Victory! Final?

 Colorado passed a law that dictates that our electoral vote total shall be given to the candidate who wins the national majority of votes regardless of how the citizens of Colorado voted. Below is the WSJ final (?) tally regardless that Arizona and Nevada are still counting. This will make little difference as the number of outstanding ballots will not affect anything.

Note that Trump has collected about 4M more votes than Harris, thus entitling him to Colorados 11 electoral votes, and making the final score 215 - 323. Definitely landslide country. Haven't heard the press on either side mention this yet. We probably should be reminding them.

Robots On The News

 As I predicted some 8 years ago,  and again 6 years ago  TV stations have moved from hiring overpaid pretty faces to robots to read the news, weather, and sports. The only difference is that instead of complex animatronic faces on upper body models with changeable wigs, they're using full body AI generated 3D models that look and move like real people. Or at least mostly like real people. The examples here  have repetitive hand movements that need a bit of variation added to make them a bit more realistic.

Visualize 3 AI models: The news is read by a 40-some male with a bit of gray at the temples in a nice suit. The sports can be read by a blond haired white gut with a good outdoorsy tan, or a black fellow who can be wearing the hairstyle of whomever is leading the sports stories today. (Dennis Rodman today.....) The weather girl can be modeled after the one a channel in Mexico found who can give the weather in such a way that notice of an impending extinction-level meteor strike goes completely unnoticed.

Notice that this will do nothing whatsoever for the veracity of the output. The models say whatever they're told to say so that the anonymous fake news writers become more important than the fake news readers.

Max Headroom, call your office. Your full body upgrade is now available.

Kung Flu - L.A. Times Contributes To The Fog

In this article featured on the Drudge top bar, The L.a.Times announces that neither Chloroquine nor Hydroxychloroquine seem to be contributing much in the fight against the Kung Flu virus. This seemed to be at odds with the many reports that came out early of impressive success using these drugs. The Times cites 3 studies and to their credit, even included links.

Study #1 here, is from France. Here's the summary:

No evidence of clinical efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 infection and requiring oxygen: results of a study using routinely collected data to emulate a target trial

Here's the takeaway: The patients in this study were all in advanced stages of the disease and required immediate hospitalization and oxygen to survive.

Study #2 is from China.  Some 20+ doctors were involved from as many different organizations. The testing, again, involved patients requiring hospitalization and what was referred to as Standard Of Care. The daily dosages administered went as high as 1200 mg to start and 800mg sustaining. It was noted that while the virus itself was not killed off, symptoms involving blood problems were mitigated. They also noted that there were side effects in some of the patients, most notably diarrhea. As the most common dosage used in the more successful tests is 2 days of 400mg follower by 4 days of 200mg, this seems a bit excessive but heart attacks were not mentioned.

Study #3 from Brazil also involved high doses.

 We found three non-randomized studies with limited sample sizes in which (1) HCQ use led to a decrease in SARS-Cov-2 detected in respiratory secretions five days after treatment, together with azithromycin (France, 36 patients); (2) HCQ use shortened time to clinical recovery (China, 62 patients); and (3) CQ was superior to control treatment in inhibiting the exacerbation of pneumonia, improving lung imaging findings, and promoting virus-negative conversion and shortening the disease course (China, 100 patients). We found no published studies comparing different dosages of CQ/HCQ and their thorough safety assessment.

So the HCQ and CQ both helped shorten hospital stays and improved lung function in the studies that this study covered, but this study had some heart problems show up.

The preliminary findings from CloroCovid-19 trial suggest that the higher dosage of CQ (12 g total dose over 10 days) in COVID-19 should not be recommended because of safety concerns regarding QTc prolongation and increased lethality, in the Brazilian population, and more often in older patients in use of drugs such as azithromycin and oseltamivir, which also prolong QTc interval.

 12g/10 days translates to 1200mg/day or 3-6 times the usual dose. Nasty side effects? Certainly. Also, note that the patients in the test were also in an advanced stage of the disease and required hospitalization.

My Conclusion: If you begin the Q drugs, at standard dosages of 2-400 mg/dy, either one of them, along with an antibiotic, at the earliest stages of the disease, seems to work quire well and will have you back on your feet in about 5-6 days. Some people recommend Zinc. Note that 1-A-Day contains 15mg of zinc. At least the ones I get do.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor. I'm just an engineer who read the papers, both the scholarly ones and the LATimes. Feel free to follow the links and tell me what I missed.

Five Questions, Seven Answers

Five Easy Questions and Seven Easy Answers

Over at dcdirtylaundry.com Mike Adams asks “Five Simple Questions regarding the El Paso shooter. Here are some answers:

Five huge questions are screaming out for real answers:

 Well, actually seven, but so what?

#1) If there’s only one shooter, why did so many eyewitnesses report multiple shooters at the scene?

Back in Viet Nam, when five VC observed an American helicopter shot down, all five reported it and the news dutifully reported five helicopters as having been shot down.

#2) Why did the local police arrest and hold three suspects in custody, as was widely reported by the media before the story was changed to a “lone shooter?”

Cops arrest everybody even remotely suspicious, and sort them out later. This is only prudent practice.

#3) Why does the so-called “manifesto” appear to be written by someone far older than 21 years of age? (Answer: The manifesto is a hoax. It was not written by the individual who was arrested as the shooter.)

Cut and Paste is your friend if you can't write deathless prose. Just find something you agree with and put it up.

#4) How does one man kill 20 people and wound another 30 people with a single magazine that only holds 30 rounds? The surveillance photo shows no chest rig, no battle belt and no spare magazines.

Firing into a tight group with an AK rifle, you would expect multiple hits an many of your shots. As we note in IDPA: Shoot-throughs count.

#5) If the shooter is on a suicide mission, why does he bother to wear both eye protection and ear protection? Answer: Because he knows he will survive his “mission” and be taken into custody after surrendering to police. It wasn’t a suicide mission at all. Eighteen months from now, the world will have forgotten the name of the shooter, and the media will never report anything about him again. (He will likely be relocated under the witness protection program, living under a new identity after having completed his “mission” for the deep state.)

Maybe he just wants to maximize his body count and he knows he'll have trouble doing this if he's hearing or vision impaired. He may be crazy, but he's not necessarily stupid.

BONUS QUESTION: If you hate illegals and want to protect America, why would you mass murder Americans shopping in an American store? Wouldn’t you theoretically want to target illegal aliens if that’s who you want to destroy? Nearly all the people who were shot were Americans. It makes no sense to hate illegals and then turn around and mass murder Americans.

Speculating here but if you want to promote gun control, like the fellow in New Zealand, you attack the people who vote for candidates who support it, increasing their motivation to elect gun-grabbers.

ONE MORE QUESTION: Why was the shooter’s online profile changed from “Democrat” to Republican / Trump supporter / QAnon follower? Clearly the deep state is modifying his online profile to match their own conspiracy theories and official narratives about QAnon followers being “domestic terrorists.” This is Orwellian-level psyop stuff being run on the entire nation…

Knee-jerk reaction by the left. They need this sort of thing to be done by a gap-toothed redneck in a Trump hat in the worst way so every time a “progressive” does this they try to cover it up.

I Told You So

At some point I expected the robots to begin replacing the talking heads employed in their thousands by every media outlet in the world. At least the TV outlets, although I don't see why internet outlets that feature podcasts couldn't do the same thing. I know I have a face made for radio and a voice made for the keyboard.. Now a Chinese TV station has a cute female news reader in what  might be advanced beta test mode. She is the latest step after they put forth a couple of male versions that were reportedly less advanced.

The day when Kent Brockman had to sit behind a fancy desk and try to look sincere while reading bullshit are coming to an end. Now an AI will seem to sit behind the desk and rattle off the most outrageous stories without ever cracking a smile or expressing any emotion at all. Of course that feature can be added later. A contemptuous sneer or a look of swelling pride and admiration will soon be programmable depending on the story or the political party of the subject.

This can be done in a messy cube farm by former newspaper writers who took the advice and learned to code or more likely learned to use the software GUI. No fancy studios will be required, and interviews with real people will be conducted remotely, cutting back and forth from the perfectly dressed "news anchor" and the interviewee, wherever he or she happens to be when the interview happens. Think of the money the media outlets will save not having to keep celebrities on the payroll.

Sitting in a bar at 5 PM watching the news, people can make a drinking game of listening for mispronunciations of words resulting from the autocorrect function of the text writers computers putting a wrong word into the script.

Writing For Conservatives

Kurt Schlichter has a column on writing techniques for aspiring conservative writers. Interesting, and I know the left has its version of a style book that they work from as well so I'll consider the most recent non-story about a train wreck in Virginia. First off consider that there must be several hundred songs written about this sort of thing, especially in Appalachia where trains run one every 20 minutes and crossing gates are apparently unheard of. Cue the banjos:

First the Democratic version:
Right Wing Terrorists Use Train To Attack Working Class Recycling Hero
Several dozen right wing terrorists today used a train to ram a truck carrying recyclables to the recycling center in an effort to discredit the green movement. This is suspected to be an extension of their efforts to dismantle the EPA and Make the Atmosphere Smog Again (MASA). The ultimate end is thought to be a partnership between the President and a coalition of Russian hookers to convert money losing Trump hotels into upscale branches of the U.S. prison system.

And the Republican Version
Left Wing Terrorists Use Truck Bomb In Mass Assassination Attempt
Apparently disappointed with James Hodgkinsons abilities as a marksman last June, leftist terrorists attempted today to assassinate multiple members of the Republican congressional delegation who were on their way to a retreat to discuss even greater tax and regulatory relief for the working citizens of America. So far Nancy Pelosi has not responded to questions as to why the truck failed to explode. Her staff has denied her involvement in the incident and denounced a previously unheard of memo on the topic as being a"a complete fabrication" setting off a rush to try to find this memo even though no one had ever heard of it.

To my mind, what makes the thing memorable was that the train in question was carrying passengers instead of coal.