How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
It does not hurt, on our little isolated island here at this blog, to try to walk in the shoes of regular people.
I recently became reacquainted with a man I knew years ago, a newscaster, and became Facebook friends. He knows everyone who is anyone, and his list of friends includes people whose names I recognize as important in the Montana sense. They were or are in news, politics, business. They are each in a cloud, as we all are, a dense smokescreen difficult to penetrate called “me.”
The plant to the left is commonly known as “Everts Thistle,”named after Truman Everts, a low-level bureaucrat who used its roots to survive during a 37-day ordeal that lasted from September 9 to October 15, 1870. The plant was and is abundant in Yellowstone National Park.
This post is not part of the normal fare of this blog. I have long known the survival tale of Truman Everts, but never the details. I have long known that cirsium scariosum, or Elk Thistle, was renamed in honor of this man. On our way to Yellowstone last month, my wife read the Everts tale to our grandson and me from the book by Dave Walter, Montana Campfire Tales, and I was enraptured. It is an heroic tale, but Everts did not go on to become a governor or senator, to write a book or to even become famous. He was just a man who in the face of 37 days of insults to his body and mind, survived.
Most of us are by now familiar with the movie Hidden Figures, about how three black female mathematicians working for NASA did heroic deeds involving Mercury, Gemini, and ultimately Apollo 11. The move is a layered psyop, since, as most readers here know, Apollo 11 was merely a rocket ditched in the ocean, no human leaving low-earth orbit, much less setting foot on the moon. Ergo, no one did the complicated math needed to plot the trajectory, though I cannot say how complicated it is. However, no one, white, black or any other race did that math. I do not discriminate! It did not need to be done.
It’s a sophisticated ruse, however, because now, in addition to being Apollo deniers, we are also racists. This has to have entered into the sophisticated calculations of those planners behind the fake Apollo program in how they deal with critics and disbelievers – “Set them on their heels by making them defend themselves as bigots too!” They are doubling down.
Continue reading “Tiera Fletcher, NASA rocket scientist, appears on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”
The above video is an interview of Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto, by Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and pundit. I don’t expect that the reader take time from other pursuits to watch it, but if you do, it is informative. Peterson talks about how far afield the gender identity movement has gone.
Over the past months I have become familiar with Steyn, and enjoy his writing and speaking style. He is a climate change skeptic, and at one time called Michael Mann’s hockey stick “fraudulent.” In response Mann sued Steyn.
I just got done (mercifully) doing a double-delete on a post I was writing about higher education. I was out of my depth. The post was completely derivative and based on a book I am reading called The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch, first published in 1979 and said to be a “national bestseller.” It is a fun book, in fact, even exciting for me is it mentions so many names, movements, perversions and attitudes that I grew up in, through and around. (Just to name one, there is the mythical female orgasm. Trust me, it doesn’t happen.)
American history says that two former presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both died on July 4, 1826, fifty years after signing the Declaration of Independence. I’ve long wondered about that. I took classes in college on the subject of statistics, but the problem was that I was having a testosterone storm centered on a certain girl, and my mental capacities were shut down. I eked out a C and remember very little.
Continue reading “The odds that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826”
My recent foray into the matter of climate change had many surprising features, one of which was how easy it was to grasp the underlying science behind the matter. Climate study is, for the most part, mere collection of data in search of trends. Below the fold, for example, is a graph showing precipitation trends in California over the last 100 years.
On our recent trip up north to Yellowstone National Park, our grandson wanted to see a real dam. We had driven by Boysen reservoir on the way up, and he was disappointed when we got to the actual dam that it was just an earth-fill. So on the way home I headed up Highway 20 out of Cody up to Buffalo Bill Dam, the real thing, seen above. Of course, snow runoff this year is massive, so that the floodgates are wide open. The actual scene is not so serene as this photo. It is far more violent.
We are in the last day, a travel day, after spending the last week in Yellowstone National Park with our 12-year-old grandson. What a fun time we have had! A few observations.
“Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who’d rather be Rollerblading. Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there’s no reason we can’t entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates.” …
These are the opening lines of a newspaper column from the Chicago Tribune. It is very short, but I cannot reprint it in total due to copyright, only a snippet as fair use. Read the whole thing here.
