Probably Not The Impact They Were Looking To Make

h/t WRSA

The Fat Lady Would Like A Word

This for all those tres concerned that the largesse we've bestowed on Ukraine will suddenly sink the US economy.

The U.S. economy, make no mistake, is in dire straits.

And the concern itself is touching, albeit misguided.

But the bit you and anyone of similar bent is panties atwitter about, is (provided you embiggen the pic to even see it) the tiny white speck in the upper left corner of the right hand side of that graphic. That's a precise measure, using actual numbers.

Worrying about our contributions to Ukraine's defense (including the graft funneled back to Emperor Stumblefuck Poopypants and his cronies) is about as monumental a problem in the grand scheme as the weight of the crackers in some kid's pocket when he boards a lifeboat trying to escape the Titanic.

A fart in a hurricane is a greater concern.

So we present the header graphic as a carefully constructed, dead-on balls accurate representation of exactly how meaningless everything we've sent to Ukraine is, in the bigger picture of the U.S. budget problem.

Get a better argument. And learn to do math. Spazzing over this is as silly as a woman leaving off toenail polish to lose weight. If the woman was Rosie O'Donnell.

Another lady (who's not fat, but definitely hilarious) would like to offer some perspective on high finance. Cue it up to 1:42ff to 2:30, and you'll see what I mean:

Sucker Bet

 

VAERS Finger-counting

 

VAERS is the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

They just released new numbers for all adverse events related to the COVID Vaxx injections, from Dec 2020 to April of this year.

1) They report, among other outcomes, a total of 12,672 U.S deaths alleged to be causally related to the vaccine.

2) Reports are not necessarily correct, as allegation does not equal causation, but the trend generally supports that conclusion, which is why we have a VAERS in the first place.

3) For historical reference, VAERS generally only gets reports filed on about 1% of actual incidents.

You would then be justified, based on that ratio, in extrapolating that the COVID vaxx has probably caused 1,267,200 deaths in the US in 2 years. U.S. Covid deaths are reported, per the Johns-Hopkins ARCGIS site, to be 993,588 since the outbreak began.

(And with milder strains and far better outcomes than the initial outbreak, the CFR of COVID has fallen now to 1.2% of the 81M cases, about 12 times worse than annual flu, but less than half of the initial CFR running near 3% with the initial strain.)

How much overlap there may be between the numbers dead from COVID vs. dead from COVID Vaxx, God alone knows.

Even assuming no overlap, it's safe to say that the cure was literally worse than the disease.

Like nearly 30% worse.

Which even hard-core vaxxholes are starting to mutter about, sotto voce.

This doesn't even get into the permanent disabilities reported, which are four times as frequently reported as are actual deaths. That's over 5M people with permanent disabilities from that poison. (E.g., if you think Bruce Willis' sudden "aphasia" was spontaneous, rather than a likely vaxx-caused stroke, I have a Nakatomi Tower to sell you, cheap.)

For historical comparison, when they rush-released a vaccine for Swine Flu in 1976, it was pulled from further use after a mere 32 deaths, and 500 cases of Giullain-Barre Syndrome.

Biff Bashed

Just like Biff, Putin never saw it coming.

10K dead, 15K wounded, 5K POW/defected, as the Ukrainian Debacle enters Week Five.

Quite the box score for four weeks of blundering in the mud.

Putin's invasion forces have literally been decimated there. They've lost something close to 10% of the armored might of Russia in less than a month, and now they're getting pushed off of ground that had previously been secured by them.

For the attention-challenged, about six weeks before this Ukrainian disasterpiece, Putin had to send 250K troops to Kazakhstan to put down violent riots and open revolt there. They can't leave now without risking a two-front war.

All tolled, Putin's missing 35-55% of his entire armed forces, either destroyed or tied up, and taking troops from elsewhere risks similar risings in Georgia, Chechnya, and elsewhere, not to mention Russian borders at risk with opportunistic neighbors, including China, and staving off a coup in Moscow itself.

On paper, Russia's Biff Tannen army outnumbered Ukraine's George McFly forces 5 to 1 in combat power at the outset of this invasion. But Putin could only spare an attack force barely sufficient for a 2:1 advantage, when normal combat calculus is that an attacker needs 3:1, 5:1, or more in order to prevail. And so they haven't. And then we found out how untrained, unprepared, unprofessional, incompetent, and simply outright awful the Russian Army is at combat in 2022. How the mighty have fallen. And in their thousands.

UPDATE: Russia brags about shiny new ship unloading fresh war material at a Black Sea port. So Ukraine promptly blows it the hell up.

All the Russians have actually accomplished is to threaten to move Putin up to the medal-round in killing civilians, nearing parity with Castro, and then moving up on 4th-place Pol Pot. Whether he gets to bronze depends on whether or not he skips straight to the WMD phase once his demoralized and dreadful conventional forces are completely exhausted.

The only question remaining is whether Ukraine will continue to be resupplied with Javelins, Stingers, etc., sufficient to maintain this level of combat performance until Russia finally throws in the towel.

If they do, Russia stalls, and falters.

If they cannot do so, Russia eventually prevails by sheer weight.

For about 5 seconds. And then has to conduct an endless occupation against 100 times more fighters than the mujahideen ever mustered against the Russians in Afghanistan, but this time, against a near-peer adversary with a permanently seething hatred of all things Russian.

And every minute this continues, Russia appears militarily weaker by the minute to every other country on the planet, and their 12th place Brazil-sized economy shrinks by half, to one closer to 22nd place Taiwan's.

Unrest grows as well in the Russian military, which has lost more generals in the last 4 weeks than the US Army has lost in total since 1965. (The biiger problem is not the generals Ukraine has whacked; it's that they've identified the ones who most resemble Larry, Curly, and Moe, and have left them completely unharmed and unmolested, and free to carry out their cunning plans to the limit of their abilities. The Moscow citizenry is none too pleased either. Demonstrations recur, and someone today dropped off a gift of gasoline at Putin's Kremlin residence, in the handy 750-ml flaming wine bottle party package.

This does not bespeak a Russian victory parade any time soon, and the only group destined to suffer higher casualties than Russian troops attacking Kiev are likely to be Putin's food tasters.

Meh...

 h/t WRSA

No Big Deal.

After all, what's 32,000 deaths and permanent disabilities, between friends, right? In just 9 months of trying.

So let's keep injecting it over and over, and double or triple or quadruple those numbers, forever.

For reference, in the '70s, when the Swine Flu vaccine was rolled out, it killed 53 people, and they pulled it immediately, and never spoke of giving it to anyone again. You could look it up.

FTR: 32,000 dead or crippled for life is only more vaccine deaths and disabilities than every other actually tested and approved vaccine in the History of Ever, since we've been keeping records, combined.

For a disease which, for the infected, has roughly a 98.4% survival rate, in the U.S., overall. And gets better the younger from age 80 you are.

And we still have no wild idea what this shot will do to people in 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 years, nor to the next and all succeeding generations, and we won't know that for 1, 2, 4, 9, or 19 more years from now.

Just comply?!? Pfffft. Not bloody likely. Never, never, never, never, NEVER give up!

Your General Loan Moment Is Coming

 h/t  Avalanche, in Comments

Math anyone can do.

Don't Tiptoe Around It

 

zero sum game: one in which one party gains in exact proportion to how much the other side loses.

And Another Thing

 

Lying With Graphs 101. Or, as DemoCommunist
 fabulists would say, "False, but accurate".

Yesterday's graphic, useful as it was to open the discussion, is lying even worse still. No, really.

Because the financial idjit that made the graphic totally forgot that while $1 buys 1 Hershey bar now, in 1913, $26.14 would have bought 1,307 Hershey bars.  Not 30, as described in the graphic. The bars were 2¢ apiece back then. Whoops.

Double bonus: The price of a cup of coffee in 1913? Also 2¢.

So, empirically, you could have also bought 1,307 cups of coffee with your $26.14.

Or 50 of either with a 1913 dollar. Or 25 of each.

IOW, in real commodity-based pricing, your dollar is worth exactly 50 times less now than in 1913. That would be...2¢. Color me shocked. Gold, chocolate, coffee: all confirm the data. BTW, another data point: average wages in manufacturing in 1914 were 22¢/hr, or about $11/wk. That would be $11/hr or $2200/wk now, based on purchasing power. After taxes. If you're not clearing that now after taxes, IOW making the price of between 1/2 and 1 ounce of gold/week, you've lost ground over your grandfather and great-grandfather. The average weekly wages, per the .Gov , are around $900/week or so in manufacturing. Pre-tax. So it's not your imagination that you're losing ground, no matter what you do. You are. Figure that $900/wk is taxed at 20%, bringing it down to $700ish, versus $1100 that should be earned with dollar-parity. Your real wages, IOW, have slipped nearly 40% because of just inflation in the last century. You're making less actual money, and everything is costing more inflated dollars to buy. And it doesn't last as well. See if this rings a bell:

You don't need to watch it all. You're living it every day.

$26.14 is now supposedly worth $1. But $1 is worth 2¢. To have the same $26.14 as you had in your pocket in 1913, you'd need $1307 in dollars right now. Or $2407.69 in gold. That's 5000% cumulative inflation over a tad more than a century. It's about 4% annually, every year, forever, compounded. And bear in mind, the government pays no taxes on inflated dollars. You do. Put another way, your dollar bill from 1913, when it was gold-backed, should now measure 18 inches high and nearly 4 feet long, because that's now much it's been inflated. That's a beach towel. If you wanted to know how much it's shrunken in value, it should measure 1/10" tall by not quite 1/4" long. That's this small, depending on your monitor:

$1 today. Actual value size.

QED

The graph is also glaringly wrong in yet another way: From the creation of the US Federal Reserve, in December of 1913, until FDR took us off the gold standard in June of 1933, the value of that $26.14 did not decline and go every which way: $26.14 in dollars was worth the exact same amount the entire twenty years' time, and the cash was redeemable in gold at any bank. That's the whole point of gold-backed currency. So the first twenty years of that graph should be a flat horizontal line.

The gyrations inaccurately portrayed above are the only other way you get price increases: scarcity. In this case, due to a World War, followed by a boom of too much money chasing too little goods and services. That's not inflation, it's simply Supply and Demand doing what they do. You could look it up. The dollar didn't become worth less until it was de-coupled from gold. Now, it's worth so much less, it's worthless, in real terms. 

From 1837 to 1933, the US economy, with a gold standard, featured regular boom-and-bust cycles. It always recovered, because the dollar was sound. We stopped having boom-and-bust. We had a Great Depression, worsened by socialism until finally, it took a World War and scarcity, coupled with 160% employment, to reverse out of it.

But uncoupled from gold, the economy never really recovered. We just inflated our way out of it. Like a bus slipping over a cliff, inch by inch, with Uncle Sugar shoveling dirt under it and into it, to tip the center of gravity, to try and slow the slippage. You need more dirt, the further towards the abyss you slip. Eventually, you need so much dirt you're trying to shovel the entire former contents of the Grand Canyon into the back seats, just to balance the load. Ain't nobody got time for that. And you run out of room. Then it looks like this, times 8 billion.

That's how you get to 100 trillion dollar banknotes. Because a $50 today (not a $20) is a $1 from 1913. And we're headed for it being $100 bill, soon. Long before you get to $100 trillion, the paper and ink are worth more intrinsically than their actual face value. Hence the toilet paper and kindling stage. And the whole thing leaves that Wile E. Coyote dust puff at the bottom. Starring you, and everyone you know, to Six Degrees Of Bacon. [Hint: That's everyone.]

And the only two reasons - conjoined at the hip - for taking sound currency off a gold or silver standard - is to increase the cash supply, and steal from people either holding or accepting debt instruments - dollar bills, in this example - with inflation, and by paying for real goods with more and more inflated dollars, which inevitably becomes a death spiral. When a non-gold-backed "dollar" is now worth less than 2¢, you've about reached the maximal ability of that Ponzi scheme, and the whistle is about to be blown, with gravity kicking in rapidly at that point. FTR, 40% of all the US dollars that have ever existed have been created - mainly digitally - in the last few years. I say yet again, 

BRACE FOR IMPACT.

Because the first time the US economy hiccups, the whole house of cards comes all the way down. Look what one sector eating it did to us in 1999 or 2008. Now imagine that with everything, simultaneously.

 A Vegas casino is required to have a dollar in cash in the vault for every dollar of chips in play. The USGov has no such requirement. So imagine a casino where they just keep paying you out with chips, and then everyone tries to redeem them. But the till is empty. Hilarity ensues. People get trampled. People get shot in the face. Expect both, on a societal scale.

Graphs like the above is what happens when they don't even teach history to people who make such graphs.

Mafz Iz Hard. History + Mafz is apparently Chinese Calculus to some people.

But I just explained monetary policy and most of basic economics to you, not to mention a summary of a lot of world history since 1000 B.C., in two posts. You're welcome.

Bonus: GMTA twice.

Math: Still A Thing

 

The above graphic is one that has been used frequently on the WRSA site whenever there's a story about the number finagling with COVID, esp. deaths.

I am loathe to point out the obvious, but there's a wee problem: it's total bullshit.

Don't believe me, use your own lying eyes.

Let's look at the tally, and see what we get.

Take the salmon pink "All causes" death percentages.

Note that the span goes from "Under 1 yr" to "85 years and over".

(Common Core grads: That would be "everyone".)

So those bars are all deaths, for all ages, according to the graph.

Under 1 yr: 1%

1-4 yrs: less than 1%

5-14 yrs: 0%

14-24 yrs: 0%

25-34 yrs: under 1%

35-44 yrs: under 1%

45-54 yrs: 1%

55-64 yrs: 1.5% (Don't worry about the fractions, we'll round up, to be fair.)

65-74 yrs: 2%

75-84 yrs: 5%

85 and up: 15%.

1+1+0+0+1+1+1+2+2+5+15=29%.

That's the percent of all people who died, who died. From "All causes".

So, according to this graphic, the other 71% of the people who died, didn't die.

It's right there on the graph, in living color. I'm not making this up.

I'm not a pathologist, but I'm pretty sure that's a slick bit of mathemagic, right there.

Explaining that no one died of "all causes" in 2020 between age 5 and 24 is also beyond magical.

The word you'd be looking for would be "recockulous". As in "so far beyond riDICulous that a bigger word is required".

Math hint: When you add the percentages, and it doesn't add up to 100 (give or take an infinitesimal fraction, over/under) what you're looking at is the same kind of math that got Biden 110% of eligible votes cast in certain precincts of Philadelphia in 2020. It's how Saddam Hussein was re-elected as dictator of Iraq with 125% of the votes, time after time.

Also known as what drops from the south end of a north-bound bull during a bowel movement.

Important safety tip:

If one is looking for graphics, selecting one that isn't more suitable for use as rose fertilizer is always a good policy.

You'll get no argument here that some unscrupulous entities have monkey-f**ked COVID deaths for nefarious ends, to a degree. (I doubt seriously that it's beyond 5%, either way. You can't pad them that much farther than that without it coming out and biting you in the ass. Ask Fredo Cuomo how that works out when you try it. It's also pretty tough to get thousands of random strangers to all collude randomly in such a vast conspiracy, accidentally or on purpose. If it were otherwise, Nigerian scammers would have the houses next to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. But I have no doubt at all that the numbers bandied are not 100% accurate.)

But as a general rule, it's probably not helping anyone to claim the numbers are fake, by posting a graphic that is itself self-evidently off by a factor of nearly 345%. This is like telling the cop you were only doing 29 when his radar gun reveals you were doing 100. Try selling that whopper to a judge in court, and tell us how it works out for you.

And let's let ABCNNBCBS corner the market concession on obvious bullshit and fake news.

I have no doubt that the graphic's use is an oversight, and that it was probably posted by someone originally with laudable intentions, but crap is still crap, and whoever made that graph is full of it. 

The only thing to do with such crap, is to flush it.

No, Actually, Not So Much

 

© Angus

Angus, who - regardless of what he may think of us, if he does at all - has been a diligent scribe of the ongoing COVIDiation in FL throughout this mess, has posted an infographic, above.

His post title is We're Doing OK. Hence the title of our post.

Well, maybe for some values of "OK", but nothing I would brag upon.

Here's a better infographic, if we do say so ourself:

© Aesop

We post our notes here, because while this is no slight on Angus (despite his previous belief that we were being rude, however much we might push the envelope), towards whom we mean no disrespect to him in any way, in general, nor in regard to this post, we doubt he'd have been inclined to give us the benefit of the doubt.

But facts, as we noted by our infographic, are stubborn things.

If Florida had maintained no increase in hospitalizations, they'd be "doing okay". If they'd decreased the rate until they had none at all, that would've been spectacular. What Angus' graph indicates is that Florida is merely being less stupid than such egregious Blue Hive-governed hellhole examples as NYFS, ILlin' Noise, Joizy, or our own homeland of Califrutopia. In short, they're just doing better only to the extent that they're not even going to qualify for the Bronze Medal in the Fickle Finger Of Fate Kung Flu Sweepstakes (What's fifth, after Brass? Aluminum? Tin? IDK.)

And while they only have the third highest population out of 50 possible there in FL, with an inordinate number of elderly - such that the nickname for the state is already "God's Waiting Room" - I must, FTR, point out that they underperformed so, absent the handicaps of 

a) some 18M extra souls compared to Califrutopia, (one can only shudder at the thought of adding NY's entire pop. to Florida, and the ensuing results in any estimation, but we're pretty sure trumpets sound in the clouds at that point, and Four Horsemen arrive...)

b) including at least 5M+ illegal aliens, so far,

c) a homeless population comprised, overwhelmingly, of exactly the tens of thousands of toothless, banjo-playing kinfolk y'all have shipped here by the busload (I've seen their Greyhound and Amtrak vouchers, and their Social Security numbers, so I know to a metaphysical certainty where they actually came from), which I point out repeatedly despite the cries of butthurt from people who think this last fact is some slur on Appalachia, rather than on your actual kinfolk, and

d) probably the actual stupidest chief executive in any state capitol in the country, were an IQ test-off to be administered.

So yes, compared to the herculean stupidity going on elsewhere, FL, far from doing "OK", is actually pretty screwed, just not quite as screwed.

But the rate is "per million", so despite all those old folks in FL, Califrutopia has managed to surpass all bare statistical expectations, tell all the other states "Hold my beer!", and surge to new heights even Killer Coumo (D-Five Families) couldn't reach back in April and May. Atta Boy, Gabbin' Nuisance! Here's your prize!

And he won it fair and square, no cheating!

It would be even more interesting (to me, anyway) to post the bottom 5 states on that graph as well, but like as not it'll be states like AK, WY, Montana, and the Dakotas, all blessed with more livestock than residents (thus having more actual horses in each than they have two-legged horses' asses), and probably largely unscathed by the virus in general, outside a few hotspots.

So that makes Angus' assessment rather like Arkansas bragging on their literacy scores, when compared to such intellectual powerhouse states as Mississippi and Alabama, and rings similarly hollow.

Sorry if that stings a little, Florida, but there it is. Keep trying though. I wouldn't wish this plague on anyone, and I hope you, and we, can all turn it around soon. Personally, I was over this last April.

Regarding The Calculus

h/t WRSA

GVDL shared comments and thoughts at his site about the prospects for the upcoming sportiness.

One commenter shared his thought on how that will go. Go to Gerard's site, and read the exchange, then come back.

-----

1) The idea that LE, the Notional Guard, and the .Mil will work in lockstep is twaddle.

Read up on retired Lt. Gen. Russell Honore's memoirs regarding how that went during and after Katrina, then tell the class we're better, after Obama, at doing that now.

2) LE, all by itself, can generally fuck up a crowbar in a sandbox, unassisted.

I can only point to 5,000 news stories just in the last decade if you need references.

3) Their resources for handling a SWAT incident are neither comprehensive nor resilient.

Two bank robbers tied up the LAPD for most of a day. One Dorner tied up ALL OF CALIFORNIA for a week. One shooter at LAX, despite being downed by the airport cops in about 90 seconds, had LAX shut down for an entire day, and jammed up ATC throughout the country for days afterwards. And those are just three incidents from Califrutopia in RECENT times, let alone what would happen in 49 other states. 10 incidents in 10 states in the same week would cripple the country even if totally uncoordinated and random.

4) The Notional Guard, God bless 'em, regularly deploy to combat. Nonetheless, they spent 250 years earning their reputation as second-tier only after long and frequent evidence of same. It's great when they show up to help after a tornado or hurricane. Not so much if you think they're going to be the cavalry riding to the rescue, most times and places. They'd be better than the Mexican Army, sure. But even a decent Canadian active duty armored brigade would probably work them over. 1000 or 10,000 random actors in 50 states? Pfffft. At that point, the Notional Guard becomes a resupply point, not an impediment.

3) Active forces: As if.

a) The tooth to tail ratio is legendary.

b) They would be starting in the Green Zone, and are behind enemy lines from the minute they come out to play. Including their wives and families. You're sending the 1st Armored after Joe Blow? Tell me how that's going to work when he bombs their kids' playground, and shoots up the mall their wives shop at. They won't get 20 yards from post before they'll turn their turrets around, and RTB. Then the CG orders all dependents onto post, and locks the division down UFN, and laagers up the entire command inside his own wire. Game Over.

Air power? It is to laugh. Most of their flight lines are within effective range of .50cal sniper fire before they even get off the ramp. Their supply lines are all in occupied enemy territory. Food, POL, spare parts. They could fly for maybe a week, tops. Then they'd be grounded, if they ever even took off. And I don't even need SA-7s nor Stingers to get to that point.

4) Reality: Any commander would know that over half his troops would side with the insurgency, and not just a few commanders, who would all defect wholesale, with all equipment. Hell, that even happened in the Russian coup attempt, when it was still the Soviet uUnion, under the iron grip of the CCCP. You think good old boys in Texas, Georgia, NC, etc. would be less inclined to start stringing up generals, or more???

It's even odds that the minute you tried going all posse commitatus on American soil, Marines from Quantico and Lejeune would have already seized the White House, and be holding the entire NCA under guard before anyone else had a chance to stop it, and they'd be reinforced by the 82d AB division and Special Forces before lunch time.

5) There are more hunting licenses just in PA than there are all troops in the US Army.

By 50%.

There are more hunting licenses in the US (nearly 37M, last I looked) than the number of all soldiers in all armies of the world, combined.

Let's spot you that 3M of those are every active and reserve military member, and every LEO in the U.S.

So that only leaves hunters outnumbering cops and military in the country at 10:1 odds.

That war is over by breakfast on Tuesday the Monday it starts, and 90% of them don't even get to fire a shot before Team Oppression is extinct.

The second and third volley wipes out every Democommunist in these United States, and that's less ammo than those hunters used to sight in last year.

Seriously, the idea that this would be hard is risible.

9 out of 10 hunters would be skunked, without anyone but civilians to shoot at, and that's the biggest tragedy in the whole scenario.

6) A couple of years before his untimely death, WeaponsMan estimated (with copious supporting records and documentation) that the oft-cited hoary statistic of "200M guns" in the US was off and understating things by a factor of 3, minimum. (Common Core grads, that means there were 600,000,000 guns.) That was several years ago, and recent events and sales lead one to the inevitable conclusion that there are probably circa 1 BILLION firearms in private hands in the U.S., and several trillions of rounds of ammunition for same.

7) The idea that we couldn't defeat Iraq and Afghanistan is ludicrous. Our military couldn't, certainly, under Marquess Of Queensbury ROE that required them to extend their pinky fingers, and wait to be shot at before returning fire. But if we simply turned hunters loose on those two countries, and issued bounties, you could move in lions and buffalo to restock the human deserts they'd become, if we'd taken that approach, and it wouldn't have taken more than about a month. And both former nations' populations would be as extinct as Carthaginians after the Third Punic War.

"But Aesop, we'd NEVER do that!!"

Perhaps not. More's the pity.

Now tell me the average hunter wouldn't decide that in a civil war, all bets were off, and human life was too precious to shed blood on behalf of liberty and freedom.

Bear well in mind, you'd be selling this to people who kill a deer every year, and already like guns.

I haven't even brought in the other 200M gun owners with no hunting license, who just want to be left alone. So please, tell me they're all going to sit this one out. I think it far likelier they'll settle that shit with one magazine expended apiece, and then go home in peace for the next 100 years, because they could at that point.

And some of them would take the time to mount the heads on pike poles at the city gates afterwards, pour encourager les autres.

8) I'm supposed to be afraid of Big Tech, and neighbors, because reasons.

a) Tech runs on power. If you forgot that, you're an amateur, and should get back on the porch. If you didn't know that because you never thought of it, shame on you. And kindly STFU. Adults are talking.

b) Neighbors run on food. Right now, "snitches get stiches". In civil war, snitches get body bags. And it's tough to tattle if you can't phone it out. Those Karens are going to learn to MYOFB, or they're going to be an endangered species in about a heartbeat. Some will figure it out after the first time they get cold-cocked like Moldylocks did. The ones who keep yapping after that will resemble Eddie Adams' portrait of a VC in Saigon, just as his mind was opened to a new way of thinking. Suture self.

Bug? Feature? Depends which side of the muzzle you're on.

c) How did big tech, a military machine, and snitches work for TPTB in Saigon, Beirut, or Sarajevo?

How about in Baghdad or Kabul? Are we winning there, or not? Show your work.

So yes, things will get sporty, then they'll get ugly.

But anyone that thinks this is going to be a losing proposition for Average Joe are trying to wargame army men against Indians, thinking the cavalry's carbines are insurmountable.

Tell that to Custer.

That's the correct paradigm to look at a civil (which will be anything but) conflict between the people and the .gov in this country.

Team Oppression can make an example out of the brave but stupid, certainly.

But in the end, they're going to be a dead elephant making a meal for jackals, buzzards, and ants.

Ozymandias said to tell them "Hi".

And in case no one told you, this war - and that's what it is - kicked off at 8PM Hawaiian time, 11/3/2020. Much like WWII started for the US the day the Japanese carrier fleet sailed for Honolulu. Not on Dec. 7th.

You are in the battlespace prep phase of things.

Get busy, and start getting your crap in one bag.

Hopeium Futures Take Another Hit

h/t to CDR Salamander

"May you live in interesting times."

Well, $#!^.

For those out there trying to draw some illusory level of comfort in the mythos that current reported US Kung Flu deaths are a byproduct of perverse incentives, and packing the numbers with non-Kung Flu casualties like snowmobile deaths and people juggling polar bears, there's some really bad news, apolitical in the extreme, from the number crunchers in London at the Financial Times.

They don't give a damn there whether your politics are Left or Right, or what political dog whistles you hear. They just, y'know, analyzed the data, and then compared it with historical death numbers from the same countries and cities from years past to show change over time this year. Almost like they were using mathematics and statistics, or something. (For anyone unacquainted, they're a handy tool, and you should try them from time to time.)

Suffice it to say, the numbers you think are padded may actually be drastically undercounting the actual Kung Flu death toll by as much as 50-60%.

 (LONDON) "The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries. Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods. 

If the same level of under-reporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death toll would rise from the current official total of 201,000 to as high as 318,000. 

To calculate excess deaths, the FT has compared deaths from all causes in the weeks of a location’s outbreak in March and April 2020 to the average for the same period between 2015 and 2019. The total of 122,000 amounts to a 50 per cent rise in overall mortality relative to the historical average for the locations studied."

Oh NOES!!!! The Flu Bros Hoaxer Myth just took another .44Mag silver bullet right to the heart.

Data graphic for countries (these embiggen):

Data for individual cities:

Those big red spikes, above? Those are what people who read graphs call "anomalous spikes", and they represent how badly and how far this thing has changed things versus historical death numbers, in exactly the same way you look at holes in ballistic gelatin to determine relative ballistic performance and effectiveness of firearm rounds. Look at the graphs again. Did we say .44Mag? Sorry. We meant to say .50BMG.

"The extra deaths are most pronounced in urban areas with the worst virus outbreaks, and have completely overwhelmed reporting mechanisms in some. This is especially worrying for many emerging economies, where total excess mortality is orders of magnitude higher than official coronavirus fatalities. 

In Ecuador’s Guayas province, just 245 official Covid-related deaths were reported between March 1 and April 15, but data on total deaths show that about 10,200 more people died during this period than in a typical year — an increase of 350 per cent.
{And an increase in COVID-19 deaths of 41,000%! "Just the flu, bro." - A.} 

Experts have warned of serious under-reporting of Covid-19 cases in residential facilities for the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable to the virus. “Very few countries appear to be testing people in care homes, staff and residents, systematically,” said Adelina Comas-Herrera, research fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre of the London School of Economics. 

Even the much higher numbers of deaths in the pandemic suggested by excess mortality statistics are likely to be conservative, as lockdowns mean that “mortality from numerous conditions such as traffic accidents and occupational injuries possibly went down”, said Markéta Pechholdová, assistant professor of demography at the University of Economics, Prague."

More rounds, center mass to the chest.
Kind of like this:

ED-209? No. COVID-19. You have 10 seconds to comply. 9,8,...
"You killed Kenny! You bastards!"
 

The only good news? Most of those spikes appear to have peaked. For now.

And just to really take a monstrous dump in your corn flakes:
That's in the First World, i.e. what we mean when we say "civilization", with robust medical care, and transparent reporting systems.

In the Turd World, i.e. Sh*tholia, Trashcanistan, et al , where neither of those things apply, the pandemic is liable to be far, far worse.

We have NO WILD IDEA what the outbreak is doing in places where they can't count beyond twenty, even though they're already barefoot.

IOW, you're so far beyond F**ked by this virus, you can't see F**ked from here.
F**ked was eight stops ago, and you slept right past that station, and the train's rolling way beyond where you thought it was. At full speed.

Cheers.

Now tell me about how prepared you are, and for how long?

BTW? For those who would discount the CDC projections of estimated deaths, here it is, helpfully posted over at Salamander's blog from back at the end of March this year:

Talk about calling your shot. Pisser for those who have to admit that the actual totals are right down the middle of the fairway so far (except that it doesn't yet seem to be leveling out like they thought, does it?).

Let's hope that it does indeed level off, as they projected weeks ago. Rather than, say, having wingnuts keen to ignore this charging out and spiking it even higher in the next few weeks.

Let The White Whale Quest End, Please



Pursuit of the impossible past the point of insanity never
 turns out well for Captain Ahab.

Angus: try reading the story, not just the headlines.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo revealed Thursday that preliminary results from a coronavirus antibody study show the statewide infection rate is 13.9 percent, which would mean around 2.7 million residents could have carried the disease.

The 3,000 samples were collected from 40 sites in 19 counties, according to Cuomo, and suggested the infection rate is as high as 21.2 percent in places like New York City.
The governor says the testing was conducted at sites set up outside places like grocery and box stores.
“These are people who were out and about shopping,” Cuomo said. “They were not people who were in their home, they are not people who are isolated, they are not people who are quarantined -- who you could argue probably had a lower rate of infection because they wouldn’t come out of the house.” 

Nearly 70 percent of the overall testing was done in the regions of Westchester, New York City and Long Island. 

In Long Island, the positive rate was 16.7 percent, while the positive rate in Westchester/Rockland Counties and the rest of the state was 11.7 and 3.6 percent, respectively.

That's direct from the text.
"Sciencing"?
Yeah...no.
How does that stack up with actual science and statistics?
Pretty poorly.

Sample size: adequate.
Specificity of testing for Kung Flu: uncertain, at best.
Controlled for age, sex, race, etc.: unknown, but dubious likelihood.
Selection: anything but random.
Skewed heavily towards NYFC, the world capitol of Kung Flu.

If we wanted to know the infection rate among people regularly breaking quarantine around Kung Flu City World Pandemic HQ, it tells us a lot.
NYFC rate of infection: 21.2%
Long Island rate: 16.7%
Westchester/Rockland County rate: 11.7%
Rate of infection in the rest of NYFS: 3.6%

So, granting the premise of this dubious study, with 16,000 dead there alone already, unlocking everything in NYFC could yield a final death toll of as much as 80,000, if they manage to infect every single person in New York Effing City.

Genius!

Meanwhile, the rate of infection in the rest of the state, under, once again, the rosiest non-vetted, unpeer-reviewed piece of totally questionable codswallop is not 21.2%, nor even the weighted 13.9% in the headline Angus grabbed, but only 3.6%.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, man, they printed that right in front of you, in English, FFS. What more could you possibly want??

Meaning the rest of the state still stands to infect the other 96.4% of the population with no antibodies whatsoever, and increase their final death toll by as much as 25 times what it is right now.

I cannot imagine why all the residents of both the Big Horse Apple, and the Empire State, are not clamoring loudly to be allowed the freedom to roam without let or hindrance, with the prospect of only another 64,000 dead in NYFC (where X=16000; 5X-16000=_____.), and another 108,000 or so dead in the non-NYFC part of the state as their reward, if they can just max out the spread. (That's the 4500 NYFS non-NYFC Kung Flu deaths currently, times 24 multiplier, represented by the 96% of NYFS that isn't infected, according to this latest polished turd of a survey, Angus. Wouldn't want you to have to do your own math to see where I come up with my numbers, would we? IOW, if X=4500, 25X - 4500 =______.) I mean, seriously, who'd pass up the chance to kill more people in one state from this than the entire U.S. lost in combat in every war since WWII, to date, combined, perhaps as early as Labor Day?!?
Other than anybody with two brain cells, I mean.
But cheer up. If they contain the spread to only 50% of the state, it'll "only" kill 96,000, instead of 192,000! Maybe even more, if the people locked in and not coming out to "grocery and big box stores" come out of hiding too! What's not to like?

And now guess who's butthurt, exactly as I noted, and got spanked by another blogger, and engendered his own special commemorative post. Angus, seriously: when I say you're butthurt, and then you get flagged for being butthurt, and then you post on your blog about how butthurt you are, how do you think it looks to everyone else on the internet?

You've devolved from occasional information to mere entertainment. And your butt is so scorching it could pop popcorn.

Your ongoing attempts to paint me as the bad guy in your silly Ahab-like quest just ran headfirst into a neutral third party, got you correctly called out by same, and you got burned.
And you did it all by yourself. Toddle back to your HQ, stop slandering innocent third parties and trying to throw shade at someone who's been blogging longer than I have, and probably longer than you too, and stop making up such tall tales that archived blogs from dead people even demonstrate your mendacity. You've forgotten that any number of live people who also visited there regularly can undo your fairytales as well.

IANAD, but I would suggest you need a case of this, stat:

It should go without needing to be said, but I don't want this pandemic to be any worse than it really is. I will, most happily, cheer any legitimate work that shows it's less severe, or liable to dry up and blow away, provided the authors of any such news haven't been huffing hopeium by the metric fuckton, to the detriment of actual science and statistical accuracy. And I sure as Hell don't want it to be a biblical apocalypse, just to be able to rub your nose in "I told you so". If you can't grok that, you're certifiable. I, however, most certainly am not.

I told you at Borepatch's blog that I still read yours. So if it'll help, let me suggest that if you want to get my attention, it isn't necessary for you to set yourself on fire like this. It's gotta be painful. I can get a post without your kamikaze antics. Trust me on that.

You want to blog Coronafest? Knock yourself out. It's a free blogosphere.
Just maybe consider the option to leave me out of your rants. It isn't turning out like you'd hoped, and you aren't getting any luckier with each dice roll. I'm not the white whale you're hunting. If it makes you feel better to think I'm the retard in this internet argument, go right ahead. It's on me. You will anyways, so what the hell, right? Get over it. Let it go, man. Live your life, and stop worrying about me.

Math For Common Core Grads

So, seriously, what's the CFR on Kung Flu?

If you line up bloggers (for but one example) end to end on that question, they'll point in all directions. Or will they?

Let's try working backwards.
There are currently about 42K dead, as of this morning.
(That's the speedometer you have. Live with it.)
If the CFR was "just the flu, bro", that would require that to have the same CFR as annual flu (0.1%), 42,000,000 would need to have been infected thus far. That's about 13% of the US population, nearly 1 in 7.

Even the recockulous Stanford paper, not yet reviewed by anyone without an axe to grind, only posited about 3-4% of the population was infected.

So
a) this manifestly has a CFR one helluva lot higher than "just the flu".
b) if this has only infected 4% of the country, the death toll has the potential to multiply by as much as 25 times more. (Or, stop anywhere between now and 1M dead.) That's current case to worst case, if it's actually infected 4% of the country (i.e. ±13M people).

So we'll call that the Rosiest Extrapolation Line.

Let's try that for NYFC.
They have 14,600 dead this morning.
There are only 9,000,000 in the city.
If we look at the NYFC Metro area (all the burbs nearby, incl. in Joisy, Lon Gisland, and Westchester County), it's about 18M people.
If the CFR is 0.1% it's infected somewhere between 81% of the entire metropolitan area, or else it's infected 162% of everyone in NYFC.
(If you're wondering how it could infect 162% of the population there,
a) you didn't learn math via Common Core methods
b) you're not a DNC vote counter
c) this is simply impossible; Duh.)

So
a) the CFR is clearly one helluva lot higher than 0.1%
b) If we take the Rosiest Extrapolation Line, and 4% of New Yorkers have been infected, that would be 360-720K, depending on whether you want to count city dwellers, or the entire metro area.
c) 14.6K dead gives you a CFR for those two populations of between 2-4%. Color me shocked. No points for scrolling back a month or more, and see what exact guesstimated CFR I used to calculate potential casualties. {Hint: It was 3%.}

Hmm.
Maybe we're starting to zero in on things here.

Let's try somewhere not as egregiously affected by this, and who hasn't for example, still got their gorram subway running every day. just to be sporting about this.

I know. Let's try Florida.
According to his daily updates, McThag, who's made a small hobby of disagreeing with me on damned near anything possible, has calculated Florida's rate.
He has zeroed in, over time, and entirely on his own hook, right around the 3% mark as well.

His numbers take known positives divided by number dead, with a shade over 1% of the entire state having been tested for Kung Flu.

If, in the wildly optimistic Stanford paper assumption, 4% of FL has been infected, then the number of positives should have been 11K, not 27K, out of the 284K tested.
And only half as many people should have died, unless the CFR is much higher than 3%.
So either even the Stanford paper guesstimated wrong by 100%, and 8% of the state has it, not 4%, to get those requisite number of positives actually found by testing; or else FL just got randomly lucky, and managed to find more positive people by pure luck. 17,000 more lucky times, so far.

Or else the rosy assumptions from Stanford are so much rose fertilizer, rosy in both directions, and not applicable to anyone but Yuppies in Silicon Valley, after oldsters there (they didn't correct the sample for age, and picked them off of Facecrack) were self-selected out of the whole invalid survey sample, and the actual infection rate differs state to state (which explains why states that ignored lockdowns until too late, like NYFS, got the shit kicked out of them, while Wyoming, with more cattle and horses than people, doesn't even know what we're talking about with this "imaginary pandemic", and Angus' calculations of the CFR in his neck of the woods are running just about spot on.

Hmm.
What could it be, what could it be...?

When you keep triangulating from different points, and different people do it, the odds of where reality is, get narrowed down pretty quickly, unless you were resecting with fat crayons.

With 42K dead, and a CFR of 3%, this thing has infected about 1.4M Americans. Which is exactly double the number confirmed by testing, meaning to a large degree, the other 700K are exactly the totally asymptomatic carriers well-known from this outbreak going back to Day Zero. And it only amounts to about 0.5% of the country infected, not 4+%.

That means, before everyone everywhere decides "Fuck it, let's re-open everything everywhere, because we're smarter than everyone telling us not to", that you only have
328,600,000 Americans who haven't been exposed to Kung Flu yet, but that you'll probably kill 3% of any additional people you give it to, to a final tally of dead anywhere between today's 42K and  a worst-case upper limit of 10M, depending on how stupid you want to get.
(So far, that depth of stupidity cannot be estimated with existing technology, because exactly like peak oil, every time a theoretical maximum is reached, new discoveries show orders of magnitude more capacity exists in reality.)

IOW, you may have only killed 0.4% of how many you're going to kill, so far, with 99.6% of the casualties yet to come.

And you have no wild idea how far you're going to drive that tally up, but you'd rather risk all 9.96M you haven't managed to knock off, yet, because your pussy hurts, and science is just so much magic to your cargo cult of idiots.

Just so we're all clear on this.

The Dumbocrats have now unequivocally owned the shutdown.  (And overwhelmingly, all the asinine draconian overreaching bullshit perpetrated because of it, too.)
And TPTB in NYFC have owned what happens when you treat this as a hoax.

So now, the (overwhelmingly) Right Wing shit-for-brains contingent wants to step up to the current USA Kung Flu Death Tally, and say,

"HOLD MY BEER." 

 

In a weakened economy, in a presidential election year. Despite the historical example of the Spanish Flu, where the second wave re-emergence killed more people than the opening salvo.

 

Rock On With Your Bad Selves.

 

We told you, and are still correct in doing so, that the deaths from this virus were the least of your concerns over it, and the second, third, and fourth- through N-th level effects were going to roundly kick the ever-loving shit out of you. Exactly as they are, and will.

 

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

 

And the answer from the side of the political spectrum that goes from middle right, to right off the deep end, is "Hell Yeah! Iceberg dead ahead. Flank speed forward!"

 

 

I have yet to crack open so much as one can of my emergency reserves of anything over this, or spend a nickel of savings. But then, I wasn't talking out my ass about preparedness for the last 10-20 years, I was actually getting ready for bad days.

For some other people (quite a lot, I suspect), all this has done is show what blowhard jackholes they really are, while catching them with their hindquarters suddenly flapping in the breeze.

 

Now they want to play chicken with Louis Pasteur, Germ Theory, and Kung Flu?

 

 

B'Bye!!!