FIFY

 h/t WRSA

Natzsofast, Guido

 h/t WRSA

In the linked post, CA takes note of a Substack blogpost discussing the book in the header.

We read that very book a couple of months ago, and reached entirely different conclusions.

First, Jacobsen can write at grade level.

That's the good part of the book.

Now, the bad, and then the ugly.

Most of the people she's talking to about nuclear scenarios haven't been within a country mile of the operating parts of strategic response for anywhere from 20-40 years.

Pardon me all to hell for noting that in strategic planning, that's about three entire lifetimes. If Jacobsen had set out to write a book about the topic in, say, 1985, this book would have been brilliant. It also would have broken about 50 NDAs, and at least three national security felonies. Which would have put most of her confidantes, and herself, in Supermax to this day.

That's the bad.

The ugly?

She concocts her entire "This is plausible, I swear!" scenario around one very specific set of circumstances. One, out of a universe of 10,000 such scenarios.

This is like looking at one of Edison's thousand failures at inventing a working incandescent light bulb, and then focusing all your effort at straw-manning just that one, then damning electric light on that sole basis.

In the book, for GAK (God Alone Knows) Reasons, the Norks pop off a nuke at the U.S., then follow it up with more canned sunshine.

Then, she, from her decades of no experience in nuclear warfighting and planning, decides that the U.S. response would necessarily be to launch nukes over the North Pole, necessitating overflying Russia and China, yet cleverly without informing either of them of this idiot savant strategy.

Leaving those poor boobs in both countries, with inferior predictive abilities, to conclude that the US was attacking them, instead of the Norks.

Leading directly and happily to Jacobsen's nightmare 'Use them or lose them" orgy of everyone launching everything at everyone else. All life in the Northern Hemisphere ends.

QED.

Point Of Order, Shit-For-Brains: Maybe nuclear war planners at the Pentagon, having wargamed that scenario out, from both sides of the chess board, about 10,000 times before it occurred to you, might have, y'know, figured out for their own goddamned selves, a reason or ten why obliterating Norkistan by launching missiles on a polar route over Russian and Chinese territory might be a bad idea, for a few hundred thousand megatons of reasons, and so they wouldn't do that, even without the ankle-biting genius of some half-bright writer coming up with a flaw in that plan all by her lonesome.

Maybe they'd elect to respond with missile subs closer to Norkistan, and leave the Minutemen in their silos.

Or just conventionally bomb the shit out of Norkistan, all the way to the Yalu River. We've seen us do that before.

We're just spitballing here. Meaning it's theoretically possible that someone whose sole military experience is watching movies and talking to people who retired from the military when Daddy Bush was president, might not be privy to the highest levels of military thinking 10, 20, 30 or more years later, and may be talking out her other end about all the things she doesn't know she doesn't know.

SecDef Rummy called those unknown unknowns. Jacobsen's not even familiar with the concept.

Granted, the recent leadership at the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace leaves a lot to be desired, and the lack of military intelligence is a chasm with no discernible bottom, but the steely-eyed missile men who planned and ran SAC when we had such a thing seemed to have a pretty good handle on the whole smart vs. galactically stupid thingie. And they didn't throw out all common sense in the SIOP just because the Soviet Union folded.

In others words, Jacobsen is no Tom Clancy. She's not even a Fred Clancy. Clancy The Clown, maybe.

In fact, most of her nightmares were better covered, and more succinctly, with none of Jacobsen's lurid verbosity, way back in 1972, (fifty years before this topic even occurred to Jacobsen, if you're keeping score) in a spiffy little tome called When War Comes, by Martin Caidin, whose sci-fi book Cyborg was the basis for the whole Six Million Dollar Man television programs, along with books-turned-into-films like Marooned and The Final Countdown.

If you want the actual nuclear, chemical, and biological nightmare list, and just the facts, without any gratuitous advocacy, you should get a copy (nearly free for the asking from the Internet Archive link above), or hunt down a dead tree edition (you can't have our copy, well-thumbed since the 1970s), and bone up on the topic. Little of it is any less applicable as far as it goes than it was the day it went to print.

But that's because Caidin was a stickler, in his fiction and non-fiction, for actual facts.

Jacobsen starts by describing the indescribable horror of a nuclear holocaust, and then works backwards to make one inevitable, simply by assuming she's the smartest person in the room, having the entire US Strategic Command fight this imaginary scenario in the most asinine way she can concoct, and finding the one way such a thing could be stupidly inflicted on humanity, then riding that pale horse to death, whipping it there with unmatched frenzy, and bankrupting a couple of ink companies in the telling.

Which is why, after reading it, we didn't review it or recommend it to anyone. We're simply not cruel enough to do that.

It doesn't age well (as in, by the time you get to the end of the book, you're wishing you'd spent your time on something profitable).

It is, in point of fact, nothing but someone trying to flog the whole premise behind the excremental TV melodrama The Day After, which focused solely on the horrible effects of a nuclear war, and sought to put wind in the sails of the whole Soviet-sponsored nuclear disarmament movement during Reagan's presidency, but which all looked jackassically stupid and short-sighted by 1990, after the Soviet Union imploded, taking the entire premise with it, not least of which all those Soviet rubles for Useful Idiots' astroturfed peace movements.

If Jacobsen had wanted to do society a service, she could have documented that the major reason nuclear war is even being discussed recently is to only an infinitesimal degree the proliferation of nukes to morons like the Kim Family Crime Syndicate in Norkistan, and overwhelmingly a thing again mainly because the darling superhero despot of the half-bright, Vladimir Putin, has rattled Russia's moldering and rusty nuclear saber about 40 times since his disastrous invasion of Ukraine, to try and bluff and bluster his way to a military conquest he cannot win on the ground.

Write a book on the megalomania it takes to think threatening the release of canned sunshine is a reasonable and rational way to achieve ground conquest, and talk about the threat to world peace that is (recognized as such by such shrieking warmongering political partisans as 250-years-neutral-until-Putin Sweden, and every single country that was under Soviet Russia's thumb from 1945-1991). FFS, not even Stalin nor even actual Hitler got Sweden to abandon its centuries-old neutrality, but Putin accomplished that in less than a year of trying.

Print it in Russian, and send copies to Moscow. What the hell, what's 50 years in a Siberian gulag between friends, right Ms. Jacobsen?

Maybe try the same thing for the lunatics in Pakistan and Iran. If you can find anyone there who can read.

Otherwise, absent that effort, Jacobsen is just beating the nuclear disarmament drum again, 50 years after it failed in America and Europe the first time, and beloved mainly of the continued Useful Idiots of the Stalinism that died in Moscow circa Yeltsin, but thrives in American academia and media among the halfwit class.

Save yourself the twenty bucks and multiple hours it would take you to read Jacobsen's drivel. Get a copy of When War Comes, and John Hersey's Hiroshima, and watch some historical newsreels on YouTube instead, and you'll be $20 richer and forty IQ points smarter than you'd get by wasting the time or money on Nuclear War.

If you own a goat, wait for the book to show up in the $2 rack at a bargain bookstore. Then get it, and feed it to the goat. It's cheaper than goat chow at that point, and whatever Billy or Nanny shits out afterwards will be much smarter than what Jacobsen did.

We can't stop you from wasting your time and money, but afterwards, kindly remember that we tried.

TL;DR: When a half-bright second lieutenant, or even a midwit cadet at Colorado Springs could come up with a decent "Why this scenario would be galactically stupid" position paper on their lunch hour recess, you have not found wisdom, nor anything close to it.

Our rating: Were still trying to figure out how to give this sort of codswallop negative stars. We kind of like the idea of giving it five Black Holes:

 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ . 

Stupidity so concentrated no illumination or information escapes. 

Or maybe just Five Piles: 

💩💩💩💩

💩

Ruminate, sil vous plait

Military Axiom #1: When you get a totally jackassical order from a higher-ranking jackass, carry it out to the letter.

Much ado about nothing is being made about the failure and self-destruction of the pier in Gaza.

"It's an outrage!"

"$320M dollars shot to hell!"

"They could f**k up a crowbar in a sandpile!"

And on and on.

Okay, if your blood pressure needs a little jolt now and again, you can stop there.

But you don't have to do that.

Eaton Rapids Joe has one contrarian take, and he's not wrong about any of it, but I'll go even further than that in a minute.

Look, there are a few givens today.

One of them being that neither Emperor Poopypants' nor his entire fraudulent regime could find their own asses with both hands, a map, and a rearview mirror.

Granted, with oak leaf clusters.

Proven ten times a day for three years running.

But...

Work with me for a minute or two.

What happens if we build the damned thing, and it works?

"Humanitarian" aid starts moving into Gaza. A trickle at first, but eventually, a steady flow. Which takes more pressure off of Hamas, and puts more pressure on Israel to stop doing the sensible thing by exterminating this problem for all time, and relenting, yet again, to face it again in a few months or years.

For the Common Core grads, Israel was getting rocketed and shelled from the shreds of the failed state that was Lebanon in the early 1980s. Not their bases. Their people's homes, farms, and schools. Their women and children, FFS.

Finally, having had enough, they sent the Israeli equivalent of Patton's Third Army into southern Lebanon, and cleaned house. 

First, they sent a drone broadcasting electronic "Shoot me! I'm the entire Israeli Air Force!" radar signals flying through the Syrian air defenses erected in the Bekaa Valley to guard the strongholds of a plethora of Arab terrorist camps there. Right behind that drone, they had another few recording live video of all the missile batteries, and more collecting all the frequencies and signals of their search and tracking SAM radars.

The next day, with a complete up-to-the-minute map of those sites, they flew actual planes in and wiped the board clean. With total air supremacy, they sent in tanks and APCs, and used the bodies of countless terrorists there to grease the treads of their tanks, all the way to the harbor in Beirut.

What was left of Yasser Arafat and the PLO was trapped, and screaming for help, and everyone, including their weapon suppliers, sent them back a box of FAFO medals, and their deepest sympathies on their plight.

Then, some jackasses at the U.S. State Department thought Israel killing off the thorns in their side was too one-sided, and convinced Reagan (of all presidents) to swoop in, and interpose US Marines between the two sides.

Yasser Arafat and the PLO fighters still alive were evacuated from Beirut, and taken home to Gaza. Israel sat on their side of the barbed wire, helpless and frustrated, watching the same blood enemies who'd masterminded hundreds of terrorist attacks inside and outside Israel get away yet again.

And by way of thanking us for this magnanimous act, the Marines' ground HQ at the Beirut airport was blown up by a truck bomb (as were the US and French embassies), the Marines there began taking daily shell fire and sniping, and we shelled hillsides in the Lebanese countryside with the 16-inch guns of the USS New Jersey, bombed miscellaneous targets from time to time, and got US troops killed and captured for no good end, until we finally wised up and GTFO of Dodge.

It was an expensive and pointless clusterfuck, and Arafat became the leader of Gaza, beginning to turn it into the tunneled and honeycombed terror base that has plagued Israel for the last 40 years. The only thing that changes there is which terrorist @$$holes they put in charge. Most recently Hamas.

We sent billions in aid to Gaza. We sent them pipe for water systems and wells.

They turned the pipe into homemade rockets, which have been launched at Israel nonstop, every day for decades. (If Mexico had been doing that to San Diego from Tijuana, Baja California would be Mexican-free now, as a permanently annexed US territory, and Mexico's presidential elections for the next 50 years would be held at a conference table in the White House Situation Room, with only members of the National Security Council casting votes.)

Flash forward to last October. Hamas, the current bunch of rabid monkeys in charge of Turd World Shitholia-On-The-Med, decided they were big and bad enough to f**k with an actual first world military and nation like Israel. It hasn't worked out well for them, nor should it. If everyone in Gaza were incinerated to ashes, the other billion or so Arab Muslims would piss and moan for about 15 minutes, until the red lights on the cameras were turned off, then go about their business as before. Presidents and princes from Morocco to Pakistan would weep and gnash their teeth publicly, and then each send Netanyahu a case of champagne apiece and warmest felicitations in private. Some good number would even supply him with more bombs and napalm.

Enter Mr. Sumdum Phuq in DC with a soft head and a soft heart for Hamas and the "poor Palestinians" who elected Hamas in the first place, and still support them, by 80:20 or better, to the current minute, and given the chance, would do another October 7th attack on Israel tomorrow, even knowing Israel would respond exactly as they have so far, all over again.

And Mr. Phuq wants to help the poor suffering terrorist lovers in Gaza, and hits upon the idea of building a pier to unload pallets of aid (which will be, to a metaphysical certainty, commandeered by Hamas in a heartbeat, given only to their most whackjob strident supporters, or sold and bartered for more guns, bullets, bombs, rockets, and Semtex, to kill more women and children in Israel. Just like every penny of aid they've received from 1967-five seconds ago has been.

And which pier will act like a bung driven into the cask of American foreign payola, creating an annual commitment to fund Hamas and their terrorism, opening the tap $1B or more, annually, until Hell freezes over.

Including the next round of attacks in this country.

That's what a working pier gets us. Which is exactly the over-the-top incompetence we expect from Mr. Fraudulent and his gang of merry misfits in the White House.

Show of hands: Who wants that?

Col. Nicholson in Bridge Over The River Kwai, building the Japs a better bridge than they could've done themselves comes to mind. Madness.

But just suppose that somewhere below the radar, in the Corps Of Engineers or Navy Seabees, there's a general or admiral who's as big a fan of Gomer Pyle and Cmdr. McHale as he is of General Patton or Admiral Halsey.

One who thinks this request for a pier calls for a really futile and stupid gesture, and his guys, like Delta House at Faber College, are just the guys to do it.

"Boys", he says, "I know this is going to be a little bit out of character for you, but I need you to do something for the good of the nation. I know you can build bridges and piers under enemy fire, like we've done in multiple hot shooting wars. And those bridges saved lives, won wars, and made America great. But what we need right now, is a pier that looks like we tried to do our best, but is actually so fornicated up, it breaks up, tears apart, blows away in a slight breeze, and sinks.

"Because if you build them a good bridge, before you know it we'll be sending a bottomless ocean of American dollars here, funding terrorism - even against ourselves - on a monumental scale, and eventually costing us rivers of American blood, both guys like you stationed here, and moms and dads and their kids back home. So we need a total piece of sh*t, that will demonstrate how jackassical the very idea is of sticking our nose in here where it don't belong. You'll catch some heat, but I'll take most of it, and I'm going to retire in a couple of years anyways, so why the hell not?"

"And the people who don't get killed, and the neighbors who won't have billions in tax dollars sucked out of their pockets, and your little brothers who won't be fighting a war here in 5 years, will all thank you someday much, much later."

"So whaddya say? Do ya feel me? Can you get out there, and screw the pooch for the Team?"

Put like that, you'd get a bridge that would be the envy of the guys who built the Titanic, the Hindenburg, and the Edsel, and give you a defense boondoggle that would make Robert McNamara cream his shorts if he were only alive to see it. It would rival the engineering expertise that gave the world the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Three Mile Island.

Which, as it turns out is exactly what we got.

Look, I'm not saying this was masterminded by the bumbling jackholes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the U.S. Capitol who think they run this country. But the guys at the bottom of the totem pole, the ones at the downhill terminus of every Pentagon project shit-rolling contest? Buddy, I'm here to tell you, you come up with a genius plan like this, and they could blow up the Hoover Dam or drop the Golden Gate Bridge, and do it so precisely it wouldn't crack so much as a window on Fisherman's Wharf nor jiggle a single dice roll on the Vegas Strip.

I'm not telling you that's what happened. But while most of the Pentagon brass could be melted down for fish sinkers, most of the NCO corps and the E-3 Mafia are 24K gold.

So just open your mind to the possibility, and don't sell them short.

The $320M "wasted" on this boondoggle mostly got log-rolled to US companies and salaries (with a non-zero portion kicked back to congressweasels in both parties, like always, since ever). It wasn't just thrown into an open furnace. And it's certainly not like what Obozo did, sending literal pallets of $100 bills to Iran to build nuclear weapons and fund terror groups without leaving any financial fingerprints. This was just a blip in the grand scheme of Pentagon graft and grift.

We also got the Ham@$$holes we were nominally trying to help to show why that was a stupid idea, by having them mortar the thing during construction, and injure at least one worker severely. I don't know about you, but the construction workers I've met, who were getting that level of "thanks" from the people they were building something for, might be inclined to leave out nuts and bolts at critical points, pretty much every day after that, don'tcha think??

And we get Good Guy points for the appearance of looking even-handed, and take some paltry Gomer Pyle lumps for looking like incompetents. While saving the US BILLION$ for a pointless, endless commitment to fund a bunch of terrorist shits the world is better off without. Not to mention untold numbers of American lives saved, some not yet even born. Screwing the pooch like this may yet turn out to be the biggest bonanza to the US in living memory.

"Hey, we tried man, but it was just too hard to do. Too bad, so sad. Oh, and maybe next time don't poke the lion in the eye when he has metric tons of artillery and napalm. B'Bye!"

Then we f**k off smartly, and nobody asks us to attempt anything so foolish for years and years, and we aren't losing GI Joe and GI Jane by the bushel to snipers and IEDs while some idiot has them doing peacekeeping or Meals On Wheels in Gaza for the next 20 years. World-class genius, right there.

It's even just barely possible that someone old enough to remember the debacle might have learned a wee bit from Beirut 1983, and taken the right lesson(s) about such efforts to heart, even if they never announce that publicly. Wouldn't that just tickle your giggle switch?

I'm certainly not excusing the bottomless incompetence from on high we've seen in living color beyond our wildest nightmares since 2021. Just suggesting an outlook with less sourpuss, and more befitting of happy warriors. And less negative waves, Moriarty, for a change. Woof! Woof!

As a cool-down from the thought exercise, imagine if the schlubs who built out Tan Son Nhut airport in South Vietnam had buggered it up worse than Denver International and Apollo I combined.

We lose interest. Other problems crop up somewhere else. The government's squirrel-on-crack memory wanders to something closer to home, and far less destructive or divisive. The Fuck-Up Fairies responsible for the original pooch-screwing could have saved America billions of dollars in military waste in the 1960s, and saved 58,000 lives.

Never discount the beneficial power of insolent obedience.

And BTW: this whole idea was official US government policy taught to those working in countries behind the lines from 1939 onwards. The fact that the CIA only declassified it in 2008 should tell you more than a little about the rise and fall of the Soviet Empire.

I'ma take a wild guess that what worked on communist idiots over there would work on communist idiots over here equally well. And may already be in play.

YMMV, but take the greater lesson to heart.

Slippery Slopes

 

Four, of two million examples. This week.

Divemedic bemoans that a law institutionalizing the gravely disabled might be misused. Rather than clog his blog with this rather epic reply in disagreement to that proposition, we post our response here. I get where he thinks he's coming from, but he's way off-base in this instance.

Natzsofast, Guido.

"Grave disability" as good cause has been on the books here for literal decades.

You're missing hugely on this one.

The crime is that it's taken 60 years to enact it beyond the pointless 72-hour hold, and start the process of re-institutionalizing the perennially to permanently crazy into a system that was stupidly disassembled two generations ago, by prior faux do-gooding by entirely evil libtard jackholes.

Laws against even murder can be abused too.

Shall we repeal those as well? The rules regarding the fallacy of reductio ad absurdum apply in full, when you draw a slippery slope the size of the Great Wall of China. Any excuse based thereon is moot.

For that matter, they've abused the Second Amendment in numerous states. Should we repeal that because government refuses to get it right until they're dragged there, kicking and screaming, by honest judges?

These people aren't homeless because they misplaced their home, or left it in their other pants (or shopping cart). They're homeless because they're batshit crazy, drunks, stoners, terminally and childishly irresponsible and entitled, serial criminals, or, in 98% of cases, some combination of all five.

We're not talking about "gentlemen of the road" happily cooking hot dogs and pigeons on a forked spit under the railroad tracks, living their best lives, whistling tunes and playing harmonicas, happy and free, and minding their own business. 

We're talking about literal plague-host hordes of rotting, shambling, scabrous, filthy lunatics shitting and pissing themselves 24/7/365, wherever and whenever nature provides opportunity, and leaving a trail of fecal matter and dropped maggots from their open sores by the yard. 

Every city hereabouts, of any size, every day.
cf. "Shithole".

And you're now arguing that those people, literally too crazy to clean themselves to the barest public health minimums, care for themselves to the level of a first-grader, or seek food or shelter sufficient to not starve or freeze or get sunstroke, should be allowed to fester and rot on the sidewalk?

That's the Calcutta expedient.

Try that experiment in Key West, Miami, Tampa, and Tallahassee, and please, get back to us on how well it works.

I can find 5000 lab rats for your experiment within the sound of a gunshot from where I'm sitting at home, right this minute. Totally not kidding.

Sorry, but the distance you're off on this one would need satellite GPS to calculate.

They won't go to any of numerous shelters, because there are rules there, chiefest being that they can't commit crimes against each other, shit on the floor, or bring their dope and booze inside. Horrors!

And they won't take their psych meds, because being sane "feels weird" to them, and feels not nearly as fun as being stoned on weed, methaphetamine, carfentanil, or stewed on any booze they can find.

Welcome to the corner of Civilizational Minimal Norms Street and Tough Shit Avenue. Instead of seeing you 500 times a year at the local ER, we're putting you back in the Crazy Zoo you belong in, and once a year, we'll hold a court hearing, with your court-appointed advocate present, to decide if you can unfuck yourself well enough to have another crack at life outside. Keep coming back, and we stop asking the question, forever, for you. Don't like that? Mexico is due south, and Canada just a couple of states north. Or you can buy a rowboat, and start paddling west from the shoreline. Best wishes, whichever you choose.

The only thing better than this would be to forcibly return anyone apprehended under it to their state of origin, based on their social security number. 95% of them weren't born here, don't belong here, and were dumped hereabouts deliberately by 47-49 other states, by handing them a plane ticket and a rehab slot, which they failed out of within hours, and they then ended up stuck here forever, homeless, stoned into psychosis, and rotting away on my sidewalk.

Every other state should own that behavior, and take back their own state's native douchebags to deal with as they see fit, other than shifting them onto other states, which should be actionable at law, including criminally, for repeat offenders. A couple of governors and state officials getting frog-marched in cuffs would be a salutary outcome.

Second-best would be house arresting them, with a complement of the homeless they foisted on us moved to bunk in with them for a year or five, with the culprits entirely responsible for their feeding, clothing, and housing.

Stop sending us your douchebags and lunatics from every point on the compass, and there'll be fewer of them for us to round up hereabouts.

QED

Even Libtard bastions like Santa Monica and San Franshitco have finally seen the error of their ways. So whenever you see Califrutopian officials, usually with their heads waaaaayyyyy up their own asses, making any constructive efforts to wipe the shithole TPTB have let the once-Golden State become, back off, and let them take a shot. They've done nothing for literal decades. It's time for the people in charge to scrub that anus, and pull their pants back up, like any self-respecting person would.

Personally, we're pretty sure they should have taken a flamethrower to the problem some years back, but we're old-fashioned that way.

This Might Be Why Your Junk Hurts

 

In response to one of yesterday's posts, commenter Fido offered up, in apparent rebuttal, the abstract of an Oz/Kiwi study on PubMed, comparing effectiveness of cloth versus medical masks for personal protection. We held off posting it only until we had a chance to devote the requisite time to giving it a once-over. The results did not turn out the way we suspect Fido had hoped.

Natzsofast, Guido.

Ground rules:

1) This no personal slam on Fido. I don't know him, but I'm spotting him that he was offering what he thought was "Scientific Proof!" as a legitimate debate data point, in good faith.

2) The slam here is on the total jackasses and frauds deliberately foisting such ass-generated codswallop on the public, for any purpose other than pure comedy relief.

3) That point established, pray, go and read our reply in detail.

4) First and foremost, and apart from what we wrote, both cloth and medical-grade masks are NOT (and never were) intended to provide any protection to the person wearing the gorram things, they're worn to prevent the wearer's slobber droplets from infecting other people, since Joseph Lister was a practicing surgeon in Victorian England 150 years ago (which you'd think even the stupid bastards in Oz and Kiwistan would have been taught at some point in their obviously wasted years of formal education). So anyone studying which masks provide better protection, when comparing masks never intended to provide any wearers ANY protection whatsoever is simply a world-class fucktarded moron, with delusions of functional intelligence. This is like testing t-shirts and cotton underpants to see how much protection they provide in a motorcycle crash: so far beyond pointlessly stupid one cannot be seen from the other even from space. (If this is news to you, apply a tourniquet to your wedding tackle at once.)

5) "Studies" of this caliber of babbling baboonery is exactly why bloggers like Silicon Graybeard remind us nearly annually that anything between 70% and 95% of all studies published are total non-reproduceable bullshit (he'll have the exact number handier than I do, I'm sure), and why that's so to an even higher percentage where Covidiots and their Covidiocy are concerned.

6) If you didn't read a given study, and/or cannot grasp in a couple of minutes where it probably veered off into lunch for Biff Tannen, you probably shouldn't be jumping up and down and pointing to one, linking to any, or blogging any collection of them as "meta-studies".

Another tragic victim of junk science "studies"

7) As we noted in comments previous to our reply to Fido, "meta-studies" are like polling the fans at a basketball game - and the guys selling beer outside, and  the parking lot attendants not even following the game, and random hockey fans in some other county or state or province - on who's winning the game; as opposed to actually, y'know, looking at the scoreboard for the correct answer. It's what you do when you have grant money, but have blown it on pizza and beer, and are too lazy or stupid to do actual frontiers-of-science original research, because that's too hard, and they got their MD, MPH, or Ph.D. credentials online, from Jamaica or Zambia. Egon Spengler, Ray Stantz, and Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters weren't entirely fictional characters.

When You're Retarded, Everything Sounds Like "Science"

 h/t 90 Miles From Tyranny

This kind of idiocy is why we're doomed:

Not even N95 masks work to stop COVID.

Which then links to an article from the Brown Underpants Institute pimping some cockamamie horsesh*t purporting to support the same recockulous contention.

Which finally links to the actual study, concocted by midwits, and published by actual halfwits, in the Annals Of Internal Medicine.

You can read the study yourself.

For the TL;DR crowd, allow me to summarize.

One group was people who sometimes have access to N95 masks.

The control group did not.

Lo and behold, the rate of COVID among both groups is roughly equal.

Therefore, N95s offer no additional protection.

QED, if you were one of the two co-stars of Dumb and Dumber.

What they didn't do was study people who wore N95 masks 24/7, even while sleeping.

They didn't study the function of N95 masks themselves.

They studied people who sometimes had access to N95 masks.

Natzsofast, Guido.

Let's put it another way.

Suppose you wanted to test whether parachutes work better than nothing.

But you didn't drop 50 people suitably equipped with a parachute, versus throwing 50 random convicts wearing just boxer shorts out of a perfectly good airplane at 10,000', and compare the results for each group to determine whether parachutes worked as advertised. Oh, no, bucko. That would be too easy.

What you did instead, was study people in the 82nd Airborne Division, who sometimes had access to parachutes.

And then compare the death rate to, say, the 1st Armored Division, who don't.

If somebody in the 82nd Airborne dies in a car crash, it's those fucking worthless parachutes.

Fell off a cliff, without a chute? Those damned worthless parachutes.

Shot by a jealous husband? Another parachute fail.

Died from drinking to the point of respiratory arrest, on a three day liberty in Fayetteville? Those damned parachutes again.

Drilled into your head with a hammer drill and a 1" bit? Parachutes don't work for you, either.

Stop me when the penny drops for you.

That's the sort of grant-funded gold-plated fucktard-driven "research" the shit-for-brains editorial staff at AOIM printed, with a straight face.

FFS, those mouth-breathing shitheads even told you they were this transparently stupid right up front. This is like scooping baby shit out of a diaper, and putting sliced bananas next to it and whipped cream on top at Baskin Robbins, and telling you it's ice cream.

And you eating it.

And then someone with no idea how actual science works reads the headline, which tickles their confirmation bias like a lesbian's vibrator running on plutonium, and we're off to the races.

Hint For The 80-IQ Booger Eaters

You can't test something by looking at the results among people who aren't using it 24/7/365.

If you want to test seatbelts, you test them by people wearing them versus people not wearing them, while they're actually driving.

You do not lump in the deaths of all people from 187 other causes, compared to people who ride busses with no seatbelts, and use them to prove seatbelts don't work.

This is so fucktardedly simple it's embarrassing to even need to mention it, but the general IQ, let alone science sensibility, has sunk so far, it's like taking the "Remove Shirt Before Ironing" warning, and making it a class for college credit.

And it's now percolated up to people in the blogosphere with less sense about that than God gave a jackass.

That whoever pimped this wasn't taken out behind the building and shot, or tarred and feathered, is why society as you know it is doomed, and that includes people so jaw-droppingly stupid as to reprint it at face value.

For the Pedantically Stupid (You know who you are):

It may have escaped your notice, but this is not an argument for or against the efficacy of any mask for any purpose. It's an argument against bullshit being perpetrated as science, and average idiots too stupid to tell the two apart.

But thanks a pantload in advance for proving why it needed to be addressed, thanks to your Common Core education, as any number of anonymous comments are likely to prove beyond all doubt.

Natzsofast, Guido

WRSA posted the above FAS graphic today as part of a larger meme dump. One ought to be careful when publishing the propaganda of communist front groups. The technical term for the FAS' poster is "lying by omission". We have amended the graphic to read more accurately.

One is forced to conclude the primary motivation for Putin's repeated Ukrainian land grabs since 2014 is that he did them mainly because he could.

Thus becoming lesson 8,000,012 in world history on why you never give up your weapons.

Yet Again: Nope.

h/t WRSA 

Smoking gun, or smoking crack?

Yeah, no.

Natzsofast, Guido.

The referenced Mail article gets most of its exercise by making YUUUUUGE leaps of assumption to get from A to Z.

Facts:

1) A US P-8 was monitoring events from within NATO airspace on the Romanian Black Sea coast the day Moskva went all explodey.

2) Its detection range on ships is "over 100 miles" per the article. (Per the Navy, its radar can see Nimitz-class targets broadside from 222 mi. away. But Moskva is only a third of that size even from broadside, so the P-8's ability to see it would be appreciably much shorter range. IOW, it would have trouble picking out the Moskva at even 70 miles even under ideal conditions, let alone average field conditions.)

That's it. That's all the Mail knows, and from which it extrapolated (from somewhere deep in its underpants) the whole "US aircraft targeted Moskva for Ukrainian forces" fairytale. Which is how the sausage gets made.

Outright Lies In The Mail

1) Despite the Mail's recockulous claims, Russia has made no such "admission" that enemy action took out Moskva. Any such claim is pure bullshitting on their part.

2) The US Navy has made no admissions regarding supplying weapons targeting information to Ukraine, nor would they confirm nor deny any such thing, this side of anyone finding snowballs in Satan's underpants. The US hasn't even said it's supplying any intelligence information whatsoever, nor has any other NATO member. The is the dog that isn't barking.

Obvious Problems

1) No one (who's telling) knows exactly where Moskva was located when it exploded. Which is kind of vital.

2) Reports vary: one puts Moskva "roughly 60 miles south of Odessa" and sailing east after the explosion, another puts it "roughly 75 miles away from Odessa".

3) That's a lot of blank blue real estate. 75 miles from Odessa to Sevatopol on a straight line puts it east of where the US Navy P-8 could probably even have detected it. 60 miles directly south of Odessa puts it at the edge of that possible detection range.

4) Neither the ship nor the A/C in question, before nor after the attack, was just sitting there like a duck in a bathtub, nor hovering stationary in the sky. Moskva was moving at anything between 10 and 30 knots. And presumably under some Russian variation of EMCON, to limit its electronic signature.

5) Ditto for the converted Boeing 737-800ERX that's the basis airframe for the P-8. Even at a slow loiter, it would be doing racetracks towards and away from the war zone, at anything near 200 knots (230MPH). Meaning within twenty minutes when headed away from point of nearest approach on the downstream leg, the Navy P-8 couldn't see Moskva even if it had beached itself on the tip of the Romanian coast. And at best detection location, it would be moving away a 4 miles/minute at least 50% of the time. (And realistically, any surveillance aircraft with squawk turned off isn't going to cut right up to the limit of the border of a nation that's an active war zone unless they want to try out their parachutes and life rafts. So figure they were already pulled back 10-20 miles for bare common sense reasons, which limits their target detection range even more.)

Speculation, Recockulous Speculation, And Wild ASSumptions

1) It's possible, and not unlikely, that the US and NATO are sharing some degree of intelligence with Ukraine. We stayed officially neutral in the Falklands War, but we were absolutely supplying satellite intel to Britain the entire time. It's presumptive that we're doing the same or similar with Ukraine now, though no one anywhere has admitted to any such thing. Nor will, for some years to come, unless they've got a hankering to see federal SuperMax prison from the inside.

2) It's highly unlikely we're supplying real-time targeting information, down to bearing and range, to the minute-of-cruiser standard, with any kind of near zero time-lag necessary to achieve hits. We have trouble doing that now between our own aircraft and our own troops on the ground. There's almost no way in hell we're doing it from the US Navy to the Uke Navy or ground command in real time, with the requisite degree of accuracy.

3) The ocean area of uncertainty in question is over 2000 square miles of flat blue water, 45 degrees apart from each other at the extremes. Surface-to-surface anti-ship missiles like the Neptune have a narrow cone of targeting success, and this on a target likely maneuvering at 20 knots or more. IOW, you could point one a mile or five off, and still get acquisition and hits. But you can't be shooting a missile from Scranton PA at Philadelphia, and get a hit on a target that's actually in NYFC, which is an exactly comparable degree of 1:1 scale.

4) Even if we were sending real-time intel, and dead-on balls-accurate targeting information to the Ukes at the speed of light to enable a successful attack, this is absolutely NOT tantamount to an act of war upon Russia.

a) US aircraft have been monitoring the situation since Feb. 25th. It's a little late to blow the rape whistle now, given the total dearth of any other such sinkings to try and prove a pattern. And you don't just wake up one day and decide to sink a cruiser, because somebody got a wild hare up their ass; neither in the US Navy, nor the Ukrainian defense forces. The very suggestion breaks the world record for the long jump by its very suggestion, and requires a level of inter-operability we have trouble pulling off with Canada or Great Britain in peacetime exercises, under ideal conditions, let alone with a non-NATO member amidst a war of survival.

(It might be exactly what happened, despite the extremely long odds against, and will make a fascinating never-before-revealed story in 75 years or so, but right now, on the merits, it's like inventing an entire dinosaur out of whole cloth after finding one bare tooth, or pulling globull warming out of your underpants, or Biden votes out of suitcases.)

b) Russia has categorically denied any enemy involvement on the conversion of Moskva from cruiser to submarine. No crime, no victim. QED

c) From 1966 to 1975, Russian surveillance "trawlers" sat 50 feet outside the coastal ADIZ of Guam, on a direct bearing from Andersen AFB to Hanoi, and radioed the departure of every B-52 headed to North Viet Nam, including heading and speed information, to give the NVA AA gunners and missileers exact time-of-arrival of US airstrikes headed to (then) North Viet Nam.

They did the same exact thing around the clock with trawler surveillance of every carrier sortie at Yankee Station launching air strikes from the ocean into the North for the entire duration of the war.

US pilots knew this 24/7/365, inclusive, for that entire conflict.

We lost 17 B-52s in combat over North Vietnam, and 102 aircrew killed, captured, or MIA, and literally hundreds of Navy and Marine Corps carrier-based aircraft were lost as well, with commensurately larger numbers of American aircrew killed, captured, or missing in action. At no point did anyone, anywhere seriously suggest that what the Russians were doing was casus belli, nor WWIII, nor did we increase our DEFCON level even one step in response. The Russians can eat shit on this: sauce for the goose is good for the gander. And they'd first have to trot out a new explanation for how their precious cruiser got all explodey, and then prove a causal link, which neither the USN nor Ukraine is inclined to hand them on a platter.

Short answer: Wild assumptions that any such thing took place are only missing one key thing: any evidence whatsoever to make it not only likely, but inevitable, that the story the Mail pulled out of their underpants is not only possible, but inevitably and necessarily likely.

Not. Happening.

None of that means Vlad isn't going to go all WWIII unhinged at any point (he'e pretty fucking far from sane as it is). But he'll have to be doing it out of pure unadulterated paranoia, without a shred of proof, nor even likelihood). But that's been the case every day since February 24th, and it says more about Puton's raging fulminant psychosis than it does about what's actually happened.

I don't just throw darts at a board to come up with this. That's analysis based on the facts in evidence. If you've got a counter-argument that's more than gainsaying, and not mined from pure-grade diaper spackle, trot it out, and let's see how it sounds.

More Napkin Math

 

Putin's gonna peg the Ruble to gold, and knock off the dollar! Eleventy!! ZOMG!!!

Natzsofast, Guido.

Last year's Russian budget was $233,000,000,000. (Way more than that - 16 TRILLION - in Rubles, which are worth about a penny, and less now that two months ago.) Russia's gold on hand, per some commenter, which we'll stipulate for humor purposes, is 2200 tons. At current rates of gold/dollar exchange, that means that the Russians printed 33% of the government spending out of Putin's ass-gas from borscht and caviar. And that's only LAST year. That means everything they printed every year prior and every year from now on is ass-gas too. Times, what...32 years, just since the birth of the current Russian Federation?!? And forward in perpetuity??

(Bonus: Anyone remember why the Soviet Union collapsed? Anyone? Beuller?? Ferris Beuller...???)

And the Russian government budget is only 20% of their national GDP.

IOW, in order to meaningfully peg the ruble to gold, they'd need 7-8 times more gold than they have, which would be 50% of the total known gold reserves of the entire world, which they ain't got, ain't gonna get, and never will have.

And the Russian economy is only about 7% the size of the US economy. We have double their gold reserves, and we couldn't do what they're announcing in a thousand years, short of worldwide ironclad agreements, and massive deflation, which would also halt all government money printing virtually forever. NTTAWWT.

This is like Texas trying to take over the world by printing Confederate money, and requiring it (or gold) to buy Stetsons, Pace Picante Sauce, and Igloo Coolers.

Sh'yeah, when monkeys fly outta my butt.

Not. Happening.

And in any event, neither Putin, nor Russia, nor anyone sane, is ever going to swap rubles for gold. That ship sailed for good in 1971. Which means this is all Russian bullshit, and the ruble is, and will continue to be, finely-engraved toilet paper, just like all fiat currencies. (Including the dollar, as we've told you, and told you, and told you.)

It would take a simultaneous agreement for 5300% worldwide deflation, from everyone, and a permanent exchange rate, to back the world by stable currencies, using all gold reserves in existence, divided by the current planetary GDP.

Your $10K in savings would be worth about $189.

Your $50K annual salary would shrink to about $18/wk.

That's 46¢/hr. $3.68 for an 8-hour day.

Minimum wage (from $15/hr) would be 28¢/hr. $2.08 for 8 hours.

And that's pre-tax income. Uncle Gimme and his state and local minions would still have their hands out for 10-50% of what you make.

Gasoline (from $6/gal) would be selling for 11.9¢/gal.

8¢/gal in the free states.

And so on.  

Forever.

Get 200 nations to sign on to that, and we can back everything with gold, forever.

Until then, as neither Russia nor any sane nation will ever again trade their fiatbux for physical specie (gold or silver), this is all smoke and mirrors. Fairytales. Vaporware.

To be crudely blunt, but precise, the only way Putin's pegging the ruble with gold is like this:

There may come a point where the dollar isn't the international reserve currency*.

But this news ain't it. It would take a helluva lot more than just Russia to do that.

Stop swallowing the doom porn. Pay your bills, and go deep on the preps you can.

That is all.

*UPDATE: Want to see how it's far more likely to come about?

Capitalist Eric: RTWT h/t WRSA

[Pro Tip: You've heard about this from Peter at BRM. You've heard it from CA at WRSA. You've heard it from me. You've heard it from Phil at Bustednuckles. And from John Wilder. You've probably heard it from Deninger and Tyler Durden a time or twelve too. Now Eric is piling on, in splendiferous detail. Bracken. Ferfal. Selco. Michael Yon. ,Rawles, since ever. And on and on. Maybe, just maybe, at some point, the penny will drop for you, if it hasn't already. And you'll start to think in terms of a world where those green pieces of paper in your wallet and bank account are worthless. And you'll decide to prepare for "Then what?", hopefully while there's still some brief period of time to do so.

Nota bene: NOBODY is telling you to run around like a headless chicken, or a person whose head is on fire. They're telling you that the financial system you take for granted, and have your whole life, is a house of cards, and a windy day is coming. Make prudent preparations for that. If you can figure this out for yourself without being a spaz now, you'll never have to be one later. I'm guessing the Fukushima Tsunami was a lot more fun to watch from over here, than it was on the coast of Japan in real time. I'd venture a guess that financial collapse will be a lot like that too, and high ground for that looks a lot like arable land with available potable water, a garden and some barnyard animals, friends and neighbors to ride the river with, clear fields of fire, and being pretty self-sufficient for most to all normal needs. Just like for 37 other possible problems.

Worst case? You're early, or it never happens, and you're still ready for a buttload of other grief from any number of scenarios.

Don't care? No problem. Suture self.]

Hey Hey! They're The Monkeys

Tough times for the Johns Hopkins Econ department after their COVID "study" was released...

We could continue to beat this study not only to death, but until all that remained of it were sub-molecular dead-horse particles.

And dollars to donuts, I read 60 more pages of it than 99.99% of those linking to it online in the last couple of weeks.

We would note that with nearly 19,000 studies, them only finding 34 worth the bother points out that 99% of everything in any study is crap.

If we note that they were able to focus on 1,084 before selecting the 34 finalists, the crap ratio drops to only 97%.

It's not impressing us much.

We could observe, as they do themselves on Page 8, that they excluded all studies that relied on artificial models (Globull Warmists and Climate Changeophiles, call your office) as being all hogwash, because "the results from these studies are determined by model assumptions and calibrations".

Proving that the Econ Department at Johns-Hopkins isn't quite as bright as the Art Department, what with sculpture being around for almost 35,000 years, or what any kindergartener knows: when you control the Plah-Doh, you can make it into anything you want.

We could note that this is exactly what they did anyways, by defining "lockdowns" as virtually anything the government does other than vaccines, or propaganda campaigns, thus they have beggared the English language to the point of insensibility. When everything is a lockdown, nothing is.

We could note that government merely instituting a lockdown is no more a measure of anything than laws are a measure of compliance with them. By that recockulous standard - looking at decrees rather than compliance, which is the exact way they look at these "anything-is-a-lockdown" measures - neither the laws against homicide in Chicago, nor speeding laws anywhere, "work". This is utterly asinine.

We could note that the main reason that the 34 studies they selected show no effect was because they selected studies that cancelled each other's results out, thus allowing any "meta"-study's authors the same prerogatives as kids in any arts and crafts class. Creation as an academic endeavor has a place, but not when it's research data and results.

We could even look at just the 34 cherry-picked studies, and note that among them, they rely on non-peer-reviewed working papers for 1/3rd of them, co-mix studies from the US and multiple other countries, early in the pandemic from late in the pandemic, and that their overall methodology between studies isn't just apples-to-oranges fallacious, but literally trying to compare all the pieces of a fruit salad to each other, as if they were all the same thing, when in fact they are anything but that.

This is therefore nothing but a Shit Stew, composed by mixing the dung of every animal in not just the barnyard, but in the entire zoo, and then trying to sell it to you as sausage. Bon apetít!

But as we had already warned you of this truth from the outset, we choose not to belabor the point any further.

The great pity is that, just in case these economists had any actual economic expertise on offer, they could have performed something truly useful, but letting us know exactly how much economic damage (something far closer to their bailiwick than medical efficacy, of which they know Jack and Shit), was done by dragging out mostly half-assed lockdowns beyond Memorial Day 2020, when it was clear that the only thing they were doing was crashing - first as collateral damage, and ultimately by express design - the greatest economy in US history, while setting the stage for the eventual bloodless presidential coup, in return for nothing useful to most of America, except Emperor Poopypants and his minions.

No points for guessing why they didn't bother to do that. They'd have been kicked out of academia faster than Drs. Stantz, Venkman, and Spengler, and with none of the comedic aftermath.

The Accidental Utility Of Shovelled Bullsh*t

So other than sprinkling it on the rose bushes, what further use can be made of this study?

Plenty, we assure you.

Soviet and Eastern European ex-pats with long experience frequently relate that even in the cover-to-cover non-stop lies of communist house organs like Pravda and Izvestia, the diligent reader could always infallibly discern multiple truths.

Chiefest among them: Who and/or what are they telling me to hate? 

Why is that useful?

Because one may then know the enemies of The Official Narrative. And exactly as in an old Afghani proverb, "The enemy of my enemy is my ally".

So despite the manifest flaw-holes in this "study" being big enough to drive an entire solar system through, blindfolded, what does it tell us may be true? There are numerous possibilities.

1) The Emperor is butt-ass naked. Most obviously, this may the first of many ham-fisted attempts to walk back a two-year epic policy disasterpiece. Midterm elections are coming on like a freight train, and vote theft which works on a national scale isn't nearly as effective in 468 or so individual elections for Congress and the Senate, never mind a host of state offices. Lincoln's observation on how many people you can fool, and how often, is about to come home to roost at the DNC.

2) Shitstorm Inbound Which tells us: 

a) they're weaker, politically, and in terms of national vote-fraud organization, than the 2020 presidential election fraud portended

b)  they're about to have their political asses handed to them, and be shat on from a great height, and

c) they know it.

Losing the Senate would be bad for them. No SCOTUS picks, no ambassadors, no higher-level bureaucratic flunkies, no bills passed whatsoever, etc. (No new vice presidents confirmed, either, nota bene, which leaves them stuck with Sen. Kneepads indefinitely, and Gropey Dopey's Ultimate Freshness Date expiration is approaching at supersonic speed, because biology.) 

Losing the House as well would be a calamity. Yertle is not likely to return to being the Senate Majority Leader in that eventuality, and Kevin McCarthy, the presumptive new Speaker and long-time pro-Trump ally, is not likely to do anything but send the Left into new fits of apoplexy.

And no, you still aren't voting your way out of this, but if all you're going to do, when thrown to the lions, is to resolve to taste bad, a great help to that strategy is crapping in the lion's mouth on the way down.

3) Get In Zee Boxcars, Jüden! Given the absolutely ass-tastic but purposeful conflation of anything anywhere as a "lockdown", they may be telegraphing the desire to re-institute total lockdowns, Australian-style (which is to say gestapo-style). "True lockdowns have never been tried. This time, it'll be different." Pay attention if totalitarians inadvertently or outright tell you something like this. They usually mean it.

4) Mega Vaxx Attacks The "study" rather pointedly only looked at non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). So what? That means they could be setting the stage for MORE VAXX! BIGGER! FASTER! HARDER!!! NO EXCEPTIONS EVAR!!!!! And after that? See #3, above.

They could also just be a bunch of pointy-headed academic idiot savants, without the savant component, and simply so full of shit and incompetence, they don't know what they don't know.

Or, anything from 1 to 4, above could be true.

Worst of all, 5) All Of The Above.

Quo Vadis?

What that means for you and me, is that this isn't the beginning of the end, but it's the end of the beginning. There's a long, awful slog still ahead, and we may be nowhere near the bottom, and the long, hard crawl to try and get back to anything anyone living remembers as "normal". But their Plan A has totally gone to shit, as both the Canadian Uprising, and most of Europe shit-canning any COVID-related restrictions, underlines in red Sharpie.

Stay frosty, and double down on BFYTW.

Nothing else will work. And you may be backing it up Rittenhouse-style at any point in the exercise. Which will probably be a feature, not a bug.

Gooooooooooo, Team Fucktard!

In Case You Thought I Was Kidding

 

I wasn't kidding. I'm just getting warmed up. Part One continues...

1) Was This Trip Really Necessary?

We've shown the clowncar of earnest idiots in the economics department at Johns-Hopkins set out on a fool's errand in the first place with this "study". But as they open, they explain why they decided to do it anyways.

"Our early interest in the subject was spurred by two studies. First, Atkeson et al. (2020) showed that “across all countries and U.S. states that we study, the growth rates of daily deaths from COVID-19 fell from a wide range of initially high levels to levels close to zero within 20-30 days after each region experienced 25 cumulative deaths.”

So, some idiot suggested COVID deaths would level off after 25 deaths. (SRSLY??) And two years and millions of dead people later, this gang of idiots thought they needed to see if this was, in fact, the case. 

To be fair, this is actual scientific inquiry (hypothesis + experimentation = conclusion), but it's actual science from, like, retarded fetal alcohol syndrome kids fed lead paint chips and drinking out of lead mugs. It's on the same level as Dr. Robert Ballard writing a grant proposal to study whether the RMS Titanic was actually unsinkable. After he discovered the wrecked pieces of it on the ocean floor 73 years later. "Chief, I'm thinking your study is a bit late on locking the barn door after the horse already got out there."

We'll get to some actual numbers in a minute, but they really open the ball with the following sentence:

"Today, it remains an open question as to whether lockdowns have had a large, significant effect on COVID-19 mortality."

SRSLY?!? In what psych ward???

 Walk with me for thirty seconds. If you had looked at nearly three dozen studies of different people lowering the temperature of water until it froze, and controlling for the other variables (atmospheric pressure, salinity, etc.) Who The Actual Fuck would open their "study" by saying

"Today, it remains an open question whether water freezes at 32° Farenheit."???

If you had that many relevant, properly designed studies, the answer is "No one with an IQ above fungus would ask that question." In fact, to even ask the question, let alone declare it "open", you'd have to be a functional retard. Or, a Johns-Hopkins economics researcher. But I repeat myself.

The question being "open" implies that either the studies point in all directions, that they must not be repeatable, accurate, nor well-constructed or valid, or that the people looking at them cannot comprehend what they're reading.

Let's drill a little deeper on how they worked this out.

2) Meta-What?

This "study" in question is no such thing. No actual research was done. Because it's a meta-survey. Think of it as the Cliff notes to multiple other studies, purporting to have any internal errors in any one study cancel each other out, to better reveal the truth.

It's also the lazy man's way to sound smart without doing any actual, y'know, science.

 

"A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies. Meta-analyses can be performed when there are multiple scientific studies addressing the same question, with each individual study reporting measurements that are expected to have some degree of error. The aim then is to use approaches from statistics to derive a pooled estimate closest to the unknown common truth based on how this error is perceived. Meta-analytic results are considered the most trustworthy source of evidence by the evidence-based medicine literature." - Wikipedia: meta-analysis

Sounds positively spiffy, and it can be, with a few caveats.

The surveys or studies considered have to be looking at the same question, the same way, and controlling out all the same variables. Otherwise you're just playing Splattergories.

They should all be properly constructed, with valid methodology.

The results for each should be quantifiable, not subjective, and in a common frame of reference, not apples-to-oranges, let alone houseflies-to-houses.

Good ones are always this, which is what makes them useful in the medical community. Bad ones are none of this, which makes them towering piles of bullshit masquerading as science. 

For example:

Suppose you have in your employ one Faston Flock, the great grand-nephew of Himself, John Moses Browning, and he has invented, designed, and built a truly splendiferous and earth-shattering method of making accurate rifles, and you want to see how accurate they really can be.

So you assign ten product reps, one at a time, to take three rifles, and 39 rounds of ammunition, to each of the top ten rifle shooters your research department can find. They're all top marksmanship competitors, based on points in international matches, Olympic events, pre-qualifying matches, etc. They're all right-handed and right-eye dominant (to eliminate another pair of variables). They each get 13 rounds of ammunition in three lots named Red, Blue, and Green. They get three spotters for each lot, and after sighting in, they fire ten rounds for grouping, from three rifles, #1, #2, and #3. Rifle #1 is fired with Red, #2 is fired with Blue, and #3 is fired with Green. No time limit is allotted. The reps each record the time of day, the weather (temp., humidity, barometric pressure), the wind, the site elevation, any slope to the target to the 100th of a degree, and the time between shots. And any other 27 variables you'd care to name. Each rep takes the rifles to a different marksman, and only conducts the test once. What neither any of them or any of the marksman, knows, is that Rifle #1 is an average rifle with factory standard ammo, the second is an accurized rifle with standard ammunition, and the third is an accurized rifle with match-grade ammunition. Group size for each string is recorded, and after all the tests are performed with all the rifles and all the marksmen, the data from each shoot is compiled into a meta-study to see the final results.

That's the kind of meta-analysis you're hoping to perform and analyze.

But if, instead, you hand out 100 rounds to the ten reps, and tell them to go to ten shooting ranges, and record no data other than group size, and just have the first ten people they meet try a 10-round string, and record those results, it's a wee bit different. Because alongside a couple of legitimate riflemen, some of the shooters have never fired any rifle before, some are nearly legally blind, some are likely drunk, and you suspect at least one of the reps threw the ammo into his own garage, and just pencil-whipped phony "data", and turned it in to HQ. The results of those 100 strings are likely not going to be representative of anything useful whatsoever.

Let's see what we have here.

3) Let's Meet the Contestants

The Assclowns In Question (hereinafter AIQ) started with 18,950 COVID studies. They ended up only looking at 34.

We'll get to the details in a moment, but for openers: they threw out 18,916 studies, IOW 99.82058047493404% of them, and based their entire survey conclusions on the results of the remaining 0.17941952506596% they actually looked at.

To put this in perspective, that would be like deciding the 2020 presidential elections on the votes of a population the size of Wyoming, amidst 158M voters. It would be basing the winner of the World Series based on 10 randomly-selected at-bats per team in any season.

Which begs a couple of questions:

If there were 18,950 assorted COVID studies to look at, why did only 34 actually evaluate lockdown effectiveness in curbing mortality?

If any one of those studies were pure poorly-designed and invalid crapola, it would represent only 0.0052770448548812% of all COVID surveys.

But if the same were true for one of the 34, it would be weighted 584 times more heavily.

So how did they chuck all those other studies? They threw out 17,542 based solely on looking at the title, which is generally about ten words or less. So if the title didn't sound applicable, without any further checking, they chucked it. Quelle scientifique!

They threw out another 934 because they didn't measure the effect of lockdowns on mortality, ignoring, yet again, the possibility that they did so because one has no effect on the other, the entire point at issue. Pure scientific genius in action, right here.

That left them 117 studies that they actually, y'know, read. And promptly dumped 83 of them, i.e. all but 34 studies. Because reading more than that would be...work?

4) So, about those "lockdowns" they looked at... 

"Compulsory non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), commonly known as “lockdowns” – policies that restrict internal movement, close schools and businesses, and ban international travel – have been mandated in one form or another in almost every country. We use “NPI” to describe any government mandate which directly restrict people's possibilities. Our definition...include[s] mandated interventions such as closing schools or businesses, mandated face masks etc. We define lockdown as any policy consisting of at least one NPI as described above."

 SRSLY???

Allow me to illustrate:

Sorry for all the short bus kids who could tell us what the windows taste like, but every one of those examples are what the authors of this "study" consider lockdowns.

So, for the Common Core glass-tasters in the crowd:

Who would like to hazard a guess why this sort of "lockdown" might not accomplish...anything?

This is just the level of total horseshit found in the first seven pages, and only 53 more to go.

So keep those "Yeahbuts" coming in the Scratching Post, er, Comments.