From last month, Are we actually all in this together? I talked to four friends from the aviation world in the last few days. One is isolated on 40 acres of oceanfront with 12,000 square feet of in… | Continue reading
Amazon has an advertising affiliate program. There is an easy way to get deplatformed that is highlighted in red at the top of the page: As a reminder, we ask all of our associates to exercise good… | Continue reading
Mindy the Crippler says “Happy Cinco de Mayo”: | Continue reading
We don’t get too much news about our southern neighbor. Given that it is Cinco de Mayo, however, can we ask how Mexico is faring? The charts at ft.com suggest that the country’s experie… | Continue reading
“Epstein had his own office, phone line at Harvard even after his 2008 conviction of soliciting sex from minors” (The Hill) reveals that Jeffrey Epstein was fond of Massachusetts: Harva… | Continue reading
All over the United States, a principal source of revenue for Native American tribes has been shut down by orders of the (primarily white) state governors. But if Indian nations are sovereign, whic… | Continue reading
Want to stop coronaplague? The Church of Shutdown says it is as simple as social distancing. But an analysis of social distancing by the Maryland Transportation Institute shows that the very places… | Continue reading
I caught up recently with my source for “Fast-food economics in Massachusetts: Higher minimum wage leads to a shorter work week, not fewer people on welfare”. He owns donut shops and, f… | Continue reading
Massachusetts Facebook friends were gleefully discussing the wave of death that is “I Just Came Home to Sweden. I’m Horrified by the Coronavirus Response Here.” (Slate) As part of strat… | Continue reading
Professor Johan Giesecke, former chief scientist of the European CDC, and most of the rest of the 15 state epidemiologists in Sweden, started out from the position that Western government “lo… | Continue reading
I found a fun illustration of my theory that American attitudes toward coronaplague are primarily religious. Two physicians in California would ordinarily have been celebrated as heroic “fron… | Continue reading
“NYC subways will close overnight for coronavirus cleanings” (New York Post): New York’s 24/7 subway system will shutter nightly from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. to facilitate coronavirus cleaning… | Continue reading
One of my activities during the coronaplague has been listening to Major Transitions in Evolution, a 24-lecture course that probably is best enjoyed in the video format because there are a lot of f… | Continue reading
My gun enthusiast friends are excited by “Canada bans assault-style weapons after its worst ever mass murder” (CNN): “You don’t need an AR-15 to bring down a deer,” Pr… | Continue reading
Our town, which has a 2-acre zoning minimum, has imposed a rule requiring the “Use of Face Coverings”, starting today. People cannot be out of their yards without a mask: Roads, sidewal… | Continue reading
Happy International Workers’ Day, comrades! How productive are you and your co-workers now that everyone has gone to work-from-home? In my small survey of for-profit enterprises that are stil… | Continue reading
A friend is a physician in a moderately coronaplagued city here in the Northeast. She’s in a private discussion group for hospital workers. Since they actually do have some Covid-19 patients,… | Continue reading
EAA Airventure (“Oshkosh”) is canceled (press release). Is it time to buy the Oshkosh 2020 T-shirts? Unlike with Tokyo 2020, they won’t rename next year’s event, I don’… | Continue reading
A year ago I went to Disney World with a rich friend (post). He paid up $8,000 for two days of a VIP guide who enabled us to cut the lines. It still wasn’t that nice, however, due to the Time… | Continue reading
Note the priority given to the options for a person who might live in the same house or apartment: Textbook Heteronormativity. The gender ID choices: Textbook Gender Binarism. Aside from the agency… | Continue reading
On March 26, I asked “Number of new COVID-19 cases worldwide is declining now?” (updated every few days with data and comments) Within just a couple of days, the answer seemed to be … | Continue reading
On April 1, I asked “What did the hand sanitizer end up being useful for?” On March 21, I asked “Why isn’t hand sanitizer back on store shelves?” Despite a 1-per-customer ru… | Continue reading
Text messages received by a friend from his family’s former au pair, now back in her native Germany, age 26: People are slowly having enough of this bullshitThere are hundreds of people down … | Continue reading
An interesting work of journalism from the Washington Post: “U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19” The analysis is similar to the N… | Continue reading
The richest NYC-area folks whom I know have moved away to escape coronaplague and the associated lockdown. Why be in an apartment, even a $10 million one, if restaurants, museums, theaters, and off… | Continue reading
Conversation with a friend who immigrated to the U.S. to attend Harvard College: Me: Do you and [Betsy] want to go for a walk in the woods tomorrow morning with Mindy the Crippler?Him: I don’… | Continue reading
A more-interesting-than-usual collection of folks celebrate the life and work of Mike Hawley, currently suffering from cancer. Mike was an early application developer at NeXT, then an early faculty… | Continue reading
From a neighbor: I reached home last night (April 23) about 12:30. Nine hours of roadtransport was followed by a three hour flight to Delhi, then a fifteen hour flight to San Francisco. and finally… | Continue reading
As a measure of how desperate things have become, I’ve taken to reading poetry to the kids (denied their precious and wholesome screen time due to a cruel policy of the local dictatorship). H… | Continue reading
Governor Baker has now announced that schools in Massachusetts will be closed through June (i.e., until September). There was a hint at the briefing that businesses would also be ordered closed thr… | Continue reading
Here are some folks who, had they been listened to, could have saved Americans, or at least Texans, a lot of anxiety… “Stockpiling Ventilators for Influenza Pandemics” (Emerg Infe… | Continue reading
In these times of coronashortage, gang turf wars can extend into the supermarket. Honey Crips apples, for example: (from the Waltham, Massachusetts Market Basket, October 2019) | Continue reading
Some countries are suffering more from the coronaplague than others. Italy, for example, is a hotspot while Greece is scarcely touched. Parishioners in the worldwide Church of Shutdown would say th… | Continue reading
“Study finds no benefit, higher death rate in patients taking hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19” (CNN) is discouraging. We’re apparently not on track to have a better drug treatment… | Continue reading
I trust that everyone is celebrating Earth Day in an environmentally responsible low-impact manner. Here are a friend’s photos from the Carnivale in Viareggio (Italy, in a much happier time) … | Continue reading
Considering joining an anti-lockdown protest? The official Massachusetts coronaplague report is now in a new format that is much more helpful. Although it is heretical Sweden that is featured in ou… | Continue reading
Journalists around the world love to condemn the Swedes for their refusal to attend the Orthodox Church of Shutdown while instead following the false prophet (former chief scientist of the European… | Continue reading
One of my Facebook friends, a guy closing in on Medicare eligibility: I was almost 13, standing before my temple congregation, and I still remember reading these words from my Torah (bible) portion… | Continue reading
Perhaps we can get another year or two out of it? (above vehicle is right next to the Minute Man National Historical Park’s Battle Road) Meanwhile, I wonder if all of the bailout money has le… | Continue reading
Department of Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics: “In Sweden, Will Voluntary Self-Isolation Work Better Than State-Enforced Lockdowns in the Long Run?” (Reason). As noted previously in t… | Continue reading
A friend in medical research and I were joking about people who claim to have hindsight regarding coronavirus. I said that I alternate between bragging about my garage full of N95 masks and ventila… | Continue reading
That’s my meme for the day: I’m so old I remember when flying helicopters was dangerous and shopping for groceries was safe. A viral-ready version for the viral age: | Continue reading
When friends on Facebook expressed anger that Donald Trump had not used the Defense Production Act to expedite production of N95 masks and ventilators, I would endear myself to them by linking to &… | Continue reading
Today’s numbers are out. From my big tracking post: 4/17 comment: Sweden at 613 cases/130 deaths; Denmark at 321/12; Massachusetts at 2,221/159. It is getting tougher to argue that the Danish… | Continue reading
A friend has a beautiful house, decorated to a museum standard, here in our boring suburb of Boston (Zillow). I thought that it would be snapped up by an eager buyer, but it has been on the market … | Continue reading
I am informed by the New York Times and friends on Facebook that coronaplague was easily foreseeable and every intelligent person (i.e., not Donald Trump) saw it coming. Regrettably, in our own hou… | Continue reading
Our Boston suburb, which imposes a two-acre zoning minimum to keep out the riffraff, has hung a “We’re all in this together” banner across the main road. (We can restore the Black… | Continue reading
On April 12, I noted “Everything the gleeful journalists said would happen to Sweden has happened… to Massachusetts”. Massachusetts has been shut down since mid-March. Swedes, on the ot… | Continue reading