Rust Never Sleeps

h/t Captain's Journal

The only enemies your guns have are rust and politicians.

Now that Virginia is on statewide home lockdown orders, let's tally up the successes from that big Gun Woodstock rally back when Kung Flu wasn't a thing, shall we?

(RICHMOND, VIRGINIFORNIA) The bills signed by the governor on Friday are: 

• Senate Bill 70 and House Bill 2, which establish universal background checks in Virginia
• Senate Bill 240 and House Bill 674, which establish an Extreme Risk Protective Order, allowing authorities to temporarily take guns away from people deemed to be dangerous to themselves or others
• Senate Bill 69 and House Bill 812, which reinstate Virginia’s one-handgun-a-month law
• House Bill 9, which requires gun owners to report their lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement within 48 hours or face a civil penalty.
• House Bill 1083, which toughens the penalty for leaving a loaded, unsecured firearm in a reckless manner that endangers a child 

[Gov. Blackface Babykiller] proposed amendments for other bills without signing them into law, including:
• Senate Bill 35 and House Bill 421, which give local governments more authority to ban guns in public spaces, like public buildings, parks, recreation centers, and during permitted events
--- The governor requested amendments clarifying the exemption included in the bill for institutions of higher education
• Senate Bill 479 and House Bill 1004, which bar people with protective orders against them from possessing firearms and require them to turn over their guns within 24 hours
--- The governor requested amendments recommended by the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance to allow judges to hold the person in contempt of court if they fail to comply

Bummer. Say, that's quite a box score, though! VA went from Zero to Califrutopia, in one swell foop. Gov. BB seems to be quakin' in his boots. "We stopped the AWB!" doesn't have quite the same ring to it now, does it? Sure is a good thing the jet-fuel geniuses behind that January rally spent that whole month planning that shindig, instead of spending time (that they don't have now  - thanks, Kung Flu!) to organize militias at the county level to actually oppose any such nonsense. Surgical mask and gloves optional, but strongly recommended.

Maybe in two or three more months - if we're all really lucky with the pandemic and all - somebody might look into doing that this time around, as something that has a much better chance of actually working, and focuses on the acknowledged strengths available at the local level in 95% of the state, before the dumbass Gun Woodstock sucked all the oxygen out of the party.

Or, you could hold another rally. Maybe next time, masks at the capitol will be mandatory, instead of banned. (As long as they're N95s.)

That will show your legislature who's the boss, and it'll be just the thing to calm the Normies down right on the heels of a pandemic, and the outset of a monster economic recession/Depression: seeing a bunch of jaspers waving rifles around outside the state capitol. It's sure to sway average folks to that side of the argument, you betcha.

Just look how well it worked on the legislature.

Better luck next time around with Plan B. Maybe act like time wasn't infinite, this time.

And FFS, once you're not on lockdowns and stay-at-homes any more

Stop playing in the street.

Nothing you want is won there.

 

You'd have thought a decade and more of total hippie failures would've taught people at least that much about it.

Day 1 - Fatal Attraction

Blame Sarin.



"I won't be ignored."

Day 0

totally bootlegged and adapted from WRSA



吉利根·王（Gilligan Wang）在市场上出售了我们的实验兔!

 

A little help...

Cut. Paste. You'll work it out.

 

Popular Delusions And How To Spot Them

(A)

(B)

(C)

Matching:
Match the memes above with comments below, or elsewhere.

Note: Memes may be used more than once.




Well Played

Courtesy of the fucktards, the Comments policy has changed.
Best wishes to them with yelling at themselves, after studying the above manual on how to comport themselves when they couldn't gain a win any other way.

For the vast majority who could manage to make a point without reaching into their underpants, my sincere thanks for the last decade-plus. I'll miss 99% of you.
But life's too short for cleaning up after retards, for free.

Maybe a merciful deity will use Kung Flu to do some civilizational housecleaning.
We live in hope.

UPDATE:
Setting up moderation was less of a hassle than expected.
If you made the short list, you're gone forever, and I never even see your drivel.

If, OTOH, you had zero problems with what you posted before, you won't now either.
I have no desire to be anyone's nanny.

Comments, questions, and anything else will appear as and when I have time to push them through.

Rude assholery will disappear to the ether, and new handles attempting same take one mouseclick to permaban, and then I never see the attempts; I just hit the flush button occasionally.

Welcome back.

Update From Chairman Mao

1,897 deaths yesterday in the U.S. In one day.

Good thing this isn't real, or that might be worrisome. [/sarc]

 

The absolute last "Bridge Out" sign before even the hardiest morons will have to admit this is really a thing, is if, heaven forbid, this ever gets to numbers above 7000 deaths/day. That's the number of daily deaths from all causes in a normal year (±2.6M of them/yr): heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, shootings, getting trampled by buffalo, eaten by feral pigs, etc.

 

If we overtop that, there's no more thin trees to hide behind before the peak of obvious fact appears, that people are dying now, faster, and it can't be imaginary "packing all deaths into Kung Flu" black helicopter horseshit.

 

(It really shouldn't even take that: the number of, for example, car accidents or shootings now is waaaaaaaaaaay down, because no one's out and about. A normal night for us at work is 5-10 car accidents; we're amazed if we see 1 now.  Vehicle accident stats and crime numbers everywhere are doing a mega-nosedive. Deaths from cardio-, cardiorespiratory, and pneumonia deaths are off the charts. That should be a less-than-subtle hint, even to space cadets, but you can't argue someone out of a position using facts and logic, if they didn't use facts and logic to get to where they are in the first place.)

 

That doesn't mean sanity will break out, especially among the chemtrail lunatard fringe; it just means the tinfoil millinery contingent will have to STFU, or risk a good and well-deserved public stoning every time they open their yawps. NTTAWWT.

 

 

You, Sir, Win The Internetz For The Day!

Kudos to Political Clown Parade's superlative headline:

Bernie Sanders Tests Negative For President.

Huzzah. That's world-class, right there.

----------

In other news you can use, at Feral Irishman:

While we were busy watching Coronavirus news, Johnny Jihadi kills three women and stabs a fourth at truck stop.

Apparently it's okay though, because the three women killed were all older, with pre-existing co-morbidities, so they don't really matter.

Wait, that doesn't apply?

Somebody's going to have to publish the rules on this, soon.

Logic Fail

 

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

 

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

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

Just saying.

 

Since It Keeps Coming Up...

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

Au contraire, mes amis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

."

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

lightspeed to Alderaan in about 30 minutes of

cinema time. QED

I don't pick examples randomly.}

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m educable.
Please, show your work.

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

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

{Bonus for readers here:


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

}
























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

-----

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

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

Never  ╪ Now.
Now ╪ Forever.

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

Life Lesson Genius: One Panel Truth

o/~ One of these things is not like the other... o/~

Go ahead, budding Einsteins: You decide which model seems wisest to you, at this point.

Kung Flu response: so simple, a cave man could do it.

Hell, CA Gov. Gabbin' Nuisance is a certified moron, but compared to NYFS Gov. Cuomo (D-Five Families) he's Stephen F**king Hawking compared to Gilligan. Because for once in his mostly useless life, he listened to smarter people (and to be honest, in Nuisance's case, that would be all of them), and did the right thing, when it really mattered. Cuomo, by all accounts, has never done the right thing, or listened to smarter people ever, on anything.

And to be totally full-disclosure fair here, the one place in Califrutopia where it's blowing up -  L.A., I'm looking at you - it's exactly because people there are being NYFC levels of stupid, grouping together, ignoring quarantine guidelines, and doing the exact same dumbfuckery that made NYFC the COVID Capitol of the World.

QED

And from Comments:

"CNN mentioned assumptions of studies in an article from today (drudge linked): https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/health/ihme-updated-covid19-model/index.html

 "But the newest version of the model underscores just how important social distancing continues to be: It assumes that those measures -- such as closing schools and businesses -- will continue until August, and it still predicts tens of thousands of deaths."

  

August is SIX GD Months of economic shutdown! Much more at the link." -RSR

Thanks, RSR.

I appreciate the summary of IMHE's assumptions, something no one with a megaphone on the Internet is talking about, even as they plan to get the beaches in Amity re-opened just in time for the 4th of July. It sux that they can't figure it out, while even CNN couched their report in that reality. When CNN scoops you, it's time for some loudmouths to sit down.

There's nothing wrong with IMHE's inherent predictive casualty analysis on that basis, but as usual, the Short-Bus Short-Attention-Span Jackholes don't pay attention to such niggling details, they just think they can cut straight to the conclusion page, and sound like Harvard MD post-doctoral fellows.

I still think they're smoking pure, straight hopeium in opining that this magically fades away in a couple of weeks, though.

There's still no empirical basis for suspecting that out loud, other than blind hope. That's throwing darts at the prediction board, not science.

But it's entirely possible that, like crime, this is driven by the actions of the fractional number of  dumbest dumbass Gilligans in society, and once you cull the stupidest few thousand, like in NYFC, that - exactly like the Three Strikes laws - once those assholes are winnowed out of the general population, the trend spikes downward like a crashing Space Shuttle, largely for the same reasons: stupidity and arrogance meet reality and end up in the same smoking hole of hubris.

On that basis, this may indeed peak shortly, but we'll only know that after it does.
People should buckle down, STFU, and wait and see.



Oh, and for the "lift the lockdowns now!" crowd:

And since when do we listen to the most unprepared knotheads about when or whether to do that, in the same manner as letting Gilligan take the wheel, or Rainman drive the car...??

Just asking.

Pro Tip: Don't Be That Guy



Cluebat For Retards: Mayor Vaughn is not the secret hero of this film.
Apologies if that was news to anyone.
 

Theatre is life.

Film is art.

Television is furniture.

- (Entertainment industry truism.)

Art imitates life. And vice versa.
Let art inform your real life.

Hint: When the guy on the front lines and the smartest guy in the room have sussed out the full nature of the problem, and the danger it represents, don't be the guy digging in his heels, and yelling the loudest to re-open the beaches on the 4th Of July.

You're just ringing the goddam dinner bell, fer chrissakes.

And it never works out well.
For anyone.

This would all be hilariously funny, and terribly ironic, if it wasn't real life, with actual dead people stacked up like cordwood in freezer trucks outside NYFC hospitals, knowing that a 20-something-year-old nobody named Stevie Spielberg had this figured out in the late summer/early fall of '74.




And a little point about the guy who told you the truth, before you listened to the yappy ignorant assholes, and the cheapskates worried about being on welfare the whole winter:

 

Yeah, he dies in the end, saving cheap bastards who couldn't care less, but you decide: would you rather be the Tragic Hero, going out swinging till the very end, or be the archtypical Asshole Of the World until the day you die, knowing every waking moment that your pigheaded stupidity and petty greed killed your friends and neighbors, who foolishly misplaced their trust in you?

 

I've made my choice, and I can sleep like a baby at night.

 

I'm From Missouri

You get that there's two ways to take that, and they're both complete
opposites of each other, right?

Prognosticators and Flu-sayers are proposing (and TPTB are listening) that this week and next are the coming peaks of Kung Flu.

You can read their product here.

Are they correct?
I have no wild idea.
I do find it somewhat optimistic, but I'm open to persuasion.
I'd certainly like them to be correct.

When you project the peak in two weeks, at 3000 deaths/day, +/- 5000, that looks like shotgun forecasting.
I see no reason imaginable that things will get that bad, and then suddenly shrink, because Magic Brownies or something.

If they had some explanation for why things will tip over, and work out, beyond "I don't know; it's a mystery." and then actually start trending downward, I'd like to hear it.

Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't, but absent some rational theory, with viable and valid evidence, it sounds to me more like wishful thinking than actual analysis.

It seems to me the only way you know when you've crested a mountain on terrain you've never been to, is to wait until you start walking down instead of up.

IOW, when actual deaths trend downward, and keep on doing that, give a holler.
Forget cases. Testing is so screwed beyond belief, since ever, there's no one in Creation who has any bare clue how many people anywhere have been infected. When California is so backlogged they can't tell you how bad this was on March 20th until May 10th, anyone who says they can predict when this peaks, for any value of "whenever", is smoking controlled substances.

What I do know is this:
There's no vaccine.
There's no widely acknowledged effective treatment.
There's no immunity to it.
There's no way to test for who has had it, and gotten over it.

So unless and until people stop dying daily in growing numbers, and the death trend starts pointing downwards, we're not past the hump yet.

Worse, lifting things like lockdowns at that point may simply trigger the peaks to shift to areas less-affected now. Like everywhere west of the Mississippi River.

And while it would be nice, particularly for residents there, to hear that NYFC is finally over the hump in the pandemic, if we then lift lockdowns, and merely shift the locus of the problem back to the middle of the country or to the Left coast, it would be a pyrrhic victory. [Common Core grads: that's a case where the cure IS "worse than the disease". You could look it up.™]

It seems to me to get past this, you're going to have to first have a rapid-result test in quantity.
Then start by testing everyone working and deemed "essential", so you know they're okay to be out and about.
Then maybe start testing one zip code per day in as many regional areas as you can simultaneously, until they're all tested, and only people with no Kung Flu get out of self-quarantine jail.

Those positive are still in it, and get re-tested every 30 days.

Otherwise you're just turning people loose in the tiger cage, and waiting to see how many get eaten. If lifting lockdowns "just because" happens, and it kills scads of people, the last 0-3 weeks' lockdowns have been a total waste of time. Unlike in Iraq, we have no ability to surge medical resources to fight this, if we declare victory too soon.

So until this thing actually peaks, and we know it based on bona fide truth and accurate numbers, rather than pollyana optimism, I wouldn't put all my chips on this thing tapering off in a week or three, no matter how many Magic Beans the salesman promises us in return for the family cow - or the actual family.

I will believe this thing has peaked - when it actually does.
Not before.

On a personal note, I was notified that one - of numerous - patients I cared for in the last few weeks, and was suspected of Kung Flu, was confirmed positive for it. That doesn't mean I've been exposed to it; that's why we wear PPE. But it means one of the rule-out cases scored snake eyes. It was the first for me, but it won't be the last. (Not least of which because some were tested, and died, and we're still waiting for their test results.) And it means if I pop on any of the symptoms, I've now got skin in the game.

As I said earlier on these pages, all I know is that as of yet, I'm not infected.
Until I am.

So I'll be finding out experientially if the PPE recommendations worked, or not.

Which is the same when you'll know when we're over the hump on this: when you see it (or not) with your own eyes.

When you walk into a swamp you've never been to before, at night, the only thing you know is that the farthest you can walk into it in any direction is halfway. But you can have no idea when you've crossed that point, because you don't know how big that swamp is.

Nobody knows how big this swamp is.

The projections referenced may be spot on, or they may be just quaint little fond wishes, with a sprinkle of hopeium. I can't see where they have any reason to think otherwise, but I'm open to reasonable explanations.

And even if they're right, we've still got a couple of really craptastic weeks coming up, don't we?

Dewey Defeats Truman was a funny headline for actual victor Harry S Truman the next day.

America Defeats Kung Flu will not be nearly as funny to us the morning after if it turns out Kung Flu won.

Don't believe me on that; ask Shrillary what it felt like to find out that the World's Foremost Experts got it totally wrong, and you believed them. Last I heard, she still hasn't sobered up since that night.

Sunday Music: It's Too Late

The first single, and arguably best cut (of seven out of twelve that charted hugely), off of her ground-breaking second album, Tapestry, long-time songwriter Carole King took center stage as performer. With back-ups by friends like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, the album racked up four Grammys, this song was Record of the Year, and this disc is one of the top-selling albums of all time, with over 25M sold, staying on the charts for nearly six years straight. This track is a huge part of why.

Math Update And Ventilator Numbers

S3: Shit Mardi Gras.
Worse than a Shit Show (S1).
Worse than a Shit Circus (S2).
Better than a Shit Riot (S4).

1)  On March 17th, we had 4000 confirmed cases. Today, April 4th, it's at over 300,000 confirmed cases.

We have more than that; you know it, I know it, Yellow Dog knows it. But that means, minimum, this is doubling every three days, and has done so six times in the last nineteen days.

That's eight million cases by the 19th of April, give or take.
And spotting this the low end of only a 1% CFR, that's 80,000 dead in two more weeks, which surpasses any flu season, and is 4 times worse than the average one.

In perspective, it's nearly a year's worth of U.S. combat deaths from WWII, in just 2 more weeks, if it rolls out that way. It may be better or worse, but it's sure as hell not anywhere close to good yet.

So, can we please finally STFU about how this is "just the flu", and how "the cure is worse than the disease", when opening the floodgates takes the spread of this to Mars, on a rocket ship?

It's doubling every three days now, not just because of testing, but because it can, and this is with most of the country on at least voluntary stay-at-home, to restrain the spread (which is working, when dumbasses actually do it).

You can think happy thoughts when cases and deaths (over 1100 since yesterday) peak, and come down the other side of the roller coaster. Not before.




2) We've covered this material, multiple times, but probably in a response in comments, or on another forum, so once and for all here, a reminder about ventilators and such.

Nurses don't run ventilators.
Respiratory therapists do that.
It takes 2 years to train one, and another year of OJT to get them good at it.
Each RT can manage 4 vents, if you want it done right.
If you don't care about killing people, maybe you can surge that, short-term, to 6 or 8@.
And that's it.

A vent can deliver 100% fiO2, at pressures you need to understand to do properly.
It's known as PEEP. A good setting for a vented ICU patient with Kung Flu is as high as 25.
Average for normal times and cases is much lower, but that's what happens with Kung Flu pneumonia: it requires more force to pop the alveoli open when they're filling with fluid and mucus. Think lungs full of goop, like blowing up a balloon partly full of Elmer's Glue, and you're on the right track.

You can't get to this level of O2 concentration with an oxygen concentrator, and you can't get that level of forced pressure from a C-Pap machine.
Period.
Can. Not. Be. Done.

You're trying to fly to Mars in a hot air balloon.

So just no, for all related questions of "Can I do_______?"

And if somebody, anybody, thinks we're good if we just crank out 100,000 or 1,000,000 ventilators, because "'Murica!", then please, tell me how you plan to squat, grunt, and shit out the 25,000 to 250,000 trained respiratory therapists you'll need to run that many vents, which you don't have now just sitting around playing cards and waiting to come to your Pandemic Party in ICU or the ER.

And BTW, the Nawlins ER Doc who wrote this clinical missive (which is probably dead-on balls accurate - it's an industry term) notes that Kung Flu patients on ventilators die at rates between 70% (Seattle) and 86% (worldwide average), to date.
So anyone bad enough off to need to go on a ventilator with this (which means they're also sedated, and in ICU, as either a 1:1 - one nurse:one patient - or 1:2 patient), has between 1 chance in 3, and 1 chance in 7, of surviving to recover and go home. The other 2 out of 3 or 6 out of 7 will simply die, between Day 11 and Day 21 of intubation. Sometimes, even quicker. (Our patient last week lasted 48 whole hours, and coded multiple times before the MDs called it off for good.)

So I repeat, for emphasis:

Stay your happy ass at home, and DON'T catch this.

 

Somewhere between 97 and 99% of you will probably recover just fine. But 1-3% of you, and not all of them "old" by any standard, are going to die in a coma, isolated, with a plastic tube down your throat, and breathing mucus while you drown in your own body fluids.

 

If you don't have it now, and don't catch it, you don't have to see about finding that out firsthand, even at 1 chance in 33 or so.

 

Go back and read this morning's post, and see what you need to be working on. Worrying about this won't fix it. Just know it's still craptastic. Now go get on with your life, such as it may be, and do constructive things with your time.

 

FFS, Go Clean Your Garage

And now, already, cue the whinging.

If you live so far out of the mainstream this isn't affecting you, or barely so, rejoice. Really.
Just because the shark hasn't swam up and bit you in the ass personally, I can assure you it's actually a thing. I've personally carted several people to the ICU, and at least one of them is deader than canned tuna. Within 48 hours, and he was in his 50s. Not his 80s, 70s, or 60s, his 50s.

We've been on lockdown here for 3 weeks (Gee, I wonder why cases here are so much smaller than in places where they're still riding the subway everyday, or held an open-air Mardi Gras bacchanal just a month ago? What could it be? What could it BE?).

Some places have been on stay-at-home lockdown less than 2 days.
That's right, a whole two m*****f***ing days!!! The HORROR!
This isn't Ethiopia during a famine, FFS. No one's kids are orange-haired bloated-bellied scarecrows covered in flies. Grow some balls and deal with it, instead of losing your shit already.

NYFC currently has 1800 people dead, and over 7000 have died nationwide in the last three weeks. Anybody remember what happened the last time a few thousand people died in NYFC, and what a nothingburger that turned out to be??

And no, they're not packing everything and the kitchen sink into those stats, no matter what Alex Jones, George Nouri, and the black helicopter/chemtrail/Tinfoil Hat Society posted on their lunatic times dispatch from mommie's basement. 

With even a single-digit percent mortality, this is killing a lot of people, and that's not even the biggest problem from it.
But 7000 dead means that there's probably only 1M people who have it yet, out of 330M.
So, who wants to make sure we jack up the casualty figures 33,000%, right now, so we can have 1-2M dead in a couple of weeks?
Anybody? Beuller? Ferris Beuller...??
Go home and read a book or something, or go clean out the garage.

I repeat, if you're currently out of this, and not interacting (or even doing so minimally), this will turn out fine for you. If you don't spaz out about it, and don't start the drumbeat and catcalls for Boogaloo or some other stupidity.
If you don't want societal meltdown, don't start ringing all the bells to make sure you get societal meltdown.

If you think hitting the reset will be all peachy, go read Ferfal or Selco's blogs, who've both BTDT and got the T-shirt, and ponder the fun you'll have living on rat stew and bartering whatever you can scratch together for enough medicine to keep your kid alive, or getting jacked for your shoes, and then tell me that you want to live in The Book Of Eli for the next decade or three (I don't; if you do, fuck you and the horse you rode into town on). FFS, if you think this will be fun, why not take a vacation in Beirut, or Caracas, now, and tell the class afterwards what jolly fun you had. Only an asshole would want that. Most of you would be dead in a month anyways, and everyone would be happier for it, other than that whole collapse of civilization thingie. Just STFU and deal, wouldja?


Stay frosty, stay smart, and deal with small potatoes, as long as they stay small.
Five minutes after this is over, it's mostly a blip on the radar for the same 90% of you for whom it's nothing much now. Except with less overseas jobs, and more homegrown production, and hopefully, less opening the floodgates to everybody from anywhere else but here.

Beat that drum, and I'll subscribe to your newsletter and march in your parade.

Still can't figure this out?
Need some Martha Stewart/Burt Gummer Household Tips?

Square away your domicile. Clean the f**k out of everything.
Where's your gear in case there's a small fire?
Where's the medical stuff?
Set the outside up (short of concertina and sandbags - yet) like some douchebag is going to case it, or try to break in. Trim what needs trimming. Light what needs lighting. Put lights on random timers. Make it hard to get close, harder to get in, and easy to die trying.
Where are your shooting irons and such, to repel boarders?
How much ammunition do you have? Where?
Where's the cleaning gear for them all?
Are they all clean and pass a function check?
How much food do you have?
What food do you have?
Write out a menu for the next 30 days.
Then the next. Then the next, based on what's on-hand.
What about water? And water storage? And purification?
What about the pets?
Got all that squared away, RFN? (As if, for 90% of anyone, even on this blog.)
Where's your library of good-to-know books?
Crack it open, and start reading.
In fact, organize it, and make a subject study schedule.
Bone up on one subject at a time, every day, if you've got time on your hands.
If you have others at home with you, start teaching and doling out those lessons too.
Five year old kids can learn first aid; I've seen it, and taught it.
Ditto a lot of other skills.
Get all that knocked out - just that - and then come back when you're bored, and wish this was over.
For most households, that should be some time around the 4th of July.

Just Saying

Hey kids, remember this from waaaaay back in last week?:

Allow me to mention:

Write this on your hand with a Sharpie:

1) I don't lie to you
2) I'm not "scaremongering" nor advocating panic
3) I'm providing you with the best analysis I can, based on the best information I can get, to allow you to make rational preparations based on what's possible, and what's most likely
4) I'm doing this out of pure altruism and goodwill

I don't know any other way to do that than by giving you the truth, and showing my work.
If you spaz, or go into denial, or irrational delusional psychosis, you've got bigger problems, and they're not mine to solve. Seek professional help, and medicate yourself heavily. (And STFO of my blog.) And once again, we're still giving this to you ahead of the Usual Suspects, and we're still hitting it right down the fairway.

As are several other sites as well, but most of them aren't.  Draw your own conclusions on who to listen to, going forward.

Quoted For Truth: A Pandemic Tale

h/t WRSA

Click over to American Partisan, RTWT, and absorb some ground reality on the current outbreak on the East Coast.

"Normalcy bias is real, and it has bitten a lot of people. You who survive this need to remember that.
Refusal to believe reality will kill people. As Rand put it, “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of having ignored reality.”
If you still truly think that this virus is “not as bad as the flu”, I invite you to visit the nearest hospital and spend some time in the ICU with the intubated Covid patients. Of course, the only way you can do that is if you yourself are seriously ill and have to be intubated, and about 3/4 of those folks that sick die. If you survive the experience I’ll bet you’ll sing a different tune.
This bug killed over a thousand people yesterday. If the death rate continues to increase, in three weeks we’ll be losing the average annual flu deaths in a day."

This is pure truth, right now.

Some Rules Always Apply

Numbers

Yep, that's 1150 deaths in the U.S. since yesterday. 50,000 flu deaths in a bad year, divided by 52 weeks, =less than 1000/week. But Kung Flu is only that bad in one day. Glad this is "just the flu" and a "hoax", otherwise this might get serious or something. We could get an alternate viewpoint, but at least 1150 people are going to be rather quiet on this topic, going forward.

And the cheeriest CDC estimate puts the peak of things at least two weeks in the future, and staying at this level of crappy or worse until the end of May. And that's with 3/4ths of the country on a soft, voluntary lockdown. Get rid of even that weak sauce, and this thing goes straight up to the moon.

Now tell me how important your cubicle job or whatever is, because rent and shit. And you'd rather shoot for a million deaths, or more, instead of a hundred or two hundred thousands.

Simmer down, suck it up, and deal with it.



UPDATE:

Anonymous posting is now disabled, because the Usual Suspect shitposters have trundled out from under their bridges at WRSA, and mistaken this blog for CA's deliberate free for all, and I've neither the time, patience, nor inclination to shovel out the living room three times a day because some babies can't wear a diaper.

Step Two will be comment moderation.
I hope I don't have to go there, because it's a pain in the ass, and comments will probably simply be disabled in perpetuity.

For those long-time posters here who will now be comment-blocked, my regrets.
Hopefully this is a short-term situation, when the asstards see that they can't fling shit here and scamper away.

For the rest, if you can't own your comments, nor follow the comment policy on the front page, go back to 4chan or whereverTF you came from, and stay there. Grownups are talking here.

We Don't Burn Down the Republic To Save It

h/t Peter

This, folks. And the source material from Hot Air. (If you can't find Hot Air without a link, you fail the Internetz.)

Some recent examples:

Dumbasses, at county and state levels, attempted use the current emergency to shut down gun stores.

The correct response to that is a sentence that ends "...sideways, with a rusty chainsaw; and the horse you rode into town on."

And POTUS (an absolute commie anti-gunner to the people who wear their AR-15s and a bandoleer of ammo to go to the bathroom inside their own houses - NTTAWWT), and the DHS, helpfully sent exactly that message, by declaring any and all 2A related business "essential", even - if not "especially" - amidst a pandemic.
Game, set, match, Jackie Jackboots. F**k off with that noise.

Some idiots tried to restrict abortions as non-essential procedures during this.
They're jack-booted thugs, full of the exact same amount of sh*t as Nancy Alzheimers and Chuck U Schumer.

Some other monumental jackholes have held mass church services during lockdowns.

I'm pro-free exercise of religion, and anti-abortion, but both of those moves are fucktarded beyond belief.

The state - any state, under any form of government - has a compelling interest in preserving the health and well-being of its citizenry. In fact,  protecting their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is the exact sine qua non without which they descend into replaceable tyranny, deserving of a rope or a guillotine, in short order, by that citizenry.

This is why "religions" claiming adherence to their holy tenets of temple prostitution or child sacrifice get short shrift in cases before SCOTUS, or any lesser court.

What should have happened is, whatever dimbulb fuckwit running that church should have shown the sense God gave a jackass, and not held that meeting. Nota bene I did not say "not hold any meetings, ever". Nor is decertifying them as a church in perpetuity allowable. That's jackbooted thuggery of the same stripe.

But what the state should do when Pastor Shitforbrains (and he is, and has them) held that meeting during a quarantine, is simply fined him, personally, and all present, at the rate of $1000 per attendee per occurence, and the church for $100,000 per occurrence. (E.g.: If 500 people show up, the pastor owes $500K, the 500 owe $1K@, and the church owes another $100K. Lather, rinse, repeat.) If God loves such stupidity, maybe the heavens will rain money on them. If not, best re-think putting the Lord to such a foolish test, dumbasses.

It's also wrong to try and back-door ban abortion under color of crisis. There is a freshness date on terminating a pregnancy, which, sadly, continues to be legal in this republic.

If one wishes to change that, either:
- have someone COVID-positive cough on Ruth Vader Ginsburg, or wait for the actuarial tables to solve that problem;
- have Congress remove the issue from the purview of the courts (which they can do at a pen stroke, and even SCOTUS can't say boo to it), and then outlaw the practice;
- wait until a suitable majority overturns the idiotic Roe v. Wade/Dred Scot for babies decision, and let federalism solve that problem. NFY, CA, and IL will probably keep it, but it will become mighty scarce from about Pennsylvania to AZ in about a minute and a half.

All of those are smarter, and to put a fine point on it, legal and just ways to solve that tangle under the Constitution.

Trying to bootstrap your prejudice or predilection for that, or any other sillyass position, and slip it in under the sheeps' clothing of Kung Flu Response, is the sort of thing that should get you a nice scalding hot tar and chicken feathers spa treatment, and a ride out of the city limits sitting on a rail carried by the torch-and-pitchfork mob, never to be allowed to return.

We once told the mightiest empire in the world to get f**ked, and made them our bitch by making it stick. Doing the same to any would-be local Napoleons now should it become necessary, ought to be small work. Many of us are willing, able, and a wee bit more than enthusiastic about the prospect of that undertaking.

You want to get another revolution? This sort of happy horseshit is how you get another revolution.

Zero fucks will be given.

And if we have to chop heads off and string some bastards up while wearing gloves and N95 masks, or in MOPP Level IV, or just lobster bibs and carnations in our lapels, we'll manage, I assure you.

Suture Self

NYFC has as many flu deaths in one month as they get from the flu in an entire YEAR, and math-resistant fucktards are still yapping about "but this is no worse than the flu".

If you can't figure out which is worse, I can't help you.

Apparently, for some level of morons and/or psychotics, until NYFC starts knolling the body bags in Central Park, those 1000+ dead people didn't happen.

Here's your other fun thought:
On 3/19, the entire U.S had 4000 Kung Flu cases.
On 4/1, we have over 4000 deaths from it here.

Today, we have 190,000 cases (and it went up yesterday alone by 26,000 cases).
So, let's see where we are on deaths in two weeks, and see if today's case rate spike is just from more testing, or the lag between cases versus deaths. (I don't know, but if it ends up working like that, this isn't over on April 30th, or even May 30th.)

Currently, the CDC is projecting the peak in mid- to late-April, and somewhere in the vicinity of 100K deaths.

So no matter what, this is still the ramping-up phase. Peak is still off in the misty distance.
Hang in there.

The idiots licking toilet seats because they're immortal, and this isn't real, will have their reward in due course.