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Home » Open thread 1/20/22

Open thread 1/20/22

The New Neo Posted on by

Hard to know quite what to say about this, but the voice of the narrator is annoying enough that you might want to mute it:

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Open thread 1/20/22 — 34 Comments

  2. Our daughter had a friend who was a professional in a good-sized zoo. Said Orangs were pretty mellow critters but you always had a barred enclosure between you and them. They are immensely strong and smart enough–this is weird–to take insult as if they were human. But perhaps not quite getting the nuance of the interaction.
    Stories from time to time of them living near humans in the wild. One was that a female orang stole some skirt left out to dry and insisted on wearing it, and went to the river to wash its along with the rest of the women on laundry day. Apparently she was given some other skirts as well.
    Do they wish they were human?
    So…show her how to use a frying pan…..

  3. “The Trimates, sometimes called Leakey’s Angels, is a name given to three women — Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birut Galdikas — chosen by anthropologist Louis Leakey to study hominids in their natural environments. They studied chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, respectively.”
    Fossey was murdered by poachers in Rwanda. Goodall and Galdikas are still going strong.
    Galdikas is 75 and dedicated to the scientific study and preservation of the endangered species of orangutans in the forests of Borneo.
    Here’s her site: https://orangutan.org/
    Thanks for the video.

  4. Re: Richard Aubrey;
    Makes sense to me. Orangutans have well developed frontal lobes similar to humans. They may not have developed language, but they’d probably understand quite a bit. Clothing seems rather simple. Infants pick up clothing pretty quickly.
    Not sure if Orangutans can handle the complexity of cooking with a fire (which primarily includes containment and control of the fire) and recipes.

  5. Richard Aubrey,

    I’m struggling to think of an animal as weak as humans. When I was a kid, I remember some other kid telling me he had read something explaining that most animals keep muscle once developed, but humans have some “feature” where our muscle atrophies if unused?

    We have to be the weakest of the primates, and, pound for pound, weak in comparison to any other animal I can think of.

    We’re also really slow, which, I suppose is associated with our low muscle mass (or inferior muscle type). However, we’re better than most animals at heat dissipation, so we have very good endurance, in comparison.

    I know our brains require a lot of calories. Maybe our different muscle (assuming the rumor I heard from that kid is correct) requires less energy than the muscle other animals have and this is a tradeoff for having big brains in comparison to our body mass? I think the only other animals with similar brain to body mass ratios are aquatic and don’t need as much energy to fight gravity.

  6. Perhaps Zaphod will comment? FT says the Zero virus goal of China’s Hong Kong means prohibitions of travel on pets that may carry the virus. And with the CCPs huge coercive stamping out of dissent means the rich and not rich in HK are seeking to emigrate elsewhere:

    “The territory’s strict quarantine regime is leading some expatriates to abandon the city while increasing numbers of local citizens are joining immigration schemes set up by the UK, Australia and Canada in the wake of political unrest in the Chinese territory in 2019.

    “Hong Kong’s efforts to stamp out the virus have extended to pets…”

    Things sound increasingly grim in HK.
    https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4031121/posts

  7. Teachers’ Unions on the Democratic party ramparts:
    “Teacher Unions Used Pandemic to Funnel Millions to Divisive Political Groups: Government Accountability Institute”—
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/teacher-unions-used-pandemic-to-funnel-millions-to-divisive-political-groups-government-accountability-institute_4219852.html

    Reminder: The Teachers’ Union, having demonstrated that it is the enemy of the American family, helped perhaps more than anything else Youngkin to win in Virginia. One hopes they will continue to openly espouse their hyper-partisan, anti-family insanity.

  8. Rufus. Yeah. An adult male chimpanzee is a stone killer whose muscles are, fiber for fiber, three times stronger than a human’s, and more quick-twitch. They will flat kill you.
    Humans run. Fastest horses in the world run a mile and a quarter at the Kentucky Derby, while high school kids run three miles in cross country competitions.
    From pursuit hunting. Prey stops to breathe, then those two-legged types with the sharp sticks show up, and it’s off again. Tougher if the first encounter involved a wounding strike and the prey is also bleeding. Yeah, the antelope was pretty good the first quarter mile….
    I suspect the orang could easily imitate the use of a frying pan although judging done-not done would be a couple of lessons down the road.

    When I said, “insult”, I meant more broadly things which look as if they’d be unpleasant, not just the raised eyebrow at the wrong time.

  9. “Do [Orangs] wish they were human?
    So…show [them] how to use a frying pan…..”

    Give them baseball bats and let them try out for MLB.

  10. All animals have certain instincts. The mothering instinct in many mammals allows nursing females to nurture other species as she nurtures her own. Tigers have instincts. The young like to play. The adults: hunger, kill, eat. Those cubs bonding while young with the Orang may override adult instincts. Maybe.

  12. Hey Neo, have you ever heard of a New York ballerina named Marta Beck? I recently got the chance to tour her theater out in Death Valley Junction, and wondered if you had any clips of her performing. Really enjoy your columns, both the art pondering and the political views. Thank you for running this.

  14. Re: the strength of chimps. When I was living in Chicago a chimp got loose from the zoo and the police were trying to catch it. They just gave up and hid after a while because they were afraid of it. The chimp was tossing around garbage cans with one arm as if they were baseballs. The zoo keepers eventually showed up and were able to safely take it away.

  15. }}} We’re also really slow, which, I suppose is associated with our low muscle mass (or inferior muscle type). However, we’re better than most animals at heat dissipation, so we have very good endurance, in comparison.

    We’re not really that slow, but endurance is certainly relevant. We’ve learned, among other things, how to use our speed appropriately.

    200/200/200. Paces — Run 200, Trot 200, Walk 200. Experienced human hunters (no, not city folk! 😀 ) can keep this up indefinitely. It is what, along with tools, makes us the apex predator we are — any other animal, we can follow it, chase it down, run it down, until it’s exhausted and can flee no further, so it must turn and attack… at a clear disadvantage because now it’s exhausted. This is true of Elephants, Tigers, Bears, and Boars. And presumably Rhinos and Hippos, both of whom tend to be forgotten when we think of “dangerous animals”.

    As to Orangs, well, the funny thing about things like the above — the thing that makes the “Tarzan”, “Mowgli” and “Lucan” myths so particularly resounding, is that they are singularly and particularly unusual (ditto the Lysistrata meme, with women demanding an end to a war).

    Animals generally kill the offspring of any other species — which makes a great deal of sense in a species survival context — either it’s competition for resources, or it’s a predator which will eat your “family”.

  17. @TJ:

    Don’t forget for a moment, if you please, that Free Republic is as ideologically blinkered and driven as Mother Jones, whatever In-House Paper the Iranian Revolutionary Guard publishes, and that North Korean News Reader. It’s self-selected membership very broadly take a position of absolute (fanatical… although you don’t see it that way, of course) belief in Truth, Justice, The American Way, and the Messianic duty to go on international Jihad by means of arms, advertising, trade incentives and sanctions to spread same as universal human values — no matter how destabilising this may be and no matter how much bloodshed and mayhem this may ‘inadvertently’ cause. Nothing personal. That’s just how it is. And it’s perfectly normal to have one’s biases. I have mine, too. And 10 years ago I would have thought more like you or the site you reference.

    Now every day I wake up, and live a pretty normal life apart from the inconvenience of travel in and out of HK. Nobody is forcing me or haranguing me daily to get vaccinated or boosted. Government employees and serfs employed in large companies face more pressure to do so, but they have sold their souls for messes of pottage anyway, so why would I care about them? A few restaurants I go to, require me to scan a QR code to enter. I, like everyone else, have a spare Android phone configured so that this reporting App can’t ‘phone home’. They pretend to regulate us and we pretend to obey.

    And no, nobody in long leather trenchcoats is around in Citroen Traction Avants, squealing to a stop and demanding ‘Your papers!’ It’s not some terrible dystopia. Terrible dystopias generate clicks. Boring old creeping (slower now here than in your locale) techno-tyranny doesn’t make for good click bait.

    There’s a bunch of youngsters in prison, either on remand or doing roughly a year to 6 years on average for being busted during the protests. Prisons in which there are no Black or Hispanic gangs to rape them in and which they will emerge from alive and then emigrate to go live in your town and vote Democrat and support CRT at the local PTA. I feel for them… You do grok, don’t you, that as soon as foreign Freedom Fighters (yay!) show up in the USA they invariably immediately figure out which way the wind is blowing and get on the racial grift bandwagon. They don’t know what they want and they got sold a bill of goods by GloboHomo and by the same people who managed to make Iraq worse than it even was for the average Iraqi.

    Well, it sucks to be those guys.

    It also sucks to be young, middle-class, and only able to afford maximum one child because of the 100% non-CCP driven non-free market in property. Somehow the Heritage Foundation never notices that both Singapore and Hong Kong are in effect run by local oligarchical cartels in their annual free enterprise reports (because the Heritage Foundation are a bunch of stupid clowns just like most Official Conservatism :P). Immediately the UK started handing out ‘refugee’ visas like candy to HK’ers, these folks sold their tiny flats in HK and bugged out for Greater Manchester, Reading, etc. I know a few who did this.

    Now the UK should have handed these out before 1997. They did not. Anyway, said ‘refugees’ are in for a shock when they find they’ve gone and plonked themselves down in a society which badly mismanaged Covid demonstrating massive managerial incompetence, which cannot and will not protect its own populace against predation by Third World Immigrants, and which will encourage their now affordable 2.1 children to become trannies and degenerates. But far better to be a tranny and mutilate yourself at age 12 than to salute the Chinky flag at morning school assembly, no? I mean the inhumanity of having to love your country!

    So… not as simple as just Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad.

    Of course this place is no paradise. Nowhere is. And in 3, 2, 1, the obsessive Om will show up to claim that I live a life of sybaritic ease and privilege here and that I’m in no way representative of life as it really is. All I can say is that I’ve been in and around this place for 30 years, know people from all walks of life, and have actually adapted and *changed* my views in light of new experiences and new data. Eventually I noticed that one of these approaches to living while having its cruelties and excesses was becoming progressively saner and building a future while the other was become progressively more insane and shredding its own people and any it’s culture came into contact with. YMMV.

    Now, back to Hamsters.

    https://www.covidvaccine.gov.hk/en/dashboard

    If you click this evil Communist Link and scroll down, you’ll notice something. 56.7% vaccination for people age 70-79. 28% for people aged 80 and above. Now why would that be? Well… believe it or not… and you should believe the truth… This evil Communist regime doesn’t go around forcing its senior citizens to roll the dice with vaccines which could easily kill them. It gives them a free choice. Weird that, no? Possibly went unmentioned at Free Republic? Of course the regime also didn’t throw a bunch of sick people into Aged Care homes at the start of the pandemic either. Only degenerate Westerners could be that stupid. This is a Confucian society. Still a deeply Confucian society. There is a thin patina of Zhongshan Suits (that’s a Mao Suit to those who don’t know anything about Chinese history but still fee OK to comment on it) and red flags and slogans which nobody takes literally. What you really have is just another dynasty in a succession of Imperial dynasties. And Chinese dynasties rule not through randomly slaughtering their citizenry but through promoting the greater good and respecting Confucian pieties — e.g. not offing the oldies just because it’s expedient to do so.

    (What happens when dynasties collapse, or falter, and there are interregnums and civil wars is another story: that’s where things like the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution get filed — along with the equally bloody Taiping rebellion, Mongol invasions, Xiongnu, and other things you simply don’t have context for.)

    So… Don’t kill the Oldies. Respect the Oldies. Don’t force them to get vaccines which may or may not work and may or may not kill them. So whatyougonnado?

    Well, one thing you might do is feed Hammy the Hamster into the woodchipper if it looks like a bunch of Hamsters in different pet shops and the pet shop warehouse all have Covid.

    Because Humans Before Animals.

    Or, I suppose you could import some Blacks to loot freight trains and give Cuomo a book contract and then say ‘But they’re not OUR team… they’re Demoncrats’. So what? Still your place and you haven’t stopped them yet. So why throwing stones at other people’s slightly cleaner glass houses?

    🙂

    Now admit it, you knew you’d get a good rant out of me… and I like to keep my public happy.

  18. That chimp knew he’d triumphed. If it were a he. Think it’s mature? Kind of small. glad he hadn’t watched anybody swapping mags.

  20. The Euthanasia advocates never mention something anyone who has been around the terminally ill knows: When things get bad enough they *will* slap one on a syringe driver and keep upping the dose. Painkillers, you know. Everybody plays along with the charade it because it’s all for the best.

    So, while there are great unpleasantnesses many of us will have to endure, it’s not as bad as the Euthanasia Fanatics claim.. and simple truth is that as humans we all have a moral duty to take one for the team so as not to pave the way and grease the slippery slope for the evils that legalised Euthanasia would permit.

  21. Z die-jest is a tome of tomes. Exceeds even the philosopher.

    Even prisons in Hong Kong and the CCP don’t have gangs (those features (organized crime and gangs)) are surprisingly racially determined. Astounding how civilized the Han are, almost a master race to hear Z. 🙂 😉 😉

    Imagine that, probably there were no gangs in the Soviet Union or in Roosia today either.

    Okay, Z, you have to sell something. A sucker born every minute and the old shell game. Nothing new here.

    Carry on as you will.

  22. Go get your Booster Shot, Om. Won’t hurt a bit.

    Prisons have Triad gangs. Funny that.

    When was the last time you heard of Chinese Triads looting a train? Or burning down the only grocery store in their neighbourhood? These guys have triple digit IQs. Different type of criminality.

    They *will* be the Master Race if yer don’t all up yer game. Stat.

    Nothing to sell and nothing to declare except my partiality — which I make no secret of.

  24. The Z die-jest continues.

    So there are gangs in China and Hong Kong after all, and somehow Z knows about gang behavior in Hong Kong prisons and in the bigger part of Xi land. Or just more smoke.

    And how does my vaccine status have anything to do with anything Z?

    But it is reported that the CCP vaccine is even less effective than those in the West. Seems the CCP wasted the head start that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had on everybody. Z’s master race seems to have stumbled out of the starting blocks (that’s a track and field thing Z), sort of like jamming your derailleur Chappie.

    Keep the comedy coming and your ball rolling.

  25. @Om:

    The ChinkyVax doesn’t seem to be very effective. We all know that. Mind you, doesn’t seem to have as many nasty side effects as the Western ones. Doubtless, however you still think they planned the Pandemic from the Get Go? 🙂

    In HK you get a choice: No Vax, Chinky Vax, Pfizer Vax.

    You’re not Peter Stringer or Richard Gere… You probably can figure out the right answer to the choice between your Hamster or your Life if you sit quietly and nut it out for a while. Begone!

  26. In non Hong Kong and non Xi land we have a thing called a Constitution that is sometimes used and useful. You wouldn’t know about that and have no use for such things.

    But you said thqt you choice entirely relies on evading the law and the regs. Funny how that choice works. The master race is incompetent too?

    The master race stumbled. Zoot alours!

    This isn’t your bog and do stay civil. Carry on Chappie.

  27. Getting boring Om.

    I’ll just say that I’m probably more free in my quotidian existence than you are. As are most folks in HK. And even Greater China. There’s less Big Brother breathing down their backs and the worst that the Educational System seems to do is instill nationalism / patriotism. As far as I can tell it’s not teaching children to hate their parents and irreversibly sexually mutilate themselves at an impressionable age.

    At least here we rig our elections cleanly and efficiently. You guys can’t even manage that 😀

    In China, Government cuts Big Tech down to size. In USA Big Tech cuts your preferred President down to size.

    For all your vaunted freedoms, you’re still in effect a serf of FedGov via a Federal Contractor. Frankly for that alone, you should not have a vote or any other say in the governing of your polity given that you feast upon the public teat. But if you really believe that you’re free, why don’t you go post a link to your participation here in this blog on the Company Slack and see how long you last 🙂

  28. Moving Right Along From Om…

    Some of you will be familiar with ‘Gun Jesus’. Very informative guy on YouTube.

    Well… Here’s Harpsichord Jesus! And he’s a Revelation.

    Bach – Aria mit 30 Veränderungen Goldberg Variations BWV 988 – Rondeau | Netherlands Bach Society
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AtOPiG5jyk

    A YouTube channel subscription to the NL Bach Society is highly recommended.

  29. The Z die-jest continues.

    I chose to work where I work and contrary to your self appointed omnicience it isn’t serfdom. Those things called “words” actually have meaning. As regards your “knowing” about the US, well our hostess has tried to correct your ignorance about that too. A lost cause.

    Its been reported that many are fleeing your freedom in Hong Kong. That might be a clue Z.

    Carry on while you can and stay out of the jails as long as they allow it.

    Keep your joke coming.
    Cheers, Chappie.

  30. I am behind on reading the blog….
    Spartacus, condolences and prayers for you and your nephew’s family!
    Yes, we need to press on and fix this monstrosity!

  31. Something very quite amazing: Accidental Stereo Recordings.

    Way back when, Before Reel-to-Reel Tape, recordings were made by cutting 78RPM masters. Sometimes it happened that the recording engineers cut two masters with two microphones on two machines at the same time so as to have a backup and to have two Masters to generate copies to send off to record pressing plants.

    Well… guess what? Nowadays it’s trivial to cue them up and run them through some cleanup DSP and produce stereo recordings:

    ELGAR, KOUSSEVITZKY, STOKOWSKI Accidental Stereo Recordings (1929-33) – PASC422
    https://www.pristineclassical.com/products/pasc422

  32. @ Zaphod > listened to the audio at your link while I was reading.
    So nice to hear some good symphonic music!

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