The LeMay Theorem

 

We thought this ponder from Tam self-evidently obvious, and reference it for truth, as using multi-million dollar missiles to shoot down multi-hundred dollar drones is asinine beyond belief, despite the shrieking caterwauling objections from people who think Common Core is actual mathematics, and that the world's #1 problem is Joooooooooooooooooos!

But contrary to years of evidence to the contrary, at least one or two people in the Five-Sided A$$hole Palace realized that the correct answer to the Houthi problem wasn't expending scarce and expensive missiles from an under-supplied fleet, it was doing alpha strikes from aircraft carriers, and dropping metric fucktons of iron bombs on deserving jackholes, just like any other time since about 1943.

Some lackwit will always plaintively whinge "How many is 'enough'...?"

Well, Sh*t-for-Brains, here's your One-Step Cluebat For The Calculationally Impaired:

Q.: Are they still fighting? 

    Yes: Load up another metric fuckton of bombs, and sortie again.

    No: Success!

So simple, a caveman can do it.

PSA For The Thinking Impaired

 

Swing away.

We get comments, for most of which we're grateful. But a non-zero number of which, if not outright straightforward trolls, lead us to despair the dearth of common sense and critical thinking of the average population.

Case in point:

About that whole "Russia's artillery usage is unsustainable" thing...

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/decision-arm-ourselves-or-arm-ukraine-navy-secretary-admits-crisis-us-defense-stockpiles

Ignoring the obvious question ("Since when did any appointed idiot in the Biden fustercluck become an authority on anything military, let alone factual?"), we're aware we get a bad rap on this blog from certain reasoning-challenged people, because compared to them, we come off as a never wrong know-it-all. (T'aint so.) That's because to anyone sufficiently primitive, modern technology is indistiguishable from magic, and to anyone sufficiently stupid, common sense, reasoning, and applied intelligence seems like witchcraft.

We get that just because this is the internet, this blog looks easy, because you've got keyboards too, so how hard can it really be? So maybe if we break down what we do before we reply, readers who inhabit the left edge of the bell curve could level up their game somewhat. (We live in hope.)

We're wrong on occasion, but damned seldom, because we know how to think, and because we check and double-check the relevant facts. Which do not include random quotes, but rather actual numbers of actual things.

We will break it down for the diligent. Have another look at the above comment.

Go to Durden's linked post. RTWT.

Then follow the link in our reply to that comment.

Therein we find that the annual US military budget is over 15½ times greater than that of Russia.

Think about that for a minute. The US spends, in any month, more than the entire Russian military spends in a year. Every. Single. Year. Since they stopped being Soviets, and simply became a Turd World failed nation with a nuclear arsenal.

Do some more research. Knock yourself out. Look anywhere. Google. Even Wikipedia, worth every penny you pay for it, but better than throwing messages in a bottle and waiting for a reply. Whatever.

So ask yourself a couple or three questions:

How big is the Russian military?

How big is Ukraine's military?

How big is the U.S. military?

Then ask the same questions about the military budgets of those three countries.

Call those questions 1a, 1b, and 1c, and 2a, 2b, and 2c.

Now calculate the military spending per capita for each country's military.

Call that 3a, 3b, and 3c.

Answers*:

1a: 1M active, 2M reserve

1b: 246,445 (pre-war)

1c: 1.35M active, 800k reserve

2a: $65.9B

2b: $10.4B

2c: $782B

3a: $22k@

3b: $42.2k@

3c: $363.7k@

We now arrive at the common sense portion of today's lesson:

What kind of military do you think Russia is getting, spending the ruble equivalent of $22k per troop? How do you think those troops compare to Ukraine's, at twice that level of spending, or the U.S.', at eighteen times as much?

(Masters-level students: we get it's not this simple, but it illustrates the basic point.) 

Do you think Russia is able to field and equip someone by spending 8% of what the U.S. spends for the same product?

Looking at those expenditures, are you really that surprised that Ukraine, with a huge influx of more equipment and munitions from the US and Europe since last March, is kicking the shit out of a Potemkin army that runs on vodka, lies, and graft, and hasn't won (nor even fought) a serious conflict with anything close to a peer in over 75 years? Srsly?

Have you seen videos of modern US recruits barefoot, unfed, with rusted over weapons, or no weapons? Where are the YouTube videos of recruits at the rifle range yelling "bang!" because they don't have any bullets, or even rifles? With Russia, that's the last six months.

So, what do you think happens to Russian military adventures, when motivated but poor Ukrainian troops, who hate Russian invaders with a passion, are given a sudden shitton of the best weapons America can produce?

And finally, given their respective budgets, which military do you figure is more likely to run out of ammunition first: that of the U.S., or Russia? Show your work.

With that in mind, and recent articles showcased on CDR Salamander's website at the front of our mind, we suggest Navel (not a typo) Secretary Shitforbrains would be better off spending less time talking out his bilge outflow, and more time supervising rust and paint details, so that half the US Rustbucket Navy isn't decertified for combat operations because it's rusted to the pier.

USS Zumwalt Rustbucket

And people who think the substantial but relative pittance of military largesse we've showered onto Ukraine's military this year is going to leave the US military defenseless, probably need to learn to count without taking off their shoes before they swallow the kind of codswallop that Shitforbrains is pimping.

Is the US military short of ammunition in its war stockpiles, and for annual training?

Fuck YES!!! And has been for over 50 years, since even before Jimmy Carter's regrettable presidency, and counting, because congressweasels keep buying boondoggle pieces of shit like the F-35 Thunderjug, Little Crappy Ships, and carriers like the USS Edsel, while underallocating funds requested for things like maintenance, training, training, training, training, and war reserve stocks, while fully funding Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, gender reassignment surgery for confused mental defectives, and staffing the TO and E of the 69th Intersectional Dildo Brigade of LGBTEIEIO Transdykefaggotry Force, in preference to paying for fighters, bombers, destroyers, submarines, armor, artillery, and by-God combat troops, let alone the munitions they need to train and fight wars. That problem didn't start last February, it's been an open scandal for decades.

Ukraine's contribution to actual ammunition shortages is so small as to be negigible by comparison, and anybody with 5 minutes' actual time in military service knew that without being told any of this. Which is why the never-served contingent of Internet featherheads are so baffled by that obvious truth. They have no idea how much they don't know about how much they don't know.

And they're too f**king lazy to waste five or ten mouseclicks self-educating, when they could be obliviously bloviating far beyond their IQ or experience.

Which is why, with them, you get what you get, and get dumber the more of it you read.

Suture self.

And ponder that every cabinet secretary since Benjamin Franklin was postmaster has complained that his trough needed more government funding to do its job, and that maybe they're talking out of their ass for mercenary, rather than factual, reasons, before throwing their quotes and any extrapolations based thereon at us as if they were actual information, or contained any relevancy to any topic under discussion.

A quick follow-up would be to ask anyone quoting them to name every competent person appointed by the current administration to any position of trust and responsibility.

We'll be right here while you work those two things out.

*[We used Wikipedia for illustration, purely for speed/simplicity. You could have tried any number of other sources, if only for comparison. Whatever else the Agency f**ks up, the CIA's annual World Factbook online is a five-star excellent and reliable resource. So is anything published by Jane's. Ditto SIPRI (for facts, not politics). And many others. The answers will thus be slightly different, but like bullets, will fall in a grouping on the target not drastically far from each other if you don't choose bullsh*t references from the outset. Like some whackjob's axe-to-grind website, where they pull information out of their underpants and pass it off as facts. Now guess why some people who do that are accused, rightfully and precisely, of eating other people's sh*t. Don't be That Guy.]

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.

Damascus Road

 h/t WRSA

To those for whom this essay is too much obvious truth and common sense to absorb in one sitting, try it in small bites.

If you can handle it, try it in one sitting.

Either way, RTWT.

For those who need to lose some weight, you'll find your journey through life immeasurably better once the scales fall from your eyes, and you drop about ten pounds of b.s. from inside your head. This essay is liposuction.

If the shoe fits...

Natzsofast

from WRSA :26/27, and one clinker

The difference between a rose, and rose fertilizer, in one quote.

Said Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan. Napoleon. Bonnie and Clyde. Hitler. Mao. Castro. The Manson Family. Pol Pot. The Clintons. MS-13. BLM. Jeffrey Epstein. Some 19 y.o. @$$hole in Uvalde. Ad infinitum. All of whom acted "according to the dictates of" their own consciences. Which was exactly the entire problem there. Kindly show all work if you're going to espouse such claptrap.

This is simply "If it feels good, do it." It's total unadulterated bullshit since its utterance by Simone de Abbatoir. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's literally the exact lie of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, from which proceedeth all subsequent human error and catastrophe to date.

Anyone you could think of, from Victor Davis Hanson, to Thomas Sowell, to Peter Hitchens, to Jordan Peterson, to Bill Burr, to Ricky Gervais, would make anyone espousing the same wish they'd never been born inside of 10 seconds' simple explanation.

Meme selection fail. Re-think.

A Cautionary Tale

h/t Wilder

 

Also razors, soap, deodorant, and the Lever. Including the one on a toilet tank.

A picture may sometimes be worth a thousand words, but a bad one is never worth 1000 IQ points.

So if you're going to tell a story in pictures, select them carefully. And beware of memes you didn't make yourself.

And never ask rhetorical questions you haven't thought about, or to which you do not know the answer(s).

John knows better, but the genius who came up with the original meme clearly never took a chance on the second grade.

Not so funny when you turn up the brightness.

Making a meme, like everything else, is harder than it looks to the Dunning-Kruger crowd.

The essence of comedy is Truth. Stupidity is just farce, where you're the punchline.

Always, always: Make Good Choices.

A Giant Wet Plopping Sound

 

News We'd Like To See Dept.

 

And as to the furious finger-pointing and CYA I told you about over this?

Oopsie. (h/t  Tam)

Turns out Union Pacific bears most all of the blame for the current state of things after all.

Entirely suicide: totally self-inflicted.

Just like I told ya, and confirmed in Comments.

Aesop 7, Union Pacific 0.

The Science Is Irrefutable

 

But this stopped being about science and medicine over a year ago.

Mr. Anchovy and Survival's Dirty Little Secret

 

Bourne/Bond Corollary:

Go to Zero's place. RTWT. Watch him crush all the Walter Mitty survivalist fap fantasies in a 20-ton shop press of Reality.

And then, watch the whole skit, for entertainment.

The fact that it's survival truth is just icing on the cupcake.

(Supermodel not included.)

Everything Old Is New

We see where the folks who've killed all the productive white farmers in S'Africa are hungry, and they have no money to buy food at any price, because they destroyed all the (white-run) industries that used to provide jobs, lacking the literacy, numeracy, and magic juju to run those businesses themselves. Just like every day since australopithecus shinnied out of Olduvai Gorge.

Fortunately, back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, we had people, dedicated thinkers of great thoughts, who'd thought about this, and had a solution.

Just like with gone-too-soon Robin Williams, I miss Sam Kinison every single day.

But he's still just as funny the 500th time I see this.

Need the longer and more erudite but flawlessly exposited answer from 2002?

RTWT 

Nearly 20-30+ years old, respectively, and still spot-on.

So Let's Talk Turkey

In this case, the 800-lb. turkey in the room.
As various levels of lockdowns, quarantines, safer-at-home, and other restrictions are lifted, some more wisely than others, it's time for a serious come-to-Jesus talk.

Some of you were ready, mostly.
Most of you were found to have your pants around your ankles.
A goodly number of the latter also were found to have heads inserted, to various degrees, up their own @$$#$.

And everyone knows what excuses are like.

The ones that were ready, mostly, will have a hard time ahead, because they're going to have to think, really hard, about where they might have failed, or would have come up short, for any number of "what if"s that didn't happen. Most of them will survive that trial handily, since they're pretty good at "what if"ing. But no plan of action survives first contact with the enemy, and it will still require diligent and careful consideration to be prepared for the next Problem.

And there will be a Next Problem, most assuredly.
(No small part of which is the follow-up to what has transpired this year, to date.)

That concludes their after-action memorandum, and being the ones who did OK this time, they're probably already working on doing even better next time. No one ever glides and coasts across the finish line in first place, and they already know that.

So the bulk of this little chat will concern the bulk of people for the past few months.

Bare Survival

You're here reading this? Congrats. You survived. So far. This always beats the alternative.

Details

1) You thought to yourself, "Self: The Government will Never do X, Y, or Z."
I warned people waaaaaay back, because the CDC outright told you, they planned to do exactly the shutdowns that happened. I got told, online, and in person, "That will never happen, because reasons."
Well, sucks to be you, doesn't it?
They called out the National Guard. They shut everything down. Schools. Businesses. Courts. Government offices. Congress. SCOTUS. Every-damned-thing.
If you thought, to any degree, there was something they'd never do, you just got a metric fuck-ton of evidence that your head was one of those shoved in a dark, quiet place.
Welcome to Reality, Bucko!
Don't be That Guy ever again, please.

EVERYTHING is on the table, always, every time. Get that through your heads.
That foolish and short-sighted take cost some people their lives, others their livelihoods, and the reckoning on the final tally of damage will take a decade to properly assess, and there's no guarantee today that you'll be there for that final announcement.

 

YOU WILL SEE THIS MATERIAL AGAIN

2) Despite being told, any number of times, the sage advice of Ol' Remus, to

"AVOID CROWDS"

most of you couldn't, or wouldn't. Not "Run to the hills" necessarily. Most of you lost your complete shit at being told to simply stay home, and mind your own business. As if you'd been told to fly to Mars in a balloon. No plan. No resources. Little to no forethought whatsoever to that eventuality, judging purely by the pissing, moaning, and caterwauling, both here and a hundred other sites, leads me to believe you'd do even worse if it was anything worse than just going home, and effing off.

Resistance? Insurrection?? Civil war??? Pfft. You'd have been roadkill on Day Two.
Some number are anyways, right now. And you thought you were going to kick ass?

Sh'yeah. That stinging in the back of your head? That was Reality slapping you.
If this was news to you, I'm sorry to have delivered it.

3) Despite any number of times you might have heard it from me, The Other Ryan at the former Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest, or in Commander Zero's Notes From the Bunker, or from Selco, or Ferfal, you didn't - and DON'T - have a multi-month cash float of funds to see you through a crisis even as mild as the one we've just gone through.
"Oh, but, But, BUT...!"
Reality doesn't give a sh*t, Snowflake.
If you aren't homeless, in a box, eating from dumpsters, literally living hand-to-mouth 24/7/365, you had disposable income, and you foolishly and short-sightededly got a house mortgage, car payment, credit card balance, or any number of toys, geegaws, and other miscellaneous sh*t that you suddenly found burdensome, because you did not pay yourself FIRST and use those funds to establish a cash reserve sufficient for your normal expenses for three, six, or twelve months with no other means of support.

This has been commonsense advice from sites like Kiplinger, Motley Foole, Dave Ramsay, and about 1000 others for effing YEARS, man.

Isn't the back of your head really red and sore yet??

"BUT BUT BUTT I CAN'T DO THAT!!!

Okay. So you're now an American't, instead of an American. Enjoy the welfare dime, suckle up to government's cold, hard teat, and may your chains rest lightly upon you.

If, however, you "coulda, shoulda, woulda", but didn't, then just own up to that error, and correct it, FIRST CHANCE YOU GET. Not next year, next month, or next week, but next paycheck. And every bit you can, FIRST, until you've got money you can lay hands on, even if the house burns down, even if the bank is closed, even if the power grid goes down and there's no ATM, no Internet, and no financial system, so that next time, you're not That Guy.
If you have nothing, work on a week's pay. When you get a week, work on having a full month. When you get a month, work on three. When you get to three, work on six. When you get to six, work on a year. At least 90% of all problems that aren't global zombie apocalypse can be readily solved with a passport, a credit card with a high limit, and/or a fat envelope of cash. If you want to get to more than a year, good for you. If you want to diversify from fiatbux greenbacks into other currencies, as well as gold and silver PMs, great for you.

And nota bene if you run a business (RUN, not "work for") the same should be true of your business emergency contingency fund. If you can't do that, you're a failed business, and skating along the edge just ensures you'll be the first one over the cliff at the first sign of trouble. Some of you have already discovered that.

Your parents and grandparents, who went through the Great Depression (which was anything but Great) knew this in their bones. Now you do too. The Gods Of The Copybook Headings just called to say "Hi!"

4) Three days food (and other necessities of life) is a joke. One told by FEMA and the Red Cross, mainly to people for whom 1 day's extra anything is something their tiny minds never thought of. Three days' stored food just means that on Day Four, you're in a FEMA camp, as a refugee.

No sh*t. All it takes is the barest planning ahead. I had a month on hand, for two, in a one-bedroom apartment, when the Northridge Earthquake hit. We did fine. I upped it to six months since then. In this non-event, I've yet to crack a single can of that. But I'm working on making it a year before the next annoying little PITA comes along.

5) And my TP "hoarding" consisted of buying exactly one extra package, before it became a thing, because I already had months of that laying around stored too. Ditto for damned near everything else. I'm working on the same for meds and other supplies. You? Probably not so much, right?

6) Not living on land I own, water is only ("only") a couple of months, plus about nine ways to purify all I can gather and store. By year's end, I'll be at six months. 

7) Power/heat is something to work on, but I can cook for several months ("Several", because I need to see how long a fraction of what I've got stored works, and then see how long everything I've got stored extrapolates to.) Heat here is only a problem a few months a year, worst case, and mostly solvable with warmer clothes. Handled. But adding a small capability for renewable power for a fridge/freezer, and brief use of a couple of appliances, was on this year's list anyways. It has moved higher since January.

8) Any problem that lasts more than a year has gotten beyond mere survival, and become an extinction event. Aim to be able to handle that, too, eventually. But more guns, and more ammo, aren't going to feed you, because anybody worth robbing has probably already gotten there ahead of you, along with a lot of people who think they'll be doing the robbing. Even during the height of the German Occupation, the French Resistance, small and humble as it was in reality, never seemed to lack for enough guns and bullets. Neither will you, because at some point, the people who have them become a supply point for everyone who doesn't. You only need a knife, or a rock, or a few feet of stout wire, to start leveling up.
Stop focusing on weapons, and start looking at tactics, strategy, and logistics. Starving people never won a war in recorded history, and even modern society, fat as it is, hasn't managed to eat itself quite to death yet. Calories are more important than gun racks, in the grand scheme, though you'll always need enough of everything.

9) Communications, with PACE, were a minimal concern in this Lilliputian problem. Next time, they may feature more heavily. You might want to get on that.
Just saying.

10) Medical?

"What's a virus?"
"What's PPE?
"What's handwashing?"
"What masks work, at all? Good? Better? Best?"

And on and on and on and on, ad infinitum.

GET TRAINED.
GET SUPPLIES.
GET ENOUGH SUPPLIES.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

My Porcelain Thinking Room catalog library shows N95 masks, which don't expire, were going for $1.49@ from Major Surplus as recently as 2018, in 10-mask boxes. IOW, for $150, you could have put on a new one every day from the beginning of the lockdown to now, and still had masks left over. That'd be good for decades if you never used them. But more than a few people bought a ninth handgun for three times that price, that they never used this time around. If you have a gun collecting itch, fine. I do. I could arm enough people to take over most countries south of Mexico without breaking a sweat. But let's call your fetish a fetish, and not confuse it with anything but a nice inheritance for your heirs when you die of old age. I'm closer to the end of my life than the beginning, and I've used the medicine cabinet far more than the gun cabinet, to date. Both are good, and even fun, but one has a wee bit more utility in the long haul, and should be accorded a higher precedence if you're using your big head to work your way though a problem, instead of the little one. Get smarter about that, get trained, and get the supplies that can support your training, and vice versa. If you can deliver babies, birth cattle, and safely remove an appendix, with what's on-hand at home, you're the exception that proves the rule.

Almost none of you are there, nor anywhere close, and very few really want to be, until it's far too late to fix. I've made a tidy sum over the years on those people. Ask me how I know.

We could go on, but won't.
I hope you all enjoyed your free trial of communism, and I hope you all manage to bounce back and thrive coming out the other side, whenever this current sh*tshow all ends finally.
But you shouldn't have been setting your hair on fire nor sh*tting your pants about anything that happened. And you wouldn't have been, IF you'd been more than half-assed totally unprepared for it.

You just got the world's most annoying fire drill. You're not on fire, as it turns out. So go forth, and learn the goddam lessons you should have already learned, instead of going back to sportsball, mall therapy, and general obliviousness, so that the next one doesn't kick your ass like the last one did.

And please, by all that's good and true, remember this nonsense the next time some government-paid tool tells you "Don't worry. This will never happen. It will happen, but not here. But if it happens here, we'll crush it. We're ready for this. We've got this. We'll do fine."

Instead, worry a little bit.
It will happen.
Here.
We won't crush it.
We're not ready.
They don't "got this".
You won't do fine.

Remember that, and nothing else they say will concern you much, as much as make you laugh at them. And hopefully, inspire you to take a wee bit more personal responsibility for your own safety and security, to the extent possible, rather than bitch at the government for telling you lies, or bitch at other people for telling you the truth. You come off looking poorly in either case, and none of the BMWing helps with your ultimate problem.

The harder this little note made you cry and want to hissyfit and tantrum, the more it applies to you. Best wishes in your future endeavors, but Denial isn't just a river in Africa, and Hope still ain't a plan.

Napkin Math For F**ktards, With Actual Numbers

New York F**king City has a population of about 9,000,000.
To date, they have 18,000 Kung Flu dead.
The rosiest (for the "just the flu, bro" @$$clowns) circular reasoning "surveys" there have put penetration of the infection there at about 20% of the city.
Meaning, granting such silliness arguendo, it's yet to get to the other 80%.

Los Angeles (city of)has a population of about 4,000,000.
They have almost 1,200 Kung Flu dead.
The rosiest recockulous "surveys" there put infection penetration at under 5% of the city, meaning 95% of them have yet to have any contact with it.

In the one documented smart decision of his life, Califrutopia Gov. Gabbin' Nuisance closed things down early, and widespread. That's largely why NYFC has a death rate between 2 and nearly 7 times worse than L.A. (You can argue pop. density and public transport all you want. NYFC isn't locked down, and L.A. is. One city took this serious, and one didn't. The results of each decision, particularly the number and rate of infection and deaths, speak for themselves. QED)

NYFC is an exemplar of what doing nothing about Kung Flu gets you.
They've run the subways every day during the outbreak, and only started disinfecting them every night starting yesterday or the day before. WTAF?!?

If we extrapolated NYFC's death rate to the country as a whole, that would get us about 660,000 dead, so far, with only 20% infection.
(330M ÷ 9M x 18K = ___X___.)
If it penetrated to everyone, worst case, that's 3,000,000 dead.
(X x 5 = ____Z____.) [Math breakdown included for Common Core grads.]
That's two months of real-world experience, kids, not magical models.
Who's up for going full-speed ahead to kill another 600,000 of your friends and neighbors?
Beuller?
Beuller...??
Ferris Beuller...???
Anyone...????

Neither of these numbers is "just the flu", and both those numbers (660K and 3M) are what represents the lower and upper limits of this pandemic, if we'd listened to the Flu Bros since Day One. We didn't do that, but the fact of that doesn't therefore disprove the projections based on the outcome of following that course. We repeat this for the kids who'll read it, but dropped out in middle school following ingestion of too many lead paint chips and suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome.

It also demonstrates that the numbers projected if we did nothing line up vastly closer to the 2M dead estimated by the British projections, versus the recockulous Ioannidis fairytales that this was, indeed, going to be "just the flu".

Forty-two states went into hard lockdown mode, which stopped this everywhere but the one city where they didn't do any of that. The seven other states that declined to do so benefitted far more from the widespread lockdown, rather than suffering for the behavior of idiots in NYFS and NYFC, and this was mainly by dint of vast geography between NYFC and them.

And yet, being a moron is apparently an irresistible siren's call, because some people still want to pretend NYFC (and Italy, and China) never happened. And emulate their non-response, in perpetuity!

{Nota bene: Someone in comments elsewhere suggested some silly-ass projection that this would peak at 67K total dead, by August 4th. This was just a few days ago. We noted then that we would achieve that dubious milestone by more like May 4th. We leave it to the reader to pop over to the Johns-Hopkins Kung Flu Dashboard this weekend, and decide who's been speaking from common sense and reality on this topic, and who's been smoking hopeium and talking out their own @$$#$.}

This embiggens. Oh Lookie here! Note the date, and the number of US deaths.

Should we therefore stay in lockdown everywhere, forever?
Hell no!

Not because this isn't a thing, but because it is. Today, the federal response guidelines (and they were always thus, not mandatory regulations, so any beef you have is with your own governor, not with Orangeman) expired.

Some governors will be stupid on the too strict side of lockdown-lifting, and others will be stupid on the too loose side of lockdown-lifting. We are not going to go 49-0 everywhere other than NYFS. Expect TPTB to f**k this up. It's what they do.

Eventually though, after exhausting all other options, the republic will muddle through.
That's what we do.

An endless total lockdown kills healthcare by giving them no patients.
No lockdown kills it by giving them too many.
Both extremes kill healthcare for everyone.
Something between those two extremes is therefore called for.

We aren't doing magic in hospitals.
Nothing we do cannot be done for most of society.
If people would calm the fuck down and stop panic-hoarding, we can get to having enough masks and gloves for everyone to use.
Some number of monkeys might even be taught to wash their goddam hands before touching themselves. (Don't get offended and butthurt; this is even hard for doctors and nurses, who nominally know better.)

We also know that the virus dies outside on warm sunny days in less time than a Superbowl commercial break. So the places we should be opening, weather permitting, are parks, beaches, golf courses, pools, etc. (Indoor movie theaters and malls, not quite so much.)Opposing this obvious common sense on days with temps in the 90s is why Gabbin' Nuisance's one moment approaching normal IQ was a fluke, and challenging that ignorant fascist fuckwittery in court, as half a dozen OC beach city mayors are doing, is God's work. And the first superior court judge predictably failed the same IQ test, but the battle continues. Nazi Bitch Gov. in MI is another exemplar of How Not To Do This, and the flip side of the ignorant laissez faire of NY Gov. Cuomo [D-Five Families], who is yet the spiritual kin to some numbnutted red-state governors in the Flu Bros camp.

When the stupidity on Left and Right is indistinguishable, those terms are hardly helpful. The battle here is between science and intelligence, versus irrational kneejerk stupidity. There's more than enough of the latter on both sides of the political aisle to kill another several hundreds of thousands of people, given the opportunity. Let's not do that.

As I noted in comments elsewhere, on a long enough time frame, modern medicine achieves 0% success. Because everybody dies. The goal is not to save everyone, because that's impossible.

But ignorant fuckwittery, just like malign intent, can make trainloads of the soon-to-be-dead, and neither side ever seems to lack volunteers to load the boxcars.

Cheerfully ignoring the volunteer applications for those, and beating them about the head and shoulders with a stout cudgel, is therefore always in style, because the goal is also not to go ahead and kill everyone we can as fast as we can, because reasons, and "I want to go to Starbucks NOW!"

So what we should be aiming for is picking out a sensible middle ground of getting ourselves out of this mess, while pushing as few people into the woodchipper along the way as is reasonably possible. Wearing a face mask in public (gloves optional, but highly recommended, as long as you're smart enough to change them before you touch your uninfected stuff or self), and maintaining some distance between people in public, while continuing to find better ways to treat the most seriously infected by this virus, is a great part of that. It's also no great social burden.
And witness the normally-idiot mayor of L.A., opening up Kung Flu testing to all comers, almost like someone with a brain has been advising him or something. Mirabile dictu!

He announced that, he said, because the test centers were only seeing a fraction of their daily capacity. That kind of common sense will get us through this, however occasional or spotty that coverage is from TPTB. Celebrate common sense whenever and wherever found, and the marketplace of ideas will drive the Stupid People out of business. Like it does.

Staying in perpetual lockdown is idiotic, to the exact same extent as doing nothing is.
But if you like your Kung Flu, you can keep your Kung Flu.

Just move to NYFC.
I promise, no one will miss the left end of the IQ bell curve if all of them move there.
They'll be among friends, I assure you. They can lick the stripper pole, and pee on the third rail, and the rest of us can just watch the YouTube Fail videos of their exploits.

Paraphrasing the iconic Inspector Calahan,

So You Want Out Of Lockdown?

First, a few points:

Ending lockdowns isn't going to jumpstart the economy, nor end massive unemployment.

1) Airline and cruise travel, tourism, pro sports, amusement parks, hotels, etc. - oh, and the entire oil industry - are all going to be in the sh*tter for the rest of this year, and well beyond.

2) I seem to recall this wee $11.5T stock market massive flaming nosedive ending in a smoking hole, that may have just a tad to do with how the economy performs going forward, even if your Fairy Godmother whisked this pandemic away with a flick of her wand, right now.

3) I'm not impressed by the whinging and hyperventilating about the horrors of a seven-week shutdown. There are no bloat-bellied orange-haired children with flies in their eyes walking the streets of anyone's city, town, suburb, or dirt road, neither in Big City, nor Hootenholler. So quit with the panic attacks.

4) Let's also recall the situation in the Great Depression, where it was far worse, and everyone ate their babies, committed suicide, and the whole country starved to death because...oh, wait, never mind, none of that happened because of the Great Depression. So let's tone down the "OMG! Economic Catastrophe" what-ifs for a minute.

The economy is currently shit. The lockdown being lifted isn't going to turn that into ice cream, and certainly not overnight. But stupidly lifting it unilaterally has a damned good chance of showing you what 49 more NYFCs look like, where you live.

So let's not do that, shall we?

We've flattened the curve. In some places, flatter than whale turds at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Everyplace else, much flatter than NYFC.

They are now the poster child for how not to deal with this pandemic.

How about doing and trying everything other than stay-at-home/shelter-in-place?

1) Latest word from WH briefings and the CDC (caveat emptor) is that summer sunlight and temperatures kill this thing on surfaces and in air in less time than a commercial. So a priority ought to be lifting the jackassical lockdowns on outdoor recreation areas and beaches. The bathrooms there, and any indoor air-conditioned venues, not so much.

2) Ordinary isopropyl alcohol apparently kills this bitch deader than canned tuna in half a minute too. So how's about we all agree to decon the f**k out of everything not moving, especially in public, over and over again, with every anti-viral cleansing agent known to man?

3) There will always be the 10% Gilligans in any population (Stout cudgel. Cranium. Assembly required.) , but people should be required to wear and use properly appropriate PPE, like masks and gloves, and given the opportunity to take responsibility for their own protection, and get out and about. I've taken care of 1-2 dozen Kung Flu patients already, at close range, using nothing more complicated than that. It works, and if I can do it, you darned sure can, if you have access to enough of the PPE to do it. Let's require its use in public, universally, and crank that stuff out by the metric f**kton.

4) We're going to have to test, and universally. First to find out who doesn't have it, and who does. So we need gajillions of rapid tests, that are accurate, and specific to SARS-CoV-2, not just any coronavirus including ones that cause a cold. We should start by testing the populations of lesser inhabited states first, and turning them loose, both because they'll be easier to clear faster, and if mistakes are made, they endanger fewer people. Besides, it's time North Dakota and Wyoming were at the head of the line for something. IL, FL, NY, TX, and CA should be dead last. Suck it up, buttercups. By the time we get to them, we should have a lot more tests, equipment, etc., so we'll be better prepared to open them as well, and fast enough to get it done.

5) And BTW, start by testing the actual essential workers, to clear them. Transportation/drivers, freight handlers, farmers, grocery clerks, water/gas/power engineers and workers, garbage collectors, cops, firefighters, EMS, and medical personnel. Then, everybody else, household by household.

6) Actual no-shit quarantines of infected/contagious people, with full lockdown "stay your @$$ at home" quarantine rules, posted signs, public health monitoring, and draconian enforcement for any violations, until they're cleared. Instead of locking up the healthy people.

None of that requires waiting on treatments nor vaccines made of vaporware. It isn't stupid, and it's all doable starting tomorrow. And none of it, done right, is liable to contribute a single new infection or death. It simply takes hospital and public health common sense from a century ago, and demands that we use it now.

Let's do this by hemming this bitch virus in, instead of stupidly doing unilateral lifting of lockdowns, which will just spread it around, and guarantee that we spread this to everyone,  create 49 or 100 more NYFCs, and kill people off by the bushel for the rest of the year.

That, I can get behind unreservedly, and other than the contagious infected, requires just about Jack and Squat Big Brother nannyism, or any more jackassical overreach by local petty tyrants and our would-be clipboard commando overlords. It also requires not one single bit of dubious surveys, magical models, calculating unknowable percentages of exposed, sick, hospitalized, dead, nor any other wild thing.

That doesn't mean they, and sheltering in place, never served any useful purpose, but their utility is largely over (unless TPTB/Idiots In Charge cock this up by the numbers, and get us back to Square One).We know what we need to know about things, and pushing decimal points back and forth solves nothing.

It will require hordes of testing materials, and PPE and decon supplies in small and large mountains. Okay, so let's get on that.

Wash your damned hands, wear your mask, and gloves - and change them! -  decon the hell out of everything not moving, and lock up the infected people, and we can get through this without killing off worst case estimates.

Or, slow-roll an idiotic unilateral lockdown lift, and spend the whole year killing great gobs more people slowly, with a dull rusty saw.

You pays your nickel, and you takes your chances.

Co-Morbidity

Never have so many used a word so much with less idea of what it actually means.
Even Vizzini stands in humble awe. The serial failures are currently scream-worthy.

So what does it really mean?

Here's that bastion of low-cost truthiness, Wikipedia:

Co-Morbidity: the presence of one or more additional conditions co-occurring with a primary condition; in the countable sense of the term, a comorbidity is each additional condition.

Here's Google Dictionary:

Co-Morbidity: the simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient.

Nota bene: the operative word for both definitions is presence. I put it to you: Were you ever present when someone died? Were you therefore responsible for their death? Was anybody/everybody else who was present similarly culpable?

If you can answer this here, thus endeth the lesson. If not, plow on.

So, what are some likely co-morbidities, in common experience?
For examples, let's look at the Grand Slam of Death:
1) Obesity
2) Hypertension
3) Diabetes
4) Chronic Renal Failure

Let's explain. Since this will help you, because all of the above are frequently observed co-morbidities of a poor outcome when combined with SARS-CoV-2, AKA Kung Flu.

Obesity. You're a fat ass. Like more than 20% over your ideal maximum healthy body weight. This has consequences, over time. (Think years to decades). Like

Hypertension. A resting blood pressure anything greater than 140/90. because carrying all that extra flab forces your heart to have to push blood through miles of extra fat, to service the whole body, it has to push harder. Combined with atherosclerosis, the aging and hardening of your arteries, which you can't help because you're old enough to have eaten enough double cheeseburgers, and your body's metabolism, having passed the Rubicon of middle age, has now gone from Magnum P.I. to Higgins.

Diabetes. In this case, Type II, i.e. the old adult version, as opposed to Type I, which is people whose Islets of Langerhans, in their pancreas, aren't making any or enough insulin anymore, which usually begins in childhood. In Type II, your body makes insulin, it even makes enough for a normal-sized person, but when you get fat, the cells tell the insulin, which brings the sugar into the cells, in essence, "F**k you, we don't take that card any more." So the sugar stays in free circulation, making it harder for you to get fine blood circulation to your feet (so you get infections, and even gangrene, from simple wounds that don't heal, because lousy circulation) to your eyes (so you get progressively blind), and to your kidneys, which then progressively fail. If you want to be legless, blind, and tied to a dialysis machine three days a week, for three or four hours a day, until you die - early - just ignore your obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. As a bonus, the diabetes demands your kidneys process more and pee more, right when they can't, and also the extra osmotic pressure drives up your blood pressure, which is already too high, and when you use meds to absorb the extra sugar you should be cutting back on, it makes you fatter. Special bonus: the nerves in your heart muscle, the ones that let you sense pain, die. So frequently, your first clue about a heart attack is keeling over dead. This is what's known in medical terms as a "vicious circle". And the kidney disease becomes

Chronic Renal Failure. Chronic, meaning long-term, permanent, and progressive until total.
So now, all the crap your kidneys (which, with your liver, are the body's main filters, exactly like oil filters on an engine) used to filter out and excrete, only gets pulled out at dialysis, along with the extra fluid you can no longer pee. If all of this sounds like a hellish existence, it's because it is. No points for guessing what sort of hip pocket lecture I give to new-onset hypertensives and non-compliant diabetics, who still have all their body parts, while it's yet early enough not to be the walking hulk I describe at the end of the process. Scaring the hell out of people like that is the best way I know to save their lives, while it's yet early enough to make a difference. Kind of like the "No Swimming" signs upstream from Niagara Falls.

Pay attention now, this is where we blow your minds, and correct your misimpressions of the meaning of co-morbidities in Kung Flu, or anything else.

NONE of these conditions kills anyone.

Let me fine tune that for you.





NONE OF THESE CONDITIONS KILLS ANYONE.

Do they contribute, indirectly, sometimes even directly?
O Hell yes they do. That's why we treat them, and want you to get them under control, to put off paying the Reaper the bill we all owe, for as long as possible.
But trying to pin things on them is the same misguided sensibility that would stop obesity by banning forks and 40 oz. sodas, and putting 10-day waiting periods on Oreos and Twinkies.

What kills people?
(Pay attention here: this is human physiology, in two words:)
Cardio-respiratory failure.
Due to any number of pathologies.
Like any form of shock. Obstructive, hypovolemic, distributive, or neurogenic.

Will Obesity kill you? No. But cardio-respiratory failure, secondary to being fat as a house, and your heart failing to be able to do its job as a direct result, will kill you deader than canned tuna. Years early, as a rule.

Will Hypertension kill you? No. But it will give you a huge and ongoing increased risk for heart attack, or a stroke, which will induce cardiogenic shock, or neurogenic shock, or cerebral edema, or a brain aneurysm that pops and fills your skull with blood, which, having no place to go, squeezes your brains out the little hole at the base of the skull, which tends to shut off your pulse, blood pressure, and respiratory drive.
Which is cardio-respiratory failure.

Will diabetes kill you? No. But it'll give you a diabetic coma, unleash diabetic ketoacidosis, as your body tries to eat itself, gets dehydrated, you go into circulatory shock, and die.
From cardio-respiratory failure.

Will chronic renal failure kill you? No. Unless you skip dialysis for a couple of visits. And one of the by-products not being filtered out is potassium, which normally ranges from levels of 3.5-5 mmol/L (or 3.6-5.2 mmol/L depending on whose lab/reference you're using). But you skipped visiting your artificial kidneys a couple of trips, so your potassium level is north of 6 or 7, maybe 8, perhaps even all the way to 9 mmol/L.
( 9 mmol/L is much like Stage V of Cancer: it is equal to the ECU: the Eternal Care Unit, at Forest Lawn mortuary and cemeteries, hereabouts).

{Trade secret: Lethal injection, when carried out, consists of three drugs:
1) A sleep-inducing agent, like Valium, Versed, etc., to knock you out, so you miss watching/experiencing the final act.
2) Succinylcholine, a synthetic derivative of curare (yes, exactly like from natives' blow-darts) which paralyzes your muscles, including those used for breathing, for long enough to kill you. We do the sleep agent first, because being conscious, and unable to breathe, is suffocating while wide awake, and rather terroristically panic-inducing. We're usually talking mass murderers here, but I'm still not willing to add torture to the execution, as a general rule, amusing as it might be. Slippery slopes and all.
3) Potassium. Because every muscle in you body needs an electrolyte balance, and sodium, potassium, etc. go back and forth to make your muscles work. But get the potassium too high, and you shut off the muscles. So what? Well, you may recall your heart is a muscle, and rather important, since it beats about 37M times/yr until you die. So when your potassium gets to about 9, everything stops moving. Including your ticker. In seconds after a suitable KCl bolus, BTW.
So we turn off your consciousness, your breathing, and your heart, like flicking off light switches.
Which causes: cardio-respiratory failure.

And you - or Mack The Knife - have now paid the state the debt owed for capital crimes.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! But again, we digress.}

So in you come, after skipping your dialysis serially, with your potassium headed for the final elevator stop before the afterlife, and then your heart stops, and we can't get it going to get you back, most times.
Cardio-respiratory failure.

So what?
Having these things with Kung Flu, doesn't mean you died from them instead of from Kung Flu.
Could they have made it easier to get Kung Flu?
Hell yes, from what I've seen published.
Could they make it a bit easier for Kung Flu to kill you?
Hell yes, because your heart is already strained from obesity, hypertension, and your kidneys weakened or failed from diabetes, and thus you have poorer reserves of cardiac or respiratory stamina, or electrolyte imbalances, or sepsis, or twelve other things Kung Flu does to you.

So what kills you, virtually every stinking time:
Cardio-respiratory failure! Because of Kung Flu!

NOT because of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, or renal failure.
Those just made you a juicier target, and a slower moving prey.

Fat antelopes die of cardio-respiratory failure too, because the lion bit down on their wind pipe, and severed their jugular, and clawed their hindquarters open and bloody.
She/he caught them because they were fat, but what killed them was the lion, not their fat ass.

When you get mugged and killed in a robbery, because of a Rolex and a diamond pinkie ring, you die of cardio-respiratory failure from getting shot in the heart. Wealth didn't kill you, the mugger did. Wealth just made you a juicier target.

When you get raped, it's the rapist who rapes you.
You got raped because rapists are evil douchebags, not because of your short skirt and high heels.

Those of you mistakenly or deliberately trying to pretend (co-morbidity = proximate cause of death) are not only wrong, and functionally dumb, you're using the excuse that the victim's skirt was too short, their heels were too high, and they had it coming.

Which is definitionally incorrect, morally reprehensible, and also not very bright.
Please, stop doing that.

People don't drop dead from just old age. Nor just obesity. Nor just hypertension. Nor just diabetes. Nor just chronic renal failure. To a certainty, those things hasten their deaths and shorten their days. But they don't abruptly drop at 2000/week in one city alone because of those things.

They're dying of Kung Flu, which is inducing cardio-respiratory failure, from lungs full of goo, from coagulopathy, from God Only Knows (and pathology is going to start telling us, to a certainty), because they had Kung Flu.

NOT because they had co-morbidities.
To say the latter was causative puts the cart before the horse, and only shows you lack the basic understanding of how this works.
Kung Flu is the lion, the robber, the rapist.

So for crying out loud, stop waving your hands as if you have an "AHA!" moment when it turns out that large numbers of the dead had one or more of those conditions.
This is America: nearly half the country is obese (haven't you been to a Wal-Mart, or even just the "people of Wal-Mart" site?), and a third probably have hypertension, diabetes, or both. You may as well claim they died because they had arms and legs.

Now, if you can find an example of someone driving a snowmobile off a cliff, eaten by wolverines, struck by lightning, or fell in a wood chipper, and whose death was then lumped into the daily Kung Flu death stats, by all means, call that silly b.s. out, loud and clear. But somebody dying in the ICU, with bilateral multifocal pneumonia, a tube down their throat, in NYFC or Bugtussle, amidst a pandemic, is overwhelmingly likely to be a Kung Flu death, until proven otherwise.




Extra credit: Go look up post hoc, ergo propter hoc , and his little brother that starts with cum. They are examples of how not to deduce truth and discover reason.