atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,

#7017: First real snow of the season

Yep, it was pretty thick. Maybe three inches, so I decided I'd get the little snowblower out and clear at least the side of the driveway that Mrs. Fungus parks on.

Of course it didn't want to start. When was the last time I used it??

...but it did start and I got the driveway (half) cleared off and scattered some salt. It's supposed to be 36 on Sunday anyway.

* * *

Here's an interesting fact: if you carbon-date something and the result comes out negative, it was made after 1950. Atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs created a crapton of Carbon 14, a lot more than occurs naturally.

So, you decide to test a belt which is claimed to have been owned by a Roman centurion. If it's fake, carbon dating reveals that it was made in like 2298 AD.

* * *

China is now forcing people into quarantine at gunpoint. Well--look, depending on what the actual fatality rate of the disease is, that might be perfectly sensible.

Like Vox Day, I doubt the fatality rate is 16% because a lot more of the cases that occurred outside China would be leading to fatalties--but I also doubt the official Chinese number of 2% simply because of how the communist Chinese government itself is treating this thing.

Quarantining entire cities--building hospitals specifically to treat people with the disease--arresting the people who first reported the outbreak--and to make things even worse are the videos that somehow make it out of the hot zone showing hospital corridors littered with bodies, as if the Chinese medical system can't keep up with the number of infected who are dying.

Look: I know we are not being told the truth about this, not by anyone. The question is, how bad is it? How bad does it have to be if countries in the free (or "formerly free") world are keeping it under wraps? Thanks to Hollywood it's easy to imagine an extremely high fatality rate that's wiping out people by the thousands--but if that were the case social order would already have broken down in China.

Not that we'd be told about it, of course.

...but I do think that the truth lies somewhere north of 2% fatal, but probably nowhere near as high as 16%.

As with everything to do with China, the truth lies between the official story and what the anti-government faction is claiming. If 25,000 people are dead, that's one of the worst epidemics in recent history. But it's ridiculous to suggest that only 500 people are dead, because that's an insignificant figure, especially for China's population. If 500 was the truth, there would not be a response on this level.


The real Chinese death rate is the death rate with no medical care, in unheated buildings, in winter. The Western death rate is what you get with basic life support and central heating. 16% versus 2% might be plausible.
That last is a good point. Under communism, hospital care is practically on the same level as going to see a witch doctor for some voodoo (unless, of course, you are a member of the Party elite) and fatality rates even for common maladies and conditions are appallingly high.

Basic upshot of all this is that we don't know how bad it is, and likely won't know until it's long over. Here's hoping we all live that long.

* * *

The Democrats want a do-over in Iowa and I don't know that we shouldn't let them have it. I mean, reflexively, I want to say "Hell no! You have one chance and you blew it, so suck it up!" because in America we don't keep holding elections until people vote the way the sitting government wants them to.

But their caucuses were a total clusterfuck, and let's face it: they were screwed up from the very beginning because the wrong guy was winning and they wanted to change the results so someone less wrong would get the nod from Iowa. The Des Moines Register not publishing their poll results because one respondent might not have seen Pete Buttplug's name in the same font as everyone else's--that just reeks of a desperate excuse, and I'd bet a bag of donuts that they freaked out because their poll showed Bernie Sanders winning the thing.

What does a do-over get them?

Well, it lets them redo it and get a result that they like better. That doesn't mean that Donald Trump loses in November, mind you. I don't think there's a person running on the Democrat ticket who can win the election absent a bunch of brownshirts marching people to the polls and holding guns to their heads while they vote.

It does not erase the fact that they needed a do-over to get a usable result, that they tried to get fancy with the thing and blew it, big time. Regardless of anything else, this caucus demonstrates how totally fucking inept the Democrat party is.

Oh, and by the way, here's why I don't bother watching Fox News:
Do you notice Fox absolutely refuses to note the popular vote share? They don't want to damage their Democrat allies by noting that Bernie is ahead in the popular vote but behind in delegates, due to the establishment giving votes to Buttigieg just to stop him.
Fox News was never right-wing, anyway. They used to be moderate; now they are slightly less leftist than the other major news organizations. You people out there who call it "Faux News" can stop now; they're converged.

What they want to do, actually, is to "re-canvass" which basically means to recount the existing votes. Because that's what Democrats do when elections don't go right; they recount the votes until they get their preferred outcome.

"Needless to say, Trump was the real winner in Iowa."

And how.

* * *

I told you assholes this would be the result. I said it and said it--impeaching Trump is a bad idea, don't do it--but they didn't listen to me, and the thing turned out exactly as bad for them as I expected.

Don't get me wrong; I'm pleased as punch at this outcome. It's actually better than I imagined.

Nancy Pelosi tearing up the speech was icing on the cake because there simply could not be any better demonstration of how ungracious and petty the Democrats are. There are no statesmen there; statesmen would look at their loss and say, "We need to do better next time!" rather than spend three years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to whip up fake charges into something real.

The sorest losers on the block, that's our Democrat party.

Even better? Nancy Pelosi may have committed a felony, to wit the willful destruction of an official government document:
The Constitution requires that the president, "from time to time," deliver a report on the state of the union to Congress.

A publicly broadcast speech is not constitutionally required -- that was a practice started by Woodrow Wilson.

But the report itself is required by the Constitution.

It's an official document required by the Constitution. The president transmitted that document to Nancy Pelosi, as the Constitution directs, and then Nancy Pelosi... destroyed it.
It could be considered the official document, the official, constitutionally-mandated report.

Oh, don't get me wrong--this won't be prosecuted and no one cares. But it is interesting to think about.

* * *

Ah, getting rid of Bernie makes sense because they have Bloomberg buying his way into the election. The Democrats changed the rules so he could be in the debate tomorrow; I think Bloomberg is going to be the one they try to nominate, if only they can do something about all those pesky kids voting for Bernie Sanders.
In the wings, perched on a couple telephone books, is Mike Bloomberg, waiting to try to buy his way in as the sensible sorta-center candidate. Seems like a good plan. When the Bernie bros are once again denied their victory by the blatant cheating of the Democrat establishment, they'll flock to the bite-sized billionaire. He'll totally get the nomination, or in his case, the gnome-ination.
Except that only about half of the Bernie voters will "flock" to Bloomberg; the others will either vote Green (or Communist but I repeat myself) or stay home.

They might pin their hopes on Bloomberg, but I don't think that'll work for them. Still: I'm going on record now, betting the Democrat ticket will be Bloomberg/Buttplug.

* * *

A shithead who worked on the show for two out of its thirty-one seasons thinks he has the right to tell people they can't use still frames for memes.

I have a sudden urge to start posting right-wing memes using images from The Simpsons.

* * *

Boeing, boeing, gone. No, that was cheap and cheesy. Anyway, Starliner had bigger problems than not making it to ISS for a docking test.
During its quarterly meeting on Thursday, NASA's Aersopace Safety Advisory Panel dropped some significant news about a critical commercial crew test flight. The panel revealed that Boeing's Starliner may have been lost during a December mission had a software error not been found and fixed while the vehicle was in orbit.

The software issue was identified during testing on the ground after Starliner's launch, said panel member Paul Hill,... The problem would have interfered with the service module's (SM) separation from the Starliner capsule.

"While this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected it would have led to erroneous thruster firing and uncontrolled motion during SM separation for deorbit, with the potential for catastrophic spacecraft failure," Hill said during the meeting.
In other words, as launched, the bloody thing didn't work.

They had to patch the software to make it work.

ANd here's where it gets juicy:
"The panel has a larger concern with the rigor of Boeing's verification processes," Hill said. "As a result, the panel recommends that NASA pursue not just the root cause of these specific flight-software anomalies but also a Boeing assessment of and corrective actions for Boeing's flight-software integration and testing processes."

The safety panel also recommended that NASA conduct "an even broader" assessment of Boeing's Systems Engineering and Integration processes. Only after these assessments, Hill said, should NASA determine whether the Starliner spacecraft will conduct a second, uncrewed flight test into orbit before astronauts fly on board. (Boeing recently set aside $410 million to pay for that contingency).

Finally, before the meeting ended, the chair of the safety panel, Patricia Sanders, noted yet another ongoing evaluation of Boeing. "Given the potential for systemic issues at Boeing, I would also note that NASA has decided to proceed with an organizational safety assessment with Boeing as they previously conducted with SpaceX," she said.
You thought that the problems with the 737MAX were confined just to that program? Ha! They're endemic to the entire damned company, and it's not even remotely surprising.

There are two ways to staff an engineering department. One way costs a lot more, and your workforce looks...monochromatic...but you get people with solid knowledge in their fields who can turn out good work and build for you a good reliable product.

The other way, you can celebrate how "diverse" your workforce is, and it has the advantage of being significantly cheaper...but while it gets you a product that looks pretty good, it turns out to have unexpected deficiencies.

Guess which one Boeing chose. And that's why they got 737MAX.

Guess which one Intel chose. And that's why AMD is eating its lunch in the processor market right now.

* * *

Just remember that to be a leftist you must first be a hypocrite.
But what's the *real* reason why they’re not creating their own thing, when they manifestly hate what they're actually colonizing? Let the game designer explain:
Yes, we wanted to do something with Cthulhu because Cthulhu sells. they did it badly, ignoring whole swaths of the source material.

Well, they don't want the wrong people to buy their games, anyway, so I think making a SJW mishmash out of Lovecraft's ouerve will probably help with that goal.

* * *

"Buttplug" is easier to spell than "Buttigieg".

* * *

Well, they finally took down the Touji Beach live camera. *sigh* Made it to early February before they did, though.

  • #7750: I did it again!


  • #7749: No, it didn't happen


  • #7748: Decidedly warm outside, old boy


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