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Open thread 4/22/21 — 39 Comments

  1. Speaking as someone who lives in a rural area who regularly sees deer, and has had lots of near misses and one hit, I think that situation was very avoidable. The driver wasn’t paying attention closely enough. Driving through wooded areas you have to be constantly scanning your peripherals during certain times of the year and certain times of the day. In particular during rutting season I drive a bit slower and I’m more careful in the early evenings and mornings when there’s open woods or fields on either side of the road. It’s really annoying but you have to be vigilant.

  2. From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
    After Derek Chauvin verdict, Twin Cities set to defortify
    Public safety officials described plans to take down barriers and boards, citing calmed tensions and decreased threats of civil unrest.

  3. I live in a rural area too, and Nonapod is right. However, deer are deer and sometimes no matter what you do you can still hit one.

    On Interstate 71 there are several places in the stretch between Cincinnati and Louisville where the highway is split into two sections, north and south bound, with acres of woods between the two halves. There is a herd of deer that like to hang out in those woods.

    Last summer my wife and I were traveling southbound at night, (full dark, not twilight) when a large buck came running out of those woods flat out from the left side of the road right in front of me. I couldn’t react in time, and hit him square going at least 70mph. Living where we do, we are both very vigilant for deer, but it was to no avail.

    I tell people that that deer must have parachuted out of a helicopter, because the first I saw of him was when he appeared out of nowhere less than 50 feet in front of me.

    It completely destroyed the front end of the car and we both got to experience the joy of an airbag deployment. Both my wife and I came out of the experience unscathed, but the car was totaled. The poor deer never knew what hit him.

    One thing people should know is that if you ever have a deer run out in front of you when traveling at high speed, you should never swerve to try and miss him. Just go ahead and hit the deer. A lot of folks get killed every year because of deer encounters, but in most cases it is because the driver swerved to miss the deer and lost control. They then go off the road into a tree or a culvert other some other immovable object.

    PS: Those look like Elk in the video.

  4. I lived in Poland and had a very near hit. The elk (that is what they are) just froze and I quickly went into the other lane doing about 45 mph with my Opel Vectra. I loved that car. It was very sporty and responsive. When I lived in Poland 97-2000 the roads just absolutely sucked and there was no chance to go really fast. You had to have lighting reflexes because there were no berms or sidewalks and people on bikes and kids walking home from school were literally 1 foot away. Twice I did screeching halts and once went off the road to avoid a bicyclist who hit a hole in the berm and swerved into my lane. A tractor had to pull me out.

    I also saw three fatalities. One happened in front of me. You never forget those images.

    In the US I side swiped an 8 point buck which wrecked my Montana on the passenger side. He jumped a fence and landed on the side of the road. I had maybe two seconds to react. When you hit something with a vehicle there is a solid thunk sound. The buck made it off so I didn’t even get to have the antlers.

    So driving in Poland was an adventure but Southern Europe city driving….ho boy. Naples was the pits. The old saying that lights are suggestions in France and Italy ran true there. The farther south you got into a country the worse the drivers.

  5. A deer jumped out in front of me when I was on my bicycle. I avoided the deer but crashed in the process (wheel caught the pavement edge) and seriously banged my patellar tendon in the process. Was limping around for a month. Dang wildlife!
    That first car in line came through pretty well, considering. That elk looks pissed.

  6. My wife and I were driving in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula a few years ago. There was a sign by the road listing the number of moose killed so far that year (It was September) on that highway. As I recall, it was about 290. Amazing, however, nothing in Alaska goes to waste. There are also signs along all the highways giving the “wildlife management area” you are in. There are lots of subsistence level folks living in the boonies. If you are one, you can put your name on the list for your area. Any roadkill triggers an alert and the name at the top of the list has first chance for the roadkill. You have a half hour to respond, then the next name is called. A moose can feed a family for a year.

  7. Or…. you could encourage hunting so the huge herd can be culled. Therefore, reducing the danger to cars and reduce crop damage.

  8. I used to live in the thick of Atlanta, suburbs and city. Even with all the highway and commercial & residential growth, it’s a heavily wooded city. In the spring and fall you will see families of deer running through your yard, on the streets, and coming out of the woods as you go around a curving road, unable to stop in time. Happened to me twice when I lived there. Not a good feeling.

  9. I agree that even if you’re hyper vigilent there are definitely some instances where it’s pretty much unavoidable.

    In almost 30 years of rural driving the one and (so far) only time I hit a deer was at dusk in early November. I was driving past a wooded area I drive past every day on a pretty low traffic road (by low I mean perhaps 1 car every 2 minutes during “rush hour” periods). I was going perhaps 35 to 40mph. As I said, it was twilight. A buck jumped right out of the woods. I hit my breaks but it still more or less totalled my front end of a car that was literally less than a month old (because of course). The deer sort of hobbled away, but clearly was doomed. I considered myself an animal lover but in that moment I was in so enraged I yelled out loud “Good! I hope you die you !!”

  10. I have never hit one, but I have seen one hit before by a car in front of me- makes a mess out of the car in addition to the deer.

  11. Or…. you could encourage hunting so the huge herd can be culled. Therefore, reducing the danger to cars and reduce crop damage.

    I think the deer population, like the number of trees, is much higher than at the time of the Revolution. Of course, hunting has become a big no no for the left which is why California is seeing more mountain lion attacks every year. I personally dealt with three that I recall, one fatal.

  12. “They then go off the road into a tree or a culvert other some other immovable object.

    PS: Those look like Elk in the video.”

    Yes they do somewhat. Certainly not whitetails or even mule deer, yet not big enough in the body to be North American Elk. They are European Red Deer.

    That video has to be from Poland or Germany. The language looks Slavic.

    OK: Now the cheating part. I just looked up red deer and find that some of them can be as large as American Elk, and are considered by zoologists to be closely related.

    Back to honest comment …

    However, I have never seen Elk leap like that. Usually they walk, and at best trot. I have chased them through the woods and although I could not catch up, I would have been able to keep close long enough to get a better angle for a shot than I might have had when I first spotted them.

    No chance of that with whitetails. If it is alarmed and moving, you have about 2 to 3 seconds after you are spotted; and unless it is quartering away in an open field the chance on a running shot is far from sure.

  13. One thing people should know is that if you ever have a deer run out in front of you when traveling at high speed, you should never swerve to try and miss him. Just go ahead and hit the deer.

    Probably true statistically, but someone I knew in upstate NY was killed when the deer crashed through the windshield. You can see from this video how that could happen if the deer tried to jump.

  14. “Nuke em from orbit it’s the only way to be sure.”

    But wait, John F Kerry said today that all(?) CO2 has to be removed from the atmosphere. We are in good hands.

  15. There is very good piece on the COVID response that is linked at Powerline from the Healthy Skeptic site.

    I tried to post a link here but it didn’t work for some reason maybe someone else can do it.

    It is a very balanced look and the entire situation.

  16. Every now and then when Dinesh D’Souza’s name pops up, I pop up with the comment that he’s a grifting douchebag who has no business telling (trigger warning) White People how to live.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/10/19/washington-times-clips-its-right-wing/dd009c93-883b-446c-bbbf-94c0a0570a1a/

    He got the late Sam Francis fired from the Washington Times in 1995. Just about everything Sam Francis predicted has come true. It’s the job of Dinesh D’Souza and people like him to make sure that you don’t have a clear view of where the system is taking us. He’s not your friend.

  17. Zaphod,

    $2M seems high for Barrett when her book is almost certainly going to contain fewer tales of meth fueled threesomes with hookers than Hunter’s did. Although maybe ND law school was crazier in the mid-90s than I imagine.

  18. @Rufus:

    Like I said: it’s Payoff Season.

    Does anybody in 2021 seriously believe that these political tell-all books recoup advances? It’s pure and simple money laundering of Good Behaviour Awards for prior service or retainers for future services.

    The fact that it can be done blatantly is part of the messaging: there is nothing Joe Public can do about it. Joe Public is Nobody.

    It’s a Big Club, and we’re not in it.

    One thing for sure…Her having grasped the Ring, her decorative Haitian adoptees won’t be going to law school in ND. If I’m wrong about everything, will be Harvard Law. If I’m right, will be Culinary Institute of America Cannibalism Stream.

  19. }}} PS: Those look like Elk in the video.

    I dunno. They may have looked like Elk, but they were acting more like Shriners.

    😛

  20. Talking of Corona-chan… It seems to be going gangbusters in India right now.

    Can’t really argue with the Powerline view that this virus is mostly just accelerating the downward spiral of old and otherwise vulnerable individuals who were all set to de-compensate the next time they stubbed a toe or got a cat allergy or bumped into the common cold virus.

    India, Indonesia, Philippines are full of older sedentary diabetic fat people. Africa much less so and perhaps that’s why there hasn’t been that much obvious impact there to date. But who knows?

    The big worry about these vast and older sicker populations being mown down a month or six prematurely is that nature taking its course doesn’t preclude one of them, in dying 1 month earlier than they otherwise might have, throwing out a random mutation which wipes out the rest of us. Happy Thoughts, Happy Thoughts 😀

    As for ‘Saving Lives’… well it’s going to be a busy time for Radiologists, Oncologists and Co. these next few years. Big backlog of cases coming down the pike.

  21. “I dunno. They may have looked like Elk, but they were acting more like Shriners.”

    You win the thread, Sir!

  22. “…Africa less so…”.

    Speaking on a hunch—and on a hunch alone—I suspect that the general Black African adaptation/ability to withstand malaria (though the down side is, certainly, an unfortunate predilection for sickle cell anemia) enables them to withstand, at least to some extent, COVID-19.

    (Just a hunch, which might be taken up by those who actually know what they’re talking about…unless, of course, it already has…)

  23. Links to and excerpts of the Mike Lindell follow up on remote fraud by machines is around, hailing further details. The counter-hack analysts are making more detailed and more sinister (or crazy, if you insist) claimed about What Really Happened to fraud the last big election.

    I don’t know what to make of it yet. But chewing further on this FICUS burrito, I must. Rasmussen reports that 51% of Americans do not believe His Fraudulence was legitimately elected even now (a harsh opinion probably boosted by the border crisis — in other polling, Pew finds more Am’s worried about the border invasion than Covid, now).

    JoAnn Nova has a first take on it:

    Title: “ The new battlefront in war is election machines”

    “The Sequel is out– ‘Absolute Interference’ is the followup to the ‘Absolute Proof’ video is out. There’s new information in here, more details, cross checks, and missing pieces.

    “The vote rigging appears to have happened across every state and county. The software is opaque, no one can check it. We’re told the machines are not connected to the internet but they are. The Democrats were worried about the electronic voting machines a year ago but now, it’s just a conspiracy theory. [/sarc]

    US intelligence agencies say that cyber attacks from foreign entities are happening regularly. In Dr Franks analysis of Ohio (a state thought to be okay) there was an improbable 100% registration in all 88 counties, and the same voting proportions in each age bracket in every single county.

    “In other news, it looks like poll workers may have had phones built by a Chinese electronics company that acted as a wifi hot spots sending messages back to the source….

    “It’s history in the making — the highest stakes, most aggressive political battle since the cold war, but this time the US is losing….”

    Mike Flynn adds “ All machines in New Hampshire started election day with 300 votes for Biden. There may have been as many as 35,000 votes added in Arizona.
    The FBI and CISA gave alerts out warning that Iran was interfering in the election.”

    https://joannenova.com.au/2021/04/the-new-battlefront-in-war-is-election-machines/

    LET THIS DETAIL SINK IN:

    “In Dr Franks analysis of Ohio (a state thought to be okay) there was an improbable 100% registration in all 88 counties, and the same voting proportions in each age bracket in every single county.” GOD DAMN.

    Such stark claim of concrete details like this can be checked. If they stand up like this, there will be years if not decades of this scary/insane theory to deal with.

    IT AIN’T OVER. IT’s HERE AND IN THE FUTURE.

  24. Hitting a deer on the highway usually kills the deer and makes a mess of the vehicle. Hitting a moose on the highway makes a mess of the vehicle and usually kills the occupants. Fortunately, moose cross the highways and roads much less frequently and much more cautiously (you see them sooner).

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