The weather is doing the "Spring is- oh no I'm not!" stuff,

so if you're staying in here's some data to go over

Friday night, etc.

Go look.

A theory that the 1918 pandemic was made worse

by overuse of aspirin

Good article on the subject of THE PANDEMIC!!

Warning: it does not involve any hair on fire.

The left and 'elites' like to angrily denounce the commoners for their lack of respect for Expertise

and for being Anti-Intellectual.  Well, let's look at one more example of what Experts and Intellectuals are doing to us:
High school students won’t have to be “proficient” in either math or English to graduate, under minimum required test scores proposed by State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria.

They will just need to know enough to do the most basic of jobs.
 ...
DeMaria said the “competency” scores are not meant to show readiness for college, or even a career, only that a graduate knows enough to do the basics of an entry-level job. 

“The competencies that we’re describing are meant to be about that high school-only job position,” he said. Graduates can then learn more on their own.
And the shitheads in the legislature seem to be happy to go along with this.

We've got people in college who, not that long ago, would not have made it into high school until they repeated a grade and got it right; now these idiots deliberately want to dumb-down education to the point of "You'll be- barely- able to do some entry level jobs, as long as they don't require much."

I'm afraid it's long past time a bunch of the bastards behind this were tarred and feathered, and a bunch of them hanged.

Sometimes the hits just keep coming

Friend of mine, a while back his wife informed him she wanted a divorce.

Few months later, his mother had a massive stroke and died.

Today, his father had a stroke.  No official word, but it looks bad.

And aside from encouragement, not really a damn thing anyone can do.

The only proper response to this idea from the 'elites' involves bad language:

Try it, motherfuckers.  You really won't like the result.
Well, here’s a Georgetown Law professor and national-security eminence speculating openly upon mechanisms for stripping conservative states of self-governance. In brief, the Fourteenth Amendment provides for reduction in representation for states that unjustly restrict the franchise; the received wisdom on the left is that voter-ID laws and comparable measures qualify; therefore states with them should have their national representation in the Congress reduced.

Set aside the empirical weakness of the case: specifically that voter-ID laws and the like have not appeared to suppress voting by anyone in any meaningful way, as the turnout numbers of the past decade amply demonstrate. Focus instead on the intent, which is that Acela-Corridor types are growing increasingly creative — and overt — in their efforts to find means of retaining and extending their rule over the rest of us.

 Or, as Mr. Williamson once put it,