Whom Gods Destroy...

h/t Tam

Bud Light: "Watch us torpedo our brand, lose a billion dollars, and drive ourselves out of business."
Jaguar: "Hold my beer, and start your engines..."

 

"...if the purpose of advertising is to get people talking about you, the new ad campaign has succeeded at that." - Tam

 Someone has perhaps conflated "talking about" with "pointing and laughing derisively and uproariously at".

♫ One of these things is not like the other one. ♫

And when last we looked, as a general rule, the purpose of advertising isn't "to get people talking about you", it's to get people to buy your product. We haven't read a marketing textbook in 40 years, so we may be wrong about that, but we doubt it.

So unless androgynous and transgendered freaks is an emerging market for high-end car manufacturing, this ad campaign is going to go over about as well as Bud Light hiring Dylan Mulvaney as a spokes-tranny did.

Jaguar's ad campaign is selling something.

But that Something isn't anything to do with selling their cars.

At least now we know the real reason Ellen Degeneres left the U.S. was to oversee all advertising for Jaguar. Someone needs to sack her, and then sack the person who hired her.

It bears mention, from a medical standpoint, that the people who make such desperate cries for attention as what Jaguar just did are generally the same psychotic chicks cutting their wrists with razor blades.

Put Daniel Craig (or hell, even Ryan Reynolds) in a tux, stand him next to a silver F-type R-75, have him deliver a few lines, and then have him drive off, with that bundle of neon oddities chained to the rear bumper as he Tokyo drifts the entire gaggle over a cliff, and Jaguar's woketarded misstep is history.

Do it not, and their brand is history. And this ad campaign can be seen for what it is: Jaguar drunk dialing their ex, with a box cutter in hand, and a bottle of sleeping pills, demanding he come back, or else.

Natzsofast

from WRSA :26/27, and one clinker

The difference between a rose, and rose fertilizer, in one quote.

Said Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan. Napoleon. Bonnie and Clyde. Hitler. Mao. Castro. The Manson Family. Pol Pot. The Clintons. MS-13. BLM. Jeffrey Epstein. Some 19 y.o. @$$hole in Uvalde. Ad infinitum. All of whom acted "according to the dictates of" their own consciences. Which was exactly the entire problem there. Kindly show all work if you're going to espouse such claptrap.

This is simply "If it feels good, do it." It's total unadulterated bullshit since its utterance by Simone de Abbatoir. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's literally the exact lie of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, from which proceedeth all subsequent human error and catastrophe to date.

Anyone you could think of, from Victor Davis Hanson, to Thomas Sowell, to Peter Hitchens, to Jordan Peterson, to Bill Burr, to Ricky Gervais, would make anyone espousing the same wish they'd never been born inside of 10 seconds' simple explanation.

Meme selection fail. Re-think.

Coronatardation Bad News: Still A Thing, By The Metric F**kton

 

If you're smarter than this guy, you could be the next head of the CDC,
 the TSA, or the CEO of your company.

A reminder:
Remote temperature sensors are
a) inaccurate
b) only measure surface temperature, not core temp.
And Kung Flu
c) is asymptomatic in (30%, 60%, 90%, you tell me) of infected persons
d) incubates for 2-21 days before symptoms present, during some of which time period the infected person is fully contagious.
So for anyone with more sense than the Almighty gave any jackass in Christendom, anyone, anywhere using any sort of temperature-reading device as a means to screen people for Kung Flu is a thorough-going moron, of the type in the last century usually screened out by attempting to place an iron ring of a given diameter over their cranium.
Because if your head would fit through said ring, clearly there was insufficient space inside to support a brain big enough to breathe, walk, and chew gum without a handy guide, and/or regular reminders for any one of the listed functions - or even all all three - by means of regular applications of a stout stick somewhere between your head and your thighs, as a helpful reminder.

So anywhere you see, hear, or read about anyone using temperature scanning in any form to screen out Kung Flu:
1) the people actually doing it are dumber than a bag of hammers.
2) the people who decided to have people do that are dumber than a bag of dicks.
3) 99.9999% of people infected and fully contagious with Kung Flu are being admitted to the premises as if they were "healthy". That will turn out well.
4) Anyone involved at any level make phrenology and astrology seem rational and scientific by comparison.
5) This practice is akin to hiring Stevie Wonder to drive your bus, and RainMan to drive your car.

We dun tole ya all this, long since, but seeing recent idiot newsmorons (but we repeat ourselves) covering the latest surveillance-state gee whiz face-scanning stormtrooper helmetry,

whatever the point of the exercise, clearly screening out Kung Flu infectees is exactly 0.0000% of the actual rationale; and apparently some people's heads are afflicted with sphincter-induced hypoxia.

Secondly, for those still addicted to the Tinfoil and Black Helicopter Hopeium-Huffing Theory Of Kung Flu, the following notations and explanations are in order.
Someone, somewhere, (we'll let you follow the breadcrumbs yourself) posted the following, which was picked up in our regular read of Ol' Remus at this week's Woodpile Report

 "Doctors have been instructed to list Covid-19 as a cause of death if the deceased had any of the symptoms associated with Covid-19. They receive $13,000 from Medicare for each Covid-19 patient and $39,000 for each patient put on a ventilator."

Any number of people will treat this out-of-context factoid as their "A-HA! J'Accuse!" moment of Kung Flu clarity. But before you get on your horse bassackwards, and ride off the cliff, a couple of wee notes to temper such blisteringly stupid jackassery.

1) The average COVID patient thusly diagnosed is in hospital for 10-21 days, at an average cost of $2K-$5K/day. For those who only know Common Core mathematics, that would be $20,000-$110,000, just for the hospital, before fees for doctor, laboratory, imaging, etc. are added to the bill.
2) The average intubated COVID-19 patient gets the same course of treatment, except in the ICU, at a cost of $5K-$10K/day, which would run $50,000-$210,000, plus the aforementioned doctor's fees, laboratory fees, imaging fees, etc.
3) So, for anyone thusly diagnosed and treated, you've just informed me that Medicare has, per their paradigm, agreed to pay an amount somewhere between about 20% and 85% of the hospital bill. Which considering their usual M.O. is to pay only about $0.03 on the dollar for all care received, is, for them, the height of fiscal largesse. With other people's money, as usual.
4) Medicare only kicks in for those over 62, and who have it; it pays NOTHING for those under that age, EVER. If this were a presumed inducement, there should be zero cases diagnosed for anyone under that age, and thus not on Medicare.
5) The money is by way of reimbursement for treatment; it is not, entre nous, distributed as a fat wad of money in a briefcase, as if the doctor in question had just brought a coyote hide to local sheriff's office for the bounty money.
6) Doctors, unlike bounty hunters, practice under this quaint form of practice known as absolute liability, which means that risk management, utilization review, best practice, and the entire American bar Association, (along with an army of accountants, doctors, nurses, administrators, second-guessers, Monday Morning Quarterbacks, and other assorted paid medical/fiscal proctologists, in a quantity that would embarrass the planners of the Normandy D-Day invasion) will be expected to crawl and dig through every bit of the record of care, like dung beetles searching out the smallest molecule of fecal material (and with roughly the same scruples and sense of humor), to find any small thing that was out of norms for practice, standard of care, insurance coverage, payment, or medical justification.

Without naming any names, one might expect that a website purportedly dedicated to making sense, and alleging some facility with numbers, especially financial numbers, would have been a little more circumspect than to burp the preceding load of utter horseshit off as anything like a moment of "Gotcha!" theater, when all it really is, is government doing what it does, i.e. underpay for service, by handing you some of your own tax money back, after gathering it at confiscatory rates, and acting like they're doing you a favor by f**king you out of the full price, after they skim their own fat-ass non-productive salaries right off the top, in perpetuity. And then turn around and tax you AGAIN for the money they just underpaid you, out of part of your previous taxes. (Government is not the Tooth Fairy, and while they can print fiatbux out of thin air, they can't actually create nor earn money, as if they produced something and earned a profit on their labors. EVER. They are always and only just the middleman, slapping an extra cost on something you could have gotten without them, for less money, had you the means and wherewithal to go straight to the source.)

If anyone thinks that you're going to get doctors to do something, particularly falsifying medical diagnoses, by promising to underpay them, kick them in the balls, then add a bonus of a punch in the nose (before we even mention getting them sued and/or criminally prosecuted for malpractice and fraud if they do it), and that those same medical professionals will thus be overwhelmingly fiduciarily inclined to take you up on the deal in droves, I have a bridge to sell you, cheap (as long as you don't mind the crotch kick and punch in the nose I'll give you as icing on the cake).

When people who should know better overlook something so ass-chappingly obvious, they're either morons, or blinded by the same sphincter-induced hypoxia.

Sorry, but there is no third option there.
Fucktards gonna fucktard.

And we remind all and sundry that we cannot, using facts and logic, argue any person out of a position or predicament, that did not use facts and logic to get into that position or predicament. More's the pity.

----------

I told you all that to tell you this:
The tests for Kung Flu, because of the incompetent government @$$holes at the CDC (but I repeat myself again), Suck Balls. Bigly.
The swab tests report an inordinate number of false negatives, and the antibody tests (which AFAIK no one has reliably demonstrated yet are specific to COVID-19, as opposed to all coronaviruses, like the common cold) throw out false positives, like a drunk spilling pocket change staggering down the street.
This leads to undercounting those who do have it, and overcounting those who never had, both of which inexorably undersell how many people are infected who we think have it, and oversell how deeply it's penetrated this society. The latter is a number less than 5%, and probably less than 2%, nationally, at least anywhere outside the Five Boroughs.

Which has inevitably led medical professionals, contrary to the jackassical suggestion above, to use y'know, a clinical medical approach to making a diagnosis of presumptive Kung Flu.

"Like what, Aesop?"

Wee quaint little diagnostic tools like, say, X-rays, kids. (Common Core history grads, look up Marie Curie. #medicine # X-rays #actual things.)

For laymen, esp. those who didn't pay attention in middle school science class, here's what an average normal chest X-ray looks like:

Bog-simple, no problems. Spiffy, right?
What does it look like when you have ordinary pneumonia?

Mini-anatomy lesson: you have two lungs, R and L. You have 5 lobes; 3 on the right, 2 on the left. Upper, middle, and lower on the right, upper and lower on the left. (Your heart is part of the reason there's no Left Middle Lobe.) So, look at the pic above. The red arrows in the original stolen (Fair Use, btw) image came with it. See that area of schmutzy stuff all over the right middle lobe? That's RML PNA: Right Middle Lobe PNeumoniA. The opacity (the blurry part) indicates fluid in the alveoli (little air sacs) in the lung, which is why you can't breathe: your lungs filled with water don't work well underwater, because they're lungs, not gills. That's what bacterial pneumonia, the kind that antibiotics will treat well, and that a shot will help prevent, looks like. In elderly people, pneumonias of the lower lobes, from less physical activity, prolonged immobility, etc. are the most common, and nota bene: as in this illustration, only on ONE side. (Gunny Hints:You will see this material again.)

So what?
So, let's look at a typical CXR (Chest X-Ray) of a Kung Flu patient:

WHOA!
Not typical.
Not even typical pneumonia.
There's schmutz EVERYWHERE.
Schmutz? = "Ground glass opacity".
Bilateral multifocal pneumonia.
Like you won't see in bacterial pneumonia.
Like you'd expect to see in pneumonia caused by a respiratory inhaled virus, and/or virus-induced coagulopathy, and/or both. (Pathologists, chime in anytime.)
Which fits only Kung Flu.
You have fluid ALL OVER your lungS, plural, (and pleural! See what I did there?) on BOTH SIDES, which is why people who have this symptomatically can't effing breathe.
Their lungs, as in the whole contraption, is full of fluid.
And if you're hypoxic (too little oxygen in your blood stream) on room air, or worse, even on supplemental oxygen, like a nasal canula, or a face mask, you're pretty f**ked.
If you have that, and a fever from the infection, and a cough, and this CXR, and your blood tests fit the pattern, neither I, nor anyone witrh MD or D.O.  after their name, needs a gorram broke-dick CDC-approved COVID test to tell you, me, Yellow Dog, or Medicare, that you have Kung Flu!
They can see it for themselves, with their own lying eyes, and they're not going to falsify it for some pittance of chump change from Uncle Sugar.

Go back and read the AAR from the ER doc in Nawlins (like every one of the ER MDs I know and work with did, long since): clinical indications = Kung Flu. Period. A test, good, bad, or half-assed, is a nice confirmation, but the CXR and other clinical indications are diagnostic (that means a lead-pipe cinch sure thing). Testing, at that point, is a luxury, and if it comes back opposite the clinical indications, will be completely and rightfully ignored. Because the tests are all so much bullshit, courtesy of The Usual Gang Of Idiots at CDC, plus Typical Government Incompetence.

BTW, none of these are my actual patients' X-rays, but #3 was what the CXR looked like on my guy from this past weekend. (One of six COVID-positives I cared for, BTW.) He's in his early twenties, kids. Not 80+. Not 70-80. Not even over 40. Barely old enough to legally buy a beer. Full coronavirus bilateral multi-focal pneumonia.

What does this mean for you?

1) Temperature screenings are going to get everyone infected.

2) Getting everyone infected means you can expect orders of magnitude more sick and dead people (from Kung Flu, not with Kung Flu, if you're that particular brand of Coronatarded) than you've seen so far.

3) Lockdowns largely stopped this, but
a) we cannot, and weren't intending to, lock everyone down forever until the economy was in total flames, nor would we wish to continue the experiment
b) some of you were too smart to pay attention to what worked, because "muh paycheck!"
c) TANSTAAFL

4) You (for any value of that term) have essentially decided to throw everyone who dies from this under the bus, in order to preserve the economy.
a) You did it, are doing it, and want to. Own it.
I'm not judging which is better, but don't try and soft-soap and sugarcoat the decision you made, and the consequences as a direct result.
b) Don't yap and yammer about your anti-abortion creds, if you're willing to kill people at the end of life as casually as the Governor of Virginia is willing to kill them at the beginning.
Like Esau, you've sold your credibility there for a mess of pottage, and there are consequences to that sale. As noted in one tale, "we've already established what sort of person you are; now we're simply discussing the price".
c) There was a right way to do this, but most of the country couldn't wait for that.
Suture self. And tell granny and gramps you loved them, and will miss them.

5) Get used to your masks, unless you like bilateral multifocal pneumonia.
a) Unless you're Mary Mallon.
b) And deserve her fate.

6) You have no wild idea who's sick, and who's healthy, never did, and probably never will.
a) You DGAF, never did, and probably never will.
b) You have not hired Helen Keller as your crossing guard on the freeway.
c) EVERYONE is Helen Keller crossing the freeway.
d) Kung Flu is the 5000 busses upstream from you.

7) Good luck with your choices, and may the odds ever be in your favor.

8) I told you before, you're not going to get what you like, and you're not going to like what you'll get.

9) This is a virus. It's real. It kills people. There's no recognized effective treatment, and no vaccine, and neither truth will change, probably this year, at least. There's no evidence - none, nada, zip, niente, bupkus - that getting this confers any immunity to re-infection or that any such thing as "herd immunity" will ever be achieved. Not least of which because it's been genetically altered with SARS, Ebola, and HIV sequences in the gene. (Thanks, Dr. Frankensteins!)

Luckily for you, it "only" kills about 1-3% of people who get it. That's 1/30th-1/90th of Ebola. It's 20-30 times worse than the flu. But it can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with, it'll just keep coming.

Bonus: Getting it symptomatically creates permanent damage to the lungs and other organs, even if you survive.
And as you're seeing now, (and 30-50% of those reading this will totally ignore, no matter how many times we tell it to you) the deaths from this virus are the least of your worries in the grand scheme of things, compared to the other 5000 consequences to life in society.

10) This virus doesn't give a flaming bag of dogsh*t what your politics are, what whackdoodle conspiracy theories you espouse, who you voted for, or for the Constitution and Bill of Rights. People on both sides politically are so full of sh*t about this crisis their eyes are brown, and stupidity is no exclusive province for either side. (No, really. And I can show you their blogs and press releases.)

11) You ain't seen nothing yet.
You're not crawling out of this.
You're not even close to the crawling-out-of-this stage.
You're still in the crawling-into-it stage.
You have no idea how deep this swamp is, and while one can only ever walk halfway into such a swamp, you had no idea how big it was when you walked into it, thus when the halfway point was will only be determined after you come out the other side, retroactively.

Hurts, don't it?

A New Drinking Game For You During Coronatardation

Go to your favorite go-to websites.

Every time one of them links to this CDC web page on Kung Flu deaths, and then, with utter un-concern for cluelessness, tells you anything close to "the CDC has revised Kung Flu deaths down by 30,000!" or any variation, you must slam a shot of your favorite high-test adult beverage.

When you get to the end of your list, you'll probably be just about drunk enough for them to make sense.

But you might have to do it two or three more times, until you're too blind to see

a few caveats, provisos, and codocils on the actual page, wherein the CDC, on the same page linked to, tells any olde foole with a spare two seconds of time and grade-school reading ability:

"Natzsofast, Guido!"

 

Sober people can be forgiven for noting, in the same two seconds, a few choice words about those "new, revised, lower Kung Flu deaths":

 

"Provisional death counts are based on death certificate data received and coded by the National Center for Health Statistics as of May 4, 2020. Death counts are delayed and may differ from other published sources (see Technical Notes). Counts will be updated periodically. Additional information will be added to this site as available.  

The provisional counts for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) deaths are based on a current flow of mortality data in the National Vital Statistics System. National provisional counts include deaths occurring within the 50 states and the District of Columbia that have been received and coded as of the date specified. It is important to note that it can take several weeks for death records to be submitted to National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), processed, coded, and tabulated. Therefore, the data shown on this page may be incomplete, and will likely not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period, especially for the more recent time periods. Death counts for earlier weeks are continually revised and may increase or decrease as new and updated death certificate data are received from the states by NCHS. 

 WHY THESE NUMBERS ARE DIFFERENT

Provisional death counts may not match counts from other sources, such as media reports or numbers from county health departments. Our counts often track 1–2 weeks behind other data for a number of reasons: Death certificates take time to be completed. There are many steps involved in completing and submitting a death certificate. Waiting for test results can create additional delays. States report at different rates. Currently, 63% of all U.S. deaths are reported within 10 days of the date of death, but there is significant variation among jurisdictions. It takes extra time to code COVID-19 deaths. While 80% of deaths are electronically processed and coded by NCHS within minutes, most deaths from COVID-19 must be coded manually, which takes an average of 7 days. Other reporting systems use different definitions or methods for counting deaths. 

Things to know about the data 

Provisional counts are not final and are subject to change. Counts from previous weeks are continually revised as additional records are received and processed. Provisional data are not yet complete. Counts will not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period, especially for more recent periods. However, we can estimate how complete our numbers are by looking at the average number of deaths reported in previous years. Death counts should not be compared across jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions report deaths on a daily basis, while others report deaths weekly or monthly. In addition, vital record reporting may also be affected or delayed by COVID-19 related response activities.

I never stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. But generally, when the FedGov, on it's own web page, tells you five times, nine different ways, including using giant type, bold face printing, and highlights, repeated enough times for even Gilligan to figure this out, including labeling the whole lash up

"PROVISIONAL Deaths" 

then maybe, just maybe...they're trying to tell the sloppy non-readers not to jump on these figures, and go galloping off on them in all directions, for another two months, or more.

Just spitballing, mind you.
Anyone who thinks the issue might be settled is invited to go to the linked page, and read it for yourselves.
It's always possible that the polarity of the entire universe, including the English language, just reversed itself 180 degrees, and it's now Bizarro Opposite World from now going forward, and telling people those numbers aren't the last word actually means "Please, by all means, pretend like we NEVER TOLD YOU that these numbers AREN'T the last word."

OR,
It could be that some people have an Emily Litella Moment coming, to match their impending Emily Litella Award, in 3, 2,...

 

 

{Hint: This info is not "fine print" when the .Gov puts it in 40-pt. bolded block letters, and repeats it more times than Nancy Pelosi stutters in a five minute speech.}

Let The White Whale Quest End, Please



Pursuit of the impossible past the point of insanity never
 turns out well for Captain Ahab.

Angus: try reading the story, not just the headlines.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo revealed Thursday that preliminary results from a coronavirus antibody study show the statewide infection rate is 13.9 percent, which would mean around 2.7 million residents could have carried the disease.

The 3,000 samples were collected from 40 sites in 19 counties, according to Cuomo, and suggested the infection rate is as high as 21.2 percent in places like New York City.
The governor says the testing was conducted at sites set up outside places like grocery and box stores.
“These are people who were out and about shopping,” Cuomo said. “They were not people who were in their home, they are not people who are isolated, they are not people who are quarantined -- who you could argue probably had a lower rate of infection because they wouldn’t come out of the house.” 

Nearly 70 percent of the overall testing was done in the regions of Westchester, New York City and Long Island. 

In Long Island, the positive rate was 16.7 percent, while the positive rate in Westchester/Rockland Counties and the rest of the state was 11.7 and 3.6 percent, respectively.

That's direct from the text.
"Sciencing"?
Yeah...no.
How does that stack up with actual science and statistics?
Pretty poorly.

Sample size: adequate.
Specificity of testing for Kung Flu: uncertain, at best.
Controlled for age, sex, race, etc.: unknown, but dubious likelihood.
Selection: anything but random.
Skewed heavily towards NYFC, the world capitol of Kung Flu.

If we wanted to know the infection rate among people regularly breaking quarantine around Kung Flu City World Pandemic HQ, it tells us a lot.
NYFC rate of infection: 21.2%
Long Island rate: 16.7%
Westchester/Rockland County rate: 11.7%
Rate of infection in the rest of NYFS: 3.6%

So, granting the premise of this dubious study, with 16,000 dead there alone already, unlocking everything in NYFC could yield a final death toll of as much as 80,000, if they manage to infect every single person in New York Effing City.

Genius!

Meanwhile, the rate of infection in the rest of the state, under, once again, the rosiest non-vetted, unpeer-reviewed piece of totally questionable codswallop is not 21.2%, nor even the weighted 13.9% in the headline Angus grabbed, but only 3.6%.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, man, they printed that right in front of you, in English, FFS. What more could you possibly want??

Meaning the rest of the state still stands to infect the other 96.4% of the population with no antibodies whatsoever, and increase their final death toll by as much as 25 times what it is right now.

I cannot imagine why all the residents of both the Big Horse Apple, and the Empire State, are not clamoring loudly to be allowed the freedom to roam without let or hindrance, with the prospect of only another 64,000 dead in NYFC (where X=16000; 5X-16000=_____.), and another 108,000 or so dead in the non-NYFC part of the state as their reward, if they can just max out the spread. (That's the 4500 NYFS non-NYFC Kung Flu deaths currently, times 24 multiplier, represented by the 96% of NYFS that isn't infected, according to this latest polished turd of a survey, Angus. Wouldn't want you to have to do your own math to see where I come up with my numbers, would we? IOW, if X=4500, 25X - 4500 =______.) I mean, seriously, who'd pass up the chance to kill more people in one state from this than the entire U.S. lost in combat in every war since WWII, to date, combined, perhaps as early as Labor Day?!?
Other than anybody with two brain cells, I mean.
But cheer up. If they contain the spread to only 50% of the state, it'll "only" kill 96,000, instead of 192,000! Maybe even more, if the people locked in and not coming out to "grocery and big box stores" come out of hiding too! What's not to like?

And now guess who's butthurt, exactly as I noted, and got spanked by another blogger, and engendered his own special commemorative post. Angus, seriously: when I say you're butthurt, and then you get flagged for being butthurt, and then you post on your blog about how butthurt you are, how do you think it looks to everyone else on the internet?

You've devolved from occasional information to mere entertainment. And your butt is so scorching it could pop popcorn.

Your ongoing attempts to paint me as the bad guy in your silly Ahab-like quest just ran headfirst into a neutral third party, got you correctly called out by same, and you got burned.
And you did it all by yourself. Toddle back to your HQ, stop slandering innocent third parties and trying to throw shade at someone who's been blogging longer than I have, and probably longer than you too, and stop making up such tall tales that archived blogs from dead people even demonstrate your mendacity. You've forgotten that any number of live people who also visited there regularly can undo your fairytales as well.

IANAD, but I would suggest you need a case of this, stat:

It should go without needing to be said, but I don't want this pandemic to be any worse than it really is. I will, most happily, cheer any legitimate work that shows it's less severe, or liable to dry up and blow away, provided the authors of any such news haven't been huffing hopeium by the metric fuckton, to the detriment of actual science and statistical accuracy. And I sure as Hell don't want it to be a biblical apocalypse, just to be able to rub your nose in "I told you so". If you can't grok that, you're certifiable. I, however, most certainly am not.

I told you at Borepatch's blog that I still read yours. So if it'll help, let me suggest that if you want to get my attention, it isn't necessary for you to set yourself on fire like this. It's gotta be painful. I can get a post without your kamikaze antics. Trust me on that.

You want to blog Coronafest? Knock yourself out. It's a free blogosphere.
Just maybe consider the option to leave me out of your rants. It isn't turning out like you'd hoped, and you aren't getting any luckier with each dice roll. I'm not the white whale you're hunting. If it makes you feel better to think I'm the retard in this internet argument, go right ahead. It's on me. You will anyways, so what the hell, right? Get over it. Let it go, man. Live your life, and stop worrying about me.

Natzsofast, Tam

According to her blog, the above is a dumb holster idea.

"Basically, unless you're wearing a plate carrier or LBV or something that interferes with a normal belt mount, you should probably leave the drop-legs to Hollywood space pirates and B&W cowboys."

Oh really?

Point of order.

Look, I can give you eleventy times and places where a drop leg of any type is weapons-grade dumb (self-castration optional); BTDT and got the t-shirt. But I can also think of several situations where it's pretty wizard-level. And let's face it, not everyone is a Travis Haley gunslinger, nor trying to be one.

What about for someone who's not trying to look tacticool at all, but maybe earning a living driving a truck all day, or a cabbie, an Uber/Lyft driver, or a pizza delivery guy?
(Not in NYFC or similar anti-gun locales, but in places where the Constitution still applies most days.)

I would normally defer to Tam's judgment on this sort of thing, if only because she's certainly shot more last year than I did last decade.

But I think the above examples are an example of not thinking this all the way through, especially for Joe Average just earning a paycheck.

Sit in a car, a delivery van, or a semi rig cab, and show me your IWB or appendix-carry draw, against, say, a robber or carjacker.With your seatbelts on (in observance of the law, natch), and maybe wearing a jacket, just to make it interesting for you.
I'll wait.
(We won't even talk about where that IWB is digging into you all shift, or where your appendix carry muzzle is pointed, sitting in a vehicle seat. And to be sporting, we won't stipulate that one might be a bit on the portly side.)

Now, sit in a car seat, same conditions, and tell me where your hand falls on your upper leg:
unless you've got gorilla-length arms (which you'd need to get to any ankle rig), that'd be right where this holster sits. Handy. Readily available. Not pointed at your junk.
Five stars.

I'm not saying it'd be a good choice for CCW (obviously), let alone a trip to the brew tappery for a bite and pint, or window shopping at the local mall. And anyone who's ever tried running with a drop leg on knows when it's a dumb idea (and they probably speak in a voice an octave or two higher than normal).
But for a guy sitting in a car or truck seat, for hours or all day long?
Pretty close to ideal.

This is what happens to folks who've never sat in a Humvee or Jeep with a sidearm strapped on all day long (let alone a Prius or a Freightliner).
They're missing a thing or two because they never experienced it.

It's the same reason pilots and AFV crewmembers have been partial to their shoulder holsters. Because it works for their specifics.

I'm thinking that "Dumb Holster Idea" pronouncement might want just a smidgen of walking back. Maybe with just a dash more of humility.

"Purpose-specific Holster Idea"? That I could see.

But one idea does not fit all.

Mafz Iz Hard Department



"If you can't set up the equation properly, you'll never get the right answer." - every math teacher I ever had, in the days long before Common Core

For example:

" Never before has there been as much “official force” in America as there is today. It comes in many forms:

• active-duty military;
• military reserves (i.e., National Guard);
• federal law enforcement agencies;
• state police;
• local police;
• lots of federal, state, and local government employees who go about their daily business armed. "

 Following which is an otherwise well-formed essay on a host of ills that have befallen America, and some that may. But another part of a decent classical education is knowing that opening arguments matter, and even more so when they are factually so far wrong as to be risible.

My rebuff to that error:

Please.

"Never" before?
You're much, much better than that.

Use the categories you listed, and google the active duty military strength of the US in 1945. Then as a percentage of the US population in 1945.

We are at a fraction of that level of official strength today.

In light of that, you want to restate that premise a tad, I suspect.

 Gentle Reader, I have no more access to the www realities than yourselves, so let's cut to the chase:
Had the addressee taken the few mouseclicks to do that, they would have determined that US population in 1945 was about 140M, and the number of US troops in uniform was some 16M, or  about 11.5% of the entire country. Essentially 1 in 6 men of military age was in uniform in this country from 1942-1945. These are still actual facts, even for those who didn't know them beforehand, because History is Still A Thing.

But they did not do that minimal homework.
Instead, just doubled down.

No, Aesop, I stand by it. Read the sentence again, carefully this time. You'll get it on your second pass.

Riiiiiiiiight. The facts, aren't, and it must have been my mistake to misunderstand that sentence. So, let's do the math.

So, look kids, 11.5% of the US population now would be (330M x 0.115=) 38M people.
(Almost like I knew whereof I spoke, and left bread crumbs the size of baguettes to that reality in my first reply.) So you'd have to have more government force enforcers than that to be at a level we have "never" reached before.

Then, let's bear in mind that the 16M number is only the military component of that equation. It doesn't add in every cop or other enforcer, from local, state, and federal agencies, in 1945. Which only makes this worse, if someone's sole intention was to pile on.

Unfortunately, right now, we're at a fraction of that level of governmental "force" enforcers.
There are about 2.1M US military active/reserve/NG, total, and roughly 3M LEOs at all levels, best guess, without taking a week to gather all available source material. Even if we add in park rangers, dog catchers, and the SWAT team for the Department of Agriculture.

That's about 5.1M. Not 38M. Whoops.

But to sweeten the pot, I'll even round that up to an even 6M.
And then double it, to 12M, just to be sporting. And even with that rhetorical largesse, you'd still be yuuuuuugely short of that 16M troops number of actual bodies from 1945, not counting civilian "force" then, and not even 1/3 the 38M, if we wanted to look at this in equally proportional percentage of the population terms, for comparison between 1945 and 2020.

3/8. 1/3. These would be called "fractions". Justifying my earlier use of the word, with mathematical precision. Just to keep things honest here. 

QED

I posted all that information, and more, in an unpublished (as of yet, and probably ever) second response.

Are there far too many civilian agencies with guns, badges, and a wannabe SWAT/Delta Force mentality with a Paul Blart Mall Cop level of actual capability?

O Hell Yes there are.

Are there so many laws, at all levels - local, state, and federal - that the weight of them alone could be expressed as double-digit multiples of the body weight of the late Andre The Giant, to the point of nuclear megatonnage overkill in a supposedly free republic?

O Hell Yes there are.

(Hint: Those two things are the actual problem.)

But have we "never" reached the level of "official force" as we have about us today?
Mathematical logic inarguably says O Hell No. As the equation was laid out, things were much worse 70 years ago. Except they weren't.

Topic sentence shot to hell.
And the reason why, in an essay, "never use 'never' " is a pretty good rule in most cases.

The way to fix that metric to make that point would be to
1) drop military forces from that equation (because, unlike in banana republics, they aren't pertinent to the topic)
2) focus on civilian badged orcs, and the tonnage of jurisprudential effluvia that enables them
at which point you'd hit a rhetorical home run, with no Brobdingnagian factual errors to hamstring your effort.

I didn't point out the obvious error to belittle anyone, but to suggest that by eliminating the error, they might sharpen their rhetorical hatchet.

So maybe, when someone points out such a glaring factual error, and suggests a minor course correction that you might better make your point, particularly one with which we tend to otherwise agree, maybe the snippy initial response was uncalled for, and it isn't aided by what sounds to these ears like ladling on a steaming case of butthurt. (But, yet again, maybe I'll get it on the second time through, right?) This is about the factual, not the personal. Anyone who can't separate the two more readily probably needs some time on a sunny beach, AFK. Ditto anyone who thinks erasers on pencils are for other people.

Errare humanum est.

Just saying.

This Ain't Gonna Work Out Like You Thought



They weren't "Californians" when they landed here, nor when they left here.
They won't magically become such when they get to where you are either.
But you're welcome to all you want.

"You all can go to Hell; I'm going to Texas!" - Rep. David Crockett

According to an article by Tyler Durden linked at RLGore's Straight Line Logic, Crockett's sentiment is shared by a growing number of companies seeking refuge from Califrutopia's confiscatory taxation. Which, make no mistake, is as bad as you've heard. You should RTWT, at either place. But as we've pointed out WRT Durden's prognostications before, what he covers is rarely as important as what he unknowingly overlooks. So stealing a line from the late great Paul Harvey, let's tell you The Rest Of The Story you won't get in the OP either place, in a fitting cautionary tale for Friday the 13th.

One quote in it has 70,000 "Californians" (the vast majority of whom are not, and never were, but we'll leave that point momentarily); the awkward paragraph's next quote has 12,900 (15% of 86,000), unless it was aiming at stating that ex-Californians were 15% of all new Texas arrivals, a number shrouded in vagueness.

So Point One, the minor one, would be to figure out WTF number we're aiming at, if you're seeking some precision beyond vague statements that "a lotta people are going to Texas from Califrutopia", which conveys close to zero actual and useable information.

Point Two, the far greater one, is that most of the people leaving CA are geographical gypsies, and have been their entire adult lives. Having no investment in where they came from they plundered and moved on to greener pastures, exactly as they'll do at their next point of alighting.
That prospect, far more than where they landed and plundered last, should scare hell out of anyone in Texas.

They weren't native Californians, people who carved an oasis out of a desert, built the ships and planes of WWII, entertained the world with world-class stories and music, or feed the world annually from their surplus. And, incidentally, voted solid Republican for most of a century, since the territory was founded as a state.

Texans aren't getting them for neighbors.

They're getting the detritus from everywhere from Pigknuckle to NYFC, the second- and third-raters who couldn't survive in the corrupt scumopolii of the East and Midwest, the ne'er-do-wells whose parents stuck it out in the dustbowl or Appalachia or the deep South until long after all the good jobs were gone, and then only moved to Californy after the welfare hammock there made the trip worthwhile, have now sucked it dry, and have chosen a new clueless rube to rob and loot before the husk here collapses from its own weight.

One might be forgiven for having thought Texas would have learned its lesson in Houston after Katrina, but there's always one bozo who has to grab the hot stove two times to catch on.

Tag, Texas; you're it.

You'll be getting the illegal aliens too shiftless to work here, the ones not quite bright enough to climb the cartel hierarchy, the white trash and Diversity Beans who've timed out their welfare benefits, and the proud younger diplomates from the 49th-ranking educational system in the country.

The ones who voted in Gov. Gray Davis, who bankrupted the state by buying its own power back from Enron at 4 times the market price, then became the first CA governor to get recalled in 100 years; the ones who thought Moonbeam Brown hadn't done enough damage to CA in his first two horrible terms back in the '80s, and gave him two more, those who voted for Clinton and Obozo and Shrillary, and then gave us Gabbin' Nuisance as a follow-up to Moonbeam, now finally termed out in his dottage, all while saddling the entire country with Barbara Boxer, the stupidest senator in the country for pretty much her entire term of service, gun-grabbing Sen. Fineswine, and Speaker Nancy Alzheimers, not once, but now twice, because the first time didn't screw the country up hard enough.
Sen. Kamala Klowncar Kneepads, beside this rogue's gallery, is just a latter-day asterisk.

You're getting their voters. To him who has ears to hear, let him listen.

Look real hard at where Davis, and Pelosi, and Boxer are from (Google it, I triple dog-dare you); that's who voted for them here, too, and that's who's moving to Texas, by demographic inevitability. And hey, Texicans, check out your southern counties, and note how your entire state is purpling up nicely, and due to flip (D) forever inside of 20 years, and then tell yourselves you'll be different, and "it can't happen here".

Don't believe me; ask around in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona. They think they got inundated with "Californians", but mathematics is a rare gift, and they never had the wit to figure out that if all their problem came from here, this state would be as barren  and de-populated as North Dakota or Alaska, even if we threw in half of Mexico here illegally for free.
It simply isn't possible, and never was; those states were inundated not by "Californians", but by people who couldn't ruin Califrutopia fast enough, and just kept moving. We were just the last place they despoiled before moving along. License plates aren't birth certificates, a fact they learned too little, and too slow, if they even know now.

Now it's Texas' turn.

I forward Texas my sincere best wishes dealing with that locust storm, but no matter how I say it, it still comes over as the English translation of a Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." You're going to do just that; no doubt. And you're going to get what your governors have been recruiting for, good and hard. Based purely on a lifetime's eyewitness observation, let me assure you it will not be anything like what you'd hoped for.

Oh, and you other folks? Substitute the name of your state patch for Texas, as necessary.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

The next uprising will not be North vs. South.
It will not be Coast vs. Hinterland.
It will not be City vs. Country.
It will not be Everywhere Else vs. Califrutopian Hordes.

It's going to be street to street, and house to house.
Wrap your heads around that, and stop bullsh*tting yourselves.
The biggest threat to your existence for the next 40 years is not coming from Califrutopia, NYFC, or the District of Mordor.
It's coming from within 5 miles of your front door, right effing NOW.
And it always was.

Courtesy Card

In other news this weekend, SCOTUS Associate Justice Ruth Vader Ginsburg was taken to the hospital, presumably where Death was arriving shortly to collect his due, but after Ginsburg flashed her Courtesy Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free Card from Beelzebub, and her copy of her compact with His Infernal Majesty, signed by Satan himself, Death, yet again, had to return empty-handed, leaving Ginsburg to alight her broomstick and return to her castle with flying monkey escorts.

She's too high up for anyone to SWAT her, but perhaps someone might gin up credible tweets from her purporting to have the goods on Fat Bill and Shrillary, to induce another mysterious case of Arkancide.

Maybe next time...

Game Of Flubs

Peter muses over at his blog that the rogue Starbuck's cup seen in one scene must have been a deliberate plant, because Hollywood craftsmanship and duplicity.

I don't watch the series in question, and other than being aware of its mere existence, could care no less for it were it filmed on Mars, and broadcast only on cable access in Farsi and Serbo-Croatian. But I do know a thing or three about The Biz, firsthand.

Keep in mind that "Hollywood craftsmanship" is an oxymoron on a par with "military intelligence", "government help", and "jumbo shrimp".

Allow me to elucidate.

Bear in mind I've only done 20-something years in Hollywood.
You could strafe every movie lot in Hollywood with miniguns, for days, and never, ever hit anyone smart enough to earn a Ph.D.

Then remember the stupidest things these geniuses say and do when they put on their 0-diopter glasses to "look intelligent", and bear in mind this is when they're trying to look bright.

Now imagine them on the set, in hour 14 of a 16-hour day, amidst an 80-hour week, on take 9 of a complicated scene, on a set teeming with extras pulling down minimum wage and a bologna sandwich.

The miracle isn't that there was a Starbuck's cup in a shot; it's that there isn't one in every shot.

Go back and watch Twister sometime: in the opening sweeping shot after the flashback, as the camera zooms across the fields of Oklahoma to Bill Paxton's truck, and notice that right on the front quarter panel, you see a beautiful full reflection of a Bell JetRanger, with the cameraman hanging out the door filming the scene.
In a movie directed by a well-acclaimed former director of photography.

Watch Pretty Woman, in the scene where Richard Gere and Julia Roberts are meeting Ralph Bellamy for dinner, and watch the sorbet cups appear, disappear, reappear, magically refill, disappear, then come back again.

And a million other goofs, flubs, and such.

I might even know of an incident where a raccoon tail was shoved up the nostril of a moose head on set, and no one noticed until they'd moved on, and saw it in the background of several shots during dailies the next day, and it was too late to re-shoot the scene, so it's in the final cut, but I ain't saying anything more about it. Maybe the moose snorted a raccoon.

In the silent version of Ben Hur, they ran over an extra with a chariot. Killed him deader than canned tuna.

In Last Of The Mohicans, one of the special-ability extras firing a black powder musket fired a ramrod into another actor. The target actor survived, after they pulled three feet of steel out of his body.

In Twilight Zone: The Movie the entire production staff conspired to set off explosives under a low-hovering helicopter, lied to the parents of the kids in the scene and the fire marshals watching the stunt, then lied their asses off in court, after they'd killed Vic Morrow and two kids.

The producers were on planes to Acapulco within a half an hour, out of subpoena range and unable to be extradited, until the movie wrapped.
And nobody went to prison for three counts of manslaughter.

This is Hollywood, 24/7/365.
Better than your family home movies? Certainly.
Safer than the drunk redneck who says "Hold my beer!"? Most days, but not by much.
Flawless production geniuses?

Stop.
My sides are splitting.

And BTW, nobody gets fired for something like this.
They get thanked at the end of the day, and the next day, their name isn't on the call sheet anymore.
It's called "employment at will".
(If it was talent, their pay gets docked for the cost of the digital removal. And they get a rep with the entire production crew as dumbasses, and they're watched like a hawk watches prey, lest they screw up another shot. Ask me how I know.)

Stars and directors have died during productions, and they worked around that.
No one on set is irreplaceable.

The Starbuck's cup?
Small potatoes.
You have no idea about even 1% of what goes on.

We will say no more at all about something which, to engineer and pull off, would require the complicity, acquiescence, and conspirational silence of about 500 lawyers from both HBO and Starbucks, which is only slightly less probable than Bigfoot, chemtrails, and the faking of the lunar landings.

If that last sentence gored your ox too, your tinfoil hat is wrapped way too tight to comment on my blog.
Stifle that urge.

The Power of Myth

On the heels of the earlier post regarding Wakanda, we get the comment to consider the example of the "university" at Nalanda, in India.

"Not so. The first Western-style university may have been founded in 1818, but the earliest major center of learning in India (known so far), which was structured more or less like a university (various schools with dedicated professors etc) was Nalanda, which was founded around 500AD, and flourished until it was sacked by islamics (big surprise) in the late 1100s.

Much of Indian culture and learning was suppressed or otherwise smothered by the British, but prior to that, India had been one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and highly developed. I'll grant that they didn't reach the level that Rome managed, but they did have sewer and irrigation systems (3000BC), some of the earliest steel processes (high-carbon Wootz steel prior to 500BC exported across Asia and Middle East) and Crucible steel 300-200BC also for export, earliest known plough 2300BC, earliest known stirrup 500-200BC, first articulation of Pascal's Triangle, and so on. Also, first demonstration of radio transmission 3 years prior to Marconi, the precursor to Chess, the development of cotton as a clothing fiber including early cotton gins, decimal place value and zero, and lots more.

The problem with India stems from entering a dark age when islam invaded in the 1100s, got somewhat better under the Mughals, and then sank again when the East India Company came in and dismantled most of India to finance various other initiatives, while beating the initiative out of the populace. Despite having fairly extensive trade with both East Asia and the Middle East/Mediterranean, India was always somewhat isolationist, so others easily took credit for their work, because India didn't have the expansionist bent that others did.

A considerable amount of discovery is being re-attributed to India, albeit not much since the Colonial period. 

Just as an addendum to Nalanda, there's documented evidence of students from as far away as Tibet, China, Korea, Persia, Turkey, and Central Asia (presumably Mongolia), and at least contact with Indonesia. Courses of study included not only Buddhism, but fine arts, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, politics and the art of war. It had around 10,000 students and 2000 professors. That looks a lot like a University to me."

So, let us examine this idea best, by simply granting the premise.

Not disputing nor gainsaying the existence of the offered example of Nalanda per se (which, I must observe, is far too linguistically close to Wakanda for many to resist witticisms at its expense, including your humble author), I doubt just the influence or significance of it. (TL;DR: none).

If it all was as claimed, one cannot but wonder how, short of an Indian sub-continental genocide then unseen in the world, and of which no record yet exists, a mere Muslim invasion could suffice to so destroy not just that lone university, but the entire concept of one, culture-wide, specifically in the minds of the very 2000 professors and 10,000 students who'd experienced it, functionally forever, such that they never had nor created another one, ever, anywhere, until British rule, despite being in presumably vigorous existence for a mere 700 years prior to their destruction(!).

It's as implausibly so as that Alexandria were the only library in the entire world until the Italian Renaissance. Which, of course, it was not.

If the university were there, and such an early great idea, one would expect there would be multiple of them, and the concept to have spread across all sorts of cultures, and destroying one would no more suffice to extinguish the model than destroying the first round wheel would do. There should be exemplars from India to Korea, let alone across Africa, were that tale any sort of true, just as in the Bolognese example in the West, to which multiple thousands of colleges and universities now trace their direct lineage.

Granting the premise of a therefore dubious history shows its unlikelihood, and the monumental flaws in the whole thing. It's a little like waving your hands and conjuring SMOD to explain the sudden inexplicable extinction of dinosaurs, instead of just offering the humble but intellectually authentic "we don't know".

I suspect revisionism is at the root, along with an addiction to the diversity mythos, and some fanciful imaginary elaboration on the part of those spreading the tale, along with the same sort of intellectual vigor that leads comic book authors and Hollywood screenwriters (often the same thing) to always posit some convenient and mystically hidden monastery in the Himalayas that possesses the hidden knowledge to alter time and space and make one a super-warrior, whether we're talking about Dr. Strange or The Dark Knight, or combining both myths into one, adding SMOD to the cake/screenplay recipe, and then positing the Magical Meteorite Made Of Unobtanium, to get us the exact Wakanda Myth itself, as in Black Panther.

Once we leave the suspension of disbelief inherent in a comic book or a mediocre screenplay, it doesn't hold up well in the light of day.

What we actually have in Nalanda is a Buddhist monastery, whose curriculum consisted of Buddhism, grammar, logic, and magic. Apparently they hadn't yet invented alchemy.

Supposedly, they discovered all sorts of things, and worked on such things as medicine, law, astronomy, and city planning. Despite the supposed 600-year headstart on Bologna, they never discovered planetary rotation, the telescope itself, or a plethora of other things that made Western civilization itself what it is. Like, as in SiG's original example, the entire constituent members of the Periodic Table of Elements, the building blocks observed for all matter in the universe.

Once again, much like the Soviet claims circa the 1950s and 1960s, Nalanda would become a convenient portmanteau, exactly like Mary Poppins' handbag, Merlin's suitcase from Sword In The Stone, or Hermione's purse in the latter Harry Potter flicks, into which one can posit that they discovered everything from baseball to movies to ice cream, and put in or pull out anything they like at their leisure contrary to all laws of the physical and intellectual universe, until those durned Muslims came in circa 1200 AD and kicked over the picnic table.

Like the joke about the psychic who gets creamed by a falling piano, apparently for all their attributed brilliance, they did not see that one coming.

This was a monastery, not a university; insular, self-absorbed, and primarily concerned with the arcana of Buddhism, not discovery nor learning, and wholly insignificant intellectually to anyone, let alone everyone, on that subcontinent. And its ultimate significance to any but a few random monks, during its heyday and after its destruction was effectively nil. One look at India from 1200-1800 would confirm that diagnosis in a heartbeat.

Try to tell me that a volcanic eruption that decimated Bologna and wiped out the university there in 1800 would have wiped out all of Western Civilization, for a glimpse into the magnitude of the feat attempted with the story of  poor Nalanda, wiped out by Muslim invaders circa 1200 AD. It's simply farcical.

This is the power of fantasy, not rationality, and we find it implausible and highly dubious that Nalanda was ever much of anything beyond a very insular Buddhist monastery, with so little influence on learning, or the culture itself, that the destruction of the one lone exemplar could eliminate any shred of influence it supposedly had on seven centuries of the Indian subcontinent during its existence, let alone afterwards unto the present day. It amounted to no more than a stain upon a dinner napkin in the grand scheme of world history, if even that much.

And lo and behold, it turns out that in the flight of some of its surviving acolytes to Tibet with the Sacred Scrolls, it's the exact exemplar of the mythos behind comic books and screenplays for The Dark Knight and Dr. Strange.
QED

Color me shocked.

And once again, Western Civilization for the kill-shot win in the panorama of world history.