I haven’t talked about Georgia’s ChinCOVID for a few days.

I think. Anyway, looking at the state’s COVID-19 Status Report is always morbidly amusing.

The state reported an additional 13,348 confirmed cases today. That’s the number that the CDC and Johns Hopkins reported as new daily cases. It isn’t.

Georgia actually reported a whopping 12 new cases for today. That’s preliminary of course, and will go up as reports trickle in to DPH. So the CDC will only be inflating our new daily cases report by more than a thousand times.

Speaking of case reports trickling in: I have a date I watch. I started watching it when I noticed the case count for that day still changing months later. That date is July 6, 2020. Today, the count increased by to 5,890.

I ask you: How in the living fuck can reports still be trickling in more than a year and a half later?

About a year ago, I saw some research that found smokers get ChinCOVID at a lower rate than nonsmokers. Georgia happens to track smoking as a co-morbidity, so I’ve been following that, too.

Roughly 18% of Georgians smoke. All things being equal, you might expect that roughly 18% of ChinCOVID cases would be smokers.

Try 5.05%. Smokers are way under-represented.

Turns out nicotine binds to the ACE2 receptors in the lungs. ACE2 is the same one that the SARS-CoV-2 virus tries to attach to. It appears that if the nicotine gets there first, SARS-CoV-2 is SOL. As a retired RN noted the other day, smoking is an ideal aerosol delivery system to the lungs.

A final point. While cases counts are through the roof (highest peak in the “pandemic”, but dropping for the past 18 days), COVID deaths are still at one the lowest rates in the whole thing.

Maybe more people took up smoking.

“[T]he United States is firmly and steadily following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union.”

We heard from the Ukraine president earlier. Now let’s hear from Vladimir Putin. I’m not exactly a Putin fanboy, but even a stopped clock…

It’s a short, one minute clip so I don’t know the full context. But what he says here is true, right down to the push to impose socialism/communism.

Minor Incursions

“I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.”
senile Gropin’ Joe, 1/19/2022

As you might imagine, that didn’t go over well in Ukraine.

“We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations. Just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of loved ones. I say this as the President of a great power.”
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky

Chill, dude. You’re only talking 127,000 troops crossing your border. Xiden let 173,620 folks across our border in November 2021 alone. We got another 325,779 so far just this month. Well over two million in the past year.

127,000? Shoot. Just do what the Biden administration does, Zelensky. Feed ’em, fly ’em for free to where they want to go, and turn ’em loose.

What could possibly go wrong, there, or in America?

This begs an obvious question.

Record number of guns found at TSA checkpoints last year, 86% of them loaded, agency says
The 5,972 guns intercepted at U.S. airports last year represent a 35% increase, or more than 1,500 more weapons, compared with 2019. The agency also reports that 86% of those firearms were loaded.

Why in hell were several hundred people carrying unloaded guns?

About the only time I do that is when I have extras in my bag on the way to the range.

[Update] Suck It Up, Sotomayor

I’m not seeing the problem here.

Gorsuch Is Only Justice to Refuse to Wear a Mask for High-Risk Sotomayor, NPR Says
Justice Neil Gorsuch is reportedly the only member of the Supreme Court to refuse to wear a mask to help protect his colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose diabetes puts her at high risk for severe illness from COVID-19. NPR reports that after Sotomayor made clear she felt vulnerable amid an Omicron-driven surge in cases, Chief Justice John Roberts asked the other justices to wear a mask on the bench. All of them did except Gorsuch, who also happens to sit next to Sotomayor, according to NPR. As a result, Sotomayor has attended weekly conferences remotely.

If masks work, why can’t Sotomayor just wear one and do her damned job?

Maybe she can demand the other justices eat dietetic candy to protect her from diabetes.

Added: This is pretty funny. The reason I even heard about Gorsuch refusing to mask up to “protect” the moron is this:

Supreme Court rejects bid to block mask mandate on airplanes
The emergency application was filed by a father on behalf of himself and his 4-year-old autistic son, both of whom claim to be medically incapable of wearing masks for extended periods.

Their request was filed to Justice Neil Gorsuch, who handles emergency applications arising in several Western states, and he referred the matter to the full court. The justices denied the request without comment or noted dissent.

Gorsuch personally referred a mask mandate challenge to the full court, but didn’t even bother dissenting on the cert denial. I’m pretty sure he only referred it just to piss off Sotomayor.

Added 2: Apparently the mask conflict was made up by NPR, and isn’t true. I dunno.

All Your Child Are Belong To Us

Sometimes I run across something so bizarre that — especially these days, as the left-wingers devolve into full-blown psychosis — it’s hard to tell if it’s real or satire. I accidentally found one this morning. It’s published on the San Francisco Chronicle, so that’s one indicator that it’s insane but real. If it ran in the Babylon Bee, I’d have taken it for brilliant satire.

Likewise, the author has a history of crazed writings. And he’s affiliated with New America, a group dedicated to “big, bold ideas” for end game hive communism.

Opinion: Want true equity? California should force parents to give away their children
Fathers and mothers with greater wealth, education or other resources are more likely to transfer these advantages to their children, compounding privilege over generations. As a result, children of less advantaged parents face an uphill struggle, social mobility has stalled and democracy has been corrupted.

He works through it incrementally.

The rich should give their children to the poor, and the poor should give their children to the rich. Homeowners might swap children with their homeless neighbors.

In his “Republic,” Plato adopted Socrates’ sage advice — that children “be possessed in common, so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parents” — in order to defeat nepotism, prevent the amassing of great fortunes and create citizens loyal not to their sons but to society.

How ’bout, Fuck you? You want to see that tragedy of the commons?

In fact, a suggestion from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in a recent Supreme Court hearing on a case that could overturn Roe, inspired me to write this column. She posited that abortion rights are no longer necessary because all 50 states now have “safe haven” laws that allow women to turn their babies over to a fire or police department after birth.

But voluntarily surrendering kids isn’t good enough.

My proposal would merely make mandatory such handovers of babies to the state.

Why?

But you shouldn’t pay those critics any mind. Because they just can’t see how our relentless pursuit of equity might birth a brave new world.

This dangerously demented dude thinks that Huxley’s Brave New World should be a model for our society. To achieve “equity.”

If you haven’t read the novel, and that synopsis doesn’t quite do it for you, I’ll run down the basics.

Joe Mathews wants you to live in a “utopia” with a genetically engineered caste system of masters and slaves (I suppose he assumes he’d be an Alpha). A “utopia” in which everyone to drugged in complaceny lest they all suicide or turn to violent chaos. A world in which 70% of all women are sterilzed just to make sure no one breeds across caste lines. A “utopia” that appears to be dependent upon an external “savage” class for food and genetic diversity.

Holy shit. Many years ago, I pointed out that 1984 was a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual; a sentiment I’m pleased to see others also noting that (it would be nice to believe my quip inspired those others, but it’s a fairly obvious point).

The pro-1984 advocates have nothing on let’s build a master/slave commie hive for equity Mathews. I suppose I should be relieved that he apparently hasn’t read Hellstrom’s Hive. He’d probably love dispensing with women completely and living a happy life as a mindless drone insect. Come to think of it, I think he’s working on that.

Equity in a Brave New World. Remember: when these nutjobs babble about “equity,” this is what they mean.