One, i should be in hospital. Entire nest, id never make it.

I grabbed one wasp once some 15 years ago. There was a nest under the steps of a pool and i got it on the way up. Thankfully it was just the one that got me and not all of them ( it was a small nest.. just a few but still... ) Hand and arm was on fire. I couldn't breathe, temp went up, lightheaded.  Instead of going i went and sat in the house. Took some benadryl. I decided if it got worse id go, but i'm sure i should have anyway. That is how people die, by being stupid.

Many many decades ago i was turning left into a parking lot, leaned forward a bit. A little sweat bee had flew in and got behind me. As i leaned back it stung as i squished it..  I thought i was going to die then.  That was when i learned im stupid allergic. 

My dad did get attacked by a whole swarm. He was a mess. I'll tell the story sometime. It is fairly long.

Mon Sep 20 2021 11:54:14 EDT from LoanShark

Wasps are fuckers, though. 

This one time, I got stung, I knew it was probably going to happen and didn't have much choice...

Was rock climbing in the Gunks. On this route, you have to make a 5.8+ move and the easiest way to do it is to jam your whole arm into this 5" wide crack. I mean it's so much easier if you do it that way, it makes something difficult into something casual.

Of course my partner was leading and he went first and got stung. So I figured there was probably a nest in the vicinity, maybe even in the crack not too far away.


So I had to follow and sure enough I got stung too. On the bicep of the left arm that you have to jam in there.

I think it was a wasp or a hornet. Not a bee. Anyway, that sucker left a welt the size of a quarter, with a dot in the center, that looked sickly for at least a couple of weeks. It turned a pale white color and sort of collapsed inward, a bit, with a red ring around the outside boundary.

Nasty fuckers. If you got hit by a whole angry swarm, you could wind up in the hospital.

So our local heath department is asking for a meeting with our dev team to "discuss possible options of creating a proof of covid vaccination phone application"

Super. "lets see your papers"

Like most states, we want our own thing to control, not pay another for the privilege of using it.

That too, but there is something to be said about having control of  your own destiny. 

Besides, would you trust ANYTHING NY touches? :) 

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/10/flu-season-winter-america-choice/620373/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheAtlantic+%28The+Atlantic+-+Master+Feed%29

Coming soon to an authoritarian regime near you - flu-season lockdowns and extensions on limiting interaction between citizens for less important reasons than pandemic... 

Many covid positive *reported* were actually flu cases.  It dont matter, they will find ways. Right around election time if i'm right.. 

Hell, at the rate gas prices are rising, we wont be able to afford to go outside anyway. 

Although, with that said - it doesn't sound like a terrible idea. Japan has a strong, united, collectivist social *identity* as a nation and a people - a strong sense of interdependent responsibility to one another that trumps individualism. Some manifestations of that are troublesome in their society. It creates a culture very concerned about avoiding offending - to the point where it limits interaction and people are very formal and restrained with strangers in public settings. That makes it individually isolating and lonely. I met Chinese and European white people there and we had lots of discussions, and the Chinese guy liked me so much he wanted to be my friend. He was disappointed when I told him it wouldn't be safe for him. Showed him my Facebook feed, and he understood. But I didn't really get to know *one* Japanese person in the week I was there. They don't know you, they have the bare minimum of acceptable interaction with you. 

On the other hand - none of them are complaining about being asked to wear masks. In fact, you don't have to ask them - they just *do* it when they think it is necessary. 

Asians like that are... interesting. They've adopted Western Baizou Liberalism. Let me take a wild stab... 

She is single, or dates almost exclusively white or black men, if she isn't married to one. She has a strained relationship with her family. She doesn't really have a huge circle of OTHER Asian friends? 

I don't know Koreans as well as Chinese and Japanese - and their culture is markedly different in some significant ways... and then you add a dash of West-Coast vs. East Coast in there... 

 but from just what you've described - I bet I'm pretty close. 

I never trust an Asian who will admit to being "oppressed" by the "White European Male Patriarchy," or who will reduce themselves to the status of an "oppressed minority". Culturally, they're among the most racially xenophobic people in the world - They don't like *other* Asians, tolerate white people, and their opinion tends to rapidly decline on any other ethnicities after that. 


And that is part of the problem. I *love* the society of Japan and Tokyo... but you have to be born *into* the ethnicity to ever really be part of it. They don't ever say it outright and they're very polite and nice - but if you're not born Japanese, you'll never *be* Japanese, and they're glad you're visiting and spending your money - but they also can't wait for you to go back home. 

I know its a scifi book, and we dont have the tech. But i can see us ended up living like the majority of the puppeteers in from Larry Niven's books.

They all lived in windowless cubicles stacked to the sky. hardly any interaction other than walls that were video screens/cameras..

Aside from massive overpopulation, they were afraid of their own shadows. As we are slowly being trained to be.

Figured my odds were pretty good I was going to be in the right neighborhood. Your description of her... is basically a template. 

Fri Oct 15 2021 13:35:36 EDT from LoanShark

You're not too far off the mark. I don't know who she's been dating lately, except for one fling with a (white) climber a few years ago that I was aware of. Before that she was married to a mutual friend of ours--a white rock climber--for maybe a decade. She apparently had some tensions with her Korean family, who wanted her to settle down and just start having children.

Asians may be the target of attacks in this country, but at this point they are more economically successful than whites. So if you're the type of person who believe that the *only* kind of racism is structural racism, than guess what - Asians are never the victim of racism (at the present moment in history.)