What’s the most recent known speciation event?

— Misha Gurevich. Angel Investor, Photographer. (@drethelin) July 19, 2021

This exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding both of biology and evolution. Speciation is not an event, it is a process. Species boundaries are not so sharply-delineated as that, there is not one identifiable moment when one species diverges into two.

I don’t know why people think about this sort of thing — and most things — so poorly.

Nevertheless, there is some literature.

More.

More.

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The Kids Were Safe From COVID the Whole Time. Why now is the time to rethink COVID safety protocols for children — and everyone else.

According to the CDC, among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same.

This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic — indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease. The preliminary mortality data from China was very clear: To children, COVID-19 represented only a vanishingly tiny threat of death, hospitalization, or severe disease

This gratuitous torture of so many people for no reason at all will make us seem like utter demented fools to anyone looking back in years and decades hence. The judgement of history will not be kind, nor should it be.

But the below you definitely aren’t supposed to talk about. It gets in the way of panic and the plutes hoovering up even more money.

All told, 80 percent of American deaths have been among those 65 and above. According to the White House, 90 percent of American seniors are now fully vaccinated. Which means that while more cases are likely and some amount of hospitalization and death, as well, vaccines have eliminated the overwhelming share of American mortality risk, with the disease now circulating almost exclusively among people who can endure it much, much better — kids especially.

Remember this as people are panicking over the Delta variant and demanding yet more NPIs, lockdowns, and the continuance of prison countries into the foreseeable future. These people are your enemy and they hate you; they want you and everyone to suffer in perpetuity while the plutes loot all your wealth. This is because they hope to get a piece of that purloined pie, directly or indirectly.

It is absolutely fucking insane in particular what we are doing to kids, given their extremely low risk from Covid.

And the risk of children is dramatically smaller still than that CDC baseline; according to one, much-cited paper, the infection fatality rate for those aged 5 to 9 is less than 0.001 percent. It suggests that a child of that age, even sick, faces roughly one-ten-thousandth the mortality risk of an 85-year-old

Long Covid in kids is much rarer than we had been led to believe, too.

Reading this article that is actually grounded in some sort of reality, and not in panic and/or the dreamy fantasies of “Zero Covid” nonsense, you realize just how much we’ve overreacted after the initial uncertainty and continue to do so.

We need to get out of the penitentiary pandemic mindset. It’s not too late to quit torturing kids and harming ourselves.

The diesel price increase may have been the trigger, but, to interpret the Gilets Jaunes first and foremost as a protest against climate policy is to miss the point. The real target was economic distress, inequality and President Macron.

The Gilets Jaunes had to be portrayed as “against climate policy” because that would successfully demonize them in the eyes of the left. It worked!

By the way, this mostly only happened in the Anglophone press and not nearly as much in the French press. There, it’d be harder to lie successfully. Having to cross a language barrier enabled this disinformation to prosper quite well and now most Anglophone liberals believe the Gilets Jaunes were just a bunch of racist hicks who wanted the planet to burn.

In reality they were for climate policy that forced the rich to also make sacrifices, and outside of that they supported the reduction of inequality in society generally.

I wonder how much of the same sort of distortion and deceit is done when covering movements and events that occur in languages I can’t read and understand? I bet a whole damn lot.

When lost in lockdown, let your senses save you.

This is propaganda preparing the way for the next inevitable wave of lockdown in many places. It made the plutes too much money not to keep repeating it. Why mess with success? Throughout the pandemic, The Guardian has been an an enormous lockdown narrative backer, never failing to perfectly hit all the proper lib/plute-supporting notes.

I wonder how long this will keep working? I don’t mean lockdowns. I mean, how long will the libs really go for this, how many years will the propaganda narrative function? Will they really believe this is the way life has to be in a decade?

I don’t know. It seems so but I wish I didn’t believe this. Anyway, get locked down, peasant! A billionaire needs more cash.

Watch how great Naomi Watts is here. Anyone who thinks that level of performance does not take extreme skill is just delusional. Try having a regular person do that and it’d be absurd.

Christ she’s brilliant there. I like seeing it unedited.

In 1992 with the world watching, Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo shot the arrow of a lifetime to light the Olympic cauldron in Barcelona to begin the Summer Games. He had extracted a promise from organizers to allow him a second shot if he missed. It was not necessary.

Hey, remember when we weren’t concerned with everything being “completely safe?” We were having a lot more fun then.

Notice that he shot a big fucking flaming arrow over the heads of a few thousand spectators. “Completely safe” wasn’t something we used to give a crap about, and it was better.

When did the so-called liberals become the ones hating sex, hating socializing, despising space exploration, detesting going outside, hating the Olympics, most standing firmly against the majority of their former strongly-held values of freedom and personal choice?

What the hell happened there?

What a clever and fun book cover:

I might have to pop that book into an e-reader, see what song it sings.

Boris Johnson is taking another huge gamble by lifting lockdowns in England.

Hey, libs, haven’t y’all gotten the news yet that there are a variety of safe and effective vaccines that are widely available? Have you heard? It’s pretty cool.

You should totally look into it.