February 2014 – Page 3 – The Unwanted Blog

Mysterious polio-like illness affects kids in California

A new virus has popped up in California, striking at least 25 kids with polio-like symptoms (from a paralyzed limb to four paralyzed limbs to respiratory paralysis). It’s not polio, but apparently works just like it.

I have the feeling that the latter half of the 20th century and the first decade or two of the 21st might well be remembered as a golden age between eras of pestilence.

A panoramic photo taken last October as a small rain cloud dumped its load to the north-east of Thatcher, almost on Tremonton.

You can also download the very much larger version by LOOKING HERE (over at my long-disused photo blog), good for printing and such. Permission granted for personal use.

I’m trying something new here. For several years I have attempted to sell my panoramic photos in a number of venues; those who have been reading this blog for a while may recall that it has been one financial failure after another. So… screw it. I’m going to try *giving* the high-rez digital photos away. However, I’ll add a donation button to each photo posting. If you like the photo and want to toss a few coins my way… well, there ya go.

In the news recently have been several breathless reports that claim that followers of the old Norse faith believe that Ragnarok is upon us. What’s actually going on is that a Viking history center in Britain is simply ginning up interest. However, on a Fark.com discussion thread on this topic, one of the commenters raised some good points:

atomicmask 2014-02-22 06:49:39 PM

so according to the norse calendar, ragnarok begins today and this marks the end of fimbulwinter (3 years of winter, cold, wet and with record lows) So according to norse myth the following will happen..
1. fenrir will devour odin
2. Midgaard serpent will poison thor
3. Loki will kill hemdall the keeper of the bridge
4. The hound garm will kill the god Tyr
Sounds like silly jargon? Lets look at it like a metaphor..like most myth should be observed.
1. Fenrir is a giant wolf, a symbol of wrath and gluttony. Odin is the symbol of wisdom, forethought, and memory. When war takes president over forethought, when gluttony and greed devours wisdom, it foretells doom.
2. Jorgamundr or the midgaard serpent is a symbol of corruption and and deceit, thor is a symbol of leadership, honesty, bravery, and strength. When corruption poisons leadership, and honesty bravery and strength dies, it brings doom.
3. Loki is a symbol of trickery, pranks, and the father of hel. Hemdall is the symbol of watching, vigilance, guarding, and protection. When the world is more interested in entertainment it destroys vigilance, and thus the above two may happen. A note of interest is that loki is the father of hel, death. How a god of pranks and trickery can be such a major deity in the cosmology is evident if you look at it from this perspective, inattentiveness leads to disaster. It allows doom
4. The hound Garm is a symbol of pure evil, it is malace without logic or intent, a snarling, vicious dog out for blood. Tyr is the god of noble sacrifice, heroic deeds and soldiers, he who sticks his hands in the mouth of fenrir to quiet him. When Pure evil rules the world, soldiers die by the thousands. tossed into the jaws of death. Noble sacrifice becomes meaningless slaughter. It is doom.
5. Yggdrasil the world tree, will shake. No one in the world will be without fear and upheaval.
Now armed with this knowledge, it is far easier to reflect the wisdom of this ancient mythology.
1. If you are more interested in entertainment, you will make it easy to fail at vigilance against those out to wrong you.
2. If you allow corruption and deceit to rule you, it will poison the good in you, just like a serpent.
3. If you allow wrath and gluttony to devour you, wisdom will die, you will not see what is coming, and forget what has been. Stupidity devours all that is good.
4. If you allow evil to rule you, you sacrifice good for your own gain.
5. While the above is going on, massive amounts of upheaval and terror will be going on, the world will be ruled by fear.

How this relates to the modern world, and why it may very well be true and happening.
1. Greed and gluttony are currently destroying our environment. Wisdom states that if we destroy the world we live in, we cant feed ourselves or breathe the air.
2. Corruption and deceit plague our government. No leaders exist, only politicians.
3. Every time a change in policy occurs, a new bill, or some major world event (Riots in Kiev, Singapore, greece, france, etc…better see what justin beiber is up to!) the media instead focus on some celeb and what silly fux pas they did this week.
4. wars over oil, soldiers sent to battle simply to expand corporate interests instead of defense of our nation.
5. Terrorists, and a terror based world. We are so afraid of our own shadows that we allow constant spying on ourselves and wavier our rights for a little bit of security.
It isn’t all bad, much like the book of revelations in the bible after the events come and pass, the world becomes a veritable paradise. The earth reverts to a standard of extreme growth and fertility, food is plentiful and peace reigns for thousands of years. Humanity survives and becomes enlightened from the event. The god Vidar, or “rightous fury” will survive, he hunts down fenrir and rips him apart with his bare hands. Justice survives in this analogy, and we put those responsible on trial.
Vali survives, the god of “old justice” who was birthed specifically to kill a murderer. Executions are the punishment for the previous.
Magni survives, the son of thor, whos name means strength. The strong survive and those strong willed.
Modi survives, the god of berzerkers. Soldiers survive the event and lead the world post apocolypse
Lif and Lifbrasir, man and woman survives, humanity lives threw it all, and goes on to repopulate the newly fertile earth.
Baldr and Hodur return from death, a love of beauty, art, and song. Hodur returns also, a caring for the sick and weak, the disabled and poor.

Looks like Ragnarok *is* upon us. However, I disagree with the commenters view that it ends well. If you’ve read the Eddas, you might agreed that the happy ending where the Earth is reborn seems kinda tacked on. Up until that point, the tone and teachings of the Eddas are quite distinct from those of the Bible, yet there is a 90 degree left turn at the end. I’ve long believed that that ending was simply added to the Norse beliefs by the Christian Snorri Sturluson, much as he added a preface claiming that the Aesir and Vanir were misremembered tales of the likes of the Trojan kings. So… if you eliminate the last little bit, the forces of chaos and stupidity win at the end of Ragnarok, or at the very least the forces of good and order lose. Everything in the Norse tales lends a sense of foreboding and impending doom, a recognition that all the efforts to fight the forces of evil are not to defeat evil, but to delay the inevitable. And that seems to me far more likely than a happy ending, the way things are going today.

If for no other reason: if western civilization gets taken down, by plague or asteroid or EMP or war, how will we build back up? All the easy energy sources are gone. If you want coal or oil to heat your home, you can’t exactly go get it with a rusty pickaxe. And a civilization that has been knocked down is hardly likely to ever again be able to reach for the stars without nukes and the products of petroleum (not just gas to drive cars, but chemicals to grow crops, plastics to build stuff out of and meds to keep us marginally healthy). And if we don’t reach for the stars… then even if mankind lasts another geological age, it will have all been for nothing. The stupid, strong unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last.

Human lung made in lab for first time

Same process that has been used before to make simpler parts. Take a donor organ (lungs in this case) and dissolve out the cells, leaving the collagen “framework.” Collagen is basically the glue between the cells, so what you have left is a ghostly 3D model of a complete set of lungs. Then, seed the lungs with cells from the intended recipient, soak the scaffold in a nutrient bath for a month, viola! A new set of questionable lungs, ready for human trials in about 12 years. To be tried out on pigs first, apparently.

The new lungs are said to be less dense than natural lungs. I’d imagine they’re pretty squishy and probably fairly easily damaged… cough good and hard and you might tear ’em in half. One would hope that in time they’d become good, proper lungs, but testing over a span of years should answer that.

I would imagine that within a decade-ish, 3D printers may well be able to print out collagen scaffolds for any of a number of organs, the basic CAD model being adjustable for various needs and sizes. And it may be possible to 3D print the scaffolds with the cells already in place… lab-grown cloned good cells from the recipient, each cell individually placed. The end result *might* be a lung, say, printed out in a few hours, ready for implantation in… I dunno, a few days? For those with genetic flaws, then the cells might be cloned genetically engineered cells, with the flaws removed, perhaps derived from reverse-engineered stem cells taken from the patient.

Time travellers: please don’t kill Hitler

Gives the usual set of reasons why time travellers shouldn’t go gunning for Adolf. But perhaps the most important reason isn’t given: a world without Hitler might well have been *worse.* Consider this hypothetical:

1918: Corporal Hitler gets whacked deader’n Disco on the battlefield. Germany still loses WWI.

1920’s: Weimar Germany is a badly-run pile of awful. On the political fringes, you have the National Socialists on the Left, and the Communists on the far Left. These two groups of idiots have the same idiot street battles they had in Real History. But sans Hitler, the Nazis never really get anywhere. The fascist movement in Germany remains a disunited mess of knuckleheads. But with Soviet assistance, the Commies gain in power, effectively unopposed by the Nazis.

1930’s: Instead of being taken over by fascism, Germany is taken over by Communists. With a strong Commie Germany, France will probably slip into at least strong socialism by the late 30’s/early 40’s.

So when Stalin’s war does break out, likely in the early 1940’s with an invasion of Poland to solidify Communism in eastern Europe, Germany will likely be on their side. France almost certainly won’t go to war with the Soviets… they certainly didn’t in Real World 1939 when the USSR invaded Poland (people forget that Germany invaded Poland from the west with the USSR simultaneously invading from the east). So by the mid/late 1940’s, Europe will probably be one gigantic Soviet all the way through France, with a very, very nervous Britain offshore (not sure where Spain would be… without the Nazis, the Spanish Civil War might well have resulted in a Commie Spain.

Japan probably would have been just as militaristic and expansionist as IRL. So the US and japan probably would have tangled at about the same time. Unclear what would have happened in Europe. But if history is any guide, you can expect the death toll from Communist Europe, even without a giant war, to approximate the death toll of World War II. There would be vast numbers of rich/well-off/middle-class Germans and French and Spaniards who would be given the Kulak treatment. Famines would wipe out more as local agriculture is taken over by Five Year Plans; the Soviets would very likely put Nazi dream of “Lebensraum” to shame as western Europeans are shuffled off East, and Russians and Siberians and such are shoved West. With the guts of Europe eaten by Stalinism, would Italy, Scandinavia, Portugal, Switzerland survive? There would be a whole lot of people in those countries with a whole lot of money, you could expect pretty much most of them to die, followed by many more as chaos and central planning erupts.

And then there would be war. Somewhere along the line, you can bet that a Europe-wise Stalinist state would decide that it was time for Britain to join the club. If the US got sucked into it, you’d add the WWII European theater death toll on top of the tens of millions dead due to Communism. Yay.

In the Pacific: without Hitler to suck America into the European war, the US focuses on Japan. Most likely, this would mean that the US would make faster progress in the push to Japan. But there’s a problem: probably no nukes, or at least delayed. For some reason, a lot of Americans of the time saw Fascism as substantially worse than Communism. And Nazisms weird-ass focus on Da Jooooz aided the US’s atomic program. So… seems fair to assume that the Manhattan Project would have been considerably slowed. And so America would have had little choice but an invasion of Japan… with millions dead on both sides. And this assumes the much richer, much stronger Soviets don’t invade Japan their own selves.

So… yeah. Don’t kill Hitler. If a time traveller wants to kill someone… start with Marx. Then Lenin, then Stalin. *Then* Hitler. Kinda difficult to imagine what European history would have been without this pack of a-holes, but it’s hard to imagine it would’ve been worse.