Ivermectin for the Win!!

 A new study finds a very high degree of effectiveness using Ivermectin to treat Covid-19.

Article is here.

OTC Covid Killer

Diphenhydramine (Benadryl), and a protein in milk. Link to article below.

Two Common Over-the-Counter Compounds Reduce COVID-19 Virus Replication by 99% in Early Testing

Covid Vaccine Fail

Well, this is interesting. According to this paper, vax effectiveness starts to drop off after about 90 days.

Click on the image to read el gato malo's summary, click on the link at the bottom of the page to read the Lancet pre-print.

 

Read the Lancet pre-print here.

Thing is, we kinda knew this already, given the re-infection rate of the vaccinated. 

I'm sticking with gin and orange juice.

Omicron Covid

Here's a rollup on Twitter of the South African Medical Association Covid statement:

Covid Vaccination In A Nutshell

 Update (This one is scary! More to think about!):

OMG! On this clip.

This doctor trained at the Mayo Clinic and runs the largest independent testing laboratory in Idaho.

Listen to what his lab testing is showing. pic.twitter.com/WmX7N3qKHK

— Jangled Nerves (@ToriaMart) November 14, 2021

Two articles I've come across give good reason to pause and think hard about the Covid vaccine.

With no further comment, here they are.

Article here.

Article here.

World Covid Map

From Johns Hopkins University, the Covid dashboard. Click the image to open a new window:

(Amazes the heck out of me that China has so few cases!)

I suspect that Gerard is anti-pumpkin. 

In fact, based on his post about it, I'm pretty sure:

I couldn't leave it alone:

To be contrarian, pumpkin pie is one of my favorites, along with lemon creme pie.

So. On All Saints' Day, cut the pumpkin into chunks, and steam said chunks until the inside part ('guts') is soft. Scrape said guts into a mixing bowl, add pumpkin pie spice (or cinnamon & nutmeg), and sugar as appropriate for the volume of guts or taste. 

Pour into pie crust(s), and bake at 475 deg F for 15 minutes, then 375 deg for about 45 min. Done when nothing sticks to a knife stuck into the middle when pulled out.

Serve with cream, whipped cream, or home made vanilla ice cream. (Recipe for *that* at the above listed blog.)

As promised. vanilla ice cream, below the fold.

We Need 'Demo Day' Now!!

Demo day. Unleashing the power of a sun, here on the face of the earth. We need one today, just to remind the unwashed Over There not to fuck with us.

Go, RTWT:

From Gerard's American Digest.

Billionaire Space Race

 So Branson beat Bezos.

But neither has hidden a body.

Link List: Wuhan Virus Articles

(Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

This is a collection of links to articles on the various aspects of the Wuhan Lab leak issues (newest at the top).

I'll pin this, and update it as I find new stories.

6.7.2021:

Daily Mail, Genome Sequencing Proves Virus Man-made 

Hudson Institute, A Just Response

As of 6.6.2021:

Daily Mail. Patient Zero

New York Post, Fed Money for Bat Study  

Vanity Fair, Lab Leak Theory

The Bulletin, Virus Origin, People or Nature 

Memorial Day

As I've gotten older, I've dabbled in family history, mostly my Dad's. I have copies of the pictures below, but they are in the original monochrome.  

One of my cousin's sons has taken up the colorizing bug, I got copies.

Dad and Uncle Jordan survived the war, which I guess makes their holiday Veterans' Day, but they are both gone, so I think Memorial Day is fitting.

Thank you to my Dad, all of my uncles, and everyone who served.

SSG George Webber

CPT Jordan Webber

Jordan and Dad

I did a little mental math to get a swag on when these may have been taken. Jordan didn't enlist until '43, so I'm guessing '44 at the earliest, maybe '45.

That would make Dad about 26 or 27, Jordan about 19 or 20.

Dad was a supply sergeant somewhere in the Pacific Theater, Jordan trained to fly P-38 Lightnings for areal reconnaissance in Europe.

No guns. The idea was the P-38 was faster than anything the Germans could put up.

The war was over before he completed training.

Thumper (and Me)

 Just before Jen left for home last month, we noticed Thumper was limping. Our working theory was that, in digging into the compost bin and bouncing it up and down with his snout, he had managed to guillotine his paw and injure it. I got him some doggo aspirin, which seemed to take care of the issue. 

He would go for a few days without limping, then start again. Give him aspirin, limping stopped. Lather, rinse, repeat until this past Monday.

He suddenly became a tripod dog, not using the injured paw to walk on at all.  Aspirin did nothing. So, Friday (yesterday), we went to the 24 hour emergency vet (our regular one was booked up and waitlisted). We did the intake, a tech came out to the car and got Thumper, and home I went. 

Calls back and forth, talked with the vet. Basically, the x-rays showed no breaks, but one of the bones in the 'elbow' looked fuzzy. We didn't get the radiology report, so the vet released him, along with doggo Ibuprophen and gabapentin. I was instructed to get some Pepsid to make sure he wouldn't get an upset stomach from the ibuprofen. I was chuckling during his lecture, and finally told him that I've been on nsaids and gabapentin for quite a while, and was confident I could handle this. 

Thumper was pretty well stoned when we got home. The idea is to give him 10 days of rest, followed by 10 days of slowly bringing him back up to speed, assuming the limp is gone. The 10 days of rest is what the gabapentin is for.

So, that is Thumper, in a nutshell. 

I wound up not sleeping in this morning. In fact, I think I was awake at about 6:30 - 7:00. I gave up and got up, and started the day. Got Thump out to the back yard for a bit, then took him around the corner early afternoon. At about 2:30, I decided to go up for a nap.

When I woke up, it looked like early morning light. My phone said it was about 5:30, so I was expecting to get up and face the new day, in a while. Read my mail fiddled around on my dating site, and decided to get up.

So here I'm thinking it's Sunday AM. My phone told me it was still Saturday evening. And down the rabbit hole I went. I honestly was worried that something had happened to the internet clock, but the timeline as I remembered it didn't make sense either. I was confused. 

I bounced around with it for a while, until I realized that it was way too dark for 8:30 in the morning, even with the rain clouds overhead. It slowly dawned on me that I had taken a nap at 2:30, and a) either I'd slept for almost 30 hours, or b) it was in fact 8:30 on Saturday night.

Occam's razor prevailed, and so here I am, sharing this at (now) 9:30 Saturday evening.

I'm pretty sure this is another reminder that I don't have as much stamina as I did before my surgery. 

And, as any IFR pilot will tell you, "You gotta trust your instruments."

Fauci Knows

 He always did.

Wade leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions. 

The case for 'escaped virus from the lab' is certainly more presuasiven the 'it came from the jungle.'  It has a couple of particular features that haven't been found in the wild, that can partricularly target humans.

Yes, Fauci knew they were doing 'gain of function  work' (making new, more virulent virii). It was the whole point of our funding.

We've been using cheap chinese labs to do our virus research. Not up to standards, and cutting corners.

He's covering his tuchus.

Don't believe me - here's the whole thing.

God. One possible scenario

Once again, I find I am merely transcribing what Gerard has written. This comes a couple of day after  my retired flight attendant friend asked me if I'd gone back to a church yet. I tried to explain that I hadn't because I wasn't sure if my peculiar perspective on things would fit into the Catholic framework. That's probably a conversation I need to have with a friendly Jesuit.

Anyway, this popped up this morning, and since it answers my friend's question better that I did, I felt the need to post it, and send her a link. So here we go:

 The Spark Gap

I’ve long had a theory about why prayers are answered but answered rarely. I think that God, for all his omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience is pretty much nailed to the present as far as humans go.

Yes, I know all the arguments for predestination and preordination but those strike me as a one-way street to Dullsville even for God. If, as God, You let Yourself know everything that was going to happen everywhere for all time (Not that You couldn’t if You wanted to.), what’s the entertainment value in that proposition? Slim to none, if you ask me. 

RTWT: Sunday sermonette: While You Were Out

Absolute Swagger

 

From Gerard's 'Ka-Ching - Things That Go Boing in the Brain'

Shamelessly Stolen...

 ...one of my two favorite posts by Gerard. (The other is World Demo Day.)

How Beautiful We Were

by VANDERLEUN on JANUARY 20, 2021

A short list. In no particular order.

We had car shows, boat shows, beauty shows, and dog shows.

We ran robots on the surface of Mars by remote control.

Our women came from all over the world in all shapes and sizes and hues and scents.

We actually believed that all men are created equal and tried to make it come true.

Everybody liked our movies and loved our television shows.

We tried to educate everybody, whether they wanted it or not. Sometimes we succeeded.

We did Levis.

We held the torch high and hundreds of millions came. No matter what the cost.

We saved Europe twice and liberated it once.

We believed so deeply and so abidingly in free speech that we protected and honored and, in some cases, even elected traitors.

We let you be as freaky as you wanted to be.

We paid you not to plant crops and not to work.

We died in the hundreds of thousands to end slavery here. And when that was done continued to fight to end slavery for a century and a half after all around the world.

We invented Jazz.

We wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg address.

We went to the moon to see how far we could hit a golf ball.

We lifted a telescope into orbit that could see to the edge of the universe.

When people snuck into the country against our laws, we made parking lots and food stands off to the side of the road so they wouldn’t get hurt, and we let them use our hospitals for free, and we made their children citizens.

We didn’t care what God you worshipped as long as we could worship ours.

We let the People arm themselves at will. Just to make sure.

We gave everybody the vote.

We built Disneyworld. Just for fun.

We had a revolution so successful it was still going strong two and a quarter centuries later.

We had so many heroes, even at the end, that we felt free to hate them and burn them in effigy.

We electrified the guitar.

We invented a music so compelling that it rocked the world.

We had some middling novelists.

We had some interesting painters.

We had some pretty good poets.

We had better songwriters.

We ran our farms so well we fed the globe.

We made the automobile and the airplane.

We let you get rich. Really, really rich.

We didn’t care who you were or what you were or where you came from or who your parents were. We just cared about what you made or what you did.

We had poor people who, even at their most wretched, were richer than any other poor people on the face of the planet.

We were the noblest nation the world had ever known.

We had so much freedom that many of us voted to just throw it all away.

Even towards the end, as we dissolved into the petty bickering and idle entertainments that come with having far too much leisure and money, many among us were still striving to make it higher, finer, brighter, better, and more beautiful.

Even towards the end, the best of us declined to give up and pressed on. “Where to? What next?”