An advertisement-free blog about motorcycling, Northern life, home improvement, power plants, submarines, nuclear stuff, and a few other off-beat subjects. Comments are welcome. (Image is the Selway Crags in Northern Idaho)
James Stockdale, on his 7 years as a POW of North Vietnam, in the "Hanoi Hilton".
Q: "Who didn't make it out?"
A: "Oh, that's easy. The optimists"
Q: "The optimists? I don't understand."
A: "The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, "We're going to be out by Christmas." And Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they'd say "We're going to be out by Easter." And Easter would come and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart"
I have more to say about the pandemic response from both the media and the authorities, the loss of life, and the wobbly economy. That will be a longer and more thoughtful post, and it will have to wait for a bit.
This is not my normal type of post. I try to avoid social or political commentary, but I think unusual times deserve unusual responses. As I write this post, we are at the beginning of a global pandemic that's keeping most of the world under a no-travel advisory, or "lock-down".
Below: Playing chess with Death during the Black Plague - a scene from "The Seventh Seal"
Apparently we have passed a time in this country where the US government is willing to give its citizens some straight talk about a public health issue.
For those who haven't seen what straight talk from the government looks like, or no longer remember, watch the video below. Back then they understood that propaganda/spin wasn't going to fix an infectious outbreak. In the video below, the US Surgeon General , C. Everett Koop, explains HIV/AIDS to the US on national TV.
Modern Infotainment provides either scaremongering, or viewing this viral pandemic through the lens of politics or economics. This is not useful framing for Covid-19, which is a public health issue. Infectious diseases don't care about politics or economies, nor about your wealth or your place in the hierarchy of human civilization. So give that crap up for now, and try to make yourself safe.
I'd like to share a quick 15 minute video, where an expert in contagious diseases shares his thoughts with a guy who asks (mostly) decent questions. Please watch and learn. I guess this is the modern equivalent of the US Surgeon General going on TV.
It's pathetic that Americans should have to scour the internet to locate a video on their own to gather decent information on what might prove to be a world-altering event. It's more pathetic that it's a private citizen that has to provide the forum for this information.
It is widely believed that a large asteroid collision was responsible for the event that caused dinosaurs to suddenly go extinct after ruling the planet for millions of years. They were not capable of foreseeing the event, but humans are. So we spend time, effort, and money scanning the sky for these dangerous objects.
Even so, recently an asteroid exploded in an air-burst above the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. The asteroid wasn't detected until it slammed into the atmosphere at a speed of tens of kilometers/second.
I recently watched this fascinating video about the tremendous difficulty of detecting earth-crossing asteroids, and thought I'd share it.
