Japan puzzles over its sudden coronavirus-control success.

Hey, here’s another one of those articles that treats it like some sort of grand mystery that vaccination is working. It also contains a large lie (and links to an article that discusses a study that’s been fairly well been debunked IIRC).

He cautioned, however, that breakthrough infections in the U.S., Britain and other places where inoculations began months earlier than in Japan show that vaccines alone are not perfect and efficacy gradually wears off.

Sterilizing immunity wears off a bit. This is not the fucking same as efficacy waning, which the very article this goofus links to states quite clearly. Why just lie? How does that help anything? The Pfizer vaccine retains 90% of its ability to prevent hospitalization as expected.

Even as the Delta variant became the predominant strain across the Southland, the vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations held steady at close to 90% for as long as six months.

Note again, again, again for the hard of reading, that “as long as six months” DOES NOT MEAN “only six months,” but that six months was the resolution of the study.

When I say that libs lie about vaccine efficacy (“the vaccines don’t work”) this is exactly what I mean. So why do they do it? Just desire for continued lockdown life? Simple malice? I have no reasons that make sense. But I know I despise them, and that’s enough for me.

I know a lot of people hated this intro, but that’s just such a bang-on performance from Virginia Madsen. And the hair and makeup are great. I am glad they didn’t give her any unusual body mods or even have her speaking another language in this scene because as it is, when she begins the monologue she just seems unutterably strange. It’s like she only learned to speak English 30 minutes ago and is having thoughts of cosmic horror the entire time. She just seems not really like us at all, and the effect is only enhanced because she looks normal. If they’d had her speaking another tongue or made her look too odd, the just unspeakable foreignness of her affect would have been much reduced.

The way she says “fold space.” What. The. Fuck. That accent…Madsen is an American, and she somehow came up with an accent that sounds like nothing any human has ever spoken before or since. Just such a great weirdo fucking showing from her.

I love that intro so much.

Lucy’s solar panel hasn’t latched—a problem for a mission powered by the Sun.

All deep space missions should be nuclear-powered. Solar power for this kind of craft is insane and a terrible idea. We let people’s terror of anything nuclear ruin so much.

I’m a generic Twitter user and I tested positive for COVID. I am utterly furious at you for giving it to me and I am going to vent in this thread.

And vent I will, as I am the innocent victim of your reckless behaviour that led you to contract COVID.

1/

— Julian (@julianlewis2012) October 15, 2021

Great thread.

Something that was really reinforced for me by Covid: people highly overvalue their own priorities, and literally cannot imagine anyone else would have any different ones, or that there are real tradeoffs involved in any choice, unavoidable ones.

Not everything is zero sum, but some things are. And during a pandemic, many things are.

Before the new version, let’s revisit 1984’s Dune—the greatest movie ever made.

I wouldn’t say “greatest,” but it’s a really damn good film and below is one of the reasons.

I love Dune because it feels just as alien as something set 80 centuries in the future should. (To put that span of time in context, remember that 8,000 years in the past would still be 3,500 years before the Great Pyramids were built.) To create this feeling, Lynch blurs the novel’s plot and characters into a Spaceballs “ludicrous speed” lightshow.

That is also why I love Lynch’s Dune. You have no idea why any of those people are doing what they are doing and that’s the way I like my far-future science fiction. It seems the characters do have reasons that motivate them, but they are incomprehensible to us — as would be true for events that are happening 8,000 years hence.

There’s just so much glorious strangeness in that film, as there should be.

How the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Helped Make Your Smartphone’s Screen Possible.

Another thing that according to liberals “never happened” but of course is true of many technologies they use every day. The article lists a few of them but what nearly everyone misses is the spillover funds from the general Weltanschauung of valuing science that also never would’ve occurred without lavish funding of space-related activities.

Still, good piece that’ll have a billion libs wailing.