The blue-state model: stay out of the nursing home

The butcher's bill in the USA is likely 130k as of now. IFR holds true at 1% like it did at the start. So whassup?

There are various allegations about reclassifying deaths - on the part of Team Red. WI is cooking the books on the Team Blue side. WI's reclassifications keep the official numbers lower than the excess death rate should be. On the other hand FL is looking to have OVERreported. Governor DeSantis errs on the side of caution. When the Right tout FL they're justified - which hints well for TN. Unsure about others like TX and GA - or CO.

There's a real question about how this disease is so clustered with the Team Blue districts. Does this mean their harsher lockdowns don't work?

The numbers got so high because of nursing-homes; this 0.6% accounts for (by some reckoning) about 43% of the death although if the overall deaths are higher, I expect that better-documented proportion be lower. Also some excess deaths, at least in the UK where the situation is similar were "Alzheimers" - read: shock, and nurse-abandonment, even without personally bearing the pathogen.

The nursing-home excess is squarely on Team Blue's governors. Even where they imposed decent policies for the rest of us, their murderous actions against Teh Oldz ran up the score against themselves.

That doesn't mean their stringent measures elsewhere were/are bad per se.

Shooting the wounded: all matter accounted for

From Science Daily, ICRAR's 27 May press release. The question here is to account for such (apparently) invisible mass as is not bound up in galaxies. So this is not Dark Matter, detectable precisely because it is clustering in galaxies. They're talking free baryons - that is, protons, otherwise known as "hydrogen". Also I think they were expecting to see more hydrogen (mostly) from the cosmic-background, than is today inferred from galaxies.

So they were looking at intergalactic space. This space is a near perfect vacuum - sparser even than interstellar. But it might bear (barely) enough gas, mostly hydrogen remember, to scatter light. That light should be emitted from as distant as possible, so scatter such that we can see it here. It also helps that they are confident in the Hubble Constant now.

A gamma-ray burst should do it, and that's what they've seen. Now the numbers add up, for baryonic matter. One more intergalactic dragon slain.

HUBBLE HOBBLING 11/6: Anyone claiming confidence in Hubble this year is a damned liar.

Tunguska not explained

Now that the angle of a meteor is being included in calculations for effect, how about where the angle is side-on. Such a meteor might skip off the Earth's atmosphere, never landing at all. It is still a "meteor" because it did enter the atmosphere enough to heat up and be seen.

More to the point, heard. Tunguska is being implicated. I'd first read about this one when I was about eight. That aerial explosion famously didn't drop debris. They figure the core asteroid might have held together if it was iron, in which case the blast was a shock wave.

They do admit that the damage on the ground should have been elliptical, where Tunguska was circular. I'd say they need to go back to the drawing board. My theory since, I dunno, age ten was that the meteor was a comet with an icy core. Pretty sure that's most theories that don't involve gateways from the overcrowded Sumerian underworld.

Which is not to say that elliptic shock didn't occur in other times and places in history.

The origins of the present mass-homicide

It's been over a month since I last rapped atcha 'bout the 'Rona. So:

We're getting a picture on how we got here. Genetics show it is from one February Chinese lineage, and several Euro lineages, whence the real spread began.

COVid-19 broke out sporadically in the US from November to January, but these were among people who didn't get out and about much. Otherwise the numbers stayed near-negligible. After DJT imposed his travel ban to/from China (a good idea in isolation), 40000 American citizens had to get back home. They came without quarantine. Then, this Administration sent the right drug to the wrong places. And yeah, for those insulated as well as DJT, mask-wearing would be symbolic.

And this Administration isn't done being negligently deadly. Fauci is striking a new tune, that masks are "symbolic". And the White House is now saying it's okay to sing in a choir again. You could believe That Guy On TV... or you could believe papers like this one and academics like these, or just basic sense.

Donald John Trump deserves to lose this November. Our problem is his likely opposition.

Once the influx came, mostly to large (Democrat) cities, their governors like Cuomo and Whitmer sent the sick to those nursing-homes. They made a bad situation almost twice as bad, 140% as bad to be more-exact.

If I were a cynic this might have been done to blacken Trump's name, 140% more than the orangeman had done to it himself. And it might be done to raise the apparent IFR: this could cause panic, for that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. (An opportunity taken, Kotkin adds.) Further, the affected population is the elderly, which still skews white and even if not in a nursing-home (and dead) yet, they can be moved against Trump by fear. Their IFR is much higher than 1%.

Once again, me lads: the Stupid Party and the Evil Party.

Northern "Serbian" DNA

Yesterday the Turtle posted about Bronze Age DNA from what's now northern Serbia - Mokrin, prettymuch the tip.

It's R1b-Z2103 with a touch of J2b. R1b is associated to the older, nonAryan IndoEuropean populations like us Bell-Beakers; Z2103 an ancient branch (15 kBC!) more typical of Shqiptarët called "Albanians" by us Latins. The J2b, more Near Eastern, is presumed L283, also common to modern Albania. The J2b had likely got here first. As to language, J2b may have spoken an "Afro Asiatic" tongue but the great Indo-European migrations swamped that out.

Both modern Albanians and modern Serbs speak Indo-European languages today, and they've grown up together in a Sprachbund. However. The Slavic peoples trend more to R1a. That the north shore of the Danube was Shqiptarët implies most of the Morava, and especially the Ibër watershed was protoAlbanian well into the Iron Age.

We shouldn't identify this with classical "Illyria". The Adriatic southern neck spoke Messapic and Doric, the north was exposed to Etruscan dialects and in between, of course, Italic owned the Italian shore. Historic precedent suggests that who owns Venice has a claim on the Dalmatian seafolk. I'll leave others to haggle over "Illyrians".

I'm talking about the land which these data describe, the latterly eastern-Yugoslav inland. I'm talking about eastern Kosovo and the Ibër to the north. And frankly I'm talking about the people there, who weren't Slavs and weren't Serbs until Late Antiquity. (At a guess, the Ibër was protoTosk and the Danube was paraGheg.)

There were many Milosevics in the Serbian nation's past, steadily driving the Shqiptarët south. And yes, it was population-replacement.

The Levant

Two papers in Cell. One is "Genomic History of Neolithic to Bronze Age Anatolia, Northern Levant, and Southern Caucasus" doi 10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.044. The other is readable, "Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant".

Together they agree that all the action in the Levant, which is Bronze Age Canaan, happened to the place from the north and northeast. So, we need to understand the north before we understand Canaan. The key, which I expect will appear in the press-releases, is During the Late Chalcolithic and/or the Early Bronze Age, more than half of the Northern Levantine gene pool was replaced.

Following that, the latter paper notes "Hurrian" personal names appear in the 15th and 14th centuries BC, at Megiddo and Taanach. The Hurrians proper were along the Jazira. Behind them, I think, were protoUrartians around Lake Van. At home, they weren't admixing with others much. Abroad, under the Mitanni especially they became a strong force in the Jazira. Note that they brought their women: ALA019 at Alalakh was an Aryanette. (Obviously she didn't bear a Y chromosome, they weren't #woke enough for that back then.)

At Chalcolithic Arslantepe, Davidski finds an R1b, in one man. That is not Aryan and, indeed, it's pre-Mitanni. R1b-V1636 is rare today but back then, it was rife in the North Caucasus Piedmont steppe which, in Eurogenes parlance, means Crimea on east and northeast. This piedmont proper - the old Circassian forest - should be Maykop and points south.

Back to pre-Palestine besides the admixture and incidental foreigners, the latter Cell paper makes clear that the genes correlate with the historical Canaan. Analogy is made with Yamnaya. It makes sense then to consider a Canaani ethnos.

Relative to that baseline, the coastal ports Sidon and Ashqelon were mixed-ethnic. So was Baq‛a, here more tilted to some eastern population.

We all got baked

Geological periods are associated with fossils. After the fossils shift, that's a new period. The old life tended not to die quietly - there was a mass extinction event. One such period was the Devonian and its violent ending was 359 million years ago.

The press release states what's going on. East Greenland (and Titicaca) rocks on the 359 million year border were heated to see what was in the air at the time. That would be spores, consistent with Devonian flora: ferns and mosses. These spores weren't healthy. They had spines and were radiation-baked.

The Great Baking might be a Proxima-level flare, from our Sun or from some neighbour gone nova. Another model has that the ozone dissipated right here. (We got an ozone air-quality warning right here in Denver these last couple days.)

Before the Cretaceous rifting, Greenland was geologically part of the eastern North American Craton. (Which is why Trump wants it back.) Over the Devonian, this craton was in turn part of Euramerica, alias "Old Red Sandstone" - an equatorial continent. (Titicaca was, then, Gondwana, southern.) East Greenland in that continent had a big lake, which environs they say was like the Lake Chad region today. So the Euramerican ozone shifting was not because of some move to the Arctic.

It happens that the Devonian Earth was cold. This planet, at this time, heated rapidly. That heating knocked out the ozone-layer, planetwide.