TheVat

@Ken Fabian , thinking about those needed commitments, as I drove through our epic American drought, I wrote this [edited] to a friend: Traveling this week, I reflected on the drought as I drove through a charred area somewhere between Hyannis and Mullen, Nebraska. (It was interesting how you could see where the fire had jumped the road, but then some places stopped dead by the railway embankment just past the road) Beef is now more problematic, and you don't want too much grazing on parched land - that's how goats increased desertification in the Sahel region which borders Sahara. And it will be wrenching for farmers trying to shift from their usual grain to drought-hardy cropping. Drought-hardy invariably means fewer calories/acre, so you have to pick something that brings a good price - pearl millet is one, sometimes called "the last crop standing." I expect [a coeliac friend of ours] would not be displeased if the wheat belt became a millet belt. And the Ogallala Aquifer might just survive, if economic forces and political will can make such a shift. Some current madness, like growing so many leafy grains in AZ, will have to end, and I'm already hearing about plans to shift more of the salad belt to California where it makes more ecological sense. We shouldn't be draining the Colorado dry for a f-ing salad. If a drought spurs that shift, that might be a longterm benefit. Arizona was not meant to be cropland, and these parched years are underscoring that reality. Long-term, I can see beef being more a luxury food, ranchers then getting the higher prices they need, and maybe with viable reduced herds the high plains don't turn into a Sahel-hole. 🤠 As for [a farmer in the Nebraska Panhandle], yes, no-till cropping seems like a good start. Take care of your grass and your soil moisture. Stop voting for the Great Denialist, too, and his ilk?? Meanwhile, a massive silver lining is developing around the world from the Iran/Gulf situation, as countries scramble to being more renewable installations online as they no longer trust oil/LNG as a reliable import. Read something in the Post a couple days ago about Philippines rushing a gigawatt solar project in a time frame of WEEKS! And Indonesia is going all out on massive hydro. The silvering lining may soon tarnish, however, as some places are ramping up coal, in response. As always: F--- TRUMP.

Emily asked a philosopher about what constitutes evidence. He replied with a riddle... God, Lee H. Oswald, etc., anecdotal, Plato? DC enacted law - so heel, dog!

We were warned many times. Here's one red flag, from the Guardian in November 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2016/nov/21/watch-movies-donald-trump-films-fast-forward Donald Trump’s greatest talent is his ability to boil complex themes down into blunt sentiment. While Hillary Clinton broke her back trying to set out a wide-ranging and inclusive moral ideal of what the United States should be, Trump wore a hat with “Make America Great Again” written on it and won. This ability, it turns out, stretches to Trump’s movie-watching habits. A feature in the Sunday Times this weekend recalled an occasion in the 1990s when Trump wanted to watch the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Bloodsport during a flight. However, Bloodsport is a long film – 92 minutes long, in fact – and Trump is a busy man. His solution? Making his son fast-forward through all the boring bits, like exposition and dialogue, until he was left with a relentless 45-minute supercut of broken bones and knuckle sandwiches. (Me again): Trump's foreign policy, such as it is, has no moral center or guiding geopolitical principle. It's just about people giving you cool stuff, making money (or stealing it), bullying whenever possible, and if you get a chance to act tough and blow things up in a spectacular way, with lots of Van Damme supercut moments, go for it. Damn the bone spurs, full speed ahead! Add in the advancing effects of dementia as it further reduces self-awareness, ability to comprehend strategy and absorb anything from intelligence briefings, any rudimentary grasp of the global economic effects of unleashing chaos in the Gulf, plus general failure to grasp political optics, and you have a president demolishing his own party with each TACO Tuesday that isn't met by a 25th amendment team. Remember the story well, and its many scientific corrections later (much as his later Ringworld had glitches that were pointed out, and which Niven corrected in sequels). I remember my journalist papa returning from some conference in NY (where he met Lyndon Johnson), and he'd bought a couple sci-fi books in an airport store during a long layover. One was Alfred Bester's collection (Starburst, iirc), the other an issue of Worlds of If, which happened to contain "Neutron Star." Both that story, and an especially horrific one by Bester called "Fondly Fahrenheit" were a lot for a ten/eleven year old to take on board (let alone a younger sibling), but they set my imagination to sizzling.

You can keep your boots on, if you like...(another Devon Cole song, with possibly less of a message...)

More progress in understanding the relative output, in this case, based on biological sex. https://wapo.st/3Q7ucfj Science has finally settled the age-old debate of whose farts smell worse — men or women. But to appreciate the answer, you need to understand how researchers figured it out. The methodology alone deserves an award. The man responsible is Dr. Michael Levitt, a gastroenterologist who joined the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital in 1978. An Air Force veteran himself, he would become known as the “King of Farts” to his colleagues for his interest — and eventually unparalleled expertise — in one very particular subject: the status of flatus...

Both my parent's surnames were derived from patronymics. On the Scandinavian side, my grandfather was the first generation to freeze the surname in place. What a pity my great-grandfather waa not named Jet. 😎

Spoiler Warning (due to spoiler function not working): Well done. And thanks for not pointing out that, given the Latinized form of the Greek name, my implied plural form is grammatically incorrect. (In Latin, -us is only pluralized to -i when the -us is a suffix; our colorful friend, however, ends with -pus, which means foot, so it's not a -us suffix, ergo it becomes -puses rather than -pi) Now I must hurry, I've missed two downtown bi already.

On returning, the mathie recounted his morning dive and the various marine species he'd seen. He concluded his description: "... and I had the rare privilege of seeing 25.133!" What could he have meant by this?

This might be the point where prominent voices all over the political spectrum (Tim Miller, the center-Right frontman for The Bulwark, also chimed in on the deranged vibe of the Easter morn post, I see) are converging in a reenactment of Edward Hicks' famous Peaceable Kingdom series. Reading news, I felt like I was on some unorthodox Easter egg hunt where all the eggs are in plain sight and all inscribed "time to invoke the 25th amendment!" I imagine one of the objections at this point is "I don't even know what the agenda is anymore, Mr President." Some of the upper level command getting purged are probably officers who were aghast, but averting their eyes, at killing people clinging to wreckage off Venezuela, and then started to snap when their CIC and Whiskey Warrior Pete started openly rooting for war crimes that would surely kill thousands of civilians. It's a little surreal waking up each day now and opening up a news feed on some alternate reality, like some mindbending Phillip K. Dick novel where we're still in the Roman Empire and Caligula has been resurrected.

Never thought I'd see Bernie Sanders and Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly saying pretty much the same thing. She's traveled some distance from her Trump-troll days.

Lilac bushes in our yard leaf out a couple weeks earlier than they used to. Ditto honeysuckle. And grass has been resuming growth earlier - due to the very mild winter this year, we saw green shoots pushing up (and mule deer nibbling them) at the end of March. Normal for this semiarid stretch of South Dakota has been end of April. We had ten deer in our yard yesterday. (they usually don't graze destructively, but earlier in winter some were chewing bark off the lilacs, so I started spreading human hair trimmings around the base, which works pretty well to keep them off. We also keep a large antique bike horn (with the squeeze bulb) on the kitchen counter - when we noticed them near the lilacs we could flip up the window, give a few honks, and they'd scatter. We don't usually run out and yell at them, because then they'll avoid the property entirely, and we lose their weed control and fertilizer contribution. And, oh yeah, the charm.

The rational protocol is to smile and say anodyne things until he settles down and wanders off to soothe himself with a cheeseburger, a 14 year old girl, and a JCV Damme action movie.

No doubt the small hunter-gatherer bands of most of our evolutionary history benefited when people could align their beliefs with the others, thus promoting group cohesion. For small groups, such cohesion would be important to survival. The ability to do science, with careful data collection and analysis and high-order abstract reasoning is more what SJ Gould called a spandrel. We later learned to put that spandrel of extending certain cognitive skills to a useful purpose when we entered the complexity of larger communities and divisions of labor and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)

Re MAGA: Say too, Bondi hid no booty as AG (Amer.)

A man poses for a photograph with a gold-painted, faux-marble toilet sculpture titled "A Throne Fit For a King" that was installed March 31 near the Lincoln Memorial. The Secret Handshake, an artist collective, put up the statue, which mocks President Trump's renovation of the White House bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom, a project that drew criticism for taking place during a government shutdown.

Another hockey stick. Also reminding that the Medieval Warm Period was not globally uniform. Warmer in the north Atlantic region, but not in the Far East (though data back then was kind of spotty). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

TIL who Dirty Dick was, and how a pub in London came to bear his name. Lest anyone think this is an April Fool, here is a brief biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Dick In his late thirties, Bentley became parsimonious and stopped washing and cleaning himself and his shop. He picked up the nickname Dirty Dick, and his shop became known as "the dirty warehouse". Both he and his shop became well known and were lampooned in the press. People visited the outlet to see the squalor and noted that Bentley was very polite and had impeccable manners. Rumours circulated that Bentley had not washed since his fiancée had died on their wedding eve and that he had locked the dining room, complete with the wedding feast, and left it to moulder. Bentley moved out of his shop in 1804, and the contents were sold off. One enterprising publican purchased some of the contents, including mummified rats and cats, and used them to decorate his pub, which he renamed Dirty Dicks; as at 2025 the pub is still in operation under that name.

One among many inconsistencies is that some astrologers do not seem aware of precession of the equinoxes, which means assigning everyone the incorrect "sign." Some would say you're a Virgo, when in fact precession means the sun was actually in Leo at your birth. Also problematic is that the sun moves through 13, not 12 constellations, so two of my uncles are not Sagittarius but rather Ophiuchus - the Babylonians simply omitted Ophiuchus because they wanted their system based on number 12. And yes, it's all silliness anyway given the constellations are just imagined groupings of stars, not real astronomical phenomena. The only thing that Sagitt-, I mean Ophiuchans, share in common in terms of the cycles of the natural world, is that if they happen to arrive from a womb situated in the temperate zone of the N hemisphere, then as infants they will all experience the same sequence of seasonal changes in their first year of life. If someone cared to study that sort of developmental effect, then it would shift the inquiry from pseudoscience to science. (And don't forget to compare them with June babies in Australia, South Africa, and other seasonably comparable areas in the S hemisphere)

Merci. Rejouissez bien le jour! Et faites attention aux crapauds qui tombent. 🐸

(AP) - The president, following a 158th viewing of the 2013 film "Gravity," was briefly distracted from his usual routine of contemplating (and commenting on to staff) the firmness of Sandra Bullock's derriere by the scene which depicts the onset of a destructive ablation cascade. While it's unclear what drew the president's attention on this particular viewing, it became quickly apparent to the NASA officials and space tech billionaires who were summoned to an emergency meeting that he has now realized the genuine threat which Kessler Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome poses to America's future in space. Consulting with a team of experts which included his hairdresser, a former golf caddy, and a YouTube professor known for his research into rains of toads, the president concluded that the country's best option is, in the president's words, "just don't go too far up there." To that end, he has directed NASA and conmercial space companies to shift their focus to suborbital passenger flights which will be as he put it, "so amazing, you will go so fast you can leave New York and be in Tokyo in thirty minutes, and it will fix our air travel problems with the greatest rocket network in history!" NASA is also directed to begin developing suborbital satellites, a concept which has caused some confusion and criticism from space flight engineers and scientists. Press Secretary Katherine Leavitt, questioned about how such satellites could work, dismissed the critical comments as "symptomatic of the decline of imagination among overpaid eggheads who fail to appreciate the president's visionary approach." A Democratic Senator, Bob Goddard IV from Massachusetts, suggested that the president's notion of "just don't go too far up there," might better serve as sound advice regarding a part of the president's anatomy. The Senator is currently en route to Guantanamo Bay for what the White House described as "protective sequestration" and a "brief time-out where he can think about being respectful."

It's hilariously awful, usually found on lists of worst films ever made. The Hellstrom Chronicle was far better in the insectmageddon subgenre, giving a knowing wink to the audience now and then. Seems to be a longevity effect from appearing in The Swarm, however. Lee Grant and Olivia de Havilland both centenarians, Michael Caine and Richard Widmark both reaching 93 (Sir Michael still going). Wonder if they all tried yeast supplements. Or the health regimen of bee venom? Sorry @sethoflagos this is derailing somewhat.

Looks like a powerful sealant, but I did wonder about buying boards pretreated this way and then cutting them to length with my power saw. Wonder if I'd need PPE while sawing. Finely powdered glass shooting out from the saw kerf sounds like a hazard to be handled carefully. (One also dons PPE when cutting old pressure-treated lumber, due to the old stuff getting impregnated with an arsenic compound. Glad they switched to the safer copper-based a few years ago.)

Hadn't thought so much about agribees poaching on the wild ones. (Requested this thread be merged with the one on same topic started by Mr Evil yesterday)

Sounds like I'd better read your recommended "Careless People" if only to prepare fortifications against further incursions by the Reptilians or their Fifth Column. My thanks to whichever human(s) cancelled the DVs! To the topic - a recent read in the genre of alien incursions was "Annihilation" by Jeff Vandermeer. Vastly better than the movie adaptation made a few years ago. Some books have psychological explorations which are really hard to translate into the language of cinema. ETA: Wynn-Williams' title sounded so familiar to me. Then realized it was from the ending of The Great Gatsby. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Fitzgerald's words will never lose their freshness. While I'm here, let's have the rest of that sublime literary coda: And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Awesome! 😉