Camp Daddy, Bloggers I love

2021 07 20

Last weekend was the ArtTalkers club picnic in Mariinsky Park in the center of Kyiv. As  one of the few members who recalled previous efforts at outdoors meetings, I was a bit apprehensive. Absolutely wrong! It was well attended as you can see from the picture, and the idea of having everybody bring blankets and mats so we could sit close to the speaker and follow the shade as the sun moved was genius. My speech highlighted absurd and humorous moments in a lifetime of cycling.

The week before we had had several of the same people over to our house for a picnic. Oksana and Anna bought another set of used outdoor furniture, more sturdy wooden stuff this time advertising Slavutych beer. We set up four tables so they would be in the shade of the cherry plum tree when the barbecue started. It worked beautifully – the guests carried a fifth table down when it was needed. Eddie assumed his traditional role as the fire maker as we cooked ribs, sausages and mackerel. I thought 2:00 was a bit premature to light them, but we got everything off the grill just as the guests arrived. I made tabbouleh, potato salad and dolmas, asking guests to bring sweets and drinks. The kids were in hog heaven for three days demolishing what was left of the desserts, and I am still enjoying drinking other people's beer.

My diagnosis of Eddie's reading problem has changed. He never learned phonics. He stumbles when we come to multisyllable word such as material. He resisted when I asked him to spell it. What are the letters? Instead, he uses the American standard whole word approach to make 15 guesses at what the syllable might be before I convince him to spell it out. In this case I asked him "what do the first three letters spell?" After a second he said "mat" and then spat out material without bothering to see how the other syllables were actually constructed. We are making progress, but not quickly. I am making a strong note to ensure that Zoriana and Marianna learn to read phonetically from the very beginning. At any rate, my fears of dyslexia are diminished. If it is mostly just a problem of bad instruction I think we can overcome it.

Correspondent Mark Taylor and I are fond of Benjamin Graham's quote on stock markets: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." I apply it to the today's world situation. Things are getting crazier and crazier, more absurd than I could have imagined, and yet the charade goes on. The number of pundits pointing out that the Emperor is stark naked has grown exponentially, and yet the naked emperor continues down the same path. There seems to be a consensus, echoed today by Victor Davis Hanson in a piece entitled "The American Descent Into Madness." Yes, he captured it, but I almost didn't read his piece because so many other people have said the same thing. He compares today's insanity with that of the French Revolution and China's cultural Revolution. It can't go on. But to return to Benjamin Graham, above, it has been going on a whole lot longer than I imagined was possible. I'm just glad to be on the sidelines.

The anomaly of the day here on the sidelines is that Ukraine has the lowest vaccination rate of any country in Europe and also the lowest incidence of Covid 19. Number two in both categories is our neighbor Belarus.

Conversely, highly vaccinated countries like England and Israel seem to be quite affected by the Delta variant and lining up for booster shots.

As a statistician I keep looking for correlations to systematically explain what I observe. No matter what to which aspect of the Covid puzzle I attempt to apply it – origins, masks, vaccines, other patent drugs – nothing seems to make sense. Here is the chart of Covid cases in Ukraine.  Maybe it correlates with the black market price of Hydroxychloroquine?  Which I paid a couple of times.

Ukrainians are taking it all in stride. Although the mask mandates remain in place, fully half of the riders on the bus no longer bother. People my wife's age and older grew up with the absurdities of the Soviet Union. It prepared them well for the present age.

I'm continuing to post my Toastmasters speeches on YouTube despite the fact that they removed one for "medical misinformation" a couple of months ago. My upcoming speech is an elaboration of a topic I mentioned a month or two ago – extinctions. My first YouTube post on the subject simply pointed out that new species seem to be evolving faster than the pace of extinctions chronicled by the Red Book. This speech analyzes the causes for extinction to explain why that might be. My bullet points on causes are:

·        Environmental - massive volcanic events

·        Competition

·        Predation

·        Loss of Habitat

·        Warming?

·        Self-induced social issues

and my conclusion is that warming has never been much of a cause whatsoever. Humans, as very effective predators, ruthless competitors and inveterate explorers, have indeed contributed to extinctions by eating and pushing aside other mammal species and, especially since the age of exploration, introducing invasive species everywhere. Warming? Our own ancestors and those of every other species survived warmer and colder climates than the present just fine. Corals are the poster boy for the global warming argument. Environmentalists are concerned that coral is bleaching at a pretty good rate on the great barrier reef and elsewhere. I don't want to gainsay them, but I do observe that corals have been around for half a billion years and survived the five great extinctions. I think they will outlast us.

Which brings me to my final point on extinctions. Some animals, such as lemmings, seem to have a mechanism to control their own population. John B. Calhoun's mouse experiments of the 1970s, one called Universe 25, exhibited weird changes in the behavior in mouse colonies when they became too crowded. The newsmagazines of the time were correct to draw parallels between the dysfunction in his mouse colonies and that which could be observed in, say, New York City. I don't think anybody would contend that New York City is getting less weird, but they have stopped talking about John B. Calhoun. Probably too frightening. Anyhow, here is my video, provided YouTube doesn't banish it.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the women are good looking, (see photos above), the men are strong, and the children will be above average if we can get them past the "whole language" and "rainforest math" invasive species of pedagogy being imported from the land of intellectual twilight.