These Seeds Are Giving Their Lives For Science

We're scheduled to do a major remodel of our house and yard this year, although with the way California regulations work, we may not get our permits until 2032. Our contractor thinks they'll start in June. July is possible. My growing season is effectively shot. In spite of that, I'm taking another swing at watermelon and tobacco.

It's probably a total waste of energy, but I wasn't going to be doing anything else anyway, so why not?

Eastern San Diego, where I live, is more desert than coastal. That means that until later in the year, the nights are too cold for plants from Dixie to get going. I'm keeping the seed trays indoors at night, not that is helping much. We don't turn on our heater at night, so the house gets down into the low fifties. In the day, I put them out on the hot tub cover which acts as a solar butt warmer for the plants. Not because of the hot water inside, but because the cover absorbs sunlight and converts it to heat on its surface.

Anywho, while those seeds are floundering around, I'll be working on some science and engineering projects for the future. In the past, I played with Raspberry Pis and really liked them. I've got an idea for Raspberry Pi-controlled greenhouses and tobacco fermentation chambers. I recently bought this little temperature and humidity sensor and will be learning how to connect it to a Pi.

It's a data logger that connects to your phone via Bluetooth. I was hoping for a WiFi sensor I could access from my server, but those are kind of expensive. My Pi will have to act as a gateway and controller. Since it's Bluetooth, the sensor is a serial device, which means I need to learn how to get at those from either PHP or Python. I know PHP very well, but I've never used Python. I've discovered that it's the number 1 programming language in the civilized world right now, so I think Python lessons will be included in this effort.

I'll blog more about how this all progresses as ... well, as it progresses.

Russia Vs Ukraine

This is a real bum fight. Russia's army is stalled out close to its border. Meanwhile, all kinds of sanctions are being leveled on Russia and some of them look pretty severe. However, Reuters is reporting that Germany still has ways to pay for its oil and gas imports, so there's that.

I looked at the German order of battle for the invasion of Poland in 1939 and compared it to Russia's order of battle for the invasion of Ukraine a week ago. The world-class Wehrmacht going into Poland was ten to fifteen times the size of the vodka-soaked Russian invasion forces. Picking comparable waypoints, the 1939 Wehrmacht blew through Poznan like it wasn't even there on the way to Warsaw. The Russkies of today are struggling to take Kharkiv which is about 30 miles from their border.

Never send a Putin to do a Hitler's job. The guy is not a global threat, he's not a threat to us, he's just another regional warlord. Yes, he has nukes, but they don't mean a thing if you're not going to use them. Meanwhile, the media is whipping us up into a frenzy of Ukrainophilia.

Don't get me wrong, I'm on their side. I'd would love to see Putin take one in the back of the head and get replaced by an oligarch who is more interested in maintaining a flock of 17-year-old hotties to infest his yacht and dacha than recreating the Russian Empire. That's looking more and more likely as the Russians struggle with tackling a nation even less capable than 1939 Poland. 

Just don't tell me this is a globally big deal. Here in the US, our southern border is letting in an invasion force the size of Russia's every three weeks. That doesn't seem to bother our media at all.

Meanwhile, you're still a racist.

The German Army Is Kaput

... while the Russian army is on the rampage. 

I wonder why.

Bonus Tweet

REPROTER: "Targeting the Russian energy industry is totally off the table? Is that what you are saying, Daleep?"

SINGH: "What I'm saying is that our measures were not designed to disrupt, in any way, the current flow of energy from Russia to the world." pic.twitter.com/eo6jt5mcD1

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 24, 2022

Doctors, Nurses And Hospital Administrators Need To Go To Jail

 ... if they participate in sex transitions for kids. Texas seems to be leading the way on this one.

Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott this week directed state agencies to conduct “prompt and thorough” investigations into the use of gender-affirming care for transgender children, a move that follows an opinion from the state attorney general that such treatments are a form of “child abuse.”

In a Tuesday letter to the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services, Abbott cited an opinion issued Friday by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stating that certain gender-affirming treatments for transgender children — including gender reassignment surgery and puberty-blocking medications — “can legally constitute child abuse under several provisions” of state law.

Abbott wrote that the protective services agency “is responsible for protecting children from abuse,” adding in a tweet Tuesday that the agency will “refer for prosecution any such abuse.”

That snippet, with all of its scare quotes around the words "child abuse," comes from a horrified Boston Globe article. Here's more from that blog post written by Jazz Shaw of Hot Air.

It’s not just the doctors and nurses who perform these procedures who could be in trouble. Abbott reminded everyone that doctors, nurses, and teachers all have an obligation to report child abuse when it is observed or suspected. Failure to do so can come with additional criminal penalties...

We’re talking about children and it has long been established that American society, along with the government, has a responsibility to protect children and ensure their safety. Particularly when we’re talking about prepubescent children, there is simply no way that they have any real idea about how they will view sexuality and gender once they become adults. And their woke parents don’t know that either. Subjecting them to irreversible medical procedures to “affirm their gender” at that age is unforgivable.

Faster, please. Everyone involved in these procedures, from top to bottom, should be doing hard time.

In the past, I've written about a "friend of mine" who is a woman claiming she's a man. She's now been on testosterone treatments for about 18 months. She's exhibiting the secondary sexual characteristics of a man, but with a twist. She's also exhibiting signs of central nervous system distress such as the shakes and mental health problems. That's unsurprising as her endocrine system is in crisis which can't possibly be good for the rest of her body. 

She's being slowly poisoned to death right in front of me with the full support of the social justice crew. She's an adult, so there's nothing I can do about it. At the advice of trans social media influencers, she's cut everyone out of her life who won't agree that she's a man. That puts me in an impossible position. All I can do is watch her die and hope she pulls out of it.

Jail is too good for the people who are pushing this, including politicians.

To every trans kid in Texas:

You're amazing. I'm proud of you.

You belong right here in Texas, and I'll fight for you to live freely as yourself and free from discrimination. pic.twitter.com/rLvxoOHS9F

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) February 23, 2022

Can A White Rook Take A White Bishop?

 ... because, in essence, that's what we've done to our petroleum production and to Germany.

By taking much of our oil production offline and then approving Nordstream 2, we made Putin's moves for him. Germany, having gone global-warming-climate-change-insane, turned off their nuclear power plants, but didn't turn off their winters. Now they need oil and gas to keep from freezing to death. We can't provide that because we're energy importers again, thanks to the global-warming-climate-change-insanity here.

As an added benefit, Putin the Terrible has got plenty of cash to splash because our eco-idiots have driven the price of oil through the roof with their idiocies and Russia gets all its money from black gold.

All of this would have been more or less acceptable had we not turned Putin into Arch-Enemy Numero Uno. Ordinarily, we wouldn't really have a stake in which pack of vodka-soaked, corrupt oligarchs rule the steppes, but now that we've screamed "Russia! Russia! Russia!" for the last several years, we can't very well let Russia's rich, decrepit perverts steal territory from Ukraine's rich, decrepit perverts.

So we've pushed lots of chips into the pot, we've discarded our trio of aces and drew a three, a five and an eight, all of different suits. Not to worry, our Elites are telling us that Putin is a dummy.

Putin would never make it at UCLA, much less Harvard!

I read recently that Germany is backing our play, at least for now, as far as the Nordstream pipeline goes. We'll see how long that lasts when the energy bills go up and the Kraut voters start complaining. Their deplorables probably don't care about Ukraine any more than ours do.

Finally, there's the military side of things. Sure, the booze-fueled Russian army isn't going to be crossing the Danube any time soon, but they've got an attack submarine or two. If we go into Ukraine and establish a no-fly zone, as some geniuses are suggesting, that means that American units will be shooting down Russian planes. Putin is a prickly customer and he's not likely to take that laying down. Russian attack boats vs American aircraft carriers isn't a matchup I want to see happen in real life.

You can find a tremendous thread about no-fly zones in the Ukraine here.

So, in summary, we've got no reason to get involved and few resources to do so, but we are getting more deeply involved every day while one of our most important allies is lukewarm at best. Thank God our leadership caste all went to Ivy League schools. I'd hate to see what would happen if they weren't so very, very smart.

Bonus Canadian Trucker Update: Man, was I wrong about that! It turns out the Canadians like the jackboot on their necks. Who knew? I guess it keeps them warm in the winter or something. The free world is now down to us and England and I'm not so sure about England or even some of our own states. I'm talking to you, California.

Extra Bonus Canadian Trucker Update: OK, maybe I was wrong about being wrong and I was right instead. Trudeau rescinded the Emergency Power Act, or whatever it's called, before the Canadian Senate had a chance to vote on it and whup his behind. Who knows what's going on in Canadia, anyway? It's a frozen enigma buried in a snowy riddle frozen to a mystery. Or something like that.

Super Special Bonus Tweet

Wretchard the Cat put the intellectual decay of our leadership caste quite poetically.

We slid, bit by bit into perdition, greased by imbecile theories that abolished competence, design margins, borders and finally common sense. The wonder was it took so long to happen but it finally did.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) February 22, 2022

Invading Mexico Would Be Easier

 ... than defending Ukraine.

Hey, don't dis me, man. I'm just taking the WaPo's idea and running with it.

This is not insane. No, really. It's totally not insane.

So yes, war is hell — but have you considered the alternatives? When looking upon the long run of history, it becomes clear that through 10,000 years of conflict, humanity has created larger, more organized societies that have greatly reduced the risk that their members will die violently. These better organized societies also have created the conditions for higher living standards and economic growth. War has not only made us safer, but richer, too.

OK, I'll agree with that for the sake of argument. War makes everything better. Great! Now let's figure out which war to wage. I say we invade Mexico. Heck, half of their population is already in the US anyways, why not just annex the dang thing and put an end to the Mexican invasion of the US?

Then there's the logistical comparison. Why send an insufficient number of troops to the other side of the world when a perfectly good armored division is already sitting right there on the Mexican border in Texas? It's a heck of a lot easier to get gasoline, beans and bullets to our heroes on the front lines when the front lines are only 80 miles away.

And then there's the payoff. What do we get if we defend Ukraine? We side with one pack of sclerotic, dying, alcoholic losers against another pack of sclerotic, dying, alcoholic losers. If we just give them another generation, their populations will be cut in half because they can't figure out how to do the Horizontal Monkey Dance any more. Meanwhile, if we whack Mexico, we can "accidentally" take out the drug cartels that are killing our citizens by the tens of thousands. Whoops! It looks like we dropped ten Daisy Cutters on Culiacán and now the place looks like the Mojave. Well, you have to expect some collateral damage. Fortunes of war and all that.

So, yes, by all means, let's have war. Lots and lots of war! But let's do it prudently. Let's attack Mexico.

How Many Times Can You Insult A Friend

 ... and have them still be your friend?

In a democracy, a politician has to get a majority of the voters to select him in order to be successful. It's pretty simple. Now check out these memes.

Whether it's Trudeau's goons trampling little old ladies for health, Garcetti forcing LA kids to wear masks while he claims he holds his breath at football games or the Ivy League idiots trying to pass off Will Thomas as a girl on the Penn swim team, these are all insults to the rest of us. They're not even trying to come up with believable excuses for their behavior.

That's fine if you live in a dictatorship. The Soviet bigwigs used to drive around Moscow in limos while the peasants took wheezing, old buses to and from work. Everyone knew the Workers' Paradise thing  was a sham, but no one could do anything about it without being shipped of to Siberia or catching a bullet in the back of their head. This is different.

How does this all end? Well, if recent history is any guide, it will result in an electoral blowout of epic proportions.

Which, of course, will be proof positive to the progs that white supremacists are behind it all.

Bonus Tidbit

Dig this from the Atlantic.

From Beyond The Grave, Franz Kafka Is Cursing The Ottawa Cops

We've now reached the point where the Ottawa cops are beating people with batons and trampling them with horses to force them to get vaccinated because the government cares about their health. Yesterday, some little, old lady on a mobility scooter got run over by mounted police. Because they care. About her health.

All of this makes perfect sense.

Love is winning.

Bonus Meme

Super Special Bonus Take

By now, if I was Justin Trudeau's public affairs team lead, I'd be drinking the vodka straight from the bottle.

Knowledge And Decisions

 ... is a book from 1980 written by Thomas Sowell. One of Dr. Sowell's many gifts is his ability to think and write clearly. He's also a fountain of common sense. These are combined with sophistication in Knowledge and Decisions. It speaks to so much of what I've tried to do on this blog over the last couple of years. That is, to answer the question, "Why are we seeing what we're seeing?"

A crude summary of the first section of the book is to separate decision-making into motivations, knowledge and information. To use Justin Trudeau's mystifying recent decisions as an example, I've not been able to figure out his motive. What does he gain from fighting the truckers and forcing them to show vaccine passports at various traffic chokepoints? Canada already has an ~89% vaccination rate. Is it worth all the chaos and conflict to get to 90%?

What if the problem isn't Justin's motivation, but it's his lack of knowledge instead?

Way back when, I got tired of going to meetings where there didn't seem to be a purpose. We'd talk and talk and talk for an hour and by the time we'd left, we had nothing to show for it. I took to starting every meeting by asking, "At the end of this meeting, we will have ... what?" I had never seen anyone else do it, it just seemed like a useful thing to do. It was always appreciated and it clarified our purpose. It almost always bore fruit.

That's not to pat myself on the back, it's to say that the knowledge of how to run a meeting with purpose isn't a given. Perhaps Justin doesn't understand how to use cost-benefits tradeoffs. That's a learned skill, at least in a bureaucratic setting. It's not hard to imagine any meeting going off the rails and producing bad decisions because no one there has a good grasp of practical decision-making methodologies.

Finally, Justin might not know that the tow truck companies and the banks are reluctant to enforce his decrees. He's given some pretty bold orders lately, does he know if they will be executed? Will his minions and his citizens practice Irish democracy and simply ignore his edicts?

Dr. Sowell focuses a lot on feedback loops. When we make a decision, how do we know if it had the desired effect? How does Justin Trudeau know? Does he have a well-defined desired effect? If it's simply to clear the streets, he could do that by ditching the mandates. Is it clear the streets and maintain the mandates? Several Canadian provinces have given up on the mandates already, so how will they work nationally now?

I've read plenty of people say the Trudeau has been backed into a corner and will have to relent, but that only works if he knows he's in a corner. If he doesn't know or can't recognize a corner when he's in one, then all bets are off.

Whatever happens in Canada, I highly recommend Knowledge and Decisions.

When Everything Is A Black Box

 ... then every decision has to be outsourced to "experts."

This one floored me, but seems to confirm a suspicion I've had ever since Tim mentioned it in a comment a while back.

Italy unpersons 500,000 elderly workers for refusing the vaccine, suspending them from work. "The unvaccinated are not a part of our society." -- Prime Minister Mario Draghi pic.twitter.com/wdijHgeXyD

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) February 16, 2022

Just in case you don't speak Italian, here's the story.

Employers and workers face heavy fines if caught in violation of Italy's new Super Green Pass rules.

Italy’s covid-19 vaccination mandate for the over-50s kicks in today, Tuesday 15 February, as the government ramps up its Super Green Pass rules for the unvaccinated.

The compulsory vaccine mandate applies to everyone in Italy aged 50 or over, with unvaccinated workers to be suspended without pay and employees who go to work without the Super Green Pass risking fines of between €600 and €1,500.

So in the middle of an economic crisis, you're going to sideline thousands of your most experienced workers? It's of a piece with Justin Trudeau's insane war against the truckers. To people comfortable with some amount of science and math, neither of these moves make sense. It's when you realize that Draghi and Trudeau truly have no idea how anything in the non-political world works that the pieces fall into place.

A simple substitute for the vaccine passports would be to test people for antibodies. If it turned out that they've already had the Wuhan Flu, they could get stamped as such and excused from all vaccinations. That wouldn't take care of the paranoids, but it would deal with those who understand that recovering from the WuFlu is better than the vaccine. You'd at least be acknowledging real science. Who knows, if you ditched the masks as well, you might end almost all of the rancor.

Instead, Draghi, living in a country with completely screwed up age demographics, is going to furlough the unvaxxed over-50 crowd. It's breathtaking in its stupidity.

But is it surprising? Imagine your math skills were at the 4th grade level and you associated science with Bill Nye. The thought of making decisions about how to deal with a pandemic would be the stuff of nightmares. It would be like a college final exam in a subject you'd never studied. It's "Conjugate these Urdu verbs or you'll be expelled" sort of stuff.

Trudeau and Draghi aren't making any sense because they're consumed with sheer, animal terror.

He's popular with our friends in Hollywood. Let's trust him!

If Trudeau Wins

 ... he gets Canada to go from 88.56% vaccinated to 90% vaccinated?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday he is enacting the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history, in response to ongoing protests over COVID-19 restrictions in Ottawa and around Canada. Trudeau says the act will be limited in time, scope and geographical area and it is not being used to call in the military or to override the charter. The act, established in 1988, allows the federal government to override the provinces and authorize special temporary measures to ensure security during national emergencies.

I still can't figure out the cost-benefits calculation here. He's establishing the equivalent of martial law in exchange for vaccinating an additional 3500 people? I'd say there was some kind of conspiracy at work, but five provinces have already said they won't support this. It's not a conspiracy if other people won't play with you.

It's as if Trudeau can't find an offramp even though they're all around him.

The view from Justin Trudeau's office.

Bonus Content

It's like they think they're the only ones who can escalate the situation. Dig this bit from the Deputy Prime Minister telling us that banks will be forced to cooperate. That means the money of private citizens can be impounded. It's doomed to make things worse. If you take everything away from the protestors, then you've also made it so that they've got nothing to lose.

Again, what do they get if they win?

This is literal madness.

Canada's Deputy Prime Minister says, under the Emergencies Act, banks can immediately freeze or suspend bank accounts without a court order and be protected from civil liability.

Is this still a free country? pic.twitter.com/IzAALIxzbB

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 14, 2022

On Ordered Relationships

In the last two blog posts, I've argued that it's a mistake to look at nutjobs who go for leather dog costumes and guys swimming on girls' teams from the individual's point of view. Instead, I suggested that we look at it from a societal point of view.

Once we ditched the idea that there is an objectively correct, ordered relationship between men and women, complete with expectations, roles and behaviors, all fetishes were destined to become acceptable... 

The problem with the LGBTQWERTY normalization is not the individual fetishists or even their possible victims. Heck, most of them don't have victims at all. No, the problem is what has happened to the sexual health of society. We aren't forming families through marriage and we're not having children. Women are experiencing increases in anxiety and depression. Those are clear signs of a society in distress.

But is there an objectively correct, ordered relationship between men and women in the first place?

Physics is knowable and objective because it describes a physical world that is ordered. That is, sub-atomic particles, atoms and molecules behave in fixed ways and have fixed constraints. That same physics, plus chemistry and biology, govern our lives as well. Put on all the leather dog costumes you want, it's not going to change the equations that describe your endocrine system or the chemical changes that happen as a result of sex. It doesn't matter if you're alone in a hotel room or writhing in a big pile of lubed-up CNN producers, your body's chemical fuels required for sex are finite. Further, they are replaced at fixed rates.

The presence or absence of those fuels change the way you interact with the world. Men and women behave differently depending on their current hormone levels. That means it matters how you spend them.

Take the example of OnlyFans. OnlyFans is Uber for porn. It allows individuals, typically attractive young women, to record porn and then post it for viewing by subscribers. The girls get paid and the guys get off. When the guys get off, they're changing their body chemistry which, in turn, changes the way they will interact with real girls the rest of the day.

Asking a girl out on a date requires courage. Getting accepted requires the guy to have some amount of competence, ambition and personal hygiene. Consuming OnlyFans requires none of that.

Let's say some chick's OnlyFans account has 10,000 very active subscribers. In effect, she has taken those 10,000 guys off the market. Because of that, there are 10,000 girls out there who won't be asked out on a date. The OnlyFans chick doesn't look like she's directly hurting anyone else, but, in fact, she is. No dates means no boyfriends. No boyfriends means no marriages. No marriages mean any babies that might come to these girls will be born out of wedlock. Bad stuff, that.

All I've used to get to this conclusion are the basic sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. No references to JP II's Theology of the Body were required. More on that in later posts.

BOOM.
"I'll just leave this little pamphlet here. You may read it at your leisure ..."

Swimming For Penn While Wearing A Leather Dog Costume

Yesterday, we discussed this.

His name is Sam Brinton. He's a mediumwig at the DoE. On the plus side, he's the one holding the leash, not the one in the leather dog costume.

Now, let's expand to this.

This is Will Thomas. He was a swimmer on the Penn men's team. He's now pretending to be a woman and wants you to call him Lia. Unable to think of a reason why not, Penn lets him swim on the girls' team. In swim meets, he's mopping the bottom of the pool with the girls.

Once we ditched the idea that there is an objectively correct, ordered relationship between men and women, complete with expectations, roles and behaviors, all fetishes were destined to become acceptable. In other words, the open-minded and compassionate women on the Penn swim team did this to themselves.

From yesterday's post about Captain Kink in the DoE:

And why not? Those are the fruits of Obergfell. What is wrong with Sam doing ... err, whatever it is he's doing there? There was always only one guardrail when it came to sex and that was how babies were made. Once we ditched that, bestiality, pretend-bestiality in this case, and pedophilia were the inevitable, logical future steps for the simple reason that we can't explain why it's wrong.

There is a tension between individual freedoms and the best interests of society. From Will's point of view, what harm is there in him wearing a dress and using the pronouns she/her/crazy? It didn't hurt me, I don't even know the nut. It has hurt the women on the swim team as they now have to compete with a man. Good luck with that, ladies. You're on your own because we're looking at this from an individual point of view. We can't help you without appearing to hate Will.

Sam and Will are just two, small examples of the much larger tarpit we've fallen into by embracing complete sexual freedom.

Out on the Interweb Tubes, conservatives are hyperventilating about the whack job in the top photo being given a corner office in a DoE building. He must be some kind of security risk! Nah. He's not any more of a security risk than the straight-laced Presbyterian dude in the corner office one floor down.

The problem with the LGBTQWERTY normalization is not the individual fetishists or even their possible victims. Heck, most of them don't have victims at all. No, the problem is what has happened to the sexual health of society. We aren't forming families through marriage and we're not having children. Women are experiencing increases in anxiety and depression. Those are clear signs of a society in distress.

As much fun as it is to laugh at the Penn swimmers and mock them for choosing the form of their destructor, it's the rest of us that deserve the mocking.

No Guardrails, No Problem With Leather Dog Costumes

Programming Note: It are my blogiversary today! 16 years of ranting into the ether. I deserve a cookie. Or maybe a straightjacket.

In any case, on with the show.

Way back when, in the pre-Obergfell days, when the citizens of this country still had a say in what was and what was not a marriage, people like me who said that marriages were strictly one man - one woman things said that to do away with that requirement would invite all kinds of trouble. Pictured below is President Biden's nominee for Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy.

His name is Sam Brinton. On the plus side, he's the one holding the leash, not the one in the leather dog costume.

Now the DAS of SP and WD in the O of NE for the D of E isn't exactly Archduke Ferdinand when it comes to government power, but that's not a janitorial position, either. He's high enough in the food chain to be visible to the Public Affairs crew at the DoE. They, apparently, are fine with his sex play.

And why not? Those are the fruits of Obergfell. What is wrong with Sam doing ... err, whatever it is he's doing there? There was always only one guardrail when it came to sex and that was how babies were made. Once we ditched that, bestiality, pretend-bestiality in this case, and pedophilia were the inevitable, logical future steps for the simple reason that we can't explain why it's wrong.

Some will claim that consent is the real guardrail, but consent is subjective. Baby-making is objective. Babies and the making thereof constitute a hard limit for acceptable behavior. Consent is in the eye of the beholder. Hey, I know some really mature ten-year-olds. Why can't they give consent? Are you some kind of prude or something?

Back in the day, people like me were told that we were being hysterical. Love is love! Love wins! 

I'm not sure if love won, but from the looks of that photo, the real winners are the people who own dry cleaning businesses. I can't imagine that costume stayed clean for long and leather is pretty touchy stuff when it comes to stains.

More on this topic in future blog posts.

The Science Has Changed

As a connoisseur of respiratory viruses, having spent a decade or two in deep, meaningful relationships with them, I had to laugh when I saw this.

"The science has changed." @DrLeanaWen explains why she supports lifting some pandemic restrictions and thinks the decision to wear a mask should shift from a government mandate to an individual choice. pic.twitter.com/vaiybBBF2b

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) February 8, 2022

Having been a marketing and sales dilettante for a year or twenty, allow me to say that this is not how the game is played, children. Here are the infection rates for a randomly chosen state since the start of the Wuhan Flu pandemic.

The shape looks like every other airborne virus pandemic ever as it evolves and mutates. Whether it was the seasonal flu of 1976 or the stomach flu of 1998 or the common cold that descends like the fog every winter, that's what airborne viruses do.

Also, virions, the free-floating viruses, are really, really small. Like smaller than a toy poodle small. And that's they way they've been since ... well, since forever. In fact, they're so small that they can float right through a cloth mask. You can look up the width of the gaps in the cloth weave and the size of the virions and figure out that the weave is little more than an orange safety cone in the middle of a four-lane highway to the virions.

Then we get to the at-risk groups. We had that figured out two months or so into this thing. Some viruses go after kids. Those were the ones that I enjoyed when I was a tot. The WuFlu viruses went after the old and the fat. The less fat and old you were, the less risk you had. If you were very young, you wouldn't have known anything was happening if it hadn't been for the Elites screaming at you about ScIEncE. SciEnCE, which, apparently, has now changed.

Right.

The Marketing And Sales Angle

By now, all but the most neurotic of the neurotic wine moms has figured out that the Elites have been lying to them all along. Sometimes, an organization will do this. Sometimes there are good, short-term reasons to lie to everyone. Most of the time, there aren't. In any case, after you've had a good lying session with your customers and they've been screwed out of two years of their lives, their businesses have been ruined and their children traumatized, there are some well-accepted guidelines for recovering whatever trust you can. Here's one good take on it and here's another.

A broad summary looks like this.

1. Acknowledge your mistakes.
2. Apologize to your customers.
3. Listen to their complaints and create a summary of the key points.
4. Incorporate the expressed rage into a new approach to everything.
5. Get going on having an honest relationship with your customers as if you actually respect the worthless sacks of filth and treat them with the respect they deserve.

Notice that at no point do you come out with, "the science has changed." That's called "lying some more." At some point in time, you will have to start being honest. Throwing up your hands and figuring that you've burned your credibility to the ground, what could a little more scorn for your customers hurt, is not the answer.

Farther And Farther Out On A Limb

The governors of four blue states said yesterday that they were going to ditch their mask mandates as the world moves towards relaxing Wuhan Flu restrictions. 

New Jersey’s governor seemed to be ready to throw in the towel and stop fighting public sentiment on the issue. Well, shortly after that, the push to put an end to the mandates appeared to start spreading faster than the Omicron variant. Three more blue state governors joined Phil Murphy in saying that mandates would be coming to an end either this month or in March. Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware jumped on the bandwagon, with the governors of those states sounding suspiciously like the protesters who have been demanding that people – particularly school children – be allowed to go back to some semblance of normal life and get their early social and educational development back on track.

At work, our beloved conspiracy theory connoisseur told us that California will follow suit. I haven't taken the time to look it up yet.

All of this leaves that Canadian idiot, Justin Trudeau, in worse and worse shape. Everyone else is relaxing and he's still as rigid as ever. This was all so predictable.

So what does Trudeau get if he wins? Every day the truckers sit there, Omnicorn fades away some more, the natural immunity numbers go up and Trudeau's payoff becomes smaller. For the life of me, I can't figure out his end game.

The guy is clearly an amateur. A professional would have been able to see a few weeks into the future, heck, a few days in this case, and would have made magnanimous concessions to the truckers with some fine speech about balancing the needs for safety with the call to freedom or some such rot. Instead, he ran away and hid and called them violent, Nazi racists. What a nitwit.

What's the over-under on how much longer he remains prime minister?

Right about now, the old pros on team Trudeau must be wondering just this.

I Grant You Nothing

BLUF: I'm arguing for a completely different attitude towards the racial justice crowd from the standard one where they are granted some amount of moral high ground. That high ground gives their criticisms of us and America weight that it simply doesn't warrant. When you stop seeing them as well-intentioned, it changes all of your interactions with them. In short, if they can't earn your respect by pointing to real-world success, they shouldn't get it.

---

I've ranted in the past about the appalling test scores in Baltimore, but this one was a real shocker.

BALTIMORE (WBFF) — A Baltimore City teacher came forward with devastating information that showed 77% of students tested at one high school are reading at an elementary school level.

The teacher works at Patterson High School, one of the largest high schools in Baltimore with a 61% graduation rate and a nearly $12 million budget. We agreed not to identify this source who fears retribution for giving Project Baltimore the results of iReady assessments.

In reading, 628 Patterson High School students took the test. Out of those students, 484 of them, or 77%, tested at an elementary school reading level. That includes 71 high school students who were reading at a kindergarten level and 88 students reading at a first-grade level. Another 45 are reading at a second-grade level. Just 12 students tested at Patterson High School, were reading at grade level, which comes out to just 1.9%.

Emphasis mine. Baltimore is run, top to bottom, by the racial justice crowd. Just what future do those illiterate kids have? Are they going to get into STEM, perhaps?

Meanwhile, recently in Science magazine, we have this.

As science struggles to correct systemic racism in the laboratory and throughout academia in the United States, external forces press on, making it even more difficult to achieve equity on all fronts—including among scientists. The latest example is the decision by the US Supreme Court to hear cases brought against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill challenging their right to use race as a factor in undergraduate admissions. It is sometimes easy for scientists to let colleagues in other disciplines engage in a debate like this, but the dismantling of race-conscious admissions would deal another blow to equity in science.

Scientific American isn't any better. It's all political action and race relations with no acknowledgment of what the data clearly shows - family structure is the dominant factor.

Academic institutions and scientific organizations must confront race relations while navigating the difficulties of a pandemic and economic strife. They should also aknowledge (sic) their role in perpetuating systems of racial oppression. It should not have taken this long for them to realize that something had to be said, and it should not take long for something to be done.

To the racial justice crowd, particularly in the sciences, I say: I grant you nothing and I mean nothing. I do not accept any claims of good intentions, compassion, concerns for racial justice, devotion to equity or anything else. I grant you nothing. Those kids in Baltimore are not outliers, they're the norm. If you didn't know that, it's because all of your attention has been focused on you. You don't understand, know or care about those kids.

Nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court is all about you. Lobbying for affirmative action in the sciences is all about you. Showing affluent blacks in crazily disproportionate numbers in TV ads is all about you. It's all fantasy.

This is nothing but moral masturbation and a lot of us can see it being done out in the open. It's sick.

Why Fight With The Truckers?

As the chaos unfolds in Canadia where the beavers now lack a way to ship their maple syrup to the donut shops and the lumberjacks are running out of Molsons, I can't help wondering what it's all about from Justin Trudeau's point of view. 

Ask yourself this: What percentage of the population meets all three of these criteria?

• Is unvaccinated (16.25%),
• Has no natural immunity (Washington state as a proxy has 36.9% with none) and
• Is in a WuFlu risk group (28.2% using the US data).

It must be less than 1 in 1000 by now. The numbers above lead to 1.6%, but the people at risk have significantly higher vaccination rates. Also, Washington State is an outlier here in the US with many states in the 80-90% natural immunity range.

In any case, the real risks to the population are well behind us. If US WuFlu reproduction numbers are anything to go by, the Omnicorn wave is rapidly receding.

So what does Trudeau get if he wins? Every day the truckers sit there, Omnicorn fades away some more, the natural immunity numbers go up and Trudeau's payoff becomes smaller. For the life of me, I can't figure out his end game.

Is it just as simple as this meme where Bilbo is tempted by the One Ring?

Marketing A Towing Company

 ... would be significantly more difficult if their customers spread the word that they were jerks.

Dig this from the Great Canadian Trucker Revolt:

Aerial of Coutts border blockade right now

Help their legal defence at https://t.co/FgSvcLwSPy pic.twitter.com/8xHxBaUzgR

— Syd Fizzard (@SydFizzard) February 2, 2022

This is in Alberta, on the US border. Here are more details.

The blockade, which has halted traffic through the busy U.S. border crossing in a protest of COVID-19 health measures, is in its fourth day.

Mounties moved to enforce the law Tuesday after negotiations broke down with protesters, who began the blockade Saturday. Some vehicles left the protest, but RCMP reported other protesters breached a police barrier to join the blockade, with two of those in tractors sporting Canadian flags racing down a ditch along the highway to join the demonstration.

“We (began) to remove some vehicles from the protest area. A few left. I didn’t get an exact count of how many went out. And then we received notification that additional protesters were arriving on the scene and came around our secured area,” RCMP Cpl. Curtis Peters told The Canadian Press.

If I'm a towing company in Alberta, I think I'm calling in sick this week. Either way I go, I'm going to tick off some big customers. If I side with the cops, truckers will be telling each other that I'm a scab and a rat. If I side with the truckers, the cops won't call on me to tow parking violators.

No matter which side the towing companies choose, this is a bad situation. Like the last scene in The Maltese Falcon, it calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides. Every increase in force by the cops may be met with an increase in force by the truckers. 

Bonus Information

Dig this.

After a massive 15 percentage point swing in the space of just two weeks and coinciding with the trucker revolt, the majority of Canadians now want all COVID rules to end.

A poll conducted by the Angus Reid Institute found that 54 per cent of Canadians agree “it’s time to end restrictions,” with the “strongly agree” category of answer rising by 11 points in just a fortnight.

Political leaders being what they are, I suspect the location of their best interests, to use the turn of phrase from the video above, are becoming significantly clearer. If I were on Justin Trudeau's payroll, I'd be working on my resume right now.

Neurotic Behavior In One Chart

New York has a mask mandate. New Jersey does not. There's barely a sliver of daylight between the two graphs of daily new infections per 1,000,000.

SciENcE!

Here in San Diego, I see school kids walking around outside, wearing masks all the time. Even when they're alone. I still see people wearing masks while they drive their cars alone.

Blue states create neurotics.