The Federalist Beclowns Itself

 

Masktardation is a thing, and it cuts both ways.
Don't be a masktard.

Some blogs, even ones which we visit and pass along content here, apparently either desperate for content, and/or overcome by pathological levels of confirmation bias, go dredging old news to come up with that content. (Kids with a blog, we beseech you earnestly, don't do this. It rarely goes well, and will nearly always  blow up in your face.) Kill your own meat, kids, and eat it fresh, not months-old. Case in point:

The Federalist has now breathlessly announced that Kung Flu is an "airborne" virus. Based on the pronouncements of "medical experts" (our emphasis, with appropriate derision) from the Communist News network, CNN.

Firstly, when you're listening to any of the usual gang of five-star gold-plated idiots at CNN, you deserve what you get, and even the fucktards at The Federalist who pointed at that bunch of @$$clowns should have known better than to go there, yet away they went.

Secondly, much like that term in a military context, the designation of a virus as "airborne" has actual criteria, which Kung Flu does not meet, and has never met thus far. It's a virus transmitted by droplet transmission and contact transmission. (And nota bene, gentle reader, that the @$$clowns at CDC and numerous sites have deliberately hazed and clusterfornicated up all those definitions in their ceaseless efforts to karenize Kung Flu into the Virus From Hell; I had to go all the way to that bastion of accuracy, Wikipedia, which was the seventh or eighth listed definition for "airborne" transmission, to get an accurate and correct definition that hadn't been completely and purposely fucked up to make Kung Flu fit that mold, which it does not meet to date.) 

For reference: "Airborne or aerosol transmission is transmission of an infectious disease through small particles suspended in the air." (Emphasis mine, for a reason.)

Briefly, something like TB is airborne. The bacteria wafts around and floats in air for prolonged periods of time (we're talking half an hour to hours) after mere exhalation, let alone coughs or sneezes. This is what makes TB or any airborne disease such a royal PITA, medically and epidemiologically. One person with TB can infect dozens in a restaurant or movie theater in a few minutes' time, and did before antibiotics, and still do. Which is why places where TB is endemic and widespread, like slam-packed Asian nations, are places where wearing a cloth surgical mask over the nose and mouth is a daily thing going back decades. (We'll return to tht point momentarily as well.)

But then, the dutiful Karens at Wikipedia, not content to leave the science alone, have gotten into the moving goalposts act, which is what happens when high school and college "experts" are left to edit any repository of knowledge, with all the experience of Gilligan playing with plastic explosive:

"Airborne transmission traditionally has been considered distinct from transmission by droplets, but this is incorrect." - same Wikitardia article 

With a footnote that links directly to some hogwash entitled "COVID-19 has redefined airborne  transmission".

By the numbers:

1) Airborne transmission is, is, IS distinct from transmission by droplets. If you have a plant mister, you get this. Blast a mist of aerosolized water into the air, and there's a mist cloud there, briefly. Unlike, e.g. tuberculosis bacteria, that vapor cloud isn't there very long. (For instant proof, try that on a hot day.)

2) COVID-19 didn't "re-define" airborne transmission, but jackholes trying to make COVID-19 do something which it manifestly does not do, have changed the definition of "airborne" to suit their purpose, by first ass-raping the English language and medical definitions.

QED

Language doesn't work like that, especially in science, versus in political advocacy.

Language, especially medical and scientific, is not
fungible, despite the earnest opposing desires of
crack-smoking Leftards.

For those with military training, it's the difference between getting hit with nerve gas, versus by a projectile. If you're standing in someone's cough- or sneeze-spew cone, you're being hit with a droplet. It's a projectile. If you walk into a cloud of VX, you're getting hit with something airborne. And minute sneeze particles hanging about for a few minutes is not the same as something that lingers for hours. Period.

But wait, there's more.

Then, our heroes, both the blog in question, and The Federalist, not content with that much fail, go far beyond stupid, to recockulous.

"Joe Biden’s COVID-19 adviser Dr. Michael Osterholm similarly agreed that wearing masks is “largely” nonsense and that “trying to stop the flu [another respiratory virus] is like trying to stop the wind.”

Point of Order: So CNN "experts" weren't stupid enough, now you're going to reference Joe Biden's "science adviser"?!? Well-played, soopergeniusii.

And then point to a "meta-analysis". Which isn't a clinical study. It's a study of other clinical studies.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

If you do a meta-analysis of physics studies, published by Einstein, Fermi, Richard Feynman, and Sir Isaac Newton, you might have something worth reporting. If instead you do a meta-analysis of studies published by Gilligan, Goober from Mayberry, Inspector Clouseau, and Baldrick from Blackadder, well, not so much.

Because you lump all the studies in together, and assume that their methodology wasn't hugely suspect, and that their results are repeatable.

Put another way: Exactly how much straight horsehsit are you okay with being cooked into your meatloaf?

Now bear in mind that most of the "studies" are pure horseshit, and re-answer the question.

That the overwhelming bulk of such studies are results that are totally unreproduceable has been an open secret in research science for two decades. SiG revisits this topic frequently, and it's gotten worse than 70% bullshit, year after year. It's something like 90%+, when last I looked. "Meta-analysis" sweeps all that under the rug into a nice hidden shitball of fail.

That's just the overall problem. Next, there's methodology.

IOW, if you want to study something, you have to account for all variables. ALL variables. Ideally, you want to get down to studying just one. Hopefully, the exact one you're hypothesizing about.

For instance, if you want to know the exact temperature at which water freezes, you do at testing at 14.7 psi, I.e. atmospheric average pressure at sea level. Otherwise, when someone tries to replicate your data in Denver, it won't work. You standardize ambient humidity at, e.g., 50%. Or else someone in Panama, at 99% humidity, and someone in Anchorage in January, when humidity is 2%, are going to fail to get the same results, and thus doubt your "proof". And you use absolutely pure sterilized ionized water, with 0% salinity, otherwise, someone trying seawater, or sediment and bacteria-laden swamp water, are going to announce loudly and publicly that your research is horse cobblers. So then, with only the ambient water temperature a factor, at standard sea level pressure, and 0% salinity, you freeze water 100 times, and it keeps coming to 32° F. time after time after time, and you've got something you can publish.

And, for bonus points, if you get random other numbers, you've failed, but you've discovered a hidden variable, an Unknown Unknown, and your new job is to find that little bastard, and track down the Truth. This is why Edison tried and failed hundreds of times to invent a working lightbulb, until he'd weeded out all the variables, and it finally worked.

But grant-beholden scientists nowadays especially are too lazy for that. It's too hard; they know they're right, so they skip a few steps. And when someone checks their experiment, and it cannot be reproduced, it's so much crap. But the "scientist" who did the original experiment has "proved" that asbestos is harmless, and smoking causes no health problems, so the building material supplier or tobacco company who funded their "experiment' pays out, and they cash the check, and never look back. Have lab coat, will falsify data for cash.

Enter advocacy government.

Global warmism/climate change. Or gender dysphoria. And now, coronatardation and COVIDmania.

Suddenly, you're "testing" masks never designed to protect the wearer, and - mirabile dictu! - "masks don't work". (Somebody call Pasteur, Lister, and Semmelweiss, and tell them it's not germs, it's bad air floating in the phlogiston that cause diseases. I'll wait over here.)

There may be others in recent times, but I'm aware of precisely one proper study of the effectiveness of cloth and surgical face masks, used as intended, using documented infected persons, in a study that lasted years, and controlling for the only variable that matters: does the virus get out?

TL;DR: 

No mask - 100 to 1000 coronavirus viral particles land in a viral particle chamber in front of their face after 30 minutes.

Bog-average surgical mask - 1 viral particle escaped. IOW, a 99.9% to 99.99% prevention of viral load down to 5 microns or less was achieved over 30 minutes' exposure.

None of the studies referenced by The Federalist tested that. They tested whether the masks protect the wearer. [Pro-tip, fucktards: they are neither designed nor intended for that, since ever. You could look it up.] This is like testing parachutes to see how many people wearing them didn't land on the earth. Fucktard Science 101 level error there, geniuses.

They tested whether the masks stopped everything, for unknown long periods of time, e.g., during extended surgical procedures.

In one "study" cited, they found that wearing a double t-shirt mask increased the level of virus expelled above the level transmitted by wearing nothing. [Pro-tip: if you can't figure out why this is prima facie recockulously impossible, try putting a t-shirt over the gas nozzle at the local station, and see if that delivers more gasoline into your car's tank. IOW, you can't exceed the results of no mask, under any circumstances, unless you're having people blow through a fully colonized petri dish of germs grown for days beforehand.]

When a test succeeded exactly as expected, it was labelled as "apples and oranges".

We could go on and on, as these assclowns have, but their point is pointless.

When you keep pointing to retards, and bullshit studies, and then act like Little Jack Horner pulling a plum out of your ass, you're just an idiot.

When you can't account for a thousand other things, like people wearing their masks on their chin, or touching everything with gloves, and then taking those gloves off with their teeth to touch their cellphones, or don't wash their nasty hands after they crap and rub feces all over them and then finger-bang everything they touch afterwards with their poo, the problem isn't masking or not, it's societal retardation. And dozens of variables you forgot to control out of the experiment.

Masks Work - As Designed

A surgical or cotton mask isn't something you wear to protect yourself. Write that on your hand with a Sharpie in case you're too stupid to remember that. You wear one to protect other people from you. For the same reason you put a diaper on a baby's ass. It's not there to protect the baby from shitting himself. If this needs further explanation, you're not smart enough to be let out in public without the chaperone from the short bus field trip, and you can probably tell the class what the glass on its windows tastes like.

If your aim is self-protection, you need to be wearing a properly fitted and fit-tested N95, or better. Got facial hair that prevents a proper seal? You're f**ked. Haven't been fit-tested? You might be f**ked. Don't know how to put it on right and seal it properly? You're f**ked. That's why the surgeon general correctly told you not to bother with an N95, unless you're going to do the homework necessary. Only afterwards did CNN and Fauci retardedly conflate that down to "masks don't work".

Anybody who was ever in a military or police tear gas training chamber exercise knows what I'm talking about here.

People too stupid to understand that were very entertaining to those of us in those chambers who watched them spaz out and lose their shit, choke, and puke, because they didn't pay attention. Don't be That Guy.

What Masks Won't Do

An N95 won't protect you from anyone if you wear it wrong, or it doesn't fit and seal.

A surgical or cotton mask isn't there to protect you from anyone else.

Any mask is pointless if you aren't in close proximity to the infected, and you aren't infected yourself.

In your car, by yourself, wearing a mask? You're a fucktard. Walking outside, or exercising, by yourself, with a mask on? You're a fucktard. In a population that isn't infected with COVID, flu, or anything else, and wearing a mask? You're a fucktard.

The problem comes with that last part: knowing whether you, or anyone else, is infected. Want to go mask-free? ROWYBS. And so will everyone else around you. Which works fine (just like with VD and AIDS, and merrily sport-f**king people.) Until it doesn't. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I've been wearing masks of all levels, and putting them on people, professionally, for decades. They piss me off mightily. But if you cough or sneeze or spit, fuck your comfort. And if I have to be around you, and you could give me something nasty, or lethal, fuck my comfort too. Harden the fuck up.

When enough people play stupid games, the professional jackasses in politics feel honor-bound to nanny them.

When they have a spring-loaded fuck-with-everyone-and-control-their-every-waking-activity setting, then it becomes the shitshow we've lived for the last two years and counting.

And when intelligence is a constant, but the population is increasing, the mean IQ is dropping like CNN's ratings.

Bloggers and the usual gang of science-impaired idiots at The Federalist should probably stop hitching their wagons to the fucktards at CDC and ABCNNBCBS. Unless you don't want people to be able to tell the difference.

Related: GMTA. RTWT.