They knew

Slowly, ever so slowly, it is starting to leak out that scientists and researchers knew back in 2020 before the vaccines were released that aspirin was the Covid super-drug. Yes, plain, old, garden-variety, low-dose aspirin.

If fact, they knew back in 2007 that aspirin was THE GO TO drug for SARS. SARS is also a corona virus and is a kissing-cousin to Covid-19. 

The power of "Big Data"

There is a type of human who is gifted at sifting through data and finding "A-Ha!" events. Sometimes they are hired by pharmaceutical companies hoping to find that their proprietary, very profitable drug has a legitimate off-label use. They have access to millions of "records" with billions of discrete history data points.

Armies of those data-sifters were doing exactly that during the early stages of Covid-19.

They quickly noticed that patients who were already on low-dose aspirin therapy were rarely (i.e. at statistically very significant levels) ending up in ICU for Covid complications.

Aspirin

It has been comment that aspirin would probably not be allowed as a drug if it was discovered today. It has too many side-effects. It is not a simple black-box drug where pushing button A fixes only symptom B.

For one thing, aspirin is an anti-inflammatory drug and one of the ways Covid killed is that it triggered cytokine storms that were a self-amplifying inflammation cycle.

For another thing, aspirin is also an anti-clotting drug. Many of the Covid deaths were due to lung embolisms (clots that end up in the lungs).

$37 will buy you five POUNDS of USP grade aspirin at Valley Vet. That is enough aspirin for 28,000 low-dose tablets.

More recently, researches discovered that Acetylsalicylic acid disrupts SARS-CoV-2 spike protein glycosylation and selectively impairs binding to ACE2

The "problem" is that aspirin is a commodity with very, very low profit margins. 

The other "problem" was that emergency certification of vaccines are not allowed if there are other approved therapies. Powerful people had patents for modified-RNA based vaccines. It was in their economic best-interest to squash alternative therapies. It is also likely that they enjoyed basking in the glory of being called "Savior".

This is one of the reasons why I have a very low level of trust in the Deep State. 

Scouting out fishing spots

 

Unusual bark on this tree

OH!!! These are Kentucky Coffee Trees (Gymnocladus dioicus). Folk wisdom is that Native Americans used the large seeds for a betting game and inadvertently spread this species when they lost the seeds.

Hmmm! I might need to cut a few branches so my cast doesn't get caught.

Viewed from left-to-right, looking downstream

Looking straight out

Looking upstream

The current is closer to the other side. I think these are "shallows" in front of me and probably get very weedy in the summer. Still, a fine place to fish in the spring.

Grab bag

The REAL Woodpilereport.com can be access through the Wayback Machine website. You may have to fiddle with it to find what you are looking for. There are no new postings since Remus slipped his mortal coil.

My crystal ball informs me that sometimes-commenter Gary has skills in this area. Maybe he can direct us to a more elegant way of accessing the old postings.

One example.

Fence posts

Grab-bag of interesting vegetables and apple cultivars

Mangels (giant beets)

Daikon radishes

Black winter radishes 

Rutabagas

Lehigh potato 

Mt Brushy Limbertwig apple 

King David apple

Golden Russet apple 

Little Ice Age, the growth of cities

One unexpected outcome of the famines of 1816-1820 were the fact that rioting in cities due to bread prices caused fearful governments to subsidize the cost of bread in the cities and only in the cities. That resulted in a depopulation of the countryside as people fled to where "services" were available.

That famine was short-lived because it was caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. One has to speculate that if the root-cause resulted in a longer disruption of grain production that perhaps the rush to the cities would result in them being death-traps. 

Sirach

Sirach is one of the books that is included in the Roman Catholic Bible as "Divinely Inspired and Unerring word of God". During the Protestant Reformation, it was consigned by the reformers to an appendix called The Apocrypha which are books that the early reformers considered "Holy but not Divinely Inspired and Unerring". 

Which books that were to be tossed and which were to be kept was an intense debate. For instance, some reformers wanted to remove the Book of James but their arguments did not carry the day.

Sirach is very similar to the Books of Wisdom and Proverbs. It is filled with many short, high-impact quotes that have high signal-to-noise ratios.

Some of my favorites are:

Touch pitch and you blacken your hand; associate with scoundrels and you learn their ways.

Do not lift a weight too heavy for you, or associate with anyone wealthier than you. How can the clay pot go with the metal cauldron? When they knock together, the pot will be smashed:

The rich do wrong and boast of it, while the poor are wronged and beg forgiveness.   From Sirach 13

Those are timeless. Given social media and today's culture and its worship of celebrities, athletes, and "influencers", those words are as fresh today as the day they were first written.

If you choose you can keep the commandments, they will save you;
if you trust in God, you too shall live;
he has set before you fire and water
to whichever you choose, stretch forth your hand.
Before man are life and death, good and evil,
whichever he chooses shall be given him.   From Sirach 15

My son, be steadfast in honoring your father; do not grieve him as long as he lives.

Even if his mind fails, be considerate of him; do not revile him because you are in your prime. Kindness to a father will not be forgotten;

A stubborn heart will have many a hurt; adding sin to sin is madness.

When the proud are afflicted, there is no cure; for they are offshoots of an evil plant.

The mind of the wise appreciates proverbs, and the ear that listens to wisdom rejoices.   From Sirach 3

The woodpile report

With my beautiful snow-highway melting, my attention now turned to processing the wood that I brought up near the house.

An aside: I beat the heck out of my body hustling to cut and move the wood from the back corner of the property to the house before the snow melted. I am coasting to give my body some time to heal. In particular, the tendons on the insides of my elbows.

Tendons are not well supplied with blood so they heal slowly. Push too hard and you will be unhappy for the long time that it takes them to heal.

 

Some of my pallets still have snow on them. I decided to wait a bit before stacking wood on them.

Some of the wood I hauled up from "out-back"

Some more of that wood.

This is my plan. Slit the bigger pieces into halves and stack bark-side-up to shed rain.

Pieces that are on-deck waiting for the snow to melt.

Presented without comment

According to an article in The College Fix 

80% (of Gen Z college students) said their parents have communicated with their manager at least once

Over 50% of college-age job seekers had their parents sit with them at an in-person interview, a January survey by Resume Templates found.  What’s more, over 35% of surveyed individuals reported parents either writing a cover letter or performing a test assignment for them. 

The survey polled young adults ages 18-23.  Parental involvement in this survey was defined as “the actions a parent took for their child during the job search process.”

The young adults surveyed reported parental involvement was often repeated.  They also said parents submitted applications (64%), completed test assignments (51%), and sat in on in-person interviews (51%). 

Additionally, 80% said their parents have communicated with their manager at least once, including 67% who reported multiple instances.  During these interactions, the most common topic was their schedule or hours (58%), and the second most common was workplace accommodations (38%).  

The first skunk of spring

I smelled the first skunk of spring as I took Zeus out to his run this morning.

The post on Election Integrity generated a lot of comments.

RJW eloquently argued the counterpoint.

It gives me no joy to state that I think the bus left the station. The trust is gone and must be re-earned.

Democrats in Michigan openly gloated that "Detroit and Grand Rapids delivered again". That is, they generated enough votes to deliver state-wide victories to the Democrats.  Actually, they said "Wayne and Kent counties".

Partisan judges stopping Trump from enforcing the laws (deporting illegal aliens) while they were blind to Biden illegally bringing them in on aircraft and bypassing the few, porous processes at the border.

January 6 protestors who were demonstrating to slow the certification SO IT WOULD BE MEANINGFUL (i.e. actually check out claims of wholesale fraud) were treated like foes of Stalin and all exculpatory evidence was destroyed. Does that look like integrity to anybody with an IQ over 90?

The list of betrayals, not of me personally but of their oath to uphold the Constitution, are endless. 

Our trust is gone. The other side burned through our good-will. The tank is empty. They usually tell lies to enrich themselves and increase their power but it has become such a habit that they tell lies just to stay in practice. 

Leigh, heads-up! Cleaning a traditional, masonry stove

Cleaning a masonry stove (Russia)

Leigh, this post is for you. I have no expectations that you will DO this, but it is informative to see how other people solve universal problems.

There is very little dialog explaining what is going on.

Based on the vegetation (Populus nigra, Acer platanoidies), available fish species (including Scomber scombrus) and the displays in the WWII memorial parks, I think this is in Russia on the east side of the Baltic Sea.

It looks as if the exhaust from the fire is drawn through a labyrinth (to the left of the fire) to transfer the heat to the bricks.

The grandmother scrapes off the plaster in a few places and "knocks-out" some plugs and cleans the passage ways of soot and masonry dandruff.

At the ten-minute mark, she mixes up mortar (perhaps as simple as sand and a bit of flour to bind it).

The mortar is mixed "soupy" or wet.

A person experienced in drywall repair would have figured out a way to secure the block being mortared into place with florist wire and a dowel so the mortar could have been aggressively troweled into place without pushing it into the space behind it.