The 2024 Virus Is Coming!

Go. See Big Government's Ox Gored.

 

Read. The. Whole. Thing.

This is a magnum opus. Were one to write only this one piece, it would still merit a vote into the Hall Of Fame.

Make copies. Spread them around.

BOHICA

h/t Irish

Today on the Duh! Channel...

 

Anyone, anywhere, claiming for any reason because of this, that "Masks Don't Work" is simply an irredeemable fucktard. That's as nice as that can be put. Reality burns people's asses like that.

Tell these folks your genius epiphany that "Masks Don't Work":

Let us know how that goes for you.

What this does merit telling people, to a metaphysical certainty, is that 

Masking As Public Policy Doesn't Work. And Never Will.

That, you should write on your palm with a Sharpie, lest ye forget.

O, If Only Someone Had Told Us This Years Ago, Before This Got All Pear-Shaped!

Oh, wait. That exact thing happened, right here, April 22, 2020, @ 8:13PM PST.

We told you why and how masks work.

We told you why masking policy would never work.

As we noted with another blogger, saying "Masks Won't Work" is as retarded as saying "Airplanes Won't Work".

Airplanes, since Orville and Wilbur Wright, obviously work.

Everyone knows this.

Masks have worked for as long, or longer.

But not everyone should have an airplane.

People get this, because they've seen people drive.

So pretty much everyone knows without a chalkboard lesson why everyone can't operate an airplane.

But the Utopians out there, particularly the fucktarded government variety, are now shocked to discover that, exactly as predicted, everyone can't operate a mask.

(Anyone who went through military basic knew why this is so, after going to the Gas Mask training course even one time in boot camp.)

Wait...People are total shitheads?!? Yes, we told you so. Most folks know that in their bones, but we tried to bring some of the slow learners along. In vain.

So, after an entire blistering pandemic of fail, even the most ardent fucktard utopian in evidence has to admit the obvious: people are too stupid, as a group, to use masks.

(Like centuries to millennia of folks drinking water they just shit in didn't reinforce the concept of human stupidity for all time.)

You may now adjust your expectations of society appropriately, for all intents and purposes.

Under those revised expectations, for The Usual Suspects:

If you ever decried the use - including citing beyond-fucktarded "surveys" - of simple surgical masks or face diapers, or wore one, to protect the wearer (including yourself*), here's your sign:

*{Triply so for anyone wearing one in the car alone, or while out walking or running by themselves in the sunshine. IQ is a constant; the world population is increasing.}

Yes, Really.

"Donated by Jane Fonda" stamped inside the cover.
Always have a hobby.

What Is The Sound Of One Buttcheek Flapping?

We ask that question, because this is the most Pollyannish, "Remain calm! All is well!" load of half-assed codswallop we've seen since Russia invaded Ukraine last year.

And considering all the recokulous bullshit spewed on the topic to date, that's saying something.

Kill twenty minutes, and a few brain cells, because you'll be dumber for reading the whole thing, but take one for the team and do it anyways.

Then, maybe someone who plays over yonder could ask Armchair Warlord a few pointed questions.

1) How far short of their conscription goals did Russia's planned 300K mobilization fall?

1a) Who did they get, when some 6,000,000 draftable military-aged Russian males GTFO of Dodge last year, to Anywhere But Russia, rather than be drafted, and when report after report - with Russian MoD photographic proof - of the sick, lame, and lazy, blind, crippled, and crazy were "the best they could come up with?

2) Of the 350,000 initial total ground forces they started out with last year

a) how many of them did Russia lose, KIA, WIA, DOW, crippled for life, etc., to date?

b) of the 183 nominal fieldable battalions On War Day One, how many of those were destroyed to date in Ukraine?

c) Of those Imaginary 395 maneuver battalions AW ass-trapolated exist now, where in blistering fuck did the tanks, APCs, support vehicles, AKs, shovels, mess kits, clothing, boots, and underpants needed to increase the Russian Army by 116%, and make good all combat losses in Ukraine simultaneously, generate from, other than somewhere deep inside his own underpants? 

3) If the Russians are doing an "all of the above" refit and mobilization, where in blistering fuck are all these imaginary T80s and T-90s hiding?

3b) Granting arguendo the recockulous idea that Russia has the industrial capacity to start shitting out metric fucktons of T-80s and T-90s and that they could even make enough to cover losses, why would they even bother to undertake a 3-year refit of museum-piece brew-up-at-a-flick T-62s (obsolete when Nixon was president, FFS), rather than just crank out even more metric fucktons of those world-beating T-80s and T-90s alone, instead of more cannon fodder for anything from a LAAW on up?

[Hint: "I need so many tanks, I'm going to refit those M-4 Shermans and M-48 Pattons to fight alongside my M-1A1 and M-1A2 Abrams tanks"...said no general ever.]

4) If Putin could do all of this while getting his army's ass kicked halfway back to their start lines since August, what magical new operational art have they learned while parked, or driving in reverse for the last year? Where? When? How? This is operational art via the Underpants Gnome.

Granting some of AW's mathematics, he forgets a wee bit:

A) He's accounted for exactly 0% of Russian losses to date, which even Russia acknowledges have been prodigious.

B) He imagines the Russians, who haven't been able to find their own asses four days in a row since the first day of the invasion, now possess a resurrected Marshal Zhukov, with vast Russian hordes of troops ready to sweep across the steppes like Genghis Khan. Sh'yeah; when monkeys fly outta my butt.

C) He neglects the vastly diminished capability of Russia to lay down artillery barrages, evidenced by the steadily shrinking output of rounds from the peak last summer.

D) He hasn't explained the near total lack of Russian ability to conduct combined arms attacks, ever, in any way, pretty much once since 1946.

E) He neglects to tell us where the vaunted Russian Air Force has been hiding since February 28th, 2022. Currently, there are more MiGs on Moscow milk cartons than there are seen in theater, and that's been true since last March.

F) The only Russians suffering more losses than Russian privates are Russian generals. That's also the only military demographic where Putin's body count has outstripped Ukraine's.

- - -

In short, rosiest assumptions to the fore, Russia might have been able to replace half their losses since this started. With even less experienced troops and officers, and older and more decrepit equipment - when they even have enough boots and rifles to issue to troops - fighting the same way that's seen them pushed back inexorably for a year.

Not construct an army two and a half times as big as the one Putin created in 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union.

That's dorm-room bong-level bullshit.

And the single-most effective Russian unit to date was Wagner Group, which has been quite simply destroyed. It no longer exists. Their Spetznaz and airborne troops, the only other formations that rose to a level above mediocre, were erased last year trying to take Kiev and the nearby airport. Well-played.

And just because you write a new version of "Any Day Now" in red letters twenty feet high all over the Kremlin, it doesn't make it true.

The linked piece puts the "anal" in "analysis".

It should have been left up his ass, not pulled out on the end of his thumb and polished.

Sunday Music: September Gurls

 

1986 cover of the original song, stupidly never released by the Bangles' management as a single, but included on all their compilations since, with lead vocal by bassist Michael Steele, ironically now the only main member to no longer be with the band. Posted because it's beautiful, as she was, and to properly educate anyone who thinks Joan Jett or Susanna Hoffs were the only hot member of any band Steele was in.

R.I.P. Jimmy Buffett

 

A friend of mine sought Jimmy out in Key West a couple of decades ago, managed to meet him, and they had a pleasant conversation. He said Jimmy was the same guy IRL as onstage. And they enjoyed...well, listen to the song.

Passed away yesterday, aged 76, at home, peacefully, surrounded by family. Thanks for the tunes, dude.

Intelligence vs. Information

h/ts to both  WRSA and My Daily Kona

Item One: As noted in that graphic above from WRSA, Oz firm Spypaq is reportedly supplying UKR with 100 cardboard small, short-range drones/month.

Item Two: 100 drones/S2S missiles/month is roughly the entire production capability of Mother Russia.

Source

Mr. Garibaldi's original source for that is an article by Aviation Week & Space Technology. FWIW, their source and information reliability rating runs at A-1 or A-2 for 50+ years, unlike the MSM, or either side's propaganda wings in this conflict.

Obviously, a cardboard Spypaq AP/harassment drone is not a hypersonic Kinzhal by any wild stretch of imagination. We emphasize for the Usual Halfwit Suspects, we're not saying otherwise.

But by the same token, UKR is getting many other missile weapons from other sources (NATO, Turkey, Israel, et al), as well as building their own weapons, which underlines the lopsided nature of Russia's struggle to keep up with the rest of the world when they've been starved of importable tech for a year and a half. Help from China in that respect is apparently pure vaporware. Draw your own conclusions about the strength of that "alliance" in light of that reality.

Russia is struggling, and UKR has an embarrassment of riches, relatively speaking. (As the former captain of the RFS Moskva, or the admiral in charge of Russia's Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol could tell you.)

And if you think Xi and ChinaInc. aren't taking copious notes of how this works in real time, with a view to how it might go for any variation of Them vs. Us over, say, Taiwan, I've got a bridge to sell you, cheap.

Each of those pieces are information.

Synthesizing them in light of each other crosses over into actual intelligence analysis.

One of these things is not like the other.

If this is news to you, you've been remiss in taking advantage of folks like Culper, over there on the right, on the blog resource list, or any number of websites where you could download for free virtually the entire unclassified assortment of current U.S. intelligence-MOS field manuals. Fix that. Adapt, or become extinct.

Remember all this when somebody tells you anything based on one article from TASS, and tries to spin it into Glorious Russian Victory, or Imminent WWIII.

Reality is quite a bit less ham-fisted, and much more nuanced.

This is why we keep telling you what we keep telling you, and it's not (and never has been) based on the latest piece of comic-book propaganda we read last.

Anecdotal Reality

 

For anyone who reads this blog, but doesn't also read Divemedic :

1) Stop not doing that. He writes an eclectic collection, and covers more things we agree on than disagree, since ever. You'll find good stuff there.

2) He's recently changed ED jobs, and posted a couple of updates on how COVID is going down Florida way at his new shop. You should read them both.

I commented there, but for anyone's benefit, here's the same info I shared from hereabouts.

From an average of zero cases most of this year, my ED in Southern Califrutopia is now seeing 3-6 new COVID cases/day over the past couple of weeks.

The youngest was a patient several weeks old. The oldest was 102.

Of the ones we've seen, we've admitted exactly Z-E-R-O cases for solely COVID signs/symptoms. We routinely do COVID tests on patients we're admitting, particularly those with URI/respiratory symptoms, or suspicious chest X-rays.

None of them had COVID symptoms serious enough to merit hospitalization; the ones admitted were for other problems almost or entirely unrelated. For some of them, their signs/symptoms of COVID were so subtle as to be non-existent.

Which means five, ten, or eleventy mutations later, COVID is now "just the flu".

Three years ago was quite simply horrific. Now, for most of the ones testing positive, it's a nothingburger.

{For those curious: We use a bedside 10-minute test cassette, very similar to a home preg test. One snot swab, swished and dribbled, positive or negative. Period. Usually pops in 1-2 minutes, but the book says it's not over for 10 minutes. Whatever. Flu is a separate swab, and different test, and that one is run in the lab within an hour; it's the same one we've used for flu for a decade. COVID was never the flu, and the flu was never mistaken for COVID, now or ever.}

And the 2/3rds of staff who got double- and triple-vaxxed have all had a new case of COVID. Some of them, for the fifth or sixth time.

Of the one-third of us who refused Death Jabs, only one tested positive for COVID this time around; the rest of us are COVID-free, and have been. All the vaxxhole shit-talkers giving us endless mountains of sass for not getting the vaxx two years ago are now deeply submerged, running silent, and gone deep. 

They don't want to even mention the topic any more.

This last is completely understandable, because no one likes seconds on a shitburger.

The death rate during peak initial-wave COVID was 1-3%. Annual flu is 0.1%, since before anyone reading this was born.

If anyone is dying of COVID now, they're either extremely fragile, or someone was holding a pillow over their face to get their life insurance.

Wash your hands, and stay home if you're sick. Kids too. I still don't want your goddamned colds and flu bugs. Once school is back in session, all your mindless little juvenile spawn become petrie dishes for whatever URI crud has been waiting to spring free and sweep the nation, just like it does every year.

If you get sick, a URI virus wants rest, and fluids (alcohol and caffeine are diuretics, and make URIs worse, not better). Think water, gatorade/non-caffeinated sports drinks, soup, jello, etc. If you aren't peeing crystal clear, you're under-hydrated.

And COVID or not, unless your SpO2 reading is <90% on room air, no one cares. (Fingertip pulse oximeters to check your SpO2 go for $12 on Amazon and under $20 at the drug store, and they work fabulously well. You should have put one in your first aid kit three years ago, and/or keep one in the household medical cabinet, beside your thermometer.)

Don't come to the ED if you're not sicker than that; stay your ass home and self-treat. If you're panicky, call your family doctor for a prescription. Ivermectin is now an approved treatment for COVID, btw, and the EUA for most of the COVID experimental Death Vaxxes has been rescinded. Avoid all of them like the plague itself.

But anyone telling you to be afraid of COVID at this point is trying to steal another election. And/or has a 60 IQ. (The two are not only not mutually exclusive, they tend to be the same circle on a Venn diagram.)

And for the 12 millionth time: If you ever wore a simple face diaper mask, with the misbegotten impression that was to protect yourself from anything, you're in the same diagram circles, above. And always were. Like we told you, then and now.

That concludes your 2023 COVID briefing.

TL;DR: You have actual real issues to deal with. Bank real assets; stockpile food; and you never have enough sturdy boots, sturdy friends, and ready ammunition. Hard days are coming.

See to all that, if you please.

The unravelling of society accelerates exactly like a pandemic curve: slowly, then all at once.

Oopsie?

 

Prigozhin has appeared in a new video from Africa, where he notes that
reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated.
$64 Question: Is it live, or is it Memorex?

The video obviously could have been shot shortly before his death, and thus has been overtaken by events. Bummer for Priggie, who would thus be an ex-parrot.

But if another video pops up, some FSB assclowns are going to discover the meaning of "defenestrtration", experientially. Bummer for Vlad.

My money's on success, based on historical precedent and Putin's experience in capping his enemies. Time will tell, but it's not on Vlad's side in this. Grab some popcorn.

If he successfully nipped his Wagner problem in the bud, Vlad had better habeas a pretty damned convincing Prigozhin corpus, and do it tout de suit, or speculation on his continued incompetence is going to be the kind that moves his Makarov retirement party a couple of uncomfortable notches closer to kicking off.

A Century Of US History In One Panel

 h/t daily timewaster

Equal opportunity? Fear not.
The Republicans put the air in your bike tires.

Seek Tranquility

h/t Odd Job

Bubba Chump

h/t Irish

Nonsense, Based On A False Premise

 

Jonas Nightengale had a better grasp of Christianity in Leap Of Faith 
than most members of Congress have since ever.

Vox thinks Conservatism failed Christianity, because it "failed to conserve anything".

This is feather-headed nonsense on so many levels, including both religious and political, it's hard to know where to start.

But let's agree, arguendo, to grant the recockulous premise.

Barry Goldwater wrote Conscience Of A Conservative in 1960.

FTR, his actual walk-the-walk commitment to Christianity was virtually invisible, then or ever.

So:

A) List please, for the class, all the actual conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate, from 1960 to now, inclusive. (Hint: If you're very good, you may be able to come up with as many as 5 such, in that entire 63+-year period of time.)

B) Show which year, or years, those conservatives ever held a majority in either body, let alone both at the same time.

C) Tell which of those majorities were elected by conservative Christians, who have ever been a minority within their own faith.

D) While you're up, tell us which Christians put Kennedys in office every year from the 1950s onwards.  And which Christians elected any 57 black politicians from Shirley Chisholm and Mad Maxine Waters onwards. Which way did those politicians vote, while you're at the chalkboard? Which Christians gave you Mittens for a Senator? None of those Christians voted for any conservatives, and most never intended to do so. Let me know when the penny drops.

Once you suss out the fact that conservative Christians never elected anyone to run the country, nor ever could, tell us again who failed whom.

Any fool, religious or not, who ever expected a bunch of failed game show hosts and used-car salesmen to accomplish anything worthwhile on the public dime, in benefit of either the culture, or any particular religious faith, is the sort of fool who'd sell the family cow for magic beans.

And if we ever, so much as once, get a conservative majority in either federal house, let alone both of them simultaneously, give a holler.

That would be noteworthy for being the first time it's ever happened in the history of the republic, 1789-ever.

Vox, like millions, is guilty of a basic error: Confusing anyone with an [R] after their name on a ballot with any sort of conservative, let alone any sort of Christian.

One can't fail to accomplish something they never had the power nor authority to undertake in the first place.

The fundamental mistake is not understanding that reality.

Sunday Music: Bad To The Bone

 

Cultural icon anthem that never charted, from 1982.

Also the marching song of the 45th president. If he somehow becomes the 47th as well, this song should replace "Hail To The Chief".

This Is The Way

The Posse Should Be Well-Mounted; And Leave The Married Men At Home...

 h/t WRSA

Ever notice...?

Plus Ça Change...

h/t  OddJob

This flat out cracked me up.
And I'm ashamed I didn't think of it first. Kudos, NTM.

This Always Bears Repeating

Best Laid Plans

And They're Gonna be Hurting For Weeks...

Who won the GOP debate last night? TRUMP.

UPDATE:

Faux News GOP debate: 12.8M views.

Tucker Carlson Trump interview: 248M views.

If you're keeping score at home, that's GAME OVER for the entire 2024 primary season.

America just wants the guy they elected the last time to get into office this time. Period.

We've seen how Fox treated Tucker, and it's about like the GOPe treated Trump.

Fox should stop the charade, and just move any future Faux News debates over to CNN or MSNBC, and have them moderated by George Snuffleupagus, or Don Lemon. If not Jill Biden.

It won't affect Fox's ratings, which went in the sh*tter the minute they fired Carlson.

It's 2025. Meet The New Boss...

Don't Get Fooled Again.

 

Putincide Strikes Again

 

Prigozhin bizjet crashes of Suddenly™, all aboard eat shit and die.

Just a week after another Russian senior general running things for the Ministry of Defense, lately jailed, also succumbed to a mysteriously coincidental case of Suddenly™.

Maybe Putin's making them all get COVID boosters. Or something.

Where they'll die of Suddenly™.

Whatever it is, if Putin's army could kill Ukrainian troops as well as Putin gets rid of Russian generals, they'd be parked around the Ukrainian parliament building in Kiev on T-90 tanks, and enjoying a late summer tan in Odessa, instead of getting pushed back in Luhansk and Donetsk, at a snail's pace, but always rearward.

And the Usual Suspects will still convince themselves that the Wagner mutiny "wasn't really a coup attempt."

Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud

 h/t Eaton Rapids Joe

Sh'yeah, Right. That'll Work...

How do you know it's a party organ?
It only plays one note.

Hilary After-Action

USS ELEANOR ROOSEVELT puts to sea to avoid getting wet and
melting, ahead of a rapidly weakening tropical hiccup
so mild that no damage was recorded anywhere in San Diego Bay.

And that about covers that.

I can guaran-fucking-tee that 2000 Marine recruits at MCRD watching the TR flee this cloudburst were even less impressed yesterday, probably doing PT and close order drill out in the rain.

As noted in Comments:

I get the underlying rationale.

But it's only sound if you accept that they couldn't tell the difference between Chicken Little's inflated doomporn, and actual actionable weather intelligence.

It's like launching nuclear missiles because someone's radar detected a squadron of pelicans incoming.

They still look like idiots, obviously they don't have any better intel than Joe Schmuck, and they fell for the vastly inflated hype, rather than actual accurate weather reports.

If they did this as a readiness exercise, they're just stupid. If they did it because they couldn't tell the difference, they're stupid morons.

They look like not just pussies, but incompetent and gullible pussies.

There's no way to salvage this for them, and they wasted metric fucktons of fuel and money for no good reason, while sharing with near-peer adversaries their total inability to tell a real threat from a fake one.

You can bet Russia and China were taking notes.

FIFY

 original from WRSA

Bluff Called: I'll pay anyone $1 for every one of them born here,
if they'll give me 10¢ for every one of them who wasn't,
and I'll buy a Ferrari for cash from my winnings on that wager.
Take your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk back home. 

Tropical Mousefart

 

2AM - Clear as a bell, dry, some very high altitude thin stuff moving up from the SE.

4AM - The softest drizzle seen in these parts in some time, not even loud enough to hear from inside the house. Light breeze, maybe 5-10MPH.

6AM - Cloudy, no rain, no wind.

Now - Barely daylight, raining almost hard enough to call rain, wind 6MPH from the NE

Updated forecast for the day: Maybe 1-2 inches of rain, wind gusts up to 30MPH, mainly 10-20. Thunderstorms possible. Your asthmatic granny could blow harder than that putting out birthday candles. Santa Ana winds gust up to 60MPH, FFS, and people are out walking in them since ever.

I'll probably sleep through this today.

Gone by Monday noon.

Yawn.

This isn't likely to hit hard enough to wash the truck.

Hurricane Hilary was already downgraded from Cat 4 to Cat 2 just from dragging along the Baja Peninsula.

Looks like another overhyped weather-pocalypse that fizzled, up here.

Mexico may be another story. We'll see.

UPDATE: 1320 Local - If the media hadn't hyped this like it was going to drown the state, and there were no weather satellites whatsoever, this would have been regarded as a slight summer shower day. Like we've had half a dozen times here since Memorial Day, with several of them being orders of magnitude windier and rainier than this has been.

Oh Noes!!!

 

Cartel drones drop 33 bombs on Mexican peasantry in a gang turf dispute

Another load of rock salt in the ass for The World's Foremost Expert on using drones (COTS: Commercial Off The Shelf models, not ginormous professional models) as weapons, with the five-millionth report of somebody using them to drop explosives on soft targets, like some of us told you years ago was not only going to happen, it already had.

We also speculated that it wouldn't take much beyond the sheer will to do it that would let someone make a soda-can thermite grenade, and pay a visit to any oil or LNG storage facility anywhere in the world, and wreak havoc for a paltry couple of grand in U$D. So don't come crying to us when that happens.

Color us shocked: Bad people will find bad uses for neutral items.

We only have metric fucktons of videos proving the theorem in the years since we first warned you about this potential, against the extensive expertise of the Canuckistani Drone Maestro in crashing his RC toys while half-potted. So you can continue to believe him. Or, trust your lying eyes.

We offer Herr Dronenkapitan some balm for his ailment, as we struggle not to laugh aloud at his predicament.

Sunday Music: Steal Away

 Robbie Dupree's #6 hit from his 1980 debut album. No overproduction. No pitch-bending. Music from when you had to be good to cut a record. Ars gratia artis. Enjoy.

For Comparison

 h/t WRSA

This is Hurricane Shrillary, not Hilary.
The death toll is 186, so far, that we know about...
And as a reminder, Epstein didn't kill himself.

A Bitch Named Hilary

Windy. All wet. Over-hyped. Unwanted. Bringing nothing but misery. Stop me if you've heard this one.

Except this isn't the criminal maven of Little Rock, it's the once-per-century Cat 4 (currently) hurricane rolling up the Baja California coast and set to cross right over the most populous stretch of the CA coast from San Diego to L.A. from Sunday night to Monday morning. Bummer for Sea World and Disneyland, but that's the breaks.

Baja, especially Ensenada, looks to be going to get royally hosed. You won't hear as much about that, because they're Mexicans, but those people living in shithole shacks and on trash heaps up countless canyons down there are about to get washed away, and make 150 or so dead Hawaiian citizens look like a sorority pillow fight by comparison. I'll be amazed if it doesn't wipe out hundreds of them.

But the media, breathlessly gearing up for a real live Califrutopia catastrophe - with 48 hrs notice, unlike an earthquake - will focus on the SoCal part, where by the time it reaches us, it won't be the Cat 4 hurricane, it'll be a rapidly weakening tropical storm with 50-60MPH winds...IOW, a wet Santa Ana wind, from the other direction; and 2-6 inches of rain, which will overwhelm the flood control channels and storm drains due to rapidity, not volume, and flood some intersections and lows spots on the freeways.

The deserts to the east of L.A. are in for a rough flash flood time, more than likely.

Power may even go down in spots for a day or so.

Otherwise, a rare instance of August rain hereabouts.

I was picking up mail this morning, and the supermarket next door saw every person coming out with bundles of bottled water and batteries. BTDTGTTS. I'd make fun of them for waiting until now, but at least they're getting them ahead of time. The real idiots are the folks with nothing, who won't even make that little effort to take care of themselves beforehand.

I'll be on duty Sunday night in the ER as it crosses the border, so it'll be raining from before I head in, until the end of my shift, if the NWS has things right.

I predict a lot of nothing at work: people will stay home in droves, mostly. Probably call out sick Monday too.

But there's definitely a silver lining I can see on the horizon: any number of homeless wastrels camping in river beds washed out to sea and fed to sharks and crabs, which will cleanse the local river systems for some weeks. Expect to see dramatic news footage of some meth-head dipshit being winched to safety when his dirt island in the middle of the Santa Ana or San Gabriel or L.A. River floods away, in a stirring and melodramatic waste of taxpayer time and money. But it keeps the fire guys in practice.

We'll probably also lose some Mcmansions on hillsides where houses should never have been built in the first place, and Eyewitless News will try to tug heartstrings when millionaires who should have known better get to pay for their view, and live like common folks for a couple of weeks at the Hilton, like they do in the winter every rainy season. Boo frickin' hoo. News flash: gravity works, and adobe hills become adobe washes at the bottom, just like every year since 0.

Assuming power, I'll post an after-action Monday. Otherwise, I'm more worried about - and at greater risk from - the jackholes on the freeway to and from work than I am about the coming deluge/windstorm. Unless NWS gets it gloriously wrong, we get an actual hurricane coming ashore in SoCal, storm surge and all, and this turns into an Irwin Allen/Michael Bay wet dream. Literally.

If I wasn't working that night, I'd put on a burlap robe and Father Time beard - and a life jacket - and carry a sign that said "The End Is Coming" through downtown L.A., just to scare the bejeezus out of the weak-minded.

Dollars to donuts some local station will decide to program a showing of Evan Almighty or Noah (if not both) Sunday night. Comedy gold, right there.

Nothin' Left To Lose...

Two posts by Divemedic:

Freedom

Three Decades

RTWT. Both times.

"Busted flat in D.C. ..."

It's Exactly Like That

 h/t Chief Nose Wetter

FIFY

 h/t WRSA

Oopsie

 

(Forbes) Why I'm not getting so much of the spam screeds in comments telling me of the strength of the ruble.

The Dog That Hasn't Been Barking - MOAR RUSSIAN WINNING!: 

"Russia’s ruble slipped past 100 per U.S. dollar on Monday morning, a nearly 17-month low that has sparked internal discord over monetary policy as economic pressures from its ongoing war in Ukraine mount and international sanctions erode Moscow’s income streams."

Crayon drawing for the slow learners:

Dear hardcore retards:

Currencies go up and down. I haven't cock-a-doodle-dooed about this before now, even as the ruble slipped back to reality (starting last winter), for the same reason you shouldn't have been doing it when the ruble temporarily went up last year (for about seven months).

The dollar is shit, because we've inflated it beyond reality. That's bound to come in for a landing one day, sooner or later. And yet it's still better off than the ruble (currently by 10% overall), compared to five minutes before Pootie-poot got all grabby about other people's countries. Suck on that. There's also more USD being held as the world's reserve currency than there was several months ago. So news of the dollar's utter demise is a wee bit early, even if it's fundamentally less sound than Emperor Poopypants' memory.

The ruble is shit, because all Russia has to back it with isn't gold (they're not handing that over for rubles, jackholes, never were, and never will), it's commodities. Which revenue stream has been halved since Putard's asinine invasion, and which they're only selling (at fire sale prices) to India and China, both of whom are ecstatically happy to profit from Russia's stupidity, and get cheap energy while they can.

Whether there are long-term consequences and punishment from the rest of the world towards India and China when the dust settles remains to be seen, but neither has anything long-term to look forward to.

But FFS, stop pointing to the ruble as some bastion of stability. It's the Mexican peso in Cyrillic writing, with the inherent worth of Zimbabwean dollars. Even more so as long as they're an international pariah. Their economy is currently a fraction of what it was 20 months ago, and it isn't going to get better until they end this war, withdraw from Ukrainian territory in haste and for good, and probably pay hefty reparations on top of that. That's what they've bought themselves. Get over it, snowflakes.

Kremlin PANIC: FORTUNE: in-panic-mode-after-ruble-plunges-below-a-penny-russia-rescues-vladimir-putin-from-humiliating-currency-collapse-with-emergency-hike

Sunday Music: Low Rider

 

I passed two of these guys on the way home this morning; both classic black Caddies, one a '56, one a '69, both sailing along the freeway about 2" above the asphalt.

If this 1975 classic can't help you get your mojo going, you're past help.

More cowbell, before cowbell was cool.

Candor and Clarity

Secret Service Codename: Depends

Operation Juggernaut