Unfortunately, there's no IQ test for meme generator sites.
For example, Peter over at Bayou Renaissance Man posted quite a collection of good ones today, and one total clinker.
We have gently and lovingly fixed the mental misfire for the person who wrote it.
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| This embiggens. |
For the layman, comedy/wit has to be two things:
1) It has to be True.
2) It has to be Funny.
Rule #1 is inviolable.
Rule #2 is hard.
But Rule #3 is a cast iron bitch:
3) If you fail at #1 or #2, what you write is just stupid and pointless, and the joke is always on you.
A true comedic genius, Mel Brooks (perhaps you've heard of him) once pointed out further comedic truth:
"Tragedy is me stubbing my toe.
Comedy is you falling off a cliff."
So to the unknown soopergenius who posted the first part of today's illustrative lesson, I'd like to thank you for providing comedic relief - unintentionally. You'll be sharing the award with gravity. Mind the drop.
Now enjoy Chuck Jones, Robert McKimson, et al, proving how smart Mel was.
The salon in question is the one in Texas. The woman running it has her staff and customers in masks. There is no waiting, because it is by appointment only. The chairs are all 6 feet apart.
ReplyDeleteThe statistics just don't back this virus up as being as dangerous as you think it can be. 92% of the people who have died are over 65. More than half live in nursing homes. Even in the worst hit parts of the country, the death rate was less than 7 percent.
This lockdown was originally sold to us as "flatten the curve so the hospitals don't get overrun." Don't look now, but the hospitals are laying off staff because they are so empty.
My son is an NP and went to NYC to work in the ED as a surge worker. When his contract was up, he decided to extend for 6 more weeks because the hospital where he works is cutting hours because they are so slow. Even in NY, he tells me that he hasn't admitted a single COVID patient in almost two weeks.
1) The salon in question is one salon out of 10,000.
ReplyDeleteIf everybody ran every salon like that since back in January, she'd have a point. I'll pay you $100 cash for every one that did that which you can document.
I'll pay you the same amount for every other one of the named businesses that were doing that before the lockdown.
2) The person who made the meme is still a moron, as noted.
3) The virus is exactly as dangerous as I think it can be. I kills about 3% of the people who get it. The other 97% survive.
4) 8% of the people who have died are under 65. What's your point? Are older people expendable by fiat? Where is that principle in the Constitution, state law, or common law...? Should we also crash test cars with old people? Use them to clear minefields?
More of the dead have been men than women. Is that good or bad?
Should we try to get the death rate for each sex equal?
Does no one over 65 patronize any of those businesses? Or is it that the virus doesn't give a fuck about people with an agenda, and kills who it kills?
And that if you treat it like a nothingburger, like NYFC did, it lays waste to your city and your healthcare system for two months; but that if you take precautions, like everyone else did, and like states opening up are doing now, it can be vastly less serious?
Quite the poser there...
5) Don't look now, but NYFC hospitals were paying nurses $10K/week (about 7X the going market rate) when they were getting their asses kicked for two months. Ask me how I know.
6) In CA, I admitted 4 COVID patients in the last 2 days. We had two more on deck when I left this morning. So once again, your point is...?
As to number 3, the virus is killing 3 percent of the people who get sick enough to go to the hospital. From the beginning, the numbers have been trash. In the first month or two, they were only testing people who had symptoms AND had been travelling to certain countries. This means that there could have been many people with the virus who were never tested. It's called selection bias. Add to that, the numbers coming out of N Korea, China, and Iran (among others) are highly suspect and can't be used.
ReplyDeleteThere is no way to say exactly WHAT the fatality rate is, because we don't know how many are infected.
The people who are dying are the exact same ones who die from the flu- the people who were probably going to die anyway. The median time of survival for a person in a nursing home in the US is only 23 months to start with. How many of them would have died during the same time period?
My point? I have been a reader here for years, but you have to admit that you are a bit of an alarmist and overreact to every virus that comes down the road. I get that you want there to be a massive die off from some killer virus for some macabre reason that I can't fathom, but this virus ain't it.
The numbers have been trash because we put incompetents into that job.
ReplyDeleteNo, it's not killing 3% of the people who go to the hospital.
NYFC would have needed 700,000 people to go to the hospital for that to be true, but that's only 11 times more beds than there are in the entire state of NY.
It is killing about 90% of those put on ventilators anywhere though, which is why they tend to not do that anymore. The first people through the minefield always teach medicine new lessons.
I expect there are many people not tested, but who had the virus.
But based on actual deaths, I suspect it only ever infected about 1% or so of the population, overall.
If we want to give credence to recockulous surveys loaded with selection bias, we can assume arguendo that NYFC had a 20% infection rate. Which points out that if the entire city were infected, their casualties, using actual numbers, would go up five-fold. That's about 100K. That would give us an observed fatality rate of a tad over 1%. IOW, about ten times worse than "just the flu, bro."
Nationwide, that tops out at 3.3M dead, if 100% get it. Scale it down as necessary based on how wide and deep you expect it to penetrate. Given that we have less than 80K deaths nationwide, not 3.3M, it suggests pretty firmly that it's gotten to less than a few percent of the country. I'm pretty damned happy about that, but it proves that isolation works, not that the virus is harmless.
The flu doesn't kill all it's victims in two months, nor more, in that time, than in a entire bad year, so if this was "the exact same ones who die from the flu", it wouldn't be racking up bodies with the speed it is now for another 5-10 years.
The median time of survival in nursing homes is germane to a 0% value for the other half of the dead people in this outbreak. But thanks for throwing other people's relatives under the bus, and early. I can understand if that wasn't your intention, but there it is.
I haven't been alarmist here, ever, and if you think otherwise, you clearly haven't been paying attention as closely as you think you have. 3% is a massive die off compared to average years, because it outstrips all causes of death in a normal year, which is about 2.6M; it's hardly civilization-ending, however. But even 1% fatality, with anything like a widespread infection rate - on top of all other causes is one helluva lot worse than any flu epidemic in any year you could name, including the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, which was pretty effing bad.
(cont.)
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ReplyDeleteI don't want any such massive die-off, now nor ever, and if you sincerely think so, you're a lunatic for even suggesting it.
I'd suggest shooting a back azimuth 180º out of your ass if you expect me to take anything further seriously, but if you meant it, DLTDHYITAOYWO. I can't believe you'd be reading this blog if you really believe that.
I only pointed out about 37 times that deaths from this virus were the absolute fucking least thing to worry about, but that doesn't mean they're therefore inconsequential, and it's worse when people are jackhole-stupid about that.
NYFC and about 20K dead there, alone, stands as grim testimony to what you get by treating this as a non-event, but there's always someone - or in this case, an entire city - that has to grab the cherry-red stove with both hands before they believe it's really hot. You may even have noticed the deafening silence from Gov. Dipshit and Hizzoner DeBozo since getting their collective asses kicked the last two months by reality. Why everyone else wants to emulate that approach baffles the shit out of me, but like the march of the penguins, they just keep on coming.
And if people are this stupid with a virus that's relatively mild, WTF do you suppose will happen the next time - and there will be a next time - some misbegotten dipshit from the Turd World manages to struggle here from Africa with full-blown Ebola, which has a 66-90% fatality rate, and turns loose 10 or 20 cases in the general population, and us with all of 11 staffed beds BL-IV to handle that properly? How many Dallases then, and NYFCs now, would you like to see? I vote for zero, but it doesn't seem to have caught on, whteher we're talking at the CDC, or most of the retard-right blogosphere. But the depth of the bench on the left end of the IQ bell curve for that latter contingent has been most disenheartening.
I don't want an Ebola pandemic any more than this Kung Flu b.s., but Ebola concerns me one helluva lot more than this weak sister, and the usual idiots, including Fauci, who presided over the last fustercluck, are still .Gov's go-to morons this time around. That, frankly, scares the hell out of me more than anything else.
And yet there are still people too stupid to put their masks on right, or wash their goddam hands, even now.
My point all along has been that no one, at any level - federal, state, county, city, nor individual - is ready for this, nor anything close. Look around at the wailing and gnashing of teeth, over a relatively minor disruption, in the grand scheme, and tell me I've been wrong there. People are flat-out losing their shit, and setting their heads on fire.
The problem seems to be that people think they can outsmart the Gilligans, but Gilligan is going to fuck us over every time, and I suspect for many people out there, being forced to recognize that their fate has far more to do with the choices morons make than with their own choices and precautions, is somewhat upsetting to the illusory sense of control of our destinies everyone fools themselves into thinking are reality.
The actuarial tables tell quite a different story.
Which one are you in this, Aesop? The kettle or the pot...?
ReplyDeleteNeither Glen. I wasn't posting a funny for comedy's sake, I was telling the truth.
ReplyDeleteBut if you like seeing someone else do a face plant, there's always some humor in it somewhere.
Another whiff, but keep trying.
There hasn't been a lot of discussion about viral load. Aesop, maybe you could explain in Gilligan speak
ReplyDeleteThanks for tomorrow's post topic!
ReplyDeleteThey don't get Aesop. People like me that get it die. I am pretty healthy and alive today. Been working on projects around my compound every day except when I have to give my older body a rest for overdoing it. If I get it the other biological factors give me a high percentage of death. Ain't scared should have died in January due to pulmonary embolism. I do it to care for and protect my family and its future which will be way worse than what is happening today. Still go out for project supplies but wear gloves. No mask anymore to many not wearing them.
ReplyDeleteEbola is the one that really scares me. That's a no-shit end of civilization event if it gets loose in the airplane-connected world.
ReplyDeleteI don't get it. It seems obvious to me that the first meme was overwhelming sarcasm. The second meme tries to pick apart the first one like they were being legit, and that is where the fail occurs.
ReplyDeleteWhat am I missing?
The first meme was overwhelming stupidity, and dead serious.
ReplyDeleteWork forward from that point.
When someone is trying to be funny, but they're wrong, they're not funny.
Except to point at and laugh.
First meme mixed apple and oranges.
ReplyDeleteFixing it would also tighten it up (eschew needless verbiage) to wit:
Corona-chan is so smart she knows not to infect people in big corporate conglomerates like Costco, but only in your local feed stores and other small businesses.
Such a tsundere!
Aesop, what is the current thinking about the permanence of or recovery from "ground glass opacity" in the lungs of children and relatively young adults? Does GCO "go away" or is it permanent?
ReplyDeleteI just did a search for "Covid-19+ground+glass+opacity+lungs+capacity+prognosis" and limited it to the past week. There are dozens of articles, here are just a few that caught my eye.
The "flu-bros" might not be so casual if they have reason to believe their lungs can be permanently ruined even after they "recover" from Covid-19.
[Given that they already don't give a damn if everybody over 65, or diabetic, or with a cardiac or pulmonary history etc. dies of it.]
Interim Clinical Guidance for Management of Patients with Confirmed Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html
Chest CT imaging characteristics of COVID-19 pneumonia in preschool children: a retrospective study
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7232932/
Clinical Features, Diagnosis, and Treatment of COVID-19 in Hospitalized Patients: A Systematic Review of Case Reports and Case Series
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.00231/full
@MB,
ReplyDelete"Ground glass opacity" is merely how radiologists describe the foggy look on the lungs of CXR, during infection.
That goes away when the infection does.
The scarring of the lungs does not, by all accounts.
I haven't seen any "After" CXRs of people who had this, all the way to intubation and ICU stays, and recovered.
What I hear anecdotally from the docs I work with is it's permanent damage.
The open question is whether infection once confers any immunity whatsoever from future re-infection, which will determine if "herd immunity", or a functional vaccine, are even ever possible.
If not, like the common cold, chicken pox, herpes, and AIDS, this sh*t is forever. And like Granny's leftovers, it just keeps coming back.