My epicaricacy at the too-long-delayed demise of this anti-2A bitch knows no bounds. No word on when her broomstick will be exhibited across the state to confirm this joyous news.
Nonetheless, the world is now DiFi-free, one of the greatest blessings that could befall this state, and the republic. I'm hoping that, before she slipped into a terminal coma, someone whispered in her ear that Judge Benitez overturned the large-capacity magazine ban.
h/t CW
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| Apollo XII LEM pilot Alan Bean. November 20, 1969. Photo by Mission Cdr Pete Conrad, Oceanus Procellarum Base |
CW, at his daily timewaster blog, provides a daily dose of fascinating and interesting photographs on an eclectic and universal range of subjects. They're occasionally brilliant finds, and always worth a look (his Friday Open Road collections are particularly enjoyable). But continuing yesterday's rant about Village Idiots, the ceaseless Fucktardariat of the internet can't help itself in commenting far beyond their grade level, even on simple photographs, and as usual, the best worst offenders are the Happily Anonymous, as this exemplar from the head of his pledge class demonstrates:
AnonymousSeptember 27, 2023 at 6:52 AMAlso reflected along the top of Bean's visor is a row of Klieg lights providing the background lighting effects.
My reply, which the bloghost has elected to remove:
"Riiiiight, soopergenius.
Couldn't possibly be a laminated curved multi-layered helmet visor to prevent getting fried from heat or radiation with no protective atmosphere and outside temps of >250° F. on the moon's surface.
Also, if anyone were using "a row of klieg lights" visible in a visor at close range, they'd create a commensurate row of multiple shadows, obvious even to Stevie Wonder, which would totally discount the possibility that it was lit by a single incredibly bright light source 93,000,000 miles away, measuring 864,000 miles in diameter (a paltry 400x larger than the Moon). {BTW, if anyone was stupidly trying to replicate that with multiple basic stage lights, they'd be smart enough to cluster them, horizontally and vertically, as close together as possible, then place a giant diffusion filter in front of them to create a single glowing light source, and get rid of the 9 shadows your clueless explanation would create. As if they were simultaneously too stupid to notice the exact artifact you just did, and airbursh it out with 1969 technology commonly available in Playboy.}
But what do I know? I've only worked on hundreds of film and TV sets, and seen that multiple shadow effect happen for real as many times.
I'll take "People Who Flunked Basic Gradeschool Physics" for $500, Alex.
Please, take the cleats out of yer junk, tie a tourniquet around your weenie, go back to 4th grade science class, and pay attention this time, especially when they explain light and shadows, and the relative sizes of the sun and the moon.🙄
But thank you for staying Anonymous.
Don't make me make a post out of you."
Too late; I couldn't help myself.
And, for the hardcore fucktards, NASA did a flyby in 2011 with high-res photography of all six Apollo landing sites:
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| Apollo XII landing site, Sea Of Storms |
FFS, you shit-for-brains assclowns, you can see their goddamned footprints in the lunar soil, 42 years later!
This aside from the fact that Apollos 11, 14, and 15 each deployed laser reflectors on the lunar surface, enabling scientists and astronomers on earth to bounce a laser beam off the lunar surface, and use the speed of light and a pocket calculator to determine the exact distance to those points on the lunar surface, because someone set those laser reflectors in place - in person - from 1969-1971.
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| Lunar Laser Reflector, Tranquility Base, July 1969 |
All this happy horseshit never cropped up until the release, in 1978, of the godawful piece of cinematic shit, Capricorn One, and for which cinematic crime against humanity - despite his other work - director Peter Hyams should have been punched right in the dick for between seven and ten years, daily.
Before that monstrous piece of feces was foisted on a gullible and largely witless public, no one uttered the risible speculation that the moon landings were anything but legitimate as given.
Since five seconds after that film to the present day, no one with a middling or lower IQ can conceive of the fact that that they were anything but an enormous con, despite literal mountains of evidence and the overwhelming tsunami of common sense piled up to the contrary. This general idiocy has served to provide people like Art Bell and George Noory employment, food, and rent money for decades on late night radio, which, along with reality talk shows in the daytime has substituted in modern society for what we used to consign solely to mental institutions and circus sideshows.
You can judge whether a person has an IQ over 80 or below it, using the Capricorn One Test, to within an accuracy error of less than 1%:
Did America land men on the moon? Yes. Over 80 IQ, every single time.
Did America land men on the moon? No. Moron, every single time.
Wilder: The Kids Aren't Alright: Mental Health
Sorry JW, but you're looking through the wrong end of the telescope here.
"44% of high school students feel persistent sadness or hopelessness"
So, have you talked with current high school students?
That only 44% feel persistent sadness or hopelessness tells me that at least another 40% have a vastly inflated opinion of themselves and their abilities.
They can't read (or write) a note in cursive. They can't tell time on a dial-face timepiece. They don't know their own phone number. They can't make exact change for a $10 order without taking off their shoes, and calling two of their lifelines.
For F--K SAKE man, I see this Every. Single. Day!
This is simple sh*t we were taught to do by first grade, and these are high school juniors and seniors. Or for that matter, freshmen and sophomores in college, AKA 13th and 14th grade.
They can't write a book report, can't construct a coherent paragraph, can't multiply to 12x12 without a TI-84 and seven lectures on higher mathematics, and they treat the ability to sit through a 90-minute movie without talking or checking their phones like it's a freaking Jedi Masterclass.
They can tell you what Taylor Swift wore to the Video Music Awards, but they couldn't pick Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, or the Parthenon out of a line-up.
They can't put any three basic major historical events in order, find any city, state, or country on a globe (even if you spot them a hint of which continent it's on), or in most cases, find their own asses with both hands, an anatomical chart, and a rear-view mirror.
If you stranded them 5 miles into the desert between a rotary dial phonebooth and a stack of change, and a gassed-up car with a stick shift and the key in the ignition, 99% of them would die right there of starvation and exposure.
They should all be flunked back to kindergarten at their high school graduations, and then retry each level until they attain mastery at an 80% score. About 1% would be done in a week. For the rest, they'd be there seven days a week from 6AM to noon. Then they'd be given not a diploma, but a pair of stout leather work gloves, to dig ditches, shovel shit, and sort garbage at the dump from noon until 8PM, to earn room and board - in a tent, fed the same menu prison inmates get - to take them permanently out of mommy and daddy's tender embraces. No cell phones. No calculators. For anyone not advancing any grade level after two tries, the daily beatings would commence. Every fall they'd replace migrant workers picking vegetables in the fields until they graduated fair and square. In the winter they'd shovel snow on the roads by hand, and in summer they'd be spreading tar and filling potholes, until they finally graduated. Then and only then would they be granted the full privileges of citizenship. They could escape only upon graduation, or by enlistment in the military (the Air Force wouldn't count, and they don't take non-h.s. grads anyways). Those choosing the military option would not be allowed out of the military until they'd earned at least a GED.
When they finally graduated from one or the other for real, they'd have something about which to feel happy and proud, probably for the first time in their lives. Universities and community colleges would cease to offer remedial primary and secondary school education, and go back to teaching actual college subjects full-time.
Until something close to that happens, most high school students should be told they're the exact idiots they are 24/7/365 until they can disprove it, with a properly-footnoted 20-page hand-written research paper, and deliver a defense of that thesis before the faculty of the local high school.
The numbers you speak of come from the most mollycoddled bunch of unskilled lackwits in the history of the world. (We can talk about the mass floggings and/or tar-and-featherings of the teachers and administrators who helped create them at some point in the future.)
Fans of science fiction know these kids as H.G. Wells' Eloi.
Anything which makes them feel like exactly the oxygen thieves they are is a good thing.
Anything which whips and beats them towards the finish line of improving that situation and becoming functional human beings is even better.
Dept. Of We Told You So: RTWT It isn't hard to be less of a frothing lunatic than Ann Barnhardt (the bulging eyes should be a cluebat there) but there's not a single thing in what she says in this piece we can disagree with.
The first half of this video simply shows another badged lying sack-of-shit @$$hole who desperately needs to be unemployed, prosecuted, and imprisoned.
Which is about as rare in this country as grass lawns.
I can count half a dozen felonies and misdemeanors Officer Jackboots committed in a few minutes, and there's no reason why he hasn't been fired and frog-marched to jail, already, except for institutionalized corruption and brazen bureaucratic stonewalling of the obvious.
Sleep tight, America. Officer Douchebadge is on the case.
From the thirdish iteration of Jefferson Starship, the newly Grace Slick-less group's hard-rocking Top 20 hit from 1979.
I'm currently working under my 20th CPR card, my 15th ACLS and PALS cards, and - thank a merciful Heaven - only my 8th TNCC cert, because that only has to be re-certified every four years, rather than every two. So in the pages of the latest edition of that last manual is where I'll be for most of the next couple of days. Proctored by someone who's been in the business for a third as long as I have, and stopped doing hands-on nursing of any sort five years ago. Sideways, with a rusty chainsaw to that nonsense.
I get that things change, and I'm fine with having initiates learn this the first time or two. The rest is something that could be covered in an online video and check-off box, unless someone has notably effed up for reals. Think of how jackassical it would be to force your plumber to re-learn plumbing every few years, after they'd been doing it for a career.
Beyond a certain point, you're not teaching, least of all anything really new; you're just flogging a dead horse in pursuit of rent checks for the certification agencies and entities, most of whom haven't practiced anything medical at the bedside with real patients in decades.
So who's kidding who here?
Let's cut the bullshit, and just call this a Ponzi scheme, powered by grift and shakedowns, from The State to The Agency to The Hospital to The Department, and just let me write you a suitable check to leave me the hell alone, and tell you to fuck right off and let me get back to doing my job without the Good Idea Fairies and Clipboard Commandos justifying their existence at the expense of both my precious time and earned-by-sweat-and-blood paycheck. Would $50 be enough to make that pay off all around?
Oh, sorry. A little too on-the-nose there, was I?
Back to the textbook...
Divemedic has a couple of relevant posts. Go and read them, if you haven't already.
My 2¢ to those who defend the police and policing we have, and have had, for some good time:
---------
"The media lies" is a cop out. (No pun intended.)
We know - because we've seen the videos - what happens when a citizen screws up; anything from a quick concrete tune-up up to and including sidewalk execution (and frequently justified).
But when it isn't, the commensurate number of videos and stories of police officers getting walked out of their department like Chuck Connors at the opening of Branded,
and subsequently frog-marched into a squad car, convicted at trial, and ass-raped to death in prison afterwards should be similarly legion for the times when they screw up.
They are no such thing, nor anywhere close, because that almost never happens. You should police yourselves more harshly than the rest of us, but instead you don't do so, or do so barely at all, and only when the transgression is so egregious and virally seen as to be a virtual white-hot fireplace poker up administration's ass to push it forward.
And before Rodney King, it was twenty times worse.
The only thing that should be scarier than an ordinary citizen breaking the law, should be the spectacle of the mills of justice grinding an officer who's transgressed. Punishment should be draconian, and more fearsome than being kidnapped by drug cartels.
Instead, it's mainly wrist slaps, if it happens at all, and even then, mainly only honored in the breach. That's why departments have lists of officers with 10, 20, 50 verified major screw-ups, and even fired officers just drift to other departments, and rack up serial bad conduct rap sheets without the hammer falling until they kill somebody or make the national news, rather than being black-balled from the profession for life.
What sticks in everyone's craw isn't that the media gives cops a bad rap, it's that every police department in America uses the Catholic Church's example for dealing with child-molesting priests as their disciplinary model: sweep it under the rug, and pretend it never happened. The lump is now the height of Mt. McKinley, and that plan isn't working for you like it once did.
If it were otherwise, the blogs and YouTube videos of the hazing other officers would deliver, let alone official (metaphorical) floggings-around-the-fleet by management would be more numerous than the bad cop videos, by orders of magnitude.
That they aren't shows that the whole blue gang is in on the con, and the availability of anyone with a cell phone camera to be Paramount Pictures and CNN has shown the truth of the matter.
So has the dearth of officers going on strike for cleaner departments, or quitting and/or whistleblowing because they can't stand the corruption and mollycoddling of their fellow thugs and crooks in blue.
That behavior is what earns Divemedic's percentage: misprision of felony, accessory after the fact, criminal conspiracy. In the penal codes of 50 states and 7 US territories.
But apparently, they don't cover this in any police academy in the nation, except with a wink and a nudge.
(And telling me about one or two exceptions doesn't disprove the other two million that never happened. Statistics are a bitch like that.)
You guys are a blue gang, pure and simple, with a Mafia-like code of silence regarding in-house problems, from simple screw-ups to criminal conspiracies and organizational corruption, and when confronted, you shrug and mumble, and walk away. If nobody got caught, it never happened.
Frank Serpico remains a cautionary tale, from coast to coast, bottom to top, and even then, only for people old enough to remember the story.
That's why nobody trusts you, and why nobody likes you. Your entire profession has squandered any trust and integrity you ever had, collectively, and you'll never get that back, short of figuratively (or literally, at this point) putting the heads of defaulters on pikes at the doors of the station house.
That would be a good start. And I'm not exaggerating.
And at the rate things are going, the people - all of them, good and the bad - are going to start doing that for you, to drive the point well home, even knowing what that means for society for some good time. You're a cure that's become far worse than the disease.
That truth may hurt, but the sting doesn't disprove the thesis.
"90% of cops are bad" is wrong.
It's probably 9% too low.
Your profession has made its bed.
Very soon now, they're going to see what it feels like to lie in it.
And the entire society will pay.
It's always the people you trust the most who fuck you the worst, and stab you in the back the hardest.
Because they're the only ones who can.
Et tu, Flatfoot?
GMTA Dept.: Hot off the presses - Evolution Of The American Police State
Kenneth Branagh's first outing as Agatha Christie's brilliant sleuth Hercule Poirot was in Murder On The Orient Express in 2017, but was hopelessly overshadowed by the original 1974 film by Sidney Lumet, which was the last movie made of her works to gain Christie's full personal approval. Albert Finney was nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal, Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for it, and the flick is a cinematic classic.
Branagh followed that up by remaking Death On The Nile for a COVID-delayed 2022 release, this time comparing unfavorably with Peter Ustinov in a career tentpole role in the 1978 film, playing Poirot flawlessly in the first of six movies, three onscreen, and three for TV. Even Branagh couldn't compete with Peter Ustinov, David Niven, and Lois Chiles getting her head blown off half a dozen times in different flashbacks, and he probably shouldn't have tried.
This time, Branagh selected Christie's Hallowe'en Party as the novel to loosely base this film on in his third outing as Poirot, a book which no one else has adapted for the screen before. It was an excellent choice, and he has finally hit his stride.
If you're a fan of old Hollywood, and want to see a solid whodunit, perfectly selected for a Halloween season release, with a solid cast, clever plot twists, by a brilliant actor/director, and with none of the woketarded nonsense that infects currently and happily on-strike Hollyweird and every piece of crap they burp out, preferring instead great entertainment for your time and money, this is your movie.
Branagh's earlier attempts had him doing the role of Poirot well, but not superbly, and making decent remakes, but it wasn't anything like career-best work, certainly not up to his earlier standards, and comparing second-best even to the earlier versions.
A Haunting In Venice is more like his work back in his Henry V days, when at 29 he was rightfully described as the Orson Welles of the era, and for which film he was nominated for Oscars for both Best Actor and Best Director, back when the award denoted actual merit. If he keeps churning out adaptations of Christie's novels and playing Poirot like this, he will be back on that perch to stay.
Rating: ★★★★ - Enthusiastically recommended. And frankly, the best flick of the paltry four offerings we've bothered to see this year, to date. You should only go if you like good movies.
Vox: The US will lose the next war
Point Of Order:
Pvt. Hudson was all over this long before you figured it out.
FTR, when you write an article today, that could (and should) have been penned in 2000, you are the guy explaining the vulnerabilities of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor to sneak attack in a memo to the President.
In 1964.
Thanks for waking up, but this isn't a will question, it's a have already retrospective history. Folks already grok this, and had it pretty well figured out by our assholes-and-elbows bug-out from A-stan.
The memo is 23 years late. Might as well have sent it in the US mail.
h/t Pirates Cove
Chicago Considers City-Owned Grocery Stores To Replace Those Which Closed Because Of Crime
We rate this as highly unlikely.
Mainly because we cannot conceive of any government sitting still for deliberately creating an opportunity for you to steal from them, instead of the other way around.
h/t Earl of Taint
We love Earl's stuff, but we decided this one regarding Mittens needed to be cut a little closer to the bone.
First single released from Carole King's landmark 1971 album, Tapestry. This song made the Top 20, the album won King 4 Grammys, and spent more time on the charts (6 years) than any album before or since except for Dark Side Of The Moon.
h/t John Wilder
Wilder meme-piles on the above NYTimes nonsense (but we repeat ourself) at his place.
We drop a frag on anything still twitching after he's done:
Male what?
The words you strung together have some meaning individually, but collectively we don't know what you're talking about. In a "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are having an intellectual argument, and it sounds like some millenial's Furby collection speaking in a gibberish word salad while stray cats are giving birth" kind of way.
I suspect the best cure for male loneliness among the soy bois reporting it and who read the NYTimes is to knock that sh*t off, put that fishwrap back under the bird cage where it belongs, have a urologist re-attach your balls, and stop crying like a girl.
Chicks hate whiny crybabies who sit at women's feet looking for an answer to life's questions, they have no respect for them, and they replace them with actual men every chance they get. And when we say "every chance", well, we hate to be the one to break it to you if you thought they were really out with their friends five days a week, but it's time someone clued you in to why they aren't interested in you anymore except as a life support system for their credit card and a dog walker for their yappy little purse-mutt.
GTFO of the house, go shoot something, kill something, or build something (ideally, a solid brick BBQ for the animal you shot and dressed or the fish you caught and drove home from out in the wilds in your gas-guzzling 4WD pickup), and whichever you choose, generate enough carbon from your efforts to give Greta Thunberg a fit of apoplexy. When you get back, tell that whiny advice columnist you're staying with to turn off The Spew and make you a sammich.
And if she leaves you over that, be sure and tell her "Thank you!"
By the time she hits the wall, and realizes she's living in a middle-aged prison of box wine and cat hair long after her freshness date is a distant memory in life's rear-view mirror, and comes crawling back to you begging for a do-over, you'll be dating three Scandinavian stewardesses, and you won't be able to hear you ex's pitiful whinging over the sizzle from the BBQ, the scream of your power tools working on projects in your garage, the tune-up you're doing on the 4WD, or the screams of passion in your ear from Astrid, Helena, or Ingrid.
You're welcome.
{UPDATE: For those who just stumbled in here because of a link, and missed the epic week-long ass-walloping we just gave, especially like one commenter already, maybe you want to set the Wayback Machine to last week, and catch yourself up a tad, before you walk into a movie at the final scene. Maybe.
Raconteur Report: Sciency Isn't Science
Raconteur Report: Second Inning: Still a Shut Out.
Raconteur Report: The Slog Continues
Raconteur Report: Back To The Septic Tank Dig
Raconteur Report: Another Post-Purgatorium Perambulation
Raconteur Report: Poop Without End
Raconteur Report: Another Day In The $#!^ Mine
Raconteur Report: ♫I've Been Working On The Sh*tpile♬
Raconteur Report: Coffee Break's Over
Raconteur Report: Delving Into The Deep End Of The Septic Tank...
Raconteur Report: Bugler, Play Taps...
Because if you do, you won't be the Baby Duck who just woke up, plopped down here, and shit all over yourself because this discussion is completely new to you.
Just saying. We now continue with our program, already in progress...}
___________________________________________
So, how do we tell the difference between her epic bullshit, and actual information?
Just like with currency: When you handle actual bills, the counterfeit ones stick out instantly.
Actual mask performance study: Respiratory virus shedding in exhaled breaths and efficacy of masks
Abstract:
"We identified seasonal human coronaviruses, influenza viruses and rhinoviruses in exhaled breath and coughs of children and adults with acute respiratory illness. Surgical face masks significantly reduced detection of influenza virus RNA in respiratory droplets and coronavirus RNA in aerosols, with a trend toward reduced detection of coronavirus RNA in respiratory droplets. Our results indicate that surgical face masks could prevent transmission of human coronaviruses and influenza viruses from symptomatic individuals."
Aesop summary: They took 246 people, 123 of whom had actual viral illnesses, including 111 with seasonal corona virus. Had them cough for 30 minutes at a virus collection machine (actually named the Gesundheit-II). Counted how many viral copies were captured. Then repeated the experiment, exact same conditions, but with the actual infected individuals wearing a variety of masks.
Results: No mask = 10¹ to 10³ viral droplet particles collected. (For Common Core grads, that's 10-1000.)
10³ to 10/4th (sorry, there's no superscript 4) viral aerosol particles collected. (Common cores, that's 1000-10,000)
Wearing surgical or simple face masks = 0 to 10º viral particles collected. (For Common Core grads, that would be one. Not 1%. Just 1. Down to zero.)
For reference, via nasal swab samples prior to the experiment, the average person with corona virus had between 10,000 and 10,000,000,000 viral copies (that's 10 billion with a B) present on a single swab of the nasal mucosa. And always more in the nose than the throat. (See if you can guess why we think so poorly of lackwit idiots sticking their schnoozes out of their masks...)
Conclusion: With the average social distancing, having people wear masks provides a reduction in viral transmission 10x-10,000x or more better than wearing nothing. And as noted by actual study data, prevents any viral transmission onward from respiratory vectors.
BTW, the face masks did better with seasonal corona virus than they did with flu and cold viruses.
They didn't use test media, they used actual virus from infected people. They measured exposure for 30 minutes. They actually tested the masks' performance, they didn't test the infection rate for people who might be licking stripper poles or living with plague-monster rug rats, absent any protection at home. Not being total morons, they also didn't bassackwardsly test to see if the masks protected the wearers.
In short, they narrowed the test down to one variable: putting on a mask.
And that's all visible there, at the study link. You could look it up.
Blackjack for the dealer. QED
AFAIK, this is the only such test of actual face mask performance done, before, during, or after COVID, and Covidiocy. (If you can link to anything similar, please do so.) Like the lack of studies of hydrochloroquine or Ivermectin when it mattered, you can decide why that would be so.
We've already shown you 51 or more examples of how not to test what you're supposedly looking at. (Starting with the maxim: "Read the goddam study first!")
Now you see one example of how to do it right, using "Science, bitchez!"
That's why all the bullshit ceases, and unless you conduct the same test, and can't replicate it, and no one else can either, you have to STFU about whether or not "masks work". (Unless you're a moron. Which is punishment enough for one life.)
We repeat for The Usual Suspects from the short bus:
Masking Policy doesn't work, because people won't follow it. Children certainly won't, but also adults acting like children, or with the intellectual ability of a two-year old, in most cases.
For the hardcore fucktards, whose memory is shorter than their pecker, to a metaphysical certainty:
You weren't told to mask to protect yourself. If you heard that, or believed it, you're the idiot there. Don't feel bad: 20% of medical professionals, actual doctors, are thereby idiots too.
You weren't masking to stop all transmission of the disease. See the above if you thought otherwise.
You were wearing them to protect everyone else from you, because then, now, and always, we don't know who the asymptomatic spreaders are, so everyone is guilty until proven innocent where infection is concerned.
You were told to mask up when out and about amidst people indoors or in crowds (anyone wearing or enforcing wearing in bright sunshine, or travelling in cars, while alone, or in deserted places, is beyond fucktardedly stupid), to drastically slow the spread enough that a novel virus, with a worst-case 3% CFR, (which meant 97% of people would be just fine, as we told you, and told you, and told you) would not overwhelm all health care in the country, or any one region of it, simultaneously, while still allowing people out and about for necessary functions, like getting food.
It worked when people did it, but it was carried out for far too long, and it was an abysmal failure as a semi-permanent policy, both for reasons of sheer human cupidity and stupidity, and for a host of larger reasons, esp. when coupled with lockdowns of everything in perpetuity, starting with sheer economics, and moving to undermining the republic, and curtailing personal freedoms indefinitely.
Bitch about that to Heaven. It's true, and eminently and demonstrably bitchworthy.
But save the horseshit about "masks don't work". That's a fucktard's fuckwit line. Don't be one.
If you disagree, back it up with valid firsthand proof of what you're claiming; otherwise your confirmation bias and/or innate stupidity is yanking the bell on your Dunning-Kruger gene, and trying to drive the bus from the back row.
Masking policy depends, and depended, on near 100% compliance. One asymptomatic Gilligan being a Special Snowflake fucks the whole idea up for everyone, and did. And always would. And always will. Which is why it never will and never could work.
Like WE TOLD YOU, all the way back at the beginning.
In any pandemic, you're at the mercy of your own ability to self-isolate, times the number of Gilligans in society trying to fuck things up 24/7/365, because that's what Gilligans DO.
COVID showed that last to be about 50% of the population for any given day or place. Babies with a case of live grenades couldn't have fucked things up any better.
And TPTB were either criminally stupid for not knowing that would be the case, or criminally evil for knowing it and doing it anyways, because the worse they could jack life up for everyone, the better for stealing an election, and putting their boot on everyone's face forever.
The third- and fourth-order consequences of COVID are still fucking up everyone's life, day after day, and all the lava chunks from the initial explosion still haven't all landed. Starting with the biggest pieces of horseplop it inflicted upon us all, currently sitting in the Oval Office, and just down the hall from it.
Stop throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and focus on the actual realities, and biggest problems. Walking around with your underpants on your head and chanting "We're morons! We're united!" isn't getting anything useful accomplished.
Kindly knock that stupid shit off. You're mainly just pissing off people smarter than you, and sounding stupid while doing it.
47) AEIR jumps on their own dick with cleats, again
a) they understate the actual COVID CFR by a factor of 1500% (which is what happens when you shoot your mouth off six months into a three-year pandemic)
b) their sources for masking info are YouTube videos. No, really.
c) They claim that wearing a mask for one minute is toxic and incapacitating, despite literally millions of surgeons and OR staff over a literal century to prove exactly the contrary
They make a few good points on policy, and if they'd only confine their bloviation to their forte of economic, legal, and philosophical arguments, they wouldn't sound like jackasses out of their depth every time they try and make medical pronouncements.
What they either know, or can prove, about the utility of masks could be written inside a thimble with a Sharpie, and their papers haven't aged well, unless they were printed on 4"x4" squares of perforated tissue.
Open Letter's informative value in this discussion: nil.
48) Yet ANOTHER survey of other people's surveys, trying to extrapolate apples to oranges
Do original research, or go back to class, kids. This is like reading the newspaper and calling it "medical research". Just because you found 5, 10, or 200 people who failed to prove something, you don't get to take a vote, and elevate them to being Oracles of Truth. Maybe (usually) they're just lackwit fuckups who publish to justify a rent check.
As in 90+% of all research, especially medical.
The fact that they had to dig through 804 studies to find 6 they could call "qualified" should be a major cluebat up against the back of their pointy heads.
49) Oz article in the Sydney Morning Herald from 20 years ago
Srsly? Why not quote the NYTimes, FFS? Or The Daily Show? Or The Onion? GTFO of here with that horseshit.
50) Federalist article based on ONE STUDY, showing that face masks don't protect the wearer
Here's Your Sign:
No thought given to likelihood of transmission outside of school. Or from family. Or out and about away from school. This is like basing the effectiveness of seatbelts on a survey of "highway deaths" that includes fatalities of motorcyclists, pedestrians in crosswalks, and people on busses who died of heart attacks.
See if you can guess why something so patently retarded can't get peer review.
Applicability to mask effectiveness: nil.
Well, butter my ass and call me a biscuit! A total of 51 studies examined.
Total that shed any light on "Nurse Claire's" central thesis:
ZERO.
Thus not only fulfilling our exact expectations from before we started, but indeed, far surpassing them, with study conclusions that directly contradicted "Nurse Claire's" hare-brained prounouncements about masks, and in a highlight, one of which was already revoked and disavowed years before she linked to it.
Total test score awarded, based on accumulated points for this examination:
ZERO.
Total number of these links she's probably ever actually read in her life:
ZERO.
Total IQ it takes to point to things you've never read, when some of them flat-out contradict what you're claiming is so:
ZERO.
Nurse Claire Brings The Receipts
We tell you again, if you're going to listen to things on the Internet, either find trustworthy sources, or do your own damned homework.
When somebody spams out 51 links to total bullshit and hyperbole, and calls it "evidence", grab your wallet, and hold onto your ass, because one or the other, if not both, is directly at risk.
If Nurse Claire is actually any sort of nurse, she should get back to the veterinary clinic in haste, before the puppies miss her, or else return to her actual school of human nursing, and punch all her instructors in the dick and/or throat, and refuse to leave until she secures a full refund of all tuition paid.
Or just come clean, and admit profound retardation, to end this farce.
We spent our own time to dig through this enormous pile of shit purely for the satisfaction of telling you the truth, so you don't have to. You're welcome.
But we gave you the links and the quotes to enable you to see for yourself both the accuracy and validity of our complaints against the misapplication and propagation of this kind of bullshit as if it were useful information.
And in a conclusion altogether sweet and fitting:
40) Canuckistani doctor feels bad about masks
It turns out they don't do what they never intended to do: protect the wearers. But wearing them makes stupid people feel better about not getting sick, which makes the MD feel bad, because it doesn't help.
Why this wandering dribble got published in a medical journal is anyone's guess (maybe the publisher is his uncle or something), but there's a dearth of anything beyond feeling bad supporting any of it.
It makes me feel bad for Canada's medical expertise, is this is the level of discourse in their supposedly scholarly journals.
41) Lancet "study" of Hajj pilgrims
"Findings: From October 13 to 17 in 2013, October 2 to 6 in 2014, and September 22 to 26 in 2015, 7,687 adult participants from 318 tents were randomised to facemasks or no facemasks; 3,864 participants from 149 tents were assigned to the Facemask group and 3,823 participants from 169 tents to the Control group. In the Facemask arm, respectively 27% and 51% participants used facemasks daily and intermittently, 22% did not; in the Control arm, respectively 15% and 38% participants used facemasks daily and intermittently, 47% did not."
And based on the haphazard, half-assed, slap-dash inshallah version of masking, what did Dr. Fuckhead and Dr. Shitforbrains conclude?
"Interpretation: Facemask use does not prevent clinical or laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections among Hajj pilgrims."
I can't make up pseudo-science this retarded out of thin air. Apparently, you have to go to medical school to have a gallon of shit pumped into your head to substitute for brains.
That The Lancet would publish such total fecal material tells you everything you need to know about the skill behind the Britistani National Health System.
42) Facemasks in the COVID era
Abstract: (wait for it...)
"This survey has been retracted."
Aesop Summary:
Non-shocker for everyone not living in Switzerland: passing a law doesn't mean 100% compliance.
And the plural of bullshit is still not "data", no matter how many other people's invalid and poorly-constructed "studies" with methodological gaps big enough to drive a pandemic through you wave around as if they were factual information.
a) they misstate the purpose of masking in hospitals, straw-manning the argument by only the second sentence
b) go from small lies to outright whoppers about rationale for masking in hospitals, and its prevalence
c) moves on to telling outrageous whoppers about the pandemic itself, 18 months into it
d) plays the politics card
e) moves on to list all those "studies", many if not all of which have already been dealt with in earlier installments of this shit-show.
Unless you're Rumplestiltskin, resubmitting the same documented bullshit does not spin it into gold.
Another amalgamation of bullshit masquerading as scholarly effort. 279 possible choices were whittled down to only 12 possibly applicable studies, many or all of which we've already eviscerated in earlier installments.
This is all diarrhea from the same bad burrito. There's nothing new to see here.
46) American Journal Of Infection Control study from 1992
"METHODOLOGY: The flow rates through the masks ranged from a constant value of 5 to a constant value of 100 L/min, thus simulating the different physiologic workloads that result in a wide range of instantaneous flow rates during respiration."
Point Of Order, Slick: 100 L/min??? The human lungs hold, on average, 6L of volume, but the volumetric tidal volume amount of the average human breath is only about 500mL (half a liter). Any respiratory therapist can tell you that. The average respiratory rate is 12 to 20/minute. Meaning the upper end of normal respiration is around 10L/minute. NOT 100L/min.
100-yard sprinters aren't even sucking and blowing 100L/minute at the finish line, FFS! They'd have to be breathing full breaths at 200 times/minute to achieve that, which is physiologically impossible.
So, in short, the study designers tested masks designed for normal human respiration at an air movement rate that's approximately the same as strapping it to a hole in the car windshield, and driving at 100mph.
I cannot imagine how anything could fail to penetrate the mask filter with that level of stupidity running the testing, up to and including songbirds and large insects.
Color me shocked, at the 10L (i.e. actual human level) end of the scale, penetration was minimal.
Second Point Of Order: They were measuring penetration at the surface of the filter. Unless someone's doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation right up against the mask, they could be expected to be two to several feet away, even in surgery. By which time all those theoretical penetrating particles fall to earth.
Third Point Of Order: If you're testing mask penetration in surgery, as claimed, then to be accurate according to real-world conditions, the testing of aerosols or particles should be done from the other side of a second mask, several feet away (at least two), to simulate the person on the other side of the OR table you're worried isn't being protected by mask worn by the first person, shouldn't you? Oopsie, they weren't doing that at any point in the testing process.
The engineering technical term for doing this sort of jackassically incorrect test is "screwing the pooch".
This sort of pure horseshit is virtually every test we've seen or heard of in regard to mask testing, since ever, and it only got worse during Covidiocy.
Team Claire: 0 for 46. Max possible score still available: about 10%. Which, as we mentioned in the last post, is far lower than a moron score on the SATs if you just left the damned thing blank and walked out.
In aeronautical terms, this is what it looks like when you invent a helicopter that screws itself into the ground when you attempt takeoff.
Having apparently run out of random PubMed bullshit studies with no applicability to anything to point to, Nurse Claire's List Of Total Horseshit now delves into Sumdood's opinions for authoritative scientific and medical information.
33) Does Universal Mask Wearing Decrease or Increase the Spread of COVID-19?
Our first contestant in the Shit Some Bloggers Spew sweepstakes is apparently Leo Goldstein. The title itself is a trick question: mask wearing has never been universal, for any value of that word, which truth even Leo stumbles over:
"Some people position their mask to cover only their mouth but not their nostrils, though nostrils have higher viral concentration, see Leung et al. below. Some people frequently remove and replace their masks. When removing their masks, some people fold or roll masks so that the interior and exterior sides come into contact. Some people drop their masks into a purse, pocket, or glove box only to use them again at their next stop. After a few cycles, the masks’ interior and exterior become interchangeable."
So, having shot his own thesis, and himself, right in the ass by the middle of what would be the second page, Goldstein wanders all over the map, pulling together random papers (most of them already discounted specifically or in general in our earlier notes) without explaining or examining them ("I'm a blogger; Trust me!") to make whatever point at which he's whacking away, at any given moment in his Splatter-gories train of thought.
It's kind of like kitten on the keys, but with science pronouncement macros.
He does a whole lot of leaping to conclusions and circular reasoning, cherry-picks sentences to support his point, and skips a lot of things like actual links to the relevant referred-to articles. At the end, he lists 26 selected references, including that bastion of scientific accuracy, the LATimes, and even references his own butthurt refused comment rejected by JAMA. Fisking his pile of codswallop would be another two weeks day and night, and I respectfully decline undertaking another such romp in the swamp, unless someone want to pay me for the effort.
34) Masking: A Careful Review Of The Evidence
This one, at least, from someone with some bona fides in medical research, albeit appearing in everyone's first choice for medical news, the website of the American Institute For Economic Research, a right-of-center economic thinktank/lobbying shop, in the heart of America's bastion of free enterprise and liberty, Massachusetts. {/sarc}
In order, they
1) quote themselves as an authority
2) Note that face masks don't protect the wearer (!)
4) Try to spin the idea that COVID is primarily oro-fecal transmission (we can point to the shit in that idea, but it's not coming from the COVID-infected)
5) Quote Ioanniddis (which is like calling Karl Marx for an impartial view of economics) and cite his wildly inaccurate guesstimates from the early stages of the pandemic as though they were authoritative, then, now, or ever
6) Understate the actual IFR of COVID-19 by 100%-600% (even spotting them that this was a year into the pandemic)
7) try to spin this as "just the flu", when it was no such thing then, and is only so now, two years and any 5, 10, or 20 mutations later, since that point
And that's just them "carefully reviewing" virtually no actual scientific evidence.
They then go into a lengthy diatribe against lockdowns and school closures, as that end of public policy is more their bread-and-butter concern. Nonetheless, it's done with cherry-picking and a lot of hand-waving and somersaulting. Science is not a gymnastic exhibition, so when laser light shows and pyrotechnics make an appearance, you're watching a magic show, not listening to a medical lecture.
That's all well and good, and we probably even agree with some of their points, but they leapt over any cursory look at scientific evidence to get there. Knee-jerk freedom is certainly better than knee-jerk socialism, but only just barely if you're going to claim scientific and medical basis for you claims. Either do science, or don't, but don't anally rape the concept and then claim it was a dinner date.
If we're going to make this a philosophical discussion, we'd rather hear from the likes of Kurt Schlicter, Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Bill Whittle, or Jordan Peterson, rather than someone whose expertise is in medical research, but aspires to be Aristotle rather than Hippocrates. Stay in your lane.
They then wander around masking, yet again focusing on the fact that neither simple face masks nor surgical masks protect the wearer (exactly as they've never been intended to do nor claimed to do, for 120 years).
In short, this is simply the work of earnest morons in service of an agenda, trying to serve up some red meat to knee-jerk idiots to justify their own prejudices. As if there's a shortage of that in the world, let alone on the internet.
The entire piece, like the preceding blog burp-out, would require multiple days to fisk in detail, as they spew bullshit at the speed of light, paragraph by paragraph. We decline the opportunity, as most of their bullshit has been overtaken by events, but their prejudice is all they bring to the table, and they shed no light on the matter, or the evidence, evidently preferring to simply crap on it, and then walk away contented.
35) Unpublished bullshit on COVID by two UK Quacks...
"Our findings on facemasks or coverings are perhaps counterintuitive especially given the strong debate on their use. In a recent systematic review we concluded that the evidence in favour of face mask use outside the hospital was weak."
The citation links not to any such review (yet another survey of other people's work, applicable or not) but to a Reuters newswire article. They have just cited their own quote in the newspaper to prove their point! Mirabile dictu! Who needs evidence? Just get a newspaper to print your bullshit, and quote yourself. Pure genius!
"On the other hand, a recent modelling study concluded that community face mask use could reduce the spread of COVID-19."
IOW, "Hold the phone, but according to actual scientists, we may be full of shit."
"Our results on face coverings should be considered preliminary because the use of coverings was recommended or required only relatively late in the epidemics in each European country."
"All you dead people in Europe...sorry about that."
"The results for face covering are too preliminary to inform public policy but indicates face covering as public policy merits close monitoring."
IOW, "We appear to have been totally full of shit on masking. Please ignore everything we said earlier. And now, having taken both sides on this policy, no matter which way the consensus breaks, we can tell you we told you so."
I cannot imagine how such mealy-mouthed double-talking mendacious bullshit failed to obtain peer review, and get published in the UK's medical journals, instead of winding up in their medical urinals.
Well-played! Pad the stack with irrelevant bullshit. Nothing says "Serious science" like finding 99 crisp slips of blank paper banded under every real $100 bill in the briefcase.
37) 70-page booklet by WHO from 2019 on decreasing influenza transmission
Applicability:
"...the pooled analysis suggested a relative risk reduction of 22% in the face mask group..."
"There are no major adverse effects of face mask use."
"RECOMMENDATION: Face masks worn by asymptomatic people are conditionally recommended in severe epidemics or pandemics, to reduce transmission in the community. Disposable, surgical masks are recommended to be worn at all times by symptomatic individuals when in contact with other individuals."
"Knowledge gaps: There are important gaps in our knowledge of the mechanisms of person-to-person transmission of influenza, including the importance of transmission through droplets of different sizes including small particle aerosols, and the potential for droplet and aerosol transmission to occur in different locations and with different environmental conditions. Additional high-quality RCTs of the efficacy of face masks against laboratory-confirmed influenza would be valuable."
"Acceptability: Likely to be acceptable, but not appropriate in some circumstances and the adherence and compliance is low."
Aesop summary: the studies are shit; wear masks; most people are idiots.
Need we remind you that this, yet again, proves that "Nurse Claire" never read a word of any of the sources she shat out from a cursory Google search?
38) Another AEIR stink-tank piece, this time by a DC lawyer
Because whenever I want internet information on a scientific or medical question, my first stop is a D.C. lawyer with no medical or scientific training or background whatsoever.
The author correctly states the politicization of the issue, and the suspect nature of any conclusions promulgated after that point.
Unfortunately, other than guilt-by-association, she provides no scientific evidence in either direction. As bare-knuckles rhetoric, this is great stuff, especially if disseminated to amateurs ("boob bait for the bubbas", in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's elegant turn of phrase). As medical information, it's snake oil masquerading as curative.
Money quote:
"Ultimately, I do not have the credentials to determine whether or not –or to what extent — masks work."
But the article is here nonetheless, because the author apparently once stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.
Grunting and squeezing over the porcelain thinking chair will produce equally scientific information, which evidently is how low the bar for such at AEIR.
39) Another rehash of another old meta-NON-study, non-peer-reviewed, with an update
Money quote:
"CONCLUSIONS Most included trials had poor design, reporting and sparse events. There was insufficient evidence to provide a recommendation on the use of facial barriers without other measures. We found insufficient evidence for a difference between surgical masks and N95 respirators and limited evidence to support effectiveness of quarantine. Based on observational evidence from the previous SARS epidemic included in the previous version of our Cochrane review we recommend the use of masks combined with other measures."
Aesop summary: "The surveys are shit; wear a mask." We couldn't have said that better ourself.
Praise to a merciful heaven there are only 12 more of these atrocious, mendacious, and profoundly retarded items to peruse. If we stick to covering five apiece, only three more posts, all proving that thisa was exactly the nothingburger of shite we alleged from the outset.
Team Claire: 0 for 39. Maximum possible score now: 24%. F-.
On the Rotten Tomatoes Certified Fresh scale, this is "Double-rotten total shit; you should stay home".
For reference, the old SATs spotted you a score of 25%, if you just wrote your name on the test, turned it in, and walked out without filling in a single answer bubble. No, really.
Team Claire has dropped below even that benchmark. Just...wow.
