Going, Going, ...

We've been enjoying the holiday season hereabouts, as well as working our regular job for most of the actual holidays. Tonight will be no exception. Hence a lot of periods of late where we've been content to coast, rhetorically speaking. Sure, we'd like to offer up something substantial to wrap up the year, but let's face it: it's been a craptastic year in nearly every way, and summarizing 2022 could be done more than justice simply by micing up the porcelain fixtures in the lavatory of any decent chili contest, and hit the nail squarely on the head by broadcasting the auditory highlights thereof. We are sure we are not alone in expressing our happiness at seeing the back end of 2022 finally going by in the parade of years.

There's also the fact that we've already put out 599 posts this year (counting this one), the second highest tally we've recorded in any year since launching this blog fourteen years ago, so we certainly haven't been slacking off in product. Based on views and comments, the shrieking poo-flinging anonymous baboon contingent notwithstanding, we think we've done more than our fair share for the year.

We'd rather save our efforts for when something moves us appropriately, the better for your humble scribe, and you our readers, to enjoy a holiday weekend. We may offer something more substantial after the calendar page turns, once we have more time for reflective contemplation. But for the moment, we are content to wish all concerned a Happy New Year, with hopes that it will turn out to be better for everyone than 2022 was, rather than worse. Time will tell about that all too soon.

We only hope that we have informed, entertained, or encouraged you from time to time this past year, and possibly given you something to think about that you wouldn't have otherwise done, and simply thank you all for dropping by this year, while aspiring to remain worthy of your visits next year.

Chicka-chicka!

Strong Message Follows

h/t Peter

Sounds like somebody forgot they lost a war over this. We hope they bandage their wedding tackle before they bleed to death. Or, not.

Wakanda Logic

F**k Off, Hoser!

 

As If...

 h/t WRSA

Touché.

And given a choice between "laundered" and "cleansed", just as with chocolate and vanilla, steak and lobster, or blondes and brunettes, most people would answer "Both, please."

Real-World Tips For Underground Partisans

 

Once again, Retard Trigger Warning: This is not a Ukraine post. It's a "What works in the real world" post. If you still can't figure that out despite the warning, you're not tall enough for the internet, and should go back to your PlayStation. Or, more likely, your barnyard animal See-N-Say.

Sunday Music: Merry Christmas

 

Chinese Craftsmanship Is An Oxymoron

Apparently, the culture that invented gunpowder and paper, and built the Great Wall, cannot grasp the concept of putting cord-locks on drawstrings. Even though they make the cord-locks too.

The list of other items with drawstrings upon which this bit of exorbitantly-priced high-tech do not appear is staggeringly long, even though the technology has existed since the 1970s.

Fortunately, I have a solution. For the exorbitant price of 25¢ extra@, I now own several pairs of sweatpants that will no longer self-deploy to the floor when I'm working out outside. For which providence, my neighbors and random automobile travelers on my route offer their thanks. 

It's a pity no one in China every had this sort of Reese's Peanut Butter Cup chocolate-and-peanut butter epiphany, and did it themselves, all on their own. Maybe in 50 or 100 years...

Imagine their shock in a couple of more centuries, when they perfect the concept of dipping the fraying ends of drawstring, paracord, shoelaces, etc. into Plasti-dip, too! Which, FFS, can even be found at China Inc.'s Horror Freight retail chain. 's magical mystery, clearly.

Common sense is a super power, I tell ya.

Worse Than You Imagine

 h/t WRSA

Today, CA gave you this:

The reality is far worse:

What's in your wallet? Finely-engraved toilet paper, in most cases.

Useful & Useless Kit

Moron Alert: This is not a Ukraine post. 

When things go sporky anywhere, these lessons will remain important. Especially in any situation where Uncle Sugar isn't flying in pizzas, porn, and beer by the metric fuckton to keep the troops happy. Learn a lesson.

Once An Eagle

Official Trademark Registered

...from the Dept. Of Calling A Spade A Spade

 

Sunday Music: Somebody's Baby

 

Jackson Browne's biggest hit, launched to the top of the charts by being on the soundtrack to Fast Times At Ridgemont High in 1982.

Vlad Wisdom

 

Just In Time For Christmas

My sincere thanks to you all.

1978 Flashback

 

Settled Science

 Mr. Garibaldi nails it. RTWT

Amen.

Mood attire.

If I lived in a Constitutional Carry state like AZ, I would not wear this t-shirt. It's how I would carry an actual Beretta 92 during December. It's only fair.

And no, Gun Karens, no one would take it away from me, because of the loaded MP-5 on a three-point sling.

And even if they did take it:

Oops. No bullets.

If you're going to go with something, commit all the way, right?

Whatever you pick, we wish all Happy Christmas viewing. I'd watch this, but I've got the entire 1st season of Reacher  to binge-watch instead.

Yippie Ki Yay.

'Tis The Season

 

I avoid pretty thoroughly any forays into retail establishments during December on general principle (the principle that I hate hordes of clueless knuckleheads), but the occasional trip has reminded me that the bellringers for Satan's Army are out, as if we forgot their announcements last year that they hate white people.

Feel free to copy the above, and print them out, to drop in the kettle, until the point sinks home with the woketards from last year, who were lightly tapped on the wrists, but maintain their employment with Satan's Army.

When SA fires them for cause, renounces their communist drivel, and shouts both those things from the rooftops, I will relent. Not before.

And The Beat Goes On...

 

Sunday Music: Shambala

Classic psychedelic groovy tune from 1973, released by two artists nearly simultaneously, which Three Dog Night, despite releasing it second, took to Number 3 before B.W. Stevenson, who released it first, could make it his own hit.

The Jokes Write Themselves

 

Any Minute Now - Day 274

 

And Now A Word From The Sponsors

 h/t WRSA

Elections have consequences. Especially fake ones.

Retard Science Pt. II: The 672' Tall Elephant In The Room

h/t Not Telling You, out of sheer pity 

Shooting Fish In A Barrel Dept.:

Hamfistedly fucktarded. QED

Look, kids, I get that science is hard. There's logic, math, and shit, right? But this is embarrassingly bad, and stupid.

First of all, as anyone who ever used a microscope knows, 25x is what you use to look at coins, stamps, currency, etc. And the mask in question, at 25x, would be a solid blue wall. Not a trawl net for whales.

That's a picture of a blue fishing net, FFS, or a volleyball net, not a picture of a surgical mask. If I had a standard microscope with a photographic function, I'd take the pic myself, just to prove it to you.

But here's a polyester surgical mask, at something like 500X, under an electron microscope.

Notice how this, at probably 20x greater magnification than the meme fraud, doesn't look anything like the pic of some guy's aunt's knitted afghan. That should be a cluebat.

Secondly, to be fair to the autists out there, that alleged (and recockulously so) "virus" in the picture is pure hokum and horseshit. Take a look at the lower right corner of the image. That horizontal white line is a scale bar, alleging a measurement of 2mm.

Using a standard ruler and calibrated eyeballs, that makes the "virus" in question in that picture something close to .28 millimeters, or 28,000 nanometers, across. Why this will become important will be explained presently. The scale of the fraud could best be explained by imagining an African bull elephant that was portrayed as being 672 ft. tall.

[UPDATE: My mistake. I dropped a zero. 0.28 mm would be 280 micrometers, or 280,000 nanometers, not 28,000. So that elephant would actually have to be 6,720' tall. That's an elephant over a mile tall. That's how recockulously huge that faked "virus" is. Entirely my fault for whipping up the math just before bed time. Mea culpa. But I still caught the math error before anyone else did, albeit four days later, including ahead of all the brave anonymous trolls. Pthththththththbt. :P]

For reference, St. Louis' Gateway Arch is only 630' tall.

So...anybody hereabouts seen any 672' tall elephants lately?

If anyone thinks they could even see a virus, which measures 20-500 nm (that's 2-50 10,000,000ths of a meter, or between 0.00000078 and 0.0000195 inches across) at a paltry 25x magnification, I've got a bridge for sale, cheap.

You could look it up.

More to the point, if you think viruses travel dry, like powdered cocoa, rather than encapsulated in huge globs of saliva, which the average surgical mask stops from flying outwards at between 100 times and 1000 times better than wearing nothing, I can get you a prime deal on beachfront property in South Dakota.

For reference, here's a picture of a human hair measuring 75 µm (micrometers) across, at 1000X magnification, taken by a scanning electron microscope. It's about the size of any of the fibers in the bundles in that actual mask pic above.

That would be 75,000 nanometers, i.e. you'd need to string 150 of the most monstrous viruses there are, end-to-end, like a pearl necklace, to reach the same width of that one hair, which means any one of them would need to be blown up another 200 times, for a combined total magnification of 200,000X, just to see one virus in a photo at the same size as that hair follicle.

Light microscopes (the kind that use simple light, that most of you think of as a microscope), are limited to a resolution of about 1000X.

The most advanced scanning electron microscopes can see fuzzy pictures of atoms, at magnifications of 10,000,000X.

Atoms of oxygen, scandium, and praseodymium at 10,000,000X.
Image © Cornell University

What passes for common sense and basic scientific understanding these days wouldn't have passed middle school health class a generation ago.

Whoever made the original meme, and the picture it's based on is a total fucktard, and is bullshitting the gullible at world-class levels. And the gullible are swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. Don't be That Guy.

And it only took me about 4 mouseclicks and three trips to the calculator app to work this out, in about a minute and a half. And maybe twice that to type this reply.

The enstupidization of the nation hasn't got far to go before the average IQ is on par with fungi. But it doesn't have to be this way.

And for the Common Core Posse, nota bene this has nothing to with masking pros and cons. As we pointed out in comments the last time, we already covered in blistering detail how and why masks work, but masking wouldn't ever work, years ago.

BONUS: Two years later, even the Babylon Bee has figured out this problem.

This is simply a plea for people who don't know what they're spreading on the net, to STFU until they actually know what they're talking about, if only to spare their dicks more cleat marks. This stuff isn't hard to find, if you make the effort.

If you can't be bothered, then as Will Rogers said, "Never pass up a good opportunity to shut up."

Or at the very least, be like Timmy:

Just Saying

When You're Retarded, Everything Sounds Like "Science"

 h/t 90 Miles From Tyranny

This kind of idiocy is why we're doomed:

Not even N95 masks work to stop COVID.

Which then links to an article from the Brown Underpants Institute pimping some cockamamie horsesh*t purporting to support the same recockulous contention.

Which finally links to the actual study, concocted by midwits, and published by actual halfwits, in the Annals Of Internal Medicine.

You can read the study yourself.

For the TL;DR crowd, allow me to summarize.

One group was people who sometimes have access to N95 masks.

The control group did not.

Lo and behold, the rate of COVID among both groups is roughly equal.

Therefore, N95s offer no additional protection.

QED, if you were one of the two co-stars of Dumb and Dumber.

What they didn't do was study people who wore N95 masks 24/7, even while sleeping.

They didn't study the function of N95 masks themselves.

They studied people who sometimes had access to N95 masks.

Natzsofast, Guido.

Let's put it another way.

Suppose you wanted to test whether parachutes work better than nothing.

But you didn't drop 50 people suitably equipped with a parachute, versus throwing 50 random convicts wearing just boxer shorts out of a perfectly good airplane at 10,000', and compare the results for each group to determine whether parachutes worked as advertised. Oh, no, bucko. That would be too easy.

What you did instead, was study people in the 82nd Airborne Division, who sometimes had access to parachutes.

And then compare the death rate to, say, the 1st Armored Division, who don't.

If somebody in the 82nd Airborne dies in a car crash, it's those fucking worthless parachutes.

Fell off a cliff, without a chute? Those damned worthless parachutes.

Shot by a jealous husband? Another parachute fail.

Died from drinking to the point of respiratory arrest, on a three day liberty in Fayetteville? Those damned parachutes again.

Drilled into your head with a hammer drill and a 1" bit? Parachutes don't work for you, either.

Stop me when the penny drops for you.

That's the sort of grant-funded gold-plated fucktard-driven "research" the shit-for-brains editorial staff at AOIM printed, with a straight face.

FFS, those mouth-breathing shitheads even told you they were this transparently stupid right up front. This is like scooping baby shit out of a diaper, and putting sliced bananas next to it and whipped cream on top at Baskin Robbins, and telling you it's ice cream.

And you eating it.

And then someone with no idea how actual science works reads the headline, which tickles their confirmation bias like a lesbian's vibrator running on plutonium, and we're off to the races.

Hint For The 80-IQ Booger Eaters

You can't test something by looking at the results among people who aren't using it 24/7/365.

If you want to test seatbelts, you test them by people wearing them versus people not wearing them, while they're actually driving.

You do not lump in the deaths of all people from 187 other causes, compared to people who ride busses with no seatbelts, and use them to prove seatbelts don't work.

This is so fucktardedly simple it's embarrassing to even need to mention it, but the general IQ, let alone science sensibility, has sunk so far, it's like taking the "Remove Shirt Before Ironing" warning, and making it a class for college credit.

And it's now percolated up to people in the blogosphere with less sense about that than God gave a jackass.

That whoever pimped this wasn't taken out behind the building and shot, or tarred and feathered, is why society as you know it is doomed, and that includes people so jaw-droppingly stupid as to reprint it at face value.

For the Pedantically Stupid (You know who you are):

It may have escaped your notice, but this is not an argument for or against the efficacy of any mask for any purpose. It's an argument against bullshit being perpetrated as science, and average idiots too stupid to tell the two apart.

But thanks a pantload in advance for proving why it needed to be addressed, thanks to your Common Core education, as any number of anonymous comments are likely to prove beyond all doubt.

Warning Shot

h/t WRSA

Word to your mother.

Thoughts: 

1) RTWT.

2) Military community? Near Ft. Bragg? And the brass still approved of a drag show? Gee, the targeted nature of the response suggests that someone involved, perhaps some sort of "quiet professionals", might maybe have a wee bit of familiarity with the CARVER matrix. As YOU should.

3) Padraig's "The South" should be understood to be pretty much any rural area "south" of Canada, anywhere from eastern Washington State, and down about as southerly as Key West.

4) The incident further suggests that if a repeat performance is attempted, the next time, the transformers that get shot won't be the ones mounted on telephone poles.

5) But they might be the ones found hanging from telephone poles afterwards.

UPDATE: A) Read the comments hereafter.

B) Note the WRSA follow-up, as the draconian response by TPTB in that county achieves exactly the sort of radicalization they'd like to tamp down.

Well-played, Deputy Fife, et al. You reach for that one bullet, and see what happens Right Of Bang. It will not turn out the way you might have hoped.

Popcorn and drinks inbound.

Sunday Music: Number One

 

Today's pick comes to you from prolific no-hit wonder Chaz Jankel, courtesy of the soundtrack to 1985's Real Genius. Totally 80s.

Dear Fran,

 Re: The Question

It's nobody's first choice. But it's the only choice that's going to work.

You get the liberty you'll fight for. No more, and no less.

Best It's Been All Year

 

RIP Christine McVie

Aged 79, in hospital after a brief illness, with her family in attendance. Perfect singer, perfect song. Her maidean name: Perfect. She used to sing this at the end of every Fleetwood Mac performance, and Mick and John would listen off-stage, in tears. This time, as this final curtain rings down, it's millions of fans around the world.

It Had To Be Said

 h/t Divemedic

RTWT

Shocked! Shocked, I Say!

The Usual Gang Of Idiots are astonished that anyone could think the Russian Army has failed, repeatedly, because of a centuries-long practice of both corruption, and official lying to cover it up, and suffering real-world consequences when they face an actual opponent willing to contest the struggle. (They should look up how well this systemic drawback served Russia from Sept. of 1941 until 1943, or from 1914 until the Russian Revolution.)

As the video above belabors, this is hardly a new thing, and once this became more than a 3-day war, and Russian leadership, political and military, realized they'd been caught believing their own press releases, Reality started bitch-slapping them around pretty hard.

The cardinal problem is that modern combined-arms warfare is the ultimate trust-based system, and it depends on brutal honesty to make decisions, penetrate what Von Clausewitz called "the fog of war", and overcome its "friction" in order to achieve victory. (In American forces, "friction" is called Murphy, and he's a sonofabitch to the foolish or careless, with the subtlety of a JDAM dropping in your foxhole.)

Commanders, as the video notes, don't get perfect God's-eye-view intelligence, at least not until it's too late to help, in most cases. So they have to be flexible, and at some point, if they want to win, they have to trust downwards, and let lesser ranks at each level have the freedom to work the problem in order to win. But the reports back up the chain have to be scrupulously truthful to inform decisions, logistics, and follow-on actions.

One Courtney Massengale being the douche he is fusterclucks the whole system. One fouled up company screws up a whole attack. And when units don't know what they don't know, think they know it all, and believe their own press releases, the outcome is generally unforgiving, and people die with surprised looks on their faces.

The Russian army is made up of an entire hierarchy of Courtney Massengales, bottom to top, and they haven't faced a near peer since 1945. And all of NATO, with 20 years in the sand box for combat ops experience, has been feeding first rate intel to Ukraine, while the Russians can't even organize getting fuel to the vehicles on the attack, or socks and boots to their men at the training depot. That's third-world level competence, right there.

Russia has spent eight months proving that to the world, day after day.

And the certified idiots yapping about "any minute now" sound like Hitler in the bunker, ordering units to attack that don't exist. Except less sane than that.

Potemkin Military: Chapter 2,075

 Like We Keep Telling You Dept.:

Behold! Russian military excellence explained, in 20 minutes:

Fielding as front-line gear such things as 130-year-old bolt action rifles, pot metal and foam body armor, cardboard and plastic helmets, broke-dick 60-year-old rust-bucket tanks, and endless further examples of Russian endemic corruption, manufacturing mendacity, and bureaucratic incompetence all combine to explain Russia's underwhelming military performance since February. It also explains where those Putin-crony oligarchs with mega-yachts found the dough. And belatedly, why, with a nominal 5:1 advantage over NATO in tanks at the height of the Cold War, the Russians still felt inferior and under-armed. It was because they knew 80% of those tanks were vaporware, and the 20% they did have other than the annual May Day Parade dog-and-pony show examples were total p.o.s.

The main differences between Putin-philes and Cubs fans are that once every 108 years, Cubs fans have something to cheer about, and the Cubs never tried to take over Indiana.

If Mack Sennett had written the script for the Moscow Military Morons, he couldn't have done any better serial comedy.

I'm Sure It's Just Wild Coincidence

 

Just a random anecdotal sample of patients over the four-day:

58♀  Stroke-that wasn't-a-stroke, Dx with Bell's Palsy - Vaxx x3

61♂ Sudden cardiac arrest, massive coagulopathy - Vaxx x 3

15♀ Chest pain x 2 months - Vaxx x 2

42♀ New onset Bell's Palsy - Vaxx x2

24♂ chest pain, elevated troponin - Vaxx x 2

Total ER-wide COVID patients - 1:  94♀ - Vaxx x 3, slight SOB, totally stable

Total ER-wide unvaxxed COVID patients - 0

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, when my vaxxed co-workers start dropping. Oops. too late:

One nurse, on shift: 36♂ Chest pain, tachycardia, elevated BP, became a patient mid-shift. Vaxx x 3.

That's after screening out any cases where meth or any other illicit substance use was onboard as a factor. I also don't know what my co-workers dealt with, so that's only my 4% of our total patient load.

And we're just one hospital in the county, seeing maybe 2% of the daily patient load.

Nothing to see here; move along.

Looks like I'll have job security here until I'm 90.

FTR, pre-COVID, a diagnosis of Bell's Palsy happened maybe once a month in any ER I've worked in the last quarter century. Currently, it's daily to every other day. Wee uptick, wot?

AFAIK, the staff is about 25% unvaxxed nurses, but there's not a single unvaxxed doc. Gonna be a bitch until they start training pureblood doctors, from a vastly reduced pool, maybe a decade on from now, once we start losing docs.

Factor that into your Boogaloo calculations, kids. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Sunday Music: Use Me

Rock and Roll Hall Of Famer Bill Withers' classic 1972 funk hit that reached #2 nationwide.
 

Latest Polling Data

Life's Simple Pleasures

Hours of fun, for the price of a big lunch.

 

X-Box Call Of Duty vs. Real Deal

 

Happy Thanksgiving

 

We will be working as a lifeguard in the shallow end of the gene pool most of the weekend, so posting is expected to be light, and hopefully light-hearted.

In which vein we offer our annual favorite TV moment ever, which still cracks us up as much as the night we saw it, when first broadcast. Enjoy.

That's Cheating!

 

New DNC Fundraiser

h/t Odd Job

 

Saw the original at the link this morning. It was almost perfect for a meme, but like the main subject, it needed to be punched up. So to speak. So I fixed it.