X + Y = Z

As in "X Percent of Americans Are in Favor of Y Equals Zip Point Shit."

For the sake of this post, X can be anything. Gun control. Abortion. Eating whale meat. Heating homes with coal. Repealing child labor laws. Burning Mitch McConnell at the stake.

It's all pointless, because, as you should know, that's not how things work. We elect politicians to enact things we'd like to see. Which means that if the person you're voting for is not in favor of your pet issue, it matters not. Because most people are not single-issue voters; if their candidate is good on some issues but not on others, then they mauch chose not to worry about the points of disagreement.

But if there is a subset of voters who are single-issue voters, then those voters can excercise an outsized influence.

Which is why Biden's clarion call to do something about guns will go largely unanswered.

Because It's Friday

Doubleheaded steam trains:

Antivaxxers Essentially Killed This Baby

Several years ago, I stood at my stainless steel autopsy table staring at a tiny bundle swaddled in white cotton. I had never performed an autopsy on a baby before.

Medical records indicated the 4-month-old died after 30 hours of fever and excruciating abdominal pain. She had vomited continuously, curled her knees up and screamed. Hers was not the impatient cry of hunger, discomfort, loneliness or fatigue. It was a howl of distress.
...
I found the cause of her desperate cries: pancreatitis.

The condition was caused by a bacterium known as Haemophilus, type B (HiB), once a common threat to children. The epidemic stopped abruptly after 1985, when two American physicians patented an immunization for HiB. By 1987, the HiB vaccine was approved for use in all age groups. Cases of Haemophilus infection in children in the United States dropped precipitously in just a few years, from more than 20,000 cases before the vaccine to just 29 cases in 2006. Deaths now occur almost exclusively among unvaccinated children.
...
The loving parents of the baby on my table, well-educated and well-meaning, had chosen not to immunize her. Had they succumbed to the Internet hype that immunizations cause autism? Had they ever heard of Haemophilus?

Many parents are too young to remember when young children died from measles, polio, smallpox, strep throat and influenza. They don’t remember when there was nothing that anyone could do about it except sit and watch. When the polio vaccine first appeared, mothers dragged their children to the public health clinic and stood in lines around the block to get them immunized. Before the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, pregnant women infected with rubella would invariably deliver horribly disabled and disfigured babies. Many children still die from measles; they are almost exclusively unvaccinated.

The death of that child is the moral responsibility of all of those idiots who have been banging the antivaxx drum.

One might also ask if the self-styled "pro-life" crowd is going to weigh in on the importance of having children vaccinated. But I'll bet not. Their concern about life ends when the subjects of their concerns begin breathing air.

Russia's Army

This is a lengthy article that, in essence, posits that the Russian army, whether by corruption or by design, is essentially a hollow army without the infantry needed to conduct a sustained campaign.

"If Abortion is Illegal, There Would Be No Mass Shootings"

Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) was asked during an interview with Missouri radio station The Eagle 93.9 on Wednesday whether there was any appetite among Republicans in Congress to pursue changes to gun laws. It came in the wake of a gunman’s massacre of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.
...
He said there are a few solutions but that the problem can be traced back to when abortion became legal nationwide.

I'm assuming that, for the sake of argument, that Rep. Long would have a hard time figuring out how to put a six-pack of beer into a paper sack. He had to have been dropped on his head a few times. Because he's one seriously stupid Christian Taliban motherfucker.
_________________________

People my age would wonder if he was retarded, but that term is no longer PC.

They Got the White People's Terrorism Discount

A federal judge in Minneapolis on Wednesday sentenced another member of a far-right extremist group to prison on terrorism charges.

[Asswipe #1] 24, of Hampstead, got on the FBI's radar after he and [Aswipe 32], 32, of New Brighton, Minnesota, showed up with guns at protests in Minneapolis two years ago that followed the police murder of George Floyd.

[Both asswipes] were part of the Boogaloo Bois, a loose-knit organization that hopes to foment civil war in the U.S.

The men each pleaded guilty to supporting a foreign terrorist organization after trying to sell weapons to an FBI informant posing as a member of Hamas.

U.S. District Judge Michael Davis sentenced [#1] to four years in prison. The sentence is a year more than he gave [#2] in March. But Davis said he'd consider reducing [#1]'s sentence to three years if he follows through on his agreement to cooperate with prosecutors.

Noting that the 48-month term is far less than other terrorism defendants he sentenced in recent years, Davis told [#1] that he got "one heck of a break."

No fucking shit. Back when the diligient agents at Fart, Barf and Itch were sweeping up mouthy young Muslim men, they were getting sent them away for ten to thirty years. But these guys get a much shorter sentence for essentially the same crimes.

You are free to speculate on reasons other than the obvious.

Russian Loudmouths At Work

Western weapons deliveries to Ukraine are increasing the risk that third countries will become embroiled in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, warns Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

“Those kinds of risks exist, naturally,” he said while on a diplomatic visit to Saudi Arabia, saying that the situation is being exacerbated by Ukraine’s requests for weapons.

“That is a direct provocation that is directly intended to entangle the West in military matters,” he said.

Lavrov is a noted loudmouth who has no compuntion when it comes to repeating antisemitic lies. He and Putin have to be high on their own supply if they think that they can take on a good chunk of the industrialized world and prevail. The Russians are already dragging ancient tanks out of storage due to losses, how do they plan to fight a wider war without blowing up the entire world?

But if he is serious in his threats, I would not be surprised to hear that Western navies are maintaining targeting solutions on every Russian submarine at sea, so they can all be quickly sunk if the Russians are foolish enough to attack a NATO nation.

Tiling These Down, Here

The Hypocrisy is Stunning

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham took to Twitter Tuesday afternoon to criticize a decision to not send multiple launch rocket systems to Ukraine.

Right. I gather that Miss Lindsey has forgotten that when Trump sat on $400 million in military aid for Ukraine in order to try to force them to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, Graham had Trump's back.

What a putz.

p.s., I hate trying to do this using a phone.

Putler's War on Europe

Thomas Friedman talked to a number of European diplomats and leaders and found out that's how they see it:

I’ve been writing nonstop about the Ukraine war ever since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, but I confess that it took coming to Europe and meeting with politicians, diplomats and entrepreneurs here for me to fully grasp what happened. You see, I thought Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine. I was wrong. Putin had invaded Europe.

He shouldn’t have done that. This could be the biggest act of folly in a European war since Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.

I only fully understood this when I got to this side of the Atlantic. It was easy from afar to assume — and probably easy for Putin to assume — that eventually Europe would reconcile itself to the full-scale invasion Putin launched against Ukraine on Feb. 24, the way Europe reconciled with his 2014 devouring of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, a remote slice of land where he met little resistance and set off limited shock waves.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

He points out the things that have happened in a short period time: Europeans adopting sanctions that also hurt them. European nations throwing their borders open to Ukranian refugees. Sweden and Finland applying to join NATO. Germany banging a uey and rearming. He didn't mention that there has been discussions about forming a European army, but that may be coming so long as the Russians pose the threat that they do.