball the calories in a plate of food using it and one simple rule:  A cup is about 250 grams of food. 


And here's a wallet-size version for dining out.  Not very accurate but useful.  (Why grams?  Because grams are grams but ounces can be imperial or US, quite different.)  And remember, a cup is about 250 grams.

Calories per gram
(high to low)
Oils                 8.5
Butter             7.0
Nuts                7.0
Sugar              4.0
Hard liquor     3.5
Red meat        3.0
Hard cheeses  3.0
Bread,pizza    2.5
Jams               2.5
Chicken          2.0
Salmon           1.8
Most seafood  1.1
Beans, spuds   1.0
Red wine        0.7
Berries            0.45
Veggies heavy 0.4
Veggies light   0.2
Mushrooms     0

H8 is also Great.

The definition of "hate" :  "To passionately dislike."
This is human nature, to passionately like and dislike some things, to be tepid and lukewarm about others.  Making it a crime is over-reach.

Hatred is an appropriate emotion when well-targeted.
It seems a third of America passionately dislikes President Donald Trump.
They are h8ers/haters and in my view mistargeted, but natural nonetheless.
Let them conduct themselves lawfully.


And a poetic reference in the post caption:
"Some say the world will end in fire....