Friday Ephemera

Hieronymus Bosch knickknacks.
Russell’s Guide to Interdimensional Entities

I got called for jury duty. !!! It’s criminal (the case, not the jury) so I’ll probably sit a while and then be sent home when the defense settles before trial. I plan to go armed with a fat book just in case.

I got called for jury duty
Many years ago I was called and then picked and it was one of the better experiences I have had. The case was a punch up situation at some post rodeo celebrations between a visiting Aussie and a local Moari lad, initially, which then escalated to full fanau participation. Of note was the huge discrepancy between what I was hearing/seeing in court and what the local paper was reporting. And it should have been the same because the court reporter from local paper was sitting right opposite me for the whole job.
Anyway, the main takeaway from it was that the other members of the jury were just ordinary people like you and me and had a pretty good nose for bullshit. We must never lose that.

Sigourney Weaver is, it turns out, quite flexible.
For a second there…

Hieronymus Bosch knickknacks.
My gran used to teach art. I think she’d like those. 🙂

I was hoping for a model of Harry’s awesome hill house.

Japanese sea-creature teabags of note.
Cute!

I got called for jury duty.
Given my past experience with jury duty, my increasing exposure to lawyers via the HOA case that landed in my lap over a tree that has been going on needlessly for 12 years now, and my limited time reading, commenting, and getting banned at Patterico, I honestly have developed such contempt for our legal system and even, especially, its prosecutors, that I cannot possibly serve without significant bias against the prosecution. And I’m a pretty solid law and order kind of guy. If I lived in LA, I think I could simply point to Patterico as an example and get out of jury duty. Here in Florida, I’m fairly certain the combination of the above would get me out of it. Not that I would be actually trying, mind you. I generally didn’t consider the one time I was called to be all that onerous. It’s just gotten to the point that based on some relatively deep study and some degree of personal experience that I cannot stomach the lot of them.

5,806 cases in Hubei, population 58,500,000 or a provincial attack rate of 10/100,000….Probably not TEOTWAWKI as it is being billed.
As stated on Instapundit…So it’s killed what? About 200 people and infected less than 10,000. In China. A far worse virus infected the whole country, killed 50, 80, 100 million or so. And it continues to intentionally be spread far and wide, the world over, by the academics, news media, etc. etc. etc. and no one cares about that. This corona thing isn’t even a gnat on an elephant’s backside, relatively speaking.

the number dead and the number recovered, doing some elementary maths and thinking the death rate might be a bit higher than 2/3%?…but it is a bit disquieting.
Agree. But I also notice, while the number of infections are much, much lower, there are 0 deaths and 5 recoveries out of 14 infection in Thailand, 0/2/5 for Oz, and 0/1/11 for Japan. It’s certainly a scary thing and certainly something for authorities to keep a watchful eye on. But I find it amusing to disturbing that people are freaking out over this and echoing wild exaggerations (a co-worker showed me some stat saying 45,000 were infected with thousands of deaths…which was of course very wrong…AFAWK) whilst if one merely says the word “communism” people treat you like some cwazy, cwazy conspiracy theorist.

I think we’re safe, but the concern is that the numbers are being massively under-reported in this particularly fragile time for the ChiCom ruling elite, and that they have and will prioritize their reputation over global health.
Agree with this completely. But let’s also keep in mind that conditions that allow this thing to spread are very, very fertile in China. Also, administratively, while a very authoritarian regime in general, bureaucratic incompetence in the hinterlands is sure to be a contributing factor to the spread. Thus, and admittedly small relative sample size of 20 exposures, less lethality in other areas. Not that Thailand is comparable to Oz or Japan, but I’d ignorantly wager better off than the backwaters of China.

…doing some elementary maths and thinking the death rate might be a bit higher than 2/3%?
In straight epidemiological terms, the case fatality rate is dead/diagnosed expressed as a percentage.
Mortality rate is dead/population at risk x 100,000* thus .03/100,000 for Hubei province, or 1/100,000 if we consider most of the cases in Wuhan, which is probably closer to reality as reported because Joe out in East Overshoe Hubei is not at the same risk of someone in overcrowded Wuhan. Same with attack rate which is cases/population at risk x 100/000.
“Recovered” is irrelevant particularly, in this instance, as it is not defined anywhere I can find – could mean symptom free but shedding virus, symptom free and no longer shedding virus, or no longer shedding but with residual symptoms.
Regardless, they are in the “Not Dead” population of confirmed cases.
*(100,000 is he most commonly used number, sometimes when a number is low (like .03/100,000) 1,000,000 is used, e.g., Hubei comes out to 3.5/1,000,000)

How did that happen?
Indecent exposure.
Hey, I’m just going with the numbers.

Definitely not good for a prosecutor to be comfortable with “punchable face”.

We always point out potential band names so I gotta share what I find the most excellent of NHL team names.
Can’t wait to see the merchandise.

Our betters 2
Anarchism is the political equivalent of herpes, and we’re having another flare-up in the United States. Those BernieBot kids are gonna get themselves hurt real bad. I’m hoping we’ll get some fresh Sacco & Vanzetti BBQ out of it.

I got called for jury duty.
Take a big Bible. Tuck it under your arm. Tilt your head slightly back and look pious. You’ll be home before you know it.

Can’t wait to see the merchandise.
They’ve already got an official drink:

We always point out potential band names so I gotta share what I find the most excellent of NHL team names.
I sure hope they support the franchise this time, otherwise they’ll have to depend on Canadian Hockey fans from Vancouver making the drive down to fill the rink.
I live an hour and a quarter from Buffalo. Their ticket prices are much lower than in Toronto and you can actually get seats. I went to see the Sabres play the Canadiens last night (I’m a Canadiens fan) and at least 60% of the people at the game were Canadiens’ fans. From the cheering and chanting it sounded like a Montreal home game. It was actually embarrassing. The same thing happens when the Leafs, the Blackhawks, or the Red Wings play there.
But without this support Buffalo would have to fold the franchise.

the attorneys are put off by my engineer to-the-point attitude
Yeah, that was the problem for me as well. During jury selection I stated I was skeptical of a case hinging solely on eye-witness testimony. The prosecutor asked me if two people were in a room and someone walked in and shot the other person, wouldn’t the living person’s testimony be acceptable? It was going to be a DUI case which would hinge on the opinion of a LEO as to whether the guy was drunk or not because (supposedly) our county couldn’t afford fancy-pantsy things like breathalyzers. I pointed out that in his hypothetical, there would be a dead body to prove that a crime was committed. He just moved on to discussing how to make a peanut butter & jelly sammich, as if I had never said a word.

I could tell the attorneys all about Elizabeth Loftus’s fascinating work about memory (and it is fascinating).
I probably won’t even get as far as being voir dired. The preliminary questions ask if you have ever studied law (yes) and if you are a lawyer yourself (no, but if I was, would I admit it? I have standard, too) or have any relatives who are lawyers (yes). I get the distinct impression they don’t want people who might know too much about the system.

Menfolk, form a line. Your date’s arrived.

I’m not an engineer but I also speak to the point. Strike two, I guess.
If I was a lawyer, I would not want me on a jury, because if a topic interests me, I tend to analyze it THOROUGHLY. “Well, let’s see. It is certainly illegal to keep dangerous animals in your bar, especially when they already have a record of devouring patrons. On the other hand, is a pickled ‘egg’ an animal? On the third hand, a pickled ‘egg’ may not be an animal, but it would have become one if it hadn’t been pickled. On the 4th hand, what about the guy who keeps a Doberman to protect the bar? If David’s going to durance vile because of the ‘eggs,’ shouldn’t Mr. Doberman be jugged too? For that matter, given recent discoveries about the intelligence of dogs, might not the Doberman itself bear some responsibility when it tears the burglar’s leg off? On the fifth hand…”

During jury selection I stated I was skeptical of a case hinging solely on eye-witness testimony.
I think it would depend on the case, but in general, no, it has been shown eye witnesses are not all that reliable. I was on a jury for a murder trial for which there was only one witness, but also a murder weapon, fingerprints on it, and forensics to match injuries to the weapon so it was pretty easy to believe it when the witness said the perp hit COL Mustard over the head with a lead pipe in the library (details changed to protect the guilty). OTOH, we were sequestered for one night, so not only did we get our allowance, but free meals.
Menfolk, form a line. Your date’s arrived.
Not even with my worst enemy’s, as the saying goes.

Take a big Bible. Tuck it under your arm. Tilt your head slightly back and look pious. You’ll be home before you know it.
I show up in a perfectly tailored and pressed business suit with a fresh high-and-tight, my best stern drill field expression, and a Marine Corps pin on my lapel. The lawyers in voir dire virtually trip over themselves in their haste to reject me.

“We always point out potential band names so I gotta share what I find the most excellent of NHL team names.”
I’ve always thought that an ice hockey team from Devon would really have to be called the Plymouth Fury.
Greetings from free Europe, by the way.

Hi BrassG,
My dad always refused to vote because he didn’t want to do jury duty (in our jurisdiction names of prospective jurors are pulled from voter-registration lists). We kept telling him, “Vote if you want to! You were a drill sergeant! A defense lawyer would commit hara-kiri before he’d let you on a jury!”
Spellcheck wanted to change “drill sergeant” to “Druid.” I am now picturing what a Druid drill sergeant might be like. “You call THAT a banishing ritual, you maggot? That wouldn’t banish a flea! And did you put those ceremonial robes on in the dark? And where’d you get that wand, Dollar General? You are a disgrace to this man’s Druidry!” Rant rant rant etc etc etc.

It’s okay, PST. We have plenty of pickled ‘eggs.’

Congratulations to you lot over there in Blighty on your freedom, assuming you still have electricity, internet, and haven’t already had to resort to cannabalism as predicted.

Congratulations to you lot over there in Blighty on your freedom
Saw this on Ace. That they filmed this. SMDH. Hope y’all’s feelz ain’t too hurt.
https://youtu.be/egYdBDmA1ks

Is this a threat?

I think it would depend on the case, but in general, no, it has been shown eye witnesses are not all that reliable.
I once had to write up the case of a stark naked male sailor threatening a female Customs officer with a large spike. You’d think that would be pretty memorable. Four Customs officers were witnesses and they all immediately afterwards went and wrote up notes about what they saw.
I could not get the four stories to tally up on the details, no matter how hard I tried. At least one of them had clearly got the sequence of events out of order, and the direction the sailor went after the event also varied considerably.
If professionals taking notes about a highly memorable event cannot be reliable, there’s no chance that random people remember months later what actually happened.

and forensics to match injuries to the weapon
I used to be a chemical engineer. Increasingly, we’re discovering that forensics is about as accurate as eyewitness testimony. Remember Marg Helgenberger’s character from the original CSI? The blood spatter expert? Turns out that blood spatter (along with hair and fibre analysis, profiling, and a distressing amount of fingerprint analysis) is basically made up and unreliable.

Well, somebody is having a hissy fit.
It seems both factually inaccurate and intentionally diminishing. One might say spiteful. But it’s revealing in ways that presumably weren’t intended, not least regarding the motives of Mr Kumar and his peers, and the cowed and demoralised mentality they wish to propagate – say, among children. Also, I quite like some of the replies, which list the many, many ways in which this small, damp island invented the modern world.

Mr Kumar’s comedy chops have been noted previously.

intentionally diminishing
A felicitous description.
It appears to be the default attitude of Mr Khan and most of the modern Left in Britain.
I am not uncritical of much of Britain’s historical legacy, being from the boggy island to your west.
However the reduction of Britain’s history to its worst traits and deeds and the denigration of most of its achievements and qualities is tiresome, corrosive and intentionally divisive

It appears to be the default attitude of Mr Khan and most of the modern Left in Britain.
Still, it’s always gratifying to see a BBC employee inadvertently making a case for the scrapping of the license fee.

“Malformed link. No hump fat for you!”
Weird. How’d that happen? I always check them to be doubly sure. (Hmm. I’ve been using Opera and its built-in VPN for the past few days. The way the link’s been mangled, I wonder…)
“Well, somebody is having a hissy fit.”
Sheesh. They’ll be telling us coffee isn’t Italian next.

So what’s next? Telling us that curried chicken isn’t from Southall?
Oh the humanity…

Well, somebody is having a hissy fit.
Somewhat related.

Clearly so much of the remain crowd’s hatred for Brexit is based on their disdain for the lower classes. But I keep trying to remind myself that it is lazy simply to dismiss their opposition as an expression of their snobbery and entitlement, and that it is an unfair generalisation. Then I come across articles like this
Short version: All these ghastly people drinking beer and using language. And their celebrities are so D-list… at least we had Hugh Grant and Tony Blair.

Then I come across articles like this
Between Brexit and Trump, they just can’t help but to publicly bare their fangs and expose exactly what they have always thought of most of their ostensible “fellow citizens”

Of course, what makes Britain’s independence day different from most, though not all, that have gone before it is that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants. [snip]
We have become the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by.

IOW, all the people who voted for Brexit, or Trump, are to this representative of our betters, “nobody”. And if he had his way, he would make it literal. Kulaks got no reason to live.
My advice to my fellow Deplorables across the Atlantic – enjoy the brief victory but don’t get cocky.

its prize is a freedom nobody else wants.
For those who missed it.

“…its prize is a freedom nobody else wants.
We have become the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by.”
Norway’s only voted against joining twice. As have the Swiss (technically, the Swiss being the Swiss, the first one was a rereferendum – or “federal popular initiative” – on whether they should hold a referendum). Denmark and Greenland consider the latter never to have joined, but to save face the EU claims it left in 1981.
And that’s before we even think about Hungary and Poland, officially reprimanded by the EU for daring to make their own laws; Ireland, whose economy was run by unelected EU appointees for three years, and whose electorate was told to go away and vote again after defying the EU… twice; France, whose vote against the Constitution was simply ignored; The Netherlands, ditto; Italy, whose government was selected by the EU after the electorate voted for the wrong people; Greece… need I say more about Greece?; The European Parliament itself, whose rejection of the Tobacco Products Directive was ignored by the Commission in 2016, just weeks before our referendum…
“Urging other countries to follow Britain’s example, to leave the EU, to become ‘free nation states, trading, co-operating’. Go back to the old days, in other words, and try to ignore that the old days are absolutely drenched in blood. That preventing the old days ever coming back is the precise reason the EU came into being.”
The EU came into being in 1992. He’s talking about the 1980s. I’m not sure he knows that he’s talking about the 1980s – Europhiles are depressingly ignorant of the institution they claim to love so dearly – but he is.
“Short version: All these ghastly people drinking beer and using language. And their celebrities are so D-list… at least we had Hugh Grant and Tony Blair.”
Yeah. That’s why you lost.

A . . . command to war against unbelievers until they submit in willing humiliation is a product of a certain sort of mental disease, a corrupt and dishonest way of looking at the world. It is a derangement that is by no means exclusive to just Islam.
Quite.
As an example of exactly the same sort of mindset, in one corner of the US, there is Washington state Representative Matt Shea
Consider as another and basically identical example of faith based . . war against unbelievers until they submit in willing humiliation . . . , a “biblical basis for war” document that also calls for killing non-Christian men who refuse to follow fundamentalist biblical law.
There are indeed the genuinely personally religious, but neither of these are in the least bit religious.
Rather instead, all they are is a variety of faith based Dungeons And Deacons game, calling for the eradication of any and all who don’t play the preferred D&D ruleset which is, of course, vehemently claimed as being an actual religious practice instead of mere faith and posturing.

(Let’s see how that link turns out.)
Landlord, a jar of hump fat for the gentleman!

This aged well.

Here you go, Sam. Via Ace…
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2016/06/calm-down-trump-wont-be-president-and-britain-wont-leave-eu

Once again CNN zeroes in on the hard hitting and important questions.
Meanwhile…

It’s still 2016 apparently
@jtLOL
This week on Mythbusters: Can you really give yourself a stroke?

For Lady Cutekitten, once she’s exhausted the iPhone cat-collecting game; https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/228504/cat-lady
(Played at last game night. Fun little party game. Buy the deluxe edition, it comes with a kit to make your own cat cards)