Screams the headlines in various media: "Oh nos, H5N1 is 50% fatal in humans, but there's nothing to fear as so far there are only two  human cases -- but we have detected it in cows and cats, so here it comes."

Ok folks, a few facts.

First, avian influenza is really nasty if you're a chicken.  It is especially nasty if you're a chicken confined into a small space for maximum egg-laying capacity and one of the other birds in there is sick.  The reason they kill all the birds in such a circumstance in a given facility when that happens is that a huge percentage of them will die anyway and waiting for it to burn out and leave however many survivors means you can't replace the dead ones with more live ones (they'll simply get it and many of them will die too) and your egg production goes to shit, obviously.  Thus the fastest way through the problem is to cull them all and replace and the modest lifetime of a laying hen (and even less by a lot for a meat chicken) means the conferred immunity in the survivors is almost-entirely worthless.

However, this is typically not really a threat to anything else because the immune system in a bird is very different than the immune system in a mammal such as a cow, dog, cat, pig -- or human.  Thus while you can detect virus in any of them in their nose as we saw with Covid using a PCR test does not tell you that the virus is live and reproducing at a level sufficient to cause disease; you would have to culture for that and that both takes time and is expensive, so "detection" via such a test is bullshit.  By definition for something to be diseased it must have some disorder or symptom of metabolic disruption; mere detection of viral fragments does not tell you anything at all.  Indeed even detecting virus in something like raw cow's milk tells you nothing about whether the cow is diseased or you would be if you drank it.  We have viruses (and  bacteria) all through and around us all the time without producing disease; a single gram of feces contains billions of bacteria and viruses in a healthy animal, including humans.  It is only when your body's immune system becomes overwhelmed to the point of physical impact on your bodily systems that you, or any other entity, are in fact diseased.

Second, if the virus is 50% fatal in humans then why is it that despite huge numbers of people working around birds and other animals allegedly "infected" the single documented human symptomatic case resulted in conjunctivitis -- that is, red around the eyes for a bit?  A virus that is 50% fatal and airborne in a chicken coop or dairy barn should have infected and killed half the people working there and obviously that has not and is not happening.  One dude got..... pink eye from being infected.  Whoopie-deal, he was uncomfortable for a bit, now has immunity, and is fine.

That is, given what we know about avian influenza it is in fact almost impossible for non-birds to actually get symptomatically ill from it, say much less be killed by it.  Further, getting it and having a few non-serious symptoms confers immunity at least in part so what's the problem?

You do remember all the PCR hysteria from the last four years, yes?  You also do remember that if you crank up the PCR cycle count high enough you will detect said fragments in huge numbers of things that are not in fact ill and never will get ill because what you're detecting is what they picked up in the environment and not something that is actively replicating in their nasal passages with any sort of efficiency.  Only the latter can produce disease or be transmitted to anyone else.

Further, the facts are that avian influenza is neither new or uncommon.  It happens all the time; its a respiratory virus and its natural reservoir is, as the name implies, birds.  There are a lot of birds and as a result there will always be avian influenza; like all viruses if an infection manages to get to another victim before the first one either shakes it or dies, it continues onward.  With somewhere between fifty and hundreds of billions of birds on the planet  (somewhere between a half-dozen and fifty per human; yeah, we're that uncertain how many there are) there is zero possibility of us ever getting rid of this sort of virus and as with all other respiratory viruses it reassorts itself among hosts all the time when it happens to get into a bird that has some other viral infection at the same time.  That's how viruses mutate, absent human tampering.

This is where the next important fact comes from: Zoonosis is statistically so far down the probability curve with avian influenza it has to be rated as roughly as likely as an asteroid killing us all next week because otherwise, with this wild imbalance in the population of the two types of animal we would have been, through the ages, relentlessly assaulted by these zoonotic viruses and, since modern medicine is quite new we'd all have been dead before we were born.

Now let's contrast with swine, which we know have a decent immune congruence with humans (thus experiments to use them for organ sources, insulin and similar) and a history of zoonosis.  H1N1 in particular, we are pretty sure, got to humans via that path -- that was the 1918 version of flu that whacked a huge number of people and it has come around several times since, including in late 2019 and early 2020, and I personally got it by the way -- it is damn nasty but I'm not dead, am I?  Why didn't it kill a huge number of people in late 2019?  Because influenza, in humans, usually doesn't directly kill -- it is the secondary bacterial infections that do, and we now have antibiotics we didn't have in 1918 -- thus those infections can be managed where before you either fought it off on your own or you died.  There are perhaps 800 million swine in the world or about ten humans per pig as compared with somewhere between five and fifty birds per human.

In other words if the zoonotic risk was even one hundredth that of swine we'd all have all been repeatedly screwed by this and we're not -- the reason is simply that the immune system of a bird and its biome environment are different enough that zoonosis is so far down the list of risks that its safely ignored.

But enter the people in our nation and elsewhere funded by our government who like to play with genetics -- particularly viral genetics.  You'd think they learned something from screwing around with coronaviruses, but you'd be wrong.

Nobody has been arrested for what happened with Covid despite the clear evidence that it was known what they were doing and the congruence between Wuhan's original strain in the "wild" and a technology transfer in the months prior back into the US, which is documented, is genetically an almost exact match.  We also know that multiple people, including many in government agencies, directly lied as to what happened surrounding and immediately preceding Covid showing up.  While we can't exactly arrest people in China we sure can do so here and we can destroy the institutions that were involved in this, which directly and indirectly led to more US deaths than every war we've been involved in since WWII along with promulgating a dangerous countermeasure that we now know had material evidence of its harm deliberately concealed during the original trials.

We've done none of that and that is all of our responsibility because if the government won't arrest people when their actions lead to a biological agent's release into the environment, whether directly or otherwise, then who's responsibility is it to do so?  The fucking tooth fairy?

Worse, every single one of our Congresspeople and the entire Executive currently in power never mind Trump's administration which was in power when that started and was in power when the proposal was submitted to DARPA and turned down, thus it WAS KNOWN when he was in office, have done nothing to stomp on this crap even on a forward basis, say much less appropriately prosecuting those involved in what happened the last time.

Again, I will note that there is no evidence that avian influenza has or can naturally cross into humans and you had better drill that into your damned head because it is fact and that fact is why you are here and alive right here, right now.  Anyone who claims otherwise is a lying sack of crap and is likely trying to cover up their own criminal acts or complicity and even conspiracy with someone else's actions.

Therefore if it happens and there is such an epidemic human intervention is, well beyond reasonable doubt responsible and the United States Congress, each and every member, along with every member of federal and state Executive departments including but not limited to so-called "law enforcement" that have refused to arrest anyone for any of the bullshit over the last four years and in fact both funded and directly enabled it will have been directly responsible and must be held PERSONALLY responsible and liable for said outbreak and all harm that comes.

These people know damned well what they're playing with because it went wrong the last time and there is a statistically ZERO probability, much less than with a coronavirus, that such an event if it does happen this time, was of natural origin.

Those in positions of authority have the power to put a final and absolute stop to this crap right here, right now and forevermore and if they don't and the statistically impossible "natural thing" occurs this time there is ZERO question that it was man-engineered and released through either negligence or intent.

NO MORE GODDAMNED EXCUSES.

You can take all your "grieving" and shove it straight up your own ass.

Why?

Because the people bleating and "grieving" as government officials are all responsible, personally responsible, for felons like this being on the street after being caught committing crimes involving violence and other serious violations of the law and they are then released without bond and without any sort of monitoring.

Further, we keep seeing their "mothers" and others show up whining about "he diddunuttin" when the facts are that in ChiCONGO said person fired 11 rounds at someone without provocation and in MemCONGO the shooter opened fire without provocation as well.  Yes, said targeted person in both cases happened to be a cop but that's irrelevant; if you fire a weapon unprovoked at someone you deserve it if you get turned into a decent rendition of hamburger.  I have zero empathy if that is the result because it should be the result each and every time.

If it was perhaps you'd think about it before you drew that gun, eh?  I mean let's be real -- even an ape can figure that one out and if he can't, well, then his being dead is better than being alive for everyone else.

In the case in Memphis the shooter was recently arrested in a stolen vehicle with a fully-automatic weapon and was charged with possession of said stolen vehicle and said automatic weapon.  So why the hell was he, having been caught red-handed, on the streets?

I remind you that automatic weapons, otherwise known as machine guns, are illegal to possess unless you have a BATFE Form for each of them and in addition using an unregistered device to make a firearm a machine gun can't be registered anyway.  That crime carries a penalty of ten years in the slammer at the federal level all by itself, never mind being a state firearm offense along with the grand theft auto charge -- both STATE felonies.

So this clown was out on the streets (guess his race -- oh you don't have to, just have a look) as he was released without bond and apparently without any actual monitoring either despite being caught in a stolen car and having an extremely-illegal machinegun.  Oh, and it gets better -- the case is reported to have been accepted for federal prosecution (on the machine gun I presume) yet a County Judicial Commissioner (who they conveniently don't name -- gee, I wonder why) let him out on his own recognizance and without any proactive and effective monitoring.

How do we know this?

The vehicle the suspect was in when the shooting took place was also stolen and he also obviously (and very illegally, as he was now charged with a felony) obtained another gun so that Shelby County jackass who issued the ROR release didn't deter anything at all.

In ChiCONGO the person who opened fire was just released on another felony charge as well and thus was a prohibited person as he was under indictment for a felony and therefore could not legally possess a gun.  Once again he was wandering the streets which means he was let out without any enforced conditions on where he went or what he did -- if said "conditions" were allegedly imposed nobody gave a shit when he wasn't adhering to said constraints and they did not immediately throw him in jail for driving around in his vehicle.

We are well beyond the point where either (1) we have to start cheering when public officials (including but not limited to cops) get capped by these thugs who they all let out after being caught violating the law, with no consequence being paid by said thugs for their actions or (2) we have to start taking out the trash ourselves and impose what amounts to a hard separation between the peaceable citizens and the assholes, including in the second group all of the so-called government officials who think that skin color is a reason for you to be able to steal cars, convert firearms to machine guns and not immediately wind up either in jail or with sufficient bond and monitoring pending trial so you can't steal any more cars or shoot at people.

If the Executive branch of the State will not do its job when their inaction is the direct reason a government employee gets shot I am not sorry, I am not mourning, I am not anything of the sort.  I am instead offering a toast of some FINE single-malt Scotch and a loud "hizzah!" because that VERY SAME GOVERNMENT sat on its ass, let a violent asshole out on the streets when they had every ability to keep him in jail or under effective supervision pending trial AND THUS THE DEAD PERSON, WHO IS PART OF THE VERY SAME GOVERNMENT THAT PUT THE PUBLIC AT DEMONSTRATED EXTREME AND REALIZED RISK DESERVED WHAT THEY GOT.

BETTER THAT SAID PERSON BE THE ONE DEAD THAN AN INNOCENT CIVILIAN WHO HAD NO ABILITY TO DO ANYTHING TO PREVENT THIS SINCE CIVILIANS CANNOT CHARGE AND PROSECUTE, AND IN FACT THE PEACEFUL CIVILIANS IN THE AREA RELIED ON ALL THOSE OTHER ASSHOLES IN THE GOVERNMENT TO DO THEIR JOBS WHICH THEY WILLINGLY AND INTENTIONALY REFUSED BECAUSE SAID ACCUSED WAS A "DINDUNUTTIN BOOOOOY."

Don't give me any bullshit, Governor Lee, about how this was a "local" or "isolated" failure.  You're lying, that is a SIN so your professed faith is ALSO false and here's proof from the Tennessee STATE Statute books:

A person commits an offense who intentionally or knowingly possesses, manufactures, transports, repairs or sells:

• An explosive or an explosive weapon;

• A device principally designed, made or adapted for delivering or shooting an explosive weapon;

• A machine gun;

• A short-barrel rifle or shotgun;

• Hoax device;
  
  
• Knuckles; or
  
  
• Any other implement for infliction of serious bodily injury or death that has no common lawful purpose.

Nevermind that the stolen vehicle is a state felony as well.  Assuming the vehicle was worth at least $10,000 (but less than $60,000) it was a Class C felony which carries a sentence of not less than three nor more than fifteen years in the state slammer.

So spare me any whining about Memphis.  The State had every right and in fact duty to bring State felony charges and take said person into custody on same if the City of Memphis refused to do so and if the STATE had done so he would have been in jail and unable to commit this crime.  Memphis has become a shithole as a direct result of this crap and I want to know how many cops will remain on the force and be target practice for assholes if the county and State will not put a stop to this shit right here, right now, period.

I'm done with all the whining, crying and praying by cops and other so-called "do-gooders", especially the black poverty pimps and their enablers, when this sort of crap happens.

I no longer care when cops get whacked by these thugs nor will I care if any member of the State or Local Government, or any of their family members, get whacked in each and every instance where the offender was previously caught doing something carrying felony penalties and was released pending trial with no monitoring or enforcement of same or, even worse, if they were released with no charges and trial at all!

In both these cases -- and many more -- that is exactly what happened and these same thugs attack, steal from, maim and murder innocent citizens who have no actual power to indict, prosecute or imprison.  That is a power our society has delegated to the Executive and if they refuse to perform their duties under said laws then it is time for all citizens to cheer when they are the ones who pay for that refusal personally, up to and including paying with their lives.

In fact I propose that Friday night become toast a dead government official night until and unless all this bullshit DEI/Racebaiting bullshit STOPS with 100% finality, every time, and anyone who gets caught stealing cars or with an illegal machine gun gets to sit in jail or under effective 24x7 electronic supervision with a nice, high bail to be forfeited if they try to cheat until their trial occurs and if found guilty they do hard time in prison every single time as well.

I know that some counties in this state actually force accountability and monitoring with ankle monitors, cash bonds and similar for far lesser offenses than stealing cars and possessing illegal machine guns.  Shelby County has no excuse for their outrageous refusal to either lock this jackass up or maintain effective knowledge and control of what he was doing post his original arrest and neither does TBI, the State Executive generally and the State Attorney General.

Felony laws related to violent criminal acts just like anti-trust laws are not suggestions but it appears that in basically every jurisdiction, including "Red, Conservative" states such as mine, the violent felony criminal code is in fact a set of suggestions if and only if the offender is black, brown, or some form of illegal immigrant.  IF you are in one of those "protected classes" you can, by this example, literally steal cars and convert weapons to machine guns and nobody will lock you up pending trial nor require any cash bond for either even when you are caught red-handed in the act.

It is for that reason and that reason ONLY that these cops got shot.

FUCK YOU Governor Lee, and all of those in the State and Memphis city prosecutorial and judicial apparatus. YOU DID THIS.

And DOUBLE FUCK YOU to our Legislature, including specifically Speaker Sexton who of course was bleating all over Twitter on this event, a legislature that continues to fund and rubber stamp Executive agencies, including the State Police, State AG and the entire State prosecutorial apparatus who refuse to do their goddamn jobs when city and other local officials will not.  The power of the purse rests exclusively in the Legislature and thus continued funding of demonstrably corrupt entities who refuse to discharge their duties makes our Legislators all direct enablers of these felons.

I reminder Speaker Sexton that Tennessee has an "ouster" law that bears on this situation as well -- it permits an action to remove an official who has violated or corrupted their oath of office, including by willingly neglecting to perform the duties of said office.  When are we going to see that be filed and executed demanding the AG act against the STATE officers, Prosecutors and other officials who refused to step in and arrest this asshole when Memphis did not, along with the Memphis officials as well Mr. Speaker?

Those of us who care about the law and a peaceable society are tired of the excuses made for letting violent, known felons walk away from offenses without detention, monitoring or any other sort of enforced bail condition who then go on to commit further offenses of the same seriousness or worse than what prompted the original arrest.  This deliberate malfeasance is directly responsible for serious property and personal crime across this and every other state where it occurs and now it has directly resulted in both maiming and death.

Fix it right now or may you all be damned.

Friedman famously claimed that world "free trade", which he fully knew would begin with Chinese and Mexicans earning 1/20th or less of their American counterparts, would almost-immediately begin to normalize wages over there.  That is, having "tasted freedom" the workers would essentially force companies to pay competitive world wages and their standard of living would wildly improve.  This would turn them into consumers of the very same products they produced and thus greatly expand the economy as a whole.  While he acknowledged this distribution would not be even the premise was that the great improvement generally would outweigh any modest declines in established markets.

He was wrong.  NAFTA was passed and what Ross Perot said would be the case turned out to be true; wages in Mexico did not normalize with America.  We offshored labor to Bangladesh and Vietnam for textiles and nearly everything to China and wages did not normalize with the western world over there.

Likewise in many American cities in the 50s and 60s we built "projects" for low-income housing.  Cabrini Green was one of the most-notorious of course but hardly the only one.  Some of these were constructed to house displaced people during the Eisenhower Expressway system construction through major cities, but hardly all had that as their excuse.  These places turned into hotbeds of crime, drugs and squalor, and we were told it was the concentration that was the problem; dispersing said people with Section 8 vouchers all over the urban and suburban landscape would cause them to experience good culture instead of bad and thus adopt the good elements, at least in part.

That's not what happened.  Instead the "bad culture" expanded wildly into the urban and suburban school districts, destroying the quality of education for everyone.  The drugs, thuggery and similar nonsense expanded there too, along with the criminal element that inevitably comes with all of it.

Joe Biden nominated Kato Crews for a federal district judgeship.  Crews, who is currently a magistrate judge, was asked during his confirmation hearing how he'd evaluate a Brady motion.  He did not know what it is yet it forms one of the pillars of due process of law and any graduate of law school or person who passed the bar would know this.  Therefore it is fact that irrespective of any alleged credential he may have that allegedly "qualifies" him to be a lawyer -- or judge -- he never actually learned any of that material and thus did not actually earn the credential; how did he manage to get that seat?

Obviously Kato Crews' cultural values do not include actually mastering material before being given a credential, a rather basic precept in any honest society.

That people who fail this basic test are not and will not be immediately removed from any position of power and authority, no matter who they are, points directly toward an impending collapse in our nation's capacity to deliver all manner of things that are utterly-reliant on basic competence.  To refuse to demand ALL said persons' removal and back up that demand with whatever is necessary is a choice our society has made and it has consequences you are not going to like.

South Africa infamously had an "apartheid" government structure for 43 years; black people were formally and legally disadvantaged, unable to be treated as equals despite being in the majority of the population, from 1948 to 1994.  The nation, despite formal and legal segregation had a functional economy and government structure.  In the 25 years since that system was formally ended the nation has essentially devolved into gang violence, thuggery and is teetering on the collapse of basic goods and services such as production of basic foodstuffs (farming), electricity and water supply.  Please explain how, if there was no cultural or other significant difference whether in capacity or culture between the two groups this occurred and for extra credit please explain why anyone should consider assistance of any sort to this nation when the majority of the people there, who demanded equality and got it, are in fact fully and completely responsible for this breakdown in the basics of any civilized society and economy.

MASHELE: You've got a political crisis, which started in 1997, where the then-CEO of Eskom alerted government and told them that, if we do not get additional capacity in, we are going to start load shedding from 2007, which is exactly what happened.

Post-apartheid the electrical system operator warned the government that if they did not act to incentivize infrastructure and investment this would happen.  The newly-empowered majority government did nothing of the sort -- with fully ten years of fair warning -- and thus collapse it is.

Lest you think I'm bagging on people because of their race -- nope.  I'm bagging on people because of their culture and unwillingness to accept that which is when it comes to physical fact and deal with it.  Biden and his family anyone?  A wife in the family who gets a "payment" for no service of note?  A son who likes to smoke meth and, it appears, shower with underage girls in the family, never mind all manner of apparently-corrupt business dealings in multiple nations, being paid huge sums of money when he has zero relevant business or operational experience in the fields at hand.  This man winds up President, which tells me everything I need to know about the culture of this nation, particularly when his opponent in the other major political party just got done paying hospitals bonuses in the amount of tens of thousands of dollars per-person for procedures we knew did not work against a novel viral threat -- even when the patient died.

That is functionally equivalent to the Palestinians sending family members $10,000 when one of their sons wears a suicide vest and blows up a bunch of Israelis.  If that is an unacceptable act worthy of United States and international sanction tell me why the man who paid hospitals bonuses when they used known worthless treatments on your Grandmother and she died just had a huge crowd show up to cheer him on for a second Presidential run instead of running that rat bastard out of town?

When both major political parties post up candidates such as this and the people through their representative processes allow, enable and cause that to happen the cultural problem resides in us.

The instant rhetoric whenever someone engages in a school shooting is "ban guns."  How about banning thugs, virtually all of whom self-identify before the final incident?  We just had that happen in Denver, did we not?  I don't care how old you are or aren't or what race, sex or other "tribe" you belong to; if you're violent and disruptive you have no right to destroy the rights of others under some rubric of "equity."

You know, this thing called "The Rule of Law" which says when you demonstrate you're unfit to be in polite society through your actions we put you somewhere where you can't harm peaceful citizens.

I think they're called "prisons", but I could be mistaken.

There have always been thugs among humanity who, given the opportunity, will take advantage of others.  This is not new.  There have also always been narcissists among humanity who are absolutely certain they are the most-important person in the universe.

Positions of power attract these people just like crap attracts flies.

The entire reason we have an alleged "Rule of Law" and no "Divine Right Of Kings" in this nation, and such was ensconced in the Constitution of the United States is that history has shown repeatedly over more than two thousand years that as soon as you allow any group to be exempt from said laws the thugs are attracted there and you wind up with abused and dead people by the score.

Tell me again how Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted and imprisoned for sexually trafficking minors, managed to be convicted for that crime when not one person to whom she trafficked said minors to has been indicted, tried or imprisoned?  Its rather difficult to traffic minors for sex without someone consuming that service and in each and every case doing so is a serious felony.  If you believe the only person she "trafficked" them to was Epstein you're a few cans short of a sixpack; the flight logs from his aircraft make quite clear an awful lot of people were flying around on that plane, nearly all of them men and underage girls, and in addition no plausible legal explanation for where he got all of his money from has surfaced.  So where are the other prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments?  You see we still have "The Divine Right of Kings" don't we, and we, as Americans, have not sacked our government for continuing that practice despite it being the very reason this nation exists and why we shot all those British soldiers, ejecting them from America!

I'm supposed to be mad enough to ban guns over the shooting in Nashville despite the fact that a gun in the hands of a non-thug at that instant in time ended the slaughter?  At the same time 107 people, as of 3/20/2023 were shot and killed this year in Chicago, all but two of whom were apparently killed by thugs (the other two were, it appears, legitimate police stops of a thug-in-process.

The shooter in Nashville was apparently a 28 year old woman and the "early reports" were that she was apparently "in her teens."  Oh really?  Why isn't her name all over the place if she was known to be 28 years old and since when is a 28 year old apparently "in her teens"?

Then we find out -- the shooter, according to the Nashville cops, identified as a man and so gee, was biologically a woman. A copy of a social media profile with pronouns has been found.  Gee, no culture problem there right?  I get it, you didn't like being born with a slot between your legs instead of a hose.  I didn't like being born a dude who wasn't really all that good at hand-eye coordination sports because my right eye isn't as good as my left and thus, for example, I will never be any good at hitting a pitched baseball, but there's no "bionic" replacement so there's also nothing I can do about it as I was born this way.

I didn't go shoot up a school because I sucked at baseball when I was a kid nor did I demand people coddle me because I couldn't process an incoming baseball fast enough to accurately swing a bat at it.  Not do I have a right to play in the Major Leagues even though, no matter how much effort I put into training, I will never be capable of hitting a fastball.  Ever.

We all have something we'd rather be different.  The cultural difference between "well, that's how the cookie crumbles; I have to figure out how to deal with it" and "this is reason to scream, shout, demand accommodations and then go kill a bunch of people" is, well, rather profound.

WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE, AMERICA?

Rational response (this is who I am, like it or not, so I have to deal with it and figure out how to be ok with it) or kowtowing to the screaming demands of those who, when they don't get what they wish they were and can never be or have, turn rabid?

THIS IS THE CHOICE.

Biden's administration immediately tried to frame this as yet more "gun control" nonsense which is a nice attempt from deflection from the fact that he and his administration have funded the slaughter of tens of thousands of people in and around Ukraine which incidentally shielded wild-eyed corruption over there, was a direct beneficiary of our corruption of their political process and then "demanded" literal tanks in the streets -- and got them, from us.

Oh, never mind the LIE that there is no objective reality with it comes to things you cannot change and are fixed at the moment of conception too.

Why do I bring this up specifically?

Because its really all part of the same issue.  Prior to 1968 you could literally buy a gun out of the Sears Catalog by mail order and have it delivered to your door by the post office.  There was an entire section in the "wish catalog" that came out every fall before Christmas; I remember that catalog as a boy since the back part of it was Christmas toys.

Yet there was no such problem.  Indeed it was common for boys to have a shotgun in the rack of the back of their truck in rural areas because they went hunting after school with it.

Why was there no such problem?

Because if you were a thug or decided that your specific issues meant someone else had to kowtow to you our culture was that you were not allowed to get away with that crap -- you sucked it up or not, but you could not impose your insanity on others.  Oh sure, there were exceptions -- the mob in some cities and similar -- but not in the general case.  You hit a teacher or threw a chair at her you got expelled and your parents had to deal with finding a way to get you an education at their own expense.  You got neither an IEP or a "cry room" if you were incapable of being in the same space with others and not disrupting their learning.  If they didn't or couldn't act as parents you wound up having to fend for yourself.  If that ended with you in prison for life tough crap.  If you attacked someone else you got jailed.  If you did it again you got jailed for a lot longer and you got to break rocks or make license plates as your highest and best life achievement.  If you believed you were a woman trapped in a man's body, or vice-versa, you were told to suck it up buckwheat -- your chromosomes were set at conception and there's nothing you can do about it.   If you wanted to be wild-eyed crazy that was your prerogative until and unless you committed a criminal act against someone else -- and then off to jail you went.  If you were a man but liked to dress as a woman that was fine, but we still called you "Joe" and there was nothing you could do about it and no, you could not be on the woman's track or swim team.  We did not allow a parade of people to break the law coming into the United States and if you tried that you were summarily ejected, we did not allow a river of fentanyl to flow in via said illegal border crossings and we did not coddle people who committed violent offenses against others no matter their age.

Whatever gifts and abilities, for better or worse, you were born with that's what you had.  Our culture instilled the viewpoint that you should make the best use of your unique abilities to the best of your capacity, and if you choose not to for whatever reason that was fine -- but the cost of that decision was on you and nobody else.  If you tried to make it someone else's problem you'd be told "NO!" in a firm but compassionate manner -- and if you refused to accept that answer it would be enforced if necessary.

With this culture we advanced in this nation as no other country ever has over a similar period of time.  We conquered atomic energy for peaceful purpose, we put men on the moon multiple times, we built reusable spacecraft that could fly to orbit and return and we created and distributed all manner of apparently-miraculous things, including electric lights, electricity on demand, automobiles capable of being bought by the average person's salary, calculators you could hold in your hand, computers in an office, then on your desk and finally in your pocket and more.

But then over the last several decades we decided we could instead create and nurtured a culture where flat-out false claims and demands for "equality" when in fact that is impossible are tolerated and even rewarded, such as the insane "reparations" nonsense out in San Francisco, claims that a man is in fact a woman., that one is entitled to a law or other degree or diploma if one hasn't learned the material and repeatedly releasing violent accused felons on trivial or even no bail whatsoever.  Friends of mine vacationing in Nashville a few months ago were held up at gunpoint overnight in their rental by armed thugs.  To the best of my knowledge the assailants have not been caught.  Anyone care to guess whether they had priors and if so why weren't they in prison?

A couple of years ago violent bands of thugs burned and looted cities all over this nation.  How many were imprisoned for a decade for committing arson or commercial looting?  Effectively zero.  What does that tell you about how our culture has evolved to consider such thuggery nothing more than a nice night out on the town?

It is all the same thing through this article and these examples -- culture.  We have enabled and celebrated thuggery in Mexico (drug gangs), China (Uyghurs, Christians, Muslims .et.al.) and right here in the United States (drug gangs, illegal immigrants slaughtering a girl in Iowa, BLM and antifa "mostly-peaceful protestors" and more.)

This has extended into our government with both Trump (paying hospitals a bonus when they kill you) and Biden (mandates that had no basis in law or fact, "defund the police" out of Harris, shielding from prosecution his son for apparent criminal acts and more) never mind our Congress which has enabled repeated scams and schemes (Solyndra and all the various Covid-time period rip-offs anyone) going back decades and accelerating on an unbroken basis over the last 20+ years.  Rather than punish the funding source for the 9/11 attacks (Saudi Arabia) we instead waged war on TWO nations that had nothing to do with it (Iran and Iraq) and killed a few million children in one of them; one of the most-outrageous examples of thuggery in human history explicitly endorsed and permitted by the American people.

Spare me the crocodile tears until our culture changes and we decide, as a body politic, that this crap is going to stop -- and mean it.

As many of you have read in these pages Ishmael has contributed several articles on the clown world challenges of the last few years.  No, that's not me writing under another name, and yes, it is one contributor.

Let me offer, at this point, a different perspective: We won, they lost.

The outcome was in doubt for quite some time.  But now, its not.

Rasmussen ran a poll not long ago and found a very large percentage of people who are convinced that someone they knew was seriously injured or killed by the vexxines.  Remember the old mantra -- safe and effective?  Its no longer an opinion that holds sway among the American people.

But its not just opinion anymore: Now its fact, as we keep seeing.  Report after report, even showing up in the mainstream media, of people taking the Fauci Flop.  Allegedly healthy people, even elite level athletes, suddenly collapsing and in many cases dying.

Reality is that everyone dies and death is not uncommon.  But unexpected, sudden death among people younger than 60 or so is quite unusual.  Especially among athletes and other people of prominence, except from drugs, which of course have always been a scourge and have claimed people all the time.  Elvis infamously died on the crapper and upon autopsy they found ten prescription drugs in size and a seriously damaged liver.  Not all that long ago my sister died under similar circumstances, and from similar root causes.  I've had friends who also succumbed from the same sort of abuse of substances and that sucks.

But many of these are not slow suicides by drug abuse -- or, for that matter, by potato chip and sugared beverages.  They're "side effects" of something peddled to the masses and everyone knows it.  Those who were conned are scared of meeting God and having to explain their personal insanity to him, thus that fearful look in their eye.  Their attacks on you both over the last two years and today are from that exact reason: They're scared they got it wrong and you had it right -- and they may be literally walking while already dead.  Those who conned others or worse, who were enforcers either through soft coercion or even literal force, such as politicians, police officers, CEOs and supervisory people are not just scared they might be next but that their particular fiefdom and ambitions are screwed, never mind their personal life and wealth, perhaps terminally so.

Good.

The suck that the so-called "mitigations" caused from destruction of two+ years of children's education and productivity in our economy is nowhere near finished.  In fact the worst of it is just starting.  A virus that for many including healthy young people was actually less dangerous than the flu has done what essentially every highly mutable respiratory virus does: Entropy is not a suggestion any more than the laws of thermodynamics (which is what gives rise to entropy, by the way) and nothing escapes it.  Covid followed the same pattern that OC43 did back in the 1890s when nobody knew a damn thing about the structure of viruses nor were there any shots.  Even with our tampering the laws of physics were not to be denied or evaded; man may create God in an image that suits him, but he can't make hydrogen and oxygen turn into gold instead of water.

There is a maxim I didn't much discuss when I was running a business (because I certainly preferred not to educate my competition!) which is that you don't make money selling things -- you make money when you buy them.  Its has and always will be true.  When you take advantage of someone else's stupidity (which you're not responsible for since you didn't contribute to the stupid act) you acquire an advantage your competitor cannot outrun or outmaneuver whether its in business or your personal life.  MCSNet managed several of these, with one of the larger being a deal we found for office space (which of course every business needs) that was at about 20% of the going rate as a result of another firm's stupidity.  I was able to capitalize on that because I had stashed back cash, acquire a five-year lease on said office space and the cost of operations advantage over others was immense -- and dropped immediately and durably to the firm's bottom line.

The "suck" is going to tempt you in the next few years to whine and cry.  Don't.  That's self-destructive, especially if it prompts you to do something stupid like drown yourself in a bottle of gin.  Instead, if you're one of the people who said "no" and meant it build reserves, live frugally, shed unnecessary debt and expenses and be patient.  The stupidity that has run through not just the United States but worldwide over the last three years has not been local or minor: It has been immense, it has crossed nearly all professions and it has sucked into its maw the majority of Americans, say much less those in other nations.  The opportunities this will generate are also going to be immense, particularly when coupled with all the other stupidity of the last 20 years, including so-called "diversity hiring."  Just look at one minor piece of this -- the recent NOTAM meltdown in civil aviation.  NOTAMs even got "diversity renamed" to Notice to Air Missions when in fact it is Notice to Airmen.  It really is a trivial problem from a computing point of view; just a list of notices that deal with a specific route or place to warn pilots of local and abnormal conditions, such as a restriction on flying into a given set of coordinates during a certain time.  I could probably code up a system to do this in a weekend and run it in a single rack of equipment for the entire nation, then triplicate that in three strategic locations so there are two always-on spares -- literally.  Well, the FAA apparently did not care about making sure this "non-safety critical" (after all, if it fails it doesn't directly crash a plane) system actually worked and was redundant, and it failed.  The problem is that without it you can't fly because if you take off without having the NOTAMs for the area you're operating in and go somewhere you can't as a pilot your ticket gets punched, so said failure basically grounded the entire US non-military aviation system, commercial and civilian, for several hours.

This occurred because the stupid has run rampant throughout or civil and government systems where competence is no longer the gating factor to employment and supervisory positions but rather has been replaced with blind obedience to whatever the flavor of the day happens to be whether its hiring someone due to their skin color or their pronouns and then, in the last couple of years, whether they damaged their bodies stupidly because of a bunch of money-grubbing jackasses along with their enablers in the media and government.

All this will unwind and those who did the stupid things will be the ones who pay for it.  Yes, you'll have to live through the suck and we're all going to have to deal with that.  If you're younger you have never lived through a real suck.  That must be nice.  I'm almost 60 and I did -- both little sucks (e.g. early 1990s) and one pretty nasty one in the late 70s and early 80s which was caused by stupidity and arrogance, just like this one.  That latter one went on for about five years before it turned and started to improve but if you were prepared and took advantage you did damn well.  I was both too young and personally stupid at the time but I learned from that and in the 1990s pounced on its little brother.  That smaller one came at a great time for me professionally and was a big part of MCSNet being successful.  Some people levered up and won but most who did that lost with many literally losing everything.  The prepared who didn't lever up did quite well without the risk of a zero; winning less is ok unless you're a pig, in which case go ahead and grab for that Ring of Power -- just don't whine if you fall off the cliff into the lava instead of getting it.

Those of you who said NO -- the most-powerful single word in the English language -- are already winning.  You don't wake up every morning wondering if tonight you will go to bed and never wake up from a clot you throw in your sleep.  You might have been persecuted, fired and ostracized but you have your health and are not wondering if there's a ticking time bomb in your chest.

You should contemplate putting your unvexxed status everywhere -- including especially on resumes.

Wear it proudly -- you were RIGHT and its a perfectly-valid marketing point to use both personally and professionally.

Those who cheated (e.g. bribing the doc $50 to squirt it in the trash) are arguably in the worst situation of all.  You branded your own chart by doing that and in today's world with EMR (electronic medical records) you can never undo it.  If you ever used that fake credential you committed an offense against the person who you gave it to and might have committed a crime but even if it wasn't a crime if and when you get caught (and yes, it is possible for it to be proved you never got the actual shots) or try to walk it back you risk being blackballed in your industry or worse, particularly if your profession has ethics clauses -- and many professions do.  Even if you can't be blackballed you marked yourself as untrustworthy, and that cannot be reversed.

The consequences from all of this stupidity are going to have to go through the system and this is not going to be "over and done" as if nothing happened next week -- or next year.  But those consequences are going to create tremendous opportunities.   All-cause mortality is currently running in the high single-digits to around 12% all over the world, it is not coming back down materially and that is not a small figure.

Then there's disability, which is doing its best impression of a skyrocket just after launch:

Note the dip in "disabled" as we went into 2020; that was disabled people dying from the virus.  They were medically fragile and succumbed; we know this virus was especially ugly in those who were already seriously medically compromised, and that shouldn't have surprised anyone.  But what happened afterward and why, even though Omicron has been the dominant virus form for the last year and it kills almost nobody, has that trend in disability gone vertical?  Those newly-minted medically-fragile are the new screwed -- and they did it to themselves.  Perhaps this will level off in the next year or two and stop but if it doesn't, and the evidence thus far is that it is not slowing down, asset prices are going to collapse in many areas and those who are healthy and didn't screw themselves will be writing their own ticket, which will go a hell of a lot further when it comes to standard of living than it did five or ten years ago.

Take a million and a half extra people out of the workforce every year just from disability and perhaps 1/5th of that again in deaths on top of the normal everyday rate and guess what: That's almost exactly the 3% rate of "seriously screwed" I predicted and what this data appears to show was a pretty darn good educated guess.

The rage over the last couple of years was surcharging people's health insurance for refusing the jab as a punitive, coercive act.  On a forward basis those who took it may find themselves uninsurable at any price, never mind life insurance and those who refused have every right and should demand all of those surcharges back in cash, with interest at today's higher rates.  This is where you'll get caught if you try to lie too, because both the damage and residuals from taking the vexxine is almost-certainly going to be detectable and will be looked for.  Elevated troponins or even worse LGE on a cardiac MRI are impossible to hide.  Yeah, Obamacare will be there but for the healthy this means subsidy levels for decent insurance will go way up and that's good if you don't need it because it means you can have reasonable coverage for little or no cost.  In private business when this worm turns the screwed may find themselves unemployable at anything other than part-time, no-health-insurance jobs as the prognosis for those with LGE is both very poor and hideously expensive.  Then there are all the younger people still in or before their childbearing/siring years -- you have to be out of your damned mind as a young man or woman to date with the intent to marry and try to create children with a vexxed partner when you have the choice of a someone who didn't take it -- and you do.  Three percent doesn't sound all that bad but it is: Do you like adding a one in thirty risk that your husband or wife-to-be is mortally wounded and going to stick you with both the psychic and economic costs of their prior decision two, five or ten years down the road, never mind the possibility of being unknowingly unable to have children?  How about the recent study that found evidence of cardiac damage in nearly one in five young people?

How do you like those odds if you're a young man or woman?

Choose wisely -- which means unvexxed.  Let the vexxed have each other and whatever misery comes to them.  They bought the ticket; don't take their ride for them.

Here's my take: Those who thought for themselves, read the available information and then stuck up the middle finger at the people attempting to convince them to take the vexxines not only will win they have already and will keep winning.  Be smart now and into the future, build reserves, live frugally so you're prepared and be patient; you're not just winning now, today and here you're going to continue winning and those who made the other decision are going to continue losing both now and well into the future.  Not everyone who did a dumb thing will lose but in terms of economic impact that does not matter; all that matters is that many, far more than usual in our society, did a stupid thing and you will be able to take advantage when they are awarded their stupid prize.  If you do that and keep your powder dry five years from now you're odds-on to have a big fat grin on your face.

When all is said and done I expect mRNA to be consigned to the dustbin of history, the worst of a bad set of medical experiments run on entire populations without cause -- and those firms involved in it are going to be severely damaged if not (as in the case of one-trick-ponies) utterly destroyed.  Biotech firms blowing up is nothing new; they do it all the time and most of them fail.  The only difference here is the size of the detonations as a result of the stupidity of attempting to use unproved medical technology on a mass basis.

Do not expect the economic and sociological impact will be over or "back to normal" in a year.  If we're lucky in five years we'll be coming out of it; if not it might be a decade or even longer.  But those who made smart decisions will be the winners on a statistical basis and already are winning.

Hold your head high if "screw you!" was your answer to this garbage.

You were right and it is rapidly becoming consensus whether the media and so-called "bigwigs" like it or not.

So CDC, NIH and others are over-reach and bullshit extraordinaire.

I was asked to speak on this briefly today.  And did.

Then the conversation went toward "smart meters" and the overtones of "5g."

Jesus, cut the shit folks.

So-called "smart meters" are nearly all Zigbee-style devices which is a quite-common option for home automation.  This is a mesh technology and typically runs in the same bands as your WiFi router does, with less power in terms of ERP (effective radiative power) than your cellphone -- and not by a little either, given the wild difference in distance between the device and you.

The reason the power companies use this is because it can be certificate-based for security and thus is quite secure from interception or tampering, which is a really big deal when you're talking about people's power bill never mind being shut off if you don't pay.  While they could have designed their own why re-invent what already exists and is available to anyone who wants to use it when that is perfectly-suitable to the task and quite secure?

Here's an ARRL document on them, which is entirely accurate by the way.  902 Mhz is very close to the Z-wave US frequency (908 Mhz) and I've had that stuff all over my house for over ten years.  You probably have too, since it was one of the earlier "cordless phone" frequencies (nowdays most are on 2.4Ghz.)

FCC power requirements limit such a meter to one watt of RF power.  For comparison your cellphone is tower-controlled as to power level but, because you walk around with it near and on your body (which attenuates the signal thus can cause the power required to go up) its limited to 600mw, or 0.6w, which is the maximum for a handheld device.

A common ham radio HT or "walkie talkie" has both a 1W and 5W setting.  I own two.  My ham "base" transceiver has a base power level settable of up to fifty watts but the power I'm allowed to run depends on the band I'm operating on and, depending on the band and the power limits associated with amateur radio use on same I can run a linear amplifier behind that and boost the power to ten or more times that level.

I also used to work on Ku and C band microwave transmitters and in fact did control software for some of them; the C-band klystron units, in particular, had rated power outputs into the kilowatt range, with TWT units typically having rated outputs around 300-600 watts.  These were continuous ratings, not "burst" or "pulsed".

All of RF is, as you learn if you ever study it, subject to the inverse-square law.  This is why the local FM radio station frequently runs somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 watts of output power yet at your radio the signal level received by the antenna is tiny.

Thus while your meter may emit 1 watt and your cellphone is 6/10ths of that the meter is almost-certainly a hell of a lot further away from you than the phone just as your FM radio or TV is from the transmitter and thus the actual power you are exposed to is a tiny fraction of that from your cellular device, laptop connected via WiFi (which of course is transmitting) and similar.

In addition the meter transmits on a periodic basis because all the others within "listening range" have to not be transmitting at the same time or they will "step on" each other since they're all on the same frequency band.  The "mesh" is what makes this work; in short your neighbor "helps" your signal get to one of the utility company's antennas and vice-versa.  This is, of course, wildly different than what happens when you use a cellphone, PDA or laptop where your transmission is for you -- and only you.

In short the argument is bullshit unless, of course, you have no electronic devices in your house and do not live anywhere near a transmitting radio or TV station, nor do you have a transformer (which also emits EMF) on the pole or pedestal outside your home.  Well, perhaps not if you're Amish.  For everyone else?  It's crap.  Period.

The other argument is "dirty power."  Guess what I own?  A Tek digital storage oscilloscope, with which I can trivially look at the power quality coming from my AC outlets just as easily as I can use it to design, diagnose and fix electronics.  I have.  The claim is nonsense.

Why do power companies love smart meters?  Because they don't have to send people out to read them, so their costs are lower.  In addition nearly all (if not all) have a remote disconnect capability.  This cannot be used to shut you off for load management as its not designed to be used on a regular basis (it has a rated connect/disconnect under load life of perhaps a hundred cycles) so in terms of a "rolling blackout" that's not how they'll do it -- if they try they'll be buying a lot of new meters when the contacts fail.

But if you don't pay your bill, well, that's a "once in a while" deal and yeah, they can and do use it that way since now they don't need to send someone out to remove the meter from the socket and potentially meet the deadbeat with a 12ga shotgun who's rather interested in them not removing it and thus shutting their power off.

What I was asked to speak to was CDC overreach and my view that the agency should be destroyed, as their malfeasance and misfeasance, all of it intentional, goes back decades and is well-documented as is that of the FDA and NIH.  AIDS was one of the most-egregious examples but hardly the only one prior to Covid, never mind the CDC's refusal to actually act within their authority and seize and destroy contaminated items in interstate supply (such as E-coli contaminated food), which under statute they are empowered to do.

Nonetheless I refuse to have my name associated with bullshit and, while I'm polite enough not to call it out while on the Zoom, it shall not pass without my commentary here, on the record and exempt from roll-off.