What color is your engine check light?

I’ve been ambling along, telling myself that I’m OK, I’ve got a plan to get through all this, I’m fine, go away, leave me alone, I’ve got work to do. Maybe I’ve been wrong, though. Maybe I’m just really good at burying my worries. Then I ran into this simple illustration that brought my situation into focus.

I’m looking at my dashboard, and seeing that my engine status is not a solid green at all. It’s more like a solid yellow that occasionally flutters orange as my engine stutters sporadically. If I were a car, I’d be saying we ought to get this thing into the shop to be checked out (and honestly, if I were a car, I’d more likely be saying that we can coax a few more miles out of it and put off the bother of maintenance a little longer.)

I’m also thinking that there are just two things preventing me from crashing into the red.

  • The election was not totally disastrous. If the orange disaster had been re-elected, I’d be panicking that the starboard engine was on fire and the hydraulics have been cut and there’s no way to lower the landing gear — we’re going in for a belly landing in rugged terrain (yes, I’m aware that my metaphor has become airborne, but that’s to make the catastrophe more clear). Putting Biden in office just means I can sputter along in the yellow, not that everything is fixed.
  • The nature of my job is such that I have semesters of overwork separated by longish breaks. Everything is coming to a head in my classes right now, but by next weekend I’ll have the grading all done and can unwind with a lab full of spiders for a month and a half. It’s not quite enough to push my status into the green, because another semester looms beyond that, but it will help stabilize me in the yellow. I don’t think the surges in stress are the best way to teach or the best way to learn, but it’s the system we’ve got.

It does not escape my notice that yellow is not a good condition to be in.

What about you? Is your engine purring, grinding, or bursting into flames?

Bad professor

It’s always sad to see someone bring disgrace to my profession. There’s a physical science professor, Thomas Brennan at Ferris State University in Michigan, who went on a surprising rant. He raged about an elite Jewish conspiracy, that the coronavirus is caused by nanotechnology in cell phones, Covid19 is another jewish revolution, that the moon landings were fake, that atom bombs are fake, that the pandemic lockdown is a conspiracy by the Leftist new world over to take over, etc., etc., etc. He has since been placed on leave, although one has to wonder how long this guy was in place on campus, with the other faculty in his discipline looking on. They had to have known!

He was a full-on racist, anti-Semitic, far-right kook with an account on gab and ludicrously awful views about science.

But, you say, what about his side of the story? Maybe he’s got really good, rational arguments to support his views, and would be able to martial an excellent defense in a debate. I got news for you: Brennan wrote a formal letter explaining his position. It really doesn’t help him at all.

This controversy started after I made a few statements in a College of Arts and Sciences
meeting of faculty and staff about the Covid-19 pandemic. My statements were to the
effect that I believe the Covid-19 pandemic is a stunt designed to enslave
humanity and strip us of all of our rights and freedoms.
I don’t believe that the pandemic is a hoax, people have died. But its severity is being
exaggerated by revolutionary leftists in the media and government who ‘never let a good
crisis go to waste.’ The end result of this hysteria, if unchecked, will be a mandatory
vaccine. No one will be allowed into public places or permitted to buy food in a
supermarket unless they present proof-of-vaccination. Initially, this electronic vaccination
certificate will be tied to a person’s smartphone, but will soon after be in the form of
injectable micro or nanotechnology in the vaccine itself. If this comes about it will truly
be a fulfillment of the prophecy of the mark of the beast, as described by St. John the
Apostle in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13:16-17.

See? Perfectly rational. Bible prophecies are always solid evidence.

Let me address a few of these tweets, starting with the one where I used the ’n-word.’ I
believe the ’n-word’ is a mind-control spell designed to make us hate each
other. I am not racist against black people, I love and respect them. But I
reject the premise that there are certain magic words that should never be used in any
context or by certain people. I uttered the word to try to neutralize its power, and
its implied meaning in the context of the tweet was as a synonym for ‘human being,’ or
‘person,’ since I used it to describe people of different races. I deleted this tweet within a
few hours of typing it back in June 2019, way before I made the Covid-19 comment, so
someone must have screen-shotted it and been building a portfolio to use against me for
when the time came.

It’s all a conspiracy! They’re out to get me!

Ironically, my casual use of the ’n-word’ in that tweet isn’t the most controversial thing
about it. It’s that I’m calling out the huge scientific and historical frauds that I believe
have been perpetrated since the mid-twentieth century. There is real science, but there is
also fake science. Fake science is an instrument of oppression. I believe that Bill Nye,
Buzz Aldrin, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Anthony Fauci are human beings of worth, as we
all are, but I believe they are telling some lies and are a part of a system of lies.

They’re all liars! It’s all fake science!

Besides using the ’n-word,’ a linguistic atom-bomb that I only used to get people’s
attention, I also said ‘Atom Bombs are Fake.’ The atom bomb has got to be one of
the most fear-inducing, oppressive ideas of all time, and ‘fear is the mind-killer.’ After rewatching the footage of atomic bomb tests from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, it appears to me
they are just films of explosions of large piles of TNT, made to look much bigger through
special effects. By filming an explosion at a high frame-rate and playing it back in slow motion, an impression of immensity can be achieved. Other special-effects techniques
such as ‘front projection,’ ‘forced perspective,’ and superimposed images also seem to
have been used in some of the footage. A combination of these techniques was used to
produce the surprisingly real-looking tornado scene in the 1939 film, the Wizard of Oz.
The best special effects were then, and are still, a military secret, and were only used
sparingly in fictional films of the time to define a false frame of what was real on film.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fire-bombed and flattened overnight with conventional
bombs.
There is much more to the atom bomb deception, but let me move on. I also said: “the
Moon landings are fake.” The films of the Apollo moon landings were faked using
the same special effects bag of tricks that was used to fake the bomb. But the most
powerful argument for why I believe we did not land on the Moon is that the inner solar
system is a blast furnace, and the sun-lit surface of the Moon is over 700 F, not 250 F, as
NASA claims. That is why the Moon glows red during a lunar eclipse—not because of
refracted red light from the Earth’s atmosphere, as Bill Nye and Neil Tyson would have
you believe. The shadow of the Earth’s atmosphere is blue, not red.

He taught physics, let me remind you.

The entire world has fallen under the spell of a satanic, globalist elite. Their end-goal is a
technocratic, one-world government, where everyone, Jew and Gentile, will be
microchipped and tracked 24/7. They use the rhetoric of social-justice and cancel culture, not to bring about equality, but to smear and silence anyone who opposes them.
We will all be equally enslaved if they have their way. They use science, both fake and
real, as a weapon to control us and keep us in a constant state of fear. The fear-spell of
the atom bomb has worn off after all of these years, so they had to unleash a new one,
Covid-19. Lord have mercy on me and on us all.

His intentions are noble and pure, you see.

Don’t you worry about Professor Brennan. He may be about to be fired so hard he’s going to fly out of his socks, but he has a lucrative future ahead of him as a speaker at QAnon rallies and anti-vaxxer conferences, and he’ll probably be invited onto the Joe Rogan show any moment now.

We braved the wilderness to forage for food today

It’s a big production. We’re avoiding human contact as much as we can, so we only rarely venture forth for essentials, like groceries. Unfortunately, today was the day. We’re in the last half-week of the semester, so no labs, so we could use my morning lab time to make the long drive to Aldi in Alexandria to pick up a load. We go in the early hours, arriving just as it opens, again to minimize exposure to filthy humans, and we stock up on about 3 weeks worth of food, and then we flee back south to the safety of our home. We’re probably OK until mid-December now.

We’ve made a major shift in our habits, and it still feels strange. It used to be we’d take grocery shopping for granted — the store in town is close enough that I’d plan ahead only a day or two, and walk the few blocks to pick up a few things every few days. But then the local store got all pestilential and refused to enforce the mask mandate (they’ve gotten better now, but they’ve lost our trust), so now we prepare weeks ahead — I also have a store of really basic staples, like dried beans and peas and rice, that could keep us going for a few months, if necessary — and I feel like one of those stupid doomsday preppers, and I despise those people.

Now we’re back, and that means buckling down to grading. It will be great to finish up this semester, and even greater to finish up this pandemic, some day in the distant future.

An unfortunate synchronicity

OBIT Edward J. Conrad died Thursday, November 19, 2020

Here I go and post a video about Ed Conrad on the 22nd of November, and then I learn that he had died 3 days before. I had tried looking him up, but he’d dropped off the internet as near as I could tell in 2015; I guess he was living the quiet life all this time.

I hadn’t mentioned that one of his other obsessions was life after death, and he wrote a fair bit about the Sheppton Mine disaster, and was confident that the experiences survivors and families had in that traumatic evident were proof positive of an afterlife. I did not find his stories persuasive. And no, the ghost of Ed Conrad did not visit me and tell me that I had to memorialize him with a YouTube video.

OOOoooooOOOOwoooooooooo.

Have you no sense of decency, ma’am, at long last?

A German COVID-denier (hard to believe such things exist anymore) decided to present herself as bravely defying the government by standing on a stage and claiming to be just like Sophie Scholl, which kind of takes one’s breath away as an appalling act of hubris. A security guard at the event is so disgusted at the way she’s trivializing the Holocaust that he publicly quits on the spot.

Watch to the end. The best part is when the young woman is so embarrassed that she throws her microphone down and storms off the stage.

Be like that security guard. Don’t be like Jana from Kasse.

Huh. I guess I am a big ol’ prude

You probably are, too. People apparently had a different attitude towards nudity and public sexual displays in the medieval era, at least as revealed by divorce records, where one of the few ways a woman could get an annulment of a marriage was to prove her husband was impotent. With witnesses. Which seem to have been surprisingly easy to get.

In the year 1370, Tedia Lambhird filed for divorce from John Saundirson, claiming that her husband was impotent. Next, she had to prove it. Fortunately for Tedia, she had eyewitnesses.

One key witness, Thomas son of Stephen, testified in church court that he had seen the couple unsuccessfully attempting to have sex in John’s father’s barn before 9 o’clock one springtime morning. In spite of the fact that John and Tedia were “applying themselves with zeal to the work of carnal intercourse,” Thomas reported that he saw “John’s rod was lowered and in no way rising or becoming erect.” Furthermore, Thomas claimed that John’s brother also witnessed the failed sexual encounter, adding that the brother stroked John’s penis with his hand in order to see if he could help.

So to summarize: John Saundirson not only tried (and failed) to have early-morning barn-sex with his wife before an audience of two men but also received ineffective manual penis stimulation from his own brother. Thanks to Thomas’s devastating testimony, Tedia won her case.

Uh, kinky? I have no idea how common this kind of behavior was — maybe John and Tedia were swingers, atypical for the time. Or maybe we modern people are the weirdos, with our fetish for privacy and the wealth to have houses with multiple rooms and doors, and no need to resort to our nearby hay pile in the barn. Go to a zoo and you’ll see that primates are generally not particularly shy.

I have to say, though, that some of the approaches taken would make me flee — there’s a degree of casual intimacy that makes me cringe deep down inside.

Often the witnesses in impotency cases were women, either married female acquaintances, widows, or local sex workers. They might be tasked by the court with inspecting the man’s genital equipment, or they might expose their breasts and genitals to the allegedly impotent man, give him ale and tasty snacks, kiss him, and rub his penis in a warm room to see whether he became aroused. But other times, these witnesses were men who looked on as the husband in question tried to have sex, or even lent a hand and stroked his penis themselves, reporting their findings to the court.

Impotence was a pressing concern for men and women in late medieval England. Multiple poems from the time feature women gathering in groups over copious amounts of alcohol and complaining about their impotent husbands, comparing their flaccid penises to maggots, snails and bumblebees. Other poems are voiced by the men themselves, who mourn their impotence and offer advice to others about preserving their virility. “All ye lovers take heed of me, for I was once as lusty as ye,” laments one poet.

I am repelled by all of that…except for the bit about bringing “ale and tasty snacks”. Ladies, I won’t object to that at all. Bring it on!

Wait, “bumblebees”? I don’t get that one.

Stay home. Please.

Have you read the news from Minnesota?

The daily scene at Regions is playing out in ICUs across Minnesota as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 sweeps across the state. Open ICU beds were down to single digits in some parts of Minnesota last week, when Gov. Tim Walz ordered a four-week shutdown of bars, restaurants and entertainment and fitness establishments in hopes of slowing the virus’ spread to alleviate pressure on hospitals.

From Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids to Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar to Regions, ICU beds are filling as quickly as they are opening up. Statewide, 79% of available ICU beds are filled, and 26% filled with COVID-19 patients.

The state’s capacity of open ICU beds has declined about one percentage point per day the past two weeks — raising the probability that some of the 408 ICU surge beds might need to be activated in unused hospital and nursing home wings.

“There’s no beds anywhere,” said Dr. Matthew Klee, whose ICU at Mercy is full and under pressure to take patients throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin. “It’s become like a game of chess over the entire state.”

More worrisome are the growing infections among health care workers who then can’t care for patients.

HealthPartners on Friday reported 308 workers absent due to COVID-19 infections and 414 who were quarantined due to viral exposures. Collectively, the Allina Health, CentraCare and Mayo Clinic systems reported more than 3,000 such absences last week.

Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home.

You don’t need to go gallivanting off to visit family this weekend. Really, you don’t.