Articles by Herschel Smith

Good innovation.

News from the NIH.

455 contacts who were exposed to the asymptomatic COVID-19 virus carrier became the subjects of our research. They were divided into three groups: 35 patients, 196 family members and 224 hospital staffs. We extracted their epidemiological information, clinical records, auxiliary examination results and therapeutic schedules.

The median contact time for patients was four days and that for family members was five days. Cardiovascular disease accounted for 25% among original diseases of patients. Apart from hospital staffs, both patients and family members were isolated medically. During the quarantine, seven patients plus one family member appeared new respiratory symptoms, where fever was the most common one. The blood counts in most contacts were within a normal range. All CT images showed no sign of COVID-19 infection. No severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections was detected in 455 contacts by nucleic acid test.

In summary, all the 455 contacts were excluded from SARS-CoV-2 infection and we conclude that the infectivity of some asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers might be weak.

If someone doesn’t feel bad and exhibits no symptoms of disease, he can generally go about his business without harming others.  If you feel bad, you should stay home.

If you feel bad, stay home.  If you feel okay, report to school or work.  So what have we learned in this study that our mothers didn’t teach us?

Virtually everything the government (federal and state) has done has been ass backwards through this epidemic.

They began by saying the virus led to ARDS.  That myth was completely shattered early on by Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell who treated many patients in New York, and continues to be debunked by more doctors.  And yet, I have in my possession a 60+ page PowerPoint presentation sent to medical workers in North Carolina just several weeks ago restating the ARDS mythology.

The very term “happy hypoxia” came from this treating this disease, and it is now clearly isn’t an ARDS disease, and attacks the blood and CNS/PNS.  All that’s required to ascertain this is a little reading and investigation, and being open to learning from the rest of the world.  But apparently that cannot be done in my home state of N.C., where our awful governor surrounds himself with awful people.

Next up, the wearing of masks.  I have some experience in air filtration engineering from my early career testing and balancing HEPA filters and charcoal adsorbers.  HEPA filters (of concern here) work by particle interception due to electrostatic force.  Surgical masks, cloths, handkerchiefs, and other manner of cotton material (cotton is cellulose) do not have that.

My daughter wears one in surgery and the ER to prevent potential blood-borne pathogens from entering her mouth, not to prevent SARS-CoV-2, flu or the common cold (which is also a Coronavirus).  N95 masks are just that, 95% efficient for particles down to a given size.  Moreover, when a nuclear or chemical worker wears a full face respirator, if the wearer is a male and has a beard, he must shave.  Workers have tried to create work-arounds for this by glazing their face with Vaseline, but the seal never works.  The bulk of breathing air goes around the filtration media if there is no testable seal, not through it.  This is true of full face respirators, and it is true in the superlative for these silly little masks half of America is wearing.

When you put an N95 mask on, the bulk of your breathing air is going under and over the top of the mask, not through it.  Furthermore, every decontamination technique eventually destroys the electrostatic charge on the fibers, thus rendering the mask useless.  It’s designed to be worn and then thrown away.  It’s actually worse than useless, because we are now learning that there is a heavy viral and pathogenic loading on both the outside and the inside of the filter media, and we also now know that the degree to which a patient suffers from this disease is a function – at least partially – of the amount of inoculate that you breath.

Next up, Hydroxychloroquine.  Even the most recent trial of Hydroxychloroquine don’t include the administration of Zinc, and thus the trial is probably useless (a fact that had to be pointed out by Glenn Reynolds).  And despite the medical bureaucracy panning the use of Hydroxychloroquine, they didn’t back in 2005, when they said exactly the opposite.  And while we’re on the subject, while they also pan the use of Hydroxochloroquine for not having their control group and “double blind” study, Anthony Fauci’s much heralded Remdesivir lacks the very same thing.  But Remdesivir is better, because shut up.

Next up, I’ve lost count of the number of times the medical bureaucracy has told us not to put our hopes in “snake oil” or natural remedies.  And yet, we now know that China began pushing Vitamin C in their military as soon as this outbreak occurred.  I’ve sent myself articles on the effectiveness of Vitamins C and D3 in combating this virus, or at least, in showing how those most badly affected by the disease were low in those vitamins (see for example this study, this post, and this study).

Next up, what we did with the elderly will go down as one of the most inhumane things every done to people in American history.  We should have sent them home to be with loved ones, or if they couldn’t, sent them out on field trips into the sun and given them vitamins.  Instead, we sent more diagnosed patients to live among them.

Finally, the number of deaths in America from cancer, suicide and other diseases that haven’t been treated while we’ve been locked down will far outnumber the deaths from this virus when all is said and done, and that, after the economy has been utterly smashed on the rocks, rendering a brand new sector of Americans in poverty after working their entire lives to build small businesses.

Again, virtually everything the medical bureaucracy has done has been ass backwards.  Most of them deserve to be frog marched into the city square and put in stocks.  Sadly, many of them aren’t political appointees and cannot be fired.  They are lifers in the FedGov or StateGov, those seeming repositories of incompetence and malfeasance.

Reason.

An Arizona bill requiring police and prosecutors to get a criminal conviction before they could attempt to force defendants to forfeit their assets died Thursday at the hands of a bloc of mostly Democratic lawmakers.

Civil asset forfeiture is a mechanism that lets law enforcement seize and keep the assets of people believed to have committed crimes. Many states do not require defendants to actually be convicted—or sometimes even charged—with a crime before police take their property. People are thus put in the position of having to prove their innocence in order to get the money back, subverting due process. Meanwhile, police agencies keep the money they seize and sell the other property they take, thus filling in gaps in their budgets.

This leads inevitably to corruption, as cops look for a pretext to stop people, search them or their vehicles, and—if they find large sums of cash or other valuable property—claim it simply must be proceeds from drug trafficking and try to keep it for themselves. This process was sold to the public as a way to fight drug cartels and other criminal kingpins, but in reality most forfeitures are for relatively small amounts taken from underprivileged people who lack the resources to fight back.

[ … ]

What’s extremely unusual is for all the Democrats to vote against a forfeiture reform bill, especially after the same legislation passed out of the Senate unanimously. In their explanation for why they voted no, a couple of legislators said the quiet part loud: The pandemic is hurting government budgets, and they don’t want to give up the revenue.

Dam the constitution and due process rights.  Money is money, and if it’s gotten immorally, then so be it.

We are rulers.  “All of your money are belong to us.”

Politico.

A federal judge on Sunday dismantled Florida’s restrictive felon voting rights law in a ruling that could open the door to hundreds of thousands of new voters being added to rolls just ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle declared key portions of the state’s felon voting law unconstitutional, ordering the state to put in place a new process that would help people register to vote in the state.

And just like that, he likely handed Florida to the democrats in the upcoming election.

Plan accordingly.

We discussed this little gun earlier.  While I wouldn’t necessarily carry this as a primary weapon, it seems to me a good, light, reliable backup pocket gun for two-legged threats.

Optics Information.

In this article, the most common footprints/mounting standards used on red dot sights are listed. Each standard is described and an image of it is added. At the end of each section, red dot sights that use the footprint discussed are listed.

This seems like a very useful cataloging of specifications and mounting information on most, if not all, of the red dot sights available.

Someone spent a lot of time putting this together.  Gunsmiths may want to bookmark this for future reference.

News from Washington.

A cougar appeared to be stalking two cyclists as they biked over the weekend in the Cascade Mountains near Seattle. Suddenly, the animal charged, a survivor of the animal’s attack that killed one told authorities.

The man said he hit the cougar in the head with his mountain bike, and the animal ran into the woods. But as he and the other cyclist were catching their breath and getting back on their bicycles, the animal returned and fastened its mouth on the survivor’s head, crunching down, shaking the cyclist side to side like prey, King County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ryan Abbott said Sunday, describing the man’s account.

The cyclist managed to get loose when the cougar decided to chase his friend, who was running away, according to Abbott.

[ … ]

When the cougar released him, Sederbaum jumped back on his mountain bike to get away. As he looked back, he saw the cougar dragging Brooks into the woods, Abbott said.

He rode 2 miles for cellphone reception to call 911, according to KOMO.

When sheriff’s deputies located Brooks, the cougar was standing on top of the cyclist’s body, Abbott said. Brooks had been “dragged a short distance to where the animal partially buried the body under a log,” Myers said.

First of all, what a pussy.  He saw someone being dragged away to be killed by the cat and literally hopped on his bike to get away.

Folks, every man dies.  It matters how you live, and it matters how you die.  Turning someone over to a beast because you’re afraid is not a manly thing to do, because man is made in God’s image.

Second, you’d better carry a large bore handgun in the bush, boy.  Don’t ever do something like that again – either failing to carry means of self defense, or leaving someone in distress.

News from Nevada.

The gunman died after being hit with 10 shots in a shootout that Baldwin estimated lasted about four seconds.

Each shot Baldwin fired at the gunman hit its target, including nine to the chest and one to “the central nervous system.” (The second suspect fled.)

[ … ]

Baldwin, 40, said he takes firearms training seriously and hopes that those with concealed-carry permits take inspiration from his story to undergo more training. Baldwin said he trains more than the average concealed-carry holder, often training with tier one military operators and professional sports shooters like his girlfriend, Tori Nonaka, 25. He estimated that it took him about a second to draw his gun and land the first shot.

That’s good shooting under pressure.  I hope I do as well if I’m ever faced with a situation like that, but I probably wouldn’t.

One second draw and presentation, 4 seconds to land 10 shots.

Here is the Lucky Gunner post on the ninth pellet flyer he’s talking about.