Capricorn Dumb And The Enstupidation Of America

h/t CW

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 AM

Also 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:

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.

Lunar Laser Reflector, Tranquility Base, July 1969

So people arguing against all provable and repeatable reality that we never landed men on the moon are on the same plane of existence as people claiming to be poached eggs.

Just not as entertaining.

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.

Paging Otto

 

Le sigh. 

Today we look at something a lot of people think they understand, point out the glaring flaw in their reasoning, and deliver poo-flinging amounts of butthurt upon them. For them, the apocalypse. For us, any day ending in "y".

Some people keep wanting to be right on something, and it truly pains us. Like sucking on lemons would. We'd rather not do it, because there's no sweetness to be found. But sometimes we just cut up the lemons, and let other people suck it. This would be that time.

You may have seen this little bucket of codswallop. Usually as the preface for a "See?!? We Wuz Right! MASK DON'T WORK! ELEVENTY!" article trying to justify their weak grasp of middle school science.

There are at least two problems with that line of jackkassery :

1) In neither that study, nor in any of the 20 40 60 78(!) studies cited does anyone say "Masks Don't Work". Not as such, nor anything close to that.

2) That's not what they were even studying, nor even attempting to study.

So what does the study cited actually say?

I know this is a novel approach for people who swallowed the "Masks Don't Work" horseshit hook, line, and sinker, but let's excerpt the following quote from the actual study summation:

Author's Conclusions

"The high risk of bias in the trials {that would be the exact 78 studies everyone who never read them is huffing and puffing about - A.}, variation in outcome measurement {meaning endless apples-to-oranges fallacious equivalencies -A.},and relatively low adherence with the interventions {meaning no one wore their f**king masks neither properly, nor most of the time, exactly like we told you they wouldn't, ever} during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions."

In other words, 

"We took your grant money, and spent most of it on hookers and blow, because after looking at all this endless horsesh*t passing for scientific study, we still cannot make head nor tails out of any of it." 

But wait! There's more!

"The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited..."

In other words,

"We'd have more confidence in a study of the best traps to catch a Bigfoot, if it had been conducted by the Seven Dwarves, and verified by the Tooth Fairy."

Saving the best for last:

"There is a need for large, well-designed RCTs [randomised controlled trials] addressing the effectiveness of many of these interventions in multiple settings and populations, as well as the impact of adherence on effectiveness..."

In other words,

"None of these studies was large enough for statistical significance, they were all poorly designed, they were neither randomised, nor were other variables controlled for, nor did any of them examine actual effectiveness, let alone in multiple settings nor populations, nor did any of them control for the fact that people didn't follow any of the imaginary controls, so we really have no idea what effect that had on the dubious results obtained, and quite frankly, they would all be more authoritative if they'd sacrificed a goat, or read chicken entrails and tea leaves before stating their pre-ordained conclusions. We're sorry we even bothered, because what we found was pure bullshit, masquerading as prime rib and sirloin." 

The study authors have just told you, point-blank, that their study wasn't worth a bag of warm piss, and that they wish they'd found any relevant, accurate, and valid studies to look at, but since all they had to work with was horseshit, they decided to bake horseshit pie.

We pray you, stop eating the pie.

What doesn't the study say, anywhere, with any level of confidence higher than "This is probably total bullshit, and liable to be the exact opposite of reality"...?

It doesn't say, anywhere, explicitly nor by implication, that Masks Don't Work.

Which is nonetheless what multiple sites keep cock-a-doodle-dooing over, as if just the opposite were true.

If you're going to get off the helicopter and walk into the tail rotor, you'll have your reward rather promptly.

There's been, AFAIK, one actual study of whether or not masks work to reduce the spread of virus, with a statistically valid sample, and scrupulous methodology.

We'll keep citing it until the penny drops even with the midwits in the crowd:

Efficacy of face masks.

That's the only actual study of mask effectiveness in the last 5 years of which we are aware.

The 78 studies looked at weren't looking at that, which is why they set out neither to prove nor disprove that proposition.

Because they were studies not of mask effectiveness, but of masking policy effectiveness.

♫ One of these things, is not like the other one...♫

Masks work. 100x to 1000x better than wearing nothing. You could look it up.

But masking policies? Abysmal failure.

Because people are quite simply total fucktards.

You want to cite the "study" that's the basis for numerous "Masks Don't Work! See, We Told you So!" posts? That's nothing but psycho-ceramics: the study of crackpots.

But you want to tell us trying to convince the majority of the population to do something sensible, and do it circumspectly, correctly, and scrupulously, has less than a snowball's chance in Hell of working?

We told YOU that very thing, right on this blog, nearly three years ago.

Still feeling butthurt? There's an app for that.

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

h/t Not Telling You, out of sheer pity 

Shooting Fish In A Barrel Dept.:

Hamfistedly fucktarded. QED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You could look it up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or at the very least, be like Timmy:

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

 h/t 90 Miles From Tyranny

This kind of idiocy is why we're doomed:

Not even N95 masks work to stop COVID.

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

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

You can read the study yourself.

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

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

The control group did not.

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

Therefore, N95s offer no additional protection.

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

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

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

They studied people who sometimes had access to N95 masks.

Natzsofast, Guido.

Let's put it another way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shot by a jealous husband? Another parachute fail.

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

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

Stop me when the penny drops for you.

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

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

And you eating it.

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

Hint For The 80-IQ Booger Eaters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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