Hmmm. Aprivate luxury submarine, capable of 4-week journeys. Selling for "only" AUS$3B (So $1.98B U.S.).
Figuring a nominal speed of "greater than 40 knots". No worries about sea sickness. Laughs at storms. Winter at the polar ice cap; summer at the Great Barrier Reef; Tahiti, the Caribbean, Mallorca, and the French Riviera in season. Fresh lobster and crab nightly. Parties and dancing on the stern casing topside on calm nights.
1) Hell of a way to avoid paparazzi.
2) Coolest bug out ride ever for the apocalypse.
3) And of course, no one would ever use this to smuggle drugs, terrorists, arms, or people past the coast guards of 150 nations. Nosiree. Never happen. {OTOH, drop off a few dope loads "as a favor", and the loan note is paid off.} And of course, no one would get one of these and turn pirate. That'd be cheating. (Bonus points if you get Johnny Depp or Geoffrey Rush to dress up and play pretend captain. "...and really bad eggs...")
4) First sighting in the wild, even as CGI: Bond villain. Guaran-damn-teed.
Mongo like. But it still isn't going to be under my Christmas tree.
Maybe if I get 39 friends together, and we go shares. So then only about US$49.5M each.
Here is a shovel. Yonder is a pile of sand. Behind you is your ass. Some assembly required. Isn't the Tenth Amendment a wonderful thing?
Love and kisses, the Governor of Texas
Go long on popcorn and beverages. This is getting interesting.
Side note: I know locals have already declared Abbott another Vichy Republican. I note purely for informational purposes, that this current showdown is how people become vice-presidents. Trump has already supposedly decided upon his running mate for this campaign, but has not announced that selection.
This invasion (and that's exactly what it is, and was intended to be!) is the kind of lightning-rod issue that could make for a steal-proof national landslide. I'm not getting my hopes up, but the shit-fits that will be taking place in DC over this are probably biblical right now.
Courtesy of CZ's excellent blog, we learn Ruger has noticed an obvious gap in their product line, and unfortunately, in typical Ruger fashion, has once again rogered their pet dog. This is so common thereabouts, the ASPCA puts them out as "information only" bulletins.
We don't reflexively hate Ruger, unlike the way HK hates us. We have a number of products made when they - accidentally or on purpose, we're not sure - stopped thinking with their heads up their asses, and made a fine weapon. When they get it right, they get things very right.
This is not one of those times.
Cdr. Salamander (IIRC) dubbed the Navy's LCS "Little Crappy Ships". In that spirit, we present to you, Ruger's Little Crappy Carbine, in, as CZ drolly put it, .45 AARP.
Shaking my head over this...thing. First thought: "And Ruger steps on their junk again." But I repeat myself.
Ruger having the wit to make this on their PC Carbine platform would've been just fine. They excelled on that one. As I noted at the time.More than once.But in the immortal words of Captain Rex Kramer, "That's just what they'd be expecting us to do."
The only thing this left-handed attempt is better than, is nothing at all. Allegedly.
And I've still got my vintage Marlin .45 Camp Carbine, thankyouverymuch.
Probably still would have wanted to get one of these (assuming such might ever be possible here in Califrutopia) but which is highly unlikely given that by not making this on the PC Carbine platform, just looking at the picture, this thing already checks three or four boxes (folding stock, protruding pistol grip, >10 rd mag cap, muzzle brake/flash hider...wonderful! Why not just cut to the chase, and make it full auto, with grenade launcher, flamethrower, and a permanently attached suppressor built in?!?) any two of which make it it a Califrutopian "assault rifle", meaning the @$$holes in Sacramento will want any version legal for sale here to require depot-level disassembly to reload, negating the entire point of making one in the first place.
I'm sure they'll make a California-compliant version in a couple of years that's a single-shot bolt action, or some such stupidity.
If they'd built it as a PC .45 Carbine (or, wonder of wonders, simply product-improved the Marlin Camp Carbine they now own the rights to), as any foole could have told them to do, it could have gone on the shelves unscathed tomorrow.
's okay though, it's not like we're only 10% of the entire firearms market in the country or anything.
I'm surprised they didn't invent a proprietary magazine for it too, that sells for $97@ for extras. How they resisted that bit of bog-standard Ruger idiocy is a mystery for the ages.
I can hardly wait until they get around to fornicating up a Marlin lever-action in .45LC. In 10 or 20 years, at their current pace. They'll probably make it require a proprietary tube for feeding, and hold 4 rounds. Or else belt-fed, with a bipod. That way, they can piss off cowboy action shooters and Marlin lever-action fans in one fell swoop.
I know Bill is dead, but his block-headed stupidity and market tone-deafness lives on at the company he built, and seems to be dug in there like herpes. Every once in a great while they claw their way free, but then the weight of decades of "We've always done it this way" practice drags them right back to 1980 all over again.
Hoping Ruger won't screw the pooch every chance they get is like rooting for the Cubs, or voting for Republicans and expecting to get smaller government.
Thanks for living up to all my expectations, Ruger: never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I fart in their general direction.
Since SCOTUS has ruled - beyond and against any legal reasoning worthy of the name - that the U.S. Constitution does not apply to Texas, Texas should ratify that decision and return the favor, in spades.
There should be consequences to ruling a state is outside the protection of the Constitution under which it joined the republic.
All representatives of Texas outside its geographic boundaries should be recalled to the state forthwith.
1) How many divisions does SCOTUS have?
2) Texas should arrest on the spot any federal agent attempting to cut, remove, or displace any obstacle Texas has erected within the state's boundaries, or otherwise thwart prevention by Texas of the criminal invasion of their state, and hold any such arrestees without bail indefinitely, for insurrection and treason.
3a) Any of them who are current residents of Texas should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of Texas law, in batches if necessary, and imprisoned in the state's penitentiaries forthwith, for the entirety of sentences received, without any possibility of leniency or parole. If a court decides on the death penalty, a ten- or twelve-place scaffold should suffice, to save time. Pour encourager les autres.
3b) Any of them with residency outside of Texas should be held without trial until the U.S. re-establishes diplomatic relations with Texas. Outside, behind barbed wire, in their underpants, 24/7.
3c) Any military personnel who attempt to enter or leave their bases should be similarly interred as in 3b, but given normal treatment under the Geneva Convention in lieu of formal treaty.
3d) Any personnel attempting to leave military reservations within the state under arms, by land or air, should be exterminated with extreme prejudice, and those bases seized and occupied. As long as they stand down and remain neutral and unreinforced, they should remain unmolested as is. Any act of war upon Texas from such installations in any manner or to any degree voids any such guarantee. If they elect to road march on foot out of state territory, unarmed, and leaving all vehicles and equipment behind, they should be given parole and safe conduct to the state's borders. Any future return to the state under arms subjects them to immediate execution upon capture.
4) Any other federal agents, officers, or employees, lifting so much as a finger in assistance of the treasonous, seditious, and criminal conspiracy to aid and abet the invasion of the state of Texas, from within the boundaries of the state of Texas, should receive the same treatment. Tears that would be shed over any death, let alone massacre, of federal agents attempting to interfere or resist, anywhere: zero.
5) If the federal government refuses to halt this invasion, and wants to provoke a Fort Sumter moment against Texas, I suspect Texas would only have about 100M volunteers flocking to their side to take a free shot at Uncle Fuckyou within hours of declaring same, and the refugees fleeing the Mexican border region southward wouldn't be safe very much north of Cancun by the end of a month's time.
6) Some of the volunteers would start right in where they already are, and then the idea would spread immediately to about 37 other states. When the Green Zone shrunk to the District of Criminals and a handful of blue hive cities, the pro-invasion lobby would really have both tits in a ringer, and things would get interesting worldwide, in a Chinese curse sort of way.
7) Since the U.S. has not only abdicated even any ersatz border enforcement, and is now not only aiding and abetting criminal border violation, but actively preventing the several states from doing anything to stop it, Texas should take over the entire border from the Gulf to New Mexico, close it in perpetuity, and institute a "shoot-on-sight" policy forthwith. The state's DPS should then begin round-ups and imprisonment of criminal illegal aliens whenever and wherever found within Texas, and imprison them side-by-side with their former co-conspirators, outside, behind barbed wire, in their underpants, 24/7, for a term not less than 1:1 for the entire period of time they have illegally resided in the Lone Star State. If they wanted to come to Texas illegally with such fervor, they're fully entitled to enjoy the weather there outdoors in January (and every other month) unhindered.
This is what happens when you pretend an unarmed and non-violent panty raid on the US Capitol is an "insurrection", and then double- and triple-down on that fairytale, by sponsoring a criminal invasion of the country for two years.
Here's hoping Texas doesn't roll over and take it in the pants, and instead has the backbone to decide to send Emperor Poopypants the bird with both hands on this here and now, and triple dog dares federally employed criminals to wade face first into this propeller. This is where we find out whether Texas is all hat and no cattle, or the real deal.
You've had your fifteen minutes, Governor. Go back to Florida and f**k with Disney, and leave presidential campaigns to serious candidates. And sincere mad props for taking a sizzling parting shot at Jeb Haley's campaign on your way back to Tallahassee. There could be a DHS directorship in your future...until the coming election gets buggered harder than the last one.
Commander Zero brings up the topic of match safes, including this fine example.
But it still needs work.
We respond:
The problem is that the lazy bastards designing these things don't go the full way, and have the wit to place the striker (or a pair of them) in a separate O-ring sealed screw-on compartment at the other end that's NOT where the matches reside, but bean counters are invariably penny-wise and pound foolish when it comes to making gear properly.
Public domain, bitchez:
First guy to take that idea and run with it gets my cash for the product.
BONUS: stick a mirror on the inside of the match end, and mount a decent button compass on the outside of either end, and a built-in shrill whistle at the other one, and go for the grand slam of survival implements. Lanyard loop with a woven paracord necklace or bracelet. What should be mounted on the outside long axis is a small bar of magnesium stock on one side, and another striker for metal edges. Both user-replaceable, like Swiss Army knife toothpicks and tweezers. Make the safes out of both anodized aluminum in a rainbow of colors, and alternatively a solid brass version, for maritime environments, and those things will be passed down for generations, fly of the shelves, and get bought by the metric shit-ton by Uncle Sam's survival equipment cages, gear whores, and Top Tier operators.
Once REI and Bass Pro find out about them, you could retire just on the royalties and live quite comfortably.
DOUBLE BONUS: Make a matching single CR123 light with a pill safe at the end for water purification tabs (perhaps a stackable pair of compartments for a second pill item (anti-malarials/Immodium/whatever*), and a built-in nylon-lined spool for 50' of snare wire (or fishing line, or both) as a matching companion.
Victorinox, Gerber, and Cold Steel should be writing this down verbatim if they had a small clue.
*(Make compartment #2 deep enough to alternatively hold a couple of silver dimes, or 1/10th oz. gold coins. Not included as OEM, obviously, but user-selectable.)
Chances anyone with the means will actually do this are about 1%, but I'll happily be proven wrong by buying them if anyone ever finds a clue and does it.
{Please, don't anyone refer me to the half-assed cheap chinesium plastic Stansport toy, or most of the similar Coghlan's crap.
That's exactly the $5 cheapskate dreck that pisses me off. Build or find what I'm talking about, the right way, to last, and get back to me. "Good enough", for personal survival, usually isn't. "Buy once, cry once" is.}
In their ceaseless efforts to expand the intrusive reach of their one-party tyranny and use the U.S. and state constitutions as ass-wipe, the banana republic government of Califrutopia banned gun sales on state property, effectively killing several gun shows in CA on land controlled by the state.
This included the OC Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa. Which not only pissed off the citizenry, that city (who'd happily take the land over from the state in a heartbeat), and hundreds of vendors. It also got the state sued in court. Successfully, as it turned out.
Califrutopia lost. (Huzzah!) The state's chances at the Ninth Circus aren't looking any too good in light of Bruen, and several other decisions, but pending their inevitable foolish appeals, the shows cancelled since last year are now back.
I'm off to validate my existence, undergird capitalism, and strike a blow for liberty.
Not so much for actual guns (still incurring a 10-day wait hereabouts, and I'm not short any of those already), but for all the other associated (and the totally non-related) accessories, geegaws, and what-not at the show.
And to flip a giant middle finger at the fucktards in Sacramento. Again.
I take virtual pen in hand because it seems you - individually and/or collectively - need a wake-up call about the state of your business.
I write, not about your atrocious corporate policy of grooming children and sexualizing them at an early age with your dreadful LGBTEIEIO agenda, nor even to chide you for the fact that most of your establishments look perpetually as if they had just been pillaged by swarms of Vikings and Visigoths rampaging through the aisles mounted on herds of wildebeests and rhinocerii fed on a diet of methamphetamine and PCP. No, this is about nothing so controversial nor obvious.
And before we get to the crux of the matter, let me start off with a compliment. Your Mondo Llama line of acrylic paints, the entire rainbow of 63 of them (not counting the chalk shades) are simply excellent, and a superb value for the money, providing all the quality necessary for a host of artistic endeavors for less than $2/bottle, when one doesn't need to spend nor obtain commercial artist-quality tubes of the pricier stuff. I frankly couldn't be happier with the product line, and bonus for you, it's one of your store-brand lines.
Having said that, I'm not writing to criticize you now, but rather to offer my heartfelt condolences.
I offer them for what must be a constant source of despair at every level, for the simply abysmal level of illiterate, color-blind, downright stupid and lazy so-called associates you must be forced to hire to stock your shelves.
Is someone holding a gun to your personnel managers' heads when you hire such a shiftless bunch of incompetent retards? Should we call the police? Is it a federal law we need to raise the hue and cry about which requires you to employ such an all-around bunch of lackadaisical doofusii, and entrust them the incredibly complex task of - horrors! - putting things on the shelves where they belong??
Tell us how we can help you; we're here for you.
I ask because - just spit balling here, not telling such a huge corporation how to run their business, mind you - I have a wee suspicion that if you could somehow put the right colors of paint where they're supposed to go, you'd, y'know, SELL MORE OF THEM. Crazy, right? Let me know if I'm wildly out of line there with such rampant speculation.
I can only commiserate with you because not only are the plainly visible colors of the Mondo Llama paint bottles not an actual clue for the people who're entrusted every week with stocking them in the right spots, but because the names of each color are written in English on both the shelves, and the bottle tops. Almost like if someone could read English, let alone look at the flipping colors of paint inside, they could actually work out which bottles go in which place on the store shelves. Every. Single. Time. Mirabile dictu!
Do your employees need an emotional support animal to help them discern colors? Would putting a giant See-N-Spell on all store shelves help them to get all 63 colors in the right places? I'm baffled.
I just wanted to let you know that, to the extent the colors are correctly located in the stores I CC'ed in on this communication, it's because I take about 2 minutes whenever I'm in one of those stores to straighten them out. You're welcome. I have a leg up on your employees, obviously, because I'm neither color-blind nor illiterate. Just in case you wanted me to check my non-retard not-colorblind privilege.
The pity for you is, you can't seem to be able to motivate any of your $15/hr. employees to spend less than a dollar's worth of your company time to do the same thing. That'd be...work! Icky!
Yeah, I suppose it's a little OCD. And I know, many of your other customers "help" you by putting things on shelves all over the store when they're too lazy to walk them back where they got them, but this isn't that. I know, because I continuously find three bottles of paint with your pick labels attached to the lot, all the same color, and all mis-located. At every store. Every time I drop in. Because that's how your flunkies stock them.
Maybe you could think about doing an Ishihara Color Blindness Test before you hire people. You could still hire the ones that are color-blind, and get some ADA cred and points; and then, just not ask them to sort items by color. You're on your own what to do about the ones who can't read (maybe remedial English classes for the Common Core high school grads?), and the lazy doofuses.
Apparently, to Target employees, any color of blue is interchangeable with every other color of blue. And if you can read the number in this test, it's also evidently the average Target employee IQ.
Why do I get worked up about the fact that you have thousands of employees stocking your shelves who can't read, can't see colors, and/or don't give a damn? (Worst case for you, all of the above.)
Well, it's like this: Back in the day, when Van Halen (they're a rock band; maybe you've heard of them? You sell their albums...) used to have an infamous clause (#126) in their voluminous tour contract that there would be bowls of M&Ms backstage. But absolutely NO brown ones.
And if they saw a brown M&M, it was a breach of contract, and they could cancel the entire show, for cause, with full compensation owed.
Not because they hated brown M&Ms. Not because they were divas. But because they wanted to make sure, with tons of equipment, electricity, and pyrotechnics going off on a huge show, to ensure the safety of the band, their roadies, and their fans, they wanted a quick test of whether the concert promoters had read the contract and were following the rules.
It was a bellwether; a canary-in-the-coal-mine, if you will, to see if the people they were entrusting their safety to were doing their jobs.
And that's how I feel about the paint in your craft aisle. If you can't hire people that can get something that simple and basic right, how can you be expected to get anything right that's harder than that??
You guys have exactly three jobs: Stock the shelves, open the doors, and ring up the sales. (And let's get serious: you've tried to outsource that last one to your customers for years, and now you're shocked that one's blown up in your faces.) And if you now can't stock the shelves either, you won't have to worry about opening the doors for much longer either.
QED
So I feel for you, both individually and corporately. Not to mention for your stockholders.
Waaaaaay back in the misty past, like many youngsters embarking on gainful employment, I started out in retail too. At a place called Sears, Roebuck, and Co. Maybe some of the older folks there remember them? At the time I worked there, they really were "where America shopped". They parlayed catalog sales into the premier retail establishment in the country. But they had technological myopia: they couldn't see the internet as the logical extension of their catalog, and you and everyone else ate their lunch, metaphorically.
You folks, with hundreds (1956, at last count) of stores in all 50 states seem to have lost sight of the idea that you're running actual brick-and-mortar stores. And that it's your bread and butter. You get the online aspect; but if your master plan is to be a smaller version of Bezos-mart, with less selection, you're well on your way to becoming the next Sears story.
I feel even sorrier for you when I consider how it got this way. Because as I learned from masters of the craft in the military, you only get the compliance with orders you inspect for.
So this means you not only have incompetent, slovenly, or outright incapable employees, you have nearly 2000 store managers and merchandise managers who frankly don't give a flying fig about this. If they even know about it, because they never check. You'll have to decide for yourselves whether their apathy or their ignorance is worse. And you're paying them for this!
At least your hired flunkies aren't so stupid or incompetent (...yet) they put the paint bottles in the candy or cake frosting aisle, but that's a pretty low bar, don't you think?
I'm not a stock market guy, but if I was, or even if I was invested in it, I think I'd be shorting your stock.
Maybe I've got it wrong. Maybe things are great at the other 1949 stores, and it's just every store within 5 miles of me that can't pull off such a simple task. Ever. Any day in the last several years. Anytime I've checked.
But, like I said, I'm not criticizing you. You do whatever you think best.
I just feel sad that you're paying huge numbers of people (and soon, even starting them out here in Califrutopia at $20/hr minimum!) to be so utterly incapable of doing the most basic function in retail: putting things on the store shelves. And they keep getting it wrong every day, and no one in charge - all hired by you - notices or cares.
But now, we can both live in hope: Me, that anyone in your entire corporation important enough to make a change cares enough to start running your business like a business instead of thinking it's going to run itself; and you, that if they did, I'd drop dead from utter shock.
The post title is taken from the private notebook of a young gentleman from California, then in his early twenties, while attending the United States Military Academy at West Point, a proud graduate of the class of 1909. You may have heard of him.
Well well. Seems that, despite eleventy-eleven indictments for everything from overdue library books to wearing a bad hairpiece in public, Trump only beat every other GOP-lite candidate, combined, in the Iowa Cornbowl.
Fourth-place finisher Ramalamadingdong, who only trailed Trump by 43 percentage points (more than the tally totals of Jeb #2 and Jeb #3 combined), has ejected from further headfirst smashes into the brick wall, rolled over, and kissed Trump's ass, in the bid to become the next Veep running mate.
That worked for Kamala Kneepads in 2020. No word on whether Ramalamadingdong plans on stocking up on Chapstick to duplicate that feat.
None of that means fuck-all for the actual 2024 election. Team Poopypants' continued Keep-Him-The-Hell-Away-From-Live-Microphones-For-Another-Year strategy, a carbon-copy of the 2020 plan, points to the re-deployment of another massive Election Steal apparatus in 2024, except likely a necessary order of magnitude larger, to counteract what looks to be an actual 70-30 Biden drubbing, were a conventional (read "factual, free, and honest") election to be held this year.
It won't be.
My prediction of what happens in 2024 is a re-do of 2020:
Biden "wins" again this time, improving on his 81M imaginary votes from 2020, with a final score of Biden 972%, and Trump 49%. Nothing to see here. Move along.
An actual election scares hell out of both parties, because they know who'd win that. Just like he did the last two times. They're morons, but they're not complete idiots.
The Deep State would hold a motorcade for Trump in Dallas the day he wins the nomination, and the GOP would donate the convertible for him to ride in before that would happen. The FBI and CIA can be relied upon to supply the Usual Book Depository Spectators, as they both have some wee experience with that sort of thing.
But in the meantime, the spectacle of Trump single-handedly upending the entire assembled crew of GOPe midgets, every single time it's tried, is heartwarming, in that it sets the poo-flinging monkeys from both wings of the Uniparty (that would be just about all of them) to digging in their diapers for more offerings to throw at President Trump, and highlights the desperation and blatant frothingly mad depths of shrieking hysteria to which they'll happily succumb, in their ceaseless quest to keep their jackboots on the neck of the American people.
The election season is merely kabuki theater in service of that end, despite the fact that it's proving as effective at stopping Trump from regaining the presidency as were rules changes in stopping Jonathan E. in Rollerball.
The real fun starts, in both instances, five minutes after the show is over, outside the arena.
Stock up on canned goods: both the #10 and olive drab variety.
You're gonna need them.
And maybe this time, ignore the media's attempt to usurp coronation rights of their selectee, contrary to all reality.
We thought this ponder from Tam self-evidently obvious, and reference it for truth, as using multi-million dollar missiles to shoot down multi-hundred dollar drones is asinine beyond belief, despite the shrieking caterwauling objections from people who think Common Core is actual mathematics, and that the world's #1 problem is Joooooooooooooooooos!
But contrary to years of evidence to the contrary, at least one or two people in the Five-Sided A$$hole Palace realized that the correct answer to the Houthi problem wasn't expending scarce and expensive missiles from an under-supplied fleet, it was doing alpha strikes from aircraft carriers, and dropping metric fucktons of iron bombs on deserving jackholes, just like any other time since about 1943.
Some lackwit will always plaintively whinge "How many is 'enough'...?"
Well, Sh*t-for-Brains, here's your One-Step Cluebat For The Calculationally Impaired:
Q.: Are they still fighting?
Yes: Load up another metric fuckton of bombs, and sortie again.
No song screams 1980s New Wave more than this debut single from Missing Persons, with lyrics that absolutely ("totally, dude") capture L.A. culture (for some value of that word). It snuck on the charts for about fifteen seconds and hit #70 on the Hot 100, but despite a seemingly lackluster performance, it still crops up on radio playlists more frequently now than much bigger hits from the era. And yes, lead singer Dale Bozzio looked exactly like her album cover pic in live performances, as the quintessential example of "Own your niche". The past is always another country.
"Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away..."
If MLB, or any other corporate sportsball, wanted to engage a new generation of sportsball fans, they'd show that by moving to change ticket prices by moving the decimal point one place to the left at every park in their leagues. Maybe even two.
I'm not griping about the recockulous salaries of the players, but in order to pay them, the sport - any sport - has soaked the fans to the point that going to a game is an exercise in pointless nostalgia about a sport made of entirely of prima donas, both on the field, and in owners' boxes, in a financial exercise for fans who show up in person that makes Disneyland seem like a non-profit effort. Taking an average family to a game, and buying everyone a hot dog, beverage, and bag of peanuts is currently an field trip that requires selling a kidney to finance, in order to watch multi-millionaire corporate pawns try to gin up enthusiasm for other corporations' paid sumo wrestlers. The only people who actually give a flying f**k anymore are Vegas oddsmakers, which is only fair, since they're the only ones with more at stake than the players or the owners.
Which explains why watching any pro sports nowadays has all the compelling allure of televising the trading pits on Wall Street. Give day traders hand weapons like swords and axes, and televise their fights, and you might find something people would truly enjoy watching, and at far higher levels of enthusiasm for anything happening between epically-long commercial swaths on TV. Truth in advertising?
"We now interrupt this forty-minute orgy of bad commercials to bring you five minutes of corporate sport."
A little too on-the-nose there? You betcha.
You might as well televise corporate board meetings, and let the underlings stage kabuki-theater knife fights or brass-knuckled dust-ups. It would be as compelling to the audience.
Nobody not criminally stoopid gives a wet fart about multimillionaire children playing a children's game for lottery-payout annual salaries. These are not "enduring examples of excellence", they're simply the highest paid racehorses and whores in society, albeit for demonstrable skills.
Frankly, I'd rather get a hot dog from a sidewalk cart vendor, and watch a pickup game at the local sandlot, played by any 18 total unpaid amateurs, of any age from pre-teen to retiree. The game is identical, the sportsmanship higher, and the stakes far more important to those on the field than anything happening at Corporate Sponsorship Monstrosities.
Eff Sportsball, for any value of that term. The main difference between pro wrestling and any version of Pro Sportsball is everyone knows pro wrestling is totally fake and ghey. Field of Dreams has transmogrified into Field Of Used To Be. There's hardly anyone under the age of 40 now who even remembers what it is they used to watch, unless they're watching Ken Burns' Baseball documentary. The sport memorialized in the docu-epic is deader than dinosaurs, deader than canned tuna.
To quote two other lines from popular entertainment:
Neil Diamond, who reportedly was once flunked out of Music Appreciation, cranked this Top Ten hit out at age 28, the 4th hit in a career spawning 38 Top Tens and 16 Number One singles, and selling 130 million records in a five decade career. Out of 75+ albums since 1969, they're all gold or platinum, some of them triple platinum. He was still singing this song with gusto at age 71 to a packed house live at the Greek Theatre for Hot August Night III, a few years before a diagnosis of Parkinson's brought a halt to his touring.
According to Miss Manners' etiquette guidelines, for a very small faux pas, you let the defaulter off with "Excuse me." For something like ripping a monstrous fart and shitting in their pants, you pretend it never happened, and avert your gaze. Which was why I didn't say anything about this particular pantload of stench soup until now.
Spoiler Alert: The title is spot-on. Most of what Kirsch does is a steaming pile of cow-plop, and this is definitely the biggest mound he's thus far compiled. Which doesn't recommend the rest of his efforts too highly either.
Request, because considering the source, I didn't bother prior, nor would have ever, as I expected it not to amount to anything anywhere close to what was claimed. This is because Steve Kirsch has been an outspoken loudmouth with dubious accuracy throughout the pandemic. Not that he lies outright, but he is, shall we say, "economical with the truth". By which I mean he lards on stupendous claims, with dubious association with actual reality, and even less documentation, and puts the truth on the lardball with a thin veneer of icing.
Consume at your own risk.
Occasionally, he stumbles over noteworthy facts, but generally, he's so busy Chicken Littling grandiose mountainous claims out of molehills of fact that he generally picks himself up after such accidental forays, and carries on with his originally-planned Chinese Fire Drill and self-dick-stomping party.
Let's look no farther than his "Executive Summary":
Key points of the interview include:
Hospitals were actually empty when the press told us they were full.
90% or more of the COVID deaths were actually caused by the treatment protocols dictated from above, not the virus. There were both early treatments as well as inpatient treatments available that reduced the COVID death rate by over 90%.
The COVID vaccines increased all-cause mortality in hospitals by up to 80% according to one ICU doctor I spoke to who worked in the same hospital as Gail and made meticulous notes on patient outcomes.
One of the potential reasons people believed that there was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is that the EMR systems were programmed to default all COVID cases to unvaccinated and nurses weren’t told how to change it.
After the vaccines rolled out for an age group is when the hospitals started seeing very unusual things they’ve never seen or rarely seen before for that age group.
Doctors are still afraid to speak out.
All of this arm-waving based entirely on purely anecdotal evidence from one nurse and one anonymous doctor.
Now let's go to the videotape, and get down to the rat-killing.
The nurse in question worked at the time at the Kaiser hospital in Santa Rosa, located in Sonoma County.
So let's do some background, to put her input in perspective.
1) Sonoma County is mostly rural wine country, with a density of 311 people per mi². (For reference, the population of San Francisco County, some 20 miles and two counties away, is 19,180 people per mi². Just a wee difference.)
The population there consequently trends above-average in income, compared to the state as a whole. Its population of around 450,000 ranks it 17th (of 58) among California counties, coming in at just about 1% of the state's population. The more populous 16 counties, for reference, comprise 84%. Santa Rosa ranks behind 27 bigger cities just in California, behind such urban hotspots as Oxnard, Elk Grove, and RanchoCucamonga. Sonoma County is, IOW, about as representative of California as Hooterville and Pixley are, somewhere between the Shady Rest Hotel and the Douglas farmstead.
The county, looking at the Johns-Hopkins COVID dashboard, is also 75% white, and 95% medically insured, both hugely aberrational compared to Califrutopia numbers overall. The J-H COVID dashboard also tallies a blisteringly small 119,546 total COVID cases in Sonoma County throughout the entire three-year period of pandemic, and only records 556 deaths, a fatality rate of 0.46% of those infected, or about 4 times worse than annual flu, and only half the fatality rate of the state overall, which was 0.83%. For comparison, Los Angeles County had a fatality rate of 0.96%, twice as high. In Sonoma County, 1 person in 1000 died. In L.A., it was 1 in 300.
The overall U.S. numbers are a COVID fatality rate of 1.1%, nearly three times as bad as Sonoma County, and a similar 1-in-300 death tally as Los Angeles experienced.
2) It gets better. Sonoma County in total boasts a grand total of 9 hospitals. (For reference, in Los Angeles County there are 80.) The Kaiser there is only a distant third place in size, with a modest 173 beds. If you live in BFEgypt, that may be impressive. In California, there are 111 hospitals smaller than that, and most of those are either in literal one-horse towns, or are surgical and specialty centers, not actual hospitals in the way you'd think of that term. Of the hospitals that claim more than 0 actual beds, the other 223 hospitals in the state are all bigger than the uber-small Kaiser in Santa Rosa.
3) Kaiser hospitals are unique in CA. Nine out of any ten of them have no ER, by design, because of EMTALA. This is because lacking an ER lets them turn away anyone who doesn't have Kaiser insurance, which avoidance of large swaths of homeless losers and indigent illegal aliens keeps the entire chain from going bankrupt. The Santa Rosa Kaiser is a rare exception, in that it's a Kaiser hospital with an ER, so they have to take anyone they get, regardless of insurance. In one of the smaller cities in the state, with a negligible homeless population, in a more affluent and more rural county.
4) Looking at the number of ICU stays, that hospital averages a crushing (not!) tally of 5 ICU patients on any given day. (For reference, 5 ICU patients/day is what my hospital routinely has stuck in just the ER, because the ICU is full 24/7/365.) And less than 20% of their patients there in the ER are ever serious or critical; over 80% are moderate or less, and fully half are basically urgent care patients too lazy to go to one, because urgent care asks for the payment up front. So that hospital isn't exactly being hammered under the horrendous load of critical patients.
5) She was a part-time employee, obviously with an axe to grind, who got fired by the hospital in question (which tiny tidbit is only revealed a third of the way into a 1 1/2 hr. interview!), who only worked MedSurg, which is the lowest acuity patients anywhere other than the ones we kick-da-fuq-out same-day, and wasn't even there 3x more than normal. So she's talking out her ass based on no critical care hands-on experience, and is only talking about things she only knows about second- and third-hand, from the only hospital in her county doing things that way, in a chain that routinely under-admits and over-discharges all patients to save $$, as seen by one fired part-time nurse, from Tinyville, in Whitebread County, working in Teeny Weeny General hospital, in a hospital seeing a few patients in the ICU per day, telling you "how it was" during COVID.
Okay.
So this is like getting the straight poop on what it was like in WWII from fighter pilot George Gobel.
As to the "Executive summary"?:
1) "The media" never reported "all hospitals are full". They reported that hospitals were being overwhelmed early on in New Orleans (true), then Atlanta (also true), followed by those in NYFC (true again). So Kirsch trying to conflate media reports from places where COVID was demonstrably blowing up, with "everywhere", is pure grade-A rose fertilizer, and he knows it, and Kirsch milks this line of bullshit for all it's worth.
Some places got hit hard. Sonoma County Kaiser was never one of them. Things didn't blow up in Califrutopia until after the early lockdowns were belatedly relaxed, <i>after Labor Day 2020</i>, and then the pandemic did what pandemics do, because people are idiots. But Hooterville in NorCal never saw any serious impact, because the population density there was closer to being Kansas than what most people think of when they hear "California".
2) There was unquestionably monkey-business regarding treatment options dictated by know-nothing idiots in D.C., especially regarding medication usage. But in point of fact, the only treatment protocols were discovered on-the-job. There were literally none at the outset, and doctors everywhere were doing medicine by Braille, feeling their way to what worked and what didn't, and passing the answers around in real time on blogs, Reddit substacks, e-mail and Bookface posts, etc. I watched that in real time, nightly, for months on end. Guesstimating the statistics with unpublished and unverified numbers and 20/20 hindsight is flatly asinine. On Day Zero, nobody, including Dr. Anonymous Sumdood, knew fuck-all about how to treat COVID, or how many were "killed by the protocols", and anyone who claims differently is full of more shit than a Christmas goose on the topic.
There's no argument that the CDC and FDA finger-banging doctor's decisions and monkey-wrenching on-the-spot trial administration of things like hydrochloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin should have been ended, with a flamethrower, on Day Two, and doctors told to practice medicine according to their own best judgement, and share their findings in real time, but the iron law is that bureaucrats never give up power, even when they kill people, and this was no exception.
Extrapolating that into "doctors and hospitals were under orders to kill people in secret" which is what Kirsch and Nurse Fullashit allege, is a steaming turd so monstrous it's usually only excreted by blue whales with diarrhea. And then she burps out mystery stats from out of her ass, from units she never worked on, and spins pure bullshit, anecdotal hearsay, and unsupported speculation, which Kirsch treats as gospel. Well-played. This is to actual information as is a bad call-in segment on voodoo and witchcraft on Coast To Coast with George Noory.
3) [Addendum for Common Core grads: Stupid people who aren't good at reading comprehension, PAY ATTENTION to this point] The Not-A-Vaxx examples were all disastrous, beyond any further discussion. An actual vaccine was highly unlikely, and we still don't have one to this day. What we got palmed off on us was a Franken-slurry of death, exactly as multiple vaccine researchers told people would happen, which government idiots (but I repeat myself) roundly ignored, in their ceaseless quest to "do something". None of this is further proven nor informed by unverified and anecdotal allegations. And no one wants to talk about it, nor research it properly, because the march of people with torches and pitchforks on TPTB would make Robespierre's Reign Of Terror with Madame Guillotine look like a church social by comparison.
And they still have it coming.
4) Newsflash, Hirsch: This was ALWAYS a pandemic of the unvaccinated. IT STILL IS.
a) Because for a solid year after the initial outbreak, you witless jackass, THERE WAS NOTHING PASSED OFF AS A VACCINE ANYWHERE. You could look it up, FFS.
b) Because what was passed off after a year wasn't a vaccine either. EVERYBODY ON THE PLANET IS UNVACCINATED, you incredible dipshit. Millions to billions of people have been jabbed, some multiple times, but no one at anytime has EVER received an actual vaccine for COVID. Hirsch knows this too, but it doesn't serve his caterwauling screeds to admit what's obvious, even to Stevie Wonder, from space.
Total evidence for any of that truth contained in Kirsch's video: ZERO. Oopsie.
And while we're up, Shitforbrains, Epic is but one among at least 6-10 EMR systems used nationwide, it only accounts for about a quarter of the market, and you could fill entire encyclopedias with what features and procedures average users, let alone part-time flunkies like Nurse Fullashit, don't know how to do on it, or on any other one of them. (I've used 10 different systems since 2010; ask me how I know this to be true). This is like finding one flat Goodyear tire, and concluding thereby that all tires on all cars are defective. No points, and you're still full of shit.
5) And for the second time in this 6-point barrel of hogwash, we get the classic horse-and-chicken soup (at a ratio of "half and half" - one horse to one chicken) recipe of some truth, along with the bullshit. Yes, absolutely, the COVID Jab was the undeniable and proximate cause of metric fucktons of adverse reactions, more than all other actual vaccines combined in recorded history, including the novel diagnosis of Died Suddenly™. Yet again, this elephant in the room is visible from space with the naked eye.
But those torch-and-pitchfork-toting mobs aren't going to dissipate themselves if the obvious truth is revealed so soon.
6) Doctors are not "afraid to speak out". Hirsch himself and this pile of unsubstantiated speculation is proof of the opposite. Some doctors have been spineless chickenshits, like always with everyone. Some doctors have been forthright and courageous in whistle-blowing about this. That's how we know the military has crippled 1/4 of its total pilots, and injured for life unknown swaths of their entire ranks. The dam hasn't broken yet, but they can't stop the signal. You can never stop the signal.
But the message isn't served by half-baked, half-assed horseshit buffets like this load of drivel, missing only anything remotely resembling factual data. But Kirsch doesn't peddle data, he peddles clickbait and confirmation bias. As ever. He's the guy you most want to STFU, and stay off your side, if you're trying to get any respectability on the topic, but he tickles the bias of the Dumbshit Brigade, and for that, he'll have their undying loyalty.
The pandemic wasn't imaginary, and rank-and-file practitioners didn't kill people in lockstep obedience to idiots from on high.
But the country, collectively and individually, abandoned a healthy distrust of "Washington experts" (oxymoron alert) like Anthony Fauci, whose professional quack status we've decried, just on this blog, since only 2014.
The problem is, articles like this from Kirsch aren't much better, and they're nothing but a scientific laughingstock. This interview was the medical equivalent of Phil Donhue and Jerry Springer, but with even less credibility.
TL;DR Rating: If you thought this was a smoking gun, these aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along.
Let's try a slightly more accurate "executive summary" of this wagonload of cobblers:
Nurse who was fired from Kaiser for not getting The Jab, was only in the least acute section of the hospital, not the COVID ward, and only part-time, nonetheless managed to get COVID despite exposure protocols, who has no critical-care experience nor any direct hands-on patient care of critical patients, speaks out on things about which she has no direct knowledge, but brings metric fucktons of unsourced hearsay, wild assumptions, leaps of fantasy far beyond her scope of professional knowledge, experience, or practice, barrels of unsupported allegations, a total dearth of anything like data, documentation, or anything even vaguely resembling evidence, yet holds forth on everything she doesn't know, because feelz and butthurt.
This is sketchier than getting brain surgery advice from homeless meth-head schizophrenics living in cardboard boxes in an alley behind the liquor store. Or stopping at the White House to ask for directions from Emperor Poopypants.
Kirsch would have more credibility if he borrowed Biden's Christmas attire.
IOW, pretty much what Kirsch has been peddling since Day One.
His "Most Important Interview EVAR!" is the most fact-free eructation of pure bull-squeeze on the 'net since Biden's last press conference.
It's now four years along, kids. Can we please agree that unless you see Fauci and the CEOs of Pfizer, J&J, et al issue a mea culpa on national TV, culminating in them pulling pistols and performing a long-overdue auto-da-fé and act of contrition by suck-staring said pistols live, that anything less than that, from any source, is probably and overwhelmingly bullshit, from either side, only propagated to confirm your biases in either direction, utterly devoid of merit or facts, and thus merely clickbait that's entirely a waste of bandwidth and time to even lift the lid off the chamber pot to look at?
Please: STOP EATING OUT OF THE CHAMBER POT. IT'S NOT A PUDDING CUP.
COVID has mutated now to being just the annual flu. Rejoice in a healthy immune system, wash yer grubby mitts, stay your ass home when you're sick, and just get over it.
Or, like the Usual Suspects and Anonymous trolls, fulfill all my expectations, and come share your scorching butthurt at Kirsch's richly-deserved fisking in Comments. Our claws aren't going to sharpen themselves.
Not counting the news outlets or websites along the full range of accuracy and veracity, I follow multiple actual individuals' handwritten blogs. (Bot news aggregators don't thrill me.) Looking them over, many are current serving or former military and a couple are some variation of high-speed low-drag elite forces ninjas. Or just funny as all. Because life without humor is just despair. So in other words, the same folks I trusted in the military not to wet the bed, sh*t themselves, or otherwise run around like headless Nancys, are the same folks I trust on the interwebz, for demonstrating pretty much the same trustworthiness and circumspectly responsible behavior. Color me shocked.
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