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Home » Open thread 2/23/22

Open thread 2/23/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw this as a short in a movie theater when I was a kid, and something in a recent comment thread made me think of it again:

Comments

Open thread 2/23/22 — 34 Comments

  1. A shortage of shells in 1940 left the Italian fascists grasping for a replacement. They tried ziti with disastrous results. The guns fell silent. We know how THAT ended.

  2. Thank you for this from a Swiss-born American. Notice the lack of
    tomato sauce on the Spaghetti, just the way I like it.

    I found your blog on “American Digest”, NEO. It’s always interesting.
    Thank you for that also.

  3. In the Midwest of the USA, flyover land, there is the annual corn syrup festival, similar to the tradition of Maple Syrup tapping, but on a much larger scale. The immense quantity of buckets required, one for each corn stalk, is almost incomprehensible. It is a tribute to American ingenuity and work ethic.

    On a more sinister note, it has been reported that trans fats are being persecuted if not banned entirely. Such injustice!

  5. As a Wisconsin Badger, I like to journey to Appleton, and look out over the Great Fondue Lake, where most of the Western world’s chip dip and nacho cheese is pumped from.

  6. om,

    If you think the Midwestern corn syrup tappers are industrious, you need to visit a California orchard during Almond milking season. Amazing dexterity!

  7. Love the dry humor. And . . . I also like spaghetti squash, which actually does exist and can serve as a substitute for spaghetti.

  9. Great comments everyone! Any a wonderful video Neo!!

    Anyway … surfing the web today I came across political “analysis” from, what is to me, left-leaning website The Hill.

    It mentions the we Republicans are pushing the Inflation and mouth-diaper … uh … mask issues to great effect.

    For some bizarre and unknowable reason I found ZERO mention of far-leftist forced indoctrination in K-12 American public schools.

    My guess is that the issue is the most toxic and effective issue we normals have to use.

    My goodness … the most deeply Blue city in the most deeply Blue state votes 70%!!!! against Marxist indoctrination.

    I think it’s the EDUCATION issue that has the donks soiling themselves – led by President Brandon – the most.

  11. Here’s an “Everything You Know Is Wrong” article on vaccines. It’s so at odds with what I thought I knew on the subject, I don’t know what to say. I’ll have to do some reading and thinking.
    __________________________

    What is occurring now in Canada and other places is almost identical to what happened with the smallpox vaccination campaigns over a century ago, and I believe it is critical we understand these lessons from the past…

    Briefly, the original smallpox vaccine was an unusually harmful vaccination that was never tested before being adopted. It increased, rather than decreased smallpox outbreaks. As the danger and inefficacy became known, increasing public protest developed towards vaccination. Yet, as smallpox increased, governments around the world instead adopted more draconian mandatory vaccination policies. Eventually, one of the largest protests of the century occurred in 1885 in Leicester (an English city). Leicester‘s government was replaced, mandatory vaccination abolished, and public health measures rejected by the medical community were implemented. These measures were highly successful, and once adopted globally ended the smallpox epidemic, something most erroneously believe arose from vaccination.

    –“The smallpox pandemic response was eerily similar to COVID”
    https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/the-smallpox-pandemic-response-was

  12. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/us-soccer-caves-to-baseless-equal-pay-outrage-settles-big-with-womens-team

    Another item for the file marked “America’s business leadership is chock-a-block with deeply unserious people happy to screw over their shareholders when they’re not working to injure the general public”

    And they’re doing it to please Megan Rapinoe, whose view is that you should be paid according to asserted status (i.e. according to the value-scales of unttractive lesbians), not according to the revenue and earnings attributable to what you do.

  13. I would not be surprised if this spaghetti harvest video were shown to 10,000 college seniors, over 9000 of them would believe it.

  15. huxley:

    My opinion is that that smallpox piece is highly misleading; the author definitely has an agenda and I don’t think he or she is objective. I also think he’s cherry-picking his information.

    I believe that smallpox vaccination is the earliest vaccine on record. Its history goes back to the very late 1700s with cowpox inoculation. As bad as our CDC is now, medicine back then was nothing like modern medicine in terms of testing or much of anything else. It was a long process of learning, and the development of many different forms of the vaccine along the way. But early testing was very primitive compared to today.

    It was understood that the protection offered was a very imperfect protection, and that some people would sicken and die. But it was considered better than smallpox, which was highly contagious, very deadly, and much more disfiguring for survivors. You can find a lot of the history at Wiki and many other sites.

    I’ve read a lot in the past about smallpox and the later vaccine, and I have never read anything that indicates what that author writes, that “public heath measures rejected by the medical community” were responsible for the eradication of smallpox. The anonymous author never says what they are other than just general sanitation and better general health, and I find it hard to believe that they were what really turned the tide because smallpox (unlike diseases like dysentery, for example) is one of the most contagious and awful diseases in the world, and doesn’t depend on things like uncontaminated drinking water or insect control. Smallpox is spread by sneezing or coughing or otherwise inhaling droplets from an infected person, and as I said it’s highly contagious.

    Vaccination mattered:

    Second, it can be seen that among selected countries, those that had adopted vaccination legislation earlier saw their smallpox death rates decrease more substantially and suffered fewer casualties during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. Austria and Belgium, both of which never made smallpox vaccination mandatory, still recorded large numbers of smallpox deaths from 1875 onwards whereas other European countries displayed had already driven down smallpox fatalities significantly by then.

    Nevertheless, smallpox was still endemic in every European country at the end of the 19th century.

    There are plenty of charts there. Particularly impressive is the chart of smallpox around the world – it’s pretty high prior to the worldwide vaccination outreach in the 1970s and then it precipitously flatlines.

    Another chart later on is described here:

    The dramatic decline in smallpox fatalities in response to Jenner’s vaccine can be traced in the chart, which shows the number of deaths due to smallpox as a share of all deaths in London from 1629 to 1902. Before the introduction of a smallpox vaccine in 1796, on average 7.6% (1-in-13) of all deaths were caused by smallpox. Following introduction of the vaccine, we see a clear decline in smallpox deaths.

    I suggest you take a look at that article.

  16. Interesting article on how woke-style “equity” is destroying MLK-style equality:

    “How The Left’s Push For ‘Equity’ Is Destroying Equality”
    https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/23/how-the-lefts-push-for-equity-is-destroying-equality/
    – – – – – – –
    And…Durham, continued. Margot Cleveland explains:
    “THREAD: Interesting (and potentially huge) discovery from Durham filings.”
    https://twitter.com/ProfMJCleveland/status/1496477425127067650

  19. Politics free satire… how refreshing.

    JimNorCal,

    The Trudeau cabal is also encouraging their Canadian subjects to watch out for and turn into the authorities the names of anyone they know with “questionable opinions”… identifying as many of the ‘troublemakers’ as possible is the obvious goal, so that when the time is right, they can be dealt with…

  20. @Neo thank you for writing that reply, I was about to comment that I thought it was very likely to be an agenda piece. During the Revolutionary War, smallpox was one of the chief causes of casualty. If one didn’t die outright, there was a good chance of being crippled or handicapped physically, or blinded, and an excellent chance of disfigurement. Soldiers were so desperate for some kind of protection they would scrape the pus from an affected patient to apply to themselves (a crude form of vaccination – sorry for the graphic description).

  21. neo:

    Yes, thanks for the reply.

    What you say is in line (and sounds like you’ve done more research) with what I know of the smallpox vaccine.

    Yet the author, anonymously self-declared to be an MD, sounded so sure!

  22. https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-1-of-population-accountable-for-63.html

    “@The Lab Manager: I’m afraid the testimony at their trial completely disproves your claims about “three awesome white men”. They were anything but awesome; they were tried and convicted by a jury of their peers, and they got what they deserved. If I’d been on that jury, based on the evidence presented, I’d have voted to convict them.”

    Dear Whypeepo: Best not end up on trial for the rest of your natural lives when Virtuous Peter Grant is on the jury.

  23. @Huxley:

    Pound’s ABC arrived yesterday. I’m very much taken with the Aeneid in Scots!

    It’s not every day you get told off by a buke to go meditate upon Seneca / Omar Khayyam + Rochester / Fitzgerald.

  24. Z:

    Best not say what Xi, Winnie the Pooh, doesn’t like, or you’ll be missed. You after all are a white person, not that it matters to those pragmatic masters of yours.

  25. Zaphod:

    Let’s see if I’ve got this straight.

    Someone recommends a book, you like what you hear, you order the book and then you start reading?

    You are a strange lad!

    Maybe it will catch on.

    Latenightways I’ve been reading “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” I tried to read it in high school and had no idea where the book was coming from. Now I find it rather funny. I imagine N. pounding the table and roaring about GREAT HEALTHINESS!

    Clearly Nietzsche was mad or high on top-shelf stimulants.
    ___________________________

    We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand, we
    firstlings of a yet untried future–we require for a new
    end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger,
    sharper, tougher, bolder and merrier than all healthiness hitherto.
    He whose soul longeth to experience the whole range of hitherto
    recognised values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the
    coasts of this ideal ‘Mediterranean Sea’, who, from the adventures
    of his most personal experience, wants to know how it feels to be a
    conqueror, and discoverer of the ideal–as likewise how it is with
    the artist, the saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the
    devotee, the prophet, and the godly non-conformist of the old
    style:–requires one thing above all for that purpose, GREAT
    HEALTHINESS–such healthiness as one not only possesses, but
    also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one
    unceasingly sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it!

    –Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarahthustra”
    ___________________________

    I understand that Nietzsche wouldn’t have looked ahead at Hitler and Nazis and said, “There. That. That’s the Man and the Movement.”

    But the more casual onlooker who connected the dots between the three wouldn’t have been off-base.

  26. @Huxley:

    “Someone recommends a book, you like what you hear, you order the book and then you start reading?”

    Pretty much like that. Otherwise I’d just keep reading more of the same, no? Of course if I don’t like what I hear, I retaliate disproportionately with cruise missiles.

    Which reminds me is there a book you can recommend along the lines of “No, you’re not Caspar Weinberger. Relax!”

    I think the point with Nietzsche is that he figured out that Western Thought had a gigantic boil on its behind in dire need of lancing. Not entirely convinced that he was the go to guy for reconstructive surgery.

    Can’t remember if it’s in Zarathustra or not because been a long time… still I think memory not playing me false here… but any buke with:

    (a) a village called The Spotted Cow

    and

    (b) describing a young child as a Self-propelling Wheel

    is better than the average book.

    I woudln’t go quite so far as to call Ezra Pound the Ariel Sharon of Literary Critics, but it’s fun to read his pithy diatribes against Anthologists for leaving this or that out and putting other dross in. For someone who grew up with a parental bookshelf of F R Leavis nonsense crit… bliss.

  27. @Huxley:

    I’m kind of a broken record on this topic (no… not the Joos… Syphilis):

    The good old Spirochetes likely did a bit to liven up Nietzsche’s creativity as he aged. As they did for the likes of Schubert and Maupassant amongst many others.

    Can’t remember where I first read it but someone pointed out that genius level creativity has gone downhill since the invention of Sulphanomides and Penicillin. Seems not wrong.

  28. Thus spake Zarathustra. And at that time he abode in the town
    which is called The Pied Cow.

    Zaphod:

    Close enough!

    Oh, “Thus Spake” is better than the average book. But then I like the mad writers and the high writers.

    Nietzsche was big. As I sometimes slot things, the three models Westerners have to choose from come down to Judeo-Christianity, Scientific Materialism or Nietzschean self-creation.

  29. @Huxley:

    “As I sometimes slot things, the three models Westerners have to choose from come down to Judeo-Christianity, Scientific Materialism or Nietzschean self-creation.”

    Can I get a refund?

    That being said, I’d pay good money to see you do a TED Talk explaining to the Trannies that they’re mostly Fun House Mirror Nietzcheans.

    I guess my politics are more Procrustean than Protean, but for sure am no kind of Scientific Materialist Devil.

  30. …genius level creativity has gone downhill since the invention of Sulphanomides and Penicillin.

    Zaphod:

    Perhaps. Though in general I note that we no longer seem to have the wealth of Cult-Level Intellectuals offered by the 20th C.

    I think people were eventually vaccinated (ahem) against Genius Guys boldly pointing The Way to the Future.

  32. In the 2008 HBO mini-series, “John Adams,” there is a segment where some children and parents are purposefully given the pox virus as a “vaccine” against small pox. The segment depicts them all getting real sick, but they all survive.

    Recall that John Adams was the second president of the USA .

    That series also showed folks washing down their wooden floors with vinegar as a disinfectant.

  33. @ huxley > “We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand”

    Nietzsche got that last part right.
    We were looking through our bookshelves just last night (before I read this thread) and spotted our copies of “Zarathustra” in German and English, still unread after several decades, and jointly determined that (at 70) life was now too short to bother reading them.

    Share anything of interest that you find, though; I don’t have to read something to have an opinion on it!

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