Biden Says Over 150 Million Americans Killed by Gun Violence Since 2007, Which Would Be Half of U.S. Population

Biden claims firearms have killed more than half of the U.S. population since 2007 pic.twitter.com/a679hcVbYg

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 26, 2020

None of the other Dems called him on it to tell him to stop exaggerating by three orders of magnitude.

As an aside, I *really* wanna get me one of these:

Komrad 12- Kalashnikov USA

Something a bit head-scratching about this weapon. It’s a 12 gauge shotgun with a 12.5 inch barrel… but it is *not* an NFA item. (How that can be, when any shotgun with a barrel shorter than 18 inches is supposed to be a “Short Barrel Shotgun” and thus an NFA item requiring a tax stamp and a lot of restrictions, I can’t explain by any logic other than government bureaucratic. It’s classified as a “Firearm” and not a “Shotgun.”) But I want one. And listening to the yammering yahoos the Dems want to install as gun-grabber-in-chief, I want one *more.* Anybody got a spare $1050 to toss my way? I promise to say nice things about you at the range.

When I first saw the thumbnail and title of the video, my initial thought was “I wish there was a store like that somewhere within a few hundred miles of me.” Having gone through the video… I’m really kinda glad there isn’t.

Speculative fiction time.

Let’s say some new virus springs up on the world stage. It is frighteningly transmissible and extremely fatal. Let’s say… one infected guy boards a plane in London, having been infected the day before and feeling naught but a slight twinge of a headache; when the plane lands in Los Angeles, everyone on board is infected, and two days later they’re all dead except for one or two. Further, assume that the virus is a natural disease, not the product of a biowar lab… or at least, it *looks* natural.

However: the disease is not exactly unknown. The CDC, say, has been aware of it for several years and has been freaking out about the possibility that it’ll blow up, and, shockingly for the glacial and bureaucratic US Government, they’ve been preparing. However, they’re not *entirely* prepared. So as the pandemic jumps up and goes “boo,” the CDC has 100 million vaccination doses ready to go. That’s less than a third of the US population. The question becomes: who gets them? Seems to me that the first people to get them should be the first responders, cops, firefighter and soldiers… AND THEIR FAMILIES. Not only do you need to make sure that the medical professionals survive to take care of the public, but that their families do as well in order to keep the doctors on the job and working. The cops and firefighters need to keep working to keep society from eating itself.

Who’s next? Seems like those required to maintain the infrastructure… nuke plant workers, farmers, air traffic controllers, etc… AND THEIR FAMILIES.

This will still leave a whole lot of folks SOL on getting the vaccine.

But here’s the better question. If the US has a hundred million doses of vaccine against a disease that is otherwise an extinction level event, where else does it get sent? The virus, it seems, is entirely too nasty and fast for other nations to ramp up vaccine production before their populations would be effectively wiped out. There are only a few days before world transport simply ends. Those nations that don’t get the US vaccine will simply be erased from existence except for a few scattered survivors.

Obviously it would seem like the thing to do would be to share the vaccine with our allies. Some to Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, etc. But for every NATO survivor, that’s a dead American. So of those 100 million doses, how many get split off to go elsewhere?

And here’s where it could get *really* tricky: If our adversaries find out that the US has this vaccine, it’s a safe bet that they’ll get pretty damned twitchy. How many to Russia, China, Pakistan just to keep them from deciding to nuke us? Maybe the US decides to spread the vaccinated to rural areas and just accept that the cities are going to be lost? Probably a safe bet anyway… 250 million Americans coming down with the plague and realizing that they’re getting squat are going to get kinda rioty and will burn the cities to the ground. Those Russian nukes might be hitting cities that are already flaming pyres filled with dead folk.

One can also look at it from another viewpoint: the Russians are the ones with the vaccine, or the Chinese, or the Indians. In those cases, it seems a lot less likely that the government in question is going to devote a whole lot of cogitation to the heartache of deciding how many people in which other countries will get the vaccine.

NOTE: I have the niggling suspicion that I posted this same idea a year or four back, but a quick search didn’t turn it up. If so, chalk it up to me being a forgetful old fart.

A computer generated voice does a *kinda* passable job of sounding like JFK reading an expletive-laden bit of ridiculousness. It is far from perfect, but it’s not *too* bad. I suspect people who know what they’re doing could link this to a deepfake system to perfect the lip synching to replace not just the face but the voices of actors – or politicians – in videos.

I expect that unless the coronavirus takes me or civilization out, I’ll live long enough to hear about how the courts no longer consider video evidence to be usable.

A somewhat less convincing bit of fake audio, Arnold Schwarzenegger reading the Gettysburg Address:

And here’s one that is altogether too appropriate… Comrade Bernie reading the Communist Manifesto:

The Iranian deputy health minister gave a televised press conference where he claimed that the corona virus outbreak was under control. During the press conference he was seen to sweat like an Illinois politician seconds after the FBI show up… and shortly after, it was confirmed that he had tested positive for the disease.

Hollywood, take notes.

But at least the economy is ok…

Dow tumbles nearly 900 points as coronavirus fears continue

It’s more likely than you might think!

The Hu Band, previously extolled hereabouts, created a tune for the recently released “Star Wars: Fallen Order” videogame. Apparently they’re not singing in Mongolian but in some made-up alienese language (reported in some quarters at Huttese, but I dunno). Gentlemen, behold your next soothing lullaby, “Sugaan Essena:”

Old ordnance is not a specialty of mine, so I’m having trouble identifying a rather large aircraft-deliverable bomb. It appears in a number of late 1940’s aircraft diagrams, but none that I’ve seen have defined it. As you can see it bears considerable similarity in dimensions and tailfins to the M109 “Tallboy” bomb, but is notably thinner. At first I thought it might be simply a theoretical placeholder, but it appears in diagrams from at least two different aircraft manufacturers. Thoughts?

A comparison of canonical Trek – TNG and DS9 – with the JJTrekish STP. Make sure to stay till the end…

The North American Rockwell proposal for the Space Shuttle Orbiter. It is clearly *close* to what actually got built, but there are important differences. The airlock is in the nose and the OMS pods are lower on the sides of the rear fuselage and the rear portion of the cargo bay could be fitted with a pod that includes flip-out turbofan engines for range extension and landing assistance.

The full-rez scan of this diagram has been made available to all $4 and up APR Patreons and Monthly Historical Document Program subscribers. It has been uploaded to the 2020-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for Patreons and subscribers. If interested in this piece or if you are interested in helping to fund the preservation of this sort of thing, please consider becoming a patron, either through the APR Patreon or the Monthly Historical Document Program.