Friday, January 27, 2023, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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Let’s Talk About Guns and Politics and Zombies 

SC and I were talking about guns. He wanted me to accompany him to a shooting range here in Delray Beach so I could try my hand at various handguns and rifles.

I gave him my spiel…

Many years ago, I saw a list of all the bad things that can happen when people have guns. At the top was having your gun stolen from your bedside table while you slept. That was followed by all sorts of missteps and tragedies – from shooting your foot off to the accidental death of your child.

“With my bad luck and general clumsiness,” I said, “I don’t like the prospects.”

“Take a class in gun safety,” SC told me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “And anyway, as I understand it, the second amendment was not designed to keep me safe from robberies, but from government tyranny.”

“Biden used that logic to argue for gun control,” SC said. (I knew what he meant. Biden had recently made fun of second amendment defenders, saying something like, “For those ‘brave’ right-wing Americans who say that it’s all about keeping America independent and safe, if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something more than a gun.”)

“Well,” I said, “If I was ever going to buy a gun, it wouldn’t be a handgun or a semiautomatic. I want a full-on machine gun.”

He looked surprised. “Why is that?”

“Because the only time I can imagine needing one would be if my house was being attacked by zombies.”

He smiled.

“I’m serious,” I said. “You know how the zombies are these days. They’re not like the old ones, lurching at you, clumsily, one at a time. Today, they move quicker and they come in droves. There’s no way you can protect yourself without a military grade automatic weapon.”

He smiled again.

Later that day, he sent me this link to a great article about how Hollywood has expanded our knowledge of how to kill zombies.

Click here to prepare yourself for the zombie apocalypse!

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Worth Watching

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Day of the Dead 

Written and directed by George A. Romero

Released in theaters July 3, 1985

Streaming Sept. 17, 2013

Currently available from various streaming services, including Netflix and Amazon Prime

 

The Plot 

Trapped in a missile silo, a small team of scientists, civilians, and trigger-happy soldiers battle desperately to ensure the survival of the human race. But tension inside the base is reaching the breaking point, and the zombies are gathering outside…

What I Didn’t Like About It 

All of the drama between the main characters. It felt like Romero was trying to elevate the movie into something more than what it was. A bit of that would have been fine. But it constituted nearly half of the run time, thus taking away from…

What I Liked 

The unbelievably great special effects. I’m talking about what one looks for in zombie movies. Gushing blood, the tearing of flesh, headless bodies moving, bodiless heads talking… even rib cages falling out of torsos. And this is not digital manipulation. This is real old-fashioned special effects!

 

Critical Reception 

* “[The Day of the Dead] affords Mr. Romero the opportunity for intermittent philosophy and satire, without compromising his reputation as the grisliest guy around.” (Janet Maslin, New York Times)

* “It’s an intelligent, well-written, excellently played movie, with top-flight gore/horror effects, perverse humour, and a provocatively bleak vision.” (Kim Newman, Empire Magazine)

* “The third of writer/director George A. Romero’s ‘Living Dead’ trilogy benefits from a far larger budget than its predecessors, but suffers from a story as malnourished as the zombies that are chewing it up.” (Almar Hafidason, BBC)

You can watch the original trailer here.

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Worth Considering

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The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part IX: China’s Bogus Claims

In my last two blog posts, I wrote about how the WHO and the CDC rigged the records to exaggerate the number of COVID hospitalizations and deaths by 70% to 90% – and how the undercounting of cases, especially in the first 12 to 18 months, meant that the case fatality rate was probably less than 1%. Perhaps even in the same range as the common flu.

It was obvious to me back then that the case fatality rates were bogus. But an even more ridiculous falsehood that was promoted by the mainstream media (and touted by many politicians) was China’s COVID death count. Until very recently, when the total in the USA was 1.2 million, China’s reported death count was 5,000!

Imagine that. A country of 1.4 billion people – four times more than the US – having only 5,000 COVID deaths. It was absurd. Even if you believed the preposterous notion that lockdowns reduced COVID death counts, how you possibly believe that they could reduce them by 99.9999%?!

And yet, millions of people, including most of my educated friends, believed it. (Some still do.)

In the past month or so, China has been reporting a surge in COVID that has brought their case count to more than 2 million. But they are still telling the US media (and they are still buying it) that their total deaths so far have only been 5,273!

Click here for a report on the scope of this surge in cases, as well as the attempt to cover up the associated deaths.

And just so none of my readers will waste their time “informing” me that there are a few estimates that the actual count of COVID-caused deaths in China is about 60,000, that number is statistically equal to 5,273 when you measure it against the Chinese population.

There will be people that read this that believed the old reports from China and still believe China’s official explanation of their recent surge in cases. The CCP is saying that the surge was the result of relaxing their zero-tolerance lockdown strategy in response to widespread protests. And that almost all of those that got sick were unvaccinated.

Both statements are obviously false. If I didn’t have to go to dinner now, I’d take the time to explain why. Instead, I’m going to ask anyone who disagrees to go back and re-read the bits I wrote on Dec. 6 (the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”) and Dec. 9 (the lockdown idiocy).

In the next installment of this series, I’m going to explain an anomaly that puzzled me for a long time: Why it is that some poor, poorly regulated, and generally unhealthy countries, including most African countries, have a much lower COVID death count than the US, Europe, and other advanced countries.

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Fun and/or Interesting

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I’ve mentioned before that Edgar Allan Poe is one of my favorite poets. This is one of my favorite poems of his:

Alone

By Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were – I have not seen

As others saw – I could not bring

My passions from a common spring –

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow – I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone –

And all I lov’d – I lov’d alone –

Then – in my childhood – in the dawn

Of a most stormy life – was drawn

From ev’ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still –

From the torrent, or the fountain –

From the red cliff of the mountain –

From the sun that ’round me roll’d

In its autumn tint of gold –

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass’d me flying by –

From the thunder, and the storm –

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view –

Click here to listen to it read wonderfully by Tom o’ Bedlam.

Enjoy!

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Fun and/or Interesting

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What the Heck Is Time?

The Ezra Klein Show is a podcast that I’ve been hearing a lot about, so I listened to it the other day. Klein has a smart, confident voice. He speaks with the intonation of a PBS host. I’ve never heard Malcolm Gladwell speak, but this is how I imagine he would sound.

Anyway…

In this episode, Klein interviews Dean Buonomano, a UCLA neuroscientist. It’s a conversation about time. If, like me, you have never been able to understand how and why time is relative – how it curves back on itself, etc. – this might give you some sense of it.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcription here.

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Inside Paradise Palms Botanical & Sculpture Gardens

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The conservancy that I’m developing in West Delray Beach, FL, has one of the largest and best-curated palm tree collections in the world, as well as a growing collection of outdoor sculptures, a traditionally styled Japanese tea house, a stock of African cycads, and dozens of other exotic plants and trees.

This is one of the palms:

Mangrove Fan Palm

Binomial name: Licuala spinosa

The Mangrove Fan Palm is native to Southeast Asia. In Cambodia, its leaves are used for hats, for decorations, for walking sticks, and to wrap food. Its heart is enjoyed as a vegetable. And in traditional Cambodian medicine, it is used in several ways. The bark of the trunk, for example, is used to treat tuberculosis.

For more information about Paradise Palms, click here.

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