Show Your Work

 h/t WRSA

Ukraine And Russia - It Is A Math Problem

So math explains why Russia will win in Ukraine?

Uh huh, riiiiiiiiiiiiight. That's totes easy.

So, on what day did (will) that occur?

It wasn't on Day Three.

Or Thirty.

Or Day One Hundred and Thirty.

We're pushing Day 200, and they're nowhere close.

Day 300??

Day 400??

Day 600???

How many brigades (and rubles) can Russia burn through before they have a replacement problem? Did they maybe blow through that point last April?

While you're up, whip out your Whizbang War Calculator, and calculate some victories for me:

Now do the math for the Soviet Union vs. Afghanistan in 1979, and show us mathematically how that worked, and why the Soviet Union was bound to win.

The math can't be wrong, can it?

Then do U.S. vs. Afghanistan in 2003.

Then do Iraq vs. the U.S. in 1990.

Then do U.S. vs. North Vietnam in 1965.

Stop me if you've heard this one.

Then show the class your foolproof calculations for Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia vs. Israel. Any of the last five times up to bat, 1948-1973, inclusive.

Try Germany vs. Russia, 1941.

Try Napoleon vs. Russia, 1812.

England vs. the Colonials, 1776.

Then do Spanish Armada vs. England, 1588.

Leonidas vs. Xerxes, 480 B.C.

David vs. the Philistines, ca. 1100 BC.

Gideon vs. Midian, ca. 1200 B.C.

Show all work.

We'll be waiting over here while you face plant, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

For the brighter students, plug in Napoleon's maxim:

"In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one."

Wars aren't won on accounting ledgers.

A couple of other military maxims for the brighter lot:

"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong."

"When you achieve victory, be sure to tell the enemy."

Anybody telling you otherwise is either an idiot, or picking your pocket.

Next question.

Kneejerk "Logic" 101

 

I just wanted to give equal time, by summarizing every argument made here on Putin's behalf in the last 4+ months, in one meme.

The Usual Anonymous Suspects can froth in comments to the shredder. I'm off to buy some guns - plural - to celebrate Independence Day.

Xi is unashamedly standing behind Putin. Because they've both proven to be such lifelong friends of freedom and democracy, obviously, amirite?

Live by the guilt-by-association fallacy, die by the guilt-by-association fallacy. Maybe those of you on Team Knucklehead can cobble up some better talking points. Stranger and more amazing things have happened. The old ones are sheer lunacy, and you look exactly like the idiots you are. Wiping Putin's DNA off your chin wouldn't go amiss either.

Just saying.

That still doesn't make Emperor Stumblefuck Poopypants the Ist a good guy, nor ever did. Just a blind hog finding an acorn, after that wagging the dog experiment got out of the lab, like they will.

But it still makes him accidentally smarter - for a few brief seconds - than an awful lot of people (or a lot of awful people, take your pick).

And how embarrassing is that for those now taking the Second Place IQ Ribbon?!?

Pro Tip: Don't be That Guy.

Natzsofast, Guido

 

I see where several blogs (and I'm not gonna point fingers) are commenting on Vodkapundit's article on PJ Media, regarding Italy "revising" their Kung Flu death numbers.

Except, not so much. Italy did not go all Democrat on Glenn Youngkin's vote tallies with their COVID death rate, and just try to erase 97% of them. Anyone who suggested that isn't very bright, or worse. They simply moved most of them from "dead only from COVID" to "dead from COVID and more". What, people with pre-existing serious chronic conditions might have died from COVID because those exact conditions made them less able to cope with a debilitating systemic illness? WHO KNEW? I mean, besides every doctor except maybe Dr. Phil, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Seuss, or Dr. Doolittle.

Look, I like Stephen Green (Vodkapundit), he's a funny guy, and I've watched him for years with Bill Whittle, but the way he's portraying this is flat-out moronic (and face-palmingly wrong), and he needs to put the bottle down before he blogs anything further. And when the alcohol wears off, he's going to have a helluva time getting his foot out of his mouth on this. It's that stupid. Or else deliberately deceptive.

Point of order:

Those people in Italy didn't all spontaneously die without COVID either, and they had all those chronic conditions for years and decades without dying - until they got COVID.

So this is Italy re-arranging deck chairs, and tidying up their casualty lists a very, very small bit.

Not lowering the overall CFR for COVID. Just for "COVID alone".

The videos of dead people stacking up outside hospitals there, or Italian hospitals chock-a-block with the sick and dying, multiple hospitals being overwhelmed, and doctors triaging people over 70 to "wait outside and die quietly", while letting people under 70 into the hospitals for treatment, because they didn't have the resources to care for both groups - like has happened never in modern peacetime history with "just the flu" - didn't just suddenly not happen. And Green knows it.

So let's not pretend those other 97% died from "something else". Didn't happen. They died from COVID plus comorbidities, not the other conditions alone, which exact comorbidities made them a lot more susceptible to dying than people who were otherwise healthy, and got COVID alone.

All this revision tells us is that 97% of the people who died with COVID had a comorbidity, and only 3% of those who died from COVID alone didn't have any such thing.

So the COVID CFR didn't drop by 97%. And Green is either too stupid to notice that he left off the key word "alone" from that sentence, or he's deliberately lying like a sonofabitch. There is no third option besides stupidity or mendacity: he's either a moron, or a liar. It's not a pretty place for him to be.

Nice try, but no cigar.

The COVID alone CFR did drop by 97%. BFD.

COVID still killed just as many people in Italy today as it did when originally reported. Anyone who couldn't suss that out on their own in 0.2 seconds is simply not tall enough for this ride. 

Italy is simply acknowledging that a host of conditions gave COVID a great big boost at knocking people off at 28X the rate, in Italy overall, as "just the flu", with those having significant comorbidities like obesity, hypertension, COPD, and cardiac disease, at a tremendous disadvantage compared to people without them.

This "news" is about as earth-shattering as telling me really short people have trouble seeing over the heads of any crowd, and that fat people are easier prey for predators than skinny ones.

And it doesn't change the COVID mortality rate a whit. It simply bifurcates it into those already hamstrung by other problems (97%), and those whacked by the 'rona outright, despite being healthy (3%). Total dead: 100% of those reported dead in the first place. Gee thanks, I feel so much safer now.

This is an exercise in precision, not a revision of absolute COVID mortality downward by 33X.

Telling me people with cardiac conditions survive head-on impacts more poorly than people without them doesn't make head-on collisions safer, either.

There's a lot of people who should know better celebrating a non-news item that is functionally meaningless regarding COVID, and a lot of people who are flaming statistical and mathematical blithering idiots cock-a-doodle-dooing because they're so stupid they don't know what they don't know.

Let's please not fall into either category.

On Setting Aside Laws And Rights Willy Nilly

 h/t Phil

That pound of bloody ass in its teeth is about to be that of TPTB.

"O frabjous day! Callou! Callay!"

You were warned.

This Is Why You Have A Pandemic

I was bored today, and not really looking hard for blog fodder, and yet it just washes up right onto my virtual doorstep, whether I want it or not. It's also why I hate to post any more knowledge or information on Kung Flu, because the bright people already get it, while for the monkeys, it just gives them another excuse to fling their poo. 

Anyone who reads or comments here has de facto access to most of the collected actual knowledge of humanity, literally keystrokes or mouseclicks away from their beady little eyes, on the entire worldwide web of Everything.

Given that standard of knowledge availability, I apologize in advance to anyone who accuses me of kicking retarded kids, just because they write in to tell us what flavor the windows are on the short bus.

Which brings us to this gem, in commentary to our post yesterday, from someone who probably thought we'd never post it:

"https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/24/map-where-are-the-intensive-care-beds-in-california-the-u-s/ This article indicates approximately 7500 ICU beds in California. https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/ This article indicates there are about 3200 ICU patients suspected of having Covid. "The number of hospitalizations due to confirmed and suspected COVID-19 cases in California reached a total of 15,198, an increase of 620 from the prior day total. The number of ICU patients due to confirmed and suspected COVID-19 cases in California reached a total of 3,193, an increase of 115 from the prior day total." In the entire state of California. 3200 ICU patients. This is not a pandemic."

Au contraire: As our drill instructor informed us once, "There are no stupid comments, only stupid people." Welcome to a Teaching Moment.

If you wish, you can read the comment and match it with the owner, but for ease today, we'll make the author He Who Shall Not Be Named, abbreviated HWSNBN, which we will use before the fisking (and flogging) begins.

1) Actually, CA has about 7800 ICU beds. This has nothing to do with anything, except as a bare fact.

2) What percentage of ICU patients have COVID is irrelevant to anything either. If you think otherwise, you're trying to fly an airplane in clouds, in the mountains, using a thermometer.

3) The salient point about ICU beds was, as stated, the point that they're almost all full hereabouts. That means if you get shot, stabbed, have a heart attack, or a stroke, or a serious automobile accident, or simply a raging ordinary infection, or need any form of 300 types of intensive care, which cannot be competently handled by lesser-trained nurses, with lesser facilities, you're going to die. Brighter lights among the readership and commentariat will recognize that people dying of things we normally could keep alive is a bad thing. And those people aren't imaginary: they're going to happen, they aren't going to get ICU beds, and they're going to die. I personally bagged and tagged one just the other night.

4) As we warned those same brighter lights months and months ago ad infinitum, hospitals in general, and the ICU in particular, are like airline flights: if they aren't at 90% or better occupancy, 24/7/365, they're losing money. So we run - every goddam day since ever - at 95% of capacity or better. In short, the lifeboat is already damned near full, before we even add the stormy seas of a raging pandemic.

5) For Common Core grads, 3200 ICU patients, statewide, because of COVID, isn't the other 5% of ICU capacity. In a state with 7800 ICU beds, that's 41%. So what HWSNBN has just Gilligan-logicked into oblivion is that he thinks hospital ICUs (usually chronically short-handed at the best of times) can handle running at 136% of design capacity, in a system where 25% of staff or more are already MIA, because they're stressed out, under investigation for COVID infection, actually sick, or just DGAF about picking up the extra shifts and staffing openings we have, at any price.

6) Merriam-Webster cleverly defines pandemic, for the ignorant, and/or illiterate:

"Occuring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population."

According to the Johns-Hopkins Kung Flu infographic map, COVID cases have been reported in every country on the planet, and damn near every BFEgypt inhabited island on every speck of the map. 73.8M cases, and 1.6M deaths, to date, and over 305K US deaths, which is only 4 times worse - so far - than the worst annual flu season that ever was. (And this dance ain't over yet by a damned sight. Not even close to it.)

That's a PANDEMIC, fucktard.

Kids, this is what happens to society when you give high school diplomas to dipshits who can't tie their own shoes.

And worse, why you have a pandemic that won't quit, because you were depending on kids who should have been flunked out of 7th grade eight or nine years running, because they couldn't pass a science class that was any harder than watching a PBS episode of Sesame Street, and yet still expect them to do something as complicated as remembering to wash their hands regularly, and wearing a sneeze guard mask, for longer than the lifespan of a fruit fly.

The one inarguable silver lining amidst the Kung Flu coal-black cloudbank that's washing its storm over the country, is its infallible utility in churning the Gilligan chunks right to the top of the foam in the septic tank of civilization, so they can be seen. The crushing pity, conversely, is that it doesn't kill them deader than canned tuna for their failings, but instead leaves the younger, healthier ones free to kill older and usually wiser heads, like the No-So-Smart Bombs they are.

We close with the sage advice of Will Rogers to those who don't know what they're talking about:

Logic Fail

 

And for the "F**K everyone older than me, because I need muh paycheck now!" crowd:

 

Because the guys in the next foxhole have friends too, and they won't take kindly to your "Final Solution" battlefield ethics.

Rethink.
You'll find it easier, and increase blood flow to your brain, if you extract your heads from your asses first.

Just saying.

 

Since It Keeps Coming Up...

Some folks, on multiple threads,  apparently think I somehow missed Robert L. Gore's most recent essay.

Au contraire, mes amis.

RLG is a bright guy, and writes well and thoughtfully, better than me without question, and most days and times, but this example is none of those things. Sorry, but I said that out loud.
Tantrum and screed is not reasoned polemic, kids.

As if I didn't post a response to this two days ago, elsewhere.

"Objection: Assumes facts not in evidence, i.e. that a temporary quarantine will become a decades-long boondoggle.

Reductio ad absurdum Fallacy, 20 yard penalty and loss of possession.

And I observe FTR that people crying about something that’s not yet three weeks old as though it will go on endlessly are children who were never spanked, sent to bed without their supper, or told to wait for any form of gratification.

Most of us grew out of that phase of “right now is forever” tantruming somewhere around 1st grade, though the “this minute is forever” argument is sometimes heard as late as adolescence:

."

{FTR: "I'll never get off this planet" transitions to

lightspeed to Alderaan in about 30 minutes of

cinema time. QED

I don't pick examples randomly.}

RLG's personal response to that engendered a further response from me:

"You figure that stay-at-home declarations now for a current pandemic, which is knocking off upwards of 1K persons/day here, and more each day, will automagically become as open-ended and everlasting as the Patriot Act because…why, exactly?

Because that’s what we did in [2009], when Obozo had Swine Flu to pin this on?
Because Wilson did that with Spanish Flu in 1918?
Because of all the other presidents that declared perpetual martial law in every outbreak of bubonic plague in the U.S. before antibiotics?
And all those other times that happened too: smallpox, cholera, typhus, yellow fever, malaria, mumps, measles, polio?
Wait…none of that ever happened…??
Not even once???

So, what’s changed in the last 12 or 102 or 245 years to make you think we’d go for that now, since we didn’t then, ever?

I think one of these things is not like the other, not least of which because at a non-infinite point in time, probably within this calendar year (and perhaps much earlier), people would not and will not sit home and starve, or politely await handouts from the unquestioned benificence of Uncle Government, let alone do so in perpetuity, despite the current pandemic, and will express their further displeasure rather more kinetically than verbally.

You evidently disagree, or think that such response is a trifling thing.

I’m educable.
Please, show your work.

Particularly when 8 states are still under no such order, and some of them have been under one for less than 3 days.

I’ve been telling people since January this was going to be worse than “just the flu”, and the lunatards here are still in denial with people dropping in NYFC every 5 minutes, and I’m the Chicken Little; but you’ve got us giving up the republic hand over fist forever in less time than William Henry Harrison served as POTUS, on your say-so, and that’s revealed truth for the ages?

{Bonus for readers here:


Common Core grads: POTUS for precisely 31 days. You could look it up.™
Also one of my favorite presidents, for the same reason.

}
























You’ve written some good stuff, but I don’t think you could make that fly with a genie and a magic carpet."

-----

Have at it, in case my responses to RLG weren't clear enough.
Comments are open.
Anyone opening from the 5-year-old's complaint that "Now is forever" will be on the first course of the menu, labeled "appetizers".
The weapons of choice in this duel will be flammenwerfers, at 10 paces.
Asbestos underpants are cheerfully recommended.
No prisoners will be taken.
Zero fucks will be given.

If you cannot point to the time a U.S. president declared endless martial law in response to a disease outbreak in your opening salvo, best you stay home, and not saddle up for this Children's Crusade.

Never  ╪ Now.
Now ╪ Forever.

Cleverly, the English language solved these difficult logical concepts by having different words for each of them.
Consult a dictionary in case this wasn't made clear to you in the normal scope of your K-12 educational experiences.

Christianity Today: Shut The Hell Up, You Jackasses

In a half-assed, half-witted, and thoroughly embarrassing display of pulling its pants down and spanking its own asscheeks, formerly influential and currently so-woke-it's-gone-full-retard evangelical birdcage liner Christianity Today announced from its editorial page (if you can't get there, it's because it's so busy with hate mail the site has crashed) that President Trump should be impeached and removed from office. And shot itself in the ass with both barrels.

As the 347th guy to yell "I am Spartacus!" on this topic, they've stepped on the wedding tackle in so many ways it's difficult to count them.

Yet try we must.

Firstly, only someone suffering from tertiary Trump Derangement Syndrome (which is differentiated from tertiary syphilis only by what body part was inserted in what orifice; with TDS, it's one's head up one's own ass) would make such a pronouncement in public. Generally, with people in such a state, one makes pleasant noises and avoids startling them, until the appropriate men can throw a net over them and take the victim(s) to a place with soft music, soft food, and soft walls.

Secondly, had they the wits God gave Balaam's ass, they'd have noticed that all the hoopla produced by the much-ballyhooed impeachment circus produced not one single finding of objective fact in support of impeachment, nor articulated as many as one single articulable federal crime of any sort identifiable in U.S. Code, which goes by the clever title the law of the United States Of America, both of which salient facts are rather germane to whether impeachment was justified or even barely supportable. It is neither.

Thirdly, the chickenshit editor, Mark Galli, who ejected this screed from his nether regions has had months since the Mueller clown show, and weeks since the Schiff Show, during which he could have made his recockulous opinions known. But, as he's retiring at the end of the month, he chose to wait until it was too late to fire his ass, and play Ding Dong Ditch with this Flaming Bag Of Doggie Poo left on the White House steps, at the last possible minute. Bravely done, Mssr. White Feather. One hasn't seen a yellow stripe up the back that wide since Broward County Deputy Sheriff Scot Petersen was seen hiding outside a school and wetting himself while children were being shot. Great company you're in there.

Fourthly, one is reminded of nothing so much as the sage directive of General Frank Savage to the chaplain of the 918th Bomb Group:

"Your business is sin and salvation, and from here on out you will confine yourself to that theater of operations, CLEAR??"

What CT knows of presidential politics could be handily written inside a thimble with a grease pencil, with room to spare. They should, in the immortal words of Will Rodgers, "not pass on a good opportunity to shut up." But like Ron White, they have the right to remain silent...but not the ability. And now both the editor idiot-in chief and the magazine itself have their hindquarters flapping in the breeze instead.

Fifthly, if whoever runs their lashup could put such a pigeon-brained feather-head in charge of the operation, what kind of total sh*theads have they hired for the rest of the whole clownshow? Billy Graham founded the magazine, and on religious topics, it started out as a voice for religious mainstream conservatism. Now, by bare electoral math, their outgoing head jackass has absolutely alienated at least 50% (and probably more like 90%) of the subscriber base, and the only reason every Christian organization won't cancel their subscriptions tomorrow is because a goodly number of them are as bereft of reason and common sense as Editor Featherhead. Ask Dicks, Jillette, Chick-Fil-a, and the NRA how such biblically epic levels of tone-deafness play with your constituency. Then come back in six months and tell us how it's working out for you morons. If you're still in business.

Sixthly, if you're going to pull this sort of political crap, change your name.
You're clearly not an evangelical Christian magazine, let alone mainstream. Cut to the chase: join the National Council of Churches, convert, and worship the god-emperor, Pope Vladimir Fidel Mao the First, and kiss his ring to usher in the era of Marx and Lenin as god, instead of God playing his traditional role. I leave the last word on this point to Hugh Hewitt, in the earlier-linked WaPo editorial riposte:

"By injecting Christianity into that debate, Galli inevitably suggests (especially to the left, for whom it is convenient) that people of the Christian faith are, in fact, obliged to condemn Trump and support his impeachment. This is risible. It is irresponsible."

Finally, given the personal history of your founder (of your religion, not your fishwrap rag), CT of all people should be a little more sensitive and less inclined to railroad a man dragged in front of a kangaroo court on a dearth of evidence, and then throw him to the most vengeful and unhinged whims of his opposition, despite the fact that exactly like Pilate, "We find no fault with this man."

President Trump has violated no laws and committed no crimes, which alone should be reason for taking any stance but the asinine one adopted.
But I guess the allure of worldly approbation, and the shininess of thirty pieces of silver, outweighed all available impetus to common sense.

Let us know how that works out for you when the revulsion becomes pretty much universal, and the people whose favor you thought to curry turn on you because they hate all religion but the State itself.

In the meantime, in closing, we'd just like to offer you a few appropriate verses of scripture from the Gospels, and ask that you take them to heart. Better still, take them to neck. Yes, really.
God will forgive you. C'est son métier.

Matthew 27:5             Luke 10:37          John 13:27