#not aviation

[imonmywayup]

It’s summer, my ‘67 is out of hibernation, and I need to be less obsessed with my obnoxious pants.

[piccadilly-lilly]

Shamelessly stolen from my group chat

[piccadilly-lilly]

There is a difference between what happened in DC yesterday and what was happening across the country this summer.

We have been living under unconstitutional restrictions and lockdowns since March, and most politicians still expect us to passively accept the continuation of these draconian measures into 2021. We were told that our freedoms of movement and assembly and the right to make a living would be suspended for “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Three hundred days later, our elected officials still flagrantly disregard the Constitution and attempt to appease citizens with paltry stimulus packages, ignoring the rights and needs of Americans while simultaneously funneling billions of dollars into foreign aid programs and personal pet projects. Our lives and livelihoods have been placed completely at the mercy of bureaucrats and policymakers who have suppressed or ignored any statistics or scientific findings which do not support their political goals -- these are not conditions which free people will tolerate forever.

In addition to this, the vote counting in the 2020 election was marred by highly suspicious incidents and instances of probable fraud. In several states, tallying of the results was halted during the first night after the election, only to resume abruptly a few hours later. In Michigan, for instance, when the count resumed at 4 AM, Biden received over 130,000 votes while Trump’s vote count remained stationary. In Wisconsin, as another example, there were more votes counted than registered voters on record. However, despite the abundant evidence that fraud or error may have occurred during the presidential election, any attempts to investigate the matter have been stonewalled, and news outlets and social media have worked to suppress any mention of doubts about the outcome.

During the storming of the Capitol yesterday, the protestors’ aggression was directed solely at Congress -- at the politicians responsible for and benefiting from the tyranny of the past months -- not at innocent citizens and their homes and places of business. Unlike the BLM riots, which culminated in arson, looting, and assaults in my city and many others across the United States, this occurrence was a direct expression of demonstrators’ grievances and not a form of collective punishment that affects entire cities.

When this was what my neighborhood looked like, Rep. Castor said that these were the actions of people seeking to “turn outrage into constructive change:”

Yet, when this is what Speaker Pelosi’s office looked like, the demonstrators who had invaded the Capitol were said to be placing “our democracy under unprecedented assault:”

After months of encouraging their constituents to live in fear, perhaps the “lawmakers” who have been perfectly willing to sacrifice our great nation -- its unity, its security, its prosperity -- for the sake of their own political agenda need to see that eventually they will have to contend with the consequences of their own actions, because the American people will not endure this indefinitely.

[piccadilly-lilly]

For all the talk about promoting interest in computer science among the current generation of students, particularly girls, modern programs intended to teach these skills seem specifically designed to keep computing as esoteric and inexplicable as possible. It used to be that, when learning to program, one would start with a fairly high-level and simple language - probably usually some form of BASIC - and work up to writing calculators and simple games while learning to understand its logical basis. The best thing about programming languages is that once you've learned one, you've done the hard part of learning them all - after getting used to the fundamental logic of it, syntax and structure differences are easily learned.

These days, however, that seems to have been replaced by game-like tools that don't require much input from the "programmer" beyond clicking and dragging, and provide quick, easy results without actually showing how the scripts are run or teaching the precision and attention to detail necessary for programming. As a result, while coding is rebranded as easy and fun, the skills required in real-world environments remain completely inaccessible.

It can be argued that this is intentional - a technologically literate person will find it much easier to maintain their privacy and security, so teaching the next generation to be comfortable with computers at any level beyond basic office skills isn't actually in the interest of the technology industry. Additionally, I must question if this changed approach to teaching computer science isn't a continuation of the changes that have devalued logic and rationality across disciplines, from philosophy courses designed to undermine confidence in one's own perception to Oregon's new program which states that the objectivity of math is inherently racist.

[piccadilly-lilly]

I realized today (with the help of a random sanctimonious masker) that these people are actually as afraid as they say they are but not of coronavirus, otherwise they wouldn’t come within six feet of an unmasked person specifically to harass them about it. They’re worried because they still somehow believe that if everyone complied for a short period of time without exception, this would all be over -- they are perfectly aware that the mandates and restrictions are a form of collective punishment which was extended because some people haven’t followed the rules, and instead of directing their worry and anger at those who set up this system, they’re genuinely upset at those who aren’t cooperating.

That’s an entirely new level of Stockholm syndrome I didn’t know existed until now.

[piccadilly-lilly]

I hate how telling people “common colds kill millions of people a year” means nothing and they will still say “covid has killed over 3 million!!!! Nary a common cold has done that!!1!!!1”

My comment referring to COVID as a glorified cold was mostly to point out that it is an upper respiratory infection similar to the cold, flu, and other common illnesses, and yet some are now claiming that having COVID-19 makes permanent changes to both one’s DNA and its expression. This idea has no scientific precedent; the effect of respiratory infections on gene expression has been well-studied and while changes can occur during an illness (for instance, genes regulating inflammatory response or the immune system may be activated or expressed at a higher rate), they are temporary and after recovery the “transcriptome settled back into its normal groove.” In another study, the cycle of gene expression that occurs during rhinovirus and flu infections was charted from the time of infection until gene expression returned to its baseline, which it consistently did.

Therefore, I was expressing my opinion that this idea that COVID-19 causes permanent and deleterious genetic changes may be a disingenuous method of explaining away genetic changes caused by the experimental mRNA therapies commonly known as the COVID vaccines.

All that said, you are right that the statistics regarding the US death rate show no significant increase in 2020 compared to previous years, and show that the advent of the coronavirus has not increased the risk of death in any calculable way. The last verified count of the total number of deaths in the US in 2020 shows that 2,487,350 people had died as of Nov. 16th; in 2019, before the experts state that COVID had reached this country, the total deaths were 2,900,689. This discrepancy is easily explained by the 45 days not accounted for in 2020.

[piccadilly-lilly]

Welcome to Year 2, Day 1 of 14 days to flatten the curve