Flu report: Day Two

I woke up at 4:00 a.m. 

My temperature at 5:30 a.m. was 96.1 F. According to the internet, this means that I am not ovulating. Who am I to argue?

My temperature didn't hit 99F until about 10:30. First acetaminophen at noon.

I went for a twenty minute walk outside. A half-mile out and a half-mile back. The cold air was brutal to my nasal passages but other than that there were no complications.

An hour after my walk I got out of my recliner and said some bad words. A quick tour of the internet suggested that my right-side sciatica nerve was not happy. Suspecting inflammation, I took a couple of ibuprofen which is MUCH better than acetaminophen for inflammation.

I took a nap. The pain shooting down the back of my right leg was gone.

My nose is running. My cough is better. I was able to eat without feeling nausea.

Back in the day, there were many days when I went to work and put in a full day when I felt worse than this.

Mrs ERJ's symptoms seem to be lagging my by about 12 hours.

Posted for entertainment purposes (source)

• Blood type A: Overall has a great ability to generate a quick and substantial antibody response against influenza type A(H1N1) and especially A(H3N2). Their antibody response against influenza B is not quite as dramatic.
• Blood type AB: Relatively poor ability to generate high antibody levels against any of the influenza viruses.
• Blood type B: Reasonable, but not great ability to generate an antibody response against influenza A(H1N1). Slowest (it can take them 3-5 months) and weakest ability to generate antibodies against influenza A(H3N2) of any blood type. Against influenza B virus, blood type B has a significant advantage and responds differently from either blood group A or O. The blood type B immune response happens much earlier and persists longer.
• Blood type O: Relatively effective ability to generate antibody response against influenza A(H1N1) and A(H3N2) viruses. Antibody response against influenza B is not as dramatic as blood type B.

The reason that I label this "entertainment" is that influenza is constantly mutating. Even if good studies were performed and reached the conclusions shown above (and I did not look at the original sources), there is no guarantee that the next variant of H1N1, H3N2 or B will not have evolved beyond those defenses.

For the record, I am type O+. 

Tomorrow

We will not be watching Quicksilver tomorrow. Handsome Hombre is sick and he will be watching her. 

Why not Dearborn? Why isn't it in flames?

The most positive spin on my understanding is that somebody is holding the leash on the Sunni and Shia Muslims in Michigan. That proves it can be done. It also implies that the protests are the product of collusion and are not totally organic in their origins.

If you are extremely generous and naive, that can be seen as good news. 

Minnesota

Walz and Frey have no political future. Neither will ever win a fair, state-wide election. They have nothing to lose by betting every chip. 

California

Gavin Newsom has political ambition. If national news showed him unable to manage his own state, his chances of getting elected to POTUS or US Senator go in the toilet.

That doesn't necessarily mean that chaos isn't happening. It is possible/likely that the left-leaning media is leaving that footage on the cutting room floor. But the reality of citizen journalists forces him to keep a lid on things.

Michigan

Gretchen Whitmer probably has POTUS or VPOTUS aspirations. Dana Nestle (the Attorney General of Michigan) and Jocelyn Benson (S-o-S) are term-limiting out. Benson already announced that she is running for Governor.

Rashida Tliab is probably delusional enough to believe that she could win a state-wide election.

So they are all constrained the same way that Gavin Newsom in California is.

What nobody dares talk about is that Dearborn is a tinderbox of Shia (Iranian oriented Muslims) and Sunni (the rest of the world) tensions.

The Sunni contend that there are 73 branches of Islam and that the Quran tells them that there will be 72 false prophets and only one true torch of Islam. That "one true torch of Islam", according to the Sunni, are the Sunni (go figure). The followers of the 72 false prophets will spend eternity serving the Sunni in paradise.

The Shia, on the other hand, claim that the Sunni are following false prophets and that Shia are the chosen sect.

Shia is a minority in the world of Islam at about 25%. What makes it work is that for the most part, the two major sects self-segregated. Shia mostly in Iran, eastern Iraq and bits and drabs of the former Soviet 'stans.

Nearly everybody else are Sunni. 

Except for in Dearborn, Michigan. The largest mosque in Dearborn is a Shia mosque. Mosques of all flavors are sprinkled through the city like chocolate chips in a cookie.

Kudos to Whitmer and team

I don't give Whitmer and her team much appreciation, but in this case she is playing a bad hand as well as it can be played.

Am I exaggerating the instability

Let's play a mental exercise. Suppose you run a department in a spy agency somewhere. It can be Moscow, Kiev, Berlin, London, Paris, India, China, Langley, Tel Aviv. You have thousands of detailed plans sitting on shelves. Pre-canned solutions to  implement policies that your masters might desire forwarded.

Conceivably, the south side of Detroit and the first-ring suburbs would go up in flames if two hundred faux Grindr (a gay dating app) requests went from Sunni men to Shia men and from Shia men to Sunni. Send another two hundred AI generated transsexual "asks" in the same way. Send explicit video. Have some of the faux requests come from public figures. Have the smartphones ding after they broke a geo-fence and are in their mosque.

The three least experienced guys in the spy-agency IT department could do it between lunch and 3:30 p.m. the same day.

A slaughter would likely follow. 

There is precedent. Freshmen at college committed suicide over such shenanigans. It could be done from as far away as New Delhi or Hanoi or Sao Paulo.

Worth reading

Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed Sane

by vittorio on X

 

Even if you are skeptical that there ARE differences between men and women, it is still an interesting article. vittorio quotes data from peer-reviewed research and offers mechanisms based on evolutionary biology.

 

Some excerpts:

 

Men did not shift conservative toward "toxic masculinity". Women shifted progressive and blamed men.

 

Women evolved in environments where social exclusion carried enormous survival costs. You can't hunt pregnant. You can't fight nursing. (A woman's) Survival required the tribe's acceptance: their protection, their food sharing, their tolerance of your temporary vulnerability. Millions of years of this and you get (biological) hardware that treats social rejection as serious threat.

 

Men faced different pressures. Hunting parties gone for days. Exploration. Combat. You had to tolerate being alone, disliked, outside the group for extended periods. Men who could handle temporary exclusion without falling apart had more options. More risk-taking, more independence, more ability to leave bad situations.

---

The mental health collapse among teenage girls tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption, with stronger effects for girls than boys. The same vulnerability that made social exclusion more costly in ancestral environments made the new consensus engines more capturing.

 

This machine (social media + smartphones) wasn't designed to capture women specifically. It was designed to capture attention. But it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively. Women are more susceptible on average. So it captured them more.

---

Universities flipped to 60% female while simultaneously becoming progressive monoculture. The institution young women trust most, during the years their worldview forms, feeds them a single ideology with no serious opposition.

 

FIRE's campus speech surveys show the pattern clearly: students self-censor, report fear of expressing views, cluster toward acceptable opinions. This isn't unique to women, but women are more embedded in higher education than men now, and the fields they dominate (humanities, social sciences, education, HR) are the most ideologically uniform.

---

Feminism told women their instincts and biology were oppression and wrong. Wanting children was brainwashing. Wanting a provider husband was internalized misogyny. Their natural desires were false consciousness installed by patriarchy.

 

Many believed it. Built lives around it. Career first. Independence. Freedom from traditional constraints.

 

Now they're 35, unmarried, measuring declining fertility against career achievements. And here's the trap: the sunk cost of admitting the ideology failed is enormous.

 

ERJ notes "Not Yet" becomes "NEVER". Never marry. Never have kids or grandkids. If you outlive your husband, which is highly likely, there will be nobody to visit you when you are old, in a nursing home, dying.

---

I should be honest about something: men weren't immune to capture. They were captured differently.

 

Women got ideological conformity. Men got withdrawal. Porn. Video games. Gambling apps. Outrage content. The male capture wasn't "believe this or face social death." It was "here's an endless supply of dopamine so you never have to build anything real."

 

Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed Sane

 

(Repeat of link to the article) 

One sunny day does not make it summer

 \

It looks like Monday-through-Friday of next week will be the challenge

We are nearly through our first "day" of the plague.

My lymph nodes showed up at 6:30 a.m. My temperature wandered around between 99 and 101 from 8 a.m. until now, 5 p.m. Those temperatures are NOT exceptional for the flu.

The copious mucus tapered off. I am still coughing. Maybe I will get slammed again in the morning. 

I held off on taking ibuprofen or Tylenol until 3:00 p.m. By then, I was getting a muscle tension headache at the base of my skull, undoubtedly from lifting my chin up to swallow.

The muscle pain showed up. I believe it is because muscles cramp-up to make heat for the fever. And since I was sleeping, they didn't get stretched out through the day. It was a big surprise when I stood up out of my recliner and my right leg gave out.

It has been a blessing to be able to sleep.

I ate a leg from a rotisserie chicken and a very small sweet potato. That was a mistake. I kept it down but it was a chore.

You know, I would be absolutely thrilled if Mrs ERJ and I both had the common, garden variety flu. There are times when it is good to be boring. 

A prime example of marital miscommunication

I think Mrs ERJ is getting just a little bit too interested in my manufacturing enterprise.

We had an agreement where I promised to shrink the shelf space by using the components I have on hand by turning them into finished assemblies. The finished assemblies take just about half as much space, by volume, as the components. 

"I saw a new box in front of the garage today. I thought we had an agreement.  What is the story?" she asked me.

"Well, dear, the brass cups are sold in one size of package and the pewter inserts come in a different sized package." I explained.

"And so..." she asked, raising one eyebrow askew.

"The very best price for brass cups are the ones that are sold in packages of 1423 and they come from a gun range in Texas" I explained.

"And the pewter inserts?" she asked.

"The best price for those are from a fellow out in Idaho who sells in packages of 719" I informed her. 

"I don't see what the problem is. Buy one package of brass cups and two bags of pewter inserts" she said.

I sighed. "It is a sin to waste anything. Can't you see, that will leave me with fifteen extra pewter inserts!" I objected.

Mrs ERJ chewed on that for a minute. "How long do you think it will be before the counts of the brass cups and the pewter inserts line up?" she asked.

"I really can't tell ya, honey. I thought I would be completely done with the 9mil Buger Cups in September and would be assembling Short-and-Weak and JMB's design now."  

***Satire*** 

Mrs ERJ is WAY too smart to pull the wool over her eyes like that. 

***End Disclaimer*** 

A little bit of coughee early in the morming

I slept for about five hours. Sleeping on my back was a non-starter because it made me cough. I woke up a little after 2 a.m. My temp was an improbable 95.7 F.

Lots of thick, stringy phlegm everywhere. The first half-hour awake involved making a cup of coffee and very productive coughing. Temp at 4:30 was a more plausible 97.9 F.

No enlarged lymph nodes yet, so my body's immune system does not recognize that I am sick. I expect that to change over the next 48 hours. I consider enlarged lymph nodes to be a positive sign. It means the fire-fighters are scrambling to jump on the ladder and pumper trucks. 

Mrs ERJ is still in bed and is coughing every couple of minutes.

I am working at staying hydrated and taking guafenesin which is a mucus thinner. My goal is to make it easy for my lungs to keep clearing out the mucus.

Fiddling around at the reloading table is on the docket for today. That counts as light work. A huge note of thanks to my neighbor who lives south of me. He reminded me that making miniature brass-and-pewter artifacts gives me joy and purpose.

Bonus image

 

...be a shame if something happened to it.

"Nice business (home, race-horse, city), it would be a shame if something happened to it."

The latest Tic-Tok star from Minneapolis was a (former) DIE, oppressed-group trainer. She claimed that she was "in the tech industry" but she was really one of the collectors of the Danegeld.

Trump's administration eviscerated WOKE, DIE-centric funding. Lacking ANY ORGANIC DEMAND for their services, thousands of trainers found themselves unemployed. From 100k/year to unemployed and unemployable.

They proved amenable to interfering with ICE enforcing the law. Minneapolis politicians, Law Enforcement and Judges proved amenable to letting them do that. They saw an opportunity and they took it.

What hangs in the balance is the question of how the larger part of America interprets events. Are our immigration laws arbitrary, capricious and unconstitutional? If so, why did Congress pass them?

Are ICE agents performing their sworn duties in ways that can be described as "drunk and disorderly"? Are they being criminally reckless as they discharge their sworn duties?

Are the protesters and "observers" motivated by something other than pure, altruistic concern for the illegal immigrants who ICE are collecting to be processed as Federal laws require? 

When those protestors demand "...an opportunity for dialog..." do they really mean "Submit. The only voice that is valid are ours." If you are a student whose grades are at the mercy of a teacher, surely it is more the second than the first.

Historically, the thugs in the protection racket were treated very harshly by their former victims but the pain and humiliation the thugs endured paled beside the punishments that were heaped upon the traitors and quislings who sold-out their fellow countrymen.

That would be the governors and mayors and cops and judges and news media who looked the other way, perhaps for a piece of the action or some other advantage.

Karma comes with compound interest.