Science: WuFlu recovery 99++%.

Good news, peeps. You're not gonna die from the WuFlu.

This is a graph of "Infection Fatality Rate", IFR, over age. This is a measure of the number of people that die from WuFlu. Note that the TOP of the scale is 0.01. That number means that the number of people who actually caught WuFlu and then died of it, at worst, is 1 in 100. [Corrected! Thanks Robin.] On average, if one hundred people over 65 caught it, one died.

The number we see bandied about in the media is different. That is "Case Fatality Rate." CFR. Those are "documented cases" and not a measure of the total infection rate.

Early estimates of case fatality rate (CFR, ratio of deaths divided by documented infections) in the elderly were very high and they played an instrumental role in disseminating both fear and alacrity in dealing with this serious pandemic. Early estimates of CFR from China (48) described CFR of 8% in the age group 70-79 and 14.8% in those ≥80 years. Extremely high CFR estimates were also reported initially from Italy (49) and New York (50). However, the number of infected individuals was much larger than the documented cases (51). Therefore, IFR is much lower than CFR. We are aware of three previous evaluations of age-stratified IFR estimates that combine seroprevalence data with age-specific COVID-19 mortality statistics (4, 5, 52). Levin et al (4) is also the basis for the US CDC pandemic planning scenarios (53). Levin et al report IFR 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85 (4) without separating nursing home deaths.

So then, if we know we're not all going to die of the Chinese Lung AIDS, why do we keep seeing this type of thing?

Because the Big Lie is coming unravelled, that's why.

Certain political and economic forces in the Western World have made this disease political. I presume, but can't really prove, that this is because they're using it as an excuse to do things like spend a billion dollars (that would be $1,000,000,000 taxpayer dollars) on a "vaccine passport" that people will be forced to keep on their cell phones.

I use this as an example because it was pointed out at Small Dead Animals that the most an application like that should cost is $250,000 to design, maybe another million to implement at the outside most.

If they gold-plated it, the most it could cost would be $10 million. If they went insane and spent like drunken sailors, maybe they could burn through $100 million.

   $100,000,000 One hundred million.

$1,000,000,000 One billion.

See where I'm going with this? What happened to the other $900 MILLION bucks? What the hell did they spend that on?

And let us be clear, this is not money spent for the treatment or housing or even the funerals of people who got sick from WuFlu. This is a phone ap. It's official purpose is to sort the vaccinated from the unvaccinated at stores, public events etc.

This is the same exact scam as the old gun registry, which cost the Canadian taxpayer $2 billion dollars. ($2,000,000,000) That was a database that these days would easily run on your phone. Back in the day it would have fit on a desktop PC. Where'd the money go?

Well, they took it. Legally of course, by means of all kinds of committees and contracts and so forth. All quite proper I'm sure. But when you get right down to it, they took the money and gave it to their friends. Which those friends of course donated to political campaigns and other sorts of things. Rinse, repeat.

Same thing everywhere. By hook and by crook, all over the Western world, governments are doing this in all kinds of ways. The difference this time is that we can see them move.

Uppity Update: The dreaded and extra-deadly Delta Variant Fourth Wave in Ontario... yeah.  Nothing.

Meanwhile the public health talking heads are all screaming: "Fourth Wave!!!! Lock-down!!!11! Right after the election though, okay? Justin asked real nice, so we're doing him a favor."

The new Apple spy-Phone

Edward Snowden (who fled to -Russia- for his freedom, let's not forget) speaks about the new Apple "child safety" spyware.

If you're an enterprising pedophile with a basement full of CSAM-tainted iPhones, Apple welcomes you to entirely exempt yourself from these scans by simply flipping the "Disable iCloud Photos" switch, a bypass which reveals that this system was never designed to protect children, as they would have you believe, but rather to protect their brand. As long as you keep that material off their servers, and so keep Apple out of the headlines, Apple doesn't care.

So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren't backed up to iCloud? What happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing reports about encountering "extremist" political material, or about your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an algorithm, "a person of interest"?

Pretty much my take on it. No one objects to Apple keeping child porn off their servers. Pretty much everyone with a functioning brain objects to a corporation filtering their photos, running facial recognition on their videos, downloading and storing files off their phone (and laptop, and PC, and iPad, and Apple-TV, and etc.) without permission, and so forth.

Apple scanning stuff I store on their iCloud is objectionable, but ultimately up to me. I make the choice if I want to send it to the cloud. If I don't want it scanned and stored forever to be used for other purposes at their convenience, I won't send it to them.
 

Apple scanning my phone, whether I send things to their cloud or not, that's different. Now they're screwing with my hardware, that I bought.

And let us not pretend, as Snowden says, that this intrusion will remain forever limited to child porn prevention.

That's bad enough, after all. No more pictures of your little kids, ladies and gentlemen. If it has a kid in it, a cop is liable to show up at your house. This is known as "function creep." A process whereby they need another child-porn arrest this month so they can make their budget, so they tighten up the algorithm another notch. Before long, a diaper advertisement on a billboard you drove past while taking video of the scenery is getting you a visit from the constabulary.

But function creep is a wide ranging thing. All it takes is a court order to Apple and suddenly every phone in the world gets scoured for... pretty much anything they want. Location data, photos, text files, videos, telephone conversations, game data, whatever is in there.

Currently that capability does not exist. But in September, it will.

Time to go buy a film camera for your family photos, before the inevitable price jump. It's very difficult for Apple to scan Polaroids. They have to physically come to your house.

This is why, just like  I put a piece of tape on my Apple product's camera. It's harder for them to spy on you when you cover the sensor with  tape.

Science: the cloth mask does nothing.

Well well. Mask bad again.

TORONTO -- A recent study from engineering researchers in Ontario has found that high-efficiency masks are up to six times better at filtering aerosols compared to more commonly used cloth and surgical masks.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo looked into how effective different types of masks are at filtering out aerosol particles, which are solid or liquid particles approximately 0.001 millimetres in diameter and suspended in the air. They published their findings in the journal Physics of Fluids on July 21.

The team put masks over a CPR mannequin that could simulate a person's breathing and exhale aerosol droplets, which were made using olive oil, and measured the amount of aerosols that would be built up in a large, unventilated room. The measurements were taken from two metres away, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)'s recommended distance for physical distancing.

The researchers found that R95 masks were able to filter out 60 per cent of exhaled aerosols, and KN95 masks could filter out 46 per cent.

On the other hand, cloth masks and surgical masks only filtered out 10 per cent and 12 per cent of exhaled aerosols, respectively.

"There is no question it is beneficial to wear any face covering, both for protection in close proximity and at a distance in a room," said lead author Serhiy Yarusevych in a press release. "However, there is a very serious difference in the effectiveness of different masks when it comes to controlling aerosols."

Emphasis mine, of course.

What they're blathering about is the difference between "droplet" transmission, where the virus is held in a water droplet from a sneeze, a cough or from "speaking moistly" as the Shiny Pony famously said, and "aerosol" transmission, when the virus itself is floating around in the air, with no water droplet.

The difference, as one might imagine, is size. Water droplets from sneezing and coughing are pretty big, comparatively speaking. The shitty surgical masks and the cloth masks do stop some of those. Maybe half (50%) when taking into consideration all the leakage out the sides. You know how your glasses fog up when wearing the never-sufficiently-damned surgical mask? That's because wet air is jetting out around your nose and fogging them. Better than nothing, for droplet transmission.

Aerosol transmission, this is a different story. According to this story, the aerosols being tested are particles 0.001 millimetres in diameter. That's 1 micron in science speak. As it happens, the filtration of the N-95 mask material is ~99.5% for particles that  are 0.75 microns and up. The N-95 filters 95% of the most penetrating particle size, 0.1 to 0.3 microns in diameter. Anything larger or smaller than that is filtered at better than 95%.

The WuFlu virus itself, naked as it were, is roughly 0.14 microns, which falls into that "most penetrating" particle size. Therefore the N-95 "only" filters it at 95% capability. Here's a handy WuFlu size comparison chart.

This assumes NO LEAKS in the mask fitment. That's an important point, because the shitty stand-alone paper units leak atrociously. Your filtration effectiveness will drop down to 50-60%. Rule of thumb, if it fogs your glasses when you wear it, it's pretty much useless.

Naturally, the government mandates the shitty, useless surgical mask. You might as well tape a kleenex to your face. Oh, and that plexiglass barrier? Useless, at best.

On the bright side, despite the ever dropping effectiveness (currently hovering at 49% with two (2) doses) of the mad science experiment in genetic modification they are daring to call a "vaccine", 99% of people who catch the WuFlu recover. In fact, ~90-95% of people over 80 who catch it recover.

Afghanistan is deliberate. It is not a mistake.

This is a spontaneous explosion I posted over at According To Hoyt. Kindly excuse the bad words, I'm angry the last couple of days.

Sarah said: "They didn't know Afghanistan, a place that is like our primordial tales where parents are served a stew of their children, a place that not only has never been civilized but relishes barbarism, would fall that fast."

Okay, you pushed my button Sarah. Here doth ensue a rant:

Can we all stop pretending these people are stupid? They're not. They are the very smartest of the smart, and they are EATING OUR LUNCH.

This fall of Saigon II is not a mistake. Not a miscalculation. Not a screw-up. It is quite deliberate. Everyone involved, for the last 20 years, knew this would happen. The Afghans knew it, the Taliban knew it, NATO knew it. They fucking well knew.

I'm not going to pretend that I knew it, but as news reports stop being able to lie their way out of this fiasco, reports keep popping up of documents and officials in and out of government who called this right from the start. They knew.

So why the surprise now? Why turn Trump's orderly and gradual withdrawal into a rout with people falling off airplanes? Because now they can pin the disaster on the doddering old man in the White House who can't find the bathroom on his own. Perfect fall guy.

Deeper issue, why let it happen at all? Because what happens in Afghanistan is not important. They don't care. As long as their gravy train keeps running and those biscuit wheels keep sopping up all that beautiful wonderful gravy, they do not give a single shit about guys falling off the outside of C-17s trying to escape the Taliban. They don't care about the world-wide reputation of the United States. They don't care about soldiers dying for nothing. They don't care if inflation drives the whole middle class into poverty, destroys your savings and fucks over the whole nation for 20 years.

Those things are not important, okay? They don't care.

And how do we know this? We know because we've seen it before! Anybody out there old enough to remember John F. fucking Kennedy playing chicken with Nikita Khrushchev over the Cuban Missile Crisis? It was revealed in his memoirs that Khrushchev turned those ships around because he finally understood that Kennedy was insane. Kennedy wasn't paying any attention to Khrushchev, he was busy positioning himself to win the coming election.

It wasn't important to Kennedy what the Soviets did. It wasn't important if a war started. It wasn't even important if nukes were launched. He didn't care. It was only the next crooked election that mattered. All those Joint Chiefs of Staff guys and the whole Cabinet knew that, and they let him do it.

Okay? That's what this really is. We are the stupid, clueless idiots who go along and let them do it.

Here endeth the rant.

Update: Support for my thesis is showing up.

 

Mr. Fox attributes this massive problem to bureaucratic “brainworms“, or a mistake by professional bureaucrats within the State Department trying to help but actually making things worse.  However, there is a possibility it’s not a mistake.  Perhaps this was done purposefully.

As previously noted by Lara Logan, outlining a position I happen to agree with {GO DEEP}, the growing scale of the crisis in Afghanistan cannot simply be chalked up to mistakes, snafu’s, blunders and errors in judgement.  At some level it must be accepted that these events are happening because they are intended to happen.

While it is never a good idea to assign duplicitous motives to issues and events which can be more easily explained by stupid errors, the scale of the errors in this situation beggars belief.

When you think about the people within the chain-of-command inside the U.S. State Department, specifically the number of people currently assigned to review everything U.S. Embassy Kabul operations is conducting, this instruction to blitz a document to all applicants, that is so easy to duplicate had to be made intentionally.

Tens of thousands of fraudulent State Department documents showing up at the already overwhelmed gates of the Kabul airport will only make things exponentially more difficult to sort through.

Something like this is beyond FUBAR.  This level of specific evacuation crisis is benefitting some purpose.  Essentially, this “mistake” as outlined in the video above, is going to collapse any hope for an efficient evacuation with verified personnel.

We have seen this play out before [Bathtub Principle] where a crisis is created because the crisis has a purpose.

In Libya rather than Hillary Clinton and CIA Director Leon Panetta getting busted for selling surface-to-air missiles (SAMS) to al-Qaeda (Operation Zero Footprint), the State Department and CIA -essentially brother and sister agencies- helped “the Benghazi rebels” take over the Kadaffi weapons caches.  If SAMS were then used elsewhere (Syria), well, they came from Kadaffi’s stores… see how that works?

Based on current political alignment, alliances, and the ideology behind who is in charge of specific U.S. government agencies, it can reasonably be assumed someone (insert Obama here) wants Pakistan and Iran to have advanced military technology via the stolen weapons we leave behind in Afghanistan. 

Why?

Because those same people already made money selling advanced military tech to Iran, and this ‘crisis’ provides cover when it shows up later in their arsenal. (more)

“Something is going on”… Something much more consequential than appears at the surface.

 Yeah. We've seen them do this shit before. They're doing it all the time now. 

You really think the US Border Patrol can't secure their southern border? They can! They've just been told not to. You really think the Portland cops can't stand up against Antifa? They can! They've just been told not to.

You really think it's an accident that the USA abandoned Bagram air-force base with its fortifications and multiple landing strips because they couldn't stand up to the toothless hillbillies called the Taliban? You really think that the US military would -choose- to stage out of the single landing strip of Kabul airport? No way. This is an arrangement.

Whoever is pulling Biden's strings ordered this. I assume because they have to. I must assume this is because they're all guilty of things that will earn them the death penalty, and have nothing to lose. I think the big movers and shakers in DemocRat Washington have been doing shit that if we all knew about it, there'd be no crack deep enough for them to hide in. Pizzagate, if true, would be the least of it.

What about those ignorant anti-vaxxers, eh?

Yeah, about that:

A new report by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh has found that the most highly educated Americans are also the most vaccine hesitant.

The researchers canvassed no fewer than 5 million Americans who responded to surveys on whether they were "probably" or "definitely not planning on getting a COVID vaccine.

The results will shock many.

"More surprising is the breakdown in vaccine hesitancy by level of education," reports UnHerd. "It finds that the association between hesitancy and education level follows a U-shaped curve with the highest hesitancy among those least and most educated. People a master's degree had the least hesitancy, and the highest hesitancy was among those holding a PhD."

In addition, while the lowest educated saw the largest drop in vaccine hesitancy for the first five months of 2021, those with PhD's were the most likely to not change their minds.

There is a reason for this. When you have an Masters or a PhD in anything it is much more likely that you will know the difference between a memory RNA genetic modification mad science experiment and a genuine vaccine. It is also much more likely that you will know when people from the government are telling you bullshit and pretending it's true. It is also more likely that you will know that the words "vaccine passport" mean something very, very bad.

My Masters is in physical therapy. That means I've studied medical statistics, the practicalities of infection control, I know how to read medical publications and I know what all those big Latin words mean that doctors lob around all the time. It means that when the government comes out one week against wearing a face mask, and then the very next week they impose a mandatory mask order, I go and look up everything I need to know about viruses and masks.

I also notice when we're all locked down and can't go to the store except for emergencies... but the friggin' schools are still open. And the airport is still open. And the border is still open, but only for refugees. Et Cetera.

Get out there and do your own research, people. Look up the filtering capability of that glorified kleenex they're making you wear. Look up the efficacy of that jab they're telling you to take. Look all that shit up, people.

Bell's Palsy added to Pfizer warnings.

Well well, it looks like that "safe and effective" label on the WuFlu jab is looking less safe, again, when you read the fine print on the box.

Health Canada says 311 patients in Canada reported a case of Bell's Palsy after getting a COVID-19 shot though that does not specifically mean the condition was caused by the vaccine.

As of July 30, that includes 206 people who got the Pfizer vaccine, 67 who got Moderna, 37 who got Oxford-AstraZeneca and one whose vaccine was unknown.

Moderna's label was previously updated to report the condition.

I'll tell you what, you have to really dig to get that information off the web. They're not handing that out very easy. As well, most websites (including CP-24) are falling all over themselves to tell you that A) it's SOOOPER rare and B) it goes away, it's no big deal, and you totally shouldn't worry about it.

I will disagree about it being no big deal. Having half your face paralyzed by unknown causes is the definition of a Big Freakin' Deal. If the disease itself was more dangerous, I'd be a lot more excited about the jab for it. (I'm calling it a "jab" now because it's shorter than "mad science mRNA genetic modification experiment.")

Get the hell out there and do your own research my friends. Don't let the lying media assholes stampede you.

Yes, books really are more depressing.

We all thought it was just us, right? Every time you pick up a book or a story, it seems more perverse and depressing than the one before. Ever since the 1990s, the written word has generally been a huge downer. Just us imagining it, we must be weirdos. Right?

Nope. It seems that around 1999-2000, something really did happen. Some guys and gals did a paper on it. The results are, hmm, interesting:

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual's mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

Emphasis mine. Note that they did this analysis in three languages, English, German and Spanish.

It is worth reading the original article, which is found here. PDF downloadable. The graphs are particularly interesting.

This coincides with the timing of me starting to complain I couldn't find anything to read. By 2014 I'd abandoned reading entirely and took up writing instead, which is when the graphs level out at a high level. Currently I read only from a small stable of authors whose works I enjoy, largely I think because they're not depressing and hopeless.

The timing also coincides with the Sad Puppies 1-2-3-4 campaigns in the Hugo Awards. Larry Correia didn't get pissed off over nothing, methinks.

It is difficult not to seize on this study and scream "SEE? I TOLD YOU SO!!!" I'd welcome some more studies like this to start refining this idea that the media we are exposed to is becoming more depressing every year. Also to bring in some other correlations like the sales of antidepressants, geographic and demographic data on depression and anxiety disorders, etc.

My off-the-cuff reaction to this is that these guys really got a hold of something here. This is a real thing. The -causes- of it are another question entirely. I'll -guess- that it has a lot to do with the rise of Post-Modernism and it's little brother Critical Race Theory in the ivory tower, and also the consolidation of the publishing industry in N. America and Europe. In my oh-so-humble opinion some research into the incidence of major depression and anxiety disorders in the publishing industry might prove very fruitful indeed.

New CDC mask guidelines based on Bear Week.

Update: Well, this puts a new and even more interesting spin on things.

ABC News published a story on Thursday headlined: "CDC mask decision followed stunning findings from Cape Cod beach outbreak." The article by Anne Flaherty and Arielle Mitropoulos explained how more than 800 people — 74 percent of whom had already been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 — tested positive for the coronavirus in the aftermath of Fourth of July celebrations in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

"The initial findings of the investigation led by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, seemed to have huge implications," the ABC News account said. It explained that the Cape Cod outbreak was "among the pieces of new evidence behind the CDC's decision" to ask Americans to wear masks indoors, even if they are vaccinated.

That ABC News article was more than 800 words long, but somehow the reporters never found an opportunity to mention two highly relevant words: "Bear Week."

Turns out the 4th of July in Provincetown Massachusetts is not your usual fireworks display.  40,000 gay men partying hearty in steamy bars with insufficient ventilation. Which, oddly, was not mentioned in any of the news reports. At all. I would have remembered that detail, had I seen it.

The guy who blew the whistle on this media malpractice was gay rights activist Peter Staley. In a Twitter thread, he complained that "everyone is missing the horny bear in the room," and noted that 85 percent of the patients in the Provincetown outbreak were male. There was also a blunt appraisal of the outbreak from columnist Andrew Sullivan, a gay man who actually lives in Provincetown: "Is Provincetown our future? Count me skeptical. In Fourth of July week, the town was completely swamped this year, followed swiftly by Bear Week; lines for the bars lasted for blocks; the bars themselves were packed; the weather was dreadful, forcing most of the crowd to pack tightly inside. A tiny town built for a few thousand residents has to absorb up to 40,000 in peak season. One bar in particular — the home for a dance party with the inspired name of "Fag Bash" — resembles a kind of dank dungeon where sweat drips from the ceiling and mold reaches up the walls. It might have been designed for viral transmission. A big swathe of the crowd had also just come from a week of Pride partying in New York City and were likely not, shall we say, at their immunological best. It was a muggy, viral heaven in a classic post-plague burst of bacchanalia."

 

So it appears that yes, if you are vaccinated with the MRNA mad science experiment, you might catch a case of WuFlu in a packed bar where drunk strangers are indiscriminately trading spit and dancing mashed together like sardines. Think mosh pit, but less clothing.

At a grocery store, 6 feet from the nearest person? Well, that's different isn't it? You don't normally see men Frenching random strangers at the store. Right? That's what the CDC based it's new mask mandate on. Naked mosh pit.

And the media ran with it. They're just lying now.

So, what can we take home from this about WuFlu? Nothing! We can conclude nothing useful, because they're lying! The CDC is lying, the media is lying, state and federal public health are lying. Is the "vaccine" safe? We don't know. Is it unsafe? WE DON'T KNOW. What about those case numbers and fatality counts? We don't know.

Dear public officials: The problem with lying is that once you lie, everything you ever said becomes suspect. At this point, we just don't believe you anymore.

Frank Miller cancelled by convention.

This may not seem like anything interesting to a non-comic book nerd, but bear with me. It gets interesting fast.

Comic book artist Frank Miller, whose credits include Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, was all set to appear at the Thought Bubble Yorkshire Comic Art Festival this November in England; in fact, he was listed first among the luminaries who were set to attend. But now he has been dropped and the great minds behind Thought Bubble have apologized for ever inviting him, because, you see, he has committed an unpardonable sin: fifteen years ago, he wrote something that some people have taken as negative toward the Left's favored religion, Islam.

Well now. This is familiar! I recall a multitude of similar actions taken by comic conventions and SciFi conventions over the past few years. Remember when John Ringo, Larry Correia and even Toni Weisskopf of Baen Books got cancelled?

The difference between Frank Miller and Correia, Ringo and Weisskopf, for the purposes of this discussion, is political. Miller is a New York Lefty and a Hollywood guy. Previously conventions were cancelling Conservatives like Ringo and Correia, and people like Ms. Weisskopf who did not actively espouse a particular politics but didn't vocally despise the Conservatives.

But now we are on to the next thing, cancelling those who once dared to put a foot wrong. In Miller's case he produced a comic called Holy Terror.

Miller was dropped after Zainab Akhtar, whom The Mix describes as an "award-winning cartoonist and small press publisher ShortBox founder," said that she would "no longer be attending Thought Bubble festival this November" because Miller was set to be there. Akhtar explained: "As a proud Muslim woman, I cannot in good conscience attend a festival that deems it appropriate to invite and platform Frank Miller, a person who is responsible for the propagation of abhorrent anti-Muslim hate, particularly via his work."

Ms. Akhtar goes on to label Miller as all sorts of bad, but never really offers anything concrete.

All this sounds so heinous, it is remarkable that, as The Mix notes, "Akhtar does not cite any specific instances of anti-Muslim bigotry from Miller." However, "it is assumed that she is referring to his creation of Holy Terror, a graphic novel in which an original character known as The Fixer sets out to battle Al-Qaeda."

Yes, that's right. The Fixer fights al-Qaeda, and that's "abhorrent anti-Muslim hate." When the "War on Terror" was young, we were constantly assured by the political and media elites that al-Qaeda had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with Islam, and that the war against terrorism was not and must not be construed as a war against Islam or Muslims.

As usual, there is one (1) complainant. The Thought Bubble Yorkshire Comic Art Festival immediately bent over and grabbed it's collective ankles, cancelling Miller. Probably didn't want to get stabbed.

Miller has been feeding the alligator since the 1990s, by my estimation. In the 1980s he made a big impression in Marvel and then DC comics. I have to give him respect for those, they were brilliant and I bought all of them. Miller's work and pretty much the rest of the comic book universe went to shit around 1992/93, and I stopped buying them. It wasn't a subtle change, the story lines became hard Left with sex and violence taking the place of everything else. So here we are today, 2021, and Miller is being attacked for doing a sex-and-violence comic back in 2011 against Al Qaeda. Miller himself backed off Holy Terror according to wikipedia, saying it was done at a "dark time" for him.

Oops. Sorry Frank. New Rules, you know. What was "edgy" in 2011 is "PURGE HIM!!!" in 2021.

CDC: "Oops."

Well now. The CDC in -internal- documents has said: "Gee whiz Space Cadets, it looks like that darn WuFlu virus done mue-tated on us and the vaccine everybody thought was the silver bullet, well, that bullet ain't so shiny no more, buckaroos."

In more sciency language:

It [the unpublished internal CDC communication] cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.

And what might this unpublished data be, hmm?

A person working in partnership with the CDC on investigations of the delta variant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak, said the data came from a July 4 outbreak in Provincetown, Mass. Genetic analysis of the outbreak showed that people who were vaccinated were transmitting the virus to other vaccinated people. The person said the data was "deeply disconcerting" and a "canary in the coal mine" for scientists who had seen the data.

Yeah. People who were vaccinated were transmitting the virus to other people who were vaccinated. That ain't good, buckaroos. It means the vaccine is variant-specific. It works on the variant it was designed for, by programming human cells to produce a specific spike protein found on the target virus. It doesn't work on new varieties which have mutated, presumably (and I say that I presume because this ain't my expertise so I'm making an educated guess) because the new variety has a different protein forming the spikes.

That seems logical, right? All the viruses with Protein α, β, γ, those are similar enough that the vaccine covers them, and they are out of circulation. But the NEW Delta variant with Protein δ, that one is different enough that the immune system of the vaccinated people does not  react to Protein δ. Back to zero again. If you want to vaccinate against Delta you need a new vaccine that codes for a new spike protein, Protein δ.

Now thanks to my otherwise useless but very expensive medical education, I learned a bunch of stuff about the history of vaccines and how they work. One of the biggest problems with vaccines is that they are usually specific to a single feature of the organism, such as the protein it makes its outer shell out of. This is not a problem if you have targeted a feature of a virus that it can't change easily. Smallpox vaccine is an example of a vaccine that the smallpox virus has not been able to mutate its way around.

But in the case of corona viruses, no one has been able to identify a feature they can't change easily. That's why there has never been a vaccine for the common cold/flu the way there is for Smallpox. You can create a vaccine for a specific flu, that's the flu-shot you get every year. It's different every time. That's also the reason you catch the flu anyway. You caught a different flu.

"But this time is different!" they said. "This time we will use Genetic Modification! It will work for sure, yep you betcha!" And it does work. On α, β, γ varieties. But apparently not δ.

Oops.

There are also those pesky side effects to consider, some of which seem to affect parts of the population that the virus does not. Unless you are already in ill health or over 85, the risk of serious illness from the WuFlu seems less than the risk from the MRNA mad science Frankenstein shot. That's my opinion, not a proven fact. Readers are encouraged to do their own research.

Waiting for the Canadian ban on Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine to be revisited. That will be politically interesting, to say the least. When all the lemmings find out that those things protect against getting a serious illness from WuFlu, I predict they're going to be pissed.

In conclusion, ladies and germs, I'd just like to say: Do. Your. Own. Research. Don't trust the Public Health assholes from the government to know what they're talking about. They might know, but then again they might be talking out of their asses like they were all this time since March 2020. You won't be able to tell the difference if you don't go look it up yourself.

 

Update: Well, this puts a new and even more interesting spin on things. Turns out the 4th of July in Provincetown Massachusetts is not your usual fireworks display. It is Bear Week. Which means 40,000 gay men partying hearty in steamy bars with insufficient ventilation. Which, oddly, was not mentioned in any of the news reports. At all. I would have remembered that detail, had I seen it. 

 

So it appears that yes, if you are vaccinated with the MRNA mad science experiment, you might catch a case of WuFlu in a packed bar where drunk strangers are indiscriminately trading spit and dancing mashed together like sardines. Think mosh pit, but less clothing.

 

At a grocery store, 6 feet from the nearest person? Well, that's different isn't it? You don't normally see men Frenching random strangers at the store. Right? That's what the CDC based it's new mask mandate on. Naked mosh pit.

First your gun, now your truck.

From my cold, dead, driveway. Assholes.

Pickup trucks are a plague on Canadian streets

Many things have changed in pandemic times. One that has not is North America's love affair with the pickup truck. Even in the midst of economic uncertainty, consumers lined up to buy these hulking, belching kings of the road. Once the vehicle of the cowboy, the contractor and the good old boy, pickups have become the continent's mainstream ride. Even city parking lots are simply full of them. In Canada, Ford's F-150 has been the best-selling auto for years.

<snippage>

For heaven's sake, why? Most people no longer use pickups to haul bales of hay. They drive them to the mall to shop or the soccer field to drop off their kids. Why anyone thinks they need such a beast to do that is an abiding mystery.

<more snippage>

Even if they weren't polluting and dangerous, the parade of pickups would be a blight on the roadscape and a finger in the eye of other drivers – a way of saying to everyone else: I am bigger, badder and richer than you. A vehicle that started as a practical tool for hard-working people has become, for many, an obnoxious assertion of dominance and division.

This piece of soi-boi whining and metrosexual urban-dweller snobbery was written by Mr. Marcus Gee, a staff writer at the Globe and Mail. 

 

Mr. Marcus Gee, truck hater.

 

Now you can put a face to the name of the guy who thinks your frigging pickup truck is "an obnoxious assertion of dominance and division."

Personally, I drive the second biggest thing they make, an F-250 crew cab long box. The only thing bigger before you get into commercial vehicles is the F-450 crew cab dually.

For Heaven's sake why? (Yeah, Heaven is capitalized, you illiterate dickheads.)

Because I can shut the tailgate on a 4'x8' sheet of plywood. I can tow a 38' trailer. I can pull a Bobcat out of the mud or a tree stump out of the ground. I can buy 16' deck boards at Home Depot and take them home. I can move a motorcycle, a refrigerator, a doctor's exam table, a table saw, lumber, a tree or half a ton of firewood. I can jump in and drive from Hooterville to Toronto in a howling blizzard and not care a damn, because I have snow tires, four wheel drive, a foot of ground clearance and a locking diff front and back. It's a TRUCK. It can do lots of things.

 

But mostly because I get to choose what kind of vehicle I spend my money on. Not you, Mr. Gee. Not the government. Not the Globe and Mail. Me. I choose.

This is Canada, Mr. Gee. It's nice that you can go from your air conditioned apartment and take the air conditioned subway to your air conditioned office without ever going outside, and it's nice that you can hire people to screw in your lightbulbs and move your furniture for you.

But some of us have to do this type of thing for ourselves. We have to face the weather. We need to carry shit from one place to another. We can't buy station wagons and big sedans with TRUNK SPACE!!! anymore because effete urban simp environmentalist weenies made them illegal. So, obviously, we buy trucks. When you assholes finally make those illegal, we will buy whatever we can get that can pull a hen off a nest and burns furnace oil.

So, Mr. Gee, if you think pickup trucks are "an obnoxious assertion of dominance and division" then just you wait until the parking lots are full of delivery vans with dual rear axles. Go ahead, make pickups illegal. See what happens.

And by the way. Did you ever think that maybe guys in pickups tailgate you because you drive like an effete urban simp? If you don't want to go fast, don't be in the center lane. Go in the outside lane with all the other simps.

First seen at Small Dead Animals.

New warning in Covid-19 vaccine data sheets.

Well now. After weeks and months of physicians and other medical types being kicked off of You Tube, Facebook, Twitter etc. by the censors, we have this tidbit here:

FDA plans to "move rapidly" to add a warning to fact sheets for Pfizer and Moderna's Covid-19 vaccines about the rare risk of developing inflammatory heart conditions, an agency official said Wednesday.

"Based on the available data, a warning statement in the fact sheets for both health care providers and vaccine recipients and caregivers would be warranted in this situation," Doran Fink, deputy director of FDA's vaccines division, said during a CDC advisory committee meeting on Covid vaccines.

Gee whiz fam, I guess my friggin' tinfoil hat wasn't on that tight after all, eh? So, let's see some numbers shall we?
 

The scope of the problem: The conditions are rare, with more than 1,200 cases under investigation as of June 11 among more than 150 million people who have received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. CDC has found more cases occurring after the second shot of an mRNA vaccine. More cases have been reported among Pfizer vaccine recipients, which may be due to the fact that the shot is authorized for people age 12 and up, while Moderna's shot is only authorized for adults.

The "mRNA vaccines may be a new trigger for myocarditis," said Matthew Oster of the CDC. The condition can also occur after viral infection, including Covid-19.

Of concern here is that teens are getting myocarditis from the vaccine but they don't from Covid-19. So your kid most likely won't have a problem with the WuFlu, but they might with the vaccine, meaning there's no reason to get your teens vaccinated and at least one good reason not to. Ivermectin does not cause myocarditis in teens. Just sayin'.

When the N. Korean defectors says Columbia U is crazier than N. Korea...

...then you know it is getting very bad.

When it came to gender pronouns and manipulation of the English language, [Yeonmi] Park was even more confused.

"English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say 'he' or 'she' by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them 'they'? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?" she remembered asking herself. "It was chaos. It felt like the regression in civilization."

"Even North Korea is not this nuts," she added. "North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy."

This from a girl who first escaped North Korea, and then sex slavery in China, and finally made it from Mongolia to South Korea. She found Columbia abusive.

Eventually, Park stopped arguing with her professors and "learned how to just shut up" so that she could graduate. She reserved her most pointed criticisms for the woke scolds who constantly lament about being oppressed.

"Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like," she said. "These kids keep saying how they're oppressed, how much injustice they've experienced. They don't know how hard it is to be free."

"I literally crossed through the middle of the Gobi Desert to be free. But what I did was nothing, so many people fought harder than me and didn't make it," she added.

I saw some of these Columbia/NYU assholes when I was in PT school in the 1990s. I never backed down from a single one of them myself, but then I was huge, male, White and Canadian so I had quite a bit going for me that she doesn't have. I'm sure if I was this girl and worried about my GPA, I'd have shut the hell up.

It isn't like getting up in their faces and calling them on their bullshit made even a tiny pinch of difference anyway. Most of them you would need to literally beat them with a Louisville Slugger to even get their attention. Not really kidding about that. New York liberals are utterly impenetrable. Nothing you can say will raise even a flicker of thought. Even repeated muggings sometimes fail to change their minds. 

Update: Jordan Peterson interviewed Yeonmi Park. Two hours, very powerful story. I recommend it.

HCQ USA study: 200% increase in survival.

This is yet another study showing huge, astounding results using HCQ, (hydroxychloroquine) and zinc on Covid-19 patients.

"We found that when the cumulative doses of two drugs, HCQ and AZM, were above a certain level, patients had a survival rate 2.9 times the other patients," the study's conclusion states.

That's nearly three times the survival rate of the unmedicated patients in the study. You never see things like that in the medical literature. You see things like 10% improvement in survival. Ten percent is considered pretty good. Survival rate triple? You never see that. That's like a Royal Flush in poker.

Just a reminder, HCQ is banned for use on Covid-19 in Canada. Banned.

Okay? Are we learning yet?

Whiteness, the new Lefty cause.

We've been seeing this word bandied about rather freely of late: Whiteness.

If you go to PubMed, the big online repository of Science (capital S for super important Real Science) papers, this is one of the "scientific papers" you're going to find:

On Having Whiteness

Donald Moss

First Published May 27, 2021 Research Article Find in PubMed 

https://doi.org/10.1177/00030651211008507

Published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) on May 27th. That's a real journal, by the way, not one of those pretend ones run by some grad student in his mom's basement.

Abstract

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which "white" people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind, and in one's world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts' appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness's infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning ("never again") or as temptation ("great again"). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

"There is not yet a permanent cure."

Which isn't true at all. There is one sure-fire permanent cure. Hitler used it on the Jews. Stalin used it on the Ukrainians. Mao used it on the Chinese, winning the numbers game by a wide margin. Mr. Donald Moss appears to be hinting he might like to try it here. On us.

Here's his book.

 

Here's a picture of him. Looks happy, right? I notice that he suffers rather severely from Whiteness.

 

Here's another one, in case anybody thinks the first one was a random alcoholic I plucked from teh interwebz.

Just in case you were wondering who's thirsting for your blood, now you know.

And now, from the bloodthirst to complete lack of self awareness: Yoga is too white, it should be Blacker. I'm not going to include the picture from the article, it is really unflattering to the poor woman. She's very large, and quite black. That's all you need to know.

Jessamyn Stanley needs you to know what yoga is really about - and it's not the poses.

In her new book Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, the yoga instructor and body activist shares reflective personal essays that touch upon everything from racism to the cultural appropriation of American yoga, from consumerism to cannabis.

Yeah, but no. The book is actually about White Supremacy.

The book explores the existence of white supremacy and cultural appropriation in American yoga. "I would venture to say that everything in our collective society is rooted in white supremacy. I am sure there are many people who would disagree with that, and honestly I don't care because I believe that and I know it's the case," she says.

"I think that we see it show up in a lot of different ways. In the same way it's everywhere else and it has polluted everything else, it's polluted yoga. It's very much a part of how yoga has spread in America. The popularity of yoga really came down to wealthy white people wanting to learn and explore in a very specific way, and that's why yoga has been so white for so long in America."

The lack of self-awareness of an American black woman talking about "cultural appropriation" in regard to Yoga is really quite something.

Yoga is an Indian, specifically Hindu tradition that goes back well over 1500 years. A spiritual and religious tradition, the aim of which is to extinguish one's karma and get off the Wheel of Reincarnation. Nirvana is the aim. It has nothing to do with race, or Whiteness, or "body positivity" or any of the other things she's talking about in her book.

The book, so far as one can tell from her statements in the article, is pretty much a tirade against skinny rich white women, and has nothing to do with Yoga at all.

This recalls another recent article about Yoga being too White. A government program was the obvious answer.

Or this one, No Whites Yoga classes at UofT.

Or this one, where White girls are not allowed to teach Yoga because they're too white.

This has been your Whiteness update for today. Tune in tomorrow (and for the foreseeable future) for more Whiteness.

Why is Canada insane?

In case you were wondering why the Canadian government seems insane, and why they keep doing things that fuck-over the general public, I have news. Canada is run by guys who think Canadians are STUPID, think we have too much freedom and too much money, and are determined to put a stop to it.

In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Mark Carney, former governor both of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, claims that western society is morally rotten, and that it has been corrupted by capitalism, which has brought about a "climate emergency" that threatens life on earth. This, he claims, requires rigid controls on personal freedom, industry and corporate funding.

Carney's views are important because he is UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He is also an adviser both to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the next big climate conference in Glasgow, and to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

He's a Fascist, essentially. The capital "F", Third Reich, Hugo Boss wearing kind. And he thinks his star is so much in the ascendant he wrote a whole book where he says the quiet part out loud.

You're welcome. Vote accordingly. While you still can.

WorldCon finds Pre-Crime doesn't pay.

Ah yes, remember this little beauty?

Previously, Mr. Jon Del Arroz was banned from WorldCon and called a racist by them... for talking on the Internet. 

 

He hadn't done anything or said anything prohibited by the WorldCon rules. He mentioned he might wear a GoPro camera at the convention, in case some of the scooter-riders might try to hit him with their oxygen tanks. (Okay I made up the scooter part, but it was in that vein.)

Pre-crime. He -might- do something in the future, and they didn't like him anyway, so they banned him.

He sued them. And through the last several years, the suit dragged on.

Well, today the WorldCon apologized and paid Mr. Del Arroz money. I expect they thought it would be cheaper to admit the truth and knuckle under than continue to pretend they were in the right. Potentially be stuck for legal fees and court costs. That could hurt.

What goes around, comes around.

Fwd: Microsoft caught censoring the internet.

This time it is sufficiently unsubtle to be worth talking about.

One of the pics of Tank Man from that day.

That's Tank Man from Tiananmen Square. Very famous. You can't miss it. I searched and downloaded this one from Google today.

Search "Tank Man" on Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo.

Nothing.

Okay? Microsoft, red handed, carrying water for the ChiComs.

Time to switch to Linux? I'll be looking into it.

Google, don't be evil to the Jews.

Can't believe I'm sitting here, 2021, and we're having the "Jews are evil!" conversation. I thought the Greatest Generation settled that shit when they picked Hitler's dead ass out of his bunker in 1945.

But no. Here we are again.

Kamau Bobb, Google Diversity Tzar.

Kamau Bobb, who is also an 'Equity in Computing' don at Georgia Tech, wrote a 2007 blog post, which remains on his website, titled: 'If I Were A Jew.'

Bobb writes: 'If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself. Self defense is undoubtedly an instinct, but I would be afraid of my increasing insensitivity to the suffering of others.'

This is not "Kamau Bobb the guy in charge of sandwiches at Google" okay? This is "Kamau Bobb, Google's head of diversity strategy." He's the guy who puts the "J" in SJW. Here's some more of what he wrote, published in the Daily Mail:

In his 14-year-old blog post, Bobb wrote: 'Suffering and oppression typically give rise to sympathy and compassion among the oppressed ... I would conclude that my Jewish faith and the history of my people render me closer to human compassion; closer to the instinct to offer healing to hurt, patience to anxiety and understanding to confusion.

'I don't know how I would reconcile that identity with the behavior of fundamentalist Jewish extremists or of Israel as a nation ...

'I wouldn't understand those who suggest that bombing Lebanon, slaughtering Lebanese people and largely destroying Beirut in retaliation for the capture of a few soldiers is justified.

'I wouldn't understand the notion of collective punishment, cutting off gas, electricity and water from residents in Gaza because they are attacking Israel who is fighting against them.

'It would be unconscionable to me to watch Israeli tanks donning the Star of David rumbling through Ramallah destroying buildings and breaking the glass.' 

The essay concludes with the paragraph: 'If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself. Self defense is undoubtedly an instinct, but I would be afraid of my increasing insensitivity to the suffering others. My greatest torment would be that I've misinterpreted the identity offered by my history and transposed spiritual and human compassion with self righteous impunity.'

If it seems a bit much to be dredging up 14 year old blog posts to slam this guy, I kind of agree. They've been sitting there on his blog for a long time, where was all the outrage back then?

But then I remember stuff like people getting fired over Halloween costume pics from the 1980s, I remember Jenna Marbles being chased off the internet for "blackface" when it was just a friggin' makeup video, I remember director James Gunn getting fired from Guardians of the Galaxy over 14 year old tweets. And I remember Justin Trudeau being caught doing -actual- blackface 40 times and getting a free pass from the media because he's Justin Trudeau.

So no. It's not too much anymore. New Rules are a bitch, boys. The friggin' Diversity Tzar of Google wrote "If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing" and he left it on there for 14 years. If James Gunn can be fired for a joke, this asshole can be fired too.

Update: It seems Google is a little gun-shy. Mr. Kamau Bobb is FIRED today.

Google removed the head of its diversity team after a blog post about Jewish people resurfaced.

Kamau Bobb, whose LinkedIn page says he has been in the position since September 2018, "will no longer be part of [Google's] diversity team going forward," a Google spokesperson told the Washington Examiner on Thursday.

His removal, though he will remain with the company and focus on STEM work, came days after the blog post titled "If I were a Jew" resurfaced, though it has since been deleted.

 

Yeah, FIRED! Buuut not really "fired", right? More like moved sideways until the uproar dies down. "We're sorry you wingnuts were offended by this totally reasonable thing our guy wrote."

Still, I'll take it. Every time one of these pricks gets cancelled, all the SJWs feel the Breath of Righteousness on the backs of their necks. That little zing of fear that someday their very own Cancel Machine might pick them.

If they really believe that might happen, the Cancel Machine will get put back in the garage and we won't see it again.

"SHUT UP NERDS!!!" they explained.

Today in nerd hatred, we have the Netflix announcement that the character Death in their TV series of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" graphic novel will be played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste, a black woman. Oh, and they listed all the actors' pronouns too, to be absolutely sure we all knew there was a non-conforming gender actor in there. There is a controversy over this, because the character of Death in the graphic novels is depicted as a white Goth woman. Fans of the graphic novel have voiced their opinions on this casting choice, which range from unctuous and fulsome approval to serious disapproval.

(English speakers with a classical education will understand that "unctuous and fulsome" implies dishonesty and sucking up, just to be clear for you people who got ripped off by your teachers back in the day.)

Now, I must say at the outset that I do not care. I have not read The Sandman. I think I looked through it when it first came out in 1987, decided it was SJW trash and passed hard. Over the years it has generally been my opinion that Neil Gaiman writes stories in a way that I find intensely annoying, he is not well represented in my library.

Therefore, I can't offer an informed opinion of Ms. Howell-Babptiste's fit as the character Death, and on the whole I really don't care. It is most unlikely I will watch it if there's anything else on.

However, that is not what this post is about.

Comic book lovers will recall the Fantastic Four reboot. They cast Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, and the internet came alive with people like me predicting the movie would suck. And it did! The FF reboot movie could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. What was interesting at the time was the number of media people screaming "RAAAAACIST!!!1!" whenever anyone would object. 

 

We were all called sexist for saying Dr. Who would suck when they made the Doctor a woman. (It did suck.) 

 

But in the same breath, all the SJWs -demanding- that Iron Fist must cast an Asian as Danny Rand, or that Dr. Who must be black were brave fighters for social justice. 

 

As it happened Iron Fist and Dr. Who sucked anyway, but not because of them casting white actors to play white characters.

What this post is about is that one more time, comic book fans are not allowed to have an opinion. If you think that you want to see the Neil Gaiman version, with casting that reflects what he did in the comics, then you are a racist and you need to shut up before somebody shuts you up.

Sorry. Nerds have opinions. We're not about to shut up. Go ahead and try to make us, see what happens.

My prediction on The Sandman by Netflix? It will probably suck. Whenever the studio stars fucking with the story by using the casting as a vehicle for virtue signalling, that's a bad sign.

From the bulging "WTF did I just read?!" file, a Canadian speaks.

I don't go to TOR.com very often, because frankly it is painful. It's the Stupid. It burns.

But today, by misadventure, I went there, and found this:

Five SFF Novels Featuring Men Who Don't Give Up Easily

"When one thinks of science fiction and fantasy protagonists, one thinks of figures like Morgaine (Gate of Ivrel), Essun (The Fifth Season), Cordelia Naismith (Shards of Honor), Beatrice Clayborn (The Midnight Bargain) and Anna Tromedlov (Hench). A casual glance suggests these are generally women, which only makes sense. The majority of fiction readers are women and of course they want relatable characters."

This is by Mr. James Davis Nicoll who according to his bio lives in Kitchener Ontario. I'm tempted to drive up there and slap him for this article, except I don't know where he lives. Slapping every man in Kitchener seems excessive just to get this one guy, you know?

Bilbo Baggins? Allen Carpentier? Harold Shea? (Yngvi is a louse!)

At any rate, he continues:

"However, it's entirely possible to write a book with a strong male protagonist at its centre ("strong" as in striking, resolute, and/or determined, not as being able to dead-lift surprising amounts of weight, of course—assessing male characters purely in physical terms would be offensively reductive). Consider these five recent examples:"

And then he outlines five books I've never heard of, by authors I've never heard of except for C.L.Polk, another Canadian. Her I've heard of, she's nominated for a Nebula this year.

Now, leaving aside the obscure recommendations, I really do take exception to the "majority of fiction readers are women" business. That's true if you take the entirety of all fiction genres. Are the majority of SF readers women? I strongly doubt it.

The final howler is here:

Of course, I could have chosen other examples. There are literally dozens of books that feature strong male protagonists!

Dozens?  Maybe only dozens published by TOR, that's a possibility.

But my vote for "strong male protagonist" in a book coming out this year is Owen Zastava Pitt.

Happy Day After Molly Norris Is Still Hiding Day!

I just remembered that yesterday marks the day that Molly Norris got thrown under the bus. 2010, we celebrated.

Here we are, 2021, and Molly is still in hiding. Her old personal website is now a broken hookup site. http://www.mollynorris.com/

Is there anybody out there still noticing that Molly got dumped by the Free Speech Left, those defenders of human rights and stuff? Nope. Not really. Molly fell off the radar back in 2015, going by Google search.

So here's to Molly. Hoist a cappuccino to the brave cartoonist who at least stood up to the assholes. You'll know it's a free country again when Molly can reclaim her name in safety.

Ivermectin turns WuFlu around in India, home of the Double Mutant Strain Of Doom

Graphs are funny things. When you see a graph with a steep upward trend, that's a big deal. Something is growing. Likewise a steep downward trend, something is shrinking.

The media lately is pretty funny too. When it comes to the WuFlu, they only notice upward trends. The steeper the line, the more they notice it. When something goes down, that they don't really bother with so much.

Case in point, India. Remember three weeks ago when India was going to become a barren wasteland of WuFlu victims? The Double Mutant Indian Strain was going to come and kill everybody? Remember that? Steep upward curve on that graph. But this week there is an equally steep downward curve, and you don't hear about that on CNN, do you?

Yeah. Big spike on the right there, and then they did something and WuFlu fell off a cliff. And you, ladies and gentlemen, did not hear squat about it.

Because for whatever reason, the public health apparatus in Canada, Europe and the USA would very much like to keep pretending that Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin don't treat WuFlu. Even though they obviously do, and quite successfully. It's hard to deny that chart showing the dreaded Indian Double Mutant Strain falling off a cliff there as soon as they got their Ivermectin distribution going.

Just like they would very much like to pretend wearing a mask prevents the spread of WuFlu, and lockdowns prevent WuFlu, when there are plenty of charts out there showing they clearly don't. (Yeah, the dentist mask? It's not protecting you. N-95 at a bare minimum to filter out the WuFlu. The dentist mask is good for maybe 10% at best, assuming you wear it right.)

Just like they would prefer if you didn't call it WuFlu, or the KungFlu, or the Chinese Flu. But it's totally okay for them to say Indian Double Mutant strain, right? Because reasons.

Now, for you Canadian readers, you've heard the fuss about Bill C-10, the SHUT UP! bill from the Liberal Party of Canada. This blog post is exactly the type of thing that C-10 is meant to curb. They'll try to charge me money for posting that graph there, or they'll simply ban JoNova's blog from Canada so I won't have access to the graph.

Okay? That's where we are right now, May 21st 2020. Now get back to work, you've got taxes to pay.

Laziness and Stupidity: Colonial Pipeline

 Laziness and Stupidity. Capital L, capital S. That's why you can't buy gas on the eastern side of the USA today.

Excerpt from a Slashdot story:

In a separate report from The Associated Press, the East Coast pipeline company was found to have "atrocious" information management practices and "a patchwork of poorly connected and secured systems," according to an outside audit from three years ago. Slashdot reader wiredmikey shares an excerpt from the report: "We found glaring deficiencies and big problems," said Robert F. Smallwood, whose consulting firm delivered an 89-page report in January 2018 after a six-month audit. "I mean an eighth-grader could have hacked into that system." Colonial said it initiated the restart of pipeline operations on Wednesday afternoon and that it would take several days for supply delivery to return to normal.

I like the consultant guy: "I mean an eighth-grader could have hacked into that system." 

That means the company management could not be assed to apply basic security measures to their computer system. That's some capital L Laziness right there. And the various layers of alphabet soup government organizations didn't make them do it, even though that's their damn job.

And this is a PIPELINE company that handles the most, as in more than half, of the fuel for the eastern USA. Which is, among other things, a strategic asset. During a war, if your army runs out of gas, you lose. Leaving that type of thing unsecured is Stupid. Capital S kind of stupid. The kind that gets people killed. Possibly a lot of people. As in hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions, in a war.

But I am quite sure that the company management is 100% certified and current on all their workplace safety and social justice qualifications.

This is almost as lazy and stupid as the Line Five pipeline fiasco in Canada, where the governor of Michigan is threatening to cut off the entire fuel supply for eastern Canada, and it looks like the governments of the USA and Canada are going to let her do it. It is illegal for her to do it, because of international treaties, but environmentalists are more important than that. So when you can't drive and you can't heat your house this fall, at least you'll know why. Greenies.

Ashli Babbit investigation closed today. No rioting reported.

 The US Dept. of Justice has closed their investigation into the shooting death of Ashli Babbit. No charges will be laid.

 

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will not pursue criminal charges against the U.S. Capitol Police officer involved in the fatal shooting of 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, the Office announced today.

            The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia’s Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section and the Civil Rights Division, with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division (IAD), conducted a thorough investigation of Ms. Babbitt’s shooting.  Officials examined video footage posted on social media, statements from the officer involved and other officers and witnesses to the events, physical evidence from the scene of the shooting, and the results of an autopsy.  Based on that investigation, officials determined that there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.  Officials from IAD informed a representative of Ms. Babbitt’s family today of this determination.

 

Translated from Officialese, "she was asking for it."

Based on the video I saw, "insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution" is a bold statement. But hey, Harris/Biden administration, amiright?

 So, just to recap for those who haven;t been paying attention: Black policeman shoots white woman for disobeying his orders, in front of cameras, "there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution." White policewoman shoots black man for disobeying her orders, in front of cameras, murder charge and riots. #BurnItAllDown.

Still, America, you can take comfort in the fact that no matter how fucked and crooked your gubmint is, Canada's is worse.

Why stop at defunding police?

 The Dips want to defund the entire Canadian Armed Forces.

The policy resolution titled “Elimination of the Canadian Armed Forces” was submitted by the party’s Spadina-Fort York Electoral District Association (EDA). 

It claims that “in a world with a globalized economy traditional militaries are becoming increasingly unnecessary” and points to other countries like Costa Rica and Iceland which have allegedly “abolished their armies.” 

“An NDP government will commit to phasing out the Canadian Armed Forces,” the policy resolution states. “All members of the Canadian Armed Forces will be retrained, at the expense of the federal government, into civil service roles that help expand Canadian, provincial and municipal social services, such as expanded health care, education, community services, public transit and parks.”

This is the type of thing that passes for "intellectual conversation" in Toronto these days. No word on what their plan is if the Russians start mining uranium in the Yukon and leaving an eco-unfriendly mess. Strongly worded letter, probably.

That sound you hear is my eyes rolling.