Quote of the Day

Battle of Stamford Bridge (1066) by Peter Nicolai Arbo (1870)

From comments on a story on Quillette.

It is one thing to disagree with someone politically and hope that ones own views triumphs. This is perfectly normal. However it is quite another thing entirely to try and ruin the life of someone who disagrees with you politically.
Such an attempt encapsulates the type of personalities involved in the PC witch-hunts . I am surprised that more is not made of the obvious personality disorders / deep level neuroses associated with those involved.
If I was to witness a man on the street racially abusing a random stranger unprovoked I would assume that the man is laboring under some sort of defect of reason . I would assume not unreasonably that he has an underlying personality disorder and that the racial abuse is a symptom of this disorder.
In a similar vein it is clear that the type of people who accuse others of being racist, sexist etc on the flimsiest of pretexts have serious personality disorders and or/ anger issues. It clearly goes much deeper than whatever the apparent matter at hand is.
I wonder if PC ideology makes its strongest proponents vicious attack dogs who have no compassion for those they seek to destroy or perhaps it is a case that the ideology attracts these sort of people in the first place. - Caleb

Via View From The Porch

Taliban kicked Jews out of prison for arguing too much

The last Jews in Afghanistan argued so much the Taliban kicked them out of prison and stole their Torah. - Israel National News

Best thing I've read all day.

Via  parliament613

Bourbon

Results from evaporating three drops of Bourbon whiskey with different concentrations of alcohol

Three guys from the University of Kentucky started playing around with bourbon whiskey and made some curious observations. Scotch whiskey doesn't do this.

Diluted samples from (a) Four Roses (b) Heaven Hill (c) Maker’s Mark (d) Jack Daniel’s (e) Pappy Van Winkle’s (f) Woodford Reserve

The mechanism by which these patterns are generated is so far unknown. It might be useful for identifying counterfits, if that ever becomes a problem.

Poster with more images here.

Via Detroit Steve.

Stupid Walgreens

Pill Minder

I take a handful of pills every day to combat being old. I have a couple of pill minders I fill up once a week to make it easy to take the right pills the other six days. Yesterday I ran out of one drug, so I ordered a refill from Walgreens. It should show up in the mail in a week or two. It showed up yesterday afternoon. If the package had been from Amazon, I wouldn't have been too surprised, but Walgreens has never been this fast. Their website, which normally does a good job of keeping track of which drugs I am likely to need and can be ordered, must have slipped a cog. Oh, look, it's not Walgreens anymore, they've farmed out their web services to something called AllicanceRx.

You would think a big company like Walgreens would do a better job of ensuring their web service was working properly before they turned it loose on the world. Not only does it not keep track of orders properly, it can't even remember my logon and password. Even my bank does that. It might be incompetence on the part of the programmers, or if I put on my mud tinted glasses, it might be someone's stupid idea to keep people from stealing opioids using grandma's prescription.

And what's the deal with requiring the pharmacist to 'release' drugs? I go to the drive through to pick up drugs for my wife and the pharmacist wants to tell me things about these drugs. I don't want to know, I'm just the courier. Presumably the patient discussed this with their doctor. All this information is written out in the papers that accompany these drugs. There is no reason to waste the pharmacist's time with this kind of nonsense. Except, some people are (1) unable to read and (2) can't remember what happened two hours ago, but they are still allowed out in public.

I suspect the real reason for having the pharmacist 'release' the drugs is public relations. Some people want to talk to the pharmacist, not just some clerk. I admit talking to the clerks is a little annoying, they operate from a script that requires both of us to recite the correct phrases in order for them to hand over my gift from the gods. The pharmacists are a little more free, and some of them are interesting characters. Immigrants, mostly, from obscure places.

I will admit that the papers that come with the drugs are like just about every pamphlet included with every other product on the planet. They do include two or three lines of useful information, but those few lines are buried in twenty pages of useless bullshit. Yes, I know, we need lawyers to mediate disputes, otherwise this country would be like Syria, but do we really need to have all this legal crap intruding on our otherwise peaceful existence? Can't they keep it confined to the courtroom?

P.S. Blogger's spellcheck doesn't recognize opioids.

Trees

Why almost all coal was made at the same time
I ran across the story of coal a while back and I meant to do something with it, but it didn't happen. Now we've got this big tree planting project and everybody and their brother are making videos about trees and this one pops up and it's got some science. So here we have the story of coal and I didn't have to do any work other than embed this video.

Given that there a zillion trees in the world already, I don't think another 20 million is going to make a big impact, but hey, it's not going to hurt. I mean, trees are good. Let them grow for a while and you can cut them down and use the wood for all kinds of useful things, like building houses or making fires to heat your house or cook your chicken dinner. I have a fir tree in my back yard that is 40 or 50 feet tall. It was maybe 8 feet tall when we planted it ten years ago. They grow fast. Problem is when we cut them down faster than they grow. But now I wonder, how many trees are lost to natural fires compared to the number cut down by people? We hear about these fires in California and the Pacific Northwest that consume zillions of acres of forest. And then we hear about how the Amazon rain forest is losing a zillion acres to people clearing land for crops. Talk about an army of ants. Which one wreaks more destruction?

Trees are made of hydrogen and carbon (hydrocarbons), but being as carbon outweighs hydrogen by a factor of 12 to one, you can say that trees are mostly carbon.

Joywave - Obsession

Joywave - Obsession
I like the tune. The video doesn't seem to have much to do with the tune. It is entertaining though. It is a succession of title clips from fake movies. A couple of people's names that show up in these clips are names of people in the band.

Joe's Talking Trees

Nugbeard, King of the Ents

Found this on reddit/r/jokes this evening.

Joe's Talking Trees

You might enjoy it. It helps if you know that one of the standard jokes on reddit/r/jokes is that "the real jokes are in the comments".