Friday Ephemera

If you sort the list by “Deaths/1M pop”…
Mighty Gibratlar FTW, which just goes to show rates without raw numbers and vice versa are meaningless.

Fansworth, too right. My own household, for instance, ranks with the very best, at 0.00000000000 Deaths / million population.
My secret to health is for sale. Bidding starts at 1,000,000 Quatloos.

…which just goes to show rates without raw numbers and vice versa are meaningless.
Pretty much. Except we’re talking about real lives and that’s what has gotten lost in all of this.

Except we’re talking about real lives
Oh but I don’t think China is.
Does anyone — anyone — believe that China has barely had a case for a year?
But apparently we believe them when they say that they:
1) respect Hong Kong’s independence,
2) will decarbonise their economy some time soon, honest,
3) are putting Uighurs into concentration camps.
Biden’s presidency must be the PRC’s dream result.

Scenes.

Scenes.

Don Aaron, a spokesperson for the Metro Nashville Police Department said the situation began when Officer Baker stopped a black Chevrolet Camaro after learning the owner of the vehicle had six outstanding drug warrants.

Hardly a reason for a traffic stop, and to get shot because you shot him first. The rozzers clearly are out of control.
Meanwhile, over in the UK, at long last, yet another existential crisis is solved as the Wokesheviks decolonize Kew Gardens by renaming plants.

The famous botanic gardens in London will change display boards for plants such as sugar cane – previously harvested by slaves – to highlight their ‘imperial legacy’.

It will now be “C6H12O6 Plant”. They were going to go with “Tall Thin C6H12O6 Plant”, but that offended the short and fat people.

A Kew spokesman said signs for the plant will be changed after consulting Ajay Chhabra, an actor with an insight into how sugar cane was linked to slavery.

Science ! I, for one, would be curious to see what special insight an Indian actor has about the Caribbean slave trade.

It comes after Kew this week released a podcast about botany’s ‘hidden legacy of inequality’.

Damn, now I have to take a flamethrower to all my landscaping, racist bastards as those plants are, especially the azeleas – you know who had azeleas – right, plantation houses.

you know who had azeleas
I was going to guess Hitler. Do we know if he had any vegetation so it can be cancelled / renamed as well?

Do we know if he had any vegetation so it can be cancelled…
Eidelweiss – there was a Nazi fighter squadron and an SS troop that used it as a symbol, and the name itself “Nobel White” just screams racism and yte supremacy.

botany’s ‘hidden legacy of inequality’.
Don’t forget all the underqualified POC students who flunked Botany 101 at elite universities.

Do we know if he had any vegetation so it can be cancelled…
…and don’t get me started on that whole Schwarzwald thing. Really ? A whole forest called black, what is that supposed to mean.
There finna be trouble if they don’t change it to “Schwarze Leben zählenwald”.

it seemed almost like an improvement George Pal would’ve welcomed as superior to his already-incredible stop-motion animation
While I recall George Pal and movies like 1960’s Time Machine, my fave stop animation was done by Ray Harryhausen – who scared the dickens out of me as a child with Jason and the Argonauts and then did the same for my kids with Clash of the Titans (1981).

Shamelessly lifted from Powerline…

Funeral today for BLM martyr George Nkencho, who was shot dead when he tried to decapitate a police officer. Let us all observe a moment of silence for this gentle giant cut down in the prime of life by structural racism.

…here’s the story about the supermarket chain that’s doing this.

…Giant’s 164 stores in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia…

Mainly leftists, I think I know where this is going.

…the new shelf-label program is part of its supplier diversity efforts…

“We are members of the Wokesheviks, please loot the Winn Dixie, it even has Dixie in the name, the racists.”

@ pst324: “… on gifted schoolchildren who have psychological or emotional impairments” specifically severe speech/communication delay.
Thankyou for the information; that’s very interesting. Some autistic children present with elective mutism, but the notion of uneven rates of brain development to such a degree that speech development is extremely delayed in children of possibly great intelligence makes sense. The diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome* [AS] as per DSM IV required that development of communication, including speech, not be delayed or affected at a clinical level. Indeed many of us diagnosed as AS talk from very early childhood as though we swallowed the whole English dictionary – unabridged version!!! What was rarely understood was that being diagnosed as AS did not preclude being mentally retarded/intellectually impaired. Children diagnosed with Autism per se always had delays in communication as assessed. If Einstein had communication delay then he simply could not have been an ‘Aspie’ as per DSM IV criteria. Hans Asperger, an Austrian, wrote about a small group of autistic ‘little professors’ in 1940 or so in German and his research work did not come well known until Lorna Wing and later Uta Frith wrote about it in English starting in the 1980s. That led to a separate category of Autism [Asperger’s Syndrome] in DSM IV, but now AS is subsumed under Autism Spectrum Disorder.
While I and my brother were diagnosed as ‘Aspies’ under DSM IV, under current DSM V criteria we would now be diagnosed as Autistic – which makes complete sense to me having spent 40 years working with over 2000 autistics of all ages and abilities.

Hans Asperger, an Austrian, wrote about a small group of autistic ‘little professors’ in 1940 or so in German and his research work did not come well known until Lorna Wing and later Uta Frith wrote about it in English starting in the 1980s.
Similar to how I have heard that German medical and dietary research from that period was also lost thanks to the war?

Thomas Sowell has written a book about late-talking children
I don’t blame Piaget for this. He was always quite clear that individual children progressed through the stages of development at different rates, it was the sequence that was invariant.
It’s the teachers and child psychologists who ignore everything he said about the timeframes being averages insisting that if your child isn’t talking by day 23 on month 7 at 11:53 in the morning there’s something wrong.

This is what happens when you let your society be run by garbage people who fundamentally hate the society they run
“Garbage people” is a deeply dehumanizing epithet–and entirely deserved.

Heh…pst beat me by 10 minutes. Should pay more attention…

To pst314: Re “Hans Asperger, an Austrian, wrote about a small group of autistic ‘little professors’ in 1940 or so in German and his research work did not come well known until Lorna Wing and later Uta Frith wrote about it in English starting in the 1980s.”
I should have mentioned that at the same time [in the 1940s] Leo Kanner in the USA was writing about a group of mentally retarded autistic children. Of course Kanner wrote in English and was on the ‘winning side’ in WW II so his work became well known to the point that professionals, in describing the presentation of certain children, would actually describe them as ‘typical Kanner autistics’. The point now is that services exist to support families and their children and autistics in many countries and are no longer diagnosed as ‘childhood schizophrenics’ – a common diagnosis up to the 1980s.
Then there is France: “In many countries, the standard way of treating autistic children is with behavioural therapy – stimulating and rewarding them to develop the skills they need to function in society – but France still puts its faith in psychoanalysis. And an increasing number of parents are now demanding change.”
In short the French still see autism as a form of mental illness and the field of autism is ‘owned’ by psychoanalysts presumably seeking to cure autistic children:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/08/france-is-50-years-behind-the-state-scandal-of-french-autism-treatment
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/france-autism-treatment-care-support-french-healthcare-a8161416.html
Thomas Sowell’s son is lucky to live in the USA and have a father who is enlightened and thinks for himself. As Daniel R. says the rate of individual development naturally varies, but there is such a panic if little Sarah doesn’t walk at 15 months that she must need intensive occupational or physical therapy and one or both parents should be reported to children’s services as they are clearly harming their child.

The animal rescues neighborhood is one of my favorite areas of YT.
I do, in general, like dogs and have watched a handful of rescue videos. I remember one that began so horribly I hesitate to repeat the details. But if you want to experience a, shall we say, broad range of emotions, you can watch it here.
Needless to say, do watch to the end.

But if you want to experience a, shall we say, broad range of emotions, you can watch it here.
I’m not crying you’re crying.

Damn it, those invisible onion-cutting ninjas are at it again.
It does say quite a bit about the range of human beings a puppy can encounter. I’m not overly sentimental, but I did experience a slight dampening of the eyes.
[ Clears throat, looks manly. ]

“Greater love hath no woman than this, that she lay down her child’s life for her own convenience.”
–Sanger XV, 13

Extreme self-love used to be recognized as a sin
Didn’t it also cause hairy palms?