Yellowstone is turning out to be one of my all time favorites...

1883, the spin off, has proven to be ok. Nowhere close to Yellowstone though, even if Sam Elliot steals the show.

House of the Dragon - Nowhere close to being as good as the books and the acting was meh. Nowhere close to Game of Thrones, the CGI even sucks at times, seems to be on a very limited budget. I hated the time jumps where they changed all (or just about) the actors. Like they keep doing on "The Queen", which fucks up the character depths.

Am getting to the final episode of Andor, which has proven to be a good Star Wars spin off.

Suggestions on what's good, what's not?

The Teotihuacan Pyramid
(Photos from the FB page of Archaeological Wonders - https://www.facebook.com/archaeologicalw...7145222533)



This pair of images flipped a switch in the old memory banks to a find and the loss of that find in 2009.

For starters, I don't recall exactly when I began using Google Earth for entertainment/discovery purposes, but am certain it must have been prior to early 2009.
And, while I don't recall the initial impetus, I am fairly certain it had to do with Peru-sing ( ) the Nazca Lines.

An example from said Nazca Lines...



As those initial forays broadened, to span much of the globe, some efforts began to focus on Central America, and, more specifically, Guatemala...where I stumbled upon what was referred to, at the time, as El Mirador - a Mayan archaeological site in the northeastern corner (at the time), not far from the border with Belize.

Today, should you search "El Mirador, Guatemala" in Google Earth, you will be taken to the location of a restaurant much farther south.

Anyway - after a good bit of time searching the surrounds...one day, I found myself moving west along that northern border, marking and documenting high points, low points, and other points of interest...then, taking this effort in a northerly direction into Mexico...and, as those efforts developed, one day, said efforts were focused on documenting (in fine detail) a "mountain-top strip" that measured a couple of feet (unvarying) in width, and precisely 300 feet (due north/south) in length, amid a group of mountains somewhere in northeastern Mexico (moving toward the border with Texas).

I say "somewhere" (in NE Mexico) because of what happened, on THIS day (November 26th) in 2009...(or, actually, November 27th - as will be evident shortly)...

We were living in a duplex...and, sometime during Thanksgiving's evening hours, the neighbor's toilet (or, the pipe that sent their-&-our waste to a sewer line in the alley) became stopped, and backed up...causing said waste to back into our domicile.

We were notified of this disgust by the sound of canine paws splashing through the mess...during the cold dark hours of the morning of the 27th.

A great deal of urgent effort went into rescuing all manner of anything residing on the floor (including such things as boxes of old photos)...but - the spiral notebook in which I had logged the "mountain-top strip" sat directly on the floor...and, in effort to get as much of the "shit" out of our dwelling as possible, my wife threw it into a pile outside (to go directly into the dumpster). (At the time, it was nowhere among my concerns.)

A short time later, we had moved into a proper home...and, it was then that I discovered the loss of this 'treasure'.

I have tried numerous times since then to 're-discover' this anomaly in Northeast Mexico, to no avail.

But - the images above sparked the memory...and made me wonder whether I (or anyone) will ever find it, again.

Should you be anyone interested in taking up such an effort, you might note that said location was well north of Mexico City...and thus, the Teotihuacan Pyramid shown above.

Good Caturday Apocalypse!

Quote:‘Zombie’ virus revived after 50,000 years trapped in Siberian permafrost (November 25, 2022)

Researchers from the French National Centre for Scientific Research have revived more than a dozen prehistoric viruses that were previously trapped deep within the Siberian permafrost, according to a pre-print study.

From seven ancient permafrost samples, scientists were able to document 13 never-before-seen viruses that have been lying dormant, frozen in ice, over tens of thousands of years.

In 2014, the same researchers unearthed a 30,000-year-old virus trapped in permafrost, the BBC reported. The discovery was groundbreaking because after all that time, the virus was still able to infect organisms. But now, they’ve beaten their own record by reviving a virus that is 48,500 years old.

Quote:Abstract

One quarter of the Northern hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, referred to as permafrost. Due to climate warming, irreversibly thawing permafrost is releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million years, most of which decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect. Part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistorical times. While the literature abounds on descriptions of the rich and diverse prokaryotic microbiomes found in permafrost, no additional report about “live” viruses have been published since the two original studies describing pithovirus (in 2014) and mollivirus (in 2015). This wrongly suggests that such occurrences are rare and that “zombie viruses” are not a public health threat. To restore an appreciation closer to reality, we report the preliminary characterizations of 13 new viruses isolated from 7 different ancient Siberian permafrost samples, 1 from the Lena river and 1 from Kamchatka cryosol. As expected from the host specificity imposed by our protocol, these viruses belong to 5 different clades infecting Acanthamoeba spp. but not previously revived from permafrost: pandoravirus, cedratvirus, megavirus, and pacmanvirus, in addition to a new pithovirus strain.
.....
The biohazard associated with reviving prehistorical amoeba-infecting viruses is thus totally negligible, compared to the search for “paleoviruses” directly from permafrost-preserved remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, or prehistoric horses, as it is now pursued in the Vector laboratory (Novosibirsk, Russia) [75], fortunately a BSL4 facility. Without the need of embarking on such a risky project, we believe our results with Acanthamoeba-infecting viruses can be extrapolated to many other DNA viruses capable of infecting humans or animals. It is thus likely that ancient permafrost (eventually much older than 50,000 years, our limit solely dictated by the validity range of radiocarbon dating) will release these unknown viruses upon thawing. How long these viruses could remain infectious once exposed to outdoor conditions (UV light, oxygen, heat), and how likely they will be to encounter and infect a suitable host in the interval, is yet impossible to estimate. But the risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming when permafrost thawing will keep accelerating, and more people will be populating the Arctic in the wake of industrial ventures.

An update on eukaryotic viruses revived from ancient permafrost

Quote:Can deadly virus and microbes survive in the ice?

An outbreak of anthrax in Siberia in 2016 caused the death of a 12-year-old-boy, hospitalization of scores of other people and the death of more than two thousand reindeer. The outbreak was traced back to an old reindeer corpse, which had melted out of the permafrost during what was the warmest Arctic summer on record.

The anthrax in Siberia outbreak generated a fear that other and perhaps even more dangerous microbes could be released from the melting ice, such as smallpox. Is it possible that malignant viruses and microbes, after hibernating in the ice for millennia, could be released by the on-going melt and pose a risk to humans?

SAS: Rogue Heroes charts the creation of the famed Special Forces unit. Based on the book by Ben Macintyre. From the Creator of Peaky Blinders. High energy, entertaining, thrilling show. IMDB

Quote:One of the most expensive TV shows made for UK television at the time of transmission.

The show has received a great deal of praise from the British press although much has been made of the anachronistic choice of 1980s rock music for some scenes. However the director pointed out that the SAS never played by the rules and the way it was made was intended to reflect this.

Filming in Morocco took place from March-June 2021 with UK location filming taking place in Norfolk, Suffolk and Gloucestershire rom late June to August 2021. The series then spent nearly a year in post production and editing.

The guns and rifles are authentic WWII weapons (not replicas) . They were brought into Morocco from a UK based specialist vintage armorer. All were modified to only fire blanks and due to Moroccan law, the producers had to get a permit signed by King Mohammed VI of Morocco to allow the importation of the weapons for this production. Even though the guns could not fire live ammo they were securely locked away when not in use and placed under direct police supervision.

The production had a team of 50 stuntmen led by stunt coordinator Neil Finnighan, a retired Royal Marine parachute instructor.

Snakes were a real hazard whilst filming in the Moroccan desert. Producer Stephen Smallwood said that they hired a snake wrangler to keep the set clear of the creatures although on one occasion a snake crept undetected onto the set and was found sleeping under a chair resulting in mild panic whilst trying to locate the wrangler to deal with it.

Rogue Trivia

Here's a good 1 hr overview from the Corbett Report.

CBDCs: Beyond the Basics

Do you know the difference between retail and wholesale CBDCs? Sounds like a big convoluted monetary warfare between central & commercial banks.

Current prototype testing:



Future monolithic Central bankster cartel dream goal for world domination:

Wiki

Here's a short vid from TEDx (2011), author Tyler Cowen:



Peter Thiel and George Gilder debate on "The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth" (2012)



Peter Thiel, Co-founder of PayPal, Technology Entrepreneur, Investor, and Philanthropist VS. George Gilder, Chairman, George Gilder Fund Management, and Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute.

Thiel's thesis that technological progress is decelerating has been featured prominently as of late in a number of opinion journals and popular magazines, while George Gilder holds to the supremely optimistic premise of his famous 'Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology'.

Interesting to hear Thiel's rationale & thinking from 10 years ago. He gives some good examples.

From a week ago: The End of the Future with Peter Thiel Peter Thiel presents a new explanation for the Great Stagnation: in the mid-20th century, dire dystopian narratives about science and technology began seeping into the culture.

People don't want to feel as if they're building the machines that will destroy the world. Dystopian narratives have been facilitated by the dual-use nature of so many modern technologies.

For example, Thiel sees the turning point on nuclear power as 1975, when India got the bomb after the US transferred its nuclear technology. (?)

But, also entirely pulled out of thin air and based on his feelings and ideology. It’s just a narrative, nothing more. Some interesting evidence for this is that the 1970s saw an explosion of "scientific" models showing the end of civilization was near. E.g., Limits to Growth (MIT study), Population Bomb (Ehrlich), peak oil predictions, co-founder of Earth day saying mass starvation was inevitable, etc. and yet here we are. Thiel is, after all, an expert on this topic; having founded one of the most dystopian listed companies i.e. Palantir.

Probably a good time to revisit this 2014 piece by Peter Thiel...

Quote:You Should Run Your Startup Like a Cult. Here's How (WIRED, Sept 2014)

No company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside. The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues, including Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and David Sacks, have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies.

Rule 1: The Best Startups Work a Lot Like Cults

In the most intense kind of organization, members abandon the outside world and hang out only with other members. We have a word for such organizations: cults. Cultures of total dedication look crazy from the outside. But entrepreneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriously.

The extreme opposite of a cult is a consulting firm like Accenture: not only does it lack a distinctive mission, but individual consultants are regularly dropping in and out of companies to which they have no long‑term connection whatsoever.

Every company culture can be plotted on a linear spectrum:

The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

This is a link to the movie that has been released titled "Died Suddenly"..https://rumble.com/embed/pj.v1to6s2/
https://rumble.com/v1wac7i-world-premier...denly.html

The video is all about the covid vaccines, blood clots, heart attacks, cancer, and the kitchen sink as far as health. Before you dismiss some of this listen to the percentage of increase in these cases to include military casualties
or
https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=v...M6QD3l3raI

I really do enjoy this Youtuber (The Why Files) and the way he presents his subjects.

So - My wife & I were standing on the patio, aimlessly discussing something to do with her travel plans for the coming days...and, apparently, a squirrel was perched on the roof, a few feet away - probably trying to catch some juicy gossip (a well-documented vice of perched squirrels)...when...for some reason, the squirrel lost its perch, and fell from the roof...splat...onto the concrete patio, landing flat on its side (no creatures died in this episode).

As I later reflected on this strangeness, the fact that the squirrel dropped from the eave...while (it could'a been) listening in on our conversation (with seedy intent, no doubt) - gave new/double meaning to the phrase "Eaves-Dropping".

What do you think?

I just received this from my brother. I did not even know someone had interviewed him. Parkinson’s had pretty much wiped out his facial expressions, which was causing a lot of the breathless/choking/coughing issues, and his hearing was bad enough that the guys were having to speak pretty loud to him and even then he couldn’t always understand them. He was dead 3 weeks later after 3 strokes. At that point, he was within days of being 95, and he weighed just over 120 pounds, down 60 pounds from his former size. Knowing how weak he was, the effort he was putting out in that video shows how much he wanted to give those guys a memorable talk. A very sad example of a very vital hard working man of 95. At 75 he had to sell his airplane because his sight was getting so bad. Toward the end his sight, hearing, and being very frail made for a guy who tried all his life but old age finally got him. A war buddy of his told me dad was the last man alive in is squad twice mostly because he took over a machine gun position on both occasions after the machine gun crew was killed or disabled.

You will need to turn on the sub titles if interested.