Sunday Music: Momma Told Me Not To Come

Answer to the Jeopardy! question, "What was the first America's Top 40 #1 song played by Casey Kassem?".

And penned by no less an American songwriting legend than Randy Newman.

Dig it.

Leftards Start Losing Their Collective $#!^ in 3, 2, ...

h/t  100% eFfed Up

Robert Barnes of Barnes Law was first to break the news with a link to the opinion of Judge Patricia McCullough via Mark Levin. Now, in another surprising move, the PA Trial Court has ruled the 2020 election was likely unconstitutional in PA and that gives the state legislators the power to choose electors.

That's one governmental power they'd darned sure better exercise. 

Dear PTB:

The popping sounds heard after that won't be corn kernels.

When you try to replace a republic with a banana republic, because you thought you could, it becomes an extinction-level event for one side or the other.

I can give you odds on which side that turns out to be.

If anyone is planning to sit that one out indefinitely, "may your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget you were our countrymen." If the theft of a presidential election isn't enough to equal a Fort Sumter moment, the country is already too dead to care about.

Right now, it's quiet enough to hear sphincters tightening from the DC Beltway to Hollywood.

Call that toss in the air, gents.

Happy Thanksgiving

"O Lord, on this day, we thank Thee for thy numerous blessings, and ask of Thee only two things:

Health and Strength.

With provision of but these two things, anything else we require, we'll get for ourselves, and spare Thee any further trouble on our account."

The blessings of the day to your and yours.

And lest we forget, a bit of timeless holiday cheer to enjoy today:

Appeasement Isn't In Our Nature...

Election theft = war. 

No compromise. But we'll accept your unconditional surrender.

The secret is out. 

If you'll steal an election now, and get away with it, you'll steal them forever.

We're not going to spend 4 years - or forever - learning to like the taste of sh*t sandwich.

But you will.

You called that tune.

Time to pay the piper.

The Spirit Of Rebellion

h/t Sal the Agorist

Just noticed, didja?

I don't call him Gabbin' Nuisance for nothing.

Gonna be a long, cold winter in Sacramento.

Busy

No, really.

Art Is Truth

Sunday Music: Down At The Twist And Shout

What's that you say? She's not a certified cajun babe? You weren't listening to the song, obviously. If this cut doesn't get your feet moving, you're either a paraplegic, or you're dead.

And at 3:25, it's one of the few country songs that's only 15 minutes too short. I keep hoping one day I'll wake up, and hear Mary Chapin Carpenter has returned to doing country only, always, and just like this. Until then, I'll just have to put this one on repeat until I get tired of it. Hasn't happened yet in nearly 30 years. Hope it don't for thirty more.

Stop Peeing On Me And Telling Me It's Raining

h/t OddJob

Banzai!

h/t WRSA

Hai.

"On dispersive ground, therefore, fight not. On facile ground, halt not. On contentious ground, attack not. On open ground, do not try to block the enemy's way. On the ground of intersecting highways, join hands with your allies. On serious ground, gather in plunder. On difficult ground, keep steadily on the march. On hemmed in ground, resort to stratagem.

On desperate ground, fight."

Peruse.

Ponder.

Plan.

Prepare. 

Pray that you're around afterward, to hear someone tell you

"Now it's a nice day."

Just A Reminder

Think of it as a blast from the past. Literally.

Iron Sharpens Iron; Nothing Sharpens Mud

I don't have to troll around looking for arguments. Just spouting common sense and reality means they find me regardless.

Case in point:

B, over at Middle Of The Right, put up a post. (And I still read people who I disagree with, or who have disagreed with me, because there's always a chance they'll come around, or I will learn something I didn't know, and they absolutely have a perspective that's outside my cranium, which is kind of the point of the internet.)

A thought:

 So Menards (and Home Depot) both were early adopters of the "Mask Mandate"...here where I live in Indiana, months before the state-wide requirements for masks came into effect,,..

But they don't disinfect ANYTHING.

Not carts, not credit card machines, nothing.

The Virus is transmitted via touch and via airborne at a similar rate...

Yet again, we have the requirement for masks, but nothing else. Much like in a restaurant, or a bar, where one is dangerous when walking to and from the table (or the bathroom) but not when eating or drinking.....

The local grocery stores, all of them, including Wal-Mart, DO at least make the attempt to sanitize the carts and other common touch surfaces. 

Much like the TSA, it is all Theater. 

He's gotten touchy before, but against hope, I responded:

Checking temperatures is theater. Absolutely.

Masking works. (I'm open to counter-argument: just provide the names of the first world hospitals that don't require masks in general surgery, and in fact actually prohibit them, and you win.)

Failure to disinfect: that's just stupid laziness.
Gilligan FTW, Example #3042.

But unfortunately, it's the idea of not being able to cough and sneeze his germs all over random strangers that's apparently the point at issue for him, so full of the bile that led to the last go-around, here's his snappy comeback.

Aesop: Show me evidence that they work, and I'll believe you. If they were effective, we should have stopped this disease already as most mask mandates have been in effect for about 10 cycles of infection....there should be little or no cases if masking the population was an effective deterrent to the spread.

So go ahead, prove it. Or shut up.

Your history shows you are big on talk, but not much else. 

Look, Stud, put your dick away. It's just not that big. And certainly nothing to wave about.

(We'll ignore the 47 Straw Man Fallacies you set up there, ignoring things like spread among relatives, where no masking occurs, as though you'd never heard of it. Taking you to task for errors that obvious is just kicking retarded kids, which is why I didn't get personal in my original reply. But you wanted to dance, so I'll call the tune this time.) 

In fact, I agreed with a lot of what you wrote. You got some things right. Huzzah!

But when you throw out little tard-bombs like that last line, you're pogo-sticking in a minefield of explosive poo bombs, and asking not to get any on you.

It's not all theater.

 

"Always avoid 'always'. Never say 'never'." - Rhetoric 101 

But with reality vs. theater, evidently you can't tell the one from the other.

Sorry to have to be the one who pointed it out, but there it is.

And where I disagreed with you, I didn't come after you and insult you, and instead gave you a pathway to demonstrate your superior grasp of this. You elected to fling diaper spackle instead. Color me shocked.

Instead of acknowledging the proof you demanded, which was already pointed out in my response, and then declining to name any hospital that bans masks in surgery "because they don't work", as requested, you skipped to the Triple Dog Dare. Why would anyone offer you more proof when you can't grasp the obvious, that's been around as common knowledge since your grandfather wasn't even a gleam in your great-grandfather's eye?

You decided to get all butthurt, as seems to be your bent, because you didn't get 100%.

My only response to that is the same one I got in school:

"You want 100% scores? Study harder."

This ain't rocket surgery, but you have to make an effort.

But for B's edification, here's the response to him that I won't bother to post on his blog, because it'll never see daylight:

You win. Pasteur was wrong. So was Lister. Semmelweis too.  

Wait, no they weren't.

Here's the critical flaw in your reasoning, from just that reply:

"If they [masks] were effective, we should have stopped this disease already as most mask mandates have been in effect for about 10 cycles of infection." 

Let's change a few small words and phrases, and see if it gets clear for you:

"If [gun laws] were effective, we should have stopped this [gun crime] already as most [gun control] mandates have been in effect for about 10 [years]." 

You're arguing like the guy who thinks passing a law = 100% compliance, because everybody obeys the law, always, at all times and places. Like they don't ever. 

People run red lights 100 times a day. Should we get rid of stoplights, because they don't work, and they're inconvenient? Laws against murder have been in effect since Hammurabi, and yet people still murder each other. Using your "logic" shouldn't we get rid of murder laws too?? Because they obviously don't work! 

And then, knowing people don't obey laws, and having undone your own underlying rationale for why mask mandates should have worked, you argue against yourself, to throw out all mask laws, because people are people. 

All I'm suggesting is that you take a breath, and pick one side or the other. 

Do masks work? 150 years of medical history says yes.
I haven't been everywhere, and I've only worked in 30-40 or so of the 6000 hospitals in this country, for most of three decades, and not in such a cosmopolitan venue as Indiana. So something world-class may have gotten by me that you alone have figured out, unlike hospitals in Rome, Paris, London, NYFC, Tokyo, or anyplace else, going back to when Victoria was a young Queen of England. So I can believe your skepticism and scientific acumen, or my lying eyes. 

You're not going to win on that point, ever, because it's counter-factual.  

Does the lack of perfect 100% compliance mean that the law (or any law) is of no value? That idea is pure hogwash. Perfection is not the standard, and never was. 

People are Gilligans. Not every single one of them, but it only takes one Gilligan to keep the castaways stranded for the entire run of the show. 

Funny on a '60s sitcom; in real life, amidst a pandemic, not so much. 

The Gilligans have been driving this pandemic since Day One. 

You probably get the concept that "We have to win every day; the terrorists only have to get lucky once." 

That's how virus propagation works too.

So, given that 50% or so of those with this infection are asymptomatic, and can never be detected as infectious (except by testing, daily, 330M people in this country, which we haven't come close to accomplishing even given 10 months), do you figure the better way is to pretend this infection doesn't exist, and throw out all restrictions? Or is it to ask you to make the superhuman sacrifice of wearing a mask in public among people, and keep the flying germs from your coughs and sneezes to yourself amidst everyone else, instead of flinging them outwards 10-30 feet at 100-300MPH? 

We only do two things in the hospital, 95% of the time: wear a mask, and wash our hands. And lo and behold, doctors and nurses aren't dropping like flies from Kung Flu, anywhere, despite working literally inches from people with full-blown COVID for 12-hour shifts, for the last 10 months. 

That's your proof. 

Is there hokum and security theater going on?
Hell YES, by the metric fuckton!
Are some evil nitwits arrogating totally unconstitutional authority and powers they don't have to themselves?
Hell YES!!  

Does it piss me off too?  

HELL YES!!!

Go after that pointless nonsense, and I'll march in your parade and subscribe to your newsletter.

Just please stop throwing out the baby with the bathwater simply because it's a minor inconvenience to put a mask on in public places, amidst other people. 

Somebody telling you that you need to wear a mask all by yourself, 20 miles out of town, alone, is a farking moron.
Somebody telling me they don't want to wear one at the supermarket at noon on Saturday "because masks don't work" is an even bigger one. 

Both statements are absolutely true.

And that, B., is the difference between simple pugnacious gainsaying, and making the point.

But your response serves me right for thinking you were ready to change your spots, and be reasonable and rational. Sorry to have troubled your single thought. No, really. But might I suggest that next time, you try two or three thoughts, all at once. The exercise with the increased weight will do your mind well. Not to mention, your blog.

But lest you feel cheated, I made something for you in shop class.

So, You Want To Steal Elections?

If the courts fumble this (and they're the last hope before bullets start flying, unless any of you plan on surrendering, and resolve to taste bad when thrown to the lions), you're going to see the Right do some serious politicking, and you're going to find out precisely what those "other means" look like. In living color.

And let's don't have any yappy little bitches, nor the Leftards who set The Big Steal in motion, start yipping and pissing themselves about "destroying the republic". That was a fait accompli when all those phony ballots started getting dumped into the hoppers.

That was the Rubicon, and they plunged into it, and across, long since. The last vestige of the republic was strangled on November 4th, in its sleep.

They're going to find out what happens next. It will not be a peaceful transition of power. Ask Caesar and Brutus and Mark Antony how that worked out for them personally.

I leave our would-be communist overlords at the DNC to ponder their ultimate fate, in light of those famous last words of the Ceauçescus one fine sunny day:

{Update: With Dominion executives ducking hearings with PA representatives, and Cobb County GA officials shredding ballots ahead of a statewide audit and multiple court cases, I think it's pretty clear that the individuals and groups responsible have made their choice, and want to see whether or not they'll be stood up against a wall.

I'm prejudiced, but I think we should totally accommodate their wishes on that. ASAP.}

The Next Aviation Milestone

Democrat Math

No doubt the 125% turnout among black voters in Detroit and Atlanta between 2AM and 5AM the day after the election was particularly gratifying to the DNC.

"Bitch, I already got welfare cards in 47 names! 

Showin' folks how to get 500 mail-in ballots apiece wasn't sh*t!"

The Great Backstab Continues - Beware the Ides Of November

We note the media now waving the latest eructation by Ohio's Quisling-In-Chief, Mike DeWhine (we're not sure when his family dropped the missing "h", but never was a politician more aptly named), who has evidently amended the federal Constitution, and decided that his opinion, and not the electoral college, should now be consulted to determine the presidential election outcome.

This sort of behavior from a nominal Republican, now-obvious RINO, and revealed closet never-Trumper, is now being added to the din of boos and catcalls from people salivating in the wings at the prospect of the Democommunists stealing an election in broad daylight, and using any means necessary to push the elected president out of the White House.

If you reside in the Buckeye State, I suggest none too gently that he belongs on your local accountability list, to be dealt with, of course, at the next election. With "friends" like DeWhine in high office, who needs enemas?

In the military, we called backstabbing fair-weather friends something that starts with the word "buddy" and rhymes with "muddy suckers".

DeWhine qualifies.

It was always going to be Trump vs. all comers.

So now the Ohio governor has evidently decided his best interests lie in joining the likes of Utah's carpetbagger Mittens, the frothingly mad Media, and the Democommunist Party (but I repeat myself).

He is now one of the 42 guys to pile on stabbing Caesar, after Brutus kicked off the party.

DeWhine has made his political bed.

Now let him lie in it.

Sunday Music: What A Fool Believes

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for this chart-climbing Number 1 hit for the Doobie Bothers in the spring of 1979, and a cautionary tale about the problem of wishful thinking, written by Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins.

Pincer Movement

The battle continues. On two fronts, it appears.

On one side Grifter-in-chief Palpatine, and his sidekick Jar Jar Kneepads, abetted in the fraud by their spokesholes at the local versions of Pravda and Isvestia, which is just about every newspaper and broadcast radio and TV station, in every market, coat to coast, save a token opposition and a few stragglers, is amping up their perpetual gaslighting of the challenges to this election, and cranking up the volume and tempo of their relentless drumbeat that the Hidin'/Kneepads ticket was victorious, and that therefore President Trump ought to get it over with and commit political seppuku.

This with zero electoral votes awarded anywhere, and about 90 such in total doubt, with fraud so widespread and rampant it's visible from satellites in space.

Natzsofast, Guido.

There's at least two problems with that: first, it ain't just about President Trump anymore. It's personal now, because the Leftards have already openly called for enemies lists, re-education camps, and worse. The only way for them to walk that back with any good faith is to apologize, and kill themselves. Lest it be in any way misunderstood, that was not a merely rhetorical suggestion. You asked for a fight to the death, you got it. Win, lose, or draw, that goes away only when those who called for it are dead, dead, dead.

Secondly, what's the rush?

If Palpatine and Jar Jar won, the Leftards should welcome honest audits and recounts, the better to take another victory lap, while rubbing the Right's noses in the Left's inevitable march to the throne room of power. People who've actually scored a touchdown don't bitch about re-watching the video that proves it. It's that simple.

You can run the tape back and forth, and if the feet are inbounds, and the ball is in control, it's a touchdown time after time after time.

So when one team's coaches, and half the fans in the stadium, boo and catcall the replay, and start agitating loudly to ignore it and just call the touchdown without looking at that pesky video replay, you know they didn't score, and you know they know they didn't score, so all their histrionics and hissyfits beforehand and afterwards is just them being pissed that they lost, refusing to admit it, even to themselves, and terror at having their noses rubbed in you seeing it with your own lying eyes, on a 50' tall jumbotron, in front of millions of eyewitnesses.

They'll be left losers, with egg on their faces, and be thwarted at achieving what they wanted so badly they could not only taste it, but were willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get.

That's the only and most crystal-clear obvious explanation for their frothing insistence that everybody stop looking, and see things their way. Time lets people come forward, swear affidavits, document vote harvesting, forensically dissect software "glitches" (which miraculously only ever go one way), prove ballot stuffing, find dead people voting in the thousands, and prove beyond any doubt countless other stock-in-trade tricks of the Democommunists, not just in this election, but pretty much since we started voting for leaders on this continent.

But that's not enough for them. We're being flanked by people pretending to be on our side.

We've got the quisling RINO contingent cheering them on, and the old-school lose-gracefully weak-tea pseudo-cons pre-conceding the recounts, the court challenges, and everything else, on our behalf, and wargaming how we do our best to slow walk to the boxcars, and resolve to taste bad when thrown to lions.

Better do a re-think on that on, Fuckwheat, because I don't remember conceding my rights or reality to some half-witted process with somebody's fat ass on the scales, nor electing some lily-livered chickenshit punditry to speak on my behalf, giving first consideration to their own cushy rice bowls rather than the republic.

Obvious fraud is obvious fraud, and it doesn't become magically blessed and sacrosanct just because some committee, or some judge, nor even all of them combined, decides that their own myopia prevents them from seeing it.

Steal this election, and it's war.

I'm sorry, let me be clearer about that:

Steal this election, and it's war. 

War to the knife, knife to the hilt, then gouging eyes and biting off ears.

There won't be any mythical "unity" with people who've called for our shaming, rounding up, re-education, and our deaths. Nor any  "let's-let-bygones-be-bygones" bullshit. There isn't going to be any kowtowing to a horrendously corrupt process that even let anyone get this close to pulling it off, as though the Marquess of Queensbury Rules would remain in full effect, just because someone got away with it.

We aren't gong to regroup, and hope the Senate, or SCOTUS, or the fucking Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny, come to our rescue to keep frothing communists from enacting the Soviet/Cuban/Venezuelan Worker's Paradise they've been salivating over for 80 years.

The minute someone violates democracy, and all due process, the social contract is broken, the Rule of Law is out the window, and any and all allegiance anyone owed or might claim from us to the former republic is null and void, in perpetuity.

Because from that moment forward, that republic has died, and ceases to exist.

I henceforth owe it nothing.

Not nostalgia, not love, not treasure, not true faith nor allegiance, because the party to whom all that was owed is no longer extant.

I will agitate, protest, strike, undermine, monkeywrench, sabotage, and if necessary, kill people and break things to destroy whatever hologram of the former republic anyone tries to prop up, and I won't rest at that until I'm either dead, or I win.

We're not going to hope for miraculous salvation, we're going to shoot m#####f#####s in the face. Those are the stakes, and you said you wanted to play for blood. Game on, girl scouts.

I get only a 1/330,000,000th say in that outcome, but I vote for liberty and freedom, even if I spend my time under bridges and on the run, and anyone opposed to that can go to Hell. The only peaceful transition, at that point, will be transitioning communists into soil supplements. And I'll do it with a smile on my face, and sleep like a baby afterwards.

BFYTW

If this is news to anyone: at DNC HQ, the NYFTimes, Fox News, or anyone inside the Washington DC beltway, bookmark this spot, because I told you so.

You want the allegiance of people, there's but one way to get it: 

uphold the rule of law, get your elbows off the scales of justice, throw out the bogus votes, and stop the cheating at elections once and for all time.

Anyone on the other side of that question has entered into a blood feud, and with half of the country.

Ask Fletcher how that worked out.

"Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor..."

Amazing Coincidences

h/t OddJob

Mirabile dictu! 

Especially in states that were split 50-50 before they stopped counting.

"Once is happenstance;

Twice is coincidence;

Thrice is enemy action." 

- Ian Fleming 

Ruh Roh

h/t daily timewaster, twice

Never, never, NEVER piss off the guy with the radio.

He's never outnumbered.

Oh, and Beware Of The Foom! 

Astute students of US military history may detect a pattern in our approach to warfare:

Pity we haven't used that approach in the Persian Gulf anything like recently.

You get farther with a kind word and a broadside, than you do with a kind word alone.

Possibility

How To Get What You Don't Want

h/t Peter

The courts and the legal process grind slow. I get that.

But when you're robbed, it's not so much the loss of the cash in your wallet that pisses you off.

It's the unmitigated pain in the ass of having to replace every other damned thing, from driver's license to other IDs to credit and bank cards, and the loss of the irreplaceable things, mementos, photographs, phone numbers, addresses, etc.

For $40, some punk made you his bitch for days and weeks. And we, naturally, resent the hell out of that.

Election-stealing is like that.

Bad enough to actually try it - this time, clearly and overwhelmingly on an industrial, or even information-age scale* - it's the waiting for justice to (maybe) prevail that really offends. And the chance that even that will fail us. 

What pissed people off most about communist socialism was the way they casually wasted your time, which is the stuff your LIFE is made of, standing in line, and various other Kafka-esque daily petty insults. Because you, the individual, had no intrinsic value to TPTB.

Whereas our own tradition is to send 10,000 people to search for one lost hiker or boater, because in our worldview, and the way we live our lives, every individual matters.

When Edmund Blackadder complains "We are like the private parts of the gods; they toy with us for their own amusement..." it's funny, because we all have the feeling that Life, the Universe, and Fate bitchslap us around for their own ends, and we are just a bunch of Barbie dolls in their effort. Whether by malicious design or sheer happenstance. We laugh, because we can't see behind the curtain, and it's just venting.

But when the same thing happens from mere mortals, whom we can see doing it, because they think they can, and are entitled to do it, it rankles the hell out of us.

And that's exactly what Leftardia has done with this attempted (so far) election theft: they have decided that we - every man Jack of us - are merely their private pawns, useful only for their amusement in their unending quest for ultimate power over every aspect of our lives, and over every living soul.

We know, from history time and again, exactly where those boxcars unload.

People have expressed the idea, more than once, that this will lead to conflict.

It WILL.

Which outcome was, I gathered, rather the entire point of the Left doing it.

They think they can win such a contest.

The solution to that isn't to clutch our pearls, but rather to give them precisely that existential life-and-death struggle, in spades, and end the problem for at least a generation, if not far longer.

America with 200M people instead of 330M isn't all bad, and would be vastly preferable to one with the morons in charge, unrestrained by anything like reason, morality, or the rule of law.

If they really want Rule 308, it's high time they got what they wanted, and in haste.

I'll settle for a favorable and correct series of court decisions for now, but like the series of compromises made in the US Congress in the early 1800s, that merely postpones the central question necessitating the underlying looming civil war, until technology and the resultant conflict becomes more toxic and lethal. 

It's just kicking that can down the road a couple years or so.

Let's lance this boil now, so we don't have to do amputations later on. It's absolutely going to happen anyway. Not might any more, but will, because we've now seen that there is absolutely nothing they won't stoop to doing. There is no bottom to their perfidy, amorality, and soullessness. You cannot negotiate with sociopaths. So the only open question is how soon.

I'd rather take it on while we have the strength to prevail, and the will to do so. The recidivism of the other side is beyond argument, and only holding their heads under water until they stop kicking is going to cure them of the habit, at this point. 

Their desire for totalitarianism is like rabies. The only cure for that is a bullet to the head.

Time to start medicating.

*(The levels of fraud in this election weren't bigger than you imagine.

They were bigger than you can imagine.)

Veteran's Thoughts, On The Day

Counting votes is not my problem.

Nor tallying electors.

Neither is counting noses at SCOTUS.

I'm counting bullets.

Magazines.

Cans of food.

Boxes of medical supplies.

Bags of specie.

And so on.

I voted at the polling place. 

That was over more than a week ago.

If I have to ratify my vote, it will likely be from behind sandbags, or on rooftops.

I'm hoping really hard not to have to, but I've watched this bunch of @$$clowns we call a government my entire adult life, and they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And the only thing they fail at, at a perfect flawless 100% rate, is to not f##k things up worse after they get into it than it was before they finger-banged it.

At the moment, I'm Errol Flynn throwing the dead deer on Prince Biden's feasting table at Nottingham Castle.

How the rest of the dinner conversation goes remains to be seen.

Know this well: if you didn't vote for the Hidin'/Kneepads ticket, you've already been sized for your coffin since long ago.

So, I ask you: does it really make a helluva lot of difference if you end up on a wanted poster between now, and when they slip you into it?

Or, as my older brother's generation put it, from various enclaves outside Da Nang:

Happy Veteran's Day.

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

Much has been made by bloggers whom and on sites which I respect, about certain prognostications by Mssr. Briggs, statistician, regarding Kung Flu.

I'm not quibbling about his numbers, just what he makes of them, evidently from an utter lack of knowledge about that of which he speaks.

Unfortunately, Briggs' combines his statistical skills with what he doesn't know about science in general, and epidemiology in particular.

1) There are, indeed, "good" flu years, and "bad' flu years. But it's not a 1- or 2- variable problem set.

    a) there are always older people, some of whom are more frail, and many of whom are going to die. But surviving flu one year doesn't, ergo, make you another year older and thus more likely to die the next year. That's kindergarten math thinking.

    b) How many other conditions does any given grandpa or grandma X have?

    c) What is their general health condition?

    d) Did they get a flu shot that year, or not?

        d1) Did the flu vaccine witch doctors guess the actual flu strain mutations well, and formulate a great shot (a year with a 95% efficacy) or poorly (a year with 15% efficacy). {e.g., in 2018, IIRC, there were 635 individual strains of flu rampant in the US, and that year's shot had about a 15% effectiveness. This is nigh on to worthless, relatively speaking.}

        d2) Was there even a flu shot at all?

(In, to my best recollection, 2010, there was no flu vaccine available at all. Whichever year it was, it was a record low flu year. Because CDC and FedGov bombarded the airwaves with PSAs telling people to "Wash your goddamned nasty hands! Stay home if you're sick!" in so many words, and mirabile dictu, old people and parents of young children actually did it. Flu visits to the ER that year were negligible.)

That exact level of concern, plus masks, and distancing, is why, by all accounts, this year's flu season cases will probably be contained in a thimble.

Those are just some of the 100-500 variables behind who dies, and why, from flu, Kung Flu, or any other thing, in any given year. Not just whether it was a "good" or "bad" flu year, last year.

Yes, it was world-record @$$holian to put known COVID+ cases into convo homes, which are the lowest form of medical care other than anything found in the Turd World, and you get a perfect storm of the most vulnerable patients, and the most execrable level of care not delivered by actual gypsies and witch doctors (and in most convo homes, there's little difference between them. The fact that they reek of sh*t and piss the moment you walk in is what poker players call a "tell".) Those deaths were, indeed,  low-hanging fruit.

That such deaths may have accounted for nearly half the initial wave is bad.

It does nothing for the next wave, unless you stop doing that. I have yet to hear that it's no longer policy. And even if it was, that overlooks the obvious problem: Kung Flu presents asymptomatically in up to 50% of cases (which is why checking for fever temperatures at building entries is like looking for elephants in trees: asinine and pointless.)

If they really wanted to keep infected people out of convo homes (which are still chock full of vulnerable patients, in 50 states and 7 territories), they'd have to be rapid-testing every patient they admit, before entry, and rapid-testing every staff member, daily, and every single visitor, vendor, etc., and holding them in quarantine outside until they test negative (an hour or two later). We don't even do that in first-class hospitals.

Doing so would cost a large fortune, and bankrupt everyone, everywhere.

So the exact same thing is going to happen, over and over and over, because you won't pay for doing it right. No one will.

Own that.

It's the exact asymptomatic Gilligans - the young and "healthy",  who won't get really sick nor die from this - who have been and will continue spreading this virus around, until it hits the susceptible victims, and makes a guaranteed percentage of them very sick, and some of them very dead.

Some of them, yes, will be the aged, infirm, and those with levels of disease that were killing people at age 66 in 1933. (That's why FDR had Social Security kick in at age 65; FedGov expected you to be dead within a year. And then medicine, the same bunch that know-nothing idiots bitch about for the cost, went and started increasing everyone's life expectancies to the 80s. See if you can guess why SS is broke.)

And yes, we know a little bit better what to do (and not to do) to care for those hardest hit by Kung Flu. Which will make about a 1-25% difference in fatalities in subsequent waves. Because those in the roughly 3% likely to die, are still going to die. So maybe now the death rate goes down from about 3% to 2.7%. (The death rate for flu, BTW, is about 0.1%, since ever. Don't you feel better now, knowing this is only 27 times worse than flu, instead of 30 times?)

The biggest problem with those prognosticating from ignorance in general is overlooking the fact that most of the population, in this or any country, has yet to be exposed to the virus.

E.g. Califrutopia, last I looked, has tested about 10% of our 40M people.

The rate of those infected at some point, is running damned near 10%.

With millions tested now, rather than dozens, those numbers are statistically valid (unlike, say, Biden's pre-election poll numbers) and thus (unlike Biden's vote tallies) aren't going to widely fluctuate. Right up until we throw open the floodgates, eliminate any precautions, and start spreading Kung Flu virus around like it was welfare money in a Blue State. (Or blank mail-in vote bundles at any Democrat HQ building.)

Then, the more people you infect, the more people will die.

Yes, only at that +/- 3% rate.

We're pushing 250K dead now, with the infection rate of 10% in certain places (mostly highly populated areas), and probably less than 0.1% in most of the country denigrated as Flyoverland.

So, roll the dice, and tell me what happens when the infection rate goes up everywhere.

Especially if the infection rate goes up by leaps and bounds, rapidly.

And for a special bonus, in the exact places where true modern medical care is 1-4 hours away.

On a good day.

Then we get to the fun questions:

Does infection confer immunity?

I have no goddamned idea. Neither does WHO. Neither does CDC. 

Neither does Pfizer, or any-effing-body else.

I have one firsthand example of repeat infection, hospitalized in front of my face. 

I have dozens of cases reported anecdotally.

I have seen zero literature explaining this.

I have seen or heard of zero literature documenting exactly how widespread this is.

No one knows how much, or how widely, the original strain is mutating.

Thus any claims of vaccine efficacy are so much bullshit.

Any claims of herd immunity are so much whistling past the graveyard.

Any extrapolation of how bad this is going to be, with those exact unknowns being so glaringly obvious, are nothing but Bandini Mountain, with a sewage frosting from downstream of the septic plant.

Do I want fiat lockdowns again?

HELL NO!

Make a case, trot out evidence, not SWAG bullshit, and weigh the benefits and costs.

Medical, scientific, economic, everydamnedthing. Talk it over, and think it through, FIRST.

Then have the legislatures pass laws, or not, and have governors sign or veto them.

Y'know, like republican government has worked going back to, oh Magna Carta, or even Rome and Greece. If only for the novelty.

I went over a month in a SoCal ER with no likely COVID patients. I tell you, it was heaven. A crappy night with no COVID patients was like old times.

That ended last week. Just about 3 weeks behind the spike in cases, we just had, on my shifts alone, 3 slam-dunk sure-as-hell-got-it COVID patients. I had 2 of them personally, and one of them was the re-infection case I wrote about previously. When I left yesterday, we had a guy who literally desatted from 80% to 60% oxygen level in the two minutes it took to get him from the triage tent to an iso room inside. He was in his 50s.

The ICU nurse who died from my hospital got it from a patient who was uninfected, then exposed by an asymptomatic patient in a regular ward, brought it to the ICU, and infected 10 nurses there before they knew it was a COVID case. That nurse was in her early 50s, not her late 80s.

Times, in 25 years of my career, that happens with flu: never.

Not one goddamned time.

Not even a consideration.

So I'm getting pretty damned tired of ignorant @$$holes burping out pure undiluted horseshit quotes like the following:

Young (under 65) healthy people are not being killed by the doom—or much of anything else.

Yes, they are. On a regular basis.

Pointing out that they do so at a lesser rate does nothing to remove the lie from the quote above.

And noting that old people die more often is cold comfort to someone whose 30- or 40-year old spouse died because to pointy-headed number crucncher, they were just a rounding error, or "within the margin or error". If you don't have to look the survivors in the eye while their loved one's bodies are still warm but heading for room temperature, kindly STFU about things when you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Suppose I told you, with absolute statistical confidence, that if you ran red lights, you only had a 3% chance of getting bashed to hell, killing someone, or going to prison. 

Would you do it?

Suppose I told you that your meatloaf was 97% steak, and only 3% bullsh*t.

Would you eat it?

If you answered "yes", how much shit could I put in your meatloaf before you'd turn it down??

You can tell me that driving is hazardous, because of drunks and idiots. I'll still drive.

Mainly because I don't drive 100% of the day.

But unlike bar fights, liquor store robberies, or drunk driving deaths, everybody alive on the planet breathes, non-stop, 24/7/365, without any choice in the matter.

So unless you can live isolated, or hold your breath for years on end, or live in a spacesuit 24/7, that makes a respiratory ailment in widespread circulation one hell of a lot bigger concern than the other causes of death which, exactly as the CDC and Briggs note, knock off about 50,000 people every year in this country. 

Which makes statistical prognostications from someone like Briggs sound to me exactly like a fresh hot steaming pile of cowshit smells.

I can listen to statistical bullshit from people who don't know what they don't know, or I can believe my lying eyes, backed up by medical evidence, and common sense.

You guess where I'ma come down on that one.