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2024-06-20

Worthy

  • How to build a mosquito kill bucket | Popular Science

    BTi, or Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, is a naturally occurring bacterium used in mosquito control products known as Mosquito Dunks. These dunks are donut-shaped briquettes that float on the surface of standing water where mosquitoes breed. When placed in water, the dunks release BTi spores ingested by mosquito larvae. The BTi bacteria produce toxins that specifically target the larvae’s gut, disrupting their digestive processes and ultimately causing death. This method effectively reduces mosquito populations without harming other wildlife, pets, or humans.

    • Also available in a liquid form, which is great for bagworms and other caterpillars on plants.

etc

Horseshit

Electric / Self Driving cars

celebrity gossip

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

Musk

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

  • Anthony Fauci: The First Three Months of the Pandemic - The Atlantic

    On New Year’s Day 2020, I was zipping up my fleece to head outside when the phone in the kitchen rang. I picked it up to find a reporter on the line. “Dr. Fauci,” he said, “there’s something strange going on in Central China. I’m hearing that a bunch of people have some kind of pneumonia. I’m wondering, have you heard anything?” I thought he was probably referring to influenza, or maybe a return of SARS, which in 2002 and 2003 had infected about 8,000 people and killed more than 750. SARS had been bad, particularly in Hong Kong, but it could have been much, much worse.

  • Dr. Anthony Fauci finally reverses course, agrees keeping schools closed during COVID was ‘mistake’.

  • The Fauci Covid Conspiracy.

    In the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020, nobody knew much about this mysterious new disease. People were scared, and they were eager to follow the advice of the public health authorities. The experts, from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) chief Anthony Fauci to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and on down to local officials, all seemed confident they knew what they were doing. And they wasted no time telling us what to do.

    We all had to stay six feet apart. Better yet, we should avoid leaving the house at all. Weddings, funerals, and religious services were cancelled. Businesses closed. Schoolchildren were consigned to remote “learning.” The media celebrated an unhinged Florida lawyer who roamed beaches dressed as the grim reaper, while authorities in San Clemente, California, filled a skateboard park with sand to protect local teenagers from the dangers of fresh air. Experts showed an eerie unanimity on the scientific mysteries surrounding Covid: Where did it come from? How did it spread? What treatments might be effective against it? The only acceptable answers to those questions were the ones passed down from the World Health Organization, America’s Centers for Disease Control, and similar authorities.

    In the absence of hard data, a little overreach on the part of experts might have been forgivable, at least at first. As the pandemic ground on, however, scientists started learning more about the disease, including insights that could help slow transmission and that undermined the case for rigid lockdowns. But the Covid gatekeepers mostly ignored any data that challenged their initial recommendations. They never admitted a mistake and rarely changed course on policy. And when it came to the mystery of Covid’s origin, the scientific community instantly closed ranks. The idea that a bat-related coronavirus might have emerged from a Wuhan China lab devoted to studying bat-related coronaviruses was deemed a far-out right-wing fantasy.

    In other words, our public health officials, abetted by a politicized media, manufactured an airtight consensus on both Covid science and policy. This consensus was largely immune to scientific evidence or concerns about the real-world impacts of draconian policies.

  • The Pentagon’s Anti-Vax Campaign

    During the pandemic it was common for many Americans to discount or even disparage the Chinese vaccines. In fact, the Chinese vaccines such as Coronavac/Sinovac were made quickly and in large quantities and they were effective. The Chinese vaccines saved millions of lives. The vaccine portfolio model that the AHT team produced, as well as common sense, suggested the value of having a diversified portfolio. That’s why we recommended and I advocated for including a deactivated vaccine in the Operation Warp Speed mix or barring that for making an advance deal on vaccine capacity with China. At the time, I assumed that the disparaging of Chinese vaccines was simply an issue of national pride or bravado during a time of fear. But it turns out that in other countries, the Pentagon ran a disinformation campaign against the Chinese vaccines

    Frankly, this is sickening. The Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign has undermined U.S. credibility on the global stage and eroded trust in American institutions, and it will complicate future public health efforts. US intelligence agencies should be banned from interfering with or using public health as a front.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

  • Why unions are showing up in force to support the pro-Palestinian protest

  • Stonehenge sprayed oranged by climate protesters

    Two climate protesters were arrested Wednesday for spraying orange paint on the ancient Stonehenge monument in southern England, police said. The latest act by Just Stop Oil was quickly condemned by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as a “disgraceful act of vandalism.” Video of the incident showed two people running towards the 4,500-year-old stone circle and spraying plumes of orange pigment as a third person attempted to stop them. A few stones were smeared in orange. According to Just Stop Oil’s website, the pigment was made of an “orange cornflour” that would wash away in the rain.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • How free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life

    Philip Hazel was 51 when he began the Exim message transfer agent (MTA) project in 1995, which led to the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PRCE) project in 1998. At 80, he's maintained PCRE, and its successor PCRE2, for more than 27 years. For those doing the math, that's a year longer than LWN has been in publication. Exim maintenance was handed off around the time of his retirement in 2007. Now, he is ready to hand off PCRE2 as well, if a successor can be found.

    I asked Hazel, given the recent XZ backdoor attempt, how he intended to vet any prospective PCRE2 maintainers. He replied that it was a good question "to which I have no answer. I will have to see who (if anyone) makes an offer". To date, he said he had received "no communications whatsoever" about taking over the project. Perhaps, once the word gets out more widely, a qualified maintainer will step forward to take PCRE2 into the future.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

The problem isn’t Americans or America, it’s the elites that are running America. They think they are putting up ramps of opportunity with their ideas but instead, those ideas turn into roadblocks. As they put up more roadblocks, the chasm gets larger, not smaller. They are the gatekeepers. The move to Trump in 2016 was a manifestation of that. Trump is an insurgent. People didn’t vote for Obama to cure the kinds of ills we have today. Obama is a strict gatekeeper. As Shelby Steele perceptively points out in his book, “White Guilt”, they did it to cleanse themselves. Trump offers some antidote to what ails us but it is not the cure. The cure cannot be summarized into a soundbite or one political slogan. It’s much more complex than that. But, Trump can blow things up and that would be a huge step in the right direction.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Iran / Houthi

Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

  • Weightlifting at retirement age keeps legs strong years later, study finds

  • FDA wants to stop advisory committees from voting

    There have been a number of cases in the last few years where the FDA has gone against the recommendations of its advisory committees and approved drugs after strongly negative votes from those hearings. The reverse situation (where the AdCom says "yes" and the agency says "no") is much more rare.

    it appears that the agency (and especially its commissioner, Robert Califf) has heard these criticisms. And they have apparently decided that the way to deal with them is (drum roll). . .to hold fewer advisory committee votes. This came up the other day during a "public listening session" held by the agency, where Califf reiterated his desire for the AdCom meetings to be more about discussion and less about casting a vote at the end.

    it's time to quote Feynman again (from the final report on the Challenger disaster) that "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled". Preach it, professor. The FDA needs more rigor, not less. Its job is to approve useful medicines, not just to make people happy. You know something that makes me happy? People getting a chance to take drugs that work and that don't do more harm to them while they're taking them. And something that pisses me off? Closing your eyes to evidence and just hoping that things will work out and that you can keep everyone happy while doing it. That doesn't work. It never has.

  • That dizzy feeling isn’t the weed – Chinese pesticides used on pot farms linked to nausea, memory loss and even cancer.

  • Microplastics Discovered in Human Penises for the First Time

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

  • Monitoring marine litter from space is now a reality

  • Pollution from East Palestine train derailment rained down in 16 states

  • Shipping regulations made climate change worse

  • Private firms are driving a revolution in solar power in Africa

  • Poisoned trees gave wealthy couple a killer view, united residents in outrage

    uspicious deaths in an idyllic seaside community and detective work that points to poison sound like themes from a classic murder mystery. But the victims in this Maine whodunit were trees that stood in the way of a wealthy family's oceanfront view, allegedly felled by well-heeled killers who, while ostracized and publicly shamed, remain free. Wealth and hubris fuel the tale of a politically connected Missouri couple who allegedly poisoned their neighbor's trees to secure their million-dollar view of Camden Harbor. The incident that was unearthed by the victim herself — the philanthropic wife of L.L. Bean's late president — has united local residents in outrage.

  • Sattelite megaconstellations jeopardize recovery of Ozone hole

  • (April 2023) The Four Taboos of Environmental Education

    A few years earlier, Saylan coauthored an article with Daniel T. Blumstein entitled “The Failure of Environmental Education (and How We Can Fix It)” which outlines what they thought at the time were the root causes of this dysfunction and how they might be remedied. In the article, and a book by the same name that followed, Saylan and Blumstein detailed a seven-part roadmap for “improving” environmental education. Their critique is mild and free of political context and contains common-sense suggestions on most of us would agree with. “Our book was not well-received by the environmental ed community, in fact, we were criticized by almost every EE organization we encountered. The general response was negative all around. Even our publisher asked us not to be too ‘dark,’ which I found amusing given the topic.” This is remarkable in that the criticism and potential solutions proposed by Saylan are relatively mild. In my view, Saylan and Blumstein’s analysis isn’t worthy of such derision. This article may be, as we venture further into what is dysfunctional about environmental education through an analysis of what amounts to prohibited discourse within the field.

    Environmental education has, so far, failed to clearly delineate exactly what we oppose and has equally failed to present viable alternatives. We should consider the degree to which incomplete narratives about environmental destruction legitimize its root causes. Something is not always better than nothing. Without self-examination and the dismantling of these aforementioned taboos, we are consigning environmental education to irrelevance. Make no mistake, our situation demands that we should be on a war footing. Conflict is necessary for change; with all the trauma it may entail. Our enemies are far nimbler, determined, far better-funded and perhaps most important of all, ideologically consistent and goal-focused, i.e., towards profit no matter the externalized costs to the biosphere. The mechanics of cultural metanoia should be the topic for future discussion, but one thing is certain: we cannot become effective agents of change without open discourse and the abandonment of taboos extant in the field. Without such a critical assessment, and immediate action, environmental education will itself sink beneath the waves.

  • The Decline of the Rio Grande | The New Yorker

    The issues with the Rio Grande reflect a greater crisis in the American West. In recent years, low water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which are fed by the Colorado River, have caused considerable alarm. But levels at the Rio Grande’s two major reservoirs in Texas—Amistad and Falcon—are even lower. Farmers in the lower Rio Grande Valley are bracing for the possibility of a summer with very little water allocated for irrigation, a prospect that could result in the loss of nearly half a billion dollars of revenue for one of Texas’s poorest regions.

  • Sinking Cities, Rising Seas

  • 2024 Lancet report on Europe: unprecedented warming demands unprecedented action

  • Banks Are Finally Realizing What Climate Change Will Do to Housing | WIRED

    Rising sea levels, biodiversity collapse, extreme weather—these are the grisly horsemen of climate apocalypse. But don’t forget the fretting loan officers. A study published earlier this year found that US mortgage approvals tend to dip following periods of hotter-than-normal weather. For every 1 degree Celsius that temperatures rise above average, approvals fell by nearly 1 percent—and their value by more than 6.5 percent.

  • Chrome Is Dying Because It'll Kill You

  • Oceans group takes UK government to court over oil and gas licences

  • Big Oil and Big Corn Form Alliance to Challenge Pro-EV Policies

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