Here's Your Big Chance

Trump has Kung Flu. (Bummer for those of you who thought this was un-possible, but such is the price of delusion.) A) They rushed him to Walter Reed. Explain how this is exactly what they do every time the president catches "just the flu, bro." B) The Dumbocrats don't control the medical response, so feel free to explain how and why Trump is perpetuating this disease as a hoax, as if it is one. (When your head explodes trying to pull that off, feel free to get some toilet paper to wipe up all the sh*t it was full of.) C) He's doing well, and will in all likelihood (please, God) get over this with minimal impact. Like 97+% of those who caught it already have. Explain how they always do daily medical briefings coast-to-coast every time he catches a cold, gets a hangnail, or cuts himself shaving. Best wishes in those attempts, doomed to epic failure as they necessarily are. I'm sorry he got infected, despite some pretty stringent precautions. I'm glad he's doing well, and pray and trust that he will both recover completely, and kick the ever-loving sh*t out of the Hidin'/Kneepads ticket in upcoming debates, and the coming election. But neither sentiment does anything but confirm that this is really a thing, and it ain't "just the flu, bro", nor do anything but underline that you're far from done with it, even now. (Recall when we told you next Easter, minimum, while noting that anything better and sooner would bring nothing but shouts of ecstasy from this blog.) Then Google-search "European/Worldwide Second Wave", and get back to us. We have 200K fatalities (juiced or not, it's what we got to work with). WHO guesstimates - guesstimates, we emphasize - a worldwide penetration of this of no more than 10% of the population. (The @$$holes running NYFC and NYFS and running the city subways carefree 24/7/365 during the height of the outbreak there, and shoving infected patients into ill-prepared nursing homes were obvious over-achievers.) Do the math, and tell the class what a nationwide 100% penetration would tally to in the US, seeing as most states never got to even 5%, and then go back and look at our rosiest worst-case projections, if this had been met with zero response, from earlier in this year. Then, kindly STFU, as we already knew that answer before you did, and yet again, events have borne that out. To breezily quote no less an authority than President Jed Bartlett, "You were wrong. Just sit there and be wrong in your wrongness." Yet again, my epicaricacy knows no bounds.

I Toldja So, Pt. 2,487

Color me shocked: U. of Iowa re-opened, as did universities in many states, including in North and South Dakota. No points for guessing where the three highest per-capita Kung Flu infection rates in the U.S. are, as of right this minute. In Week One, U. of I. had a student body infection rate of 13+%. (That's worse than the documented infection rate for the entire state of CA after 9 months of this crap, FTR. FWIW, we're seeing a COVID case every 2 weeks or so, rather than 10-a-night, currently, here in my part of SoCal. L.A. is another story.) This week, Week Two, it's now north of 28% at U. of I. Well-played. I can hardly wait to see how long before they get to full goose bozo 100% infected. The really fun part is that somewhere around 50% will be totally asymptomatic. When those unharmed students start passing it on to their parents, professors, and ancillary staff, and so on, it won't be so bitchin' for the previous low infection rates in those three states. Or their hospitals. How fun is that? Flash back to food production earlier this year when national epicenters of beef, chicken, and pork production had sudden clusters of 10, 20, or 50 packing workers taken out with Kung Flu, and guess the price of bacon and chicken going forward a few weeks after that happens again. Remember: if you like your pandemic, you can keep your pandemic, and this is how you do that: trust the biggest jackasses to be responsible participants in society. In this case, that group being university students. And their moron administrators. Go, Team Gilligan! The only small silver lining in that clouded hurricane sky is the prospect that they might ass-idently wipe out an entire generation of aging hippie leftoid fruitcakes in academia, which will be an unexpected own-goal for the ChiComs who bungled containment, and the Leftards and NeverTrumpers cheering on the pandemic. If they can repeat the success from Iowa at places like Harvard, Berzerkely, et al, color me properly amused. But as expected, and right on track, the next COVID-wave spike now looks to be late September-October-ish, due to school re-openings from K-PhD. Followed by the inevitable one after that, likely from Thanksgiving to New Years', inclusive, secondary to large family holiday gatherings. Almost like Pasteur's Germ Theory and 150 years of epidemiology research was true or something. But for those not addicted to low double-digit IQs, and utilizing face masks, handwashing, 6' social distancing, and copious use of hand santizers, events tease the prospect of the smallest annual flu numbers in decades hereabouts. Whether society can survive the low-IQ pandemic, and the election held amidst it, is the open question of the year. So much for imaginary pandemics, and "It's Just The Flu, Bro." Hopeium is now trading in Zimbabwean Trillion-dollar treasury note ranges. Keep up the PT, and stocking your deep larders. You're only in the middle innings of this.

Every Once In Awhile

From time to time, work means babysitting patients on hold for an entire shift, and I can bootleg a little access, when everyone behaves. Comments were cleaned out at the same time, because I could get to legacy blogger from this PC, it not being an archaic tablet. FWIW, The Circus masquerading as a presidential election continues unabated as far as I can tell, and the only thing I'm certain of is that no matter who wins in November, somebody's going to riot over it. My suspicion is Orangeman takes 40 states, but two months is still a long time. ----- WRT Kung Flu, the second spike is tapering off, its launch coinciding exactly with the release of more Gilligans to freedom, and its demise coinciding with them getting whack-a-moled by TPTB in their respective states. It's going to happen again when schools are re-opened, because you can't get 10 and under kids to wear masks or wash their hands to (literally) save a life, even if it's that of granny, Grandpa, or their teachers. My SWAG is another spike after that, and another from Thanksgiving to New Years, because holidays. If we're not still playing mask and gloves games nationwide through Easter next year, I'll be properly ecstatic. And after literally millions of tests, my hunch has proven correct: even in Califrutopia, this never penetrated beyond 10% of the population, and the CFR is running between 2 and 3%. Color me completely unsurprised, as that's what I said before mass delusion took hold from coast to coast, and from the looney Left to the whacktard Right. The worst part was that had people been less stupid from the get-go, this could have been crib-strangled with one three week lockdown of everything that moved, if it had been done all at once, and just once. Slow-rolling it, and letting the morons in NYFS pretend it wasn't a thing got us the first 50K dead. After that, it was a full-on party. Then and now, the Gilligans have driven this bus, just like in every pandemic. What's not fair is that they aren't the ones dying, just the ones spreading it to those who do. If you like your pandemic, you can keep your pandemic. Let me know how that's working out for ya. ----- I dunno about anyone else, but I'm not missing any sportsball, of any stripe. (Never paid much mind to it anyways, but now it's a hard complete skip.) They were always entitled whiny crybabies, and now they're ignorant clueless entitled whiny crybabies. Dear MLB/NBA/NFL/NASCAR/etc: Google the career paths of Skinhead O'Connor and the Pixie Twits after they forget their job description and area of expertise, and let me know when the penny drops. When pro football and baseball players et al are getting gigs working in car dealerships and selling siding in the off-season, and ticket prices drop to less than hourly minimum wage, the cluebats will once again have struck home. Until then, their entire industry doesn't exist for me, and I can't say it's been any great loss. And Hollywierd is finding out they're non-essential as well. O frabjous day! Callou! Callay! ----- That's really all I've missed covering in the interim, except the opportunity to make the "Hidin'/Kneepads: Give Communism and Anarchy A Chance" 2020 campaign poster meme. I have new wheels that I enjoy, the Krag project is coming to a middle, and my life is happy, for the moment, despite the decrease in internet access. Which has probably been a blessing in disguise. How long things stay neat-o for all of us depends on how things go in November, which is already ten ways wrong on how America is supposed to work, but them's the breaks. The Founders, in their boundless spot-on pessimism at the foibles of human character, originally structured things so that the only person you cast a direct vote for was your own personal congressweasel. No one else. Screwing that pooch has put the republic on life support, and dimmed anyone's prospects for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness rather severely since it went off the original rails. If you aren't adding to your larder and medicine chest, and doing regular PT, you're behind the curve. Ammo is already beyond your grasp, for the most part. COVID was a shock to the system; don't get surprised by the next hiccup. The slope gets steeper and more slippery as time goes on. Best wishes until I can make this a more frequent feature, and thanks for dropping by.

Miscellany

You're not the only ones who thought I was dead.

I missed a scheduled shift at work. (All my own fault; I mis-remembered which days they shifted me, and got it forked up.) And, as I'm of the generation that learned to exist without being tethered to the 'net 24/7/365/forever (you may have noticed the light posting hereabouts) I left my phone charging in the car. Where I couldn't see nor hear it buzzing, ringing, vibrating, nor any of the other cacophony of electronic claptrap as various among my supervisors and co-workers called, texted, etc., your humble bloghost to ask us whereinhell we were, since we weren't processing meat in the ER at our appointed hour. Without any explanation.

This struck them as so out of character, they convinced themselves we were in grave distress, and persisted in their hyperventilations to the point of sending the local constabulary to seek us out and determine our life status.

It was evidently a busy night, but a slow morning, and thinking ourself work-free for several days, we had stayed up watching a Marvel movie marathon, in chronological order, through "Avengers: Civil War", and we were consequently sleeping in the following morning.
(Bearing well in mind that our typical awake working schedule has been nights for about 25 years.)

But come about 11AM, it being a slow day for the City's Finest, not one but three black and whites showed up, bearing five rather LARGE police officers, intent on giving us a rousing cop-knock reveille. (For the record, I recommend one's own alarm clock). I awoke to the pounding thinking someone was working on a fender across the alley, because other than giving the door a PR-24 shampoo, they uttered not a sound.

I almost convinced myself after I was fully awake that I had dreamt the whole thing, but decided to investigate a wee bit further before returning to my pillow.

Which was fortunate, because that's when we spied about half the city's PD day shift arrayed all up in our domicile's grill. We were now fully awake, but perplexed, as we had not, to our knowledge, committed any bank robberies, mass murders, nor any other actual deliberate felonies, and we hadn't heard any hue and cry regarding pursuit of any other violent outlaws to our neighborhood. As we heard them questioning the neighbor about the last time anyone had seen us, and whether they had, perchance, heard a single gunshot, we began to dress to meet the day. As a general rule of thumb, whatever's coming your way is better addressed with you wearing both shoes and trousers. When the mail slot snapped open, and we heard one of them report no smell of bodily decay within, we began dressing more rapidly.
But when Huey, Dewey, and Louie began discussing whether breaking in a window or the front door would be best, fun and games were decidedly over.

We called out that we'd be out as soon as we had our pants on, then proceeded to exit the premises rapidly afterwards. They expressed astonishment that we had slept through what had apparently been several rounds of urgent door pounding, along with relief at not having to retrieve and then babysit a pungently expired corpse until the coroner showed up (a relief matched, if not surpassed, by my own at not having them see the general state of my man cave, the mere sight of which would have assured them of a burglary in progress, a duel to the death, and or an imminent military coup - or all three - had recently occurred within, in any particular order), and once assured by presentation of valid ID that I was the body in question, and explained what must have happened, they inquired ever so sweetly if I would, perchance, care to call my employer to assure them that rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated?

Once I agreed to do so in haste, they went about their business, while some of my sketchier neighbors began to slink back into their own homes, having gone out their back doors and such when they saw the panda car party entourage descending upon my house.
_____

So no, I'm not dead, nor laying low or "going dark". Nor, really, taking a vacation, except from blogging. The last because the PC up and died last month. We have a new machine on deck to replace it, but it really is quite the PITA to dig out the cables and connections to pull out the dead one and install the replacement, with work and a couple of other projects sucking up our time quite handily. So we continue using the obsolescent touchscreen notepad.

One of which projects is rejuvenating a 120-year-old Krag, which has suffered both a longtime lack of preventative maintenance sufficient to call forth the ghosts of generations of drill instructors and give their spirits a serious case of the @$$ - obvious exterior rust will do that - coupled with a surplus of Bubbination to the OEM milspec sights, and replacement with vintage mid-century cheeseball Redfield peep sights, with elevation and windage mechanisms, both of which are as rusted as the exterior of the rest of the piece.

All original value being thusly buggered, we've begun stripping the whole thing to the white, preparatory to restoring it to as-issued condition, and reblueing it and rehabilitating the stock until it looks like either a high grade replica brand new, or an issue arm circa 1898.
(We're leaning towards pretty over functional, and are willing to work on it until the blue looks like a Colt Python frame circa 1970, from the Custom Shop, and the stock looks like something from the expensive rack at a London bespoke arms dealer. Since the thing looks like @$$ now, we can only improve on it at every turn.)
Then we're going to get it dialed in, because any gun we can't shoot, we don't want.

So between that, putting together some new IFAKs for any future unpleasantness, and getting our butt kicked several nights a week with all the critical COVID cases and deaths the jet-genius Gilligans of the Internet assure you are a mythological communist disinformation campaign, time for keyboarding is running a distant fourth place in the How Ima Spend My Time Weekly Sweepstakes.

It isn't a permanent thing, but the general idiocy about things medical, scientific, and political hasn't improved since we were last at it, and anyone who thinks that positive change this side of Labor Day is likely hasn't been paying very close attention.

Make prudent preparations for seriously $#!^^!#£ times, and you'll seldom be disappointed by things being all wonderful, over a long enough timeframe.

And if you haven't done much, or enough, then get cracking.

OTOH, if you're in good shape WRT general preparedness, water, food, finances, and so on -- including regarding Kung Flu - count it all joy.

And start asking "What if?s", just to be sure.

"Don't forget nothing." - Roberts' Rangers Rules

We'll be back at this presently, and rest assured, with all sorts of breaking opinion on the perennial ooze of civilization into the compost heap of history.

Look to yourselves in the meantime, and invest some time in meatspace with helping some worthwhile prospect(s) with even more catching up to do than you for any version - Pollyanna, Middling, or Curmudgeonly - of What's Coming.




P.S. - And if you don't think I'll be meme-dunking on Hidin' Biden [ (c) Raconteur Report 2020)] , and then trash-talking while hanging on the rim, you must be new around these parts.

Administrivia

Sometime last month, the hit-meter rolled past 7,000,000.

We are frankly astonished each time it rolls over another million views, and more so at the increasing frequency each time that happens. And somewhat humbled.

We thank ALL of our readers, every one of our fellow bloggers who link us, and the 99.8% of our commentariat who bring something useful to the table.

You folks are the main reason we do this, since this blog brings us a steady $0/yr since ever, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Sincere thanks, and best wishes to you all.

Your Hopeium Broker Called: Sell Short

Read my last comments to the previous post.
There ain't nothin' to be cheerful about, unless you' re where the Kung Flu isn't.
And even if a merciful Deity or blind chance in a random universe hasn't got COVID kicking your @$$ personally, the fact that it's beating the big cities like a rented mule is going to have consequences for you too, unless you're totally self-sufficient, grow everything you eat, and wipe your bottom with tree bark.

The other 99.9% of you should fasten your seatbelts tighter: it's going to be a bumpy rest of the YEAR. Perhaps longer.

Just Wondering...

So, you let your Gilligans drive the bus on dealing with Kung Flu.
How's that working out for ya?

FL ICUs are at 98% capacity statewide.
TX has exploded. So has AZ, and 17 other states.
CA gov. Gabbin' Nuisance re-closed 30+ counties yesterday, all because of the morons that think wearing a mask is the Mark Of The Beast, and washing your hands is communism.

So, just wondering, how is everyone enjoying that footlong $#!^ sandwich all y'all are eating, just like we dun tole ya would happen?

We're now going to be dealing with this until New Years' at minimum, and probably more like next Easter.
Or, you could try wearing a mask, and washing your hands.
Dealer's choice.

Suture selves.