The Uses Of Racism

An accusation of racism is the most common way a liberal concedes defeat in an argument with a conservative. The conservative response should be, at this point, to graciously accept the admission and move on, but wait!

At the urging of Department of Public Health and Environment employees, Colorado will join other state and local governments in declaring racism a public health crisis.

What might this mean? On finding him or herself on the losing end of a discussion, the long suffering liberal can now admit defeat by calling the conservative a racist, and rather than moving on, can call up the Public Health Department to come pick up the winner and quarantine them until the topic of the discussion is forgotten?

Absolute genius, I say! 

The Future Of Conquest

The Chinese are working on AI and not for your benefit. Before they conquer a new country, they will have its entire population compacted onto 3 lists:

1. Harmless

2. Watch

3. Arrest

They are developing it in XinKiang and testing it all over China. They will be selling it to foreign governments soon and you can believe that any information it collects will be copied to China.

New Debate Format

In light of the unusual circumstances we are seeing, the upcoming presidential debates will be held in a new format.

First, on the Dem side, Mr Biden will not appear in person. Rather a deep fake of his head will be put up on a computer screen mounted to the platform, adjusted to place the top of his head at the 6'6" mark. This "Max Headroom" version of Mr Biden will realistically answer any question asked with answers typed in from a small committee in his basement and run through a text-to-voice program. Voice, facial details, and most mannerisms will be perfect, except that no confusion will be permitted. Answers will necessarily be delayed as the committee needs to agree on them and insure that they don't contradict previous answers. The delay will be attributed to electronic transmission times. Odd pronunciations due to text-to-voice shortcomings will be written off as on-line noise.

Mr Trumps side will feature a similar screen, probably 80" wide and with a nice gold frame. This split-screen will be showing a still of Trump on one side and his Twitter feed, which Trump will be using to answer his questions, on the other. To keep things even, both sides will be limited to 3 Twitter length character strings per question. Trumps image will be changed from a smile, to a frown, to a contemptuous sneer, depending on his evaluation of the question or Bidens answer.

Biological Warfare - Round 2

Here's the latest shot from our friends, the Chinese:

It's a Tyvek envelope containing a handful of seeds.

Clue #1: It arrives in your mail box unsolicited, from China.

Clue #2: It's labeled as jewelry. Jewelry is not subject to inspection. Agricultural products are.

These have shown up in mail boxes in Washington State, Utah, and Virginia. Got wide spread distribution. The U.S. Dept of Agriculture is asking that if you get one of these packets, that you do NOT open it. Especially do NOT plant them to see what comes up. They are probably not magic beans. Think Round Up resistant noxious weed. A leafy version of C19.

Do NOT trust China. China is A**hole! Feel free to write the U.S. Dept of Agriculture and ask them what these things are. My guess is an attack on our food supply.

Side note: Everyone likes to talk about WWIII. Listen up folks, WWIII ended Dec 26, 1991 with the final collapse of the Soviet Union. We won, they lost. We are now into WWIV which is pitting western civilization against an unlikely alliance of Islam and Chinese Communism. The Chinese are attempting to eradicate Islam in their Western provinces, and at the same time bolstering it in Iran. Eventually both sides are going to figure out that they chose their allies poorly, but until then, they have in the U.S. a common enemy.

QOTD

Found at Ace of Spades:

And President Trump Lifted Up His Eyes And Prayed: Oh Lord, I Thank Thee That Thou Hast Made Mine Enemies the Sorriest Collection of Incompetent Boobs and Ass-Clowns That Could Ever Be Imagined. Thou Couldst Not Possibly Make Them More Weak, Foolish, and Corrupt. And The Lord God Saith Unto President Trump, Holdest Thou My Beer:

This commemorating the arrest of one of the founders of the never trump movement regarding a $60M bribery gig.

Impacting The Vote?

I seem to vaguely remember, from way back in the past, some sort of issue that came up that looked like it could impact the opening of the fall semester at the University of Colorado. Maybe a student boycott, maybe something else. I don't remember.

Adding to the tumult, was that this was happening in an election year, and the reason that Boulder was such a hotbed of Marxist thought was because all the students had been registered to vote there. Without the students, Boulder is a republican county. Upshot: The campus was opened and no Donk lost his job.

Now here we are with a momentous political decision to make: Open the schools or not? Keeping the schools closed imposes greater suffering on the working class voters, which will be blamed on Trump. OTOH if the university is closed, some 17,000 generally Democratic voters will not be there to maintain the status quo. Republicans might even get elected. Oh! The humanity!

If the university is opened, it will, of course, become a C19 hot spot. Probably not a really big deal as the students are generally low risk so the fatality rate will be no higher that that due to alcohol poisoning on Fraternity row. The risk might be higher for some of the more ivy-covered professors in the ivy-covered halls, but one can't make an omelette without cracking a few eggs, and the adjuncts will welcome the chance to move up.

If I were a gay, liberal governor with aspirations to higher office, I think I'd judge the potential loss of the state senate to be a greater political risk than the loss of some fusty old academics, and order the universities open this fall.

Handling The Virus

There are lots of ways to do it and which methodology you pick will depend on your favored outcome:

No ones life matters, just power.

Assessing The Virus

First off let me say that I think the C19 virus was, in fact, a modified virus developed in the Chinese lab at Wuhan. That said, I also think it got out by accident, Chinese quality control being legendary.

Having gotten out, the Chinese government turned out to be a fan of the “Never let a crisis go to waste” school of thought. Initial reaction was to try to suppress news of the outbreak in hopes of not getting caught working on biological warfare, but when that failed, the well oiled disinformation machine went into top gear. “Studies” from China told us that the virus was not human-to-human transmissible, That masks did no good, that HCQ not only didn't help, it increased your chances of dying, and that first Remdesivir didn't work, and second that the Chinese had gone into full production of the stuff and were ready to sell it at a good price. We were also told that they had testing kits ready in large quantities suspiciously quickly, and they sold them all over the world to gullible governments.

What the Chinese learned, quickly enough, was that the virus was more dangerous to the elderly than to anyone else. In China that group, “the elderly” has two meanings: First is the old and retired population, or as Stalin called them, “the unproductive units”. No great loss there. The other meaning is “the most senior levels of government”. This hits close to home as it's the most important demographic in China. Just ask them.

In the meantime, shutdowns impact the economies of the capitalist world in ways the Chinese military could only dream about. In parallel with this, is work on vaccines which are currently being tested on Uigurs in Xinkiang. Given that C19 is the same type of virus as the common cold, I expect to see a vaccine against the common cold show up about the same time as the C19 vaccine, which is to say, never. Also remember that Chinese vaccines can be expected to work about as well as anything else you'd get at Harbor Freight.

Meantime there's efforts to “flatten the curve” and to impart “Herd immunity”. What this means in the first case is that not so many cases requiring hospitalization develop at once to overwhelm the hospitals. In the long run, the same number of people die, they just die a few months later. In the second case, once all those susceptible people shuffle off the mortal coil, the virus will kill fewer people over all. Note that it will never actually go away, it will simply sputter along on a reduced number of victims. Thus C19 will join the ranks of leading causes of geriatric death along with H1N1 and heart failure, as just another unfortunate statistic. We are seeing this now in the increasing number of cases being discovered as the economy opens up, and a steadily falling death rate as the most vulnerable are removed from the population. The way it works, any government can expect to see the same infection and mortality curves, and since mortality is going down and infections can be expected to begin to decline similarly over time, all politicians can crow about the success of their plans and get re-elected.

Picking Your Victims

The big Twitter hack/scam that just happened perhaps confirms a statement here that better educated people are less prone to get caught by fraudsters.

Scott Adams noted this morning that while the Biden Twitter feed was used, the Trump feed was not. I guess if you're looking for suckers, some places are much better than others.

Whose Life Matters?

Having spent the last 3-1/2 years trying to get rid of President Trump, it now begins to seem like the left will be taking the Chicago approach to the upcoming election. You know the drill; it's where the two gorillas in cheap suits come into your shop and compliment you on it. "Nice shop you got here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it." This is followed by a request for a percentage of the till to be delivered weekly to insure that nothing does happen.

In this case, it's the rioting. The left can promise that it will immediately go away if the right person gets elected this fall. NOT re-elected. Elected. They can also plausibly promise that the rioting, looting, and burning will continue if Orange man wins, so consider your vote carefully.

Turnout in the just completed primary is being reported as 99.3% which is at the level one doesn't usually see outside of Communist dictatorships. The secondary tactic is to heavily fund the challenger to any incumbent Republican so that the Dem, in the general, will not be facing an incumbent. Thus we see novice challengers suddenly able to outspend established office holders by as much as 14:1. Be assured, that all this support will go to the Dem in the General.

I may be overly cynical, but I'm seeing Colorado as a lost cause and fully expect that in another 2 years, I won't be able to afford to live here any more.

Product Endorsement

OK it's early, but here's my initial reaction. The aftermarket automotive fuel pump previous owner had installed on my Yamaha failed in that it would run for only about 10-12 minutes before ceasing operations. A 10 minute wait would get me back on the road for another 10 minutes but this is obviously not going to cut it.

Fuel pumps of the type normally fitter to the bike are available on e-bay at prices ranging from $15 to slightly over $500. Go figure. The same pump seems to be pictured in all ads. With some skepticism. I got one labeled "high performance". Not sure what that means in a fuel pump but aftermarket parts on e-bay tend to be factory seconds from China so any additional endorsement helps. Price was a bit under $21 so not bad, and it ships from CA. Surprisingly it arrived 3 days sooner than I had expected.

Not mentioned in the ad was any useful specs like flow rate or pressure. Not mentioned on the pump is any indication of inlet or outlet. You have to figure this out yourself. Put a few drops of gas down each of the hose connections and put some power to it and flow direction will become immediately obvious. Hose size is 5/16" which of course I didn't have lying around. No big deal. Pressure turns out to be about 3 psi which is fine for a carbureted motorcycle. One more thing: This is possibly the noisiest fuel pump I've ever dealt with. The rattle from this thing rivals the exhaust noise. It's louder when there's no fuel in it so I suppose it will be easy to tell when I've run out of gas. Or maybe it's just quiet in the garage by myself.

I'll take it out on a test drive today. I expect it will get me there and back again with no problems.

UPDATE: OK under normal running conditions I can barely hear it at idle so I was right about the garage being quiet. Forget what I said about the noise.

How to Celebrate

It's 9:20 PM and the 'hood here sounds a lot like a war zone. In the background I can hear a couple of municipal displays going off. The local noise is much more encouraging as every single explosion is a thumb in the eye of the nanny state.

Rattle the windows, kids!

Gun Sales - Through the Roof!

It would seem that  the powers that be behind BLM and Antifa can sell guns even better than Hillary or Obama. June checks are nearly 4 million and the projection model* is looking at nearly 40 million checks this year. Yes, I know not all checks represent a gun sale, but even using the NSSF estimate, that's nearly 27 million gun sales for 2020.

O.K. then, the 2020 curve is well off the reservation. The Murder Hornets, which seem to have disappeared from the news, don't have a chance. When your revolutionary army is met by liberal lawyers wielding AR-pattern rifles, you could reasonably conclude that you're on the wrong side of history.

Data like this can also be presumed to show a rather drastic decline in popular support for government. At this point, the lack of faith is in local level governments. Mayors and Governors. People are beginning to ask who is funding all this turmoil. Looks like outsiders.

*Yes, I know that projection models are in rather bad odor currently, but you got to use something if only to point a general direction.