We seem to be out of scary names for winter storms

As of 1100 this morning.

As of about 2200 last night.

This is fairly typical of snow storms here in the low lands, low. A mere dusting, sufficient to terrify Californians.

As of about 1100 this morning.

You might get the impression from the fact that I blog about weather like this that it happens a lot.

That would be a "Man bites dog" news report.

Somebody insisted on 'sploring the backyard, but soon repented.

Read All About It!

 This is all over MeWe and Gab already, but on the of chance you haven't sen it, Time Magazine just published what amounts to a SuperVillain Monologue that details how the presidential election of 2020 was rigged. 

Oh, wait. How the Presidential Election of 2020 was fortified to ensure that Democracy was saved! 

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

Interestingly, that's the way the title on the web page reads, but the tab calls it "The Secret Bipartisan Campaign..."

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

But's was okay, because Trump did it first by saying mail-in ballots were insecure. 

"Hygienic Fascism"

Hygienic fascism: Turning the world into a 'safe space' — but at what cost? | TheHill

Author Aldous Huxley once said, “A thoroughly scientific dictatorship will never be overthrown.”

Even as we try to battle the COVID-19 pestilence, we may be contracting a more dangerous virus — hygienic fascism. This involves a process when our political leaders defer to a handful of “experts,” amid what Dr. Joseph Ladopo, an associate professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, describes as an atmosphere of “COVID-19-induced terror.”

Ideologically, hygienic fascism is neither right nor left, nor is it simply a matter of taking necessary precautions. It is about imposing, over a long period of time, highly draconian regulations based on certain assumptions about public health. In large part, it regards science not so much as a search for knowledge but as revealed “truth” with definitive “answers.” Anyone opposed to the conventional stratagem, including recognized professionals, are largely banished as mindless Trumpistas, ignoramuses, or worse.

I must confess, I was surprised, most of the articles I've seen at The Hill.com tend to be more on the Big Government/Social Justice Snowflakery end of the spectrum than in Rugged Individualism's neighborhood, although it is very true that I don't go there enough to be able to say that my impression of their material is conclusive.

But there they are running this article, too: Facial recognition: The other reason we may need a face mask | TheHill

Don’t get out of the hard-learned habit of covering your face, even if you live in a place that will soon no longer require it. Long after the pandemic recedes, we may still need our N-95 respirators, surgical masks and DIY bandana coverings. Marking the triumph over COVID-19, when it finally happens, should not include a bonfire of masks. This symbol of the coronavirus fight may prove just as crucial against a different foe altogether.

Also spreading fast, but largely outside of global health debates and meaningful scrutiny, is facial recognition. We’ve had Apple’s handy Face ID since 2017, of course, with its 30,000 invisible facial dots that coalesce into a phone-unlocking faceprint, but potentially more perturbing applications are already here or around the corner. Face-Six wants to reduce medical errors and fraud by promising to help hospitals “identify patients whenever necessary, conscious or unconscious.” ISM Connect has scanned crowds at Taylor Swift’s concerts to weed out stalkers and generate tour promotion metrics. Clearview AI has been used by over 600 law enforcement agencies to solve cases from shoplifting to murder. So private it listed a fake Manhattan address as its business location, Clearview AI sold a product that allows users to take a picture of someone they are curious about and obtain links to public photos and sites pertaining to this person.

The power that such apps must bestow is suggested in another purveyor’s name, iOmniscient. Its site boasts of clients in 60 countries and over 30 industries, including retail, where it measures customers’ footpaths, visit frequency and dwell time. iOmniscient “excels in uncontrolled environments with non-cooperative individuals,” which would explain its suspected use during Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy protests. In response to the potential surveillance, demonstrators toppled smart lampposts believed to house the technology, destroyed CCTV cameras, hid themselves under umbrellas -- and donned face masks.

These pieces are from the Opinion pages of TheHill.com,  not "news", but still, I'm surprised.

Maybe there's hope after all.

Pandemic Panic Ponders

Haven't posted as much as I might, for a variety of reasons.

For one thing Bobbi and the guys at Powerline are tracking my thoughts pretty closely, and probably more eloquently than I could.

When it comes to science, I have found Spin, Strangeness, Charm and Watts Up With That? to be excellent sources; the former, especially, posts daily (if not more often) on news reports put of Europe, translated into English, with clear explanations of the science and medicine involved, with a minimum of hysteria.


OldNFO published this meme yesterday:

There is a lot we still don't know about SARS-CoV2 and COVID19. A lot of that gets lost in the squabbling surrounding it.

How virulent is it? What simple countermeasures are effective? Are the asymptomatic contagious? are there risk factors beyond the obvious?

If you find yourself hoping people die because they identify it as coming from China, then you're an idiot and I don't care for your opinion. If you screeched because the president shut down air travel from China and then kept screeching that he was overreacting, and pivoted immediately to he wasn't doing enough then you're an idiot and I don't care what your opinion is.

It is my opinion that after a 2 or 3 week lockdown we could have started re-opening with precautions, and we would be a lot better off, because people would still be working, the economy wouldn't be tanking, and, based on the experience in certain places that did not go full "Stay in your homes or else" mode, the disease "profile" would look little different.

I am not an epidemiologist. I admit I could be wrong. But when you look into the backgrounds of the "experts", there's a lot to question there.

The Brit that claimed the USA would have 2,000,000 deaths  was not only grossly mistaken, but he was responsible for several past public health related over-reactions on the part of Her Majesty's Government. (Not to mention having his married lover visit him from across town after publicly scolding Brits to stay indoors...)

Several years ago Dr Fauci responded to legislation banning certain virological research by funneling money to... a Chinese lab in Wuhan China. (I can actually follow the reasoning here. The research involved testing certain mutations to viruses to study responses. and treatments, so the research was important. But...)

As for government reaction...

Releasing felons from prison and arresting law abiding citizens for going outside? No wonder they want 100% mail-in ballots!

A New Definition for "Chutzpah"

It used to be the guy that murdered his parents begging for leniency in sentencing, due to being an orphan.

Now it's the Director General of the World Health Organization saying we should have been listening to him all along...

#BREAKING 'World should have listened to WHO' on #coronavirus: Director General Tedros pic.twitter.com/N7eua2j0JA

— AFP news agency (@AFP) April 27, 2020

 

Do You Want The Boogaloo? Because This is How You Get The Boogaloo (Updated)

(Links added to comments.)

First: If  you don't understand what is meant by The Boogaloo, well... I guess you can look it up on The Urban Dictionary.

Having said that...

In View From The Porch: People are getting edgy... Tamara excerpted a key 'graph from the rather lengthy post The COVID-19 Boogaloo Opus - Handwaving Freakoutery at Medium.

So then I see the following Tweet:

"The drones, donated by DJI, a Chinese company, have gone to 43 agencies in 22 states, all to help enforce social distancing rules."

US using Chinese drones to spy on and lecture Americans about a virus caused by communist China

Oh, and DJI "may be sending data to China" pic.twitter.com/LqH6VzonzH

— Elizabeth Harrington (@LizRNC) April 17, 2020

 Which of course, prompted a revival of the age-old questions

• Drone: Rifle or Shotgun?

and

• What Caliber for Drone?  

As infuriating as the implementation of technology in service of Big Government nannyism is,
Law enforcement is using drones to shout at people for violating social distancing.
the really bizarre thing about this story, as @LizRNC points out in her tweet above, is that these are DJI drones, a product of Communist China.

And an Internet search for the keywords "chinese drones law enforcement" will return dozens ( a conservative estimate) of articles referring to the US Government banning the use of drones from Communist China because of the predilection of the commies to have their tech phone home to the mother ship with details we'd rather the commies not have.

Seriously, what kind of an idiot elected official can be so tone-deaf in the face of Communist China's obvious responsibility for the current global pandemic and think "Hey, I know! We'll use ChiCom spy technology to nag people!" is a good idea.

Allegedly, these drones do not have the ability to transmit or record video.

Sure.

Winnie The Flu says so.

EDIT to add: And then there's this crap:

How do you report places that aren’t enforcing social distancing? It’s simple: just snap a photo and text it to 311-692. #AskMyMayor pic.twitter.com/WQdCcVf1Rl

— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) April 18, 2020

Note: See comments for some links to news reporting on the subject. Also, statements re: No Video are probably meant to be "no recording of video or taking of photos."

I Feel Dumber

I haven't been blogging as much about Pandemic Panic as I might have been because I found that Bobbi has been doing a good job of explaining some issues that my own thoughts were, shall we say, less than fully developed.

F'r instance, in Week Two Of Taking It Seriously, fresh off the Intertubes, she discusses the supply chain.

Which was timely, because I happened to get up a little early today, and walked in on Mrs. Drang while she was waking up and feeding cats and watching morning TV.

Where the talking heads were interrogating the Surgeon General of the United States about why in the world the President's Phone and Pen cannot just magically make millions of surgical masks and nitrile gloves appear in hospitals and clinics. "But it's been days since the Defense Production Act was 'invoked', why are there still shortages of Personal Protective Equipment?"

Oy.

I am not a logisitician, I did not stay at a Holiday In express last night, I do not play a logistician on TV...

...But I spent 20 years on the Army, and, as a Marine General said "Amateurs talk about tactics, but Professionals study logistics." (Quotes on logistics on this page go back to the American Revolution.)

Just because the President has authorized the DPA, does not mean that suddenly the factories are cranking these things out 24/7.

Assuming that the factories aren't already running 24/7, they have to find trained staff to run three shifts. They have to find the material. The material has to get to the factory. Workers have to be paid among other Human Resources actions, they have to be fed, the facilities have to be maintained, and kept secure.

And the finished product has to get to warehouses, or in some cases directly to the consumer. Which means trucks, mostly, which have to be maintained and fueled, and the drivers fed and paid and...

You can surge some of that. If you have trained personnel, facilities, and materials available you can go to an emergency schedule while the bean counters and paper shufflers sort out the details.

(Did I ever mention that during college I worked a couple of summers on an assembly line at one of the Big 3?)

If you have a facility that can be repurposed -- you make widgets and now there's a need for framastans -- it takes time to retool, and to ensure your staff know how to make a framastan. The assembly lines at Big 3, Inc., used to shut down for one or two weeks in the summer tor retool for the new model year of the same car model the plant had been making for years!  (One year they all shut down all the plants at the same time. Glad I was in Korea by that time...)

Watching these idiots talk to people about things that may as well be magical to them makes me feel like my IQ has declined to their level.

Which may be unfair, they're just flailing around with concepts they haven't ever had to deal with, or knew existed.  Food just appears in the store. The mechanic mutters incantations and my car works.

Grasshoppers. Grasshoppers, all of them.

***

 About those shortages of PPE. Interesting article: Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News: Federal stockpile of N95 masks was depleted under Obama and never restocked.

Now, that sort of implies that Obama just shrugged and said "Never mind", which is highly unlikely. I'm guessing that line items in budges for the re-stocking of mundane things like surgical masks and gloves got cut because no one involved really believed they would be necessary, and anyway, there were more important things to spend the money on.

Rumor Control -- Updated

Coronavirus Rumor Control | FEMA.gov

Naturally, there are those who immediately assume (!) that anything put out by FEMA is a lie.

Seriously, if you happen to find the Twitter thread in which FEMA lists these myths, don't read the comments.

I refrained from reading comments to this one:

I hear unfounded rumors about #NationalGuard troops supporting a nationwide quarantine. Let me be clear: There has been no such discussion. ... For news about the great work the Guard IS doing to support the #Covid_19 response, click the link. #COVID19 https://t.co/JZROM4xfF9

— Gen. Joseph Lengyel (@ChiefNGB) March 20, 2020

 

Meanwhile, in Washington State...

We heard reports that a @target in Seattle was selling n95 masks.

My staff and others stepped in.

Those masks are now on their way to the health care workers who desperately need them. https://t.co/7sCM5kqyfs

— Governor Jay Inslee (@GovInslee) March 21, 2020

 

Apparently, government assets are seizing consumer goods from store shelves...

Great job!! Now, PLEASE SET UP SHELTER IN PLACE!!!! People aren’t staying home or practicing social distancing! This is at Rattlesnake Ledge today!! pic.twitter.com/S84ewSOPDn

— Fledra Hamill (@fledra_hamill) March 21, 2020

#ShutItDownJay this is ridiculous and we look like fools. All the deaths will only be made worse by the republican governor we will be stuck with because you won’t act.

— Kevin Tracey (@KP_Tracey) March 21, 2020

And the response is to beg the governor to lock the entire state down.

Look, social distancing and all that is a good idea; as an introvert, it's what I do anyway. But The Roads Must Roll; as a Son of Martha myself, the idea that we should all just hunker down and let everything stop because the grasshoppers have succumbed to hysteria disgusts me.

(OK, too many literary allusions in there, sorry, not sorry.)

And part of why I tweeted

Would I be regarded as exceedingly paranoid if I suggested the reason Democrat governors are rushing to tank the economy is to get @realDonaldTrump?@stevenfhayward

— Drang (@DWDrang) March 21, 2020

Do I really believe that one or more governors, possibly coordinated, decided "I know! I'll ruin the economy in the pretense of preventing the spread of the pandemic! That'll show that Bad Orange Man!"

No. They may think that what they're doing will really help, they may think they have to Do Something and this is all they can come up with, or maybe they think they have to be seen to Do Something, which is, after all, a common motivation for elected or appointed officials to Do Something Counterproductive and/or Stupid...

Although I do not rule out the possibility that the thought occurred to them that the bright side of a crash would be that Presidents are not usually re-elected when the economy turns bad.

UPDATE:  And just like that, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer make the question of "Would Democrats trash the economy to get Trump?" look a little more rational...

"On RUMINT"

Tamara has an excellent post (cross-post, I guess) up titled "On RUMINT".

As a former secret-squirrel type, I cannot recommend this highly enough. 

In the SIGINT world, we used to indicate phrases we weren't sure of in our gist by indicating the validity of a word or phrase by writing "(%A VAL)" or "(%B VAL)" after it.

Most of the rumors I'm hearing these days amount to about a %Q VAL.

No, the Stafford Act does not give the president the authority to declare martial law.

No, the National Guard is not being Federalized and mobilized to enforce lock down nation-wide. 

If you heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend... it's probably BS.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Tracking Map

Coronavirus 2019-nCoV

As of right now, 34,963 cases "confirmed", 34,620 of which are in Communist China.
725 deaths, in China.

Assuming you believe the Communist Chinese government, of course.