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Home » Open thread 12/9/22

Open thread 12/9/22

The New Neo Posted on by

But why no mention of Mary Queen of Scots’ height? She was reportedly about six feet tall and Elizabeth I was at most 5’4″, so Mary would have towered over her had they actually met.

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Open thread 12/9/22 — 32 Comments

  1. Big news – Sen. Kyrsten Sinema leaves Democratic Party to be an Independent. Now she becomes the Power Broker. Going to be interesting in the Senate. We know though she will caucus with the Dems.

  2. The video is not well-executed. The casual viewer has hardly any idea what she’s reviewing.

  3. Another COVID update so everyone can be ready for the MSM and government’s “warnings!!”

    Overall US cases now rising for the last 10 days. The “acceleration” of cases/day^2 is positive, so the “velocity” of cases/day is increasing. The slope of the velocity is quite linear, so I’m able to predict the increase in average cases to be about 16% in two weeks time from now. The cases are still about 33% less than the August wave, but if the prediction holds, that will be cut by half in two weeks. For more comparisons, cases are 20% of the January wave, and 5% of the omicron wave. Deaths (lagging indicator) across the states I monitor are still around 2-3/day which is a very small percentage of all other causes of death.

    Frankly, to me, it looks like the RSV is much more concerning than COVID, but I’m sure any opportunity for ramping up the fear factor will come into play. These “waves” will continue ad infinitum until all this testing for COVID stops.

  7. Biden recently released Viktor Bout, a big-time, worldwide, illegal guns + arms dealer, from prison.

    THEN, Biden goes to an anti-guns meeting, + tells Americans to “get those horrible assault weapons aka guns,”, off of America’s streets.

    Did he [really] think that letting Viktor Bout out of prison, would [keep lots of [guns] out of the hands of criminals?]

    He is unbelievable.

    https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/president-biden-calls-for-assault-weapons-ban-at-gun-violence-vigil-while-freeing-international-arms-dealer-who-sold-to-al-qaeda-taliban/

    (p.s.- just a warning- I find the site, “thetruthaboutguns”, to be [very] much for US civilians owning guns.
    A lot of the time, site’s tone seems pretty bossy to me, but please- like or don’t like the site’s tone, as much as you’d like to do. That’s totally up to you. )

    Cheers.

  8. Did COVID or the Year of Separation cause us to become more aggressive?

    I’ve noticed a large increase of fatal accidents in our area the last two years. More recklessness?

    I was talking to my daughter, a principal of an inner-city elementary school and her husband, a teacher at a middle school recently. She was talking about the lack of respect/aggression by kids and also their parents. Students just telling teachers “I’m not doing that” when given instructions. Parents verbally assaulting her. Same with my SiL.

    They’ve been at this school district for 10 years, and it has always been a problem, but she thinks it may be worse since the kids came back to class after a year of distance learning.

    Is it just my imagination?

  9. It may have been a commenter here who speculated that the Minnesota suitcase heist wasn’t Brinton’s first. Airport security all over the country will be checking surveillance footage now that this guy can be identified. (He doesn’t travel in those outrageous drag outfits.)

  10. Brian E, I don’t think it’s your imagination… after effect of lockdowns and mass psychosis event.

  11. Some ducks from yesterday. They are reacting to an Eagle about 3/4 of mile away. They are mostly a mix of Mallards, Pintails, Wigeons and Green-wing Teal.

    https://youtu.be/il-ltfB0Fm0

    Here is an air attack from last Sunday. A White-winged Scoter (a large sea duck) in a 6-minute fight for its life. The attackers will try to wear the duck out, getting it gasping for breath and then jump on it and drown it.

    https://youtu.be/SSvCnn9fRBs

  13. physicsguy,

    What is meant by “cases”? Serious question. I honestly do not know. Does the term represent the same thing in different places? Same questions for “hospitalizations” and “deaths”. When the science and medical establishment, the government, news media and big tech lie so often and so egregiously, I find that the only sane approach is to regard most “data” as crap. And, sadly, the analysis by those who slice it and dice it regardless of how honest or competent the analyst.

    TR, Biden position on guns makes no sense because Dems have never made any sense on guns. Anti-gun measures are based purely on emotion. Standard liberalism. People are shot by a gun. Guns are bad. Pass a law and problem solved. We expect more logic and intelligence from kids in middle school.

    Same emotional abandonment of logic underlies every aspect of the lefty narrative. Can anyone name any Dem position that stands up to reality and logic? Voting Democrat is how immature, irrational people feel good about themselves.

    — this is pretty good. https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-january-6-protest-summarized-in-one.html
    Especially these two points:

    1. If the election was fair, show us. Answer the questions. Do the audits. Examine the machines. Follow and enforce the laws. Act like honest people instead of crooks involved in a coverup.

    2. Trump speaks truth to the liberal bullies on behalf of the forgotten working-class people that elites have abused for decades. If Republicans want to be rid of Trump, they better start speaking truth to the bullies. Trump voters aren’t going to support wimps and cowards who don’t care about their problems and don’t fight for the restoration of the constitution.

    And my position — if you claim to want what is best for conservatives/libertarians/republicans and you criticize Trump for his failings, I expect you to acknowledge all his accomplishments and the positions where he has been shown to be correct despite unrelenting bashing and abuse. Then you’ll have some credibility. Because he has been right on nearly all the important issues and often he was alone in bringing them to the table. If you aren’t going to join the fight that he was so effective in waging, go away. You don’t really have anything worthwhile to offer.

  14. Romney translated: “Merlin will be punished until he creates the magic I demand (and I will be enriched).”

  15. I doubt that Mary Queen of Scots was 6′ tall. I am sure she was tall for her era and was most likely 5’6″ or 5’7″.

  16. BrooklynBoy:

    On what is your doubt based? There were some tall people back then, including – for example – Henry the VIII, who was about 6’2″, and his predecessor Edward IV, who was apparently 6’4″. They have armor and clothing and measurements and that sort of thing, as well as contemporaneous reports. Mary Stuart was either 5’11” or six feet and that really isn’t disputed by historians, who all mention it. It was one of her most noticeable characteristics.

  17. Stan:
    “1. If the election was fair, show us. Answer the questions. Do the audits. Examine the machines. Follow and enforce the laws. Act like honest people instead of crooks involved in a coverup.”

    This!

    To prove anything, one must show the facts. To wave off questions about an election as “baseless” shows nothing except a desire to not be transparent. When a play is questioned in football, the refs go to the film to gather the facts. The film is played in slow motion for fans to evaluate. In the end everyone (well, almost everyone) is satisfied. The record is kept (the video) and can be examined. People accept that the game was fair. The same should be true for elections.

  18. Her height was one of the reasons she married Darnley, who was well over 6′, and she looked up to him when she danced. I can relate to that.

  19. https://ace.mu.nu/archives/402205.php

    Another item in the files indicating that racial discourse is an exercise in status games. A blackademic was enraged that his work was critiqued, and he found 1,000 people appended in some way with the Association for Psychological Sciences to succor his sense of being violated, an activity seconded by the board of the association. What leftist academics do best is manufacture narcissistic monsters.

  20. OpenAI’s Dall-E and ChatGPT platforms have made quite a stir in recent months. Although their technology has been inevitable for at least a few decades, and, perhaps, they have taken longer to arrive than often speculated or predicted; actually witnessing their work is extremely thought provoking. Barring some natural disaster or a world war, it’s hard to imagine anything more significant to the future of humanity that we are witness to, today.

    This tweet thread is well worth a few minutes of your time, but there are myriad other examples proliferating on the Internet in the month since OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public: https://twitter.com/AndrewLawton/status/1600701156732248064
    In that thread check out the Toronto Star example, Joe Rogan interview example and plot summary and storyboard for an Oceans 14 script.

    As far as Dall-E, again there are a lot of examples on the Internet. You’ve no doubt already seen some, including news stories on what has been generated. Here’s one such example: https://qz.com/2176389/the-best-examples-of-dall-e-2s-strange-beautiful-ai-art

  21. Regarding my above comment, I find it a useful thought experiment to try to guess what of my “timeline” will be discussed in history books 100 years hence, 200, 1,000.

    Gene sequencing technology seems like an obvious candidate. It’s hard to imagine the future won’t be changed immensely by our ability to sequence and model DNA. We already see it in genetically modified foods and medicines. Surely future generations of school children will learn about the initial sequencing of the human genome in 2003.

    What else? Transistors were here before I was born. Electric motors, powered flight, rocketry, the germ theory of disease… All predate my birth. Democracy, capitalism, socialism… No new political or economic theories that make this current era special, or noteworthy.

    I sometimes wonder if we are not at the precipice of an era where computer processing and programming can be pointed at elemental chemistry and biology? I know both of those fields currently utilize, rely on and benefit from computer processing, but we still don’t see a lot of design coming from computer modeling in chemistry or biology. It seems like we will one day reach a tipping point where computer models have enough data points on how sub-atomic particles interact and/or how biological processes work; and then computers will give us insight into new, incredible ways biological and non-biological materials can be created, combined and manipulated.

  23. Brian E,

    I’ve heard teachers and employers state they perceive a difference in attitudes since lockdowns were implemented. More people aren’t even pretending to do what they are told. Anecdotal from my perspective. I can’t say I notice a change in those I interact with, but I believe it’s possible.

  24. These “waves” will continue ad infinitum until all this testing for COVID stops.

    The amplitude of the waves is declining all over the occident. (In the U.S. over the last 8 months, the seven day moving average of the daily death count has varied between 280 and 520) We get to see how high they go in the temperate zones over the next two months, at which point we’ll also have 12 months of data from a vanguard set of countries. Tentatively, it appears that COVID mortality may have in that set fallen to a level characteristic of seasonal flu. The countries where this appears to be the case are India, South Africa, Argentina, and the Netherlands. Brazil appears to be just behind them.

  25. Chases Eagles,

    I was recently observing ducks and thought nature had protected them fairly well with their ability to maneuver in three different worlds; land, sea and air. But I see by your video they can still be an easy target. A “sitting duck” as it were.

  26. Physicsguy, cases were used to scare the rubes and keep them afraid. In mid August of 2020, here in MA, the state’s reporting showed that the average age of death was 82 with two or more underlying preconditions such as diabetes, heart disease, … This should be compared to the average age of all deaths for all reasons was 80 at the time. This is how it was on the Italian cruise ship in March of 2020. I recently heard both Bill Gates and the CEO of Pfizer say the same thing, the mortality is among the elderly who were already in precarious health.

    The use of cases scares people because the numbers are so large even though the actual lethality is so low. At the time of the AIDs epidemic, Kerry Mullis, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for PCR, severely criticized Fauci for trying to use PCR to track the epidemic as a serious misuse of the technology. Unfortunately Mullis is no longer alive.

    It would have been very hard to stir up fear continually if it was clear to all that only the sick elderly were dying, and even then it was with Covid and not due to Covid.

  27. Paul in Boston,

    You apparently weren’t reading neo at the start of the pandemic. She and many of her readers, including physicsguy, rather quickly parsed the data to learn what you point out.

    This site was one of my most useful tools during the pandemic. Neo, physicsguy and a few others continually reviewed and analyzed data, including the cruise ship and offered non-biased opinions on what the data were indicating.

  28. }}} and Elizabeth I was at most 5’4?

    Cate Blanchett is 5’8½”, so she’s probably 4-5″ taller than Elizabeth actually was.
    😉

  30. It would have been very hard to stir up fear continually if it was clear to all that only the sick elderly were dying, and even then it was with Covid and not due to Covid.

    The death toll from COVID in this country during the period running from March 2020 through February 2021 was 538,000. That’s 15x what you’d expect from an ordinary flu season. This ailment is an exceptional problem. Successive variants have been less lethal and the disease is receding globally (bar those places where it was initially suppressed through border controls and lockdowns and where the spread of natural immunity was retarded). It is receding at different paces in different places, more slowly here than other places. There have been 292,000 deaths here in the last 12 months, so we have a ways to go to get back to normal. There have been 79,000 deaths since 15 May 2022; given how death tolls in the December to May period have compared to those in the previous May to December period over the last two years, we might guess that there will be 175,000 deaths recorded in the 12 month interval from May 2022 to May 2023. That’s still 5x an ordinary flu season.

    It’s looking more and more like COVID is over in India and some other countries, but we could be suffering here for a few more years.

  31. Rufus T. Firefly,
    See this kind of stuff everyday does make you appreciate not getting eaten. Eagles are magnificent. Watching them on the hunt with their wingovers and chandelles and timing is a thing of beauty. But they are stone cold killers. One of their techniques is the duck panic in the first video. Lot of opportunities for collisions and my experience is the cripples last less than a day.

    The other technique is to catch a diving bird unaware under water. They can’t take to the air because the Eagle will just kill them. Their only chance is to duck and evade and hope the Eagles run out of wing (as in this case) before the victim runs out of lung. Loons, large ducks, and Cormorants are drowned. Small divers like Buffleheads just get plucked off the water. Before living here, I had no idea that Eagles could land and take-off from deep water.

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