Questions. I Get Questions...

In the aftermath of yesterday's Ebola update, the following:

Q. I have a question about the contagiousness of this once it finds a new population group. Do the natives of central Africa have any advantages of having a higher immunity to Ebola?

No. Neither do we. In a U.S. ICU, with normally anal-retentive nurses (second only to those in OR) following the (idiotically flawed) CDC protocols, the first U.S patient infected exactly 2 nurses, i.e. the same r-naught one would expect with no precautions, with Ebola in the wild. Based on all current data, both you and they have the same immunity to Ebola as you do to nerve gas and bullets, i.e. none.

Q. Does living with the amount of germs the typical African does daily give them an advantage over western populations? I would hope that western populations with better hygiene practices and avoiding the funeral body washing will be an advantage. However is there any studies that suggest western populations may be less immune or more susceptible to contracting contagious diseases from a lack of exposure to the environment that Africa has?

Based on morbidity and mortality figures from the African continent, they are worse off than Western populations, mainly because they're debilitated and malnourished from dealing with living with a higher amount of germs daily. "Cleanliness is next to godliness" is the best medicine ever practiced, even by Poor Richard's Almanac.
Hoping for magical immunity based on geography is a forlorn expectation, counter-factual to all available evidence. 

Q. My biggest concern is that there is an unknown reservoir species in Africa that keeps Ebola alive and available for reinfection.

Mine too. GMTA.

Q. If it gets here, will it establish itself in a similar species, and Ebola becomes endemic in the US?

Overwhelmingly likely that's also a "yes".

Q. Or Indonesia, Vietnam, China, India?

Also "yes".

Q. The gift that keeps on giving.

 Precisely.

Q. Would you stick around if you were offered the vaccine? 

Yes. Long enough to get the vaccine.
Currently, of those who have received the experimental vaccine on an emergency basis, there have been zero Ebola infections, and no serious side effects noted.
Once I had gotten it, I would still GTFO of Dodge, and then hunker down somewhere behind concertina wire with clear fields of fire. 

Q. What are the chances that vaccinated people could inadvertently infect a loved one by accidentally bringing the virus home through poor infectious control procedures?

Exactly the same as unvaccinated people doing that. If Ebola comes in, GTFO.
Period. If you can get vaccinated first, do that. Then GTFO.

Q. Is it even possible to ramp up vaccine production to one hundred million or a billion doses? We know Ebola can produce enough virus. 

No effing idea. That's a question for the bean counters at Merck, Glaxo-Smith-Klein, etc. It's mainly a question of time, resource allocation, and facilities available. Making Ebola vaccine probably means they're not making tetanus, measles, and flu shots, for example, which killed more people in the 20th century than Ebola has in all outbreaks combined. In any event, it's a months-long process, and depending on when you start, you may be too late to succeed, because you won't have enough until six months after everyone in the affected area is dead. Complicating things is that so far, the vaccine is still experimental, and only being used on humans in the affected hot zone(s), because so far, there's been no full clinical trials.

I hope President Trump takes this seriously. We may get past this outbreak, but what about the one in 2021, and 2024, and...

 That was the exact question in 2014-15 too. that outbreak stopped for no apparent reason, since exactly none of the infection control criteria laid out by WHO/CDC/MSF to contain it were ever met, in any of the affected countries. IIRC, the entire country of Sierra Leone was effectively written off in November or December of 2014.

{Just a personal hunch, but as it had killed some 3-4X more people in reality than what was credited in "official" reports (the biggest open secret of the entire outbreak), I think that the high-risk areas were finally depopulated of all available stupid people.}

 

And just a reminder, but the "survivors", besides suffering Post-Ebola virus syndrome, are apparently infected for life. Every subsequent screening finds them all, male and female, with reservoirs of live EVD in their bodies, to the present date.

 

Q. I'm not following this biology math. If ebola was as contagious as you say, then the last time it was in the US with the sick nurse going to her wedding etc. then it should have taken off. That set of events was an experiment from which contagiousness in the US environment can be estimated. How does that estimate turn out?

What sick nurse, going to what wedding??
Amber Vinson, not contagious at the time, tried on her wedding dress at a shop in Ohio. Being scrupulous, she noted an increase in her temperature while on that trip, and on her return to Dallas, checked in to hospital, where she was diagnosed with Ebola. (The dress shop, OTOH, a 20-year going business concern, closed permanently and went bankrupt as a direct result of just that one contact. Multiply that times a few hundred to a few thousand businesses, and tell me how you see that contagion experiment going here, anywhere.)

Both infected nurses (who had done everything they were told as far as PPE) were isolated nearly immediately after first showing signs of elevated body temperature, and were not wandering the streets for two weeks while fully contagious and coughing out virus. Unlike just about nearly every infected person in Africa.

In very short order, they were both moved to full BL-IV isolation, because clearly the CDC protocols were fatally flawed (as the infection of two nurses proved rather devastatingly in exactly 21 days), and no one else at THP wanted to play any more.
The entire ER and ICU staff there threatened to quit if the hospital didn't close.
Given that as Ebola Central, THP had a patient census now in the single digits, they shut their doors for several months, and barely avoided bankruptcy.

And at the height of the outbreak, we had exactly one open BL-IV bed left in all of North America.

So you were exactly two patients from Dallas becoming Monrovia, Liberia, at the height of the outbreak.

Followed by the entire country rapidly becoming West Africa.

Ebola, with no precautions, in the wild, doubles every 21 days, on average.
Ebola in the US, with full infectious disease precautions and hazmat gear, doubled in 21 days.
Then we stopped f**king around, and put all infectees into Level IV hazmat isolation.

That, and the fact that Duncan was the only contagious person to slip out of W. Africa and into the US, is the only reason the disease didn't take hold here and go all Black Death on us.
Pure, dumb luck.

Getting a grasp on how contagious it is now?

Q. So how many cases in the US before you would go into Lockdown mode?

One.
Next question.

And by "Lockdown" *I* mean:
No flights into or out of the affected country(ies) for the duration of the outbreak plus 40 days, except military mercy flights. No entry of individuals from those countries directly nor indirectly, except after entering full 40-day absolute quarantine seclusion prior to being permitted to proceed. That incudes all healthcare and medical staff, without exception, even if totally asymptomatic on arrival.
No "home seclusion" bullshit, no "wandering outside the house at will", but rather being behind armed guards and barbed wire, sitting in a tent or locked room for 40 days, and showing not one single sign of illness for the duration.

On Day 41, they can walk out.
And the traveler pays the full cost of the personnel to monitor them, and 6 weeks' worth of MREs or equivalent.

If they don't like it, they can stay in the Hot Zone country and wait a few months until the outbreak is resolved.

Their choice.

And don't try any civil rights bullshit. Quarantine law is well-established, going back 600 years.
If anybody in the Do-Gooder Brigade doesn't like it, they should stay their ass in Ebola City over there, or stay their ass home here without going to Ebolaville in the first place.

Any country or air carrier not scrupulously implementing the exact same protocol will be barred from entering US airspace, and any persons arriving from them subject to the same quarantine and rules.

Or take a Sidewinder missile up their tailpipe, and uncontrolled descent at the coastal ADIZ. Flaming Jet A/Jet-A1 is a great sterilizer. So is 2000' of seawater over the wreckage.

 

Also from comments: the US Army field manual in pdf form on Physical Security.

 

https://www.wbdg.org/FFC/ARMYCOE/FIELDMAN/fm31930.pdf

 

But if you can fence a yard, you can do this.

 

The FM stuff is for stopping people a bit more motivated to breach that perimeter.

(If it comes to that, The Walking Dead  and World War Z are documentaries, not works of fiction. Ponder that.)

 

Ebola and droplet precautions means you only need 10-20 yards of separation, and no outside contact.

Gowning up to play amongst it is a 30-45 minute procedure both coming and going, and requires 2 people also suited up as monitors for watching you putting the gear on and taking it off without contaminating yourself.

 

Along with a metric fuckton of supplies for that, and the ability to safely burn all contaminated items.

 

You won't have that, so you ain't doing that. If it comes to the worst, don't even try.

 

 

 

[footnote: the most recent UN/WHO Ebola report

http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/276464/SITREP_EVD_DRC_20181205-eng.pdf?utm_source=Newsweaver&utm_medium=email&utm_term=click+here+to+download+the+complete+situation+report&utm_content=Tag%3AAFRO%2FWHE%2FHIM+Outbreaks+Weekly&utm_campaign=WHO+AFRO+-+Situation+Report+-+Ebola+Virus+Disease+Outbreak+in+DRC+-+Sitrep+18+%282018%29

 

 

Relevant passage re: vaccinations:"As of 3 December 2018, the cumulative number of people vaccinated is 39 845."

By bloghost executive fiat, I am spotting the UN the extra 115 vaccinations in the last 8 days since the report was issued, to take them to an even 40K people dosed.]

Ebola 2018 Update: Lying With Statistics

On more than a few recent occasions this year,
(Why This Is A Problem,
8/16/2018, 8/24/2018, 8/28/2018,
9/15/2018,
10/6/2018, 10/11/2018, 10/28/2018,
11/17/2018)
I've warned you that things in Kivu Province, DRC, aren't going well with respect to Ebola, and the current outbreak.

They still aren't.

(Note that's only 9 posts out of 300 or so in that time span. This is not "The Ebola Blog", nor ever will be. I'm just better - and righter - on it than ABCCNNBCBS combined, nine days out seven. I concede that's a pretty low bar to get over. For reference, I started paying attention to Ebola in 2014 in the spring, and didn't even blog about it at all here until early August 2014, at which point it was over 1000 cases in W.Africa. Note that right now, we aren't but halfway to that point now. I still beat 99.9999% of the MSM to the punch by about 2 months then. In 2014 terms, we are now where we were in June of 2014. In October 2014, it got to the U.S., and we were off to the races. Think about that timeframe long and hard.)

As you'll note at sites like Peter's BRM or Old NFO's, people familiar with math and common sense (and in Peter's case, Africa itself) are beginning to pick up on things. Before they actually get here, and without me pulling the fire alarm.

Read their posts, and then come back; I'll wait.

- - -

So, let's look at that bastion of accuracy, Wikipedia, and see how they're doing covering it.
Oh, surprise! Not well, with respect to Ebola. Just like Kivu. Color me shocked.

Here is their current graph showing time and cases.
(We'll skip the obligatory caveat in Africa of "If they can count past 20 with their shoes on, if they're not lying to save face", etc. etc.)

Seems straightforward, right?
Unfortunate growth of the Ebola outbreak currently, but slow, steady and increasing.
So, where does the "Lying" part of "Lying with statistics" show up?
Look at the x-axis (for Common Core grads, that's the horizontal line) which measures time.
Not quite 150ish days, from 8/12018 to present, a couple of weeks from Christmas 2018.
Fair enough.
Now look at the y-axis (again, for the Common Core-ons, that'd be the vertical measurement line on the left side). It doesn't show 0-150, like it should if it were an honest graph.
It instead shows you 0-600.

IOW: It's lying to you, to your face, by a factor of 4X.

Here's what is should look like, it if were an honest graph:

Sorry if you can't read it now, but that's because I made the time axis correspond 1:1 to the number-of-people-affected axis, by shrinking the x-axis to 1/4 of the original.
Note how the graph from zero to any point- cases, deaths, whatever - is now far more vertical. In layman's terms, that's a viral outbreak liftoff.
Like a Saturn-V moon rocket.

Here's the same graph, but with the typical r-naught exponential growth of Ebola (of r=2) plotted roughly (inaccuracy due entirely to my freehand crayon-like art skills with Paint) with a bold red line.

Whoopsie. Oh dear! It seems Ebola in Kivu is above that line, substantially.
That means Ebola in Kivu is growing much faster than the unchecked spread would, meaning human activity (stupidity, pre-literacy, unscientific ignorance, the local asswipes burning Ebola Treatment Centers, and hordes of criminal thugs roaming around with AK-47s shooting up medical relief workers, for instance) is causing Ebola to spread there right now more rapidly than simply doing nothing would.

Greeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

So, how bad is it, really?
Let me help again, with Paint's crayon:

Holy shit, Batman! The r-naught for deaths isn't 2, it's 4!
For total Ebola cases,  it's 6!!
So, Congolese incompetence and international apathy, unchanged since we started telling you about things this year, is spreading the current DRCongo Ebola outbreak at 2-3 times the speed it would progress if people just walked around doing nothing.

Well-played, fucktards.
You're now improving on 2014 by 2-3 orders of magnitude, and we're still only at Stage 9 (out of 34) levels of death and pestilential spread.

2019 is going to get interesting. In a Chinese curse kind of way.

This thing has now hit a large (Butembo: pop. 1M), if isolated, city already.
That's going to pay yuuuuuuge dividends in deaths, momentarily.

And if it gets to Nairobi (pop. 3M)?
One of the largest cities on the continent Nairobi, international air hub Nairobi?
And it jumps the continent?

Start stocking canned goods, water, ammunition, and concertina wire. Again.
Not necessarily in that order.
(And like you should be already, for a gazillion other contingencies.)

Es kommt.
Nochmal.

Merry Christmas.

Subtle Hints Dept.

h/t Daily Timewaster


Bloghost C W Swanson at Daily Timewaster, with an eye for a memorable pic, regularly accumulates some spectacular random photography.

And I am an incorrigible smartass, with an occasional worthwhile phrase or thought.

Behold what happens when I'm bored:





PSA

 

And Another Thing...

"Those who don't remember the past are doomed to jump on their own junk with cleats." -Aesop

When you can’t correctly diagnose the problem, any suggested treatment is almost certain to be a load of horseshit as well.

Those who knee-jerk disagree illustrate the point better and more concisely than I could, as a poster child for That Guy.

If you’re still not seeing it, pay attention.

Historical note: you got Hollywood as a largely (but not then nor never entirely) Jewish invention, precisely because of the same white-hooded goose-stepping anti-Semitism in the OP and responses, except at the turn of the last century, coupled with the avarice of Thomas Edison Inc., Philadelphia lawyers, and Tamany Hall politics conniving to try to sue Jewish filmmakers out of business every time they made a movie, and the subsequent and reflexive decamping of the Thalberg/Mayer/Goldwyn/Selznick types from corrupt East coast environs, where justice was sold by the pound to the highest bidder, and getting off the train in Phoenix AZ on the one day in 365 it ever rains there.

That wouldn’t do at all, so they all got back on the train, arrived in Los Angeles, saw they had 300+ days of sunshine/year, ocean, desert, mountain, plains, forest woodland, and city-scape all in close proximity, coupled with a thriving and booming metropolis, hard-working people absent trade unionism, and dirt-cheap real estate, with none of the East Coast kleptocracy previously noted, and the match was made that gave you the single greatest cultural achievement in America since ever: the movie business.

They could shoot cowboy and indian flicks three miles from downtown L.A., because in 1910, everything from that point to the Pacific Ocean was bean fields, cactus patches, and rocky chapparal, and hordes of broke-dick former ranch hands became cavalry troopers and Schmoe-hawk tribe Indian stunt men.

Squeeze Jell-O, and you always end up with a mess all over yourself. If Edison, Tamany Hall politics, and robber-baron kleptocracy hadn’t squeezed the Jews out of the East Coast, Hollywood would have been called Long Island, Connecticut, and/or New Jersey. Well-played. How’s that working out for those areas now?

Hollywood is not a Jooooooooooos!!! problem; those exact folks gave you The Wizard Of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Stagecoach (starring some B-list singing cowboy), Goodbye Mr. Chips, Of Mice and Men, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, Dodge City, Drums Along The Mohawk, Gunga Din, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Jesse James, Young Mr. Lincoln, and about 100 other movies, including a couple of Secret Service-entitled flicks starring some kid from Illinois, all in just that one year (1939)!

If you can’t suss that out, that year was the Yankee’s “Murderer’s Row” of movie-making, compared to ever in history, anywhere.

Now tell me the names of the producers and studio heads, just for those 12 flicks, in 1939.

As Casey Stengel noted a time or two, “You could look it up.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_1939

Tell me about the Hollywood that produced, e.g. It’s A Wonderful Life, Sahara, Twelve O’clock High, Ben Hur, and 30K-40K other films, some 1000 of which are international treasures, and the high points of the entire quintessential American art form; then compare and contrast that with the Hollywood that makes any four examples of the current shite you’d care to name, and see if you can spot what changed between Hollywood 1915-1990ish, versus Hollywood from 1990-present.

If you didn’t know that around the break point in that tale, the overwhelming bulk of movie financing and box office revenue started coming from overseas, which is why Hollywood no longer gives two wet shits for mainstream America’s viewpoint, nor caters to same, you’re waaaaaaay behind the curve on this topic.

Pay more attention to the “business” half of the entertainment business.
In short, “follow the money“.

Hollywood happens to be located in America, but it caters to everyone but America. This isn’t a Joooooooooooos!!! problem, it’s a ¥en/€uro/riyal problem.

WTF do you think the mediocre Red Dawn reboot was CG-scrubbed of the original (as written and shot) ChiCom villainy, and the Norks’ notional invasion scenario CGI-inserted into the entire film in post-?

The man who pays the piper calls the tune, only since about 5000 B.C.

The answer isn’t armbands and goose-stepping.
And for the really, unbelievably culturally dense, Major Strasser was not the tragic hero of Casablanca.

Finance your own viewpoint, and kick the whole corrupt bundle of current Hollywood douchebaggery right in the pussy.

As I noted, Mel Gibson, dragooned bassackwards into the wrong end of this conversation, proved that point: No one in anti-American/anti-Christian mainstream Hollywood wanted to finance a film in spoken Aramaic about the trials and crucifixion of Christ. So Mel coughed up $30M of his own money, shot what he wanted, released it, and as the producer/sole-owner of that flick, raked in the lion’s share of the >$600M gross it returned. So far.

You really want to f**k Hollywood where it hurts, without any lube?
Great.
Do that.
THAT was “Operation Gibson”. He laughed all the way to the bank.

Anything else is just babies shitting their diapers, and flinging the contents as spackle.

Masthead point: The only way to fight a culture war is to FIGHT a Culture War.

But disagree: name one war-by-boycott that ever won anything.
Show all work.

I’ll pitch you a softball along that line:
Explain how sanctions and embargos in the late 1930s-early 1940s brought the Imperial Japanese war-mongering of that era to a swift and bloodless halt.
Bring in supporting evidence from the embargoes and sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq from June 1990-January 1991, showing how that worked out.

I’ll be over here watching.

What changed is who pays for films to be made. Around 1990, give or take.
When you lost the checkbook, you lost the industry’s attention.

This is what happens when you abdicate fighting culture wars, and think you can ignore them, which was the Right, inclusive, from 1960-five seconds ago. Not “conservatism”, not “Boomers” (aged about 0-15 when that clever plan was hatched), but rather every swinging Right-side Richard for 60+ effing years, and counting

Well-played.

Keep doing that, and call me when it succeeds spectacularly.
Not.

Like it never has, nor ever will.

This is why those railing against Hollywood, particularly in the vein of "It's all run by Joooooooooooooos!" are mouth-breathing morons with the IQ of a cup of custard, and less culture than a cup of yogurt.

Hollywood is an American invention, not a Jewish one.

Currently, a ream (Common Core grads, that would 500 sheets, i.e. one sealed bundle of same) of paper at Office Depot runs about $3.

Only in Hollywood can I add $2 worth of ink to any 200 sheets of that ream of paper, turn it into a screenplay, sell it for $1,000,000, have it made into a top-grossing movie, lather rinse, repeat, and retire like George Lucas when DisneyCorp buys your empire, for $6,000,000,000 dollars.
(Not bad for a guy who only actually wrote two movies in his entire life, and only actually directed about four.)

Initial investment, $5. In 1970s dollars, about $1.80.

J.K. Rowling is even worse/better: she was unemployed and living in her car when she penned the first Harry Potter book. In spiral-bound notebooks, with ink pens, FFS. Ten movies, ten books, and a gazillion dollars of promotional merchandise later, she's a wee bit better off.

Try that in any other field of endeavor.

So, show of hands: who doesn't know what a "muggle" is, and never heard of a light-saber?
Beuller? Beueller? Ferris Beuller...?"

{Double hint: that's another example, courtesy of the late great master of adolescent American angst, John Hughes. Clever folks may spot a trend here.)

And, ZOMG, Ben Stein is a Joooooooooooooooooooo!!!!
WTF cares? He was brilliant, and hilarious.

And there's another absolute Semite, who AFAIK only wrote two songs, and everyone in the Anglosphere from age 10-65 can sing them, in their entirety, word for word.
The guy was Sherwood Schwarz.
If that name sounds familiar, it's because the two songs are the opening theme songs for Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch.

There's a famous audience-warm-up guy for live-audience television in Hollywood who opens his act by singing just the first line of either theme, and in about 0.2 seconds, the entire audience will complete the tune(s), in a rousing crescendo chorus, from memory.
Every single time he does it, for thirty years and running.

"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip..."

"Here's the story...of a lovely lady..."

You have now received a concise lecture, illustration, and demonstration of cultural penetration.

So, you want to win the cultural wars?

Invest $5, and do that.

Boycotts, anti-Semite mouth breathing rants, etc.?
STFU and die. Of dick cancer.

"Roger Shuttle Columbia, You Are Cleared In Hot..."

h/t WRSA

"Spread Far And Wide"??
Well, I don't think they meant "like the Space Shuttle Columbia, coming in to land with a big chunk of heat tile missing on the wing", 'cuz that's about how this is going to go, so let's get started on that re-entry.

The "Cunning Plan" .

So, how's that going to go?

"Have fun storming the castle..."

It's also a little late (like by an effing year, minimum) to try and pull something like this out of your ass on D-Day.

If you're trying to fail publicly and demoralize your base (that is, the 5% who'll still be around by the time they get to the end of that .chan thread), it's a great way to shoot off several toes in one go. Maybe even a whole foot. Winning!!!!!

Double Bonus Points for deploying the Stormfront sourcing as the BLUF, because nothing succeeds against Hollywood like throwing on your NSDAP armband and holding a torchlight rally with a bunch of guys with toothbrush moustaches who missed the news in 1946.

"Gee, I wonder how everyone from the Lamestream Media to Norm the Normie will react to guys in swastikas attacking Jooooooooooooooos!!!!! What could possibly go wrong there??

But hell, I've only worked in that town and that biz for twenty years or so, so WTF do I know?

The worst part is, Hollywood IS yuuuuuuuuuuuuugely over-ripe for such a takedown.

But when you let autistic twelve-year-olds and the Henry Gibsons from The Blues Brothers come up with the "strategy",

and it doesn't even give Haxo a chubby, anyone marching in that parade is pretty well fucked before you get started.

{Strategic Tip To Anyone Concerned: Probably not the best idea to get the World's Worst People At Media Savvy to do anti-media campaign. Like hiring termites to guard your woodpile-bad. Like putting Rosie O-Donnell on guard at the Twinkie Factory bad. Like handing Rep. Evita Guevara-Castro a microphone and putting her on CNN bad. Like asking DiFi about AR-15s bad. Times a  million. Let me know when the penny drops; I can go on if I haven't quite jack-hammered that particular point home with a 20MT hammer..}

In fact, they're probably so far from Fucked, they couldn't see it with a telescope orbiting in space.
Just saying.

Find some people like Sabo, who know how to craft a message, and get the fucktard minions to keep their Nazi-dicks in their lederhosen for a week or two hundred, and then try this for real. With an actual strategy (besides resolving to smell bad), a fuckton of actual planning, and a way to appeal to flyover America with less swastikas. Like maybe none. Think of swastikas like camo at a press conference: it's pretty much the equivalent of wearing a beanie with a propeller for your presidential debate. Not even the faintest whiff of swastikas that only a bloodhound could detect, ever, with 5 weeks of sniffing. Please. I'm begging you with tears in my eyes, because if you fuck with this, you'll kill everything, and people will talk about what happened for a hundred years. While Sy Snoodles and the Tatooine Cantina Band plays marimba riffs on your whitened skulls.

This is like a landing craft dropping the ramp at Normandy, and having 100 retards with Airsoft gear try to take the beach. After tying all their shoelaces together, wearing their underpants outside their trousers, and putting their shoes and socks on in that order.

Funny as hell to watch, but only on newsreel footage.
In person, not so much.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Oh, wait, you were serious?

Okay.
Start with when you want this to hit.
Say, the Oscars in 2020, and the summer after that, eight months to two months out from Election in November. (Which event, I'm reliably informed, could be of some importance to the future immediately afterwards.) Which means you've got this month to plan taking them out starting next month, and building that snowman for all of 2019.

Not posting it on Fucktard-Chan on Monday for a Thursday roll-out.

Start there, and work your way forward.
Finding someone over twelve, and with an IQ over 12, to mastermind your Cunning Plan would also be a healthier prospect of actual effectiveness, unless the plan all along was to drop the lit road flare you're juggling into that wading pool of racing gasoline.

And BTW? Gibson made Passion Of The Christ, with his own wallet of money, for $30M. I dunno what his distribution deal was, but to date, worldwide, it's only grossed $611,899,420.
So I'm just spitballing, but I'm pretty sure Mel's over Hollywood's snubs, by a paltry half a billion dollars or so.


And this, boys and girls, is how we get a post. Those fish in the barrel aren't going to shoot themselves.

Well, Yeah.

h/t  90 Miles From Tyranny

The Bug

Not so much that it's appropriate at the moment, as much as I'm a fan of Mary Chapin Carpenter, and a Mark Knopfler song that gets underplayed.

Enjoy.

Asinus Rex: Obozicus I

I'm not positive, but the odds that Obozo is also from whence Rep. Evita Guevara-Castro learned economics are about 2000:1 in favor of the proposition.

And no, HopeyDopey, you didn't build that.
This happened because you're gone and irrelevant now; not because of anything you did, but rather, in spite of everything you did for eight nightmarish years.

Now, how can anyone ever miss you if you won't STFU and toddle off the stage?
Shush, Barry; grown-ups are talking. And governing.

This Is My Not So Shocked Face

Former DPD Officer Killshot is now under indictment for manslaughter murder.
Couldn't happen to a nicer killer:

(DALLAS) Amber Guyger, the [former] Dallas police officer [later fired, and] charged in the shooting death of Botham Jean, was indicted Friday on a murder charge — an upgrade from the “manslaughter” charge at the time of her arrest.

The shooting occurred on September 6, 2018. Guyger claimed she mistook Jean, an accountant, for an intruder in her apartment but realized she had opened fire inside his unit in the same building. She was fired weeks later by the Dallas Police Department.

Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson told reporters Friday that the charges were upgraded from manslaughter because “at the moment of the shooting it was a knowing… offense.”

Guyger claimed that she did not realize she was at the wrong apartment until she called 911 and was asked for her location. According to USA Today, the family has questioned her version of events, alleging discrepancies:

An affidavit for a search warrant states that Guyger and Jean encountered each other at the door to his apartment, instead of having an exchange across the room.
After the shooting, Guyger’s blood was drawn to be tested for alcohol and drugs, according to Hall. Authorities have not released results.

 Guyger posted a $300,000 bond and will await her trial outside of prison.

Deadeye Douchebadge also neglected to mention that she had made multiple complaints for noise about the very upstairs neighbor she murdered, including one complaint the same morning of the day she killed him. Whoops.

So he was not unknown to her, and the idea that her 1-block drive from PD HQ to her apartment left her so groggy she missed 20 obvious visual cues, including the blazing neon lit door plaque and red carpet outside his apartment, make her farcical claims that this was a tragic mistake flatly recockulous.

Like we told you at the time: this was an execution, under color of authority.
Because she thought she could do that, and get away with it.

Nice of the Dallas D.A.'s Office to finally pull their heads out of their asses and admit the obvious.

Now she just needs a fine public trial, and a choice between confession and LWOP, or the needle for premeditated homicide.

The real tragedy in this case is that public hanging has gone out of fashion.

RIP Captain Wilton Parmenter

(Hollywood) Ken Berry (85), the amiable and musically-talented TV actor of the 1960s and ’70s who starred in “F Troop,” “Mama’s Family” and “Mayberry R.F.D.,” died Saturday.
His former wife, actress Jackie Joseph-Lawrence posted the news on Facebook. “F Troop” co-star Larry Storch wrote on Facebook, “We hope you know how much you were loved. Goodnight Captain.”
Berry played Captain Parmenter on Western sitcom “F Troop” for two years in the mid-1960s.  

Born in Moline, Ill., Berry started out as a singer and dancer. He served in the U.S. Army special services under Sergeant Leonard Nimoy, entertaining the troops and winning a slot on the “Ed Sullivan Show.”
Nimoy helped introduce him to studios after he left the Army, and soon Berry was under contract to Universal to appear in movie musicals. Berry worked in several musical revues, including with Abbott and Costello, and with Lucille Ball. He also worked with Carol Burnett, who later invited him to guest on her show.
After brief stints on “Dr. Kildare” and George Burns-Connie Stevens sitcom “Wendy and Me,” he landed his first regular starring role on “F-Troop.”

Unlike other recent deaths, this one should be free of controversy.
I have no idea what his politics were, which with actors is feature, not a bug.

Famous for nothing particular, except sneezing "Retreat!" and reversing it to "Charge!", resulting in a cinematic Civil War victory, gaining a Medal of Honor, followed by a Purple Heart, and a posting to forlorn Fort Courage, the armpit of the Army (just like every other army post IRL since Valley Forge), for command of the hapless troopers of F-Troop. This resulted in two years' time over 65 episodes interacting with the savvy and formidable Hekawi tribe, in their village just north of Ventura Blvd, just down the street from Stalag 13, and across the lot from Gilligan's Island, at a time in America when the news from the activities of our real Army was far less amusing. Followed by sitcom legendary status in syndication.

We are merely saddened by this milestone marking the passing of time, and the loss of a man who entertained millions, while pissing off pretty much nobody you know.
Which ain't a bad epitaph.

The incorrigible Cpl. Agarn, Larry Storch, soldiers on at the ripe old age of 95, while Private Dobbs, James Hampton, is 82, and living quietly in Texas at last report.
Storch's kind words in remembrance of his former co-star are fitting and touching.

Hand salute.