Karma Is A Cast-Iron Bitch

 h/t Mike

Allow me to be the first to pile on. : https://i.imgur.com/DLxB60a.png

Some days, we have to work for a post. Like think, and stuff.

Other days, the muse gift-wraps them, and drops them in our lap.

Today is definitely the second kind of day.

Alec Baldwin kills DP, shoots director on set

To whom this set of observations applies, spare me your butthurt.

1) Of course they use guns (albeit heavily modified) on movie sets. Since ever. File under "Duh!"

2) Some propmaster dun fucked up, massively, and should shortly be charged for manslaughter and aggravated battery via gross negligence. There should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be live rounds on the main set, let alone anywhere near prop weapons.

3) It's not the actor's job to ensure safety of prop weapons used on set, it's the propmaster and the weapon's handler's job. Weapons are supposed to be double-checked on loading to prevent this sort of cock-up.

4) It's likely that when Baldwin was shooting, he was, almost certainly exactly per rehearsals and blocking, aiming at the camera. Which is where the director of photography and director sit, 90% of the time. And in real life, there's no way to tell you've fired a real bullet rather than a blank after the first shot, until bodies hit the ground. Blood doesn't explode from people's chests, they just crumple. Be glad it was a western, and not a gangster film. He could have taken out a swath of people, instead of just the two he hit.

{We add in amendment, that if, instead, Baldwin was waving the gun around off-camera, and pulling the trigger, or some other form of jackassery, he should be charged and convicted like any other perp. We find that unlikely in the circumstances, but not entirely impossible. See #6, below. We look forward to a definitive explanation as this story develops.}

5) Andrea Widburg's witless commentary about gun safety at American Thinker regarding this incident only proves she's a cinematic idiot, who should STFU when she's in over her head. But she won't. Firearms Safety is literally the first and second topics in the official industry-wide safety bible. It's lifted directly from NRA guidelines, and then amplified. So by definition, when something like this happens, rules written in blood were obviously and flagrantly violated. I say it again: STFU Andrea; you're abusing the internet privilege to be an uninformed jackass with a keyboard.

6) I said for 20+ years in motion picture production, going back to the beginning of this blog, that even allowing for "only using blanks", it borders on professional incompetence for any propmaster to ever hand an actor any weapon not made of rubber. Because they're idiots. Like 99.9999% of them, by actual observation. (FFS, John Wayne even shot Ward Bond in the face on a bird hunting foray IRL. That should tell you something.) Triply so around weaponry of all types, or anything even sharp.

7) The takeaway isn't that @$$hole Baldwin will not be charged; he bears exactly no culpability nor intent for the crime AFAWK. That's as it should be. Don't be stupid about this. And if time changes that, we look forward to Baldwin getting what he deserves.

8) What you should be focusing on, is that despite that reality, you can now claim, FOREVER, that exactly like Ted Kennedy's car, Alec Baldwin has killed more people with guns than your/my/anyone's collection of misnamed "assault" weapons have, ever.

9) He'll NEVER be able to escape that legacy, not even when he dies, and he's going to hear it 1000 times a day until that happy occasion. It's going to be on bumper stickers, lapel buttons, memes, and a gajillion other things, for all time. He's just taken himself out of the anti-gun speaker's pool forever!

10) If that reality, and not the imaginary injustice of not charging him with the killing that likely wasn't his fault, doesn't warm your heart, you're simply a lunatic.

Learn to take "YES!" for an answer from the Fates.

And just to doubly piss you off a little more, this is one of the reasons that motion picture productions that have fled SoCal to non-union states always have these sorts of fuck-ups. When productions go off the reservation and hire unprofessional non-union fuck-ups for a cut rate, they get what they pay for. In this case, a dead DP, a wounded director, and an actor who will, to a metaphysical certainty, be justifiably scarred for life. Not to mention metric fucktons of bad publicity for the event.

Baldwin's a victim of both a cheap-ass production (he's one of the producers, btw: Own Goal Achievement - Unlocked), and a total fuck-up homicidal weapons master.

And karma is a cast-iron bitch.

QED

(And rest assured, Gentle Readers, while we are giving Baldwin the benefit of the doubt at this point, if it turns out, against likelihood, that @$$hole Baldwin was, in fact, totally and jackassically responsible, we will revise and amend our judgement of him the moment his homicidal culpability becomes apparent, and add to the clamor for his prosecution and conviction. We would hope, at that point, for the entire judicial machinery of the state of New Mexico to fall on him, from a great height. We're certain, when the whole truth comes out, he'll get what's coming to him. He's only done, to best recollection, three things right in Hollywood: played a great ghost in Beetlejuice; absolutely nailed Jack Ryan in Hunt For Red October; and warmed our heart when he fell into the bear pit in the climactic scene of The Edge. We still haven't forgiven him for taking Kim Basinger off the market at the time.)

Double bonus: I think we've seen the last SNL Baldwin-Trump skit forever. With any luck, Baldwin just retired permanently from everything.

UPDATE: You might want to read this article in the Daily Beast, that just confirmed everything I already told you about amateur propmasters and cheapskate production, which was why those crew members on the camera crew walked off the set, and saved their own lives.

Imagine that: We got it right, 5 hours before they did, and we didn't have to talk to anyone there. Almost like we might know WTF we're talking about where such on-set shenanigans are concerned.

Just Say No

 Someone in Comments inquired if there was a single post here that summarized the reasons not to get vaxxed.

Alas, we had no single post, merely the preponderance of the evidence for the last 10 months.

Allow us to therefore rectify the lack, and offer the following summary:

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

Fully Endorsed: Paging Lesco Brandon...

h/t Drawn Cutlass

 

Feel free to page your friend, Lesco Brandon, anywhere you have the option.

Tell him he needs to meet his best friend, Eidabagga Dix.

Re: Wilder's Site

 

He related some minor site issues, which ought to be resolved presently.

Don't panic. You'll be hip-deep in Pez, puns, and bikini model graphs before you know it. But we're sure he appreciates the concern.

UPDATE 10/20/21 @ 0845EDT: Back Up.

R.I.H., Serial Killer

 

This was the global policy genius behind the "you break it, you bought it" idea to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan, and try to grow democracy by planting a seed, and then yanking on the shoots as soon as they sprouted. Which worked about as well for Middle Eastern democracy as it does if you try it with corn or wheat.

Had he retired after being Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, after Gulf War I, he would have been a respected military hero and genius strategist, for winning a  6-week war capped by a 3-day ground game, and devastating the retro-armed and bloated half-assed army of the biggest pain in the ass in that quadrant of the globe in decades, for the relatively modest cost of less than 300 American dead.

Instead, he fulfilled his Peter Principle destiny, promoted not to a great SecDef, a job at which he would have excelled, but rather to being a mediocre Secretary of State, who helped get us into two more pointless wars, and materially contributing to the total waste of the lives of over 6700 US troops, 8000 private contractors, and the suicides of over 30,000 former US servicemen since the war's end. We won't know the final toll until we find out how many US citizens have been killed since the abrupt abandonment of Afghanistan, and the last OIF/OEF veteran eats his own gun. That's a lot of blood on the hands of just one incompetent affirmative-action hire. I hope he wore bermuda shorts and a t-shirt to the afterlife, because it's likely to be pretty hot were he's gone.

All for a foreign policy strategy for Mesopotamia more appropriate for running a Pottery Barn.

But he got his vaxx, and it availed about as well for him as his foreign policy did for the U.S.

And some people say the universe doesn't have a sense of humor.

But he has served one useful purpose:

If anyone hasn't tripped over the concept that "fully vaccinated" is now a synonym for "marked for death", you haven't been paying close attention.

Sunday Music: Money (That's What I Want)

 

It's tough to steal someone else's song, especially when they're a mega-group, and even sweeter when you do it better and make it yours. But when total nobodies The Flying Lizards grabbed the Beatle's 1963 version of Money and gave it some New Wave polish (and a great vocal) in 1979, the result eclipsed the Fab Four's original effort by a country mile, and made them one-hit wonders.

On The Shoulders Of Giants

 

MOAR! HARDER!

 

It is obvious that "Fucktards gonna fucktard". But some people are abusing the privilege.

FFS, just stop, man.

Somebody, please, get Sumdunce some Depends, and tackle him before he gets to the keyboard again, and fills up both pantlegs to overflowing, including his shoes and socks.

A few wee points: 

1) There are not "hundreds" of container ships off Long Beach/L.A. The number of ships is under one hundred. Closer to half that, in fact, which is down by nearly 20% since a month ago. So it's getting better, not "worse". You could look it up. Re: the actual backlog: Dozens? Sure. "Hundreds?" Take off your shoes and learn to count, meathead.

2) Per comments over at Bayou Renaissance Man's blog in response to the original recockulous article, the actual statute permits all trucks made since 2010, not those "only in the last 3 years", to pick up cargo at the ports. Semi trucks made since 2010? By SWAG, that would be about 90+% of them, nationwide.

3) From a brilliant comment to my earlier post, the capacity to unload ships is normally about 12,500 40' containers (25,000 TEUs) per day in the ports of LA/LB. By going to three shifts, they could up that to somewhere near double that amount. If nothing breaks. If they have three times the manpower. Overnight. But there are apparently something like 500,000 containers to unload.

That's a 20-day backlog.

During which time, an additional 20 days' worth of new container ships already en route will show up, and line up for their turn. And this is the busy shipping season.

So this isn't going away by waving anyone's magic wand.

4) There are also queues of container ships outside Savannah GA as well. Last I looked, Georgia has no such emission mandates on drayage vehicles as Califrutopia does. So obviously, claiming that farcical explanation as "the root cause" of the backlog is, as previously noted, patent bullsh*t. Clever folks would have called that info tidbit a "clue".

5) Orders to China, hence goods coming here from there, are up over 25% compared to last year pre-pandemic. In no small part due to people not having jobs most of last year, nor the ability to buy a lot of things, until things started easing off this year. But even pre-pandemic, the capacity to handle cargo increases was only about 5%. There is simply no elasticity built into the entire jackassical "just-in-time" system. This is that, all that, and only that.

6) The shortage is truck drivers, not trucks. Anyone who hasn't heard about new federal regs making it hard to impossible to make a decent living for truck owner-operators nationwide hasn't been listening, and has their head securely up their own @$$. And any of those drivers close enough to retirement has long since sold their rig, and said "Let's go, Brandon!" to the whole trucking industry.

7) 500,000 containers, a 20-day supply if the ports unload 24/7, means we'd need 25% of the entire 2M truck US semi-truck industry to come to Califrutopia in a conga line to get it all. Sh'yeah, right; when monkeys fly outta my butt. Even if we whittle it down to only 25K/day, which is what the port might be able to unload now with 24/7 operations, at 70' long from front bumper to rear of the 53' trailer, that's a conga line of trucks 330+ miles long, reaching from L.A./Long Beach Harbor nearly all the way to Phoenix AZ, Kingman AZ, or St. George UT, bumper-to-bumper, with 0 inches in between each rig. Under normal conditions, the three main roads heading east from SoCal (I-10, I-15, and I-40) would be jam-packed in their entirety for hundreds of miles. And at 55MPH, it would take them a full 12 hr. trucking day to make one such round trip, apiece, and they'd have to keep it up every day, no holidays or weekends off, from now until the end of the first week in November, just to clear the backlog waiting offshore right now.

This has fuck-all to do with "green compliant" trucks, or any imaginary lack thereof, regardless of how recockulously stupid and asinine any of Sacramento's fairytale green mandates are. And make no mistake, they are exactly that. But continuing to pimp the demonstrably false narrative that those laws are "the root of the problem" is more asinine than the laws themselves are. It bespeaks someone both too ignorant to change their mind, and too obstinate to change the topic.

But the problem which really is causing this, is that we don't have enough trucks, nor any other logistical capacity, at any point in the entire supply chain, to move that kind of backlog, ever, period.

Hiring more dockworkers or crane operators won't make cargo unload any faster than hiring more mechanics and drivers makes cars go faster at the Indy 500. A 500 mile race at 200MPH takes 2½ hours, because of physics timespace. Period. Just like there are only so many berths, and so many cranes, and only so many containers that can be plucked off ships per hour. If you want to lay out a plan to terraform the harbor to increase throughput capacity, the time to do that was 20 years ago. 

Kind of like Califrutopia's power grid, highways, and water supplies. Three terms in total of Jerry Brown as governor here was the functional equivalent of 7 major earthquakes, 10 riots, and 200 brushfires inside the city limits, in terms of damage to the state. We'll be paying for that serial disaster even decades after I'm cold and dead.

Even putting the cargo on trains presents the exact same logistical burden.

That's 60 complete fully-loaded double-stacked freight trains/day headed out of Los Angeles, in perpetuity, each one 100 freight cars long, stretching over a mile long, each.

Our leaned-to-fumes logistics system is not designed, nor capable, of going from "Park" to 125MPH overnight, and staying there indefinitely.

That's why there's a backlog of unloaded containers in the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Savannah, and will continue to be for some weeks to months.

So certain jackasses should stop trying to pin this on a truck mandate with negligible, if any, effect on the entire system, or the problem, no matter how silly and butthurt they're liable to be for admitting they biffed this, repeatedly.

The very idea is simply full of more shit than a Christmas goose.

Anyone who doubles down on something that's clearly beyond their ken is just an object lesson in why one should not wear white pants to a dinner party where chili is being served, whether we're talking about problems of spillage in the front, or leakage in the rear.

They should leave the party, change their trousers, put the keyboard down, and they need to crack a friggin' book.

Secondaries

 h/t Gateway Pundit

Seismographs and BDA analysis reveals a secondary explosion 

from last weekend's attack on the Southwest Airlines Deathstar:

Delta Airlines CEO on Vaxx Mandates: F**k Joe Biden 

And that, kids, is how you do it: call their bluff, and they sh*t their pants and run.

"Let's Go, Brandon!"

It Only Takes A Spark

 

Meanwhile, in Austin...

History For The Short Attention Span Crowd

h/t tsk tsk should've known better

AKA "Don't pee on my head, and tell me it's raining."

A mere fraction of the Port Of Los Angeles

Once upon a time, there were four rich men. The were called nabobs. It was shortened to "nobs". They all decided to build lavish homes in the same neighborhood in San Franshitco (back when it was a bustling thriving nexus of commerce, rather than an open festering sore, open-air outhouse for the homeless, and running national joke), and all those homes on the same hill there. It is called Nob Hill to this day.

The four named themselves The Association, and were comprised of

Leland Stanford (former 8th governor of California, later U.S. senator from CA until his death, and Central Pacific and Southern Pacific RR president; you may have heard of a small private college he founded).

Collis P. Huntington (CPRR VP, director, and chief legal counsel, and whose nephew, who started the first inter-urban train transit  in SoCal himself, has a city in L.A., another city and beach in OC, and his lavish San Marino mansion and grounds all named after them).

Mark Hopkins (treasurer of the CPRR, the Trump of his day, and on the former site of whose mansion there's a landmark Frisco hotel that still bears his name).

Charles Crocker (railroad route chief engineer, and later financier, who once controlled Wells-Fargo and served as its president; he had a wee bank of his own once too; their commercials in my youth introduced the world to a struggling brother-sister singing act, before the bank was consolidated back into the Wells-Fargo financial empire).

Among the pasttimes of these rich kids, as noted above, was running a wee railroad, known as the Central Pacific Railroad.  The one that spanned the country by 1869. Later, it was consolidated with the Southern Pacific RR, at which point, in 1909, it connected the sleepy little nowhere cow-town of Los Angeles with the small wharves of San Pedro/Wilmington and Long Beach, the greatest natural harbors on the western coast of the continental U.S., after San Francisco Bay itself.

The sprawling openness thereabouts, however, with more open land all around than all of peninsulated San Franshitco County, allowed that by 1920, that Port (actually two adjacent ports) would surpass Frisco, and become the pre-eminent port of entry for the entire nation, remaining so unto the present day.

I provided copious links, because I'm a giver, and because You Could Look It Up.

We told you that story to tell you this one:

Railroad tracks run right to dockside in Los Angeles/Long Beach to the present day, a fact which makes fairytales about green truck mandates being responsible for the current goods bottleneck so recockulous as to cause open-mouthed gawping at the spectacle, and at the jackassery necessary to palm such a load of bullshit off as steak.

The fact that there are a finite number of berths, cranes, and longshoremen, with a commensurately predictable maximum number of containers that can be offloaded per hour, and thus a similarly predictable number of ships per day, expressable for one-, two-, and three-shift days, is rather tediously obvious to anyone who can do math with their shoes on.

You can't starve a python for nearly eighteen months, than suddenly try to feed it an entire herd of elephants, and expect that everything will proceed smoothly through from there.

This shouldn't have had to be said, yet here we are.

Just part of what's waiting to unload locally

There are, at latest reports, some multiple dozens (61 ships, per NYSlimes as of 9/21) of loaded container ships sitting offshore from just those twin SoCal ports.

The average container ship hauls between 500 and 7500 40' containers, or TEU equivalents (one TEU is a 20' conex, and container ships range from 1000 to 15000 TEUs of capacity).

The average freight train carries 200 and more 40- and 53-footers, apiece.

The average truck pulls one. A double trailer, with 53' boxes, could manage 2½.

Yet no one is squawking mountains of bullshit about how trains are backed up 97 deep trying to fit all the containers on them and pull them to points eastward, because that'd be patent horseshit.

And if picking up loads at the ports were really "the root cause", even a gifted dimwit would simply platoon the compliant trucks at the port, carry the containers from there a couple of miles from the port, to any one of hundreds of nearby SoCal truck yards, and transfer the loads to the millions of trucks that can't use the ports, but which nonetheless transport goods all over the rest of the Golden State 24/7/365, as anyone who's spent 5 seconds on the freeways hereabouts can attest; they would not haul the loads all the way to the motherfornicating Califrutopia state line, hundreds of miles away, FFS!

Conflating "port of" with "entire state" for the Fucktard Win!

The idea that there is any shortage of trailer trucks operating on California's highways, especially in the corridor from the Ports to every other interstate highway accessible from same is so recockulous as to fail the sniff test for 0.2 seconds with anyone who drives here for more than 5 minutes. But cleverly, they invented a heavy-duty workaround where truck traffic can be hauled entirely independent of the highways we drive on, at hundreds of times the capacity of a tractor-trailer rig, for 95% of every journey for every pound of cargo carried, and it's been around since the early 1800s. We called them railroads.

So please do some basic dumbshit math before trying to claim that lack of new compliant trucks is why nothing is moving through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, as if that could ever be true, and pretending like they couldn't just get the containers straight onto railroad cars and ship them directly to 47 other states by the literal trainload, taking the trucks out of the equation entirely.

The entire pipeline is overfull; it's no more complicated than that. Pythons can't digest elephants overnight.

When containers are stacking up at 500 freight yards by the railroad tracks, you can tell me there's a truck problem. Not before. Not even in Califrutopia.

The bullshit passed by the idiots here in Excremento is big, and unquestionably stupid and short-sighted, but it isn't omnipotent, and it isn't the reason that they can't unload cargo any faster or get it to your local Dollar Store, so pull the handle on that sort of nonsense, and send it to the sewer it crawled out of, rather than passing it off as gospel.

And try shaving people's arguments with Occam's Razor.

Fucktards gonna fucktard, but you don't have to listen to them if you can do basic thinking.

Posers discuss strategy. Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics. Geniuses learn all of them from history.

But maybe that little historical wander is why we keep telling you to look at history like James Burke does. Wheels within wheels, all spinning and interconnecting. The guy should be the chairman emeritus of History for the world, for life.

UPDATE: FAR more likelier explanations:

1) New transport regs making it harder for truckers to make a living, so they've gradually bailed out. Nobody notices the dog that doesn't bark until after the burglar's been and gone.

2) Jab mandates at rail and truck companies (see Winston Smith in Comments), playing hell with staffing. Wait until this becomes a longshoreman issue as well, and grab your ass then. You can't replace them, and without them, just like truckers and rail workers, literally NOTHING moves. The Vaxxholes are about to pee on the third rail. Grab your popcorn.

3) Paying @$$holes too much welfare for far too long to sit on their asses playing X-box instead of going out and getting hard and relatively dangerous transportation jobs.

4) Leaned-out (times 30 years) jackassical "just-in-time" port infrastructure, with no elasticity to ramp up or down for higher capacity imports or exports, let alone both simultaneously. You can send more ships, or trucks and trains, but you can't whistle up more docks, cranes, and operators overnight.

5) Anyone can stop an economy, or a car engine, by shooting a big enough bullet into the engine block. What you can't do is restart it just as fast, simply by grabbing pliers, and just pulling the slug out afterwards.

We repeat for emphasis: Anyone of even average intelligence should have known this without being told.

Which is why none of it occurred to any government, from city to state to federal, nor likely will ever. They're simply not packing the gear to grasp that.

STILL TL;DR? Read the concise analysis by Noveske's Rock, below. It's tight, right, and flawlessly reasoned.

One definitionof insanity is trying the same thing, over and over, despite the fact it doesn't work.

Finally!

 

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origins finally propelled Capt. Kirk to the edge of
space this AM. If NASA had possessed any PR brains at the time,
they'd have put him on the shuttle Enterprise for its atmospheric
flight tests, back when they had the chance. 

Not Spock. Not Han or Luke. Not Buck, or Starbuck. And not Picard or Ryker nor even Data.

Captain Kirk, bitchez!

ADDENDUM:

In comments at SiG's place on this topic , our fellow blogger John Wilder noted, in full Shatneresque delivery (mad props for that one JW, btw):

"Yup. The man...did...more...for science...than almost any actor."

I repeat my reply to that observation here:

"Let's be fair, John: The man did more for science than NASA."

WTWT.

QED

As the tagline for the animated LOTR by Ralph Bakshi went at the time:

"One fantasy is more powerful than a thousand realities."

Oh, yes it is.

And anyone who didn't wish, at least once, to be on a real bridge like that one, coming out of warp to orbit a new M-class planet in some distant quadrant of the galaxy, is dead to me, and dead as a human being. Every time one of the eleventy Star Trek TV shows or movies taps into that, they brush a contact on the battery of the human soul, and Shatner was a copper rod straight to the main power supply of that for most of his adult life. And for that, he's the best Canadian actor the USA ever produced. 

If anyone on Earth ever deserved to see the view from 80km straight up, he did.

And if Bezos and Company missed a trick anywhere, it's that he should have sent Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura up with with him. Hell, Paramount Studios would have paid for the whole mission out of petty cash.

Exchange Of the Decade: Hilarity Ensues

 

See for yourself, per GMay in Comments: SWA CEO Caves

A quick note to our socialist would-be overlords:

When you think God died, and left you in charge of the universe, you better check your hole card, or you're going to be the bitch in that prison cell for a long, long time.

And if you think this isn't coming on a national scale, in about 0.2 seconds, you've got another think coming.

We aren't Australia.

Payback here is going to come with fishhooks on the tip of the spear, and rip you Vaxxholes a new @$$hole when it gets pulled out again.

RELATED: h/t WRSA from briggs

The Vaxx is now clearly and beyond rational argument nothing but a worthless hoax, with absolute risk of death or permanent disability. Requiring anyone to get it is tantamount to medically sanctioned torture on the order of the concentration camp medicine of Dr. Mengele, and deserves a robust kinetic response: shoot the motherf***ers requiring it in the face. Doubly so when half the Congressweasels and their staffs were getting HCQ and Ivermection protocol treatments rather than taking their chances with the medicine they mandated to the proles.

The blog's sincere condolences to anyone who took the Vaxx shots in good faith, but you've been well and truly had, and it gets worse for you from here on out. 

Who should you be shouting at about that?

"Let's Go Brandon!"

Updated Flight Weather Report: Sh*tstorm

 

(Note to Tyler Durden Actual: Sorry man, but just this once, I had to break Rule One.)

There's a reason that Southwest cancelled 1000 flights today, and will do so again tomorrow.

And it ain't because of "weather", except for the sh*tstorm of vaccine mandates that are, not coincidentally, starting with occ fields with a high percentage of former and current mil and mil-reservists.

Go to TLR: RTWT

What you're seeing, and what you saw when my employer tried this, and ended up caving and granting mass exemptions to 25% of the workforce, was Phase One. The Flop! was seismic.

Now, the same thing is hitting police and fire unions, and then airlines and flight controllers, in Phase Two. It's going epicly bad for those trying it.

And FakeNews isn't able to contain the reality.

If they keep trying this with Phase Three, Tyler and Company will not be making an object lesson. They'll begin castrating people, one on one, in the men's room, and those surgeries will not be reversible once they drop the missing bits in a food processor. The slow learners after that will start getting an epidemic of sudden carotid exsanguination, followed in about 20 heartbeats by being Deader Than Canned Tuna.

And you want to start pushing your poison into kids?!? 

What could possibly go wrong there???

Dear Vaxxholian PTB:

Do. Not. Fuck. With. Us.

This is not Australia. We aren't going to whine. We aren't going to protest. We're going to start fucking killing you. And unlike you, we're looking forward to that transition, because every one less of you, is one less of you forever.

Much like a clay pigeon in the hopper, the last word you're liable to hear is "PULL!"

Sunday Music: Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover

 

Top 5 hit from 1992. Ignoring the moonbat real-world politics of the artist (like you have to do with 95% of them), my only reaction to her in 1992, based solely on what I saw and heard, was much like Tony Stark's first introduction to Natasha Romanov: "I want one."

This Switch Hasn't Been Flipped Because...?

 

"Hey, don't rush me. I'm thinking..."

Related: An essay today by Porretto. RTWT.

Something To Occupy Your Mind On A Lazy Saturday: This Is A Drill

 Don't post the details. Don't even answer "yes" or "no" in comments. It will never see the light of day here. I don't want to know, and Big Brother doesn't need the intel. Capice?

Weapon? Basic load? Body armor (for any value between T-shirt and Level IV hardplates, with helmet. And gas mask.)? Sustainment supplies? For up to 72 hours? Eye and ear pro? At any point beyond "P" in your comms PACE plans? Boots (broken in!)? Clothes appropriate for the weather, including the next few days? Car Keys (with a full tank, and ready to rock!)? Go-To-War Jump Bag?

What if your neighbor called you?

A relative?

A relative some distance away?

Spouse or kids, not at the homestead?

What about with one minute's notice?

Don't lie to me, and don't even try to b.s. yourself. How would you fare, with yourself as the grader for this exercise, supervised by the sweep second hand of your watch?

Could you, really and truly, hit the Batpole, and come out at the bottom ready to face the forces of evil?

(And nota bene: We're not talking about your "Repel Boarders" response time, which must needs be about 0 seconds, unless you want the Second Place Home Invasion Trophy. We're talking about how long before you could go out hunting them, or dissuading them at range, starting long before they ever get to your door.)

Ponder the above. Hard.

The pre-Revolutionary militia standard was ready to mount or march, 60 seconds, with musket, powder and shot, water, one day's ration, bayonet, and hatchet. In 60 seconds, at your front door, or beside your saddle mount.

It's still a damned good standard.

And BTW, while you're thinking: Just exactly how long do you think you have to get this together, without looking like a soup sandwich, before this isn't a thought exercise, or just a drill?

As a rule, when TSHTF, it doesn't make a reservation.

WARNING: 

OBJECTS IN CRYSTAL BALL MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.

Color Me Shocked...

 h/t I Hate The Media

(People's Republic Of Oz) Health Minister Foley announced 867 new COVID cases recorded yesterday.  During the statistical outline Foley identifies 375 people as hospitalized, 81 people in intensive care and 61 people on a ventilator.   Then comes the statistic everyone in government and media ignore.  Amid the recorded cases “78% of the hospital cases are fully vaccinated, and 17% are partially vaccinated (1 dose)”….

That means 95% of the COVID patients in Victoria hospitals are vaccinated.

At the 2:45 mark: 

Whoopsie. 95% of those hospitalized, which obviously includes the most critical cases, were vaxxed. So much for that "lessens the severity of the illness" fairytale. Funny how you've never heard this, from three weeks ago, at anytime on the lamestream news, not even once, huh?

And the best clip I've seen, at Cold Fury:

Interviewer: "So all these millions of people that got the shots, they're just stupid?"

Ted Nugent: "Yup."

For those in the readership who made that choice, my sympathies. I'm sure you acted in what you thought was your best interest at the time, and in good faith. No one, at this point, should be so similarly bamboozled by the lies of officialdom. And you'll understand if the rest of us choose not to share your fate, out of enlightened self-interest in our own long-term health prospects. And to those who inflicted this not-a-vaxx on us?

 

Payback? = A CAST IRON BITCH.

BET ON IT.

That Moment You Know...

 h/t Odd Job

...that average folks have had enough of the metric fucktons of bullshit; that consequently, things are about to go pear-shaped, and in a decidedly kinetic fashion; and that most of them are looking forward to that day.

Bitch, Please...

 

Both Wilder and Silicon Graybeard have looked at the below-referenced poll, and when two people on my daily read list go somewhere, I figure it ought to be work a look.

Which poll purports to show that Trump voters and Biden voters are (fill in the blank):

a) Hopelessly divided

b) both composed of a remarkable number of Big Government lovers

c) totally ginned up creations from out of the alleged pollsters' underpants.

So let's have a closer look ourselves, SiG having led the way in posts at Wilder's blog, and then in more depth at his own site.

Having been trained and experienced in polling methodology ourself, firstly in regards to political science, and then again in terms of medical research, we begin by looking at the polling methodology followed, to see if this poll is valid and trustworthy, both, either, or neither.

Properly and scrupulously followed, with valid methodology and questions, polling can indeed be rather accurate. Sadly, such precision and circumspect honesty is rarely followed nor practiced, and largely not at all for some decades by anyone of importance where politics are concerned.

From the linked site courtesy of SiG, the exact method of conducting this, um, "poll":

"From July 22 to Aug. 4, 2021, Project Home Fire worked with Innovatemr, an industry-leading top 20 marketing research data collection firm, to capture online responses to more than 300 questions spanning social, political, and psychological topics from 1,001 Donald Trump presidential election voters and 1,011 Joe Biden voters (N=2,012)..."

 

"online responses"

Srsly? Online??? Where 99.997% of "women" on dating sites are gay dudes in their mother's basements trolling for dick pics? Where 117.4% of adolescents looking for hook-ups with adults or trading kiddie porn are named either "Detective", "Special Agent", or "Officer"? That Internet of "online responses"?!?!?!? That's mail-in voting levels of reliability, without even the after-rape kiss of requiring a postage stamp.

But those were actual "Trump voters"? Because, online, without any means of verification of their existence, let alone their political affiliation, they said so?!?

In the words of Emperor Poopy Pants the Ist, "C'mon, man!"

I'd stop there, but since I'm already suited up, cleats sharpened, and mid-air in the act of piling on, we continue.

"responses to more than 300 questions"

At the risk of quoting myself here,

I wouldn't spend the time to answer three political questions online, let alone three hundred. The idea that they found anyone who would, let alone 2000+ such people in a two-week span, even with a talent pool of the entire US online, is flatly recockulous.

You're only going to get the sort of people I see in the ER, usually there for either substance overdose, or for a psychiatric evaluation, which Venn diagrams constitute a remarkable degree of overlap.

Or else a bunch of underage 4chan droids either deliberately gaming the system for their own amusement, interns from UVA jerking the results around to pass a class, or both. Chances that even 10% of them are old enough to vote in any election, let alone did so: 0%.

Believing that they got 2000+ actual persons, including nearly half actual Trump voters, and all willing to sit still for a 300-question Bataan Death March questionnaire, requires Solomon Oddonkoh levels of gullibility.

So what does that make any such alleged "poll"?

We're talking an-army-of-veterinarians-feeding-truckloads-of-Ex-Lax-and-Metamucil-to-industrial-beef-feed-lot-quantites-of-cows-sized piles of bovine effluvia.

Metric fucktons of pure bullshit.

Beyond any further rational argument.

Figuring that out took me maybe 10 seconds, after reading that one excerpt.

You want to grab 1000 random people each, at a NASCAR race, a Packers game, standing in line at Disneyland/World, at a Teamsters meeting, and at a Black Lives Matter protest, poll them maybe 5-10 questions max, and than analyze that research data, and we can talk. Yes, it'll be biased for each group, but out in the open, in a way that cancels out, which is the entire point of looking at Trump voters v. Biden voters, and with real people, not the invention of someone's fevered polling dweeb imagination (overlooking the obvious: that any 10% of purported Biden voters exist only as a concoction of someone with a stack of mail-in ballots and a Sharpie, and not anywhere in real life; rather exactly like this "poll"). But that would take actual legwork, investment, and physical risk, and we can't be risking that for snowflakes too afraid to even go to local malls. In which case, tell that Soros-funded center, and their hired polling flunkees, to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut anytime they peddle such bilge-spew as "data".

John, SiG, and anyone else similarly taken in by the referenced "poll", I know you guys have probably heard of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, 

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't." - Michael Crichton

but may I gently and respectfully suggest that before you invest any further time with polls from academia, the media, or both {Bonus Question: What is 0 times 0?, which is the reliability of both groups multiplied.}, you refresh yourselves on the concept, rather than spend any further time dealing with the machinations of admitted liars and horse thieves, unless it's to figuratively string them up, in print.

The mendacious bitchez who ginned that amount of pure diaper-spackle "polling" from their own underpants know it's exactly that, and nothing else. Stop giving them the time of day, let alone the time available to yourselves, and your readers. Their effluvia demonstrates vividly that the plural of "excrement" is not "data".

Other than for the negligible worth of practice at forensic examination, I absolutely despise waste.

Forget It, Jake...

 Whenever you see any of TPTB pulling some brave, new dumbassery related to Kung Flu or general vaxxholian retardations, remember this timeless quote:

Keyboard Alert!

 h/t Odd Job

Soda out the nostrils burns.

You were warned.

From The Ministry Of Obviousness

 h/t WRSA

Point of Order: This is, and has been for over a year, a real pandemic. By any rational standard.

The question that was meant to be asked in that almost-brilliant but bungled meme was, "If the pandemic was the real problem, would health care workers be laid off?"

And the answer to that is "Of course not."

Which begs the question: "What is the real problem you're attacking, when you're laying off health care workers amidst an actual pandemic?"

And the only answer that can be true is, the problem you're attacking is "any failure to follow TPTB, off a cliff if needs be, in order to maintain 100% compliance, and provide the simulacrum of consent."

QED

In short, every unvaccinated health care worker who refuses to knuckle under is another kid at the parade pointing out that the Emperor is running around in public as bare-assed as the day he was born.

And TPTB hate being mocked and beaten about the head and shoulders with the raw unvarnished truth above all other things, and any body count from their lies be damned.

The pandemic is undeniably and inarguably real.

It's the "solution" that's a total fraud.

Satire Is Dead

h/t SLL 

From the Babylon Bee:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The CDC today issued a reminder for Americans to trust healthcare professionals when learning about the vaccine—except if said doctor disagrees with the government, in which case he should be ignored and fired.

“When we are trying to understand all the pros and cons of a brand new vaccine, the one absolute must is total groupthink,” said CDC Director Rachel Walensky. “We cannot allow any sort of healthy dissension, especially from highly trained healthcare providers, to help guide us.”

The administration has promised to make it easy to recognize unvaccinated medical professionals by ensuring they are unemployed. If one of these out-of-work doctors attempts to talk about the vaccine, the CDC has recommended citizens place their fingers in their ears and begin singing ‘Baby Shark’.

“It’s hard to even put into words how stupid the CDC is,” said a local doctor who also writes for a satire site and must remain anonymous. “I have natural immunity because I kept taking care of patients when this pandemic hit. My entire family became really ill, but those were the risks we had to take. Now hear me: the vaccine is a medical marvel. It has saved many lives, it has allowed my elderly patients to resume living—I am very grateful for it. Yet while the vaccine is very safe, it is not a zero-risk intervention. Real, significant adverse events can occur, although rarely. So for someone with natural immunity—which the latest data shows to be seven times stronger than vaccination—there is simply no reason they should be compelled into vaccination and take on that risk of an adverse event. Same with children, given their low-risk profile for serious disease, and the need for longer studies to determine potential adverse effects. The broad mandate for everyone to get vaccinated, regardless of natural immunity status, is egregiously anti-science.”

The CDC has asked anyone who read the previous paragraph to please smack their heads into a wall until they forget everything they just read. Drones have been dispatched to take care of that silly doctor, who is probably hiding in Brazil.

 When satire and actual government policy are indistinguishable, satire is dead.

Sunday Music: Escape (The Piña Colada Song)

 

The '70s equivalent of "Never Gonna Give You Up", it was released in October of '79, and climbed right up the charts to No.1 before year's end. Then got bumped, and then peaked again, becoming the first pop song to chart Number 1 in two decades. It was everywhere, literally for years. And you still can't get away from it forty year later, after it landed on the Vol. 1 mix tape from Guardians Of The Galaxy. Because everybody loves a happy ending.

Minding My Own Business

 

If you've noticed the relative (and likely also temporary) peace and quiet here, it could be because we've been taking part of that potential job loss war chest from the last couple of months, and picking up some more needful things. Not all of it is being spent, to be sure, and that slush fund will remain well-added to as well.

But we remind you all, Gentle Readers, that

1) Inflation is rampant. And running 5-20X what FedGov claims it isn't. Buying more things now that will keep allows you to eat next year at last year's prices.

2) Winter is coming on soon. Figuratively, as well as actually. This one may last years to decades.

3) Government isn't getting less intrusive, brighter, nor more helpful, at any level. The more you do now to preclude needing them later, the better off you'll be both now and later.

4) We even note some calming of the ammo hoarding, and the modest return of once-familiar items to local store shelves. Add to your surplus now, before the next panic-trigger, and the one after that.

5) We will also be activating some back-of-our-mind contingency plans that we had thought about before the whole jab-or-be-fired kerfluffle. That includes the A-C-E for everything, at every level of consideration, for our own personal PACE planning. Consider us now firm believers in the belt-and-suspenders-and-duct-tape School Of Preparedness. An acre (or more) in adjoining/nearby state(s), as well as the closer hinterlands in this one, offers an unbelievable number of interesting possibilities. And that's all we'll say about that.

Research

 h/t Phil