Quackery

Ars Technica link: Like science, but stupider: The XSTAT30.

It’s a wonder product that can almost instantaneously stop bleeding from gunshot wounds. It does not heal the wound, but it plugs it temporarily to avoid significant blood loss until the wound is treated. The device looks like a syringe full of tablet-sized sponges that expand after injection to the wound. Within 20 seconds, the expanded sponge then fills the cut, preventing blood loss and giving the patient a higher chance of survival. Each sponge last for up to four hours and absorbs up to a pint of blood. . . XSTAT 30 is manufactured by RevMedX, Inc., in Wilsonville, Oregon.

If the article got it right (which is far from certain given general and specialist media obtuseness) it's a wagonload of bullshit.
If it isn't cleared for use in "certain" parts of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, WTF good is it? Jack and shit.
You're making a device that will be applied by 110-hr wondermedics with basic EMT certs, or at best by 6-month paramedics, and you're going to have them play "Do we or won't we?" games with the exact parts of the anatomy where tourniquets don't work?
Which have unhelpfully been blown open by bullets??
Total hype, hokum, and horseshit.

If you shoot that thing into a head wound, and it swells with blood collected, you've produced an unreduceable hematoma in the cranial vault. Stroke, and/or pushing the brains down through the spinal foramen (the hole at the bottom of the cranium where the brainstem lives and connects to the spinal column). The only more effective way to kill someone would be to pull their brains out with a crowbar and then stomp on it.

You can't put it into the chest, because it could tamponade the heart or major vessels, and they then have an unsolvable heart attack, or a hemothorax that a needle thoracotomy won't fix.

Ditto for the neck, where it could choke off blood flow to the brain, or block airways.

Put in inside the digestive tract, and you have a bowel obstruction that won't resolve. Ditto if it ends up in the bladder.

That eliminates 85% of the human body where it can't be used.


So when you eliminate the head, neck, chest, abdomen, and pelvis ("certain parts"?? I repeat, total horseshit) you're left with the arms and legs: IOW the exact places where the CAT and SOF-T tourniquets are expressly designed to shine, and have done for near 15 years. At one-third the list price!

And on an anatomical note, the sponges (92 of them) are designed to absorb "up to a pint of blood" each. So what they've designed is a device to exsanguinate the entire body at the speed of blood loss, since you only have 10-14 pints of blood in your entire body.

So as the blood flows out the holes and into the sponges, it is removed from circulation permanently, to form a cluster of clotted sponges full of blood, and your veins and arteries are sopped entirely dry. Rapid and profound shock, coma, and death result, in short and irreversible order.
Fucking genius, that. If you're a mortician looking for a handy way to prep the body for burial.

On the spectrum from Shineola to shit, this appears to be a truckload of the latter. An utter abortion, without legs.

Absolute best case: You might could use it on groin and armpit wounds.
If the bladder/lung isn't punctured. I suppose you'd need your handy field ultrasound machine to make that call. Which no one has, because it doesn't exist.
And if the wound's so bad you can tell they are punctured without your nonexistent field ultrasound machine, you can't use it. QED

So still worthless bullshit in search of a purpose. And government and institutional dollars.
While it clogs your kit with something of dubious, if not even non-existent, utility.
That thing's a CAT or Israeli bandage you didn't bring, both of which actually work.
And priced at the DoD friendly $100@.
Comedy gold.
"Mr. Shoddy: Dewey, Cheatham, & Howe are calling about patent infringement..."

Maybe in the new gender-bender military, it could find use as a field marital aid, and ad hoc birth control device.
"Introducing the SpermStopper 2000!"

That analysis is based purely on the article, but I can't imagine where you'd usefully shove it with the restrictions stated in the article, or how they expect field medics to utilize it under such recockulous restrictions under actual conditions. (I could suggest a place for the manufacturer to shove it, which you can probably guess that without further hints, but they'd have to pull their heads out first.)

If I hear or see more about it, and the maker has a better-than-the-Underpants-Gnome explanation of its function, utility, and restrictions that makes more any sense, I'll revise that opinion.
Comments are open.

Elucidation and explanation is welcome.

8 USC 1182f

"Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."

As Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up."
(Scroll down to Subsection f).

I am no Trump fan: as a supposed Republican conservative, he's a three-dollar bill.

But with the Open Borders/Chamber of Commerce GOP jacktards who sold the party out for 40 years missing the obvious, Trump has hit this issue out of the park, resonating with every working American, let alone those who don't want to be blown away at the mall, and the party pols are handing him the nomination, and probably the election.

And asswipes like former Veep Dick Cheney coming out and stating that Trump, by asserting a prerogative (unlike those attempted or done by the current gay Muslim racist Enabler In Chief) that is specifically and constitutionally LEGAL, is doing something "un-American", are throwing gasoline on the discussion. And beclowning themselves.

When you're up to your wedding tackle in thorns, the shortest way out is to quietly back away.
So maybe crack a friggin' book Cheney. And STFU. Dick.




(And nota bene the same wave of the hand could have been applied to all those coming here from Ebola-afflicted countries since last summer, without even breaking a constitutional sweat.)

Pure Parody Gold

(h/t Weaponsman 's blog)

Just The Facts, Jim

So apparently, James Wesley, Rawles over at survivalblog decided to issue the following howler today:

The tragic events yesterday in California’s Inland Empire deserve attention. I’ll just stick to the facts:

The primary shooter, Sayeed Rizwan Farook, age 28, was American-born to parents who were from Karachi, Pakistan, and was described as “a very devout Muslim”.
He recently traveled to Saudi Arabia.
According to The Daily Mail, “Farook graduated from California State University, San Bernardino with a degree in environmental health in 2009.”
The second shooter killed in the shootout was Farook’s wife Tashfeen Malik, a pharmacist, age 27, born in Pakistan but more recently a resident of Saudi Arabia, who had married Farook two years ago.
The long guns used in the attack are banned in California, both by name and by description. Farook most certainly did not just walk into a California gun shop or a gun show and buy them. ALL long guns less than 50 years old are banned from private party sales in California. To legally possess a banned semi-auto rifle in California, it would have had to have been registered to Farook on or before December 31, 1999. But he was 13 years old in 1999, so that is impossible.
The attack clearly took considerable planning and logistical preparation. It is highly unlikely that the “three crudely made bombs packed with black powder and rigged to a remote-controlled toy car” were assembled just before the attack. It also indicates that there might have been a wider conspiracy.
To call this event simply “workplace violence” would be absurd. People do not drive home, methodically don multiple magazine pouches and gather up guns and pipe bombs, in a simple fit of rage.
They dropped off their six month old baby daughter with a grandmother, before the attack. That is another sign that this was a premeditated attack.

These facts speak for themselves.
Calling for additional “gun control ” laws in the wake of this attack is ludicrous. California’s existing gun and explosives laws were clearly flouted so passing any more laws would be useless. We have the right to arm ourselves in defense against similar terror attacks! – JWR

Mr. Rawles, I have been a fan of your blog for some years, but you shouldn't write or opine on things of which you have no or grossly inaccurate knowledge.
Which, in this case, would be just about every "fact" regarding firearms contained in that post.

1) The long guns used in the attack are not "banned in California", neither by name nor description.
(In fact, one of them, the S&W MP-15, has only existed for a couple of years, and like most of the M-4geries sold, enjoys great sales here in CA. Duh. The other was a DPMS. Both are legally sold here.) I have owned identical models to both of them, and recently at that. And in fact, they're selling with spectacular success daily, and have done so for nearly ten-plus years, to the eternal consternation of DiFi and her toadies in Sacramento.

2) Farook, or anyone else lacking a criminal or mental health prohibition could, indeed, walk into any CA gun shop, and walk out with such weapons 10 days later, and probably he did precisely that. Just like any thousands of others have in droves, esp. since 2008.

3) Long guns less than 50 years old are not banned from private party transfers in California. They are not allowed to be transferred without federal paperwork and a waiting period, except to blood heirs, but that's another thing entirely from being verboten out of hand. Rawles is at best terribly unclear on what he meant to say, or at worst dreadfully mistaken on that entire point.

4) To legally possess the rifles in question, they merely need only possess the simple expedient of a "bullet button", a device which makes the use of a tool (as opposed to just your booger hook) necessary to change magazines. They are sold here, so equipped from the manufacturer, by the dozens every day, from San Diego to the OR border. And there is also quite a cottage industry in shipping lowers from all manner of places to stops en route (including in ID, Jimmy) where they install the CA-compliant devices for you before sending one's toys in to the Golden State. (And eliminating the need for those horrible contortionist stocks that go up, around, and over to not be "protuding pistol grips". Suffering cats, what abortions those are.)
This is basic firearms biz 101 stuff hereabouts.

The likelihood, without examining the weapons, nor having a detailed account of events, is that they may have used banned high-cap magazines (>10 rounds), and/or may have removed the installed CA-compliant "bullet buttons" from his weapon(s), and replaced them with the standard issue version, or screwed a workaround onto the mag release. They may even have acquired the weapons illegally, but there is no basis for concluding that they must have committed any such violations of law in order to obtain them. Assertions to the contrary absent documentation are entirely speculative, and fairly ridiculous.

As any of these actions would be felonies, having created the exact "assault weapon" CA imagined it was banning, the conclusions regarding the prep and time involved, and the futility of additional laws to stop such incidents are entirely valid. That the first actual felony (regarding the firearms, not the conspiracy nor the manufacturing of IEDs) was opening fire with them in the first place is why the entire encyclopedia of gun laws is asinine in the extreme. When the presenting symptom is death by bullet, a law is a poor excuse for a solution, and more than a tad late to the party.

But Farook-plus-one may, in fact, have performed no such felonious actions, and simply the pair of them opened fire, and changed legal 10-round magazines a total of as little as one - or none! - time(s) apiece, and nonetheless created the exact carnage recorded in a couple of dozen seconds. That's the takeaway point on how stupid laws regarding Gun Free Zones, magazine capacity, assault weapons, and waiting periods truly are in the real world.

At any rate, while gratuitously bashing the Califrutopian firearms laws is great fun (trust me, I live here, and I do it daily myself), if someone can't get the basic and actual facts straight on the first go, best to wait and do some simple research. Google is your friend.
I'm sure it looks easy to do color commentary on this from way up there in ID, but ignorance is no excuse on this. Doubly so for a former Californian who ought to know better, and who makes his living dealing out advice and consultation.

The truth here in CA about the gun restrictions we put up with, and the actual incident, is scary enough, without misinformation being passed by people who should know better, and from voices from whom we expect better due diligence than what we get from WaPo and the NYSlimes.

Party foul, first class, Jimmy.
"Grade: D   Needs Improvement".
And next time you "just stick to the facts", maybe perhaps just stick to the facts.

Local Shenanigans: Allahu FUBAR

                                                   Now they're good Muslims.

 

The "Before" things unfolded post:

WTFever.

This was a Christmas Party for the Dept. of Public Health, at a developmentally disabled group facility.

So, I doubt this was about someone mad at retards.
Likelihoods, in descending order:

1) Allahu akbar. Nota bene it was a Christmas party.
2) Someone mad at someone at the SB DPH. These aren't the child protective services guys, they are the county inspectors, health, environmental, etc.
Somebody got their business closed because of health citations, and decided to whack the other 10-12 bystanders as cover.
3) Someone else with an axe to grind against San Berdoo officialdom.
4) Magic brownies.

Some fucktard Limey paper and other BS early squawks were reporting they were white men, in ski masks, armed with AK-47s.
WTF.
If they were wearing ski masks, unless they were otherwise butt-naked, you have no effing clue what race or skin color they were.

And this will be a combined Gun Free Zone/assault weapon/high-cap magazine/waiting period law fail.
Califrutopia fucktard politicians for the Grand Slam Of Fail!
Hint for the Demotards: Criminals don't obey laws.

And just as I was coming in and logging on, the SBSD whacked two of the m*****f*****s, one on the street, and one in an SUV, and word is they have a possible third cornered in the area, within 2 mi. of the original incident.

Apparently they had no exit strategy, and just hung around nearby.
Which tips the odds for Door #1 above way up.

We'll see, but kudos to the constabulary in San Bernardino for marksmanship far in excess of standards (word is the SUV was ventilated, in a Bonnie & Clyde sort of way). Notably, unlike the asshats from Boston PD, they did it without setting the Bill of Rights on fire and locking down half the county; and unlike the asshats from the LAPD, they apparently didn't shoot up two wrong vehicles and twenty-seven nearby houses in the melee either. It's a Christmas miracle.

Oh, and if this turns out to be two Not So Smart Bombs from The Religion Of Peace(tm), I predict open season on mosques hereabouts every Friday until the problem with that particular identity group fades apace with their dwindling demographic. Inshallah.
At any rate, it will cut down any fervor for "Syrian" refugees to be relocated here to about the same level as enthusiasm for Japanese gardeners in CA as of January 1942.

 

 

The "After" Post:

So the shooter was Sayeed Farouk Imawannajihad, and the other shooter was his towelhead main squeeze/fiancée/fellow-douchecanoe, Tashfeen Malouk Imawannajihad.
Farouk Imawannajihad was an employee of the agency holding the party, who went there, returned with his bitch, this time both armed with Californicated M-4geries (one by DPMS, and one M&P-15, if you're keeping track at home), two semi auto pistols (Llama, and S&W; thanks for asking), body armor, black clothes and ski masks, and, oh yeah, three previously prepared IEDs left salted at the scene, and later disarmed by authorities before they could go off.

MSNBC and President Barack Hussein FuckYourselfSidewaysWithARustyChainsaw Obomber are puzzled and perplexed at what possible motive could be the culprit here.


This is Aesop's Total Lack Of Surprise that the Imawannajihads were victims of Sudden Jihadi Syndrome, and decided to go out by trying to take out 30+ people celebrating an office Christmas party. Part of the 90% of Islam that gives the other 10% a bad rep. (Anyone inclined to bitch about that summary can give a holler when they have a Reformation, and renounce jihad by sending us the heads of those who preach it, proactively.)

We stopped playing Crusades vs. Jihad in the late 1500s.

Apparently, the other side would like to revisit that agreement, and thinks the lemon is worth the squeeze. Best rethink that.

The last group of fucktard suicidal religious zealots who kept messing with our way of life now have shadows of some of their people permanently etched into the concrete of their streets. We know how to deal with this sort of thing; there's an app for it. And we won't have a gay racist Muslim in the White House forever to give the other side cover.

And on a smaller scale, when random members of The Religion Of Peace(tm) start showing up with their throats accidentally cut, wearing hog's heads like Halloween masks, and with their tiny dicks inserted in their rigor mortised jaws, rest assured I will give out candy to my friends, and have an ironclad alibi.
Hear me, God.

This Is The Future They Promised Us

Back when I grew up hoping for a jet pack and a flying car someday, this is the kind of stuff NASA was supposed to be working towards.

(h/t Solomon at SNAFU )

Now, if you want to see the NASA that isn't, you have to watch The Martian.

If you want to go to space, you'll be flying with Blue Origin, Virgin, or SpaceX.

Surprising no one, private industry is drinking NASA's milkshake.
And near-space tourism is going to bankroll the steps beyond Tranquility Base.
I hope I live long enough to see it happen.
And if I can swing it, I'm going to space on one of those rides.
F*** Six Flags. This is the real deal.

SPECTRE

 

 

Call the ASPCA.

Somewhere in Hollywood, there's a pooch who should be submitting a rape kit, because it was well and truly screwed.

Sam Mendes has done what even Roger Moore playing the part in his 60s couldn't accomplish: he made 007 boring, and turned him into a blooming metrosexual in the process. If it gets any worse in subsequent outings, Q will have to start supplying 007 with tampons for his mangina.
 

It's many of the locales, some of the toys, a few of the cars, and all the set pieces you'd expect. And all done so predictably, so lackluster, so abjectly suspenseless, so just plain yawnworthy, that at 148 minutes long, you wonder why they didn't just turn the cameras on and leave everything in, because the outtakes would have been at least as entertaining as the actual movie. Two villians got away lucky: one had his eyes poked out, and another had them eaten by ravens. I would trade places with either one if you told me I had to sit through this flick again.
 

An hour in, I was wishing they'd go back and play some of the pre-movie trailers again.
Two hours in, I was wondering what was playing on the Oxygen Channel. And wishing I'd brought a sleep mask and a set of ear plugs to the movie.
The only bright shining moment of the entire flick was after the interminable credits, the promise in the final seconds that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN".
Which will be great compared to this time, just for the change.
The sad part was noting that he made no noticeable appearance in this film.

Stay home, wait for Netflix, or even wait for this to show up on cable.
Which, if word of mouth has anything to do with things, should be the day after Thanksgiving.

My rating: Jiggle the handle on this one, and light a candle to St. Fartius, and hope neither the solid evidence nor the smell from this flick lingers.

But somewhere, Michael Apted is happy: With the release of SPECTRE, he no longer holds the bottom rung of the Bond-verse with The World Is Not Enough. But it was close. The last time I felt this bad after seeing a movie I expected to like was after Star Trek: Nemesis.

Sam Mendes did that POS Jarhead. Now he's plopped this pantload out. If there's a fund to stop him from making any more movies, put me down for a month's pay.

Turns Out He Can't Do Stand Up Comedy Either

What we heard on the internet yesterday:

What we saw in our mind's eye when we heard it:

Inside word has it that President Liston is not amused, and the cleat wounds into his own wedding tackle may take some weeks to heal properly.
Dr. Carson is rumored to have offered him some salt to apply topically.

 

Beep beep, President Hopey Dopey.

 

 

Internet Balance Is Restored

A couple weeks ago, American Mercenary called it quits, and scrubbed his entire blog off the 'net.

Now, in perhaps some cosmic restoration of harmony, the long-dormant Lizard Farmer has returned.

Yay.

CRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUZ!

Republican Debate 10/29/15 - Cruz pwns jacktard "moderators"

Cruz FTW.
As expected.

It's long past time to stop these charade dog & pony show debates with at least 10 people who shouldn't even be onstage, fire the media once and for all, and have real debates on real issues with candidates who matter, with questions on point, delivered by people who don't need cheat sheets to understand the issues. Moderated by George Will, Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, Ann Coulter, Ben Stein, and Bill Whittle.* Go around the networks and cable completely, and simply post them in their entirety on social media, and upend ABCNNBCBS once and for all.
Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube et al will cackle all the way to the bank.

And Cruz just knocked that one out of the park.







*(And if anything like that happens before pigs fly unassisted, that should also be, respectively, the next White House Press Secretary, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of Homeland Security, Attorney General, Secretary of Labor, and National Security Advisor. You're welcome.)

Less Bread, More Circus, Lots of Cowbell

Gaffe-A-Matic himself, VP Joe Biden, announced today he's out.

By the numbers:
1) Both parties are left with unelectable jackasses as their current front-runners, despised by the majority of each party:
Trump for Repubs, and Sanders for the Dems.
2) Any hope of Biden weakening Shrillary enough to knock her off the block, and let The Anointed One help select the (D) nominee at a brokered election are now abysmally dim.
3) Hopey Dopey is thus left with either backing the person he despises, despite her obvious criminal conduct, and praying they can brazen it out and get her into his chair next, or letting the leash slip on the FBI once and for all, seeing her and the Dumocrat Party brand go down in flames for the next 4-8 years.
4) The Benghazi hearings and the ensuing likelihood of either a Special Prosecutor, vs. stonewalling, followed by torches, pitchforks, and a tumbrel cart on the front lawn of the White House, just got a whole lot more interesting.
5) Sanders doubling down on Shrillary's criminal conduct in Dem Debate I, and attempting to give her a pass on everything by royal fiat has essentially put him and the entire party all-in on her criminal shenanigans from here on out.

Shrillary getting indicted or not is now the litmus test for whether we have any bare shred of a republic left to us, or have permanently transitioned to just the banana version of one.

 

Smart money: Go deep on beans, band-aids, and bullets.
And if you were wondering when the next round of ammo- and gun-buying madness would start, I think I just heard the opening whistle on that.

And Another One Bids Adieu

From American Mercenary's blog, 5 hours ago:

It's been fun. If you want anything grab it before it's gone.

And it's gone.

My sincere best wishes to AM.
We wrangled a time or three, but his perspective on most subjects was well-thought out, and at least reasoned to, rather than ever being knee-jerk.

The number of thoughtful and rational people on the Internet is never "Too Many", and his absence will be noted.

I hope he survives the current ongoing Army purges, and makes it to field grade, but wherever he goes, I wish him well.

Thoughts On The Latest (And Every Other) School Shooting

 

Gun banners, call your office. Your policies are working exactly as planned.

 

 

Trauma Is Never Pretty

I've been working trauma cases professionally since the early 1990s. (Before that was simply happenstance.) And while all trauma is the same after the first 500 times, no two are ever exactly alike.

Something you have to know, in a way most of you hopefully will never learn from bitter experience, is that some wounds are non-fixable. Whether you're working with a victim of a car accident or someone attacked by a mob, or simply one dedicated assailant, you have to know going in that you will not fix certain things, and that in many cases, no one can.
Not even if the injury in question happened inside a trauma surgical suite, with the doctors and team prepped and ready to go, even if you had 20 units of O-negative blood hanging ready to transfuse.

HIPPA and concern for a certain family prevent me from getting detailed at this point.
But suffice it to say that sometimes, a gunshot or blade will create more damage than can be fixed, and that person is simply going to die, rapidly.

There's a scene at the beginning of the plane crash in The Grey, when Liam Neeson's character is surveying the injured and dead, and he finds a guy with traumatic abdominal bleeding, and he tells the man, in his final moments, that yes, he is indeed going to die, right there, and rather quickly, which he then proceeds to do on screen.

That was truth: it works just like that in the real world too. When someone pumps out all their lifeblood in ten or twenty pumps, like they will, that's it. Getting an IV won't work, you aren't going to cut them open and crossclamp their aorta, and an IV or five isn't going to save them, because there's no hemoglobin in normal saline.

That means you can start IVs, even IO lines (that's an IV in your bones for the laymen in the audience), and pump in liter after liter of fluid, even with whole blood, and it ain't gonna do anything but come out the hole(s) you can't fix. And run all over the place outside. They'll still get no oxygen in their vital organs, and they'll simply be warm and dead and white as a ghost when you're finished, and that truth is ordained before you ever lay hands on your patient.

That's going to be true in a disaster, or even a trauma unit. In the latter, you do every damned thing you can, especially on a young healthy victim, because they have the best chance. Best being relative when the absolute odds are close to absolutely zero.

In a disaster or worse scenario, you aren't - and probably shouldn't - do all that. At that point, you're simply wasting precious supplies to feel better about someone dying that you couldn't save. Which is both wasteful and unwise.

God help you and your conscience if you haven't wrapped your head around that reality long before the day you get there. Even knowing the truth, the moments will hang around in your head for a good long time.

If you're going to do this, yeah, you save the ones you can.
But you have to know in your bones that there will be plenty you can't save, and you have to let them go. Physically, mentally, and emotionally.

And I can't even begin to tell someone how to do that when it's someone you know, or care for deeply.

You've seen this material before

"Where are you?" - Anonymous

I'm minding my own business.
Chasing down every Ebola story is currently rather pointless.
Consider this my Generic Ebola Response Post until further notice.

1) Ebola hasn't gone away this time, in any way, whatsoever.
Only the media's coverage of the phenomenon has disappeared.
Best described thusly:

 

 

2) What's keeping it away now is the simple fact that 99.9999% of the poor bastards in West Africa can't afford a plane ticket out. (A bus ticket to Capetown, Nairobi, or Cairo is another thing entirely).

 

Except for all the do-gooder doctors, nurses, aid workers, and NGO folks.

(If you're keeping score at home, that would be every non-African case of Ebola except Duncan, last year.) So nothing to worry about, because TPTB at the CDC

a) swear Ebola will never get to the U.S.

b) assure us that if it does, U.S. medical superiority will ensure that no one else could ever get it, because

c) the CDC is from the government, and they're here to help us.

 

3) With no media attention on their activities, the kleptocracies currently infested with the disease show no signs of ever getting a handle on it, it continues to whack people at a notable rate (viewed in historical perspective), only there's no media attention/scrutiny of their reported cases, no hordes of international help forthcoming, and a notable dearth of doctors, nurses, and assorted other necessary personnel, due to the health care worker casualties from last year's original outbreak.

 

4) This makes its eventual escape from Shitholia and into the larger world population a virtual certainty, the primary question becoming a game of "When?", not "If...".

 

5) There are still a sum total of 11 Ebola beds in wards capable of adequately caring for those with the disease, in the U.S. And 3 of those are permanently reserved for CDC and military bio-casualties, in perpetuity. So, 8 beds. Period.

 

6) The CDC's plan is to ensure the spread to all available health care staff members and the greater population via other patients  let regional hospitals bear the brunt of caring for any additional cases by utilizing their vast expertise in dealing with pandemics, coupled with throwing hordes of untrained and unequipped staff members at the problem, until they all die or quit in droves, probably in about an exact 50/50 ratio, within 3 weeks of any U.S. outbreak greater than 2-5 cases in the same city/region.

 

7) Given the above, make prudent preparations, because TS is going to HTF sooner or later, given the single-minded determination to keep pointing the Titanic at a metaphorical asteroid field of icebergs at full speed, with the captain blindfolded, until one gets lucky.

 

 

Each of these things is just like the other.

In each case, the winning strategy is to be somewhere else, and stay there.

These jackasses pretend not to know any better.

 

 

 

You do.

 

 

 

Next topic.

Dewey Defeats Truman

From the fishwrap of record:

MONROVIA, Liberia — More than a month after Liberia was declared free of Ebola, at least two new cases have emerged, the first discovered when the body of a 17-year-old boy tested positive for the virus, officials said Tuesday. 

The World Health Organization declared Liberia Ebola-free on May 9, a landmark moment in the country, which has suffered more deaths from the epidemic than any other.

But on Tuesday, Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia’s deputy minister for health, announced at a news conference here in the capital that a new case had emerged.

It occurred in a small town just outside Monrovia. The family of Abraham Memaigar, 17, who died over the weekend, called a burial team that took swabs of the body and sent them to a laboratory. It confirmed that the boy had been infected by the virus.

On Tuesday, an Ebola response team exhumed the body and had blood drawn for a more precise swab test. That test also came back positive.

Dr. Moses Massaquoi, the case manager for the response team, said the blood test was necessary because investigators could not find the source of the infection and were trying to determine whether it was an “isolated outbreak or new strain of the virus.”

Late Tuesday, a person connected to Abraham tested positive for Ebola, and tests of two other people were inconclusive, Dr. Massaquoi said.

Thirty-three people who had contact with the teenager were isolated in their homes and were being monitored, he said. Three people will be sent to a treatment unit here Wednesday, he said.

“The Ebola fight is not over, but we must not lose hope,” said Dr. Bernice Dahn, Liberia’s newly appointed minister of health. She contended that the quick response to Abraham’s case, including the rapid testing and confirmation that the boy had the virus, demonstrated Liberia’s preparedness to deal with another outbreak.

Liberia has recorded close to 5,000 lives lost to the virus.

The country reactivated an Ebola treatment unit at a time when the facilities, built with the help of the United States military, had stood empty and Liberia was beginning to close them.

Mr. Nyenswah said it was not yet known whether the infection came from Guinea or Sierra Leone, West African neighbors that still have small numbers of new Ebola cases.

Abraham, who sold used clothes at a local market, fell ill at his mother’s house a week before his death, experiencing fever, diarrhea and vomiting.

Abraham’s father, James S. Memaigar, 49, a shoe salesman, said a local clinic had told him just three days before his son’s death that Abraham had malaria. The clinic had sent him home with a handful of tablets, Mr. Memaigar said.

Abraham died Sunday in his father’s home in a community known as Smell No Taste, a few miles from his mother’s home and a short distance from Liberia’s international airport and the Firestone rubber plantation.

Mr. Memaigar had contacted the burial team and dragged his son’s body out of his room on a mattress. Abraham was buried the same day by an Ebola burial team in an overgrown cemetery a short distance from the house.

Dr. Dahn said investigators were trying to determine how the boy had become infected.

Points of note:
1) In a country ravaged by Ebola, and desperate to convince everyone they're free of it, with purportedly only one case to deal with, the crack Liberia medical care system missed the initial diagnosis. Until it had doubled. Perhaps multiple times. Stop me if you've heard this one...
2) The virus, certainly not a new strain, but the same one that's been rampant since December 2013 in West Africa, has done its main thing: it has already spread to at least one other person, and perhaps a dozen symptomatic ones and/or a hundred unsymptomatic soon-to-be diagnosed ones. A month or more later. Stop me if you've heard this one...
3) Liberia has proven competent to confirm two cases, now that they don't have people dying by the hundreds this year. Yet. But as far as stamping out the disease at such a low level, they are about as competent as the Iraqi Army against ISIS.
4) We have no idea how many other cases they've missed/mis-diagnosed since outside attention has waned.
5) With the uninterrupted media blackout of most all Ebola-related news, we never will, either there, nor here. It's frankly almost a miracle that the NYT even chose to publish this piece.

Don't worry, though.
Ebola will never ever get here from there, so there's no need for flight quarantines, and our superior health care system and dedicated medical practitioners would stop it in its tracks if it ever...oh, wait, nevermind.

GSW OSh*t Contingencies, Everyday Variety

First, H/T to the always excellent blog of WeaponsMan , and in particular this post , for inspiring this follow-on riff. Read it first, or at your leisure.

A lot of us like to shoot.
Many of us realize that accidents can happen, even while shooting.
Some of us are even prepared for "B", if it happens during "A".

Please, try and make sure you and any club you patronize is in that last category.

Having a GSW OSK (O Sh*t Kit), for yourself, your friends and loved ones, or some random dumbass one lane/bay over is never a bad idea.
What to put into it is the subject of any number of posts and blogs. Visit them, do some thinking, and work it out for yourself. If you're smart enough to digest three or fourteen points of view, I'm not too worried about what you'll put inside it. If you aren't that smart, nothing else I write is really going to solve that.

But as important as what goes in the kit, is knowing WTF to do if you have to use it, including if/when you're doing so on yourself or a loved one.
So get properly trained - and no, just watching a couple of TCCC videos on YouTube isn't enough - to use whatever you decide to pack.
And because Two Is One, And One Is None, do your damnedest to make sure there are other people trained to standard and present as well, if more than one of you is going shooting. It's embarrassing when the Medic bleeds to death because he shot himself, and no one else knew WTF to do, right? It's also hard on their relatives.

And then, there needs to be a regularly updated Range Safety Plan.
Not some piece of CYA boilerplate BS known only to some insider Illuminati, but an actual explained plan known to the lowest schmuck above Raw Newbie Nevershotagunhbefore at that range on that day.

Oh, what's that, you say? Pre-paid annual range membership didn't get you that briefing, and you don't get an annual update in snail or e-mail? Then as good as your club is, it sucks balls in that respect. Bring it up with TPTB until they listen, or take your membership elsewhere. When they have an accident, you'll be able to buy them out for pennies on the dollar, sooner or later.

What it should comprise is knowing where you are, who and how to call 9-1-1, what to tell them, and how to direct them when they respond from the nearest paved road to where the bleeding body is actually located.

If that requires someone to be the "Follow Me" vehicle from the gate to Range B-23, so be it. If that requires 5 rodeo clowns to keep every other yahoo off the range road until the emergency is dealt with, so be it. Plan for the resources you have, to deal with what you might have to face.

And if possible, have/know a suitable nearby spot(s) where Lifeflight etc. could land and pick up the bleeding dumbass in a pinch, if this becomes necessary. That dumbass could be you, if some other dumbass shoots you.

DO ALL OF THIS WITH THE ADVICE AND INPUT OF THE FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD LIKELIEST FIRST RESPONDERS TO YOUR VENUE, AFTER HAVING THEM VISIT SAME IN PERSON, AND LISTEN TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO DO WITH A PURPOSE.
And if you haven't consulted adequate legal counsel in depth about all this beforehand, you're STILL doing it wrong.

And do NOT, under 99% of circumstances, half-ass some home-concocted "designated ambolance" out of Fred's flat-bed and Aunt Martha's Chicken Soup and Bedsheet Doctoring Supplies" unless you want to be taking it in the heinie from some lifer named Bubba for the five to ten years you'll get for negligent manslaughter for trying to cobble this together on your own.

If you either like the buttsecks, or have two to five school-trained and certified paramedics, trauma RNs, and an emergency or trauma physician present for duty, with a state-certified medical transport vehicle fully stocked standing by, along with a lawyer on retainer and speed dial, and a $10M liability policy that covers deliberate personal stupidity, and all your personal assets are shielded by an LLC, and your job won't mind the months you'll spend in court or prison, and your family can get along without you for those years, then by all means ignore the previous suggestions at your whim.

Bonus points: When was the last time your club, in conjunction with the likeliest 9-1-1 responder agency(ies), did a no-shit live drill of same, from incident to arrival at a Trauma Center/Emergency Department, or from incident to Lifeflight (etc.) departure from scene?
If the answer is zero in recorded history, your club probably still sucks balls on this, whereas if you've gone to the point of volunteering to provide a real-world training opportunity to one or more agencies, the only way they won't take you up on it is if their training directorate sucks balls. This is why your local politicians (who pay for those agencies) have constituent assistance lines. Just saying.

I yell because I care.

Thoughts On Garland

No word on when Texas will be training the French police on how to respond to these sorts of incidents, but the difference in outcomes there vs. here argues for such a program to be instituted among them and our nominal EU allies, in haste.

My take is that this latest event is so full of Fail for both the perpetually offended adherents of the Religion Of Peace (tm) and for the hoplophobic would-be Overlords of Progressivism, and so chock-full of chocolatey frosted win for Those Of Us Who Like Guns, that this event will disappear from the mainstream news pages in about seven seconds, even if Bloombozo has to sponsor, at his own expense, two psychotic whackjobs to shoot up separate busloads of pre-schoolers to accomplish the feat.

Someone elsewhere called the recent incident wherein the final tally was Beat Cop 2, Jihadis 0, a "childish First Amendment stunt", and opined that they didn't much like it.

O, how I beg to differ.
And I put some extra Eloquence Wax in my morning coffee:

It's a free country, and you don't have to like it. ROWYBS.

And yes, it had a happy ending, and the cop is in fact a bona fide hero.
Except for us not subsequently JDAMing the Phoenix mosque wherein they festered, and that at sunset on a Friday, pour encourager les autres.

But it was also subsequently alleged that enticing lunatics to commit acts of violence and hoping someone else intervenes on your behalf is jackassical.

If one so believes, this is where the wheels depart one's Logic Wagon in haste.
1) Definitionally, lunatics' opinions are suspect, especially when those opinions are coupled with the utter lack of an impulse control filter leading them to commit violence, because they're gorram lunatics. This is why and for whom such helpful asylums as Guantanamo and Alcatraz were originally constructed.
2) Free speech and the First Amendment doesn't include the helpful phrase "unless it upsets anybody". You could look this point up if there's any doubt.
3) No one was "hoping someone else intervenes on" their behalf; the organizers laid on extra security, as did the authorities once their intel networks picked up the increased jihadi twitter chatter. And it's Texas: extra security is included in every CCW bite, at no charge to anyone. So that point goes away wholesale as well. The only thing jackassical may have been not advertising this as
"Security provided by the Second Amendment, and Bring Your Own Rifle LLC".

It was also alleged that staging stunts to prove your bravery and love of the first amendment, while counting on someone else to protect your hide is childish - to say the least.

As noted, that point is non-operative, so repeating it doesn't win any points.
Unless one is suggesting that it was Pam Geller's job, personally and single-handedly, to patrol the entire event perimeter, and/or the borders of Texas itself, outfitted like Paul Blart, tactical-tommy Mall Cop. Best wishes in making that argument.
We currently have 10,000 newspapers and magazines, 400M blogs, 357 cable channels, a few thousand TV and radio stations, and upwards of 300M citizens using everything from flyers and  handouts to bad breath, who are staging similar "stunts" every day from 1776-now, inclusive.
One who suggests that this event was a "stunt" take a looooooong healthy look at their position, shoot a back azimuth, and try that sentence again.
This was America. And it was (predictably) attacked by adherents of the Religion Of Peace(tm).
Once again, JDAMs, I say.
"Millions for JDAMs, and not one cent for dhimmitude" should in fact be one of the winning presidential campaign slogans this - or any - season. The sooner people stop finger-banging themselves in ignorance of that fact, things will get better for us, and worse for them, and things will approach rightness for the world to the exact degree we live this out.

Lastly, it was elsewhere noted that if this had been orchestated by anything other than two fucktards, it could have been much worse... and probably not at the actual venue where armed men were lying-in-wait; perhaps instead at a school or church a few days later.

Which rather argues for killing the bastards, both fucktards and professionals, root and branch down to the last semen stain in their underpants on seven seas and continents a-purpose and aforethought, on general principles, rather than staying home, cancelling an event, and shitting in one's pants lest some offense be found in their dhimmitude. Which is the gist of the "she was asking to be raped, walking down the street like that" argument at this point.
Which, it should be noted, is their argument for raping infidels since about 700 AD, which then requires a helpful stoning afterwards under the Religion Of Peace(tm), for being an infidel strumpet.

Thus a general rethink of any such twaddle is heartily suggested, coupled with some actual applied logic in consequential outcomes, and a healthy dose of "How the Constitution works in a free republic, e.g Texas".
So if anyone opining otherwise notices their dick bleeding afterwards, I have some band-aids. But housecalls are rare, and cost extra.

Someone noting, for example, that "the Pope wears a dress and a funny hat", or that "If God had not wanted us to eat pigs, he wouldn't have made them out of bacon" is not a sufficient provocation to anyone's religious beliefs to justify jihad and attempted mass murder, amongst civilized people.
Even if we note for the record that one's religion was founded by a mass-murdering pederast with delusions of grandeur, and is stuck in the backwards tribalism of illiterate pre-technological 6th century assholery to the extreme. Or put that on billboards.
Uncivilized people who miss this critical point are there primarily to provide target practice for the rest of us, pretty much since people learned how to write on clay tablets. (cf. Philistines, visigoths, and any number of natives on the African and both American continents, etc.).

If anyone wants to run around in a loincloth waving a spear, their so-called civilization is "quaint".
But when they roast peaceful missionaries for lunch, slaughter settlers on the frontier, or come to the town square and attempt to practice their curious cultural customs, like jihad, here, they have broken the social contract of tolerance for their peculiarities, and they need to be removed forcibly from the gene pool.
Probably in batch lots of several hundred thousand at a time, merely to politely drive the point home to their toothless bongo-playing kinfolk.
How much that improves the targeting skills of our military personnel, or how much fun and entertainment that provides to the rest of us, is merely a happy serendipity.

This event was nothing more than one Texan well-schooled in common sense, of the sort one used to routinely find at the grade-school level, applying logic to that exact situation, one magazine-full at a time.
Had he used lit molotovs instead of a semi-auto pistol, it could have been no more eloquently put.
But had he chosen the former weapons, as observed by that noted tactician Col. Kilgore, it would have smelled like victory.

What Ebola? Where?

 

 

As noted yesterday, Ebola is not, in fact, gone from any of the three most heavily impacted countries in West Africa.
In fact, the weekly tallies right now are running at a fairly steady percentage of what they were during the apparent peak weeks last fall.
And without laboring yesterday's point, based purely on admittedly bogus numbers of dubious reliability, for any given point in this outbreak, including now.

In the past, outbreaks have burned out; usually by killing 90% of everyone in some remote village, and then going away because the other 10% survived/were immune.

We don't know how the Index Patient in this outbreak contracted it. Just like we don't know where any other Index Patient in any prior outbreak contracted it.

But this time, it hasn't gone away. Because this time, there's a near limitless pool of new victims, because it isn't confined to some remote little village. It's gotten loose across entire countries, and in the large cities thereof.

And it simply hasn't disappeared in any of them. It waxes and wanes, but it's still infecting people, and still killing them in droves. Despite everything we know (and don't know), and despite everything we've done and not done, it just keeps on keeping on.

It keeps infecting the careless, the stupid, the ignorant, and even those taking special precautions and wearing frickin' hazmat gear.

We did not duck this bullet, it just went over our heads last time.
There is absolutely NO reason to assume this will continue to be the case. In fact, rather the opposite: every day it doesn't spread just makes the day it does more inevitable. Like against terrorists, we have to get lucky every time, this virus just has to get lucky once. The calculus on that argues for preparation for what is clearly inevitable.

So how's that going over here?
No ban on flights here from there.

But why do that? No one has gotten here since they started the screenings.

Yeah. And signs prohibiting it are what keeps elephants out of the trees at the local park.

Which argues for several things:
* the screening measures, shoddy as they are, have been good enough to stop obviously infected people from travelling, in most cases (they wouldn't have stopped Duncan)
* it's harder to spread early on, and thus early infectees who are pre-symptomatic are the only ones who can make it past the screening
* we're dealing with a target population for whom taking an airplane flight is only slightly more likely than flying to space.

Unfortunately, that means that:
* those who do travel will have the means to go anywhere
* they won't raise suspicions until they're far from the minimal screenings that exist
* they'll then become symptomatic amidst their home populations, long after they're not under any sort of organized and mandated surveillance, and thus all reporting is completely on their honor and best behavior.

And as witnessed with Dr. Special Case, Dr. Special News Reporter, and Nurse Mimi Crybabypants, people, even trained medical professionals, are self-serving lying little shits who will endanger the public recklessly and repeatedly, left to their own devices, where Ebola and the horrors of quarantines (which latter have been instituted and accepted by all civilized people since medieval times) are concerned.

And that's just assuming the disease stays in West Africa, behind the current zone of interest.
If it gets out of that zone, like the Germans going around the end of the Maginot Line, there isn't anydamnthing to stop it or even slow it down.

And what about here?
We still have a treatment capacity of 11 beds, nationwide. And several of those are permanently reserved for military research casualties, so it's really only 7-8 beds.
I.e., the same number of Ebola cases in any of the three originally affected African countries by Week Two.

Then, it's back to local hospitals.
Which is to say, the Worst Of All Possible Worlds.

Dallas gave you a glimpse of what to expect.

As I've related, I've been flitting hither and yon locally in my professional capacity.
I'm here to tell you, having now seen multiple local hospitals, it's far worse than I could have imagined.

Most hospitals have no supply of protective gear for even a single outbreak case.
Many have no negative airflow room in which to place the victim(s).
None have more than a very few of them.
All of them require moving an infected patient through the entire ER, from lobby to treatment area, completely exposing not only visitors, but their entire staffs, to potentially infectious material.
None of the ERs I've worked at has any personal protective equipment rapidly available.
None of them has adequate PPE available for more than a few staff members.
None of them has conducted anything but cursory training in dealing with potential infectees; most have conducted none at all, and a few don't even address the possibility of it ever becoming necessary.
None of them has any capability to sort infected people before they enter the hospital, nor do most have any plans to do so.
The ones that do have plans are mainly limited to vague incantations about setting up some ad hoc magical whatsis. None have actual sorting facilities, decontamination abilities, nor have held any training or exercises to practice such implementation.
None of them has any capability to treat so much as one potential case, and still safely stay open to other patients, yet that is precisely what they have done and will continue to do, until it becomes apparent that they've already contaminated their entire staff, the entire ER, and recklessly and deliberately exposed dozens to hundreds of unprotected people to the disease.

Go back and read that last sentence again.

Bear in mind we're talking about busy ERs in a diverse, multi-lingual major metropolitan area, wherein reside approximately 10% of the entire US population, countless international tourist destinations, multiple international airports, three major seaports, and an international border within 1-2 hours' ground travel distance. Not the 2 bed ER in Podunk, Inner Wyoming.

Now let's talk about your ER, especially if you're within a tank of gas of those five major destination airports for flights from West Africa.

Then let's talk about your ER if you don't even have that going for you.

And now I'm not even on the home team in those ERs?
Potential Ebola Case walks in, I'm out. Period. Done. B'bye.

And the difference for me is, at least I'll know something there, because they'll come in with suspicious symptoms.
What are you going to do when someone coughs in the market, or is sitting next to you in the theatre or the bus with a fever? Wait until blood is shooting out of their eyes?

Best wishes with that plan.

I repeat, Dallas was a warning shot.

IIRC, Duncan was sick in hospital for a week or so before he died. I don't know how many nurses cared for him there; at 2/day it could have been as many as 14, plus ancillary staff, or as few as two. And with their inadequate protective measures (the same ones I've seen ready or not at most local hospitals) that means he successfully infected between 14% and 100% of his direct caregivers.

All of whom KNEW he had Ebola before they walked into his room.

His one case closed that entire ER for the duration-plus, and the ICU, and for all intents and purposes, a 400- or 500-something bed major acute hospital became a ghost town overnight. It may yet stave off financial ruin and bankruptcy.

Based on the early reports of the first nurse's lawsuit, I wouldn't hold my breath there, and despite the blow to the community, they probably don't deserve to stay open.

Then there was the disruption and expense to the city and county, from a grand total of three actual cases: Duncan himself, and the two nurses. (And both of them were evac'ed to two of those eleven beds mentioned earlier pretty rapidly.)

So the moral of the story is, the first eight or so people infected here have a shot.
Patient Number Nine and following will stand about the same chance as victims in Africa.
Which is somewhere between a 10 to a 40% chance of survival.
And, evidently from recent news, with a lifetime's major permanent disabilities and sequellae, including lifelong vision deficits up to and including permanent blindness in many cases.

So yeah, Ebola has plateaued at a fraction of its peak, but refuses to burn out.
Which is merely that same exponential growth curve, on "Pause".

And given the current mutually-agreed-upon news blackout, your first clue it's rolling again will be when they announce on the news that someone is at County General, and came in shooting blood out both ends after they collapsed at the mall.

And then it's last September all over again.

Oh, BTW, for reference, at one of those ERs, in one week's time I've taken care of ten patients who came in with such routine symptoms as coughing blood, vomiting blood, and/or bleeding out their back end. We won't even talk about how many had fever, headache, and body or joint aches. So yeah, we'll get right on catching that Ebola patient the first time they come through the ER, because it's so easy to spot.

Just like they did in Dallas.

Sleep tight.

Welcome To The Party

Hi. Nice to be back. Fully and completely.

I was going to spend my day off tomorrow coming back to re-visit the entire (and ongoing) Ebola outbreak.

But today, on his blog, American Mercenary went there.

And I replied in comments.

Which occasioned his reply, and now this post, mainly because it's too frickin' big to fit there, it bogged down and choked his Disqus comment server, and I needed this excuse to kick me in the pants and drag me back to this whole thing eventually.

So, let's get to the rat killin':

AM wrote:

Aesop, I've always been a bit in awe of your ability to be so certain about the uncertain.

Why stop with "less than one third"? Why not say "Less than one tenth?" or "Less than one hundredth?" or "Less than one thousandth?"

What gives you any certainty for a bounding of the uncertainty?

It is an interesting question, isn't it?

The same question, asked a different way, is "how do you know even a fourth of cases were accurately reported?" Or "How do you know the population of any given country isn't complete and total bullshit?

And to go one step further, do you know if the rate of under reporting has been consistent or inconsistent? If it is consistent we can still use under reported numbers to track the progress of the epidemic. If the reporting has not been consistent, how would you know?

Here goes: 

I appreciate the snark, but unfortunately, WHO selected the "less than 1/3rd" Fudge Factor for those reports some months back, which has been noted on this blog over and over. In fact, it was revised to a higher Fudge Factor the worse things got, because it became crystal clear even to the doorknobs at UN/WHO that the locals were deliberately spinning numbers out their fourth points of contact as a matter of course, and the previous "1/2" Fudge Factor was No Longer Operative. Unless they've taken away the breadcrumbs, the memos to that effect from last July/August/September/October etc. are still available online, including on the Wikipedia page concerning the outbreak:

Note: the CDC currently estimates that actual cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea are two to three times higher than officially reported numbers[1][2][3].

(Nota bene that those Wiki links are to a CDC report, Science Magazine, and the LATimes' story on the subject, respectively. From last September and October. So as far as plucking that factor out of my back end, my hands are clean. I can still pull this out of recollection, and I haven't touched the issue since about last December, IIRC.)

And the exact point of the exercise has been that the reporting of the statistics by the involved countries was and is complete and utter bullshit, then, now, and ever shall be. The "1/3" Fudge Factor is the minimum of how much BS to ascribe to the stated numbers. The upper limit is bounded only by the actual population on the ground.

IIRC, I think I only made that exact point about 200 times amidst the height of the crisis.

Like here.
Here.
Or here.
Or probably any number of 200 other posts anytime after July/August.

The entire key to managing this outbreak, by all expert testimony of world-class epidemiologists, is having and effectively deploying sufficient resources, which requires accurate intelligence about where and how bad the outbreak is, and is progressing.
And actually having those resources.

Which has been and continues to be the exact things that have never existed anywhere in West Africa from 400 B.C. to date, inclusive, not least of which because you're dealing with people who have to wear open-toe sandals to count to 20, and have literacy and numeracy rates that make Appalachia look like Caltech and MIT, before we even get into the self-serving corruption problems endemic to the world's poorest former colonies, or the abysmal lack of response to this from outside until well past the date it would have mattered.

Has this spiraled along the exponential mathematical pathway it could have done by now?
Thankfully not. Huzzah.

Why didn't it?
No frickin' idea, anywhere, from anyone.
(Personally, I'm hoping it was the Invisible Hand of the Grim Reaper, selecting out hordes of Darwin Award Finalists with carefree abandon, particularly the 50% of people there who are sure Ebola is caused by witchcraft, and the 45% who are convinced it was cause by the United States practicing witchcraft, but that's just my mischievous nature breaking free for a moment in the sun.)

How bad was it then, and how bad is it now?
We know precisely two things: Jack, and sh*t.

So we don't know where it went, why, or how, and we don't know why it stopped or what was most effective, because we never had any accurate data to go by, not even roughly.
Which makes any official pronouncements about the outbreak from on high as relevant to actual medical science, as astrology forecasts are to actual astronomy.

PAY ATTENTION PLEASE:
This is exactly why the original pronouncements from CDC, like "This will never get to the US", and "We KNOW how to handle and contain this disease", turned out to be total horseshit too: they don't know what they're talking about, and they don't KNOW they don't know what they're talking about, because they're basing their announcements on prognostication based on happygas, NOT on actual scientific analysis or sober reflection on reality and facts on the ground. AND THEY NEVER HAVE.

In the West, it's even worse: the US effectively managed, what, eight or nine simultaneous cases?
And our max capacity is...eleven. Then, now, ever.
A number they had in any of those three countries last March or April, three months before anyone much cared.

The greater point was and is:
This disease will get out, again, and we'll fail to deal with it, again, and next time, once it gets to 12 cases, that city is f*cked.
Twelve cases apiece in two cities and that state is f*cked.
Twelve cases apiece in three cities, and we're Liberia, or Sierra Leone.

And if we're very very lucky then, you might contain it in just one time zone, or on one side or the other of the Mississippi, or the Rockies. At gunpoint.
If it gets to any African or Asian megalopolii, where the number of potentially infected people who can spring for a plane ticket is seven orders of magnitude more than all of the rural African continent, fuggedaboudit.

So how many MOPP suits does your unit have, and how long do they work saturated in infected blood?
And what happens if the factory where they make them is inside the Hot Zone next time?

This is a temporary pause, and we neither know why it paused, or when or where it will return.
We only know that unlike all previous outbreaks, it hasn't burned out and gone away, and now it probably never will.

And as long as we allow them to do so, it's a virtual certainty that people will continue to get on planes there, and bring the disease here and to Europe, in both of which where it won't be noticed immediately, and will thus propagate and spread, and that if it does so over the 21-day incubation period, it could infect enough people that, just like in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, it will suddenly spread like wildfire, in cities where the Black Death isn't just hyperbole, but merely dimly recalled actual history. And then the Gods Of The Copybook Headings are going to have their due, in exponential hyperbolic glee, without any nod towards dismissive snark, nor any regard of officialdom's irrational exuberance.

And the bodies of the disbelieving and the slow to respond will be stacked like cordwood.



AM is, by any manner of measurement I can devise, a thoughtful and bright guy, a serving Army officer who evidently survived the recent purges, and in all likelihood, destined for field-grade and higher service.

So while we may occasionally disagree on finer points, I wish him nothing but the best, and hold his posts and comments in high regard, because he takes things apart and puts them together rationally, as a rule, if not entirely. If it were otherwise, he wouldn't be over there to the right on my Blog Roll.

But having noted that the figures we were being fed were pure crapola, pretty much for half a year, which was reported on, sourced, and fact-checked ad infinitum, I can't begin to understand when or why he ever thought it was otherwise, which is the kiss of death to ever understanding this disease or combating it scientifically and efficiently, let alone putting the slightest shred of faith in any official pronouncements regarding it.

My official policy remains: "Ebola: Run for your lives." because the signal to noise ratio is at best 1:10,000, and worse than that the higher up on the panjandrum scale any of TPTB reside.

I didn't think this was news anywhere, but evidently I haven't made the point frequently, forcefully, and cogently enough yet. My apologies for tiptoeing around that 800-pound gorilla.

Comments are wide open.