Recent Comments

1. 4 days ago on Brewster Rockit

   And in a fair analysis, although reaction to Musk is likely to be part of the issue, auto industry analysts worldwide are pointing to numerous other factors, including the fact that Teslas have not had an overall technology update or upgrade in over twelve years save for the Cybertruck. In addition, competition worldwide is catching up and even surpassing Tesla in quality, range, price, etc.

   The Cybertruck, like the Hummer, was always going to be a niche market, no matter what Tesla marketing said.

2. 4 days ago on Brewster Rockit

   But the biggest idiocy by far was a noted Hollywood starlet (I believe Alyssa Milano) announcing in November 2022 on then-still-Twitter that she was trading in her Tesla for…………… a VOLKSWAGEN.

   Offloading a car because she believed one guy to be racist or a white supremacist or letting the “wrong kind” of people back on Twitter or whatever……… and replacing it with a car from a company LITERALLY started by Adolf Hitler………….

   This take a particularly special kind of stupid.

3. 4 days ago on Brewster Rockit

   To be completely fair about this, that specific game has by far the longest odds against any contestant winning the offered car…….

4. 6 days ago on Prickly City

   “Cage-free” =/= “free-range.”

   You can keep cage-free chickens in a sealed barn or chicken house, which reduces vastly (but, to be fair, doesn’t quite eliminate) the exposure to outside birds or other carriers.

   It’s “free-range” flocks that are at (much greater) risk to exposure from outside pathogens. You can, in theory, let chickens free-range in a totally screened chicken run, but there’s still the risk of bird droppings, unless you make the screens somehow bird-proof AND eliminate all trees, bushes, wires, and other wild bird perches.

5. 8 days ago on Prickly City

   As the co-owner of my own flock and someone actively staying atop of both the industry and hobby repercussions of avian flu, I’m not the one you have to make “think” about this. The egg farms I’m talking about are as isolated as they are IN PART to reduce the risk of exposure to wild birds—in the middle of the freakin’ desert, “miles from civilization.” As far as has been publicly disclosed, only one chicken farm in Arizona has been confirmed with avian flu and been exterminated wholesale, and that farm was on the western outskirts of the Phoenix metropolitan area.

   It is possible to attempt to eliminate avian flu exposure from the “wild” by keeping birds cooped up in cages indoors—and that would be both inhumane and violate the “cage-free” poultry/egg mandates instituted by many states. And bird netting or screens over entire farms is both impractical and ineffective.

6. 9 days ago on Prickly City

   The many various accounts I read said the Super Bowl crowd booed Taylor Swift, not Trump.

7. 9 days ago on Prickly City

   The only problem with your analysis is that poultry farms have, in the past decade or so, locked themselves down into fortresses of impenetrability, even BEFORE the current avian flu outbreak. No infected chickens are getting out, whether or not they could infect humans. The egg and poultry farms I know of bar outsiders in part because they can bring in pathogens that can wipe out a million-plus birds, and many workers wear the equivalent of hazmat suits, and not just for possible flu but for other pathogens that can go either way.

   I was talking with the head of a large egg farm company that had installed a railroad terminal to bring feed to its farms and several others in that part of the state. We had a mutual interest in railroads and heritage breeds of chickens—but he flat out told me before my visit, “You know I can’t let you and your wife within five miles of either of our farms, you understand?” (Marek’s Disease, also highly infectious, is a problem where we are.)

   There is still lively and legitimate debate over whether the wholesale slaughter of farm or backyard flocks is necessary or prudent. The counter-argument might be, “So let’s just kill all those people with measles in Texas to prevent the spread—makes sense, right?” The relative failure of COVID-19 “preventative” measures have millions of people rightfully skeptical of the intentions and motives of “the government” when it comes to avian flu, and the conspiracy theorists not only have a rich lode to mine, but start making sense after a point…….

8. 9 days ago on Arlo and Janis

   We SAID, “Let’s just not go there……”

9. 10 days ago on Arlo and Janis

   Perhaps all of this blather above is for naught.

   Another plausible explanation: “Here’s to George Washington,. and that’s about all we can say before others insist on bringing up his owning of slaves and blaming virtually every perceived sin of American being upon him…… so let’s just not go there for one day, huh?”

10. 16 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

    Greta Thunberg was wearing that traditional Palestinian headscarf while protesting and getting arrested. She chose sides—and chose poorly, as did most of those pro-terrorist college student protesters.