The reason my photos suck is entirely because I don’t have access to exotic geography. Yeah, that’s it.

Tantalizing. I keep seeing news about the discovery of a massive cliff face in a remote part of central Colombia that is covered with ancient rock art. This would be really cool, except that I’m feeling suspicious and skeptical. But look at this image! I want it to be true.

There are a few reasons I’m dubious right now. I don’t doubt that the rock art is there, but I’m seeing claims that it’s between 20,000 (as reported in 2015) and 12,500 years old. What I’m not seeing is citations to the scientific literature. The recent surge in interest seems to be fueled by the upcoming release of a television program on UK Channel 4. For all I know, that could be equivalent to an announcement that it’s going to be on the History channel, which would tell me it’s garbage and hype. Does anyone know if there is a paper in an archaeology journal about it?

I just like the idea of seeing more art by witnesses to Giant Ground Sloths.

It really makes you want to read the whole thing, doesn’t it?

Except, when you actually read the story, it’s not that interesting. The “rise from graves” is just masses of shallowly buried mink corpses bloating and bulging up to the surface. Unpleasant, yes, but these are not zombie mustelids stalking Denmark. The “mutated form” bit is also not a big deal — viruses are constantly mutating. The real concern isn’t even mentioned in that story. The mutation is just a useful marker, as near as I can tell, that allows them to trace patterns of infection, and 12 people have been found to be infected with COVID carrying the same marker. That suggests that we could have zoonotic transmission from mink to humans (or vice versa). Also, about a fifth of the Danish mink farms have the disease among their animals, which says it’s spreading fast among the captive mink, and now we’re seeing infections and death in mink farms in Utah and Wisconsin. It also seems the virus is deadly to mink.

The Utah Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (UVDL) completed necropsies on several dead animals from the two mink farms after the mink operations reported unusually high mortality rates in their mink populations. The samples were tested at the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory at Washington State University. From there, the samples were sent to the National Veterinary Services Laboratories for final conformational testing. The affected mink farms have been completely quarantined to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

Denmark is going to kill 15 million mink to contain the virus. It sounds like a catastrophe for the ethical treatment of animals, but I would remind you that all 15 million were already doomed — they were raised to be slaughtered for their fur, so this is only accelerating their death…and depriving mink farmers of their profit. On the bright side, it may lead to the demise of a particularly brutal kind of animal abuse.

I did not enjoy making this video at all, not because of the content, because of all the copyright bullshit YouTube put me through. I use a few very short clips from the History Channel show, Ancient Aliens, specifically to criticize the stupidity therein, and I guess the History Channel is very protective of their idiocy, and the thing kept getting flagged. I finally said screw it, demonetize it, I’m not going to let that channel of lies and foolishness push me around.

So here it is, for what it’s worth. I hate the History Channel, alien pseudoscience, and Giorgio Tsoukalos even more now.

Do I include a sorta partial script of what I said, below the fold? Yes, I do.

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Well, good for Clallam County (if you have no idea where that is, it’s on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state. Port Angeles? Nirvana? Does that help?). They voted for Biden, and now have a 40 year winning streak in ‘predicting’ the outcome of presidential elections.

Clallam County is on quite the winning streak — one that no other county in the United States can claim.

According to the latest count on Monday from the Clallam County Auditor’s office, 50.43% of voters cast their ballot for former Vice President Joe Biden and 46.72% voted for President Donald Trump.

That means the county has picked the correct presidential winner in every race since 1980.

Going into this election cycle, Clallam County was just one of 19 counties nationwide to hold that voting record.

With just over 50% of the county’s votes going to Biden, it is now the only county in the country to have kept up such a winning streak.

The county residents don’t know how they are so good at this. I have an explanation, though: it’s chance.

40 years is just ten presidential elections. Because of the way our system works, it’s a binary choice, basically — so like a coin flip. The likelihood of calling 10 coin flips in a row is 1 in 1024. There are more than 1000 counties in the country, so I’d guess that the chance of one of them having a ten election streak is pretty good. Also the fact that it’s not really a 50:50 chance — one outcome proves to be slightly more likely after the fact — and that Clallam has a nice demographic mix, with the slightly urban Port Angeles plus all the conservative loggers and fishers, and it’s not surprising at all.

Then, of course, look what xkcd posted:

None of that will prevent Washington state journalists from descending on Clallam county in 2024.