Category: Uncategorized

Lookout

I stood at the lookout up on Cypress with the affable and intelligent Katie K today.  She had given me the excuse that I should take her for a spin in Ziva, and it was lovely to get the commuting within 15 K of your home stink blown off the car.

First we stayed at Ajax Baldwin, her house, for tea and bagels, and then, a ride.  I can feel that I got some sun…..

I think I finally have the ‘listening to myself in the car’ phase knocked out of me.

How to be a denialist

How to be a denialist
Martin McKee, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who also studies denial, has identified six tactics that all denialist movements use. “I’m not suggesting there is a manual somewhere, but one can see these elements, to varying degrees, in many settings,” he says (The European Journal of Public Health, vol 19, p 2).

â– 1. Allege that there’s a conspiracy. Claim that scientific consensus has arisen through collusion rather than the accumulation of evidence.
â– 2. Use fake experts to support your story. “Denial always starts with a cadre of pseudo-experts with some credentials that create a facade of credibility,” says Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut.
â– 3. Cherry-pick the evidence: trumpet whatever appears to support your case and ignore or rubbish the rest. Carry on trotting out supportive evidence even after it has been discredited.
â– 4. Create impossible standards for your opponents. Claim that the existing evidence is not good enough and demand more. If your opponent comes up with evidence you have demanded, move the goalposts.
â– 5. Use logical fallacies. Hitler opposed smoking, so anti-smoking measures are Nazi. Deliberately misrepresent the scientific consensus and then knock down your straw man.
â– 6. Manufacture doubt. Falsely portray scientists as so divided that basing policy on their advice would be premature. Insist “both sides” must be heard and cry censorship when “dissenting” arguments or experts are rejected.

Sometimes the broad understanding and the teachable moment do not coincide

enh…. still working on the proper places to shift… which is wearing.  I’d be fcking euchred without a tach… which is a thought I have had many times over the last week or so.  Thank you gentlemen and ladies, for making such a thing as a tachometer.

and sad frown, an accident… upside down vehicle, two cop cars, bottom of the hill, check engine light comes on.  Flashy lights past the cops, don’t look don’t look, can’t trigger a migraine.  Doesn’t look like anyone was injured, as  there are two cop cars and no other emergency vehicles.  Then, at the left turn from Gaglardi onto Cariboo, the guy second in front of me is a pal from work, in whose car I have recently been riding, and he’s clipped the driver of the equally expensive (and tasteful) car in front of him.  The next sentence deleted on the cross eyed and hard breathing insistence of my lawyer.  It’s bad enough that I’ve identified him as my coworker.

That’s my cue.. Keith just came in.

Extending two middle fingers skyward

I ignored the fracking check engine light, which obliged me by going out and staying out, and conveyed Katie and myself to Mike’s folks’ house, and then to tried to get some gelato on the drive.  That didn’t work out, so we went to the place at Glen and Venables instead, and then home, after a run for some much needed toilet paper and sixty bucks of gas.  Shower now, and then work.  After work, church Board meeting.