Adjust Your Tin Foil Hats Accordingly

We’ve got west nile in the county, and that means helicopters flying overhead spraying chemicals to keep a lid on the mosquito population. Or… maybe that’s just what they want you to think! I hear one now. I feel calmer already. I don’t know why everyone is so angry at this Obama guy. Joe Biden is smart.

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22 thoughts on “Adjust Your Tin Foil Hats Accordingly”

  1. West Nile is a highly variable disease. Most who contract it never know it, most who do suffer symptoms report relatively mild “flu like symptoms,” but every so often someone “wins the lottery.” You do not to win that prize, so it’s best not to play that game to start with.

    Try to dry up every place water stands and mosquitoes breed you can find. A few drops of oil on the waters surface will cut off the larvae’s access to air if you cannot drain the water and keep that place dry.

    West Nile originally came here in the water in salvaged car tires, so it does not take much water to keep mosquito larvae alive.

    Stranger

  2. Sebastian, I seriously wonder if you wouldn’t be more successful politically if you weren’t always insulting those less … enlightened than you.

    It really can get off-putting at times, and I have to wonder what your answer is to the question I’ve learned to ask myself before sending email, making postings, etc.: “What am I trying to accomplish with this communication?”

    1. I should of course let Sebastian speak for himself, but I’ll kick in that from my own experiences as an “activist” for a number of years, and a number of issues in addition to the RKBA, I have never once found the — uh — unenlightened to be an asset to any cause, in any way, other than for their raw value as voters come election day. Quite the contrary. They are huge time-wasters and almost always wind up diverting efforts away from the important issues at hand.

      I don’t want to go into one of my long Old Stories, but there was a time when a few of us were having unusual success with something that wasn’t often very successful, by the simple expedient of sitting on or driving away the wackadoodles and keeping them from standing beside us in the public eye. But people above us thought the numbers game was more important and threw the gates open to anyone who would come and bring any level of craziness with them. What a few of us had accomplished over several years was swept off the board in several months, and never has recovered.

      So, hats off to Sebastian if he offends the tinfoil helmet (and other crowds) and drives them away. Other people are itching to get them. And I’ll say that even if I wind up being someone driven off. :-)

      1. I forgot to add that of course people in tinfoil helmets can be excellent check-writers, but when you pursue that path, very shortly the check-writers are steering your cause, and you’re not.

    2. I’m poking a bit of fun at the chemtrails conspirators. I didn’t realize this was a mainstream enough movement I had to be concerned about offending. I’m going to echo a bit of what Andy B. says…. do you really want those folks engaged and talking to legislators? Because here’s the catch… most of them can’t turn that shit off when they need to… and then you end up painted with that brush, whether it’s fair or not.

    3. I should also add….

      While I’m an advocate of building coalitions that can win, which necessarily means working with people you don’t agree with on everything, there’s a certain fringe if you bring in will only make things difficult for you. Conspiracy theorists are among the worst, whether they are 9/11 truthers, chemtrails people, or folks that buy the UN blue helmet conspiracy. It sounds like Cocopuffs to legislators. I’m not really interested in bringing that crowd into the big tent, and I actually think the movement benefits from keeping them out.

      One of the big mistakes the left is making right now is not doing enough to keep their fringes under control and out of the limelight.

      1. OK, the conspiracy theorists are indeed a hopeless bunch (although I thought this was a reference to black helicopters, I forget about the chemtrails types since … well, I’m a chemist by training and I can do math, and the math just doesn’t work, and I have trouble remembering the entirely irrational) … and small enough in number and influence, now and potential, that keeping them out of the tent is very possibly the right thing to do. Although I find constant public insults to be distasteful.

        I’ll wait and call you on a less marginal case, where I believe you’re pushing people away who aren’t hopeless.

      2. “do you really want those folks engaged and talking to legislators?”

        Not only legislators. Whether you want to consider it deliberate or not, reporters and media will usually go after the most quotable statements they can find to print, so when you get people spouting nutsiness in public, as “gun rights advocates,” who do you think will be quoted in the press the next day, or make the Film at Eleven? Hint: It’s not going to be you with your dry statistics and well-reasoned arguments.

        It’s bad enough that that will contribute to stereotyping your cause, while not contributing anything to the public debate; an additional effect of that will be to attract still more crazies to your cause, while keeping away people who might be real contributors.

  3. And you’re not even right on the facts, or at least all the press releases for upcoming spraying say they’re going to use trucks….

      1. That’s almost certainly in Dallas, where the (Democratic) Mayor has held off on spraying long enough for 150 to get sick and 10 to die.

      1. It was reported yesterday that they were going to be spraying along the Schuykill River, and up the Delaware River yesterday, using helicopters. But, that was for black flies, and not for West Nile mosquitoes. I was out on the river by Bristol all yesterday afternoon and didn’t see any choppers, though.

        Come to think of it, I didn’t see any black flies, either.

        1. From Wikipedia:

          Pennsylvania, in the United States, operates the largest single black fly control program in North America. The program is seen as beneficial to both the quality of life for residents and to the state’s tourism industry.

          I have a friend who grew up in Maine, a father who’s hunted and fished in Canada, the article confirms everything I’ve heard about.

          1. Having encountered black flies in most memorable ways in other states, I believe it.

            It is fascinating that the spray is a black-fly specific bacteria, and not a chemical.

            1. I can’t recall having encountered these critters since I was a kid. I had a great aunt and uncle who had a cabin (that’s being charitable) on Red Mill Pond in Sussex County, Delaware. In the water you had to deal with aquatic snakes. Out of the water were those damned flies. There was no way to win. The water was green from agricultural runoff. Somehow as a kid this kind of thing does not gross you out. You’ll still swim in it.

              Now I think that area is pretty built up, but back in the mid 80s, it was kind of something out of deliverance. At least that’s how I remember it.

              1. Imagine swimming under the Burlington-Bristol Bridge in 1956. I did. At the time I didn’t even know what some of those things I was pushing out of the way were.

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