And Now Poopypants' Minions Want To Play

 

Asking for 300M friends: Was being a functional retard a requirement to get into Poopypants' cabinet, or is all of them being overqualified in that respect just a serendipitous luck-of-the-draw?

I ask purely out of wild curiosity.

Because not content to let Lindsey Grahamnesty hog the limelight all to himself, SecState Blinken (rhymes with thinkin' and stinkin', take your pick) wanted to let the world know that the U.S. is ready for war with Russia.

Because with half the Russian Army rampaging through Ukraine, right next to NATO member states, what you really need is the US SecState throwing gang signs and saying "Bring it, bitch."

Lord love a duck.

Got bunker?

Because these stupid m*****f*****s are going to skip two or three intermediate steps, and stumble right into a Sh*t Riot or even a Sh*t Tsunami. And when it happens, Blinken will have that same gaping piehole and dumbass look on his face, coupled with sheer astonishment.

Having lived through most of the Cold War, including in uniform for a good fraction of it, I can't recall a US Secretary of State shooting his fool mouth off with quite this level of naked insanity or tone deafness at such a delicate time.

I used to laugh at the pants-wetting horror-porn of dramedies like The Day After, which in Churchill's memorable phrase was "Overtaken By Events", when just a few years later, after all the hyperventilating, the Soviet Union collapsed in a whimpering mousefart of obsolesence.

Now the prologue and build-up from that sappy melodrama are being LARPed into reality by the current crop of chuckleheads in D.C., and they're going to be the most shocked when they look out their windows and see Poopypants being manhandled into Marine One for a quick trip to Mt. Weather, just before a new sun comes up at 3AM.

Oh, and factor this report into your considerations.

Just for BCE.

Let Me Know When The Penny Drops

 

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

Much has been made by bloggers whom and on sites which I respect, about certain prognostications by Mssr. Briggs, statistician, regarding Kung Flu.

I'm not quibbling about his numbers, just what he makes of them, evidently from an utter lack of knowledge about that of which he speaks.

Unfortunately, Briggs' combines his statistical skills with what he doesn't know about science in general, and epidemiology in particular.

1) There are, indeed, "good" flu years, and "bad' flu years. But it's not a 1- or 2- variable problem set.

    a) there are always older people, some of whom are more frail, and many of whom are going to die. But surviving flu one year doesn't, ergo, make you another year older and thus more likely to die the next year. That's kindergarten math thinking.

    b) How many other conditions does any given grandpa or grandma X have?

    c) What is their general health condition?

    d) Did they get a flu shot that year, or not?

        d1) Did the flu vaccine witch doctors guess the actual flu strain mutations well, and formulate a great shot (a year with a 95% efficacy) or poorly (a year with 15% efficacy). {e.g., in 2018, IIRC, there were 635 individual strains of flu rampant in the US, and that year's shot had about a 15% effectiveness. This is nigh on to worthless, relatively speaking.}

        d2) Was there even a flu shot at all?

(In, to my best recollection, 2010, there was no flu vaccine available at all. Whichever year it was, it was a record low flu year. Because CDC and FedGov bombarded the airwaves with PSAs telling people to "Wash your goddamned nasty hands! Stay home if you're sick!" in so many words, and mirabile dictu, old people and parents of young children actually did it. Flu visits to the ER that year were negligible.)

That exact level of concern, plus masks, and distancing, is why, by all accounts, this year's flu season cases will probably be contained in a thimble.

Those are just some of the 100-500 variables behind who dies, and why, from flu, Kung Flu, or any other thing, in any given year. Not just whether it was a "good" or "bad" flu year, last year.

Yes, it was world-record @$$holian to put known COVID+ cases into convo homes, which are the lowest form of medical care other than anything found in the Turd World, and you get a perfect storm of the most vulnerable patients, and the most execrable level of care not delivered by actual gypsies and witch doctors (and in most convo homes, there's little difference between them. The fact that they reek of sh*t and piss the moment you walk in is what poker players call a "tell".) Those deaths were, indeed,  low-hanging fruit.

That such deaths may have accounted for nearly half the initial wave is bad.

It does nothing for the next wave, unless you stop doing that. I have yet to hear that it's no longer policy. And even if it was, that overlooks the obvious problem: Kung Flu presents asymptomatically in up to 50% of cases (which is why checking for fever temperatures at building entries is like looking for elephants in trees: asinine and pointless.)

If they really wanted to keep infected people out of convo homes (which are still chock full of vulnerable patients, in 50 states and 7 territories), they'd have to be rapid-testing every patient they admit, before entry, and rapid-testing every staff member, daily, and every single visitor, vendor, etc., and holding them in quarantine outside until they test negative (an hour or two later). We don't even do that in first-class hospitals.

Doing so would cost a large fortune, and bankrupt everyone, everywhere.

So the exact same thing is going to happen, over and over and over, because you won't pay for doing it right. No one will.

Own that.

It's the exact asymptomatic Gilligans - the young and "healthy",  who won't get really sick nor die from this - who have been and will continue spreading this virus around, until it hits the susceptible victims, and makes a guaranteed percentage of them very sick, and some of them very dead.

Some of them, yes, will be the aged, infirm, and those with levels of disease that were killing people at age 66 in 1933. (That's why FDR had Social Security kick in at age 65; FedGov expected you to be dead within a year. And then medicine, the same bunch that know-nothing idiots bitch about for the cost, went and started increasing everyone's life expectancies to the 80s. See if you can guess why SS is broke.)

And yes, we know a little bit better what to do (and not to do) to care for those hardest hit by Kung Flu. Which will make about a 1-25% difference in fatalities in subsequent waves. Because those in the roughly 3% likely to die, are still going to die. So maybe now the death rate goes down from about 3% to 2.7%. (The death rate for flu, BTW, is about 0.1%, since ever. Don't you feel better now, knowing this is only 27 times worse than flu, instead of 30 times?)

The biggest problem with those prognosticating from ignorance in general is overlooking the fact that most of the population, in this or any country, has yet to be exposed to the virus.

E.g. Califrutopia, last I looked, has tested about 10% of our 40M people.

The rate of those infected at some point, is running damned near 10%.

With millions tested now, rather than dozens, those numbers are statistically valid (unlike, say, Biden's pre-election poll numbers) and thus (unlike Biden's vote tallies) aren't going to widely fluctuate. Right up until we throw open the floodgates, eliminate any precautions, and start spreading Kung Flu virus around like it was welfare money in a Blue State. (Or blank mail-in vote bundles at any Democrat HQ building.)

Then, the more people you infect, the more people will die.

Yes, only at that +/- 3% rate.

We're pushing 250K dead now, with the infection rate of 10% in certain places (mostly highly populated areas), and probably less than 0.1% in most of the country denigrated as Flyoverland.

So, roll the dice, and tell me what happens when the infection rate goes up everywhere.

Especially if the infection rate goes up by leaps and bounds, rapidly.

And for a special bonus, in the exact places where true modern medical care is 1-4 hours away.

On a good day.

Then we get to the fun questions:

Does infection confer immunity?

I have no goddamned idea. Neither does WHO. Neither does CDC. 

Neither does Pfizer, or any-effing-body else.

I have one firsthand example of repeat infection, hospitalized in front of my face. 

I have dozens of cases reported anecdotally.

I have seen zero literature explaining this.

I have seen or heard of zero literature documenting exactly how widespread this is.

No one knows how much, or how widely, the original strain is mutating.

Thus any claims of vaccine efficacy are so much bullshit.

Any claims of herd immunity are so much whistling past the graveyard.

Any extrapolation of how bad this is going to be, with those exact unknowns being so glaringly obvious, are nothing but Bandini Mountain, with a sewage frosting from downstream of the septic plant.

Do I want fiat lockdowns again?

HELL NO!

Make a case, trot out evidence, not SWAG bullshit, and weigh the benefits and costs.

Medical, scientific, economic, everydamnedthing. Talk it over, and think it through, FIRST.

Then have the legislatures pass laws, or not, and have governors sign or veto them.

Y'know, like republican government has worked going back to, oh Magna Carta, or even Rome and Greece. If only for the novelty.

I went over a month in a SoCal ER with no likely COVID patients. I tell you, it was heaven. A crappy night with no COVID patients was like old times.

That ended last week. Just about 3 weeks behind the spike in cases, we just had, on my shifts alone, 3 slam-dunk sure-as-hell-got-it COVID patients. I had 2 of them personally, and one of them was the re-infection case I wrote about previously. When I left yesterday, we had a guy who literally desatted from 80% to 60% oxygen level in the two minutes it took to get him from the triage tent to an iso room inside. He was in his 50s.

The ICU nurse who died from my hospital got it from a patient who was uninfected, then exposed by an asymptomatic patient in a regular ward, brought it to the ICU, and infected 10 nurses there before they knew it was a COVID case. That nurse was in her early 50s, not her late 80s.

Times, in 25 years of my career, that happens with flu: never.

Not one goddamned time.

Not even a consideration.

So I'm getting pretty damned tired of ignorant @$$holes burping out pure undiluted horseshit quotes like the following:

Young (under 65) healthy people are not being killed by the doom—or much of anything else.

Yes, they are. On a regular basis.

Pointing out that they do so at a lesser rate does nothing to remove the lie from the quote above.

And noting that old people die more often is cold comfort to someone whose 30- or 40-year old spouse died because to pointy-headed number crucncher, they were just a rounding error, or "within the margin or error". If you don't have to look the survivors in the eye while their loved one's bodies are still warm but heading for room temperature, kindly STFU about things when you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Suppose I told you, with absolute statistical confidence, that if you ran red lights, you only had a 3% chance of getting bashed to hell, killing someone, or going to prison. 

Would you do it?

Suppose I told you that your meatloaf was 97% steak, and only 3% bullsh*t.

Would you eat it?

If you answered "yes", how much shit could I put in your meatloaf before you'd turn it down??

You can tell me that driving is hazardous, because of drunks and idiots. I'll still drive.

Mainly because I don't drive 100% of the day.

But unlike bar fights, liquor store robberies, or drunk driving deaths, everybody alive on the planet breathes, non-stop, 24/7/365, without any choice in the matter.

So unless you can live isolated, or hold your breath for years on end, or live in a spacesuit 24/7, that makes a respiratory ailment in widespread circulation one hell of a lot bigger concern than the other causes of death which, exactly as the CDC and Briggs note, knock off about 50,000 people every year in this country. 

Which makes statistical prognostications from someone like Briggs sound to me exactly like a fresh hot steaming pile of cowshit smells.

I can listen to statistical bullshit from people who don't know what they don't know, or I can believe my lying eyes, backed up by medical evidence, and common sense.

You guess where I'ma come down on that one.

Ouyay An'tcay Ixfay Upidstay

Well, unless you use a big enough hammer.

I've attempted, earnestly, logically, and at length, to point out the 57 ways Richmond is liable to turn into a shit show. The Tard Army apparently likes the taste of shit sandwich, so they're ordering a double-burger. This is why they're the Tard Army.

Absent, in every reply in opposition, was any actual explanation of the following:

Who's organizing your goat rodeo?

Why are they doing it differently than every other year before this one?

How effective is it likely to be now that you've lost the majority of your entire state government?

If you know it can't work to any good purpose, why do it?

What is the benefit of threatening your own violence at an alleged "peaceful" rally?

Why walk into a venue where you control nothing, and risk everything, when the best outcome you can hope for is that it doesn't explode in your faces, to the detriment of your purported cause, and risks injury or even death to your nominal supporters?

Why would you make your most potent national appearance a suicide mission?

Zero answers to any of that have been given, because to focus on the obvious foolish, stupid, and borderline insane mission would be to admit that it's all that and a bag of chips, on even the most cursory examination.

When it blows up, with a greater than 75% likelihood, you will change minds.
You'll get all the uncommitted Norm the Normies to go from wishy-washy unsure, to dead-set against you, and lose your state forever, and the argument from here on out.

Your "sanctuary" counties will start to slip back the other way.

Uncommitted people who'd have sided with you when you seemed grassroots sensible, will see you as nutroots deranged and dangerous.

Well played: Fucktards.
QED

But let's be fair: some of your aren't fucktards at all. You're doing exactly what your Soros- and three-letter-agency-funded handlers hired you to do. Those folks will miraculously be nowhere handy when it goes pear-shaped. And then, some of you will actually want to follow them next time, because they've BTDT and got the T-shirt. Google: controlled opposition, will ya, FFS? Sweet suffering Shiva, the FBI was doing this in the 1960s. They wrote the gorram manual on it. You could look it up!

And so, because the Bubbas nominally running this aren't any brighter than the buffaloes in a buffalo jump, they will merrily and cluelessly run you all right over the cliff. But they'll pay their rent for another month or two. Their subsequent legal bills, not so much.

Some jackhole accused me of profiting from warning you to try more logical and sensible resistance. I write no books, sell no ads, and make not a dime or anything else from putting out more smarts in the last week than some of you could gather if you doubled your IQ every day for a year. It's purely pro bono work, in this case casting pearls before swine. Fortunately that's a miniscule fraction of who reads this blog, but those of you who own it, go big and loud.

Stampede on, fucktards. What I will get is laughs, tinged with a minimum of sadness, when this almost inevitably does nothing, and far more likely explodes in your faces, as you jump up and down on it. Darwin will have his culls.

Here's the all-time classic example of what happens when Useful Idiots toting guns show up to do something they know nothing about:

Go, Tard Army! Keep working on this! It's coming loose...!

I've laid out two options here. I'm nine states away, amazed that a population that nailed down 90+% of their state now wants to set themselves on fire in public rather than calling a time out, and stopping this rush off the cliff, but you're the ones who'll live (and perhaps die) doing stupid things to no good purpose. And the ones who'll live under the consequences of the Second Pickett's Charge. It's no skin off my ass if you're suicidal, and wish your entire lives to be useful mainly just as a cautionary warning to brighter people elsewhere. (Like Malheur was.) As you will. But you get to choose, and you get to own that choice. ROWYBS.

But every day you gallop another league closer to the cliff, and the calendar's pages flip relentlessly, and the only thing you'll provide for me and a dozen other bloggers asking you to stop thinking with your big heads instead of your little ones is a punchline the next twenty times I need one, for how not to be dumber than a bag of rocks.

IQ is destiny.
Yours isn't looking very promising.

Tick-tock.



{Common sense and logic in reply is always welcome, exceedingly rare though it is.
Dick-measuring replies in Comments will be deleted into the ether, or scathingly mocked, solely at my whim. Enjoy your brief ejaculatory spurt of internet glory. I especially love it when really tiny-minded cretins accuse me or anyone else of doing nothing but typing, by doing nothing but typing.}

Economics 101 For The "Legalize Drugs" Crowd

h/t to Kenny @ Knuckledraggin' blog

Write this on your hands, kids:
When we're right about something, and we've pointed it out, in depth and detail, ten times over, arguing against it is a waste of electrons.
Stop beating your dead horse; it's never going to rise and carry you to victory.

Illegal pot sales outpace legal cannabis in California

"SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California’s marijuana industry is undergoing some severe growing pains -- and it’s much bigger than just licensing permits.  

Nearly two years after recreational marijuana became legal in California, the black market is still much bigger than legal sales of marijuana. 

At All About Wellness, a Sacramento pot shop, business is thriving. In fact, owner Phil Blurton is planning to expand into a bigger building next month. But, he’s also worried about his illegal competitor(s) who don’t pay taxes. 

“Our city license now is $20,000 a year,” Blurton said. “The state license is $96,000. Then we pay 8.75% sales tax to the state." 

Blurton said he also pays an additional 4% cannabis tax to the city, on top of an additional 15% tax to the state, “which is making the cost of our product so expensive the black market is booming now.” 

It's booming to the tune of $8.7 billion in illegal sales this year. That’s more than double the legal market."

Waitwaitwait.

Legalizing it was supposed to "drive the cartels out of business" and lead to a Utopia where the government collects mountains of cash from pot farms fertilized by flying unicorns shitting strawberry-scented piles of cash.

And, Holy Obvious, Batman, who knew that criminals, by definition, don't obey the laws???
(Oh, besides every swinging Richard - by the thousands - that told you, going back decades, that legalization as a "solution", was a giant steaming mound of fresh hot horseshit?)

So how's it working out day to day, in Reality?:

(CHICO, CA) — The Special Enforcement Unit of the Butte County Sheriff’s Office made 12 arrests Monday after discovering $164,200 found stashed in a vehicle during a traffic stop on Nov. 6. 

The traffic stop spurred a search warrant on properties along Bonnie Meadow Lane in Brush Creek, said a press release issued Thursday by the Sheriff’s Office. 

According to the release, deputies believe the three arrested during the traffic stop were en route to buy a large amount of pot while armed. 

When serving the warrant, multiple men ran into the woods but deputies detained 15 people and arrested 12, all from Mexico. 

Detectives think the operation was being run by a Mexican drug trafficking organization. They destroyed 1,204 live marijuana plants, collected 278.91 pounds of processed marijuana bud, 457.32 pounds of marijuana bud on stem and 184.02 pounds of marijuana shake.
The Special Enforcement Unit also located and collected two illegal AR-15 rifles with high capacity magazines, one of which was a short barreled rifle, one AK-47 with a high capacity magazine, three pistols and ballistic rifle rated body armor. Detectives seized $14,380 in U.S. currency.

Roberto Estrada, 38, was arrested on suspicion of maintaining a residence for drug sales, employing a minor under the age of 21 to sell marijuana and possession of marijuana for sale.
Nestor Ortiz, 32, was arrested on suspicion of maintaining a residence for drug sales, cultivation of marijuana and possession of marijuana for sale.
Cristobal Briseno, 19, was arrested on suspicion of cultivating marijuana and possessing marijuana for sale.

RTWT

Waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait.

Legalization was going to make the stupid, futile, impossible, nasty, evil, mean, rotten, unwinnable War Mutually Beneficial Slap Fight On (Some) Drugs, With Collateral Damage go away forever and ever, and peace would guard the planets, in the dawning of the new Legalized Pot Age Of Aquarius.

We've been assured this would happen in 5000% percent of cases. Apparently neither the Mexican drug cartels, nor the Butte County Sheriff's Office, got that memo.
How...curious and surprising. Not.

WTF?

It's almost like bad ideas are always bad ideas, and criminals are going to criminal.
This was just one raid, on one day, in just one county in Califrutopia.

And those were just ordinary, decent, hard-working illegal aliens, growing the pot that Americans won't grow, right?

WHO was it that said “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."
Because I forget sometimes.

And now, a word from the sponsor of this sort of fairytale happy horseshit:

Stop me if you've heard this one...

Cue the "If only we paid the government MOAR TAXES so they could raise or manufacture and give all drugs away free for anyone, free for the asking, forever, by the metric fuckton...!" Argument, in 3, 2, ...

So, tell me, how's that worked out with food?
Have we somehow won the War On Poverty with that?
Or do we just have nearly half the country addicted to being shiftless, fat, lazy, welfare-sucking piggies at government's trough?

(Hint: Check out People Of Wal-Mart and get back to us. I'll wait.)

Asking for the 50% of the country still pulling that wagon for Uncle.
So far.

Spare me the touchy-feely let's-buy-the-world-a-Coke 1960s hippy Left-wing party-line bullshit.
When your Utopia turns to a pile of shit after 15 seconds in the real world, your map is not the terrain. And never was.

And illegal drugs will ALWAYS outsell and underprice the government competition, even if drug cartels have to give them away and pay you to take them, just to capture market share and drive the competition out of business. (They can -and will - always jack the prices once they have a monopoly, and you're hooked. Google "rich heroin addicts", and get back to us.)

It's almost like they might have paid off some of the government @$$holes who enacted this nonsense in the first place (who now get money for and from both sides of the current farce),  to simultaneously make it fail, and yet end any enforcement on their otherwise-contraband, as if they were running a criminal fucking business where the only rule is "Succeed."

("Drug cartels pay off government shitweasels? That's crazy talk, Aesop." said no one ever.)

Politics is the continuation of war by other means.
The Enemy ALWAYS gets a vote.

That Face When...

...you hear that Speaker Alzheimers and her Clowncarnucopia Of Fail Clowns have decided to go ahead with impeachment inquiries, a year out from the 2020 elections:

Just so we're clear here:

Then-Veep Biden, in a flagrant display of nepotism and outright corruption while in office, extorted Ukraine into firing their prosecutor, when said prosecutor was investigating shenanigans by the company on which his son, Hunter Biden, fresh from being kicked out of the Naval Reserve for being a dope fiend, sat on the board of directors, and was then collecting a salary of $50,000 a month. Doubtless for his sterling business acumen, and not at all because he was the ne'er-do-well son of the sitting VPOTUS.

(And I have a bridge for sale cheap if you believe that one...)

Biden has admitted he did exactly this, and no one's whispering a word about investigating that, charging or prosecuting him for it, or anyone pulling Gropey Dopey Joe aside, and suggesting he take a gun and one bullet, and go seclude himself and do the honorable thing, for the Dumbocrat Party and the country's sake.

Instead, President Trump is being investigated (!), for asking the Ukrainians, in compliance with a treaty signed into law by Bill Clinton, to fulfill their obligations, and investigate said corruption, in pursuit of criminal conduct, including that by a sitting US government official, in exact obedience to the oath of office he took on January 20, 2017, to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed", as he is charged to do in Article II, Section 3 of the United States Constitution.

In short, Demented Nancy & Co. are investigating a sitting president for upholding his oath of office faithfully, and thus seeking to remove him from office for doing his job exactly as intended for every occupant of the White House since 1787.

If they succeed in their fifth  sixth open coup attempt since 2016, or damage Trump to the point that he loses in 2020, and the Dems aren't swept out of control of the House next year by a landslide, you can look forward to one thing above all others.

I think there's almost certainly going to be a shooting war in the streets.

Whether over just this, or the totality of the treason going on non-stop since 11/9/2016.
(We won't even go into what's been going on since 1800 or so.)

Because at that point, there will be no further reason to do our revolutions every four years peacefully at the ballot box, as we've done for 230+ years.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. " - President John F. Kennedy

And the Dumbocrats are doing this because they think they can win that war.

Which, quite frankly, should scare the hell out of every sane person in the country.
Once that Pandora's Box is open, no one alive has any idea what the results will be before it's closed again.

YMMV.
I could be seeing this all wrong.
But that's not where I'm putting my chips.

And even if it doesn't: The other side is willing to risk that to fundamentally change  undermine and subvert the America you grew up in.

What are YOU prepared to do?

 

Random Annoyances, And Why I Need More Chainsaw Bar Oil

I've been interested in technology since discovering the second generation of Tom Swift books, reading Popular Science and Popular Mechanics in the barber shop while waiting my turn, and since visiting the Museum Of Science and Industry, back when L.A. was a world-class city and not yet a world-class third-world sh*thole.

That would be a very, very long time ago.

So on the whole, for my edification, instruction, and entertainment, I adore it when someone comes along and explains anything they're Subject-Matter Experts on, in language anyone can grasp, and with suitable illustration of major concepts and particular details. Bonus: for free!

And if Thomas Edison hadn't invented motion pictures in the 1890s, talkies hadn't come along in the 1920s, television in the 1930s, and YouTube hadn't been around since 2005, I wouldn't be so quick to bring this up. But it's not like anything I'm about to say should be news to anyone. Yet, it is.

But the two worst things on the internet, bar none, are amateurs on YouTube etc. who don't know WTF they're doing, and professionals on YouTube etc. who don't know WTF they're doing.

Whether you can't help whipping out your idiotPhone 27 and filming the grandkid's birthday like you were having a seizure during DTs, some idiot savant backyard wizard with the production values of Ed Wood and the plot coherence of Robert Altman, or just some BBC fucktard with way too much caffeine and a raging logorrhea syndrome, trust me when I tell you This book is for YOU.

Read it, learn it, live it, love it. Or else die. Of dick cancer. In a pool of hungry crocodiles. With frickin' laser beams on their heads.

For the short-attention-span TL;DR crowd, a brief summary.

1) Shakespeare died in 1616. It's a f**king VIDEO. So don't tell me, SHOW me.

If you don't get this, and TV looks easy to you, trust me when I tell you: it's because you're a retard. GTFO of the Internet forever.

When Peter Falk tells pre-pubescent Fred Savage in The Princess Bride "Back when I was your age, television was called books", it's witheringly funny. But nota bene, Gentle Reader, that neither consummate director Rob Reiner, nor maestro screenplay author William Goldman then proceeded to give us nothing but Peter Falk droning on from the book for the next two hours. Because it's a frickin' MOVIE!!

Today's f*cktard-fail case in point (and the reason for my rash today about the topic):

Stop. Do not watch!

*I* wanted to watch this. I wanted to hear the information, and more importantly, see the story. Not attend an endless lecture with some insane effing blabbermouth. Otherwise, I could have tuned it in on a podcast, or read the damned book. Don't bother watching this, let me summarize it in nine words, and a much briefer video clip:

"Insane homeless guy breaks into museum to explain history." - best comment under this video at the site

Here's the entire 25 minute video summarized , in only 78 seconds:

 

World of Warships insanely sponsored the other content in question, and I'm here to tell those guys: you were ripped off, and you're mega-idiots for paying money for this. That video is an enthusiastic moron in love with the sound of his own voice, and a sadistic glee in torturing a trapped audience, with no more idea of how to use the camera to tell a story than he has of how to build a warp drive with household tools. He needs a beating with heavy pipes and a sock full of rocks. If he wants to lecture to mopes in person who're free to walk away or throw rotten fruit, fine, but he should GTFO YouTube for life, before he has an accident. Involving a dull rusty chainsaw.

There's one YouTuber, a former USAF ATC, on ATC flightSims who responds to that much blather without any purpose succinctly:

"That's great; blog it."

This is dumbass code for STFU already.

You want to see how to combine a story with visuals?
Here's your guys:

Anything with James Burke. 40 years old and more, and still brilliant exposition.

2) Yes, it's a video. No, the video isn't the most important thing.

Learn a lesson:
People will watch sh*t video with great sound forever:
Blair Witch Project - $140.5M profit on a production budget of $60K.

People will drop sh*t sound in 0.3 seconds:
you, every time your friend calls you on his cheap ass cell phone from the bottom of a well.

If you can't get flawless audio on your video (unless it's man-in-the-street action, like a car crash or a gunfight in progress), shitcan that audio recorded from up your @$$, and dub over that.
There are only 1000 sound editing programs, and any microphone at BestBuy or WalMart is better that the p.o.s. in your cell phone, or even on the video cam you bought. Guaranteed.

Put a wind sock on that mike outside (it's a thing that looks like a tiny poodle of faux fur). No one wants to hear the hurricane, or you puffing and panting. Not even on your own sex tape.
Tie the dog to the car bumper, and drive it away. No, really.
Don't shoot under the airport landing pattern, next to the freight train yard, beside a guy with a jackhammer, or anywhere else bystanders are wearing earmuffs because of OSHA requirements.
Otherwise, the above comment regarding dick cancer and crocodiles applies to you too.

3) But it's still a video. Get a tripod.

No shaky video unless you're recreating a Saturn V moon launch.
And every time you get the urge to whip-pan while the video is rolling (unless the Blue Angels are flying right overhead at Mach 0.8 and 200'AGL), stick your tongue in a live light socket. Repeat until that urge passes.
If a tripod is illegal, get a monopod.
If a monopod is illegal, get a sandbag or a square of wood with a 1/4"x20 threaded bolt (the size of every tripod socket since about ever), and put it on a stable surface.
If those won't work, take your buddy, the one who wanted to do all those puke-your-lunch whip-pan shots, and once the tongue-in-the-socket electric shocks render him unconscious, duct tape the camera to his torso. And get your shot, with no seizure-shakey cam.

4) Pencil and paper have been around for centuries.

a) Write a script. Shakespeare died, but the idea of knowing what you're going to say before you say it hasn't.
Every time you say "Um"? Tongue. Light socket. Repeat until the problem resolves.
Won't resolve? Dick cancer. Crocodiles. Frickin' laser beams.

b) Make a shot list.
What shots do you need to have for the script? Get them.
Telling us about a tiny detail (By which I mean showing us a tiny detail)? Insert shot: a super close-up shot of the exact detail in question. (E.g., guy defusing a bomb, someone setting their watch, etc.)
Watch the James Burke video above, even any one of the longer versions of it on YouTube, and compare that clip with the lack of anything like that in the perfectly awful Turbinia video, at least in the 90 seconds I could stand to watch it before my blogging fingers started twitching. Worse than a crime, it's a tragedy.

c) You can use online tools like Sketch-Up, or even a crayon, and draw out a stickman storyboard just like a comic book and combine the shot you want with the dialogue/voice-over for that shot, and then go out and shoot it. Check them off when you get them. (That's how you know you got what you came for.)
Just like they do in Hollywood on multi-hundred-million-dollar movies.

You can copy this just by having enough brain cells, and doing it.

Now see if you can figure out why Marvel Comics is making the most and best franchise movies in the last 20 years, bar none, and Stan Lee is and will remain the most successful movie writer in history.

5) EDIT!!!!!

Take out every boring second. Every bungled attempt. Random noise. Cars honking, dogs barking, dumbasses screaming into the microphone. Every last flaming thing that isn't 5-star flawless, or 4 stars and salvageable with some editing magic. Like Hollywood does because they're pros, and like you don't because you're a lazy bastard.

Accept one-take magic if it happens. That Tiger Woods Nike commercial back in the day, bouncing a golf ball on the club head for 28 seconds, and then whacking the ball to Antarctica?

One take. Screwing around during an all-day shoot. Which became the commercial.

I was working on Just Shoot Me once, in an episode where George Segal's character had bet Donald Trump he could beat him at golf, in a dress. (No, I didn't get to meet pre-presidential Trumpster.) But we went on location to a local golf course. In the script, Segal had to sink a putt that was at least 30'. In a dress.
We had a golf pro. A coach. Ten dozen brand new golf balls. Entire crew, and truck load of film. Segal showed up, walked over to wardrobe, came out in the dress over his regular wardrobe, walked over to the green, took a few air swings, and we settled in for what was to be a long afternoon trying to get the shot.
So for the take, Segal walked up to the first ball, lines up the shot, tapped it perfectly, and it rolled straight to the hole like it was on a rail, and dropped in with a sound-perfect plunk in one take. "Do you want another one?" he asked.
Director says, "Nope. We're done. That's a wrap." Everyone home early, for a shot that was 2 seconds of TV on a minor sitcom.

A friend of mine worked on a beer commercial, with a Professional Pourer. (Yes, it's a thing, apparently.) Take One, the guy pours the product into the pilsner glass, it swirls in a perfect amber-colored maelstrom of hoppy wonderfulness, the foam head gets to just over the lip, and one absolutely perfect drop of foam overflows, and dribbles right down across the logo. Absolute artistic orgasm of a shot.(Which is why there are Professional Pourers.)
Director says, "Let's get one more good take, just in case the client wants another version."
Seven cases of beer and fourteen hours of filming later, they hadn't replicated the first one, nor even come close. Guess which take they used in the final cut...?

Bottom line, know what you want, and chop out everything that isn't that. First take, eightieth take, doesn't matter. But if it is take 80, get rid of the other 79 before you post the thing.
Nobody cares about all the extraneous crap, and they'll appreciate not wasting half their day waiting for your video to get to the point. More importantly, they might stick around long enough to see the whole thing.

(I just saved you $200K for the most important 95% of things you'll learn at film school. You're welcome. Now buy the book above for the other 5%. Mine was shorter and cheaper, but that one is definitely better.)



Those five weird tricks will move you from the ranks of the 99% of awful creators on YouTube, Vimeo, etc. who deserve dick cancer and a bloody, laser-scorched end, and move you to the top tier of production, whether it's a 5 second gif shot, or a garage-band feature film.

And I won't have to hunt you down and kill you, slowly, with a dull chainsaw, starting at the toes.


{Aesop has worked in Hollywood for over twenty-five years on everything from feature films to Top 40 TV shows to commercials to low-budget award-winning short films to homemade music videos, and has produced, directed, shot, miked, lit, gripped, propped, wardrobed, EFX'ed and more, times beyond counting. And has a growing list of people on his To-Be-Chainsawed List, while the grains of his life ebb away one by one. Please, he yells because he cares, but he's not above thinning out the gene pool.)

Junior Dumbass Of The Day

For The Sunday Talkshow Yammering Hammerheads

Pundits gonna pundit today.
Probably been waiting all week just to get their rhetorical rocks off today.
So, before they even get going...

 

 

And the always popular:

 



The Dutch Airline With $#!^ For Brains

Mental retardation apparently strikes even at 30,000 feet:

(STRONTHOOFD) A pilot was forced to make an emergency landing after a fight broke-out when a passenger wouldn't stop FARTING.
The Dubai to Amsterdam flight made an unscheduled stop in Vienna as the elderly overweight man reportedly refused to contain himself in the packed out cabin.

Chaos erupted on the flight when two Dutchman who were sitting next to the flatulent man told him to stop and complained to Transavia Airlines crew.
Yet despite repeated requests and even a direct order from the pilot the man carried on and a fight broke out.

Perhaps the pilot was sick the day in pilot school when they covered things like physics and physiology, but when you fly, you aren't travelling in a cabin pressurized to sea level, but rather in one partially pressurized to about 5000 feet above sea level.

Flatulence, being a gas phenomenon, responds to the laws of physics, and when the pressure outside is suddenly reduced, like by travelling to altitude, versus the pressure inside the human body where digestion makes the gas, you're going to fart.

EVERYONE farts on a airplane at altitude. Every. Single. Person.
As anyone who's flown ought to know, let alone the pilot of the plane.

And a "direct order" from the pilot to stop is about as sensible as standing at the ocean and commanding the tide to stop coming in.

So Pilot Fucktard, instead of informing the dumbass Dutchmen taking offense at an unstoppable physical phenomenon, instead chose to feed their ignorant superstition, and punish a man who could no more contain himself than could he grow gills.

I have no idea how fucked up EU law is, but I hope Mr. Farter ends up a few million Euros the richer for this nonsense. The soccer hooligans ejected with him were the problem, and their fate is entirely deserved.

And as passing gas constitutes no more of an in-flight emergency than yawning, however unpleasant it is to your fellow passengers, if that, rather than the fight egged on by the captain's ignorant assholishness, was the reason for the emergency landing, the pilot should have his CATP license suspended, and be forced to retake an extensive course in flight physiology, and sensible decision making and aircraft management, not to mention testing for some baseline amount of common sense, which he's clearly lacking, ideally while being subjected to twice or thrice daily beating about the head and shoulders with a stout pole, to drive those lessons well home.

He's obviously an unmitigated fucktard, clearly too stupid at present to be entrusted with flying an airplane and the commensurate responsibility for a multi-million dollar aircraft loaded with passengers, and his customer service skills (let alone common sense) owe far more to the Gestapo than to common sense.

Idiocracy From The Terminally Stupid

From the fishwrap of record in Los Angeles.

(Stupidville) Tesla and SpaceX chief  (and idiot savant - A.) Elon Musk has joined dozens of CEOs of artificial intelligence companies in signing an open letter urging the United Nations to ban the use of AI in weapons before the technology gets out of hand.The letter was published Monday — the same day the U.N.’s Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems was to discuss ways to protect civilians from the misuse of automated weapons. That meeting, however, has been postponed until November. 

“Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare,” read the letter, which was also signed by the chief executives of companies such as Cafe X Technologies (whichbuilt the autonomous baristsa) and PlusOne Robotics (whose robots automate manual labor). “Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close. Therefore we implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers.” 

The letter’s sentiments echo those in another open letter that Musk — along with more than 3,000 AI and robotics researchers, plus others such as Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak — signed nearly two years ago. In the 2015 letter, the signatories warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence in weapons, which could be used in “assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group.”

So let me get this straight: the guy whose business is something like 50+% dependent on government subsidies to keep its doors open, along with the guys whose products are replacing $15/hr dumbasses at coffee kiosks, and put dues-paying union assembly drones out on the street in the Rust Belt for going on forty years, don't want any of that government money going towards weapons that have been cutting edge since JFK's older brother died testing them in 1944, and have petitioned the world's champion toothless gasbags to help them put an end to what's been going on quite merrily since Leonardo daVinci (perhaps Musk has heard of him) was looking to make a fast buck off the ruling Medicis in Florence ca. 1480 or so. What an ignorant bunch of fuckwits.

This sort of mindless shrieking is Proof #10,043 in why Intelligence In One Narrow Field of Endeavor Does Not Confer Basic Intelligence In Anything Else.

One wonders what exactly Musk thinks Werner von Braun was up to in 1943 at Peenemunde, before we captured him and his toys, and set him to play over at NASA.

Musk, and his fellow-Flat Earthers, are about 70 years late (if not 6,000 years), and two functional synapses short, in trying to stuff toothpaste back into the tube nearly a century later.

Time fuzes on artillery shells became a thing back in 1800s, and as noted above Kennedy was killed in Operation Aphrodite, testing a radio-controlled B-24 heavy bomber loaded with explosives when it and they became so much heat and noise.

So despite Mssr. Musk and Co.'s sudden notice of misty historical realities, this march has been pronounced and inexorable since before the US Civil War. Them or anyone else getting worked up about it only now merely announces to the world that you slept through your grade-school history classes, and just woke up, now. Dumbfucks.

Lastly, covering this level of asinine moonbattery as if it were earth-shattering actual news is also why the selfsame fishwrap is the local town joke in "journalism" (and has been since the communist heirs of the Chandler clan ran it in the 1960s) just underwent yet another desk-clearing, to re-arrange deck chairs on the newspaper Titanic.

Fake News and manufactured outrage, on sale near you 24/7/365.
(While supplies last.)

Go catch a flick, Elon. It might explain things for you, and it's funny.

Even if, like your notice, it's a wee bit dated.