Suddenly dawn’s silent. What is missing? I wonder as I swing out of my bed With a moan and a grunt, after kissing My drowsing wife. My old mind looks ahead When I would rather be looking behind. What is missing? I think again, and hear No robin chirping. The brash bird’s gone to find Down south what’s missing. It seems to me queer That what is missing is in his own mouth. In some palm he now greets the greening dawn And disturbs the sleepers of the sunny south With cheerful chirps, a brand new day kissing As one by one the stars go missing.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
FULL DISCLOSURE ABOUT BEN FRANKLIN:
Yes, Franklin did own slaves. Up to seven, in fact. They were initially uneducated, which enabled Franklin to initially believe darker skinned people were more stupid than lighter skinned people, by nature, genetically.
THE REST OF THE STORY
Six of Franklin’s slaves consisted of a father, Peter, his wife, Jemima, and their four sons Othello, George, John and King. Franklin had custody of this family between 1732 and 1781. I can find no records of him breaking up the family by selling any member for profit. As a slave-owner he assumed the responsibility for the well-being of his so-called “property”. He had to “care”.
Perhaps it was due to this caring for Peter, Jemima, Othello, George, John and King that Franklin did something some find hard to do. He changed his mind. In 1758 his friend Samuel Johnson brought him to a school for black children, run by an enlightened soul named Dr. Bray. By the following year Franklin was donating money to the school, and became active in the founding of America’s movement to abolish slavery. In the final year of his life, 1790, he petitioned congress to make plans to abolish slavery.
Think of the changes the man saw and physically experienced! Franklin was living proof you can teach an old dog new tricks, and had great faith that people besides himself could change, and change for the better, while being pragmatic enough to recognize some hate the idea of others having liberty, and will repress others to enjoy a sort of liberty in their own lives (which is not true liberty).
Franklin is so crucial to the establishment of the United States it makes me wonder who his teachers were. Those teachers deserve honor and praise, and I think six of them were Peter, Jemima, Othello, George, John and King.
The phrase “Going to hell in a wheelbarrow” goes back to medieval times, and appears in the stain-glass windows of old churches, but alliteration prefers the “H” sound, so there are all sorts of variants: “To hell in a handcart” apparently sprang from “wheelbarrow”; “To hell in a handbasket” may have sprung from the grim days when guillotined heads were caught in baskets. The phrase often means things are going bad swiftly, which brings us to, “To hell in a hurry”. Lastly, my stepfather told me that up in Maine his grandfather substituted the word for a horse-drawn-taxicab, “Hack”, and quite often an extra “H” sound was added in by using the word “whole”, which resulted in his grandfather stating, over a hundred years ago, “This whole, wide world is going to hell in a hack”.
In any case, we are not the first to look around and roll our eyes at the sight of the entire world seeming to be going down the tubes. (If you should currently happen to be feeling that way.) Misery loves company, and it is good to know you are not alone. However the sensation can be so overwhelming that a sort of loneliness creeps in.
There’s a good story about such loneliness from around 2900 years ago, which demonstrates how crushing such depression can be. The tale goes like this:
Despite the fact Elijah had soundy defeated the prophets of Baal, he was threatened by the murderous Jezebel and fled into the wilderness, where he crumbled into complete despair, stating, “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” God had to send him an angel to nurse him back to a semblance of sanity.
Elijah then flees further into the wilderness, until he has an encounter with God. In explaining why he’s run away from worldly responsibilities Elijah justifies, “The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your alters, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”
So it is obvious Elijah feels very alone, but, in the process of dusting Elijah off and getting him back into working condition, the Lord reveals to him, “I reserve seven thousand in Israel – all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and all whose mouths have not kissed him.” So Elijah was not as alone as he felt and thought.
Roughly two hundred years earlier the poet (and king) David faced similar depressions, and a similar sense of futility and despair. For example, Psalm 10 begins:
Help, Lord, for no one is faithful anymore; Those who are loyal have vanished from the human race. Everyone lies to their neighbor; they flatter with their lips but harbor deception in their hearts.
But one odd thing about David’s misery is that it is, “For the director of music.” It is part of an event I’ve heard described as a “public lament.” It makes me very much wish I could go back in a time-machine and see what an audience in David’s throne room was like. In any case, it seems that it would have been very hard for David to feel alone when he sung his blues so publicly.
I should add David doesn’t just moan and groan. After articulately expressing his disappointment over the dismal levels of spirituality displayed by his fellow man, (friends as well as enemies), and perhaps hinting God ought to kick a few butts, he always adds a resounding affirmation of God’s goodness and power. Also David’s faith addresses God in the present tense, giving one the sense God is not far away in space and time, but in David’s throne-room. Besides being Infinitely Loving and Infinitely Powerful, God is Infinitely Close.
I always find this idea a bit disconcerting. To be honest, I instinctively flinch away from the idea of God being so nearby. I seek distraction, but have to admit I am the one drawing away from God, not Him from me. Nor can I truly escape. He is as close as ever, though my attention wanders away to dumb things such as….well, I won’t go there.
But what is true for me is also true for people who I consider “bad guys.” As soon as I thought this, into my mind’s eye came an image that tickled me: I imagined a boardroom full of plotting politicians and billionaires, up to no good, utterly unaware that sitting in their midst was God.
This idea seemed worth a sonnet:
If God is in all then He is even In the plots of the wicked. What great fools They are, whether with plots to stone Steven Long ago, or to make computers tools Of wickedness today. For God’s sitting In at every board meeting, intimately Involved, cognizant of greeds they’re getting Gratified, of double dealing, and He Wields the pure Law they aim at corrupting. He deals the cards they hold, and He can cheat Better than they. He can reach out and take The ace they hide up their sleeve, and defeat Despots with a stroke. This news isn’t fake: All thieves will win is a trophy of shame For God can steal hearts and wins every game.
Time flies when you’ve just begun. Thirty years Ago I paused Poet’s Purgatory: (Bleeding-lip loneliness sleeping with fears I’d die young in my car). I’d marry A woman with three children, three brothers, And a mother. Camping involved just eight. But things happen, when you include mothers. This year forty-three camped, and it was great! But the campground owner asked us if we Could find somewhere else, next year. Our loud joy Disturbed peace, he said, though what caused our glee Wasn’t booze, nor looter’s wish to destroy. Ringers at horseshoes just made us yell a lot. Funny how some think that joy is a plot.
Yes this did happen. The campground owner did state my family had “grown too large.” It’s just another crazy event in a crazy year.
Oddly, in some ways I agree with the man. As I sat watching 42 people have all sorts of happy fun, I (now the official “patriarch” of the bunch), had the sense things had gotten out of control. This was not what I intended.
What did I intend? Well, this involves looking at preconceptions. I don’t much like doing this, because it is embarrassing confessing how seldom anything in life has worked out as I planned. However within the obscurity of this website I’ll expose my dunderheadedness, by wondering what my preconceptions were, when I married thirty years ago.
I think I assumed that by now my kids would be raised and out of the nest, and I’d be in a quiet house. When my job as father was done, I could spend my declining years thinking, simply thinking. My house would become a sort of monastery, and I’d be the monk, deeply engrossed in thought. If any of my children were about, it would only to be to hear me deliver some sage wisdom in a reedy, old voice.
As usual, my preconception was utterly, completely wrong. Being a grandfather is not the same as being a monk. If you really want to be a monk, remain celibate, and then there is no danger of ever being a grandfather.
Yesterday I was trying to write and there were three grandchildren from three separate children making a racket in the background, aged six, two and one. My wife loves such rackets, and I love my wife, but I confess there are times I mutter nonspiritual things like, “Shakespeare never had to put up with this shit.” And usually it is just then one, or two, or sometimes all three small children are not willing to rest content with being background noise. They are not the slightest bit interested in the profundity I am gritting my teeth to stay focused on, but rather are interested in me. (Odd. No one else is.) And then I am confronted by these innocent eyes and wonderfully clean minds, and I am ashamed I called them “shit.”
To be a grandfather involves sacrifice. There is no pension, where you are rewarded for your years of service, and are freed from further service. Rather your reward is to sacrifice further. Not a good selling point. But the strange thing about such sacrifice is that the more you give the more you get.
What you get is beyond the comprehension of greed. Let me put it this way:
Mother Theresa only wanted to help a few dying children experience compassion as they died. Yes, a few were saved and survived, but mostly she attended to the dying innocent. And her reward was to be given more and more dying children, until she had to also deal with a whole nunnery of nuns who also attended to dying children. What the heck kind of reward is that?
I can’t say. I’m not Mother Theresa. But I assume she saw something in the eyes of dying children that made her kindness worthwhile.
In like manner, on a far lesser level, I see something in the eyes of grandchildren (and over a decade’s worth of kids at my Childcare), that makes sacrifice worthwhile.
In order to explain such sacrifice to the greedy, you must put it in terms the greedy can understand. It’s hard. But perhaps I can do it.
When you start out small, for some reason you are given more. You start out camping with eight, but it becomes forty-three. It becomes such big thing that people start to notice. A campground owner feels uncomfortable. Basically he is saying, “Stop. Something is going on here which is out of my control.” (The word for that is “sacrifice.”)
I’m scheduled to return to that campground at the end of summer, but not as part of a mob. It will just be me, my wife, and two close friends. (Oldsters need time to relax and be refreshed). But while I’m there I hope to engage the elderly campground-owner in a good conversion. If I can figure out how to break the ice, there is much to wonder about.
After all, in 1987 I was the sort of ruined drifter, basically homeless, who campground-owners did not want to see arriving at their campground in a battered, brown 1974 Toyota. Who could imagine the same dude would now be a “patriarch”, still pitching a tent but with 42 others, including four driving motor-homes?
In Sweden they never shut down the schools or businesses or asked people to socially distance, preferring to allow the Corona virus to spread through the population until “herd immunity” was achieved. The only precaution they took was an effort to protect the elderly, which was a failure, for the Corona Virus penetrated the defenses and did get into Swedish old-age-homes, which was where most of the Swedish deaths occurred. However after this spike in deaths the Swedish nation-wide weekly death rates became lower than normal, (primarily because the old people who would have ordinarily have died of “old age” were already dead).
Sweden has seen none of the side-effects of “lock downs”. They have not seen the increase in domestic disturbances and child abuse seen in other societies. Especially they have not seen the increase in suicides, and most especially suicides among children, seen in other more “protective” lands. They have not seen family small businesses go bankrupt. They have simply gone on with life as usual.
Sweden does not have to worry about Corona Virus because everyone who was going to get it has already gotten it. For many it involved less suffering than a bout with the common cold. Now it is over and done with.
Compare this with New Zealand, which has done the best job of isolating people from the virus. They have done such a good job of social distancing the virus does not exist on their islands. But they are cut off from the rest of the world. Roughly a quarter million are now out of work, because they had jobs dependent on tourism, and now New Zealand can not allow tourists to enter their sanitized abode.
New Zealand is now placed into a situation where they must live in dread of infection. Rather than “herd immunity” they have chosen “herd susceptibility”. A single foreigner entering their nation could make their homeland as sick as Sweden once was, but rather than having it be over and done with, as Sweden is, they are creating an isolation which worsens their susceptibility, for the longer New Zealand remains isolated, the larger the number of viruses it’s people are not exposed to, and the larger the number of viruses exist which New Zealanders have no immunity developed to resist.
If the people of New Zealand are hoping a vaccine will be developed which will allow them to return to modern civilization, I have sad news. And news is this: Viruses constantly mutate. Viruses mutate so effectively that, when one gets a ‘flu vaccine, one has only a 40% chance of not getting the ‘flu virus. If the corona virus is able to mutate as swiftly, the entire population could get the vaccine, and 60% would still be liable to be infected by a mutated version as soon as they allowed foreign tourists in.
In actual fact Corona Virus is more closely related to the virus which causes the common cold. Let me ask you this: Have you ever heard of an effective vaccination for the common cold? If one existed, how much money could be made?! Yet it doesn’t.
The corona virus is so like the common cold that people recovering from the common cold have antibodies in their blood which help them battle corona virus, often to a degree where they never even know they had corona virus. The body’s immune system is created to deal with an amazing onslaught of viruses.
However the people of New Zealand are increasingly possessed of protected immune systems, which, like spoiled and protected children, are ill-prepared for the onslaughts involved with dealing with the world outside of a mothering nest. The more protection they receive, the less immune they become.
If this goes on, eventually even a case of the common cold could clobber New Zealand, for the country would have no immunity to a virus which the rest of the world calls everyday.
In history such shocks are recorded, as the world’s peoples began to cross oceans and associate with each other. History tells us of tragic pandemics which clobbered Native American tribes with pandemics. History also tells us that Europeans were clobbered by an American disease at the same time, which shamed and hugely changed Europe.
The ailment was apparently some form of syphilis. Apparently Europe was morally loose to a degree where the American venereal disease spread like wildfire. There was no cure, and people were forced to change their lifestyles. This may have been a reason “free” and “loose” behavior fell out of favor and fashion, and puritanical behavior became fashionable.
Even before people changed their actual sexual behavior, people responded to the stigma of the consequences. One side-effect of this American venereal disease was hair fell out of European heads, and the hair on European scalps became patchy, with bald spots. Everyone knew. Therefore, to hide the shame of sexual misconduct, Europeans began a new fashion: They wore wigs. The rich people could afford fancier wigs, and became people known as “Big wigs”. Bigwigs might have syphilis, but they could hide it better.
However New Zealand should not be so backwards and primitive as the bigwigs of Europe in the 1500’s and 1600’s. They should be Globalists, and think of the world as one big unity. If others get the germ, they should share it. If they did this, they might be as strong as Sweden.
Here are some more insights, regarding the dichotomy between Sweden and New Zealand:
If YouTube blocks the above post, it hopefully can still be seen here:
To conclude, it is best to embrace sickness when it comes. Be like Mother Theresa, heading straight to the slums of Calcutta.
In terms of saviors, Bill Gates is no Mother Theresa. The only reason he invests in a Corona Virus Vaccine is because he expects to make ten billion for every billion he spends.
Better than any vaccine is the immune system we all own in our flesh, given to us by our Creator. A vaccine does not “make” us immune, but rather stimulates the immune system which already exists.
There are things as simple as sunshine which stimulate the immune system in ways which can defeat the corona virus. There are quinine derivatives and steroids which can cure Corona Virus even without a vaccine.
This is bad news for Bill Gates. He invested a billion, and his return will be zip-zero.
Mother Theresa poured out love on dying children in Calcutta, and her reward was zip zero. After all, the child died. But she felt it was enough to sooth their dying with love. She felt happy, though the dying child never paid her a cent.
Bill Gates would call her illogical. He demands a return on every penny he gives. He is liable to lose his temper if people do not oblige.
Because Sweden never did oblige, Bill Gates can’t be bothered with them. But the people of New Zealand should watch out.
One thing many do not comprehend about the Pole is that during the summer it collects more heat-per-acre-per-day than even the equator. The sun never sets, and if the Pole were a flat area of land at sea level the heat would continue rising, 24 hours a day, until burning hot air-masses were created, and then expanded south. I’ll leave it up to science-fiction writers to figure out the meteorology of such a planet.
Our Earth is quite amazing enough as it is, and is created with a sea full of ice to the north, which moderates the effects of the 24-hour-sunshine wonderfully. But things do get slushy up there. As far back as we have records explorers have remarked about how “rough sledding” occurred in July. The original inhabitants of Fletcher’s Ice Island (T-3) stated the need for hip-waders, due to the depth of slush in some areas, back in 1952. So the summer melt is not a new thing.
Below is a picture of the surface of the sea-ice on the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska in Mid-July, 2016. (From Susan Crockford’s excellent “Polar Bear Science” site, and originally from NASA.)
The above picture has four fascinating features I’d like to point out.
First, to the upper left, is a melt-water pool with a darker blue bottom. This darkness may be soot and dirt, which collects more sunshine because it is dark, or it may merely be because the ice is thin and about to become a hole to the deep sea beneath.
Second, to the upper right, extending halfway down the right margin, are three pools joined by a drainage stream, with the headwaters pool even managing to carve a canyon through a weakness in a sizable pressure ridge. This demonstrates how the melt can create drainage systems atop the sea-ice.
Third, at the very bottom is some “dirty ice”. This once led to arguments about whether the “soot” was “natural” (from volcanoes), or “man made” (from Chinese coal-powered plants.) More recently we’ve become more aware the sea-ice has algae growing on the underside, and when such cakes of ice are flipped they present a dirty face to the world.
Last but not least is the large, triangular melt-water “lake” at the center of the picture. This lake is entirely bounded by three pressure ridges and has no outlet, and the lighter hue of its water shows it is entirely atop ice. It is likely shallow, but causes problems, for the microwave sensors used from outer space will tend to see such water-covered-sea-ice as “open water”. In fact such sensors may well look at the above picture and report it is 50% sea-ice and 50% open water. This data then gets reported to various map-making models which show there being far less sea-ice than actually exists.
Susan Crockford (and astute bloggers, and people who comment at this site), have pointed out that, now that we have radio collars on some polar bears, we can see bears wandering about on what the maps show as open water. Either the bears have an ability to walk on water we didn’t know about, or we have some problems with our graphs and maps. Susan goes into how this phenomenon is manifesting this summer in Hudson Bay, here:
In other news, the MOSAiC expedition drifted down south of 80 degrees north latitude, and on July 29 had to disassemble their base on a large, flat chunk of sea-ice to avoid littering the sea-floor with expensive pollution.
Packing up instruments in Met City, which is situated directly next to a melt pond.
Auch das Zentrum der meteorologischen Arbeiten auf der Scholle, Met City, wird abgebaut. Es befindet sich mittlerwile direkt neben einem Schmelztümpel.
Apparently they are going to use their icebreaker Polarstern to continue researching conditions along the edge of the sea-ice, and then head back north to again get stuck and observe the refreeze during the autumn. They have gleaned all sorts of new data involving temperatures and salinity of water at various depths under the ice, conditions in the ice, and temperatures and humidity in the air above the ice. Much is going to require further study (I haven’t the time to even decipher much of the data) but they have already seen some preconceptions will need to be adjusted. They have also seen a lot of cool micro-critters we knew next to nothing about, and been on the edge of some fascinating whirls of water that form as southbound currents brush against northbound currents in Fram Strait. For example, check out the whirl by the red 80 degree north in the clip below. They crossed this whirl.
Personally I find such knowledge fascinating, and feel that, although the gleaning of such knowledge may seem obscure, it is far more likely to be beneficial to humanity, dollar for dollar and in the long run, than the billions Bill Gates is spending to make tens of billions more than he invested, with a vaccine we likely can do without.
Joe Bastardi at the “Weatherbell” site shared a graph comparing this summer’s sea-ice melt to the record melt of 2012, which I think shows why Alarmists were so excited a month ago, and why headlines broached sensationalism’s ever-expanding limits, only to now go silent.
2012 was a rough year for sea-ice Skeptics. If you look back to April in the above graph, you can see that in 2012 the sea-ice was actually at above-normal levels. Back then I publicly wondered if we were starting to see a “rebound”, and the start of a return to a “cold” AMO situation. Six months later I had to eat a lot of crow. In fact I was in a semi-denial state, until I actually got in touch with some people, (via the internet), who had actually flown over the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas and witnessed how much ice simply vanished, in a matter of 72 hours, during the sub-960 mb gale which occurred that August. That taught me my lesson, and though I still venture my opinions, I’m prone to couch my words in pillows of “maybe’s” and “might’s”, for one is often astonished by the doing of the arctic. One never should crow about anything unless they are able to eat the crow.
There is still no sign of a gale this year, though I think the possibility increases as the fading summer heat starts to clash with the first beginnings of winter chill. Currently there is some weak low pressure and subfreezing air towards Bering Strait which might brew something up.
DANISH METEOROLOGICAL INSTITUTE MAPS FOR 00z August 8
One interesting phenomenon, as the sun sinks at the Pole, is that often the coldest temperatures seem to occur south of 80 degrees north, perhaps because they start to experience actual nights down towards the arctic circle. Such cold air evades detection by the DMI temperatures-north-of-80-degrees-north graph, which has shown the warmest second-half-of summer we’ve seen in some time, which I think is due to the lack of sea-ice towards Eurasia.
I’d like to conclude this post with a wonderful bit of free-thinking I came across, which included some thought which seems preposterous and made me laugh, but also got me wondering, as it involved undersea avalanches I’ve heard a little about (primarily off Hawaii), but never extrapolated to other places in the manner the blogger “OffTheGrid” does. (As if we don’t already have enough to freak out about.) As I understand it, he suggests there are lakes of water under extreme pressure under Greenland’s icecap, and the melt-back of glaciers due to Global Warming allows such highly pressurized water to be released like a massive fire-hose, stirring up huge amounts of sediments which carve the sea-bottom and disturb the ecosystem terribly.
Itp 94 deployed by the Mosaic campaign has finished Its run and returned some very disturbing readings. Dissolved oxygen at near zero for the whole Atlantic side transit. Dissolved and particulate organic matter, turbidity through the roof. I desperately hope the DO sensor was faulty. But it would explain why all the polar bears were way out on the Atlantic front.
Major high turbidity upwelling from well below 760m depths was detected out near the pole. Suspect that sediment and methane laden bottom freshwater flow from Laptev and/or 79N NE Greenland subglacial outbursts have busted the deep halocline stability out in the deep basin bringing up ex-hypersaline bottomwater mass from the deep basin. VERY scary. Our much appreciated contributer Veli albert kallio is the world acknowledged professional expert on this kind of thing. We’ve had discussions previously about this sort of possibility, with Wadhams and other experts I work with involved. I’ll get a conference going. We may have to look at urgent oxygen and salt restoratation in deep benthic Atlantic side of the Lomonosov.
Would be very helpful if Uniquorn can do one of his locations/date animations over bathometry so we can localise events clearly. Polarsterns been sampling that eddy for precisely that reason.
This looks like well over 20 gigatons of subglacial outbursts in the NW alone in the last few weeks. Not only are they heavy with up to 90% rock, capable of carving canyons over 1000 km out into deep ocean basins, but the surging of fast glaciers can melt the bedrock at 1500 C plus, so they can be very warm indeed.
I found OffTheGrid’s comments on one of Nevin’s Arctic Sea Ice “Forums” involving “MOSAiC News”, and noted some in that forum muttering OffTheGrid’s comments should be censored or “edited”. But I tend to think it is better to allow all ideas to be floated, if a forum is to be a true forum, even if a trial balloon is a lead balloon. After all, it was said about Winston Churchill, “The man’s mind flashed a hundred ideas a day, and three were good ones.” The best solution to problematic thought is not to stop the mind’s thinking, but to have goodly critics about, who can politely point out our mistakes.
This being Sunday, it likely would be a good thing to confess. I’d rather confess about all the things you do wrong, but apparently it is better to confess about my own spiritual blunders. So I’ll get on with it.
It might be fun to sheepishly admit some of my behavior as a lusty young man was not entirely ethical, but the problem with that is: I am not what I once was, so such confession is no longer very applicable. Also you might become suspicious that rather than feeling remorse I was bragging.
Instead I’ll confess a couple of events which recently confronted me with how I put things of this world ahead of That Which Is Lasting. The first was that my yearly chest X-ray, delayed six months due to the corona virus, reveled a suspicious “spot”, (actually a shaded area), and I was advised to immediately schedule an MRI. If I thought I might be able to milk some sympathy from my wife (and I confess I was playing the violin’s of self-pity a bit) such thinking came to an abrupt, screeCHing halt. She too had a virus-delayed physical, a lump was discovered in her right breast, and she was told to schedule an immediate mammogram.
We looked each other in disbelief. Could we be at our end?
As much as I’d like to draw out the suspense and make a good story of this event, I’ll cut the fortnight of anxiety short and state the tests came back negative for both of us.
We could go right back to our ordinary fretting about incidental concerns, but in a way it was difficult to do. It was like walking from a church after a funeral. One wants to forget all about the confrontation with mortality they have just experienced, (and one usually does a fairly good job of developing amnesia), however one can’t quite do it; one pauses, at least briefly, and considers the fact all the material stuff we think matters is stuff we can’t take with us, and that, embarrassing as it may be, we depart this veil of tears as butt naked as we entered it.
So I did some considering. It was rather good fun, as I could do it with a wife who was equally considerate. Also we are not Atheists, and are able to wonder about an afterlife poor Atheists can’t. And then I felt thankful, in a strange way, that we had our socks scared off by the prospect of cancer, and grateful I was made aware of how I am perhaps too attached to some things of this world, and too neglectful of That Which Will Last.
But wouldn’t you know it? I went and got a little bit smug about how I had learned my lesson, and was now a new and improved version of myself. Maybe I wasn’t detached two weeks ago, but I had made the right adjustments. And then?
And then I misplaced my wallet during a family camping trip. I’ll cut this long story short by stating I found it in the pocket of a sweatshirt I’d worn briefly during the morning chill, but that was only after three hours searching everywhere else. (I’d forgotten I wore that sweatshirt briefly, and then hung it over the back of a camp-chair.) The areas under the seats of both my and my wife’s vehicles are now far cleaner than usual. I discovered my memory still works, as I retraced every step I took. And during those three hours I discovered there are some mutterings and curses I am capable of, which seldom escape the lips of true saints.
After I had looked everywhere I was forced to contemplate the unthinkable, and that there was the possibility an unscrupulous person had taken advantage of my idiotic carelessness. I didn’t mind the loss of thirty dollars in cash as much as minded the loss of my license and credit cards. It would be such a (-bleeping-) nuisance to report their loss and replace them. And there was nothing I could do until Monday. What sort of mess could be made of my credit rating before then? Was there someone I should call immediately?
Another question drifted across my mind. Was I going to ruin the weekend for everyone else, just because I had been a careless dunderhead? No. I sucked in my gut and decided to be merry.
Interestingly, as soon as I made that decision I felt calmer. I suppose I was in some way refusing to allow things of this world to rule me, and was to some degree behaving in a manner more faithful to That Which Is Lasting.
It was only then, as I sat by the campfire and joking and laughing, that a thought drifted to the tip of my tongue, “You can feel the coming heat wave starting to build. We won’t need our sweatshirts tonight….sweatshirts…hey!”
I’ll conclude this Sunday Sermon by simply saying the same sort of fears and worries are applicable to the Corona Virus. Some have died; some have lost money; but in the case of many death and poverty were sheer imagination.
Panics occur to many all at once. People come to their senses one by one.
I wanted to quickly note the recent sideways blip in the extent graph, which shifts the yearly decline into areas more typical of recent years. The question now, as we pursue the wildly exciting sport of watching ice melt, is whether the remaining decline before the refreeze will be shallow (orange line above [2017]) or steep (dark blue line above [2016]). I am looking for a more shallow decline, basing my belief on the fact the remaining sea-ice holds pressure ridges due to the way the sea-ice was pushed over to the Canadian side of the Pole last winter.
I am always impressed by how much sea-ice melts from beneath, even as it starts to refreeze from the top. There is considerable variety in the rate of such bottom-melt. For example, while a gale in 2012 resulted in major melting, a similar gale in 2013 hardly resulted in any melting at all. Likely the melt depends on the stratification of slightly warmer and saltier water under the “lens” of fresher colder water at the surface, and I have no access to readings of temperatures of those layers. Lastly, if there is no gale, there is no mixing, and less melting. Currently there is no sign of a gale.
Why are there only seven deaths in Taiwan, out of 25 million people? It is because they fight the inflammation of the lungs caused by the virus with an noninflammatory steroid called “budesonide” which is inhaled through a nebulizer. With the congestion gone the body is able to fight off the virus.
Spread this news. The fact that such information is not available is a crime against humanity. The people involved in the suppression of effective alternative medicines should be ashamed, for either they have invested heavily in the vaccine or they are using the virus as an excuse to claw for power. Their desires are leading to unnecessary death. Unwittingly they are murderers, or, worse, they knowingly are murderers.
If Youtube censors doctors like this, the same way they censored the doctors promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine, they should be seen as accessories to murder.
Even in the dog-eat-dog world of advertising, which is not known for honesty despite “truth in advertizing” laws, one company is not allowed to censor another company’s advertisements. Americans should be allowed to go to another doctor for a second opinion, even if the first doctor thinks the second is a quack. And only 7 deaths in Taiwan suggests a second opinion which is valid.
Spread this news. There are those who want it censored. Even a little site like mine is being “disappeared” from search engines.
Sunrise's Swansong 