Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
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Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

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Saturday, February 19. 2022

Saturday morning links


Image via P'line's Week in Pictures


 How conscious are we of reality?


Is "long Covid" real?


I often have fatigue and brain fog, don't you? I never had Covid though.


Making it illegal to do talk therapy with the gender-confused 


 Trade Restrictions on Oysters Get Shucked


The Flight of Big Tech. Lethargic, overcapitalized, and resigned to Chinese dominance, Silicon Valley is losing its productive talent to the Midwest and South


WSJ:  Who Are Those ‘Techies’ Who Spied on Trump? ‘Benevolent posse’ or partisans for Hillary Clinton? John Durham has the answer.


 The Checkered Past of the FBI Cyber Contractor Who 'Spied' on Trump


 Cringe Inducing: Kamala Harris Explains The Internet To Audience As If They Are Toddlers…


 VP Harris Finally Focused on Securing the Border. No, Not Ours—Ukraine's.


 Whether or there is large-scale fighting in the Ukraine, the key thing is that it won't involve the US








Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 05:52 | Comments (19) | Trackbacks (0)

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I can't stand to listen to Kamala Harris speak. She plasters this smiley, insincere expression on her face when she starts, tilts her head, and proceeds to lecture us all in that little-girl voice. This is what sits a heart-beat away from the presidency.
#1 RebeccaH on 2022-02-19 09:50 (Reply)
Give her a break, Rebecca. She was just reminding herself of something she just learned.
#1.1 mudbug on 2022-02-19 11:07 (Reply)
Well, you know who Kamala learned theses things from, don’t you? Who else in politics has been putting on the exact same act for thirty years now?
#1.2 B. Hammer on 2022-02-19 12:43 (Reply)
"Making it illegal to do talk therapy with the gender confused"

Well logically that would make it illegal to encourage it or talk positively about it too! Right?
#2 JustMe on 2022-02-19 10:04 (Reply)
Re Consciousness and reality: Interesting article, worth reading closely. It's hardly a new insight that the world we perceive with our senses is an evolutionally crafted model of the real world. For instance, we only have sharp, color vision in a small, ~10 degree angle of view corresponding to the fovea region of the retina. Yet we have strong impression of color vision out to the periphery. The visual system creates this model by constantly scanning the environment in a series of brief glances (saccades). It seems to be partly created from memory, and partly by the visual system "filling in the blanks", as is shown in many experiments with visual illusions. It light of this it seems no great mystery that we don't perceive all of what is right in front of us. But it also implies that we may have a degree of control over what we notice.

Consciousness, I believe, is closely connected with memory. A (traditional, mechanical) thermostat has no memory; claiming it possesses a rudimentary "awareness" simply because it responds to temperature changes just trivializes the meaning of "awareness". By this definition, a melting ice cube is also "aware" of the temperature of the room.

I think it is also a stretch to claim that e.g. web-connected devices or simulations extend our "reality" in any more than a trivial sense, the way a violin does for a violinist or a book does for a reader. More of a quantitative than a qualitative difference, I think.

Dr. Chalmers is to be commended for taking on a difficult problem indeed. I hope he keeps chugging away at it.
#3 Hairless Joe on 2022-02-19 10:29 (Reply)
After watching the police in Canada full riot gear backed by police with full auto rifles and them backed by snipers as they set off to bring violence to a totally peaceful protest I wonder if this will end well? It seems to be an intentional provocation through use of unnecessary force. I acknowledge that the government has the right to end a protest that shuts down public streets even when the protest is peaceful and even when the protestors are right and the government is wrong. But why the violence? It is obvious watching it that three cops could enter the crowd and handcuff and arrest any protestor, we have seen that. It is so peaceful that no one is resisting, so why the violence? Now contrast that with the lack of police response to the antifa and BLM riots in Canada where the crowd set fires, injured people, fought the police, looted and caused massive damage. Why?

Because the BLM and Antifa were no threat to the New World Order, in fact they were their brownshirts. But the citizens opposing the unnecessary and tyrannical mandates are a threat aimed at the heart of the NWO. The law abiding citizens are a threat to Trudeau's rule and must be crushed. Jan 6th comes to mind here. Our own government is no different than Canada's in this respect. Our leaders are beholden to the NWO and not the voters. If we hope to survive we have to change this, one way or another.
#4 Anon on 2022-02-19 11:12 (Reply)
You've nailed it.
#4.1 Humdeedee on 2022-02-19 13:04 (Reply)
Regarding you picture can I add stop putting sirens into radio commercials. Probably 95% of radio listening takes place in the car and the sirens played on the radio can cause confusion.
#5 DailyDriver on 2022-02-19 11:16 (Reply)
More doorbell.
#5.1 Zachriel on 2022-02-19 11:51 (Reply)
QUOTE:
Our own government is no different than Canada's


Quick, name a US politician (other than Trump) that has spoken out against any of the actions that the Canadian government has taken against the truckers? Any politician in the West? I know about the guy down in S. America. They must be okay with this type of action? Especially the seizing of Canadian bank accounts? Name one. Where is Sir brave Ted Cruz? I don’t think even DeSantis has had a comment on the bank seizures.
#6 B. Hammer on 2022-02-19 13:02 (Reply)
If I were a US Senator I don't think I would comment much on Canada's political events. I don't like it when they comment on ours, after all. Why are you so certain that good judgement is actually timidity and cowardice?
#6.1 Assistant Village Idiot on 2022-02-20 08:58 (Reply)
Regarding long Covid. I would believe there are potentially some long term damage outcomes which take place. I have a friend who claims his myocardia is a result of Covid. I question that, mainly because he had it prior to Covid, though he says his doctor claimed Covid made it worse.
I know other people who all have varying forms of 'long term' issues. I had a few.
I know, for at least 2 months after having it, I was in a brain fog and had short-term memory issues. I was sleeping up to 9 hours a night. I was very tired. Then summer rolled around, I was out exercising, going to the gym again, and pretty soon I was back to normal and better than before.
Of course, when I was forced to get the vaccine, I found myself terribly ill for a day and ever since then (about 3 months now), I've been fatigued and sleeping up to 9 hours a night again. There was a brief period of that brain fog again, but it didn't last. Still, I have noticed that my ability to spend time on the elliptical has suffered dramatically. I've definitely had lung capacity issues which I told my doctor about. Nothing major, but noticeable. And my joints have been giving me problems.

Are any of these things related to the vaccine or Covid? I have no idea. I'm not suggesting they are, but it is odd these situations coincided with me getting the vaccine.

That said, it's like the "syndromes" people love to sue doctors over. Nothing precise, not clear similar set of symptoms presented, but by taking 10,000 people who have varying degrees of different things happening, we can call it a "syndrome". Too bad you can't sue over the vaccine or maybe I could find a group suing pharmas over my "syndrome".

(FWIW, while what I've experienced is real, I'm very tongue-in-cheek about suing)
#7 Bulldog (Link) on 2022-02-19 18:18 (Reply)
Most Covid deaths are vaccinated people https://freewestmedia.com/2022/02/08/italy-most-covid-deaths-are-vaccinated-people/ Maybe another booster will fix this.
#8 OneGuy on 2022-02-19 20:49 (Reply)
You do know this is just a guy with a distantly- related credential saying this off the top of his head from one piece of data, don't you? He thinks something already, and then thinks a segment of one day's data corroborates him. One intensive care unit out of a whole country? Really? No study, no data-gathering, no comparing alternative explanations.

It's a European site that probably originates in Sweden and puts out lots of clickbait stories that are small news at best. Long on speculation, short on skepticism. Lots of patting conservatives on the hand, saying "Yes, yes, your suspicions are correct. There is tyranny everywhere! A rumor from Australia! A quote of some leftist being dense and stupid in Sweden! A German political group saying something irritating in support of LGBTQ! Yes, yes, it's all part of a pattern!"

Others can check my work on that.
#8.1 Assistant Village Idiot on 2022-02-20 08:55 (Reply)
If there were absolutely irrefutable proof that a majority of covid cases and/or covid deaths were happening to the vaxed and/or partially vaxxed would you still cite reasons to doubt it? What is it exactly that keeps you from seeing the facts around the ineffectiveness of the vax? Is it pure bias and stubbornness?

Are you also aware of the massive death toll FROM the vax? Or are you a denier of that as well? By the way it appears that the vax is also responsible for the increase in heart problems that we are blaming on covid.
#8.1.1 OneGuy on 2022-02-20 09:58 (Reply)
My blood pressure did not go back down after covid and I had to have daily medicine for it. I am hopeful that this is temporary, but I had covid in November and only got things stabilised about four weeks ago.

There has been an increase overall in heart symptoms among those who had covid. If there are usually 100 heart attacks in a population and now there are 125 we can't tell which of them were more directly related to covid and which were going to have heart attacks anyway. But we can see that the total is higher.
#9 Assistant Village Idiot on 2022-02-19 21:38 (Reply)
‘Long Covid’ is just a new name for an old illness - post viral syndrome. I had it 20 years ago when I was living in the Congo. Took almost 2 years to recover fully. But I got better, and they will too.
Whole thing of pretending it’s a previously undiscovered syndrome is just more scaremongering.
#10 Jm01 on 2022-02-20 10:18 (Reply)
Australia just told Canada "here, hold my beer" https://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2022/02/australian-police-burn-anti-mandate.html Do you still believe you live in a democracy
#11 Anon on 2022-02-20 10:25 (Reply)
I was saddened and outraged to read that the Ottawa police fired rubber bullets and tear gas on the peaceful protestors. But then I read that indeed the protestors instigated it and deserved it because they were shouting "freedom".
#11.1 JustMe on 2022-02-20 10:43 (Reply)

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